Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  One morning I came into the biochemistry lab after a trip down memory lane. I’d been to see my friends at the old organic lab. I had a glass distillation apparatus from the lab glass-blower in my pocket, and I rubbed my fingers over and over its cool smooth contours. I discovered Q slumped on the stained and burned couch in the corner, crumpled up, breathing violently through his nose, talking to himself. He was poring over photographs of clinical presentations borrowed from the medical-school lab: children with a variety of genetic diseases.

  He flipped a sheaf of photos at me without speaking. (I admit that I have trouble with medical-textbook photographs. The subjects look manipulated, terrified. I find the clinical “framing” of the disease and its victim intrusive.) The first photo I looked at was of an albino child, who wore her unpigmented skin like a hair shirt. Under the photographer’s harsh overhead lights, she looked bald and wounded, invaded by the camera: a pure-white chubby girl in a Care Bears T-shirt, her colorless brows knitted together above her pale red-glinted eyes. She was trying to look fierce, since emotion can give color; she squinted angrily, she shot furious red darts at what I imagined to be the cameraman’s stupid ruddy glow, his gleaming black hair and mustache, the treacherous rainbow caught in his lens.

  Q had worked, off and on, for a long time on the problems of albinism, trying to determine at a molecular level whether the genetic defect that led to pigment degeneration affected an entire chromosome or a single gene. The idea, of course, was that if one narrowed the field, one could develop an in utero screening test. Q knew this test was just around the corner.

  I wondered what kind of reaction he wanted from me now, scientific or emotional. He looked at me foggily, breathing thunderously, his eyes twitching behind his wayward glasses. He was wearing a horrible tie, I remember there were pink parrots sewn into its sky-blue weave. I really hoped that he wasn’t going to get sappy on me. He did this type of thing occasionally, making me feel manipulated. His wife was dead, he had no children, but he slipped, every once in a while, into an avuncular sentimentality so gross and powerful it was like drink; he wept and slurred words, he swayed at my shoulder, urging tragedy on me like a late-hour cocktail.

  “Look at this,” he gasped, then peered over his glasses at me. “When I look at these faces, I tell you, Esme, I get back on the track. I remind myself that we are not isolated here. We’re not a bunch of theoretical chemists, computer jocks!”

  He coughed, a lengthy, stagy, wheezing bark. This cough had become famous among graduate students and fellows, who imitated it both in and out of the lab—it had a certain self-conscious bass quaver to it, as if he were about to break into a Ray Charles imitation. I’d gotten to know a medical student who could do a perfect reproduction of it—this guy reduced me to tears late one night in a campus bar by coughing, Q-style, several bars of “Georgia on My Mind.” Now, however, I put these thoughts out of my mind and waited demurely for him to finish.

  “We’re bench chemists, wet chemists.” He blew air through his nostrils. “We’re in the trenches, returning fire.”

  He spat a little on me. I was embarrassed enough to be cruel.

  “Save it for the grants committee,” I said, without looking up at him.

  I was finding it hard to tear my eyes away, flipping through the black-and-white documentation of nature’s out-of-the-park foul balls: Down’s syndrome, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, beta-thalassemia, PKU, Gaucher’s disease, Alpha1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. This last disease, this horror, had been my own obsession. Colleagues of mine pursued immunological questions—AIDS being a primary focus—or tracked malfunctions in cellular growth, that is to say, cancer. I’ve always been intrigued by single-gene deficiencies, not just because they supposedly offer more promise of cloning and reintroduction of a doctored gene back into the body: I was just after this one. I stared at a photo of a young man, barely twenty (I could guess by his childlike facial expression) who’d developed the premature emphysema that characterized a1AT. His chest was sunken, iron-ribbed from the terrible exertion of drawing breath after breath. His body looked fifty years old. I saw that he would be dead in a year or two, if he made it that far. The emphysema usually doesn’t hit till the twenties, but might show up before then. To parents who had a kid who looked and seemed healthy, every cold, every sore throat was a potential nightmare, the beginning of the end. My father died of emphysema, but that’s not why I identify with it so strongly. I reacted calmly to a1AT; I felt outraged by it—but focused. I thought I knew how to pursue it. I knew its habits. But, at the same time, I knew we had no real cure rate.

