Blood Music

He pointed to the screen. “You’ve never let me explain it to you.”

“You get all crazy and I don’t understand you,” Candice said, her lip quivering.

“It’s more than I ever thought possible.”

“What Vergil?”

“The concatenations. The combinations. The power.”

“Please, make sense.”

“I’m trapped. Seduced but hardly abandoned.”

“I didn’t just seduce you—”

“Not you, sweetums,” he said abstractedly. “Not you.”

Candice approached the desk slowly, as if the screen might bite. Her eyes were moist and she chewed her lower lip. “Honey.”

He jotted down numbers from the bottom of the screen.

“Vergil.”

“Hmm?”

“Did you do something at work, I mean, before you left, before we met?”

He swiveled his head around and looked at her blankly. “Like with the computers? Did you get mad and screw up their computers?”

“No,” he said, grinning. “I didn’t screw them up. Screwed them over, maybe, but nothing they’ll ever notice.”

“Because I knew this guy once, he did something against the law and he started acting funny. He wouldn’t go out, he wouldn’t talk much, just like you.”

“What did he do?” Vergil asked, still jotting numbers.

“He robbed a bank.”

The pencil stopped. Their eyes met Candice was crying.

“I loved him and I had to leave him when I found out,” she said. “I just can’t live with bad shit like that.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I was all ready to leave you a few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought maybe we’d done all we could together. But it’s just crazy. I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re crazy. Crazy smart, not crazy shit-headed like other guys. I’ve been thinking if we could just loosen up together, that it would be really wonderful. I’d listen to you when you explain things, maybe you could teach me about this biology and electronics stuff.” She indicated the screen. “I’d try to listen. I really would.”

Vergil’s mouth hung open slightly. He drew it shut and looked at the screen, blinking rapidly.

“I fell in love with you. When you were gone to visit your mother. Isn’t that weird?”

“Candice—”

“And if you’ve done something really awful, it’s going to hurt me now, not just you.” She backed away with her fist tucked under her chin, as if she were slowly hitting herself.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Vergil said.

“I know. You’re not mean.”

“I’d explain everything to you, if I knew what was happening myself. But I don’t. I haven’t done anything they could send me to jail for. Nothing illegal.” Except tamper with the medical records.

“You can’t tell me something isn’t bothering you. Why can’t we just talk about it?” She pulled a folding chair from the closet and snicked it open a couple of yards from the desk, sitting on it with knees together and feet spread.

“I just said, I don’t know what it is.”

“Did you do something…to yourself? I mean, did you get some disease at the lab or something? I’ve heard that’s possible, doctors and scientists get diseases they’re working with.”

“You and my mother,” he said, shaking his head.

“We’re worried. Will I ever meet your mother?”

“Probably not for some time,” Vergil said.

“I’m sorry I…” She shook her head vigorously. “I just wanted to open up to you.”

“That’s all right,” he said.

“Vergil.”

“Yes?”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes,” he said, and surprised himself by meaning it, though he did not look away from the screen.

“Why?”

“Because we’re so much alike,” he said. He was not at all sure how he meant that; perhaps both were destined to be failures, or at least never amount to much—to Vergil that was the same thing as failure.

“Come on.”

“Really. Maybe you just don’t see it.”

“I’m not as smart as you, that’s for sure.”

“Sometimes being smart is a real pain,” he said. Is that what they’re finding out, his little lymphocytes? The pain of being smart, of surviving!

“Can we go for a drive today, go someplace and have a picnic? There’s cold chicken from last night.”

He jotted down one last column of numbers and realized he now knew what he had wanted to know. The lymphocytes could indeed spread their biologic to other types of cells.

They could very easily do what it seemed they were doing to him. “Yeah,” he said. “A picnic would be great”

“And then, when we come back…With the lights on?”

“Why not?” She’d have to know sooner or later. And he could find some way of explaining the stripe patterns. The ridges had gone down since he had begun the lamp treatments; thank God for small favors.

“I love you,” she said, still in the chair, still watching him.

He saved the computations and graphics and turned off the computer. “Thank you,” he said softly.

METAPHASE October—December

CHAPTER NINE

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA

It had been two years since Edward Milligan had last seen Vergil. Edward’s memory hardly matched the tan, smiling and well-dressed gentleman standing before him. They had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employee’s cafeteria of Irvine’s new Mount Freedom Medical Center.

“Vergil?” Edward shook his hand and walked around him, a look of exaggerated wonder on his face. “Is it really you?”

“Good to see you again, Edward.” He returned the handshake firmly. He had lost twenty to twenty-five pounds and what remained seemed better-proportioned. At medical school, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock- haired, snaggle-toothed kid who wired doorknobs, gave his dorm floor mates punch that turned their piss blue, and never had a date except with Eileen Termagant, who had shared some of his physical characteristics.

“You look fantastic,” Edward said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”

They stood in line at the counter and chose their food. “The tan,” Vergil said, picking out a carton of