The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  “Justin would never allow it,” I said. “You know how he is, he’ll do everything in his power to stop me from taking the project from his lab. Just as he’s probably doing everything to delay Craig’s publication.”

  “There’s nothing he can do to stop you,” Aeden said. “Once the paper is written you’re free to leave. We could leave together.”

  I sat gazing at the alignment on my screen. What he was proposing I do was reasonable, maybe even doable, but that wasn’t what troubled me. “It’s not just the project, Aeden,” I finally said. “It’s mostly about what I told you the other day, which you didn’t want to hear.” After another pause I added, “I’m not sure that I’m the right person for you.”

  “I’m not asking you to marry me, Emily.” I turned from my screen to look at him, and saw in his face the stubborn determination his voice had not conveyed. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”

  “I will,” I said, knowing that I would. “I’ll think about it.” I stood from my chair and picked up my handbag.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” I said, trying to sound casual about it. What I needed was to be alone, to assimilate what he’d said.

  “I’ll phone you tonight.”

  “I’ll need a little more time,” I said.

  And then, without looking back, I hurried across the hallway, feeling a surprising burst of joy inside me, the dog whimpering anxiously behind me. “Go back, Smokey,” I said, suspecting he would try to follow me all the way to the elevator. “Go back.”

  Chapter 25

  I walked into our bay early the next morning expecting to find Aeden sitting where I’d left him the previous day, and was disappointed to discover that he wasn’t. I hung my handbag on the armrest of my chair, gathered the ear puncher and surgical scissors and a fresh batch of Eppendorf tubes from Aeden’s workbench, and sat down to wait for him. We were scheduled to genotype our litter of mice in the facility.

  The room, I remember, was ominously quiet—that first half of the morning when experiments are underway and time feels suspended. For a while I gazed distractedly out the window, wondering if Aeden had forgotten we were supposed to meet early and whether I should phone him to remind him, when I spotted Smokey scuttling unleashed on the overpass below, and Aeden and Ginny a little ways behind him. The sun was beating down on them, and being several stories above them as I was I could barely make out his face, but what struck me as all too real, to the point of feeling obvious, was that he and she and the dog looked almost like a family. As I watched them, Ginny bent down to scrape dog shit from the sun-warped pavement, wearing jeans that were too tight on her, and Aeden smoked a cigarette and dragged his feet lethargically, and yet they seemed to be together in some casual, nonaccidental way. Together in that spontaneous fluid way in which the kids from Shaw Woods had been together. Together in a way I feared Aeden and I would never be together even if it were just the two of us alone, stranded on Mars for the rest of our lives.

  Justin, when I showed up in his office moments later, feeling miserable and bent out of shape after seeing Aeden and Ginny together, was rearranging travel mementos on his walnut bookcase. He turned from the bookcase to look at me, and I could tell that he was pleased to see me there, in his private quarters for the first time in months. He had ignored the emails I had sent him explaining the scientific reasoning behind my decision to postpone the analysis of the litter, and I hadn’t summoned the courage or the nerve to explain myself in person. My decision to wait for the mice to be older had been heavily influenced by Aeden, and he knew it.

  Now he deposited the broken-looking object in his hands back on the shelf. “What can I do for you, Emily?”

  On my way there I’d made a mental note to ask him about the status of Craig’s paper, and knew before even stepping into his office that I wouldn’t, that the moment I came face-to-face with Justin, the question I had never dared to ask him, and had wanted to ever since my return from Livingston, would come pouring out of me. “You once told me,” I began, in as steady a voice as I could produce, “you said that I reminded you of yourself, at my age. You mentioned ambition, single-mindedness, loneliness, but these are just a few of the things that we have in common, aren’t they?”

  Justin motioned with his head toward the puddle of light bathing his makeshift living room. I went to settle on my usual spot on the couch, and he on his wing-backed chair, diagonally facing me. I glanced at the window, too self-conscious to look at him after what I’d brought myself to ask.

  “You obviously don’t know what it’s like to be me, Justin,” I said. “You’re not in my head to know it. But that day, when I expressed my concern for Aeden and you called me insane, it felt like you were trying to warn me about something.”

  Justin smiled at me, for the first time in months. A knowing smile I felt I could trust, despite my history with him. “People like you and me,” he said, “we’re made of a different fabric than most people. A name doesn’t do justice to the fine genetic differences between individuals, except maybe to help you confirm what you already know, or suspect. We’re not built like everyone else. We’re not meant to be with other people in the way in which they’re with each other. Does this make sense to you?”

  It did, but not completely. “What about love?” I asked.

  “Love?” Justin said, chuckling. “You might find it, but it won’t last very long. We may feel desperately alone, but deep down what we crave is solitude. Your best bet is here, academia. This is where you stand the best chance of being happy, and making others happy.” He looked at me and paused. “If I’m upsetting you I’ll stop.”

  I looked away from him. “It’s just your opinion,” I said. “Besides, we’re not identical, you and I.”

  “You came here to ask for my opinion, didn’t you?”

  “I wish I hadn’t.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Emily, everyone in this world is alone. We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.”

