Excerpt from Blood Test by Charles Baxter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When she returned, she handed me two pieces of paper, lab orders. She had another piece of paper that she did not give to me. Private doctor insider info: Am I well groomed, etc.? I would have liked to see my chart, but they don't care to disclose it. That's private, insider MD stuff. She explained about the blood and urine tests, an X-ray to make sure that I had what she thought I had, another X-ray for my back trouble: all standard practice. Insurance would cover most of it, she said, as if I didn't know what was covered and what wasn't. She repeated herself and told me I should exercise more, take walks, watch my diet, avoid unpleasant situations, abstain from excessive alcoholism. Yes, fine. After I took these tests, she would see me again, she told me, a follow up exam during which, I was sure, my medical condition would arouse tedium in her all over again.

She wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but that doesn't mean anything these days.

"There's one other thing," she said, looking down at the other sheet of paper. "I just saw a patient who stabbed himself in the leg. He had ... went a little crazy, but it was predicted."

I ignored her bad grammar. "Predicted?" I asked. "Predicted how?"

"Well," she said, sitting back. "There's this start-up company, Generomics Associates. Bunch of Harvard and MIT graduates, they tell me, mostly in molecular biology and computer science. Genome plus Geronimo, like the Indigenous warrior. They're in Cambridge, the Massachusetts one, across that river from Boston? And they're marketing this blood test, analyzing your genome, DNA and so on. It's somewhat secret, what they're doing. The jury is still out on the science of this thing, but we have ... I need to tell you that your insurance won't pay for it. It's still somewhat speculative and experimental, this test they've invented." She waited. "I have my doubts about it, myself. If it's what they say it is, whoa. But if you want to pay for it, you can get it. Results come back in two, three weeks."

"So what does it tell you?"

"Well." She smiled, as if she was divulging a secret. "As I said, they take your blood sample, get your entire genome, run it through a supercomputer, and then they digitize it and, you know, they have these algorithms that ..." Her voice trailed off. "I'm not sure how they do it. I'm just a country doctor. But we have ... It's been decided that we should tell people about it, in case they want it." She probably meant: the clinic gets a kickback if you agree to this thing.

"But what does the test say?" I asked. "I'm confused."

"It's predictive," she informed me, twiddling a ballpoint pen between her fingers.

"Like what diseases I'm going to get? Hereditary, like that?"

"Yes. Well, and also no. No, not this test." She glanced at the clock on the desk. "It's, I don't know ... I suppose I should give you the literature. I've got the brochure over there. What it does is, it predicts behavior, tells you what you're going to do before you do it, based on the ... arrangements in your genetic structure, your psychology, and your past and your what-have-you. Plus your faith history. Plus how you fill out the questionnaire. Plus who knows what. Your internet purchases and browsing history — things like that. With these computers, and the fancy algorithms, and the way you answer their questions and stuff, they can get very specific. There's nothing these mainframes don't know. They can figure out anybody. Like that person I was telling you about. They told him he was going to stab himself in the leg, and, guess what, he went and did it. Or so I heard." She stopped twiddling the pen. "Probably it was an accident. Who stabs himself in the leg?
Nobody! Anyway, science marches on."

"Pretty specific scientific guess marching on, right?"

"You can say that again," she said, and when she nodded, her glasses hanging on their chain trembled a little.

Excerpted from Blood Test by Charles Baxter. Copyright © 2024 by Charles Baxter. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.