A Perfect Life by Eileen Pollack

by the currents, too. But he had needed to ask himself how evolution could account for his willingness to throw away his DNA to save a man who was even weaker than he was, even less fit for life. Sitting on that rock, warmed by the sun, he felt a connectionto God he couldn’t deny. He left graduate school to attend divinity school, but he soon realized he didn’t have the temperament to become a minister. No, his calling was to help his fellow humans understand the beauty and complexity of the science by which God’s creation worked. Not long afterward, he had made a name for himself developing a brilliant new approach to cloning. And yet, even those scientists who respected his results regarded their discoverer as somehow soft in the head. They were suspicious that at any moment he might stand up and make a case for intelligent design, or claim that God had planted the fossils to test our faith.
    Initially, I had been suspicious, too. My parents blamed my mother’s disease on genetics, and no amount of prayer could cure her. Better to put my faith in my earthly father and the money he was raising for his foundation, or my own ability to find the gene. And yet, working for Vic, I came to feel I benefited from a double layer of protection. I had Vic’s power to provide the equipment and material I needed to conduct my work. And maybe, just maybe, his extra powers of intercession would provide a miracle.
    Now, with Willie hovering behind Achiro, I slid my petri dishes out of the incubator and carried them to the tissue-culture hood. After all that talk about feeding my cells, I was embarrassed that Willie should see how simple the task really was. All I had to do was siphon off the old media, then squirt on fresh stock, bright as pink Kool-Aid.
    â€œThat’s it?” he said.
    I slid the dishes back into the incubator. We went out in the hall. “Not quite,” I said. “A few of my mice are readyto deliver. If you don’t catch them right away, the mothers eat the pups. The mutants, that is. And they’re the ones we’re interested in.”
    We were standing in a corridor so narrow that if Willie had stretched out his arms, he could have laid his palms on opposite walls. “Why would the mothers eat their babies?” he asked.
    For some reason, I felt the need to pretend the mothers’ cannibalism didn’t bother me. “They probably don’t want to waste all that good protein.”
    â€œNah,” he said. “You give them mouse kibble. I think they’re just ashamed.” He stuffed his shirttail in his trousers. “Were you ever ashamed of your mother?”
    People hardly ever asked me about my mother. My friends seemed to avoid the word “mother” altogether. And my family didn’t feel compelled to reminisce. Still, the question Willie had just asked had haunted me for years. It was a terrible thing to watch your once-fastidious mother drool juice on her blouse, or roll her eyes backward in her head until the capillaries showed, or tremble so incessantly she stripped her scalp raw against her pillow.
    â€œI wasn’t ashamed of her,” I said. “She was a very attractive woman. But after she got sick, we couldn’t keep taking all those wool skirts and silk blouses to the cleaners. She couldn’t manage buttons, so my father brought home these double-knit pants from his store, and these polyester tent-dresses. I would try to replace the buttons with Velcro. The pamphlets make it sound so easy, but I can’t sew. She had to wear these awful nurses’ shoes, because it was so hard for her to walk. I wanted to tell people, ‘She wasn’t always likethis. She started college at forty and she would have earned her doctorate in biology if she hadn’t gotten sick.’ But I don’t think you could say I was ashamed of her. It was just that I knew she would have been ashamed of herself.”
    Cesar, the