Aeden gave a slight shrug. He didn’t bother to inquire what exactly about the database had brought me to the lab. His eyes were no longer even on me. The place we were headed to was visible in the distance, and his gaze was stubbornly anchored on it.
I wondered why he’d asked me to lunch, but didn’t ask him. Or rather, chose not to. If there was an ulterior motive behind his invitation I didn’t want to know about it.
The cafeteria at AUSR (American University of Science Research) was a one-story structure poised like a melting icicle at the edge of the East River. From a distance the roof looked almost deformed, until gradually the shape of a spiral staircase began to emerge, and on closer inspection the two helices of a molecule of DNA, bound by slabs of glass. Inside, the seating area was magnificently large, with carpeted floors and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the watchtowers of the Queensboro Bridge: oxidized little fortresses I imagined inhabited by an insane person with nowhere else to go.
Aeden led me past the cash register to a small table in a corner of the crowded dining hall. Penetrating odors wafted into the air, and people sat noisily chitchatting. Following him between the rows of tables I saw Steven and Eduardo from the lab. They had been lost in conversation until they spotted me moving past them with my tray of food, at which point they quit talking to each other and stared up at me. Men rarely noticed me, and I wondered why they had.
At the table Aeden poured two packs of sugar into his black coffee and stirred it with a thin plastic straw. Ignoring the sealed sandwich on his tray, he raised the Styrofoam cup of coffee to his mouth, then lowered it back down.
“I know why you’re here, Emily,” he said. “Everyone does.”
I dug my fork into my Cobb salad. “Really?” Despite the seriousness of his face I could feel a smile spreading across my own. I wanted to be taken seriously by my peers in the lab, wanted them to think I had potential.
“Justin told us about you. He held a group meeting last month to discuss the recent outpour of genomic data, the thousands of genes whose function no one knows anything about, just sitting there in public databases across the world. How important it was to bring someone like you to the lab, with your expertise in bioinformatics. How he’d already hired you, in fact.”
“You don’t sound too thrilled,” I said, which he didn’t. I felt my smile fading.
“In principle I’m not opposed to you perusing the database. I just think your talent would be put to better use researching something else.”
I put down my fork. “What do you mean?”
Aeden slid his tray to one side and leaned into the table. “Allegra and I identified a set of promising genes. It’s what we’ve been working on for the last three years.”
The whole mess was descending on me like a dark cloud, and yet outside, beyond the windowpane, the day stood perfectly clear. Unable to hold his gaze any longer, I looked at his forehead, wedged with nascent wrinkles. “How do you know they’re important?”
“We don’t,” Aeden said. “We don’t have knockout mice to prove it, but we’ll have them very soon.”
“If you don’t have the mice,” I said, “you can’t possibly know that your genes are doing what you think they’re doing.”
Aeden studied me across the table. The expression on his face was one of quiet amusement, or outright disbelief; it was difficult to say which, and the difference hardly seemed to matter. “I think you’re missing the point here, Emily. The project is ours. It always was, from the beginning.”
I didn’t budge. Despite his territorial grab, or because of it, I had a feeling that he was scared. “Then why did Justin hire me?”
“Justin?” Aeden said, so incredulously that for a moment I wondered if we were talking about the same person. “Justin has nothing to lose. He only stands to win from having postdocs compete against each other in his lab. Whereas you, Allegra, me . . .” His hand went to his heart. For a moment I felt I knew what he was getting at: the dearth of jobs in academia, the struggle to stay, to find a niche. But what he said instead was: “This project is very important to me, Emily.”
“And to me it isn’t?” I managed to say.
“I’m not saying it’s not. I’m sure it is. Look.” His timer was beeping. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news. I know this can’t be easy for you, your first day here, but I wanted to get it out of the way.” Suddenly he was standing. “I’m sorry, I need to get back to the lab.” He picked up the untouched sandwich on his tray.
“I appreciate your honesty about the project,” I said stiffly. I couldn’t look at him.
Aeden didn’t move. I could feel him standing over me, watching me, until at last he stepped away from the table, leaving a faint smell of cigarette behind.
Somewhere outside I could hear the sound of a blowing horn, and when I turned to look out the window I saw a freight ship moving down the East River. The deck was crammed with containers, stacked one on top of the other in multicolored towers: black-green-orange-red . . . green-red-orange . . . red-red-green . . . yellow-black . . . There was no pattern to the sequence in which they were stacked, only a haphazard randomness I tried in vain to piece together, as if a color-coded motif could help me decide what to do: whether to stay in the lab or to leave.
The ship was already a spot in the distance when I pictured myself standing on its sunny deck, between the towers of containers, leaving the lab and what I’d gone there to do forever behind me. Imagining this I felt a tingle of liberation spreading throughout my body, radiating like heat from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, and when that feeling died out—and it did very quickly—it was replaced by sheer terror.
Damn you, Justin, I thought.
Someone at a table nearby was laughing, and I was certain it was at me.
