“Shark, whatever R.A.B.B. is…I hope it works for you. I really do.”

  “Yeah. Me too. Hey…thanks for the drawing.”

  He said goodbye to them while the blue van waited, mouth gaping. The farewell was oddly subdued. He had told them to rent his room to a new quad, not to wait for him to come back. “I don’t know how long this is gonna take, man,” he said, “so don’t keep a light on for me.”

  “Are you sure you read all the fine print this time?” Fielding said, squinting in the morning sun.

  “Yeah. I read it all. Hey, Bushnell, if you ever find my snake, you can keep him. Code, take care of my beer cans, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Cody spent the afternoon with country and western blaring on the stereo, drawing naked women in chains.

  A month went by. They kept his room ready. Fielding’s nine-year-old son was planning to visit him during Christmas vacation so Adam tidied up Sharkey’s room a bit to use as a guest room. He hauled the men’s magazines out to the garage and stored the beer can collection in boxes in the closet. Fielding was nervous about the marijuana terrarium so that, too, went out to the garage. It was his son’s first extended visit since the man’s divorce, and he was worried about how it would go. Few marriages could survive a broken neck, Cody had come to realize, and not many old friendships endured. He had heard horrible stories from other quads and pares—of being taken for every cent they had as fast as their wives could pack, of aides and housekeepers who stripped their homes of everything, abandoning them in the night. Bushnell had once almost married, post-accident, but when he demanded that his fiancée sign a carefully worded prenuptial contract, she backed out. Had they divorced, she would have relinquished all rights to any of his possessions. Cody felt it was the distrust that had killed the relationship, not the contract.

  Fielding’s divorce had been amicable and at his request. His ex-wife still talked to him on the phone and he worshiped his son who had been three at the time of the accident.

  “What am I going to do with him for five days?” he said. “What do we do after Disneyland, for Chrissake?”

  “You’ll think of something,” Cody assured him.

  “What if I embarrass him?”

  “If you do, he’ll get over it. He’ll get used to you—to all of us. Kids adapt.”

  “Does the house smell okay? I mean, not like pee or anything.”

  Cody sniffed. “I can’t speak for Sharkey’s room. It may smell of dead snake, I’m not sure. Right now all I smell is barbecued chicken in the oven.”

  The visit went smoothly. Cody got a neighbor to come over and take snapshots of the little boy so he could later make sketches to give Fielding for his birthday. He wondered fleetingly if he might have had children of his own by now had his life not been so altered. Would they have looked like Jenny, he mused. He calculated. He was now into his sixth year as a quad. Had he married Jenny he might have had a child ready for kindergarten by now. He began to sketch imaginary children, and traveled into mind territory he’d never thought about before.

  When two months had passed without word from Sharkey, Bushnell called the Bio-Med Research Center to find out what was going on. “They said he’s not there anymore,” Bushnell reported to the others after he hung up.

  Cody pulled away from the drafting table. “What do they mean he’s not there? He’s got to be there.”

  “Well, he’s not there now. They were real closed-mouthed about it—wanted to know what I knew about Project R.A.B.B. You don’t think—”

  “No,” said Fielding. “They would have told us if he was dead. Wouldn’t they?” He looked at Cody. “I mean, we’ve got all his stuff…everything.”

  The next day two men from the research center came to take away Sharkey’s personal effects. They seemed uninterested in the beer can collection, selecting only Sharkey’s loud Hawaiian shirts, jeans, and other personal things, including his guitar. They were evasive concerning the man’s whereabouts. They did say he would not be returning to the house.

  “He’s dead. He’s gotta be dead,” Bushnell said. “And they’re afraid if word gets out that they wasted a human guinea pig they’ll lose all their government funding. That’s why they’re not talking. They killed Shark. They killed him.”

  “No,” Cody said slowly. “If he were dead they wouldn’t have taken his guitar.” A sudden coolness spilled down through him as if all the blood in his body had just rushed to his stomach.

