“What am I seeing?” I asked.
“The electroporation results,” Aeden said, sounding pleased with himself.
I looked up at him. “When did you do this?”
“I don’t know, while you were sleeping, I guess?”
The plan had been to insert our modified gene into mouse embryonic stem cells after I was finished with all the preliminary analyses, but Aeden had gone ahead and done it earlier, at his own risk, making up for the lost time. I stared back down at the cells, in whose DNA our gene was now integrated.
It was obvious, but I wanted to say it anyway. “They’re beautiful.”
Of the hundreds of cells floating in the red liquid medium, only a small fraction were likely to have our gene inserted in the right location. To find them—the cells that had exchanged a copy of their normal pathfinder gene for our mutated one—we would have to screen the cells in the flask, and to screen them we’d have to expand them to colonies.
After only two days the cells were growing so quickly we were waking up in the middle of the night to replenish their growth medium, split them into new flasks, check the pressure of the oxygen tank to ensure the incubator was supplying enough oxygen to the cells. By the time we had finished everything we needed to do it felt pointless to go back across the street to our dorms only to have to be back again in the room two hours later. So with the first sign of dawn outside the window we went to the food truck across the street and got coffees and eggs on rolls to go. It was against lab rules to eat or drink inside the tissue culture room, but we did it anyway. We’d broken so many unspoken rules, this one hardly seemed to matter.
While we ate and drank we listened to music from Aeden’s favorite radio stations, NPR news, and talk shows where people spoke a lot and said very little. But mainly, we listened to our voices. We talked nonstop. Except for that one conversation we’d had at the Tramway we’d never really spoken, and hardly knew anything about each other. Now we began to.
Over the weekend, Aeden told me, he’d tidied his dorm and gone shopping for a pair of new shoes and found nothing that he liked—nothing worth trading his shredded Converse sneakers for. He hadn’t touched a cigarette in weeks, and wanted to start tennis again. “My brother and I used to play tournaments in high school. Do you play tennis?”
“I wouldn’t know how to hold a racket,” I said. “Besides, I’d much rather go to the gym.”
“What gym do you go to?”
“I don’t.”
Aeden smiled at me, amused. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I don’t like crowds.”
“You’re in the auditorium every Friday.”
“That’s different,” I said. “The lectures are different. There’s a purpose to the lectures.”
“There’s a purpose to a gym, a concert hall, a football stadium. There’s a purpose to being around other people, Emily.”
I shifted away from him. “You’re starting to sound like my father.”
“Does that upset you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I answered, but it did.
His timer started beeping and Aeden stood up, and by the time he returned from the incubator with our tower of living cells, his mind was luckily in a different place, the conversation seemingly forgotten.
Within weeks the borders between our cells had all but vanished, and amoeba-like colonies were starting to show themselves at the bottoms of the flasks. I was tired most of the time, but I’d never felt more alive than when we were there, just the two of us in the tissue culture room, drinking bad coffee at five in the morning with the city lights fading before us.
I’d discovered a theatrical side to Aeden I’d been completely in the dark about. One morning, quite out of the blue, he stood up from the workbench where we’d been sitting with the timer and ran a near-perfect imitation of Justin.
“Your Majesty.” He bowed to some invisible king stepping through the door. “Let me help you.”
“I can take off my own coat, Philip. Is that a mouse? I think I just saw a mouse scurrying into the kitchen.”
“Oh no, I assure you there are no rodents in this household.”
“But I just saw one, with my own eyes.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the cook you saw, Your Majesty?”
“I think I can tell the difference between a person and a mouse, Philip, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, can you?”
“How dare you address me in this manner, Philip? You shall pack your trunk and leave at once.”
“Gladly. Fuckhead.”
It was a far cry from the less grandiose, more self-examining image I carried in my head of Justin, but I laughed nonetheless. With time Aeden perfected his role of the servant, and every time we stepped in and out of a room, even when there were people around, he would hold the door open for me and make a little bow as I walked past him. “Your Majesty,” he’d say, and we’d snicker at our private joke.
When that joke was exhausted, we found something else to amuse us during the hours of waiting: Carlos, the guy from Lab Safety, never said good morning when he came to collect the trash, and the way he shook his head disgustedly at the mouse carcasses in the cold room was seemingly evidence enough that he hated his job. Aeden asked him once, as we sat in the tissue culture room, if he was all right. Carlos gave him an unfriendly grin and rolled his eyes indignantly at the large number of flasks popping out of the biological waste bin.
Aeden and I began to call Carlos “the reluctant stowaway,” from the series Lost in Space, reruns of which, as it turned out, both of us had loved to watch as children. The carcass bin is empty. I guess we missed chatting with the reluctant stowaway. Is that the reluctant stowaway at the end of the line? What is he feeding his muscles for lunch?
The theme kept us busy for a good two weeks, until it too ran its course. By then, the end of April, a new graduate student from Boston by the name of Ginny Wu had moved into my old bay, and we often found ourselves discussing her.
