Robin invited him to come home with her that night for dinner, but he begged off and prowled the halls with quarters for the vending machines, instead. Mendelssohn walked home and Glass drove off; the others unlocked their bikes, clipped on their lights, and rode away; but Cliff bought two packets of orange peanut butter crackers, a bottle of Veryfine apple juice, and a cellophane-wrapped brownie. He ate all this in minutes, washing down the gluey brownie and crumbly crackers with the cool, metallic juice. Then he sped downstairs to the animal facility. As he'd promised Feng, Cliff was going to sacrifice this group of mice alone.
In the animal holding room a blurry mix of classical music and commercials streamed from the black radio perched on top of the paper towel holder. A Mozart piano concerto followed an ad for Persian carpets. Cliff scarcely noticed as he took his cages from the rack. He'd been up so long, he was on his third wind now.
Turning toward the bench top with his hands full, he saw the door open. “Robin, what are you doing here?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“You went home.”
“I came back,” she said.
“Oh, okay. Good.” He spun around gaily and held up his mice. “Do you want to look at these with me?”
She hesitated, as if trying to think of a polite reply. “Not really,” she said at last.
“What's wrong?” Standing before him, she looked small and almost dejected—not wired, as he was, from lack of sleep, but worn out.
“I'm thinking about switching projects.”
He took this in.
“It's been five years,” she said. “And I've been patient.”
“I know,” he told her.
“And I've had some little leads, but nothing . . . nothing to write home about, and I know no one else thinks my stuff is going anywhere. I tried to ignore it before, but then I realized no one really thinks I'll make a go of it—not even you.”
“Oh, Robin.” He put his arms around her.
“Here's the thing,” she told him, looking up into his eyes. “I want to work on my bone tumor idea. I've got a cell line, and I want to pursue it. But when I went to Marion, she said there wasn't time for me to start. I'm supposed to be a team player and pull the line for you.”
“The bone tumors?” He looked dubious, and she broke from his embrace. “But you'd be starting from scratch.”
“I know.”
“Why don't you wait until we hear about the grant?”
“That's what they said.”
“Well, they're right.”
“Except I don't want to wait. I don't want to work on the grant.”
“Why not, Robin? This one's going to get funded.”
“But what if I don't want to work on your stuff?”
He shook his head at her, trying to understand. “Is this because I didn't want to work with you? Do you still think I looked down on your project?”
“I'm senior to you,” she reminded him.
“Senior? What does that matter?”
“But it does . . .”
“What does that matter between us?”
“I've been here much longer.” She pressed on. “Why do you assume I'm going to jump at the chance to do the scut work on your experiments?”
“I never asked you to do the scut work.”
“You don't understand.”
“Yes I do,” he said, “because I was in your position last year when they wanted me to work with you.”
“But that was different,” she said.
“How was it different?” he burst out, exasperated.
“Because you could say no, but I can't. I'm expected to do what I'm told.”
“The difference is that your experiments weren't working, and mine are,” he told her as he put on his latex gloves. “They're asking you to work on R-7 for your own good.”
“Hitch your wagon to a star,” she said.
“Why don't you just listen to them?” he asked her. “Why do you have to make everything so hard?”
“You think all my ideas are unfeasible, and I shouldn't even try to start something new.”
“Oh, please don't start telling me what I think.”
“All right,” she said slowly, and she turned to leave.
“Robin,” he called as the door closed behind her.
She heard him call her name, and hovered a moment just outside the door. But having sought him once, poured out her heart, humbled herself, asking tacitly for his help, she was too proud to turn to him again. She paced the hall instead, half hating him, half longing for him to come out and comfort her.
