The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  “I think I’ve deduced that much about you,” Aeden said, smiling across the table at me.

  The waiter had brought our orders: blackout cake for Aeden and lemon meringue pie for me, plus coffees. I sank my fork into the pie, savoring the sweet lemon tang.

  “Do you think it shaped your life?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your sensitivity to the smell of cut grass, would you say that it has affected who you are?”

  “I don’t know. What you’re asking me in a way is what came first, the chicken or the egg. The answer I’ve been divulging now for several years is that the egg came first. A mutant egg.”

  “Funny,” Aeden said with a frown, clearly finding as much humor in the joke as my last date had. I thought he would leave it at that, but then he said, “I don’t think it’s just you, Emily. I think we all feel like mutants in our own way.”

  Hearing him say that, I felt a weight inside of me had been lifted. “You’re probably right, Aeden. The problem is I don’t know what everyone else is feeling. I’m not inside anyone else to know. But how about you? What brought you to the project?”

  It wasn’t until later that night, until after we left the Tramway and reached the scaffolding of our dorm and had been standing out in the chilly night air for a while, discussing the pros and cons of smell hypersensitivity, that Aeden told me about his mother.

  The accident had happened over a Christmas holiday during which he’d accompanied her on a last-minute shopping errand and was following her down a flight of stairs, to the underground lot where they’d parked the car. His mother slipped and fell down the stairs, landing on the concrete floor.

  “When I first saw her going down I thought one of her earrings had come loose and she was bending down to look for it. The fall was so slow, so unreal. The next thing I know, my mother’s lying motionless at the bottom of the stairs.” He flicked ashes from his cigarette on the pavement. “A week later she began to complain. Food was flavorless and she couldn’t smell anything, not even a burning pot. A month later they told her the impact had sheared off the nerve endings in her olfactory bulb, and she was diagnosed with anosmia. That was four years ago. The latest prognosis from the specialist in New Jersey is that she will never recover her sense of smell. The worst part of it is that my mother essentially lived to smell the roses. She loved gardening and cooking. Especially cooking. There was always a cake baking in the oven, and she would throw dinner parties every weekend. It was her thing to have people over. These days it’s a good day if she can get out of bed. I’m lucky if I can get her on the phone.”

  Aeden dragged on his cigarette and let out a soft stream of smoke. I noticed that his nose had a slightly veered septum, and found myself drawn to the imperfection.

  “So I figured,” he said, “if I could contribute to our understanding of how the map of smell is formed, someone in the future might be able to restore a severed bulb. Not that my mother will live to see the benefits. The kind of cure I’m talking about is decades away, and my mother is in her sixties.”

  “Do you blame yourself for the accident?” I asked.

  Aeden shrugged. “My hands were caught up with shopping bags and my mother was wearing high heels. So no, I don’t blame myself. But if I could turn back the clock, if I could go back in time, I would have let go of those bags much sooner than I did.”

  Level with his voice I could hear the seashore drift of vehicles on the FDR Drive that lulled me to sleep at night, and make out their lights. Aeden was on his last cigarette and I almost didn’t want him to finish it, knowing that our conversation would come to an end.

  He fixed his eyes on mine again. “I don’t know if what you’re looking to find is out there, Emily. I don’t even know that it exists. But if it does, I doubt you’ll find it in the database. It’s pretty incomplete. David built it in his spare time. I don’t know that he even knew what he was doing. Many genes are missing from his database. I know this for a fact. If I were you I wouldn’t set my hopes too high.” He tossed the burning butt of his cigarette and turned toward the sidewalk.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked, catching the inflection of my voice. It was unrealistic of me to expect anything from him, to be disappointed.

  “I need to photograph some bulbs and prepare for tomorrow.”

  “What’s happening tomorrow?”

