Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (9 page)

If Shannon thought she’d be winning our father’s blessing, she was mistaken. My parents both thought entering the monastery was a bad decision. She continued on nonetheless. Just as I was seeking my own community of acceptance, so was Shannon. She desired an authentic sisterhood, a connection with other women that she’d never had in our family. She also prayed that the cloistered life, free from the stress of the everyday world, would restore order and peace to her body. Blood, as ever, was a monthly ordeal. Though less painful, her menstrual cycle had become distressingly irregular. Shannon hoped the sisters’ ascetic disciplines would be an anchor, physical as well as spiritual.

As the first stage in joining the order, she had to meet regularly, over a six-month period, with the monastery’s Reverend Mother. The two women were separated by a small grille and, while it sometimes felt like being in a confessional booth, Shannon has said, she found the Reverend Mother to be a wise, wonderful woman with a delightful sense of humor. “We’d talk about my conviction in becoming a Carmelite, about prayer and faith. And about family. She was kind of like a therapist.”

In Shannon’s most recent retelling of this story, I found that it had more shades than I’d previously known. “Only one thing scared me about joining,” she told me, trying to sound portentous but breaking down in laughter.

I tried to guess. “They wouldn’t let you play Joni Mitchell on your guitar? No crewelwork allowed?”

“No, no, no. I was really nervous about—don’t laugh—about my feet being cold. You had to wear sandals with bare feet. And,” Shannon said, as if this were the final straw, “the monastery was unheated.”

“So that was the deal-breaker?” I laughed. “The bad footwear?”

“Well, no—”

She fell silent. “Actually, you helped me with that,” she said.

“I did?”

“Yes—” Another pause. “—when you came to me and shared that you were gay.”

I wasn’t following.

She then explained that she’d looked more deeply into the church’s views on gay people, and that ended her desire to join the Carmelites. “In fact, that’s when I left the church.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I’d unwrapped an eighteen-year-old present, one made with such love, but also one that I could not have appreciated at twenty-three. I’d have seen it then as too huge a sacrifice, a debt I’d need to repay. Now I saw it not as an abandonment of religion but as her claiming her own voice, an expression of true faith.

“Well, there was no question,” Shannon added. “I just turned completely around and walked the other way.”

F
IVE

Origin Story

Is he strong? Listen, bud!
He’s got radioactive blood. . . .

—
S
PIDER
-M
AN
THEME SONG LYRIC
, 1968

MOST OF MY BEST INFORMATION ON THE ARCANE INNER world of comic books has come from Steve’s occasional late-night, half-medicated commentaries. “Listen to this,” he said in bed recently, reading aloud a snippet from the letters page of a back issue of
Fantastic Four:
“This is a fan writing: ‘Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, . . . The characters shine. They live and breathe. Real, red human blood pumps in their veins. I can easily believe their world for, though colorful and bizarre, it is just as real as ours. . . .’ ”

Steve chuckled. “Wow, he’s got it bad.”

I put down my
New Yorker.
“Fantastic Four? That’s the one with Mary Hart?”

“Uh-huh.”

Of course, this made perfect sense to me. A young Mary Hart (from TV’s
Entertainment Tonight
) would be Steve’s pick to play the Invisible Woman in a big-budget Fantastic Four movie.

Steve then commented on the fan’s use of the word
real
to describe a comic with a woman who can turn invisible, her brother who can burst into controlled flame, her husband whose body becomes Silly Putty, and her friend who’s essentially an animate pile of rocks. I still wasn’t sure, though, whether Steve was poking fun at the letter writer or being serious.

“Cool, isn’t it?” he said. Okay, there was my answer.

“Yeah.” It
is
cool. I find the wholehearted suspension of disbelief that avid comics fans share to be marvelous. Although I prefer the sure footing of nonfiction, I still envy that fearless willingness to lunge into pure imagination. My beloved collections of Joan Didion essays are never so transporting. The degree to which a comic-book reader is drawn into the illusion depends upon the adherence to a set of conventions dating back to the late 1930s, the earliest days of this indigenous American art form. The heroes must have fabulous powers or abilities. They have bright costumes and dual identities. The conflict between good and evil is clearly delineated. And the convention that wraps all these elements into one neat package is the origin story, the tale of a character’s pivotal moment of transformation. Whereas ancient myths always have a definite resolution—odyssey’s end, deification, betrothal, and so forth—superhero comics are usually meant to be never-ending sagas. Regardless of the adventures yet to come, though, the character is always anchored by his or her origin. Superman—no matter what a current creative team does with him—will always be a survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, raised by the Kents in Smallville, Kansas.

