Rabid (55 page)

~~~~~

At Mass that Sunday, Bev sat at the organ in the choir loft and picked out chords with one hand while the choir sang. She used the bass pedals more than she had before, with both feet, trying to lend some depth to the one-handed music.

First Mass was so early in the morning. She sipped her flask of Irish coffee, medicating her mild hangover that rumbled in her body and twanged her temples.

The choir finished their short song and filed down to receive Holy Communion. Mary and Lydia tilted their heads toward the stairwell and the spiral staircase that led down to the floor, but Bev smiled and arranged her music so she wouldn’t have to turn pages while she was playing.

Below her, Dante’s sonorous voice said, “The body of Christ,” quite clearly.

The hangover threatened vomiting, but she stayed at the organ, sweating pinpricking droplets, wishing she could escape his voice that had stroked her neck the entire Mass.

The nearness of his voice, too, was penance.

~~~~~

Two weeks later, Leila sat in a booth at the Dublin, drinking beer to quell caffeine jitters and reading a scientific paper, one of the eighty-seven papers she had referenced in the bibliography of the scientific papers that she had written.

She really should read more than the abstract in case it was a bad paper with a good abstract. She skimmed the introduction and materials and methods sections.

The door above her opened, and spring sunlight swarmed into the dark bar.

Two undergrads were playing pool in the back. The balls snickting off each other sounded like a switchblade released near her ear.

Footsteps clomped down the stairs, and Father Dante—open Roman collar, black shirt, wrapped in his black coat—trundled down the stairs, watching his feet. At the middle of the stairs, he steadied himself by grabbing the railing and surveyed the room until he saw Leila, sitting sideways in the booth.

She had been waiting for him. Monty had told her the priest’s schedule.

His head bounced in greeting. He walked over to her.

“
Buona sera
,” he said.

“Que sera, sera, yourself,” she said and set the paper on the table.

“May I join you?”

She shrugged and he seated himself opposite her.

Leila swallowed a gulp of her light, sweet brew.

Dante ordered a pint from the bartender.

“How are your papers coming along?”

“Almost ready. You’re second author. Danna is third. ‘A Novel Neuron Apoptosis Pathway Is Activated During HIV Infection and Inhibited During Neurovirulent Lyssavirus Infection.’”

“Apoptosis? And you’re sure it’s not merely necrosis?” he asked.

“It’s apoptosis all right. Perfectly programmed. Perfectly regulated. It’s beautiful, really.”

Monty brought a well-poured beer to Dante, his usual. “And you managed to avoid saying rabies.”

“In the title. It’ll save Conroy’s reputation until they read the abstract.”

Dante’s question was quiet. “Did you have live HIV in your lab?”

“I labeled it biohaz, used the glove box and sealed flasks, put it in sealed incubators, and bleached everything. My aseptic technique is impeccable. Only-child, paranoid control freak-type of perfect. Those’re standard safety conditions for HIV.”

“Are you still using the live virus?”

“Conroy’s slip-ups scared me.” Which was entirely true.

“So you autoclaved everything, all the strains, all the cells, all the frozen stocks.”

“Yep,” she lied. Indeed, she had a timepoint at ten that night in a little experiment just to confirm that the apoptotic neurons’ nuclei were blebbing, a note added in proof. The confirmatory experiment was Conroyesque in its redundancy.

Dante sipped his beer. “Why experiment with that HIV? Why not something safer, like the simian virus?”

She used the moist bottom of her glass to imprint a Mandela ring pattern on the bar and considered the interlocking circles of her life.

Dante said, “I’m sorry to pry. How about them Knicks?”

Some secrets, Leila hid.

This didn’t have to be one.

“My dad,” Leila sipped her beer, “died of AIDS. A decade ago, or so. His strain was resistant to everything. I used HIV because nothing else is really comparable.”

“I’m sorry.” Dante sipped his beer, and his hand flickered toward her, then retracted.

“He used to take me to gay bars with him when I was a kid, when I visited him in Florida.” Those wild, parrot-colored summers.

“Those are no place for children.” His tone was conversational, not condemning.

“I was with a crowd of boy-moms every night, adored, dressed in trendy clothes, went to theater and arts performances, danced all night with men who had absolutely no bad intentions toward me. I was a hell of a lot safer with my dad than I was in California. I ran away every August before he had to send me home. When I was fourteen, I got as far as North Carolina before the Queer Patrol found me. Dad tried to get custody but,” she flipped her fingers in the air, miming the impossibility of catching smoke, “a gay man in court, against the mother, who had a ‘stable home’ and a bat flock of priests testifying that she was a staunch pillar of the Church. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.”

Dante rested his elbow on the table. Without the white tab, his shirt looked almost like a flat Nehru collar.

“The virus attacked his brain more than most people,” Leila said. “My mom didn’t want me to see him at the end, but one of his friends, Ducko, sent me a plane ticket. The way the virus ate his brain, it was like what you’d expect in Alzheimer’s or a prion disease.”

