She stops then, and turns around to face me, but the face I see as her eyes settle on me isn’t hers. The face I’m seeing isn’t one I’m able to recognize at all, until it dawns on me that I’m looking at my own.
Part Three
Recombination
Chapter 14
The first time Aeden saw me handling a pipette he walked away and for the rest of the day did not speak to me again. Not that he’d been addressing me with much more than monosyllables since our meeting in Justin’s office. I’ll see you here again in an hour were his usual words for me, spoken to the timer in his hand, the water bath on my workbench, my lab coat pocket.
About a week after Allegra left the lab we received a FedEx package containing a DNA primer we’d rush ordered from a biological supplies company in Massachusetts. Aeden tore open the dry-iced packet and stood the tiny vial in crushed ice alongside an Eppendorf tube with buffer. I thought he would walk away, but he didn’t.
I reached for the stand of pipettes in front of me and pulled out the thinnest one. I wrapped my fingers around the slender neck and pressed the lever with my thumb and aimed the tip of the pipette to the inner wall of the vial, raising the lever carefully to suck up all the liquid inside. The idea was to transfer it to the Eppendorf and mix it with the buffer. Nothing too complicated, nothing I hadn’t done before in summer lab rotations and graduate school and in the lab when Aeden wasn’t watching. But now he was. My hand shook, and instead of aiming the liquid into the tube I squirted it outside, wasting a pricey drop of DNA designed especially for our purposes. It rolled down the wall of the plastic tube like a tear and vanished into the ice. “I’m sorry,” I said, and giggled, from sheer nervousness.
“You could have helped her stay,” Aeden said.
It was the most personable thing he’d said to me in weeks, perhaps months, but by the time I raised my eyes to look at him, he, like the primer, was gone.
A week after the spill we went into the cell storage room at the end of the hallway to retrieve our frozen cells. We had screened a commercial library of bacterial cells containing genomic mouse DNA and had identified several cells that potentially contained my full-length gene. I had tinkered with the liquid nitrogen freezers before, lifted the heavy lids and reached inside them for the metal tiers of boxes. Those other times Aeden had alerted me to the pair of oven gloves hanging from the wall next to the freezers. But this time he didn’t. I dipped a latex-gloved hand into the bubbling nitrogen, pulled out our tier, and, squealing in pain, managed somehow to release my frozen fingers from the metal handle. It plopped soundlessly back inside the freezer, shooting out a blinding mist of air.
Afterward, long after the fog had dissipated, I stood next to the freezer, holding my hands together.
“You okay?” Aeden asked me, in his smoke-roughened late-afternoon voice.
“Why didn’t you remind me to wear the gloves?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said flatly. “The gloves are right in front of you.”
Following the liquid nitrogen incident I came into the lab early one morning to check on the electrophoresis gel I’d left running overnight. By then Aeden and I were sharing the same bay. Justin had asked David to set me up in Allegra’s former space to free up my bay for a new graduate student, and as much as I’d dreaded the idea of giving up the quiet solitude of my corner bay, I’d also felt a rush of excitement at the prospect of moving in with Aeden. Sitting back-to-back with me, he would have no choice but to talk to me, look me in the eyes, eventually make peace with me.
When he showed up that morning, later than usual, I was sipping cold coffee and reading Introduction to Practical Molecular Biology—one of several method books I’d taken with his permission from his shelf.
“You overslept,” I said casually, despite the fact that it was nearly noon.
Aeden, who was in the habit of ignoring my attempts to make conversation with him, stopped in his tracks. But he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were on my workbench, specifically on the power supply box my gel was attached to. The amperage reading, I realized with a pit in my stomach, was higher than I’d thought. Much higher than it should have been.
“You let the DNA run out of the gel,” he said, and headed toward his desk.
I staggered to my feet, reaching the bench in one move and lifting the gel tray with my bare hands and the electricity running. At the Eagle Eye machine across the aisle, where Aeden and Allegra had once stood together, celebrating their knockout mice, I pushed the tray into the slot and switched on the ultraviolet light, but instead of the glowing ladders of DNA I saw only a depthless black. The samples I’d loaded on the gel were lost, and the oversight would set us back at least a day.
I dumped the gel into the biohazards bin near the radioactive hood and walked back over to the bay. Aeden was sitting at his desk, staring at his laptop. I snuck a look at the screen and saw what I first thought was Earth viewed from a satellite. It took me a moment to realize I was actually looking at the olfactory bulb of a mouse, another to comprehend that Aeden was reviewing images of his knockouts. Quietly I sat on my chair, facing the empty desk wall in front of me. “I’m sorry, Aeden,” I said, without looking at him.
“Sorry about what?” he asked.
I thought about it, and after a while said, “For being such a klutz?”
“You’ll just have to redo the procedure.”
It was still relatively early in the day. I figured if I set out to redo the DNA digests and rerun them on a gel, I could make up for the lost time, or partially make up for it. Instead of an entire day, only half a day would be lost. I sprang from my chair and hurried over to the end of the room where David was loading empty mouse cages on a cart. I opened the freezer and rummaged the shelves in search of the restriction enzyme box.
“Are you all right?” David asked me.