  “Why would he want his guitar?” Fielding asked.

  “To play it,” said Cody.

  “Sure. Very funny.”

  Cody nodded. “Yeah.”

  Sharkey’s absence was a little like that of a friendly alley cat that just wasn’t around anymore, Cody thought. As a kid he’d always had cats. They came and went and when they disappeared he sort of wanted to believe it was because they’d found someplace better, not that they had met with disaster. That was the way he thought about Sharkey. At least it let him think of other things. Still, sometimes at night when sleep didn’t come, he wondered.

  They waited two more months for some kind of contact from the man before reluctantly putting word out for another tenant. No one spoke of him, but they kept his beer can collection and other paraphernalia in storage, waiting. His magazine subscriptions mysteriously stopped so they knew somebody, somewhere, had made some address changes. Cody seized on an inspiration one day and typed out a letter to him in care of the research center. It was returned with all kinds of red-stamped cancellations. It seemed as if Sharkey himself had been cancelled out of existence. Cody tried a second letter addressed to the house and laboriously printed PLEASE FORWARD on the envelope. That letter didn’t come back. But they still didn’t hear from him.

  The rainy season tapered off into the dry season—California summer. Cody became totally absorbed in a graphic arts course. He designed a music festival poster for a contest and won first prize. More commissions came in, more than he could handle. He was happy. Wilson, the new quad, introduced Cody to his sister. Wilson had been a copter pilot in the Navy. He had never even had a near miss. He got his falling off a roof while putting up a TV antenna. Wilson’s sister was pretty. She asked Cody out to a movie. He invited her to the Sawdust Arts Festival in Laguna Beach. Cody found her easy to be with, for she was used to quads and the idiosyncrasies that were a part of their world. But he didn’t think he could love her. The essence of Jenny was still present in all his fantasy women and always would be.

  Cody was waiting for Adam to meet him outside the Book Nook on Hollywood Boulevard when he saw Sharkey crossing the street. Walking. Free and easy. Cody stared. It definitely was Sharkey. There was no mistake. His red hair was cropped neatly and only the mustache remained from his Van Dyke. But it was Sharkey. Cody felt his voice leave him as he tried to shout to the man. Sharkey reached Cody’s side of the street and started moving down the walk, away from him.

  “Shark! Sharkey! Wait!” Cody hit the switch on his chair and moved after him, weaving between pedestrians. “Sharkey!” he bellowed with what little force his lungs could muster.

  The man stopped and turned around. Cody gaped at him. It wasn’t Sharkey. The face was so similar—even the gray of his eyes and the Roman nose were like Sharkey’s. Cody had an eye for detail and every shadow of cheekbone in that man he knew, for he had sketched his friend many times. But Sharkey’s skin was pitted. There had been a scar over his left eye from a broken beer bottle in a gang fight when he was fifteen. This man’s face was flawless—without so much as a worry line.

  “I’m sorry,” Cody said. “I…thought you were somebody I knew.”

  “You called me something,” the man said. There was no hint of Louisiana in his voice. He didn’t sound remotely like Sharkey.

  “You look…a lot like somebody I used to know…an old friend.”

  The man stared at him. “Am I? Your old friend?”

  Cody swallowed. The early evening crowd was out. He didn’t like hanging out on the boulevard after dark. “No. My mistake. Sorry.” He wished Adam would show up with the van.

  “Did you call my name?” the man asked, continuing to stare at Cody.

  “Just a mistake.” Cody turned around to head back to the book store.

  “My name is Sharkey. John Sharkey. Do you know me?”

  Cody spun around so fast he almost tripped a woman with his foot rest.

  * * *

  They sat in a table in the smoke-filled bar. Cody couldn’t get his chair under the table top, so he parked at an angle. The waitress didn’t hide her irritation as she took their order, addressing Sharkey only, as if Cody were mentally incapacitated as well as physically handicapped. It was a reaction he was long used to, but it never ceased to anger him. The fact that he was crying didn’t help the situation. Sharkey ordered a beer for Cody and Perrier for himself.

