She frowned.
Skepticism became her, Christopher thought. The pearl hanging from her left earlobe swung fetchingly in its harness. “So how’s med school? Have you saved dozens of lives?”
Suvali thought for a moment. “I don’t think I did any damage,” she said. “I’d call that a moral victory.”
“First do no harm.”
“Primum non nocere. Our first lesson.” She gestured toward his heap of articles. “I trust you follow a similar principle?”
“Rigorously,” he said. “But I won’t bore you with my sober obsessions.”
Christopher had trouble returning to his photocopies. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Suvali sped through the front section of the Times, slowed when she got to local news, set aside sports and business, and settled in with arts and entertainment. She looked up to find him peeping over her shoulder at a four-color spread.
“I’m afraid I’m ruining your concentration,” she said.
Christopher shook his head. “It’s not your fault that Van Gogh is more interesting than golden rice.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that.” Suvali folded her paper and pivoted to face him. “Isn’t that the rice that cures blindness?”
“That’s what the press releases say. The fine print tells a different story.”
“I guess I haven’t followed closely.”
Twenty-five words or less, Christopher warned himself. “The ‘gold’ is vitamin A. Whether it’ll be concentrated enough in GMO rice to make a medical difference is one question. Another is whether farmers can save their own seed, or if they’ll have to pay the multinationals every season.”
“Right.” Suvali nodded. “I did read something about the seed banking issue.”
“Vitamin A deficiency strikes hardest in Southeast Asia and Africa—you’re probably up on that too. The article I’m reading is from the Nutritional Studies Institute.” Christopher checked the title page. “It’s in Birmingham, actually. They’ve got an interesting angle, kind of a big-picture look at the ongoing scrap.”
“So what do they conclude?”
“It turns out distribution of golden rice can’t happen without an infusion of private foundation money,” Christopher said. “The grants are already secured, but the funds are earmarked for payments on seventy separate patents. Not for farmers or distribution centers. For seventy separate patent owners who demand return on their investment in this one genetically tailored grain.”
“Isn’t that reasonable? If they paid for the research?”
“I guess that’s not the question I’d ask. The red flag here is that the poster child for genetically engineered agriculture is being marketed to nonprofits. So the story behind the story is that four billion dollars in annual R and D is aimed at generating charitable donations? That seems pretty implausible to me.”
“I’m not sure I see.”
Christopher hesitated. What the hell, he thought. “That’s just not how capitalism works. In the best possible case, if farmers grow it and eating the stuff causes blind kids to see, the game is still rigged. Golden rice as a miracle cure isn’t what’s in play. It’s a smoke screen. You can tell because there’s no real profit to justify the research investment that brought it to market. Golden rice is a feel-good story that distracts from the leg irons that Monsanto and Novartis are trying to clap onto every farmer on the planet. What they really want is to sell patented seeds that require patented chemical fertilizers to achieve the promised yield, and forbid growers from banking the seeds they harvest so they have to pay again next year, then—watch the birdie!—once-independent farmers are indentured to agribusiness for life.”
Suvali took in his argument. “I don’t know, Chris. I can see how you’re fitting that story together. But I wonder if your inferences might fall out differently in another telling.”
“I suppose they might,” Christopher said. “It’s hard to sort spin from fact when the issues are complex. In my experience, following the money and the information that’s downplayed by the press is your best bet. But it’s work.”
She nodded, considering. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll credit you this much: I knew several underinformed members of the reactionary Left at university, and you’re certainly not in their camp.”
“Thanks, I think.” Christopher grinned weakly. Was she mocking him? “Maybe we should talk about Van Gogh.”
“Ah …” Suvali reopened arts and entertainment. “I’m really sorry to miss this.”
“I’ve always loved that chair,” he said, gesturing.
“Which one, Gauguin’s or Van Gogh’s?” There were two paintings pictured in the article.
“The yellow one,” Christopher said. “Didn’t Van Gogh paint both?”
“He did, but the red one is Gauguin’s, the yellow chair is his own. They were working together in Arles at the time.”
“Is Van Gogh a particular favorite?”
“Of mine? I suppose. During his own time he turned art back toward its emotional core. Impressionism strikes me as superficial, all surfaces and light. Then Van Gogh came along and made painting urgent again. And sensual at the same time.”
“You’ve studied art history.”
“I’m a dabbler, really. But I don’t respond well to sunny optimism, at least not among nineteenth century Europeans.”
Christopher supposed she was talking about life on the short end of the colonial stick. “You don’t strike me as a gloomy person,” he said.
“British upbringing.” Suvali shrugged. “Never wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. And at all costs resist what you Americans call ‘irrational exuberance.’”
“Bottom line, as a Yank I can’t possibly have a clue.”
“Exactly,” she said, smiling.
Christopher let a few moments pass. “So can I ask what drew you to medicine?”
“That’s a hard question to answer. Especially if cliché is off limits.”
“I don’t mean to press.”
“No, no—it’s just … there’s more than I can sum up in a tidy little package. Seeing people suffer, admiring people who can relieve that. Making my family proud. Breaking into a professional class that’s often closed to women of a certain background. See? It sounds so clichéd already.”
