Team Leach? Leroy would love that. If he were talking to her she could tell him.
“Besides, now you can focus your attention on your other project. You can really get a handle on the molecular evolution of the nylon-digesting bacterium. That’s a good, interesting project for your little thesis.”
She was leaving the office with her head down as Nawthorn walked through the door. She didn’t see him until it was too late. She threw her arms up and her elbow hit him in the solar plexus and knocked him onto one knee. Benny reeled sideways and landed on her bum, stunned. Leach began to laugh.
Once Nawthorn caught his breath, he stood and helped Benny up. She moved past him, through the door, and went to her bench. She paced the aisle by her bench, turning circles in the confined space. A few minutes later Nawthorn found her and motioned with his head toward the door.
“Come and have a beer.”
She followed him into the hallway, where he reached into one of the fridges and pulled out two cans of Bud. He closed his office door behind her. She sat on the couch. He opened a can and passed it to her. She admired Nawthorn and tried to imagine a life of pure research, with no application, pursued solely for the sake of satisfying curiosity. That was Gabe. He was a scientist for all the right reasons. He loved discovering stuff. He was not venal and he was not sussing out how he could make a killing by connecting his work with some biotech start-up. Although she was trying to create something practical, if anyone could appreciate what she was trying to do, it would be him.
“I’ve seen women rushing out of Melvin’s office plenty of times, but never that fast,” he said. He sipped his beer. “Why not finish your thesis on molecular evolution and get out of his lab as quickly as you can? Then find a post-doc working on plastic degradation and write your own ticket in that lab.”
“There’s nobody else. Besides, my research career is almost over.”
“Why don’t you come to my lab?”
“Thanks, Gabe, but that project is the sole reason I’m here.”
“Get the plasmid to work, and I’ll deal with her.”
It was Leach, talking to Jonathan at his bench. Benny had come back from her beer and was about to enter through Leroy’s lab when she heard her name. She stopped at the door.
“I want my name first on the paper,” Jon said.
“Absolutely. You won’t regret it, my friend.”
“Sure.”
“You know what I don’t get? I don’t get how she can run so fast and work so slow. I saw her during the marathon running up First. She was really moving. She looked good too, in her tight leggings and T-shirt.”
“Instead of those ridiculous army pants she wears here,” Jon said.
They laughed.
“She’s got no tits, though,” Leach said.
“Whatever. Let me get back to work.”
Benny left the lab and wandered around the neighbourhood. The sky in the west was darkening as heavy clouds rolled in. She found them comforting, as if the world was mirroring her feelings. Her mind was an ouroborus, swallowing its own tail, passing all the familiar landmarks of pain: the doubts she had that her work would be successful; the way her body continued to confuse her; her father’s demise. She had to exhaust herself or go crazy with these thoughts.
She walked with her head down so nobody could see her crying. The sidewalks were a map of crevices, splits, and cracks leading nowhere. At the intersection of 79th and Lexington, a crew was working on the road. A jackhammer pounded the pavement rhythmically, like a woodpecker drilling holes in a spruce. It probed under the city’s skin for a purchase for the sidewalks and subway tunnels, the concrete footings of skyscrapers. All it would find was more concrete and asphalt, layer upon layer, laid down by the city’s builders from Stuyvesant to Trump. Scar tissue. Year after year, decade after decade, the island’s flesh was reopened, then sutured with beams, rebar, concrete, and wire. At the base were the bones of the Lenape people and under them middens of discarded oyster shells. The jackhammer seemed intent on getting there, as if only then would it have a chance to put down roots.
She went home and took the stairs to her apartment two at a time. There, she stripped to her underwear and stood in front of the mirror that hung on the back of her bedroom door. Her face was puffy. Her clavicles protruded, casting shadows on her chest. She cupped the soft flesh of her breasts and looked at the sharpness of the bones below them. When she sucked her belly in, she could count her ribs. Below her belly button were her scars, running vertically for two inches. She turned around and looked at her ass over her shoulder in the mirror. It was taut from running and as flat as always.
She pulled on her black track pants, her sports bra, and her white sleeveless top. She tied her hair back in a ponytail and laced up her shoes. It was drizzling by the time she got to the street. She had run through heavier rain than that. She headed west, dodging cabbies driven insane by the ever-changing red and green. At the corner of 70th and Lexington a mother pushed her infant in a stroller ahead of her at the crosswalk. A lull in the traffic allowed Benny to pick up speed between Madison and Fifth and she sailed into the park fully warmed up. The contrary wind of the coming storm was churning the leaves, offering their lighter underbellies up to the sky. The heavy clouds were moving to cover up the last bits of blue remaining behind her to the east. As she reached the road and headed north it began to pour. This urged her to pick up her pace. As she passed the Met she thought how Leroy was able to sit among the sculptures and stare at them until he wasn’t seeing them anymore. It was his form of meditation. For her, the park was the only place she could be herself and think clearly. It was the city’s masterpiece, the one work of art essential to her sanity.
