I hurried over to where he stood. “Justin made me swear not to say anything until the meeting,” I said. “But it didn’t feel right not to tell you beforehand. I found a gene candidate, in the database. I don’t know that it’s related to the gene Craig found, but it looks promising.”
Aeden smiled at me with effort, looking mildly intrigued. “Is it what you’ve been looking to find?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it could be.”
“You’ll need to knock it out.”
“That’s where you come in. Justin says you’re the most qualified person in the lab to do the job. He says if you put your mind to it you could engineer a knockout in just months. We could work together.”
Aeden shook his head. “I can’t work with you, Emily.” He sounded almost indignant. “I’m happy for you, but I have my own experiment.”
I nodded, trying to hide my disappointment. “I thought this project was important to you.”
“It is. That’s why I haven’t lost faith in my genes.”
I let his words sit for a moment, seeing no loophole around them. Then I said, “I understand how you feel, Aeden. The first time I saw your genes I thought they looked good on paper, but I also had a strong suspicion that they wouldn’t turn out to have the role you’d hoped.”
“The first time?” Aeden said.
“I came across your sequences before Justin gave them to me,” I said quickly, realizing my mistake.
“Where?” Aeden asked. He was suddenly standing to his full height, blocking the view of the bridge.
“The database,” I lied.
“David’s database?”
“Yes,” I said, and it was here that things took a wrong and irreversible turn.
Aeden reached into his coat pocket for another cigarette, then changed his mind. “That’s impossible,” he said.
“Impossible?” I said, feeling dread curdle my stomach.
“About a year ago, when David built his library, Allegra and I wanted to know if our genes were in it. We tried to isolate them. Nothing caught. They’re not in his library, so they can’t be in the database. There’s no way you could have seen them there.”
I looked toward the railing, at the river’s shifting surface, and back at him. “The truth is, Aeden, I took the printouts from your filing cabinet. It’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever done before, or will ever do again. I’m sorry.” I glanced down at my watch, making out the dials through a fog. “It’s getting late,” I said. “We should start heading to the meeting.”
Aeden just stared at me. It was as though I’d suggested he go jump in the river.
“What do I tell Justin?” I asked, when it was clear he wasn’t going to respond. I couldn’t look at him; I stared at the brick-layered ground between us.
“You can tell him to go fuck himself.”
Justin was gazing dreamily out the window of his office. In a corner of the room an espresso machine was puffing steam. I’d smelled the coffee outside the door, but it was the sight of croissants layered on a silver tray that made my stomach turn as though I might throw up.
After wavering by the door I crossed the room and sank into the couch in front of him. The printed pages of my gene were on the coffee table, with the bridge motif highlighted.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Justin said from his chair. “Let me fix you a coffee.” He uncrossed his legs to stand, but didn’t. “What’s the problem?”
“Aeden isn’t coming,” I said, holding back a sudden impulse to shed tears.
“Of course he is.”
“He isn’t. I just spoke with him. He’s not interested. He says he has his own experiment.”
“He has no choice but to be interested. When he shows up, let me do the talking.”
“He won’t show up.”
“Yes, he will.”
“Maybe someone else in the lab can help me make the mouse, maybe Steven or Eduardo, or Wendy, maybe even David.”
Justin shook his head. “Aeden is the most qualified person to do the job.”
“Steven is just as experienced.”
“And nowhere near as skillful. We’ll get scooped waiting for Steven to engineer a mouse.” Justin stood up abruptly and walked to the espresso machine. With his back to me, he fixed himself a coffee. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked in an insinuating tone.
I was contemplating a full-fledged confession when Karen appeared at the door, looking very proper and dignified in one of her shoulder-padded blouses, her silver hair pulled back neatly from her face. “Do you need anything before I take my break, Justin?”
“Please tell Aeden we’re waiting for him.”
For ten long minutes I stared at my shoes while Justin drank his coffee. Just as he was finishing his second cup, Aeden walked into the room and sat on the metal folding chair next to Justin, facing me.
“Emily made a breakthrough,” Justin said. He pointed at the pages on the table. “It’s all there.”
Aeden didn’t move. I could feel his eyes on me.
Justin raised the page with the motif and held it out to him. To my surprise, Aeden took it. He sat with his head lowered to the page, studying the sequence, and after about a minute handed it back to Justin. “I’ll look at the gene more closely later. I’m sure I’ll know where to find it, won’t I, Emily?”
I met his eyes and knew he wasn’t about to mention what I’d done, knew that he was bigger than that.
“Can one of you please tell me what’s going on?” Justin demanded.
“Nothing,” Aeden said, and smiled at me.
“Then keep it that way. I haven’t got all day.” Slowly at first, reining in his enthusiasm, and gradually picking up speed, Justin went on to describe my gene, the motif in its sequence and how its mirror symmetry recalled a bridge. What became of the motif in the protein, what it did at a functional level, was anyone’s guess. There was no crystallography data to answer the question, and there probably wouldn’t be any for a long time. What was important now was to test the function of the gene, and to do so immediately. If it turned out to have a role in shaping the map of smell, and if there were other genes similar to it, we would be in business.