Robin had been wary of him from the beginning, when he first arrived in the lab. He was eight years younger than she was, his doctorate newly minted, his degrees from Stanford and MIT much fancier than hers from the University of New Hampshire and Boston University. Robin's thesis advisor, John Uppington, was well respected, but Cliff's had been renowned, and his graduate work that much more lustrous. Cliff's famous advisor and Stanford education reflected his privileged upper-middle-class background, while her less illustrious advisor and state school matched her workaday origins. Cliff never acknowledged the huge difference in their circumstances, but Robin was always conscious of the gap. And there was the class difference—right there.
He had come in as heir apparent to the lab. Once, her project had been of paramount importance, but when Cliff arrived, he came with a new set of plans. He'd usurped Robin's position, beating her out for money, space, time, attention. From the first day he'd had special treatment, and it infuriated her that he would not acknowledge that. She remembered how eager Marion and Sandy were to show him off at conferences. Just after he arrived, the whole lab had gone to a virology meeting at a run-down resort in Maine. Cliff made his debut with a talk in the plenary session. Robin, on the other hand, was relegated to the poster session in a badly lit ballroom.
At night the posters were taken down, and two hundred virologists assembled there for dinner and dancing. A swing band played, and Robin watched Sandy present Cliff to the senior scientists at other tables. Sandy was in high spirits. He swept back to their table with Cliff in tow.
“Behold the conquering hero,” Prithwish said. He had to shout to be heard above the music.
Cliff sank into his chair next to Robin and confided, “Yeah, well, I haven't conquered anything yet.”
“They liked your talk,” Robin pointed out.
He shrugged. “It was all from my dissertation.”
She stared at the dance floor and watched one lone couple, husband and wife virologists from Hopkins, trot and spin.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked.
“Yeah, right.” She thought he was joking.
“I could show you how,” he said.
“I know how,” she retorted. She had learned for her father's wedding.
“Marion, it's up to us,” Sandy announced. “We'll have to show these kids how it's done.”
And to everyone's amazement, the two of them took the floor and began to swing. The postdocs couldn't stop laughing at the two of them—Sandy showing off, trying to spin Marion out wide, while she countered, holding herself upright through every sudden turn. They were all in hysterics by the time Cliff took Robin's hand and dragged her to the floor.
Then suddenly she was embarrassed. She felt herself blushing, heat spreading under her skin. The others were calling out to them from the table, and she would have run away if he hadn't been holding her. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to remember the steps. She listened to the music and counted silently to herself: one, two, one-two, and then plunged in, as she might jump into freezing water.
The pressure of his hand on her waist surprised her.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
She looked up at him, confused.
“I'll lead,” he said.
The hall was dimly lit at night, but the animal room glowed brightly, illuminated from within, and Robin saw Cliff clearly throug
h the red-tinted window. He was blood red, wine red, maraschino red, the red of cell media, the red of stained slides. He'd found his way into the inner chamber of discovery.
But how had he gotten there? What secret door had he unlocked? He had known no more than she. Like Robin, he'd been flailing in the dark. He had suffered, confiding in her that he was paralyzed by the hopes Mendelssohn and Glass placed in him. He'd disarmed her, confessing that he hated the miracle worker role they wanted him to play.
“I wrote a good dissertation. That was all,” he'd told her one night at Café Algiers. “They should put a stamp on everyone's dissertation that says ‘Current results not necessarily indicative of future performance,' or something like that.”
“Like the stock market.”
“Yeah. They should call your dissertation a prospectus.” He'd sighed. “That would be more accurate.”
He'd bucked the starring role thrust upon him, and Robin commiserated with him. They'd suffered together in a sweet fellowship of failure. Secretly they'd mocked Sandy and Marion and called them S&M. They called Marion Madame Defarge for her grim, most ungrannylike way of knitting during her postdocs' presentations. They became such buddies that Aidan called Robin and Cliff the evil twins. But they weren't twins; they were nothing alike; and always Cliff was drawing closer, as close as she would let him.
His first year in the lab, he'd asked her out so many times, her refusals had become a running joke. He'd begun to say, “Okay, tell me the reasons.”
