Naturally, Cliff felt Sandy and Marion were manipulating him. He understood that their whole attention was captured by the research potential of three tiny creatures whose tumors had receded. He knew he was being used, and still he didn't care. He had begun something with the mice, set events in motion that might lead to real results. He saw it in the other postdocs' eyes: tremendous discoveries befalling him. The field had opened up for him; the whole world was ringing in his ears.
All day he worked with the others, preparing cells for the new trials. He dashed from the cold room to the lab, then into the stockroom and across the hall. By evening, the others were swirling all around him and debating where to go to dinner, arguing about where to celebrate, all except for Robin, who was silent. In the midst of that bustle, he pulled Robin into the hall.
“Well?” he asked delightedly, and drew her close.
She reached around him and thrust her hands into his back pockets. “Congratulations,” she whispered.
He knew how hard and how long she'd worked. He understood that she despaired of ever triumphing as he had that day. Still, he wished she would let herself celebrate, jump and dance down the empty corridor.
“Robin,” he chided her. He wanted to tell her all this would happen to her, too, that her luck would turn as well. But he had no good arguments for this, and she had no reason to believe him. Such luck as his was far too rare.
“I hope it all works out,” she said, looking up, and then, as if afraid to sound too stingy, she added, “I'm sure it will.”
He bent down to kiss her, but she turned away slightly, and his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Please be happy for me.”
Part II
Mice
1
T
HAT WINTER
Cliff worked longer hours than anyone. Even Feng went home by eight or nine o'clock so he could eat dinner with Mei. Cliff would dash out to Store 24.
Ambition, long dormant, had awakened in him, and where he had been weak from lack of hope, now his appetite for science revived. Was Feng's observation significant? Cliff knew this was his question to address. These were his experiments, his years of preparation yielding a possible bonanza. This was the crucial moment. If he was lazy or lost focus, someone else would take up the charge and seize the credit. Now, in the darkest season of the year, he lived and breathed and dreamed about his new batch of three dozen hairless mice.
“Unfortunately,” said Feng one January night, “I think this will all turn out to be an artifact, and the virus will have no effect.”
Cliff looked up, hurt. He knew Feng always spoke that way, but the dark logic wounded him nonetheless.
The two of them were working side by side in the animal facility, injecting human cancer cells into the new mice. The work was tricky and tedious, and it was late. Cliff and Feng were both exhausted. They didn't use the laminar flow hood, because Marion wasn't around to see them. She would have been horrified, but they injected the mice on paper towels spread right on the stainless steel table. None of the postdocs really believed in Marion's extra precautions with the animals. Experience showed them the nudes were not nearly as fragile as she assumed. Peculiar as they appeared, the creatures were surprisingly hardy. In fact, Cliff had irradiated these mice the day before so that the cancer cells would have a better chance to thrive. Even when they were supposed to sicken and die, nude mice did not drop dead as easily as everyone supposed.
They were trying to work quickly. Feng had carried the cells downstairs in orange-capped tubes stuck into a plastic bucket full of ice. Seven tubes of cancerous cells, and two tubes of normal cells for the controls. To all the cells, Feng added a special gel that promoted tumor growth.
As Feng prepared the syringes, Cliff wadded up a paper towel, stuffed it in a mason jar, then poured in a capful of anesthetic from a brown bottle. Anesthesia ready, Cliff moved two cages from their rack to the tabletop. He removed the lid of the first, sloshing water from the animals' water bottle. Suddenly uncovered, the mice stood up on their hind legs and strained upward, noses swelling, bodies swaying. Cliff plucked up the first mouse by its tail and placed it in the mason jar. The tail kept popping out, so Cliff didn't screw the lid on all the way. The lid jiggled as the mouse tried to escape, but in a few seconds the little animal succumbed and slept. Cliff laid out the mouse on its belly, nose down, tail loose, utterly limp except for the ears, which fanned out, rigid and erect on top of the head.
Even now, after all these years, the mice sometimes spooked Cliff. The anesthetic was intense, but brief. Thirty seconds in the jar yielded just about thirty seconds' time for the injections. Occasionally an animal woke up, twitching. Startled, Cliff could misdirect his needle, poke all the way through the skin, or hit an organ. A big mouse might need a second dose of anesthetic, or even a third.