“Not at all,” Christopher said. “It sounds real and responsible. Admirable. I’m kind of partial to people who do the right thing.”
“Well. You are very serious.”
“People tell me that.” They sat silently for a long minute. Christopher racked his brain for a segue into something lighter. “How often do you get back to England?” he asked, grasping at the first available straw.
“Twice in three years.” She brightened a little at the question. “First Christmas and second summer.”
“I suppose you miss it?”
In answer she pointed to her newspaper.
“I’d love to visit someday.”
“Tell me about yourself, Chris. What do you do besides read science through a political lens and talk about art with strangers?”
“Actually, that pretty much covers it.” Her ebullience buoyed him. “Born and raised across the bay,” he said. “My dad’s a professor at Berkeley.”
“In what field?”
“Molecular biology.”
“Ah, so the political interests are oppositional?”
That knocked Christopher back on his heels. “I suppose the town and time had an influence. My mom was a committed sign-waver, I guess you could say I grew up as mama’s little activist. Dad’s a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but as far as genetic engineering goes he’s too deeply immersed to see context.”
“Fair enough,” Suvali said. “I suppose that’s true of specialists everywhere.”
“Anyway.”
“No, go on. I shouldn’t be so sharp. You said when we met that you do layout for a living.”
“Do you know the Reporter?”
“The weekly tabloid?”
&nbs
p; “Right. I’m half of the production department.”
“Why not write? You strike me as the type.”
Christopher worried his glass, turning it slowly on the table’s surface. “It’s complicated,” he said. “When you tally up pages, the Reporter is mostly ads and reviews. And I’m too involved as an activist to write political features. The publisher doesn’t want the paper stained by partisan tendencies, other than his own. So the most I can hope for are short pieces. Producing the paper is steadier work. I write online news, agitprop, that sort of thing—on my own dime. For byline credit.”
“What about other professional options?”
“Journalism or in general?”
“Either way.”
“I suppose I’m not so interested in careers. I’m attached to the people I live with. We’re a collective, people I’ve done political organizing with since college. A family of sorts.”
“Do you live in a squat, then?”
“No,” Christopher said, smiling. “Not exactly. The building is owned by a guy who likes to rent cheap to activists. We’re the activists.”
“How many are you?”
“Six,” he said, consciously omitting Brendan. “Plus a rotating cast of four or five undergrads on the bottom floor—State, City College. We’re closer to some than others.”
“That’s a sizable family. Any kids?”
“A teenage boy. His mom was a prominent lefty in our cohort at Berkeley, for whatever that’s worth. The biological father blew us off years ago. Anyway, keeping all that together seems more important than a professional trajectory. I couldn’t move for a job.”
Suvali bit her lip. “I can’t imagine.”
“What?”
“I suppose it’s just human variety,” she said. “My family leapt to the UK, and I’ve jumped even farther to pursue medicine. I’d wager you’re as capable as anyone in my program, but you’d forego a career rather than move two counties over.”
Christopher shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a generational phase. My dad’s parents emigrated from Eastern Europe. My mom’s family fled Ireland’s potato famine. Ambition burned bright on both sides—look where my Dad got to. Then you fast-forward, and I’m born where I want to be.”
“If you were lazy, it wouldn’t be so striking,” Suvali said, gesturing to the self-imposed curriculum piled on his side of the table.
She regarded him over her milky tea. He rested his gaze on the tabletop.
“I suppose I ought to move along,” Christopher said. “Leave you to London.”
“I hope I haven’t scared you off with my brusque British manner.”
“Absolutely not.” Christopher wasn’t as sure as he made himself sound. He began to pack his bag. If he didn’t say something now … “I enjoy your company, Suvali, but we should quit meeting like this. How about a movie next week? Maybe Thursday?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. “I’ve got exams next week, how about the Wednesday after?”
“A week from Wednesday?” Braced for rejection, Christopher had to conceal his shock. “A week from Wednesday is great. The seventh.” They exchanged phone numbers. Christopher wrote out his e-mail address too. “I have to warn you, the number is a landline. I’m the last guy in town without a cell.”
“Yes, you said when we met. The mad internet chatter is a Luddite!”
Christopher laughed away the allusion to his IRC with Chagall. “It’s been a pleasure. Two for two.”
“For me as well, Chris.”
He picked his way through the tables, fighting an impulse to shout out loud.
NINE
Berkeley hadn’t changed, Christopher thought as he ascended the escalator from the subway. The rotunda capping the BART station still squatted like a glossy brown cough drop spit onto the corner of Center Street. Runaway kids still mixed it up with junkies on Constitution Plaza, clean-cut Moonies hadn’t stopped recruiting for mass marriages. At the moment nobody was circulating petitions to recall the governor or tax the rich, but that only meant the usual suspects had packed up and gone to meetings.
Stepping onto the bricked plaza, Christopher recalled the first vigil he ever attended, clutching his mother’s hand in this very place, baffled by a crowd’s surging passions.
