Once Mike left the room, Leroy asked her if she wanted another drink. She put her hand on his arm and shook her head.
“Can we go to your room?”
He grabbed his can of beer and followed Benny into his bedroom. She went to his desk, littered with journal papers, CD cases, and gum wrappers. He turned on his lamp, threw the quilt over his unmade bed, and sat down. Benny picked up Blue from the desk and put it in the player. She sat beside him and told him that she had stopped seeing Rachel.
“I wanted it to work out. I love her, I do. But . . .”
He reached out and put his palm between her shoulder blades. Her breathing changed and she began to cry.
“Lie down,” he said and sat beside her. She turned onto her side, facing away from him, and he rubbed her back. She relaxed and stopped crying. She shouldn’t talk to him about Rachel anymore, it wasn’t fair. She turned her head to face him.
“Can you sequence some DNA for me?”
“What sequence?”
“A stretch on the fourth chromosome.” She paused. “Mine.”
“What are you looking for?”
She picked at his quilt.
“I told you that my father drowned. There was more to it.” With an index finger she traced the outlines of the squares on the quilt. “I’m convinced he had Huntington’s disease.”
“Does it run in your family?”
“He was depressed. It began all of a sudden. He forgot things and snapped at me for no reason. I want to know if he had it. He might have had a seizure on the dock that day.”
“And if he had it . . .”
She nodded. Any father with Huntington’s has a 50 percent chance of passing it on to his daughter. The normal gene has a short sequence in its DNA repeated about twenty-five times. The mutant form results when that short sequence was stuttered over during DNA replication so that the sequence was repeated forty to a hundred times.
The apartment was quiet. The traffic had all stopped. No honking horns. She breathed, in-out, in-out.
“What do you need from me?” Leroy said. “They’ve cloned the gene, right?”
“In 1993.”
She wanted him to do the test. It would take one polymerase chain reaction and sequencing fewer than two hundred nucleotides. He routinely sequenced DNA fragments from Chico and his other mouse mutants. It would take one evening to do most of the work and she’d know the result in less than a week.
“Why don’t you go to a clinic and get tested?”
“I need it to be anonymous.”
“Where are we going to get the probes?”
“A Huntington’s researcher in Madison sent them to me.”
“O.K., but this goes no further than you and me. If you test positive you go to a doctor and get a proper test and don’t mention this one. If they find out I was using the lab for genetic testing they’d drum me out of school quicker than you could say Jack Robinson.”
“Leroy?” She was smiling.
“Yeah.”
“Does everyone up there talk the way you do?”
“What?”
“Does everyone in Canada use archaic expressions like ‘Jack Robertson’ and that thing you say about the flapper on a duck’s ass?”
“It’s Jack Robinson and it’s a goose’s ass and, no, not everyone up there talks like that.”
Leroy grabbed the pillow from behind Benny’s head and bopped her with it. She laughed and he lay down beside her. Leroy put his arm around her and Benny snuggled into his chest.
“No funny business, O.K.?” she said.
He squeezed her. “You can sleep here if you want.”
They listened to the music for a while and then she realized he had drifted off. She got up to turn off the light, then lay down again. There were voices in the neighbouring apartment coming from a TV and the white noise from the street. She wanted to stay.
Partway through the night Benny woke up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. When she returned, Leroy had undressed and climbed beneath the covers. She lay down beside him. In the morning Leroy lay with the covers pulled up under his chin. They talked for a long time while Benny sat on the windowsill.
“I like sleeping with you,” she said.
“Me too.”
“But I don’t want to have sex.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.” He grinned and shook his head. “You’re a strange girl, Benny, but I do like you.”
He made her oatmeal for breakfast and they went to the lab. At the end of the day she invited him to spend the night at her apartment. They ate supper and then went to bed. She opened the blinds so they could see the city lights and climbed in beside Leroy. She leaned over and kissed him, and her hands began touching him before she caught herself and pulled back. She lay awake long after Leroy had fallen asleep, wondering if she was being foolish to insist that they not consummate their unusual friendship. They liked each other and she found him attractive, but soon enough she would be saying goodbye to him too.
32
Forest Garden
We are sitting on the bluff. No buildings in sight. No crowds of people. We are alone and farther from New York than I have ever felt. Across the bay lies Cape Chignecto, a band of green against the water’s grey. Isle Haute, the solitary island, rises out of the water like a disc to our east. Art calls it the clitoris of the Bay of Fundy.
“Benny was a fool to get him to sequence her DNA,” Art says.
I ask why.
“If your biography was written down, including what hasn’t happened yet, would you read it?”
I say I would.
“You didn’t take time to consider the question.” Wisps of smoke from his cigarette carry out to sea, then dissipate in the gentle breeze. “Because that’s what she wanted. She might have got some really bad news that she’d be able to do nothing about. And what if there was a cure for that disease? What if they could have changed her father’s DNA and cured him? Would she have chosen that?”
“Anyone would want that.”
“I don’t think so. We all have to die. He died young, before his joints and bones began to rot.”
