Race Across The Sky Part 12

"I read your book," Caleb blurted out. "I came here."

Mack smiled. For the first time, Caleb felt the pull of those eyes.

"You run, dude?" His voice was surprisingly nasal.

"I just did six."

"Miles?"

"Yes."

A pained pause followed. The other people at the table were looking at him.

"Come back when it's hours."

"I can't run six hours straight."

"Sure you can. Isn't that why you came here?"

Through the holidays Caleb ran seven days a week, base building, exercising ladders and cutdowns and pyramids. He practiced meditating, to direct kinetic energy deeper into his body. He e-mailed his resignation to his manager and signed a year lease near Centennial Park.

By then he had cut refined sugars and red meat from his diet. His musculature began to harden, while he lost fifteen pounds. His first runs through subzero temperatures made him gasp. In February Mack saw him on a frozen trail and complimented him on his progress. It was considered a long winter, but to Caleb it went by in a white blur.

That April Caleb returned to the Rocking Horse, and waited for Happy Trails to arrive. When Mack sat down, Caleb approached his table.

"Come out with us Friday," Mack offered as he lifted a shot gla.s.s.

"I can't do six hours yet."

"Let me tell you what you can do."

Caleb's first run with Happy Trails was ecstatic. As the sun rose he moved with fifteen other rigid-spined, piston-armed, wide-smiling runners. He could feel warmth emanating from their bodies, just as Mack's book had described. The runners in front of him kicked up last evening's rain, which fell around his eyes like an angel's tears. After five hours he bent over on a narrow trail, his hands on his knees, and threw up. Mack jogged over, and leaned down.

"Run."

Caleb shook his head, heaving. He tightened his eyes, shaking, acid burning through his chest. But somehow his legs started moving. Within a half mile his stomach cramped, and he stumbled, fire raging through his spasming body.

"Drop," Mack explained quietly, "and this is your last run with us."

Caleb stared wide-eyed at him, seeing that he meant it.

Suddenly Mack raised his hands and shouted, "'Now triumph! Transformation! Jubilate!'"

Caleb straightened. There followed the hardest minutes of his life. He deteriorated from a walk to a crawl. Mack stayed beside him the whole hour, repeating affirmations. When the stopwatch hit six hours, some of the others carried him, he had no idea how far, to their house.

He awoke on a mattress on a floor, to the sound of group chanting downstairs. When he appeared in the big room, they all stopped and clapped for him.

Afterward, Caleb was admitted into members.h.i.+p. He ran with Happy Trails several times a week. He discovered how to absorb the energy in the steam emitting from a buck in the woods, and from the friction of a warbler's wings against a branch.

By this time, it had become very difficult to speak with his family. When he called, Julie spoke to him as if he were a child suffering some shock. Fred wanted to find him a job in Seattle. Shane explained that he understood and wanted to come out and see him. Their disconnection from what he was experiencing frustrated him; they a.s.sumed he was in trauma, when really he was in transcendence.

That fall, Caleb ran his first ultramarathon, a fifty-mile Fat Race in Winter Park. When he finished in eleventh place, Mack hugged him, his breath steaming in the cold.

"'Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content I travel the open road.'"

Caleb felt hot tears streaming down his face. Afterward, Mack gathered the house in a circle. They held hands, and quietly initiated Caleb into Sunday energy healing.

Once he moved into the house, he experienced total clarity about his life. He knew what was expected of him each day, and still each minute was filled with unpredictable pleasures. Every two months he competed in hundred-mile ultrathons, moving gradually from placing sixtieth, to thirtieth, where he plateaued for some years, and then the twenties, and now, finally, the single digits.

Caleb kept his life this way for ten years, until the morning when he had been in the kitchen and heard a knock from the front door, and watched it open, revealing June and Lily.

After that, there was no such simplicity again.

Now, lying on this narrow shelf, inches away from an endless drop, the smell of Lily's skin washed over him like a rain. He thought of how he had accomplished nothing to help her, and he let loose a prolonged and agonized scream. A face appeared upside down far above him.

