The Rest is Silence (26 page)

Benny didn't move.

“They're all like that. Every damn plate in the incubator.”

“Looks like they've been melted on something.”

“I can see that. Shit.”

Benny put a latex glove on and picked up the plate. As she squeezed gently to hold it, the plastic gave way and her fingers went through the plate. Leach threw the plate in the garbage can by her side, turned, and strode out of the lab to his office. She followed him. He wore a short-sleeved shirt tucked into his pleated pants. He took his fedora off his balding head and hung it on a hook on the back of the door.

“I'm going home for a couple of weeks,” Benny announced.

Leach picked up a reprint of a journal paper from his desk and, without lifting his eyes from it, said, “It's hardly an appropriate time for you to leave, Ben, right after you've decided to switch thesis projects.”

“I have family business to attend to.”

He dropped down in his chair. “Someone who wanted to succeed would buckle down after a setback and get right back at it. A certain maxim about getting back on the horse springs to mind.” He began sorting his piles of notes and journals.

She forced a smile. “And that's what I'll do when I get back. I've been going through a lot lately and I need a break. This trip will give me time to clear my head, analyze my project, and come back refreshed.”

“Suit yourself. I have to admit you're a hard worker and you haven't taken any time off for a while. Let me tell you, though, that success in research comes not only from hard work. You've got to have inspiration and mental agility as well.” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “I suggest you use this little holiday as an opportunity to be creative. Come up with some novel ideas for experiments you want to do when you get back.”

“I'll see you in two weeks.” She turned to leave.

“Oh, before you go, see Jon and go over the maps of the plasmid construct you gave him. He's having trouble getting the esterase cassette out of it.”

The trouble was that
she
didn't give it to Jon and, ergo, she wasn't able to explain that he was probably using the wrong restriction enzymes to remove the fragment he wanted.

Back at her desk she leaned over her binders and found the pages with the schematics of the circular DNA constructs she had made. The images were concise and spare. She pulled the map out of her binder and put it on Jon's desk with a note explaining how to extract the esterase cassette.

She returned to her desk and went through her notebooks, flipping through sheets and sheets of raw data. She would not miss the lab once she was gone. Not the experiments, nor many of the people she had worked beside for the past three years. She wouldn't miss the smell of the caged mice down the hall, a smell of fear, not hope. She wouldn't miss seminars, like the one in which that benighted scientist from Cambridge had described her work infecting cats with herpes simplex virus by scarifying their eyes. No cure was worth torturing cats and mice. It was like arguing that inventing, then using, the atom bomb was justified because it ended the war and diminished suffering. Any evil that entered the world contaminated the world. That sort of thing — the mice, unethical experimentation — was of no use to her. She only ever had one purpose; the rest was a distraction. The lab had outlived its use to her and now she was ready to be far from it.

She pulled out all the pages related to her plastics digestion work and stuffed them into her backpack. She went to the freezers in the hall, removed the DNA samples and bacteria that were hers, and put them in her backpack too. Once she had disposed of all this, she would have her smokescreen; all signs pointed to Jonathan as the one working on this project. He was the only one with data, the only one in possession of DNA samples. Benny took the capped vials of desiccated cells from the pack and put them in the pocket of her pants. Leach and Jon knew it was her, but if things got bad they wouldn't be able to convince the authorities of it. And by then she would be long gone.

When she left for the last time, Leach's office door was closed. Gabe's door was open, as always, and he was sitting on the couch, his feet on a chair, reading. She smiled at him and he waved. Benny walked partway up the street before turning to take one last look at the building. It was as beautiful as the first time she'd seen it, solid and immovable. She heard a high-pitched cry and, looking toward the top of the building, saw a falcon circling.

She took the stairs in her building to the fifteenth floor and went to the garbage room. It smelled of rotting food. The handle of the chute was greasy. She turned her pack upside down and shook its contents into the shaft where they clattered to the ground, echoing against its metal sides as they fell. She opened the door, looking left and right, and went to her apartment.

She poured a glass of water and drained it. She reached into her pants pocket to remove the vials of desiccated bacteria. One each of bacteria capable of digesting polystyrene, nylon, and PETE. She turned the faucet on again so that it dripped, then she added a few drops of water to each vial, sealed them, and shook the contents. She put them back in her pocket.

She left her apartment and walked up 70th Street. She passed the Lebanese lunch place where she got her falafels, the deli beside it, and the newsstand where she bought her Sunday
Times
. An ambulance stuttered down the clogged street, its siren wailing impotently. She saw the people on the street anew, really noticed each face, as if she were moving in slow motion. She turned right onto First Avenue and went into The Food Emporium. She pulled the vials of recombinant bacteria from her pocket. She selected the right one, putting the other two back, and opened it. Her index finger felt the mud of cells, brought out a clump, and touched plastic soda bottles of every brand and size she could find. Two-litre bottles of cola, ginger ale, seltzer, root beer, cream soda, and tonic water. Smaller bottles of cherry-this and grape-that, and all the brands of water she could reach. All of them manufactured from PETE. Tomorrow she would know if she had been successful.

