The brill pill, p.1
The Brill Pill, page 1
Praise for
THE
BRILL PILL
———
“The Brill Pill is a lively and thought-provoking novel from a highly promising young writer. In scientist anti-hero Will, Akemi Brodsky has created a Victor Frankenstein for our time—an ambitious academic who lets personal rivalries deflect his moral compass, making him push the boundaries of genetics too far.”
—ANDREW CRUMEY,
author of Beethoven’s Assassins and Pfitz
“Brodsky transports us into a strange new world of regenerative science that is uncomfortably close to our own. Dark, intense, and compelling, this fully immersive lab-based tale— told through the eyes of a flawed but all-too-human scientist— probes at deep questions of medical ethics, society, love, friendship, consciousness, and the all-consuming landscape of modern scientific research.”
—JENNIFER L. ROHN,
author of Cat Zero, The Honest Look,
and Experimental Heart and editor of LabLit.com
Copyright © 2023, Akemi C. Brodsky
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-523-4
E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-524-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903613
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
Interior design by Stacey Aaronson
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To Christian, who makes everything better, and to Lauren, who makes me better.
———————
PART I
———————
Chapter One
———
Viki was kind of a bitch, he conceded. More than kind of. He could tell by the way other girls looked at her, as if they had to swallow a tablespoon of honey before speaking to her. He didn’t care. In fact, he admired her ability to fake such a disinterested expression over such sharp features. What he couldn’t necessarily see was that she had drawn them in herself. It took about twenty different pots and pencils to orchestrate her face each morning. He would probably marry her. He wanted to marry her. But he wondered, in between these mental professions, if he could come up with even one really good reason why.
He could tell that she was smart enough for success, but at the same time he knew she would never bother to really support herself. It wasn’t worth her time. Maybe it was her style that won him over. Even he would admit he wasn’t above that. When she was all dressed up, she disappeared inside her #ootd, and he was attracted by the small, shiny objects that dangled from her ears and swept her thin neck. He still couldn’t figure out why she’d ever agreed to date him. He used to be cool, he supposed. He used to be fucking cool. He wanted to know what their children would look like, what they would be when they grew up. But it had been that way with Eva too. And with Kate.
In any case, he wouldn’t see Viki until the weekend. It was Tuesday, and the weekdays were for working. She lived in New York—that is, New York, New York—and he appreciated the separation. On weekdays he had to focus. He lifted the pipette for the hundredth time that morning, discarded the tip, and stretched his hand, extending his cramped fingers. He hated lab work; it was tedious, and it left too much room in his mind for daydreams. He didn’t believe in daydreaming, but he couldn’t help himself. It was his only vice, apart from vanity, an excess of assiduity, what some would call a drinking problem, and what anyone would call a quick temper. It was his only vice, in his eyes.
———
“Guten morgen, Wilhelm! Just kidding—hey, William.”
It’s just Will, he said to himself. “Yeah, J?” he said out loud.
“Can I just borrow that, one quick sec?” Joe smiled and scooped a bottle of reagent off of the counter in front of Will before he could give an answer.
“Sure. Borrow whatever you like.” He nodded at the back of Joe’s head.
The three other postdocs, the three other people with whom Will spent virtually all of his time, were Joe, Jenny, and Jon. He referred to each of them simply as “J” so as not to get confused. But he knew the difference. Jenny was the worst. Of course, he could never admit that out loud. There still weren’t a lot of women in his field. Will was a forward thinker, though, always had been. He knew it; he prided him-self on it. But God, how Jenny sucked. She ordered expensive enzymes she didn’t need, she left her food in the fridge for months, she booked lab equipment and was then perpetually late getting her samples ready, so the time would go to waste. Worst of all, she was dumb as a brick. Just plain stupid. And she wasn’t even hot. Sometimes Will worried that the reason her food was left in the fridge for so long was that she had gotten it confused with a sample somehow and either eaten the sample or was planning to throw the food into a centrifuge. He was pretty sure that was the only piece of equipment she knew how to use properly.
Joe was okay. At least he knew what he was doing. And he was friendly besides, even if the small jokes and obvious cultural references were sometimes lost on, and more often ignored by, Will. He often borrowed things off of Will’s bench, but he always returned them. And Will was pretty sure if he ever found himself short of something, he could rely on Joe for it. But he was never short. And if he was short, he would go to the supply room and take whatever he needed. He didn’t rely on anyone else. Except for the technician that ordered all of the materials, kept them stocked and up to date, who also fixed anything that was broken, replaced parts, tinkered, tested, and tuned everything in the lab. Of course—that was his job. Joe had moved to America years ago to do his PhD, but he still seemed unseasoned. It was charming to most people. He was taller than Will, and sportier; he had a lot of energy, and he knew a lot of people. One of those.
