PART I: KEITH
“Some alien blessing
is on its way to us.”
--W.S. Merwin, “Midnight in Early Spring”
CHAPTER 1
April, 2013
He wrote:
There are things you cannot get
your mind around. You go to school, grow up, go to college and law
school, get a job. You marry, love, fight, divorce, make partner,
marry again, divorce again. People you know have children, or
career changes, or deaths. Every change in your life feels enormous
at the time, and in the context of your life it is enormous,
cataclysmic, life-altering. But not unexpected. Other people
around you are experiencing these same things, rich people and poor
people, famous and obscure, quietly or with maximum theatrics. Each
cataclysm, you see as you get older, is just part of the normal
pattern of life. Disappointing or exhilarating, at least what
happens to you is universal. Possibly even banal.
Then something happens so far
off the expected, outside the pattern, the ordinary turned into the
unthinkable, that your mind simply rejects it. It cannot be. It
isn’t happening. Impossible. No way.
Like the aliens.
Or Lillie.
He looked at the paper, and tore
it up. The lame paragraph didn’t even come close. What had
happened couldn’t be expressed in words. There were no words.
Of course, that had been the whole
point.
# # #
September, 1999
“I’m pregnant,” Barbara
said, and grinned at him like a six-year-old who had just tied her
shoelaces for the first time.
Shit.
“Don’t look like that, Keith,”
she said, her voice already trembling. Then, with a sudden show of
what passed in her for anger, “Just because you’re my brother
doesn’t give you the power to judge me.”
“Of course it does,”
Keith Anderson said. “Don’t spout these mindless slogans at me.
Everyone has the right to judge actions according to belief and
practicality. It’s called ‘using good judgment.’”
Her eyes filled with
tears, and Keith willed himself to patience. Softly, go softly. Be
a good brother. She had always gotten upset too easily, even when
they’d been small children. He knew that. Barbara was emotionally
fragile.
So how was she going to
cope alone with a baby?
He reached for her hand
across her tiny kitchen table. Outside the dingy apartment window,
someone on Amsterdam Avenue rattled garbage cans and cursed loudly.
Cabs honked incessantly. “Tell me about it, Babs,” he said gently.
Instantly her tears evaporated.
“You know I always wanted children. Then the years somehow went by
and things happened and...well. You know.”
Keith knew. Her first
husband the non-working narcissist happened, and her second husband
the just-barely-this-side-of-the-law bankrupt happened, and a string
of disastrous love affairs happened, and so Barbara was thirty-six
and working as an office temp and, apparently, pregnant.
“Who’s the father, Babs?”
“That’s the best part. There isn’t one.”
“A virgin birth,” he
said, before he knew he was going to speak. Once a Catholic, always
a Catholic.
Barbara laughed and ran
her hand through her short brown hair. It stood up in spikes. “No,
an anonymous sperm donor. No man to interfere with us, bully us,
upset Lillie and me.”
Lillie. Already
this fetus was a person to her. Keith braced himself for the
argument ahead. But she anticipated him.
“I know what you’re
thinking, Keithers. But that’s taken care of, too. This fertility
clinic took five of my eggs and fertilized them all, then chose one
that doesn’t carry the genetic marker. The baby won’t get breast
cancer.” She and Keith were both carriers; their mother had died of
the disease.
When he remained silent
she added, “I’m being very careful of Lillie. Yes, I’m positive
it’s a girl, I had the amnio. I wanted to know.”
“How far along are you?”
“Three months already,”
she said proudly, standing up and turning sideways. “I’m starting
to show!”
She wasn’t. Skinny as
always, impulsive as always, improvident as always. Keith looked
around the cramped apartment in the bad neighborhood that was all
she could afford. Paint peeled off the walls. He glimpsed a roach
crawling in the dim crevice between stove and refrigerator. Outside
the grimy window, kids who should have been in school sauntered
along Amsterdam Avenue in the mellow sunshine.
“Barbara, how did you
afford the in vitro fertilization? A woman in my office told
me it took her and her husband three tries at nine thousand dollars
a pop.”
She sat down again.
“This clinic, it’s called ChildGive IVF Institute, is on a sliding
income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”
“A clinical trial?
Who’s running it?”
“Oh, Keith, how should I
know? And it doesn’t matter anyway. Stop sounding like a lawyer!”
“I am a lawyer. How did
you learn about the clinic?”
“Ad in the paper.
Keithers, please stop.”
