Knockout Mouse (3 page)

As I finished putting coats in the closet, Wes caught my eye. He held out his glass for a refill. I took it to the dining room, where Jenny was holding court. She was in her element here, keeping everyone entertained, dispensing drinks, and adding last minute touches to the table, all without skipping a beat. As I poured wine, she introduced me to a guy wearing a shirt in that blue that had swept the business world. He had a tie and an important busy look to match.

“I didn’t catch what you do,” he said.

What did I do? The number one question around here. The real questions behind it were, one, what can you do for me? And two, did you have the wherewithal to survive the deflation of the bubble?

“Film,” I said.

“You must travel to LA a lot.”

“I don’t do features so much. Documentaries, and, if I’m forced to, industrials.”

He nodded. His attention wandered to a tray of cheese. I didn’t try to retrieve it. Jenny’s friends did not inspire me to share confidences. Young and bright and good looking, they were all running in the same race. What brought them together was a sense of being career accelerators for one another. My friends had their quirks, but I knew I could count on them. Rita in particular—anywhere, anytime. Wes, usually, unless he was busy chasing some new capital or new romance.

I took Wes his wine. Sheila’s back was to me. As I handed Wes the glass, she turned. Her elbow knocked the glass into my chest.

“Oh no,” she apologized. “All over your white shirt. I’ll get you some soda water.”

Wes waved her off. “Bill’s got a closet full of them. He wears the same thing whenever he goes out. White shirt and jeans.”

I looked at the spot above my left breast. “Bad enough I have to drink the stuff,” I murmured. “Now I’ve got to wear it.”

“I’m jealous. You can’t get away with wardrobe tricks like that when you’re female,” Sheila said.

“Nice meeting you,” Wes said abruptly to her. He headed for a tall woman with large dangling earrings across the room.

I caught a
was it something I said?
glance from Sheila. I could only shrug and dab a napkin on the stain. “He’s bad at good-byes,” I told her. I didn’t add that although I always told Wes he ought to go for a scientist, he insisted on being drawn to women who were fast-track lawyers, agents, marketing directors. He must have thought they had something he didn’t.

Sheila was anything but fast. In spite of how nicely the black ringlets of hair framed her head, and the elegance of the single bracelet on her wrist, a sadness shadowed her face. She made a valiant effort to keep it tucked away, but it seeped from the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth. I wondered where it came from. Maybe she just worked too hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how she ducked away from the camera in the parking lot, then refused to admit it. I was getting more and more curious about why.

Jenny called us to dinner.
Sheila and I wound up together down at the end of the table. Across from us and over a seat, Wes was absorbed with the tall woman with the earrings. Marion, I heard someone call her, and remembered she was the other date Jenny had in mind for Wes. She had a strong jaw, pale skin, and long, flat blonde hair. Her height, mild European accent, and stylish glasses made her an imposing figure. She was regaling Wes with a story about mold colonies.

The talk at the rest of the table was of real estate, bandwidth, and the venture capital market. Sheila remained quiet. She ate methodically, using a fork and knife to neatly divide the appetizer of mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes. I noticed she was sniffling and her eyes were rimmed red. She kept rubbing them.

“Is the cat bothering you?” I asked.

“Cats. Trees. Grass. I’m pretty much allergic to life.”

“This area is bad for pollen.”

“It’s getting worse. Cities and companies don’t plant female trees anymore if the species is dioecious. Just the males. The females drop seeds, fruit, husks—litter people don’t want to clean up. So we get the male trees, spewing pollen.”

“It’s always the males causing problems.”

She flicked me a mischievous glance. “So I’ve heard.”

“But let’s face it, women
are
messy. Dropping eggs all over the place.”

“It’s tragic.” She shook her head, deadpan. “Chemically driven to make the globe more crowded than it already is. Losing their minds when their biological clocks go off.”

I laughed. “To be fair, it happens to men, too. Only with them I think it’s more about ego than eggs.”

“Or genes, the new superego. They demand to be propagated.”

“So why is it that they make boys want one thing and girls another?”