This animal lay still, however. Cliff took his syringe, and in three different places he inserted the needle just under the skin, gently depressed the plunger, and then drew back. The skin swelled and bubbled up where the cells and gel went in. In one place, as Cliff withdrew the needle, a drop of blood emerged. Just one drop, the size and color of the animal's own red eyes. Then it was over. Cliff restored the mouse to its cage and crushed corncob bedding. The three injections oozed like nasty insect bites, and the animal lay still for a few seconds, but after a few pokes with Cliff's gloved finger the mouse was up and about again, nosing for food.
“This stuff never works like it's supposed to,” Feng said companionably.
For the first time, working with Feng, Cliff felt a superstitious chill come over him. “Hey, man, don't bet against me like that.” He stuffed another mouse into the mason jar.
Puzzled, Feng turned to Cliff as he handed him a fresh syringe.
“It's bad luck to bet against people.” Cliff was wrought up, or he would have remembered that Feng believed the opposite was true. “Anyway, this is partly your work too. You shouldn't bet against yourself.”
“If this doesn't work,” Feng said, “there will be more experiments.”
“For you, there will be,” said Cliff. “Not for me. For you, it doesn't really matter as much. Shit!” He realized he'd left the mouse in the jar. He rushed to unscrew the top and set the mouse down on the table. The animal lay still.
Cliff bent down over the tiny body. Almost imperceptibly, the mouse's rib cage expanded and contracted. It was breathing.
“Cliff,” Feng chided, “you're talking like the unlucky one now. You shouldn't think that way.”
“How am I supposed to think?” Cliff exploded. He poked and prodded the mouse's wrinkly skin. His needle slipped into the loose folds. “This has to work. It has to!”
It was childish, Cliff knew, to stand there and will experiments to work, throwing a tantrum and expecting results to come. The forces of disease arrayed themselves in the experimental mice and all the lab's glassware and machines, just as they did outside in the world. Shouting about it was as futile as standing outside and raging against a thunderstorm. There were no imperatives in research. Even for Marion, there was no experiment that would succeed because it ought. No line of inquiry had to be right just because it matched the investigator's intuition. Cliff knew all this, but he'd been up almost twenty-four hours, and he couldn't think straight.
He was frightened sometimes by the intensity of his emotions. There were days when he envisioned such success that he felt a kind of awe, as though the lab were already covered with clouds of glory. There were days when he could almost taste the future before him: the results, the publications, the prizes. But there were times, as well, when Cliff imagined all his good fortune evaporating; the remission of the mice nothing more than a freak occurrence; the idea of using R-7 only a beautiful dream. He swung sickeningly between delight and despair.
He had never felt this way about research before. He worked on tenterhooks, alert to the slightest changes in the mice, nervous about even discussing his experiments. He had seen this in other people, but never felt it fully himself: the propulsive energy of scientific questions, the relentless force of an investigation that might succeed. He began to forget about winter: the slush, the outside world; the city out there, cloaked in white. He stopped reading the newspaper or listening to the news. He wore the same blue jeans and brown sweater every single day. He paced restlessly, feverish with calculations, touchy, paranoid. He lost track of time, but he was obsessed with time. He was the victim of his changing moods, run ragged by his own imagination. Jubilant, confused. Lovesick.
He could not tell exactly when it happened—whether it began when he despaired, or when he'd been called back into favor—but this winter a fraying chord, his own perception of himself, had broken inside of him. It seemed to him now that all his previous work had given him nothing, and that he, in his thirty years, had given nothing to the world. This was his chance now, and with it came a weight of hope and expectation that he could hardly bear.
By early February tumors had begun to form on the mice in the experimental groups. Pale and smooth, the size of pimples, tiny bumps had emerged on the flanks of the animals. Five weeks after injection with the cancer cells, the tumors were bulging, swollen knobs of flesh unbalancing the nudes' pink bodies. Cliff recorded the tumor sizes in his lab notebook. Carefully, more carefully than he ever had before, he kept and copied his records. He still scrawled notes and numbers on scratch paper, but his lab book was sacrosanct. He lined up his figures in neat columns, printing every number with the utmost care. His previous experiments had been rehearsals; his trials and errors just dry runs. Now he checked his animals night and day. He placed his cages on certain shelves of the isolator rack and posted signs:
DO NOT MOVE!
