When things quieted down, Leonard got up to take a piss. He swallowed three lithium tablets with his morning coffee, watching dawn spread across the bay. He felt pretty decent, actually. He thought it was going to be one of his good days. He dressed a little better than usual, in khakis and a white button-down shirt. At the lab, he fired up some Violent Femmes on the boom box and started preparing some samples. When Jaitly came in, Leonard kept smiling at him.
“How did you sleep, Vikram?”
“Fine.”
“Any mattress burns?”
“What, were you like—you asshole!”
“Don’t blame me. I was just lying in bed, minding my own business.”
“Yeah, well, Alicia only comes up on the weekends. You’ve got Madeleine here all the time.”
“That I do, Vikram. That I do.”
“Could you really hear us?”
“Nah. I’m just giving you shit.”
“Don’t say anything to Alicia. She’d be so embarrassed! Promise?”
“Your operatic secret is safe with me,” Leonard said.
By ten o’clock, however, the mental fog began to move in. Leonard got a headache. His ankles were so swollen from water retention that he felt like Godzilla stomping back and forth from the 30-degrees room. Later, taking a well comb out of a tray, Leonard’s hand trembled, creating bubbles in the gel, and he had to throw the tray out and start all over.
He was having GI troubles, too. Taking his pills with coffee on an empty stomach had been a bad idea. Not wanting to stink up the lab bathroom, Leonard went back to his apartment at lunchtime, relieved to find that Madeleine had already left to pick up her mother and sister. He shut himself in the john with The Atrocity Exhibition, hoping to be quick, but the propulsive session made him feel so befouled that he stripped down and took a shower. Afterward, instead of redonning his nice clothes, he put on shorts and a T-shirt and tied a bandanna around his head. He was facing more time in the 30-degrees room and he wanted to be comfortable. He stuck a can of Skoal into one tube sock and heavy-footed it back to the lab.
Madeleine brought her mom and sister by in the afternoon. Phyllida was both more formal and less intimidating than he expected. Her Brahmin accent, the likes of which Leonard hadn’t heard outside a 1930s newsreel, was truly astonishing. For the first ten minutes, as he was showing her around the lab, he kept thinking that she was putting it on. The entire experience was like receiving a visit from Her Majesty. Phyllida was all hairdo and handbag, full of high-pitched interrogatives, and eager to put her eye to a microscope and be informed of her subject’s latest scientific work. Leonard was pleased to discover that Phyllida was smart, and even had a sense of humor. He went into geek mode, explaining the particularities of yeast, and, for a moment, he felt like a real biologist.
The difficult part of the meeting was with the sister. Despite Madeleine’s insistence that her family was “normal” and “happy,” the vibe Leonard got from Alwyn suggested otherwise. The hostility coming off her was as easy to see as bromophenol blue dye. Her puffy freckled face had the same ingredients as Madeleine’s, only mixed in the wrong proportions. She’d clearly suffered from being the less pretty sister all her life. She looked bored by everything he said, and in physical discomfort. Leonard was relieved when Madeleine took Alwyn and Phyllida away.
Overall, he thought that the visit had gone reasonably well. He hadn’t shaken too visibly; he’d managed to keep up his end of the conversation and to look at Phyllida with polite interest. That evening, when he came back to the apartment, Madeleine greeted him wearing only a bath towel. Then that was gone, too. He took her over to the bed, trying not to think too much. Taking off his pants, he was reassured to see that he had a perfectly adequate erection. He tried to move through this window of opportunity, but the practicalities of birth control shut the window as quickly as it had opened. And then, embarrassingly, he had begun to cry. To press his face into the mattress and weep. Who knew if this was a real emotion? Maybe it was just the drug doing something to him. The calculating presence who inhabited the back of his mind figured that crying would soften Madeleine toward him, would bring her near. And it worked. She cradled him, rubbing his back, whispering that she loved him.
