The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 4

Joe sat on the gray planks in his underground front yard and looked around at the carpet of living greenery covering his once bare stone floor. The plants were still too fragile for Joe to walk on, but Edison sniffed around amongst them in a complicated pattern.

A bank of LED spots provided the plants with light. Water from his household pipes trickled down a nearby rock face and fed into an irrigation system originally designed for exactly the opposite environment — a rooftop garden. The system worked down here, too, and it had brought him something he’d sorely missed during these months inside.

He inhaled the smell of rich soil, wet rocks, and the green scent of ground cover. He’d picked out the plants with his garden designer, savoring their evocative names — creeping mazus, brass buttons, and blue star.

Edison looked toward their Victorian house a few yards away. The white door was thrown open onto the newly swept porch. Maeve Wadsworth, his eccentric garden designer, had ordered her crew to pressure wash the yellow boards and red and white gingerbread before starting on the garden. The house sparkled. It probably hadn’t been this clean in a century.

Like every day, he felt grateful to the gifted engineer who’d designed the city’s underground train system and built this house deep beneath his greatest creation, Grand Central Terminal. Without it, Joe would have been stranded in the modern glass and steel Hyatt where he’d been staying when the agoraphobia struck. Instead, he had a home of his own.

Still tense from work, he rolled his shoulders to relax them. He’d pulled back from Pellucid, the facial recognition software company that had made him his fortune. He only did occasional consulting work for them now, which enabled him to maintain access to their databases without raising suspicion. He didn’t miss running Pellucid.

Lucid was his new baby. It was his brain-mapping company. The human brain was already mapped on a large scale, but he intended to penetrate its secrets at a neuronal level. Like his almost-ancestor Nikola Tesla, Joe was convinced the answers to the brain lay in electricity. Not the dramatic electricity that powered Nikola’s legendary devices, but in the tiny blasts of electricity that pulsed through the nervous system at the speed of thought.

He measured that electricity using electrodes that recorded the voltage fluctuations in neurons. The tests were called EEGs, and he intended to build up the largest database of EEGs in the world. Once he had enough data, he intended to apply his pattern-matching abilities, the ones that had made Pellucid the most successful company in its field, to map the brain’s activities.

With a lot of luck, he might be able to figure out what exactly had gone haywire in his own brain and be able to walk on real grass again. He’d not only cure himself, he’d be able to help millions who suffered from agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders. Or at least that was his goal.

Joe pulled dinner out of his takeaway bag — Greek salad. Edison sniffed the air and gave Joe a painfully embarrassed look. The dog had a deep mistrust of salad.

Edison licked his hand apologetically, then trotted over to the porch, scooted up the stairs and disappeared through the open door. He’d had a long day at Joe’s office. He’d earned some decent kibble.

“Abandoning me to salad?” Joe called after him. “The shame of it!”

He laid his meal out on a blanket he’d spread over the boards: salad, beer, and a hunk of bread. This represented his first picnic in the tunnel. Then he phoned the person he most wanted to share it with.

“Celeste,” said a breathy voice on the phone. Her picture, taken years before when they’d been lovers in college, smiled from his screen. When they talked, she could see his face in real time, but he could never see hers. She wouldn’t allow it. Not anymore.

“Joe here. I’m in my garden!” He moved the phone’s camera across the plants. “Welcome to my picnic.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He let out a contented sigh. “One small step for a Joe, one giant leap for Joe-kind.”

Celeste made a breathy exhalation that might have been a laugh.

He wished she could be here to see it, or that he could see the view from her window, but his agoraphobia kept him a prisoner down here just as much as her ALS kept her a prisoner in her expensive penthouse hundreds of feet above the city.

“The LEDs.” He pointed the phone at a bank of lights. “They’re on a twelve-hour timer to make sure the plants get enough light, and they’re motion sensitive. Whenever I come outside, they retract against the walls so I can see the whole lawn. Maeve thought of everything.” Maeve was a genius — she had an incredible visual sense, was good with plants, and had designed and built the light setup herself. Truly a steampunk-esque Renaissance woman.

“It looks like it ought to be on a moon base,” Celeste said.

Trying to ignore her tone, he kept talking. “It actually ought to be on a pot farm.”

“Are you growing something useful, then?”

“This is useful.” His buoyant mood settled. “I just meant that indoor gardening is mostly the province of me and a bunch of guys growing marijuana in a closet.”

“A select bunch. Your mother would be proud.”

She was clearly grouchy about something.

“Did you get my present?”

