Lab Girl (7 page)

It was a clear night and so cold that the snow squeaked underneath my feet as I walked. After I had gone a few blocks, Lydia's car passed me while I was trudging along and I was stung with a new type of loneliness.
The old unhappy loss or want of something had, I am conscious, some place in my heart
came to me from chapter forty-four. I watched Lydia's single functioning taillight disappear across the bridge, lowered my head against the wind, and continued to make my own way home.

NO RISK IS MORE TERRIFYING
than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor—to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only one chance to guess what the future years, decades—even centuries—will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.

Everything is risked in that one moment when the first cells (the “hypocotyl”) advance from the seed coat. The root grows down before the shoot grows up, and so there is no possibility for green tissue to make new food for several days or even weeks. Rooting exhausts the very last reserves of the seed. The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.

But when it wins, it wins big. If a root finds what it needs, it bulks into a taproot—an anchor that can swell and split bedrock, and move gallons of water daily for years, much more efficiently than any mechanical pump yet invented by man. The taproot sends out lateral roots that intertwine with those of the plant next to it, capable of signaling danger, similar to the way that information passes between neurons via their synapses. The surface area of this root system is easily one hundred times greater than that of all the leaves put together. Tear apart everything aboveground—everything—and most plants can still grow rebelliously back from just one intact root. More than once. More than twice.

The deepest-growing roots are those of the gutsy acacia tree (genus
Acacia
). When the Suez Canal was first dug, the thorny roots of a scrappy little acacia tree were found extending twelve meters, forty feet, or thirty meters downward, depending on whether you are reading Thomas (2000), Skene (2006), or Raven et al. (2005), respectively. I suspect that the authors of these botany textbooks included the Suez Canal anecdote in order to teach me something about hydraulics, but the story has left me with a dank and dusky false memory instead.

In my mind it is 1860, and I see a ragged cohort of men stumble upon a living root while they are digging more than one hundred feet belowground. I see them stand gaping in the fetid air, slowly overcoming their disbelief that this root could somehow be attached to some tree that is growing far above them. In fact, both parties registered their disbelief that day: the acacia tree was also undoubtedly surprised to find its roots exposed from the rock that confined it, and produced a flood of hormones in response, first locally and then eventually diffusing through every cell of its being.

When those men moved soil and rock in order to form an unprecedented path between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, they found a daring plant that had made an unprecedented path of its own. They found an acacia tree that had moved soil and rock, through years of dry failure until its improbable success.

In my mind, in 1860, I see the men congratulate each other and gather around the root long enough to take a photograph with it. And then I picture them chopping it in half.

SCIENTISTS TAKE CARE
of their own to the extent that they are able. When my undergraduate professors saw my sincere interest in their research laboratories, they advised me to continue on for a Ph.D. I applied for entrance to the most famous universities that I had ever heard of, giddy in the knowledge that if accepted, I'd get not only free tuition but also a stipend that would just cover rent and food for the duration of my enrollment. This is how Ph.D. training in science and engineering generally works—as long as your thesis also furthers the goals of a federally funded project, you are supported at a sort of academic subsistence level. The day after the University of Minnesota conferred upon me a bachelor's degree cum laude, I dumped off my winter clothes in a big pile at the Salvation Army on Lake Street, took Hiawatha Avenue south to Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, and flew to San Francisco. After I got to Berkeley, I didn't so much meet Bill. It was more like I identified him.

During the summer of 1994, it became my responsibility to serve as the graduate student assistant instructor on what felt like an interminable field trip through the Central Valley of California. The average person cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped, but this class was not for the average person. Each day for six entire weeks involved digging five to seven holes and stooping over them for hours, then camping out, and then doing it all over again at a different place. Every feature of every hole was subject to a complex taxonomy, and students were to become proficient in recording each tiny crack made by each plant root using the official rubric developed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

While examining a ditch of interest, the student employed the six-hundred-page
Keys to
Soil Taxonomy
—a handy guide resembling a small phone book but much less interesting to read. Somewhere in Wichita (possibly), a committee of government agronomists has been perpetually enjoined to transcribe and reinterpret the
Keys
down through the ages as if it were an Aramaic text. The preface to the 1997 version of the
Keys
contains a moving passage describing the breakthroughs of the International Committee on Low Activity Clays that necessitated this new edition, emphasizing that it was written only for emergency use, given that the ongoing work of the International Committee on Aquic Moisture Regimes would likely make yet another overhaul unavoidable before 1999. But back in 1994 we were consigned to the 1983 version of the
Keys
and labored in childlike ignorance, little suspecting the bombshells soon to be dropped by the International Committee on Irrigation and Drainage.

