“You can request them now,” I said. “Can’t you? He won’t say no to you.”
Karen glanced over her shoulder at me.
“He will say no,” Justin said. His eyes went down to Karen, who was diligently attempting to slide the tiny silver mouse in her hand through the buttonhole of his cuff. “And even if he said yes, I see no point in it. They’re analyzing their mice next week.”
“Next week isn’t nearly soon enough,” I said.
Justin chuckled. “What would you like me to do, speed up time?”
“There you go,” Karen said, stepping away from him, toward her desk. “Do you have your Altoids?”
Justin patted his breast pocket, then pulled out a small red tin and popped several mints into his mouth. The scent of spearmint reached me almost instantly, bringing with it a happy childhood memory I couldn’t quite place. Justin put the tin away, grabbed his roll-on suitcase, and began to move toward me. According to the email he’d recently sent to everyone, he was scheduled to leave that morning for a conference on the West Coast.
“I would like to see their genes,” I reminded him.
“Unfortunately it will have to wait until I return,” Justin said, averting his eyes.
“I would like to see them now. I should have asked to see them my first day here. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I had in fact thought of asking him for the printouts of Aeden and Allegra’s genes then, but hadn’t summoned the nerve.
Justin stood gazing at me in that direct, almost childlike way of his. And there was that smell again: pressed linens and freshly laundered towels. Where was it lodged in him, this smell: in his lint-free suit, the patch of grays on the left side of his head, his freshly shaven face? Why did it make me trust him?
“I have a flight to catch, Emily.”
I was standing with my back to the door, blocking his way out. “Their genes, Justin.”
“I’m sure you’ll come across them in the database.”
“I have yet to find something useful in that database,” I said, infuriated. “Allegra and Aeden’s results will be published and I’ll still be on my hands and knees, searching for the needle in the haystack.”
Justin’s gaze slipped down, landing awkwardly on my flat boots. His cheeks, I realized, were flushed red. “I never said it would be easy.” He stepped around me and before I could say another word he’d slid past me with his roll-on.
The door slammed shut in my face and I heard a little snort behind me. I turned around to see Karen biting her lower lip. She pushed a silver strand of hair behind an ear and frowned into her computer screen, as if asking it about me: What planet is she from?
“You think I’m being unreasonable, Karen?” I asked. Though I knew the answer was yes, I still wanted it to be no.
Karen gave out a long breath. “It’s not my job to judge you, or anyone else here,” she said, glancing at the door through which Justin had escaped.
“What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
Karen hesitated. The tapping of her fingers on the keyboard had come to an end, leaving a silence in the room that felt almost soul searching. Then she said, “You’re not the first person coming in here with a bone to pick with Justin. And you won’t be the last. If I were you I would leave. I would find myself a less promising but kinder career path. Life is too short.”
I nodded, agreeing that life was short. “Thank you,” I said, and quietly let myself out the door.
Chapter 6
The night before Aeden and Allegra analyzed their mice, Justin strode into the main room of the lab looking restless and sleep deprived and also, mysteriously, more fully alive than I’d ever seen him. It wasn’t yet midnight, but close, and the lab was so quiet that I could hear the clock ticking on the wall and the echo of his footsteps trailing behind him.
Aeden and I were alone in the room. He was installing a dissecting scope on his bench: a round-based stereoscope similar to the one I’d used in my father’s lab as a child to examine blades of grass.
Justin plunked himself down on Allegra’s empty desk chair. “Guess who was at the conference in San Diego?”
“I have no clue,” Aeden said, not looking at him.
“Craig Wallace, remember him?”
“How could I forget?”
“Guess who he’s working for?”
Aeden shrugged.
“Take a wild guess.”
“Is it important?”
“Carol Levine. Have you heard of her?”
Aeden shook his head, concentrating on the stereoscope eyepiece.
“She runs a fruit fly lab at the Salk Institute. They have a strain of mutant flies that die young. Apparently they have a hard time finding the food source in those tubes where they’re bred.”