  I smiled, looking at him again. “You stole that from somewhere.”

  “Tennessee Williams,” Justin admitted, with a sad little snort. “First editions of his works.” He pointed to the scattered spines on the lower shelf of his bookcase, level with the floor. “Would you like to read them?”

  I didn’t. The quote was enough. The quote, I knew, would suffice for a lifetime.

  An hour passed, or it might have been seconds, before I had the presence of mind to stand up. For what felt like an eternity I sat there with a finger pressed to my temple, gazing beyond his shoulder at the blown-up olfactory bulb above his desk, seeing it not for what it was, but for what it might appear to be to an outside observer: an atlas of the world with distinct aerial routes unwaveringly charted between cities and countries and islands in the ocean. I wanted to ask him if he ever got lonely being up in the sky in his Piper, with no one around to share the view. But I doubt that I ever asked the question, because I would probably remember the answer today if I had, and I don’t.

  I had stood up from the couch and nearly reached the door when Justin said, “I know why you’re here, Emily. I got a call from Neurogen last month, someone from management inquiring about Aeden.”

  “I hope you were generous,” I said.

  “Exceedingly. I have no interest in keeping him here, as you can imagine. He’s too autonomous for his own good, and a bad influence on you. I’m glad you’re not with him anymore. I see him outside often, with the new girl, Ginny. That must have been a blow to you, but it’s better that way, believe me.”

  When I turned around to look at him, Justin was stretched out in his chair, yawning. “Aeden wants me to go with him,” I said. “After the paper is written.”

  Justin made to readjust his glasses over the bridge of his nose, but didn’t. Instead he smiled at me, as if the revelation had offset the need for a better view. “Have you packed your bags yet?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I sai
d, and knowing I had said too much, added, “Please forget we ever had this conversation.”

  “Which part?”

  “This last part, obviously.”

  Justin winced away from me, toward the sun creeping through the slats of his window. “I already forgot,” he said.

  But he didn’t. Two days later, on a late night like any other night in the lab, a night I probably would only vaguely recall today had it not been for what happened, Justin sauntered past Aeden, who was loading DNA samples from the tails of our mice into the gel on his workbench, and plopped down next to me, onto Aeden’s vacant desk chair. He was wearing a pinstripe suit with a bow tie, and his shoes smelled heavily of polish, which made me suspect he was on his way out to some formal gathering with university patrons instead of the blind date he would probably have preferred. He stretched his legs out, in Aeden’s direction. “Working late?”

  Aeden shrugged. “It depends what you mean by late.” He went on ejecting the blue samples into the wells of the gel, giving no sign of reading anything between the lines.

  The conversation I’d had with Justin two days earlier came flooding back to me, accompanied by a feeling of imminent disaster. “To what do we owe your visit?” I asked, in a lowered voice.

  Justin turned casually toward me. Until then, his focus had been on Aeden. “The San Diego lab retracted their submission.”

  “That’s excellent news,” I said, warily.

  “Yes and no. They could be planning to add new findings to their paper, or maybe they were unable to reproduce their results, in which case the role of your gene would fall into doubt. But regardless of the reason for their retraction, a change of plan is in order. I’m going to withhold publication of the knockout data. What we want now is a larger paper, one that will include sequence information for closely related genes. It’s only a matter of time before you or someone else in the lab finds them, Emily.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean someone else?”

  “You told me just the other day you were thinking of leaving this lab. You’re free to leave now,” Justin said.

  Aeden, who’d stopped pipetting, gazed inquiringly at me from his bench. Since my visit to Justin I’d avoided the topic of our leaving together. I looked away from him, back at Justin. “I didn’t say I wanted to leave the lab. That’s not what I said.”

  “Maybe those weren’t your exact words,” Justin said, examining his cuticles. “But the implication was clear.”

  “This is unnecessary, Justin. I have no plans to leave, and you know it.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like when we last spoke,” he said.

  Aimlessly I asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  Justin smiled at me. “I’m doing nothing wrong, Emily, aside from giving you the option to leave. I wouldn’t want you to stay here against your will, just because you feel obliged to finish your appointment. The project will go on without you.”

  “I’m not staying here against my will, Justin.” The more I tried to reason with him, the more I felt as though I were digging my own grave, yet I couldn’t bring myself to stop. “I want to stay in this lab.”

  “Really?” Justin said. “You could have certainly fooled me.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. I remember stealing a look at Aeden and thinking, in my muddled state, that the building was about to collapse. “You’re making things up, Justin.”

  “You told me Aeden wanted you to leave with him after the paper was written. Weren’t those your exact words? Well, I’m afraid that option is no longer available to you, Emily, but the option to leave is.”

  I was suddenly staring down at his shoes, in which the ceiling lights were reflected. “I’m not leaving,” I said faintly.

  “You came to me the other day with a problem,” Justin continued. “I’m offering you a solution.”

  “But I’m not leaving.” My voice was breaking now. “I’m not going with him.”

  “Emily!” It was Aeden. I glanced up and for a moment locked eyes with him, feeling a weight on my chest. “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  Justin swiveled his chair back toward him. “What about you, Aeden?” His tone was almost jovial. “Any objections about the future of this project?”

