I stare at the numbers. They weave and dance in front of me
as I flick through the papers. Spread sheets of data, lines of ones and zeros,
coded names for the patients, I assign them animals. I finished with the mammals
a long time ago. I’m on to the more obscure ocean dwellers, I flick past the A
names and Arapaima, Archerfish, and Arctic char. They are all people. People I've met, people I've seen, at least on the cellular level. One might be a Adrenocortical
carcinoma from a middle aged woman, her DNA code lodged on a cross referenced
page across the room, another a sliver from an Esophageal cancer from a man who
smoked all of his short thirty eight year life. I don’t know their names, I don’t
see their eyes, but I know them all the same. Their paths, their DNA, the
cities that spawned them and the culture that drove their choices into their
inevitable demise.
I stare at the numbers and see the pattern. The pattern the
computers could not work out, the intricacies of peer pressure and pollution,
of DNA and viral catastrophes. I have solved it. In my mind the pieces
interlock and form a whole, a disease, as splendid complex infinite monster
that stalks and culls the strangers who fall into its multi-layered traps.
It had all started so long ago. A short conversation in a
lab. How far were the genetic dispositions to addiction responsible for the
cancers associated with them? Then another question. How far were the genetic
dispositions to cancer growth linked to genetic dispositions to addiction? And
then another question and then another. My mind poured into the genome and I
tore out the pages of the book searching for more and more connections. Then I looked to the world, the air, the
water, the very food they consumed, their upbringing. I started to see it all,
an interconnected labyrinth of meaning at the heart of which lay a slumbering,
terrifying beast that wanted my life one cell at a time.
I saw it now, I saw the problems, the connections the way
the factors moved and whirled and swept through the world. I can see the
solutions. The way the puzzle moved under my thoughts, the way it leaps left and
right as I prodded and poked in trial and error as I searched for answers. I
hear it scream as I remove a number, I hear it whimper as I take a gene, cut a
factor; it rages around in my skull indignant I should be so bold, so presumptuous.
You are of our making and we have the right to burn you
where you stand. I laugh to myself. It is clear now. It is clear. I can save
them. I can save them all.
I turn back to the wall and see her picture, I see her eyes
her deep green eyes that were filled with such love, such hope for our lives. I
see all of the genes in my mind and I take them to the monster. I see how I could
have done it all differently, how it could have worked, how the world would
have been so different. The beast laughs at me from behind my own eyes and does
barrel rolls in the river of my memory. It sees my death and purses its lips, it sees my faults and failings and knows my time is almost at an end.
I pull a pen from the lapel pocket and walk to the blank
snow field of the whiteboard. As I touch the tip to the board I hear a
satisfying scream. I begin to write and know I will not stop until everything
has poured from me. By the time I am done I will be gone, dead, my energy
spent. But I will make this one last thrust.
‘For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee’
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