The Rest is Silence (22 page)

“I have no idea how to respond to that.” She got up to leave. At the door she turned to him. “I'll have results by Christmas.”

“Good girl.”

Benny left Leach's office and went up to the roof to think. It didn't help. Back at the lab, she paced the floor with her head down. Leroy came to her lab to weigh out some acrylamide.

“You O.K.?”

She shook her head. Then she nodded. He laughed, put down the spatula, and screwed the lid back on the jar. “What's up?”

“Two things. One you know. Leach is up in my face for results that I don't have.”

“And?”

“And I've fallen for Rachel.”

“Oh.”

“I didn't mean to. I mean, I didn't see it coming.”

“At least not for another five years.” He picked up the jar of acrylamide and the paper on which he'd weighed out what he needed, and left.

“Shit,” she said.

She went home at lunch. She needed a nap.

28

Forest Garden

I lie awake in the night with Lina breathing lightly beside me. There's no moon and no light and it's quiet. When I couldn't sleep in the city I could turn on a light and read or watch a movie. There is no light switch here, no humming fridge to derail my thoughts from their anxious track. Lina's sleeping face is relaxed. She was my touchstone, allowing me to be deceived into believing I wasn't alone. I try to rouse her by nibbling her ear and rubbing her belly, but she murmurs something that sounds nothing like encouragement and turns away. I get up and go outside.

The night air coming up the mountain from the bay is thick and damp. I feel the fog settling on my hands and hair. I find the path to the road and walk in the dark. It reminds me of being with Dad and playing the World Without game. Given the news these days I have an easier time imagining the world without plastic. He and I had worked on that one for a week-full of walks. Plastic utensils and tools would disappear. Cutlery, shopping bags, garbage bags. Cars, computers. Prostheses, pacemakers, condoms, contact lenses. The machines that make all these things. Parts of rifles, Kevlar, and cruise missiles. Septic tanks, water cisterns. Food packaging, refrigerators, and freezers. The polystyrene components of phones, computers, radios, and TVs. The logical end to all this would be industrial collapse.

I am out until the sky begins lightening in the east and I am sleepy. As I get near home there is movement in the ditch. It's a fawn with a speckled coat, trembling by itself on splayed front legs. It looks at me directly with its immense brown eyes. I glance behind it for its mother but she may be hiding in the woods. It must have been born late to have those spots visible in October. It will be hard-pressed to survive the winter. I want to pick it up and save it, but I have to let it fend for itself against coyotes, hunters, and the probability of starvation. A crow somewhere nearby calls.

Lina is still asleep when I return to the cabin. I take off all my clothes and climb in behind her. She mutters about my cold skin and pulls my arm around to her chest. Soon enough her warmth against my front lulls me down wispier mental pathways and I fly along them from branch to branch until I escape.

She is at the foot of the bed stretching when I wake. Thunder weaves between her legs as Lina rises in downward dog. I call the cat and she looks quickly at me and jumps onto the bed. She purrs as I scratch her ear. Lina smiles at me.

“Were you up last night?”

I nod. I want her to care where I've been. Otherwise how will I know she cares for me?

She continues her yoga. I nudge the cat aside, climb down from the bunk, and step outside. Yet another blue sky. A few leaves falling in the breeze. The colours have peaked. I am torn by the last gasp of warm sunshine, by the Michaelmas daisies that have struggled past the two frosts of the past week, and by a junco eating garden seeds on a stalk not a body's length from me. A turkey vulture soars low over the treetops. One after another, members of its flock come into view until there are seven of them, looking for something dead to pull apart. Their wing tips curl up as they brush the spruce tops.

Lina comes outside and stands beside me.

“Eagle?”

I could never confuse the two when they're in the air. As soon as I see their outline I know what it is. I am proud of my hawkish eyesight and my ability to discern shapes and sounds that birds make. It's not an innate characteristic, though one could be fooled to believe so. It's like learning to ride a bike; once you know how, you can't forget.

“Turkey vultures.”

But she doesn't really care. Her mind is elsewhere.

“Hey,” she says softly. “There's something . . .”

“What?”

“I'm pregnant.”

Silence.

“Since when?”

“I think about eight weeks.”

I am dizzy. I sit on the ground.

“I'm sorry.”

“About what exactly?”

“That things didn't work out for us.”

That was fast.

29

New York City

Patience was not one of Benny's virtues. She found it trying to work with
Pseudomonas
because it was a slow-growing bacterium. Cells plated on a petri dish took seven or eight days to form minute colonies. She stood at the incubator outside Leach's office and for the umpteenth time she looked inside at the petri plates. The 30oC air was moist and smelled sweet, like the soil of a flower garden.

She picked up the stack of petri dishes and held the uppermost one to the fluorescent light above her. No colonies. She'd have to wait another day. Leach called to her from his office.

“Ben, is that you?”

“Yeah,” she said absentmindedly.

“Can you come here?”

She moved to the doorway.

“Come in, come in,” he said from his desk, ushering her with his hand to sit as he continued to write a note. “Shut the door behind you.” He looked up. “I told you in November that your pace wasn't quick enough to get this job done. It's March. I've given you all this extra time.”

“I'm getting close.”

“I asked Jon to fiddle with one of your plasmid constructs to see if he could get it to work more efficiently.”

“Jon works with staph. Antibiotic resistance. What does he know about
Pseudomonas
and plastics?”

“It's his versatility I appreciate,” he said. “Jonathan's capable of moving in more than one direction at a time.”

“So are slime moulds.”

“Ben, Ben, Ben,” he said, shaking his head.

“I've asked you a hundred times not to call me Ben.”

“All right, calm down. We'll get these products out more quickly and you'll still be the lead author on whatever we publish. Here, have a mint.”

She waved her hand and shook her head. He popped a mint in his mouth before continuing.

“He's had some success getting the plasmid to be expressed. You should welcome —”

“Interference?”

Leach lost his smile. “The other thing I appreciate is teamwork. We're all part of Team Leach, pulling together for the good of the lab. We're like a braided rope, stronger together than as separate strings. It takes a village, Ben, a whole stinking village to raise one kid. I've applied that principle here to my work. To
our
work. These recombinant bacteria are my children and you're all my village. Now is the time for you to be part of the village. Part of Team Leach. We have potential products that are worth a lot of cash. Dilly-dallying won't get them to market.”

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.