“First of all,” she'd begin, “I have a boyfriend. Second of all, I'm way too old for you.” At that point she was thirty-five and he was twenty-seven. “Third of all, I don't want to.”
“But we could change that,” he'd say.
“And fourth,” she'd remind him, “it would never work out.”
But the next year her boyfriend got a plum job at CERN and she didn't follow him to Geneva. She wouldn't give up her experiments in Cambridge. She didn't want to move so far from her family, either. There was no question in her mind she had to stay. Still, she was lonely; she was sad Michel had not considered her position and her future when he decided to move away. Cliff had been stalwart then. He stopped teasing her and worked in silence, companionably at her side. He gave up asking her out and offered simple friendship instead.
And yet their friendship wasn't simple, but fraught, delicious. They worked together, ate together, slumped late in the lounge together. Rousing themselves, they'd race up the institute's back stairs, all the way from the animal facility to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time, careening around corners, until their lungs burst with the effort. Once, he took the lead, but doggedly she followed and overtook him when he stumbled, racing upward even as he called after her, “Wait, Robin! No fair.” Adrenaline and giddy fear drove her onward as he scrambled to his feet and sprinted after her. She knew he would pull her down if he caught her. In play, in anger, in sheer frustration, he'd tackle her, so she ran even faster, barely escaping his grasp. And then it was over, all their aggression spent. She collapsed on the top step, and a moment later he sank down next to her. Gasping for air, they gazed back at the stairs as mountain climbers look back at the rocks and precipices they've overcome. Then, glancing over at him, she realized he'd hurt himself, somehow banged and scratched his knuckles, which had begun to bleed. It was strange, confusing, even then, but that was the moment she began to fall in love with him. Nothing was said; he wasn't looking at her. All she did was pick up his hand.
She'd known not to get involved with someone in the lab. She knew better. And his reputation had followed him from MIT. He'd cut a wide swath there in the biology department. He'd been, and still was, a terrible flirt. She'd reminded herself that he was too young for her, armed herself with the hard truth that he cared about her but still wanted to play. She'd always known he'd break her heart and now he had, but not in the way she'd expected. He'd crushed her with his success.
She knew it was irrational, but she could not help looking on his good fortune as a kind of betrayal—as if he'd only pretended to struggle, and slummed with her, affecting nonchalance. Now he'd revealed himself as someone entirely different, and she was shocked by the change in him. She had always been the serious one, the dedicated one; she knew she had always cared for science more. She tried not to begrudge his swift ascent. She strove to understand and even take some pleasure in his brilliance, to transform her mixed feelings into admiration.
Unguarded, oblivious, Cliff stood, examining his mice, holding them up by the tail, each in turn. He had results. She saw that clearly through the tinted window. Those were results he held there by the tail.
He had an almost dazed smile on his face, a smile of utter, innocent joy. She turned away. She'd seen that look before, a gaze as familiar as his tongue, his hands, his fingertips—the realization that he'd finally gotten what he'd wanted.
Cliff saw nothing but his mice. Some were blind now from the radiation he'd used to make them more susceptible to the cancer cells. No glint showed between the folds of pink skin where their ruby eyes had been. Only with careful inspection under the examining light could Cliff even detect the blinded eyes, cloudy white, like seed pearls in their sockets. Apart from this, the six mice affected by the virus were beautiful—active, healthy, their skin unbroken, perfect. Eleven of the twenty mice injected with the virus were still tumor-ridden on their flanks and necks. But these six seemed as good as new.
The evening concert on the radio had begun. The dreamy sounds of Satie. He would have to break their necks, of course, and yet these six mice were absolutely well. He hated the thought of breaking the bodies now so wonderfully cured. He had healed these animals. First he'd brought them close to death, and now he'd brought them back, and he could not wrench them apart that way. An overwhelming, woozy desire came over him to see the mice intact.
