Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “Medication.”

  “To control hyperactivity. But”—I turned around to stir the sauce—“she isn’t hyperactive,” I whispered, “and the doctor will only pay attention to what he calls her symptoms instead of what’s amazing about her.”

  Jay snorted.

  “T-tell me what’s amazing about her.”

  I turned away and he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face him.

  “Esme, t-tell me. Really.” His face was scrunched up, as if he’d sighted me, with my quiver of heretical ideas, taking aim on the horizon.

  “She thinks in very unusual ways. She figures things out, you know, how things work, and explains them in metaphors or verbal shapes, instead of ... conventional language.”

  Jay set his drink down and put his arms around me.

  “S-sweetheart. She’s not capable of using conventional language. She can’t put thoughts and words together.”

  He held me, swaying a little, and I swayed with him.

  “Jay?” We listed together, leaning to the left, like saplings, two saplings, about to blow over in a high wind.

  “She embarrasses you, doesn’t she?”

  He jerked away, pushing me off balance. Then he turned his back on me, hunching over his drink.

  “Why can’t you just talk about it, Jay, instead of around it?”

  He whirled around.

  “Because I’m not the problem, she is. I want to talk about her, what’s wrong, what we can do about it—not my failings, what I do wrong.”

  He pronounced each word very carefully and touched himself on the chest, identifying himself solemnly. Not the problem.

  “Come here. Taste this,” I said, “tell me if it needs more garlic.”

  He opened his mouth obediently and licked the wooden spoon.

  “What’s that taste, that s-second taste?”

  “Pistachio.”

  He licked again and nodded.

  “I like it. Pis-t-tachio?”

  “No one’s the problem,” I said. “No one.”

  “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

  I watched him refill his glass. Though vodka is supposed to have no smell, the room filled with a high anxious scent, distilled and astringent, lining the moist veil of tomato-oil-garlic. The scent of ethanol solution refining itself, I thought. Bubbling in the copper vat: spirits, pure spirits. I flipped the pasta wheels and ties, like tiny Frisbees, into the boiling water. I turned the Cuisinart dial.

  The machine droned, E flat, and Jay hummed along with it, nodding. At the molecular level, his cells were humming too, taking an ethanol bath.

  I found Boston lettuce in the crisper, rinsed some, tore the leaves into salad-size bites.

  I turned the machine off. He was waiting.

  “You’re blaming me.”

  “No,” I said, “there’s no blame. It’s just a fact, isn’t it? You’re embarrassed by her sometimes because she doesn’t act like other kids.”

  “You’re blaming me, Esme. All this s-stuff about n-not being home enough ...”

  I chopped some more tomatoes. The knife clicked against the board; I felt blindly with my other hand to stir the pasta sauce.

  “Could you drain the pasta, Jay? The strainer. In the sink.” He started, then moved slowly toward the stove.

  “I think,” I said, “I’d like to talk to my mother about Ollie. I remember so little from my early childhood—and she’s so reticent when it comes to talking about the past—anyway, I thought maybe she could fill in some things. I’ve been thinking lately that the way Ollie acts is ... a tendency toward a certain kind of behavior.”

  The strainer smacked repeatedly against the side of the sink.

  “What complete and utter b-bullshit! You think it’s genetic? Your m-mom is going to help you discover inherited tendencies?”

  “Come on, Jay. It’s my field. And it’s my mother. Can you just help me think this through?”

  “What about me? What about m-my genetic input? Where’d my genes go, to the laundry?”

  His shoulders shook with laughter and he reached sideways, left-handed, for his drink.

  I didn’t laugh. I assembled the salad, mixed vinegar, oil, garlic, and mustard in a glass cruet. I remembered a half baguette in the freezer and fished it out, popped it in the microwave.

  The TV backed into the room. Then it stopped in the middle of the floor, spun around, and backed out in reverse, Ollie’s face framed by the screen, placid, her lips moving.

  I poured the sauce over the pasta, grated some Parmesan. Jay reached plates and cups down from the cupboard. We went into the dining room.

