Mutation

WONDERING how the other people put up with it on a daily basis, Victor suffered the congested traffic of a normal Boston rush hour.

Once he got on Storrow Drive heading west, traffic improved, only to slow down again near the Fenway. It was after nine when he finally entered the busy Children’s Hospital. He went directly to Pathology.

“Dr. Shryack, please?” Victor asked. The secretary glanced up at him and, without removing her dictation headset, pointed down the corridor.

Victor looked at the nameplates as he walked.

“Excuse me. Dr. Shryack?” Victor called as he stepped through the open door. The extraordinarily young-looking man raised his head from a microscope.

“I’m Dr. Frank,” Victor said. “Remember when I stopped in while you were autopsying the Hobbs baby?”

“Of course,” said Dr. Shryack. He stood up and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you under more pleasant circumstances. The name is Stephen.”

Victor shook his hand.

“I’m afraid we haven’t any definitive diagnosis yet,”

Stephen said, “if that is what you’ve come for. The slides are still being processed.”

“I’m interested, of course,” Victor said. “But the reason I stopped by was to ask another favor. I was curious if you routinely take fluid samples.”

“Absolutely,” Stephen answered. “We always do toxicology, at least a screen.”

“I was hoping to get some of the fluid myself,” Victor said.

“I’m impressed with your interest,” Stephen said. “Most internists give us a rather wide berth. Come on, let’s see what we have.”

Stephen led Victor out of his office, down the hall, and into the extensive laboratory where he stopped to speak to a severely dressed middle-aged woman. The conversation lasted for a minute before she pointed toward the opposite end of the room. Stephen then led Victor down the length of the lab and into a side room.

“I think we’re in luck.” Stephen opened the doors to a large cooler on the far wall and began searching through the hundreds of stoppered Erlenmeyer flasks. He found one and handed it back to Victor. Soon he found three others.

Victor noticed he had two flasks of blood and two of urine.

“How much do you need?” Stephen asked.

“Just a tiny bit,” Victor said.

Stephen carefully poured a little from each flask into test tubes that he got from a nearby counter top. He capped them, labeled each with a red grease pencil, and handed them to Victor.

“Anything else?” Stephen asked.

“Well, I hate to take advantage of your generosity,”

Victor said.

“It’s quite all right,” Stephen said.

“About five years ago, my son died of a very rare liver cancer,” Victor began.

“I’m so sorry.”

“He was treated here. At the time the doctors said there had only been a couple of similar cases in the literature.

The thought was that the cancer had arisen from the Kupffer cells so that it really was a cancer of the reticuloendothelial system.”

Stephen nodded. “I think I read about that case. In fact, I’m sure I did.”

“Since the tumor was so rare,” Victor said, “do you think that any gross material was saved?”

“There’s a chance,” Stephen said. “Let’s go back to my office.”

When Stephen was settled in front of his computer terminal, he asked Victor for David’s full name and birth date. Entering that, he obtained David’s hospital number and located the pathology record. With his finger on the screen, he scanned the information. His finger stopped. “This looks encouraging. Here’s a specimen number. Let’s check it out.”

This time he took Victor down to the subbasement. “We have a crypt where we put things for long-term storage,” he explained.

They stepped off the elevator into a dimly lit hall that snaked off in myriad directions. There were pipes and ducts along the ceiling, the floor a bare, stained concrete.

“We don’t get to come down here that often,” Stephen said as he led the way through the maze. He finally stopped at a heavy metal door. When Victor helped pull it open, Stephen reached in and flipped on a light.

It was a large, poorly lit room with widely spaced bulbs in simple ceiling fixtures. The air was cold and humid.

Numerous rows of metal shelves reached almost to the ceiling.

Checking a number that he had written on a scrap of paper, Stephen set off down one of the rows. Victor followed, glancing into the shelves. At one point he stopped, transfixed by the image of an entire head of a child contained in a large glass canister and soaking in some kind of preservative brine. The eyes stared out and the mouth was open as if in some perpetual scream. Victor looked at the other glass containers. Each contained some horrifying preserved testament to past suffering. He shuddered, then realized that Stephen had passed from sight.

Looking nervously around, he heard the resident call.

“Over here.”

Victor strode forward, no longer looking at the specimens.