The Rest is Silence (19 page)

“Why's Benny so hot and bothered about plastic anyways? What'd it ever do to her?”

“The same thing it's doing to all of us. She was sick of seeing garbage everywhere, of seeing loons washed up on the beach strangled by six-pack rings. Getting rid of plastic seemed as good a place to start as any.”

“I think she's a kook. I lived without plastic. It's easy to say you could do without it if you haven't had to. But you couldn't and neither could she. She wouldn't last a day. We've got things I never dreamed of as a kid.”

“And you don't think our quality of life has been degraded by all the plastic crap we deal with?”

“That's sentimental rubbish. I use plastic bags every day. At least I used to when I could get them. I drink out of a plastic cup that won't break if I drop it. The telephone I use to call Louise every day is made of plastic. We'd be lost without it, son. You've seen how hard it is to get sewer pipe.”

“Benny told me once, ‘I chose one thing to do that would make the world better.'”

“Well, she chose the wrong thing,” Art says.

I wonder sometimes myself.

21

New York City

Benny tried on a pair of Annika's earrings in the reflection from the wall-to-wall windows of her bedroom looking south over Manhattan. She moved so that her face was superimposed on the Chrysler Building. Open copies of
Applied Microbiology
and
Molecular and Cellular Biology
lay on her desk by her neatly made bed. Her bedside table held a glass, half full of water, earplugs, and a beeswax candle on a saucer. It was Friday night and she was getting ready for dinner out with Rachel at an Italian restaurant in Rachel's Lower East Side neighbourhood. Benny leaned closer to the window and pressed Annika's red lipstick across her mouth. She puckered her lips together, feeling the sticky grease.

On 4th Street, off Second Avenue, the door to Cucina di Pesce opened onto the bar. Warm, thick air smelled of mussels steaming in garlic and butter. There was Rachel, with a glass of red wine in front of her, talking to a man in a dark suit and short hair. As soon as Rachel saw Benny, she put her hand on his forearm and excused herself. The green of her blouse shimmered in the darkness of the restaurant. Her mouth was stained with wine.

Benny ordered linguine with gorgonzola, sun-dried tomatoes, and capers. They shared a bottle of wine. Rachel drank more of it and was tipsy.

“I came here once on a blind date,” she said.

“How'd that go?”

“Crappy. I was set up by a guy friend of mine. Men don't know what a girl's looking for in a date. He kept staring at my tits all night. I ordered some pasta dish with a mushroom cream sauce. I was so distracted I forgot that mushrooms make me nauseous. By the time the bill came I had to excuse myself and go outside. I thought I was gonna puke.”

“I'll watch for that ruse when the bill comes.”

“So long as you don't stare at my tits.”

Benny blushed. “I'll do my best.”

She took another sip of wine.

“These engineered bugs of yours, will they eat the vinyl siding on my parents' house?”

Benny nodded.

“Good. I hate that ugly shit.”

“Where was this house you grew up in, with the vinyl siding?”

“I moved here from England when I was twelve. My mother married an American and moved us to California. San Francisco area mostly. But my stepfather was in the army so we moved around a lot.”

“Where's your home now?”

“Here, I guess. Though nowhere really feels like home to me.”

“No place feels like home till you stop,” Benny said. “It's something my father used to say. He said our generation is rootless, that we take up migratory lifestyles that are going to be painful when we decide it is time to settle down. He figured we wouldn't know how.”

“Your father
used
to say that? Has he changed his mind?”

“He drowned a few years ago. He slipped off a dock. I wasn't there, but I think he had a seizure and fell in.” Rachel seemed on the verge of asking more but Benny didn't want to talk about it. “Tell me about Brian.”

“He's nothing serious. He's intense but he has his moments. I wouldn't want him to father my children or anything.” Rachel laughed.

“You're going to have kids?”

“Lots. Everything I'm doing is a prelude to that.”

“It doesn't sound like Brian is a prelude to that.”

“How about you?” Rachel said.

“I wouldn't bring kids into this mess.”

She had used this argument so many times that she had almost begun to convince herself. For, truly, how could anyone bring children into a world where there was more plastic than plankton in the ocean for whales to eat?