“You mean the old, ‘men want sports and women want shoes’? Nature is more clever than you think. We’d get bored with each other if we were too much alike.”

Sheila returned everything I said with a little extra on it. I liked it. “So what I’ve heard is true. You’re a molecular biologist.”

“That’s what my badge says. I work at a biotech company.”

I pictured her in a lab, neatly dividing peptides the way she did her food. “Well, if you invented these tomatoes in the lab, you’re doing good work.”

She gave a doleful smile. “They’re from a garden.”

“What kind of genes are you splicing, then?”

“Gene transfer is old news. The new big thing in the field is proteomics.”

“The study of proteins,” I said. Kumar had mentioned it.

“They’re the real building blocks of the body. DNA may spell out the recipes, but proteins do all the work. They’re the big targets for control of disease. We might have thirty or sixty thousand genes in our genome, but hundreds of thousands of proteins are in the proteome. We have a long way to go to map them.”

“I heard a bit about it this afternoon,” I said, hoping to sneak back to the subject of the parking lot. “I’ve been shooting a project for a company called Kumar Biotechnics.”

Sheila’s expression betrayed nothing. I went at the question another way and asked who she worked for.

“LifeScience Molecules. I’m a junior scientist.” She launched into a long explanation of target cells, hybridomas, and monoclonal antibodies. She was smart, articulate, and clearly passionate about her work. After a while I stopped listening and simply enjoyed watching her as she talked and made diagrams in the air. She was a beautiful woman.

It took me a minute to realize she’d stopped talking. I smiled at her to cover the fact that I’d been admiring her more than attending to what she said. The silence hung between us, a shared moment. One way or another, I wanted to see more of her, even if only as a friend.

Everyone had finished eating by now. Sheila nudged her leftover salmon, mashed potatoes, and salad with a fork, then started to tell me about how an experimental salmon without the urge to spawn was being created. Its chromosomes were engineered so that it had no desire to swim upstream. Salmon lost a lot of weight on those trips and would stay nice and fat if they didn’t make them. Others were being fattened more directly by splicing a growth hormone into them.

“You do this, too?” I asked.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “That’s not
my
work.”

From down the table, I caught a look from Jenny, which was followed by a smile with an extra little sparkle in it. I knew how to decode these smiles by now. On the surface it said she was thinking of me. The second layer said I shouldn’t be monopolizing Sheila. And the third layer was telling me to cut out the
flirting. But in my mind this wasn’t so much about flirtation as about having an intelligent conversation for its own sake, a rarity tonight amidst all the infrared Palm Pilot mating.

Marion heard the talk of salmon. She looked at me and said, “Did you hear about the company in Syracuse that wants to produce a nonallergenic cat? They’re planning to knock out Fel d 1, the gene linked to dander and saliva.”

“Do you think animals will start to come with tags, like Beanie Babies?” Wes asked.

We were catching the attention of some of the other people at the table. “I’m more worried about the ones that
don’t
come with tags,” Fay said.

“That’s small potatoes—” began Mr. Blue Shirt.

“Which are also being engineered,” Marion put in.

“The real question,” he went on, “is what happens when we start using the technology on ourselves.”

“I’m not so sure—” Sheila began.

“If it can be done, it will be done,” Blue Shirt declared. “Someone, somewhere, is mapping out their future child right now.”

Fay gave him a dig. “If I know you, Chad, you’ll just clone yourself. No improvements needed.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Sheila said. “Most attempts at nuclear transfer end in horror stories. It takes a kind of scientific voodoo to coax the embryonic cells to divide. Look at Dolly the sheep: she’s obese, her telomeres are short, and there are signs she’s aging too fast, possibly because her mother’s DNA was old. The real action in biotech is treatment of disease.”

“And plant research,” Marion put in.

“I don’t know anyone who wants to genetically program their child,” Jenny said.

“Think about it,” said Chad. “If other people start designing
their
kids’ genes, are you going to let
your
kids be at a disadvantage?”

Jenny wrinkled her nose. “A genetic arms race?”

“And legs. And brains,” Chad said. “You don’t want to be left behind.”

“I mean, your kids are your kids,” Jenny said. “You just want them to be happy.”

