A Perfect Life by Eileen Pollack Page B

froze in midtwirl. I waited to see how Willie would react. Some people were offended to share a disease with a mouse, to watch it parody an illness that had killed someone they loved. I felt that way myself. But mostly I regarded these mice as a gift.
    He set the mouse on his huge palm and stroked it. The mouse seemed to thaw. It took a few tentative steps. To keep it from falling off, Willie pinched its tail. But by then, the mouse had frozen again.
    â€œIf they’re so messed up,” he asked, “how do you force them to breed?”
    â€œWe don’t force them,” I said. “The mice that are just coming down with symptoms, they’ll jump on anything.”
    He laughed that awful bray of his. The mice skittered in their cages. “Yup,” he said. “That sounds like my dad.”
    I was appalled that he could joke about his father’s illness, although I might have been better off if I could have joked about my mother’s. “Actually,” I said, “we’re not sure what these mice have. The symptoms look like Valentine’s, but we’re only guessing it’s a mouse version of the disease.”
    Willie patted the mouse. “Are two Valentine’s genes worse than one?”
    Again, I felt the urge to kiss him. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s the million-dollar question. If the mouse gets two shots of the gene, maybe the symptoms will be so bad we’ll be able to see what’s going on, what’s responsible for killing all those brain cells. The thing is, most of the homozygotes are so screwed up they die at birth.”
    â€œPardon me if this is a stupid question,” he said, and that made me doubt it would be. “The holes in the brain? The way a person’s speech slows down?” I knew what he was going to ask. Even in his earliest movies, his father had chewed each word as deliberately as he chewed his cigarette. “Was the way my dad talked part of who he was? Or was it part of his sickness?”
    I didn’t know what to say. My mother had slipped gradually from not talking much to not talking at all. Her tendency to be withdrawn might have been a part of who she was—she had grown up watching her family die. Or her withdrawal had been a warning. To think about the brain—all those tangled neurons, the neurotransmitters carrying messages across all those synaptic clefts, the enzymes breaking down those transmitters, over and over, so the cells wouldn’t keep firing—gave me such vertigo Icould barely keep from reeling. What was a human soul if it could be so radically changed by a minuscule stretch of DNA? And how could this one protein make a once-polite woman spout such horrifying invectives, obsess over sex, and lose interest in her own daughters?
    â€œIt probably takes more than a single gene to make a person who she is,” I said. I pulled down another cage and rubbed the swollen belly of the pregnant mouse inside. Given the laws of probability, a quarter of her pups ought to be born with two normal copies of the gene for Valentine’s. Half would inherit one copy of the good gene and one copy of the bad. And a quarter of the pups ought to inherit two bad copies. If we could save these homozygotes before their mother ate them, we would drop them in preservative and give them to Achiro to dissect.
    â€œSo,” Willie asked, “who kills the poor suckers?”
    I wanted to say that I hated killing mice. One of our postdocs, Lew Schiff, was an Orthodox Jew who had written a prayer—in Hebrew, no less—which he murmured each time he sacrificed a victim, “sacrificed” being the word we all used, maybe as a euphemism, or maybe because it was the perfect word to describe the solemnity a person felt in performing such an act. I wanted to say that a mouse grew from nothing in a mere nineteen days. Each whisker was a tube with a single nerve cell that allowed the