He must have been about six, maybe 1975: the year the US evacuated Saigon. The year Weather Underground bombed the State Department. The shootout at Pine Ridge that killed three men and sent Leonard Peltier to prison for life. Whatever called their mother downtown that night, for him and Marshall the occasion was a weird sort of festival. A crowd of blue jeans and batik skirts, painted placards, candles in mason jars, one grown-up after another speaking incoherently into a bullhorn. Marshall, younger and smaller, had been frightened by the noise and the crush. He had demanded they go home immediately, and burst into tears when Christopher begged their mother to stay.
—
Christopher caught a bus most of the way up the hill. He was only the slightest bit winded when he turned off the familiar, buckled sidewalk. Behind the unlocked front door, the foyer was thick with the leafy scent of white chrysanthemums. A mass of flowers bobbed on spindly stems arcing out of a cut-glass vase that had been their mother’s favorite. A wedding gift.
Squaring his shoulders, Christopher shook off dread of whatever mawkishness his brother might have dreamed up for the occasion. The key would be to keep expectations low.
If Betty were still alive, all four Kalmans would have marked the date with dinner at home. She would have conjured up a grand feast, combing cookbooks and magazines, shopping in farmers’ markets and immigrant groceries, refusing all but token assistance in the kitchen even though the party was for her. Epicurean dinners receded into family history soon after she died. Yet Marshall insisted, over Christopher’s weak protest and their father’s distress, that the memory of Elizabeth O’Neill Kalman be honored on her birthday in the manner she would have orchestrated herself.
The house smelled like caramelizing onions, which didn’t tell him much. Christopher supposed Marshall would serve something high on the food chain. Lamb chops or steaks. Foreboding settled like a fog as he shut the door noiselessly and skirted the kitchen. The study stood empty, weeping a faint scent of decomposing books. Christopher found his father tending a charcoal fire out back, in chinos and a bib apron.
“Chris, come look.” The older man beckoned, pointing into the bowl of the barbecue. Christopher crossed the patio, sinking into fuzzy moss that grew unchecked between the bricks. The flowerbeds had gone to seed. Petals from the unpruned plum trees carpeted the yard. “Look how the heat circulates,” his father was saying. “Like blood pumping through arteries and veins!”
The briquettes did have something of a pulse to them. Father and son stared into the coals. Christopher reflected that where the scientist deduced orderly patterns, he saw ebb and swell of ungraspable complexity. A plangent bell began to peal out the hour from the heart of the campus, a half mile to the south.
“No problems getting across the bay?”
Professor Kalman wore his departmental party face, cheeks tensed in a vacant smile. Christopher thought he looked thin. Seven bells, then silence. The sound of the Campanile made him nostalgic, and nostalgia made him feel like a sap.
“The trains ran on time,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
“Not bad, not bad for an old guy. Did you see Marshall?”
“Not yet, Dad. How are your classes?”
“Fine, I suppose.” Professor Kalman pushed at the coals with a poker, spreading them evenly across the grate. “It’s my semester to teach introductory principles, but there’s little to prepare once you’ve given the same course a dozen times. The computational biology seminar is quite lively.”
“And the lab?”
“Good, very good actually. We’re coming up with some promising analytical methods. The field is generating enormous data sets, you know, and it’s easy to overlook meaningful results in the mass of info
rmation. Of data, I should say, as your brother has corrected me. The point is, this is now the fundamental problem in molecular biology.” Professor Kalman made a last tender adjustment to the coals. “How to spot wheat among all the chaff.”
Christopher studied the wispy white hair furring his father’s forearms, his slack, dry skin. Was his wrist trembling? Or was that just heat rippling up from the grill? Christopher once suggested his father’s field boiled down to a belief that scrying leaves at the bottom of billions of teacups gives more reliable results than sampling just a few. Tonight he was determined to be better behaved. “You’ll be a pure computer scientist before long,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“No?”
“Not at all.” The elder Kalman spoke with studied neutrality. “My relationship to computers is no different from yours. You lay out a newspaper, I lay out the results of my experiments. Computers are equipment, not the focus of the exercise.”
Christopher grunted noncommittally.
Professor Kalman fit the enameled lid of the barbecue to its bowl. “We’d better slow down,” he said, “and see how your brother is coming along.”
—
As they entered the kitchen Marshall slid a pan of fingerling potatoes back into the oven.
“Smells great,” Christopher said.
Extricating himself from a pair of oven gloves, the cook embraced his brother awkwardly. “Glad you could come,” he mumbled.
He’d put on weight. “You look good,” Christopher said, curious where Marshall’s growing bulk ranked in their father’s catalog of worries. Avoiding his brother’s doubled chin, his gaze wandered around the kitchen, settling on a print that had hung above the kitchen table for as long as he could remember. Paris par la fenêtre. He wondered idly whether the print had been pushing out of subconscious memory when he nicknamed his anonymous saboteur. Marc Chagall. The Eiffel Tower alongside an overturned train. It made a rough kind of sense, he supposed. “What can I do?” Christopher asked.
“Everything’s about finished. The halibut can go on in ten minutes or so.”
“Chris, can I get you something to drink?”
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