"Oh, Jesus!" a woman shouted.

Eventually someone arrived with a rope. Caleb pushed his pelvis up and tied it around his waist as instructed, held it even as it sliced into his fingers, as he was lifted from the berm, dangling in the perilous air, his feet kicking at the dirt and rock, multiple hands grabbing his s.h.i.+rt and pulling, and only when he felt the canyon trail beneath his back did he let go of the rope. A stretcher, oxygen, and blankets awaited him.

"We've been looking for you for an hour, buddy. Thought you fell through a cornice. Your pacer's been going crazy."

Caleb's voice, husky and broken, asked simply, "What's the cutoff?"

The Search and Rescue workers stared at him as if he had lost his bearings. But a watching race official understood.

"You're forty minutes over."

Caleb accepted water, thanked them, and started into his antelope strides back around the ridge of Engineer Mountain.

Behind him he heard the rescue workers shouting for him to come back. His lungs hiccuped brown sputum as he made his way down toward Telluride, where the sudden appearance of people and cars panicked him. He ran as quickly as he could through its streets, for the safety of the trails.

After miles of switchbacks he encountered a runner dry-heaving on the near bank of a river. The recent storm had flooded its banks; the water was far too high to run through. Caleb jogged west, his exhausted eyes searching for some way across. A mile upriver he dove in to swim. The current pulled him back east. It didn't matter; he was simply moving.

On the other side he found the course and began to see other entrants sitting wretchedly along the trail like refugees; one young guy lay on the ground sobbing. Caleb's sides began cramping, and his incoming breaths sounded like Lily's exhales. He guessed himself to be around eighty miles in.

At the Chapman Gulch aid station, Juan hugged him.

"Where you been man? Mack almost called out Search and Rescue."

"I had a problem."

"Man, you hear about John?"

"No."

"He lost it at ninety-nine."

It sometimes happened that a runner collapsed within sight of the finish. The mind has focused on this image for so long that as soon as it sees it, it a.s.sumes the goal has been met, and shuts off its systems.

Juan gave him an energy gel. He gagged on it, spitting blue fluid onto the ground. Then they ran to Porcupine Creek. Each mile took much longer now. The runners he pa.s.sed now smelled like sulfur.

He could see Silverton far below him, its colorful small buildings in a crooked line, like dominoes placed by a toddler. He had run the equivalent of four marathons, up thirteen peaks. Six hours later than he had intended, Caleb stumbled into town and kissed the white-painted rock at the finish.

When he looked up, June was sprinting toward him.

5.

"We call them orphans," Janelle explained as she took the exit to Target.

Shane had never encountered a woman who needed to drive as much as his wife. She could not bear a pa.s.senger seat. He had long since accepted this as his lot and sat semicontentedly watching the hills. August had brought storybook pink skies to the bay. Down a particularly steep hill the megastores appeared like coliseums.

"Orphans are conditions that are so rare, that producing drugs for them isn't feasible."

"Feasible?"

"Profitable."

"Ah," Shane nodded.

"Well," Janelle explained, switching lanes, "it takes as much money to launch a drug that helps ten million people as a drug that helps ten. Rounds of clinical trials all over the country, lawyers, dealing with the FDA. And if you get past the first round, you do it all over again, and then a second and a third time. It takes a decade, and half a billion dollars, to get a biotech drug approved. And, if you ever get as far as approval, there's Marketing, supply chain, educating doctors. And people wonder why the drugs are expensive."

She paused, pulled the car aggressively into a tight spot, and looked at him. "Helixia expects ninety-five percent of our attempts to fail. It's built into our share price. So our successful products need to pay for themselves and all of this research. If they don't, our share price plummets, we have less money for new research, less drugs get discovered."

Inside, they loaded up two carts full of diapers and wipes, and a makeup remover that Janelle favored. Nicholas hung snugly in his Baby Bjorn; Shane could smell the baby shampoo on his fine black hair.

In one aisle he spied a tired young mother speaking harshly to her fussy baby and tensed. Ever since Nicholas's birth, he felt a new responsibility toward infants. He hesitated there, unsure what he would say if she met his eyes. He caught up with Janelle in the paper towel section.

