The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman

  Aeden rolled back his chair and stood up. I sat down on the chair and pressed my eyes to the eyepiece. The tiny blue specks I had seen earlier, in the main room, appeared before me again, but large and defined, like islands seen from a low-flying airplane; each blue island a bundle of blue nerve endings arrived at their destined target and meeting point. The map of smell was normal.

  I felt the warmth of a hand on my shoulder, and heard Aeden ask me quietly, “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head and stood up from the chair, feeling like I was about to throw up. And then I actually did throw up; the first wave of nausea hit me as I ran down the hallway, so that by the time I reached the women’s bathroom and locked myself in a stall, my lab coat and hands were caked in vomit. I hunched over the toilet seat and heaved up the leftovers of the coffee.

  “Emily?” Aeden stood on the other side of the metal door behind me. I couldn’t believe he’d followed me into the bathroom, in broad daylight. “Emily, can I come in?”

  There was an unsettling ring of fear in his voice I remember wanting very badly to put at rest. “It’s okay, Aeden,” I said. “The milk in my coffee was probably bad, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

  Back in the imaging room we took pictures of the bulbs, dozens of pictures covering every ventral and dorsal and medial and lateral aspect of their surface, and hundreds upon hundreds of olfactory axons and their targets. We returned the bulbs to their vials and deposited the vials on Aeden’s shelf in the cold room, and for the rest of the day we sat side-by-side at my desk examining the blown-up images on my laptop, hoping to spot misrouted nerve endings in a sea of biological normalcy.

  Sometime late in the afternoon Justin showed up in our bay. On my way to the bathroom I’d run into several people, among them David, who I guessed had already given Justin wind of the situation. Justin didn’t bother to ask about what we’d found. Speaking from the foot of the bay he demanded a written report of the results, with images to back them. He also wanted the six pairs of bulbs preserved in formaldehyde for future reference, and the chimera and the founders in room 310 to be kept alive in the event that we decided to breed more knockouts. Aeden sat all the while with his eyes fixed on my screen, ignoring Justin even after he was done speaking. I remember the silence between them, and Justin observing Aeden from a distance, snubbed and yet refusing to leave.

  At six p.m. I sat alone in my dorm, reexamining the pictures on my laptop. The building was so quiet I could hear trapped air wheezing back and forth across the hallway outside, and the elevators aimlessly wandering from floor to floor. People rarely returned from the labs before it was dark outside, and until then neither had I.

  On the screen in front of me, slender blue filaments converged on their targets like family members on a home. What had guided them there? Not the protein encoded by my gene, certainly not that, but something else: another axon guidance molecule yet to be discovered, or another cue altogether, or a combination of both these things. The data spoke for itself, and according to it the pathfinder was not the gene I had hoped to find. There would be no paper, and in the long run no lab. There would be no future such as the future I had envisioned for myself.

  Beyond the windowpane of my dorm, on the upper deck of the bridge, a resting line of vehicles brought a giant parking lot to mind. I thought of Aeden’s mother falling down the stairs, how she would probably never again smell the juniper she’d grown in her front yard, and my heart went out to her in a way it rarely had for anyone I’d ever known.

  When I looked at the window again I saw my face silhouetted against the glass, and the headlights of cars moving smoothly toward the east. Darkness had snuck up on me, without my noticing it. I went on sitting there, feeling too heavy and too defeated to move, and it must have been here, more or less, that I got that email from Aeden—an email without a subject or even a message. I opened it imagining it had something to do with the mice, but it didn’t. When I clicked on the attachment what I saw was the image of a footbridge connecting two redbrick buildings over a narrow channel of water. In large bold letters, across the wooden slats of the bridge, Aeden had written: Come With Me.

  When he rang the doorbell some two hours later I was in the kitchen, scrubbing the refrigerator shelves with liquid Ajax. During the two hours preceding this moment, which I had known was bound to come, I had kept myself busy vacuuming and disinfecting the floors and purging the refrigerator of the spoiled milk and mealy apples I hadn’t trashed or replenished for weeks.

