Oh crap, my bio exam is Tuesday! And my Life Drawing project is half my semester grade.”
“You can’t draw,” my mother says. “Your fingers are crushed. Your arm’s a mess.” She pauses, mentally thumbing through her What Mothers Are Supposed To Know file. “She
He nods discreetly.
“At least can I have my laptop? I can type with my left hand.”
My mother glances at her own laptop.
She is having an inspiration. You can practically see the giant lightbulb throbbing over her head.
“Evening, I have just the project for you! Something to keep you thoroughly occupied.”
“I don’t want a project. I want to spend a couple of hours with Aislin. I want you to send a car for her and bring her here.”
Luna has moved to my lower back, and seriously, my desire to fight with my mother—even if it is a respite from boredom—is diminishing with each deep, healing stroke.
“It involves genetics.” My mother sets aside her computer and comes to my bedside. “You love genetics. I would even pay you to do it.”
“Pay me?”
“Why not? I’d have to pay someone else to test it. What do you want? A hundred dollars? A thousand?”
My mother, ladies and gentlemen: one of America’s preeminent businesswomen. Not a clue as to what a dollar is.
“I want ten thousand dollars,” I say.
Dr. Anderson nods his approval.
“Is that a good number?” my mother asks. She turns the question over to Luna. “Is that a good number?”
“Ma’am, I don’t—”
“Whatever,” my mother snaps. She makes a brusque gesture with her hand. “The point is, I have something that will keep you busy.”
“Aislin will keep me busy. That’s my price: Aislin. You can keep the money.”
She taps her freshly tended nails. French manicures, twice a week. Five tiny crescent moons dance on my bed rail.
She sighs.
Dr. Anderson examines a smudge on his stethoscope.
“One visit,” my mother says at last. “I’ll have security search her. If she has any drugs or booze on her, I’ll confiscate them and have security rough her up.”
I assume that’s bluster.
Then I look at her again, at my mother, and I’m not so sure it is. This is a woman with a billion-dollar company. This building is big enough to house what amounts to a small hospital among many, many other things.
Can my mother actually have people beaten up?
Maybe. Maybe she can.
She smiles to show she doesn’t mean it. The smile convinces me that she can.
“So what’s the project? You want me to wash some test tubes?”
“No, that’s why we have people like Solo,” she says. “You’re a Spiker.”
I feel a slight twinge of sympathy for Solo. I’d been assuming he’s some kind of wunderkind, and here she’s talking about him as if he were her servant.
Quite a bit of condescension locked up in those two words.
“This will be a wonderful introduction to the kind of thinking and creativity we require at Spiker,” my mother says. “It’ll challenge you, sweetheart. Bring out the talent I know you have hidden deep, deep down inside you.” She’s getting excited now. The lines in her forehead seem to smooth; her eyes gaze with a certain wild excitement at the horizon.
She pauses, waiting to be sure she has my undivided attention.
“I want you, Evening, to design the perfect boy.”
Luna stops rubbing.
“Am I doing this with crayons? Or will I be working with Play-Doh?”
My mother smiles tolerantly. “Oh, I think we can do a little better than that. You can start tomorrow morning. If you do it, I’ll have your little friend here tomorrow afternoon.”
“I think Aislin has her dance class on—”
“Evening. When I send for people, they come.”
– 10 –
“This is where you’ll be working. Playing.”
My mother hesitates, frowns, realizes she’s frowning and that frowning causes lines, and unfrowns. “Play, work, call it whatever you like.”
“So long as I do it.”
“Exactly.”
Solo is pushing my wheelchair while my mother leads the way. At the last minute, the orderly who was supposed to be assisting us this morning had an attack of stomach pains. His backup couldn’t be located.
It crosses my mind, just for a nanosecond, that Solo might have arranged to be here with me. Maybe he’s as desperate for company as I am.
Solo pushes my wheelchair into a horseshoe-shaped work station. It’s an amazing space with soaring ceilings and low-slung black leather furniture. There’s a huge ficus tree next to the desk. It’s strung with white twinkle lights, probably a remnant of the long-past holiday season. It’s oddly whimsical in the clean, minimalist setting.
I don’t have time to admire the decor, though, because I’m too busy gaping at the twenty-foot-tall, floor-to- ceiling monitor. I’ve never seen a screen so big. Movie theater big.
A strand of DNA is displayed on the monitor. This is not just some run-of-the-mill textbook image. And it’s definitely nothing like the primitive double helix model I made in sixth grade out of Styrofoam balls and toothpicks. (My mother’s assessment: “What are we, Amish?”)
This thing… this thing is pulsating with energy. It’s alive.
“That’s the project,” my mother says. “That’s 88715.”
“It’s real,” I murmur.
“No, just a simulation. You can see the DNA, you can see entire chromosomes, you can pull out further—” She demonstrates by tracing a finger across the touch screen that is set at wheelchair level. The image on the wall zooms out. “Now you see a chromosome. Out further, it’s a cell.”
Solo locks my chair wheel and grabs a chair. He yawns. Clearly, he’s not as mesmerized as I am.
“The best part is that you can use any number of different interfaces.” Tap, tap, drag. “This one’s made of Lego blocks, for younger kids. See how there’s a Lego representation of the DNA?”
My mother’s in the zone, her voice animated. She gets like this when she’s excited about an idea. And this little project—this “fluff”—is nothing compared to her real work, the work she’s overseen on new drug therapies. When she’s laboring on something she’s excited about, she’ll move into Spiker’s lab for days, even weeks, at a time. More than once, she’s come home with her mascara smudged, her nails bitten to the quick, her eyes bleary.
Usually, it’s because her team has failed. But sometimes, and there are just enough of those times, it’s because they’ve succeeded.
“You can add or subtract blocks,” my mother continues. “Hover over and you see what each does. Or”—tap, drag, tap—“you can picture each element as a colored blob or as a tile in a mosaic. But either way you can run forward and see the effect.”
