The Rest is Silence (21 page)

She pulled the sheet down again and touched her scars. She closed her eyes. She told Rachel the whole story, just kept talking so she couldn't think long enough to stop. When she finished she wanted neither of them to leave that bed or to speak ever again. She wanted to dissolve into Rachel's arm, sleep deeply again and wake in some other time. She had never told anyone the whole story. They made love again before falling asleep.

Early the next morning Benny sat up in Rachel's bed, a blanket covering her outstretched legs. A thin band of light under a bank of clouds showed the sun was threatening to rise. Rachel was packing for her trip to Peru.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

Rachel straightened from stuffing T-shirts into her backpack. She yawned.

“About us?”

Benny shook her head. “You going away.”

“We'll be running again before you know it. You'll be so busy you won't have time to miss me. It'll be a blip of absence.”

A blip of absence.
There was no such thing. Benny had learned that absence was half of a binary switch. On or off. There was nothing in between. Of 0 and 1, this felt a lot like 0.

“Promise you'll come back.”

“I promise I'll come back.” Rachel got off the bed. “I'm going to be late if I don't get ready.”

Downstairs Rachel kissed her goodbye and retrieved her coat from the hall closet. The two friends left the apartment onto 6th Street and waited for the cab. They hugged when it pulled up and Rachel whispered in Benny's ear, “Keep running.”

She would as soon as she got home, but first she decided to walk all the way uptown. The roads in Central Park were icy, bare branches silhouetted against a bright sky. She thought of how it felt to have Rachel's hands on her back and wished she could have shared with her the light coming through the trees, the metallic breeze against her face.

26

Forest Garden

I am sitting on the little stone wall smoking Lina's herbal mixture. Down the gentle slope in front of me grows a young chokecherry tree that hasn't borne fruit yet. I really should cut that tree down before it gets too big and shades the vegetables, but I like the look of it and its speckled bark in the midst of the garden.

That Mylar blanket of Benny's is probably long gone by now. It was made of PETE.

Lina walks her bike up the path, past the tree, and sits down beside me. She looks sheepish and contrite.

“Where'd you spend the night?”

“In a tree house.”

Puff, exhale.

“Who has a tree house?”

“Charles.”

Chucko. The guy from the land co-op. The tree house is intriguing, but I don't want to hear her say anything else out loud so I don't ask. I know what happened, and she knows I know, but as long as we don't acknowledge it I can pretend that nothing has changed.

I may not say anything, but I can't stop thinking about it. I don't know what she sees in Chucko. I know she admires his politics. His self-righteous, activist, holier-than-thou politics. Lina is quirky for heavy beards and long, lanky hair. Chucko has this disgusting furry thing on his cheeks and jowls that makes me shiver. His facial hair is thick enough to store objects in, and he does: chopsticks, pens, bits of his last meal.

“I don't trust him.”

“Don't be jealous,” she says.

Jealous? I've never been jealous in my life. That's a stick people use to measure love.

Lina bikes over to Margaretsville, leaving me alone in the woods for the night. Chucko has invited her to harvest kelp from the sea in his canoe early the next morning. I am in my cabin trying to think of anything but them, but what they get up to before they begin paddling is a source of vile speculation on the part of my disobedient mind. I imagine her kissing his beard, trying to find his lips. Lina has always encouraged me to stop shaving. Perhaps I should have, but I've never liked having facial hair.

Chucko takes to visiting our homestead. He drives an old beater. He seems proud of the fact that he found a '73 Satellite Sebring Plus, in excellent condition, and is driving it into the ground. He covered it with yellow house paint, then painted over that with green slogans. “Say no to GMOs!” “Would you eat YOU'RE dog for dinner?”

His bedroom is in a forty-foot white ash. She tells me it's fun to sleep up there. The tree sways with the slightest breeze at night. Each morning the resident red squirrel — she says they call it Pete — visits them, dashing in one window, eating table scraps, then darting out another. No doubt Pete pees on Chucko's pile of unwashed clothes on the way out.

When I ask, she won't tell me whether they are having sex. She says I'm being possessive.

“If you want to know for a good reason,” she says calmly, “then I'll tell you.”

“Are you doing this because I didn't say yes to you?”

“I'm doing it because I need more than to live here alone with you.”