“Something to do with smell loss, no doubt,” Aeden said ironically.
“As a matter of fact it does,” Justin said, crossing his legs. “Craig analyzed the dead flies, and their map of smell is in shambles. Not only that, but the mutated gene encodes a novel axon guidance protein.”
“Any other information about the gene?” Aeden asked, turning away from his bench to face Justin.
“They didn’t say. But after a few whiskeys on my tab at the hotel bar I got Craig talking, and guess what? Carol is planning to submit his results to Science next year.”
After a pause, Aeden said, “I find that hard to believe.”
“You think he’s lying about the paper?”
“I find it hard to believe the map of smell is in shambles. He’s probably just saying that to get back at you, after what happened to him here.”
Justin ignored the comment. “In shambles or not, as soon as your results are ready we’ll write up a paper and submit it to Science, before they do.” He looked away from Aeden and straight at me, across the gap between Aeden’s desk and mine. “How’s that for a plan?”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less of you,” Aeden told him.
Justin giggled. I held my breath and watched him stand up from the chair. “I’m looking forward to tomorrow. I expect great things from you guys.” Before I could count to ten he’d left the room and vanished into the hallway.
Without looking at Aeden, I stood up and followed Justin out. At the end of the hallway I could see his stout figure receding. “Justin,” I called out, trying not to raise my voice. I knew he could hear me, but he didn’t stop. When I caught up with him a moment later he was about to walk into an elevator. “Their genes,” I said, intercepting him. “I need to analyze them. It will help us know what to expect of their results.”
“All the information you need is in his filing cabinet,” Justin said, maneuvering his way around me, into the waiting elevator.
“And what am I supposed to do, break into it?”
Justin smiled at me. “That’s up to you,” he said, and the elevator doors came sliding shut between us.
In my dorm I had a dinner of ramen noodles straight out of the Styrofoam container, brushed my teeth, and changed out of my clothes into a pair of Gap pajamas. Lying on the sofa bed by the window I watched the headlights of cars from the FDR Drive skitter across the low popcorn ceiling, a strategy I’d been using lately to fall asleep, and allowed my thoughts to drift, as I sometimes did, to the day when Aeden had asked me across a ledge of petri dishes if I was okay. I felt his hand on my cheek, and the warmth of his breath on my throat. His mouth, light as a feather, was on my mouth, now on my nose, my eyes, my hair.
I awoke with a start. My bangs were plastered to my forehead with sweat, and my heart pounded under the light cotton fabric of my shirt. In just a few hours Aeden and Allegra would analyze their mice. A few hours more and I would know if their genes were the same ones I’d come to the lab to find. But a few hours may as well have been a lifetime away.
Without thinking about what I was doing, I put on jeans and a sweater and ran out the door. It was pouring rain outside, and I was instantly soaked. Half-blinded by the rain, I thought
I saw a man standing on the opposite side of the street, and heard the faint barking of a dog—but when I squinted more closely there was no one there, nothing but a lamppost glowing weakly on a deserted sidewalk. A cold stream of water seeped into my shoes—an old pair of Converse sneakers—as I ran toward the tall research buildings of the AUSR campus. The guard at the entrance pressed his face to the streaming glass of his booth and rang me in, not bothering to inspect my identity card or to ask what I was doing there at three in the morning.
Upstairs, on the fifth floor, night lights illuminated the path from the elevator in the lobby to the main room, though I could have found my way there blindfolded. I let myself in through the farthest door, closest to Aeden’s bay, locked the door behind me, and went to his workbench.
