Rabid (4 page)

A clank in the kitchen, and the dishwasher growled and whooshed.

Lingerie in his suitcase after a weekend trip was damning.

Idiot.

He should have checked for something stupid like that.

He wandered out of his den. In the kitchen, Beverly was washing pots. She swiped a suds-covered hand at her brown hair, inhaled a shuddering breath, and began scrubbing again.

He didn’t want his wife to cry. Poor Beverly. No wonder she had gone to the Church.

Perhaps he was lucky that she had gone to a priest. Priests were supposed to keep secrets. If Beverly had confided in Laura or Mary, he might have come home to an empty house and divorce papers. The department would have gossiped until, like a water buffalo in a piranha-infested river, they reduced him to a skeleton. “Beverly?”

She didn’t look at him. If anything, she scrubbed harder. “Yes?”

“I wanted to say,” he said, and she stopped scrubbing, “that I think we can work through this.”

Beverly’s shoulders slumped, but she still didn’t look at him. Her voice was steady. “I think so, too.”

Conroy retreated to his office and read papers on RNA viruses, neurovirulent viruses, herpesviruses and rabies.

He didn’t go to bed until he thought Beverly was asleep.

~~~~~

Bev lay in the dark bed under the covers, her fists clenched against her breastbone. Conroy’s clothes shushed against his polluted skin as he undressed on the other side of the bed. He lifted the covers. Chill air sucked her toes.

In the morning, things might not look so bleak. Problems expanded in the sun’s absence.

Darkness pressed her, weakening her knees like vodka, so she lay in the bed beside that bastard.

She dreamed that smoke filled the air, and her two girls, unfathomably both two-year-old toddlers, rested on her hips. She could hardly walk under their weight and she flowed with the crowd away from the smoke and the screaming and falling debris.

Another fireball lit the sky behind her and its heat scorched her neck.

Ahead of her, Conroy jogged easily with the crowd.

Plaster and concrete dust rushed through the air and closed off the path between them.

The whiteout parted and a man’s hand, swathed in black, reached out to her.

She took the warm, comforting hand and held on.

~~~~~

The Daily Hamiltonian:

Still No Med Head

By Kirin Oberoi

After interviewing several candidates, the selection committee is still looking for a new Dean of the Medical College. “All the candidates were well qualified, but none had that spark of enthusiasm for the University of New Hamilton,” said Dr. Stan Lugar, a committee member.

The committee is interviewing more candidates, including an unnamed UNH candidate, before their February 15
^th
meeting. The selection committee will base its decision on career milestones such as awards, grants, publications, community connections, and career potential.

~~~~~

Leila sat at her desk, a tablet propped up on her knees, reading the DNA sequence in the fluorescent light. She bit her finger and stared at the page, sorting the groups of letters in her mind into sequences that meant something or junk DNA.

She scanned the pages crowded with wordless jumbles of letters, and her finger stopped on a short sequence of A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s.

Her tongue licked her upper lip.

Hot damn. That short DNA sequence was the reason that her mutant virus kept dying. Relief slipped through her chest and sighed.

It was a little exasperating, because it was obvious now that she had figured it out, but it was worth a short paper. Heck, she could probably crank out those experiments in a month and submit the paper two weeks after that.

A key scraped the lock in the lab’s door.

She looked over, tense.

Conroy opened the lab door, said, “You’re early,” and jiggled his keys to extricate them from the jimmied lock.

She kept a finger on the block of DNA code and typed it into her laptop with her left hand to confirm what she already knew.

Conroy set his coffee on the lab bench beside the breadbox-sized PCR machine and shifted his bundled papers and journals to his other arm. “I found an interesting paper. PRV neurovirulence.”

“Pig herpes. No one works with herpesviruses. You might catch something in the lab.”

“Just read the article.” He flapped the hard copy of the paper on the desk beside her computer.

Leila told him, “The kinase and the late glycoprotein are on a bicistronic mRNA.”

Conroy sat at the other computer and checked his email. “
Bi-
cistronic. Sounds kinky.”

She folded her arms across her chest and waited. Surely he would figure out what that meant.

She waited another ten seconds.

Conroy’s head clicked to the left. “
Jesus.
Why are you sitting here? Go make that mutant. You have other experiments going?”

“None to speak of. You?”

Conroy chuckled, a bit of bitter in a single cluck. “None to speak of.”

Anyone else, postdocs or grads or undergrads or techs, would have stopped there, but Leila wanted to know what he was doing, and she had certain privileges that came with screwing the boss. “Your writing is on eight flasks of cells. You have five cages of mice.”

Conroy’s face surged into his wry smirk. “Don’t play with them.”

“Your technique is so sloppy that I bleached the incubator and the hoods.”

He laughed his usual bass rumble. “That’s probably for the best.”

“You aren’t growing pig herpes, are you?”

“No. It’s finicky in culture.”

“So, what
are
you doing?”

“It’s preliminary work. I’ll tell you when I’ve got something to talk about.” His hand covered hers. “When can I see you?”

Leila pulled her hand away, and his palm slid on her skin. “Don’t do that in the lab.”

His hand slipped over her hip. A thrill slithered up her spine at the same leisurely pace as when she had panther-crawled onto Conroy yesterday in her bed surrounded by gauzy curtains under the Persian red, gold-spangled canopy.

Persian Empire harem women, though sequestered, had expressed the range and depth of their sexuality, before the Abrahamic religions had twisted women into the male ideal: monogamous, unimaginative, repressed.

“Dinner, tonight?” he asked.

“Nope. I’m busy.” She walked out of the computer room.

As a rule, sleeping with married men creeped her out, so she rarely indulged. Conroy was one of the very few exceptions.

Marriage reeked of religion and other perversions.