Jon was his favorite, someone he could talk to, about science and girls and sports, occasionally politics—everything worth talking about. And they had published some good papers together. That was good. Jon was stout, like a scientist ought to be. He didn’t spend time playing basketball on the weekends, just watching it. He was from one of the Carolinas; Will could never remember which it was. And Jon had a family—a wife and a kid. The kid’s name was Gloria, but Will called her Jon Junior—that is, in his head.
Will joked with his PI that they couldn’t ever hire anyone whose name didn’t start with “J”. He suggested George be on the lookout for Jeffs, for Janes, for Jaspers. Sometimes Will thought that he really would have a hard time if a Fred were to join the lab, or worse, a Wesley.
“Thanks, dude.” Joe was back to return the reagent. The sound of his Chinese accent, forming American words rarely used by Americans anymore, woke Will from yet another reverie.
“Anytime, man.” He replied in kind and looked down at his work, realizing now that he had already finished and had lost minutes spacing out when he could have already been running the PCR. Fucking inefficient, Will.
“Yo, want to grab some beers later?”
“Yeah, sure, sounds good.” That was what was good about Joe—he didn’t have a family to go home to, so he was always up for a drink.
———
While the PCR was running, Will went to the library. It was a straight shot down the hall from his lab, and he often dropped by while he was waiting for an experiment to run. He generally didn’t get much exercise and, on average, it added another five hundred steps to his day. Besides, if nothing else, it would keep him from falling into his daydreams again. The only problem was coming up with a good excuse to visit. On this occasion, he had one ready.
“Hey, girl.” He was leaning over the counter and speaking to the librarian, Margot. “Can you look this up for me? Pretty please.” He handed over a piece of paper with the title of a book he had scribbled down just seconds earlier. He smiled wide but thankfully stopped himself just short of a wink.
Margot squinted at the paper as if she were being forced to decipher an ancient scroll but didn’t remark on it. After all, if he had messaged her, he wouldn’t have come to the library in person. “Sure, William. I read this book last month, and I have a recommendation for you.” She scribbled a title down on the other side of the piece of paper he had given her and handed it back. “I know you are capable of loading it yourself.” She looked back down at the text she had been reading across the screen that doubled as her desk, letting her dark hair fall like a curtain in front of her face, even before she finished the sentence.
Will knew he was capable of downloading a book from a library database. Of course he was capable, more than capable. He was even a little bit ashamed to show his face in the library itself; barely anyone went in person anymore . But flirting with Margot was just an excuse to use her. Every time he showed her something he was interested in, she returned with ten times more. He never left the library without a recommendation from her that was inevitably more clear and more thorough than what he had come in for. He figured she was marginally insane, because from what he could tell, and he had tested this theory, she had read every text in the entire medical library. Though he knew it wasn’t possible, he believed it. He felt on some level that she must know more about his work than he did. Boy, was she clever. But she didn’t have a PhD. He wanted to rub it in.
“Thanks, Ms. Margot.”
“You’re very welcome, Will.”
“Dr. Will.” He said it under his breath, but he could see that she had raised her eyebrows, though her head was still facing downward, resolutely, into her reading. “Want to grab a drink later? I mean, Joe is going, and he asked me, so I’m just extending.” He raised a hand, palm up, in her direction.
Margot hesitated before briefly looking up at him. “Thank you, but I have some reading to catch up on.” And she was suddenly fully refocused on the journal she still had open on her desk, the horizontal screen casting light under her chin and reflecting off of the glasses that Will noted were new. He would mention that next time he needed her help.
The rest of the afternoon was a wash. Will downloaded both books onto his tablet and brought them up on his desk. He only had to read a small portion of each to predictably find Margot’s recommendation to be far superior. He wasn’t even sure why he had bothered with downloading the first book, but he enjoyed the satisfaction of proving her right, or rather proving that he had been right to ask her about it. Will closed the original text, then deliberately deleted the file. It felt good to free up the space. He often got annoyed sitting at his desk. The screen was so cluttered with unread papers and hastily jotted-down notes of varying importance. He couldn’t understand how it always became so messy when everything he actually used was on his tablet, which folded up neatly into his pocket. Still, at least he sat by the window. Will looked out onto the rows of labs in the building across the street—a mirror image. It wasn’t a great view, but it was something.
———
In the Genner Lab, every member from undergraduate intern to postdoctoral fellow had their own desk situated at the end of a long countertop, with shelves above and cabinets below for storage. Keeping desk work and experimental work adjacent meant higher productivity for everyone, and Will couldn’t complain about the easy sidelong stride back and forth to confirm a data point or check on a forgotten sample. In the room where he worked, there were five such parallel constructs lined perpendicularly along the window wall where ten lab members could set up camp, one on either side. Jon was just one row south of Will, and Joe worked directly behind him. Jenny technically worked in her own bay at the very end of the room, but she was so often asking advice that she seemed to work anywhere and everywhere she could.
