At noon I saw him in the conference room, having lunch with Steven. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but by the looks of it, it seemed casual and intimate—the sort of exchange that happens between people who’ve known each other for years and will keep on wanting to know each other for years to come. I turned from the glass and headed straight to the women’s bathroom, feeling a painful swelling in the back of my throat.
We returned to the darkroom again the following week, only this time without needing to. I willingly followed him across the hallway, into the room, and stood in the dark, watching Aeden latch the door. At the table in the corner I was anticipating the stroke of his thumb on my mouth, the odor of his skin, the soft feel of his shirt on my nose, but there was nothing like that this time; Aeden turned me away from him, pulled my pants down, and raised my lab coat up to my waist, steadying his hands on my lower back.
“No,” I said.
“If it hurts I’ll stop.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
He didn’t ask me what I meant. He didn’t need to. While it lasted, before he drew away from me and left the room and we avoided each other for the rest of the day, I shut my eyes and willed myself to be carried off, to a different place, from where I could see a light in the distance. But of course I couldn’t. There was no light in the distance, only the humiliation of it all.
For days I couldn’t meet his eyes without feeling that Aeden was seeing straight into my soul and basking in my disappointment. Whenever he spoke to me, which he did about work exclusively, I found myself looking away from him, invoking the impossible resolve to stay calm and behave as though I wanted and expected nothing intimate or meaningful to ever happen between us.
I ate lunch in my dorm room across the street, and dinner I skipped altogether, leaving the lab at night as early as I could in order to avoid being alone there with him. Weekends I came in only half time, and usually only in the afternoon, when others were likely to be there, buffering me from the sight of Aeden sitting at his desk with old images of his knockouts, and the sea-breeze scent that felt like a stab in the heart.
For the most part this arrangement worked out well. While the experiments ran smoothly I could do without Aeden’s help or assistance, relying only on the protocol sheets he handed me each morning. Following his instructions I had made a deletion in the gene that would prevent it from being expressed in a mouse. Now I was looking to insert into the gene a marker that would allow us to track it in embryonic stem cells. But this was harder than I’d thought. I had screened hundreds of bacterial colonies and failed to find a single one in which the gene and marker were joined.
On that particular day, a week after our last encounter in the darkroom, I sat hunched over a petri dish, my face to the sweltering flame of a Bunsen burner, maneuvering as best I could the sterile toothpicks in my hand. I was picking clumps of bacterial cells growing on the yellow lawn of agar and dislodging them one by one into the wells of a microplate when Aeden stood up from his desk and walked over to my bench, standing close enough that I could smell him.
“Those aren’t the colonies you should be picking,” he said. “They’re too big. You need to pick the slow growers; they’re more likely to carry what you’re looking for.”
I went on picking them anyway, the snot-like colonies he was explicitly telling me not to pick.
“May I, please?” Aeden said.
Without looking at him I ceded my chair. Aeden took it and sat at my bench, scanning the hundreds of colonies in the dish with a scrutinizing frown. At last he aimed the toothpick in his hand at something I never would have seen: a colony that seemed to be barely there, its tiny head rising just above the surface of the agar. With a twist of his wrist he scraped it off the dish and dislodged it into the growth medium. “That’s what you need to screen. In fact, your search might be over.” He smiled at me, and I found myself meeting his eyes. “I’m sorry about the other day,” Aeden said. “That won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t,” I said, and just like that I felt the hurt melting away, and the hope I had somehow managed to bury renewed inside me.
The next day I walked into the darkroom with a dummy cassette and made my way with Aeden to the corner table. From then on I began to follow him around the lab again, and to play his game again, whenever and wherever he proposed to play it. We did it in the cell storage room, on the narrow strip of floor between the wall where the oven gloves hung and the nitrogen freezers. We did it in the equipment room, amid shakers with overgrown cells inside them and the smell of putrefaction, under the conference room table and on top of my desk to the sound of a night guard roaming the floor with his walkie-talkie. We did it wherever there was a door to shut and lock and lights to switch on or off, depending on his mood. We did it against walls, benches and desks, tanks and incubators, and on the linoleum floor. One moment I was light-headed and delirious and the next half-starved for what he could not give me and I was pretending I did not want or need. In my bed at night I fantasized about holding hands with him in a park, a movie theater; having a conversation with him where I saw clarity and warmth in his eyes.
“What do you want from me?” I once asked him.
“What do you want from me, Emily?”
One late evening, in the men’s bathroom, I looked up at him from a kneeling position and watched his chest rise to a halt, and felt his grip on my hair dissolve. His eyes were shut against the iodine light of the stall. They remained shut for a long time, and I remember thinking it wasn’t pleasure that he’d felt, and had been feeling all along, with each of our encounters, but the dissipation of a loss too painful to put into words: his wasted years in Justin’s lab and his vanished youth, for at thirty-two he was no longer young, relatively speaking. Not young enough to start over again as a postdoc in another lab. Not young enough to start over from scratch, on his own project, on his own terms.
