The Lord of Opium(36)

Matt caught the doctor’s arm before he could leave. “Mirasol,” he said. Dr. Rivas looked at Cienfuegos.

“It’s a long story,” said the jefe. “He has a pet Mirasol. Don’t worry. I know what to do.”

“Mirasol,” said the doctor as the two men went out the door. “Is that some kind of bird or what?”

* * *

Matt recovered slowly and was allowed out of bed for short periods. “We can’t let our new patrón take chances,” Dr. Rivas said. He spent much time with the boy, and Matt enjoyed his company. The doctor didn’t treat him as some kind of ogre, and when he played chess he didn’t make stupid blunders to let Matt win. Mr. Ortega and Daft Donald always did. He didn’t make jokes about Mirasol, either.

“You say she wakes up when you feed her baked custard. That’s interesting,” the doctor said one afternoon when they were drinking iced tea on a veranda. In the distance Matt could see the main part of the mansion, where an eejit was removing fallen leaves from a pond. Like most eejits, he wore a faded tan jumpsuit and floppy hat. Without the hat, the man might work in the sun until he died of heatstroke.

Matt raised a pair of binoculars Dr. Rivas had given him for amusement and saw that the man was collecting the leaves one by one. He waded to the side with a single leaf at a time and deposited it in a basket. It was going to take a while to clear the pond.

“Taste and smell endure longer than most memories. You can recall a whole scene from one such clue,” said the doctor.

Matt nodded. He knew that the smell of wax from the holy candles Celia burned before the Virgin of Guadalupe was enough to bring back the little house he’d grown up in. “Have you ever heard of an eejit waking up completely?”

“Never,” said the doctor, dashing his hopes.

Mirasol sat nearby, her hands in her lap. Matt had given her a glass of iced tea, and she’d bolted it down so quickly he was afraid to give her more. “What if I found more of these clues?” the boy said.

“The reaction disappears too quickly. You could keep feeding Mirasol until she weighed five hundred pounds, but that’s all you’d accomplish.”

“I’ve asked Esperanza to find brain surgeons.”

Dr. Rivas frowned. “It’s going to be difficult to convince anyone to come here.”

“I could pay them well,” said Matt.

“El Patrón paid them well too, before he poisoned them.” Dr. Rivas sent Mirasol for more iced tea, and Matt trained his binoculars on the eejit clearing the pool. Beyond them was an arbor covered with vines. Someone had hung up a hummingbird feeder, and the tiny birds swarmed around it like wasps. Below, half-hidden in leaves, was a child—or perhaps it was a statue. It was hard to see into the shadows.

“Occasionally El Patrón spared educated Illegals. I was one.”

“You?” said Matt, looking away from the arbor.

“I crossed the border with my father, wife, and three small children, on the way to a glorious career at Stanford University. Or so I hoped. I had a degree in molecular biology with a minor in cloning. Yes, I said cloning. What a fool I was to think a whole family could elude capture! I had to barter my services for their lives.”

Mirasol returned with a fresh pitcher and a plate of sandwiches. Matt wondered whether the sandwiches had been the cook’s idea or hers.

“I started out as a lab technician, growing cells from various drug lords into clones. When I had proved my skill, I was given skin samples from El Patrón. The previous technician had been killed because he could no longer produce results, and I was no luckier. El Patrón’s samples were a hundred years old and no longer responded to treatment. Those that grew were deformed. One of my sons was turned into an eejit as punishment, and so I tried harder, invented new techniques, and finally, after repeated failures, I produced you.”

Matt turned cold with shock. He had guessed where Dr. Rivas was going when he learned the man was an expert in cloning, but to hear it said so bluntly! To know that this man had selected a cell from skin so old and corrupt that it was little more than carrion was beyond disturbing. The priest had once called Matt unnatural, a soulless creature from the grave. Here was the proof!

“You were a beautiful embryo,” said Dr. Rivas. “I watched you through a monitor. I talked to you, and almost as though you could hear, you turned and smiled. Embryos can smile, you know. Who knows what thoughts are passing through their heads? When you were harvested—”

“Don’t!” Matt raised his hand to fend off the words.

“I forget that we scientists are used to such things. It wasn’t so terrible—bad luck for the cow, of course, but she’d had a happy nine months drifting through a dreamworld of flowery meadows.”