I called my mother now and then—from a pay phone.
I felt invisible. It was frustrating, but it was also reassuring.
My life became quiet for a few weeks, a breather before my first meeting with K, Lissa’s return, and what I call Hell Week.
Reclining in a worn easy chair, looking through the apartment’s tiny bay window at the banana trees spreading under the broken milky panes of the old greenhouse, I mulled over the suspect proteins from the Vendobionts.
The greenhouse sat cater-cornered to the garage, behind a big old 1920 half-timber house, hidden from my view by junipers and haunted by the staccato tap-and-whisper of the nice old lady’s slippers.
I was slowly coming to the conclusion that what I had in my little list—and it was all I had—was enough. The list would guide me to where I really needed to look in the labyrinth of chemical pathways that constitute the biography of a human cell.
But whom did these proteins talk to when they were at work? What chemical messages did they intercept or promote over the decades of a human life? Without live specimens of Vendobionts, I had no solid way of knowing. I could guess at a thousand real possibilities, but guessing has never been my style.
When the view of the greenhouse palled, and peace turned to stagnant boredom, I walked across the street, between trash-can-sized concrete auto barricades, and a few blocks west to the University of California at Berkeley. I sat in the library and kept up with the journals. I used a library computer to log onto the Internet and look over the latest preprints.
But it was an uncharacteristically quiet month in my area of interest. Reading in the library was not the cure I needed.
I thought about Nothing too much, and sadness was no friend. I needed a lab, rigorous conversations with colleagues, connections with companies doing deep genomics. I needed more specimens. I needed to work with my hands, which have always guided and encouraged the deeper muses of my brain.
So I opened up again. I put in a phone, wrote letters, and took walks around the campus and the streets near my apartment. I put out a few feelers for lab space, through my microbiologist friend, and watched them all come back rejected. Lab space was tight and my résumé was too mysterious.
My paper on mitochondrial communication with gut bacteria was put through another peer review (so I heard) and rejected. All my ties to science were being cut, and my tracks erased.
I was finally reduced to wandering through the campus biotech centers and the supercomputer lab, filled with longing, trying to imagine myself respectable, fully funded, with a nice complement of postdocs to fetch and carry and argue with me on my weaker points.
After a few weeks, my bank account was perilously low. I shopped and ate sparingly and imagined that by cutting back on food I was slowing my own senescence. For a few days, I convinced myself I was my own lab, my own experiment, and made notes to that effect—charting weight loss, ups and downs of mood. I counted shed hairs in the drain catch of the small shower.
Making thin lemonade out of old and bitter lemons.
AY3000 had starved himself for twenty years. His sex drive had dropped to zero. Bettina, his wife, had not found that a major inconvenience. Reduced caloric intake worked on rats and may have increased the life span of survivors of concentration camps. AY had been the crazy inspiration for so many of us. And now he was dying and calling up people and making threats—hardly an encouraging example as I went to bed hungry.
I was on the edge of losing heart. I had already lost perspective. My letters went unanswered, my phone calls got me nowhere.
Curing aging is not respectable in some quarters. We’re only tourists in the land of the living, many believe. Living too long is against God’s law. Who would suppose that liberal academics, even scientists, secretly fear the wrath of Jehovah?
I wondered what Rob would think of me now. In my solitude I was becoming gentler and more introspective.
I needed my brother to give me a good punch in the nose.
On one of my infrequent trips to the Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue, I saw two lean, wiry men standing near a bus stop. They wore gray sports coats and gray slacks. Their hair was dark brown and close-cut and their faces long and theatrical. They looked light on their feet; they might have been actors or circus performers. One wore a beret. The other glanced at me through small, wire-rimmed sunglasses as I walked by, then nudged the other, who nudged him back. Together, they studiously ignored me.
Nothing unusual for Berkeley.
The grocery smelled of expensive fresh peaches in fir boxes and bags of bulk carrots and dish soap and a thousand other domestic necessities. I bought four apples, four bananas, two cans of frozen orange juice, a pound of turkey ham, two loaves of bread, a bag of rice, mayonnaise, and some olives. I sorted through my change and spilled a few pennies onto the dirty linoleum floor. I picked them up, straightened, and added the necessary six cents to my twenty.
As I extended my hand to the cashier for three dollars back, a small man with a pushed-in nose and thick black hair shuffled between the registers, bumping me in his haste. More of my change clattered on the floor.
The little man’s desperate grip dimpled the soft plastic of an unmarked spray bottle, trailing drips of clear liquid.
A young and totally bald male clerk ran after him. “God damn it, get out of here and don’t come back!” the clerk shouted. He swung his booted foot, face drawn into a pimply mask of disgust. The boot missed, and the man skittered through the double door.
The clerk swung around to glare at the cashier, then at me. “Sorry about the language,” he apologized. He was festooned with ear and nose rings. “Now I’ve got to throw out all that lettuce.” He held up his hand as if gripping a pistol and disgustedly mimicked both the motion and the sound of sphritz-sphritz. “Mrs. Lo will kill me.”
“I’ve seen him here before,” said a plump red-haired woman in her fifties. She hoisted her canvas shopping bag onto the counter and pinched a lovely green head of romaine, as if it were a big insect. “I thought he worked for you.”
“I never noticed him,” said the young cashier. She stood on tiptoes to peer over the cigarette case. The little man was out of sight.
“Christ,” the young clerk said, and apologized again.
I shook my head, no offense. Just a normal day in Berkeley.
That night, I had a dream about the little man. He was spraying water on everything, and the whole town was shriveling up. The Claremont Hotel was ablaze, and the stately old houses of Berkeley melted like wax in the heat from the fire. Then I was back in the desert, walking beside the man with the white hair.
He was my father, and he was trying to tell me something important about Rob.
Hell Week began brilliantly. My friend at the University of San Francisco called and told me that on August 8 there was going to be a Promethean conference on the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley. He had wangled an invitation for me from the directors, Phil Castler and his wife Frieda—the same Phil Castler who had not impressed Owen Montoya.
The Prometheans are visionaries, innocent in many ways, and wise beyond our time in many others. Castler himself combined a grave sensibility about larger-scale politics with a childlike enthusiasm for Progress, an enthusiasm I had once shared, and now long for desperately. They were devoted to listening and exchanging information and enthusiasms, and ideas were their common coin. They were my people, my friends, even when we competed for funding, even when we disagreed.
Castler’s invitation, and a conference badge, arrived in the mailbox the next day, along with a quickly penned note from Frieda clipped to a collection of past newsletters: “Wherever have you been? Phil and I are anxious to get caught up on news!”
Never in my life had I looked forward to a conference so much. It would mark my return to the real world.
