So Much Pretty (8 page)

And just like it had in the city, the music suppressed her worry—or gave it the right sound track, at least. This was life now, and it was Claire who was grateful to be there with them. She thought of Alice and the things she would learn growing up in Haeden. How much time and quiet she’d have. Claire was glad they weren’t bringing her up in Manhattan.

In that warm, buzzed, almost drowsy moment, sitting beneath the yellow lights of the cozy bar, Claire dreamed of her daughter’s life of play and study at their little farm, her adventures with Theo on the riverbank. And she knew this was the world that would let Alice see things clearly, that would make her the right kind of woman.

Gene

NEW YORK, NY, 1992

G
ENE WORE BLACK
knee-length shorts covered with paint and plaster, and a thin white T-shirt, the sleeves of his wool sweater pushed up to reveal one forearm tattooed with a band of binary code surrounded by insects. He was tall, quiet, sinewy, strong. His white-blond hair was shaved on the sides, a cowlick at the back of his head. He knelt in front of an eight-by-twelve-foot raised bed of black earth, pulling weeds from around pale green sprouts as thin as thread.

Behind him, Constant stood at the entrance to the roof, wearing pajama pants, his black hair an unruly mass, two days of growth on his face, heavy eyebrows, full lips. His dark skin was marred by a scar on his left shoulder that looked like a large white bruise; there was another one on his stomach that looked the same, a bruise or a burn.

“Can you just think about it?” Constant asked. “I want you to think about it.”

“Well, that’s good, man, it’s good to know what you want.” Gene was trying to ignore him. What he wanted was some help with the seedlings, or some good conversation to pass the time. He knew the news had taken Con and Michelle by surprise, but he wasn’t ready for some brotherly sit-down.

“Be serious for a fucking second. You’re not going to be able to support a kid with your stilt-walking skills, and the likelihood of you getting another fellowship doesn’t seem too realistic.”

“There’s always washing dishes. Whatever, man. I’m DIY. We’ll run away and join the circus before I do anything like the shit you’re talking about.”

Gene thought of Claire’s smile, her elegant, delicate face. Her small straight teeth and big gray eyes. Sweet, smart eyes. He thought about how her shoulders looked as she sat in front of him on their bike, riding fast down the abandoned windswept corridor of Avenue A on the way home from the free clinic, metal grates pulled over doorways. He knew a baby would change things. But not that much. Not like Con was saying.

“If you take the position, it can afford you guys the time for Claire to finish this next year at the clinic and get things straight, take time off before the baby comes.”

“Honestly? I can’t believe you’re still talking to me about this. Claire would fucking leave me, not be grateful, if I did it. I’m having enough trouble with
you
doing this kind of bullshit, so leave me the fuck out of it. Okay? Please?”

“Gene.”

“No. No. You want to be a walking cliché? Go for it. Three years of idealism and the Hippocratic oath and then off to conduct clinical trials because all of a sudden you don’t like the lifestyle? Seriously?”

“It’s not forever, man. I didn’t get a free ride everywhere I went to school. If you had the loan payments I have, you would find that salary reasonable for a couple of fucking years, too.”

That was it. Gene felt his heart rate increase. His neck felt hot, and his hands began to sweat. The term “free ride” always did it to him. There was nothing free about institutionalizing his intellect for eight years.

“I’m sorry,” he told Con sarcastically, meticulously. “Did you not start this conversation with the phrase ‘repurpose the botulism toxin’? Am I wrong? It sounded like you were asking me to work for a cosmetic company to repurpose botulism. You came up here, where I am working on growing our food, and . . . and . . . and you said that I should take a job working on human clinical trials repurposing a deadly substance for nonmedical use in humans. Wait! No, wait. And the reason you gave is because
I am about to have a child.” Gene roughly shook the dirt off his hands as he spoke. “Does that make any fucking sense to you? Does it?”

Con nodded. “Yeah. It does. You are broke, you have a medical degree that you are not using right now, you won’t be going on assignment with the baby coming, and this isn’t that big a deal. There is a price at which you could make this decision.”