Again he fought down
impatience. “I can’t. I care about you. Have you thought how
you’ll work and take care of the baby, too? Good day care is
expensive.”
“Something will turn up,
it always does. The Lord will provide. You have to trust in Him
more.”
Keith stared at her
helplessly. The Great Divide; they always seemed to run into it
sooner or later. But was it really religion, or was it
temperament? Trust in God was a great excuse for sloth and lack of
planning.
So was the knowledge
that you had a hard-working younger brother that wouldn’t let you go
begging.
It would do no good to
say so. Barbara wouldn’t hear him; she never did. And Keith was
honest enough to admit that needed her as much as she needed him.
His marriage record was no better than hers. Two failures, and he
never saw either Stacey or Meg. He was childless, worked fourteen
hours a day, would have been wary of trying again with a new woman
even if he had had the time. At thirty-four, he was already
romantically burned out. Barbara was the only family he had, or
probably would have. Barbara and now this child.
He gazed at his sister,
with her rumpled-up pixie cut and thin body and hopeful face. She
wore jeans from the teen department and a T-shirt with a picture of
kittens. A child herself, perpetually.
“Let me show you the baby clothes
I bought yesterday...they’re the most darling things you ever saw!”
Barbara said, jumping up from the table so quickly that his tepid
coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup. She didn’t notice.
Keith mopped up the
coffee before she returned from the bedroom with a shopping bag.
Then he sat and looked at pink sleepers and a hat with a fuzzy ball
on top and impossibly tiny soft white shoes. As she chattered away,
he nodded meaninglessly and tried to smile. This was his sister,
and she was determined on having this baby no matter what, and the
baby would be his only genetic stake in the next generation. His
niece.
Lillie.
# # #
Barbara had an easy
pregnancy, which was good because she had no health insurance and
could not have afforded many complications. There was no morning
sickness, no bleeding, none of possible worse horrors that Barbara
insisted on reading about at the public library. Then she recited
them all to Keith, who would much rather have not heard. He took
her to dinner every Tuesday, slashing the time out of his log-jammed
schedule. He sent her a crib from Bloomingdale’s, and he inquired
of a tax attorney at Wolf, Pfeiffer about various types of trust
funds. The rest of the time he forgot his sister and defended his
corporate clients.
He was in court when she
went into labor. Turning the case over to his assistant, he drove
to St. Vincent’s.
“You can go into the
labor room but not the delivery room,” a harassed nurse told him.
Keith hadn’t wanted to go into either, but he donned the paper
garments and followed her meekly.
Barbara lay on a gurney,
her hair plastered wetly to her head and her face sweaty. To his
relief, she wasn’t screaming. At least not at the moment.
“Keith.”
“I’m here, honey.” Why
didn’t she have a girlfriend do this? He tried to look reassuring
instead of resentful.
“Talk to me.”
“Okay. What about?”
“The trial. What is it
about?” All at once her face grew very intent. She gripped the
sides of the gurney hard enough to turn her entire hands white. Her
features contorted so much that Keith hardly recognized her, but
still she made no sound. He began talking very fast, hardly aware
of what he was saying, sure she was hearing none of it anyway.
“It’s a corporate
liability case. I represent the corporation. A worker was cleaning
the inside of a mixing machine, which was turned off, of course -—“
Barbara gave a long, low
sound, less like pain than a weird kind of off-key singing.
“-- and he fell asleep.
Actually, he was drunk, we’ve proved that conclusively.”
Her face relaxed, became
her face again. “Go on, go on, go on.” She closed her eyes.
“The allotted time for
the cleaning was over,” Keith said desperately. He would give
anything, anything at all, to be back in court. “And the
supervisor, my client, called out loudly that all machinery was
going to be turned on again, and –“
Her face contorted and
she sounded the long, weird, sliding note.
“Go on, Keith!”
“And so they turned the
mixer on.” Was this a suitable story to tell a woman in labor? It
was not. “The worker was killed. The family is suing.”
“Go on!”
“I’ll give the summation
tomorrow morning. The main point is that for liability you must
have negligence on the part of the employer, the standard is that of
reasonable care—“
“How are we doing?” the
nurse said, rescuing him. She did something to Barbara that Keith
didn’t watch and, to his intense relief, ordered him back to the
crowded waiting room. He sank down gratefully into an orange
plastic chair with rips in both arms. People around him jabbered in
at least three languages.
It seemed only a few
minutes before a doctor appeared, beaming broadly. “Mr. Anderson?
You have a daughter!”