“I’m fine,” I told him. I hadn’t planned to mention my oversight with the gel, but being visibly agitated as I was, and having no one else to talk to, I did. “An accident, it’s really nothing.”
When I returned to the bay Aeden and I shared, I sat down at my bench and began labeling tubes for the digestion reactions. Minutes later David walked in. He was wearing a different lab coat, whiter than the one I’d seen on him earlier, and his hair, usually all over the place, was neatly parted to one side. “I can help you with those, Emily,” he said, moving up to my bench.
“I didn’t know you had so much time on your hands,” Aeden said from his desk.
“I happen to have a couple of hours.”
“No, you don’t. You’re just offering to help her because of the database. If there’s a paper you want to make sure your name is on it for when you apply to med school. Hopefully they’ll let you in this time around.”
David’s face reddened.
“So what?” I said, swinging my bench stool around to face him. “Why should it matter to you why David wants to help me?”
Aeden stood up. “If you want a technician, Emily, you’re welcome to have one.”
“I never said I wanted a technician.”
Without a word he tramped past me with his laptop, and was out the door before I could say anything else.
After a wordless few moments David pulled Aeden’s bench stool over to mine and sat down next to me. I looked at him and saw that his glasses were all fogged up.
“What a prick,” he said, shaking his head.
“He’s not,” I said. “Please don’t say that about him again.”
Aeden was gone for the rest of the day. The next morning he showed up in the lab earlier than usual, calm and collected in his long black coat, a Starbucks cup in his hand.
After checking his emails and finishing his coffee he stood up from his desk and pulled out a pair of latex gloves from the box on his bench and asked me if I needed any help.
It wasn’t even a question.
After dismantling the southern blot on my bench I followed him to the radioactive hood in
a corner of the room and stood with him behind a plexiglass shield, watching him expose the membrane of DNA to our radiolabeled probe, wash the membrane, and scan it with the Geiger counter in his hand, until the background radiation noise was narrowed to a piercing cry.
The sound came from somewhere in the upper left-hand side of the membrane. A spot we could not yet see. It wasn’t until hours later, until we had exposed the membrane to an X-ray film and were standing by the developing machine in the darkroom, examining it under a weak yellow light glowing tenuously over our heads, that we were able to see it: the thick black band of DNA the probe had bonded with. It was located in a column of the film corresponding to colony two, indicating that bacterial cells from that colony contained my full-length gene. Now we could map out the entire gene and begin to make changes. I felt happier than I had in weeks, though it was only the first step in a very long process.
“It’s a nice result,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
Aeden went on staring at the film, not answering me. At last he gave me a perfunctory smile and handed it back to me. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?” I said, looking down at the film.
“Equal contribution,” he said, in a lowered voice, as if afraid someone else might hear him. “You thought I’d tell Justin about the filing cabinet? I wouldn’t have; that’s not something I would ever do.”
“I know,” I said.
“And you know it’s not like I had a string of job offers lined up outside the asshole’s office. I hardly had any other choice but to stay here and help you.”
“I know that also.”
“So why equal contribution? It’s your gene, after all. Not mine.”
I stared up at him. I had imagined from the tone of his voice that he was indignant, but he wasn’t, or at least didn’t appear to be. In the scant light I thought I could see the flicker of a different, gentler sort of question in his eyes, and it gave me hope. “I wanted you to stay,” I said.
“To make the mouse for you.”
I shook my head. “It had nothing to do with the project.”
“It didn’t?” Aeden said uneasily. I could almost touch the disbelief on his face. “Then why did you want me to stay?”
“I don’t know,” I hedged.
“How can you not know?” His breath smelled of cigarettes and coffee, and of something faintly acidic that made me wonder if he’d had anything to eat all morning. “Why did you want me to stay, Emily?”
“I wanted to be with you, Aeden,” I said finally. “I just . . . I just wanted to be with you.”
Chapter 15
After what I told him, Aeden’s behavior toward me underwent a slight change, discernible in his unfailingly saying hello in the morning and goodbye in the evening, steadying his eyes on mine when he spoke to me, and walking next to me instead of ahead of me on our way to the cell storage room, the equipment room, the cold room. Occasionally he would throw in an encouraging remark about my progress at the bench, going so far one day as to teach me how to hold a multichannel pipette.
“You’re holding it like you’re going to stab someone, Emily.” He cupped my hand in his and veered it clockwise, readjusting it so that my fingers were aligned to one side of the instrument’s neck and my thumb on the lever. “That’s it.” He released my hand from his grip and crossed his arms circumspectly across his sweater, a navy blue V-neck he’d taken to wearing lately. “Let’s see you work.”
Instead of eating in the conference room with the other postdocs, as he had been doing, Aeden began bringing his lunch into our bay. Usually he ate in silence, surfing the Internet while I recorded the morning’s work in our notebook. But sometimes, especially if I was also eating, he would swing his desk chair around toward me and strike up a conversation about global warming, or politics, or what sort of sandwich I’d prepared at home and brought to work.
“So what’s on the menu for today, turkey with cheese on rye or cheese with turkey on rye?”
