Soul

The landau pulled up at a railway crossing, where a sign proclaimed HALT in gleaming red paint. A moment later, the cry of a train whistle pierced the air and the locomotive steamed past, a silver-steel centaur that puffed and bellowed as it stretched relentlessly into the future.

Lavinia watched the train passing, saw the children’s faces pressed against the glass, the heads of other passengers turning like pages in a book—an elderly matron, grief bowing her head beneath its black veil; four young soldiers grinning drunkenly; a lone adolescent boy dressed in a school uniform. Lavinia had wanted to travel to the polo match by steam train, she had wanted to feel the roar of this industrial revolution beneath her, but the Colonel considered such travel vulgar. The machine screeched again as it streamed away from them and their lives. Somehow, Lavinia felt less emancipated with its vanishing.

Turning back to the carriage, she saw that Hamish Campbell’s foot was pressed against that of her husband. James was feigning sleep, his face resting against the leather upholstery. In that moment, catching Campbell’s glance at the older man, Lavinia’s worst fears about the nature of their friendship were confirmed.

53

Los Angeles, 2002

JULIA SAT IN THE CAR MESMERISED by the traffic light. Lost in intense thought, the engine purring under her skin as she waited, the red traffic light as hypnotising as an errant sun.

Years ago she’d learnt that the best way to trigger inspiration was never to search for it directly, but to look sideways. She’d tried daydreaming, running until all conscious thought had been burnt out of her head, writing the quandary down and leaving it by the side of the bed as she slept—anything to trick the mind into taking a lateral leap.

As a child, Julia had done much of her musing in the back seat of her mother’s ’68 Mercedes. Every so often her mother would drive south from San Francisco, down the coastline of Big Sur, to escape the tedium of her job. She would bundle her daughter into the back of the car, along with a tent, an eiderdown, a flask of instant coffee, a portable TV (which they never ended up using) and a box of oranges picked from the tree in their yard. They would always start out late and it would be dusk before they hit the coastal road. This was the one part of the trip Julia really loved—leaning back, her face upside down as she watched the evening sky descend through the rear window, the stars and the moon streaming away almost as fast as they appeared; the cosmos, the infinite unknown, each galaxy embodying a million possibilities. Out there in the great unknown, she could be anyone, do anything. Aged seven, she’d seen the immense velvet night as a metaphor for her own future, which streaked forward as inevitably as the white stripe of freeway that disappeared, beat after beat, under the speeding car.

A couple crossed the road at the lights. The man was tall with thick brown-blond hair and was wearing the same comfortable sporty

clothes Klaus might have chosen. He had his arm around the woman. She looked a couple of years younger than Julia, her long legs encased in tight black pants, expensive trainers on her feet, a loose duffle coat trimmed with fur around her shoulders. As they passed in front of the car, Julia could see that the woman was pregnant, well into her third trimester—the stage Julia would be at now if she hadn’t lost the baby.

Absurdly it then occurred to her that a single freak event had sent her life into chaos—like an aberrant collision of particles. That would have been my life if it hadn’t been for that one day, she concluded. Fascinated, Julia couldn’t pull her eyes away from the woman. Only when the car behind hooted impatiently did she realise the lights had changed.

She accelerated out onto the freeway. The road ahead widened into a clear panorama broken only by telegraph poles sprouting rhythmically across the terrain. Long dash, short dash, long dash—a Morse code of wooden posts. They jolted her back to the image of the stained DNA barcodes. What did her case studies all have in common? Dyslexia? Insomnia? Low levels of serotonin? Learning disabilities as children? She remembered some of the men had displayed problems with speech and math as children, but what did that prove? Some had bad skin, and many were tall, but how were all three linked? There must be one other factor she could search for that would be the clincher, the final piece in the puzzle.

An eighteen-wheeler truck roared past in the next lane. A bumper sticker on the back, Forget the bull Ride the Cowboy, sat next to an old election sticker that read Eat Dick and Lick Bush. As Julia accelerated past the truck, she caught sight of the driver in her rear-vision mirror: a huge muscular tattooed character sporting a grey ponytail—the ultimate male. Ultimate male. The phrase repeated in Julia’s head. Men with Jacob syndrome—an extra Y chromosome, XYY—were usually tall, and often developed acne. Could it be possible that the extra Y chromosome was the missing factor? She picked up her mobile phone.