  “Oh my God—” was all Cody could say for several minutes. “It can’t be you. How can it be you? What happened? Oh Christ! They did it! They really did it.” Every time he thought he was under control, the tears welled up again. “It’s a goddamn miracle! You’re a walking miracle. Shark, why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you come back?”

  “I’m…not supposed to contact anyone from…Before. I didn’t know anyone to contact. I don’t know you. You tell me your name is Cody. You tell me we were friends. I must have known you once. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of Before.”

  Cody watched him pour the Perrier into a glass, grasping the bottle easily with long tapered fingers. He had never realized how tall Sharkey was. “How did they do it? What did they do to you, Sharkey?”

  “I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry. I’m not allowed.”

  “Shark, this is me. This is Cody. I know about Project R.A.B.B. You told me about it. Remember?”

  “No. I don’t remember. How much do you know?”

  Cody maneuvered the glass beer mug to the edge of the table, but couldn’t lift it. “I’ve got a plastic mug in my backpack. Can you pour this in it?”

  Sharkey reached into the cloth pouch tied to the back of the wheelchair, and transferred the beer to the lighter container.

  “I know R.A.B.B. stands for Rockabye Baby. That the research dealt with nerve regeneration. That’s all you told me. Sharkey, what happened?”

  Rock music blared out of a jukebox. “Did I like music like that?” Sharkey asked. “They tell me I was interested in music, but I don’t know what kind. I have a guitar. But I don’t know how to play it. I’ve tried, but—”

  Cody watched him make wet circles on the table with his glass. “You like country and western. I like R&B and rock. We used to have fights about it.”

  “We did?”

  “Sharkey, look at me. What the hell did they do to you?”

  “I don’t know. All I know about anything is what they tell me. I’m still…learning. I don’t remember Before. But I want to. Can you tell me about Before? What was I like?”

  “Different.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure—beyond the obvious. You’re on your feet.” Cody frowned. “Your arms…roll up your sleeves.” The tattoes were still there. It was really Sharkey all right. “But your face is smooth. And…your tooth is fixed. And there’s no scar over your eye. Did they do plastic surgery, too? Why?”

  Sharkey shook his head. “No. It doesn’t involve that.”

  “Raise your left pants leg.”

  The man look puzzled, but did as he was told. The spiral scar was gone.

  “Everything gets regenerated,” Sharkey said quietly. “They can’t help it. They can’t localize the process. They’re working on it, though. My tonsils are back, they said, and my appendix. I had to decide for myself about circumcision. Had to start everything over from scratch. Everything. I feel kind of lost. I don’t have much to go on. They’re working on that, too. How else am I different? I want to know.”

  Cody gestured to his glass. “You don’t drink beer anymore?”

  “I haven’t developed a taste for it. I liked it before?”

  Cody nodded. “You don’t sound the way you used to sound.”

  “The tapes…they try to put things back, afterward. They try to make things the same, but they don’t put back…the original things. They can’t. They don’t know how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The memories—everything that made me whoever I used to be. Everything gets sort of…erased. They can put back academic things. They can do that. They tell me I score better in math than before. I know…facts. That’s all.”

  Cody felt dizzy, the way he used to feel when he first sat up in a wheelchair. Everything was distorted. He’d not drunk half the beer, but he was sure that if he took one more swallow he would throw up. “This is damned confusing,” he said.

  “Yes. It is,” Sharkey agreed. “I think I’ve said too much. But I need to know. Tell me who I am. What did I like? What did I hate? Why did I let them take everything from me?” The intensity of the man made Cody uncomfortable. If ever someone looked haunted, Sharkey looked driven to the brink of madness. And yet there was a distant quality in his face, as if he were operating through remote control, trying to remember expressions that corresponded to emotions that were no longer there. Nothing was quite coordinated. He blinked. “I can’t remember why I…want to be alive,” he said.