  “So what are you saying, Jay?”

  “I’m saying, Esme, that she needs professional help and we’ve got to get it for her.”

  We set the table. I called Ollie. Jay went to get his drink, then sat down.

  “Jay, listen for a second. When I think back I remember—I’m pretty certain I remember—acting the way Ollie acts. I remember turning. I’m sure I’d walk in circles—you know, you’ve seen me, I still do that when I’m concentrating on something. All my responses to things were ... a little ritualized, disconnected. Very odd.”

  Jay took a long slow drink. Then he scratched his side, yawning.

  “You know, Esme, all your responses to things are s-still very odd,” he said.

  He began to laugh and I sat down, exhausted, at the table and joined him. We put our heads in our hands and laughed.

  Ollie appeared in the door and watched us. The TV had disappeared from her head and she had taken all her clothes off. She held a large yellow Big Bird in her arms. She farted again loudly.

  “This bird just said to get to Sesame Street, Mom,” she said. “But Ollie really really wishes not to go.”

  We looked at her. Jay burst into howls again, but I couldn’t bring myself to join him.

  “It’s OK, Olls,” I said. “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”

  Chapter 4

  Imaginary Lecture: Letter to Ollie

  WELL, OLLIE. I keep thinking that there will be a time when you’ll ask for an explanation of me: Mom the Scientist. And what would they tell you, if I was gone, prematurely carcinogenic from random hyper-zaps of radioactivity? Daddy doesn’t know exactly what I do. “She worked with blots,” he’d say. “She blew up little cells and counted their chromosomes.”

  That’s true, of course. But it’s—like I said—the Black Madonna, the absence, the intention in science that defines us. What we intend to do is what we are. A great deal of my work centered on microstructures—but I didn’t just want to play dollhouse, tinker with tiny worlds using molecular tweezers. At one time, I thought I saw lessons at the cellular level; I thought I could rewrite a whole section of biochemical history, based on the germ cell. Under the flag of genetic engineering, I’d influence the species’ capacity to spell out its own future. This is arrogance, there’s no doubt about it, Ollie, and yet I have to tell you I never knelt at that altar without reminding myself that it was an altar and that I was a worshiper—privileged to lower my knees to its biotech prie-dieu: the bench.

  For a long time now, whenever I want to make sense of my life, I go to the lab. I clear some counter space, like now—and I begin to write the story of my professional life for you, kiddo. I write on graph paper, I write with a Bic pen. Coffee spills on the page, and, every once in a while, acrylamide or acetone. But I keep writing.

  You should have seen me when I was growing up; I looked like the cliché of the kid scientist, buck-toothed and myopic. But I was not like other juvenile experimentalists in style. I was messy, disorganized, attention-deficient. I liked to think about a lot of stuff at once. I did not employ the much admired Scientific Method: step-by-step logical analysis, deductive, inductive.

  My speculative thinking would run in several directions. I’d grow crystals from bluing near the laundry tub, then try to “mutate” the crystals, adding chemicals from my set. I routinely put f
ood or household objects on wheels (to determine what shape traveled through space fastest). I included a wire whisk in this experiment, as well as a cheese grater, a loaf of bread, and a Coke bottle. I launched these items on a downhill driveway course. Or I tested them for aerodynamic ability—from the roof. I took my dad’s Gillette blades and floated them in a sinkful of water, showing how surface tension works.

  For a high school Science Fair project I tried to show how alcohol affects physical reactions and decision making—I kept notes on my teetotaling white mice. They ran the maze, sober, in two minutes, forty seconds.

  Then I ripped off a tumbler of Scotch from my dad’s liquor cabinet, filled an eyedropper with it, and squirted it on the backs of the mice. I knew they’d boycott drinking straight alcohol from their plastic water bottle, but they would lick it off their own fur. It worked. They got blotto. They lurched around the maze, bumping into walls. My experiment clearly demonstrated how alcohol was first a stimulant, then a depressant. A mouse newly buzzed on Scotch could hoof through the maze in half the time, but later, soused, would stumble along—taking up to fifteen minutes.