These were his mice, his proprietary tumors swelling just under the skin of the busy, unknowing animals.
“Good. Good. Good,” he whispered as he examined the tumor-burdened mice, lifting up the creatures by their tails.
He would buy a box of powdered donuts and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was dinner. The sudden blue sky between the trees, a glimpse of messy shrubs, the wafer-thin tombstones in the cemetery on Garden Street as they poked at rakish angles through the snow—that was all he had of daylight. A few hours' rest on the couch in the lounge or, sometimes, in his own tangled, stale sheets served as a night's sleep.
Waking up one morning, he was half surprised to find himself in Robin's apartment. She lay face down with her pillow over her head, her hair streaming over her bare back and shoulders.
“Robin,” he whispered.
She stirred and sighed.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yes, obviously I'm sleeping,” she groused, even as she turned toward him. He closed his eyes again and wrapped his arms around her bare body. She was deliciously warm; he felt as though he were sinking underground, escaping chilly air, wind, and all the work on land. But such work! What work awaited him! He was injecting his mice that morning with R-7. The virus was prepared, the animals ready, their tumors developed. This was the day. He kicked off the blanket.
“You aren't really getting up.”
“I have to hurry.”
“Don't be ridiculous.” She pulled him back down and curled up next to him with her head on his shoulder.
“I'm injecting today.”
“Saving lives, huh?” Her voice was muffled.
“Yeah, saving mice, anyway.”
She looked at him, sleepy and satirical. “Small lives.”
“Small for now.” He was entirely awake and eager, tense with the possibilities of the day's experiments, already begrudging himself the night's sleep.
“Today the mouse, tomorrow the world,” she said.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Just so you don't become a complete asshole,” she explained.
“Prophylactic teasing?”
“Right. I have to inoculate you.” She lifted her head and kissed him on the lips. “So stay.”
He slipped out from under her. Absentmindedly, almost reminiscently, he touched her face.
“It's not even six.” She sat up with the sheet covering her and pulled her knees up to her chin. “Why don't we have breakfast and go in together?”
“No, you don't understand . . .”
“Right, how could I?” she shot back, offended.
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” he murmured, even as he pulled on his clothes. “Please, Robin.” But, unspoken, the facts forced their way between them. He had results and she didn't. His experiments were like Christmas; every morning he had new questions to unwrap, but Robin had no new world to conquer.
“I'll see you soon?” he asked her.
“Just go,” she said.
“Don't be that way.”
“I'm not that way. I'm fine.”
He hesitated. He understood, even as she pretended otherwise, that she was angry with him. Chasing his results, he had left her far behind, and she feared she would never catch up. He felt her watching him as he hunted for his old gray sweater, first one balled-up sock and then another. He knelt on the bed and kissed her good-bye, but she was no longer warm. “Let's go out tonight to the worst movie we can find,” he said.
“You're working tonight,” she reminded him.
“I'm not. I'm not,” he said as he ran out the door. But he was working that night, and every night. “We'll make the time,” he called. He just didn't know what else to say.
As soon as Feng got to the institute, he hurried down to the animal facility to meet Cliff.
“Are you ready to inject?” Feng asked.
Cliff looked up from the stainless steel table. He'd already replaced his cages on the rack, gathered his syringes, cleaned out the anesthetic jar. “I'm just packing up.”
Feng stood for a moment in silence, astonished that Cliff had come in so early and worked so fast. The plan had been for Feng to help with these crucial injections, and especially with the record keeping. Marion liked Feng to keep an independent record of dates, procedures, and deaths in the colony. But Cliff had already recorded the injections in his own lab book; he'd noted the date of R-7 injections on the cage cards in black pen. As Cliff took a proprietary interest in his virus and his mice, he'd appropriated more and more of the record keeping as well. Marion had questioned this at the last lab meeting, but neither she nor Glass had directly told Cliff to ease up. No one chastised him for sprinting forward alone, now that there was a chance he was running in the right direction.
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.