“I tell you I almost killed her,” Rowan said, “I almost ended it. I couldn’t … I couldn’t … Nobody could lie to me about it. I know when people are lying. It’s not that I can read minds, it’s more subtle. It’s as if people are talking out loud in black-and-white words on a page, and I’m seeing what they say in colored pictures. I get their thoughts some times, little bits of information. And anyway, I’m a doctor, they didn’t try, and I had full access to the information. It was Ellie that was always lying, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. And I knew her feelings, always. I had since I was a little girl. And there was this other thing, this talent for knowing, I call it the diagnostic sense but it’s more than that, I laid my hands on her and even when she was in remission, I knew. It’s in there, it’s coming back. She’s got six months at most. And then to come home after it was all over-to this house, this house with every conceivable gadget and convenience and luxury that one could possibly … ”
“I know,” he said softly. “All the toys we have, all the money.”
“Yes, and what is this without them now, a shell? I don’t belong here! And if I don’t belong, nobody does, and I look around me … and I’m scared, I tell you. I’m scared. No, wait, don’t comfort me. You don’t know. I couldn’t prevent Ellie’s death, that I can accept, but I caused Graham’s death. I killed him.”
“No, but you didn’t do that,” he said. “You’re a doctor and you know … ”
“Michael, you are like an angel sent to me. But listen to what I’m telling you. You have a power in your hands, you know it’s real. I know it’s real. On the drive over you demonstrated that power. Well, I have a power in me that’s equally strong. I killed him. I killed two people before that-a stranger, and a little girl years ago, a little girl on a playground. I’ve read the autopsy reports. I can kill, I tell you! I’m a doctor today because I am trying to deny that power, I have built my life upon compensation for that evil!”
She took a deep breath. She ran her fingers back through her hair. She looked waifish and lost in the big loose robe, cinched tight at the waist, a Ganymede with the soft tumbled pageboy hair. He started to go to her. She gestured for him to stay where he was.
“There’s so much. You know I made this fantasy of telling you, you of all people … ”
“I’m here, I’m listening,” he said. “I want you to tell me … ” How could he put into words that she fascinated him and utterly absorbed him, and how remarkable that was after all these weeks of frenzy and craziness.
She talked in a low voice now of how it had gone with her, of how she had always been in love with science, science was poetry to her. She never thought she’d be a surgeon. It was research that fascinated her, the incredible, almost fantastical advances in neurological science. She wanted to spend her life in the laboratory where she thought the real opportunity for heroism existed; and she had a natural genius for it, take that on faith. She did.
But then had come that awful experience, that terrible Christmas Eve. She had been about to go to the Keplinger Institute to work full-time on methods of intervention in the brain that did not involve surgery-the use of lasers, the gamma knife, miracles she could scarcely describe to the layman. After all, she had never had any easy time with human beings. Didn’t she belong in a laboratory?
And take it from her the latest developments were full of the miraculous, but then her mentor, never mind his name-and he was dead now anyway, he’d died of a series of little strokes shortly after that, ironically enough, and all the surgeons in the world hadn’t been able to clip and suture those deadly ruptures … but she hadn’t even found out about that until later. To get back to the story, he had taken her up into the Institute in San Francisco on Christmas Eve because that was the one night of all nights when no one would be there, and he was breaking the rules to show her what they were working on, and it was live fetal research.
“I saw it in the incubator, this little fetus. Do you know what he called it? He called it the abortus. Oh, I hate to tell you this because I know how you feel about Little Chris, I know … ”
She didn’t notice his shock. He had never told her about Little Chris, never told anyone about that pet name, but she seemed quite completely unaware of this, and he sat there silent, just listening to her talk, thinking vaguely of all those films he’d seen with these recurrent and awful fetal images, but he wasn’t about to interrupt her. He wanted her to go on.