Justin, when I barged past his secretary, was sitting at his desk chair with his back to the poster on the wall—a white-and-blue sphere riddled with wire-thin filaments converging on distinct destinations, like routes on an airline map. The sphere was a blown-up image of the forebrain of a mouse, and the filaments were nerve endings called axons. Neurons in the snout bearing more than a thousand types of odorant receptors projected their axons to as many targets in the brain. My job, the reason I had come to his lab, was to find out what guided them.
Justin raised his face calmly from the glow of his desktop screen, readjusting his spectacles over the bridge of his nose. He was wearing a starched white shirt and a blazer. “What can I do for you, Emily?”
I was standing practically over his desk, with my hands on my hips. “You never told me the project was taken.”
“That’s right. I was going to talk to you about that.”
“Really? When?”
He pointed to the makeshift living room where we’d sat earlier in the day: me on the black leather couch and Justin in his wing-backed chair, stacks of Nature and Science journals piled on the coffee table between us and plush carpeting under our feet. “Please take a seat.”
I shook my head emphatically. “Had I known this I would have never set foot in this lab.”
Justin smiled at me. It was as if a wall between us had been breached, and he was enjoying the view. “And why is that?”
“Because what you’re doing is unethical, that’s why.”
We had met months earlier, at a neuroscience conference in Chicago. I had approached the crowded refreshments table where Justin had been standing alone after his keynote speech, and inquired about an opening in his lab. Justin casually referred to an existing waiting list and stared back down at his BlackBerry. Stalling for time, I lifted a heavy thermos off the table and poured myself a coffee and forced myself to drink it. Justin hadn’t moved. Not knowing what else to say to him, but feeling that I needed to make one more effort to stand out, I told him I was from Rockford. “That’s west of here,” I said. “Northwest, to be specific.”
Justin looked up at me. I was expecting him to tell me to get lost, but he didn’t. Th
e directional detail for some reason touched a nerve. Before I knew it he was talking to me about the arctic winds in the Midwest and the bleak winter forecast for the following year, and also complaining bitterly about the bed in his room. The hotel manager (“a tall blond woman, very striking”) had promised to replace his mattress with a firmer one. His coccyx was killing him, literally killing him.
I suggested that he take an Advil. I also agreed that the conference could have been better planned, and laughed profusely at his comment about the coffee at the table being so diluted it tasted like fish piss. In the breathing spaces of the conversation I filled him in on what I’d done in Vincent’s lab at Urbana-Champaign and what I hoped to do in his: the group of genes that I hoped to uncover, waiting list allowing.
Six months later I received an email from him. A bay in his lab had been vacated and he looked forward to seeing me again in the near future. It took me less than a month to wrap up my graduate and undergraduate research in Champaign, dismantle my dorm life of nearly ten years, and drag my belongings halfway across the country, to Justin’s lab.
“Unethical?” Justin repeated. “What about fair to science, Emily?”
The room was stuffy. Heavy traffic was inching mutely along the upper deck of the bridge outside the two windows. Like most lab windows, they were hermetically sealed, so I could hear no sound other than Justin’s voice and the tapping of fingers on a keyboard outside the open door behind me.
Justin swiveled his chair around to face the poster on the wall. “No one in the world knows exactly how this happens,” he said, circling the targets on the map with his hand. “No one really knows how the map of smell is formed.”
“Aeden and Allegra will soon. They’re light-years ahead of me.”
“What if their genes have no role in guiding olfactory axons to their targets; have you thought of that?”
I sank into a metal folding chair in front of his desk. “And if they do,” I said, “if the experiment with their mice is a success, I would be wasting my time here, wouldn’t I?”
Justin stood up from the desk and hurried past me. “I’ll be right back.”
I could hear him behind me in the anteroom, talking to Karen, his secretary, and Karen saying, “Yes, of course. I’ll let no one in.” Then the door clicked shut, and Justin was back at his desk.
“Do you remember what you told me at the conference, back in March?”
I shook my head. “I said many things, Justin.”
“This was personal.”
“I don’t remember,” I said, though I did.
“You said that to find these genes was what you’d been born to do.”
I folded my arms around my chest and shifted in my chair, aiming for a position that would make me feel less exposed and finding none. “I should never have said that.”
“But you did,” Justin said, almost effusively. “You did.”
A crepuscular darkness had descended on the room, as if the day outside had been switched off. And there was something else in the room that I was just noticing, a scent that had probably been there all along, which I knew came from Justin, because I’d smelled it on him at the conference in Chicago, and earlier in the day, when I’d first arrived in the lab. It was a scent reminiscent of freshly laundered linens cooling off from the dryer, a smell I’d thought exclusive to my father and had been keenly aware of during the last years of his life, whiffing it in the packages of vitamin C he sometimes mailed me and during my weekend visits to the house in Rockford. Particularly in winter, hanging my coat in the small entrance closet where his own coat hung: that clean, wide-open smell that now, after all these years, has come to feel indefinably narrow.
“So what will it be?” Justin asked me, with an insinuating smile. “Your best shot at it, or the Greyhound bus back to Champaign?”