“That ‘price’?—that ‘everybody has a price’ price, Con?—that’s fucking bullshit, man. That price doesn’t represent the value you assign to yourself. It’s what you assign to everyone else involved. Three hundred K isn’t how much you’re worth. It’s how much humanity is worth to you. Introducing some completely unnecessary, possibly dangerous procedure into the world, you’d give up a bunch of people you never met for three hundred K?”

“Dude. Spare me your grandstanding, all right? And your Dr. Moreau fantasies. Stop talking to me like I’m fucking stupid, okay? I’m trying to help you and Claire. I don’t know how we’re going to live with a baby in this neighborhood.”

Gene was furious and knew it wasn’t just because of Con’s suggestion. It was because Con was talking down to him, echoing his professors and colleagues. Hinting that his current behavior really signified a “mental-health issue,” not ideology. He would not let their vision of him replace what he knew to be true. He was not going to screw people for money. Fuck them. He was twenty-nine years old and had graduated before all of them. He knew what it was like doing that kind of research, and it was for the morally retarded. The fact that Constant now thought it was okay to do “just for a while” disturbed Gene beyond words. What the fuck was he talking about? Con was the one who had turned him on to gardening in the first place, describing the logic of it, telling him how his mother’s vegetables had saved them growing up in Beirut when there were blackouts and food shortages. Gene resented being treated as though he were somehow a
romantic for doing one of the most practical and essential things humans do.

Constant stared at him. “Why did you go to fucking Harvard, dude? Why did you even fucking bother? Put your ideology in check and do the right thing. This is asinine.”

Gene turned away and raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Wiped his hands on his sweater, leaned against the raised bed of dirt, and lit a cigarette.

Why had he gone to Harvard? Because he got in. Because you don’t know anything when you’re a teenager and labeled “gifted.” Nothing, not even why you’re good at things or whether you like doing the things you’re good at. Being good at things did not obligate you to do them. It was a mistake to think so. And he had made many mistakes, been told too many times that he was just the person for some special job or project or social movement. He’d picked medicine because it was fun at the time and gave him the most information. But it easily could have been engineering or literature or political science or what-the-fuck-ever. All he wanted now was to be who he was before he went to school. He could see flashes of it but had never been able to reconnect. Maybe now, with the baby, he could get there.

Back before Harvard and Columbia and research, Gene was a brainy, hyper kid who listened to reggae and Captain Beefheart. He learned languages because they were fun. He read small-press classics, historical books on pirates, and manifestos from the Situationist International. He ordered self-produced albums with Magic Marker covers through the mail. He was not athletic, though he had always been strong and flexible. Never played team sports and had instead taught himself tightrope walking and unicycle riding. And yes, he had to admit that most of those pursuits were romantic in some way. But they were also practical.

In grad school he spent summers at a trapeze camp teaching terrified kids to hold on, to let go, to hang by their knees, to fall. He would ride his bike back home after flying and hanging,
listening to Joe Strummer or the Talking Heads on the Walkman and going over his lab work in his head. Constant knew all this—was there for it. Part of it, anyway.

Gene was done with everything by twenty-six. And done all over again with his brief mistake in the corporate world by twenty-eight. He was very happy doing what he was doing now, could feel that it was right. His hands in dirt instead of washed and sealed inside of gloves. He could not believe Con would even bring this up. These things that had driven him up here on the roof, starving for something he’d planted himself.

He looked at Constant’s face, looked into his eyes, and watched his friend drop the subject, watched him recognize that thing they both used to feel, a separateness, a lack of faith that had once drawn them all together, a knowledge that certain Americans could be made to live longer—but making Americans as a group healthy was laughable in the current economy, with the current labor and environmental laws. They’d had this unspoken pact not to be hypocrites, not to busy themselves, in their fancy suits with their prohibitively expensive educations, rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
. It hurt his gut to think Con was taking a pharma job and was still a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility; that he wouldn’t be doing Doctors Without Borders with Michelle, even though he easily could, that he had been so unnerved by the news of a baby. He saw disappointment in Con’s eyes and wondered if his friend was simply mirroring his own expression.