Chapter 16
No one in the lab appeared to have any inkling of what was going on between us. In public our interaction was limited to work, and in private we were careful to bolt doors and stay away from windows, and to hardly breathe. There had been talk on the floor of the head of the zebra fish lab leaving his wife for his lab technician, and gossip about the dean of admissions having sex with a graduate student in the faculty club restroom. To be seen or heard by someone in the lab would have meant a permanent stain on our standing as serious scientists, serious people.
But then Justin saw us.
On a Sunday afternoon, in early spring, he had returned from a conference and was unlocking his office door when we stepped out into the hallway from the darkroom. My lab coat was hanging in my arm and my shirt unbuttoned at the top. It must have taken me several seconds to realize someone was actually there, standing some twenty feet to our right, because when I did, by the time I caught sight of Justin staring at Aeden and me, he had turned toward the frosted pane of his office door and pushed the door open with his foot, letting himself and his carry-on through.
Minutes later he was in our bay. I had gotten into my lab coat and was setting up a digestion reaction on my bench. Aeden was sitting idly at his desk. In the past, the times Justin had shown up in our bay to inquire about the project, Aeden had made a point of ignoring him. Now he sat with his chair swiveled toward him and a hand held across his unshaven chin, watching Justin with unnerving interest, as if he were studying an animal in a zoo.
“What on earth have you been doing for the past four weeks?” Justin asked, pacing the narrow space of our bay with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor, as if the ruins there, the scraps of aluminum foil and discarded pipette tips, might shed light on what he’d witnessed. “When do you expect to have mice?”
“Everything is going according to plan,” I said, despite the fact that we’d fallen considerably behind schedule, my focus having shifted from the staggering number of experiments running simultaneously on my bench to the handwritte
n notes Aeden left for me with threadbare information of where and when to meet.
“You expect me to believe that? You should be working out of the tissue culture room by now and you’re not. For all we know the Levine lab already submitted their results.” He wasn’t looking at me. He hadn’t even attempted to make eye contact with me.
“We’re a little behind,” I admitted. “It’s no one’s fault.”
Aeden was smiling at the floor. I had a feeling he was about to say something horrible, and he did. “What is it you want to know, Justin?”
Justin stopped abruptly. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why are you here?”
“To check on your progress, why else would I be here?”
“That’s not true.”
Justin smiled at him, but I could tell he was ruffled. “You know better than I do why I’m here?”
“Not everything is in your control, Justin. Especially what happens behind closed doors.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do,” Aeden said, stretching out his legs. “Maybe you don’t want to admit it, but you know.”
Justin turned away from him. I was hoping he would walk all the way out into the aisle and leave, but he didn’t. He stopped in front of my bench and leaned into it, standing very quietly next to me. I had finished capping the tubes and was shakily inserting them into a floating rack inside the water incubator. I knew his conference had been in Iceland, because he had emailed the entire lab to let us know of his whereabouts, and because he’d sent me a private message saying how much he was enjoying the hot springs and how the smell of sulfur had taken him right back to his childhood in Saratoga, where his family had vacationed every summer. How this made him feel inexplicably calm and happy.
“How was Iceland?” I asked. It was all I could think to say. I glanced over my shoulder at him and saw his eyes fixed on a droplet of water on my bench. Before I could dab it with my lab coat sleeve he popped it with his thumb. Then he looked at me, and the look on his face seemed to be telling me I was no longer his partner in solitude. I had crossed a line. “Infernally hot,” he said, and walked out of the room.
When he was gone I covered the water bath and saw the silver-tinged reflection of my face on the lid. My lips were thinner than I remembered them being, and my skin ghostly pale. My eyes had dark circles under them, from lack of sleep, I thought. But what grabbed my attention was the way they seemed suspended in a place that was neither here nor there, and contained a new sadness I had never seen in myself before.
“You realize not knowing is killing him,” Aeden said behind me.
I turned away from my reflection. “I don’t know why you had to provoke him like that. Nothing good will come of it.”
“You honestly see things getting any worse for me?” When I didn’t respond, Aeden shook his head and said, “It’s been so easy for you, Emily.”
“Easy?” I said, looking down at him. “You think it’s been easy for me?”
“I think you’ve accomplished a great deal in six months, more than many scientists accomplish in a lifetime.”
“I haven’t accomplished anything yet, and that’s not what I was referring to, Aeden.”
“No? What were you referring to?”
“I’m referring to what’s been happening between us.”
“What’s been happening between us?” Aeden echoed, as if he had no clue what I was talking about.
I looked away from him momentarily, trying not to cry. Then I said, “I’m talking about being with you and having to pretend for the rest of the day that I don’t know you. Lying in bed at night hoping that the next time we’re together you’ll lower yourself to have lunch with me. I’m talking about . . .” Suddenly I felt I was drowning, it hurt so much to articulate what I’d kept inside for so many months, to even look at him. “I’m talking about feeling like no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to get close to you, you will go on hating me.”
