by Condition
Another day passes. They dock at Pleasures to pick up a crew of divers. Gwen watches Rico help them onto the boat. His welcome speech—the same one he always delivers—sounds false and facile, a hollow performance. He is an actor, she thinks. His easy banter with the divers, his warm smile: none of this is genuine. She sees him with new eyes.
That night she feigns sleep when he reaches for her. She lies awake a long time listening to him breathe.
Finally, the morning she is to leave for Pittsburgh, she takes her backpack from the V berth and sets about packing. She removes the manila envelope and places it at the center of the bed. Rico is expecting to drive her to the airport. "Gwen, are you ready?" he calls from on deck.
She zips shut the backpack. Her dive gear is already packed. The purple duffel waits, in plain view, on deck. Hasn't Rico noticed? His little woman is ready to go.
The moment is painless; she will ache later. She has always known that she would lose him. Now that the loss is nearly behind her, she feels a curious relief.
He comes down into the hold. She keeps her back to him, gives him a moment to notice the envelope on the bed. Her heart is racing.
She doesn't say a word, doesn't meet his eyes.
Finally he touches her shoulder, and she turns to look at him.
I was going to clean out my bank account, she thinks. All my savings. The money Papa left me. I was going to buy us a boat. She says none of this.
For the first time in months, Gwen adopts the Silence. She waits for him to speak.
"You found it," he says finally.
She thinks, Apparently so.
"Why didn't you ask me about it?"
She thinks, Why didn't you tell me? Why should I have to ask?
"It's a lot of money," says Rico.
She thinks, Where did you get twenty thousand dollars? Are you sell ing drugs?
"You are angry," he says.
She thinks, You used me, and I let you. You would have taken me for everything I have. Yes, genius. I am angry.
He stares at her, mystified. "Gwen, say something." His voice breaks a little, and this is the thing that unglues her.
"You weren't going to tell me," she says finally, choking on the words.
"I couldn't. It's complicated."
She thinks, I'm so stupid. I thought you loved me. And then: My mother was right.
Outside a horn sounds.
"That's my taxi." Gwen hoists the backpack to her shoulder. "I have to go."
As a child in Pennsylvania, Frank McKotch had seen a boy trapped inside the trunk of a tree.
This happened in springtime, the year he and Blaise Klezek were ten. Blaise was his best friend, nearly a brother—Frank's own brothers, nine and twelve years older, had never been much good to him. It was late March, damp and leafless, the first sunny day after a week of soaking rain. The boys spent the morning in church, the interminable hymning and incensing of Palm Sunday. They sat through chicken dinners in uncomfortable clothing. Finally, gratefully, they roared into the forest with Indian whoops, a great stream of pent-up boyhood rushing to escape.
They lived on a hill scored with rows of company houses; behind the hill were acres of dense poplar, oak, and beech. In buck and doe season these woods were off-limits—some years before, a boy had died there, hit by a hunter's stray bullet—but in springtime the boys owned the forest. The stream was alive with frogs, water skippers, small snakes that wriggled but didn't bite. The oaks—their low, spreading branches—made easy climbing. The poplars were less accommodating, stretching indifferently, magnificently toward the sky.
For a long time the boys had eyed a certain tree, a mighty poplar sitting atop a ridge, the tallest tree for half a mile. The poplar's bark was crenellated and silvery, its trunk wide as a barrel. Its branches were unreachable, but close beside it was a tall beech to which someone had nailed crude scraps of two-by-fours, spaced like the rungs of a ladder. Midway up the beech was a wooden platform, a hunter's lookout. Standing on the platform, a boy might reach across to the lowest branch of the poplar.
It was Frank who pointed this out, Blaise who shinned up the makeshift ladder. But when he reached the platform, he hesitated.
"Can you reach it?" Frank called.
"I don't know," said Blaise."It's farther than it looks."
Frank held his breath as Blaise reached and swung into the poplar's bottom branch. After that it looked easy. Blaise crabbed toward the poplar's trunk, where the branches were thicker. He reached up to a higher branch, and then a higher one. For a gasping moment he lost his footing. Quickly he righted himself.