‘Gabriel, you know that missing factor you mentioned? I want you to test for Jacob syndrome.’

The retired sergeant yanked the metal tag on the beer can, poured himself a glass, then filled one for Julia. He flicked away a fly and sat back in his plastic chair. The desert sun had shrunk his face into a bronzed mask of fine lines, and the grey stubble on his head was still shaved into an army buzz cut. They were sitting in his yard—at least, that was how Dwayne Cariton had described it. Drive out and we’ll have iced tea in my yard. Best backyard this side of the Mojave. It was a square of obsessively groomed lawn fenced in by wire. Beyond stretched the Mojave itself, miles and miles of red-brown scrub, behind which the blue hills of the desert loomed.

Two planes stood in a small airfield just over the back fence: a Douglas A–1E and a Cessna L–19 Birddog, standard Vietnam issue. Their wheels disappearing into an iridescent strip of heat, they reminded Julia of tremulous dragonflies about to take off. A control tower—a glorified water tank—was situated to one side of the runway. Cariton’s Flying School was painted on the side in green and orange letters, now peeling and rusty. Cariton had established the school after his discharge from the army, shortly after the My Lai massacre.

The sergeant scratched at the plastic strip taped across the vein where Julia had taken her blood sample. ‘Jesus, that needle hurt. Mother! Where’s those beer nuts?!’ he yelled at the top of his lungs, seemingly to no one in particular.

For a moment, Julia wondered about his sanity and her safety—his file had indicated that he lived alone. But a minute later a Filipino woman, somewhere between thirty and fifty, appeared, silently placed a bowl of nuts next to the tape recorder sitting on the Formica table in front of them, then disappeared into the back of the house, which Julia now noticed was on wheels. Dwayne followed her gaze.

‘Yep, it was one of those ready-made houses they deliver to your vacant lot. Hell, when they rolled up with that thing, I thought, what the heck, I’ll keep it on the trailer base then I can disappear quickly. That was back in ’72. I needed to disappear back then.’

He picked up a beer nut and threw it at a puppy dozing behind an empty chair.

‘Some of the men in the platoon couldn’t get through the day without being totally bombed out of their brains. Others, they just loved the frontline adrenaline. Then there were those who didn’t know who they were until they were actually fighting. Yeah, maybe that’s it. You just don’t know until you’re there, swept up in the smell of it. Man steps out of his rational mind in those times.’

‘And you had no nightmares, no episodes, flashbacks, psychosis, afterwards?’

‘Never. I sleep like a baby—did before, do now. People are just too fucking sensitive nowadays. Living is a dirty business, dying is dirtier.’

‘Most soldiers who went through what you did were pretty roughed up, emotionally and mentally. So that makes you unusual.’

‘Well, them’s refreshing words to someone who’s been regarded as a freak most of his life. The way I see it, there’s guys out there who are built for battle. They’re not crazy, they’re not psychopaths, they’re just natural warriors—warriors who crave the noble war. And you know what else, Professor Huntington, now, right now in these fucked-up times, our nation needs these men more than anything.’

He threw another nut at the puppy.

‘I had a visitor the other day—son of an old friend of mine. Angry young gun, one of the D guys. Sniffing around like a dog looking for a bitch on heat, asking all kinds of questions—just like you, Professor. One thing’s for sure—if you do find this mutant gene thing, I reckon it’s gonna to be dynamite. Don’t fancy standing in your shoes, girl.’

Gabriel stared down at the file. He had begun to see a correlation between some of the readings; it was just the whisper of an instinct but already he could feel that rattling excitement of discovery. It would be the flip side of the mutant gene, a positive way of utilising it. If he was correct, he imagined the commercial potential to be enormous, far more outreaching than merely genetically profiling potential combat soldiers. Sitting there at the desk, Gabriel envisaged surprising Julia with a whole proven hypothesis, executed independently of her; in secret, parallel to their primary research. How satisfying would that be? And how, if his hunch proved correct, he could demonstrate that he was her equal, that, despite their age difference he was able to match her, even challenge her, intellect. She would have to take him seriously as a lover then. Now if only he had someone he could test out his theory on, someone who believed in him.

Remembering his conversation with Matt Leman a couple of months back at the conference, Gabriel booted up his computer and began to compose an email to the head of Xandox Pharmaceuticals’ Californian division.

54