“Imagine the possibilities, Aeden. The long-term applications,” Justin said, sweeping the air with a hand for emphasis. “Congenital smell disorders, acquired smell disorders, the building of an artificial nose, maybe even an artificial brain. But to test the function of the gene we need to engineer a knockout mouse. If something comes out of the work, and I’m sure it will, you will be second author in Emily’s paper.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Aeden said. It took me a moment to realize he was being sarcastic.
“What do you want?” Justin asked him.
“I want nothing from you, Justin. I’m not getting involved in Emily’s work.” He looked at me here, as if to make sure that I’d understood. “I have my own work to worry about.”
In a lowered voice, Justin said, “I think you owe it to the lab to make this mouse, Aeden.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I’ve been supported by an individual fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. I still am.”
“What about your mice? The thousands of dollars it cost to make them, the hundreds of dollars it’s costing the lab to maintain your colony in the facility?”
“If the lab can’t afford to finance my work, that’s your fault, Justin.” Aeden rolled his eyes at the Persian rug under our feet, the walnut bookcase by the door with travel mementos and first editions of seminal books, including a framed drawing by Ramón y Cajal of the branching axons of a Purkinje cell.
Justin ignored the dig. “I’m not sure you realize that at this stage of the game you have no choice but to make this mouse, Aeden.”
“What if I refuse?” Aeden asked casually.
“Then I’ll have to ask David to sacrifice your mice as soon as this meeting is over. It’s a useless colo
ny and you know it.”
Aeden stared icily at him. “If David as much as goes near my mice I’ll be out of here today, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“You’ll do what Craig did?” Justin said, making a worried face.
“Don’t fuck with me, Justin. I’m dead serious.”
For a while no one spoke. I could hear Karen back at her desk, tapping at her keyboard, and feel the wind outside fighting to get in. Justin was staring pensively out the window. He raised his hand to the glass and rapped it with his knuckles; then, clearing his throat, he turned his attention back to Aeden. “So leave,” he said. “You can leave right now if that’s what you want.”
Aeden’s knee gave a little jolt.
“With your publication record of the last three years I’m sure you’ll do brilliantly.” Justin continued, “What do you think? You think he stands a chance of having his own lab?” To my dismay, I realized he was addressing me.
Aeden made a movement to stand up, but he didn’t. He remained seated on the metal chair, his shoes firmly planted on the rug, as if a force more powerful than his will held him down. The expression on his face was so devastatingly wretched I was transported back to the museum, and for several seconds, before I could bring myself to speak, I turned over in my head the portrait of Garshin. Then I saw what I hadn’t before: a way to make everything that had ever gone wrong between me and Aeden right, to have him forget what I’d done; a way to secure his friendship, his company, his very presence in my life.
“I want Aeden to have equal contribution,” I said.
Justin’s first reaction was to laugh. His second, seeing that I was serious, was to look back at Aeden, staring at the wall behind me as though it were a place he wished he could be transported to.
“Please step outside for a moment,” Justin told him.
Aeden stood up quickly. Before I knew it his chair was empty, and Justin and I were alone in the room.
“You realize the project will no longer be yours, but a joint venture. From the paper, to the mice, down to the very gene you discovered, you’ll have to share everything with him.”
“I don’t mind sharing,” I said. “Besides, Aeden deserves a break.”
“This is his break, don’t you get it? He has nowhere to go and nothing else in this lab to turn to. That was the whole point of calling his bluff.”
“His mother suffers from anosmia, did you know that?”
“So do a million other people.”
“I don’t want him to feel humiliated.”
“You think he’s not?” Justin said. “You think he’s pleased you stepped in to rescue him?”
“If he’s not now he will be, eventually. We’ll both be pleased.”
“You must be insane,” Justin told me. The look on his face, which I recall now as vividly as daylight, was of genuine alarm. “This isn’t like you, Emily.”
His presumption irked me. “So what is me, who am I, Justin?”
Justin seemed to have no answer for the question, not then anyhow. After a moment he pulled a small handkerchief from his breast pocket and began to dab the perspiration on his forehead. “I hope you realize the only thing in your favor is your surname.”
“My surname?”
“It starts with an A. Apell et al.? Your name will be first on the paper. It will be the name people will refer to, the name on the byline. Or do you no longer care about that either?”
“I do,” I said, unconvinced. “Sure I do.”
Justin sighed. “Please don’t tell me you didn’t factor that in, Emily, before offering him equal contribution.”
“Of course I did, Justin.” But I hadn’t. The thought of whose name would live on in the annals of history hadn’t even crossed my mind. For better or worse I no longer saw the gene I’d discovered as a means to having my own lab, my independence, but as a bridge to Aeden.
When Aeden returned to the room, I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or not. His face was basically unreadable. He gave a furtive glance in my direction and lowered himself back down on the folding chair, where he sat with his arms crossed, watching Justin in a way that made me wonder if he was processing what Justin was saying. Even after Justin had finished congratulating him on his equal contribution status and moved on to discuss the work itself, how between him and me we would need to keep experiments running twenty-four seven if we expected to have knockout mice within a year in order to beat Craig to the punch—that is, if Craig hadn’t published his results by then—Aeden seemed to be looking right through him.
