The Tenth Room
It was all set up for what would obviously have been the grand finale. There were even plastic seats arranged, for us to watch the show. We sat down on the seats and we waited, but nobody from the circus came on, and, it became apparent to us all after some time, no one was going to come.
People began to shuffle into the next room. I heard a door open, and the noise of traffic and the rain.
I looked at Jane and Jonathan, and we got up and walked out. In the last room was an unmanned table upon which were laid out souvenirs of the circus: posters and CDs and badges, and an open cash box. Sodium-yellow light spilled in from the street outside, through an open door, and the wind gusted at the unsold posters, flapping the corners up and down impatiently.
“Should we wait for her?” one of us said, and I wish I could say that it was me. But the others shook their heads, and we walked out into the rain, which had by now subsided to a low and gusty drizzle.
After a short walk down narrow roads, in the rain and the wind, we found our way to the car. I stood on the pavement, waiting for the back door to be unlocked to let me in, and over the rain and the noise of the city I thought I heard a tiger, for, somewhere close by, there was a low roar that made the whole world shake. But perhaps it was only the passage of a train.
Changes
1998
I.
LATER, THEY WOULD POINT to his sister’s death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year-old life, tumors the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say, “That was the start of it all,” and perhaps it was.
In Reboot (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jumpcut to his teens, and he’s watching his science teacher die of AIDS, following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.
“Why should we take it apart?” says the young Rajit as the music swells. “Instead, should we not give it life?” His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy’s bony shoulder. “Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can,” he says in a deep bass rumble.
The boy nods and stares at us with a dedication in his eyes that borders upon fanaticism.
This never happened.
II.
IT IS A GRAY November day, and Rajit is now a tall man in his forties with dark-rimmed spectacles, which he is not currently wearing. The lack of spectacles emphasizes his nudity. He is sitting in the bath as the water gets cold, practicing the conclusion to his speech. He stoops a little in everyday life, although he is not stooping now, and he considers his words before he speaks. He is not a good public speaker.
The apartment in Brooklyn, which he shares with another research scientist and a librarian, is empty today. His penis is shrunken and nutlike in the tepid water. “What this means,” he says loudly and slowly, “is that the war against cancer has been won.”
Then he pauses, takes a question from an imaginary reporter on the other side of the bathroom.
“Side effects?” he replies to himself in an echoing bathroom voice. “Yes, there are some side effects. But as far as we have been able to ascertain, nothing that will create any permanent changes.”
He climbs out of the battered porcelain bathtub and walks, naked, to the toilet bowl, into which he throws up, violently, the stage fright pushing through him like a gutting knife. When there is nothing more to throw up and the dry heaves have subsided, Rajit rinses his mouth with Listerine, gets dressed, and takes the subway into central Manhattan.
III.
IT IS, AS TIME magazine will point out, a discovery that would “change the nature of medicine every bit as fundamentally and as importantly as the discovery of penicillin.”
“What if,” says Jeff Goldblum, playing the adult Rajit in the biopic, “just—what if—you could reset the body’s genetic code? So many ills come because the body has forgotten what it should be doing. The code has become scrambled. The program has become corrupted. What if . . . what if you could fix it?”
“You’re crazy,” retorts his lovely blonde girlfriend, in the movie. In real life he has no girlfriend; in real life Rajit’s sex life is a fitful series of commercial transactions between Rajit and the young men of the AAA-Ajax Escort Agency.
“Hey,” says Jeff Goldblum, putting it better than Rajit ever did, “it’s like a computer. Instead of trying to fix the glitches caused by a corrupted program one by one, symptom by symptom, you can just reinstall the program. All the information’s there all along. We just have to tell our bodies to go and recheck the RNA and the DNA—reread the program if you will. And then reboot.”
The blonde actress smiles, and stops his words with a kiss, amused and impressed and passionate.
IV.
THE WOMAN HAS CANCER of the spleen and of the lymph nodes and abdomen: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She also has pneumonia. She has agreed to Rajit’s request to use an experimental treatment on her. She also knows that claiming to cure cancer is illegal in America. She was a fat woman until recently. The weight has fallen from her, and she reminds Rajit of a snowman in the sun: each day she melts, each day she is, he feels, less defined.
“It is not a drug as you understand it,” he tells her. “It is a set of chemical instructions.” She looks blank. He injects two ampules of a clear liquid into her veins.
Soon she sleeps.
When she awakes,
