Plus One (16 page)

Thursday
4:00 p.m.

Jean and Hélène’s fight escalated, in French. It became clear that Jean had resumed his research ever since his son had become school-age. His partners overseas did the lab work, he crunched the numbers. I learned that the projects they were working on were permissible in France, but questionably legal in the United States.

Day Boy finally raised his voice over theirs, saying, “Do you care at all that the neighbors can hear this sensitive discussion?” He turned to Jean, chafed. “What have you guessed, that you can share with me?”

“Since your mother refuses to say the word, I will:
pinealectomy
.”

Day Boy hesitated only a second. “Are you saying the Night babies are all getting pinealectomies?”

Hélène said, “It’s an actionable offense for a doctor to divulge that information to anyone other than another doctor.” She grabbed Day Boy’s hand. “Do you understand that? You don’t
say the word
or your medical license is immediately revoked.”

I knew that an “ectomy” was when something was surgically removed from your body. I knew that the word “pineal” was usually followed by the word “gland.” And although I had probably learned where the pineal gland was and what it did at some point in a science class, I could not dredge the information up on the spot. But I had seen a few newborn babies in my lifetime, and I would have thought a surgery would have been obvious—that we Smudges would have noticed something like that happening to our babies and talked about it to each other.

Day Boy was thinking the same thing.

“Why is there no incision or portal on the scalp?”

That’s right. The pineal gland is in the brain.

Hélène clamped her lips together.

Jean said, exasperated, “If it is done the same way that they do it in France, it’s not a true surgery; instead they destroy the tissue with radiation. The pineal gland is smaller than a grain of rice in an infant, but it takes up fluoride faster than other organs in the body. They attach a tiny seed of quickly decaying radiation to a molecule of fluoride and inject it into the subject. Then they run a positron emission tomography scan to be sure the seed hit its mark.”

“Are you getting this?” Day Boy had the courtesy to ask me.

I nodded dumbly. “But I forget what the pineal gland does.”

“It secretes melatonin,” he replied.

I should have remembered that, being a Smudge. Melatonin was a daily concept for us.

“Melatonin helps to regulate the body clock,” he went on. “The pineal gland produces melatonin after the sun goes down and makes you feel drowsy. The trouble is, Smudges are supposed to sleep during the day. So theoretically I guess if you destroy natural melatonin production at night and then add CircaDiem supplements in the morning, the body clock could be reset.”

Jean said, “Except the scientific evidence that supplemental melatonin recalibrates circadian rhythm is totally nonexistent.”

I could have told them that, based on personal experience.

Jean said, “The only evidence that performing a PinX destroys the body clock comes from experiments on Siberian hamsters—an animal that is hyperphotosensitive because of its evolution. When you remove the pineal gland, hamsters ‘free-run’—their cycles drift regardless of the light hours. For them, introducing melatonin infusions at prescribed times does re-create the cycle, but I must emphasize that
no one
has ever replicated the results in humans.” He glared at Hélène. “Certainly not enough to merit blanket tissue destruction in half the population, using a procedure that is questionably safe.”

“Complications are rare,” Hélène said.

“But greater than zero!” Jean said instantly. “No amount of risk is justifiable for a procedure that has not been proved to be efficacious.”

I asked Hélène, in a voice weaker than I expected, “Did they do this to me?”

She looked at me only long enough to say in a monotone, “If you were born within the last nineteen years in a hospital in the United States … yes.”

The reality of it made me feel fragile, or damaged. I resisted the urge to touch my head, to see if it was whole. I was the same person I’d been five minutes ago. I would not show her that I cared.

I looked at Jean. “My grandfather?”

“I suspect he had the procedure when he arrived. There’s far less data in the area of adult PinX procedures, because there are so few adults who transfer from Day to Night. But we do know that the pineal gland becomes calcified with age. The uptake of fluoride is not the same, and the amount needed to hit the mark may be higher, requiring repeat injections. The effect of systemic radiation may be increased. There are data, though statistically weak until we get larger sample sizes, that show health detriments for this procedure that correlate with his illnesses.” He came over to me, the baby on his shoulder, and said gently, “The changes are seen in older patients only, not in infants, whose new, flexible bodies adapt in ways we don’t understand. But in adults, melatonin suppresses tumor production. It has vascular effects, which might explain your grandfather’s hypertension and retinopathy. It inhibits cholesterol secretion from the gallbladder—”

Hélène interrupted. “This is all theoretical, with little empirical evidence.” But she would only look at Day Boy, not at me or Jean.

