The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  It was during the last week of that December, while everyone was away, that Justin showed up again in the lab.

  He’d been away for two months, at conferences and seminars. That is what he’d informed everyone in his mass emails, and also what the asides in his private messages to me, inquiring about my progress in the project, had hinted at: sick of hotel food, left my comfy sheep slippers behind, I sometimes wish I had a companion to travel with.

  But his face, when he showed up in my bay, was lobster sunburned, and his jacket sportive and casual compared to the stiff suits he usually wore, and when in the back seat of a yellow cab on our way to lunch I pressed him about his whereabouts, he told me he’d been in Florida.

  “Doing what?”

  “Flying.”

  “A plane?”

  “I should think so. I haven’t flown a kite since I was twelve.”

  “You never told me you could fly a plane.”

  I was actually amazed, not because I doubted he had the coolheadedness to pilot an aircraft, but because I somehow couldn’t imagine him liking being up in the air. Justin smiled nonchalantly at me, and moving closer to my side of the seat, settled his right hand on my kneecap. I thought of asking him what he was doing, but his touch was so light and unassuming it almost felt as if he were holding on to me for balance more than for anything else.

  At the restaurant, a place on Broadway with padded red leather walls and dim illumination whose name I’ve forgotten, Justin ordered two onion soups for starters, and for our main course steak frites, accompanied by two glasses of a Napa cabernet. When the soups arrived he made a neat little bib of his napkin and began to eat without me, while eyeing a woman sitting alone at a table nearby. I wanted to talk to him about the sequence fragment, but for the next half hour or so, while he ate and eyed the woman, it was mainly Justin who did the talking.

  He’d purchased a small aircraft, a two-seat Piper, against his parents’ wishes, and so they knew nothing about it. But it had been a lifelong dream of his to own a plane by age forty, and if not now, when? It was difficult enough to figure out how to be happy.

  “Does it make you happy to fly a plane?” I asked.

  “Immensely.”

  “How come?”

  “I can forget who I am. Up there it’s just me and the plane, and nobody else. I feel more alive than I do down here. Even my skin smells different.”

  “That’s because you probably can’t smell it at high altitude.”

  Justin laughed.

  I didn’t want to ask him what it was about himself that he wanted to forget. I didn’t want to get into a personal conversation with him.

  “At any rate, my parents will be finding out very shortly because I’m flying my Piper to Maine in just a few hours. It’s where we converge, you know, every Christmas, my mother and father and my three sisters with their husbands and their brats. For a week we all live like family, in a very large and very beautiful house with a full-blown view of the sea. You’ve never seen anything like it, Emily. It’s like living inside a ship. Here, I’ll show you a picture.”

  He raised his BlackBerry from the table and scrolled the screen for a picture but luckily found none to show me. “Pity, I thought I’d photographed the house.” He laid the BlackBerry down.

  “Can we talk about the finding, Justin?”

  “That’s right, your gene. What about it?” He picked up his second glass of wine.

  “There’s something I’m still trying to figure out. A pattern. I don’t know that it has anything to do with what Craig found, but it looks special, different. I can’t explain how.”

  “What you need is a vacation.”

  “I’m having one now,” I said. “As we speak.” Though I didn’t consider having lunch with Justin a vacation, I was grateful for the meal, and for the company. “This is actually my first time out of the campus neighborhood in weeks.”

  “Precisely my point. You shouldn’t be spending your holiday cooped up in the lab. You should be out and about, enjoying yourself. I have an idea.”

  I was worried he was about to suggest I go with him to Maine, but he didn’t. He produced a wallet from the inside of his jacket, took out a wad of vouchers, and laid them on the table: Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, Body Worlds, a singles’ night out in the Empire State Building observatory, a Broadway show called Wicked, another one called Rent.

  “You don’t want them?” I asked.

  “They’re all yours.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Justin.” I gathered the vouchers and warily dropped the wad into my handbag. I could already see them collecting dust in my night table drawer, could easily see myself throwing them down the garbage chute outside my dorm room in a month, maybe two. I had little to no interest in spending time outside the lab, much less at a singles’ night out. The likelihood of finding someone suitable for me at that type of event was so remote I would have been better off placing an ad in Psychology Today: “Girl seeks intimacy.”

  “How old are you?” Justin asked me.

  I looked at him. “Twenty-eight,” I said, though I was closer to twenty-nine. “Why do you ask?”

  “I see you and I see myself twelve, fifteen years ago. So single-minded and ambitious, so alone.”

  I smiled at him. “You mean you’re not like that anymore?”

  “Are you happy, Emily?”

  “Happy.” I wondered if he seriously expected me to answer the question. Then I took the safe route. “How do you define happiness?”

  “Are you satisfied with your present life, your personal circumstances?”

  The way he was looking at me, with his eyes warily centered on mine, made me feel as though whatever answer I gave him would be more about him than it would be about me.

  “I can’t imagine any other way of life,” I finally said, guessing this would please him.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Did you?” I asked, but I wasn’t surprised.

