Rabid (11 page)

The blue Tiffany glass chandelier above the table tossed glittering light shards on Conroy’s skin.

She asked, “What are those cells that you have in the incubator? Primary neurons? Neuroblastoma?”

“Nothing.” Conroy ate a mu shu with a fork and fluffed his thinning white hair with his other hand. “What’re you doing in your experiment?”

“Viral apoptosis pathways in neurons.”
How a virus kills brain cells.

Conroy nodded and didn’t look up. “Neurons don’t apoptose. Which virus?”

“Retrovirus.” And here was her little lie. “Mouse retrovirus.”

He nodded. “Write the paper now. Make the mutant later.”

One benefit of fucking the professor was these precious little moments. “Here’s the thing, Conroy. If we wait until the mutant is finished, it’ll be a much bigger paper.”

Conroy shrugged and forked a kung pao chicken bit. “Two publications make your curriculum vitae longer. Give me a draft Monday.”

He was wrapped up in his little world, the university, the department, the lab, and the next, small paper. Myopia. If he saw the whole paper, he must understand the whole story in rich colors like Darwin’s paradigm-shifting book. Her paper shouldn’t be a puzzle piece. It should be art.

“You never answered about your mice,” she said, “or your cells.”

Conroy shrugged. “Just a confirmatory experiment.”

Ye gods. Conroy endlessly performed confirmatory experiments, converse and inverse, backwards and forwards, examining results that were already published and then publishing them again. It was as if he had to ensure that the wheel was not only round but a flat cylinder with a center, a radius, a diameter, a circumference, and that pi still approximated at 3.1416, because if it wasn’t, he might get to reinvent the goddamned wheel.

Conroy’s plate had two bites left. Hers was empty. The last few streaks of sauce clung to the sides of the paper cartons. “Time to go, don’t you think?”

Conroy looked up. “Going to the lab?”

“Gym,” she said. “Then lab.”
Then gay bar
.

~~~~~

Dante held a large, black umbrella above him and knocked on the Sloans’ door with the cork end of a Chianti bottle. Winter-pruned rosebushes fringed the blue wall.

Inconceivable, that Sloan would risk all this for a screw.

Dante knocked again, and Mrs. Sloan opened the door. Her smile contracted small wrinkles around her eyes, yet plumpness in her cheeks suggested youth.

Inconceivable.

They said hellos and he handed over the wine, chilled from the cold car trunk. The girls, Dinah and Christina, streaked toward him but stopped short of his legs.

In Roma, his nieces and nephew scampered like a twelve-limbed ocean wave and splashed against his legs, spontaneously dividing into three giggling children. He missed that.

Dante shook their hands in turn, the older Christina first. “Pleased to see you again.” He bent lower for Dinah, who wore a spiky ballerina’s tutu. “And you.”

“Good timing,” Mrs. Sloan said. “Supper’s ready.”

The dining room glittered. The chandelier above the table looked like melting crystal, and the glass table reflected the scattered droplets of light up to the ceiling and out the windows that wrapped the room. Candles on the table sparked gold though the glass.

Mrs. Sloan sat before he could offer to pull her chair, so he sat at the other end of the table, facing them all and those dark, reflecting windows that crackled with light.

“I hope you like lemon chicken,” Mrs. Sloan said and she began passing plates.

Dante hesitated. He shouldn’t be shy about blessing the meal. At his sister’s house, he said the benediction in Latin because it amused Theresa.

He said, “Shall we?” and spread his hands apart, suggesting an arc within a circle.

Mrs. Sloan pulled her napkin from her lap and dropped it on the floor. She picked it up and reached out to her children. “Girls? When Father Dante is here, we’ll say grace before we eat supper. We don’t need to tell Daddy.”

The girls wavered, looking between their mother and Dante, until Christina reached for their outstretched hands. Dinah followed suit.

“Join me in the Lord’s Prayer?” he asked.

Mrs. Sloan smiled. She was pretty, but she was not one of the sultry Roma beauties who tried Dante’s soul. Dinner with the three ladies was pleasant.

Pleasant
salved Dante’s raw soul.

~~~~~

Conroy typed the grant proposal on his wide computer screen. The son of a bitch needed to be mailed soon so there would be time for encouraging rumors by February fifteenth, when the university committee decided who would be the new Dean of the Medial Collage.

His barnacled heart quivered and pumped harder.
Dean Sloan
.
Dean Sloan.

Finally, Yuri went home, and the lab was empty. One can’t do experiments that should not be talked about when there are students and postdocs hanging around, looking at plates, asking
Whatcha doing?

There are many reasons to not discuss experiments.

Some experiments are wild shots in the dark and aren’t worth discussing unless they pan out.

Some experiments infringe on other labs’ work, and you have to be politic.

Sometimes, what you are doing is illegal or immoral or might cause a problem, like you might inadvertently create a deadly new superplague, or you might be working with virus strains or reagents internationally smuggled and furtively handed off at conferences, and you’ve got to be careful when you discuss those.

