“How can you be so sure?” David asked me. “Did you regenotype them?” He was smiling now, a thin and embarrassed smile, as though he’d been waiting for me to come to my senses.
I stepped back from him and left the room, covering the distance between it and the steel door at the end of the hallway at a limping trot, wanting and not wanting to ever reach it. In the cold room, the biohazards bin Carlos hadn’t yet emptied was overflowing with mouse carcasses. I knelt on the cement floor, straddling the bin between my knees, and with the stench of cadaverine pressing into my nostrils began to pull out nylon bags of decapitated mice. I hadn’t dug beyond the surface of stiff bodies when my fingers hit something hard and bony.
There were six mice inside the bag, with their heads intact. Still, something in me refused to do the math, to make the nightmarish connection between what I was holding in my hands and our knockout mice. It wasn’t until David had dissected them and stained their bulbs, until I laid down one of the bulbs on a scope stage and pressed my face to the eyepiece and I saw the surface of the bulb emerge into focus under the harsh bright lights, that the truth came to me, in a searing flash.
There they were, the neurons whose destiny I had altered. Without my gene they did not reach their targets. Instead they wandered open-ended paths, as I had hoped they would, and I had to shut my eyes against the pain.
Chapter 28
In my dorm a mixture of coffee and detergent filled the air with an inscrutable odor I’ve often encountered in airports in the early morning, before the first flights of the day have begun to take off, the sort of smell that has invariably driven me to head straight to my gate, far from the crowded food stations and mopped floors.
Two hours had gone by since I’d left him. I hadn’t expected him to still be there, but he was, standing barefoot at the kitchen sink. He’d made the bed and gotten dressed and dismantled the refrigerator shelves I’d forgotten to rinse. Two were already drying on Bounty sheets on the laminated counter. The other one he was still working on, scrubbing the Ajax off with a brand-new sponge I imagined him unearthing from the dark cabinet space under the sink where I kept my few cleaning supplies. On the stove, an espresso contraption I’d never bothered to use was fizzling with coffee, and there was music too, jazz streaming softly from my laptop near the window.
I stood by the doorway, looking at him. Pillow marks were indented on his face, two thin lines running like rail tracks down the side of his left cheek. It occurred to me it was the last time I would be seeing them on him.
“You should have left me a note,” Aeden said, smiling at me from the sink. “I was about to phone you in the lab.”
I entered the kitchen and sat down at the table behind him. “David found your timer,” I said. “In room 309.” Then I said, “Six mice are missing from that room.”
Aeden glanced over his shoulder at me and we made eye contact for a second before he looked away. The faucet was still running, but he just stood there, without moving.
“Those are the mice we analyzed, aren’t they, instead of our knockouts?” When he didn’t reply I continued. “I found our knockouts in the trash. Luckily the bin was still there. Otherwise I would have never found out, right?”
“No,” Aeden said.
“The phenotype is dazzling,” I said, ignoring his confession. “Certain areas of the map are very nearly destroyed. I’m sure you would be impressed, Aeden.”
“The experiment doesn’t matter to me, Emily. I was thinking only about you, about us.” He was no longer facing the sink. “Nothing else mattered.”
“What about what mattered to me?” My voice was quivering.
Aeden came over to the table and sat down next to me. “Your gene will still be here a hundred years from now. But you and I won’t. Do you understand me?”
“Right,” I said, looking away from him. “I nearly forgot we were supposed to be together. How could I have been so blind?”
“Don’t do this,” Aeden said, closing his eyes. “Please don’t do this to us.” When he opened his eyes again tears were streaming down his face. He took hold of my hands.
“Forget the results,” he said. “Please, just let them die in the trash.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “You’re asking me to become a different person, to be someone I’m not.”
“I’m asking you to choose me, Emily. That’s what I’m asking you to do, to choose us.”
I saw my sunken reflection in his eyes and heard a voice out in the hallway, and light footsteps skipping past the door. Children actually lived on the floor, on practically every floor of our building, children whose mothers went to the lab every morning and cooked dinner in the evening and made love to their husbands at night and met up with friends over the weekend. I thought about that, about having everything people aim to have in life: a career, family, intimacy, happiness, or the idea of happiness Aeden had painted for me: sharing a house with him where a dog ran wild in the yard, spending the rest of my life with him. Was it so impossible to have all these things, or was it just not possible for me?
“You know what I would like?” I finally told him, standing up from the table.
Aeden dropped his head into his hands, as though he already knew.
In the lab he emptied out his desk of four years in the time it takes to fill out a form at the dentist’s. Cardboard boxes were already nested like Russian dolls beneath his desk. I had noticed them that morning when I walked into our bay, light on my feet still with that feeling of vastness, never imagining how things would end.
While he packed I stood outside, by the elevators, waiting for Aeden to do what I’d asked him. At last the double doors of the lab split open and Aeden wheeled a cart of boxes past me, into an open elevator. He turned around and looked at me, but I didn’t move. I hadn’t planned to say goodbye. I didn’t want to.
“Emily,” he said, ramming his arm between the shutting doors. “Emily, please, is this how you want things to end?”