  “Our second line of knockout mice. We’re hoping to see something interesting.” Aeden looked away from me, at the empty avenue. I wondered if he could read the doubt I was feeling in my face. “It’s getting late. I better run.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night, Emily,” he said, and hurried off. I watched him head across the street toward the campus, with his coat flapping open behind him like a pair of wings. There was an awkwardness in his stride I found touching, something about it that brought my father to mind, except my father’s way of walking was not brisk but slow, very slow: his right leg always dragging a beat behind his left, as if he were moving along a path too dangerous and unknown to advance properly upon with any freedom.

  “Good luck with your experiment,” I suddenly shouted, the words just slipping out of my mouth. But Aeden was a long way ahead, and he gave no indication of hearing me. In a way, I hoped he hadn’t. To wish him luck was a mistake, because I hadn’t really meant it, and because at the end of the day science has nothing to do with luck, but with truth, and the truth does not always make one happy.

  Chapter 10

  During his years as a chemist, and for most of his life, my father aimed to resolve the structure of a sodium/proton exchanger: a revolving-door type of protein that sweeps sodium and hydrogen ions in and out of living cells, and without which many life forms on earth would not exist.

  My father devised a way to extract the membrane-bound protein from bacterial cells and reconstitute it to a purified liquid suspension so clear and inodorous it could have passed for water. The goal was then to find the conditions that would drive the protein molecules to form a crystal lattice from which the position of its atoms could be deduced, the three-dimensional structure of the protein resolved, and the inner workings of the revolving door gleaned. But the molecules, by their very nature, were disinclined to mingle, much less form a crystal lattice pure enough to diffract a high-powered X-ray beam neatly on a film.

  It wasn’t until much later in his career, when I was in my late teens, that my father came to produce high-quality crystals in his lab, on a rainy autumn day.

  The night he succeeded, it was dark outside and he hadn’t returned home. No one was answering the phone in the lab and when I tried him in the office the line went straight to voicemail: This is Roger Apell. I’m sorry I’m not here to take your call, but if you leave your name and number and a detailed message telling me what this is about I will get back to you. To make matters worse, two of my classmates from school were in our den, waiting with headphones for him to arrive: my father offered tutoring on the side.

  The phone in the kitchen started ringing, and it was my father. “Come over,” he said.

  “To the lab?” I asked.

  “I want you to see something.”

  “It’s pelting rain outside.”

  “Call a limo.”

  “A limo?”

  “Don’t ask questions, Emily. Just come over.”

  There were no limousines in Rockford that I knew of, only a modest car service company whose survival hinged on nearby Chicago and the O’Hare Airport.

  “You’re sure you want me to go there, Dad?”

  “You heard me.”

  After getting rid of the two boys in our den, telling them my father was stuck in his lab with an important breakthrough in the hopes that this might actually turn out to be true, I rode my bicycle three miles west along the narrow shoulder of the road, vehicles honking and flashing their headlights at me, to the College of Medicine.

  In the lobby of my father’s building I made out singing
, and as I approached the lab—two rooms at the end of a sinewy ground floor untouched in decades but for a recently erected DNA sequencing center—I smelled beer in the air. A homegrown student whose eyes were often troublingly red was sitting cross-legged on a bench, shoulder to shoulder with Pavel, the head technician of the lab for as long as I could remember. Pavel was a colossal man with colossal hands, whose lethargic way of carrying himself around the lab made him always seem to be either drunk or afflicted with some tender and agonizing pain smack in the center of his heart. But that night he was buoyant with happiness, singing “Dark Eyes” in Russian at the top of his lungs. “Hey, you,” he said, summoning me with his empty beer bottle. “Come join us.”

  I charged past him in my dripping raincoat.

  “What’s the matter, Emily, you don’t like ‘Ochi Chernye’?”

  “You know I do.” I actually did, very much, ever since he’d played the song on his viola over a Thanksgiving dinner at our house.

  “So live a little. Results are fantastic.”

