Saving St. Germ (15 page)

“I can’t believe this. This is fucking DNA.”

“DNA, Ollie, this is magic stuff. It makes people.”

“Candy people? Talking candy?”

“Not exactly, Ollie.”

“Is it a thought from my head that grew?”

“You wanna answer that one, Rocky?”

Rocky looked up from playing with the malleable strand.

“Man, I can’t believe
this
,” she said again. Her face was all lit up.

“I know, isn’t it something?” Going through the steps to fetch DNA with Rocky sent me back to my pre-postdoc days; I felt an involuntary shiver of wonder. “You know, this is what some people call the Word, Rocky. This is what they call God’s Code!”

Rocky grinned at me again. She looked ecstatic.

“Yeah, and who would ever have imagined
this
? This goddam DNA looks, fuckin’ deoxyribonucleic acid looks and feels just like
snot
!”

Ollie tugged at my sleeve again.

“Is it from my nose?”

“Jesus,” I said. “Let’s put this in the spinner. It’s almost six o’clock.”

“I just can’t believe it.
Snot
!”

Sometimes, when I could get a sitter, Rocky and I worked nights in the lab, wandering in and out of temperature-controlled rooms, talking to ourselves. More and more, I’d begun to feel like one of the cell cultures I routinely isolated: With the overhead lights in the domed ceiling shining down on my feeling of smallness, my murmuring multiple selves, with the unfresh air recycling, I felt like a worker phage, stuck tight to the agar, reproducing myself. I wanted my own TOE. A single theory that would unite all the others, so I worked on the computer now; I spent hours writing out equations.

But the lab: In the lab, it all continued in the same way. We went on working, we focused on certain reactions and focused again, repeating them. We immortalized cells, strains of cancer, other diseases. Sometimes we went chromosome-walking; I taught Rocky how. We moved out, gene by gene, looking for the faulty one, the screw-up: thousands of possibilities, in some cases, stretching from here to Morocco and back; but we stepped out, little by little, into the gene universe.

You could find us sometimes in the Warm Room, where it’s raunchy and overheated, like a public sauna, or the Cold Room, which is airlocked at four degrees centigrade, where RNA can survive. And sometimes we wrapped ourselves up in plastic to handle recombinant viruses capable of infecting humans.

But even though I went through the motions of all the routine tasks of the laboratory, my body performed them pretty much on its own. In my head, I was walking out into space, where my real lab was.

I
T WAS LATE
afternoon. I was winding up an informal lab review with some of the newer grad students. Step by step we enlarged our knowledge of Alpha
₁
Antitrypsin (a
₁
AT) Deficiency, a genetic plasma protein disorder—a condition created when a plasma protein stops or blocks the action of a protein-splitting enzyme, trypsin.

We have here at UGC, I explained to them, one of only a dozen or so laboratories across the country studying a
₁
AT, because the present typing system is technically difficult, time-consuming, and (I smiled at them) a boring, back-breaking job. Our reference labs
do
Pi (protease inhibitor) typing here, the genotype characteristic related to a
₁
AT, which is unusual. Many labs do not measure Pi types directly but guess them from chemical values, which are often misleading.

I talked on about the chemistry of the disease, about how a
₁
AT was an inborn error of metabolism, an autosomal hereditary disorder manifesting low serum and lung levels of Alpha
₁
. I described how it destroyed tissue, led to emphysema. I told them about the Swedish scientists who discovered it, by using electrophoresis, a process of subjecting blood plasma to the force of an electric field—their technique for characterizing plasma proteins. After doing that, they noticed that about half a dozen blood samples out of thousands lacked the alpha
₁
globulin, then found that three or four of these six patients had developed emphysema as young adults, and bingo! The wires touched. Now the clinical manifestations of the disease have been fully published; the troublemaker gene cloned; the molecular bases of the major deficiency states have been defined; techniques for workup have been used for prenatal diagnosis. Liver disease (childhood liver disease, that is to say, another gift of a
₁
AT) is still an enigma, and that problem is one we work on in this lab. Among other things, I thought.