“I just can’t do it, Connie,” he said tightly.

Con nodded, looked somewhere beyond Gene’s shoulder. Finally, he said, “Can I borrow the sweater?” Gene took it off and he put it on, buttoning it up over his bare chest. He walked forward and pulled Gene up from where he sat. Then he hugged him close for several minutes. “You’re going to be a dad, my brother.” Gene smiled at the thought of it, relaxed, and embraced his friend, pounded his back before letting go.

“Hey, I gotta go buy coffee and milk. Since we don’t have a cow yet.” Con laughed, reached in the pocket of the big sweater, and pulled out Gene’s rolling papers and some Drum, began rolling a cigarette.

“Soon, maybe,” Gene said. “That’d be fucking great! Come up to the roof and milk it every morning.” They laughed. Con smiled at him, spat out some loose tobacco, then lit his cigarette. They walked to the stairs and headed down through the building to Seventh Street.

“Did I tell you I got an uncle that used to farm?” Constant asked him.

“The one with the metal forehead?”

“Yeah.” Con laughed. “Obviously I have told you.”

“You’d think the magnets would be bad for him.”

“He only really does it when he’s drunk.”

“Which is like . . . daily?”

“P-T-S motherfucking D,” Con said. “Dude was in Vietnam. There’s worse things than drinking.”

“Wait. He’s Lebanese?”

“Fuck no. It’s my aunt’s husband. She moved to the States for her postdoc research. They’ve been there a long time. He’s not my blood relative, man. But I was just thinking, if you want, we could go up and stay with him a while.”

“And do what? Where do they live?”

“You know just see what this organic-farming shit really takes. He has a good-sized garden now, but he used to have a few acres of crops. He lives in Haeden. It’s this tiny place upstate, got a state park nearby or something.”

EVIDENCE
P47908

5/20/09 3:30
P.M
.

Sgt. Anthony Giles

December 20, 1996

Dear Gene
,

Without having to move, we now live in a pretty nice neighborhood. The bad news is there’s no more “we.” Micky got a new placement, this time in Zelingei. I am the last of us here. I know how I got here and now I know I can’t do this for very much longer. I have to talk to someone whose been through this who will understand what all these fucking details mean, and how fucking sick they are. I feel like I’ve been poisoned or brainwashed and I don’t understand why I can’t feel what I am doing. It was a bad decision—not just morally—in every way. I mean intellectually I know that what I am doing is technically insane and wrong. But I can’t
feel
it. There is some weird psychological pull that seems to keep me here at Pharmethik. One more month or one more year I tell myself and then I can take all this money and leave. Or I rationalize like: I couldn’t have paid my dad’s mortgage or helped you and Claire with the land if I wasn’t doing this. You were right. This is sick. I have to do something else. I’ve already lost whatever it was I was going to be by spending an intellectually active part of my life here. And I can’t remember anymore what it was like to think and feel clearly—really clearly about the broader ramifications of my part in all this—of which I can’t give you details. This whole month I was actually angry at you for not fighting harder with me about this work—not telling me why you got out so fast and never went back. Well, we don’t tell people much in this line of work do we? Just tell ourselves bullshit
.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I could be a whistle-blower—but I realize—and this is fucking sick too—I realize there’s not enough money in being a whistle-blower, and that I don’t like the personalities of whistle-blowers. Not that I like the personalities of my coworkers—it’s just that they have accepted certain disgusting realities and do not base their decisions on aesthetics or ideology or even emotions beyond their own. They have a focus that is outside the law and an attitude that is bizarrely similar to many of us (Michelle especially). Like us, these people do what they want. They know the system is fucked and use that to their advantage
.

You would not believe how I look or talk if you saw me. You would think this is something out of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I know you will say I have CHOICES even in what I am doing but honestly what I am doing is so ridiculously amoral that to make any of those little lifestyle choices inside of this life feels like hypocrisy and tithing
.