An elderly woman came running out of the building. She carried a small black Scottie with her and wore a gypsy’s head wrap. I stepped in front of her to get her to stop. She stared at me, confused by it all.
“What just happened?” she asked.
I pointed inside. “Did you see anyone else on your way out?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? I’m looking for a brunette woman. In her twenties. You saw her. Tell me you saw her coming out.”
I held her shoulders tight, begging her for a response.
“I didn’t see anything!”
She wrested herself away from my grip and fled. A small number of tenants came out of the emergency stairwell and ran up First. I held the door open for them, let them pass, and then began flying up the stairs. The flow of tenants petered out as I climbed higher. I got to the eighth floor and came out into a lightly smoky hallway. There was a door to a freight elevator room at the end of the hall and beyond that a door to a second hallway where the doctor’s apartment was. I ran to the end of the corridor and saw the door of the freight elevator room open. I hoped to see Katy and the doctor hand in hand, making their way out safely. It was a fireman. He stopped me and turned me around.
“My friend is in there!” I screamed.
“I can’t let you go. You have to get downstairs right now. Go. Go!”
“Is anyone alive? I’m looking for Katy Johannson.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
I relented and walked back to the stairwell. The fireman turned and reentered the freight elevator room, and I immediately doubled back to go find Katy. The fireman was still on the other side of the door when I opened it, now clearly angry I had defied him. He raised a fist and sent me back where I came from. I heard a huge crash, like a ceiling caving in, and I pictured my best friend pressed and flattened and desperate for air. The door to the stairwell opened and a wave of firemen filed by at top speed and pushed me to the side. Heavier smoke began to fill the hallway and I began to swoon and feel as if the walls and floors were molten and elastic. I retreated to the stairwell like a pathetic child and listened to the firemen shouting orders at one another from the other side of the door. I sat there trying to absorb every sound and sight because it was all I could do. I wasn’t remotely qualified to take any sort of bold action. All I could seize was proximity. I felt the urge to run to the doctor’s apartment and sit down in the blaze. I kept hoping for Katy to pass by or call me, but instead there was a big, deafening nothing. So I sat on the gray concrete steps, in the sickly fluorescent lighting, waiting. I don’t know how long I was there. No one passed by. Eventually, another fireman opened the door and ordered me to go down to ground level.
I walked down the stairs and out into the street. I smelled my sleeves and they reeked of smoke, of things burned that should never be burned. Up First, I could see yet another plume of smoke. Down First, I heard the swarm of protesters yelling and screaming. People were running up the avenue, some to the bridge, instinctively, as a sort of automatic 9/11-type gut response. Many seemed to have the palpable urge to get off the island, to get as far away from the center of the imaginary bull’s-eye as humanly possible.
I stayed where I was, as close to Katy as the FDNY would allow. I checked my phone and saw the EXPLOSIONS ROCKING MANHATTAN headline. The cops and firefighters continued shuttling in and out, saying nothing to me because saying nothing is what they have to do. I checked Katy’s status updates. There was nothing since the one she posted just before the explosion. She must have posted it while she was in the elevator.
DrinksOnKatyJ: u folks better get used to the idea of ME sticking around here a long, long time! 12:13 p.m.
That was the last thought going through her mind. She was ready to welcome another thousand years of joy and happiness, and I had promised it to her. I had brought her to this place. I had planted that thought in her mind. I could’ve stayed strong and never told her a goddamn thing, but I barely put up a fight. Deep down, I wanted her to know it all. I wanted the cheap thrill of being her little cure matchmaker.
And now she’s gone. No hospital admitted her. No one saw her leave. There’s nothing left of her. All the extra plans and hopes and dreams she had for herself will remain just that, forever.
I can’t move.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/3/2019, 4:08 P.M.
At the Protests
Our apartment is uncomfortably spacious now. I see the wine stains on the couch, and I hear Katy’s manic giggling like she’s still present. I don’t ever recall seeing her moody or displeased, which makes her abrupt and violent end all the more unbearable. All I can do is keep drinking and banter with her in my mind.
A pro-cure blogger named Ladyhawke posted another account of what happened yesterday, as witnessed from outside the UN. Apparently, she was one of the protesters.
How Many Have to Die?
We were facing the UN and screaming our heads off when the explosion drowned us out for a millisecond. But no one knew what the hell was going on. One person in the crowd screamed, “They’re trying to kill us!” and that was enough to set people fleeing in every direction. One guy pushed me to the ground so he could run past me. I was lucky; I saw another guy, who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, fall and get his head stepped on. I have no clue if he ever got back up. I got up and immediately began running up First Avenue. I assumed it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it was a terrorist attack. But I thought it was, you know, a terrorist terrorist attack. Someone from Saudi Arabia or something. My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets, and not at the road ahead of them. So I got bumped into from behind and from the side, as if someone had released a stampede of blind bulls onto the street. I got kicked in the back of the leg. Now I have a black welt there the size of a lemon.
