27 Short Stories Read online

  The Audi wove through traffic, averaging seventy-five. Stanley followed close behind. Occasionally, a gap in the traffic closed before he could use it; he found another. But he was a dozen cars behind when she cut off and took the last exit before I-80 plunged upward into Parley's Canyon. She was going south on I-215, and Stanley followed, though he had to brake violently to make the tight curve that led from one freeway to the other.

  She drove rapidly down I-215 until it ended, turned into a narrow two-lane road winding along the foot of the mountain. As usual, a gravel truck was going thirty miles an hour, shambling along shedding stones like dandruff onto the road. The Audi pulled behind the gravel truck, and Stanley's Z pulled behind the Audi. The woman was smart. She didn't try to pass. Not on that road.

  When they reached the intersection with the road going up Big Cottonwood Canyon to the ski resorts (closed now in the spring, so there was no traffic), she seemed to be planning to turn right, to take Fort Union Boulevard back to the freeway. Instead, she turned left. But Stanley had been anticipating the move, and he turned left, too. They were not far up the winding canyon road before it occurred to Stanley that this road led to nowhere. At Snowbird it was a dead end, a loop that turned around and headed back down. This woman, who had seemed so smart, was making a very stupid move.

  And then he thought, I might catch her. He said, "I might catch you, girl. Better watch out."

  What he would do if he caught her he wasn't sure. She must have a gun. She must be armed, or she wouldn't be daring him like this.

  She took the curves at ridiculous speeds, and Stanley was pressed to the limit of his driving skills to stay up with her. This was the most difficult game of Follow he had ever played. But it might end too quickly-- on any of these curves she might smash up, might meet a car coming the other way. Be careful, he thought. Be careful, be careful, it's just a game, don't be afraid, don't panic.

  Panic? The moment this woman had realized she was being followed, she had sped and dodged, leading him on a merry chase. None of the confusion the others had shown. This was a live one. When he caught her, she'd know what to do. She'd know. "Veniebam. Veniam. Venies." He laughed at his joke.

  Then he stopped laughing abruptly, swung the wheel hard to the right, jamming on the brake. He had seen just a flash of red going up a side road. Just a flash, but it was enough. This bitch in the red Audi thought she'd fool him. Thought she could ditch into a side road and he'd go on by.

  He skidded in the gravel of the shoulder, but regained control and charged up the narrow dirt road. The Audi was stopped a few hundred yards from the entrance.

  Stopped.

  At last.

  He pulled in behind her, even had his fingers on the door handle. But she had not meant to stop, apparently. She had only meant to pull out of sight till he went by. He had been too smart for her. He had seen. And now she was caught on a terribly lonely mountain road, still moist from the melting snow, with only trees around, in weather too warm for skiers, too cold for hikers. She had thought to trick him, and now he had trapped her.

  She drove off. He followed. On the bumpy dirt road, twenty miles an hour was uncomfortably fast. She went thirty. His shocks were being shot to hell, but this was one that wouldn't get away. She wouldn't get away from Stanley. Her Audi was voluptuous with promises. After interminable jolting progress up the side canyon, the mountains suddenly opened out into a small valley. The road, for a while, was flat, though certainly not straight. And the Audi sped up to forty incredible miles an hour. She wasn't giving up. And she was a damned good driver. But Stanley was a damned good driver, too. "I should quit now," he said to the invisible microphone in his car. But he didn't quit. He didn't quit and he didn't quit.

  The road quit.

  He came around a tree-lined curve and suddenly there was no road, just a gap in the trees and, a few hundred yards away, the other side of a ravine. To the right, out of the corner of his eye, he saw where the road made a hairpin turn, saw the Audi stopped there, saw, he thought, a face looking at him in horror. And because of that face he turned to look, tried to look over his shoulder, desperate to see the face, desperate not to watch as the trees bent gracefully toward him and the rocks rose up and enlarged and engorged, and he impaled himself, himself and his Datsun 260Z, on a rock that arched upward and shuddered as he swallowed its tip.

  * * *

  She sat in the Audi, shaking, her body heaving in great sobs of relief and shock at what had happened. Relief and shock, yes. But by now she knew that the shuddering was more than that. It was also ecstacy.

  This has to stop, she cried out silently to herself. Four, four, four. "Four is enough," she said, beating on the steering wheel. Then she got control of herself, and the orgasm passed except for the trembling in her thighs and occasional cramps, and she jockeyed the car until it was turned around, and she headed back down the canyon to Salt Lake City, where she was already an hour late.

  HEAL THYSELF

  There's a limit to how much you can shield your children from the harsh realities of life. But you can't blame parents who try. Especially when it's something you have to go out of your way to discuss. My parents assure me that they would have talked about it someday, but it's not like the birds and the bees-there's not a certain age when you have to know. They were letting it slide. I was a curious kid. I had already asked questions that could have led there. They dodged. They waffled. I understand.