  The ring was followed by a succession of knocks. “Emily. I know you’re there.”

  “It’s late, Aeden,” I called, not going to the door.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I have a splitting headache.” This was partially true—the smell of detergent was starting to give me a headache—but the larger truth was that I was terrified to see him, to look him in the eyes after his message. To speak to him through the door was cowardly, ungrateful even, but I couldn’t open it.

  “I’m sorry about the experiment,” Aeden said. “I really am. I know how you’re feeling.”

  “You don’t know,” I said. “People are always saying things like that, claiming to know what others are feeling, but the truth is no one knows.”

  “If anyone can empathize with what you’re going through, it’s me, Emily. But has it ever occurred to you, you may be destined for greater things than the Nobel Prize?”

  I could hear him laughing. “You have a lousy sense of humor, Aeden.”

  “Did you get my email?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “The answer is no, I can’t go with you.”

  “Why not?”

  I remember I was no longer in the kitchen but standing by the door, with a sponge in my hand. “My appointment in the lab hasn’t ended,” I said. “And I just renewed the lease on this dorm.”

  On the other side of the door Aeden said, “Those aren’t even excuses, Emily. You could pick up and leave with me tomorrow if you wanted to. Please open the door.”

  “It would never work,” I said.

  “We’ll make it work,” Aeden said. “You’ll see. We’ll get our own place, a nice little house with a yard and a dog. I know you like dogs, and I swear I’ll never mow the lawn. I’ll let the grass grow wild like your father used to, and we’ll have friends over for dinner once a month. I know you don’t like company very much. I would have liked to have people over every night, but I’ll settle for once a month. We’ll also have kids. Eventually. Two kids, like you said, or maybe just one. One should be enough.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, but I could feel the smile on my face.

  “I want to make you happy.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?” I asked.

  I wasn’t expecting him to answer, but he did. “You’re too alone to be happy.”

  “Maybe it’s in my nature to be alone,” I said. “Maybe I’m destined to go through life alone, like those wandering neurons in Craig’s paper. Maybe I’m just not normal.”

  I could feel him standing very quietly behind the door. “There’s no such thing as normal, Emily,” Aeden finally said. “It doesn’t exist in nature, and it’s not in your destiny to be alone. That’s absurd.” He paused here, and then said, in a gentler voice, “Can you at least think about it?”

  “It won’t change a thing, Aeden,” I said, but my heart was thumping. “Even if I thought about it for a hundred years it wouldn’t change anything. I’m not cut out for that kind of life, the one you will eventually want to have. It’s not in me. It never has been in me. And I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “I wouldn’t be unhappy with you, Emily,” Aeden said, sounding upset at me. “You’re wrong about that.”

  “Please go away,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Emily.” I imagined him stubbornly leaning his forehead against the door. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll stand out here for five minutes. Starting no
w. If after five minutes you haven’t opened the door I’ll take that as a no. I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again, I promise you.”

  I began to count the seconds in my head, but I soon lost track of time and gave up counting, and after only a few moments I heard him stepping away from the door, and his footsteps receding down the hallway, until I stopped hearing him altogether, and realized the five minutes had passed. And in that moment I felt a longing so deep for Aeden, for all the years in which I hadn’t known him, hadn’t known that someone like him was out there in the world, it almost hurt to breathe.

  I yanked the door open and flew outside, into the hallway, and I thought I could see him standing some fifty feet away from me, by the fire exit. And then I realized it wasn’t just a thought: He was really there. His back was to the exit sign and he was facing the east side of the hallway, where I stood in my nightgown with my hair pulled back away from my face. Aeden started toward me, determinedly, and when he reached me I leaped into his arms. “I’m going with you,” I said.

  “I love you, Emily,” he whispered in my ear.