When she is at Forest Garden I can pretend that nothing has changed. We cut firewood and garden together. We sit by the fire at night together. We continue to sleep together and sometimes have sex. When she isn't here, though, and even sometimes when she is, I miss her.

One late summer day she comes to the pine grove with me. I'm frisky and hope we will have sex. It's warm enough in the sun that I can take off my shirt and place it on the pine needles as a blanket. She lies on it and I kiss her and scratch her scalp. I can tell she's distracted. I put my hand under her T-shirt and stroke her belly, then move up to her breast. She nudges my hand away and makes an irritated sound.

“They're sore,” she says. “I think I must be getting my period.”

I pull my hand out and lie on the needles beside her, looking up at the branches of the pines mingling in the sky. She snuggles up to me, putting her head on my shoulder.

“I can see having my home base here. With you. I can go off and travel and do the things I need to do and come back to you each fall to overwinter.”

She makes it sound like she's a Canada goose, waiting to fly south to Georgia. She's with me now, however, and it seems we might work something out.

Less than a month later and she's changed her mind again. We are sitting in the dark by the fire. It is late September and we woke this morning to the first frost. We should get a few weeks of warm days and crisp, clear nights. She sits in front of me on the dry ground, my arms wrapped around her.

“Let's drift apart slowly like Morocco did from Nova Scotia,” I whisper in her ear as she leans against my chest.

The firelight reflects orange off her face. Something in the look she gives me offers little warmth. I know I am alone now, that the best I can hope for is pity, and pity is worse than nothing at all.

“Charles is going to take me to see my gran and to visit Georgian Bay,” she says. “He wants to go on a road trip to the West Coast and spend the winter out there. Then, next summer, we'll drive up to the Yukon for the Solstice.”

All the places we have talked of going together. I ask her when she's leaving.

“Sometime in October.”

So much for Forest Garden and me as her home base. I could have said yes when she asked me to marry her and she might have stayed, but that would be like clipping a hen's wings. Thousands of tiny lights ray down above the horizon of treetops that encircles us. In the years to come I intend to thin these woods with a handsaw and a felling axe, buck my firewood by hand, split it with a sharp maul and axe. And then, five hundred years from now, a mature forest will stand here, oblivious to the pain of loving and losing that came so long before. Sooner than all that, sooner than the sawing and felling, and a lot sooner than the white pines growing to their full height, I'll be alone again. She is Morocco, drifting with her half of our shared geology. One day soon, once she's gone, if you look down from where those stars are shining you'll be able to see, despite the expanse of sea between us, that we once fit together. That our edges would still mesh like two pieces of a puzzle.

27

New York City

Benny's run, after walking three miles home from Rachel's, made her tired. She was still recovering from the marathon. She slept in the next morning and was late getting to the lab. She hung her jacket on one of the hooks on the wall by her desk and sat down in the chair. It was 10:45. Underneath the clock Leach had hung a quote from Einstein:

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem to characterize our age.

She pulled a notebook down and opened it to the previous day's entry. This one was written in cursive, from right to left and in a private shorthand only she could decipher. She was left-handed and her handwriting was elegant only when she wrote backwards. It wasn't often that she associated that adjective with herself. Pushing her hand across the page the way she was told to since grade school felt like shovelling gravel. Her everyday handwriting looked like it had been scratched by an eight-year-old. It did not bring her joy to look at her experimental results because her research had not been going well. The past two weeks had been full of setbacks. First her bacterial cultures had been contaminated. Then, once she'd solved that problem, the bacteria wouldn't take up the recombinant plasmid DNA she had engineered containing the estA gene. She was at a standstill.

She pushed the book away. Somnolence tussled with the exhilaration of being in love. But she was exhausted from getting little sleep the night before. The fluorescent lights settled the match and she laid her head on her folded arms and dozed. She chose an awkward position, knowing that her body wouldn't let her sleep for long in discomfort. It was delicious to give in and float away from the lab.

“Good morning.”

The voice came to her as if through fog. She raised her head and rubbed her hand across her mouth, afraid she had drooled on her chin. Her hair was damp with sweat and both her shoulders and upper arms tingled, half asleep.

“I hope I'm not interrupting anything,” Leach said, looking like a cat with the flutter of wings in its mouth. “If you're not too busy, I'd like to speak to you in my office.”

