Cold Storage Page 2

  They looked at her blankly. Knowledge of Clostridium difficile was not a requirement in their line of work.

  “Well, they’re pernicious. They can survive anywhere—inside a volcano, bottom of the sea, outer space.”

  They just looked at her, taking her word for it. She went on. “Anyway. The sample in the tank was part of a research project. The fungus had some peculiar growth properties and they wanted to see how it was affected by conditions in space. Remember, it was the seventies, orbital space stations were going to be the next big thing, so they needed to develop effective antifungal medications for the millions of people who were going to go live up there. But they never got the chance.”

  “Because Skylab crashed.”

  “Right. So, after five or six years sitting outside in front of Enos Namatjira’s uncle’s house, the tank started to rust. Uncle wanted to spruce it up a little bit, make it shiny and new again, maybe people would pay to come see it. He tried to remove the rust, but it was resistant. According to Enos, his uncle tried a number of different cleaners, finally using a folkloric solution: cutting a potato in half, pouring dish soap on it, and rubbing it on the surface of the tank.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yep. The rust came off easily, and the thing shined up. A few days later, Uncle got sick. He started to behave erratically, not making a great deal of sense. He climbed onto the roof of his house and refused to come down, and then his body started to swell uncontrollably.”

  “What the hell happened?” Trini asked.

  “From this point forward, everything I say is hypothesis.”

  She paused. They waited. Whether Dr. Martins was aware of it or not, she knew how to tell a story. They were transfixed.

  “I believe the chemical combination that Uncle used dripped through microfissures in the tank’s exterior and landed inside, where the dormant Cordyceps fungus was rehydrated.”

  “With the potato stuff?” Roberto wondered. Didn’t sound very hydrating.

  She nodded. “The average potato is seventy-eight percent water. But the fungus wasn’t just rehydrated; it was given pectin, cellulose, protein, and fat. And a nice place to grow. The average temperature in the Western Australian desert at this time of year is well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the tank, it’s probably closer to a hundred thirty. Deadly for us, but perfect for a fungus.”

  Trini wanted to get to the point. “So, you’re saying the thing came back to life?”

  “Not exactly. Again, I’m speculating, but I think it’s possible the polysaccharide in the potato combined with the sodium palmitate in the dish soap to produce a pro-growth environment. Normally, they’re both large, boring, inert molecules, but you put them together, you might have some good unpredictable fun. Don’t blame Uncle; I mean, the guy was trying to produce a chemical reaction.”

  She was getting warmed up now—her eyes shone with the intellectual exercise of it all—and Roberto couldn’t help it, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from hers.

  “And he did?”

  “He sure the fuck did!”

  Lord, she swore too. Roberto smiled.

  “But I don’t think either the polysaccharide or the sodium palmitate was the underlying change agent.”

  She leaned forward, as if telling the punch line to a joke that everyone was absolutely going to love.

  “It was the rust. Fe2O3.nH2O.”

  Trini spit her gum into a tissue and popped in a fresh piece. “Do you think, Dr. Martins, that somewhere inside you lurks the capacity to summarize?”

  Hero turned to Trini, her demeanor matter-of-fact again.

  “Sure. We sent up a hyperaggressive extremophile that is resistant to intense heat and the vacuum of space, but sensitive to cold. The environment sent the organism into a dormant state, but it remained hyper-receptive. At that point, it must have picked up a hitchhiker. Maybe it was exposed to solar radiation. Maybe a spore penetrated the microfissures in the tank on re-entry. Either way, when the fungus returned to Earth it was reawakened and found itself in a hot, safe, protein-rich, pro-growth environment. And something caused its higher-level genetic structure to change.”

  “Into what?” Roberto asked.

  She looked from one to the other of them, the way a teacher looks at a pair of slightly dim students who refuse to grasp the obvious. She spelled it out for them.

  “I think we created a new species.”

  There was silence for a moment. Since it was Hero’s theory, she claimed naming rights. “Cordyceps novus.”

  Trini just looked at her. “What did you tell Mr. Namatjira?”

  “That I needed to check some things and he should call me back in six hours. He never did.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Called the Defense Department.”

  “And what did they do?” Roberto asked.

  She gestured. “Sent you guys.”

  Two

  The next six hours of the flight passed in relative silence. As they flew over the western coast of Africa and night fell, Trini did what she always did on the way to a mission, which was to take sleep when it was available. She also never passed an available bathroom without using it. It was the little things. Limit your needs. Hero got tired of looking at Trini’s boots on the seat next to her, so when the plane was mostly dark, she got up, climbed over her, and crossed the aisle to Roberto’s side.

  “Do you mind?” she whispered, gesturing to the empty seat next to him. He did not mind. Not in the slightest. He shifted his legs, giving her room to squeeze through, and she made herself as comfortable as possible, settling into the seat next to him. The ostensible reason for the move was that this new seat would give her a place to put her own legs up, but she could have done that in the other seat, Roberto figured. Maybe the real reason had something to do with the slightly furtive eye contact they’d been making since she’d finished the briefing, but it worked better for him, psychologically anyway, if he assumed the obvious was the case, while knowing full well it was not.