“No, it’s not,” I said, wondering if I would ever see him again. “But you’ve left me no choice.” He looked at me for a long moment, until his arm finally went down, and I saw his face vanish.
A day later I walked into Justin’s office equipped with images of the bulbs of the mice I’d dug out of the trash and watched him smile with delight as he went over them. To my relief he didn’t ask me a single question about Aeden. He conveniently turned a blind eye to the discrepancy between the initial results and those on my laptop screen, and so did David, and so did I, in the end.
At the time I told myself that by not breathing a word to anyone in the lab about what Aeden had done I was being only fair to him, and in fact that was true. But what I never let myself believe, and what was also true, was that I was trying to make myself forget, not so much what he’d done, but what could have been had I never found those mice in the first place.
The following year, working over the weekend at my washed-out, cluttered bench with short strands of DNA designed to recognize potential variants of my gene, David and I isolated from his library a series of gene fragments. I reconstructed the fragments to their full length and incorporated the sequences into a phylogenetic tree of axon guidance genes in my computer and nearly fainted at the sight. A fresh new limb sprouted from the tree, a limb bearing a small family of guidance molecules exclusive to the sense of smell.
It was an exhilarating sight. It was also, in retrospect, the most lonesome thing I’ve ever seen.
Chapter 29
Surfing the Neurogen website last week in my office, I came across a picture of Aeden I hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was late in the evening and I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the opening of the Lasker Award acceptance speech. Usually I’m able to string words together fairly quickly, and with conviction, but on this particular evening my mind kept wandering. After an hour of false starts I closed the document and clicked an icon hidden inside a folder on my screen. The moment I did so I felt
a soothing calm wash over me, as if to open the Neurogen website, to explore it again as I had done in the past was what I’d yearned all along to do.
The first thing I saw on the web page was the footbridge linking the two unpresuming buildings of red brick across a narrow stream. Except this time there was a rowboat in the water, with four would-be employees sitting inside it, smiles on their young faces and their oars idly held in their hands. I knew it was just an ad, but I couldn’t help but feel a little upset by what it seemed to me to be misleadingly portraying: that to do science, to give oneself wholly to the search for truth, is something anyone can do; that we are in fact naturally born and inclined and even destined to give ourselves to such work.
I thought of Aeden and smiled, imagining that he would have some venomous but insightful and amusing remark about the ad, and then I scrolled past it, with hesitation, to Scientists at the top of the page. The list was longer than before, but his name, to my relief, was still there. I clicked on it and before I could inhale, an image of Aeden popped up on my screen—the same photo of the thirty-three-year-old I had first seen when the picture was uploaded on the site eleven years ago. In the picture—which Aeden for some reason hadn’t bothered to replace—he was aiming his old inquisitive smile at me: a smile that always seemed to be on the verge of uncovering some important truth. Seeing it again that evening, for the first time in two years, the picture had the feel of a fresh start, a new beginning.
Starting from the time that he left the lab, Aeden had sent me Christmas cards and birthday cards almost religiously each year, and in between them a host of emails telling me how he was and inquiring about my own life: how was academia treating me, where in the city was I living, was I seeing someone, was I happy? The last message I had received from him, some two years earlier, was different, longer and more direct than the others, claiming there were loose ends we needed to tie up and arguing that it really wasn’t fair, my silence after nine years. How long could someone hold a grudge, and what was the point? He cared deeply about me, and despite my silence—because of it, actually—he suspected I still cared for him. He needed to see me as soon as possible. Would I be in town over the weekend?
I never answered this letter, or the others. I never even acknowledged receiving the greeting cards either. Though oftentimes I felt strongly inclined to do so. One particular weekend, setting up my lab over the Christmas holidays in a building so empty I could hear the wind outside from the hallway, I spotted, in my usual pile of junk mail, an envelope from Aeden. Inside was a card with a picture of a deer pulling a sled full of packages up a snowy hill dotted with tiny beautiful houses lit from within. The scent of cinnamon rippling from the inside of the card compelled me to open it, and when I did I was struck by the familiar sight of his handwriting, wishing me good luck with my appointment at the Chemical Senses Institute. It was a thoughtful gesture, and I had wanted to email him saying thank you, but didn’t. He had tried to interfere with my research, and what had made him think he could do that, decide what was best for me? A few years after that I saw his name on a paper describing neuron regeneration and memory gain in aging mice treated with growth factor proteins. I had been eager to send him a congratulatory note, but decided at the last minute against it. I was still angry with him for trying to take my fate into his hands. But more than this, I was inexplicably angry with myself.
Sometime soon after Aeden’s last letter, the one in which he’d asked to see me, his correspondence had suddenly stopped. I missed hearing from him, but I was also secretly relieved not to have to grapple with the memories, up until a year ago, when I began to wonder in earnest why Aeden was no longer communicating with me.
The question was one I’d been mulling over for several days, along with memory. How is it that neurons in our hippocampus, that seahorse-shaped area of the brain where memories are stored, persist in firing off their signals? Or more precisely, why do they? Why does the brain insist on rehashing what the mind would rather forget?