“How happy are they going to be if they’re the shortest kid in the class? The ugliest? The dumbest?”

“I’d rather be short than have short telomeres,” Sheila said. “And what you’re talking about is still more science fiction than science.”

Marion’s pale eyes were fixed on Chad. “Is that your definition of happiness?” she demanded. “The boy with the most marbles?”

“Darwin said it, right?” he answered. “Evolution doesn’t care who’s polite and picks up litter. It cares whose genes get passed along.”

I considered asking him if he planned to pass the arrogance gene on to his children, but decided to stay out of it.

“Evolution doesn’t care how we feel at all,” Sheila said. “In fact, maybe if we were built to be more naturally content, we’d be less inclined to reproduce. There must be some explanation for why it’s so hard for us to be happy in our lives.”

This brought an uneasy silence. The table stared at Sheila as if she’d admitted an embarrassing hygiene problem. These go-getters weren’t about to admit any such weakness. Weakness made you—and your genes—an undesirable commodity.

Sheila’s shoulders hunched. She wound a ringlet of hair around her finger, tighter and tighter, and looked down at her
plate. The tangy voice I’d heard earlier had disappeared. I was amazed at how quickly her demeanor changed. She withdrew as I watched.

The conversation veered back to the subject of where to raise one’s children, a hypothetical prospect for everyone there. Their faces were clear and unfurrowed. I didn’t pay much attention. I was watching Sheila. She didn’t look well. Her eyes were watery, her face was puffy, her neck red. She kept scratching the back of her hand.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, squeezing her temples. She attempted a smile. “Just allergies. Excuse me.”

She disappeared into the bathroom. Other people moved into the living room. After helping Jenny clear the table and make coffee, I passed around a tray of coffee cups, while Jenny offered milk.

I wedged myself into a corner and watched Jenny keep her contacts warm. She chatted with each person about everything and nothing. It came naturally to her, which was good, because her business depended on it.

I wasn’t much of a mingler, and no one chose me as a networking target. After a while I went into the dining room, where Marion and Wes were cocooned in a private conversation.

“Have you seen Sheila?” I asked. “She wasn’t feeling well.”

“Sheila went home,” Marion said.

“Was she all right?”

“Should be. Just some overactive mast cells.”

Wes found this funny. “That’s a relief. I thought she was crying because Fay said something to her. It was kind of weird. Fay was irate.”

“When was this?”

“Just as Sheila was leaving,” Wes said. “She and Fay were by the door to the closet. Marion was telling me about mutated fruit flies that had their eyes in their asses.” He laughed again.

I walked through the kitchen and out a door that led to a small back porch. In between the branches of the eucalyptus trees, stars twinkled feebly in the Silicon Valley haze. I thought about the guests in the living room. Was I just getting old? Everyone in there was close to Jenny’s age, thirty. Only a handful of years separated me from them, but it felt like a chasm. Except for Sheila, they all seemed so sure of themselves, so entitled, so on the make. But then, I’d been out of step with the world around me for months. I wondered if I was beginning to fall out of step with Jenny, too.

I closed the door and went back into the living room. It was almost eleven. Some people had left already, others were saying their goodbyes. A few were going back to work, I suspected, and others out to clubs. Bed sounded good to me, though. I was glad I wouldn’t be spending an hour on the freeway back to my flat in San Francisco.

Marion and Wes were the last guests to leave. Marion was not shy about giving him her card and planting a kiss on his mouth. As soon as I closed the door, Jenny and Fay commenced a review of who was there, how much funding this one’s venture was getting, how soon that one’s startup would crumble. The dinner party was judged to be a success. They were particularly pleased by the sparks flying between Wes and Marion.

“I’m glad he latched on to Marion,” Fay said. “She’s much better for him than Sheila.”

“What’s wrong with Sheila?” I asked.

“She’s just kind of…flimsy.” Fay pursed her lips. “Flimsy and stubborn.”

I was too tired to pursue it. Who cared what Fay, or Wes, or the rest, thought of Sheila? She was the most interesting person at the party, and the one I most hoped to see again.