Intuition Read online

  Still, as he threw his used syringes into the plastic biohazard containers, Cliff felt a twinge of guilt to see Feng standing there empty-handed. Cliff could have waited two hours and allowed Feng to inject the mice with him. Being a team player, or a friend, for that matter—these were things Cliff valued. Most days, he tried to show a certain generosity of spirit.

  All around them, inside their orderly clear plastic isolators, the pink mice scurried. The injections had gone well. Cliff should have been able to share that with Feng. It was just that Cliff held possible results so tantalizing and so precious that he couldn't, even for an instant, open his hand.

  Feng looked for a moment as though he might turn on his heel and go. Instead he walked over to the isolator racks and examined Cliff's mice. He scanned the rows of cages and observed a group on which he and Cliff had tested the potency of the cell line they planned to use in their experiments. Feng and Cliff had injected these mice with cancer cells several weeks before they began their official experiments, and so the tumors on these were much more advanced. These mice had already demonstrated that Cliff's cancer cells were alive and well, dividing viciously. Feng was surprised Cliff had let them linger.

  “These guys from the test group,” Feng said. “They should be sac'ed.”

  “Yeah, I'm planning to do that,” said Cliff.

  “I'll do it for you,” Feng said.

  “You don't have to.” They all hated sacrificing the animals. Euthanizing the mice with CO2 was clean and relatively easy, as was lethal injection. However, Marion disliked both these methods. She felt that gassing mice caused unnecessary suffering by prolonging death and making the animals frantic. She did not allow injections because the barbiturates used could infiltrate blood and tissue, and compromise later analysis. Instead, Marion hewed to the Philpott veterinarian's guidelines for decapitating experimental mice. The method was messy; but it was the quickest and therefore, she felt, most humane. Robin and Feng were fairly adept. Prithwish managed well with the nude mice, but couldn't bring himself to break the necks of mice with fur. “They are like real animals,” he said. “I can't explain it.” But Cliff had a real phobia. “I'll do it later,” he told Feng.

  “No, it's okay.” Feng took out the cages and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Bad form, he thought, to keep these mice around. On humans their tumors would have been unimaginable in scale, the size of cantaloupes.

  Cliff's stomach lurched as Feng plucked the first mouse from its cage. Still, he was too proud and too possessive of his animals to leave the room.

  Feng held the mouse just above the fine metal bars of the isolator's water bottle and food pellet holder. Instinctively, the mouse's feet opened and the creature clutched the bars with its pink toes. Feng took a pencil from his pocket and placed it on the back of the mouse's neck. Then, with a sharp pull, he tugged the animal's tail. In one clean jerk, the mouse's head snapped back against the pencil. Small, heavy, lifeless, the head fell forward, limp. Feng laid the body on a clean paper towel.

  Swallowing, Cliff forced himself to look as Feng picked up the next mouse by the tail. For a moment, irrationally, frantically, Cliff felt that Feng was getting back at him, pointing up and preying on his weakness. At the same time, Cliff felt ashamed. He felt the reproach in Feng's actions—the suggestion that he had been careless with his animals, the aggressive humility in Feng's insistence on doing Cliff's dirty work.

  The room was clean but close, stinking faintly of food pellets, urine, and turds—a smell like overripe granola. Already a small row of nudes lay on the counter. In death their heads had wilted; their delicate sense organs had collapsed. Where their necks were broken, right through their pink translucent skin, Cliff could see the dark blood pooling.

  Mouth set, hands quick, Feng worked intently. Once, just as he was about to sacrifice a mouse, his glasses slipped a little down his nose. Still, he did not flinch or break his rhythm.

  “I've been a selfish jerk,” said Cliff.

  Feng laid out the mouse's body and plucked the next one by the tail.

  “Look, it's a collaboration,” Cliff said. “We're working together, and you deserve a share in whatever comes out of this as much as me.”

  “As much as I,” Feng corrected.