  But fantastic had the slippery feel of one of those sinkholes people were always disappearing into in Florida. One false move and you were done for. “We’ll sing and cry together later, Pavel,” I said. In retrospect, nothing could have been more true.

  I found my father in his office, head bent into the stereomicroscope on his desk. The beehive-like dishes were piled so high all I could see of him was a tuft of white hair. “You won’t believe this,” he said, raising his face from the eyepiece.

  “Perfect crystals,” I said skeptically. It wasn’t my first time there at that hour of night, his first time calling me with a false alarm.

  My father stood up. “Take a look.” He gestured with his hand toward the dish on the stage, perched under a yellow spill of light as familiar to me as the lighting in our kitchen.

  I lowered myself into his chair and looked through the eyepiece. I had seen crystals before: needles with bright cutting edges and polygons and cylinders and cigar-shaped rods that looked like the real thing and disintegrated at the slightest nudge of a pipette tip, dissolving back into the medium in which they’d been born. But these were different.

  I turned the focus knob back and forth between my fingers, like my father had taught me, and saw hundreds of cubes suspended brightly in the medium, reflecting the yellow scope light like grains of sand on a sunny shore. There was a toughness about them, a finality of purpose the other crystals had never had, and I imagined my father’s protein packed tightly, invisibly inside each one: thousands of revolving doors locked hand in hand by unseen interactions extending in six different planes. If they held their own against the X-ray beam it would be unprecedented, a biochemical feat equivalent to putting a man on the moon.

  I looked up at him, trying to contain my enthusiasm. “What happens next?”

  My father was standing with his back to the torrent of sleet falling steadily across the window. In his world of sacrifice and unfailing optimism it was as though everything had already happened: the crystals transported to his collaborators in Chicago, the 3-D structure of the protein resolved, long-overdue papers published back-to-back, the lab expanded and renewed. His future secured, as well as mine.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “This is it, Emily.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “You know it isn’t. We’re not done yet.”

  “Of course we are,” my father said. “This is the moment.”

  But in fact everything ended there.

  A few days later, despite their promising appearance, the crystals produced a diffraction pattern too weak to be accurately interpreted. Something in their internal arrangement was off, and they did not hold up against the X-ray beam. And while my father painstakingly worked around the clock to try to solve the problem, playing around with temperature and tweaking the acidity of the buffer in the hopes of growing better crystals, a crystallography lab in Germany we’d never heard of came out with a paper in Nature explaining in full detail the revolving-door mechanism.

  Two years after that my father’s lab was shut down for lack of funding, and my father found himself a retiree at age sixty-five. The day he died I got a call in Champaign with an urgent message. I hurried out of the calculus class I’d enrolled in, to the admissions office, and picked up the phone: black, antiquated, medieval-looking. A nurse was on the other end of the line, calling from Rockford Memorial Hospital. My father had suffered a stroke and wanted to see me.

  When I arrived he was lying on a cot with a needle sticking out of his forearm, hooked to a feeding machine through a thin plastic tube. The right side of his face was paralyzed. When he spoke it was from one corner of his mouth, the words sounding like mindless blabber. The surgeon, before stepping quietly out of the room and leaving me alone with my father, told me there was a blood-filled bulge in the left hemisphere of his brain, so deep it was basically inoperable.

  The room had a single window, tall and netted, that showed the limpid spring day outside, the cold sun high in the sky. I took my father’s hand and held it, and heard him tell me he’d been a failure. That he had failed me in every way. I told him he hadn’t. I told him he had no control over what other people were doing across the Atlantic, and about me, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t his fault, how I was. It was just who I was, how I’d been born. There was fear in his eyes, watching me speak, fear in his eyes when I tried to let go of his hand. That’s when I told him everything would be okay. I was a big girl now, I could take care of myself, I would be fine. He didn’t believe me, but after a while he fell asleep, and never woke up again.