Keith felt too wrung out
to correct her. He merely nodded and smiled, shuffling his feet
like an idiot.
“Your wife is doing
fine, she’s in Recovery. But if you go to Maternity, you can see
the baby. Through this door, down the corridor, take your first
left.”
“Thank you.”
The babies lay behind a
big glass window. There were only two of them. Keith pointed to
the crib labeled ANDERSON and a masked nurse held up a bundle
wrapped in pink. Again Keith pantomimed smiling and nodding until
the nurse seemed satisfied.
The baby looked like a
baby: reddish, bald, wrinkled, wormlike. All babies looked alike.
Keith tried to think what he should do next, and hit on the idea of
buying Barbara some flowers. He escaped to the gift shop, breathing
deeply with relief.
With any luck, he’d make
it back to court before the judge adjourned for the day. With any
luck at all.
# # #
April, 2013
The aide had just left.
Lillie lay on her bed in New York-Presbyterian Hospital as she had
lain for three weeks now, unmoving. Unseeing, unhearing. Although
Keith wasn’t sure he believed that last, and so he talked to her
whenever he could make himself do it.
“How are you feeling
today, Lillie? You look good. Mrs. Kessler put a red ribbon in
your hair. I told her red was your favorite color.”
He sat down at the
little table beside her bedside and pulled out a pack of cards. It
helped if his hands were occupied. Helped him, that is. There was
no help for her.
Not a conventional
coma, the doctor had said. If a nipple was inserted into
Lillie’s mouth, she sucked. At least that eliminated any need for
an IV. She jumped at sounds, closed her eyes at light. But nothing
woke her. She didn’t use the toilet, didn’t respond to anything
said to her, didn’t move voluntarily. No one had ever seen anything
like it. Interns trooped through the room daily. Machines scanned
every corner of Lillie. Conferences were held. Lillie harbored no
viruses, no bacteria, no parasites, no cancers, no blood anomalies,
no nerve or muscular degeneration, no concussion, no endocrine
malfunctions. No one could explain anything.
Keith shuffled the cards
and began to lay them out. “I used to play solitaire on the
computer,” he told her companionably. “In law school, when I
couldn’t stand to study a second longer. I liked seeing those
little red and black cards snap into their rows when I clicked on
the mouse. Very satisfying.”
Lillie lay inert, a
physically healthy thirteen-year-old dressed in a blue hospital gown
and red hair ribbon.
“Funny, though. Once
during a boring weekend at somebody’s beach house, a weekend it did
nothing but rain, I tried to play with an old deck of cards I found
in a dresser drawer. And the game wasn’t any fun. It wasn’t the
solitaire itself I liked, it was the neatness and quickness of the
computer moving the cards. Click click.”
There was no computer
here. Keith could have brought his handheld, but if he did, he’d
probably work. He didn’t want to work when he visited Lillie,
didn’t want to get so absorbed in the law that he forgot about her.
If that were possible.
“Red nine on the black ten, Lil.”
Someone came into the
room. Keith clicked a black eight onto the growing column and
looked up. At the expression on Dr. Shoba Asrani’s face, Keith got
to his feet. Dr. Asrani held a printout in her hand.
“Mr. Anderson, this is a
new article from a Net list-serve. It describes a patient case,
brain scan and PLI and DNA chart. All the same anomalies.”
No one had done a brain scan or
PLI or DNA chart on Lillie when she was born. No reason: she was a
normal healthy infant. And anyway, PLI and DNA charts hadn’t been
invented yet. The human genome was still being sequenced. Things
were different now.
Asrani took a deep
breath. “Things are different now. There’s another one like
Lillie.”
# # #
August, 2001
Keith had the biggest
trial case of his career. He’d been working on it with a team of
assistants for months, which meant that gradually he’d seen less and
less of Barbara.
BioHope Inc. had
developed a genetically engineered soya bean with strong pest
resistance, good adaptability to soil variety, and dramatically high
bean yield. The plant had the potential to thrive in third-World
countries. The United Nations had expressed strong interest, the
World Health Organization had given the bean its imprimatur, and
several governments were interested. Mechanisms were being put in
place to distribute seeds free, courtesy of three international
charitable trusts, in Africa and Asia. Agriexperts estimated that
hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved from starvation.
Then a volunteer in the
American clinical trial of the soya bean went into convulsions and
died.
The investigation showed
that the woman had neglected to tell BioHope that she was allergic
to brazil nuts. A gene from the brazil nut genome had been spliced
into the new soya bean to make methionine, an essential amino acid
which soya beans lacked. The dead woman’s family sued BioHope.
