Race Across the Sky (20 page)

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A
ll February, Caleb trained in the snow.

The mountains had received enough snow to turn the trails sallow. The expanse of pure white powder came up to his knees, his hips, sometimes his chest. It acted as resistance, like training in water. He welcomed it, choosing paths where he saw no footprints except a mule deer's, or the slithering impression of a milk snake.

Running across the snowpack was risky; danger lay in its blinding white. In the thick roots that hid underneath it like pythons. In the sharp rocks camouflaged in gentle sparkles. In the fearsome cold that could disorient as the beauty of the sunlit snow beckoned him farther and farther away from the roads.

Up in Boulder, people ran their daily five miles equipped with thermal gloves, expensive microfiber jackets, iPhones tucked into specially designed zippered pouches. Caleb disappeared into the backcountry wearing only his light Houdini pants and jacket, plastic goggles, an old fleece hat. In the shade, bitter wind blew shards of ice across his lips. Even under the sun the cold bore its way into his bones. But avoidance of pain was never Caleb's intent. Only avoidance of suffering.

Over the past decade he had successfully extracted any emotional confusion from his life. Jobs, career, family, the expectations of the world, were all like forgotten high school friends. But now, like a patient in remission who with horror senses his symptoms returning, Caleb felt a range of sharp emotions rising up; emotions he thought he had put aside forever.

He ached for June. He ached for her like he had for the heartbreaks of his youth. He ached for her with a desperation that pulled him back from every forward step. He ached for her in a way that affected his posture, his breathing, his heart rate, his clarity of mind upon these icy paths. Even while he slept, he ached. He dreamt of his first months with her, his hours in the fields and the back room at O'Neil's, and awoke in an agony that no strained quadriceps could touch.

Instead of floating in the void, he was constantly thinking of her, where she might be, whom she could be with, and therefore also unbearably conscious of the ripping in his sinews, the lactic acid burning his muscles, the white flame in his lungs, the cold torturing the exposed skin of his face.

And yet he could not stop.

His need was like a living being running beside him, jeering his attempts to return to his previous state. He could smell its funk. He heard its breathing in his room at night, and behind the trees on the trails. No matter how he begged, it would not leave him alone. And so he suffered, day and night, in a way far worse than any cold or ruined ligament.

The only cure for his suffering seemed to be agony. Caleb found that when he pushed his body far past its boundaries, its stress could reach a point where it commanded all of his attention. And freed him. And so even when his subconscious demanded he had to turn back, he kept going, into a place where June and Lily could not reach him, where every step required all of his focus, where agony overwhelmed all thought. At times, lost in the snow and ice pack, he even succeeded in forgetting them for an hour.

He understood Mack's warnings now. Why hadn't he listened? Emotions do destroy the runner's focus. But he had a chance now, to go back to that time before they came, to again run without distraction. He had this opportunity, which June had given him by destroying his heart and leaving him alone. He could seize this opportunity, turn his suffering into anger, use it to train. And possibly survive this.

But still, the more he imagined the baby's soft skin, and June's body against his, and the way their eyes softened to him, the more he welcomed this suffering. It was worth it, he knew, because underneath this pain was promise. The promise that he would see her today. The promise that she might change her mind. And maybe he could not hold her. And maybe he could not tell her that he loved her. And maybe he could not get Lily to Shane. But he could still see them, feel their energy around him through the house. And as long as that promise existed, suffering or not, he felt hope. It was when the pain was gone, he understood, that he'd know his hope was gone too.

The following day, Mack drove him through a driving snowfall to the snow-covered Boulder High School football field. From the back of the Jeep, he jerked a rudimentary red wood sled onto the white ground. A sharp wind rippled across the flat field, shifting the snow in a way that reminded him of icing being spread over a cake.

Mack brushed flakes from his beard and loaded the sled with round black weights. Then he knelt and tied them to the sled with thick twine. Caleb placed the sled's ropes over his shoulders, and Mack tied them in anglers' loops.

“Pick you up later. Pioneer. O pioneer.”

Caleb turned, squinted into the icy wind, and began to run hard. He made tight turns through untrampled powder, traversing the field with the weighted sled tied behind him.

At one point, a truck pulled into the lot. Inside were a father and son. They stayed in the cab, staring at him, for a long time. He pulled the sled across the snowy field, trying to ignore them. Finally a dog yelped from their back seat and they drove away.