  The last year of his life he drove to his lab every morning, out of habit, and home again, stopping on his way back at the public library and staying there for hours. After his death I imagined my father sitting in that library with his coffee thermos, a legal pad and pen, and swollen notebooks decades old, going over the chemical recipes with which he’d reared crystals like sugar cubes, trying in vain to figure out where he went wrong.

  So I was worried about Aeden. In particular, I was worried about his unrelenting faith in his three genes, and his apparent blindness to all the evidence mounting against them.

  After analyzing their third line of mice, Aeden and Allegra failed to show up at a group meeting where they were scheduled to present images of their bulbs. It was apparent to everyone at the table that they had nothing to show but negative results: mouse brains with unaltered maps of smell. Yet cages with live mice inside them continued to appear every day on Aeden’s bench, and at the end of each day he and Allegra would sit for hours in their bay, studying the brain images on his laptop.

  From my desk the images were impossible to see, and the language in which the two spoke to each other, in lowered voices, was so technical and foreign to me that for all my reading and rereading the papers in the field, I was unable to form a clear picture in my head. And yet despite this I knew full well that whatever they were seeing was not what they wanted, or had expected, to see—not what Aeden had had in mind to find when he’d come to the lab three years earlier, after his mother’s accident.

  Late in the evenings, after everyone was gone for the day and it was just the two of us in the room, I would sometimes hear him talking on the phone with his mother, inquiring how her day had gone: “Did Dad get the tree?” After a brief pause: “Who’s decorating it this year?” A burst of fresh laughter across my desk wall. “Mark?”

  Other nights, when he wasn’t on the phone with his mother, or discussing the injustices of global politics with the lady who mopped the floors, or humming along with his iPod, Aeden would sit silently in front of the mouse bulb on his screen, as though he were racking his brain trying to understand what had led to the unwanted image, and where he had gone wrong.

  At times like these I fantasized about turning the clock back so that he might start over again, on the right foot. At times like these I also found myself rehashing our Tramway Diner evening, cutting across the moments and rearra
nging them into long shimmering sequences, different from the original, and yet the picture always the same: his smile across the table, the feel of his hand on my elbow crossing the street, and beneath the scaffolding of our dorm building his gray eyes fixed on mine. I don’t know if what you’re looking to find is out there. I don’t even know that it exists.

  Chapter 11

  Since that evening six weeks had passed. October had merged with November, and a lonely Thanksgiving dinner in my dorm had given way to snow-layered sidewalks and men with woolen caps rolled down to their eyes selling trees in the street, cajoling me into a false state of merriment. Christmas party invites were posted in every elevator on campus, and then the parties had already taken place and everyone in the lab was gone. Except for a graduate student coming in the mornings to work on her thesis, and David dropping by every so often to sort through shipments of perishables and check on the mice in the facility, I was practically alone in the lab.

  The doors at the end of the hallway would slam into each other with a backlog of air and I’d jump in my chair, only to hear the tick of the clock on the wall and the rasp of my laptop fan, and that all-engorging silence between Aeden’s desk and mine, throughout the empty bays of the lab.

  For all that I enjoyed having nothing to distract me, it was sometimes depressing. Especially at night, with the bridge illuminated like a Christmas tree outside my window. To add to my discontent, the lab’s database had come full circle in a disappointing way. Aeden and Allegra’s three genes weren’t in it, which meant that other genes expressed in the bulb—possibly those I was looking to find—could be missing as well, though I didn’t know this for certain.

  Among the few unknown genes that I had found, there was only one that gave me hope. I had aligned its sequence against several axon guidance genes, including Aeden and Allegra’s, and found a few hazy similarities. On the other hand, the difference, defined by a small segment in my gene of letters repeating at almost timed intervals, stood out like a tidal wave in an ocean. I didn’t know if this had anything to do with what I was looking to find, or what the San Diego lab claimed to be seeing in the mutant fly gene. But it did seem special, or at least different from anything I’d ever seen.