  Cliff grinned hopefully. Feng loved to correct Cliff's English. Feng had studied grammar seriously in school, and knew all the parts of speech by their proper names.

  The top of Feng's blue cap was all Cliff could see as Feng bent down again for the next animal.

  “I'm sorry,” Cliff said.

  Feng had emptied two cages now of their inhabitants. He stuck the plastic lids back on, and placed the empty cages just outside the door to be picked up for autoclaving.

  “I'm sorry,” Cliff said again. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Feng said calmly.

  For a moment, Cliff was confused enough to wonder if he'd actually invented this whole conflict. Was Feng's silent anger just some figment of Cliff's imagination? His surge of energy on waking had now dissipated, and sleep, the black nothingness of sleep, attacked Cliff from every side.

  “Why don't you go get some sleep?” Feng said, echoing Cliff's own thought.

  He sighed with relief. “Thanks, Feng.” He picked up his bucket of supplies and ice. “Listen,” Cliff mumbled, contradicting what he'd said before about collaboration. “I owe you, and I promise I'll sac the next group myself.”

  2

  SERENE IN the midst of the lunch rush at Harvest restaurant in Harvard Square, Sandy sat at his table with a glass of ice water. He was skimming The New England Journal of Medicine as Louisa rushed in, coat unbuttoned, backpack hanging off one shoulder. She was the rare mythical graduate student who enjoyed her work, took required courses cheerfully, and prepared for area exams by covering three-by-five cards with copious notes. Sandy's daughter loved to learn, and he couldn't have been prouder of her—except that she was studying the history of science! That entirely descriptive field. Why would anyone want to read about discoveries instead of making them? Why would anyone as capable as Louisa write about other people's inventions? Glass fervently hoped this doctoral program of hers was just a passing fancy.

  “Where are the menus?” she asked.

  “I already ordered.”

  “You ordered for me too?”

  “You were late,” he pointed out.

  “Just five minutes!”

  He grinned. “The early bird orders the entrée. You're having the roast breast of Bombay duck with bing cherries.”

  “What if I didn't want duck?”

  “But I knew you would want it,” he said.

  She shook her head at him, but couldn't argue. He knew duck was her favorite.

  “How are things?” He leaned forward in his chair.

  “I know what I want to study,” she said. “I've found the thing I want to do.”

  “Medicine!” he exclaimed.

  “No. No, no. I've just come from Houghton Library. I finally got my visitor's card. I think this is it: this is what I want to do. I want to study Robert Hooke.”

  Sandy's mouth twisted slightly in distaste. “Robert Hooke.”

  “He's neglected,” she said.

  “Wonderful.”

  “He fought with Newton. He's probably the most neglected early modern biologist—”

  “Great.”

  “Despite the fact that he invented the word cell and saw the first cells under a compound microscope. And his book, Micrographia—have you seen it, Dad?”

  “No.”

  “It's unbelievable. I was sitting there in Houghton with the book and I could not believe this stuff. Look. I've got some photocopies under here.” She rooted in the backpack full of papers and books under her chair. “Look at this one. The eye and head of a great drone fly. And this one, a blue fly.” She thrust an inky illustration in front of her father, the exquisite black engraving of an insect enlarged to monstrous full-page size: its hairs, its folded wings, its hideous f
ace.

  “Not before lunch,” Sandy said.

  “I mean, what do you think it was like to see a fly under a microscope, magnified like this for the first time?” asked Louisa. She wanted to open her father's mind, to make him understand what it was like to see these tiny insects rise up from the pages of Hooke's book like great flying machines, to unfold Hooke's illustrations: the ant in all its armored glory. “Did you know this book was a huge best seller? Do you know how many copies were sold?”

  “No,” said Sandy.

  “Neither do I—but I'm going to find out,” Louisa said. “This is what I'm going to do for my dissertation. This book has everything I love: early instrumentation, natural history, art . . .”