We taught while crowded into a ditch with the ten-odd students who had worked with us to dig it out. The curriculum was designed to usher them into the secret world of the state agronomist, the civil servant, the park-service forester, and other practical land-management jobs. The grand finale of such soil-documentation exercises is the determination of “best use practice,” for which one deems most suitable the construction of a “residential structure,” a “commercial structure,” or “infrastructure,” after which one is goaded to “specify.” By the fourth week, a septic tank seems far too posh an ornament for whatever hole your head is in, and so you resort to paving the mental landscape into one unending parking lot, which is how I suppose some portions of the United States got to be the way they are.

It took me about a week to notice that one of our undergraduate students—the one who looked like a young Johnny Cash and was perennially clad in jeans and a leather jacket even in 105-degree heat—always somehow ended up several meters away from the edge of the group, digging his own private hole. The main professor of the course was also my thesis advisor, and as his assistant, my role was largely behind-the-scenes. I floated from hole to hole, checking on the students' progress and answering any questions. I looked at the course roster and determined by process of elimination that the loner's name was Bill. I went over and interrupted his solitary work. “How are you doing? Do you have any questions or anything?”

Without looking up, Bill refused my help, saying, “Nah. I'm good.” I stood there for a minute and then walked away and checked on another group, evaluated their progress, and answered some questions.

About thirty minutes later, I noticed that Bill was now digging a second hole, his first one having been carefully refilled and smoothed over at its top. I picked up his clipboard and saw that his soil evaluation had been completed meticulously and that he had also included his second-best answers in a separate column down the right side of the page. At the very top of his report, suitability for “infrastructure” was checked, and a specification of “juvenile detention center” had been added in careful handwriting.

I stood next to his hole. “Looking for gold?” I joked, trying to strike up a conversation.

“No. I just like to dig,” he explained without stopping. “I used to live in a hole.”

His matter-of-fact relation of this personal detail made me understand that he had meant it literally. “I also don't like for people to see the back of my head,” he added.

Not taking the hint, I stood there and watched him dig for a while, and began to notice the uncommonly large amount of earth that he was moving with each shovelful and the implied strength that must have accompanied his wiry frame. I also noticed that he was digging with something that looked like an old harpoon flattened at one end—a sword beaten into a real plowshare. “Where did you get that shovel?” I asked, figuring it was from the pile of junk I had hauled out of the department's equipment locker, which had been located in the basement next to an old coal hull.

“It's mine,” he said. “Don't judge it until you've dug a mile in its shoes.”

“You mean you brought your own shovel from home?” I laughed in friendly surprise and delight.

“Hell yes,” he affirmed. “I wasn't going to leave this thing unattended for six weeks.”

“I like your thinking,” I replied, seeing that I was clearly not needed. “Just let me know if you get stuck or have any questions.” I started to leave, but hesitated when Bill looked up at last.

He sighed. “Actually, I do have a question. Why aren't those morons over there done already? This is like the hundredth hole we've looked at. How long does it take someone to learn to spot a fucking earthworm?”

I shook my head in corroboration and shrugged. “I guess their eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.”

Bill looked at me for ten seconds. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I shrugged again. “How should I know? It's from the Bible. You're not supposed to know what it means. Nobody does.”

He looked at me suspiciously for a minute, but after he saw that I had nothing further to say, he relaxed and returned to digging. Later that evening, after the communally prepared dinner had been rationed out, I sat down at a picnic table across from him. Bill was wrestling with his undercooked chicken. “Wow,” I remarked while examining my own plate. “I don't think I can eat this.”

“I know. It's gross,” he conceded. “But it's free, so I scarf down seconds each night.”

“As a dog returneth to his vomit,” I said, while making the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.

“Amen,” he agreed with his mouth full, and toasted me with his 7Up can.

After this we began to casually seek each other out, and observing the larger action as a pair became a comfortable default position for both of us. We took to situating ourselves on one edge of the group—still part of it, but removed from the main activity. It seemed natural and easy that we should sit together much while talking little.

Each evening while I spent the hours reading, Bill sat and rubbed handfuls of dirt across the blade of his old Buck knife, rounding its edge past the dullness of a spatula. He explained to me in great detail how a knife is better for digging than a shovel when you are dealing with a very clayey soil.

“What's the book about?” he asked me one night.

