The Constant Gardener

"Twenty. M." Another tap. "Bits and Bobs. That some kind of British idiom?"

"Yes, it's English. Not American, perhaps, but certainly English," Justin replied huffily. "What's that? What are you doing now? You're going too fast."

"No, I'm not. I'm going slow for you. I'm looking in her briefcase, how many folders she got. Wow. She got a lot of folders. Folder one, folder two. Then more folders." He pressed again. His phony American was driving Justin mad. Where did he pick it up? He's been seeing too many American films. I shall speak to the headmaster. "See this? This is her recycle bin. Here's where she puts whatever she's thinking of throwing out."

"But she didn't, presumably. Throw them out."

"What's there, she don't throw out. What's not, she did." Another tap.

"What's AOL?" Justin asked.

"America Online. I.s.p. Internet Service Provider. Whatever she got from AOL and kept, she stored it in this program, same as her old e-mails. New messages, you've got to go on-line to get them. You want to send messages, you've got to go on-line to send them. No on-line, no new messages in or out."

"I know that. It's obvious."

"You want I go on-line?"

"Not yet. I want to see what's in there already."

"All of it?"

"Yes."

"Then you've got like days of reading. Weeks, maybe. All you do, you point the mouse and you click. You want to sit where I'm sitting?"

"You're absolutely sure nothing can go wrong?" Justin insisted, lowering himself into the chair while Guido stood himself behind him.

"What she saved is saved. It's like I said. Why else would she save it for?"

"And I can't lose it?"

"Holy smoke, man! Not unless you click on delete. Even if you click on delete, it's going to ask you, Justin, are you sure you want to delete? If you're not sure, you say no. You press no. Press no means, No. I'm not sure. Click. That's all there is. Go for it."

Justin is cautiously tapping his way through Tessa's labyrinth while Guido the tutor stands patronizingly at his side, incanting commands in his mid-Atlantic cybervoice. When a procedure is new to Justin or confuses him, he calls a break, takes a sheet of paper and writes out the moves to Guido's imperious dictation. New landscapes of information are unfolding before his eyes. Go here, go there, now go back to here. It's all too vast, you ranged too wide, I'll never catch you up, he tells her. If I read for a year, how will I ever know I've found what you were looking for?

* * *

Handouts from the World Health Organization.

Records of obscure medical conferences held in Geneva, Amsterdam and Heidelberg under the aegis of yet another unheard-of outpost of the United Nations' sprawling medical empire.

Company prospectuses extolling unpronounceable pharmaceutical products and their life-enhancing virtues.

Notes to herself. Memos. A shocking quotation from Time magazine, framed with exclamation marks, raised in bold capitals and visible across the room to those who have eyes and do not avert them. A terrifying generality to galvanize her search for the particular:

IN 93 CLINICAL TRIALS RESEARCHERS ENCOUNTERED 691 ADVERSE REACTIONS BUT REPORTED ONLY 39 TO THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH.

A whole folder devoted to PW. Who in God's name is PW when she's at home? Despair. Take me back to the paper I understand. But when he clicks on Bits and Bobs, there is PW again, staring him in the face. And after one more click, all is clear: PW is short for Pharma Watch, a self-styled cyber-underground notionally based in Kansas with "a mission to expose the excesses and malpractices of the pharmaceutical industry," not to mention "the inhumanity of self-styled humanitarians who are ripping off the poorest nations."

Reports of so-called off-Broadway conferences among demonstrators planning to converge on Seattle or Washington, D.C., to make their feelings known to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

High talk of "The Great American Corporate Hydra," and the "Monster Capital." A frivolous article from heaven knows where entitled "Anarchism Is Back in Style."

He clicks again to find the word "Humanity" under attack. "Humanity" is Tessa's H-word, he discovers. Whenever she hears it, she confides to Bluhm in a chatty e-mail, she reaches for her revolver.

Every time I hear a pharma justifying its actions on the grounds of Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit, and that's not because I'm pregnant. It's because I'm reading at the same time how the U.S. pharmagiants are trying to extend the life of their patents so that they can preserve their monopoly and charge what they damn well like and use the State Dept. to frighten the Third World out of manufacturing their own generic products at a fraction of the price of the branded version. All right, they've made a cosmetic gesture on AIDS drugs. But what about —

* * *

I know all that, he thinks, and clicks back to the desktop, thence to Arnold's Documents.