  I threw the photos back at Q.

  “Horror movies,” I remember saying. I looked at my nails and yawned.

  He laughed. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that your feigned indifference is much more dramatic than pitched hysteria? You should speak to the grants committee.”

  I recall smiling stiffly.

  “Glad I entertain you.”

  I tried to be cool. I got up and rotated my elbow, which had been bothering me in the lab, stiffening up on me, in a series of rapid, bone-popping circles.

  He kept watching me. “What are you doing?” he asked finally. “Exercising the chip on your shoulder?”

  I froze. “What chip?” I blushed. “What chip?”

  He gave me that big limpid gaze over his glasses.

  “You are naturally gifted in this field. I admire you, Esme. Nevertheless, nonacademic science might be too volatile for you. Did you ever think about that? You seem afraid to get emotionally involved, to care.”

  It was hard for me to absorb that comment. I was his right arm. I’d come to believe that I knew everything he thought about our work together, I thought I knew everything he thought about me. Unlike other professors, he was there. He had made himself available to me; we’d become friends.

  To my horror, I turned girlish, making a little face at him, murmuring something about how I hoped that he really didn’t believe that.

  He punched me on the shoulder, slid the photographs in a file, and suggested we go to work. But I sat there for a while after he went to wash up. I took out the glass apparatus and held it up to the tube lamp. It exploded into prismatic light fractures, jumpy neon-white right angles, spangling the walls and ceiling.

  It doesn’t worry me, Ollie. It doesn’t worry me that you go to your nursery school and sit by yourself and that you don’t talk to the other kids and that you sing a little song over and over to yourself. I know you are not unhappy. I know what you’re thinking. I was like that. I remember being like that. You talk only to me, sometimes to Jay or to your stuffed dragon. I understand. Language, the language we speak out here in the world, is treacherous, ambiguous. You have to figure the world out by observation, by experiment, before you can enter the code.

  That spring I invited my mother, Millie Charbonneau, to a department party. It was ironic that she lived right in Cambridge, where I was, and yet we hardly saw each other: My lab schedule was that demanding and her job as a Filene’s buyer kept her on the run. But I wanted to see her suddenly. I wanted, I wasn’t sure why, to sit down and talk to her about what I’d been like as a kid. I couldn’t remember much before five or so—and she’d always been closemouthed about that stuff when I asked her questions. Was I a brat? Did I cry a lot? Was I toilet-trained early? When did Í speak? Walk? Was I a kid who laughed?

  Mom was delighted to come to the party. She wore a dark pink suit, pearls. Her skin—it’s so lovely—absolutely glowed. You know, it’s so strange: Since my father died, she’d been growing more and more beautiful. At sixty, she looked youthful, her hair swinging in a kind of shiny salt-and-pepper bob. She laughed like a little kid—her whole body moved around.

  I introduced her to Q and spent the rest of the party watching them fall in love. I was mesmerized. It was like watching a movie. Millie laughed her great laugh; Q pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger, closing his eyes, leaning in to make
an animated point. Then they toasted each other, clinking their glasses together in front of the cheery fire leaping in its stone grotto.

  “What an amazing man!” Millie cried in the car on the way home. I was driving, a little drunk—I remember being so hunched over my chin almost rested on the wheel. It was a cold starry April night. Everything outside looked eager—the black march of the lampposts, the first electrified shocks of green green grass, waiting to be frozen out or sweetly engaged with the season: stunned to the roots by spring.

  “I see now why you think so highly of him,” she said. She leaned over and touched my wrist. “And sweetheart, he thinks the world of you.”

  So I got to see it, like a formula, a balanced equation—two people I loved fell in love. I could relive a little history of human chemistry. I was permitted to see my mother young again, laughing, swinging a pocketbook. I got to see Q controlling a kind of joyful goofiness. He pursed his lips at odd moments and reddened, as if he was compressing a huge burst of laughter. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if he didn’t believe what he saw before him. Then he’d go dutifully back to work—and quit early! To take my mother to a Pops concert!

