“Mr. Fontanelle?”
Lyle looked up; the man was tall and wide framed, looming over him in the hospital waiting room. He wore a short-cropped beard, dark black, but Lyle could see the telltale silver where the roots were a different color. I wonder if he uses our dye?
“Hi,” said the man, “I’m Dr. Allgood. I understand you’re a friend of Jon Ford’s?”
Lyle stood and shook the doctor’s hand, his fake story practiced and ready to go; he wanted to keep NewYew’s connection to the story secret for as long as possible. “Just an acquaintance, really. I met Jon while working on a paper about flu epidemiology. I was devastated to hear about his death, but I’m a little ashamed to say that the scientist in me was intrigued by the transition from flu to stroke. I was hoping you might be able to let me look at his treatment files.”
Dr. Allgood sighed. “I’d love to—everyone here was completely baffled by his symptoms, and we’d appreciate an outside opinion, but medical records are protected and we can’t just—”
“Oh!” said Lyle, trying to sound like he’d just thought of it. “You need permission, of course. I’ve got it right here.” He held up a clipboard containing Jon Ford’s liability waiver, the NewYew name and logo hidden by the clip at the top. If the doctor looked at it closely the ruse would be lost, but Lyle was gambling that he wouldn’t. What nonlawyer had time to study legal forms? “He signed a full release when I first included him in my research.” Lyle held it out for him to take, but Allgood waved it away.
“Leave a copy at the desk on your way out. Come on back to my office and I’ll show you the file.”
Lyle smiled and followed Dr. Allgood through the back halls of the hospital, nervously nodding at the occasional nurse. What if someone recognizes me? What if they link me to NewYew?
What will we do?
“Normally I’d have to make you wait while we try to collect everything,” said Dr. Allgood, “but you’re in luck today: Mr. Ford’s files are sitting on my desk as we speak.”
“You’re still going through them?”
“Like I said,” said the doctor, “it’s a very confusing case, and we still haven’t deciphered exactly what he had. It’s not really our job at this point, but I don’t like not knowing, you know?”
“Exactly.”
They reached Dr. Allgood’s office, a smallish room lined floor to ceiling with books and shelves and filing cabinets. It felt more like a cave than an office, though the desk in the center was relatively clear. “Here you go,” said Allgood, stepping behind the desk and pushing an open folder toward Lyle; it was stacked with an inch or more of multicolored papers and reports.
“Wonderful,” said Lyle. The two men sat down on opposite sides of the desk, and Lyle scanned through the first page of the file: standard admissions information, a description of symptoms, and so on. Jon Ford had been checked in just a few hours before his stroke, nearly comatose, by a friend named Travis Meyer. The symptoms were consistent with a severe flu: fever, intense head and muscle aches, lethargy, and extensive fluid loss through runny nose and diarrhea. Nothing new there. Lyle flipped to a new page, where the admitting physician had jotted down that the fluid loss had left Jon extremely dehydrated and recommended an immediate IV. He turned another page and found the results of a blood test: A+ blood, with a high white cell count, but that was standard for a flu patient. Beyond that it all looked good—good cholesterol, good minerals, good everything. Lyle leaned in closely, examining each line of the printout in detail: iron’s fine, potassium’s fine, red cells are low … wait. His estrogen levels were incredibly high. Lyle frowned at the number on the page. High estrogen in a male subject suggests a much older man, maybe fifties or sixties, but Jon was barely twenty-five. Was he getting old prematurely? Could an antiaging product somehow turn around and literally accelerate aging?
Dr. Allgood spoke. “What did you find?”
“The estrogen,” said Lyle, looking up. “What was that about?”
Dr. Allgood laughed hollowly. “If you’re anything like us, you immediately assumed it was a premature aging shift, but wait ’til you see the autopsy report.” He reached over to the folder and sorted through it quickly, pulling out a thick subset of papers clamped together with a paperclip. “Page four, somewhere in the middle. When they made the Y incision through the soft tissues of the chest, they found mammary glands.”
Lyle jerked his head back up. “Mammary glands? He had breasts?”
Allgood nodded. “Normally they don’t cut through those, obviously, but how were they to know? They were grossly underdeveloped, and there was nothing in his medical history about intersexuality.”
Lyle looked back down at the autopsy report, scanning through it desperately. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Did he have anything else?”
“Immature ovaries, a semideveloped uterus, and a corresponding weakness in all his-her male sexual characteristics, primary and secondary. Medically speaking, he was neither really male nor female, just a halfhearted attempt at both.”
Lyle couldn’t help himself; the first thing he thought was Susan was so into this guy. He shook his head to clear it and looked back at the notes, but Susan’s interest in Ford kept coming back to mind. It didn’t make sense.
“I’ve met Jon Ford in person,” said Lyle. “There was nothing feminine about him. He was manly and handsome and … manly.”
Allgood shrugged. “His testosterone was just as high as his estrogen. Now you can see why we were so confused.”
“He never told me anything about this,” said Lyle.
“He was probably pretty sensitive about it, for obvious reasons.”
“Then why did he agree to a medical test?” asked Lyle.
Allgood scratched his beard. “I don’t know. A cry for help, maybe? He wanted to be discovered?”
Or he didn’t know about it when he signed up, thought Lyle, because this is another crazy, impossible side effect of that damned lotion. Lyle stared at the papers, trying to think. He riffled the big file with his thumb. “Is this a full medical history?”
“As close as you’ll get without a lot of extra legwork; we’ve got a description of every visit he’s ever made to this hospital, but he may have been to others.”
“Did he have any previous blood work?” asked Lyle. “A blood test from last year, or even older than that?”
“He’s been a patient here a couple of different times, according to the file, I’m sure he had a blood test at some point.”
“Are those results saved somewhere?”
Allgood nodded, picking up his phone. “Sure, I’ll make a request.”
Lyle went back to the files while Allgood spoke to his assistant. The rest of the autopsy report was fairly standard, though apparently his kidneys had been thrashed. It wasn’t until the final page that Lyle found another surprise.
“His cause of death wasn’t the stroke?”
Allgood finished his call and hung up the phone. “No, we stabilized him after the stroke, and then his kidneys killed him a few hours later.”
“Renal failure,” said Lyle, reading the line again. “What was wrong with his kidneys?”
“He had an acute hemolytic reaction,” said Allgood. “You saw the low red cell count?”