Today was different though. She hadn’t come to think. She was there to run thinking into the ground, to push herself until there was no thought left except the desire to stop. She wanted the beating of her feet on the pavement to jackhammer all thought from her mind. For this to happen she had to run fast and hard until her heart knocked against her ribs. The rain cooled her off and her tears mixed with the rain and fell to the ground, where they were washed in rivulets along the road, down the storm sewer, and into the river. Her tears were inconsequential to this rain. By the time she was running south her shoes sloshed uncomfortably with each step. Her shirt clung to her skin. As she passed Strawberry Fields two men passed her jogging the other way. They were as soaked as she was but they were obviously having fun in the rain, laughing with each other.
“Looking good, girl,” one of them shouted at her as she zipped past them.
“Fuck you,” she yelled without breaking stride. Still she cried. Even the rhythmic pounding of her feet on the pavement couldn’t stop the ceaseless chatter in her head. She returned to the street where she had entered the park and jogged home around the few souls who braved the sidewalks in the storm.
When they ran together, Rachel insisted that they not retrace their steps. “I hate gerbilling,” she said. Benny had laughed at the image of them running in circles on a wheel, but she didn’t see any way around winding up exactly where she’d started. You run and run, but you always end up back at the beginning.
She stopped at The Food Emporium, knowing what she was about to do and powerless to stop herself. She bought two bags of Oreos, a loaf of the fluffiest white bread she could find, a package of cheese slices, and mayo. Her tears were gone, replaced by a resolve that felt ominous. The pimple-faced cashier checked her out.
“Wet out there?”
“Yes, it’s wet out there,” Benny said. “And you can stop staring at my nipples.”
She shocked him more than she had anticipated. A whimper escaped his lips and she saw that his eyes were watering. The tiniest flicker of compassion fluttered in her chest.
“Oh, shit.” She looked at his nametag. “Jason. Forget I said anything, will you? Forget I was even here. I’m not having a good day.”
She pulled the groceries out of the bag he had
packed them in and left the store under a full head of steam. The tiny flicker of compassion notwithstanding, she was a one-hundred-car freight train and had just thrown on her screeching brakes, seeing something on the tracks ahead. She wouldn’t be able to stop for a mile or more. Momentum carried her forward, the product of the mass of pain her body had caused her over the years multiplied by the velocity of her mind trying to ignore, avoid, or resolve that pain. She had hated her body for too long, hated what it had been doing to her, what it lacked when she came into the world and what it lacked now.
Annika was out when she arrived home. Good. She opened one of the bags of Oreos and began eating them the way she had when she was a kid watching The Cosby Show. She unscrewed the cookie, lifted off the icing, and ate both the wafers. She collected the icing as she went and rolled it into a ball. After eating six cookies, she bit into the ball of icing. She was empty, a hollow tube wanting to be filled. There was no turning back, no temporary solution this time. No laxatives, no finger down the throat.
She had eaten a bag of cookies and was into the second one as she stood at the stove making a grilled cheese sandwich. Doing two things at once was never a good idea for her. She would get warnings to slow down and she got one now. One of her canines came down on the inside of her cheek, hard enough to draw blood. She threw the spatula down on the stove.
“You fucking piece of shit!”
Her tongue bathed in the salt of blood pooling under her tongue, then probed the puncture in her cheek. It tasted like the metal on the chain-link fence she once licked.
Benny turned off the stove and slid the grilled cheese sandwich onto a plate. The plate was the second indication that the freight train was slowing down. She wasn’t going to stuff the bread, mayo, and cheese in her mouth. She cut the sandwich in two, dropped the plate on the table, and went to her bedroom to lie down. The bag of Oreos sat like a log in her gut and she cried again. The salty tears ran down her face and into her ears. The blood had stopped flowing, yet her tongue continued to probe the wound in her cheek.
There was DNA in the cells lining her cheek. Easy to scrape off and analyze. There was DNA in the blood spilled from her cheek. All she needed was a few cells and she could sequence the DNA to learn what she needed to know.
What is wrong with me?
The combination of running and crying and eating all that sugar worked to draw the mantle of sleep around her. When she opened her eyes later, outside the bank of windows at her feet was a cloudless sky. She lay and loved that sky. Her mouth was full of the detritus of the bag of cookies, sickly sweet. She had a desperate need to brush her teeth and have a glass of water, but she loved that sky and didn’t want to move.
She wanted to corral her unhappiness of the previous evening, then put it in a stable where she could prevent it from roaming free. Her body was flawed, her father was dead, and she was failing in the lab. But she still believed in her dream. All she had to do was get her creations to work.
She didn’t want to move, or get up, or figure out what day it was. She merely wanted to lie there and relish the joy of the golden glow coming through the window onto her legs and pelvis. Her mind had cleared, the clouds of confusion had dissipated, and she felt a clarity of purpose that was calming. She would stay in Leach’s lab and work on molecular evolution. Clandestinely, she would continue to create strains of bacteria to degrade and destroy plastics. She figured she had worked out all the angles by this point, knew everything that could go wrong. From here on in she would be alone. If she was going to realize her dream it would alienate her from the lab, the city, and from everyone she knew and loved. It had to be secret now, and she would have nobody to share her ideas with. Not Leroy. Not — and this caused her heart to contract — Rachel.