  The things you tell yourself.

  The absolute truth was that Roberto was much less than innocent in this situation. He’d felt an immediate attraction to Dr. Hero Martins, and though it was the last thing in the world he would ever act on, he needed to know that the old charm was still there when he needed it. He and Annie had been married for just about three years, and it had been a rough start. Work was overwhelming for both of them in the first year, Annie had gotten pregnant much sooner than they intended, and the pregnancy was a difficult one, forcing her to stay in bed for the last four or five months of it. That’s hard enough for anybody, but Annie had been a perpetual motion machine; she was a journalist and accustomed to life on the road. Home confinement felt like a punishment. Then the baby came, and it was, you know, a baby.

  That was pretty much it for their easy years. Where were the just-us years, where was the blissful early marriage time when we enjoyed our youth and beauty and freedom and each other, and where, as long as we’re talking, was the sex, for God’s sake? Roberto hated being this particular cliché, the married dude who laments the post-baby sex life wipeout, but still. He was a human male in the prime of his life. It was difficult, at this point, for him to picture himself and Annie making it to their emeritus years together. Not at this rate.

  But he loved her. And he didn’t want to cheat.

  So he flirted. He’d never really been good at it when it counted, but something about not wanting it to lead anywhere made it easier. Roberto surprised himself with the ease with which he could talk to attractive women at this point in life and how positively they responded to him. A stable and unattainable man with a job in his midthirties was a lot different from a twenty-four-year-old grunt with a hard-on and a tongue tied in knots.

  It played neatly into Hero’s own predilections and preference. Since the end of her overlong, overly tortured post-college relationship with Max, a man-child doctoral student more or less her own age, s
he’d had a thing about married men. Not a thing for married men—that would suggest a certain amoral craving, doing a thing because it was bad, not doing it in spite of it being bad. No, Hero had a thing about married men, i.e., a personal rule or guideline, based on all the obvious advantages, which she had laid out in a notebook one day during an exceptionally dull class on laser micromachining. The advantages were, in order of importance:

  They tended toward the adult in demeanor, having embraced life’s changes by showing a willingness to marry and some concept of shared existence, which by definition involved compromise and other-directed thinking.

  They were usually better in bed, not just from volume of experience, but from repeated experience with the same woman, which couldn’t help but lead to a sense of how to give pleasure as well as receive, unless they were complete narcissists, which was usually unlikely, given reason 1.

  They were polite and grateful and didn’t leave a lot of shit on the floor, having been housebroken for at least a few years by an adult woman not their mother.

  They had somewhere to go, usually within a reasonable time frame after sex, which freed up her evenings for work.

  They were, by definition, unable to pursue an exclusive relationship, which left her free to do as she liked, on the off chance something better came along.

  Hero knew perfectly well that there were many, many reasons that did not work in their favor, that did not speak to the good character of the married lover, which she neatly summed up in a single item on the facing page of her journal:

  They’re cheaters.

  And so was she, and she knew it. She didn’t cheat on them; she never had multiple lovers—one romantic complication at a time was more than enough in her life. And she wasn’t cheating their unlucky spouses, by her estimation, because she didn’t know them and had never promised them anything. The only person she was cheating was herself, by hanging out with a succession of people who it seemed, by the very nature of their relationship, did not know how to love.

  Still, here she was, and here Roberto was, and here they were, possibly headed to their own doom (rationalize much?), and there surely could be no harm in making a little pleasant, life-affirming conversation with a handsome soldier in his midthirties who clearly had a thing for her. The fact that he wore a wedding ring was a total coincidence.

  While Trini slept, Roberto and Hero stretched their legs out on the seats in front of them, reclined as far as they could, and whispered to each other. They weren’t tired—the frisson in the air between them was too invigorating—so they talked about his life, with the exception of his wife and kid, and they talked about hers, with the exception of her romantic history with Guys Like Him. They talked about her work, and about his, and the dangers he’d faced, and the exotic and frightening places she’d been in search of new microorganisms. And as they talked, they slid lower and lower in the seats, and their heads inclined ever so slightly closer together, and when the cabin took on a bit of a chill somewhere over Kenya, Roberto got up, found a couple of harsh wool blankets in the storage cabinet nearby, and they snuggled underneath them.

  Then she scratched her nose.

  And when she put her hand back down, it was on the seat between them, her little finger brushing against the outside of his right thigh. He felt it, and she left it there. Another twenty minutes went by, another twenty minutes of effortless, breathy talk, none of it with even the whisper of impropriety to it, and the next move was his, which he made by shifting in his seat, theoretically to stretch his stiff legs, but when he put them back up on the seat in front of him, his leg was now fully pressed against hers, and she returned the pressure almost immediately. Neither of them spoke of it; neither of them acknowledged it in any way. If you listened to their conversation, you could assume they were two colleagues from slightly different fields who had met at a professional conclave and were having the most innocent, upstanding, and rather boring conversation in the world.

