City of Lost Dreams

ELEVEN

Alessandro, his normal Italian insouciance replaced with real concern for Sarah’s well-being, had insisted on keeping her overnight and doing blood work, a urinalysis, hair and skin samples, a functional MRI, and a positron emission tomograph. He had examined her saliva and ultrasounded her abdomen. He had even looked in her ears, which was somehow more intimate than sharing a bathroom with him back in Boston.

Sarah sat on the table, in a paper gown. She had been unable to make eye contact with Alessandro when she described having the most powerful orgasms of her life, but fortunately he had retained his professional composure. At least for now. She had a feeling she would be in for some serious teasing later.

“Where you get this drug?” demanded Alessandro for the hundredth time. “And don’t tell me again this story ‘someone at club must have slipped something in my drink.’ What club? Where is Renato?”

Sarah sighed. She trusted Alessandro, but she couldn’t get him involved in the galleon and Bettina. There was too much at risk. She had been texting Renato during her examination, but so far he hadn’t responded.

“I’m sorry,” she told Alessandro. “One minute I was fine, having a great time, and the next minute I felt totally strange. Renato was with friends. I didn’t want to worry him.”

“First night I pick you up at police station and last night you are high as a kite. Sarah . . .”

“Please don’t ask me any more,” she said. “You know I have my reasons.”

“It will take a while to analyze the data,” Alessandro said, collecting a sheaf of papers. “What I see from the preliminary results is something un pochino strano.”

“Strange as in . . .”

“I know you. You are like horse, never sick. Have you ever been sick? In your life?”

“Of course.”

“I am asking because so far, everything in your body is . . . perfect. But too perfect. Everyone has something. Even healthy, spinning class, yogurt-eating, hot ragazza like yourself will have something. Bilirubin slightly higher, white cell count a little off, but your levels, cara, are optimal across the board. There is no inflammation anywhere in your body. You don’t have a yeast infection or a toenail fungus or even a trace of gingivitis. Is very strange. Is like someone hit the reset button.”

“I was thinking all the symptoms were just vagus nerve stimulation.”

“Possibly you are right about that. Your striatum, she was lit up like a Christmas tree. Your nucleus accumbens was bombarded with dopamine.”

“A lot of autoimmune disorders come from degeneration of that part of the brain, right?” said Sarah. “Parkinson’s, Huntington’s?”

“Sì. It also seems to be the center of addictions.”

Sarah nodded and jumped off the table.

“You’ve been a rock star, Alessandro,” she said. “How on earth are you going to explain running all these tests?”

“I make love to the lady in charge of billing.” Alessandro smiled. “While her cats watch.”

Sarah met Renato later that morning in his office at the Kunsthistorisches. The museum, which had been all hers last night, was now thronged with tourists. She averted her eyes as she passed the centaur and greeted Renato. The curator’s skin still appeared smooth and clear. Renato told her that he had left his phone in his office last night and passed out cold a few hours after taking the drug. By the time he had gotten to the museum, his superior had already discovered the box with the galleon and a courier had come to remove it. He had told no one about the drug.

“But, Sarah,” he said, “what did it do to me? What did it do to you?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah shook her head. “It might have been a sort of supersteroid, suppressing the immune system. It might have . . . repaired it. I don’t want to get your hopes up. And I think you should get some tests done.”

“By who?” yelped Renato.

“Alessandro. You wouldn’t have to say what we took.”

“Sarah.” Renato locked his office door and then took off his sweater. His chest and arms were beautifully olive. But then Renato turned around.

The smooth expanse of skin was now delineated with darker patches.

Sarah picked up her phone and fired off another text to Bettina. Galleon on way back to British Museum. I need answers.

Renato had stripes like a tiger.

“You don’t think,” Renato said in the cab over to the hospital, “that I’m suddenly going to sprout claws or, like, fangs or anything, do you?”

“No.” Sarah tried to sound calm and confident. “The skin isn’t raised; there’s no . . . hair or anything. It’s just pigmentation. Some kind of side effect. And it’s only your back.”

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” said Renato in a high voice—he was clearly fighting down a certain degree of panic, “but I really don’t want to become a tiger. All things considered, I’m a vegetarian.”

“Alessandro will run some tests. He’ll be discreet. I haven’t told him about the galleon. Too complicated. We were at a club last night; someone slipped us some drugs in our drinks. You don’t even have to say that you had a skin condition. Just have him look at the stripes.”

“Okay.”

“You’re going to be fine. How do you feel?”