I was reading a new biography of Jean Genet, with whom I had been fascinated since seeing a production of
The Screens
in Minneapolis in 1989. To me, Genet was the perfect representation of an organic writer, one who wrote purely and didn't labor to communicate, didn't expect recognition, and when recognition came didn't take it in. He was also untaught, which meant that his voice was absolutely original and not a subconscious imitation of hundreds of other books he'd read. I was obsessed with trying to figure out how Genet's early life had destined him for success while rendering him immune to it.

“It's about Jean Genet,” I answered guardedly, knowing that I was revealing myself to be a bit of a nerd. Bill displayed no judgment and even some noncommittal interest. I ventured to explain. “He was a great writer of his generation—had a boundless and complex imagination—but even after he got famous, he just didn't realize it on some level.”

I added some of the details that disturbed me most. “While he was growing up, he was incarcerated for one meaningless crime after another and so he developed an alternative vision of morality,” I explained, surprised at how good it felt to be talking with someone about a book. Being outside in the fresh air while speculating on the motives of a dead author made me think of my family, from whom I had drifted far away, in every sense. I watched Bill scrape his knife through the dirt and remembered summer days in the garden with my mother.

“Genet worked as a prostitute and robbed his clients, and then used the time in jail to write books,” I continued. “The weird thing is that even after he got wealthy, he would still go into stores and steal random stuff that he didn't need. Pablo Picasso personally bailed him out of jail once…It just doesn't make any sense,” I concluded.

“It probably made perfect sense to him,” Bill countered. “Everybody does all kinds of shit that they don't know why they do. They just know that they have to,” he said, and I thought about that for a moment.

“Hey, you guys! Want a cold one?” We were interrupted by a good-natured offer from a drunkish student who was dangerously armed with a guitar. He was waving the sort of beer that one purchases for six dollars a case when miles from nowhere.

“No, I don't. That stuff you are drinking tastes like piss,” Bill said.

I felt a need to soften Bill's statement and added, “Well, I don't really like beer, but that stuff does seem pretty awful.”

“Jean Genet wouldn't have even stolen that shit,” Bill hollered at him over his shoulder, and I smiled, knowing that the joke was ours alone.

The little group of students leaned in toward one another and said something private, and then began to titter in our direction. Bill and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. It might have been the first time, but it certainly wouldn't be the last, that the people around us would misinterpret the nature of our connection.

During the next week we toured a working citrus orchard and were dumbfounded to learn how many different ways there were to mechanically shake the produce from a tree. We also toured the packing facility and saw rows of women standing along a conveyor belt pulling out large or oddly shaped spheres from a river of forest-green fruit that flowed down the line at a rate of ten per second. I am sure that we looked confused when our guide announced solemnly that these women were sorting lemons; it would have been easier to believe that the spheres were billiard balls, given the extremely hard knocking noise they made while bouncing down the conveyor belt.

Our guide loudly narrated our visit, gushing about how this factory was a great place to work, complete with on-site housing, and I thought about the weird little town that would result from such an arrangement. He ushered us into the plus-five-degree “ripening room,” which was like a windowless train car packed floor-to-ceiling with the hard green fruit. The door would be sealed tonight, he told us, and the room would be flooded with ethylene gas, forcing these lemons to get off their asses and ripen in ten hours. Sure enough, the room next to us contained thousands of identically sized fruits, each sporting a peel so perfectly yellow that it could have been made of plastic.

After the tour was over, we milled about in the parking lot. “Good grief, talk about mind-numbing. I'll never complain about school again.” Bill was referring to the lemon-sorting and was also jumping up and down in order to warm himself up after leaving the chilled rooms.

“Assembly lines depress the shit out of me. The town where I grew up had miles of them,” I said, rubbing my hands and shuddering at the secondhand memory of my brother's gory third-grade field trip through the slaughterhouse. “Actually, they were more like disassembly lines.”

“Did you ever work in the factory?” Bill asked.

“I was lucky, I went to college instead. I moved out of my parents' house when I turned seventeen.” I spoke cautiously, modulating my urge to trust him.

“I moved out of my parents' house when I was twelve,” Bill replied. “But not far, just into the yard.”

I nodded, as if this was the most perfectly normal thing in the world. “Was that when you lived in a hole?”

“It was more of an underground fort. I put carpet and electricity in it and everything.” He spoke offhandedly, but not without shy pride.

“Sounds cool,” I said, “but I don't think I could sleep in a fort like that.”

Bill shrugged. “I'm Armenian,” he said. “We're most comfortable underground.”

I didn't realize it at the time, but he was making a dark joke about his father, who as a child had been hidden in a well during the massacre that had killed the rest of his family. Later, I came to know that Bill lived pursued by the ghosts of his macabre ancestors, and it was they who continuously pressed him to build, plan, hoard, and—above all—survive.