“It came in with the tide this morning. Like garbage being washed ashore.”

Garbage. “You didn’t like it?”

“It was a” — she coughed — “wheelchair.”

“A state-of-the-art wheelchair. Did you put on the hat and test out the wireless EEG system? You can control it using your thoughts. You need to set up images in your head for directions, like raspberry for right or lemon for left.”

“It’s a gift you send a cripple, not your girlfriend.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

She sighed. She had so little breath it barely sounded like a sigh, but he recognized it anyway. He’d hoped to make her time in the wheelchair easier, but he shouldn’t have reminded her that he knew she was stuck in a wheelchair in the first place.

Slowly, he panned the camera across the whitewashed walls and up to the painted ceiling. The ceiling glowed a soft blue, like the real sky. Painted clouds adorned its surface. If he squinted, he could believe he was outside, but without the panic attack that going outside would bring on.

“Is that a seagull?” she asked.

“I put it up there for you.” Gulls were her favorite bird, and he’d insisted the artist paint a faraway gull flying close to the artificial sun. Its gray and white wings were angled in eternal flight.

“I like it,” she said.

Joe gazed up at the bird, making sure the angle of the phone let her see the same thing. He took another long breath of green-scented air and felt himself relaxing. The phone was a warm rectangle in his hand.

“Tell me about the lighting.” She was trying to act interested.

His good mood returned. He could make do with this. “We installed lights behind the painted clouds, and they dim or brighten depending on the weather outside. At twilight, pink and orange lights come on so the ceiling looks like a sunset. Then, at night, the lights dim down, and the paint darkens.”

“Really darkens?” Celeste was a former artist, so she was skeptical.

“Yup.” He waited for her to figure it out.

She did, of course. “You used thermochromic paint? Like a mood ring?”

“Exactly — it’s blue when the lights are high and indigo when they’re low. It gives me night and day like everyone else.”

“You’re a very talented and artistic nerd.” He was grateful to hear a smile in her voice.

“Maeve did the real work.” She usually worked designing stage sets and museum exhibits, but he’d lured her away to transform the tunnel in front of his house. He had the money to tempt her, and so few other things he could spend it on. Not cars, travel, or partying. He was the most boring rich guy he knew.

“Yes, Maeve.” Celeste had recommended her. They’d gone to art school together and stayed friends after. “Lucky Maeve.”

The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable. Was she jealous? Maeve was enigmatic and beautiful, but his heart belonged to Celeste. After all this time, she should know that.

“How are you feeling today?” Joe turned the phone around so she could see his face, even if he couldn’t see hers. He wanted her to see his concern.

She let out a rattling breath, and he wondered what number she’d say. She rated her days numerically. Low numbers were bad, high ones good.

“Three,” she said.

The color for three, red, shone in his head. Three was always red. “Three. Red like love. Red like lipstick.”

“Lipstick comes in lots of colors — pinks, oranges, whites.”

“Sunset colors,” he said. “But I saw some red lipsticks today, when—”

“Out there flirting?”

“Edison dug up some tubes of lipstick in the tunnel. Plus a purse.”

“Were you by Herald Square?”

“Under Macys?” He smiled. “Nope. Anyway, it’s no big deal. Tell me more about your three. That’s not a good number.” She didn’t sound especially ill. She hadn’t struggled for breath during the call. Something else must be wrong.

“It’s October,” she said. “And, well…”

Her voice trailed off, and Joe remembered what it was about October. Celeste’s overbearing and abusive mother had died years before, in October. They hadn’t been close, and Celeste had once told him that she and her brother Leandro had a drunken party after the wake, dumping their mother’s ashes down a sewer grate. She had died before Joe met Celeste, and he’d never even seen a picture of her. It was as if Celeste and Leandro had been raised as orphans.

“Your mother’s death?” he guessed.

“Or mine,” she answered.

“What?” His stomach clenched. “What’s happened?”

“Six months ago, they gave me six months to live.”

Six (orange) months. She’d been living with a six (orange)-month death sentence for half a year, and she’d never told him.

“Stephen Hawking has lived with ALS for over fifty years,” he said. Fifty (brown, black), a nice, reassuring number.

Celeste sighed into the phone. “I don’t want to die the same month as her. It’s bad enough that I look like her, that I have her DNA in my body.”

Dread settled in his stomach. He’d been hoping all these months that she had the Stephen Hawking version of ALS, and that she’d be around for a good long time yet. She’d never told him the specifics, and he’d never asked. “Are you that sick right now?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody fucking knows anything.”