“At least she would’ve had him around longer.”
He isn’t listening.
“That’s what’s always bugged me about Lazarus. Christ wasn’t doing Martha and Mary any favours bringing him back from the dead. He forced them to mourn their brother’s death twice.” He laughs. “As if we need any more suffering than life already brings us.”
One minute we’re talking about DNA and the next he’s getting all Biblical on me. I ask why Jesus did it.
“I doubt he did. I haven’t believed in that hocus-pocus since I came back from Italy. But if it’s true, he was showing off. Trying to convince them he could do magic.”
“I thought we were talking about science.”
“Science is our magic. We expect scientists to raise our dead. Benny’s father died and she wanted an explanation. You can explain that he had a mutation in his genes and it killed him. But she’d never know why he had to die anymore than you and I know why we’re alive. Magic. We’re marvellous machines, that’s all.”
I get up, wiping the dirt off my pants. “I’m going home to see Lina.”
“I don’t blame you.” He grunts as he stands, rubbing his hip. “You had a good run with her.”
We go back into the woods, heading toward his house. We pass a maple, its upper and outer leaves crimson, the lower leaves still green with red outlines. Beneath the tree is a blanket of red on the forest floor in a perfect circle, as if the tree had been dripping paint. The only sound is the crunching of our boots on the leaves and twigs. Then Art stops in front of me, reaches back with his right arm to still me, and raises his gun to his shoulder. I follow the direction of the barrel to where I see the tail of a deer twitching against a white rump a hundred feet away. Then a blast and the deer bolts.
“Damn. I ain’t used to missing.”
He seems embarrassed
to have me watching. We start for home.
“You know she’s pregnant?”
Ahead of me, he nods. “She told me.”
33
New York City
Another night, Benny and Leroy were reading together in her bedroom, lying on her bed, their legs touching under the comforter, like a decades-married couple.
“What’s that?” Benny said.
He closed the book on his finger to mark his place and showed her the cover. The Good Life.
“It’s about a couple who move to the country and grow all their own food,” he said. “Doug’s girlfriend told me about it. It reminds me of this daydream I had as a kid of living in a cabin in the woods. Growing my own food. Skating on a pond.”
“Do you think you’ll go home after you graduate?”
He nodded. “When I was a boy, my father would come home from work with construction paper. Before he took off his tie he’d sit beside me on the floor and we’d cut up the paper and draw on it. I was always making elaborate skylines of hills and trees, with one house on the edge of the forest that had smoke coming out its chimney and with a garden in front. I really don’t belong here.”
“That’s so far away from here.”
“Do you remember,” he said, “when I told you that first night that we’d be living together in Canada with our children?”
“You don’t still believe that, do you?”
“We make things happen by believing they will. We dream where we’re headed and one day we arrive there.”
“You’re such a fatalist,” she said. “Your belief in destiny is always going to disappoint you.”
“I saw Rachel in the park yesterday.”
“What?”
“I took the afternoon off and went for a walk. She was running and stopped to say hi. We talked for over an hour.”
“How is she? What’s she doing?”
“She’s great. She said she misses you.”
“I doubt that.”
She wanted to know more, to know what she looked like, what she was wearing, but she couldn’t ask. When Leroy’s breathing told her that he was asleep, Benny got out of bed and sat on the windowsill to look at the skyline. The horizon, visible between buildings, was nothing more than a grey line separating heaven and earth. Benny knew that Leroy found Rachel attractive and she had a hunch that the two of them would like each other. It was bittersweet to see him become so animated when he mentioned bumping into Rachel. She pictured Rachel and the scar above her breast. Leaving her and Leroy felt like a deep cut. She wondered if all she was doing by imagining them together was trying to dress a wound she was making by running away.
*
Benny and Leroy stayed at their benches late that Friday. Lynn was the last of the others to leave and then they were alone. Leroy decided it was best to collect DNA from her blood even though sequencing could be done on a few cells scraped from the inside of Benny’s cheek. He was used to drawing blood from his mice and he wanted a larger amount of DNA in case he needed to do the procedure twice.
He unwrapped a 21-gauge needle and pressed it onto the syringe. He unscrewed the cap from the glacial bottle of Leach’s rocket fuel and brought it to his nose for a sniff. He held the cotton ball against the bottle’s neck and inverted it. The ethanol he brushed along the crook of Benny’s arm was cold. His teeth gripped his lower lip, his squinting eyes were held in anticipation. He slid the bevelled point of steel into a bulging vein, tattoo blue, slithering beneath her skin like a snake. Blood darted from the vein, deep red, eager for somewhere to go.
“You never mention your father,” she said.
“That’s because I don’t want to talk about him.” He paused. “I remember laughing with him a lot when I was a kid. I wonder where that went.”
The vial filled with her warm blood. He detached the vial and jammed it into the bucket of ice on his bench. He pressed the cotton ball onto her skin to staunch the flow and pulled the needle out from under it. She rested her index and middle fingers on the cotton as he leaned into her. The bristles on his upper lip outlined the shape his moustache would take, although he had shaved that morning. His incisors were both chipped and uneven along the bottom surface. She felt his whiskers first, tickling her lips, then the warm lips themselves. Benny held her breath, then pulled her head away gently. Leroy straightened his back and put both hands on the bench to steady himself.