Caleb returned to the house fevered and blue. The creases around his eyes looked as if they had been deepened with forks. In their room, Kevin was lying on his mattress reading
Runner's World
. His black hair had been recently buzz cut, and he looked to Caleb like a kid waiting for lights out. Caleb opened their shared closet and found his cold-weather running pants. He sat and pulled them on.

Kevin looked up. “Headed out?”

“Night run.”

“You're going kind of hard, man.”

Caleb inhaled sharply through his nose, a reflex he'd picked up somewhere in childhood. People at InterFinancial had done scathing impressions of it.

“Nights are where I'm weak.”

“Yosemite is still three months away. You've got to slow down.” Kevin dropped his voice. “Steve Brzenski died there.”

“I don't plan,” Caleb said as he pulled on his cold-weather shirt, “on having that experience.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

T
he mouse was four inches from nose to tail.

He had been hand-delivered in a wooden crate, on a Tuesday near the end of February. No one had answered the door at Lab 301, so the courier had called the number he'd been given, and Shane's cell rang in the middle of a team videoconference. He had been hoping to motivate his Southern California reps, who seemed to him to be suffering some kind of overconfidence. He hesitated at the number and ducked out to take the call.

“Can you wait?” he asked the courier.

“Nope, I sure can't.”

“Can you leave it there by the door?

“Without a signature, I'll need to send it back.”

“Back? It's alive.” He could feel the courier's shrug. “Look, wait ten minutes for me?”

Apologetically Shane excused himself, garnering looks from the reps on the monitor, and jogged to the parking lot. It was exceptionally sunny, late February at its San Francisco brightest, and he had left his sunglasses on his desk. Squinting against the sun he felt vulnerable. He texted Prajuk.

M arrived. What do I do with it?

By the time he signed for his cargo, he had an answer. He unlocked the door and stepped into the cool swath of chemical air. Along the bench, rows of pink petri dishes were now covered in clustered tiny black balls of bacteria, like BBs. They looked like cancer. He recoiled from them.

Shane opened the crate gently. Beneath some padding he felt a small metal cage. He lifted it out and held it in the air for a moment. Inside stood a mouse. Their eyes met.

Its fur was the yellowed white of a lily. It was neither a cute plump mouse, nor a skinny rodent; rather it was something much more like life. It aroused neither his empathy nor his disgust; no particular emotion at all came to him as he watched its pink pupils.

“Hey, little mouse,” Shane said, setting it down.

It walked in circles inside its cage like a dazed soldier.

He followed Prajuk's texted instructions, placed water and pellets of food inside, cleaned out the droppings, placed it on the bench, and shut the shades against the sun. Then he raced back to Helixia. When he reached the conference room, his meeting had ended.

“Sorry,” he shrugged to Stacey, who was leaving. “My kid.”

That evening Shane skipped the lab and lay on the living room floor, teaching Nicholas to crawl. He loved being eye to eye with him, and breath to breath. His baby's black eyes flickered to the mouse's pink ones, and Shane blinked.Janelle came downstairs, her hands wet from cleaning up a bath, and pondered him.

“Want to get a sitter tomorrow?” She frowned. “Or are you working late?”

This bothered him deeply. Referring to the lab as “working late” implied that he had undertaken some new minor assignment at work, and not the greatest venture of his life. Now that she knew everything, he expected more support. It was not forthcoming.

“Not sure yet,” he answered, keeping his eyes on Nicholas's face, which smiled at him with utter love. “My boy,” Shane whispered to him, “one day we will take a fishing trip.”

Thinking the better of it, he added, “Yeah sure, let's get a sitter.”

The following night, he stopped by Lab 301 intending to check in on the mouse. Healy burst upon him, holding an energy bar, grinning crazily.

“Congratulations.”

Shane moved into the room, his belly buzzing.

Healy gestured to the cage, his mouth full of dried oats. “He's moving pretty slow. There a wheeze coming from his chest. I can tell you right now his oxygen's abnormal.”

“Maybe he's just tired from his trip. I don't think they flew him First.”

Healy slipped on a latex glove, opened the cage door, and lifted the mouse by the root of its rubbery tail. The mouse twitched as if touched by spirits.