  But then my childhood friend, Elizio, died of complications from his leukemia vaccination. I had been given mine on the same day, right after him, after jostling in line for twenty-minutes with the rest of our class of ten-year-olds. Nobody else got sick. We didn't know anything was wrong with Elizio, either, not for months. And then the radiation and the chemotherapy; primitive holdovers from an era when medicine was almost indistinguishable from the tortures of the Inquisition. Nothing worked. Elizio died. He was eleven by then. A slow passage into the grave. And I demanded to know why.

  They started to talk about God, but I told them I knew about heaven and I wasn't worried about Elizio's soul. I wanted to know why there wasn't some better way to prevent diseases than infecting us with semi-killed pseudoviruses mixed with antigen stimulants. Was this the best the human race could do? Didn't God give us brains so we could solve these things? Oh, I was full of righteous wrath.

  That was when they told me that it was time for me to take a trip to the North American Wild Animal Park What did that have to do with my question? It will all become clear, they said. But I should see with my own eyes. Thus they turned from telling me nothing to telling me everything. Were they wise? I know this much: I was angry at the universe, a deep anger that was born of fear. My dear friend Elizio had been taken from me because our medicine was so primitive. Therefore anyone could die. My parents. My little sisters. My own children someday. Nothing was secure. And it pissed me off. The way I felt, the way I was acting, I think they believed that nothing but a complete answer, a visual experience, could restore my sense that this was, if not a perfect world, then at least the best one possible.

  We left Saltillo that weekend, taking the high-speed train that connected Monterrey to Los Angeles. We got off in El Paso, the southern gateway to the park During the half-hour trip, I tried to make sense of the brochures about the park, all the pictures, the guidebooks. But it was dear to me, even at the age of eleven, that something was being left out. That I was getting the child's version of what the park contained. All that the brochures described was a vast tract of savannas, filled with wild animals living in their natural habitat, though it was an odd mixture of African, South American, European, and American fauna that they pictured. Of course, to protect the animals against the dangers of straying and the far greater menace of poaching, the park was fenced about with an impenetrable barrier-not illustrated in the brochures-of fences, ditches, wires, walls. The thing that made no sense at all, however, was the warning about absolute biosecurity All observations of the park in
side the boundaries were to take place from within completely biosealed buses, and anyone who tried to circumvent the bioseal would be ejected from the park and prosecuted. They did not say what would happen to anyone who succeeded in getting out into the open air.

  Biosealed buses suggested a serious biohazard. And yet there was nothing in the brochures to indicate what that biohazard might be. It's not as if herds of bison could sneak onto the buses if you cracked the seal.

  The answer to this mystery was no doubt the answer to my question about why Elizio died, and I impatiently demanded that my parents explain.

  They urged me to be patient, and then took me right past the regular buses and on to a nondescript door with the words --in small letters-- "Special Tours."

  "What's so special?" I asked.

  They ignored me. The clerk seemed to know without explanation exactly what my parents wanted. Then I understood that my parents must have called ahead.

  It was a private tour. And not on a bus. We were taken down an elevator into a deep basement, and then put aboard a train on which we rode for more than an hour-longer than the trip from Saltillo to El Paso, though I suspect we were going much slower. Underground, who can tell?

  We came up another elevator, and, like the underground train, this one had no trappings of tourism. This was a place where people worked; gawking was only a secondary concern.

  We were led by a slightly impatient-looking woman to a smallish room with windows on four sides and dozens of sets of binoculars in a couple of boxes. There were also chairs, some stacked, some scattered about almost randomly. As if someone hadn't bothered to straighten up after a meeting.

  "Are they close?" asked Mother. "We're here because the water is nearby," said the woman. "If they aren't close now, they will be soon."

  "Where's the water?" asked Father. The woman pointed vaguely in a direction. It's clear she didn't want us there. But Mother and Father had the gift of patience. They were here for me, and bore the disdain of the scientist. If that's what she was.

  The woman went away.

  My parents picked up binoculars and searched. I also picked out a set and tried to figure out how to focus it.

  "It senses your vision automatically," Father explained. "Just look, and it will come into focus."

  "Bacana," I said. I looked.

  There was a lot of dry grassy land, interspersed with drier, sagebrushy land.

  In one direction were some trees. That must be where the water was.

  "Spotted them yet?" Mother asked.

  "To the left of the trees?" asked Father.

  "There too?"

  "Where did you see them?"

  "In the shade of that rock"

  I searched and finally found what they were looking at.

  Men and women. Long-haired. Filthy. Naked.

  My straitlaced parents brought me here to see naked people?

  Then I looked again, more closely. They weren't exactly people after all.

  "Neanderthals," I said.

  "Homo neanderthalensis," said Father.

  "They've been extinct forever!"

  "For about twenty thousand years, most conservative guess," said Father. "Maybe longer."

  "But there they are," I said.

  "There was a long debate," said Father. "About how the Neanderthals died out."