“What happened the day your dad drowned?” Leroy said.
“I don’t know for sure. A neighbour saw him leave the house. He must have walked to the lake and wound up at the public dock. He slipped and drowned.”
“Can I kiss you again?”
She shook her head. He leaned toward her but she pushed him gently. “I can’t.”
“I don’t get you.”
She nodded.
“I’ll isolate this DNA while it’s fresh.”
“Here’s my key if you want to stop by on your way home.”
He poured ethanol into a small beaker and downed it. She tried to kiss him on the cheek but he pulled his head away. She dropped the key on the bench beside the bucket holding her blood. “Annika will let me in.”
It was after two. There was a tapping on Benny’s door, then it opened. Leroy climbed in beside her. She put her arm over his hip and he huddled in closer.
“Do you remember showing me that falcon’s nest on the roof?” he said.
“Uh huh.”
“I remember looking over at you and you were smiling and looking down at the nest and I said to myself, ‘This is her. This is the one I’ve been waiting for.’”
She murmured into his shoulder blade.
“Huh?”
“Hopes are different than prognostications,” she repeated.
“You keep telling me that.”
“Rachel’s your girl.”
“You think?”
Soon, she could tell from his heavy breathing that he had dropped off. She wished she could fall asleep as quickly as he always did. Instead, once again, she lay and thought. She loved him and she loved Rachel but she knew she wasn’t being fair to either.
Two days later Benny ran into Leroy on his way from the freezer to the dark room, carrying a sequencing cassette the size of a thin coffee table book. Inside was a piece of film waiting to be developed.
“This is your sequence,” Leroy said, tapping the cassette. “I’m going to develop it now to see if there’s too many repeats.”
“I’ll look at it when I get back.”
She went down the hall to another lab in search of glass petri plates. She had constructed plasmid DNA that might allow her bacterial strains to digest polystyrene. Now it was time to transform the bacterium with the DNA and see. Polystyrene. Rigid, with the potential to be transparent, it was ideal for storing fresh food. All those to-go boxes holding hamburgers and sushi and roast chicken would one day be gone. An alternative to the Styrofoam insulation in the walls of plastic houses would have to be found. Ditto ballpoint pen barrels. In the meantime, the petri dishes they used in the lab were made of polystyrene; she needed to find glass ones.
Benny went to the lab of a classmate of hers who studied signal transduction in human cells. Kim used glass dishes for tissue culture of human cell lines. She lied that she was trying to get Pseudomonas to grow more quickly. She had altered their medium, fiddled with the incubation temperature, tried different wavelengths of light. Nothing had made much difference. It was a long shot, she knew, but they might grow better on glass.
“Not likely to make a difference,” Kim said.
“Maybe not. I wonder if the bisphenol A the plates leach out is affecting their growth.”
“I doubt it. They’re over there. Take as many as you need.”
Leroy was waiting for her at her bench when Benny returned.
“You got the wrong primers from Madison,” Leroy said.
He handed her the film. She held it up to the window and studied it.
“There
are no repeats in this sequence at all,” he said. “There should be at least twenty-five.”
“Leave it with me.”
She rose from her stool and left the lab to retrieve a flask from the autoclave down the corridor. Leroy was gone when she returned. She poured the hot liquid medium in twenty glass petri dishes, covering each one as she went. Once she was done, she sat at her desk and looked at the film he had given her. She knew there would be no repeats. She wrote down each nucleotide — A, C, T, G — as a band appeared. She worked her way down the film. When she came to the end, she found her copy of the 1993 paper from the American Journal of Human Genetics reporting the sequence of the SRY gene. She compared her sequence to the wild-type sequence. There it was. One nucleotide different. A transversion mutation at position 1846, putting a C where an A was supposed to be.
In the beginning was a mutation. That small change — one typo in her three-billion-letter autobiography — changed the way the whole book had been read.
That night the blinds were open and light poured onto the single sheet that covered her and Leroy. It might keep her up. She put one arm underneath her head to look at the lights blazing from the Citibank building. She thought of the songbirds that were being lured to their deaths, confused by the lights, dying for the city’s fabulous skyline. Leroy was pressing her about the sequence of her DNA.
“Did he send you the wrong primers?”
“I need to sleep.”
“I could have kept the sequence, you know.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Was it even on chromosome four?”
“I got what I needed.”
Leroy sat upright. “Why would you lie to me?”
“I don’t want you to know.”
He rested his back against the wall.
“Can’t you relax about anything?” He bit the words off. “All this secrecy and your obsession with plastic. You’re like Joan of Arc, burning with this passion to save the world. It’s bullshit. No one asked you to save us.”
She whispered, “Please leave.”
He jumped from the bed and, as he was pulling his pants on, said, “I have more fun in my bathroom than in your bed.”
The Rest is Silence Page 19