  I started applying for jobs—it was time. I wanted to go to Southern California because it was unlike anything I could imagine. It might as well have been the moon. I wanted to get away from my mother, Q, Cambridge, the familiar labs. I wanted a life that belonged entirely to me. Once I had wanted an academic reputation; now I simply wanted out.

  When I was hired by the University of Greater California, UGC, I was a little stunned. Now I’d done it. UGC is big, but its chemistry and biochemistry faculties are highly inbred. In fact, in my area of biochemical research, the department was made up entirely of men. But I didn’t care if I’d been picked to fill a demographic requirement. I cobbled together a most peculiar situation at UGC. Though I was trained as a biochemist, with advanced work in molecular biology, I asked, as a special request, to teach undergraduate Organic. I wanted to prove to myself (and Q) that I could hug the earth and theorize. I wanted (I thought) to inspire the young with some kind of politics or rather, (god help me!) some sense of honor in a scientific age that goes without. At the same time, I didn’t want to just transmit the politics I’d contracted from Q.

  What I really needed was time to think—and fortunately there was some time for that built in. The one thing I did right was to insist that I not be involved in grant-seeking or fund-raising—from the government or the private sector. Some professional, hired by the university, could advertise my work to potential backers. I wanted to walk in my lab and work, walk in my classroom and teach—not hustle for bucks.

  One night before I left Cambridge, my mother telephoned.

  “I can’t talk long, Mom—I’ve got a lot of writing to do on this manuscript. And I really haven’t analyzed my data.”

  Mom was feeling terrible. She said she felt awkward bringing it up, but she’d been thinking about my “friendship” with Q and she wanted me to know that if her relationship with him caused me any anxiety, she’d end it.

  I asked her if she was suggesting that I had a thing going with him.

  “I’m not implying anything, Esme. He seems to think you might be feeling a little displaced.”

  This pissed me off. I remember throwing down the novel I’d been reading instead of rewriting my manuscript for my last publication as a postdoc. It was Charles Baxter’s First Light, one of my all-time favorites, and it pissed me off even more that the book lost pages as it slid across the floor.

  “Well, that’s certainly fucking arrogant.”

  “Esme ...”

  “Mom. There’s nothing between Q and me, except scholarly respect. All on my part, of course. To him, I’m just a grunt, a slavey. If you’re attracted to him, that’s great. I’ve never been, I swear. I don’t know, Mom, have you looked really closely at his ears?”

  So then I had to face him, had to go in to his office and have it out with him. All this time, I’d been avoiding him, making excuses, exiting the lab when he arrived.

  I knocked at his door, then pushed it open. He was startled to see me, and he struggled to get up from his overstuffed chair. He began wheezing and barking, rearing way back—he had a lot to say, it seemed.

  I held up my hand. “I am not in love with you.”

  I shrugged out of my knapsack, filled as usual with about forty pounds of Xeroxed journal papers, and I dropped it with a big thud on the floor. I went over to the window and looked out at the sunny quad. I’d rehearsed everything that I was going to say and I didn’t want to screw it up. I turned around and faced him.

  “I am not in love with you, but I am suffering because of you. I couldn’t say why for a long time, and now I’ve finally figured it out. It’s not you and my mother, I find all that kind of charming. I figured out that what’s really disturbing me is the way you think.”

  Q sat absolutely still, for once unblinking, unwheezing.

  “Go on, please,” he said. His phone buzzed; he reached over and clicked a button that held all his calls.

  “Not long ago you told me that this work may be too emotional for me. I didn’t understand what you meant. Now I do. I’ve always believed that science requires its practitioners be in a state of despair, informed despair. The problem with you is ...”

  What energy one derives from defiance! It fueled my speech, it filled my body, till I felt I was taller, stronger. He watched me, growing before his eyes.

  “Look, Q, the problem is—you are too fake-hopeful—that’s what screwed me up. You are full of this crap, this Romanticism of Science. We’re not just investigating the nature of matter, but saving people as well. Affecting culture, determining the Good. How did all this social enlightenment creep into the lab? That’s what I want to know. Did it come in with the big grant money, when molecular biology got so sexy?”

