I couldn’t help myself, and I smiled. “I bet you do.”
When I opened my eyes, her lovely face and her lips were there. We kissed softly and everything felt a little bit better, and safer, and right.
Chapter 14
LUPITA VALENCIA LOOKED as frail as a newborn bird.
But after Dr. Castro examined the four-year-old girl that evening, he smiled at Lupita’s mother and said, “I think she’s over the worst of it. She’s going to beat it. You’ll probably be taking her home sometime tomorrow.”
“Bless you, Doctor,” the woman said, tears in her eyes. “Bless you for saving her.”
“Glad we could help,” Castro replied. He patted her on the shoulder and exited the room into a crowded hallway at the Hospital Geral on Santa Luzia Road in Central.
In Brazil, there were two kinds of hospitals: public, for the poor, and private, for the rich. As public hospitals went, Geral was very good, and the doctor was happy to have found work there.
“Who’s next?” he asked the triage nurse evaluating the line of patients that wound out the door.
“No one for you, Dr. Castro,” the nurse said in a disapproving tone. “You’ve been here thirty-six hours as it is. Go home. Sleep.”
For once, Castro didn’t argue. He said, “See you next time. I’m at the university tomorrow.”
“Get some sleep,” the nurse repeated and shooed him away.
The doctor changed out of his scrubs and left the hospital, mindful of the line of patients that seemed to get longer every day. Castro hailed a cab and almost gave the driver his home address but then changed his mind and gave him another.
Dr. Castro fell asleep and did not wake until the taxi stopped in a light-industrial area on the western outskirts of Rio. The doctor walked beneath sodium lights toward a long, low steel-walled and -roofed building that had a door with multiple locks. Beside the door, a small cheap plaque read:
AV3 PESQUISA—RESEARCH
Castro got out his keys, looked around, and then unlocked the door. He went inside quickly, shut the door behind him, and flipped on a light, revealing an empty room. He locked the outer door and went to a second locked door opposite it. Beyond that was an airy warehouse space dominated by a large white rectangular tent made of laminated cloth. A myriad of ducts and hoses ran into and out of the tent roof.
Without stopping to admire his ingenious design, Dr. Castro went through a flap into an anteroom of sorts. There he donned a full hazmat suit, duct-taped all the seams, and entered a pressurized decontamination shower. Only then did he pass through an air lock into his clean room.
Despite having worked for thirty-six hours, Castro felt renewed energy being back in his secret lab. He loved some parts of his other life—helping patients, teaching students—but it was only here that he felt buzzing and alive.
The doctor crossed the clean room to five glass tanks arranged in a row. Above each was an alphanumeric code and a small camera attached to a plugged-in Samsung digital tablet.
Castro paused at each tank, studying the white rats within. In the first four tanks, the rats were moving around, but there were sores visible on all of them, and several were stumbling as if they had lost their motor skills.
In the fifth tank, the rat was dead. Its sores were more grotesque, and there was dried blood around the eyes, nose, and mouth.
That’s interesting, Dr. Castro thought. When did that happen?
The doctor went to the tablet and called up a video that featured a running time display at the bottom. Castro sped the video in reverse until he found the moment the rat convulsed and died. According to the time stamp, death had occurred one hour, forty-eight minutes, and sixteen seconds after the doctor had left the lab.
One hour, forty-eight minutes, and sixteen seconds.
The doctor stared at the frozen time stamp for several long moments, thinking that if he weren’t so tired he might be doing a victory dance right now.
One hour, forty-eight minutes, and sixteen seconds!
It was the breakthrough. It was what he had been working two long years for, and he was too zonked to celebrate.
Wait. He had to replicate his experiment. He had to know for sure before he did any rejoicing.
Castro noted the code above the dead rat and went to a stainless-steel tank, where he donned insulated gloves to twist open the top. Fog curled out of the liquid nitrogen. He lifted a tray of steel vials and found one with the code that corresponded to the one above the dead rat’s tank.