The open notebook glared accusingly at her from the desk. She closed it and returned it to the shelf above her desk.

Leach was moving a stack of copies of
Molecular and Cellular Biology
and
Applied Microbiology
journals from the couch when she entered. A beige filing cabinet stood against the wall behind the door. She walked over to the lone window. Grime-encrusted, it faced into a shaft that was bordered on four sides by offices like this one. That space, no more than six feet square, was designed by an architect — either a hopeless optimist or a fool — to allow light into the rooms from the roof three floors above. It was dark, even in daytime, and it was a trap for any bird that made the mistake of dropping into the space. Leach told her to sit on the couch. Three storeys below lay the carcasses of half a dozen birds. She turned away from the window and sat down. Above his desk were two framed magazine covers. One was a framed cover of
Time
, showing Leach with lips pursed and his eyebrows drawn down, both fists on the bench in front of him, staring out at America in his impeccable white lab coat. At the bottom, in bold orange letters:
Is this the scientist who will save us from Superbugs — and ourselves?
Underneath it was the cover of the latest
SI
swimsuit issue, with a woman with lush blond hair, plenty of flesh hanging out of her yellow bikini, and a sultry pout.

Leach leaned back in his chair to reach a bowl of mints he kept on a shelf behind his desk. He threw her a mint and unwrapped one for himself.

“I heard about our little marathon disappointment.” He smiled and appeared to be offering sympathy. “Shot your wad too quickly, huh?”

Benny gaped. The smile drained from his lips, leaving traces only around the eyes.

“Ahem.” He made a throat-clearing attempt that rattled convincingly. “Anyways. Be that as it may, I'm concerned about the status of your research. You've been here almost three years. By this time you should be thinking about how to wrap up your story. Your experiments should be directed toward the apex, reaching a point that will culminate in a body of work that is unique.” She knew this. PhD candidates ate, drank, and slept with these things on their minds. “Beginning, middle, end. That sort of thing. Your beginning here was full of promise. You found those mutants that had adapted to metabolize polystyrene and nylon. Good work. You isolated the plasmid-borne genes that were responsible. Good work. And then
pfft
. You stalled. Nothing has happened since when, last year?”

“I've been having trouble getting the plasmid to be stable in
Pseudomonas
.”

“I know, I know,” he continued in a paternalistic tone. “But we've got to move quicker on this project.”

“Why can't we publish my results about the enzyme?”

“Are you nuts? We're not publishing anything until we have a strain that eats plastic, and eats it like a fat man at an all-you-can-chow Chinese buffet.” Leach laughed. “A really fat guy who whimpers at the sight of moo shu pork.”

“It's going to take more time. It'd be faster to publish what we have and team up with other labs.”

“You don't get it, do you? There's something I need to explain to you. Again. BioGreen Enterprises will buy anything we have that is capable of digesting plastic. Every municipal and state government will want it for their waste disposal programs. BioGreen knows this. They will pay us money for it. Lots of money. Well, not us, me. But it will benefit you, trust me. You will be the lead author. I have the patent application here, in this pile, completely filled out except for one thing. It's waiting for the details of the strain that you are going to create. Not data on an enzyme. Not preliminary findings about how, with a few more modifications, you might come up with a strain that eats plastic. I need the strain.”

He told her that if she couldn't get results soon he'd have to bring someone else on board to lend a hand. He was thinking of what was best for her. If she'd reached a dead end it was important to realize that as quickly as possible. They could find a simpler project for her to complete. He wondered if she'd be interested in pursuing a more theoretical angle, to look into the evolutionary aspects of the mutants she'd found.

“Are you trying to force me out of your lab?” Her voice squeaked.

“Don't get all hysterical on me. This isn't about your abilities as a graduate student. It's about getting these products onto the market as quickly as possible. I'll need some real progress by the end of the year.”

Less than two months. He was giving her an impossible task so he could justify taking her work from her.

“When I first met you,” she said, “you led me to believe it was the environment you were doing this for.”

“You misunderstand me. I know you think I'm in this just to make a buck. It's not true. But, hey, what if it was? If what I'm doing helps the environment, why shouldn't I be rewarded for it? But you've got to remember that the competition is stiff out there, Ben. Stiffer than a sixteen-year-old in a harem.”