“We’re in the trenches, returning fire. ”
He spat a little on me. I was embarrassed enough to be cruel.
“Save it for the grants committee,” I said, without looking up at him.
I was finding it hard to tear my eyes away, flipping through the black-and-white documentation of nature’s out-of-the-park foul balls: Down’s syndrome, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, beta-thalassemia, PKU, Gaucher’s disease, Alpha 1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. This last disease, this horror, had been my own obsession. Colleagues of mine pursued immunological questions — AIDS being a primary focus — or tracked malfunctions in cellular growth, that is to say, cancer. I’ve always been intrigued by single-gene deficiencies, not just because they supposedly offer more promise of cloning and reintroduction of a doctored gene back into the body: I was just after this one. I stared at a photo of a young man, barely twenty (I could guess by his childlike facial expression) who’d developed the premature emphysema that characterized a 1 AT. His chest was sunken, iron-ribbed from the terrible exertion of drawing breath after breath. His body looked fifty years old. I saw that he would be dead in a year or two, if he made it that far. The emphysema usually doesn’t hit till the twenties, but might show up before then. To parents who had a kid who looked and seemed healthy, every cold, every sore throat was a potential nightmare, the beginning of the end. My father died of emphysema, but that’s not why I identify with it so strongly. I reacted calmly to a 1 AT; I felt outraged by it — but focused. I thought I knew how to pursue it. I knew its habits. But, at the same time, I knew we had no real cure rate.
I threw the photos back at Q.
“Horror movies,” I remember saying. I looked at my nails and yawned.
He laughed. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that your feigned indifference is much more dramatic than pitched hysteria? You should speak to the grants committee.”
I recall smiling stiffly.
“Glad I entertain you.”
I tried to be cool. I got up and rotated my elbow, which had been bothering me in the lab, stiffening up on me, in a series of rapid, bone-popping circles.
He kept watching me. “What are you doing?” he asked finally. “Exercising the chip on your shoulder?”
I froze. “What chip?” I blushed. “What chip?”
He gave me that big limpid gaze over his glasses.
“You are naturally gifted in this field. I admire you, Esme. Nevertheless, nonacademic science might be too volatile for you. Did you ever think about that? You seem afraid to get emotionally involved, to care .”
It was hard for me to absorb that comment. I was his right arm. I’d come to believe that I knew everything he thought about our work together, I thought I knew everything he thought about me. Unlike other professors, he was there. He had made himself available to me; we’d become friends.
To my horror, I turned girlish, making a little face at him, murmuring something about how I hoped that he really didn’t believe that.
He punched me on the shoulder, slid the photographs in a file, and suggested we go to work. But I sat there for a while after he went to wash up. I took out the glass apparatus and held it up to the tube lamp. It exploded into prismatic light fractures, jumpy neon-white right angles, spangling the walls and ceiling.
It doesn’t worry me, Ollie. It doesn’t worry me that you go to your nursery school and sit by yourself and that you don’t talk to the other kids and that you sing a little song over and over to yourself. I know you are not unhappy. I know what you’re thinking. I was like that. I remember being like that. You talk only to me, sometimes to Jay or to your stuffed dragon. I understand. Language, the language we speak out here in the world, is treacherous, ambiguous. You have to figure the world out by observation, by experiment, before you can enter the code.
That spring I invited my
He spat a little on me. I was embarrassed enough to be cruel.
“Save it for the grants committee,” I said, without looking up at him.
I was finding it hard to tear my eyes away, flipping through the black-and-white documentation of nature’s out-of-the-park foul balls: Down’s syndrome, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, beta-thalassemia, PKU, Gaucher’s disease, Alpha 1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. This last disease, this horror, had been my own obsession. Colleagues of mine pursued immunological questions — AIDS being a primary focus — or tracked malfunctions in cellular growth, that is to say, cancer. I’ve always been intrigued by single-gene deficiencies, not just because they supposedly offer more promise of cloning and reintroduction of a doctored gene back into the body: I was just after this one. I stared at a photo of a young man, barely twenty (I could guess by his childlike facial expression) who’d developed the premature emphysema that characterized a 1 AT. His chest was sunken, iron-ribbed from the terrible exertion of drawing breath after breath. His body looked fifty years old. I saw that he would be dead in a year or two, if he made it that far. The emphysema usually doesn’t hit till the twenties, but might show up before then. To parents who had a kid who looked and seemed healthy, every cold, every sore throat was a potential nightmare, the beginning of the end. My father died of emphysema, but that’s not why I identify with it so strongly. I reacted calmly to a 1 AT; I felt outraged by it — but focused. I thought I knew how to pursue it. I knew its habits. But, at the same time, I knew we had no real cure rate.
I threw the photos back at Q.
“Horror movies,” I remember saying. I looked at my nails and yawned.
He laughed. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that your feigned indifference is much more dramatic than pitched hysteria? You should speak to the grants committee.”
I recall smiling stiffly.
“Glad I entertain you.”
I tried to be cool. I got up and rotated my elbow, which had been bothering me in the lab, stiffening up on me, in a series of rapid, bone-popping circles.
He kept watching me. “What are you doing?” he asked finally. “Exercising the chip on your shoulder?”
I froze. “What chip?” I blushed. “What chip?”
He gave me that big limpid gaze over his glasses.
“You are naturally gifted in this field. I admire you, Esme. Nevertheless, nonacademic science might be too volatile for you. Did you ever think about that? You seem afraid to get emotionally involved, to care .”
It was hard for me to absorb that comment. I was his right arm. I’d come to believe that I knew everything he thought about our work together, I thought I knew everything he thought about me. Unlike other professors, he was there. He had made himself available to me; we’d become friends.
To my horror, I turned girlish, making a little face at him, murmuring something about how I hoped that he really didn’t believe that.
He punched me on the shoulder, slid the photographs in a file, and suggested we go to work. But I sat there for a while after he went to wash up. I took out the glass apparatus and held it up to the tube lamp. It exploded into prismatic light fractures, jumpy neon-white right angles, spangling the walls and ceiling.
It doesn’t worry me, Ollie. It doesn’t worry me that you go to your nursery school and sit by yourself and that you don’t talk to the other kids and that you sing a little song over and over to yourself. I know you are not unhappy. I know what you’re thinking. I was like that. I remember being like that. You talk only to me, sometimes to Jay or to your stuffed dragon. I understand. Language, the language we speak out here in the world, is treacherous, ambiguous. You have to figure the world out by observation, by experiment, before you can enter the code.
That spring I invited my
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