Conroy wrote in his lab notebook:
8:30pm (22 hp pass), infected c 1000 PFU/mL RV-12.

Keeping careful notes is vital in science. If you screw something up, you can figure out what you did from your notes. An hour can make a difference in viral titer.

When treating patients, careful notes can allow you to see a pattern you might not have considered and thus save a patient, or notes can save your ass during a lawsuit.

Conroy kept meticulous, though coded, notes on everything.

Padded gloves protected his hands, and he opened the giant Thermos flask. Warm air seeped into the tank. The liquid nitrogen boiled, and the tank burbled like an ice volcano.

Labeled, metal tabs ringed the mouth of the tank. Conroy selected one and pulled up an aluminum basket full of long aluminum canes. He pulled out one cane. Frozen vials, longer and thinner than thimbles, lined the cane. One vial,
RV-12
, he teased out with double-padded fingers. The tiny tube frosted over, obscuring the pink crystals inside and coating it in slippery ice.

The ice-covered vial shot from his encumbered fingers and tumbled through the air. He dropped the cane in his frenzy to catch the vial, and it splashed into the liquid nitrogen. A fine, freezing spray speckled his face. The tube brushed his cottoned fingertips, danced in the air, and fell into his palm, safe.

Jesus H. Fucking Christ.

Conroy’s hand clamped around the miniscule tube and shook.

If the frozen, brittle vial had shattered on the floor, the virus would have burst into the air and aerosolized, and he might have inhaled it. This strain, isolated from the
Pipistrellus subflavus
bat, was particularly infectious. The virus would have burrowed into his tender lungs, leapt into his blood, infested his nerves, and swarmed up to his brain.

His face flushed as if with fever.

He hadn’t dropped it.

He just needed to be careful.

Very, very careful.

He set the vial on the counter and eased the basket down. The liquid nitrogen bubble-bubbled, toiled-and-troubled. He capped the tank and carried the vial to the tissue culture room.

In the hood, he set the vial down and stepped back.

During storage, if liquid nitrogen had seeped past the silicone gasket and gotten into the vial, the vial would explode when it thawed, splattering the hood with virus. Still, that was a better proposition than contaminated shrapnel flying through the lab.

He shucked the padded gloves, slapped on latex ones, and waited, interlacing his fingers behind his head to support his neck.

Outside the tissue culture room, the lab door crashed closed.

Conroy jumped and inspected his samples, but they were all labeled with innocuous numbers. He draped a floppy latex glove over the vial of virus stock to hide it anyway.

Leila strode into the tissue culture room. She was wearing damp yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Her hair was slicked back in a ponytail. She opened the incubator, a warm contraption the size of a dorm refrigerator, and pulled out trays of cells. “What’re you doing here, Dr. S.?”

“Tissue culture.” He glanced at the glove-covered vial in his hood.

She slid a flask onto the microscope and stared through the oculars. The video camera displayed pink, spindly neurons like stretched fried eggs on the computer monitor. She said, “Oh, secret experiments again.”

“No. Nothing important.”

“Yeah. Right.” She white-balanced the screen to remove the pink tint. The brain cells’ splatted cell bodies and long axon spikes sharpened on the screen.

His vial of virus stock had probably thawed and was, as they spoke, degrading in the caustic hibernation chemicals.

She focused the picture of the neurons, looking at the screen and twiddling the knob on the side of the microscope. “So why are the Jesuits after you?”

“They aren’t
after
me. I met Petrocchi-Bianchi and wanted to know if he was legit.”

Leila tapped the space bar, and the image on the monitor froze. “I can’t believe you got the Jesuits after you. The Jesuits are the radical fringe of the Catholic Church. They’re actually kind of cool.”

“You don’t think anything about the Church is cool.” The heresies she promulgated, the scoffing and outright hostility she evinced, usually in bed, turned Conroy on.

“Well, the Jesuits aren’t as sick as the rest of them. Some were killed in Latin America during the troubles. Others disappeared because they opposed Pinochet. They’ve nearly been excommunicated
en masse
a couple of times.” She looked up, away from the cells, and a small smile curved her lips. “If I were a priest, I’d be a Jesuit.”

“You can’t be a priest. You don’t believe in God.” Conroy’s virus stock was dying.

“Not to mention that I lack a necessary member, but it’s philosophically impossible to prove a negative,” Leila stared in the microscope, “so you can’t say there is no God. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Good thing his wife didn’t know that crap. She would have his ass in Mass every day. “That waffling wouldn’t be acceptable during the Liturgy.”

Her jaw tightened and ligaments lined her neck. “I know the Liturgy, Conroy.”

“Jesus, Leila. Are you Catholic?”

“Nope.” She slapped the space bar, capturing a picture. She cranked the microscope, slapped the bar, cranked the scope, smashed the bar. She shoved her samples back in the incubator, “’Bye, Conroy,” and strode out.