“The only choices we have,” Rachel said, as if reading her mind, “are to participate in the destruction or do something about it.”

“Yes, and I see my work as my child. I'm building a frigging monster and then I'm going to unleash it on the world.” Benny laughed.

“Wouldn't it make more sense if we stopped using plastic? You guys are always looking for a technical fix. We need social change.”

Benny told her that the social solution would never come. Even if they stopped using plastic, the seas would be awash in the detritus of their desire for convenience for centuries to come.

They left the restaurant. Benny felt the warmth of Rachel's hand sliding into hers.

“You'll have to help me here. I'm a bit wobbly.”

Benny's heart thumped and her arm stiffened. Her friend was smiling up at her. They walked up Second Avenue and to Rachel's building on 6th Street. It was a red brick tenement, five storeys tall and four windows wide. She turned to face away from her place and pointed down the short street that ran one block to the tavern at the end. Loud laughter and arguments echoed down the street.

“That's the reason I prefer to sleep at Brian's most weekend nights. That's my window there.” She turned and pointed up to the second floor.

Up in the room Benny sat on the floor with her back to the window and Rachel sat against the door jamb facing her as they talked. Around midnight, the number of noisy beer-guzzlers milling about outside the entrance to McSorley's increased. Two college-aged men wove their way down the street and were standing in front of Rachel's building, saying goodnight to each other as though they were never going to meet again.

“Every weekend it's like this.”

Rachel got off the floor, closed the window, and sat back down. She put her arm around Benny. Her head inched forward toward Benny's until their foreheads touched. Rachel smiled and sighed. She rubbed her nose against Benny's from side to side. Benny smelled her breath, sweet and boozy. Rachel parted her lips and was about to kiss Benny. Benny pulled her head away.

“What're you doing?” Benny said.

“What do you think, silly?”

“You're drunk.”

Benny leaned away from Rachel and stood up. “I think I should go.” She grabbed her coat from the bed. Rachel followed her down the stairs to the front door.

“Are you sure?”

Benny bit her lip and nodded. She headed toward the tavern on her way to St. Mark's Place and the subway home. She was halfway up the short street when she heard Rachel calling from her second-floor window.

“Keep running!”

22

Forest Garden

Our days are numbered. We choose to ignore this for blissful stretches of time. All winter I have lived in one of those stretches with Lina, imagining this time going on forever, the two of us living together and nothing changing but the seasons.

But things are changing. Something is wrong with the sun, with the air, with the food we eat from the store. Most of us ignore the toll this takes on our minds and our souls. What is impossible to ignore is what's happening to our bodies. Almost everyone has flaking skin, rashes, unexplained sores. All winter the backs of both my knees are unbearably itchy. I wake in the night scratching them raw. I also have cold sore after cold sore, a new one every few weeks, always on the same part of my upper lip, where they've left a scar. Winter illnesses used to be predictable and familiar. You'd get a cold or the flu and you knew what you were in for. It might be nasty, but you knew what it was called, what it felt like, how long you'd be vomiting or blowing your nose. The new diseases seem to come on faster, be more intense, and they are more intractable to treatment. The symptoms, like everything else these days, have become exaggerated. Their names — Norwalk, H5N1, West Nile, SARS — are on everyone's tongues but these sicknesses were rare not that long ago.

The snow has melted, the ground thawed, and the muffled atmosphere of the forest in winter has given way to spring. The rain and mud make it impossible to keep our small space clean. The sheets on our narrow bed are gritty and, along with our pillowcases and the floor, are covered with Thunder's muddy prints. We need to get outside. Lina and I bicker about silly things, like the dishes, which are never easy to do, or her habit of leaving her washable menstrual pads to dry on a line over the wood stove. The cabin is too small for that.

“Pileated woodpeckers have it worked out,” I tell her. She's sweeping the floor for the third time today. “The male and female have holes in separate trees.”

“They also mate for life,” she says.