“I’m freaking out.”

“But other than that?”

“Other than that, I feel great. I mean, look at me.” Renato held out his arms, wonderingly. He ran one slim brown hand over the other, then touched his chest. Tears came to his eyes.

“Sarah, whatever this is, I don’t want to change it. I don’t want to go back. I don’t even want to know what it was. You have no idea how good it is to feel my own skin. Touch me. Please. I don’t mean . . . just touch me.”

Sarah ran her hands down Renato’s forearm. When they reached his hand, he gripped her fingers.

“How did the tiger get his stripes?” He laughed softly. “God works in mysterious ways. But you were right, you know. Thomas did like me. I thought, when I ran up and kissed him, he would ask me what happened to my skin. But you know what he said? He said, ‘What took you so long?’”

Sarah stayed with Renato and Alessandro long enough to ascertain that all of Renato’s vitals were normal. The blood work would take longer.

“I cannot say if the marking on his skin will be permanent or no,” Alessandro said when they were alone together in the hallway. “I think it is an allergic reaction to this drug. Every person has stripes on their skin, called Blaschko’s lines, only on most people the pigment differentiation is so faint you cannot detect this, unless you look under strong UV light. Or sometimes with allergy, you see this.”

“Is that related somehow to the vagus nerve?”

“Not that I know of.” Alessandro shrugged, then added, “There is one other explanation. Genetic chimeras—people who have two sets of DNA instructions in their cells—often have visible Blaschko’s lines. Maybe the drug is confusing Renato’s DNA. I need to know what it was, Sarah. Stop with the nonsense about someone slipping you something. Renato is not as good a liar as you.”

“It’s hard to talk about.” To say the least, thought Sarah.

“There is more?”

Sarah thought of the empty cannon with regret. If there had been any left, they could’ve tested it.

“No.”

“You can find more?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please, Sarah, ti voglio bene. You must not take whatever it is again. These different symptoms are strange. I am not convinced there won’t be further repercussions. DNA is not GPS. It will not simply reroute if you take a wrong turn.”

No response from Bettina. Sarah needed a long walk. She headed for the Donaukanal—the arm of the Danube that bordered the city center. The Danube, she found, was far from blue here—more an olive—but the walls along the pathway were a riot of colorful graffiti: cartoon characters, tags, messages, faces, figures. In some places the ground was littered with the discarded tips of spray cans. This was a different view of Vienna, younger, more energetic, struggling to define itself, literally. Yet even here Austrian sensibilities prevailed. The violence of a dripping black Fuck cops! was mitigated by something Nina had told her at the ball about city officials making it legal for graffiti artists to work on designated sections of the wall. The technical quality of the art probably benefited (no rushing to get through before Der Fuzz showed up), but it took a bit of the element of anarchy away.

Bikes zoomed around her as she dialed her phone. Jose answered. “Pollina at the palace. I go to pick her up soon.”

“How is she today?”

“She taking new medicine, but she no like. She say it make her joints hurt. Oksana say she not understand why nothing working. She want to know if you meet the doctor in Vienna.” Sarah felt something in her chest tighten and squeeze.

“I’m working on it.”

“I go to mass every day,” Jose said. “I pray to Jesus to keep her safe.”

Prayer. That was what people did when there was nothing else left to do.

Sarah wandered over toward the Hofburg complex, pausing outside Michaelerkirche as horses and carriages clomped past. The church contained, she knew, the largest Baroque organ in Vienna, a superb instrument by Johann David Sieber. She thought she might have a look since she was here.

It couldn’t be that she wanted, like Jose, to pray for Pollina, could it? She hadn’t prayed since . . . since her father died.

But if Sarah had been motivated by some latent desire for a compassionate Almighty, the sight of Michaelerkirche’s high altar knocked it out. Meant to evoke a flight of angels escaping from Hell, it looked to Sarah like someone had assembled those little gold babies people hid in cakes and stuck them into lumps of putty. Putti putty. Gothic Play-Doh. There was nothing here for her but creepy art. She was about to make a hasty exit when a burst of music sounded above her.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Fuga sopra il Magnificat.”

Ah, hell, thought Sarah, leaning against a pillar and surrendering herself to the cascade of sublime sound. God in words and God in pictures left her unmoved. But God in music?

Her phone, which she had set to vibrate, buzzed in her pocket.

Thank you. Galleon an unwelcome gift, I assure you. I need answers, too. Someone stole my laptop. I need it back. You must help. It is not safe for me to return to Vienna yet. I will message you again.