He was tucking his shirt into his pants as he left her room. She only saw him once more after that.
34
Forest Garden
Martin and Jenifer are out for the evening. I’m taking advantage of their absence to bathe in their clawfoot tub. The emptiness of the house gives me time to think, and time to think makes me sad, and that sadness has no bottom. Many months after my father died, I became determined to will the sadness away, thinking that only by effort could I return to some semblance of normal. I saw no rational reason to be depressed anymore. Sometimes in life you flew into a window. Best to shake your head and fly on.
If only it were easy for me to obliterate grief with drink. Instead, what I’ve got is a cup of tea, a hot bath, and Sophie’s Choice. The tub is too short for me and my feet rest on the taps out of the water. I turn the hot water on with my left foot from time to time. William Styron also wrote a book about his depression. He said that some people who had a parent die when they were young resolve their grief by creating a lasting legacy to their own life. Long after his mother died of breast cancer when he was a boy, Styron did that by writing Sophie’s Choice. I hold the hardcover with damp hands but I keep reading the same page over. I can’t focus on it and am thinking about Sophie’s alcoholism and depression. It is too familiar for me to let go. I close my finger in the book and hang my hand over the tub’s edge.
Smells from my past overwhelm me when I reach for the lukewarm cup of tea on the other side. Cigar smoke and juniper berries. I turn, sure that I’ll see my father in the room. There is nothing there but the door with a towel hanging on a hook. I close my eyes. There are the stalks of corn, eight feet tall, yellow scallopini squash, and row after row of green beans in our garden. Then I do see him, his sunken cheeks, a day’s stubble on his chin.
“So, it is you. I was remembering.”
I feel no embarrassment at my nakedness. I put the tea down and he reaches for my hand. I enjoy that firm grasp once again. I motion for him to sit on the lid of the toilet. He asks what it is I don’t understand.
“What do you mean?”
“You were remembering. We remember what we don’t understand. That’s why you can’t let it go.”
“Shit, Dad, I’m just trying to get it right.”
“Listen to me. It passes quickly. One minute all that matters is you’re playing goal for your college team, keeping the puck out of the net and hoping that pretty girl is in the stands again watching you. Then the next thing you know all the good stuff is behind you and you’re staring down a dark road leading nowhere you want to go.”
I felt like throwing the book at him.
“I don’t understand you leaving without a word. I don’t understand Mom disappearing. I don’t understand how a child who was so happy ends up in the woods alone. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“You’re not still trying to figure out whether I killed myself, are you? That’s like trying to figure out what caused someone’s cancer. You may never understand what you’re remembering. Learn from my mistake. Be content with what you have. Let it go.”
The smell of cigar smoke is getting fainter. Panicking, I sit up in the tub. Water rises in a wave to the end and sloshes over the side. I’m desperate to grasp his hand again but he’s gone.
“Fuck you!” I shriek. “Why are you always leaving?”
It was only eight years that he and I went camping. When I was young and each of my years passed slowly, those few weeks we spent together camping were a large fraction of my temporal and imaginative life. Yet as I grow older, time shrinks those weeks and that time falls away like dead skin, like dust.
The tides continue to ebb and flow through that sheltered bay off Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island twice each day, raising and lowering the wooden wharves I played on. It’s just that I’m not there to see them.
It’s one of those autumn days, warm, bug-free, without a cloud. There’s a heavy joy that comes at the end of the growing season, when the air is still as time holds its breath, waiting for us to catch up with all changing things.
I’m eager to have Lina’s help to plant the garlic before she leaves at the end of the month. We weed this summer’s potato beds, loosen the soil with the fork, and rake the surface smooth. Then we mark off seven rows in each bed, running the handle of the rake along the soil to make a line we can follow. We push the large cloves into the ground with thumb and index finger along this line. After each row I run my hands over the crumbly earth and cover the cloves until the bed is completely planted. We cover all five beds with straw and when Lina and I are finished it has the same satisfying effect as seeing dry cordwood, split and stacked against the cabin.
She and I lie on the grass in the sun, no longer concerned about ticks or mosquitoes or blackflies. There’s brilliant sunshine to soak up, as if we are storing warmth for winter as red squirrels store fat. Her black hair is shiny in the sun and warm on my palm that cups her head. I lean toward her and whisper in her ear.
“I knew at the beginning it was going to be hard to love you. I just didn’t know how hard.”
She squeezes my hand. “Do you keep all your letters?”
I keep most of them.
“I’m thinking of burning mine and burying the ashes under a tree.”
I face her and look into the black eyes of a stranger. It’s awkward, as if I haven’t hugged her, slept with her, and loved her intensely.
“You’re going to have a hard winter,” Lina says.
There are pieces of me that I have left in her care with an uncertain future. Envelopes tucked in her backpack, slips of paper I’ve written notes on folded into her journal.
“I saw a black wasp nest over there at shoulder height. They want to be sure to be above the snow.”
“How about I get through the fall first?”
A crow glides down, wings folded in, to land on the straw of one of the garlic beds. It expresses a curve from crown through rump and down its tail. Its feathers glisten in the light and are luscious, black and sleek like the head on my arm. I stroke Lina’s hair as if my hand is running along its smooth and glossy back as it hops on the straw we have spread out. It caws as more crows fly overhead.