  But she never moved her hand, and neither released the pressure in their legs. They knew. They just weren’t saying.

  After a while, Hero stretched and stood up. “Bathroom.”

  He pointed toward the back. She smiled thanks, squeezed out of the row, and walked off toward the rear of the plane.

  Roberto watched her walk away. Inside, he was panicked, and had been for several hours. He couldn’t quite believe what was happening. None of his relatively innocent flirtations had ever gone nearly so far, and it was like sliding into a mud-slicked hole that he couldn’t climb out of. Every movement he made only pulled him deeper in, and when he didn’t move it was worse, gravity took over and pulled him down.

  And he liked it. He was angry, not getting what he wanted or deserved at home, and why not this woman, this brilliant, beautiful creature who asked so little of him and found him so fascinating and was clearly, genuinely interested in him? Why not, other than the fact that it was completely wrong? Or maybe it wasn’t even happening. Maybe the pressure of her hand and leg had easily explainable and innocent reasons behind them—she probably hadn’t even noticed, for Christ’s sake—and he was letting his overactive sex drive run away with his rational mind, as usual.

  Or maybe it was happening, and maybe he wanted it to. Maybe he would get up, wander to the back of the plane, talk to her some more there, and if her eyes happened to linger on his for a few seconds longer than they ought to, he’d kiss her. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d do. Maybe that’s what he’d get up and do right now.

  Roberto summoned every bit of resentment he could find, every ounce of righteous indignation he’d acquired over three frustrating years of marriage, and he stood up.

  That’s when he felt the hand on his arm.

  He turned. Trini was awake, staring up at him, the fingers of her strong right hand clamped around Roberto’s left forearm.

  Roberto looked down at her, his face turning into a poorly rendered mask of utter innocence. Trini just looked at him, her penetrating gaze bright even in the dim cabin light.

  “Sit down, Roberto.”

  Roberto’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He wasn’t a very good liar, even worse at wholesale invention, and rather than stammer out something stupid, he just closed his mouth again and shrugged an I don’t know what you’re talking about shrug.

  “Sit down.”

  Roberto did. Trini leaned over and put a hand on the back of his neck.

  “That ain’t you, kid.”

  Roberto felt a hot flush rise in his cheeks—anger, embarrassment, and thwarted desire sending any spare blood to his face on the double. “Stay out of it.”

  “My advice exactly.” Trini kept staring.

  Roberto looked away. He felt humiliated and wanted to make her feel the same. He turned back to Trini. “Jealous?”

  He’d wanted to lash out, and he did; he’d wanted to hurt, and he hit the target. Trini’s face fell, ever so slightly, less in wounded pride than in disappointment.

  Trini had been on the other side of her first and only marriage for ten years already, and the fact that she’d ever married in the first place was remarkable in itself. The marriage fell apart not because of the travel and secrecy required in her line of work, but because of her innate distaste for other human beings. People were okay; she just didn’t like looking at or listening to them. She’d been alone for a decade now and liked it.

  In her mind, she’d always thought of her occasional attraction to Roberto as a purely chemical response to his rather overstated good looks. She liked him fine, she enjoyed working with him, she deeply admired his professionalism and the fact that he felt no compulsion toward small talk, but she’d never had any romantic interest in him whatsoever. He was her co-worker. Her incredibly good-looking co-worker. Sometimes even people who don’t like sweets admire a piece of chocolate cake. That’s what it’s designed to do: it’s supposed to look good. So was he. And he did, usually. No big deal. Trini kept it to herself.

  But in ’8
3 she had been in a jeep accident and had broken two bones in her lower back, an exceptionally painful injury that resulted in her subsequent addiction to the painkillers the base physician had liberally prescribed to her. It was at bedtime that Trini liked them best; she’d take one an hour before bed and then nod off into drifty opiate sleep, feeling like nothing hurt, and not only that, even more than that, nothing ever would hurt, then or ever again. And where else in life can you get that assurance?

  The addiction dug in and grew. It went on for nearly six months, undetected by everyone except Roberto. He confronted his friend about it and then gave enormous amounts of time, energy, and emotional support to help Trini get clean. Trini insisted on doing it without any other outside help whatsoever, and Roberto agreed to try. Early on, during one of Trini’s worst shaking, sweating, sleepless nights, she’d started to panic, and Roberto had climbed in bed with her and held her, just trying to get her through it all. Trini had looked up at him at one point, told Roberto she was in love with him and always had been, and moved to kiss him. Roberto deflected, told his friend to shut up and go to sleep, and Trini did.

  They slept that way all night, and nothing happened. Roberto never told Annie about it, and in fact he and Trini had never spoken of it again themselves.

  Until now, when Roberto wanted to hurt her.

  Which he had.

  From the other end of the plane, the bathroom door closed with a soft click. Hero came out and headed back to her seat.

  Trini turned the other way and slouched down to go back to sleep.