As the pilot completed the last-minute safety checks, Cyrus wondered what Mambo Atabei had accomplished for him last night and how it might affect his agenda for the day. Already he found himself thinking of her as a loose end. One that might need to be tied off permanently, just like Tanbyrn.
As the largest individual shareholder in the company, Cyrus stood to lose tens of millions of dollars if the legislation went through. He knew that name-brand drugs are safer and more effective than their generic counterparts. But also, yes, of course, more expensive.
For good reason.
If you were a novelist and spent a decade writing a book, and then someone came along and copied 95 percent of your words, packaged the book similarly to yours, and sold it at a fifth of the price, that person would be guilty of copyright infringement. It’s the same as the Chinese and Russians producing designer handbags or watch knockoffs that sell for a fraction of the price of the original products.
Yet generic pharmaceuticals are enthusiastically welcomed by the general public.
Because they’re cheap, not because they’re ethical.
But still, incomprehensibly, they are legal.
There were two factors at play in the pharmaceutical industry regarding protection from generic drug infringement: data protection and patents.
According to the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act, generic drug companies can release drugs to the marketplace without clinical trials as long as the companies can prove that their drug is equivalent to the name-brand drug. This allows them to earn income off the millions or billions of dollars of research and development that they don’t have to pay for. There’s only a five-year span of time after the release of data related to the drug’s research before the equivalent generic drug can be released to the public.
Thankfully, however, for RixoTray and other pharmaceutical firms, their biopharmaceutical products also have patents that run not for five years but for twenty. However, considering that the only way to protect intellectual property on a research-based project like this is to file for the patents early, and research and development of the drug might take eight or ten years, the twenty-year protection shrinks to ten or perhaps twelve at the most.
Since the five-year data protection and twenty-year patent protection time frames run concurrently and generic drug companies will often sue to have patents overturned, the actual length of time between the release of the name-brand drug and its generic equivalent can drop to five or six years. Not a lot of time at all to recoup your R&D investment.
And that was about to change.
Cyrus’s man had told him that if the president got his way, the time frames were going to be cut in half.
The helicopter took off.
He sent a text to the vice president’s people that he was on his way, then reviewed what he was going to say to Vice President Pinder about the legislation initiative that the leader of the free world was going to propose in just under four hours.
We step into the Franklin Grand Hotel down the street from Independence Park.
Xavier was right. The kids went crazy over the limo ride.
I figure that neither Dr. Colette nor Dr. Arlington will be at work yet and we have some things to get together before meeting with either of them anyway, so after stopping by the front desk to check in, I suggest that we get settled and then the grown-ups meet in Xavier’s and my suite to figure out our plan for the morning.
In the elevator, Mandie gets the honor of pressing the button to the twenty-second floor.
One wall is glass, and as we ascend we see the Comcast building nearby. Fionna mentions that it was built to look like a giant flash drive, and everyone agrees that it really does. For a homeschooling mom, school is always in session, and she explains to the kids that Philadelphia is sometimes known as the “City of the Nation’s Birth” and that it has the largest number per capita of Victorian-style homes in the US. “The city hall is also the largest city hall building in the world. No steel reinforcement; it’s all concrete, brick, and marble. It was built in 1901 and has more than two hundred statues surrounding it. The statue of William Penn on the top of the tower is thirty-seven feet high, and the circumference of his hat is more than twenty feet.”
The elevator pauses at our floor and the doors open.
“Who can give me a definition of circumference?” she asks her kids.
As Maddie does so, we all troop off to our respective rooms, and Xavier mentions quietly to me, “She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”
“She sure is.”
The Question Behind All Questions
After dropping off my bags in the room, I decide that before our meeting begins I’ll grab some coffee and bagels for our crew from the coffee shop across the street.
As I pass through the crosswalk, a young mother pushing a stroller ferrying a warmly bundled-up baby boy joins me. She greets me and I wish her good morning back. “That’s a cute baby you have,” I tell her honestly.
She beams. “Thank you. His name is Frankie.”
A moment later she and Frankie walk out of my life, but they send my thoughts cycling back to the days when my sons were that age.
And I think of Rachel too — the young mother who loved them and then took their lives.
In the months following their deaths, lots of people gave me advice, and almost none of it helped. Especially not the line about the ones who’ve passed away “living on in our hearts.”
My family lives on in my heart as much as the memory of the night I got drunk in college and totaled my car, as much as the recollections of food poisoning sending me to the hospital for a whole weekend last year.
A memory is a memory is a memory. And that’s all it is, so if that’s all we can claim for our loved ones when they die — that they live on in our hearts — then that’s a pretty puerile and insulting thing to say to a grieving person.
Memories. The fictions we tell ourselves are true.
But perhaps wishful thinking is less painful than the brutal truth: “Don’t worry, you’ll remember Rachel and the boys for a while, then life will go on and they’ll slowly get crowded out of your heart by other, more trivial things. And then, of course, before too long you’ll die too, and eventually all of you will be forgotten in the sands of time.”
Unless eternity is real, unless heaven is more than a fairy tale, death always wins in the end.
The air inside the coffee shop is interlaced with the sweet smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and aromatic coffee. I load up on half a dozen giant cinnamon rolls drenched in icing, some bagels and breakfast sandwiches, as well as coffee and lattes for the adults, and head back to my room.
One piece of advice that did seem to help, though, at least a little bit, was something one of my ultramarathoner friends told me: “Hang in there. It’ll never always get worse.” It’s a saying ultrarunners have to remind themselves at eighty or ninety miles into their hundred-mile races that eventually the trail will get easier. At least for a little while.
Obviously, life for everyone has its ups and downs, and I’ve had lots of good times over the last year, but a pervasive heaviness has settled into my heart, as if the default setting of my life has changed from joy to disappointment. Grief might actually be a better term.
Life might get worse, but it’ll never always get worse.
According to my friend.
But maybe it should. Maybe if you’re the guy who fails to notice the warning signs in the actions of the woman who would eventually become your sons’ murderer, maybe then it should get worse for you until you die and are forgotten in those sands of time too, along with them.