“I never expected to
know this much about brazil nuts,” Keith said to his office friend,
Calvin Loesser, when they met in the glossy halls of Wolf,
Pfeiffer.
“You lined up good
expert witnesses?”
“The best. Did you know
that the brazil nut, technically called Bertholletia excelsa,
is related to the anchovy pear, which makes good pickles?”
“I didn’t know that,” Cal said.
“Or that the brazil nut
meat is exceptionally rich in oil?”
“I didn’t know that either,” Cal
said, starting to edge away down the hall.
“Or that less than half the people
allergic to nuts in general are allergic to tree nuts like the
brazil nut?”
“Keith...”
“The point is,” Keith said
quietly, “that the genetically engineered soya bean would probably
only kill about ten people a year worldwide and would save hundreds
of thousands of people from starving. Conservative estimate.”
Cal stopped edging down the hall
and looked lawerly alert. “You can’t put that in your summation.
If you say that even ten people will die, the jury will turn against
your client.”
“I know. But weigh it out, Cal –
ten quick deaths or hundreds of thousands of slow ones? Maybe, over
time, millions.”
“Too coldly calculating for a jury
to respond to.”
“I know,” Keith said again. “But
if it were me, I’d vote in favor of the engineered nut. Ten people
is a fair sacrifice to aid millions. What is it, Denise?”
His secretary said apologetically,
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but your sister is on the phone and she
says it’s urgent.”
Keith sprinted to his office.
“Barbara? Are you all right?”
“No,” she said tremulously, “I’m
not. Keith, I’m sorry to bother you but I can’t...I can’t do it. I
can’t!”
“Do what?”
“Any of it! I just can’t
anymore!” She burst into hysterical weeping.
Keith closed his eyes, calculating
rapidly. It wasn’t a day heavy with appointments. On the other
hand, it was raining hard. Taxis would be hard to get. “Babs, I’ll
be there as soon as I can. Just sit down and wait for me
to...where’s Lillie? Is she all right?”
“I can’t do it anymore!” Barbara
cried, and now Keith heard Lillie yelling lustily in the background,
screams of rage rather than pain.
“I’ll be right over. Just sit
down and don’t do anything. All right?”
“All...right...”
At her apartment he found Barbara
sobbing on the sofa. Lillie, seventeen months, sat and played with
a pile of what looked like broken toys. The apartment reeked.
Lillie, dressed in only a diaper and food-stained bib, reeked more.
Every surface including the floor was covered with unwashed dishes,
baby clothes, pizza cartons, and unopened mail.
Lillie looked up and gave him a
beatific smile. Her eyes were gray, flecked with tiny spots of
gold.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Barbara
sobbed. “I just can’t do it anymore.”
But somebody had to do it. That
much was clear. Keith, well aware that he hadn’t the faintest idea
how, picked up the phone. Within an hour he had a very expensive
Puerto Rican woman from a very expensive temp agency bathing Lillie,
clucking disapprovingly at the apartment and murmuring comments in
Spanish.
Barbara ignored the cup of tea he
made her. “I’m just no good at being a mother, Keith! It’s
terrible, I’m a complete failure, poor Lillie...”
“You’re not a failure,” Keith
said. Was she? He really didn’t know if this was normal. He could
easily see how it might get overwhelming, a job and a child...But
didn’t thousands of women all over the city do it every day without
collapsing like this? Impatience warred with compassion, both
flavored with guilt that he, Keith Anderson, did not have to face
this every day.
“I hit her,” Barbara said
despairingly. “I can’t believe it, but Lillie wouldn’t stop crying,
she wouldn’t...”
“Drink your tea, Babs, while it’s
hot.”
“I can’t believe I hit her!”
He stayed until Mrs. Romero had
left and Babs was asleep. Then he carried Lillie from her crib in
her tiny, stuffy bedroom into the newly cleaned living room.
Clumsily Keith undressed his niece. She stirred but didn’t wake.
He examined Lillie carefully. No bruises, no burns, nothing that
looked either painful or suspicious. Grateful, he redressed Lillie
and put her back to bed.
He had just returned to the living
room when Barbara came out, calmer now, in rumpled blue pajamas.
“I’m so sorry, Keith.”
“You can’t help it, honey,” Keith
said, not knowing if this was true or not. “It will be easier now.