The next morning, Benny ate some toast, then filled her backpack with underwear, socks, two T-shirts, her toothbrush, and the sweater she had borrowed from Leroy. She spent the morning going through her belongings. She would leave it all behind except the letters — from her father, among others — that she'd carried with her from Newton to Lowell to New York. They fit in a shoebox. She taped the box shut, addressed it to herself where she was going, and put it in her backpack. She threw out her papers, her journals, and clothes she no longer needed.

She slung her pack over one shoulder. Leroy was stepping out of his apartment as her door closed. He seemed ready to ignore her. She said hello and he looked up. She asked him to go to the roof with her.

They walked to the end of the hallway, up the stairs, and out onto the gravel of the roof of their building. The city hummed with a combination of air conditioners, traffic, and elevator fans. A fat bumblebee flew around them twice and continued east toward the hospital.

“Where'd he come from?” Leroy said. He was smiling. “I miss being among trees and stars. I don't belong here.”

He told her about watching a moose cross the road in Fundy National Park, the Northern Lights above a stony beach off the coast of BC, the thrill of sheet lightning across a lake at night. He talked as if he needed to get out all the things he hadn't told her since they fought.

“My three years here have almost fooled me into believing that I can find whatever I need within a few blocks.”

The city had done its best to trick him into believing that any other place he chose to live would be second-rate. He had lost perspective by being immersed in it, the way fish don't know they live in water. He had been swimming in its cavernous streets. He had been drowning in the lights, the food, and the smells, as well as the endless flow of people on the street.

“I've spent too much time indoors, in a toxic, chemically infested, airless room, with people who are stressed and overworked. Most of what we do only adds to a heap of useful facts. I belong where there are trees and Northern Lights and no Irish pub for a hundred miles.”

“Where will you go when you're done?” she asked.

“Home.”

She felt his arm reach around her and rest on her shoulder. Though they were looking at the same view, she thought the light, the cabs going up First, and the man hosing down the sidewalk below them were the kinds of things she would miss about living there if she never saw it again.

She kissed him on the cheek and they left the roof.

*

What Benny found at The Food Emporium when she left the roof was beyond her expectations. She stood at the end of the aisle listening to a conversation the store manager was having with one of his employees. The two men stood in the aisle looking at the brown liquid dripping off the shelves onto the floor where it joined an ever-expanding puddle.

“I stacked them the way I always do, sir.”

“Well, how the hell do you figure they exploded then?”

“I read on a website that Coke cleans rust off cars,” the clerk said. “You can use it as radiator fluid. It cleans toilets. Maybe they sent us a defective batch and it's melting the bottles.”

“It's not just Coke, pal. It's everything on the shelf.” The manager walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Get a mop and clean it up.”

Benny saw that the clerk was Jason. Their eyes locked as they passed each other. She shouldn't have come back. A mother with her child sitting in the cart approached him and he looked away from Benny. The mother lifted her feet, marching in place, watching them come unstuck from the floor.

“Everything's sticky. All I want is some root beer.”

“There's cans at the end of this aisle,” Jason said.

Benny rushed out of the store. She put her hand in her pocket and rolled the vials of nylon-digesting and polystyrene-digesting
Pseudomonas
between her fingers. Once she felt them click together, like a talisman, she began to run. She knew where she could hide. She was afraid to take the subway, afraid to be below ground with no escape. She ran south, dodging cabs and the traffic of the late-afternoon rush hour. Her pack jostled against her back and she cinched the waist strap tighter. The intersections and their red lights kept hemming her in. She passed a post office on the way, ducked in to mail her shoebox of letters, and continued her run downtown.

By the time she got to the Lower East Side it was getting dark. She was jogging now, almost where she wanted to be. She walked down Second Avenue, past a grocer with signs in Russian and Ukrainian, a fish 'n' chips place, Thai, Mexican, and Italian restaurants. There were signs in Spanish too. She was passing the world on the street. There were punks, street people talking to themselves, an Asian guy delivering groceries on his one-speed bike, and a cabbie yelling in French at the driver of an another cab blocking his way. Across the avenue, two monks in robes were helping a man lying on the street as an ambulance pulled up. She turned west on 6th, went past the church, and rang Rachel's doorbell.

The two women stood facing each other. Benny caught her breath.

“I made a mistake.”

Rachel made a come-here motion with both of her hands and Benny fell into her arms. They stood in the hall, hugging, not saying anything. Then Rachel led her up to her room.

36

Forest Garden

A week later the morning is bleak, grey and cold, as I bike down the hill to visit Art in the hospital. He is lying with his foot bandaged and raised. He's dopey from the morphine they've given him.

“I'm glad you came back. I'm going crazy in here. There's too much time to think.”

The man in the next bed is in great pain, lying on his back and groaning.

“What's his story?” I whisper.

“The big C. His stomach.”

The man's wife sits in a chair by the bed complaining about a sandwich she ate on her way to visit him.

“Just some old dark brown chicken and mayonnaise. I hate that. I left your suitcase in the car. I saw no need of dragging that thing in here until I see where they're going to put you.”

Art shakes his head. “If she doesn't shut up about that chicken sandwich I may throw up.”

I pull up a chair by his bed.

“My ankle's killing me. I'm going to go mad in this place. I may tie a helium balloon to my prick and sail over the mountain, waving, ‘Here I am!' