The tour group I’d seen earlier came flocking into the room, past the bench where I was sitting, and gradually disappeared into a connecting room. It is important that you see this before you die, I imagined their guide telling them, and somehow that thought was able to calm me. I scavenged my handbag for a Kleenex and dried my eyes. Of the two people who had been in the room with me, only one remained, standing very still in front of the painting he’d been examining, with his face practically touching the canvas now. I thought I could see a magnifying lens in his hand, and protruding from the back pocket of his jeans a flat-edged head, similar to a spatula. A suggestion of turpentine seemed to emanate from where he was, but the smell could have come from anywhere: the entire room was one gigantic oil painting.
The man stepped back, away from the canvas, and inserted the instrument in his hand (it was a magnifying lens) into his other pocket. Then he glanced over his shoulder at me and we acknowledged each other in silence. Something about his face was very familiar, but it wasn’t until he was standing over me, blocking my view of Garshin, that I realized who he was.
“I hope you’re feeling better,” he offered kindly, his chunky arms folded around a visibly protruding belly.
“Thank you,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to make a scene.”
He waved a hand in the air. “People are always inspired to tears in this room, don’t ask me why.” He was smiling genially at me, displaying the gap between his two front teeth, discolored now with age. His face was stockier than I remembered, and his blond hair streaked with gray.
“I’m Emily,” I said. “And you’re John, right?”
He squinted at me, evidently not remembering who I was. “Have we met before?”
“Twelve years ago,” I said. “In this room, in front of that portrait.” I pointed at Garshin, but John didn’t turn his head around to look. He didn’t have to. Garshin’s was the only portrait in the room. “We exchanged a few words about it and then I left and I haven’t come back again since.” I thought of telling him about his input in my discovery, but it felt out of place, and for some reason insignificant. “You offered to show me a self-portrait of van Gogh. I don’t know if it’s still here, or whether you have time. You’re obviously working. But I’d love to see it if you have a few minutes.”
John is an art restorer in the museum, and has a workshop on the top floor: a small, busy space similar to the imaging room in my lab, except crammed with canvases instead of microscopes. After showing me the van Gogh painting and the workshop, he led me downstairs, to the first floor, past a byzantine hall with terra-cotta bowls encased in glass, through a pair of glass doors, and into a vast interior courtyard flooded with light. The glass ceiling was beautifully mirrored on the marble floor, and above our heads I could see white clouds roaming the sky.
We walked past the line of tables where twelve years earlier I’d sat having coffee, and around a bronze naked woman with one leg raised in the air, deftly pointing her bow and arrow at us. “Diana,” John said, and with engrossing finality, “goddess of the hunt.”
“Thank you for the tour,” I said, embarrassed. I hadn’t expected him to go out of his way to show me around, and he had. “It’s very kind of you.”
“We’re just getting started,” John said, and smiled so earnestly at me I had to look away. I had a vague impression that he was flirting with me, but wasn’t sure whether he liked me or merely felt sorry for me after what he’d witnessed, or both.
When we got to the entrance of the American Wing he held the door open for me—a glass door with a darkly tinted, reflecting surface. “Is it true what they say about sharks?” he asked. “That they can detect a drop of blood a mile away?”
“I don’t know anything about sharks,” I told him, and stepped past him, into the gallery, where I let myself be led along a checkered floor to the entrance of the exhibit room in which John had said were some nineteenth-century portraits he wanted to show me.
We were about to enter the room when I recalled my father telling me how every species and every individual in a species is locked in its own sensory world, and this gave me an idea. I had planned to say, in the opening of my acceptance speech tomorrow, that in the brain there’s a map of smell. But now I would change that. I would start off with something less scientific, something my father used to tell me long ago, before I thought of becoming a scientist, before I ever dreamed of discovering anything even remotely related to smell: Smell is an illusion, invisible molecules in the air converted by you into cinnamon, cut grass, and burning wood.
It was here, or maybe we were already standing inside the exhibit room, that I told John I needed to leave. It was getting late, I explained, and there was something important I had to do.
“Now?” he asked me, a hand raised to his chin, looking a little taken aback. “You need to leave now, this very second?”
“I’ll come by next week,” I said. “I promise.” Then I did something strange, and entirely unexpected. I opened my handbag and pulled out the pass Aeden had returned to me and handed it to John. “I hope you can make it.”
John regarded the yellow stub in his hand with an almost childlike interest. “I look forward to being there,” he said.
That’s when I turned from him and, quickening my steps, began to make my way back alone, to the entrance of the gallery. I had nearly reached it when I saw a middle-aged woman advancing uncertainly toward me from the other side of the door, a trusting look in her amber eyes. I thought she was about to ask me for directions, but it was just me.
Author’s Note
The research projects and findings in this book have no exact analogues in scientific literature. Their plausibility is based on established scientific principles and documented gaps in knowledge of the late 1900s and early 2000s. The steps carried out by Emily and Aeden to make the knockout mice are founded on existing techniques.
While Emily’s discovery of a new family of axon guidance genes is fictional, her source of inspiration is real: the portrait of writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in room 827.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to my stellar agent, Kirby Kim, for his enormous enthusiasm for this book, and to my talented editor, Katherine Nintzel, whose input in the work was transformative.
My gratitude to Joey Coyle and Gabriela Hidalgo Zaragoza, who read and critiqued early drafts of this novel, and to writing mentors, friends, and family who read excerpts of the book in its conception and provided precious feedback: Rita Gabis, Carol Goodman, Russell Working, Clint McCown, Connie May Fowler, Xu Xi, Ellen Lesser, Joel Rothman, Ivan Rothman, Melina Patris, Jennifer Cohen, Leah Kaminsky, Leonor Hidalgo Coyle, Deborah Kashanian, Sharon Khazzam, Alexandra Ainatchi, and Maria E. Arreaza.
Several of the science-related aspects of this project were facilitated by specialists who generously took the time to answer my questions about anosmia, bioinformatics, and color vision: Leslie J. Stein and Beverly Cowart from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Ryan Taft from Illumina, and Steven R. Ali from Manhattan Vision Associates.
I would also like to thank Brenna English-Loeb from Janklow & Nesbit, who reviewed the submitted manuscript of this book, and the fabulous team at William Morrow HarperCollins that brought the book to life: Vedika Khanna, Laura Cherkas, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Linda Sawicki, Aryana Hendrawan, Julie Paulauski, and Amelia Wood.
About the Author
ANDREA ROTHMAN was a postdoctoral fellow and subsequent research associate at the Rockefeller University in New York, where she studied the neurobiology of olfaction. She earned her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction has appeared in print and online publications such as Lablit, Cleaver Magazine, and Litro Magazine. She lives with her husband and two children in Long Island, New York.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, an
d incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the dna of you and me. Copyright © 2019 by Andrea Rothman LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
DNA chain courtesy of Shutterstock/ArtMari
Cover design and illustration by Laywan Kwan
Cover photographs © Ok Pen/Shutterstock (dots); © Design tech art/Shutterstock (glassware and microscopes); © Design tech art/Shutterstock (test tubes and flasks); © Pavlo S/Shutterstock (silhouettes of faces)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition MARCH 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-285783-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285781-1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
The DNA of You and Me Page 19