At that point, he must have fallen asleep. When he awoke he was alone. The pillowcase was damp, as was the sheet beneath him. The bedside clock said 10:17. He lay in the dark, his heart beating wildly, seized with the fear that Madeleine had left for good. After a half hour, Leonard got out of bed and took an Ativan; soon, he fell asleep again.
The following Friday, in Perlmann’s office at Mass Gen, Leonard stated his case.
“I’ve been taking eighteen hundred milligrams since June. Now it’s October. That’s four months.”
“And you seem to be tolerating the lithium pretty well.”
“Well? Look at my hand.” Leonard held it out. It was as steady as a rock. “Just wait. It’ll start shaking in a minute.”
“Your serum levels look good. Kidney function, thyroid function—both fine. Your kidneys clear the stuff really fast. That’s the reason you need this high a dose to keep your lithium level therapeutic.”
Leonard had driven to Boston with Madeleine, in the Saab. The night before, a little after ten, Kilimnik had called Leonard at his apartment, saying that he needed a batch of new samples the next morning and that Leonard should prepare them that night. Leonard had gone over to the lab in the dark and had run the gel trays, visualized the DNA, and left the fragment images on Kilimnik’s desk. As he was leaving, he noticed that Beller or Jaitly had left one of the microscopes on. He was about to switch off the illuminator when he noticed that there was a slide on the stage. So he bent over to have a look.
Gazing into a microscope still brought Leonard the same amazement as it had the first time he’d done it, on a used Toys “R” Us model he’d gotten for Christmas when he was ten. It always felt kinetic, as if he wasn’t looking through an objective lens so much as diving headfirst into the microscopic world. From being left on, the eyepiece was uncomfortably hot. Leonard turned the coarse focus and then the fine focus and there they were: a herd of haploid yeast cells undulating like children in the surf at Race Point Beach. Leonard could see the cells so clearly he was surprised they didn’t react to his presence; but they remained oblivious, as always, swimming in their circle of light. Even in the emotion-free medium of the agar broth, the haploid cells seemed to take their solitary condition as undesirable. One haploid, in the lower left quadrant, was orienting itself toward the haploid cell next to it. There was something beautiful and dance-like about this. Leonard felt like watching the whole performance, but it would take hours and he was tired. Switching off the illuminator, he walked back through the darkness to his building. By that time it was after two.
The next morning, Madeleine drove him into Boston. She chauffered him every week, happy to spend an hour browsing the bookstores in Harvard Square. As they made their way along Route 6, under a low-hanging sky the same dull gray color as the saltboxes scattered across the landscape, Leonard examined Madeleine out of the corner of his eye. Under the leveling process of college, it had been possible to ignore the differences in their upbringing. But Phyllida’s visit had changed that. Leonard now understood where Madeleine’s peculiarities came from: why she said “rum” for “room”; why she liked Worcestershire sauce; why she believed that sleeping with the windows open, even on freezing nights, was healthy. The Bankheads weren’t open-window types. They preferred the windows closed and the shades drawn. Madeleine was pro-sunlight and anti-dust; she was for spring cleaning, for beating rugs over porch railings, for keeping your house or apartment as free of cobwebs and grime as you kept your mind free of indecision or gloomy rumination. The confident way Madeleine drove (she often insisted that athletes made better drivers) bespoke a simple faith in herself that Leonard, for all his intelligence and originality of mind, didn’t have. You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight
of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope. Leonard wasn’t giving up on it. Not yet.
Leaning forward, he opened the glove compartment and searched through the tapes, taking out a Joan Armatrading cassette. He put it in.
“This in no way signals approval on my part,” he said.
“I love this tape!” Madeleine said, predictably, endearingly. “Turn it up!”
The late-autumn trees were bare as they came into Boston. Along the Charles, joggers were wearing sweatpants and hoodies, exhaling vapor.