  I pressed my nose to the crook of his neck and a thousand revolving doors locked into place, like molecules in a crystal sheet. From the depths of my heart I saw the old yellow school bus again, but more clearly and distinctly than ever before—if indeed I had ever really seen it. Haltingly the bus approached a snowed-in street corner and came to a full stop. The doors creaked open and a small child in a winter coat appeared at the top of the stairs, and began to descend them. A woman, also wearing a coat, stood waiting for the child at the bottom of the stairs, and for an instant, while the fantasy lasted, she and I were undeniably one and the same.

  Part Five

  The Issue of Memory

  Chapter 27

  Oftentimes, more often than I care to admit to myself, I wonder about the kind of life I would have had with Aeden had I stayed with him the following morning, instead of going back to the lab.

  I imagine flowers in a vase, though I don’t care very much for flowers, and a dog running unleashed in some small and untended but beautiful yard. I imagine informal gatherings with friends at our place and a child or two running barefoot in the house—children miraculously sprung from the recombination of our genes, his and mine.

  I see us drinking ballooned glasses of Baileys by the fireplace in winter, and in summer lying in the sun on outdoor patio chairs with the scent of our sweat soaked into the flimsy fabric of our clothes and the day advancing at a lazy pace, and I wonder what it would have been like to grow old together; I wonder if Aeden would have been happy with me, and I with him, and I ask myself whether it was worth it to have returned to the lab the next day.

  After we embraced in the hallway he lifted me in his arms and carried me back to my dorm and pushed the door open with his knee. I laughed out loud, feeling like a bride in a movie. Or maybe I laughed because I was aware of dwelling at that moment in some high-altitude place for a limited period of time, and the image of the bride came later, years later, when I began flying across the country to give talks on smell and catching unwanted glimpses of silly movies on the backs of people’s headrests. I don’t know.

  In my dorm the smell of detergent had reached my bed by the window. Aeden lowered me to the ruffled cream sheets, kicked off his shoes, and sat down next to me. We kissed and talked, and kissed and talked some more, almost too seriously, in retrospect, about the small country house we were going to rent in Massachusetts, and after a while we took our clothes off and made love under the sheets while outside time seemed to freeze.

  Short of pancake mix and various permutations of coffee there was nothing to eat in my pantry, so we phoned China Fun and ordered vegetable rolls and stir-fried rice with chicken and a side order of steamed spinach. The food was delivered at midnight to my doorstep, in brown paper bags with white napkins and plastic forks and enough fortune cookies to go around a conference room, though I don’t think we opened even one.

  We ate at the small table by the window, where hours earlier I’d sat examining images of olfactory neurons. The screen had long since dozed off, and while Aeden chewed and swallowed and spoke to me about the logistics of leaving (we would drive up north over the weekend, crash at his friend’s house in Boston, look for a place on the outskirts of Cambridge, within twenty miles of Neurogen) my attention kept wandering every so often to the spiraling galaxy of my screensaver, as though I were stepping out of my skin and seeing for the first time the vastness of everything, the many roads I’d never noticed, or dared to see. How I’ve hated coming across that screensaver throughout the years.

  After we ate and discussed the future we got back into bed, and eventually fell asleep. But a few hours later, when it was not quite yet daylight outside, I awoke to a troubling dream. A dream I’ve never been able to reconstruct except to say that in the midst of it my eyes snapped open as if someone had shouted my name. Something was wrong, something about our results didn’t add up. I stared at the ceiling, unable to make sense of the dream, or to understand what was wrong, and then I quietly rose out of bed and got dressed. When I returned from the bathroom Aeden was still sleeping. In the neutral light of dawn his face was bluish pale and his eyelids veiny. I could see his eyes, under his eyelids, moving in a way that made me imagine he was racing in his dream, running away from someone or something, and yet his breathing was gentle and unbroken, almost peaceful. I stood by the bedside in my jeans and hooded sweater, watching him sleep, and then I turned away and left.

