33
AUGUST 13 • ARIZONA
We were still driving east in the blood-red Mercedes, through desert caught up by morning. Bridger and I had been talking for hours, telling our stories. Banning spoke only rarely and kept checking his maps.
Bridger’s story was coming to the conclusion I did not want to hear.
“The kids sprayed us down with water to get the slime off,” Ben said. “We were both pretty limp by then. I was having visions. I was able to fly, I thought. I was in touch with powerful people all over the world. I could hear my intestines talking to me—as if they were stuffed with angels.
“They took us out to the loading dock and pushed us into that goddamned Crown Victoria. We got the seats wet, I remember. Rob was talking a mile a minute about cells and channels and receptors, about how he could feel the pathways opening up inside him. He said he could identify the ones he’d missed, the ones he’d got wrong. He seemed happy as a clam, eager to get back to work. ‘They’re letting us go!’ he said. ‘We’re getting off easy!’”
“Did he tell you what the receptors were?” I asked Ben.
Ben gave me a look, as if I were some kind of curious and disgusting insect. He faced front, squinting at the long two-lane highway. “No, fuck it, I’m sorry, Hal, he didn’t. Not in so many words, and how in hell would I know, anyway?”
“Rob had the other half of the secret. That’s what Lissa said. If I get that list, I could finish the work. I would know everything Golokhov knows. Maybe more.”
“I’m sure,” Ben said with a sigh. I was incurable—he had finally realized that—so he was giving up the moral tone.
This angered me. “Don’t you see it could be important? Rob asked, didn’t he?”
Ben nodded. “It was the most important thing in the world to him,” he said, his voice seeming to come from outside the car.
“They’ve tried to kill us, they’ve murdered innocent civilians, just to stop us from knowing.” I held off for a second, face hot, before adding, “And my brother.”
“Yeah,” Ben said
We were five minutes down the road when Ben resumed.
“We were dropped off near Times Square, soaking wet. In an alley. Stuart stuffed a pistol into my hand, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked genuinely disgusted at what they had to do. Then he and Norton went to the end of the alley to wait. I honest to God tried to aim the gun at them, but I couldn’t. I was focused on Rob.”
I felt my breath take a hitch. “You shot him,” I said, hoping he would end his story now.
“It wasn’t that simple,” Ben said. “First, I had to get mad. So I punched him, right there in the alley. I broke his nose, I think. There was this awful voice in my head, it kept telling me ‘Go for the snot locker. That’ll get him angry and that will make you angry.’ His face was covered with blood. But Rob danced and sang a song about which genes he’d work on next, which proteins he would block. He said we’d all live forever.”
“Shit,” I said, and covered my ears.
“Goddamn it, listen to me!” Ben shrieked over the back of the seat, pounding it with his fist. “Listen to me and, Jesus, give me some sort of absolution! Your brother came to me, he dragged me into this! You two stirred up the hornets, and they all used me!”
We were both crying. I reached out and tried to touch his arm. He flicked my hand aside.
“Then something changed. The flag went down and Rob got frightened. He wasn’t reacting the same way I was. He didn’t want to kill me, he wanted to talk. But I wasn’t having any of it. He backed off and said he knew something. He told me to pass on something to his brother. He wanted me to tell you what he knew, if I survived. He said, ‘Tell Hal I know why it works on you and not on me.’ Then he rattled off some names, didn’t make sense. Peace keeper or peace maker or something was the first.”
“Piecework?”
“That’s it. Then . . . Revolver or regulator.”
“Regulus?”
Ben nodded. “I told him to shut up. He found a chunk of wood from a crate. He was pitiful. I had the gun but he was waving that stick of wood. The last word was chopper. I remember that, because he was chopping at me with the wood. He wanted to get away, but I blocked the alley. He kept shouting that if I just remembered who I was and what we were doing, we could get out of here. ‘There’s so much life, there’s so much more to see,’ he said. But I couldn’t stop.”
Piecework, regulus, chopper. I was familiar with two of them. Piecework was a common bacterial gene that regulated the creation of adhesins. Toothpaste companies were interested in it because it stopped Streptococcus and Actinomyces from binding in the human mouth and reduced plaque on teeth. Regulus was a human nuclear gene that coordinated mitochondrial functions. Mess with regulus in the wrong way and you could end up with Parkinson’s. That’s why I had avoided it, though it was a clear candidate for my work. Our work. Chopper wasn’t a gene. I couldn’t immediately place where I had heard the name.
I dropped my face into my hands.
“Rob couldn’t take it anymore,” Ben said. “He made a run at me, and I shot him. Then I threw away the pistol and ran out of the alley. Stuart and Norton were gone. I was all alone on the street. It was four in the morning.”
Ben spoke this last quickly, his cheeks shining.
We pulled into a service station. I leaned out of the door, thought about vomiting, decided it wasn’t strictly necessary, and stood beside the car. “I have to go,” I said, for the sixth or seventh time. The elixir was still having a strong effect.
Banning bought gas. I got the key from the young man behind the counter, went to the rest room, and leaned over the dirty sink. Despite the nausea, I couldn’t bring up anything.
I had just listened to a man confess to shooting my twin, my shadow. My essential shadow. And I did not know how to react, whether to hate or pity. I was angry, not at Ben Bridger, but at Rob and myself. We had screwed it up so badly. We could have beaten the world. Or saved it. Instead, I had stolen his girls, then bits and pieces of his dignity. Rob had done things to me, in return. So many little disputes I should have been willing to concede. His science, that I didn’t steal, because by then we had kept secrets and stayed away from each other.
We could have done it together. We would have had the Long Haul in our hot little hands right now. We really would have, I kept telling myself, staring into the scratched and filthy mirror.
I was my twin, right down to the suicidal arrogance.
The elixir’s diarrhea came and went. I spent ten minutes on the toilet, totally absorbed in misery.
Back in the car, Ben was drinking a Royal Crown. I climbed gingerly into the backseat. He blew his nose into a blue windshield wipe and avoided looking at me.
Banning sipped coffee from an orange 76 mug and studied another fold in the map.
“You probably haven’t been following the news,” Ben said.
“No.” I felt my stomach turn, tried to stop my voice from shaking.
