But a great purpose for living, for being reborn? What could such a thing possibly be? What was the purpose for the woman who died of a stroke on the delivery table while her newborn cried in the doctor’s arms? What was the purpose for the man struck by the drunk driver on his way home from church?
There had been a purpose all right for the fetus she had once seen, a living breathing thing, its eyes still sealed shut, its little mouth like that of a fish, wires running in all directions from its horrid oversized head and tiny arms, as it slumbered in the special incubator, waiting for its tissue to be harvested-while it continued to live and breathe, of course-for the transplant recipient who waited two floors upstairs.
But if that was purpose, the discovery that you could, in spite of all laws to the contrary, keep those little aborted things alive in a secret laboratory in the middle of a giant private hospital, slicing them up at will, for the benefit of a Parkinson’s disease patient who had already clocked in sixty good years before he started to die of the illness which the fetal tissue transplant could cure, well, she’d take the knife to the gunshot wound fresh up from Emergency any day.
Never would she forget that cold, dark Christmas Eve and Dr. Lemle leading her up through the deserted floors of the Keplinger Institute. “We need you here, Rowan. I could finesse your leaving University. I know what to say to Larkin. I want you here. And now I’m going to show you something you’ll appreciate which Larkin would never appreciate, something you will never see at University, something that you will understand.”
Ah, but she didn’t. Or rather she understood too perfectly the horror of it.
“It isn’t viable in the strict sense of the word,” he’d explained, this doctor, Karl Lemle, whose brilliance had so enticed her, brilliance and ambition, and vision, yes, that too. “And technically of course it is not even alive. It’s dead, quite dead, because its mother aborted it, you see, in the clinic downstairs, and so technically it is a nonperson, a non-human being. So who is to say, Rowan, that we have to shove it in a plastic trash bag when we know that through keeping this tiny body alive, and keeping others like it alive-these little gold mines of unique tissue, so flexible, adaptable, so unlike any other human tissue, swarming with countless tiny extraneous cells which would eventually have been discarded in the normal fetal process-we can make discoveries in the field of neurological transplants that make Shelley’s Frankenstein read like a bedtime story.”
Yes, right on that score, exactly. And there was little doubt that he spoke the truth when he predicted a future of entire brain transplants, when the organ of thought would be lifted safely and completely out of one worn-out body into a young and fresh one, a world in which altogether new brains might be created as tissue was added here and there to supplement nature’s work.
“You see, the important thing about fetal tissue is, the recipient doesn’t reject it. Now you know that, but have you thought about it, what it really means? One tiny implant of fetal cells into the eye of an adult human, and the eye accepts those cells; the cells continue to develop, adapting themselves to the new tissue. My God, don’t you realize this allows us to participate in the evolutionary process? Why, we are only on the verge … ”
“Not us, Karl. You.”
“Rowan, you are the most brilliant surgeon I have ever worked with. If you … ”
“I will not do this! I will not kill.” And if I don’t get out of here, I’ll start screaming. I have to. Because I have killed.
Yes, that was purpose all right, purpose taken, as they say, to the max.
She had not blown the whistle on Lemle, of course. Doctors don’t do things like that to other doctors, especially not when they are residents and their enemies are powerful and famous researchers. She had simply backed off.
“And besides,” he had said over coffee later before the fire in Tiburon, the Christmas lights reflected in the glass walls around them, “this is going on everywhere, this research with live fetuses. There wouldn’t be a law against it if it were not.”
No surprise actually. It was too tempting. In fact the strength of the temptation was exactly equal to the strength of her revulsion. What scientist-and a neurologist was most definitely a scientist-had not dreamed such dreams?
Watching Frankenstein on the late show she had longed to be the mad scientist. How she would have loved her own mountain laboratory, and yes, she wanted to see what would happen if you only had the nerve to take the living human brain as a laboratory specimen, divorced of all moral-but no, she would not.
What a horrid Christmas present that revelation, and yet her dedication to trauma surgery had redoubled. Seeing that tiny monster gasping for breath in the artificial light, she’d been reborn herself, her life narrowing and gaining inestimable power as she became the miracle worker of University, the one they called when the brains were oozing out on the stretcher, or when the patient blundered in off the street with the ax still lodged in his head.
Maybe the wounded brain was to her the microcosm for all tragedy: life mutilated continuously and haphazardly by life. When Rowan had killed-and killed she had-the act had been just as traumatic: the brain assaulted, its tissue mangled, the way she so often found it now in victims of whom she knew nothing. There had been nothing anyone could do for those she killed.
But it wasn’t to argue about purpose that she wanted to see Michael Curry. And it wasn’t to drag him into her bed. She wanted the same thing from him everybody else wanted, and that was why she hadn’t gone to San Francisco General to see him, to check on his recovery on her own.
She wanted to know about those killings, and not what the autopsies could tell her. She wanted to know what he saw and he felt-if and when she held his hand-while she thought about those deaths. He’d sensed something the first time he touched her. But maybe that too had been stricken from his memory, along with the things he saw when he was dead.
She understood all this. She had understood, at least in the back of her mind, all along. And it wasn’t any less repellent to her as the months passed, that she wanted to use Michael Curry for her own ends.
Curry was inside that house on Liberty Street. She knew it. He needed help.
But what would it matter to Curry if she said, I’m a doctor, and I believe in your visions, as well as the power in your hands, because I know myself that there are things such as that, psychic things which no one can explain. I myself have just such an illicit and confusing and sometimes utterly uncontrollable power-the power to kill at will.
Why should he care? He was surrounded by people who believed in what he could do, wasn’t he? But that wasn’t helping him. He’d died and come back, and he was going crazy. But still, if she told him her story … and the idea was now most definitely a full-blown obsession, he might be the one person in the entire world who would believe what she said.
Perhaps it was madness to dream of telling the whole story to anybody. And there were times she tried to convince herself that she was wrong. Sooner or later she was going to talk to someone, she knew it. Sooner or later the silence of her thirty years would he shattered, if she didn’t start talking, by a never-ending cry that would blot out all words.
After all, no matter how many heads she patched up she could not forget those three murders. Graham’s face as the life bled out of him; the little girl convulsing on the tarmac; the man pitching forward over the wheel of his Jeep.