The Body Human Read Online Free Page B

pitches over onto the floor.
    I grab him, roll him face up, and feel his forehead. He’s burning up. I bolt for the door. “Nurse! Doctor! There’s a sick doctor here!”
    Nobody comes.
    I run down the corridors. Respiratory Therapy is empty. So is Support Services. I jab at the elevator button, but before it comes I run back to Randy.
    And stand above him, lying there crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe.
    I’d dreamed about a moment like this for years. Dreamed it waking and asleep, in Emerton and in Bedford Hills and in Jack’s arms. Dreamed it in a thousand ridic u lous melodramatic versions. And here it is, Randy helpless and pleading, and me strong, standing over him, free to walk away and let him die. Free.
    I wring out a towel in cold water and put it on his forehead. Then I find ice in the refrigerator in a corner of the lab and substitute that. He watches me, his breathing wheezy as old machinery.
    “Elizabeth. Bring me…syringe in a box on…that table.”
    I do it. “Who should I get for you, Randy? Where?”
    “Nobody. I’m not…as bad…as I sound. Yet. Just the initial…dyspnea.” He picks up the syringe.
    “Is there medicine for you in there? I thought you said endozine wouldn’t work on this new infection.” His color is a little better now.
    “Not medicine. And not for me. For you.”
    He looks at me steadily. And I see that Randy would never plead, never admit to helplessness. Never ever think of himself as helpless.
    He lowers the hand holding the syringe back to the floor. “Listen, Elizabeth. You have…almost certainly have…”
    Somewhere, distantly, a siren starts to wail. Randy i g nores it. All of a sudden his voice becomes much firmer, even though he’s sweating again and his eyes burn bright with fever. Or something.
    “This staph is resistant to everything we can throw at it. We cultured it and tried. Cephalosporins and aminoglyc o sides and vancomycin , even endozine …I’ll go into gram-positive septic shock…” His eyes glaze, but after a moment he seems to find his thought again. “We exhausted all points of counterattack. Cell wall, bacterial ribosome, folic acid pathway. Microbes just evolve countermeasures. Like beta-lactamase.”
    I don’t understand this language. Even talking to hi m self, he’s making me feel stupid again. I ask something I do understand.
    “Why are people killing cows? Are the cows sick, too?”
    He focuses again. “Cows? No, they’re not sick. Farmers use massive doses of antibiotics to increase meat and milk production. Agricultural use of endozine has increased the rate of resistance development by over a thousand percent since—Elizabeth, this is irrelevant! Can’t you pay attention to what I’m saying for three minutes?”
    I stand up and look down at him, lying shivering on the floor. He doesn’t even seem to notice, just keeps on le c turing.
    “But antibiotics weren’t invented by humans. They were invented by the microbes themselves to use…against each other and…they had two billion years of evolution at it before we even showed up…We should have—where are you going?”
    “Home. Have a nice life, Randy.”
    He says quietly, “I probably will. But if…you leave now, you’re probably dead. And your husband and kids, too.”
    “Why? Damn it, stop lecturing and tell me why!”
    “Because you’re infected, and there’s no antibiotic for it, but there is another bacteria that will attack the drug-resistant staph.”
    I look at the syringe in his hand.
    “It’s a Trojan horse plasmid. That’s a…never mind. It can get into the staph in your blood and deliver a lethal gene. One that will kill the staph. It’s an incredible di s covery. But the only way to deliver it so far is to deliver the whole bacteria.”
    My knees all of a sudden get shaky. Randy watches me from his position on the floor. He looks shakier himself. His breathing turns raspier again.
    “No, you’re not sick yet, Elizabeth. But you