“You think you’re so funny,” I said evenly, though I felt giddy with hope.
“My friends tell me I’m funny.”
“I guess that makes us friends?”
“I guess it does,” Aeden said, looking away from me, back at his screen.
In bed at night I often wondered what he’d made of my confession in the darkroom. After I’d told him what I had, he’d raised a hand up to his face and covered his eyes with it. I thought I even heard him say “Shit,” and it made me wish I could take back my words. But as much as I regretted them, I was also relieved. I had nothing to hide from him anymore.
So it felt like we were headed toward a friendly reconciliation of sorts. Not that we were close to being friends: we were nothing but two people civilly working on the same project, sitting back-to-back in the same bay. Until there came a Sunday in mid-February when everything changed.
Sunday was the day of the week I looked forward to most. It was often just the two of us in the main room, surrounded by nothing but the murmur of machines. On this particular Sunday we’d been working on a northern blot all morning, screening various types of mouse tissue for the expression of my gene. We had about an hour to spare before developing the X-ray film, so Aeden suggested we go grab some lunch.
The day outside, despite the cold and the wind, was sunny, the kind of tender luminosity that comes with sound and smell and the seemingly unfiltered recognition of the person walking beside you. On our way back to the lab with our sandwiches I could feel Aeden looking at me, taking overt sidelong glances at me as I walked quietly next to him.
We had reached the campus when he asked me if I was seeing anyone.
“You mean a boyfriend?” I stepped ahead of him, through the gate.
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m asking.”
“Not at the moment, no,” I said. “Why do you want to know?”
Aeden hurled the stub of his cigarette at the discolored lawn. “Tell me about him.”
“My last boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
I shrugged. “He was a medical student. I went out with him for a couple of months. We used to eat at his parents’ every Sunday. Actually, it wasn’t only his parents who were there but his entire family from Mumbai. The food was good but after a while I couldn’t take the noise and the small talk and everyone asking me if I was feeling well, which I apparently wasn’t.” Aeden laughed. “Anyway,” I said, laughing with him, “I don’t think he was the right person for me.”
“Why not?” Aeden asked, looking intently at me.
I wanted to tell him that while I’d been with Nirav—with every boyfriend I’d had—I’d never quite felt that I was being fully me. Instead I said, “Do you see me cooking for an army of people every weekend?”
Aeden gave me a long, pensive stare. “No, I guess I don’t,” he said.
While we ate our sandwiches at our desks I could feel him gazing absently at my jawline as I chewed, my mouth, the hollow of my neck. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he answered.
When the timer rang we walked over to the darkroom with the autoradiography cassette and shut the door behind us. The air inside the room was tight with the smell of vinegar. It always was, on account of the acetic acid in the developing solution, but I felt it more poignantly that afternoon. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I felt it much later, recalling what happened.
The RNA imprint in our film was confined to olfactory bulb tissue, suggesting that the gene was exclusively expressed in the bulb, and though this did not necessarily mean that it had a role in smell, the result was encouraging. “It looks great,” I said.
Aeden laid the film down on the developing machine and stretched his arm behind me. I imagined he was aiming to open the door and was surprised when instead he locked it and placed his hand on my shoulder. He turned me around until I stood facing him. I looked across the darkness at him, hardly seeing his face but feeling his thumb on my mouth, tracing th
e shape of my lower lip. He held my cheek in his hand, sandpaper dry and faintly smelling of cigarette, and with his other hand proceeded to unbutton my lab coat. “Are you okay with this?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
We went to stand in a corner of the room, by a low table where discarded films were piled in translucent heaps. I let him undo my pants, and eagerly undid his. He swept the films aside and lifted me onto the table, leaning into me. I straddled him with my legs and locked my arms around his neck, drawing him closer, but when I tried to kiss him Aeden turned his face away.
Minutes later we were sitting in the main room again, back-to-back at our desks. A tremble lingered inside me, but I sat still as a mouse, pretending to tabulate our results into a notebook. I was waiting for him to say something, acknowledge what had happened, but he didn’t.
I hadn’t seen a movie in ages and was thinking of suggesting we go see one when Aeden stood up. I turned around and looked at him. He shouldered his backpack and opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Outside the window behind him it was already dusk, the bridge twinkling a weak and solitary light. “I can’t be with you in that way, Emily, in the way that you would like. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
“I don’t expect you to,” I told him, and managed to smile.
It wasn’t until hours later, after Aeden had left and I had returned home for the night and showered and stood in my pajamas and wet hair in front of the kitchen sink, drinking water from the tap, that I allowed his words to sink in, and felt something small, like a fissure, cracking open inside me.
Later that week we went into the darkroom again, to develop another film. Once again Aeden locked the door behind us and led me by the hand to the table in the corner of the room. It was early morning. A strip of sunlight fell through the crack beneath the door, slicing the floor in two: the dark side, where we were, and the bright side beyond the door. From our side of the room I could make out the drift of movement in the hallway, the transient sound of human voices. Again I tried to kiss him, and I felt the rasp of his chin on my forehead, and after a while, after we were finished, I smelled the sea-breeze odor of his T-shirt, in which my face was buried.
The DNA of You and Me Page 9