Hard eyes beamed at him, as heads bowed together in judgment. And for a second, Nick felt like the centerpiece of Leonardo’s
The Last Supper.
“That being said, I will write my own letter of recommendation that the FDA postpone review until further tests are conducted.”
A gaping silence filled the room as the blank ballots were passed around. Two minutes later the count was made: twenty-two in favor, one opposed.
Nobody said anything to Nick as he left the room and took the elevator upstairs to his room.
TWO THOUSAND MILES AWAY JACK KORYAN lay in his bed thinking about his biological father’s remains lying in a grave somewhere in a Cranston, Rhode Island, cemetery.
A LITTLE AFTER NINE THAT SAME evening, Gavin Moy called Nick to join him at the bar downstairs. “I didn’t see you at dinner.” Moy was sitting alone in a private booth at the dimly lit rear of the room.
“I had room service.” Nick was tired and wanted to go back up to bed.
They shared a bowl of mixed nuts. “You ate all the almonds,” Moy said. “All you left me are friggin’ peanuts.”
Nick swirled the bowl with his fingers and pulled out an almond. “Here’s
a friggin’
almond.”
Moy took it and popped it in his mouth and crunched it down. They sat quietly sipping their drinks for a few moments. Then Moy said, “I heard what happened this afternoon.”
“I said what I’ve said all along. No surprises.”
“Except that your dissenting report will be a major setback for us.”
“Just one voice in the wind. I doubt it.”
“But a big voice.”
“Then you might consider reevaluating the rush to market, because the drug is badly flawed.”
“Bullshit, it’s not flawed.”
“Gavin, the only thing worse than Alzheimer’s is experiencing the same horrible trauma over and over again. And that’s what this compound has done to many victims: It keeps sending them back to relive terrible events. And that’s worse than Alzheimer’s. That’s worse than death.”
Moy made a hissing sound and batted the air with his hand. “I heard your arguments. I just wish I could talk you around to our view. A letter from you could derail the train.”
“Sorry, Gavin, but I can’t.”
They sat in silence for a long moment sipping their drinks. Moy flagged the waiter for a refill and another bowl of nuts. Then out of his jacket pocket he removed a sheet of paper and handed it to Nick. It was a photocopy of the story of Jack Koryan emerging from his coma.
“What about it?”
“It’s our jellyfish,” Moy said. “You know who he is?”
Nick felt himself tighten. Jordan Carr had requisitioned a blood assay on the guy. He had also asked for a frozen sample of his blood to check how much toxin was still in his system. “Yes.”
“I understand he’s been complaining about bad dreams.”
The son of a bitch is baiting me.
“Yes. He’s been having flashbacks.”
“Flashbacks,” Moy repeated. “Something about nightmares of violent confrontations of some sort.”
“That’s my understanding.” Nick kept his voice neutral.
Moy nodded, not taking his flat eyes off Nick’s face, and picked out a couple almonds and crunched them in his molars. “I’m just wondering if you think there’s anything to it.”
He’s playing tricks with me,
Nick thought.
Some kind of twisted blackmail
thing. “It could be recollection; it could just be bad dreams. I’m not really certain. There’s no way to know.”
“It doesn’t bother you? You don’t see a problem here?”
“We’re talking about stuff in the subconscious mind—nothing one can substantiate.”
“Well, it seems we’ve both been wondering about this guy and what he remembers, and if that’s a problem.”
“I don’t believe it is. Besides, our interest in him was strictly scientific.”
“Of course,” Moy said, and he clinked Nick’s glass where it sat on the table. “And, frankly, I’m getting tired of this fucking ghost dance.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Me, too.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah, your sunrise safari.”
Nick had mentioned that he would be heading off to Bryce Canyon.
“You know that the forecast is for freezing rain in the mountains.”
“Cuts down on the crowd.”
Moy chuckled. “A crowd of one.”
Nick’s plan was to get up around four-thirty A.M. and make it to the canyon before sunrise. “You’re welcome to join me.”
Moy made a
humpf.
“The option of getting up in the cold and dark to drive twenty miles to watch the sun rise, or stay in bed. What we call your basic no-brainer.”
“How often does one get the chance to catch a sunrise on Bryce Canyon?”
“Almost as often as sleeping in. You can show me your pictures.”
Nick left thinking that maybe he was wrong. Maybe they
were
dancing with ghosts.
“MY GOD,” NICK WHISPERED TO HIMSELF as he looked down.
He was standing a few feet from the four-hundred-foot drop-off ledge that made up Inspiration Point at the southern rim of the canyon. The only sound was the rustling of chilled winds through the ponderosa pines and jagged sandstone promontories—a sound unchanged for a hundred million years.