  When I reached the building it wasn’t quite six a.m. The lab was gloomy and deserted, but the door to the main room was open, and I could see light spilling into the hallway. I was half expecting to find one of the other postdocs in the lab, or a graduate student dismantling an overnight experiment, but instead I found David, standing in his lab coat by the sink, capping an assembly line of water-filled jars with little black screw-on lids. It was a brainless, thankless task, reserved for the floor technicians and unpaid summer students and also, when there was no one else around to do the job, for research technicians like himself. Watching him, before he noticed me there, I felt sorry for him, and for all the hours of work he’d poured into the database. Mainly, though, I felt guilty for what hopes he’d no doubt entertained of having his name on a paper.

  “How are you, David?” I asked at last.

  He raised his eyes to mine. “I’m fine, Emily. And you?”

  In my bay I changed into my lab coat and stood staring at the spreadsheet on my desk, at the date of birth, gender, ear-punch specifics, and olfactory bulb phenotype of the mice we’d analyzed. The data was shatteringly clear, but in the back of my head was that feeling I’d had in the dream, of the world turned upside down; the sense and certainty of there being something I’d overlooked and needed to do.

  I was still struggling to make sense of the dream, to make sense of why I was there, when I heard a rasping little sound, and turned around to see David standing in front of me, a downcast, apologetic sort of look on his face. I thought he was about to tell me he was sorry about the knockout results, and then saw a white object in his hand. It was Aeden’s timer, the one he’d lost. David was holding it practically under my nose, like an offering.

  “It was in 309,” he said. “On the floor.”

  Room 309, I knew, was where wild-type mice and a few other strains with normal olfactory bulbs were housed. I noticed the safety clip was broken, but made no move to take the timer from him. Something told me that to take Aeden’s timer wasn’t exactly what David wanted me to do. “You can leave it on his desk,” I said.

  “Justin said to give it to you personally,” David said.

  In the cold room the air stank of formaldehyde and faintly of cadaverine—that rotting smell you can sometimes whiff on the breaths of people with problem teeth. I stood in the center of the room with my arms wrapped around my chest, shielding myself from the chilly air and scanning Aeden’s overcrowded shelf for the tray w
ith our heads.

  Three doors down, in the imaging room, I sat in front of a scope and pulled out the vials from the tray and reexamined our bulbs, one at a time. Nothing had changed, of course. Nothing in the map of smell was amiss. Hundreds of nerve endings reached their targets in the bulb reliably, inevitably almost, as though they had been destined to do so. Nothing lost, nothing gained, everything normal—too normal, almost.

  There’s no such thing as normal, Emily. It doesn’t exist in nature.

  I sat there recalling what Aeden had said, and remembered what he’d told me once, a few months earlier, discussing science over coffee during one of our late weekend mornings in his kitchen. That in the bulbs of their knockouts he and Allegra had spotted a few wandering axons, but in such small numbers as to render the phenomenon negligible, certainly not publishable. If this was true for their mice, why wasn’t it true for ours; why weren’t there any stray neurons? Why was the map of smell of our mice so normal-looking?

  Almost without thinking, I rose from the chair and left the imaging room, walking swiftly and mindlessly back to my bay. David hadn’t moved from my desk. When he saw me he said, “A litter of mice is missing from room 309.”

  “Aeden might have used them as a control,” I offered, despite the fact that to my knowledge such controls were not required in our experiment.

  “But why six?”

  “What’s wrong with six?” I countered.

  “Wasn’t that the number of mice you analyzed?” David said, unnervingly straightening his eyeglasses.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s my job to know these things, Emily. I also know your knockout litter was under a different label for a week. I’m not a half-wit. Justin isn’t either. He knows much more than you give him credit for.” He looked at me more carefully. “Where is the missing litter?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at, David,” I said—though a part of me already did. “You’re suggesting I analyzed those mice instead of our knockouts? I took the knockouts out of room 310 with my own hands.”