  “Yes,” Justin said, with a satisfied face. “I just wanted confirmation.”

  I lifted my coat from the empty chair beside me and wrapped my arms around it, feeling uncomfortably cold.

  “You’re cold?” he asked me, fanning himself with his dessert menu.

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly annoyed. “It’s cold in here, Justin.”

  Justin chuckled. “It must be eighty degrees in here, Emily.”

  Chapter 12

  What stands out in my memory of that December, aside from what Justin said to me in the restaurant, is stumbling a few days later upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  I had spent the entire morning in the lab, submitting the segment of my gene with the repeating letters to pattern-recognition programs in the hopes of pinning down a motif. After several hours the search had produced no results, and left me staring at the ATGCs filling the small window on my screen with the same incomprehension. Yet something about the way the letters repeated was familiar.

  I was dizzy from looking at the screen, and across the street the metal hamper in my bathroom was threatening to pop open with dirty clothes. It was a Sunday. Sunday was the day I vacuumed my dorm and shopped for food and did the laundry, and I hadn’t done any of these things in more than two weeks. A shopping list was in my coat pocket, but the minute I stepped out of the lab and felt the fresh air on my face, and saw the avenue bathed in sunlight, I trailed off, in a different direction.

  Instead of heading to Gristedes, the neighborhood supermarket, I headed west, toward the place where I’d left Allegra’s hairclip lying on the counter. The next thing I knew, the campus neighborhood was far behind me, and I was gazing at Christmas trees lying discarded on sidewalks and couples with strollers and Starbucks shops wafting the smell of coffee into the cold sunny street. The day was blindingly bright, and the ATGC letters swam in my mind. Something about the
ir pattern was missing from my frame of reference, something I was blind to, like a person with anosmia is blind to smell.

  I ventured past the Nectar diner, toward Fifth Avenue, and caught sight of a building that seemed to span the entire length of the block. Tourist buses and food carts were parked at the foot of wide steps ascending to an arched entryway where there was a giant placard with a consonant-riddled name I could hardly begin to pronounce. From where I stood I could see a long line of people waiting at the entrance of the building. I was tempted to keep walking, but the vouchers Justin had given me were still in my handbag, and before I knew it my feet had taken me across the street, up the crowded steps, to the end of the line.

  Inside the museum I wandered the cavernous first floor, navigating my way around glass-encased jewelry and pottery and drinking cups from the Roman Empire. I rented an audio guide from the front desk and walked the floor some more, and after a series of long-winded explanations from a British female voice I pulled the plugs out of my ears and found my way to the nearest cafeteria.

  At the register I paid for a cold sandwich and a coffee and sat at a small table overlooking Central Park. Beyond the glass I could see white clouds roaming the sky, and beneath them benches flanking a path that wound all the way uphill into the distance. The symmetry brought the gene back to mind, swooped me right back to that impossible-to-crack pattern. Why couldn’t I see it? What was it about it that made me feel I was in two places at the same time?

  According to biologist François Jacob, whose biography I’d read, there was something called night science—as opposed to day science. Day science meant using the side of your brain involved in thinking. Night science meant using your intuition. Day science meant looking at the sequence of a gene and seeing nothing in it you could understand. Night science meant looking at it again with a vague presentiment, a hazy sensation not yet consolidated into thought.

  I abandoned the sandwich and the coffee and went up a wide staircase with brass handrails to the second floor. A long hall of tall opalescent ceilings led into several rooms without doors. I entered one of the rooms and gazed at the paintings on the walls. Some of them left me cold, despite the swarms of people surrounding them and the angry pleas of the guard to step back, while other, apparently less well-known works struck me as spectacular: a pregnant woman cradling a cat on her lap, snow-coated trees at the edge of a crystal-blue lake.

  I drifted across one room, into another, past a painting of naked women dancing in a circle, into another room, past the portrait of a woman with a mustache, into yet another room, smaller than the rest. It was inside this small room, possibly the quietest on that floor, that I first saw him, studying me undisturbed from a wall. He sat with his elbows resting on a desk cluttered with folders and books, gazing at me with eyes so intensely troubled it was as though he’d suffered some bottomless loss from which there was no conceivable recovery. I walked slowly over to him until I was standing practically inches away from his face, imagining the smell of turpentine.

  His resemblance to Aeden was uncanny: the same gray eyes and acute gaze, the same thick eyebrows jutting into the bridge of an aquiline nose, dark hair tossed back from his wide forehead. If not for the beard and the priestly looking shirt the man was wearing, and for the fact that the painting was obviously old and hanging in a museum, I would have thought he was Aeden.

  “Repin. My favorite artist in the room.”

  I turned away from the painting. Behind me was a man about my age, or slightly older. There was a badge on his shirt that said met, with his picture on it.

  “He reminds me of someone I know,” I said in a casual voice.

  “I hope your friend has better luck,” the man said. “This one threw himself down a stairwell and died when he was thirty-three years old.”