“Hey,” she says softly. I look at her again. “You should know I think you’re a good lover.”
My consolation prize. “When are you leaving?”
“He’s coming to pick me up the day after tomorrow. Early.”
The weight of her head on my arm annoys me. I wish she would pull it away, but fear she will. I could float away myself, to grow wings and fly over the garlic beds with their straw blankets, but my feet are leaden and my heart is leaden and I have no wings.
The crow pecks at the straw, looking for bugs without much effort, then flies up into the trees. It cries again, arcing its back and tilting its beak to the sky. Then it takes off to the west into the spruce woods to join others.
I am looking past the time that Lina is gone. I learned years ago that if I had a long distance to walk I only needed to keep my feet moving and, in time, I’d get there. If I was sick in bed, I ignored the milestones of recovery — the cessation of puking, the headache going away — and focused on two or three days in the future. I knew that time kept moving and that things would get better. I learned to use sleep as a way to pass time. When Dad and I were driving a long distance I would fall asleep imagining supper as the sun was setting and the car was parked. After he died I used sleep as a diversion from stress and a place where sadness didn’t follow me. I was like that breed of goat — bred to protect more expensive livestock by acting as a decoy to predators — that falls unconscious at any sudden sound. Clap your hands and the stress makes them fall down and go to sleep. But I can’t do it anymore; I keep waking up.
While I’m lying there in the quiet, with a heavy head on my arm and crows flying away, a rifle shot explodes from the woods close behind the cabin. I’m on my feet fast but frozen in place. Someone shouts in distress.
I run toward the sound, crashing over fallen debris, ducking the low branches of spruce.
“Where are you?” I yell.
I follow the voice, aware of Lina’s footsteps behind me, deeper into the forest. I find Art propped against the trunk of a maple. Blood soaks through his pant leg. Drops of red are sprinkled on the brown and gold leaves carpeting the ground around him as if they have been flicked from the end of a paint brush. The .30-30 rests a few feet from him.
“Seems I shot myself,” he says with a lopsided grin.
He’s been hit somewhere below the knee. I lift his pant leg and feel faint. The bullet has entered the boniest part of his ankle, shattering it. The white of bone contrasts with all the blood and flayed flesh. I pull off my shirt and tie it around his ankle. Lina applies pressure to staunch the bleeding.
“You’re damn lucky you didn’t aim above your knee,” I say, “or we’d be leaving you here for the coyotes.”
I pretend it isn’t serious, as much to calm my nerves as to reassure him and keep him from going into shock.
“I saw the flash of a buck’s white ass over there.” He points lamely. “I lifted the gun and it went off.”
“Too bad you didn’t forget your shells this time, huh?”
“How bad is it?”
I’m sure he’s seen far worse during the war. “Do you think you can stand on your good leg and we’ll get you out of here?”
I haul him up, his arm around my shoulder. We hobble and skip out of the woods like two drunks in a three-legged race. Lina follows us with his rifle. We get him into the cabin and I run next door to Jen and Martin’s place. It feels good to be moving over so much ground so quickly. It’s as if I haven’t run in years. I find Jen in the house and she drives me and Art to Soldier’s Memorial Hospital in Middleton.
Lina is gone by the time I get home. Maybe she’s at Chucko’s. I roll a smoke and sit on my stone wall facing the garden. Dead brown things and dirt. The wind blows the hair away from my face. A pileated woodpecker makes its monkey screech from a treetop nearby. The big bird swoops out of the tree, making an arc down, then back up to a dying fir tree at the edge of the garden. It cocks its head, turning its eye to the trunk to see any tiny movement. I don’t know where the woodpeckers spend spring and summer, but it’s in the fall that I see them. They fly away at the sight of me but their shyness belies their true nature; they are feisty birds and I see in them the grit and resourcefulness of the Nova Scotians I’ve come to know.
Nova Scotia ain’t for sissies.
35
New York City
Benny picked up the stack of glass petri dishes and held the uppermost one to the fluorescent light above her. She smiled. Scattered on the plate were hundreds of tiny colonies of Pseudomonas, transformed and surviving the lethal dose of vancomycin in the agar medium on which they grew. The cells could only be growing if they had taken up her recombinant plasmid and were expressing the antibiotic-resistance gene. The transformation had worked. The gene conferring the ability to digest PETE was piggybacking the vancomycin-resistance gene. These transformed, genetically altered bacteria should be capable of eating plastic. The glass plates had colonies too, cells containing the polystyrene-digesting gene.
She put the plates back in the incubator, closed the door, and walked back to her bench. She wanted to test her creation right away but would have to wait for liquid cultures of cells to grow. She made liquid media to grow the cells in and sterilized the flasks in the autoclave. She checked the petri plates again on her way home, though she knew they couldn’t have grown any larger in that short time.
