Carry Me Home (117 page)

Knowledge did not slow his decline. Nor did it serve Sara well. Her constant thoughts were now of greater information, of “there’s something out there on how to treat this that we haven’t yet dug up. Some monoclonal antibody therapy, some oncogene ... some magic dart ...”

The trips to West Haven became more frequent. The dosage of antibiotics was increased, the potency elevated. Still the freight train chugged as if unstoppable.

Bobby paused. Suddenly, to him, there was no longer any sense in searching the literature, in looking for proof that TCDD had caused his aplastic anemia. It was beyond reasonable doubt. The class-action suit that had been filed in January of 1979 in the names of four hundred veterans had grown to represent 40,000 veterans. To him it made little difference. For him it was the wrong approach. If the veterans won, he asked himself, would it significantly change his life? Compensation? Money was not his ultimate concern, had never been. And vindication was not sweet, not bitter, not positive other than it nudged the scale toward zero balance, toward the center, toward neutral perceptions and policies that had gone askew. But vindication would not right the wrong, would not give him four-month erythrocytes. Vindication and money were not inherently negative but, to him, their tendency to break his focus, to refocus his concern, his disciplined concentration away from his work, away from his expanded self onto his central self, was ruinous.

For him to understand what was happening to him required an expansion beyond the search into toxicological effects, required of him first a fundamental understanding of his own biology, of the biophysical functioning of affected basic units, of his own cellular-molecular composition. At this point, though he did not yet realize it, the search for understanding, for How Things Work, the delving into human cellular mechanics, was but a new step to a deeper search, understanding, expansion.

Bobby read about, studied, made drawings of microtubules, lysosomes, Golgi, ribosomes. He meditated on cell membranes—walls that actively discriminated, selectively regulated the immigration and expulsion of living and dead materials; on mitochondria, the power companies of the cells; on the endoplasmic reticulum; and the headquarters, the tactical operations centers, the Pentagon complex, the nucleus itself with its double helix structure and its fifty to sixty thousand separate dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA) offices each with its own nucleotidal foreman, plans sets, and fax machines transmitting or capable of transmitting via intra- and intercellular chemical communication lines, pools, RNA messages—do this, don’t do that, link these amino acids together like Lego blocks in this exact sequence, multiply and/or divide, or cease multiplying, dividing, or commence until this exact condition is encountered at which moment your present mission is complete, and get back to me, chemically, for debriefing so I too can rest. Genes! Construction drawings. Much more. Executives, decision makers. Still more. Stimulators, movers and shakers, motivators, prime movers, holders of the life force. Inside each gene a
desire
to be alive! An intimate and inseparable relationship of life forces, of strong, weak, love and ...

Bobby could not yet grasp, conceive, conceptualize, the primary forces within atoms, the subparticles, quarks, muons, and their relationship to atomic structure, to molecular structure, to genetic desire, to cellular communication, to the production and reproduction of cells, to the reproduction of aberrant cells.

He studied, searched, analyzed, pondered.

Hemoglobin is constructed—actively and purposefully assembled—of four porphyrin molecules “glued” to a molecule of iron. Herbicide poisoning has a destructive, though indirect, effect upon this bonding that can be measured in urine samples by testing for coproporphyrins. Reaching backward: TCDD has been shown to be stored in the fatty tissues of those exposed to Agent Orange. Reaching forward: Is there a way to flush the toxins from human fatty tissues without endangering other, more active tissues such as blood-producing bone marrow, or egg/ sperm-producing sex organs? Maybe an in-home purge? Fast and deluge the organism with endless quantities of pure Endless Mountain water, enough to cause diarrhea? Chelation: The process of chelating, or combining, with a metallic ion to form a chelate; or to form a ring with one or more hydrogen bonds ... Hydrogen bombs! Vaporize me!

The attempt to formulate a workable design exhausted him yet he pressed on. Chelation therapy introduces a chemical agent—how he abhorred that tag—that will combine, chelate, with a specific toxic element producing a precipitate that
can
be flushed from the organism.... Backward: to a conceptualization of the 2,4,5-T molecule, of the 2,3,7,8-TCDD molecule, to an analyzation of their surface topographies, to the reverse, inverse topographies, to picturing and constructing molecules with those reverse topographies—nature does it all the time, antibodies to antigens—which can key into the toxin, lock on, together fall to the “bottom” like a child’s suspension of backyard dirt in a water-filled beach bucket.