At the back of the lab were two hoods, one for working with tissue samples and one for more volatile chemicals, and at the front of the lab there were two refrigerators, one for storing samples and one for storing snacks. Though usually one or the other refrigerator was full, so often there was crossover. Will despised this negligent practice. It was bad enough they kept snacks in there at all, but he seemed to be the only one who gave a shit, so he never mentioned it. He wasn’t going to be that guy in the lab.
Will was waiting for his time slot on a thermocycler for the next step in his experiment, and waiting frustrated him. As he sat staring at his samples, George walked by, down the length of the room, shooting finger guns and throwing away words that were strung together to sound like sayings but that were impossible to interpret: “Keep on lining them up, Joe,” and “Don’t waste a bucket in the rain, Jen.” Despite archetypal academic eccentricities, George Genner was at the top of his game, and he knew it. He wore an eyeglass chain and a pocket tee with confidence as he strode through the lab to his own tempo. “Ingenuity is one size fits all, Jon. Don’t try to use a fork as a spoon, Will.” It reminded Will that he hadn’t done the dishes in a week and he had been stealing plastic utensils from the lunchroom to get by.
He finished up some reading and then went to get a drink with Joe at the bar called Bar. He ordered dinner as well, pizza topped with mashed potatoes and bacon. Will loved this pizza, not because it was better than any other pizza in town, but because it was particularly unwholesome and yet so widely popular he didn’t have to feel embarrassed about ordering it. He excused the meal because he needed to go back into lab afterward to finish up the experiment he had started that morning, and he wouldn’t have time to eat at home. But it didn’t stop him from finishing three beers. Will secretly hoped that Jon would be staying late in lab too, even though Jon would want to be at home with his family.
After a few drinks, he was sloppy at his bench. He left used test tubes and paper towels around the hood and spilled more chemicals than he ought to. But his samples were fine; he always paid close attention to what mattered most. Of course, he forgot to call Viki as he promised himself he would do most days, but it was already past midnight and he hadn’t finished his experiment yet. He would text her in the morning.
Chapter Two
———
William Dalal was raised on the outskirts of Boston, in a cramped two-bedroom apartment with both of his parents and his mother’s father. He had very nearly been blessed with a younger brother, but Will’s mother had miscarried late, and his parents had taken that as a sign that the bulk of their affection was meant for William. His father worked as a mechanic in a bread factory, and his mother worked at the local bank branch, nine-to-five jobs. At the end of the day, they left work at work and came home to spend time with Will, to teach him what they could and to give him the support and find him the resources to learn what they couldn’t. They weren’t proud people, but all of the pride they possessed, they splurged on him.
When he was just seven years old, his grandfather had died in a car crash. It wasn’t a terrible crash, but he wasn’t young, and a few unlikely and unfortunate coincidences had led to an unhappy end. It was hard for Will to remember now if he and his grandfather had been very close before this happened, but in any case, they were close now. Or Will felt a close connection to his grandfather, that is, and he was sure he had been the favorite grandson, even if it was only for lack of competition. What was more coincidental than his grandfather dying in a minor accident was the fact that his grandfather had been a researcher in a field in which, only a few short months later, there would be a breakthrough that could have saved him.
In the years following that incident, the years in which Will was growing up, starting school, learning to read, learning to bully some of his classmates and avoid others, learning to play soccer, and learning to drive, there were incredible ad-vancements being made in regenerative medicine. And by the time he was taking the SATs, swiping a number of “V-cards”—he used to be cool—applying to college, graduating with honors, becoming much nerdier, and applying for a PhD, Will, latching on to his grandfather’s memory, was following with interest.
By his sophomore year of college, it had already come to a point where most organs could be reproduced—grown from small tissue samples, relatively easily and with full functionality. Certainly not cheaply yet, but still. Hospitals were inundated with patients, previously untreatable, that now struggled to stay alive while missing components were propagated in test tubes and on petri dishes, in incubators, in tanks and in vats. Companies emerged that would take precautionary samples for a price and produce the necessary replacements as soon as they were needed or, for an exorbitant monthly fee, maintain a continuously available product in case of a sudden emergency. Business was booming. Immortality had never looked so achievable, so tangible, so close.
But as always, there was a catch. Though almost all human organs could be replicated with enough precision to replace the God-given ones, the brain often turned out just slightly awry. It wasn’t possible to tell in early trials—mice were challenging to interview. But the more human trials there were, the more it had become obvious that lines were getting crossed, and in nearly every case, it seemed some areas came out lacking. Many patients experienced a loss of memory. Some lost motor functions. Some lost common sense, simple reasoning skills, or several IQ points. Many patients wound up plain sociopathic. Many simply did not make it past the first week. It wasn’t all bad—a very few patients even gained IQ points—but one way or another, none of them were quite the same person they used to be.