Bryce Canyon gaped at Nick’s feet—a deep series of amphitheaters filled with thousands of limestone and sandstone spires, fins, and towers carved by wind and rain into whimsical shapes, creating a maze of ancient hoodoos. Overhead, the indigo vault was rapidly fading to an orange fire as the rising sun spread from the eastern horizon, bleaching out the last few stars. A crystalline quarter moon rocked in the northwest sky.
Nick inched closer to the drop-off for another shot.
He had gotten up as planned, and made it out here in his rental in about half an hour, stopping for coffee and donuts at a gas station mini-mart. Of course, the roads were wide open with no one else on them. He had checked out of the hotel at four-thirty A.M., his rental packed to take him back to Salt Lake City for his afternoon flight back home—after this glorious pit stop, of course. The last couple days had been stormy, but today the clouds were breaking. And because of the nearly nine-thousand-foot elevation, the air was still chilled and the trails dusted with snow.
The most amazing thing was that nothing moved. He could see for over a hundred miles, and there was no motion but for the junipers and pines. Not even a falling stone. Given the hour and the frigid, windy conditions, not another hiker or tourist appeared to be within miles of the place. Nick’s rental was the only car in the parking lot. From his perch, not a road or car or building or urban light violated the primitive panorama. Not a single sign that this was the twenty-first century and not a sunrise during the Mesozoic age. In fact, this could very well be another planetscape—a vista on Mars, given the reddish stones. Yet the stunning lack of sound was a gratifying relief from the noisy, crowded conference rooms and dining halls.
Nick mounted the Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter gun-barrel
lens onto the tripod, attached a shutter release cable, and began taking shots of the predawn light glazing the towering fins rising from the canyon floor.
He would take maybe four or five shots, then move along the rim as the light changed. When the sunlight began slanting into the canyon, he switched to the two-and-a-quarter Mamiya 7 with the wide angle and headed for the very edge to shoot vistas. One must sustain a near-religious trust in the integrity of limestone, for he was at the very edge of a sheer drop-off, the sight of which sent electrical eddies up his legs.
He aimed at the sunrays gilding a row of rock blades.
Click click click.
Then back to the eighteen-millimeter wide angle.
Click click click.
The light was changing by the second. He shot off the rest of the roll and put in another, then moved up the rim. There he crouched down at the edge and shot down at the sunlight glancing off a clutch of sun-enameled fans of limestone. It was amazing how they resembled a colony of fire coral, but in monstrous proportions. Of course, despite the calcium carbonate structures and the fragile flamelike shapes, so-called fire corals are not true corals but rather a hydrozoa whose stinging cells are equipped with needlelike projections containing burning neurotoxins closely related to those of jellyfish.
Jellyfish.
Amazing how lines converge. Of all the people on the planet to meet up with Solakandji jellyfish, Jack Koryan. And what had brought them together was a confluence of seemingly random geophysical events—cool Pacific seas, warm Atlantic highs, errant Gulf Stream waters, a man on a swim in the right place at the right time.
The jellyfish effect.
Statisticians would put the odds at one in a million-except that this was not a statistically random convergence of the twain. Far from it. Nick didn’t know to what extent things connected, but when he got back to Boston he’d check. But it was amazing how the closer you looked at life, the fewer accidents there were. In fact, maybe there were no real accidents.
Oh, Jack Koryan,
he thought.
Poor Jack Koryan.
You’ve got demons clawing at your brain, and you don’t know what to do. The sad thing is that nothing can be proven after all these years. And even if it came to that, how do you explain? It’s all so garbled by time. Even if you could explain, what can you do about it?
But maybe you should,
Nick told himself.
Maybe do the one decent thing that would free the guy. And isn’t that your playbill role out here: Dr. Ethics?
Deep down, Jack, we’re really not bad people, just humans in conflict—like the rest of the race. Except the stakes are higher.
Nick looked at the sun rising between a fissure in a hoodoo blade rising out of the chasm. A shaft of gold sent spikes in all directions like a crown of glory.
Sorry, Jack Koryan, for the long bad nights. But, I swear, when I get back I’ll open the door for you.
Nick moved to another outcropping of rock where he hung over the edge with the Nikon. He clicked off three shots. The light was rapidly shifting, shafts of gold shooting from the horizon through the cloud holes. He traced one to his right when he thought he spotted some movement on the higher ledge. He swung his camera around to zoom in on what appeared to be a clotted shadow among some pines just below where the rays lit the treetops.
In the split instant he depressed the shutter release halfway for autofocus, uncertain whether the shadow was an animal or a person, sudden movement from behind him sent a reflexive shudder through his body.
Before he knew it, a figure rushed out at him. In the instant before impact, it all became clear to Nick. But in a hideously telescoped moment he felt the wind punch out of his lungs, and his body was propelled off the rockface lip and into the abyss.