From the smell of the hallway alone it was possible to know whether Ginny was in the lab. She wore a singular perfume with a note of citrus that carried a repulsive undertone, similar to rotting fruit. Aeden was so baffled by the duality of her smell that he came up with a theory to explain it: a dab of perfume was perceived as pleasant because it activated unique targets in the olfactory bulb, whereas a surplus recruited extra ones, resulting in the distortion of the scent.
“What do you think?” he asked.
We were sitting side by side at the hoods, picking our first batch of colonies. I was having a hard time using the pipette in my hand with the right precision, and had shredded several potentially precious colonies to pieces. “It’s plausible. The question is how to test it.”
“We should figure out a way,” Aeden said.
“We should,” I agreed, but my thoughts had drifted to Ginny. “Someone should advise her to stop wearing so much perfume.”
“Maybe you’ll take the plunge.”
“She would despise me for that.”
“You’re probably right,” Aeden said. “Maybe Steven should tell her.” I shot him a questioning look. “He likes her, you know.”
“Steven likes Ginny?” For all her good looks and chirpy disposition and the rumor that she was a professional oboist who gave charity concerts in her spare time, I thought there was something disquietingly dull about Ginny, something that brought to mind a hollow tree where a woodpecker might go nest.
“Not just Steven.” Aeden aimed his pipette at another colony. “Everyone in the lab has a crush on Ginny, smell and all.”
“You too?” I asked him, my heart skipping a beat.
Aeden shook his head. “I think I’d be bored out of my mind with her.”
Chapter 18
The hallway outside Aeden’s dorm, on the uppermost floor of the building, was the mirror image of mine several stories below: chain-link-patterned carpeting of a purplish unmemorable color, and twelve apart
ments facing west instead of east. Long drapes sheathed the two windows of his studio, and a large rug covered the bare wooden floors I’d never bothered to conceal. A prefab bookcase stood opposite the two windows, its shelves replete with books and magazines and music and photo albums. His bed, in a corner of the room, wasn’t a sofa bed like mine, but a proper one, queen-size with a headboard and a frame supported by four legs coated in aluminum.
On the surface we went there to have lunch while our cells grew, but mainly we went there to be together. We bought food in the cafeteria and sauntered with our Styrofoam boxes out of the campus, as if we were headed to a park nearby, only to leave the boxes on his kitchen counter while we went through the motions. But the motions lacked the mindless assuredness they’d had in the darkroom, the cell storage room, the equipment room, and conference room of the lab. We kissed awkwardly, avoiding each other’s eyes like teenagers, and not lingering in his apartment any longer than necessary. In a way, it was as if what had gone on between us inside those rooms had stripped us of any pureness of feeling we would have had had our relationship started out on a different note.
But then late one evening, as we were wrapping up our experiments in the tissue culture room, Aeden casually invited me to his place for dinner. We ordered Indian food from a local restaurant, and after dinner sat in his kitchen drinking tea he’d prepared from a loose stash of Darjeeling leaves his mother had mailed him from New Jersey. It was my first time there outside working hours, without any other purpose but to be there, and I was basking in the moment, elatedly focused on the song playing from the main room, the sweet tea in my mouth, his bare feet under the table, the confidential tone of his voice telling me about his mother.
“What worries me is she’s lost a ton of weight. That’s what my dad tells me. She claims she’s on a diet but I know that she’s depressed. There’s no joy in her voice unless the kids happen to be around. My brother has two boys. Mark and Mitchell.”
“Mark, I’ve heard you talking about him on the phone, with your mother. Do they live near her?”
“Same neighborhood.”
“That’s very lucky for her. I mean, for you too, I’m guessing.”
Aeden sighed. “Yeah. I should go visit her.” I waited for him to tell me more about his mother, his family, but he didn’t. “What about you, Emily? When was the last time you saw your mom?”
“I’ve never seen her,” I said without thinking.
Aeden stared at me across the table. “What do you mean?”
“She left me with my father when I was three months old. That’s really all I know about her.”
When I met his eyes again Aeden was studying me with a barely contained look of alarm on his face. “Has she ever tried to get in touch with you?” he asked, making an effort to sound casual about it.
“Not that I know of.”
“Have you ever tried to get in touch with her?”
“I don’t even know her name.”
“Can’t you find out?”
I shrugged. “She worked in my father’s lab for a while, so I suppose I could, but I don’t want to.”
“How could you say that? She’s your mother.”
I stood up from the table and left the kitchen and went to the bookcase, where I stood taking in the soothing and familiar names on the spines of Aeden’s CD collection, his books and jacketed photo albums. I recalled the floating rack of used petri dishes on his bench, some of them so old the agar inside them had peeled off like a shoe sole, his collection of old sweaters and shoes, and I realized, for the first time, that what passed through Aeden’s hands was seldom ever trashed, that he clung to time, kept close track of the past. I picked up one of the albums from the shelf and flipped through it and felt lighter on my feet. It was a family album I imagined his mother had assembled, with pictures of Aeden dating back to his childhood: images of him and his brother shot on a ski lift, in a Mayan ruin, at a sandy beach with the sun sinking behind them. I heard a sound and saw Aeden standing some ten feet away, gazing awkwardly at me.
