of Oz had a giant baby with one of those big-city Apple stores.
The place is built around three massive spikes—as in Spiker, heh—with each of the spikes being an elevator array. Connecting them is a sort of ziggurat construction with terraces, open spaces, entire floors given over to gardens, sandy volleyball courts, a pool.
It is, without question, a great place to work. If you can get past some of the people.
And number one among the people you have to get past is the boss woman herself, Terra Spiker. Known throughout the campus as Terror Spiker.
That, to me, is a major clue someone should have gotten: If you’re going to name your daughter Terra, and if she’s going to grow up to be a psycho-bitch, people are going to start calling her “Terror.”
The way the complex is laid out, the floors are bigger below and smaller above. The bottom floor, Level One, is the largest space, the Orphan Disease Research Division. They focus on the many less-than-popular diseases that no one is ever going to get rich curing.
Whatever else you can say about Terra, she’s done some very major work down there on Level One. As in cures. As in people who were being eaten alive by some parasite or some germ are walking around alive today because of Level One. Because Terra Spiker said, “Screw profits, we’re throwing a billion dollars into beating this disease.”
The reason no one gets serious about investigating Spiker Biopharm? Because of what happens down there on Level One, that’s why. Because the psycho-bitch saves a bunch of lives.
On the other hand, the reason so many people think about investigating Spiker? Because of what happens on Levels Seven and Eight.
Me, I live on Level Four. My parents, Isabel and Jeffrey Plissken, were Terra’s business partners way back in the day, when all they had was a broken-down IBM, some petri dishes, and a dream.
I don’t remember them. It’s like that.
I could say Terra raised me, but that would be wrong. She’s no mother to me. She gives me a place to live, an education, a job at the lab.
She tolerates me.
She wouldn’t even do that if she knew.
– 6 –
A steel door opens and we enter an overlit garage. Two men and a woman, clad in black lab coats like Dr. Anderson’s, are waiting for me. I have an entourage.
“She’s stable,” Dr. Anderson remarks, “doing well,” and the other three lab coats seem surprised. They mutter medically in ways I can’t decipher.
I am whisked into a long white-tiled tunnel. Solo keeps pace beside me.
We arrive at a large glass elevator. Each member of the group stands before a wall-mounted lens.
“Optical scanner,” Solo explains as a green light clears him.
I’ve only been to my mother’s office a couple times. (She says mixing home and work is like mixing a single malt with Sprite.) The complex is visually stunning, or at least that’s what
It’s the kind of sprawling building you’d expect to find in Silicon Valley, not Marin. But Spiker Biopharm is a different kind of company, my mother likes to say, and I suppose that’s why she decided to locate it in a different kind of place.
“Different” would be her word, but others have had worse things to say. As drug companies go, Spiker’s the bad boy on the Harley your dad doesn’t want you to date. I first realized this in fifth grade, when Ms. Zagarenski passed out a form letter soliciting parents to give classroom talks for Career Week. She sent a note home with everybody but me (“Your mother’s so busy, dear”) and I got the clue. Even Danny Rappaport got one, and we all knew his dad ran the largest pot farm in Mendocino.
The elevator shoots to the sixth floor. The doors open to reveal a breathtaking lobby. Marble, glass, steel, tiered fountain. It looks like the Ritz-Carlton my dad used to retreat to when the fights dragged on too long.
I’m wondering when the concierge will show up, and suddenly here she is.
“Baby,” says my mother, “welcome to my world.” Burying me in her perfumed embrace, she lowers her voice to a whisper and adds: “Mommy’s going to fix everything.”
She leads the way through swinging doors, and suddenly we are in a hospital.
A really swank hospital.
Dr. Anderson has a platoon of assistants: specialists, nurses, techs, but, as far as I can tell, only one patient. They are shocked at how well I am doing. Everyone wants to have a look at my mangled arm, swollen like an overcooked hot dog. I learn that my spleen, whatever that is, has been ruptured. Also, I’ve lost a rib.
“You’ll never miss it,” Dr. Anderson assures me.
The star attraction, however, is my reattached leg with its Frankenstein stitches. My mother is especially interested—my mother, who always made my dad apply Band-Aids because the sight of blood made her woozy.
My gown is an oversized napkin, barely covering the essentials. I’d be massively embarrassed if I weren’t so drugged up. Fortunately, Solo seems to have stayed behind in the hall.
“Miraculous,” breathes a nurse.
It looks horrifying to me, all the blood and goo and gauze, but I have to admit I’m not feeling as awful as I was a few hours ago. The pain has gone from blinding to merely throbbing. And when they finally remove the tube from my throat, the first thing I say is “I’m hungry” in a hoarse whisper, which gives rise to appreciative laughter and applause.
One of the nurses, an older guy with a trim gray beard, introduces me to my room appointments like a bellboy sniffing for a tip. Wi-Fi! Flat-screen! Italian marble! Heated towel rack!
“Is there anything you need?” my mother asks. “I’m having your pajamas and robe picked up from the house.”
I try to focus. “My laptop. My
“You won’t be needing your laptop any time soon.”
“Do you know where my phone is?” I croak. “I should call Aislin. I think that guy—Solo?—I think he said somebody turned it in.”
A tight smile. My mother does not like Aislin. She tolerates her the way she tolerated the pet ferret I could never quite housebreak. I believe this is because Aislin shorted out our seven-thousand-dollar full-body Swedish massage chair with a puked-up Mojito, but Aislin is convinced the tide turned when she suggested a cure for my mother’s chronic headaches. I gather that the phrase “get some” may have been employed.
“Derek, see if Solo has my daughter’s phone.” A tech scurries away, and moments later Solo appears, carrying a plastic bag.
“Someone turned in your cell,” he says. “Also your sketchbook. It’s a little muddy. Nothing too major, though.”
“Thanks,” I say. I sound like my great-grandmother after her nightly Marlboro menthol.
“I’ll take that,” my mother says, but for some reason, Solo refuses to let go of my sketchbook. She yanks and it falls to the floor.
When Solo retrieves the pad, it’s open to a sketch I’ve been working on for several weeks for Life Drawing. We’re supposed to draw a person, either from memory or from our imagination, without referring to a model or a photo.
Easy, I thought.
Turns out: not so easy.
Solo stares at the drawing. It started out as a guy’s face in profile. Not a memory, just something that came