~~~~~

Chapter Three

Conroy was editing his next R01 grant proposal on the outrageously expensive, oversized computer monitor.

First grants are easy. You pull up all your results from your postdoc, wave your hands around a bit, and it goes through.

Many associate professors don’t receive tenure because they don’t get their
second
grant, which should be based on results since the first grant because they shot their wad to get that first grant, and if they don’t get the money, then they can’t hire techs or accept new grad students to produce new data, and then they can’t publish papers, and thus they cannot apply for grants.

Conroy had kept at least one R01 grant for twenty years by holding back some data from each re-application and writing one of the research goals for that very data. Thus, he met at least one of his goals on every grant. Usually, he met all of them, but he always had that one in reserve. It wasn’t cheating. He did that research, and it was real research with real results. It was just good grantsmanship, and his lab hummed along, flush with money to buy equipment that his people needed to do their work and to send his people to conferences where they made contacts that helped them the rest of their professional lives.

He wanted this new R01 grant under review, preferably with an encouraging rumor floating, before the department chair selection committee meeting,

Monday, February fifteenth, the Ides of February, almost a month hence. On his calendar, pencil ringed the date.

But this renewal, these results and this particular grant, were problematic. His hesitant typing bounced staccato off the crammed-full bookshelves and cold windowpane.

His office door was closed. A poster detailing cartooned cellular apoptosis pathways covered even the arrow-slit window.

Apoptosis, that most orderly, regulated death, was Conroy’s secret interest, though he toed the party line that apoptosis in neurons was absent or aberrant. Even an infected brain cell is better than a dead brain cell.

On the poster, cartoon arrows representing intracellular pathways bulged or diminished, and the whole poster suggested a global map of WWII armies surging, clashing, retreating, re-supplying, running amok, traveling on their bellies, flanking, fighting, and overrunning.

Ah, crap.
He had forgotten about Bev’s counseling appointment that night. He wrote
Coun c Beverly @ OLPH
on the month-at-a-glance calendar on his desk, then opened his office door and leaned out.

Leila stood beyond Joe and Danna, the young grad student who bound her electrically frizzed hair in a ponytail. Danna sucked on the end of an eighteen-inch long pipette. Buffer, which is just lightly salted water, shot up the glass straw.

Her undergrad PI had taught her to mouth-pipette and Conroy hadn’t broken her of the dangerous habit yet. Danna maintained that her mouth was cleaner than the gunk-filled pipette bulbs that littered the bench like beached pufferfish, so she got less contamination.

Contamination of the samples wasn’t the reason that she shouldn’t be mouth-pipetting, of course.

Conroy scowled at Danna sucking away on the pipette, and she goggled at him over the borosilicate tube as if she were sucking a thick milkshake up a straw.

Conroy called “Leila?”

Leila turned. A scratched Plexiglas shield reflected white lines of fluorescent light over her exotic face. She held a micropipetter in one blue-gloved hand and a tiny tube in the other. Her tie-died rainbow lab coat enveloped her slim, black clothes.

“Do you have a moment? Computer problem.”

She said, “I’m elbow-deep in ethidium. One minute?”

Ethidium bromide is a DNA stain. The dye molecules slide between DNA bases. Things that intercalate into DNA are strong, strong mutagens.