"Slippery," he called.
"Careful," said Frank.
"I can see the schoolyard," Blaise said."I can see the Twelve!"
"Are you sure?" The tipple of Mine Twelve, nearly a mile away, was the tallest structure in town.
By now Blaise was twenty feet off the ground. "It's wet," he shouted. A moment later he let out a tremendous yell. Then he was simply gone.
"Blaise?" Frank circled the tree, craning his neck, but there was no trace of his friend. It was as if a passing angel had snatched him in midair.
He heard another shout that seemed far away. Then, Blaise's voice, curiously muffled:"It's hollow! I'm in the tree!"
Frank rushed to the trunk. The sound seemed to come from above his head."Are you okay?" he shouted.
Another muffled cry.
"I can't hear you," Frank shouted.
"My leg," Blaise said, louder this time."I hurt my leg."
"Can you see anything?" said Frank.
"It's dark." Blaise's voice sounded choked.
"I'm going to go get my dad," Frank said into the tree.
"No!" Blaise shouted, so loudly that the bark vibrated next to Frank's cheek."Don't go!"
"I can't reach you," said Frank. "My dad has a ladder."The only way in, as far as he could see, was the way Blaise had gone, through a soft rotted spot in the trunk, maybe twenty feet up. Frank saw, now, that the spot was blackened. The tree had been struck by lightning. It had died from the inside out.
"I'll be right back," he called.
He ran furiously to his house, and came back with his father and Blaise's; when their rope and ladder proved too short, Frank raced across town to the firehouse. When Blaise was finally extricated two hours later—leg broken, shoulder dislocated, face and hands scraped raw—he seemed stunned and disoriented, still bewildered by the fall.
Frank hadn't thought of Blaise Klezek in a long time—he'd died ten years back in a drunk-driving accident—but the episode came back to him vividly in the spring of 1998, as he walked the streets of Cambridge muttering to himself. His mind, ever the athlete, raced like a star rebounder between two hoops. One, Cristina Spiliotes. Two, Blaise in his narrow prison: stunned, immobile, with no window to the outside. It was a prison nature had made; by following his instincts, Blaise had fallen in. Reaching for the next branch was a boy's imperative. Boy took what tree offered. He did this because he could. What pulled the boy down was likewise a force of nature. The laws of the universe bent for no one.
Humans had mass. Humans fell.
Frank fell to earth on a Monday morning. He returned from an early meeting at Protogenix to find Betsy Baird on the phone.
"Frank, where have you been? I've been calling all over town looking for you. Steve Upstairs wants to see you. As soon as possible, he says."
Upstairs, Frank knocked at the door of the corner office, where Zeichner was eating his lunch. He was white haired now, short and pugnacious, with a low, swollen belly. He resembled an army cook or perhaps a baker, rather than a geneticist who'd won the Nobel Prize.
"Frank, I'm glad you're here. Have a seat." Zeichner pushed away his sandwich and licked his fingers. "I don't have a lot of time, so I'll cut right to it. We have a situation on our hands. It concerns one of your postdocs." He folded his hands."Cristina Spiliotes."
"Cristina," Frank repeated.
"Talk to me about the pape
r, Frank."
Immediately Frank felt the winds change. Like many athletes, he fed on adversity, consequence. Crisis fired his blood. He did a quick inventory of his body, inhaled courage, shored up the reserve.
"Well, as you know, it's been accepted at Science," he said cautiously."Scheduled for the first week in April."
Zeichner closed his eyes a moment. He looked slightly ill."That's what I thought. Frank, if you're aware of any irregularities in the data, now is the time to tell me."
"Irregularities," he repeated slowly."What are you talking about?"
Zeichner paged through the paper on his desk."This." He handed Frank the paper. A line diagram had been Xed out in red ink, a fine line the color of blood.
"The tail blot?" Frank frowned. "What's the problem? It shows clearly that she got the knockout. It's there in black and white."
"So it is," Zeichner said.