“I always wondered,” Shane asked. “Does that hurt them?”

“If he's hurting, he'll let you know.”

Healy carried it over to a metal lab table.

“See if there's any hillbilly music on my laptop,” Healy laughed.

“Sorry?”

“Because you're looking at one West Virginian hillbilly mouse.”

“They shipped it from Boston.”

As Healy took the mouse's measurements, he explained, “This guy is double inbred. His parents are brother and sister. And each set of grandparents are brother and sister too. If he were human, he'd be qualified to work at the DMV.”

Shane shook his head.

“The guys at Charles River spliced his grandmother's DNA. They knocked out the gene that makes alpha-one antitrypsin.”

“Knocked it out?”

“They added the code sequence to his grandmother's DNA. Shutting down the gene. Knocking it out. Injected that DNA into her embryonic stem cells. There are two copies of every gene, right? So when she had babies, all of them carried one of these reengineered genes, and then one normal one. That only gave her a fifty-percent chance of passing the altered gene down, so they bred two of her babies together. These guys' offspring carried two copies of the knocked-out gene. Guaranteeing that this guy has himself one badass case of alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency. You are the father of an inbred, but alpha-one antitrypsin–deficient mouse.”

“That's how they do it? Breeding?”

“Incest is best. Put your mouse to the test.”

Healy took a hypodermic and pushed it into the mouse's neck. The mouse squealed, jerking and spasming.

“Now,” Healy yawned, “he's hurting.”

He deposited the blood into a small vial. Gripping the mouse's tail, he lifted the top of a Buxco box. Which wasn't really a box, Shane saw, but a clear cylinder with a tube protruding from its side. When he'd ordered it, he'd wondered what it was for. Prajuk had positioned it in a place of respect, on the back bench, where it would not be accidentally swept off the table by an errant pizza box.

“It looks like Habitrail solitary confinement,” Shane suggested.

“It looks like a mouse bong,” Healy added.

That was true enough. Shane peered into the bottom of the glass cylinder. The mouse had a couple of inches of room on either side. A small protruding tube at the top let air in and out. Healy measured the pressure coming from it, noting it with squinted-eyed intensity in a small black notebook.

“His lungs are definitely hyperinflated,” Healy said, pointing. “Not a lot of air coming out of there.”

After a few more measurements, Healy returned the mouse to its cage, where it had room, but no desire to explore. Its door closed with a light metallic clang.

“We'll know for sure when the blood comes back from the lab.”

Shane looked nervously at this mouse. He felt responsible for it; he had ordered its existence. Requested that its grandmother's DNA be spliced, its embryonic genes altered, its parents inbred, leaving it with the same wheezing and desperate gasps as Lily. He had fucked this mouse up.

Shane sat in one of the black chairs that he had put together back in December and stared at the twitching thing in its cage. Prajuk would inject it with his drug, and God willing, the faulty gene would switch on like Christmas lights and begin producing alpha-one antitrypsin, the enzyme which would hold the neural elastase back from attacking the healthy lung tissue.

Or, it would cause a toxic reaction, forcing the mouse's liver to shut down, and he would die of organ failure.

Or it would do nothing, and the mouse's labored breathing would continue until the lung damage was irreversible and he developed emphysema and died one morning not far from now.

Playing with DNA, injecting a laboratory-spun protein into a baby; this mouse's arrival had made it real. Shane considered this with increasing unease. Jesus had been nailed to a cross for less presumption than this.

Although Jesus had not waited seven years and three rounds of trials to be given green lights by a government body to cure the leper. In the end, he decided, He would have the last word on all of this anyway.

Shane rubbed his forehead. He had also ordered Nicholas's existence, he reminded himself, and he realized he could still get home in time to see him before he fell asleep. And that was when he remembered the sitter.

Fuck, he thought, pressing the elevator button a thousand times. What time was it? He took out his phone. Nine. Walking to the car he called Janelle, who informed him coldly that she was going to bed. He could still fix this, Shane hoped. He called her favorite pasta place, ordered what she loved. Driving, he could still smell the pungent sour rodent scent on himself, which was strange; he was certain he had not touched the mouse.