“I should leave,” I said.
I returned the photo album to the shelf and was beginning to make my way to the door when he started toward me. I was expecting him to pull me down to the rug to do there what we’d done an hour earlier, but he held my face in his hands and kissed me, and kissed me again, and again, and again.
I don’t know precisely how long it took for Aeden and me to be together, in the way that couples are together. I know it must have happened some two to three weeks after that night in his dorm, because the days outside were consistently warmer and the campus grounds lime green and redolent with the smell of grass.
We had screened hundreds of colonies without finding a positive one, and then one day we found it. The X-ray film spat out of the developing machine with a scraping sound and fell into my hands, infusing the darkroom air with a fresh new dose of acetic acid. In the darkness I could see something jutting out of the sea of monotone lanes: a lane with two bands of DNA instead of one.
I can’t remember anymore what lane number it was, or what colony number of the hundreds we’d screened, or whether it was Aeden or I who picked it. I only remember the imprint of a band showing itself beneath another band, like an added rung in a ladder, and thinking to myself that it wasn’t real.
Aeden tugged the film from my hands and raised it to the light. “There it is,” he said, pointing at the faint band and running his finger across it, as if to confirm that it was there. “Our gene instead of the original.”
Hours later, after pizza in his dorm and several bottles of Corona in celebration of our milestone, I awoke in his bed to the hum of something electrically powered. The air conditioner was on and the curtains were drawn over the windows. I didn’t know what time it was but guessed that it was closer to night than to day.
Aeden was lying next to me. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing with a whistling rasp that led me to believe he was still asleep. I quietly left the bed and tiptoed over to the kitchen, where I pulled a bottle of Perrier out of the fridge and drank the water straight from the bottle, a liberty I’d never taken with anyone.
When I stepped back outside Aeden was awake, his head propped on a pillow.
“I thought you were sleeping,” I said, from the kitchen entrance.
In the frail light I could see him gazing with curious intensity at my breasts, my hips and thighs, my pubic hair, my feet. After a pause he said, “You’re beautiful, Emily.”
I ran over to the bed and fell into his arms and we lay there for a while. My ear was pressed to his chest, and I could feel his heart beating, and in between the beats a distant murmur that was like a language of its own. “We need to head back to the lab,” I said.
“I wish we could just stay here,” Aeden replied. He gazed down at me, and when our eyes met I felt something pass between us: a longing that I’d never before felt from him.
“So do I,” but then I stood up from the bed and began to get dressed. The cells with our mutated pathfinder were in the incubator, and we needed to go check on them.
Part Four
Chimera
Chapter 19
We delivered our cells to the Animal Facility, where a technician injected them into growing mouse embryos. One of the embryos developed into a male with brown cow-like blotches in his fur, signaling the possible presence of sperm in his body derived from our mutant cells. The chimeric male had grown and fathered two knockout mice, which we’d crossed to each other, and whose offspring we planned to analyze.
With more time on our hands than usual, Aeden and I were often up in the terrace of our dorm building, on clear summer nights, aiming to see Jupiter with the makeshift telescope he’d built out of cardboard. I kept a spare toothbrush in his bathroom cabinet and a change of underwear in one of the sliding drawers of his closet. Weekend mornings we slept in late and had breakfast in his kitchen, listening to music and discussing without inhibition everything from testing hi
s theory about smell distortion to the futility of attempting to see anything other than Orion’s Belt with his telescope to the blatant fact that we were living in a dorm and it would have been nice to have more space. I recalled my conversation with Justin at the restaurant in December and it felt odd, as though it had been another person speaking instead of me. I did envision another way of life for myself, despite what I had told him. I had often thought about what it would be like to be with someone for the long haul, and to have children with that person. But I had never exactly thought about it in that way, or in that particular order. What came to mind when I thought of it, the only thing that actually came to mind, was a woman with her hands deep in her coat pockets, waiting on a snowy street corner similar to the one where my father had waited for me when I was little, for the school bus to arrive. It was a transient image, about as faint and seemingly unreal as the band in our X-ray film. But the woman on the street corner had resurfaced in my head that summer more often than she had during my entire life.
As the summer passed, though, I often found myself steering our conversation toward the project, away from Aeden’s growing tendency to complain about being confined to a university dorm at his age and unable to afford a car while people like his younger brother—for whom the word cell meant nothing but a phone—were living in houses large enough to fit tennis courts into, and replicating themselves.
“How many kids do you want to have?” he asked me.
Until then I’d been enjoying the poached eggs on country white bread crisped to a golden brown he’d expertly prepared. “Two,” I said, and made a fleeting victory sign with my free hand. I didn’t know where the number had come from, and wasn’t entirely sure about wanting to have children, but his assumption that I did made me confident enough to believe that I could. “What about you?”
Aeden nodded appreciatively at me across the table, as if we were talking about a routine procedure in the lab, known to us both for its uncomplicated beauty and unfailing reliability. “Two is a good number, I suppose, a manageable number.”
The DNA of You and Me Page 11