She picked up her luggage. “Thank you anyway.”
She turned to leave.
His voice boomed after her: “What can you give to that child? You have nothing! My God! One more slutty welfare mother with one more worthless infant-is that what you want to be?”
“I’m not good enough for you?” She turned to face him. “You want me to be something better. You want this baby to be something better. But you don’t even know what that word means. You talk about people like they’re bugs, insects. You say you hate them because they’re cruel and stupid, but you can take a life and twist it all out of shape—how are you different?”
“I’ve seen more cruelty than you have. Cruelty and destructive stupidity. God help us, is it wrong to want to change that?”
They were talking about John now, Amelie realized, not the baby. “Susan told me what happened with Marga. You used her and you bought her off. She was a lump of clay, right? A tool. ‘One more slutty welfare mother.’ But you can’t make a better human being out of that-that hate. I just don’t think you can.”
His face was brick red. “Obviously you don’t understand anything.”
“I do,” Amelie said. “I understand that’s what you wanted John to be. A better human being. But that’s not what happened. Not better. A broken human being.”
It struck home. Kyriakides sat down heavily. For a moment he seemed to struggle for breath.
“I know,” he said at last. “You’re right. That’s what he is now—broken.”
“No,” Amelie said. “That’s what he was before.” She picked up her bags. “Now, he’s better.”
She waited for a southbound bus at the foot of the driveway. The snow had mostly gone and the crocuses were coming up. It was a cold day but bright; there was a little breeze blowing. Kind of nice, Amelie thought. Not a bad day at all.
A bus pulled up to the curb, sighing diesel fumes. She climbed inside, paid her fare, stowed her Touristers under the seat. The bus eased away and began to pick up speed.
She resisted the urge to look back. Time to look ahead, she thought. A clean horizon and this ribbon of road. Her future was up there somewhere, waiting to be invented; her baby was waiting to be born.
A new life, she thought, but not starting over as if the past had never happened. She would carry it with her:all the memories. Not just Benjamin but Roch, too. These things are what I am. It was possible to make a better life—for herself, for this baby—but not out of shame. Not out of hating what had happened. You can’t do that she had told Kyriakides so, and she believed it.
New life inside her. Anything was possible.
You’ll be my baby, she thought. Amelie’s baby. And that’s not such a terrible thing to be.
She smiled to herself, settled back into the seat, turned to the window. Outside, everywhere along the broad margin of the road, the snow was melting in the sun.
33
Susan called from California when her ticket was confirmed.
“He’s not John,” Dr. Kyriakides told her. “Be prepared for that. But he’s not Benjamin, either. He’s awake and functional and I’m certain he’ll eventually be able to hold a job, to lead a normal life. But he isn’t the person we knew.”
He isn’t the person you created, Susan thought. And she wondered if that wasn’t John’s ultimate act of revenge, a score that had finally been evened.
She said, “I’m prepared.”
“His memory is erratic, but I think he’ll know you.”
“That’s good,” Susan said.
She took a cab from Pearson Airport Dr. Kyriakides met her at the door of the house.
Such an ordinary house, Susan thought.
“I told him you were coming. He’s looking forward to it.”
“Thank you,” Susan said, and moved toward the stairs.
“One more thing,” Kyriakides said. “John was cleaning up his desk today. He found this. He asked me to give it to you.”
It was a five-inch Dysan floppy disk in a paper sleeve. It had her name written on it—“FOR SUSAN” in block capitals.
“It’s from before,” Kyriakides said.
She knocked gently on the door of his room and pushed inside.
John was asleep.
He had pulled a chair up to the window—watching the spring clouds, Susan guessed—and he had fallen asleep there. She moved to touch him on the shoulder, then remembered the disk in her hand.
Maybe she shouldn’t wake him.
She sat down at his computer and slid the disk into its slot.
It began to run when she turned on the machine. The disk drive whined; a hard disk answered in deeper tones. It was not an ordinary PC; John had done something to the microprocessors. Susan wondered if she would be able to work it. But the monitor blinked to life all by itself.
It displayed, first of all, a date: the material was several years old. This would be, Susan calculated, when John was living on his island, before she met him, before the return of Benjamin: something from John’s deep immersion in cellular biology.
The date disappeared and there was more whining from the drives as a plodding animation appeared on the screen. Susan blinked at it, surprised. It was a metastatic tumor cell—it looked like diagrams she had seen of the 3LL mouse carcinoma, a common experimental lab tumor. The perspective closed in suddenly on the cell surface, where John had ideographed certain molecules: she recognized collagenase and the MHC glycoproteins. These dissolved in turn into ball-and-stick perspective drawings of their molecular structure. A new molecule appeared at the right side of the screen, one that Susan did not recognize, although John had labeled it meticulously—a novel protein, synthetic or even hypothetical. Suddenly it closed on the MHC glycoprotein and bound with it in a violent flurry of activity. The product was a fragmented chain.
Susan realized she was holding her breath.
The screen blanked, then refreshed with the original metastatic cell … exploded and dead.
It was a magic bullet. A designer molecule: the screen filled with a protocol for its synthesis.
Not a cure for cancer, Susan thought, but at least a cure for its metastasis, a way to interrupt the fearsome colonization of a human body by tumor cells. As a postoperative therapy it could prolong lives indefinitely. She thought of her father, rendered mute, and then dying, murdered by his metastasis before he could recover the courage for words.
She remembered, too, what John had told her on that cold January day before he walked into the warehouse and out of the world:There are lives I could have saved … thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.
This was what he meant. He had devised this program for his own satisfaction, an “experiment.” If he had made it public or even submitted it anonymously to some journal or some laboratory—it might be in production already, Susan thought, or at least well down the FDA pipeline.
She withdrew the floppy disk—carefully!—and looked at the label again.
For Susan.
She faced the bed. He opened his eyes.