I managed a smile. I hadn’t gotten to New York by bus. I had taken a direct flight from O’Hare, and he knew it. He also knew that I was incapable of leaving. This was the fork in the road I’d been headed to all my life, and like the neurons in the poster, I’d already made my choice.
Chapter 3
In the brain there’s a map of smell. Odors are represented in a pear-shaped structure behind the nose called the olfactory bulb, at spatially defined locations that light up in response to smoke, vanilla, grass . . . I knew this long before I read Justin’s papers or heard his talk in Chicago, long before I ever stepped into a classroom.
As a child I was highly allergic to grass, in particular to cut grass, and so I spent summers indoors in my father’s lab, or at home, leafing through the Girl Scouts magazines he encouraged me to read and gazing through the den window at mothers conversing amicably between mown lawns and kids shooting balls in the street and putting up lemonade stands in their front yards.
It wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do—put up a stand and shout at strangers passing by and pour lemonade into cups and gather the coins—but it was something I enjoyed watching the other kids do nonetheless. By age thirteen my body had become immune to the chemicals discharged in the air by cut grass, and yet the sweet iron odor of a sheared lawn still drove me indoors, and would continue to do so for many years, despite my father’s relentless encouragement to step outside, ignore the smell—make an effort to befriend the neighborhood children I’d grown up with.
But we were no longer children, any of us, and at times it seemed to me that I was past getting to know them. Pedaling my bicycle at night to the local Hilander, where my father sent me to buy the milk and eggs we didn’t need, I sometimes saw them, the teens my own age, sitting in a group by the wooden fence of our street with their cigarettes. If I waved at them, someone would usually wave back at me, and that was it, the extent of my interaction with them for a long time.
My persistent aversion to the smell of lawns, and by extension to civilization, was, according to my father, the reason that I had no friends, and he feared I would grow up to become a loner—which I did, in the end. If only because of this, smell was important to me.
That afternoon, after my conversation with Justin, I returned to the main room and picked up my laptop from my desk and walked back out again, through the nearest exit. In my dorm across the street I showered and unpacked my suitcase and opened the boxes I had shipped from Champaign, and surveyed an express delivery order from IKEA: a round wooden table with matching chairs, a sofa bed, a nightstand, scented candles for the bathroom, and a dinnerware set in the event that I had people over one evening.
Though I hardly saw myself entertaining, much less cooking, I still found pleasure imagining both. This was my first time in years with a kitchen all to myself, and a bed that didn’t pop out of the wall. Compared to the dorms where I had lived since I’d left home, the one at AUSR was a luxury apartment, with windows above the radiator looking out at the East River promenade and smooth wooden floors on which the emptied cardboard boxes glided like felt.
Among the books and kitchen utensils and miscellaneous other objects I exhumed from the boxes I had packed after my father’s death was a flower vase my mother had made with her own two hands and given him as a gift. My father had kept the vase up in our attic for years. Only after he retired did he take it down from its hiding place and stand it in the den, occasionally filling it with berry branches and flowers that grew wild in the forest behind our house.
My mother had worked for my father for two years as a research assistant in his lab before leaving chemistry altogether to do what she claimed she’d been born to do. She never told him exactly what that was, but according to my father it could have been anything from making pottery to waiting tables at IHOP.
They had a fling before she left. Twelve months later she appeared at his doorstep with a three-month-old baby and the threat of giving me up for adoption. My father took me in and raised me single-handedly, and that is all he ever told me about my mother. I never had a name or an address or a fingerprint, not even a picture of her face. Had I bumped
into her on the street it would have been like bumping into a stranger. Had she come knocking on my door one day I would have been curious to meet her, but that would have been about it. My interest in my mother, for all the DNA we shared, never stretched much further than the one imaginary encounter: her knocking on my door and me opening it and seeing her, and slowly coming to recognize in her something about myself that I didn’t quite know, or understand.
I untangled the vase from its plastic bubble shield and stood it at the center of the IKEA table. Warped triangles and crescent moons bulged abstractedly from its thin neck, like something made by either a professional artist or a preschooler. The base was a rusty orange color, the middle half a soothing lime green. My hands hovered uncertainly over the dark empty mouth of the neck, imagining flowers there. That is what my father would have wanted, and that is what I would do. As soon as I had the chance, I would buy flowers to put inside the vase, make this new apartment feel like home.
It was late in the evening when I returned to the lab, and judging by people’s reactions, I doubted that anyone was expecting to see me again that day, or any other. A cart loaded with empty mouse cages was blocking the entrance into the main room, and when I walked carefully around the cages with my laptop I saw Steven gazing at me with undisclosed interest, as if to say: Look who’s here. David Hobbs, the lab technician, who was twenty-three years old but appeared to be closer to fourteen, was standing at the sink, filling an industrial beaker with distilled water. When I walked past him he smiled at me and raised a sympathetic hand in the air.
I could see Aeden two bays down, inserting vials into the DNA amplification machine on Allegra’s bench. Of the two, she spotted me first, and nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. He stared up into the aisle, and for the instant that our eyes met I thought I sensed relief on his part to see me again, but I wasn’t quite sure.
The DNA of You and Me Page 2