FROM A PERCH FIFTY YARDS TO the upper right, the only sound was a solitary note of recognition—a short “ahhh” escaping from Nick Mavros’s lungs as if he had found a misplaced key—then maybe ten seconds in real time the soft smack of his body against the rock rubble below … then some muffled afterechoes as he and his camera tumbled to their final resting place in the cretaceous layers of ancient seas.
It was done, and Dr. Jordan Carr signaled below to his accomplice to return to their car before day hikers began to show.
Jordan’s guess was that Nick would eventually be found by backpackers or park rangers—a battered thing in a red North Face parka and jeans. And, depending on how long it took to recover the body, the newspapers back home would run the sad obituary of Dr. Nicholas Mavros of Wellesley, Massachusetts, senior neurologist of MGH and chief principal investigator of clinical trials of the new experimental wonder cure for Alzheimer’s, who had apparently lost his footing during high winds on a slick and crumbly rim in Bryce Canyon National Park while alone on a photo hike. He had been in Utah attending
a meeting of clinical physicians for blah blah blah, as Gavin Moy would so eloquently put it.
Jordan took a final glance into the abyss.
The only barrier between him and the Promised Land now lay below.
And
God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world.
SOLAKANDJI.
Jack had written the word on the back of René Ballard’s business card.
It was a warm afternoon, a fine day to be outside. And Jack’s rehab people were of the Kamikaze School of physical therapy, encouraging him to get out and walk twice a day.
The Robbins Memorial Library was no more than two miles from his house—maybe an hour’s walk at his rate with the cane. Located in the center of town on Massachusetts Avenue, the library was a beautiful Italian Renaissance building whose interior might have been one of the most stunning in the Northeast—high vaulted arches, Doric columns, carved marble niches, paintings, and multicolored marble floors. Beyond the rotunda was the reference room, where a bank of online computers stood against a wall. At this hour most students were in class, so there was no wait for a machine.
On Google, he came up with hundreds of hits for “Solakandji jellyfish.” He scrolled down the list, uncertain what he was looking for, but positive that this was preferable to laundry and housecleaning. Besides, he was curious about the little critters that had taken a half-year bite out of his life.
Some of the sites contained general info about jellyfish with sidebars about Solakandji; other sites were for naturalists, students of marine biology, and underwater photographers. Several explained treatments of jellyfish stings. Aunt Nancy had been right—vinegar, and don’t rub.
He clicked on a few sites that included color photographs of the animal. And there it was:
Solakandji medusa
—a smoky yellowish translucent mushroom with spaghetti tendrils. It looked so innocently pretty.
This highly venomous jellyfish is extremely hard to detect in the water …
… its tentacles can grow up to 2m long and are near invisible under water.
The Solakandji sting causes a rapid rise in blood pressure and a cerebral hemorrhage …
There is currently no anti-venom available for the sting because scientists have struggled to capture enough of the jellyfish to develop an antidote …
Coelenterates have stinging cells called nematocysts, which are made of a spirally coiled thread with a barbed end. On contact, the thread is uncoiled and the barb delivers the toxic substance …
(St. Thomas, V.I.) By the time the emergency helicopter arrived, he was screaming in agony; a few hours later he was in a coma … died four days later …
There were similar news items about rare encounters in the Caribbean with swimmers and snorkelers, but none in North America. The news account of his own attack had apparently expired.
As he continued down the hit list, he found more technical sites cued by scientific terminology—“Coelenterate,” “envenomations”—and linked to lengthy abstruse articles for marine biologists and not the beachcomber or sport diver.
Jack clicked on a few terms and found himself getting lost in the details. After nearly an hour, he came to a cluster of links to more medically slanted sites concerned with the toxin and possible neurological problems. A few enumerated the venom of various species that were clearly dangerous to humans but which were being researched for potential medical application—all very scientific. Out of curiosity he explored some of the archival abstracts of papers published in obscure journals.
Scrolling down a long list Jack came to a dead stop. For a long moment he stared at the screen in numbed disbelief:
Sarkisian N., Nakao M., Sodaquist T. A novel protein toxin from the deadly
Solakandji
jellyfish.
Biotechnology Today
66: 97—102, 1969.
What nailed his attention was the name buried in the authors list:
Sarkisian,
N
. Nevard, Armenian for “Rose.” Her professional name.
His mother.
The realization came to him in a stunning moment of awareness: She had coauthored an article about the toxins of the same jellyfish that had rendered him comatose. As if in autoreflex he read the beginning of the abstract, trying in a side pocket of his mind to put it all together:
The deadly Solakandji jellyfish
Chiropsalmus quadrigatus Mason
is rare and distributed in the tropical Caribbean and equatorial Atlantic. Four fatal cases due to stings from this species have been officially reported. C. quadrigatus toxin-A (CqTX-A, 43kDa), a major proteinaceous toxin, was isolated for the first time from the nematocysts of C.
quadrigatas …
CqTX-A showed lethal toxicity to crayfish when administered via intraperitoneal injection (LD50=80 g/kg) and hemolytic activity toward 0.8% mice … .