They looked carefully at the protein, the structure of alpha
₁
(a single chain of 394 amino acids) and its natural substrate, neutrophil elastase. I talked a little about advances in gene replacement, or the implantation into the lungs of victims of a healthy gene that can produce Alpha
₁
. This has been done with animals, I said. We’ve planted a human gene in monkey lungs—and it worked. No one had tried it with humans.

The wall phone rang. One of the grad students, Shelly Sullivan, answered it and nodded to me. I snaked through the aisles and the impromptu gatherings of student research groups and plucked the receiver from her hand. She waved to someone across the room and hurried off.

“Professor Charbonneau.”

“It’s Jesse.”

I heard myself asking him where he was in a neutral voice, forgetting to greet him or ask how he was doing. It was as if I’d expected him, as if he’d been on his way toward me—for some time.

“I’m over at everybody’s rival institution, UCLA. I’m here for a conference, but things came up back in Boston and I have to get back tomorrow. I called your department and they rang me over to your lab. Are you busy? Can you come out for a quick drink?”

I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly four. Jay was due home early and, of course, had plans to go out later for a stand-up audition—but I could call him, tell him I had to work late, and ask him to give Ollie dinner and a bath just this once, put her to bed. Then I stopped musing.
If I go,
I thought,
something will happen.

“Esme?”

“Yeah. I’m just thinking. My husband’s home tonight, so he could maybe take care of my little girl—”

“I
heard
you had a kid! I’m going to see a lot of pictures, right?”

“If you want to see them.”

“As long as you don’t tell me labor and birth stories.”

“I see you’ve got the same great bedside manner.”

“You oughta
remember
.”

“Tell me where you want to meet, Jesse. I’ll be there.”

Jay put up a halfhearted argument, for form’s sake, when I made my suggestion. I told him that I had to work late. (It did not occur to me to wonder why I didn’t just tell him the truth: I was meeting an old friend, so what?) I was afraid that he’d fall asleep on the couch before he tucked Ollie in, but I couldn’t express that concern or he’d explode: Why was I
criticizing
him? So I said nothing. And I said nothing about when he should expect me. He forgot to ask.

I hung up and stood for a minute, staring into space. I was thinking about making love with Jesse, and I stood there smiling idiotically till one of my grad students came up and raised and lowered his hand in front of my eyes.

“She’s not blinking!” he yelled to the others. “We stunned her with our questions!”

“No, it’s just lack of stimulus,” I said. “Come on, let’s go make a stink bomb.”

I saw him across the room in the fancy bar on Burton Way, and I understood, with the force of a blow, part of what had been missing in my life.
Love of the body:
but not L.A.’s human statue love, no. Love of the way someone crossed a room, stood up to greet you, put weight on one leg, cocked his head, put an arm around you, held you tight. Love of a
face,
a collection of expressions, a set of reactions, a familiar sidelong eye-flicker.

He stood up as I neared and we shook hands, then kissed each other lightly on the cheek.

“You look great,” he said. “Your hair is long.”

“So is yours—God, it’s almost shoulder-length!”

“I put it in a pony tail for surgery.”

He looked a little different, I thought: darker, more intense, more serious in his jacket and tie. The attraction I’d always felt for him leaped up full-blown and presented itself to me, and I tamped it down grimly. I hadn’t quite remembered how everything about him seemed connected to his
ease,
his being-at-home in his body, a relaxed sexuality. It shocked me, close up. There was the leisurely landscape of his manner: an amused, unshakable gaze combined with his habit of dropping an ironic take on everything around him, his quizzical deadpan look. I reminded myself of his faults: No doubt he was still an interrupter, hot-tempered, arrogant, inflexible (a failing of most medical docs); no doubt he thought
I
still had the hots for
him.

I sat down and we smiled at each other.

“You look great,” he said for the second time. Was
he
nervous?

Then he added: “Maybe it’s being a
mom,
do you think?”

“You mean,
hormones
made me what I am?”

“No,” he answered seriously. “Really
loving
somebody. Your little ... it’s a
girl,
right?”

“Right. Olivia.
Ollie
for short.”

We smiled again, stupidly.

The tuxedoed waitress brought our drinks as he admired the fan of Ollie photographs I spread across the table, a kind of protective shield between us.