  My study was disqualified by the judges, because of the liquor. I sipped a little myself on Fair Day and ended up telling Science Jokes (“What’s a quark?” “An underwater fart in a bathtub!”) to the small but appreciative crowd around my exhibit. What an awful child I was! The judges said that while my research was “inventive” I hadn’t followed project rules and I was “making fun” of Science Fair ideals. One pulled me aside and hissed, “Where are your parents?”

  That spring I built a DNA model in my basement. I used Ping-Pong balls and pipe cleaners. It was perfect, just like Watson and Crick’s, and I sat and looked at it a long time. It was beautiful, aleatory. It was a flight of stairs: two paired furry pipe-cleaner rails winding around each other in a spiral. An inanimate molecule, I thought, but the structure allowed for replication; its storytelling was built in.

  It had been called the biochemical discovery of the twentieth century, the Secret of Life, they said, God’s Code, the Shape of the Universe (since the helix recurs throughout nature). Then it became some sort of Genesis model—as if it were alive, as if it could generate life.

  It came to me at that moment, a kid experimenter, that science, though it seemed not to be, was really about metaphor—about saying something was like something else. Which is good, though it depends on who owns the metaphors. Metaphor teaches us how to make the unknown thinkable, but metaphors can eat up the world.

  I’d been reading Descartes, who said that the universe was like a clock—then somehow the world assumed it was a clock! Suddenly we lived in a clockwork universe, now we discovered a spiral staircase, now a magic bullet, now a black hole. We could only comprehend facts shaped like our own thought. Unless, I thought, twisting the pipe cleaners, science could come up with metaphors so new, so unthought-of, they could actually change the way we took in the world. Perception itself could change the physical world. I was reading a book called Flatland, written by Edwin A. Abbott in the nineteenth century: a parable of geometry. It was the story of the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world called Flatland, and what happens when a circle (who cannot really be “seen” in two-dimensional space) comes on the scene. We are trapped in three-dimensional Euclidean geometry like the 2-D Flatlanders: it was clear to me.

  I have always been interested in theory, which means that like you, Ollie, I describe the world oddly. I lay in my rumpled sleeping bag on the basement linoleum, shining my flashlight up at the hand-drawn map of the universe I’d taped to the ceiling. Which way was left? Or north? And how could you explain that to somebody not standing on earth, but somewhere in space?

  What if a Volkswagen crashed into a collapsing star? Was shape always a concept imposed by the observer’s eye? Who killed Schrödinger’s cat? It was 1961. There was DNA to think about, and dimensions beyond the third, and then there was physics. A physicist named Murray Gell-Mann discovered a new elementary particle which he called a quark (from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and then they labeled its variations up, down, strange, and charm. And I was weird? I mooned around and shot my flashlight beam in and around the constellations among the branching heating shafts and wondered, What would happen if you shot DNA into space? Cloned and carefully adopted it to another atmosphere? You’d get schoolteachers, parents, science-club presidents, I thought. Nobody seemed to think like me. Or want to think like me.

  Everything was better when I was at Harvard. Does that sound like the punch line to a bad WASP joke? But it is the embarrassing truth that the high point of my career hit when I wandered the Yard in a ponytail and stained white coat, a syringe in my back pocket, a bracelet of rubber bands around my wrist: a grunt, a slavey, a research mole in the funded vineyards of a high-profile prof, assisting his Nobel-level work in the lab.

  OK, I was never really a mole—I was a protégée, a star pupil of Professor Kendall Quandahl, whom everyone called, affectionately, Q—or, (not so affectionately) Spock. He liked me; our personalities meshed. And nothing more. Just that simple: straight regard, like a shot of strong whiskey between us. Man to man, had we been equals. I certainly idealized him, and he, in return, saw in me an intelligent, loyal acolyte. I don’t think he ever saw me as a woman.