  "I thought that Homo sapiens wiped them out." "It wasn't so simple. There was plain evidence of communities of sapiens and neanderthalensis living in close proximity for centuries. It wasn't just a case of 'kill-the-monsters.' So there were several theories. One was that the two species interbred, but Neanderthal traits were discouraged to such a degree that they faded out. Like round eyes in China."

  "How could they interbreed?" I asked. I was proud of my scientific erudition, as only eleven-year-olds can be. "Look at how different they are from humans."

  "Not so different," said Mother. "They had rudimentary language. Not the complicated grammar we have now basically just imperative verbs and labeling nouns. But they could call out to each other across a large expanse and give warning. They could greet each other by name."

  "I was talking about how they look."

  "But I was talking about brain function," said Mother, "which is much more to the point, don't you think?"

  "Another theory" said Father, "was that Homo sapiens evolved from the Neanderthals. That one was discredited and then revived several times. It turns out that was the closest theory to being right."

  "You know, none of this explains why there are Neanderthals out here in the North American Wild Animal Park."

  "You surprise me, Son," said my father. "I thought you would have leaped to at least some conclusion. Instead you seem to be passively awaiting our explanation."

  I hated it when Father patronized me. He knew that, so he did it whenever he wanted to goad me into thinking. It always worked. I hated that, too.

  "You brought me here because of the way I reacted to Elizio's death," I said. "And because you're famous scientists yourselves, you got to pull strings and get me a special tour. Not everybody sees this, right?"

  "Actually, anybody can, but few want to," said Father. "And the biohazard stuff-that suggests some kind of disease agent. What you said about the evolved-from-Neanderthals scenario being close to correct suggests ... there's some disease loose in the wild here that causes regular people to turn into cavemen?"

  Father smiled wanly at Mother. "Smart boy," he said.

  I looked at Mother. She was crying.

  "Just tell me," I demanded. "No more guessing games."

  Father sighed, put his arm around Mother, and began to talk It didn't take long to explain.

  "The greatest breakthrough in the medical treatment of disease was the germ theory, but it took an astonishingly long time for doctors to realize that almost all human ailments were caused by infectious agents. A few were genetic-such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia but those all seemed to be recessive genes that conferred a benefit when you had one of them, and killed you only if you had two. All the others--heart disease, dementia, schizophrenia, strokes, nontraumatic cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, most cancers, even some crimes-all were actually diseases. What disguised them from researchers for so long was the fact that these diseases were passed along in the womb, across the placenta, mostly by disease agents composed of proteins smaller than DNA. Some were passed along in the ovum. So we had no way to compare a clean, healthy organism with an infected one until we finished mapping the human genetic code and realized that these diseases weren't there. When we finally tracked them down as loose proteins in the cells, we--"

  "We?" I asked.

  "I speak of our forebears, of course," said Father. "Our predecessors."

  "You aren't in medical research."

  "Our colleagues in science," said Father. "We've come a long way to have you quibble about my choice of pronouns. And anthropology is the science of which medicine is merely a subset."

  I had a snappy retort about how nobody ever asks if there's an anthropologist in the house, but I kept it to myself, mostly because I didn't want to win points here, I wanted to hear the story.

  "How do you inoculate an organism against in utero infection?" asked Mother rhetorically. "How do you cleanse an ovum that has already been infected?"

  "What we developed," Father began, then interrupted himself. "What was developed."

  "What emerged from the development process," said Mother helpfully.

  "Was," said Father, "an elegant little counterinfection. Learning from the way these protein bits worked, the researchers came up with a protein complex that hijacked the cell's DNA just the way these infectious agents did. Only, instead of destroying the host cell, our little counterinfection caused the human DNA to check aggressively inside the cell for proteins that didn't belong there. There are already mechanisms that do bits and parts of that, but this one worked damn near perfectly. Nothing was in that cell that didn't belong there. It even det
ected and threw out the wrong-handed proteins that caused spongiform encephalopathies."

  "Now you're showing off, my love," said Mother.

  "It was perfect," said Father. "And best of all, self-replicating yet nondestructive. Once you introduced it into a mother, it was in every egg in her body after a matter of days. Any child she bore would have this protection within it."

  "It was perfect," said Mother. "The early tests showed that it not only prevented diseases, it cured all but the most advanced cases. It was the ultimate panacea."

  "But they hadn't tested it for very long," said Father.

  "There was enormous pressure," said Mother. "Not from outside, from inside the research community. When you have a cure for everything, how can you withhold it from the human race for ten years of longitudinal studies, while people die or have their lives wrecked by diseases that could be prevented with a simple inoculation?"

  "It had side effects," I said, guessing the end.

  "Technically, no," said Father. "It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It eradicated diseases with smaller-than-bacteria agents. Period. Nothing else. The only reason that they didn't immediately spread the counterinfection throughout the world to save as many lives as possible was because of the one foreseeable hitch. Can you think of it? It's obvious, really."

  I thought. I wish I could say I came up with it quickly, but my parents were nothing if not patient. And I did come up with it after a few false tries,