Dr. Reyes's Narrative

Martin Wells,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead, and Adrian Vale is dead too, or as near to dead as a man can stand and still be called alive. You were his roommate and you are my friend, and you are the executor of whatever mess he has left behind, so I owe you the truth, and I am the only man left who can pay that debt. Forgive the hand that writes this. It shakes. The doctors tell me the heart is failing, and I believe them, because I felt the exact moment it began to fail, and I will tell you when.

Adrian and I go back thirty years, to a graduate lab where the fume hoods rattled and we lived on cold coffee and each other's ambitions. He read a thin-layer plate the way other men read headlines, tilting it once to the lamp and never once checking it a third time. When he founded Vale Biolabs and moved into that red brick building on Folsom Street, I was already running my own bench across the bay, and for years our work ran on parallel tracks that crossed twice a year at conferences, where he would buy the wine and I would pretend not to notice how much of it he drank. When his lab needed a precursor that nobody sold, a reagent so far off the commercial route that only a fool or a friend would synthesize it, he came to me, and I synthesized it, and I did not ask what it was for. I want that on the record. I did not ask. That failure of curiosity is the hinge on which everything since has turned.

The compound he was building, he told me, was a dissociative agent, a way of taking a mind apart and setting the pieces down at a distance from one another. I laughed at him then. I said no receptor map in the literature supported anything so clean. He only smiled and said that the literature described what other people had made, and that he was not making what other people had made. He called it Compound Nine. I called it Adrian's nonsense, and I went home to my wife, and I slept well for years. Remember that, Martin, when you are tempted to admire me. I slept well.

You will want to know what our quarrel was about, since I have mentioned it, and it belongs in this account, because the quarrel was the last door between us and I shut it. Three years ago he asked me, over a dinner that he paid for and I regretted, to review a protocol he would not name, working only from fragments he showed me on paper he burned in the ashtray between courses. I read enough to be frightened and I told him so. I told him the design was not therapeutics but theology, that he was not treating a mind but dividing one, and that whatever left his bench would never entirely come back. He went very quiet, the old quiet, the one I remembered from graduate school when a result contradicted him, and then he said, "Alan, you have spent your life asking whether things can be done. I have moved on to whether they should be undone." I said something stiff and professional. We shook hands like corporation men, and we did not speak again until the telephone rang at midnight. I have thought since that if I had shouted at him that night three years ago, really shouted, thrown my glass, made a scene my wife would have forgiven and my colleagues would not have, perhaps the shout would have traveled further than the science. It did not occur to me to shout. We were chemists. We do not shout; we note the discrepancy and we repeat the trial.

Now I must set down the night itself, and I would rather set down anything else. Nine days ago, at some minutes past midnight, a courier brought me a letter. I read it standing in the hall, and it said only this: Alan, I am quite lost. I need the reagent. The old one, from my own route. I need it tonight. I telephoned Adrian at once. I had not heard his voice in person since the quarrel that ended our friendship, but a voice is a voice, and this was his, except that it was not, the way a photograph of a living man is not the man. I told him the route was archived, that the intermediates were decomposed, that he should see a doctor and sleep. He said, "Alan, if I do not have it tonight, there will be nothing left of me to save, and I do not say that as a figure of speech." And then he said a thing I have turned over four hundred times since: he said, "You of all people know what I built. You held the starting materials in your hands. Do not make me go into the city and ask strangers."

I should have called you. I have written that sentence, crossed it out, and written it again, because it is the truest sentence in this letter. I should have called you, or the police, or anyone. Instead I went down to my own lab like a man in a dream, and I pulled the route out of the archive, and I ran the synthesis with my own hands, the intermediates coming up clean and terrible, and I understood, somewhere around hour six, exactly enough of the structure to know that what Adrian had described to me years ago was not nonsense at all. The molecule was elegant the way certain crimes are elegant. Every functional group was aimed. It was not a drug for a disease. It was a drug for a man, and the man was my friend, and by then it was the following evening, and I put the sealed vial in my coat pocket and drove across the bridge into the city.

He was waiting for me at the house on Broadway, in Pacific Heights, that tall Victorian he kept like a museum of his own respectability. The housekeeper, Mrs. Marsh, let me in without a word, and I understood from her face that she had been admitting men through that door at strange hours for longer than she wanted to have been. The house itself was dark in a way that expensive houses are dark, rooms switched off one by one behind us as though the building itself were going out of business. Adrian met me in the hall. I hardly knew him. He had gone thin in a way that no diet explains, the flesh seemed to have been argued off his bones rather than lost, and his color was wrong, a gray that I associate with tissue slides rather than with living faces. He took the vial from me with both hands, the way a starving man takes bread, and then he did something worse than starving. He thanked me. He said, "You were always the honest chemist, Alan. I am sorry I made you an accessory." And then he asked me to wait for him in the cabinet room at the back of the house, the little wing where he kept his private laboratory, and he said, "Wait there. What happens next should happen in front of one witness, and I choose you."

Martin, my hands have begun to betray me — you will know this hand from thirty years of letters, and you will see in it where the pen has begun to slip. He did not force me. He asked, and I, a man of sixty-one years and a full career and a grandchild on the way, followed him down the corridor like a schoolboy following a dare. I told myself it was concern for his safety. That was true and it was cowardice at the same time, and I have learned in nine days of dying that those two things can occupy a man completely, rooming together like strangers forced to share a bed.