“She looks like you,” he said, “burning with that fever—it’s in her eyes. And she’s got your red hair and that ... You know, that talking-out-the-side-of-your-mouth look of yours.”

“Everyone seems to think she’s screwed up but me.”

“Well? Who knows her best—you or
them
?”

We talked briefly about Ollie, and in the course of that conversation, I felt relaxed again about her, about myself, about her behavior. The tensions of the last months dissolved into a new shiny substance that ran brightly, seductively, in my veins: I was a good mother after all, I was brave, everything would be all right. It shocked me, the extent to which I needed this reassurance—needed to know that
someone
thought I was doing all right. My pathetic manner made me smile, and Jesse smiled back at me.

“Remember the last time we met like this?”

“Sure. Gold Moon Thai. You raised your glass to say good-bye to me.”

“And here we are again.”

He nodded emphatically. We sipped our drinks, sizing each other up. Then he looked down at his hands.

“My father died a few months ago.”

“Jesus, Jess, I’m sorry.”

He held his glass up, looked intently at the contents, then put it down.

“I had gotten a lot closer to him these last couple years. He never talked to me much when I was a kid, and suddenly he’d reached a point in his life when he wanted to just ... unload some stuff about himself. We’d go out to a bar or just sit next to each other on a bench at the park, watching a pickup ball game. He’d tell me all about his childhood, about meeting my mom. Amazing. After years of silence.”

“How did he die?”

“Heart attack. Classic myocardial infarct. Boom. Just like that.”

“No history of heart disease?”

“He was overweight, didn’t exercise. I was always after him—but he’d had an EKG a month before in a routine checkup and there wasn’t a sign of trouble. Nothing. Like an echocardiogram of a kid.”

He lifted his glass and drank. Then he looked at me, that inquiring calm look.

“I had a dream about him a little while after he died. But it didn’t
feel
like a dream. You know that preconscious state you’re in before waking? I was right there sleeping in my bed, but awake in some way. He came and sat beside my bed and put his hands on my chest and pressed down. I started to wake up and he kept pressing gently on my chest, saying it’s OK, everything’s OK.”

“He was pressing on your chest?”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little slow. It took me a while to realize that he was telling me that he was OK, he was all right, yes, which was what I needed to know—but also that
my
heart was OK. He was reassuring me that I wasn’t going to die of a heart attack too.”

“You?”

“Shit yes. Well. I didn’t realize at the time just how afraid to die I was.” He looked at me, a self-deprecating glance. “I mean, I’m a
doc.
But then, maybe I was more terrified because I
am
a physician. I’d been doing all this bullshit death-defying stuff, hang gliding, bungee jumping, after his death just to prove that I was brave, ready to face the Zero. But of course, I wasn’t facing it at all. He knew that about me. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. He knew all this about me, he came back to release me. He blessed me with his hands.”

We smiled slowly at each other again. Then his smile turned dangerous. “Not to ruin the mood, but there was
another
manifestation of my need for release, but absolutely
real
.”

I held my breath. I knew Jesse; I knew what was coming.

“Yeah?”

“Well.” He looked around, shaking his head. “It was
weird.
I was on a plane flying to a conference in Florida right after my father’s death. I mean, it was
right
after the funeral, a
day,
maybe, and I was still in shock. I was sitting on the plane; we’d been in the air for a while. I had an aisle seat for leg room, and this girl, this young Asian woman, very pretty, was suddenly leaning over me, asking if she could take the empty window seat next to me.”

He looked at me anxiously. I sipped my drink.

“She sat down and immediately covered herself from the waist down with an airline blanket. She looked over at me: beautiful eyes and skin; perfume; wearing a flimsy kind of blouse.”

I started to laugh.

“No,
listen,
Esme. I mean it’s
what
you think, but it also is
not
that. I’d been sitting there shocked, almost drugged feeling, and I returned to this state after she sat down. Then she spoke to me. She said, ‘You look really sad, are you OK?’ I mumbled something and she stared at me and said, ‘Here, give me your hand, I can help you,’ and she took my hand and put it between her legs—she had taken off her underwear.”