Lina sweeps. She tells me it's time for her to pitch her tent again. I disagree, but she's adamant. Later that day she sets it up, far enough away that it can't be seen from the cabin. Then we cross the road to explore the abandoned homestead. Huge, gnarly apple trees from what must have been a well-tended orchard are covered with pink blossoms. Spruce and alder are growing throughout the once-cleared land. This home must have been a lovely spot, southward sloping and sunny. There's a dug well lined with stones, formerly used to water cattle, and a stone foundation for a small house, the masonry chimney broken off five feet above the ground. It's nothing more than a tombstone for the lives that were lived here. Bumblebees and flies are going from flower to flower and the air is alive with the buzzing of insect wings against the petals. We lie under one of the trees, the sunshine warming my face, my whole body.

“I'm beginning to feel like I belong on this land,” I say.

I imagine continuing to build something like this homestead, with apple trees, maybe one day even cattle.

“I wish I did,” she says. “Most places feel like foreign geography to me.”

I tell her it was that way for me too when I first arrived.

“The difference is, you people have a few hundred years of victorious armies and land-grant agencies behind you to make you feel at home wherever you choose to live.”

It's too nice a day to argue. Besides, I can see that she is surrounded by an alien culture. She is a turtle, carrying her home on her back wherever she wanders. Notwithstanding her marriage proposal, I doubt she can settle down here with me. For her, no place will ever feel like home.

After I left the city I wanted to keep moving for no other reason than that there was always the next spot a bit farther that was hiding its treasure from me. I used to think I would have been a failure as a pioneer. I kept moving without even the kind of purpose someone as rootless as Johnny Appleseed had. Some search for a home they never had. I was searching for the one I couldn't get back to.

Then I ended up at Martin and Jenifer's, saw this land, and stopped, perhaps forever. It's a good feeling, like I have become successful at least at this one thing. I can grow food, build a home, husband the land. I can plant a tree and stay to see it bear fruit.

No place feels like home till you stop.

23

New York City

Most days Benny arrived at the lab before Melvin or any of the other graduate students. Today, a Saturday, she wasn't so lucky. She had gone for a longer run than usual and Jonathan was already at the centrifuge spinning down some cells from a culture.

She had been too embarrassed and confused all week to phone Rachel. Her run that morning had cleared her head. If Rachel wanted to kiss her, despite her relationship with Brian, why should Benny care? Rachel knew what she wanted and wasn't afraid to ask for it. It was clear to Benny what she wanted as well, but in her case she was anxious to ask for it. She waited until Jon had left the room, then phoned Rachel. She asked her to meet her in the Sheep Meadow after lunch.

Tacked on the corkboard on the wall to the left of Benny's desk were a photo of her sunburnt and freckled sixteen-year-old self on top of Mt. Washington surrounded by clouds, a list of reagents she needed to make for her experiments, and a
New Yorker
cartoon — a rat in a lab coat was watching a naked man scurry through a maze of streets that looked like New York. She pulled a notebook from the shelf and opened it. She couldn't concentrate.

She hoped to create a strain of
Pseudomonas
capable of digesting soda bottles as its source of carbon. This required manipulation and splicing of DNA fragments into a plasmid that could replicate in
Pseudomonas
, transformation of the bacteria with the recombinant plasmid, and antibiotic selection of successful clones. Luckily, what she needed to do today didn't require much focus. She had to put Rachel out of her mind and get to work.

She filled a black bucket with ice and went to the hall to retrieve the plasmid DNA and restriction enzymes she needed. A researcher at Berkeley had sent her the estA gene on a plasmid. This gene encoded an esterase capable of digesting PETE, albeit weakly. Benny would splice this gene into a plasmid that would over-express the enzyme in bacteria, then select for strains that could live off PETE as their sole source of carbon. She used SmaI and EcoRI to liberate a 1.2 kilobase fragment that contained the estA gene. She poured an agarose gel, then loaded the digested plasmid into the gel. Electrophoresis would separate the gene fragments according to size. The separation would take four hours at least. She left it to meet Rachel in the park.

They spent the afternoon lying in the sun. Benny saw a red-tailed hawk fly over the field looking for rats and mice. His mate followed after, screeching. Rachel lay on her stomach in her shorts and bikini top. She was well on her way to sunburning her back, as she said she had done at least once each summer since she was a girl. Benny traced the raised tissue of a scar on her back as they talked.