  “But have you been thinking about what we discussed?” Sandy asked.

  “Daddy,” she said. “You may have noticed by now—I don't want to be a doctor.”

  “A couple of hours a day,” he said. “You run over to Central Square. They've got a Stanley Kaplan right there.”

  “But just listen,” Louisa said, “I don't want to take the MCATs. What's the point in paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars to study for them?”

  “I could pay,” her father said sweetly.

  “No.”

  “Taking the test doesn't mean you'll be a physician,” he said. “All it means is you're keeping your options open. You'll get a sense of how you'd do; brush up on skills. Give your brain a little exercise . . .”

  “Great, I'll be the only person taking the MCATs for fun,” Louisa said.

  “You'd ace them.”

  “But-I-don't-want-to-do-it,” she intoned, tapping the table with her spoon.

  He yielded then, holding up his hands. Still, he murmured, “But you should.”

  “Why?” she burst out in exasperation.

  “Because you can,” he said. And that was the truth. He thought she should go into medicine because she could, because she had everything necessary. Because she had him. He could take her into the Boston medical community and clear the way before her; he could escort her down the polished white halls, past the gatekeepers and competitors, all the while whispering in her ear—beware of this one, don't go anywhere near that one, smile here, say nothing there, watch your back. Louisa should choose medicine because it was the greatest profession; that went without saying. But his motivation was also simpler than that. He wanted her to become a doctor because it would be easy for her, while it had been hard for him.

  “The cassoulet of lamb, sir?” said the waiter. “The duck for you?”

  “Thank you,” Sandy told the waiter, even as his daughter turned on him.

  “Why do you think,” Louisa said to Sandy, “that people should do things because they can? Whatever happened to doing things because you want to, or because you love them?”

  “But the history of science?” Sandy groaned. Just a few years before, he'd sent his daughter off to Swarthmore, and of all the myriad fields she might have chosen, this subdiscipline of the humanities was the one that she brought home.

  “You don't like it,” Louisa taunted him, “because you don't understand it.”

  “It's details,” Sandy said, shuffling Louisa's photocopies together and handing them back to her. “Arcane details. The blue fly. The feet of the fly. The tufted gnat. Christ.”

  “But you've got it backward,” said Louisa. “I'm not talking about details. I'm talking about the big picture, the historical context of discovery, the nature of creativity, the changing cultural patterns of the way human beings see . . .”

  So she'd get her master's degree in the history of science, Sandy mused. She'd finish up her little project and apply for medical school the year after. Robert Hooke was fine; he was eccentric; eccentricity was all the rage in med school applications. English majors, musicians, writers. Sandy had served his time on the committees. Harvard loved that kind of thing. She would be a doctor in the end. He knew it. Louisa was no soft-spoken library researcher. No math-fearing patsy. She was his son.

  “You should see Hooke's silverfish.”

  Sandy raised his water glass, almost as if he were going to make a toast. But he was just gesturing to the waiter.

  “Dad, you aren't listening,” said Louisa.

  “I am listening, and I'm utterly fascinated,” he replied.

  “You could at least pretend to be interested.”

  “I was pretending!” Sandy protested.

  Sighing, she put down her fork and knife.

  “Weasel,” Sandy said, “you can see any of the stuff in this book with a child's microscope. You don't even need a good one.”

  “But that's not the point,” she told him. “This was 1665! They were seeing this invisible world for the first time. It was like going to the moon! It was all new.”

  “So what? Now it's old. It's old news. Look, you're young, you're bright, you're full of energy. Look around you!” He waved his hands expansively at the tables nearby, the other diners laughing, talking, tucking into Quahog chowder. “The world is full of questions to be answered, diseases to investigate, not to mention—God forbid—money to be made. There are problems screaming to be solved. I just don't want to see you throw yourself away on this historical stuff. I'm telling you—you won't have a job, your twenties will be gone . . .”

  “That sounds like your postdocs. That sounds like Cliff, not me,” said Louisa.