He attempted to enter the mind, to be the mind of an experimental pathologist, toxicologist. “TCDD induces malignant tumors”—he addressed a conference within his mind—“in exposures as low as five parts per trillion ... causes carcinomas of the liver, lungs, palate ... testicular cancer, lymphomas and leukemias ... delayed effects ... more toxic than the most lethal nerve gas in the military arsenal ... causing failure of all elements of the blood-forming system, causing victims to hemorrhage, to be defenseless to infections, essentially to deteriorate, literally to fall to pieces ...

“Yet ... But ... However ... TCDD is eliminated from human tissue via bile fluid from which, by which, it is transported to the intestines to be defecated ... Yet ... However ... here it is reabsorbed, the enterohepatic cycle, recirculated to liver, lungs, bone marrow, the body constantly discarding and inadvertently recycling unwanted trash like pissing into the wind ... Yet ... if it could be chelated, combined, as if the wind ceased, combined perhaps with cholestyramine used as a salt binder in patients with high cholesterol, used as a chelation agent in kepone toxicity ... then not reabsorbed but indeed deposited, the mark being left, the throne room’s excreta whisked away by the simple act of depressing the lever.”

Again he reached back, reached forward. What causes cancer? No! What caused my cancer? No! No! When I was wounded, light shrapnel in the legs, I did not say, “Corpsman, take
my
shrapnel out.” Nay! I said, “Medic, get this fucking shrapnel outta me!” I said, “Take this out. It’s not mine. It belongs to the NVA.” So take this cancer. Take this aplastic anemia. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it. It’s not mine. It’s somebody else’s. Give it back to Dow. Give it back to Daddy Dow. What has caused this cancer that has attacked me? Is it the Agent Orange? Sara is certain. She is leading the technical information search, the search for new treatments. She is the advocate. She is addressing civic groups in my name. She is the leading advocate for veterans, for humans. Certainly TCDD is a trigger. But what pulled that trigger?! Is it something in me? Something deeper in me than the strict biomechanical process, the reaction to a toxicant that has cleaved the genetic lines of chromosome ∆ allowing for translocation of gene
x
on arm
q
of the heavy chain to relocate to chromosome A where it lodged next to gene
y
which enables it, chromosome ∆, to evade the mechanism that controls its expression? Why was it set off in me, in this manner, and not in others who were equally exposed? Why in my bone marrow? Why my blood? Why, in affected others, did it trigger brain tumors, or liver ... or testicular ...? And what, if it is something innate in me, beyond the biomechanical, is it? What is the triggering and the site selection determinant? And if it is beyond the physical, is it something I can reverse? Is this something, if I can determine the trigger, I can psychologically or spiritually untrigger? And if untriggerable, if chelated and flushed, what happens to the chromosomal damage previously done?

Bobby searched into himself for hours on end, day after day, week after week. He sent messages, explored hidden regions, sought information, gave orders. “Headquarters, free the infiltrators, expel the double agents, arrest the saboteurs.” Can the damage be repaired? Can the war be won though major battles have been lost and the nation is on its knees? Will a win at Xuan Loc keep Saigon from falling?

Daily Bobby studied, contemplated, ruminated. Daily he unfocused, disciplined nonfocused meditation. He lay still, on his back, on the floor of Grandpa’s office, alone, wrapped in a blanket, a bedroll, warm yet not aware of the warmth, secure though without cognition of that security. Over his eyes he laid the old OD jungle sweater that reduced the dimmed room to utter darkness, to the void in which the search could be continued. He looked in. He traveled to sites of unrestrained growth, of mutant self-destructive platelets. He attempted to spy on the man-made environmental toxins triggering the aberrant cellular mutations. He tried to infiltrate the mutants’ base camp to discover their need for suicide. Why have you allowed these substances to enter the walled city of the cell? Why have you not expelled them? Why have you let them come to headquarters? Or have they simply gained control of the commo center, altered the messages and production orders, to their choosing? And why have you not recognized the abnormalities of the new structures? Why have you allowed them to replicate endlessly their chimeric clones? Or do they, themselves, or do you ...? Surely there is not and never has been a TCDD alien for each and every cell. Then why are all new cells aberrant? Surely the answer to this, like a change in the cultural norms of a society, explains the delayed onset of the disease, and like a society the aberration began with a tiny pocket of radical ...

So what?!