Needless to say, now that we know what really happened, that these doctors had been systematically targeted—I’d argue they were assassinated—we are pissed. We’re already gathering outside the UN and the Capitol right now. We will number in the tens of thousands by morning, I can promise you that. How many more doctors will the president allow to be blown to pieces before he finally realizes he’s made a huge mistake? We’ve been protesting peacefully for months, but these pro-death people—who got what they wanted, by the way—are free to just randomly kill innocent people? These are doctors who treasure life enough to bestow more of it upon the rest of us. We’re through being nice about this. We’re not taking no for an answer this time around.
—LADYHAWKE
I don’t know where any of this is going, and I don’t know which side will come out on top, or which side even deserves to. All I know is that I feel an increasing urge to get the hell away from it all.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/4/2019, 8:47 P.M.
“A little bit of bloodshed now or a lot later on”
Katy’s family is making funeral arrangements. All the organized grieving happens at light speed, as if it must be done before you realize what you’re grieving over. I miss Katy desperately. The bomb goes off in my mind every five minutes, and I’m left no less shaken by it each time. I have fevered daydreams of a blonde running from me and taking out a phone, pushing the secret code number that kills my best friend. I told the police about her. Every detail of her face and figure. I could have sculpted it from clay. They had a crude sketch drawn and posted. No one has responded. I’m not terribly optimistic.
I’ve spent most of my time reading everything I can about the bombings. The same articles over and over again. I don’t know why I keep reading them—perhaps to help drive the reality of it home. They just released a partial list of the doctors killed. Their count (minus bystanders like Katy) appears to have settled at nine: Charles Bane III ; Sofia Gonzalez; Gim Lau; Jocelyn McManus; Vishal Mehta; Frederick Polycronis, DDS; Ian Rosenhaus ; Pameer Sanji; and Ameet Thakkar. I know Dr. X wasn’t a woman, nor was he Indian o
r Asian (unless he was very, very good at keeping his identity hidden, which it seems now he was not). That leaves three possibilities from this list: Bane, Polycronis, and Rosenhaus. At some point, they’re going to release his picture. I don’t know if I can stand to find out which one is him. I gave him seven thousand bucks in cash to keep me young for the rest of my life. And now he’ll never get to use it. The fact that he gave himself the cure only makes the finality of his death harder to take. Who the hell knows how many lifetimes were just robbed from him.
I should have seen something like this coming. What happened in Oregon should have prepared me for it. But the truth is that I didn’t pay much heed to what took place in Oregon. It happened all the way across the country, so I guess even news about murder suffers from East Coast bias. There’s the added fact that I live in Manhattan. When you live here, you can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
I can’t do that anymore. What happened yesterday and what happened in Oregon are now so strongly bonded that it feels like Eugene is located right across the Hudson. A reporter named Mike Dermott wrote a huge piece about Oregon last week. I never bothered to read it before now. But I’ve read it a dozen times in the past couple of hours. I can nearly recite it from memory. Copied from Slate:
The Man Who Conquered Death
By Mike Dermott
Graham Otto never set out to conquer death. He was just hoping to help out the redheads of the world.
“I’m a redhead,” he noted in his private journal, to which I was granted exclusive access by the Otto family. “I’ve yet to meet a redheaded guy who enjoys being a redhead.” The name of the gene is MCR1. It’s located on chromosome 16. And according to the complete map of the human genome, it’s the gene that causes red hair (along with a rare condition called brittle cornea syndrome). Working with a team of fellow geneticists, Otto targeted this gene in hopes of finding a way to color hair through gene therapy. “It wasn’t the most noble of genetic experiments,” he wrote. “It was the sort of thing a wealthy university like U. Oregon does from time to time, when it feels like playing around.”
“He was excited about the potential business aspect of it. We all were,” recalls his wife, Sarah. “Frankly, I was just thrilled at the prospect of never having to pay three hundred dollars for highlights ever again.”
He didn’t fit the traditional scientist mold. Otto had attended Oregon on a partial scholarship for track and placed as high as eighth in the two-mile event at the 2000 Prefontaine Classic. He was an outgoing man, who always preferred company while working in the lab and who was always able to talk about his work in ways that laymen found not only accessible but downright fascinating.
“I think that’s what made him such a great teacher,” says UO president Raymond Lack. “He was passionate about his work but not to the point where he became insular. You never felt like he was talking over your head about any of this stuff. He made it sound interesting, even entertaining. And trust me, that’s not a commonplace trait among his peers. His communication skills were a rare gift for anyone, in any profession.”
In terms of changing hair color through gene therapy, Otto was a miserable failure. The problem wasn’t extracting the redhead protein from the gene. That proved easy for Otto and his self-described team of “Hair Bears.” The problem was replacing the color. “If you take away a person’s genetically predisposed color, you essentially give them colorless hair—albino hair,” he wrote. “You have to eliminate that protein in the gene and you have to find a way to add the color of your preference, and that’s where the engineering becomes close to a technical impossibility.” Otto experimented with altering proteins found elsewhere in the DNA helix of fruit flies (who can have red eyes that are triggered by the same gene), trying to activate a different color. “We tried blue. We tried brown. We tried green. Nothing worked.”