  “Oh, no, you've got it all wrong,” Sandy said. “Cliff is going to have any job he wants. He's got the world on a plate. Cliff, more than anyone—he's got a tremendous future ahead of him.”

  The virus had begun to take effect. Two weeks after injection, Cliff was sure the tumors on several experimental mice were smaller. Three weeks after injection, Marion herself admitted a measurable difference in four mice. Six weeks after injection, Marion turned to Sandy in their office and said, “I want you to swear to me that you won't talk about this.”

  “Talk about what?” he asked airily.

  “The experiments,” she said.

  “But which part do you want me to keep secret?” He wanted to hear her say the words aloud: we have results; R-7 is actually working in sixty percent of the mice. Marion was never going to get up and tap-dance on her desk, but Glass wanted the pleasure of hearing they might be right about something. He scooted his swivel chair over and directed all his persuasive thoughts at Marion: Say it; say it. Say that somehow in all the mess of experimental ambiguity we might have stumbled upon something true.

  “You know what I'm talking about, and don't you dare,” she said.

  He scooted his chair back to his corner of the office and smiled. Marion was getting nervous, and this was a good sign. She came to the lab at all hours and looked suspiciously at everyone who came in and out—even the techs from the labs next door.

  “I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you sound this defensive,” Sandy said.

  She answered wryly, “Yes, well, it's been such a long time since we've had anything to defend.”

  Sandy himself was growing calmer by the minute. He had a good temperament for grand discoveries and impending fame. The grant proposal for NIH would be a knockout, an utter masterpiece. How could he be sure of this? He'd already written it. Marion didn't know. She would have been scandalized, but Sandy had drafted the whole thing. He'd left out the numbers, of course, the actual tables and figures. The data were still to come, but secretly, Sandy had crafted all the filigree for the proposal. He'd extrapolated from Cliff's preliminary results, and discussed their significance at length. The data would come; Marion would come around. Craftily, Sandy did his work in the meantime, forecasting the future. Language was important when it came to winning large sums of money; style was essential. By April first, Sandy's statements of purpose and declarations of intent would be polished to such a sheen the reviewers would see themselves reflected there. He was a poet of the NIH form.

  This was entirely out of order. Marion would never hear of drafting grants prematurely in t
his way, but in Sandy's mind, there was nothing wrong with it as long as he kept the process to himself—and he kept his own counsel scrupulously. He wished he could tell Marion the level of discretion of which he was capable. How he wished he could show off his work to her so she might admire his writing. But he knew better. He kept the draft close and quiet, like a lucky silver dollar in his pocket.

  “I swear to you I won't breathe a word,” he promised, and at last she sat back, satisfied, and took out her lunch.

  They ate brown-bag lunches in the office almost every day he was in town. No one dared even knock on the door. Staff, and even some colleagues, tittered about these mysterious meetings, speculating that they were trysts, the expressions of some strange love affair. Few scientists at the institute were too high-minded to snicker on occasion. But Mendelssohn and Glass's own postdocs were closer to the truth when they imagined their mentors putting their heads together to pass judgment, to plan and parcel out work and punishment. Glass and Mendelssohn thought only of the lab. They never dreamed they might spend too much time together, or enjoy each other too much. Best of colleagues, they remained best of friends, creators of a rare world unto themselves: a peaceable kingdom where the lion might lie down with the leopard. (Marion was no lamb.)

  3

  MARCH TWENTY-FIRST, the first day of spring, more than half the mice in Cliff's experimental group were in remission. Daily, Cliff could see the bulbous tumors melt away. Once grotesque, the mice were now pink and sleek, their bodies unburdened of the humps they had carried. The change in Cliff was equally dramatic. His own anxiety had all but disappeared. His eyes were hopeful, his movements quick and confident, and while his hair and beard badly needed trimming, he seemed dashing in his scruffiness—devil-may-care and pirate-like.