listening to crickets. “God damn,” he said slowly and expressively. He turned and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His chest was splotchy and red from scratching and rubbing. He rotated and peered over his shoulder at his back.
From shoulder to shoulder, and criss-crossing down his spine, faint pale lines just beneath the surface of his skin drew a crazy and unwelcome road-map. As he watched, the lines slowly faded until he wondered whether they had been there at all.
Heart pounding heavily in his chest, Vergil sat on the lid of the toilet and stared at his feet, chin in both hands. Now he was really scared.
He laughed deep in the back of his throat
“Put the little suckers to work, him?” he asked himself in a whisper.
“Vergil, are you all right?” his mother asked from the other side of the bathroom door.
“I’m fine,” he said. Better and better, every day.
“I will never understand men, as long as I live and breathe,” his mother said, pouring herself another cup of thick black coffee. “Always tinkering, always getting into trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble, Mother.” He didn’t sound convinced, even to himself.
“No?”
He shrugged. “I’m healthy, I can go for a few more months without work—and something’s bound to turn up.”
“You’re not even looking.”
That was true enough. “I’m getting over a depression.” And that was an outright lie.
“Bull,” April said. “You’ve never been depressed in your life. You don’t even know what it means. You should be a woman for a few years and just see for yourself.”
The morning sun illuminated the filmy curtains covering the kitchen window and filled the kitchen with subdued, cheerful warmth. “Sometimes you act like I’m a brick wall,” Vergil said.
“Sometimes you are. Hell, Verge, you’re my son. I gave you life—I think we can X out Frank’s contribution— and I watched you grow older for twenty-two years steady. You never did grow up, and you never did get a full deck of sensibilities. You’re a brilliant boy, but you’re just not complete.”
“And you,” he said, grimacing, “are a deep well of support and understanding.”
“Don’t rile the old woman, Verge. I understand and sympathize as much as you deserve. You’re in real trouble, aren’t you? This experiment.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that. I’m the scientist, and I’m the only one affected, and so far—” He closed his mouth with an audible snap and crossed his arms. It was all quite insane. The lymphocytes he had injected were beyond any doubt dead or decrepit by now. They had been altered in test-tube conditions, had probably acquired a whole new set of his to compatibility antigens, and had been attacked and devoured by their unaltered fellows weeks ago. Any other supposition was simply not supported by reason. Last night had simply been a complex allergic reaction. Why he and his mother, of all people, should be discussing the possibility—
“Verge?”
“It’s been nice, April, but I think it’s time for me to leave.”
“How long do you have?”
He stood and stared at her, shocked. “I’m not dying, Mother.”
“All his life, my son has been working for his supreme moment. Sounds to me like it’s come, Verge.”
“That’s crazier than horseshit.”
“I’ll throw what you’ve told me right back at you, Son. I’m not a genius, but I’m not a brick wall, either. You tell me you’ve made intelligent germs, and I’ll tell you right now…Anyone who’s ever sanitized a toilet or cleaned a diaper pail would cringe at the idea of germs that think. What happens when they fight back, Verge? Tell your old mother that.”
There was no answer. He wasn’t sure there was even a viable subject in their discussion; nothing made sense. But he could feel his stomach tensing.
He had performed this ritual before, getting into trouble and then coming to his mother, uneasy and uncertain, not sure precisely what sort of trouble he was in. With uncanny regularity, she had seemed to jump onto a higher plane of reasoning and identify his problems, laying them out for him so they became unavoidable. This was not a service that made him love her any more, but it did make her invaluable to him.
He stood and reached down to pat her hand, she turned it and gripped his hand in hers. “You’re going now,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How long do we have, Vergil?”
“What?” He couldn’t understand it, but his eyes suddenly filled with tears and he began to tremble.
“Come back to me, if you can,” she said.
Terrified, he grabbed his suitcase-packed the night before-and ran down the steps to the Volvo, throwing open the trunk and tossing it in. He rounded the car and caught his knee on the rear bumper. Pain surged, then dropped off rapidly. He climbed into the bucket seat and started the engine.
His mother stood on the porch, silk gown flowing in the slight morning breeze, and Vergil waved at her as he pulled the car away. Normality. Wave at your mother. Drive away.
Drive away, knowing that your father never existed, and that your mother was a witch, and what did that make you?
He shook his head until his ears rang, somehow managing to keep the car going in a straight line down the street.
A white ridge lay across the back of his left hand, like a tiny thread glued to the skin with mucilage.
CHAPTER EIGHT
An uncharacteristic summer storm had left the sky ragged with clouds, the air cool, and the apartment’s bedroom window flecked with drops of water. The surf could be heard from four blocks away, a dull rumble topped with hiss. Vergil sat before his computer, heel of one hand resting against the edge of the keyboard, finger poised. On the VDT was a twisting, evolving molecule of DNA surrounded by a haze of protein. Flickering separations of the double helix’s phosphate-sugar backbones indicated high-speed intrusions by enzymes, spreading the molecule for transcription. Labeled columns of numbers marched along the bottom of the screen. He watched them without paying much attention.
He would have to talk with somebody soon—somebody besides his mother, and certainly besides Candice. She had moved in with him a week after he returned from his mother’s house, apparently intent on domesticity, cleaning up the apartment and fixing his meals.
Sometimes they shopped together, and that was enjoyable. Candice enjoyed helping Vergil pick out better clothes, and he went along with her, even though the purchases drained his already low bank account.
When she asked about things she didn’t like, his silences grew prolonged. She wondered why he insisted they make love in the dark.
She suggested they go to the beach, but Vergil demurred.
She worried about his spending time under the new lamps he had bought.
“Verge?” Candice stood in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in a terrycloth robe embroidered with roses.
“Don’t call me that. My mother calls me that.”
“Sorry. We were going to ride up to the animal park. Remember?”
Vergil lifted his finger to his mouth and chewed on the nail. He didn’t seem to hear.
“Vergil?”
“I’m not feeling too well.”
“You never go out. That’s why.”
“Actually, I’m feeling fine,” he said, turning in his chair. He looked at her but offered no further explanation.
“I don’t understand.”