I was thinking about this when Giovanna burst into my office, startling me to a standing position. “What can I do for you?” I asked, aware that those had been Justin’s words to me when I’d appeared in his room unannounced. Somehow they’d stuck.
“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Giovanna said, darting a look at Aeden on my desktop screen. Her breathing was labored, and her face disarmingly pale.
“Is it time?” I asked, glancing at her belly, over which her lab coat strained.
But Giovanna shook her head and the next thing I knew I was following her down the hallway of the lab to the imaging room: a crammed, airless cubicle where biological specimens are observed at up to two-thousand-fold magnification, a place where truths are revealed, the wanted and the unwanted, and people’s futures are very often decided—whether they will stay on in research or leave, find something else to do with their lives.
Jutting out of a petri dish, on the lit stage of a scope, was the olfactory bulb of a mouse belonging to the strain she had made, genetically designed to model a congenital form of anosmia that is present in humans. Anosmia caused by injury to the head is often incurable, especially in adults. But smell loss due to other causes might still be curable.
Our goal was to determine if enhanced expression of certain pathfinder genes in these animals could help rewire their olfactory bulbs and restore the sense of smell they’d been born without. I wasn’t particularly hopeful about the experiment. I never am. But then skepticism can grow on you like an addiction.
I sat down in front of the scope and lowered my head to the eyepiece. In the canned, stale air of the room I could feel the warmth of Giovanna’s body next to mine, and the reassuring tumescent odor of sloughed skin I’ve come to associate with maternity. What did I look like to her, I wondered, with my new farsighted prescription and the recent invasion of grays in my hair, the cumulative effect on my waistline of a steady diet of coffee and muffins? She’d been in the lab for, how long, close to two years? In that time she’d met a man she’d liked well enough to move in with, engineered a mouse strain existing in no other lab in the world, and brought a baby to near full term. In the two years it had taken me to summon the courage to revisit Aeden’s picture on a web page, Giovanna had made something out of nothing, created life where none had existed.
The bulb was veiled in a haze. I played with the focus knob of the scope and the fog lifted, revealing nerve endings spatially segregated into groups, coursing defined pathways in the bulb, ultimately coalescing onto targets called glomeruli. In one small cross section of the bulb I counted more than a dozen glomeruli, and imagined the axons that innervated them firing their signals: fragrant, woody, pungent, chemical, minty. How many of these odors and others might these animals be able to smell now?
“I’m dying here.”
I had momentarily forgotten that Giovanna was next to me. For many months she had been waiting for this moment, and the moment had finally arrived—the only one she would probably care to recall in years to come. Before she knew it she would write a paper describing how pathfinder proteins restore networking in the olfactory bulbs of mice with congenital anosmia; she would publish this paper and apply for funding to expand her research; and maybe, if she really wanted it, and family allowing, she would have her own lab. And though I’ve somehow ceased to be impressed by these kinds of achievements, and though I’ve been through a similar song and dance with several other very dedicated and extremely fortunate postdocs in my lab, I raised my face to hers, and, smiling in the darkness, said, “The results are remarkable,” whereupon Giovanna flung her two strong arms around my neck, nearly knocking me out of my chair.
I guess that’s when I knew that I had forgiven Aeden; when I told myself that the memory of our last time together was not the one I wanted to go on living with.
Chapter 30
Yesterday I received an email from Aeden—the first in just over two years. His message came in response to the email I sent him last w
eek, inviting him to the Lasker Awards ceremony that will take place here in New York tomorrow, and letting him know that in my acceptance speech I would acknowledge his contribution to the pathfinder project. Aeden’s letter was brief, and whether he planned to be at the ceremony was unclear. But overall I was more than pleased with it.
Dear Emily,
It’s nice to hear from you. As you know I’ve thought of you often. I miss that period of my life. I haven’t been doing a lot of traveling lately but it so happens that I’m on my way into the city today for a meeting, and would love to see you.
My sincere congratulations,
Aeden
I had been going over the opening sentence of my speech and feeling dissatisfied with it, when his email arrived. It was early in the morning, earlier than most people in my lab, in most labs in the building, get to work, so I had the luxury of being able to sit there at my desk and read and reread Aeden’s email while some highly cognitive area of my brain acknowledged the knot taking shape in my stomach.
Some three hours later, after a string of email exchanges in which Aeden and I defined exactly where and when to meet, I was out in the street, dodging buses and taxis and pedestrians in the snug-fitting dress and high-heeled shoes I keep in my office closet and wear to conferences and for the occasional blind date. On my way out of the lab I had stopped by the bathroom to take a close look at myself in the full-length mirror, and ended up standing in front of it a good deal longer than I had anticipated, realizing sadly that the image in the glass did not align with the one in my head. I looked older than I’d thought, or had cared to admit: thicker around the waist and with more than just a few grays tainting my red hair, and more than just a few sunspots on my face, despite my forty years of relative enclosure. To make matters worse, there seemed to be a downward tilt to the right-hand corner of my mouth that gave my face, when I wasn’t smiling, an almost tyrannical air.
The DNA of You and Me Page 17