  Aeden’s gaze had fallen on the window of our bay. He shook his head, as if he didn’t care one way or another, but I could see something dark and worrying mounting behind his eyes.

  “I hope you realize what this means, Aeden,” Justin added. “You will no longer be an equal contributor in Emily’s paper, if there is one. Not that you need that little star attached to your surname anymore, with your new job in industry.”

  Aeden said nothing to this, or maybe he mumbled a word or two or three. The truth is I don’t know: Like the victim of an accident is unable to remember those pivotal seconds before the blow, so am I, or maybe I’ve willed myself to forget them so as not to carry that moment around with me for the rest of my life. I don’t know.

  What I can remember is the multichannel pipette ominously balanced at the edge of Aeden’s workbench, threatening to fall and crash to the floor, and a second later the scent of shoe polish unraveled in the air to a toxic turpentine odor. By the time Aeden reached the chair where Justin was sitting Justin had sprung to his feet, but too late. I jumped out of my chair between them and saw a fist flying toward me.

  The punch came so assuredly I imagined Aeden delicately pushing my face out of the way, when in fact the heel of his hand had gone straight into my nose. There was no sound, not even pain, only a pounding reverberation in my skull. I cupped my nose between my hands and fell back onto my chair. Something warm and metallic was in my mouth, and it was the taste of my own blood.

  When I opened my eyes Aeden and I were alone in the room, and he was kneeling beside me with a bag of crushed ice.

  “Is my nose broken?” I asked.

  “Swollen,” he said.

  For some reason I asked, “Will it be broken?”

  He brushed off the question with a smile, but his eyes were moist and angered in a way I can’t quite begin to describe even today, after eleven years.

  “You should have seen the look on his face,” I said—though I hadn’t seen Justin’s face—and, making an effort to laugh, added, “It was like a truck was coming at him.”

  Aeden wasn’t humored. He kept holding the ice bag to my philtrum, that delicate space between nose and mouth, looking like he was about to weep. I heard the clock on the wall ticking and wondered what it would be like to stand up and leave with him and never return to the lab. And I knew that I wouldn’t do that.

  “You can’t stay here anymore,” he said.

  “Yes, I can,” I said. “This is where I belong.”

  Chapter 26

  We analyzed the mice the next day.

  I remember, before going into the lab that morning, standing in jeans and a turtleneck sweater by the window of my dorm, nursing a mug of coffee—black coffee, because the milk in my refrigerator smelled rotten. Sunlight was streaming across the glass of the window, and the rays felt like tiny daggers in my eyes. I had slept poorly, a shallow sleep without dreams, but then I’d hardly been sleeping at all for the last three weeks.

  By eight a.m. Aeden and I had gone into room 310 to retrieve our knockout litter. The four-week-old mice, technically adults, were huddled in a corner of the cage, over a pale white mountain of bedding. Some of them were asleep and some weren’t, and those that were awake seemed to be staring straight at us, but of course they weren’t. Mice don’t make eye contact. Unlike humans, they rely mainly on smell to navigate the world.

  By nine a.m. Aeden had sacrificed and dissected the six homozygous knockout animals in the litter. They’d gone down quietly, without a squeal, as mice often do when handled expertly, and now their heads, reduced to dinosaur-shaped little skulls with hollowed eye sockets and bulging olfactory bulbs, were swaying inside glass vials on a rocker on my bench. Aeden and I sat on
stools in front of the bench, saying little to each other. I kept staring down at the timer in my hand, wanting the thirty-minute neuron-staining incubation period to be over once and for all. I was nervous and exhausted and I was pretty certain that Aeden felt the same way. His sweater reeked of cigarette, and he’d uncharacteristically dropped his scalpel while dissecting one of the animals. I asked him about his timer, which he usually wore clipped to his sweater, and for an instant, before telling me he’d lost it, Aeden seemed not to know what I was talking about.

  When the half hour was nearly over, before my timer started beeping, Aeden lifted one of the vials off the rocker and held it up to the light. Through the clear walls of the vial I could see a pair of olfactory bulbs floating in the yellow staining medium, and faintly, very faintly, tiny specks of blue coating the curvature of their surface, as if some invisible hand had dotted them with a fine ballpoint pen. The olfactory nerve endings seemed to have converged onto myriad targets, as they would have in a normal mouse. I felt something shift within me: I had been so sure they would not. But then, the naked eye, I told myself, is often unreliable.

  Minutes later we had transported the six vials to the imaging room across the hallway, a tiny airless cockpit of a room so impossibly cramped with equipment that I had a hard time locating the row of stereoscopes by the wall. It was Aeden who examined the bulbs first, quietly. He switched the stage lights on and held a vial horizontally over the stage, adjusting the focus knob of the instrument and twirling the vial carefully between his bent fingers. He set the vial aside and picked up a second one and held it and twirled it as he had the first. After only a few seconds he set this vial aside too and picked up a third, and it must have been here that I took in, with a vertiginous feeling in my gut, that things were not as I’d hoped.