Re-unfocus and flow. He is a microscopic entity, not matter, not energy, but thought represented within his unformation by a blue glow flowing within his own arteries, veins, capillaries, a pinball ball ricocheting from concave disks but 0.0003 inch in diameter, inspecting each; a blinking cursor in the three-dimensional holographic computer screen of his body, leaping through tissues, randomly interviewing a sample of the one hundred trillion cells of his being, checking that each contains an identical headquarters with identical blueprints—though with different assignments, tasks to perform, different rooms to construct, different systems to maintain—checking randomly, then comparing blueprints, finding that hair cells and skin cells and toe cells all know the proper way to make blood cells so how come the bone marrow that makes those blood cells is fucking up?!!! Fire the CEO! Chastise the nucleotidal foreman! Send in a ... a what? A messenger with proper prints! “Ah, hey look, Buddy. You spilled coffee on yours and you’re building the wrong stuff, Man. See? Here’s a good set. I borrowed it from your patella.”

“I’ll make what the hell I want. Leave me alone.”

“What? Man, you keep makin that shit, you’ll kill us all.”

“Says who? You follow your prints, I’ll follow mine.”

“Man ... see, you spilled that TCDD coffee right there and the cell lysosome isn’t complete and it’s leaking its enzymes into the cytoplasm and causing quick self-destruction.”

“Says who?! Where do you get off telling me my job?”

“Naw. Naw, Man. You don’t understand. You keep doing that they goina poison your food. Hide somethin in the food that’ll cause
your
lysosome-stomach to cramp until you’re a goner, Man. Then they’ll replace you. You know, Man, transfer in a bunch a scabs. Chemo followed by bone marrow transplant, Man.”

“They wouldn’t dare!”

... now feeling the warmth of the cocoon about him, then again not feeling it at all but sensing on some level that he is warm, protected, cared for as Sara cares for him, linked eternally, secure in this care, this warmth, this cocoon, liberated to deepen the search, millimeter by millimeter, nanometer by nanometer, searching for the commo line between triggered cells and healthy cells, searching through April, May and June.

The trigger must yet be something more, something else, something different. If the trigger is in me, or of me, what am I? I am more than the sum of my cells, more than a heap of organelles, just as a book is more than the linkage of words, more than a pile of letters. The relationship of the parts, the format, is essential. And the force that organizes the format is essential, is perhaps the life force, the soul, is the essential me. How has that force, how have I, gone awry? How can I right the bias? Trying to understand, trying to construct the parallel universes of mind and body, of corporeal and spiritual, attempting to unite them within a code, to explain them in The Code, in a search for the universal tie.

“Aren’t you getting into the car?” Sara’s words were quick, light. The early morning was delightfully cool.

“Hmm.” Bobby turned, looked out across the pond, let his gaze fall on a pair of mallards by the near bank.

“I told Linda we’d meet them at River Front Park ten minutes ago,” Sara said. “We’re late.” She slid in behind the wheel, turned, checked the children, ensured they’d buckled their seatbelts. Bobby remained motionless, leaning against the car. It was to be their first real family vacation. With the Pisanos they’d rented a cottage on the Jersey Shore. “Bobby?”

“Um.”

“Bobby, are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’s—” his words came slowly, “that I’m just looking ... at the ducks.”

“Come on. Get in. Bobby ... are you feeling okay?”

“I’m a little cold.” He settled into the seat beside her. “And my head’s pounding.”

“Your crit’s low?!”

“I just got a refill.... It’s ... I think it’s because of my eye. It’s like there’s a blob of water over everything.”

“Do you want the patch while we’re moving?”

“No. Maybe. I’m going to just close my eyes awhile.”

He rested his head on the seatback, zippered his jacket. In back Noah and Paul were drawing pictures, Am was munching a bagel, all being “good,” being quiet, not irritating their father. The car rolled. Bobby sat up, took in the drive, the old gate, the orchard and Christmas trees. Then he closed his eyes again. He thought of Josh in Rodney Smith’s care, felt like he was abandoning him. The thought didn’t last. Almost immediately it was replaced by slight vertigo, by nausea, by pains in his joints, arms, butt. Pain, the inner experience, the thought, the word alone can induce it, enable it, allow it to spread. Pain, the process, exactly the opposite of DAARFE-vader, capable of being controlled by DAARFE, capable of destroying DAARFE. And cancer! What caused the ... No. He would not think of it, would not meditate on it. This was vacation time. Time with his kids. And none in diapers! What JOY! Let Tony change little Johnny; Bobby was through that stage. Better to build sand castles ... splash each other, maybe a sand dragon ... maybe an entire sand city at the edge of the rising tide.