Forty Signs of Rain

When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.

‘Good morning guys.’

‘Hey Leo.’ Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. ‘Ready to check it out?’

‘Sure am. Can you help?’

‘In just a sec.’ She moved down the bench.

Brian said, ‘This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.’

Leo was startled to hear this. ‘No. You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Oh not really. Not really.’

‘Really.’

‘How could he?’

‘Press release. Also calls to his favourite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.’

‘Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.’

‘Sorry, but you know Derek.’ Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. ‘It’s all over.’

Leo squinted at a screen. ‘It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.’

‘It will be tomorrow.’

The company’s website Breaking News box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep – lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

‘Oh my God,’ Leo muttered as he read. ‘Oh my God.’ His face was flushed. ‘Why does he do this?’

‘He wants it to be true.’

‘So what? We don’t know yet.’

With her sly grin Marta said, ‘He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Roadrunner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.’

‘But it never works! He always falls!’

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This time we’ll do it.’

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, ‘Yeah, right, you’re good,’ and started to put on rubber gloves.

‘Remember the time he announced that we had haemophilia A whipped?’ Brian said.

‘Please.’

‘Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. to show how well our therapy worked?’

‘The guillotine turntable experiment?’

‘Please,’ Leo begged. ‘No more.’

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject – alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. ‘Why does he do this, why why why?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: ‘I tell you – he thinks he can make us do it.’

‘It’s not us doing it,’ Leo protested, ‘it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.’

‘You’ll just have to think of something that will work.’

‘You mean like, build it and they will come?’

‘Yeah. Say it and they will make it.’

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Roadrunner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller – like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent Nasdaq free-fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Roadrunner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this –’ pointing – ‘it’s even better than before.’

‘See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.’

‘The fuck he did.’

‘Pretty good numbers,’ Brian said with a grin. ‘Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.’

Marta said, ‘Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.’

Leo nodded. ‘Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies where it needs to be.’

‘You didn’t read the whole website,’ Marta told him, smiling angrily again.

‘What do you mean?’ Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. ‘He’s going to buy Urtech.’

‘What’s Urtech?’

‘They have a targeted delivery method that works.’

‘What do you mean, what would that be?’

‘It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?’

‘Except by the patent, and Derek’s offer to buy it, no.’

‘Oh my God. Why does he do this kind of stuff?’

‘Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.’

‘Yeah right.’

Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterwards it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and with the protein being produced in therapeutic amounts, the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.

So, for a long time now they had been in the same boat as everyone else, chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a ‘targeted non-viral delivery system’. Any company that came up with such a system, and patented it, would immediately have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed. Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point the startup’s employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off – retire and go surfing, or start up another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby than the cut-throat struggle to make a living that it often seemed before the big success arrived.

So the hunt for a targeted non-viral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well-proven, there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey Pines – Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it) – had convinced Derek that they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president, Dr Sam Houston, an old friend and early partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.

So. It was true.

Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret – a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted – he would have to check that one out as soon as possible – and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or two papers were all that supported the whole approach.

Secret science. ‘God damn it,’ Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.

There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.

‘Oh hi, Yann, how are you?’

‘I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say goodbye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.’

‘Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.’

‘Really?’

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.

‘Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,’ Leo admitted. ‘It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.’

‘Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.’

‘That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.’

‘Oh I will. See you soon.’

And their best biomaths guy slipped out the door.

Charlie Quibler had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. ‘Have you got your backpack and your lunch?’ – this not always being the case – and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.

‘Joey and Daddy!’ Charlie would say then, or ‘Joe and Dad at home, here we go!’ or ‘How about breakfast? Here – how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk.’

This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careering around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.

‘Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.’

‘Ba!’

‘Yes, bottle.’

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfil Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

‘Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.’

‘Oh hi Roy, what’s up?’

‘Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.’

‘Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.’ The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the US to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

‘Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?’

‘I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.’

‘Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.’

‘Yeah I know. Wait just a second.’

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.

‘A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?’

‘Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.’

‘Say what?’

‘I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.’

‘So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?’

‘Yes I am.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.’

‘I bet.’ Roy cackled. ‘Do you ever get it straight from the source?’

‘Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.’

‘Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.’

‘Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.’

‘He understood!’

‘Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?’ he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

‘Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.’

‘Come on, it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean –’

‘Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you a.s.a.p., I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.’

‘That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.’

‘Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.’

‘Yeah okay but see what I did already.’

‘Sure bye.’

‘Bye.’

Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.

‘Man, you are fast,’ Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.

There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow, to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time around, though now he could hardly remember why. A perfect image for all the compromised joys and irritations of Mr Momhood, those hundreds of sessions with reluctant Nick and his bottle.

With Joe life was in some ways much easier. Charlie was more used to it, for one thing, and Joe, though difficult in his own ways, would certainly never refuse a bottle.

Now he decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.

‘Okay okay! Quiet! Hey, let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!’

‘No!’

‘Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!’

‘NO!’

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. ‘Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!’

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other daycare to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids; but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colourful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. ‘Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!’

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to DC. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.

So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood. No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again – going after a black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he was wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive mom, or in this case a nanny – a young blonde au pair from Germany whom Charlie had spoken to before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him; not a single adult in that room believed in his innocence.