It was only after about a half hour, after Justin had finally fallen silent and the meeting appeared to be over, or nearly over, that what was troubling him came to light.
“What about Allegra?” he asked.
“What about her?” Justin said.
“You left her out of the meeting. Isn’t she also a part of this project?”
“Yes, please ask her to come here.”
The person who followed Aeden into the room five minutes later felt like a shadow of the Allegra Meltzer I’d coexisted with for more than four months: the person who returned my good-mornings looking anywhere but at me, and in the bathroom washed her hands at cosmic speed, refusing to acknowledge me even when it was just the two of us standing in front of the mirrored row of white sinks. Her elegant frame, usually straight as a tack, was slightly sunken, and her hands senselessly spread on her thighs. She sat down next to me on the couch, close enough that I could feel the heat emanating from her body and smell the residue of her deodorant. Her hair part was uneven, and thick locks of chestnut hair covered the side of her face. I could see her button nose and green eyes only in spurts, every time she nodded at Justin or raised her chin at him in what felt like an effort to remain calm. Her lab coat had the yellow smear in the exact same spot, and it occurred to me she hadn’t laundered it in weeks.
Justin spoke to her at length, about my gene and the race against the San Diego lab. In the quiet interlude that followed, when it became apparent to everyone that Justin had basically finished saying all he was going to say, Allegra unclasped her hands from her knees and leaned into the table. “Can I take a look?” She gathered the sequence pages carefully in her hands, as if afraid to harm them, and settled the bundle on her lap.
She’d been sitting like that for a few seconds, with her head lowered to the pages, when Justin embarked on an account of the lab’s expenses of the last three years. How the failed project had cost him a small fortune and how he would have to keep a close tab on the lab budget from now on, cutting corners where he wished he didn’t have to.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I can’t afford to have three people working on this project.”
Allegra raised her head from a page. “She doesn’t know the first thing about bench work,” she said, speaking to Justin as if I weren’t there.
“Of course she does,” Justin said. “Don’t you, Emily?”
Allegra turned her face to mine, meeting my eyes for the first time. She looked at me as if she expected me to acknowledge my shortcomings right then and there.
“Yes,” I answered. “I have hands-on experience.”
“We all have different talents,” Justin said. “Not everyone is equally good at the bench. Are you or are you not capable of handling the workload?”
Aeden gave me a beseeching look from his chair. Though it was clear that Allegra’s position in the lab was hanging by a thread, I was disinclined to help bring her on board the project. It had to do with Aeden, his friendship with her and my fear that if she stayed, there would be no room left for us, but also with the strong sense I’d always had in her presence of not fitting in.
I looked back at Justin. “Perfectly capable,” I said, and from the corner of an eye saw Allegra gaze away from me forever.
Three days later she stood on a snowy corner on York Avenue and Sixty-Third Street. A taxi was parked at the bend of the street, and three years’ worth of textbooks and folde
rs and notebooks were packed inside its trunk. Aeden had carted the boxes down from the lab himself.
It had been threatening to blizzard all week, and finally it was: snowflakes falling from the milky sky at a dizzying pace, dimming the air and the sidewalk. Aeden’s coat was fully unbuttoned and his head exposed. Allegra’s coat, on the other hand, was buttoned all the way up to her chin, and on her head was a fur hat similar to the kind that Pavel in my father’s lab had worn. She was holding a helium balloon—one of the several I’d seen floating around in the conference room that morning, where a going-away party I’d been careful to stay away from had been held in her honor.
After a while they embraced. From where I stood I could see the top of her hat just above Aeden’s shoulder, the red balloon bobbing above them. The lab cart Aeden had used for the boxes, precariously parked on an incline, looked like it was about to roll down the street, all the way to the FDR Drive.
Suddenly, as if she could sense me watching them, Allegra raised her face to the research building across the street, all the way up to the floor of the lab. Instinctively I backed out of the window, though whether she had seen me, or had even been looking to see me, was anyone’s guess. For all I knew, for all I know now, she was taking one last look at the place she’d come to three years earlier, full of hope, and walked out of empty-handed and burned out.
I never saw her again, though I do sometimes in my dreams, a recurrent dream I’ve had on and off ever since I heard, from a reliable source, that Allegra had given up on science and was working as a patent agent in a law firm downtown.
In my dream the plane I’ve been traveling on has landed, and I emerge into a crowded airport terminal where I’m late for a connecting flight. I’m moving quickly, weaving my way with a heavy briefcase between throngs of passengers toward my gate, when I see her, a familiar speck in the sea of faces moving toward me, in the opposite direction. But it isn’t until she has walked past me that I realize who she is. I turn around and begin to follow her. “Allegra?” I tap her shoulder with my free hand, but she continues to move, away from me. “It’s Emily,” I say, and in a louder voice, attracting bemused glances from an approaching wave of people: “Emily from the lab, don’t you recognize me?”
The DNA of You and Me Page 8