“And this thing had been sustained, alive,” she said, “from a four-month abortion, and you know he was developing means of live support for even younger fetuses. He was talking of breeding embryos in test tubes and never returning them to the womb at all, but all of this to harvest organs. You should have heard his arguments, that the fetus was playing a vital role in the human life chain, could you believe it, and I’ll tell you the horrible part, the really horrible part, it was that it was utterly fascinating, and I loved it. I saw the potential uses he was describing. I knew it would be possible someday to create new and undamaged brains for coma victims. Oh, God, you know all the things that could be done, the things that I, given my talent, could have done!”
He nodded. “I can see it,” he said softly. “I can see the horror of it and I can see the lure.”
“Yes, precisely,” she responded. “And do you believe me when I tell you I could have had a great career in research, I could have been one of those names in the books. I was born for it, you might say. When I discovered neurology, when I reached it, you might say, after all the preparation, it was like I’d reached the summit of a mountain, and it was home, it was where I belonged.”
The sun was rising. It fell on the floorboards where she stood but she appeared not to see it. She was crying again, softly, the tears just flowing as she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.
She explained how she had run from that laboratory, she had run from research altogether, and all that might have been achieved there, she had run from her ruthless lust for power over the little fetal cells with their amazing plasticity. Did he understand how they could be used for transplants wholly unlike other transplants, that they continued to develop, that they did not trigger the usual immune responses of the host, that they were a field of such dazzling promise. “That’s what it was, you could see no end to what could be done. And imagine the extent of the raw material, a little nation of nonpersons by the millions. Of course there are laws against it. Do you know what he said? ‘There are laws against it because everybody knows it’s going on.’ ”
“Not surprising,” he whispered. “Not surprising at all.”
“I had killed only two people at that point in my life. But I knew, inside, that I had done it. Because you see it’s connected to my very character, my capacity to choose to do something, and my refusal to accept defeat. Call it temper in its crudest form. Call it fury at its most dramatic. And in research can you imagine how I could have used that capacity to choose and do and to resist authority, to follow my lights on some totally amoral and even disastrous course? It’s not mere will; it’s too hot to be called will.”
“Determination,” he said.
She nodded. “Now a surgeon is an interventionist; he or she is very determined. You go in with the knife and you say, I’m going to chop out half your brain and you’re going to be better, and who would have the nerve to do something like that but someone very determined, someone extremely inner-directed, someone very strong.”
“Thank God for it,” he said.
“Perhaps.” She smiled bitterly. “But a surgeon’s confidence is nothing compared to what could have been brought out of me in the laboratory. And I want to tell you something else, too, something I think you can understand on account of your hands and the visions, something I would never tell another doctor, because it would be no use.
“When I operate I envision what I’m doing. I mean I hold in my mind a thorough multidimensional image of the effects of my actions. My mind thinks in terms of such detailed pictures. When you were dead on the deck of the boat and I breathed into your mouth, I envisioned your lungs, your heart, the air moving into your lungs. And when I killed the man in the Jeep, when I killed the little girl, I first imagined them punished, I imagined them spitting blood. I didn’t have the knowledge then to imagine it any more perfectly than that, but it was the same process, the same thing.”
“But they could have been natural deaths, Rowan.”
She shook her head. “I did it, Michael. And with the same power guiding me I operate. And with the same power guiding me I saved you.”
He said nothing, he was only waiting for her to go on. The last thing he wanted to do was argue with her. God, she was the only person in the world it seemed who really listened to him. And she didn’t need anyone to argue with her right now. Yet he wasn’t at all sure that she was right.
“No one knows these things,” she said. “I’ve stood in this empty house and cried and talked aloud to no one. Ellie was my closest friend in all the world, but I couldn’t have told her. And what have I done? I’ve tried through surgery to find salvation. I have chosen the most brutal and direct means of intervention. But all the successful operations of the world cannot hide from me what I am capable of. I killed Graham.
“You know, I think that at that moment, when Graham and I were there together, I think … I think I actually