  Little by little Sharkey told him what he understood of Project R.A.B.B. “It’s done through a kind of…regression technique. I don’t understand much of it. They found out that in each of us there’s a sort of genetic switch that controls the production and growth of cells. They were looking for the switch that triggers cancer cells, they told me, and they stumbled across the regeneration switch. There’s a time—a very brief time, close to birth, when the body can correct some injuries, if the genetic switch is on. So…they figured if the brain could be convinced that the body was prenatal—the regeneration could be triggered. The catch is, when they regress a mind back to that stage, all memories are lost. For good. Everything is erased. I was ‘born’ nine months ago. My womb was a black tank filled with Epsom salts and water heated to body surface temperature. I had to learn to crawl and walk and talk all over. They try to put things back…but—” Sharkey’s gaze focused elsewhere for a moment. “They brought me clothes they said were mine. And showed me pictures of who I was. It was like reading a book about somebody else. I can’t…there’s nothing to connect any of it to. My earliest memory is of reaching up to touch a stethoscope. And…being cold. I can’t get warm. I feel so…cold all the time.”

  “So that was what you had to forfeit,” Cody murmured. “Just memories.”

  For a second something broke through Sharkey’s tranquil mask. “Just memories? You don’t know. You can’t know what it’s like, living like this.”

  “And you don’t remember,” Cody said, “what it’s like, living like this.”

  “I’ve been told what it was like.”

  “Telling isn’t living it!”

  “I know.”

  Someone had punched buttons on the jukebox for a popular country and western song. It was one Sharkey used to sing in the shower, his favorite. There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes now.

  “There were three others, before me,” he said, breaking the tension. “They’re all dead. They…killed themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t know. They’re working on it.”

  “Sharkey, I want to volunteer for this.”

  “No. Don’t.” There was fear in his eyes, as if he had just contaminated Cody.

  “Whom do I contact?”

  He hated hospitals. And every memory connected with them. The Calmar Bio-Med Research Center, however, felt more like a medical Pentagon as he followed a white-coated technician through a maze of corridors and doors, his chair humming. Fielding and Bushnell had called him crazy to consider volunteering himself for research. He had not told them of his meeting with Sharkey. He feared, above all, the failure of promised miracles. Better they didn’t know, unless it worked, he thought. Wilson, too, had heard tales of medical guinea pigs and scoffed at hope. It was their only defense, Cody knew. He would not let them bleed needlessly. Adam had flatly refused to take him to the research center.

  “You won’t come outta there,” he grumbled.

  So it had been Diane, Wilson’s sister, who had driven him in the van to L.A. She waved to him as he was escorted into the white building, promising to be back at two.

  Dr. Nicholas Meyers placed his fingertips together, studying Cody through thick glasses.

  “Frankly, I’m quite disturbed that you’ve come here, Mr. Cody. John did tell us he talked to you…. You must understand he is still under treatment. Project R.A.B.B. is quite confidential. We are years away from any public statement concerning this research. John left the grounds without our knowledge or permission. That he spoke with you—” The man’s fingers parted, apparently opening a floodgate of secrets spilled through the breach in security, Cody thought. He wondered if Sharkey was being kept under guard in some underground cell.

  “Where is he?”

  “John is, at present, being taught life skills to help him toward independent living. When he has completed training—”

  “When will that be?”

  “Another year perhaps.”

  “I want to volunteer.”

  Meyers placed his hands slowly on the mahogany desk, palms down flat. Cody was reminded of his father. The gesture said, “Let’s think this through. Let’s not be hasty.” His father had always been a careful decision-maker, weighing all options before he spoke. Cody thought more like his mother, making his decision on an emotional wave, then riding it out to the end, refusing to concede that his choice might have been the wrong one. This was how he had wound up in the Navy.