Exasperated one night in the lab, Otto became careless. In the midst of deadening the red protein in that day’s batch of flies, he removed an extra protein from the gene as well. “I knew exactly what I had done,” he wrote. “But it was late, and I didn’t feel like starting over. Every good scientist knows that if you contaminate the original sample, you toss it. But I didn’t. I figured it wouldn’t make a difference in the end, so I went ahead and injected the vector. It was pure sloppiness.” When Otto returned the following morning, nothing unusual had occurred. He tried to introduce a new color protein into the flies’ DNA, but it again failed. He placed the batch of flies aside and began taking on a new group of test subjects.
But then something odd happened to that tainted sample of flies. “They wouldn’t die. A fruit fly usually lives for less than two months. And even then, within twenty-four hours or so, you begin seeing a handful of them drop. But none of the flies I injected with the vector dropped. Ever. They just kept flying around.”
Up until Otto’s serendipitous mistake, it was assumed that biological aging was controlled by hundreds, if not thousands, of separate genetic proteins found in the body—proteins that worked in concert to determine the rate of aging across various parts of an individual. “We always assumed that a thousand different internal mechanisms and external factors worked together to trigger the aging process,” says Dr. Phillip Frank, head of genetics at the National Institutes of Health. “When you think about it, you begin aging from the second you’re born. Our studies showed that specific proteins in your body activated all the different physiological processes and free radicals that go into both growing up and growing old. There was no master switch.”
Until Graham Otto came around.
The tainted fruit flies carried on living for weeks and weeks, with an apparently limitless supply of energy. The only dead fruit flies Otto found in the container were their offspring (the altered genes, Otto discovered, weren’t passed on), the offspring of their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring’s offspring. The original flies remained alive and fluttering about indefinitely. Otto acted quickly, retracing his footsteps from that late night in the lab, finding the supposedly unimportant protein he had mistakenly altered, and replicating the experiment again, without altering the original protein in the gene. Again, the flies had a seemingly indefinite lifespan.
The supposedly innocuous portion of the gene Otto had messed with turned out to be much more important than he had ever envisioned. He rushed to form his own independent biotech firm and called a lawyer to draft a patent for the protein. “Normally, this is something you do over the course of years,” he told Lack in an e-mail. “But we’re doing it in a week, because if we can replicate it across species, maybe there’s something there.” And replicate it he did, across mice, rats, guinea pigs, and others, including his own aging golden retriever, Buggle. In all instances, the altered animals appeared ageless when compared to their respective control groups, never growing old past the day the vector was introduced into their system. And all of them remain alive and well today, in tourist displays set up by the university—except for Buggle, who remains comfortably in the Otto household.
Despite his extroverted nature, Otto wasn’t known as a cocky, presumptuous man. The only careless thing he did in his life was to mistakenly alter the wrong gene in those fruit flies. So when he published his findings, he insisted only on reporting what he had found, and didn’t speculate on the potentially enormous worldwide impact of his research. Nevertheless, many in his field declared it junk science. “It just seemed like too easy of an answer,” says Dr. Frank. Still, while many questioned Otto’s findings, they didn’t hesitate to recreate his experiments. And they soon found that his discovery was everything he said it was. Far more than that, actually. “He understated the results because he didn’t want to sound like some kook. He refused to call it a cure for aging,” says Sarah Otto. “But that’s what it was, and the follow-up research proved it.”
To see if the same gene therapy worked in humans, Otto solicited an unlikely test group: patients with early-onset Alzheimer’s diseas
e. “A disease like Alzheimer’s is triggered specifically by the advance of age,” Otto wrote in a subsequent e-mail to Lack. “So if we administer the cure to people who are just developing the disease, we can do two things. One, we can potentially prevent further damage to their brains. Two, we can see within a shorter period of time if the cure takes hold. Normally, when you do a CAT scan of an Alzheimer’s patient, you see changes—sometimes rather drastic changes—to the brain over a short period. You can see the dark spots, the ‘cobwebs,’ as it were.”
The ten initial test subjects received monthly CAT scans after being administered the cure. “In every case, the cobwebs stopped growing,” noted Otto in his second published report. “The dark spots on their brains remained dark but never expanded, which is unheard of in Alzheimer’s patients. We studied them for over a year and not one of them saw the disease advance past the early stages. Their brains remained perfectly, blessedly intact.” Two of the patients have since died from unrelated causes; the other eight are still alive and well.
By the time Otto had published these subsequent findings, the biotech community was busy stress-testing the cure in every conceivable way. Not once were they able to poke a hole in what Otto had discovered. So miraculous were the cure’s effects that many doctors began to confess on the party circuit that they had injected themselves with the vector. According to urban legend in the community, one such doctor, David Spitz, accidentally let spill to a prominent socialite at a charity gala in Seattle that he had given himself the cure. The socialite demanded the cure for herself, eventually wearing Spitz down with offers of cash and signing secretly prepared documents that absolved him of all legal liability. Thus the black market for the cure was born, well before it had even crossed the FDA’s desk.