“Did your father know who you were?” Dante’s eyebrows hovered above his eyes, sad, not derisive. He swirled his beer. “It is very hard when they don’t recognize you.”

“It didn’t matter. I knew who he was.” Leila brisked up her manner. Moroseness reserved for one day a year, and this day was not it. “Anyway, our first paper is the molecular one, the neural apoptosis pathway. HIV causes apoptosis, nice, planned, orderly death, and not some random, rampaging dying. I’m planning the second paper’s figures, which I’ll write just as soon as I finish submitting this one.”

Dante nodded and sipped the last of his drink. “And what is that one about?”

“I don’t think you’ll want your name on it.”

Dante quirked an eyebrow. “A scientist, turn down an authorship? Even though I think that fMRI interpretation doesn’t warrant a spot on even one paper, let alone two.”

“I’m sending it to
Nature
, and I bet it’ll make the evening news.” Seismic tremors quivered all through her muscles. She wanted to tell him, but he might scoff, and he shouldn’t scoff. He should be damned afraid that she was right.

He smirked. “Come now, what apoptosis pathway could generate a sound bite on what you Americans call news?”

“It’s not molecular. It’s anatomical and more. It’s theological. People who are dying of HIV have near-death experiences. They see angels and light and their loved ones and all that crap. I got scans from some people who were dying of HIV. My dad was a religious nut at the end. People who die of rabies don’t see anything. I mean, they never, ever do.”

Danna wouldn’t see visions when she died, which would be soon. Leila had visited her yesterday, even though Danna had been medicated into a coma. Leila just held her hand for an hour, hoping that Danna found some comfort in it.

“HIV doesn’t infect neurons.” The green lampshade beside Dante’s head cast a sick pallor on his skin.

Leila said, “HIV infects microglia, and those cells secrete an apoptotic factor. The rabies virus infects the neurons, yet they don’t die. And there’s a structure in the brain that HIV infects. The apoptosis pathway must be different in there, or else it’s killing around the structure and thus allowing that part of the brain to go haywire, removing the repression. The blood circulation in there goes crazy right before death. It’s even in the visual cortex. The rabies virus infects everything around that place in the brain but nothing happens to that structure. It’s dark. It just lies there.”

Leila leaned in. “I’ve found the neural locus of the brain’s flight up to Heaven,” she said. “I’ve got it all, the bright light, the angels, the soul, and how the brain works to make it seem real.” She sipped her beer. “I’m putting the Catholic Church out of business.”

“The Catholic Church has existed for two millennia,” Dante said. “Mere proof that the soul is an illusion or an artifact of neurology won’t bankrupt the Church. We’ve survived worse press than that. Besides, our business is faith, not mere facts. But yes, if you want, if you would be so generous, you may add my name to the paper. Perhaps the addition of a monsignor and the Society of Jesus to the header would, indeed, alert the media.”

“Maybe it will.” Leila sipped her beer. “So what’re you doing in a bar in the afternoon?”

Dante shrugged. “I was on my way back to the rectory.”

“Seemed like you were looking for someone.”

Dante’s head inclined to one side, between a shrug and an admission.

~~~~~

At the end of the bar, Palan, a shortened form of the Hawaiian
Palani
because boys taunted him that he had girl’s name when he was a kid, listened to the two of them talk about HIV.

He wanted to scoot closer, but he couldn’t without being obvious. What he heard was enough, though. HIV killed brain cells. It was probably killing his brain cells now as it spread through his skull like forking lightening, even though he took his pharmaceutical cocktail around the clock.

What the hell. If his brain was scheduled for demolition, he might as well kill those brain cells the old fashioned way, the way that the haoles had taught the kanakas: kulu, okoleaho, y’ona, alekohola, firewater. “Monty? What’d’ya got in a whiskey way?” 

Newlyn, sitting beside him, looked at Palan with surprise. He had met Palan at Hotbod’s and started drinking together there, but they had moved to the Dublin a few weeks ago after a screwy bar fight had ended in cops. Palan didn’t drink the hard stuff. He had expounded upon the wiles of hard liquor, suggested that the missionaries had stocked liquor and viruses on their ships to wipe out the Hawaiian race.

“Make it two,” Newlyn said to Monty.

~~~~~

Leila said to Dante, “Malcolm thinks you’re stalking me. He says you show up here, have a drink, and watch the door the whole time.”

Again, his dark head inclined. Priests shouldn’t have movie-star good looks. Priests were too dangerous to look like that.

What was that line from
Macbeth
? Something about how angels look. Her neurons probed other neurons, finding connections. “Have you been waiting down here for me?”

Dante sipped his beer slowly, a delaying tactic. For a psychiatrist, his tics were transparent. She could clean his clock if they played poker.

“Sometimes.” He sipped again and wiped the foam off his upper lip with his thumb. “I like to talk to you.” He looked up, and his black eyes were too vulnerable.

Flattery was an obvious ploy. She had expected a smart-ass answer or something priestishly waffling.