Silhouetted against the darkness I could see the dissecting scope Aeden had been calibrating, and the metallic sheen of the aluminum foil sheet beneath it, bearing scalpels and glass vials with screw-on caps, a dissecting kit, and an empty ice bucket. I moved up to his desk. A Starbucks cup with its sides all chewed up was pushed against the desk wall, alongside a series of papers on smell disorders I’d never read up on and knew nothing about: paranosmia, phantosmia, hyposmia, anosmia. In the air was an unsettling odor of tobacco, and something very faint, like sea breeze. Beneath the desk, next to the filing cabinet, a tennis racket lay exposed on the floor.
The filing cabinet was locked. I pulled open the desk drawer and saw there, among the loose coins and a pack of cigarettes, a silver set of keys.
Fastened to the cork of the desk wall were photographs of people, presumably friends and family. They gazed at me from bar stools and fireplaces, car windows and ski slopes, white-sanded beaches and mountains that seemed to touch the sky. In one of the pictures was a field of grass so green I wondered if it was even real. In another picture a middle-aged woman with gray eyes similar to Aeden’s smiled quizzically, almost sadly, at me, as if imploring me to stop. But the keys were in my hand, and I was no longer standing, but on my knees, sifting through the sea of green folders in Aeden’s filing cabinet.
At my desk I tried to ignore the jabbing pain in my head, and turned my face away from the picture on my own desk wall—a photograph of my father, taken when he was still setting up his chemistry lab: long-sleeved lab coat and clean-shaven face, shy blue eyes and a smile so wide and hopeful it was almost humbling.
I sank into my chair with the printouts of their three genes. One by one, I entered clips of the sequences into the window of a mouse genomic database, hit the Search tab, and watched links to matching sequences come up on my screen. Their genes were not new, as I had thought. They were known genes, and though their function in the olfactory bulb had not been tested, they belonged to a family of axon guidance molecules with well-documented functions in the brain. Moreover, a phylogenetic tree of the family showed that they were closely related to other gene members. This meant that if they had a role in the bulb, it was unlikely to be unique.
It also meant that they were probably not it: not the genes I was looking to find.
By the time I left the lab the sun had risen, and it was no longer raining. Brown leaves lay scattered across the campus grounds, all twisted and bent out of shape, but beautiful in their own way. The air was unexpectedly cold but had the pleasant smell of pencil shavings. I hurried toward the gates, and reached them to see Allegra descending a bus across the street. A chill coursed down my spine, a sense of being frozen in place, locked forever where I stood, at the foot of the gates in my damp clothing. Until she suddenly turned uptown, away from me, and I was able to breathe again. No one would ever know what I’d done, and no one had gotten hurt.
The sidewalk to the dorm building was speckled with sunlight and dotted with early risers. I saw women my age pushing babies in strollers, women clipping by in heels with their hair still wet from a shower. I saw men walking their kids to school with their phones held to their ears, and for some reason thought of Aeden. I remembered the lawn of grass on his desk wall, its freshness, and wished I could take back what I’d done.
Chapter 7
Growing up I often encountered mice in our house, despite my father’s efforts to keep the place clean. After dinner he would wander the small area of the kitchen with a rag over his shoulder and a cordless Black + Decker in his hand, swabbing the oil-splattered stove and running the vacuum over vegetable peels long adhered to the hardwood floor. My father was well over fifty and had lost his ability to see clearly without his glasses, and even with the glasses on, he was often too absorbed in his thoughts to give himself wholeheartedly to what he referred to as “the brain-cell-killing task of housekeeping.” Consequently, mice roamed our kitchen freely at night, especially during winter: gray-coated field mice so plump and tiny and strangely alive they seemed to have stepped straight out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.
More often than not they sniffed their way into the pantry and ended up stuck there to one of my father’s glue traps. Early the next day I would hear chirping sounds in the kitchen and run downstairs to find my father slouched over an old shoe box, syringing vegetable oil onto a squealing mouse’s cemented feet, drop by drop.