Leonard was forty-five minutes early for his appointment. Instead of going inside the hospital, he walked into a nearby park. The park was in about the same shape he was. The bench he sat on looked as though beavers had gnawed on it. Ten yards away, a statue of a Minuteman, spray-painted with graffiti, rose from the weedy grass. With their flint-lock rifles, the Minutemen had fought for liberty and won. If they’d been on lithium, though, they wouldn’t have been Minutemen. They would have been Fifteen-minutemen, or Half-hour-men. They would have been slow to get their rifles loaded and arrive on the battlefield, and by then the British would have won.
At eleven o’clock, Leonard had gone into the hospital to make his case to Perlmann.
“O.K., you stopped taking your lithium on purpose. But the question is, why did you do that?”
“Because I was sick of it. I was sick of how it made me feel.”
“Which was how?”
“Dumb. Slow. Half-alive.”
“Depressed?”
“Yes,” Leonard allowed.
Perlmann paused to smile. He put a hand on top of his bald head as though to contain a brilliant insight. “You felt horrible before you stopped taking your lithium. And that’s the dose you want me to put you back on.”
“Dr. Perlmann, I’ve been on this new higher dose for five months now. And I’ve been suffering side effects way worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. What I’m saying is that I feel like I’m being slowly poisoned.”
“And I’m saying, as your psychiatrist, that if that were the case we would see evidence of it in your blood work. Nothing that you’ve described about your side effects sounds out of the ordinary. I would have liked to see them lessening more than they have, but sometimes it takes longer. For your size and weight, eighteen hundred milligrams is not that high. Now, I’m willing to consider lowering your dose at some point. I’m open to it. But the reality is that you’re a relatively new patient of mine. I have to evaluate your case in light of that.”
“So by coming to see you I put myself in the back of the line again.”
“Wrong metaphor. There isn’t a line.”
“Just a closed door then. Just Joseph K. trying to get into the castle.”
“Leonard, I’m not a literary critic. I’m a psychiatrist. I’ll leave the comparisons to you.”
By the time Leonard rode the elevator down to the hospital lobby he felt exhausted from arguing and pleading. Despite the danger of encountering sick children and getting even more depressed, he ducked into the cafeteria for a coffee and a bear claw. He bought a newspaper and read it cover to cover, killing almost an hour. By the time he went outside to meet Madeleine, at five, the streetlights had come on, the dreary November daylight dying away. A few minutes later the Saab appeared out of the twilight, gliding to the curb.
“How did it go?” Madeleine asked, leaning in for a kiss.
Leonard buckled his seat belt, pretending not to notice. “I was at therapy, Madeleine,” he answered coldly. “Therapy doesn’t ‘go.’”
“I was just asking.”
“No, you weren’t. You want a progress report. ‘Are you getting any better, Leonard? Will you stop being a zombie now, Leonard?’”
A moment passed while Madeleine absorbed this. “I can see how you might take it that way, but that’s not how I meant it. Really.”
“Just get me out of here,” Leonard said. “I hate Boston. I’ve always hated Boston. Every time I’ve ever been in Boston something bad has happened to me.”
Neither of them spoke for a while. After leaving the hospital, Madeleine got onto Storrow Drive, passing along the Charles. It was the long way around, but Leonard didn’t feel like telling her.
“Am I not supposed to care how you’re doing?” she said.
“You can care how I’m doing,” Leonard replied in a quieter voice.
“So?”
“So Perlmann’s not lowering my dosage. We’re still waiting for my system to acclimate.”
“Well, I learned something interesting today,” Madeleine said brightly. “I was in a bookstore and I found this article on manic depression and possible cures they’re working on.” She turned to smile at him. “So I bought it. It’s in the backseat.”
Leonard made no move to get it. “Cures,” he said.
“Cures and new treatments. I didn’t read the whole thing yet.”
Leonard lay his head back, sighing. “They don’t even understand the mechanism of manic depression yet. Our knowledge about the brain is vanishingly tiny.”
“They say that in the article,” Madeleine said. “But they’re starting to understand a lot more. The article’s about the latest research.”
“Are you listening to me? There’s no way, without knowing the cause of an illness, that you can come up with a cure.”