“That’s not true,” Aeden said, looking shocked.
“Yes it is,” I said. “You hate me for getting in your way, for discovering what you would have discovered had I never shown up in this lab.”
The next thing I knew I had peeled off my gloves and was hurrying down the fire escape stairs to the ground floor exit. The air outside, despite the absence of any sun, was warm and moist and springlike. I thought I could even see tulips blossoming nearby and smell something of the sweet iron scent of cut grass that had sent me scrambling indoors as a child.
On the street, en route to my dorm, I saw the bridge to my left, its struts recalling the complex geometry of ridges inside the nose, where trapped airborne molecules bind to the receiving ends of neurons. Impulsively I turned left at the corner of the street and went up the ramp, across the overpass. The river beneath me gave off the mild stench of low tide, reminding me of enforced summer weekends on Lake Michigan with my father: the tedium of sitting on my strip of towel on a crowded beach, surrounded by people I didn’t know, the crime of time passing in vain, of growing old.
On the promenade, where Aeden and I had convened in winter, nearly every bench was empty. I walked over to the nearest one and sat down on it. So much had happened since then; I had let so much happen. At what point during that short span of time had I allowed the shape of my dreams to be so altered?
I was gazing beyond the railing, at a ferry moving southward down the river, when I heard footsteps behind me, and turned to see Aeden descending the ramp. He came over to the bench and lowered himself down next to me, a white bundle in his hand. “You left your lab coat on the stairs.”
I went on staring at the river, ignoring him. Aside from a few runners and people out with their dogs, we were alone on the promenade. The water at our feet was still, and the air silent. After a while I could make out the ferry under the bridge. “You’ll never forgive me, will you?” I said. “For getting in your way?”
“It’s not your fault,” Aeden said. From the corner of my eye I could see him shaking his head. “You didn’t get in my way, Emily.”
“You would have found the gene. It’s something I’ve often thought about, how if I hadn’t gotten involved, you and Allegra would have tried your luck with David’s library and eventually found it.”
“I don’t think so,” Aeden said. His face was now turned to the water. “To tell you the truth, I highly doubt it. Three years ago there was no question in my mind that I would make an important contribution to this field, and I didn’t, I haven’t. Maybe it just wasn’t in my cards to find your gene.”
I looked at him. He was sitting with my lab coat pressed to his chest, wincing at the river. In the grainy light of dusk I could see folds in the skin of his eyes. I thought of the beach on Lake Michigan, of time passing in vain. “It’s not my gene, Aeden. It’s also yours. It’s our pathfinder.”
“Pathfinder, is that what you’re calling it?”
I realized it was my first time telling him the name. “It’s the name of a radar device used in boats, to aid in navigation. I looked it up on the Internet.” Aeden was observing me closely, not taking in what I was saying as much as watching me speak. “What do you think?” I asked him. “About the name?”
“It’s a good name, a fine name,” he said. Then he took my hand and wove his fingers between mine. “I want you to know I don’t hate you, Emily. I never have. Far from it.”
We sat like that for a while, holding hands, his chest gently rising and falling, my heart jostling against my rib cage, threatening to fly out.
Chapter 17
Time in a research lab has a way of existing in notebooks and spreadsheets and dates recorded on the walls of flasks and vials and petri dishes; a way of inhabiting its own dimension, removed from actual time. You don’t think in years or months, but in hours and minutes: you think about this step, and the next step, and whatever happens after is irrelevant. So long as you’re on course, time seems to be happening to someone
else.
But then the trees outside look fuller, and the sun shines into the rooms for longer periods of time, and it’s not early March anymore but April, and technically no longer winter, but spring again. Another year has passed.
The spring I’m thinking of is punctuated in my mind by the salty breeze blowing that afternoon from the East River, stirring Aeden’s dark hair away from his face as we sat on the bench, holding hands. The second thing that marks the start of that spring for me is what happened a few days later, one early morning. Aeden called me in the lab. He’d never called me in the lab, or anywhere else for that matter. When the landline of our bay started to ring, I pulled away from the experiments on my bench and hurried over to the black phone on the wall, and when I picked it up it was Aeden, asking me to meet him across the hallway in an hour.
The four narrow walls of the tissue culture room across the hall, where I had never set foot, were partitioned between three laminar flow hoods, a tall incubator and oxygen tank, a refrigerator and sink, and a wall-to-wall workbench with a view of the Chrysler Building. The bulky microscopes on the workbench, aligned in single file, resembled giant insects.
“Inverted microscopes,” Aeden offered with didactic enthusiasm from the incubator. “You see the flip side of things.” He produced a U-shaped flask from a shelf and brought it to the microscope nearest me, bracing the plastic base of the flask between two metal clamps and switching the stage lights on for me. I sat down at the bench and looked through the eyepiece. At the bottom of the flask, swarms of translucent spheres were bathing in a red liquid medium, like tourists on Mars.
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