In the life of a comic book, the origin story may be retold dozens of times. Usually it’s done in a flashback, deftly recapped in a handful of panels, often to jump-start a new storyline. Marvel Comics, mindful that each issue might be a reader’s first, used to summarize the title character’s origin in a box on the splash page. I love these old thumbnail bios. Allow me to introduce, for instance, the original Spider-Woman:

When Jessica Drew’s father injected her with a serum of spider blood, he cured her of a fatal disease . . . and changed her life completely! Watch her, now, as she confronts her responsibilities, problems and unbelievable POWERS!

The idea that heroes often have supercharged blood reflects the real-world belief that qualities course through our blood. There being no scientific evidence for this does not dispel the notion. When the anchor of the nightly news praises firefighters for the “bravery pumping through their veins,” we don’t disagree. Heroes, whether actual or fictional, seem to have a blood type the rest of us don’t. This conception is amplified manyfold in comic books. Captain America, for instance, has Super-Soldier Blood; his courage isn’t the courage of one man but that of an entire battalion. Such is the potency of superhero blood that a transfusion from the original Human Torch (who, by the way, wasn’t even human) helped transform the character named Spitfire into a superspeedstress. Then there’s the She-Hulk, formerly a petite attorney. Near death after a catastrophic car accident, she was saved by her cousin, Bruce (aka the Hulk), who gave her an emergency blood transfusion, unintentionally turning her into a female version of himself, the Savage She-Hulk.

Creative teams do sometimes bend the rules. Some superheroes wear street clothes rather than costumes, for instance. Likewise, some have powers that do not originate in their blood but come from an external source, such as a talisman or exoskeleton. And there are others who don’t even have origin stories. Or, to be more precise, whose origins are shrouded in mystery. Of these, the superstrong Savage Dragon comes to mind. Dragon has a healing factor that enables him to recuperate from any injury, yet he doesn’t know how he acquired it. His earliest memory is of awakening in a burning field, naked, a full-grown man, bright green, with a large fin on his head. Despite this blank slate, he was driven to do good, as if heroism were encoded in his DNA. Whether he realized it or not, destiny clearly had plans for him. It is this particular narrative—the rise of an unknowing or unlikely hero—that I’m drawn to in my reading, the true stories of individuals who simply followed their passion and somehow ended up making history. Such a man was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek.

At the same time the Dutch artist Jan Vermeer was putting finishing touches on his last great painting,
Allegory of Faith,
his lifelong friend, the naturalist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), was in a nearby studio quietly discovering a new universe, one of previously unimagined marvels—that of microscopic life. Using a small microscope of his own design, he was the first person to observe, draw, and describe what he called “very little animals” (now known as microorganisms), including the bacteria swimming in human saliva, the protozoans in pond water, and the sperm cells in semen. Likewise, he discovered red blood cells, an accomplishment that changed the way scientists regarded the blood, transforming it from a simple fluid imbued with unseen spirits and qualities to one of burgeoning complexity. In addition, Leeuwenhoek (commonly pronounced
LAY-when-hook
) contributed to the understanding of capillaries, the newly discovered vessels bridging arteries and veins, and documented similarly intricate structures in the roots, stems, and leaves of plants. He is revered today as a father of multiple disciplines: microscopy, microbiology, botany, and hematology.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek

To fully appreciate these achievements, however, one needs to know about Leeuwenhoek’s humble beginnings. Imagine, if you will, someone like the owner of your neighborhood dry cleaner, the polite but taciturn man whose tidy little shop you patronize now and then. He is a stocky fellow with blunt features—bulging, heavy-lidded eyes, a bulbous nose. You’ve heard that he’s a widower who has also lost several children to illness, which may account for his sad air. His one surviving child, a daughter, helps him in the shop, which does modest business. To make ends meet, however, he must do janitorial work on the side. You’ve scarcely ever seen him out strolling the neighborhood. He and his daughter live in the flat right above the shop, where, word has it, he spends every moment of his spare time tinkering, always tinkering. Late at night you may’ve glimpsed his silhouette against the upstairs drapes. This is a snapshot from the early 1670s of the life of Leeuwenhoek: a curious, hardworking man, an accidental scientist.

Born in Delft in 1632, just a week before Vermeer, Antoni lost his father, a basket maker, at five years old, and his mother at age eleven. At sixteen he moved to Amsterdam to apprentice in the cloth trade. With scant education to speak of and knowing no language but his native Dutch, he did have an ability that served him well—a gift for mathematics. He returned to Delft and opened a fabric shop in 1654, the same year he married his first wife, Barbara. The next dozen years took a heavy emotional toll on Antoni. Only one of his five children survived past age two—his daughter Maria—and Barbara died in 1666. Shortly thereafter, he began experimenting with microscopes, out of curiosity’s sake, to be sure, and perhaps also, it occurs to me, as a way to fill the lonely hours of the night. Keeping busy may have also helped. He had side jobs as a land surveyor and wine assayer, and he continued at his long-term post as chamberlain (a glorified janitor) for an office of local sheriffs.