“When is Leandro coming over next?” He would know what to do with her. The twins had always been so close that Joe felt left out, but he was grateful she had someone who loved her in her everyday life, even if it wasn’t him.

“He leaves tomorrow to go to Key West for Fantasy Fest.”

Typical Leandro. Selfish enough to go on a drunken binge and abandon her when she might die at any moment. “But—”

As if she heard his thoughts, she broke in to defend her brother. “It’s just for the weekend, and he needs time away from the stress of his crippled sister. He should go.”

“Fantasy Fest?” Joe backed off. He imagined a festival dedicated to fantasy literature and tried to make her laugh. It was all he could think to do. “People dressed like hobbits?”

“It’s a big party, like Mardi Gras.”

“Topless hobbits?”

“Maybe,” she said heavily.

The thought of topless hobbits hadn’t made her laugh. “I could come over there for the weekend and keep you company while Leandro is gone.”

He was a poor substitute for her brother, but he had to be better than no one at all. Probably sensing how the conversation was going, Edison poked his head out the front door and looked over at Joe.

“You?” She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “You haven’t been outside in months.”

“When they took me to the hospital. I was outside then.” He shivered at the memory, and Edison walked across the planks to sit next to him.

“You were unconscious. Doesn’t count.”

“I could get a knockout drug. Vivian could drag me across town. In an hour I could be drooling on your carpet.”

She fell silent for so long he worried she’d fallen asleep. Edison cuddled up to him and rested his head on Joe’s arm. The dog always knew when Joe needed reassurance. Joe petted his square head, and Edison thumped his tail against the ground in thanks. He and Joe had an uncomplicated relationship.

“I don’t want you to come,” Celeste said.

“It’s not that risky. I could hire a doctor.” The thought terrified him. Him, outside and helpless under the sun. His heart raced, and Edison licked his bare arm.

“I wasn’t thinking of you,” she said. “I was thinking of me.”

“But you just have to receive me, like a queen on a throne. We could keep the visit short. I wouldn’t want to overtire you.”

“I don’t want you to come,” she repeated.

Edison nudged the phone with his nose. The dog knew the call was upsetting him. Joe lifted up the phone and motioned for the dog to sit back. “Thanks, Celeste.”

“I don’t want you to see me.” She coughed for a long spell, and he waited her out. “Like this.”

“You’re beautiful.” He’d fallen in love with her the moment he saw her, before he’d even known the wonderful, complex mind behind her gorgeous face.

“I look like Stephen Hawking.”

“I’m a nerd,” he said. “I think Stephen Hawking is kind of hot.”

Even that line didn’t get a laugh.

“I used to be hot, but I’m not anymore,” she said.

Edison licked his cheek and nuzzled his shoulder. Joe took a couple of deep breaths. He focused on the warm dog leaning against him and the sound of water trickling down the wall. Celeste needed him to stay calm. It wasn’t about his hurt feelings. She was dying, and he needed to be there for her, however she wanted.

Still, he tried again. “I don’t want to remember you from five years ago.” The color for five appeared — brown. “I want to make new memories with you.”

“We do.” He strained to hear her words. “Like this. On the phone. We do.”

“I want more,” he said.

“This is a lot.”

“How can you not know that you will always be beautiful to me?”

“If we stay like this.”

“My mother used to say that physical appearance is vanity,” Joe said. “That the real truth about anyone is never on the surface.”

“Your mother always looks like a model.”

“That’s not my point.” A lifelong performer, his mother always looked ready to step onto a stage. “I’m not going to think less of you if I can look you in the eye. If anything, I’ll think more of you because that’s the real you.”

“This is the real me, too.” She was quiet for a long time. “Maybe it would be best if we stopped the calls, too.”

“But—”

She’d already broken the connection.

He called her back immediately. His call went straight to voicemail. Their first fight since he’d inadvertently moved to New York, but it was a doozy. She still didn’t want him to see her, but now, maybe, didn’t even want to speak to him again.

Joe stuffed the phone in his pocket and sat up. The magic of the garden was gone. He was just a guy sitting in a tunnel. Celeste, the woman he’d always known was his one true love, was worried about dying sometime in the next month, and she wouldn’t let him go to her, hold her, and comfort her.

Edison climbed into his lap like a giant housecat and leaned against Joe’s chest. Joe wrapped his arms around the dog and rested his chin on top of Edison’s head. Together, they stared up at the seagull.

For the first time, Joe noticed the bird wasn’t flying toward him. It was flying away.