Day Boy scrabbled his hair with one hand, thinking. It messed him up perfectly.

“You say complications are rare. What are they, and what is the incidence?”

She said, “The vast majority of infants have no adverse reaction. Some infants have soreness at the injection site. Infrequently, exhaustion and lethargy from the radiation.”

“Is that all?” Day Boy encouraged her.

She looked at her hands. What came out next was practically wilted. “Rarely—
rarely
—the radiation misses its mark, or doesn’t decay fast enough for that individual’s physiology and seems to … it causes a leukemia or lymphoma.”

“Blood cancer,” Day Boy said, stunned.

“One in fifty thousand. But it is most often treatable.”

“How many births are there in the United States every year?” He shot the question at Jean, who shook his head.

“Four million,” Hélène said.

Day Boy clawed his hair again, back and forth. This time he created a giant cowlick that I had the urge to reach out and coax back into place. I shook my head to snap myself out of it.

“Four million babies.” He was doing quick math. “Divided by fifty thousand—”

“Forty babies a year,” I said.

“Eighty,” he corrected.

“Only two million of those births are Smudges.”

The edge of a smile lifted on one side of his face. “Right you are, Plus One.” He quickly became serious again. “Forty children with cancer.”

Hélène said, “There is a similar incidence of complications with vaccines that are given in the first few days of life.”

“Not
cancer.
And those vaccines prevent serious childhood illnesses—they prevent epidemics,” Day Boy said. “If Jean is right that this procedure confers no health benefit to the patient
or
the general population, administering it and causing random cancers is a public health disaster.”

Thursday
4:45 p.m.

When there was a pause in the discussion, I found myself blurting, “I’m sorry, I have to go now.”

Day Boy swung around. “What?”

“None of this medical talk can help me, or Poppu.” I held up my phone. “They said he’s at Jackson Harbor. I’m going to see him before he dies.”

“Just like that,” he said. “What makes you think they’re still there? How do you know they won’t hurt you? We don’t even know who
they
are!”

“I’ll take my chances and leave now. If they’re still docked maybe I can talk my way in.” I put my phone in my pocket. “I’ll wing it.”

“That’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard,” Day Boy said.

“By definition ‘winging it’ is not a plan,” I said, too crisply.

He stepped between me and the sight line to the front door. “You have no way of traveling safely in the daytime.” He pointed toward the couch. “And hell if we’re going to let you trade that baby for your grandfather.”

I looked at Jean, who was changing Fitz’s diaper across his lap, which I had never seen done before.

“I kind of guessed,” I said. “I’ll wrap a football in some blankets as a decoy and hope that it gets me as far as seeing Poppu before they discover there’s no baby.”

“Look at me, Plus One, do I look like the kind of guy who has a football in his house?”

I knew him for what he was now: a slightly disheveled, unconventionally handsome National Distinction scholar, with a fearsome stage mother and a renegade scientist for a dad. Plus he was French. There would be no football.

“A loaf of
bread
, then, it doesn’t matter.” A jumpiness had started to thrill its way from my brain to my arms and legs, making me want to run, or shake someone. “I couldn’t take Poppu home even if I tried—we don’t
have
a home anymore. My last hope is just to say goodbye to him, and
time is running out
.”

Hélène stood up. “You should in fact leave, Miss Le Coeur,” she said coldly. “But the correct plan is for you to turn yourself in. You must depart at night, in your proper sphere, without D’Arcy’s or Jean’s help, carrying this baby, and hail the first police officer you see.”

“That’s not happening,” D’Arcy said.