In hindsight, it appears that everything Leeuwenhoek lacked—formal education, professional ties, personal fortune—worked to his benefit as a scientist. When he wished to look through a microscope, he had to construct his own since he couldn’t afford one. He even learned how to blow glass and, in the process, became a master at grinding lenses. Lacking a sophisticated vocabulary and being “quite a stranger to letters,” as one colleague later wrote, Leeuwenhoek had to invent terms to describe his uncanny observations. Hence, his “little animals,” which efficiently conveyed that these bacteria, protozoans, and spermatozoa were indeed living creatures. Though he had no talent as a draftsman, he made do at first with his own crude sketches, which honed a skill for memorizing visual detail, useful in comparing countless specimens. Unfettered by preconceived notions, beholden to no one, he was poised to break new ground, “. . . for being ignorant of all other Mens thoughts,” wrote Dr. Thomas Molyneux in 1685, “he is wholly trusting to his own.”

According to one of my favorite scientific tall tales, the first microscope was “invented” in the mid-1500s by some unnamed lunkhead who mistakenly used his telescope backward. “Land ho!” became—
bump!
—“Oh, land,” and a new instrument was christened. But the true story is a lot more complicated. Its origins can be traced as far back as the earliest recorded descriptions of optical phenomena. Magnification by curved transparent surfaces was recognized by the first-century Roman philosopher Seneca, for instance, who wrote that “letters, however minute and obscure, are seen larger and clearer through a glass bulb full of water.” This effect was also created by polished gems, as reported around the same time by Pliny the Elder, who noted that the nearsighted Emperor Nero used an emerald to improve his vision while watching gladiatorial contests. The height of decadence, it seems to me, Nero’s emerald monocle must’ve been both effective and stylish, but there’s no evidence that he launched a trend. Which stands to reason. Not to be myopically insensitive, but one cannot envy what one cannot see. It would be another twelve centuries before the use of concave lenses for the deliberate purpose of enhancing eyesight was proposed, credit for which goes to the English monk Roger Bacon, who in his encyclopedic
Opus
of 1267 also predicted the invention of the microscope. His contribution to the field of microscopy was only acknowledged in retrospect, however. The monk was imprisoned for heresy, and his writings remained undiscovered until the eighteenth century.

The invention of spectacles as we know them today was made independently around the year 1285 in Florence by a man named Salvino degli Armati, a fact that, oddly, wasn’t made public until after his death some thirty years later. It seems that, like a well-guarded family recipe, he shared his creation with only a select group of friends. Subsequently, though, the use of eyeglass lenses took hold and spread throughout Europe. And it was only a matter of time before someone, rather than placing lenses side by side, arranged them one before the other, thus creating a compound magnifying instrument. Official recognition for the first microscope, however, is often ceded to a Dutch spectacle maker, Zacharias Jansen, who in 1590 combined two curved glass lenses in a small tube as a means for studying minute objects. Seventy-five years later an Englishman, Robert Hooke, stirred the public’s imagination with his startling book on microscopy,
Micrographia
(1665). In it Hooke described and illustrated what he’d observed using his own compound microscope—the hairs on fleas and snow crystals, for example. He also unknowingly coined a new scientific term when writing on why cork floats. Under magnification, the tiny air pockets he saw looked like the small rooms in monasteries, commonly called cells. Hooke had no idea at the time that he’d discovered plant cells.

One noteworthy person who picked up a copy of
Micrographia
was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Though it’s doubtful the Dutchman could have read the English text, the lush engravings of the small-made-big must have made his brain itch. He began to tinker. Rather than duplicating the elegant but complicated two-foot-tall microscope Hooke had drawn in the book, he went in the opposite direction. Borrowing the basic design of the magnifying glass he used in his shop to inspect the weave of fabrics, he crafted a lightweight, handheld device that housed a single lens. What to others may’ve seemed like a step backward was actually a great advance. The microscope lenses in common use at the time were made of poor-quality molten glass and had a power to magnify an item just twenty or thirty times. When viewed, objects appeared to be surrounded by fringes of color, and with each additional lens the optical defects multiplied. By using one spherical lens, ground and polished from a bead of purer glass, Leeuwenhoek found he got far clearer images and a magnification of more than two hundred times.