"Why not produce an orphan drug and charge whatever we have to not lose money? It might be crazy expensive, but we'd have it. And then in a few years, generics could come in cheaper."

Janelle frowned. "That would be four or five hundred thousand dollars a dose. Who pays for that? Insurance companies were set up to pay for eighty-dollar antibiotics, not six-figure biomedicines."

"There are families who would spend that in cash to cure their children."

Janelle patted his back as they walked slowly toward checkout. "So medicine for the super-rich only? There's a great idea."

"Well, 'only super-rich children live' is better to me than 'no children live.'"

"We're just at a place where producing biomedicines for a market this small isn't sustainable. And generics would lose money, so they wouldn't enter this market either. In fifty years things may be better. I know you want to help this baby, but Helixia isn't going to be the way. We need nipple pads."

While he unpacked their carts at the register, Janelle looked pensive. "Although. Have you heard of the Orphan Drug Act?"

"I haven't."

"In the early nineties this same problem you're hitting came to the attention of the government. They came up with a cla.s.sic government solution. They created the Orphan Drug Act."

"What is that?"

"It allows companies to apply for grants to develop drugs for small populations. It gives them tax incentives and market exclusivity, which is a big deal. Now, this was in the days of a more progressive government."

"So could Helixia apply for a government grant to develop a drug for alpha-one ant.i.trypsin deficiency?"

"We could. But we wouldn't."

Nicholas went full-on fussy as he loaded the trunk. Janelle whipped a pacifier from her pocket, and the boy was mollified.

"Why not?"

"Too much risk. The financial incentives are only worth anything if the drug is successful. Which, like I said, ninety-five percent of them aren't."

Janelle looked at him carefully. "Baby, you've only been here a month. Even if you'd been at Helixia for twenty years, you'd need a solid case that an orphan drug would pa.s.s trials before you could suggest it."

Confidently, slamming the trunk, he said, "I think I have one."

As Janelle's last two weeks of maternity leave approached, Shane could feel a new stress working its way through her.

Hua had offered to take care of Nicholas, freeing them from a crazed nanny search. But Janelle seemed torn about going back to work. When Shane commented how lucky Nicholas was to be in the care of his grandmother, Janelle had turned unexpectedly harsh.

"My mother comes from a different country, a different way. I don't want her raising Nicholas."

"We're raising Nicholas, honey."

"A third of the time," Janelle had shot back suddenly.

That night, Shane awoke with a start; Nicholas was screaming. He shuffled down the short wood-floored hall in the darkness, and there was his new son, red-faced in his crib. Shane lifted his warm body and sat with him in a small blue rocking chair by the window. Stroking his fine black hair, Shane felt his tiny body shudder and relax against his chest. Where had he obtained the power to soothe just by touch? This must be what Mack taps into, he thought. The trick is, both the person being touched, and the person touching, have to have complete, doubtless faith in the procedure. Perhaps this was why Mack wasn't able to help Lily; she was too young to believe in him. A baby, he understood, only believes in her parents.

He thought sadly of June. What kind of anguish must she feel, listening to Lily's wheezing and coughing, unable to make it go away? A parent without power might be the saddest thing in this world.

He imagined being incapable of helping Nicholas, the pain and rage of it. He felt certain that he would do anything he had to, go anywhere, fight anyone, to save him. Nicholas and Lily began to blend into one. After all, he wondered, how were they different? Genes, spiraling strands of magic. Other than that, not at all. He was responsible for Nicholas's future, and so, he understood, for Lily's as well.

He prayed that the tiny red-blonde baby was sleeping well right now, and he held his son close. He wanted Nicholas to soak this power, this energy, this security into his skin, so that it infused him on some cellular level. And then, humming a berceuse, Shane laid him back in his crib, and Nicholas sank into whatever dreams await a six-week-old boy.

The following morning, Shane walked by Stacey's cubicle, cradling a paper cup of coffee. "Hey," he asked, "got a second?"