The Divide (27 page)

Maybe she shouldn’t wake him.

She sat down at his computer and slid the disk into its slot.

It began to run when she turned on the machine. The disk drive whined; a hard disk answered in deeper tones. It was not an ordinary PC; John had done something to the microprocessors. Susan wondered if she would be able to work it. But the monitor blinked to life all by itself.

It displayed, first of all, a date: the material was several years old. This would be, Susan calculated, when John was living on his island, before she met him, before the return of Benjamin: something from John’s deep immersion in cellular biology.

The date disappeared and there was more whining from the drives as a plodding animation appeared on the screen. Susan blinked at it, surprised. It was a metastatic tumor cell—it looked like diagrams she had seen of the 3LL mouse carcinoma, a common experimental lab tumor. The perspective closed in suddenly on the cell surface, where John had ideographed certain molecules: she recognized collagenase and the MHC glycoproteins. These dissolved in turn into ball-and-stick perspective drawings of their molecular structure. A new molecule appeared at the right side of the screen, one that Susan did not recognize, although John had labeled it meticulously—a novel protein, synthetic or even hypothetical. Suddenly it closed on the MHC glycoprotein and bound with it in a violent flurry of activity. The product was a fragmented chain.

Susan realized she was holding her breath.

The screen blanked, then refreshed with the original metastatic cell… exploded and dead.

It was a magic bullet. A designer molecule: the screen filled with a protocol for its synthesis.

Not a cure for cancer, Susan thought, but at least a cure for its metastasis, a way to interrupt the fearsome colonization of a human body by tumor cells. As a postoperative therapy it could prolong lives indefinitely. She thought of her father, rendered mute, and then dying, murdered by his metastasis before he could recover the courage for words.

She remembered, too, what John had told her on that cold January day before he walked into the warehouse and out of the world:
There are lives I could have saved… thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.

This was what he meant. He had devised this program for his own satisfaction, an “experiment.” If he had made it public or even submitted it anonymously to some journal or some laboratory —it might be in production already, Susan thought, or at least well down the FDA pipeline.

She withdrew the floppy disk—carefully!—and looked at the label again.

For Susan.

She faced the bed. He opened his eyes.

There was so much he didn’t remember.

Waking up, seeing the woman, he was acutely aware of his handicap. He had lost a great deal over the duration of his fever: memory, vocabulary, time. The loss was endurable mainly because it was so far-reaching—impossible to mourn the absence of a thing he could only vaguely recall. But there were times, like this, when the immensity of his loss was painful and obvious.

Her face was.

I know that face.
Memories surfaced and then winked away, elusive as fish in a still, deep pool. He remembered her face next to his, her eyes on his eyes, snow on a window, words spoken softly in a silence that had seemed as large as the night; her name—

“Susan,” he said.

She smiled tentatively. Once he had been able to read the nuances of her face as simply as he might read a book. He remembered the odd sense that she was transparent, skin and skull invisible, the trace of her thoughts etched there as clearly as animal tracks in fresh snow. But now there was only her face, opaque but pretty; her eyes only eyes, very blue.

Another fragment of memory flashed past He said, “You saved my life.”

“No,” she said hurriedly. “No, not really.”

“You did,” he affirmed.

He sat up cross-legged across the bed and regarded her seriously. “Did you talk to Dr. Kyriakides?”

She nodded.

“Then you know what I am. I’m not Benjamin. But I’m not John, either. They’re gone. Both gone.”

“You’ve changed,” she said. “Well, I’ve changed too. That’s not so strange.”

“You loved John,” he said.

Susan blushed, opened her mouth and then closed it.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I loved him, and it’s hard saying it that way—as if he’s dead. But I don’t think that’s really true. I think there was something in him he never talked about or acknowledged—maybe it was in Benjamin, too—something that doesn’t go away because it’s too basic, it’s built into every cell. I know that’s not scientific but I believe it.”

He regarded her with open, surprised interest.

“I’m talking too much. But I want you to know why I came. I didn’t come expecting John—not the old John. I came to see you.” She hesitated. “I guess I wanted to say, well, here I am if you need me and I have a car parked outside if you ever need to get away.” Her fists were clenched and she was avoiding his eyes. “I couldn’t
not
come.” But she looked at him, finally. “I came because if you need to talk to someone you shouldn’t keep silent —because it’ll kill you, doing that.”

She looked at him across the room, her eyes full of doubt— surprised at what she’d said, he guessed; worried at what he might think.

He smiled.

“Those are good reasons,” he said.

They talked, and he discovered that certain memories were not so elusive after all; that the sound of her voice or the choice of a word evoked echoes from his life before the fire. Maybe this was how “normal” memory worked—the past made subtle and mysterious, forgotten moments welling up miraculously whole at the touch of a hand or the turning of a head.

“We used to play chess,” he said. “I remember.”

“That’s right. We can play again, if you like.”

“I’m not sure—I don’t know if I can.”

“It’ll come back to you,” she said. “I can help. We can learn from each other.”

That’s true,
he thought, and memory came welling up once again: of her voice, simple words, the shape of her ear in a darkened room—
Of course we can learn from each other.

It wouldn’t be the first time.