"What exactly are you suggesting?" Frank paused. "Steve, she showed me the gel from the tail blot. I saw it."
"I would hope so."
"I mean, I scrutinized it. Many times. There was nothing wrong with that gel."
Zeichner met his gaze. "Listen, I don't doubt that she showed you a gel, and I'm sure it looked fine. But that DNA didn't come from the tail. She lied, Frank."
Frank blinked, not comprehending.
"She did the tail blot," Zeichner continued. "She just didn't like the results. That gel showed that she didn't get the knockout, so she faked it. This gel"—his fat finger stabbed viciously at the page—"didn't come from the tail blot. It came from the stem cells."
Frank's mind raced. Was it possible?
"This is crazy," he said. "She's a bright girl, Steve. I haven't seen a postdoc this promising in years." As he said it, Frank realized it was true."Who's making these allegations?"
Zeichner watched him levelly. "Another of your other postdocs came to me this morning. Apparently he was in the lab meeting last fall, when the girl presented the blot from the stem cells. And when he saw a copy of the paper, the tail blot looked familiar. He'd seen it before. She recycled the stem-cell blot; only this time she said it came from the tail." He paused."She lied, Frank."
"But then—" Frank's mind raced. If Cristina hadn't gotten the knockout—if XIAP had been functioning—her deception wouldn't have ended there. The transgenic mice who appeared resistant to tumors—what accounted for their good health?
"She faked the animal data?" he said softly.
Zeichner shrugged."Frank, you know as well as I do: there are a million ways she could have massaged those numbers."
Frank stared at the floor. It was true, of course. Any animal data was vulnerable to statistical manipulation; only a scientist's integrity stood in the way. And if Cristina were devious enough—desperate enough—to lie about the knockout, why stop there? Three cohorts of transgenic mice, three cohorts of control mice: six sets of numbers, the tumors counted and measured with tiny calipers. By leaving out the sickest mice, and underreporting tumor size in the others—a few millimeters here or there—she could have exaggerated the differences between the two groups. It would have been shockingly easy to do.
"Who says so?" Frank demanded."One of mine?"
"Martin Keohane."
Frank blinked. Martin had worked in his lab for nearly four years, the organizer of the famous birthday roast. Frank had attended Martin's wedding and the baptism of his son.
"Martin? You're joking." This isn't happening, he thought. "This makes no sense. For God's sake, why wouldn't he come to me first?"
"I wondered that myself." Zeichner leaned forward in his chair.
"Frank, I have to ask: is there some reason why your postdoc would think you couldn't address this problem fairly?"
"What are you getting at?"
"Look, I don't know anything about your relationship with this girl, and I'm not asking. I really, really don't want to know. You're both adults, and the institute has no policy on extracurricular relationships between colleagues. Although in this case—" He paused."Look, Frank.
There's a hierarchy here. If your relationship with her, whatever it might be, clouds your judgment, if you can't oversee her research as rigorously as you would any other postdoc's, if things start slipping through the cracks—" His voice trailed off."Then we have a problem."
Frank opened and closed his fists. He realized he'd lost feeling in his hands.
"Steve, I'm only going to say this once. My relationship with this girl has been perfectly proper. Perfectly," he added for emphasis. "Has anybody talked with her, for God's sake? Heard her side of it?"
"Not yet." Zeichner glanced at his watch."That's up to you. But by five o'clock I want her work off the bench. Get her reagents out of the freezer. I'd see to it personally, if I were you. It's all evidence, Frank.
We'll need it for the internal review."
Frank hurried down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Pull the paper, he thought frantically. We've got to pull the paper. He loomed over Betsy Baird's desk."Have you seen Cristina?" he demanded, more harshly than he'd intended.
"Noooo." She looked at him quizzically."Is something wrong?"
"If you see her, tell her I want to talk to her," he barked.
In his office he stared into space a moment, collecting himself.
There was only one person he could imagine calling in such a crisis.
A scientist whose ethics had never been questioned, who played the game better than anyone he knew. The past was irrelevant now; the present crisis was all that mattered.