Three days later she analyzed a crude extract of the transformed cells for enzyme activity. She crushed some cells to release their contents and mixed that with a piece of a soda bottle she’d cut up. She left that for an hour, then performed chromatography on the reaction mix. There was a peak characteristic of ethylene glycol, one of the products she expected of esterase digestion. The transgenic esterase enzyme could digest PETE; the ethylene glycol would be, in turn, a source of carbon for the bacteria.
Benny left the lab early and took a vial of cells home. She found one of Annika’s water bottles in the garbage under the sink. She poured the cell slurry onto the bottle and left it in the sink. She couldn’t sleep. What had been theoretical to her, an imagined vista beyond the next hill, was now spread out before her. Her creations would divide ceaselessly, driven by the blind need of their DNA to reproduce. Once released there would be no stopping them. No antibiotic could kill all Pseudomonas. It was capable of reproducing every hour and was found on every human body, on countless other animals, and in the soil of every continent.
After waiting for sleep she turned on the light and read. That took her mind off her work and she dozed. A car backfiring — or possibly a gunshot — woke her at 4:30 and she couldn’t get back to sleep. She rose and dressed for a run. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw the bottle in the sink. It had melted. The little plastic that remained around the cap was slimy to her touch. She put the glass on the counter. She had stopped breathing. This was going to work and a lot of people were going to be angry. She must not be caught. She needed a smokescreen so that once she released the bacteria they could not be traced to her.
She threw what remained of the bottle in the trash, tied a knot in the bag, and took it with her when she left the apartment to throw down the garbage chute.
Her run began in the dark and the cool of the night brushed against her skin as she moved. By the time she headed home from the park the sun had risen. It was going to be a hot day. She showered and rushed to the lab. It was too early for Leach to be there. For the few days she had left in the city, Benny had decided to work when the lab was most likely to be empty.
She needed a lot of bacteria to release and she wanted them in powder form. In the absence of water the cells would be able to survive but could not metabolize or divide. For the past week she had grown liquid cultures of them, spun and washed the cells with distilled water, centrifuged the solutions to concentrate them, and desiccated the cells to remove all moisture. She poured the powdered cells into glass vials, capped them, and put them in a pocket of her backpack hanging on a hook on the wall.
Once water was added to this biologically inert powder, metabolism in the cells would resume, digestion of the plastic was possible, carbon would be released from the enzymatic degradation of the plastic, and the cells would begin dividing. The daughter cells would digest more of the plastic, providing more carbon for other cells. A chain reaction would begin, one she hoped might never stop.
There was a bit of powder left in the tube she had used to desiccate the cells. She was about to throw it in the garbage when she stopped. An impulse to mess with Leach gripped her even though she knew it was unwise. She added a few drops of water to the tube and pulled a swab from her shelf. She opened the incubator in the hall that held Leach’s experimental plates and swiped the bottom of two of his plates with the mixture of cells before leaving the lab.
Benny was back in the lab early the next morning when she heard the outer hall door open. Then the magnetic fastener on the door of one of the incubators in the hall clicked shut. She heard Leach’s voice over the hum of the fan in the fume hood.
“Who’s been fucking with my plates?” He addressed the corridor with the arrogance of the omnipotent, knowing he would be heard, assuming whoever heard would care. Leach’s footsteps approaching Benny’s bench signalled the definite end of peace. She considered hiding under her desk, but that would make her look guilty.
“Look at these plates. It looks like someone’s put them on something hot.”
“That’s weird,” she said.
He threw one of his petri dishes onto her bench. The plastic was thin enough in places that the agar seeped through and left a trail of slime where it skidded across the surface.
“Look at this.”
Benny didn’t move.
“They’re all like t
hat. Every damn plate in the incubator.”
“Looks like they’ve been melted on something.”
“I can see that. Shit.”
Benny put a latex glove on and picked up the plate. As she squeezed gently to hold it, the plastic gave way and her fingers went through the plate. Leach threw the plate in the garbage can by her side, turned, and strode out of the lab to his office. She followed him. He wore a short-sleeved shirt tucked into his pleated pants. He took his fedora off his balding head and hung it on a hook on the back of the door.
“I’m going home for a couple of weeks,” Benny announced.
Leach picked up a reprint of a journal paper from his desk and, without lifting his eyes from it, said, “It’s hardly an appropriate time for you to leave, Ben, right after you’ve decided to switch thesis projects.”
“I have family business to attend to.”
He dropped down in his chair. “Someone who wanted to succeed would buckle down after a setback and get right back at it. A certain maxim about getting back on the horse springs to mind.” He began sorting his piles of notes and journals.
She forced a smile. “And that’s what I’ll do when I get back. I’ve been going through a lot lately and I need a break. This trip will give me time to clear my head, analyze my project, and come back refreshed.”
“Suit yourself. I have to admit you’re a hard worker and you haven’t taken any time off for a while. Let me tell you, though, that success in research comes not only from hard work. You’ve got to have inspiration and mental agility as well.” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “I suggest you use this little holiday as an opportunity to be creative. Come up with some novel ideas for experiments you want to do when you get back.”
“I’ll see you in two weeks.” She turned to leave.
“Oh, before you go, see Jon and go over the maps of the plasmid construct you gave him. He’s having trouble getting the esterase cassette out of it.”
The Rest is Silence Page 20