The Rest is Silence (23 page)

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.

Once Mike left the room, Leroy asked her if she wanted another drink. She put her hand on his arm and shook her head.

“Can we go to your room?”

He grabbed his can of beer and followed Benny into his bedroom. She went to his desk, littered with journal papers, CD cases, and gum wrappers. He turned on his lamp, threw the quilt over his unmade bed, and sat down. Benny picked up
Blue
from the desk and put it in the player. She sat beside him and told him that she had stopped seeing Rachel.

“I wanted it to work out. I love her, I do. But . . .”

He reached out and put his palm between her shoulder blades. Her breathing changed and she began to cry.

“Lie down,” he said and sat beside her. She turned onto her side, facing away from him, and he rubbed her back. She relaxed and stopped crying. She shouldn't talk to him about Rachel anymore, it wasn't fair. She turned her head to face him.

“Can you sequence some DNA for me?”

“What sequence?”

“A stretch on the fourth chromosome.” She paused. “Mine.”

“What are you looking for?”

She picked at his quilt.

“I told you that my father drowned. There was more to it.” With an index finger she traced the outlines of the squares on the quilt. “I'm convinced he had Huntington's disease.”

“Does it run in your family?”

“He was depressed. It began all of a sudden. He forgot things and snapped at me for no reason. I want to know if he had it. He might have had a seizure on the dock that day.”

“And if he had it . . .”

She nodded. Any father with Huntington's has a 50 percent chance of passing it on to his daughter. The normal gene has a short sequence in its DNA repeated about twenty-five times. The mutant form results when that short sequence was stuttered over during DNA replication so that the sequence was repeated forty to a hundred times.

The apartment was quiet. The traffic had all stopped. No honking horns. She breathed, in-out, in-out.

“What do you need from me?” Leroy said. “They've cloned the gene, right?”

“In 1993.”

She wanted him to do the test. It would take one polymerase chain reaction and sequencing fewer than two hundred nucleotides. He routinely sequenced DNA fragments from Chico and his other mouse mutants. It would take one evening to do most of the work and she'd know the result in less than a week.

“Why don't you go to a clinic and get tested?”

“I need it to be anonymous.”

“Where are we going to get the probes?”

“A Huntington's researcher in Madison sent them to me.”

“O.K., but this goes no further than you and me. If you test positive you go to a doctor and get a proper test and don't mention this one. If they find out I was using the lab for genetic testing they'd drum me out of school quicker than you could say Jack Robinson.”

“Leroy?” She was smiling.

“Yeah.”

“Does everyone up there talk the way you do?”

“What?”

“Does everyone in Canada use archaic expressions like ‘Jack Robertson' and that thing you say about the flapper on a duck's ass?”

“It's Jack
Robinson
and it's a goose's ass and, no, not everyone up there talks like that.”

Leroy grabbed the pillow from behind Benny's head and bopped her with it. She laughed and he lay down beside her. Leroy put his arm around her and Benny snuggled into his chest.

“No funny business, O.K.?” she said.

He squeezed her. “You can sleep here if you want.”

They listened to the music for a while and then she realized he had drifted off. She got up to turn off the light, then lay down again. There were voices in the neighbouring apartment coming from a TV and the white noise from the street. She wanted to stay.

Partway through the night Benny woke up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. When she returned, Leroy had undressed and climbed beneath the covers. She lay down beside him. In the morning Leroy lay with the covers pulled up under his chin. They talked for a long time while Benny sat on the windowsill.

“I like sleeping with you,” she said.

“Me too.”

“But I don't want to have sex.”

“I wasn't asking you to.” He grinned and shook his head. “You're a strange girl, Benny, but I do like you.”

He made her oatmeal for breakfast and they went to the lab. At the end of the day she invited him to spend the night at her apartment. They ate supper and then went to bed. She opened the blinds so they could see the city lights and climbed in beside Leroy. She leaned over and kissed him, and her hands began touching him before she caught herself and pulled back. She lay awake long after Leroy had fallen asleep, wondering if she was being foolish to insist that they not consummate their unusual friendship. They liked each other and she found him attractive, but soon enough she would be saying goodbye to him too.

32

Forest Garden

We are sitting on the bluff. No buildings in sight. No crowds of people. We are alone and farther from New York than I have ever felt. Across the bay lies Cape Chignecto, a band of green against the water's grey. Isle Haute, the solitary island, rises out of the water like a disc to our east. Art calls it the clitoris of the Bay of Fundy.

“Benny was a fool to get him to sequence her DNA,” Art says.

I ask why.

“If your biography was written down, including what hasn't happened yet, would you read it?”

I say I would.

“You didn't take time to consider the question.” Wisps of smoke from his cigarette carry out to sea, then dissipate in the gentle breeze. “Because that's what she wanted. She might have got some really bad news that she'd be able to do nothing about. And what if there was a cure for that disease? What if they could have changed her father's DNA and cured him? Would she have chosen that?”

“Anyone would want that.”

“I don't think so. We all have to die. He died young, before his joints and bones began to rot.”

“At least she would've had him around longer.”

He isn't listening.

“That's what's always bugged me about Lazarus. Christ wasn't doing Martha and Mary any favours bringing him back from the dead. He forced them to mourn their brother's death twice.” He laughs. “As if we need any more suffering than life already brings us.”

One minute we're talking about DNA and the next he's getting all Biblical on me. I ask why Jesus did it.

“I doubt he did. I haven't believed in that hocus-pocus since I came back from Italy. But if it's true, he was showing off. Trying to convince them he could do magic.”

“I thought we were talking about science.”

“Science is our magic. We expect scientists to raise our dead. Benny's father died and she wanted an explanation. You can explain that he had a mutation in his genes and it killed him. But she'd never know why he had to die anymore than you and I know why we're alive. Magic. We're marvellous machines, that's all.”

I get up, wiping the dirt off my pants. “I'm going home to see Lina.”

“I don't blame you.” He grunts as he stands, rubbing his hip. “You had a good run with her.”

We go back into the woods, heading toward his house. We pass a maple, its upper and outer leaves crimson, the lower leaves still green with red outlines. Beneath the tree is a blanket of red on the forest floor in a perfect circle, as if the tree had been dripping paint. The only sound is the crunching of our boots on the leaves and twigs. Then Art stops in front of me, reaches back with his right arm to still me, and raises his gun to his shoulder. I follow the direction of the barrel to where I see the tail of a deer twitching against a white rump a hundred feet away. Then a blast and the deer bolts.

“Damn. I ain't used to missing.”

He seems embarrassed to have me watching. We start for home.

“You know she's pregnant?”

Ahead of me, he nods. “She told me.”