While the procedure lasted, the tiny creature thrashed miserably in place, stirring a scent like sawdust into the air, until the glue holding its claws to the paper dissolved in the oil and the mouse was able to wiggle free. Week after week, year after year, I followed my father out the door, to the forest behind our home, and watched mouse after mouse spring out of the shoe box and dash across the snow. “So long, sucker,” my father would yell after them, with his hand raised in a farewell salute. I laughed, watching him do that, though I was also saddened to imagine the mouse starving to death in some frigid hole in the ground, despite my father’s words of reassurance that their coats were thick and well insulated and nature would provide for them one way or another. And anyhow, he said to me once, making purposeful eye contact, their sense of smell was ultimately powerful enough to steer them in the right direction.
The summer I was eight we had the kitchen baseboards replaced, and I didn’t see a living mouse up close again until some twenty years later, when I walked into the main room that morning, two hours after returning the folder to Aeden’s filing cabinet.
On his bench was a cage similar to the ones I’d seen David wheeling out of the lab. Huddled against the see-through plastic wall of the cage was a litter of mice: brown instead of gray, and easily twice the size of their brothers in the wild. Their coats shone in the sunlight, natural light they’d probably never seen or felt. Aeden sat slouched over the scope in his faded jeans and a black T-shirt, forceps in his left hand and surgical scissors in the other, skinning a small head on the lit stage of the scope with the mindless precision of a surgeon. Allegra stood next to him in her lab coat, oblivious to my presence at the door.
I walked quietly past them and went to sit at my desk. Every ten minutes I could hear the mice clawing at the walls of their cage, too smooth and even to hold any traction, followed by a rapid succession of squeals, and then that awful silence. Who knows what a mouse feels at the instant its spine is dislocated, what it continues to feel after its head is no longer attached to its body, the last smell it perceives?
Before I knew it the cage was empty, and the dimethylformamide of their neuron-staining solution had wafted into my bay, permeating the air with a stink similar to rotting fish. Through the gap between our bays I could see a rocker seesawing on Allegra’s bench, and mounted on its base liquid-filled vials with tiny skull-like things drifting inside. I stared at the orphan gene on my screen and then shut my eyes.
Outside it was cold and windy but the sky was clear. I saw no trace of the fallen tree leaves of earlier, and wondered if someone had raked and bagged them away, or if the wind had simply dispersed them throughout campus. In the cafeteria I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a coffee and walked into the dining hall with my tray. I was about to make my way to an empty table in
a corner of the room when I saw Aeden and Allegra sitting nearby, chatting serenely over breakfasts of eggs and bacon and coffee, like a married couple.
Before Aeden could see me I darted out of the hall, instead eating my sandwich on the roof terrace, staring at the East River flowing southward beneath me. For the next half hour I roamed the campus grounds, past research buildings and administrative buildings, the dome-shaped auditorium and the faculty club, the library and a small preschool that felt about as strange and unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon. I walked a path lined with elms, up to a sad three-story structure without visible windows: the Animal Facility, where the mice were housed. Here the path split in two: one leading into the building and the other looping away, in the opposite direction. I took the second route, and made it back to the lab in time to see Aeden and Allegra walking into the imaging room with their data notebook and a bucket of ice containing their vials.
When they returned to their bay, some four hours later, the ice had melted and the vials were floating sideways in the water like shipwrecks. Aeden collapsed into his desk chair and sat quietly, with his head in his hands. Beyond the window of his desk was a pale strip of sky, the river beneath it coursing southward, toward the sunless watchtowers of the bridge. I had no way of knowing what had transpired in the imaging room, what their results were, and yet I knew.
Neither of them said a word until Steven barged into their bay. “How did it go?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Allegra said from her desk. There were dark circles under her eyes.
“Bullshit,” Steven said. “How could you not know?” He was a big blue-eyed guy with a round teddy bear face, and also, as far as I could tell, one of Aeden’s trusted friends. “What’s the verdict?” he asked Aeden, settling a beefy hand on his shoulder.
“Do you mind if we talk later, Steven?” Aeden said, not meeting his eyes.
The DNA of You and Me Page 4