  “That’s a sad story,” I said, recalling what Aeden had told me about his mother. I stared back at the canvas, trying to visualize the man with a paintbrush in his hand, and couldn’t. His hands were resting on either side of an open book.

  “Are you an artist?” the man behind me asked.

  “No,” I answered in my blandest voice, hoping he would go away.

  “Do you paint at all?”

  “I wish I knew how,” I caught myself saying, and realized it was true.

  I turned around and gave the man a closer look: pressed white shirt and corn-blond hair, a straight-shooting face, mainstream and modest. The sort of guy my father would have been delighted to see me with if he’d been alive.

  “Did he make other paintings before he died?” I asked, glancing at the portrait.

  The man gave me a funny look. “That’s Garshin,” he said, nodding toward the canvas. “Not Repin. Garshin was a Russian author. He’s the one with the tragic life.”

  This surprised me. I’d been under the impression that we were talking about the same person, that the artist and the model were one and the same. “I thought it was a self-portrait,” I said.

  “Oh, no. That would have required a mirror right around here.” He raised an arm in the air and held it out between us, flashing an image through my head.

  “A mirror?” I asked. It was as though someone had miraculously handed me a sheet of paper I’d crumpled long ago, having dismissed its vital contents as unimportant. “I need to leave.”

  He followed me across the room, to the nearest exit. “There’s a self-portrait of van Gogh two rooms down.”

  I stopped and turned around to look at him. In a city of eight million people, it was unlikely that we would ever cross paths again. “Maybe some other time,” I said.

  The man smiled at me, a sweet grin displaying the gap between his two front teeth. “John Cavalier,” he said.

  I shook his hand, chalk-dry and smelling faintly of some organic flammable substance. “Thank you, John,” I said, not volunteering my name. “You’ve been very helpful. More than you will ever know.”

  A question mark appeared on his face, but before he could put thoughts into words I was gone.

  The sky outside had faded into evening. On the sidewalk, awnings had vanished and stores were locked up for the day. Apartment windows I hadn’t seen before were glowing from the inside, and the few people remaining on the street were walking fast, as if eager to reach wherever they were headed to. It was one of those winter late afternoons when standing on a corner, waiting for the light, one can sometimes get to feeling that some essential and irrecoverable moment has passed. But that wasn’t how I felt. What I felt then, rushing through the streets, was that whatever might have passed me by, whatever I’d missed having or experiencing, was nothing compared to what I had discovered.

  In the lab a handful of people had returned from their vacations, including Allegra, who was sitting on a bench, blasting a hair dryer at a grid of biological slides. On her lab coat was a yellow smear from the potassium ferrocyanide of the neuron-staining mixture. As I hurried past her she smiled reflexively at me, and I realized that I was smiling at her; that in fact, I had been smiling all along.

  On my laptop screen was the sequence I’d been examining before leaving the lab. I had probed the letters for days, attempting to draw a theme from their arrangement and failing miserably, never realizing what that theme could be, or that the solution to seeing it was so simple.

  I color-coded the ATGC letters to yellow, red, blue, and green. I bolded the font and shrank the letters to tiny blocks, then minimized them further, until the blocks merged into a line of alternating greens and reds and blues and yellows followed by the same exact colors but in reverse, and then I remember gasping for air. One half of the sequence was the mirror image of the other, like two arms of a bridge.

  My father once said to me, shortly before he died, that a discovery is nothing but a moment. The moment when a truth, otherwise obscured, reveals itself, and your eyes are the only pair of eyes in the world to see it, and your mind the only mind to comprehend the truth and certainty of what you see. The moment is all you’re
left with, because that is all you will ever care to remember. Not the published paper that will end up on a shelf or in a filing cabinet, not the grant, not even the prize (if you should be so lucky to receive one), but the moment.

  “Aeden,” I said, and heard the echo of my voice.

  No one was there, not at his desk and not anywhere. I was alone in the lab, and the clock on the wall indicated that several hours had passed since I’d stormed into the main room and charged past Allegra. It also indicated, amazingly enough, that the moment my father had spoken of was already behind me.

  Chapter 13

  For weeks I wanted to approach Aeden with the news, but Justin, wanting me to run more tests on the gene, and also concerned about word getting out and leaking all the way across the country to the San Diego lab, had instructed me not to. The morning Aeden and I were scheduled to confer with Justin in his office, I emailed Aeden an hour before and asked him to meet me on the East River promenade.

  When I descended the ramp he was there, slouched by the railing in his long black coat. An icy wind was blowing from lower Manhattan, sweeping his hair away from his face. My plan was to tell him about the finding and Justin’s decision regarding it, so that he would be less taken aback when we met later. But when his gaze fell on me I realized that what I wanted, had been craving all along, was to have this one private moment with him, away from the lab.

  I waved at him, but he didn’t reciprocate. Instead he stared back at the water and raised the cigarette he was holding to his mouth.