The cabinet room was comfortable, which unsettled me more than instruments would have. There was a chair, a lamp, a table set with a decanter of wine, and the tall cabinet itself with its glass doors and its rows of labeled bottles, and I stood there like a guest in a hotel while Adrian went to the cabinet and took down a plain white powder that he had evidently prepared in advance. He held the glass up to the lamp. And I saw his face change before he ever raised it to his mouth, a small contraction, the ghost of a flinch, the look of a man who knows exactly how foul the thing will taste, bitterness under salt, medicine that announces its own poison. He looked at me then, and he smiled, and he said, "For the record, Alan, this is the last dose. One way or the other." Then he tipped the powder under his tongue and swallowed, and stood very still, waiting for it like a man waiting for weather.

What happened next took less than a minute, and it has emptied me of every belief I carried into old age. First there was nothing, ten seconds of a man standing in a lamp lit room. Then he made a sound I will not attempt to reproduce on paper, and his knees went, and I moved toward him and he held up one hand and stopped me as if his arm were a wall. His back began to bow. His body seemed to be shrinking, drawing inward, the shoulders curling, the frame contracting, a tall man being reduced by some interior audit, and the pain in his face was absolute, and yet, Martin, and this is the part I cannot get past, there was relief in it too, a terrible gratitude, as if the agony were the price of a fare he had been desperate to pay. His skin went pale, bloodless pale, gray white. His features did not break so much as reorganize, the way sand shifts under water, the brow shading lower, the jaw drawing in, the whole face gathering itself toward something narrower and meaner and younger, and his eyes, his fine intelligent eyes, went last, or so I thought, but when he raised his head and looked at me across the little room, the eyes were not his. The man who stood there in Adrian's clothes, stooped and thin and pale and breathing fast, was a stranger, and the stranger smiled at me, and I knew him. Do you understand what I am telling you? I had never seen him before, and I knew him, the way you know a face from the corner of an eye on a night street, the figure every city shows you once and never twice. He said, in a voice that had lost Adrian's music and kept only Adrian's diction, "Now you have seen it, Doctor. Now you are in it with us."

I do not remember leaving the room correctly. I remember the corridor, the front door, the cold, my car, and then I remember the bridge, and I remember that I drove the speed limit the entire way because some shell of professional discipline was still operating the machinery. Twice on the bridge I pulled toward the shoulder to call the police from the emergency box, and twice I drove on, rehearsing the first sentence. "Officers, a man in Pacific Heights changed into another man in front of me." I said it aloud once, in the closed car, to hear how it sounded, and it sounded like the last sentence of a career. It was deep night when I got home. My wife was asleep. I sat in the kitchen until morning, and I did not call the police, and I did not call you, and I did not call anyone, and by the time the sun came up I was sick for the first time, and I have been sick in one way or another every hour since. The doctors talk about my heart as though it were a mechanical event. Perhaps it is. But I know a time and a place of death as well as any man in my profession knows them, and mine is a lamp lit room in a house on Broadway, nine days ago, watching my friend come apart and reassemble into a stranger.

Here is the question you will ask, and you have the right to ask it. Why did I not go to the authorities? I have composed four answers and discarded them all. The true one is this: because the authorities would have asked what the stranger was, and I could not say the word that the truth required. Every framework I own, every method I ever trusted, refuses the event I witnessed. A man does not become another man in sixty seconds. Therefore it did not happen. Therefore the witness is ill. And I am ill, Martin, gravely, and the illness and the refusal feed each other, and I found that if I spoke of it to anyone I would be speaking as a dying man with a fever, and the thing would be filed under delirium, and Adrian would go on, whatever Adrian now is. I chose silence. I chose it out of love and cowardice and scientific shame, in proportions I will not live long enough to calculate.

One thing more, and then I will put down the pen, because the pen has become heavy. You will find the sealed vial's story useful, or you will not, but write this down: the reagent I made him exists nowhere else in the world. I destroyed the route before I drove to the city, every intermediate, every note, every sample. There is no second supply, no second source, and whoever else is involved in this, whatever else comes, the chemistry now lives only inside one man's body and one old man's memory, and my memory is leaving ahead of the rest of me. If Adrian asked you for help of a chemical kind, Martin, the honest answer is that none remains to give.

I am told to conserve my strength, so I will close. I have had a long life and a good one, and I am ending it in disgrace of a kind no colleague will ever see, because the disgrace is private and the death will be read as natural, and perhaps that is the only mercy in the account. Tell my wife I died thinking of the garden. Tell yourself, when the documents come to you and the signatures do not match and the city is full of rumors about a man named Crow, that one old chemist believed every word of it, and that he saw, with his own trained and failing eyes, in a lamp lit room, the second self of Adrian Vale put on his body like a coat and speak to him politely.

I am sorry, Martin. I did not ask, when asking was everything. And I will not live to see you open this letter, which is a mercy for me and a burden for you, and I leave it to you with both hands, the way Adrian took the vial from mine.

Your friend, in truth at last,

Alan Reyes

The twentieth of October