He picked up the phone and dialed Neil Windsor.
He'd been on the phone half an hour when he heard the click of high heels in the corridor. Through the glass pane of his office door, he saw Cristina walking down the hall.
"I've got to go," he told Neil."That's her now."
"Don't lose your temper," Neil cautioned."Just get a look at her notebook. That's all you need to do."
"Thanks, buddy. I'll let you know how it goes."
He hung up the phone and hurried down the hall. Cristina had gone into the lab, a Styrofoam takeout tray in her hand. She turned, startled.
"Frank, you scared me!" Her eyes scanned his face."Is something wrong?"
"You could say that." Firmly he closed the door."Have a seat."
She pulled out a lab stool and sat, staring up at him. She didn't look guilty. She looked utterly mystified.
"I talked with Steve Zeichner this morning," he said. "It seems we have a problem."
She cocked her head quizzically.
"He's been looking at your data. Our data. The tail blots."
She frowned.
"Cristina, is there anything you want to tell me?"
A shadow passed across her face, or maybe he imagined it."What do you mean?"
He nodded."All right, then. I need to see your notebook."
Cristina did not move.
"Well?" he barked.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide. Six months ago the look would have melted him. Now he felt only rage.
"Cristina," he said through his teeth. "SHOW ME THOSE GELS."
She bowed her head. For the first time he noticed a glint of silver in her hair.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
"You did this?" He stared at her, horrified. "For Christ's sake, you falsified data?" If she hadn't succeeded in knocking out the gene, the mice would have been riddled with tumors. Her paper— their paper—had lied outright.
"Do you understand the magnitude of this? Your career, your reputation. My career, for God's sake! The future of this lab. Do you have any idea what you've done?"
He waited, his cheeks flaming.
"Say something! Just tell me why."
She raised her head."I was certain I'd gotten the knockout. I don't know what went wrong." She hesitated."If I could just try again—"
He stared at her, his cheeks flaming.
"But there was no time! Frank, you wanted to submit immediately, and I didn
't want to disappoint you. I was afraid you'd change your mind."
"You're not suggesting I encouraged this." He stopped, breathed, chose his words carefully."I admit, I was eager to submit the paper. But a fraudulent paper? Are you out of your mind?"
"But you said it was ready! No reason to drag our feet, you said.
You didn't want to get mired in the details."
"Nonsense," he snapped."When did I say that?"
"Christmas Eve! You left a message on my answering machine. You said the paper was ready to go. You wanted to get it out the door."
He remembered then: Christmas Eve in Cambridge, a lonely old drunk in bedroom slippers, holding forth.
"That's exactly what you said," Cristina insisted. "I can prove it.
I have the tape."
Cornered, he got angry. Loudly, unapologetically angry. "Oh, come off it! You knew full well those comments were off-the-cuff.
It was Christmas Eve, for God's sake! That hardly qualifies as a final review."
She met his eyes. "I've made a terrible mistake; I know that. I'm not making excuses. But you did ask me why, so I'll tell you." Her voice faltered."I felt for a long time that things had gone bad between us. You were so supportive of my work at first, so encouraging. But then something changed."
Frank watched her soberly. Shame burned his cheeks.
"You were different with Guei and Martin; I could see that. I felt that I had disappointed you somehow. And I wanted to make you proud of me."
Billy and Gwen sat in the grass near the reservoir, eating greasy takeout from a Chinese place on Eighty-sixth Street. It was a Sunday afternoon in April, unseasonably warm, the air spongy and odorous, the first teasing hint of summer. Women wore sandals and flowered dresses. A steady parade of wheeled people—cyclists, skaters, infants in strollers—rolled in and out of the park.
As they ate, Billy caught himself watching her. His sister a constant in his life, comforting, reliable. Unchanged since childhood, or so it seemed: wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music—Supertramp, the Allman Brothers—on vinyl, of course. Now Gwen, at long last, had changed. Her hair had grown nearly to her shoulders.
Her ears pierced twice, seven of her fingers decorated with silver rings.