He took just one mouse and put it in the clear plastic container that served as the CO2 chamber. A simple hose fed into the isolator from a spigot on the wall. Cliff depressed the lever and CO2 filled the sealed chamber. The mouse thrashed against the walls. Bred for timidity, the little creature still fought death; the animal was alive, and it wanted to live. But the thrashing soon ended. The mouse seemed to swell as it expired, growing heavier even as it struggled, until, weighted down, life and color drained. The animal lay still, like a gray mouse statue on the bottom of the cage.
Cliff carried the body gently in his gloved hand to the dissecting room. He turned on the examining light and placed the mouse belly-up on the thick polystyrene dissecting block with its disposable pad. After a hunt for the good instruments—which, as Marion always complained, no one ever put away in the right place—Cliff perched on a stool and went to work. He took four pins and pinned the mouse down, one pin through each paw. The mouse was stretched out now in death, its limbs taut, ears rigid, its two front teeth exposed, fierce in rigor mortis. With tweezers Cliff plucked up the loose pink skin covering the mouse's abdomen, and then with small sharp scissors he snipped one vertical and four horizontal incisions, creating two neat rectangular flaps of skin to open and fold back. Cliff spilled no blood doing this. He had no broken neck to worry about, and he was careful not to snip a major blood vessel. He looked, instead, into a clean, inviolate body. Here was the soft maroon heart, the size of a bean. Here the slippery liver, deep purple, its four flat lobes fanning out enormously as Cliff picked them up with his tweezers. Here the lungs. The kidneys, just the size of lentils. Here were the intestines, curled intricately together. Once Cliff teased them out of the body, he'd never get them all back in again, packed as they had been.
As he might throw back a pair of shutters, Cliff peeled open the flaps of skin and began to pin them to his dissecting pad. Red blood vessels threaded the pink translucent skin, the vessels clustering at the mouse's five pairs of mammary glands. Cliff picked at the skin with his tweezers and exposed each gland, and each gland in turn was normal size, the pattern of the blood vessels normal
and undisturbed. There were no tumors visible inside, underneath the skin. Cliff's heart began to beat faster. Over and over, he traced the faint red lines of the mouse's blood vessels, the map of the animal's body, the hairsbreadth rivers that extended from each mammary gland throughout the skin. Over and over he looked, and each time he made the discovery again: his virus worked on cancer cells. He had never seen anything more beautiful or more important than that mouse before him on the table. He had never felt so solemn or so full of joy. It occurred to him that this was the happiest moment in his life—or would have been, if he were fully awake. He had been up since six that morning, and though his hands were steady, sleepiness broke against him in little waves, unbalancing him so that he had to lean against the table. Words bubbled up inside of him, but did not form coherent thoughts. Mammary, mammary. Blood vessels. Veins. A phrase kept running through his mind. He couldn't think where it came from: “If all our veins extended . . . If all our veins were extended . . .” The threadlike blood vessels did extend in Cliff's imagination. They seemed to spread and extend into infinite patterns and possibilities, aligning and realigning themselves against cancer. Against death. All his hours in the lab, working with the virus. All the care and ambiguity and blood and shit involved with tumor models in live mice—all that seemed like nothing now as he looked at the normal, healthy corpse before him. Here was the way forward. Here was the human body writ small.
4
MARION HAD expected Sandy to join her for lunch, but he did not come in at noon, or even by twelve fifteen. Assuming his flight home from Florida was late, she opened her desk drawer and took out her blueberry yogurt, green apple, and bag of carrot sticks. She nibbled the carrots as she trimmed and tweaked the language in the NIH grant proposal to be sent the next day. There was some rhetoric of Sandy's in the introduction. She struck it out, nixing “dramatic results” and “astonishing remission.” Numbers have to speak for themselves, she wrote in the margin. Sandy had remonstrated with her to stop editing before he left, but she kept on anyway. By the time he burst into the office, she'd slashed his beloved introduction to ribbons.
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