  First of all, I learned early on, in my undergrad days, there are not that many women in chemistry, and none in Organic. Operating on a behavioral premise I’d acquired as a little girl (that if men could do it, I could improve on it), I threw myself recklessly into this masculine preserve. Then I took Q’s courses, Q became my mentor, guiding my research, which became, in biochemistry (then molecular biology) meticulous, inspired. I substantiated his theories, theories of molecular biology that focused on synthetic enzymes. We modified proteins, intent on discovering what enzymatic defects were responsible for certain genetic diseases. When he went on to gene cloning (single-gene-deficiency diseases) I followed.

  Well, Ollie. The more I work on this, the more I see: no life ever organized itself expressly for a writer. But I have a scientist’s perilous illusion of control. And doesn’t life, after all, appear to organize itself for the scientist? Well, up to a point. And then, lab life doesn’t disappear, it simply alters form. And your bio-chem biography and mine can be spelled out quite simply: A-T-C-G. That’s adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine: the nucleotide bases, in specific sequence in each strand of DNA, that encode the genetic information that is us. (So the Biotech Bible story tells us!) One human cell contains enough DNA to ignite the synthesis of thousands upon thousands of proteins. Opening its base-pair locked strands, DNA gives birth to its daughter-messenger RNA, and presto! The command is given for an aquiline nose, a tendency to gain weight, a tendency to be a moody sot ... or the command is given for you, Ollie, you. The problem now is we have some control over these commands. So what instructions will be given—what kind of kids will we build? And will we select death right out of the gene pool?

  Yes, said distinguished Professor Q, part of the new Shook-Up Biology at Harvard (the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, which broke away from the old department, when the DNA-magus, Mr. James Watson, arrived on the scene, presenting himself like the sphere to Flatlanders). Q liked my sexy dissertation (“Genetic and Chemical Engineering of Enzymatic Active Sites in Monoclonal Antibodies”). Q, with his single social bias: a preference for obsessive assistants, female or male. He moved about the lab in his characteristic high wind—all gestures, snorting, wheezing, unfinished sentences, pushing his glasses up and down his nose, scratching his bald spot. Breathing heavily through his nose like a great engine of asthma, his genetic curse.

  He had big ears, did I say that? I see them as bat-winged babies, but I am finding lately, as I sit up till the wee hours, sneaking a cigarette occasionally, that memory has exaggerated his physical presence in all ways. He wasn’t that tall, for example. And I think he was called Spock as much for his alien-seeming nature and his conf
licted manner as for the ears. He curled into himself, with a chemist’s hunched posture. Not the carriage of defeat, but of curiosity—the result of years of bending over microscopes, sinks, boiling points: close-up inspection of life’s clues to itself.

  I worked the usual postdoc schedule: sometimes up to ninety hours a week in the lab, finishing up my three-year sentence, which included a one-year lab at the Cambridge Medical School, the Harmon-Tannen Cancer Institute, Genetic Diseases. The cancer institute was a hospital but also a research facility, an academic preserve. Physically, it was an architectural anomaly, a layer cake: There were two floors of research labs, followed by three floors of patients in beds, followed by two floors of research and so on. Every lab had medical fellows working in it—they worked in research as part of clinic training. Brushing shoulders with physicians will quickly teach a scientist what a clinician’s opinion of an academic researcher is. Those docs took their research knowledge and applied it righteously to the ill. And the physical setup of the hospital ensured that we would never be too far away from ailing human beings—the final focus, the docs said, of all our work. We were, of course (by their definition), elitist—Ph.D.’s talking about “elegant” theories and they stuck together in a practical bullying sensibility. Some academics were intimidated by this—it was easy for them to “cross over,” into the land of medical biotechnology, especially when encouraged by the NIH.

  I felt like many other academic scientists—caught between the two poles. I cared very much about the people in beds above and below us, but I also cared about the simple precision of a procedure—and how the results of that procedure might affirm or change our view of nature, the “models” for the natural world. And I didn’t care about money. We all know doctors have traditionally loved their bucks—and now, genetic research was an industry, everybody concerned could make a fortune. It seemed to me everyone was playing high-tech Monopoly.