She ignored him and continued to pin me with words. “If you had a single compassionate cell in your body, you would understand that D’Arcy worked his whole life to be where he is now, that he has already shown exceptional kindness to you at great personal risk, and that this is the only way to safely convey the baby to its parents, where it belongs, and to absolve D’Arcy entirely of responsibility, after which for his sake you shall forget any interaction you had with him other than receiving stitches and a dressing in his care.”

“I won’t turn myself in without seeing my grandfather one last time.” I felt my shoulders and neck tense—no, almost flare, like a cobra’s hood. “So if that’s what you want you’ll have to tie me up right here.” And then I heard my voice rise slightly in pitch but not volume as I said, “Do you understand that other people live, and hope, and love each other? Or is the only room you have left in your heart filled with your son?”

Jean hastily finished the diaper change, nested the baby faceup where the seat of the sofa met the back, and stood to move between us. I had gotten closer to Hélène, and something fierce was spewing out of me like water from a broken levee. Jean spoke, but I couldn’t focus; I felt light-headed, with sounds of the ocean rushing around my ears; and from the corner of my eye I saw Day Boy storm off into the kitchen.

I heard a buzzing noise through the surf in my head. I blinked. It was the doorbell. Hélène had already bolted toward the sunporch and leaped on the office chair to look down at the sidewalk.

“Three men,” she whispered breathlessly to Jean, leaning away from the window so they wouldn’t see her, just as I had done when it was her son at my apartment door. “Men in suits.”

“Crew cuts?” I heard Day Boy ask behind me. I felt an irrational flush of relief that he was back, that he hadn’t given up on us all. Hélène nodded.

He said, “It’s the men from the hospital.”

He scooped Fitzroy off the sofa, grabbed the rolled-up dirty diaper, handed it to me, and tugged me out of the room by my sleeve.

“Please don’t turn her in,” he pleaded to his mother over his shoulder, and led me briskly into the kitchen with Jean following after. I hurried down the ladder first and Day Boy followed, taking obvious care with only one hand for the baby.

Before Jean closed the hatch door, Day Boy looked up and said quietly, “Switch on the intercom.”

Jean nodded. “Keep the baby happy.” I knew “happy” meant “quiet,” and that Day Boy had probably never had to cry much when he was young. After the hatch was closed, I heard the heavy rug slide across the floor and the chair clomp on top of it.

At the foot of the ladder there was a blue vinyl bag that hadn’t been there before, shaped like a soft rectangular suitcase. Day Boy must have dropped it down the hatch during my argument with Hélène. It was about the size of the old sewing machine and case that Ciel had rescued from the dumpster when our Day neighbors had moved to the “safer” suburbs.

Day Boy picked up the bag, and I hurried to take it from him so that he’d have both hands free for Fitzroy. On our way through the kitchen to the hallway, I tossed the diaper in the kitchen garbage can. We went to his room, where I set the bag on his desk. He pointed with his chin and said, “There’s a receiver in that bottom drawer.” I retrieved it, something like a baby monitor. He tipped his head toward the wall. “And an outlet next to my bed.” I plugged it in and switched it on.

“… my husband, Jean François Benoît,” I heard his mother say.

“How do you do, sir,” a man’s voice said. “Now, Mrs. Benoît…”

“Dr. Benoît,” Jean corrected.

“Yes, of course.”

Day Boy eased himself onto the bed, propping his back against the wall, and laid the sleeping baby on the quilt, resting his hand on him. I sat in the stuffed chair beside the bed. In my mind’s eye I suddenly recalled a hazy image of Day Boy sleeping in that same chair while I was feverish: his elbow on the armrest, his temple resting on his knuckles, his eyelashes like black fringe on his cheeks.

“Dr. Benoît, may we speak with you in private, please?” the voice on the monitor was saying.

“With all due respect to you, Mr. Benoît,” another voice said.

“Dr. Benoît,” Jean corrected again. I smiled. He was being deliberately maddening.

“Are you an MD at the hospital, too?” the first man said.

“No, I’m a medical researcher. I have a doctorate.”

“Then I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the room. Mr. Smith here will take you outside for a walk.”

“Not now he won’t,” Jean said. “I am … how do you Americans say it? A Smudge.”