Before she could finish her work, however, she needed to know what was at the root of her body’s woes. What was the genetic cause of her abnormality? She would need to sequence her own DNA to find out.
30
Forest Garden
“When’s Lina leaving?” Art asks.
“A week or so.”
We are among the stunted trees on the way to the bluff. The barrel of his .30-30 Winchester is pointing down. He’s got me wearing an orange vest and cap like his. Lina is spending less time at home. I have got back in the habit of seeking out Art for company. Ostensibly, he is teaching me to hunt deer. I asked him to, but my heart’s not in it. I go out of my way to step on any dry branch that is near my hiking boots. If that doesn’t work, I hope that we’re talking loudly enough to scare any deer away.
“That’s a bugger. I’ll miss her.”
At the edge of the forest we come to a cliff that overlooks the bay. Art sits on a stump and I lower myself to the ground next to him. His gnarled hand reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pouch of tobacco. He rolls a smoke, then offers me the pouch. I have run out of Lina’s herbal mixture and now smoke tobacco. In addition to alleviating my asthma, it grounds me, especially when I’m upset, anxious, or lonely.
31
New York City
“You should see the farming they have there,” Rachel said.
She had been home for three days and finally Benny had returned her calls, asking that they meet in the park at their usual spot. Benny wore her cotton shorts and running shoes and jogged in at 69th Street to wait under the elms. It felt like she had a basket of bees in her belly and might throw up.
Rachel arrived wearing red shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. She ran up to Benny, threw her arms around her, and kissed her.
“You should have told me we were going to go for a run.”
She wouldn’t stop talking, her arm around Benny’s waist.
“They have these terraced gardens on the mountain slopes. The hills are so steep that farmers have actually fallen off their gardens.” She told of campesinos cultivating varieties of crops that had originated in Peru thousands of years ago. “There are tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and eggplants like I’ve never seen before. Every variety different. And tobacco. Do you want to jog?”
Rachel kicked off her flip-flops, picked them up, and began running. Benny, not knowing what else to do, followed her. Rachel set their pace and it was fast. She had run in Peru, at high elevation, and her body was thriving on the higher oxygen concentration at sea level. They ran past the Met, the only sounds being the slap of Benny’s sneakers on pavement and her heavy breathing. They were running up a hill, Benny struggling to keep up.
“Hey,” Benny said, reaching for Rachel’s arm and stopping. “I can’t run and talk.”
Rachel stopped too.
“I’m sorry,” Benny said. It sounded so pitiful to her ears.
“What?”
“I can’t do this. It’s not fair to you.”
Rachel shook her head. “You chicken.”
“You should never have left.”
Benny knew that wouldn’t have mattered. She hated having to let go. She loved Rachel, but she was leaving and was not coming back. She thought about the possibility of Rachel coming with her but knew it was impossible.
“I have to go,” Rachel said. She took off in a sprint. By the time Benny knew what was happening, Rachel was far from her, and though Benny had been training, she never was as fast as her friend. She tried to catch her but despaired as those red shorts receded farther. She stopped.
Benny began to run in the late afternoon to avoid bumping into Rachel. The following week she saw Rachel running toward her, either oblivious of Benny or determined to ignore her. Benny didn’t want to find out which so she turned abruptly down a path she had never run on before. From then on she ran either right before her lunch or at three o’clock.
Now, on Saturday, she stood before Leroy’s door. They had barely spoken since she told him she had fallen in love with Rachel, though their benches were only thirty feet apart. Benny needed his help. She thought she had a defective chromosome and she had a good idea which gene was mutated. Although it looked like human
mutations would be correctable in vivo in the near future, there was nothing she would ever be able to do about her defect. But at least she could have the knowledge of what had gone wrong during her development. She had no right to ask Leroy to do the sequencing of the mutation for her. What did he owe her? She wasn’t even going to tell him the truth about which gene she was looking at.
Leroy opened the door. He seemed surprised to see her but smiled. His roommate Mike waved at her from the kitchen. He was wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt in the heat.
“Leach was hounding me all day to find out where you were,” Leroy said.
It was heading toward evening and they hadn’t yet turned on the lights. Benny pulled up a chair to the round table, which was covered with a few beer cans, a tin of smoked oysters, and the crumbs of crackers. The room smelled like a beach with a smoky fire. Leroy pulled a can of Coors from the six-pack ring and handed it to Benny.
“These Canadians really know how to live the high life, huh?” she said to Mike.
“There’s not much choice at The Food Emporium,” Leroy said. “I still can’t get over being able to buy beer at the grocery store.”
“Can’t you do that up in Canada?” Mike said.
“Nope. Our liquor laws are tighter than the flapper on a goose’s ass.”
Leroy put an oyster on a cracker and handed it to Benny. She poked it with her index finger. She joked that she was checking to see if it was male or female. Oysters could change their sex, she told them. One year an oyster produces billions of sperm, the next it will release eggs. It all depends on the water temperature. In the winter, when the water’s cold, they hibernate and their gonads are flat and neither male nor female. They never know what sex they’ll be the next summer. Mike said he thought that would make planning difficult.
The Rest is Silence Page 18