  Q stood up, a little shakily, pushing at his glasses. He had a very long, fine-lipped mouth. He opened it, then closed it again.

  Some students went by in the hall outside, laughing raucously, calling out to each other. For a second, the sun went behind a cloud, the room darkened, and all you could hear was their voices, calling. “Erik? Jackson! Erik? Come on, let’s go!”

  I found this a good moment to pick up my knapsack.

  “I just want to be able to think. You know, maybe I’m not made for this bench work after all. Maybe I’m not such an egalitarian grunt; I don’t believe I can save everybody in the fucking world. I want them saved but I can’t do it—can you? MS, cystic fibrosis, AIDS ... can you? Why are you pretending you can?”

  Q sat down again. He looked more in control, though he let go a wheeze that sounded like a loose fitting on a radiator valve.

  “You need to feel like this,” he said. The desk phone buzzed again. “It’s OK, Esme.”

  “Thank you for being my teacher, Professor Quandahl. But please don’t patronize me ever again.”

  I paused in the doorway.

  “You know what else I think, Prof Quandahl? I think the DNA industry is hype. DNA can’t catalyze reactions on its own; why is everybody pretending it can? It’s like Prof Lewontin says, we’ve made it into a map—of this holy genomic kingdom of the future. The whole Human Genome Project smells of myth: We’ll fix everyone’s genes, we’ll never die! You brag about being a bench scientist, but you insist on seeing genetics as design, intellectual insight as superior to physical—you don’t like the biological working class, the cell assembly line.” I stopped for breath. I was shaking.

  “All of you guys, every molecular biologist in our acquaintance,” I continued, “has some sort of financial investment in biotechnology. Everybody’s cleaning up on the Genome Myth!” He opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head, dazed.

  “You’re not going to let me talk at all, are you?”

  I told him that I’d been listening to him for years. “It’s my turn now,” I said. “I’m entitled.”
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  “One last thing,” I said, over my shoulder. “I don’t want to hear this conversation played back from my mother’s lips.”

  He found his voice.

  “Conversation?”

  “Well, monologue then.”

  “I’ll do whatever you wish, Esme.”

  I turned around again. I just couldn’t seem to get out the door.

  “You do make a great couple. I wanted to be the first to tell you that.”

  He smiled, then his secretary buzzed through the Hold. He inclined his head toward the speaker and it gave me some satisfaction knowing that when he looked up, I’d be gone.

  Q was not the only one I said good-bye to. There was Jesse Falbo. Jesse was my roommate; he wanted to be my buddy—but he did best as my lover. He was my lover during a time when a lover seemed an unnecessary complication, during the height of my lab research. But in fact, most of the time his presence soothed me, he made my life easier for me.

  He was the one who did the imitation of Q’s cough. More than anything, I think, I must have needed someone who could put Q in perspective for me. Jesse was the guy. He was completely irreverent. Harvard Med School had only made him more of what he was coming in: a tough Italian guy from Worcester, a jock, a deadpan joker, anarchist, son of a milkman, summer-upper, lover of solutions—occasional bar brawler when all other solutions failed. He was one of the med fellows at the institute and he’d discovered it delighted him to give me trouble—but I didn’t mind. Unlike Q’s criticism, Jesse’s seemed like ragging from a sibling. Jesse I could handle, I thought.

  We said good-bye in a Thai restaurant. Our drinks came with hibiscus blossoms floating in them. I put my blossom in my hair and immediately sneezed.

  Jesse looked down at his shirt. “Amazing aim,” he said. “You got snot all over me.”

  “Don’t wash. It’s the last time you’ll get any of my bodily fluids on you.” I was leaving, driving to California in the morning. I thought I couldn’t wait.

  “Last?” He raised his eyebrows. “The very last?” I looked at him, then at his hand resting on the table. It leaped into a focus of terrible anatomical clarity: bones and blood vessels beneath the skin: a clear throbbing map.