I’ve hired Mrs. Perez to come twice a week to clean and cook and
just sort of take care that things are going smoothly.”
“You’re so good to me,” she said,
sitting in a corner of the sagging sofa and tucking her feet under
her. Her voice had a softer purr. So this was what she needed:
someone to shift the burden onto. She had never been strong enough
to carry her life alone, even when that life had been less
complicated than it was now.
“So what kind of big case are you
working on?” Barbara asked. He heard the envy in her voice. “I
know it must be something exciting.”
Keith thought of BioHope. Of the
genuinely struggling, starving mothers and children the engineered
soya bean was supposed to save. Of the American volunteer who had
died eating the bean. “Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid
millions,” he’d told Cal. But what if one of the ten were
Barbara, leaving him with Lillie?
“Keith? What is your case about?”
“Nuts,” he said.
# # #
April, 2013
Dr. Asrani’s office was small as
a paralegal’s cubicle. Keith knew that she had another, more
spacious office in the physicians' building adjourning the hospital;
this one must be some sort of waystation, a place to leave papers or
close her eyes for a moment or talk to patients’ relatives in
privacy. He sat on the edge of a gray upholstered chair and
waited.
“The article was posted by a
physician in Pittsburgh,” Dr. Asrani said. She had a very faint,
musical accent. “He describes a semi-active trance state with no
external communication, like Lillie’s. And the brain specs...here,
look.”
She hiked her chair closer to
Keith’s and spread the printout on the arm of his chair. He could
see that she took reassurance from the charts and graphs: so
verifiable, so unambiguous. She would not have made a good lawyer.
“See, here is the PLI of the
Pittsburgh patient, a twelve-year-old boy. Here, in this dark area,
is the same anomalous thick growth of nerve cells that Lillie has at
the base of the frontal lobe. It’s right against the glomeruli,
which processes olfactory signals and relays them all over the brain
to centers involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses –
pretty much everything important except muscular control.
“Now here on this page is the
boy’s neural firing pattern for that region. It is like Lillie’s,
which is to say, minimal activity in the entire area. Nothing going
on in this complex structure. Very odd.”
And that was the understatement of
the year, Keith thought. An inert, non-malignant, non-functioning
but very substantial growth squeezed into Lillie’s skull and this
boy’s, doing nothing.
Dr. Asrani shuffled her
printouts. “Now, the DNA chart shows many differences between
Lillie and the boy, of course. They have entirely different genetic
inheritances. See, Lillie carries the allele for Type AB blood and
the boy is A. Lillie has E2 and E3 alleles in
her APO genes, and the boy has two E4 –- a risk of heart
disease there in later life. And so on. But look here, Mr.
Anderson, on chromosome six. Both children have this very long –
almost two million base pairs! – sequence of genes that is utterly
unknown. No one has ever seen this in any other human genome. Not
ever.”
“Of course,” Keith said, grasping
at a vagrant straw, “you haven’t exactly examined every other human
genome in the entire world."
Dr. Asrani peered at him as if she
thought he might be joking. “Hardly. Genome sequencing is only
thirteen years old, after all. There is still much we don’t know.
In fact, we know hardly anything.”
Much as Keith liked her honesty,
it didn’t help him clarify any feelings about Lillie’s genetic
anomaly. Which now she apparently shared with an unknown
twelve-year-old boy somewhere in Pittsburgh. He gazed helplessly at
the abbreviated version of the kid’s genetic chart, full of esoteric
symbols and swooping lines.
“There is one thing more,” Dr.
Asrani said, and at her tone he raised his gaze from the printout.
“I almost was not going to mention it because it may sound so
misleading. But I will say it, after all. Both Lillie and this boy
are the products of in vitro fertilization.”
Keith’s mind blanked, then raced.
“Where? What clinic?”
“Mr. Anderson, I cannot tell you
that. I don’t even know it, as the publishing physician has
naturally respected patient confidentiality and not included even
the boy’s name in his article. But I want to caution you that this
coincidence is not meaningful. No one thirteen years ago –
or even today! – could have deliberately altered a fetal genome to
somehow lead to Lillie’s condition. It is simply not possible. We
are far, far too ignorant.”
“May I have that printout?” Keith
asked, and held out his hand.
She hesitated only a moment. “Of
course.”
“Thank you,” Keith said. “Is
there anything more, or shall I return to Lillie?”
She watched him go, her face
apprehensive and helpless. She knew what he was going to do:
extremely perceptive, Shoba Asrani. She might have made a decent
lawyer after all.
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