Madeleine was fighting her way across two crowded lanes of traffic, trying to reach the expressway entrance. In a determinedly cheerful voice, she said, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but part of being manic-depressive means you’re, you know, a little depressive. Sometimes you get down on things before you know anything about them.”
“Whereas you’re an optimist who never heard of a cure you didn’t believe in.”
“Just read the article,” Madeleine said.
After the intersection with Route 3, they stopped for gas. On the hunch that Madeleine, not wanting to cause more friction, would be lenient with him for smoking in the car, Leonard bought a pack of Backwoods. When they were cruising again, he lit one up, cracking the window. It was the one good thing that had happened all day.
By the time they reached the Cape, his mood had improved somewhat. Trying to be nicer, he reached into the backseat and got the magazine, squinting at it in the light from the dashboard. But then he cried out:
“Scientific American! Are you kidding me?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“This isn’t science. It’s journalism. It’s not even peer-reviewed!”
“I don’t see how that matters.”
“You wouldn’t. Because you don’t know anything about science.”
“I was just trying to help.”
“You know how you can help? Drive,” Leonard said angrily. He opened the window and tossed the magazine out.
“Leonard!”
“Drive!”
They didn’t speak the rest of the way back to Pilgrim Lake. When they got out of the car, in front of their building, Leonard tried to put his arm around Madeleine, but she shook it off and went up to the apartment alone.
He didn’t follow her. After his absence, he was due back at the laboratory, and it was best if they were apart for a while.
He mounted the boardwalk that led through the dunes, past the sculpture garden, to the genetics lab. It was dark out now, the compound’s conglomeration of buildings silvered under a half-moon. There was a chill in the air. The wind brought with it the mouse-cage smell of the Animal House off to his right. He felt almost glad to be going to work. He needed to occupy his mind with nonemotional things.
The lab was empty when he arrived. Jaitly had left him a Post-it that said, cryptically, “Beware the dragon.” Leonard turned on the boom box, got a Pepsi from the fridge, for the caffeine, and got down to business.
He’d been working for about
an hour when, to his surprise, the door opened and Kilimnik entered. He bore down on Leonard, glowering.
“What did I ask you to do last night?” Kilimnik said in a sharp voice.
“You asked me to run some gel trays.”
“A pretty simple task, right?”
Leonard wanted to say that it would have been easier if Kilimnik hadn’t called so late, but he thought it wise to say nothing.
“Look at the numbers on these,” Kilimnik said.
He thrust out the images. Leonard obediently took them from him.
“These are the same numbers as the series you gave me two days ago,” Kilimnik said. “You mixed up the samples! What are you, brain-dead?”
“I’m sorry,” Leonard said. “I came over last night right after you called me.”
“And did a sloppy job,” Kilimnik shouted. “How am I supposed to run a study if my lab techs can’t follow the simplest protocols?”
Calling Leonard a “lab tech” was intended as an insult. Leonard noted it.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, futilely.
“Go,” Kilimnik said, dismissing him with a wave. “Get some beauty rest. I don’t want you screwing up anything more tonight.”
Leonard had no choice but to obey. As soon as he came out of the lab, however, he was so furious that he nearly went back in to tell Kilimnik off. Kilimnik was on his case about mixing up the samples, but the truth was that it didn’t matter much. It was abundantly clear—to Leonard, at least—that moving the HO gene to the other DNA strand wasn’t going to change the asymmetry between mother and daughter cells. There were a thousand other possible causes for that asymmetry. At the end of this experiment, two to six months from now, Kilimnik would be able to prove, definitively, that the position of the HO gene had no effect on the asymmetry of budding yeast cells and, therefore, that they were now one stalk closer to finding the needle in the haystack.
Leonard imagined saying these things to Kilimnik’s face. But he knew he would never do it. He had nowhere to go if he lost his fellowship. And he was failing, failing at the easiest tasks.
The Marriage Plot Page 33