It occurred to him that the mouse might be attempting to communicate something: I am part of you now. Remember me, and what I have been through. Shane blinked. He had been caught up in the narcotic thrill of seeing if he could do this, but after tonight, he understood, he could not feign naïveté. Whatever happened, he would always know that he had possessed the opportunity to stop it.

Inside the house he tripped over a rubber ball.

“Shit!” he shouted with surprising vehemence.

He righted himself and looked around. The house was strangely silent. Shane set down the food and walked upstairs calling, “Janelle?”

It was ten o'clock. He passed the bed with his sleeping wife, ran the shower, and pressed his head hard against the tile. He stayed there for a long time. For years, he had spent his days driving leisurely between doctors' practices, taking a lunchtime run, taking Janelle out at night to see her favorite DJs. Now he could not seem to imagine doing any of those things.

He experienced an intense need to hold his son; had he spent more time with the lab than with him? It was unlikely, but that he even had to consider this made him feel ill. Child psychologists, he was painfully aware, stressed the urgency of the bond created in these first six months. He imagined Nicholas confessing to a college girlfriend that he had never felt close to his dad.

He went to Nicholas's room, bursting with the scents of baby lotion, fresh crib sheets, the baby's natural smell, and inhaled the goodness of those molecules into his body. He lifted the sleeping boy and sat with him on the rocking chair, swaying gently, and met his deep brown eyes as they opened. We fight wars over where the soul goes after death, he thought, but we never discuss where it lives before birth. For surely Nicholas had not been created by him and Janelle; assuming this seemed the height of arrogance. This boy arrived from someplace else and seemed to have brought with him a knowingness. If only he might connect with it. What, Shane wondered, are you trying to tell me?

He thought again of Lily. A question taunted him: which would be harder to live with? Completing this drug, delivering it to Caleb, and finding out that it had harmed her? Or shutting the lab down right now, removing this insane risk to all of them, and finding out later that she had died from lung damage?

The struggle to answer this question should have kept him awake all night. He should have turned it over and over, sweating through his sheets, pacing the living room. And yet in the peace of Nicholas's room, in the lulling softness of this perfumed air, the terrible ache behind his eyes started to seep away.

And he knew exactly what he would do.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

“Afternoon there, Caley,” Hank called.

Caleb broke through the bare branches and into the flat expanse of snow behind the house. Approaching the steps, he saw Hank, squat and crew-cut, Kyle, young and steaming with energy, Alice, lithe and double-jointed, on the back deck, their breath like billow clouds against the beams.

Then he saw June.

Caleb stopped, and sniffed hard. They had not exchanged a word since the day she had told him she would not leave Happy Trails; this was the closest he had been to her in weeks. He felt her presence as if she were turned all the way up, shooting toward him on jets of air.

Nervously, June stretched her arms upward, affecting a stretch. Her sweatshirt lifted, revealing the parchment skin of her belly. Caleb could not take his eyes from it.

“How is it out there?” Kyle asked him.

“Good.”

“How's that feel?” Hank gestured to his backpack.

The perilous isolation in Yosemite necessitated wearing heavier packs than normal, filled with more water and clothing. Mack had begun requiring everyone in Happy Trails to train with them.

“Not so bad.” With the back of his hand he wiped snow from under his eyes. “You get used to it.”

Hank turned to June. “Are you going to practice with one?”

As June nodded, straw-colored hair flew into her eyes. “Sure.”

“It's your first hundred-mile ultra?” Kyle asked her, squinting. “It's not the one to start with.”

“If I drop, I'll work a station.”

“If you can get to one.”

“Leave her alone.” Alice shook her head, smiling. “She'll be cool.”

Kyle exhaled. “Okay, we're gone.”

Caleb opened the back door and kicked off his wet shoes. Inside he found it difficult to slow his heart down. He went to the sink for some water and was on his third glass when he felt her behind him.

“Hey,” June whispered.

He turned around, locked onto her enormous eyes.

“Makailah's watching Lily upstairs. Do you want . . .”

“You're running Yosemite?” Caleb asked her quietly.

She nodded.

“Why?”

“This is the Happy Trails race. We're all doing it together, right?”

“You can't risk . . .” He stopped himself. Running an ultramarathon and risk were, of course, inseparable. “Just be really careful.”

She cocked her head at a dramatic angle. “Everyone's saying you're training too hard.”

“Everyone”—he smiled—“doesn't know everything.”