The arcane scientific language meant nothing to him. But it was his mother’s words, her fierce intelligence expressed in her adoptive language. The coincidence was almost too much to grapple with. And yet, he sensed a logic and some greater import, like watching a Polaroid photo slowly develop.
He moved the cursor back to the search box, typed in “Solakandji N. Sarkisian,” and hit the Search button. Four articles came up listed under “Hydra Library”:
Sarkisian, N.A., 1969. Isolation and determination of structure of a novel polypeptide extracted from marine organism
Chiropsalmus quadrigatus Mason. Pure Appl Chem
14: 49.
Sarkisian, N.A., 1970. The potent excitatory effect of a novel polypeptide, protopleurin-B, isolated from a rare jellyfish
(Chiropsalmus quadrigatus Mason).
J Pharmacol Exp Ther
14: 443—8.
Sarkisian, N.A., 1972. Pharmacologically active toxin from a rare tropical jellyfish. Various neurological activities demonstrated in maze-patterned behavior in laboratory animals.
J Pharmacol Exp Ther
17: 226—233.
And there were others with her name and coauthors. From what he could determine, his mother had been involved with the identification of some properties in the jellyfish toxin that over time had been found to have some effect on lab animals with potential pharmacological implications.
He then went back to the less technical sites, those of general information on the species, and looked up pages that gave its habitat. After scanning several articles about the creatures’ encounters with swimmers off various Caribbean islands, he got the hit he was looking for—an article written by a
reporter for the
Cape Cod Times:
“Fish Out of (Home) Waters,” with the subheading : “Writer finds tropical fish in an unlikely place—Homer’s Island”
For years scuba divers have reported seeing exotic strangers such as butterfly fish, triggerfish, and angelfish around the point of Buck’s Cove of Homer’s Island in late summer and early fall. They are not so much visitors as prisoners of the sea—swept north by the Gulf Stream when they’re the size of a button.
For most of them, the journey is a one-way trip, and their time is limited. They’re doomed to die when the water temperature falls as winter approaches … .
Among the visitors spotted by aquarists are cobia, black drum, and stingrays. Even a juvenile lionfish was captured two years ago … .
But the most unusual finds in recent years were the meter-long Solakandji jellyfish, which are usually found in the Caribbean and Pacific …
JACK WAS NOT CERTAIN WHAT HE had found, but what stood out in his mind was the fact that his mother had decided to publish under her maiden name and not her married name, Najarian. Had she gotten caught up in the woman’s liberation movement? Did she decide to distinguish her professional self from her married self? Or were she and his father so estranged?
That last possibility sat festering in his brain as he left the library and headed home.
Jack knew almost nothing about his biological father or his parents’ marriage. He had also never visited his father’s grave.
So why all of a sudden was he calling ahead for the exact location? And why spend the better part of two hours driving to Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Cranston, Rhode Island?
A little late to be showing respect for the man who had sired him, he told himself.
Or do we smell the proverbial rat?
THE CEMETERY OFFICIALLY CLOSED AT SUNSET.
In his rental, Jack arrived an hour before that. The directions given to him by the administration office were perfect.
LEO K. NAJARIAN
There was no inscription. Just the incision of the Armenian cross and the dates.
What Jack knew about his father was that he had come to this country from Beirut, Lebanon, and settled in Rhode Island, where he had relatives, all dead now. That was the Armenian immigrant pattern. But apparently the two sides of his family were not close; after his mother’s death Jack had almost no contact with the few people on his father’s side.
Perhaps it was strictly a professional decision to use her maiden name. Perhaps their marriage was in trouble and she was receding from it. His aunt and uncle told him nothing about their relationship. And even if they had marital problems, what was the point of his knowing?
He looked at the headstone, his eyes filling up as he took in the name of the father he had never known. The man who was just a name and a couple of faded photographs.
For most of his life, Jack felt the absence of a real father the way amputees suffer phantom limbs. His uncle Kirk was a nice man, but too infirm and too distant to fill the void that left Jack wondering just what it would have been like to have had a real father to have done things with. “
Hey, Dad, let’s play catch.”
Who were you?
Who am I?
“Sorry, Dad,” he whispered, feeling a deep, searing guilt that he had ever entertained the hideous suspicions that the man buried here was the creature in the dream—the thing in the hood with the mallet.
He put down the pot of flowers he’d bought and through the mist took in the headstone. It looked so stark. Only the years were listed: 1931—1972. No month and date—which seemed odd, since the surrounding headstones gave complete birth and death dates.
Whatever, he had come and paid his respects, and now it was time to get back to the here and now. And he limped back to his car and drove home, thinking about calling René Ballard. She had some explaining to do.