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"Now, we talk," Vince said, turning in his seat to face Quentin. His face was half in shadows, making his teeth flash white as he spoke. "Antoine Ducharme is two thousand miles from here. The last time you talked, he gave you an extension until December first, twelve days ago. You missed it, which makes you my responsibility now. And I don't do extensions."
"Look, Vince, please… It's all the red tape with money transfers. I swear on my life."
"Your life doesn't have weight." He pointed to the dark upper corner of the house. "Just behind that 'TotFinder' sticker is a pretty pink bedroom with a pretty pink bed where your pretty pink daughter Robyn is asleep." Before Quentin could ask, Vince handed him three photographs, all of Robyn: at her bedroom window that morning, being dropped off at school, at recess.
"Listen, Vince-" he began.
Vince clamped his gloved hand on Quentin's jaw. "No, you listen." He pressed his face so close that Quentin could smell garlic on his breath from his di
Quentin started to protest, but thought better. He grunted that he understood, and Vince snapped his face away. In dead silence they drove back to the Emerson, as Quentin massaged his jaw and wondered how to manipulate Darby funds, thinking how his daughter's life hung in the balance.
"This is me here," Quentin said as they rolled by his Mercedes. But they continued all the way to the emergency room. "But I'm back there."
When Vince stopped the car, he extended his gloved hand. Quentin took it, gratified that it would end with a gesture of civility. Except that Vince didn't let go. Instead, his other hand closed over Quentin's.
"This is closer."
"I don't follow."
Still holding Quentin's hand, Vince said, "You're going to need to see a doctor."
"What?"
Vince then clamped one hand onto his index finger and bent it all the way back until it broke at the joint with a sickening crack. Quentin jolted in place with a hectoring scream which Vince instantly caught in his glove. Pain jagged through Quentin like a bolt of lightning, searing nerve endings from his hand to his crown and through his genitals to the soles of his feet.
While Quentin yelled and squirmed in his seat, Vince kept his viselike grip on Quentin's mouth. For several minutes he held him until the cries subsided to whimpers.
Quentin's hand had swollen to twice its size, while his finger hung at a crazy angle like a dead root.
Vince then opened the passenger door, and in the same silky voice he said, "The next time it will be your daughter's neck."
And he shoved him out and drove off.
The morning after Je
Worse still, she could see herself as an old woman: a hunched and wrinkled thing with flabby skin, thi
While she had come to accept the grim inevitability, it was no less shocking to apprehend it in her own face. What Chris had dubbed the death gene-that nasty little DNA switch that never failed to click on the long slide to the grave.
But, damn it! Wendy told herself, Je
"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."
Chris's phrase hummed in her mind.
Feeling a surge, she put on her ru
But why not? And why not her?
She splashed through shafts of sunlight, thinking that the choices she made now would determine how she lived out the rest of her life: Her grief from Ricky's death would never leave her, but it was time to end the habit of mourning.
Half-consciously she rubbed her hand across her breast as she jogged along. As Je
It was her visit that had done it-seeing Je
"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."
Yes! she told herself. YES! And she glided down the path thinking of baby names.
That night Chris peered through the eyepiece of his microscope and saw the landscape of eternity. And it took his breath away.
He was looking at the cells of his own body-cells that contained all the information that made him Christopher Bacon. Cells that should be turning bright blue, dying under his eye-but were thriving.
Eight weeks ago, he had scraped off some flesh from the inside of his cheek. He liquefied the sample and divided it into equal batches, one treated with nutrients-growth factors, hormones, vitamins, insulin, and a lot of other stuff-that sped up replication, collapsing the remaining life of his own forty-two-year-old cells into two weeks. The other he treated with the same nutrients plus tabulone. Within twenty-four hours the surface of each dish was covered with newly replicated cells. From those batches he made subcultures. He kept that up for four weeks until the untreated cells stopped subdividing and died. Meanwhile, the tabulone-treated cells continued to thrive. Two months later they were still replicating. If he had kept that up, he would have produced endless tons of his own cells.
The realization was staggering: The cells of his own flesh were reproducing indefinitely.
That could only mean that human death was not programmed in the genes but the result of a program of cell divisions-a finite process that climaxed in the eventual breakdown of cell walls. In other words, we lived as long as our cells kept replicating. But why did they stop at fifty?
He did not understand the genetics, but it confirmed his suspicion that aging had no clear evolutionary purpose. Traditional textbook reasoning about making room for the next generation made no sense since most animals never made it to old age. They were eaten by predators or died from disease. There was no reason for natural selection to genetically favor demise, Chris told himself. No purpose served.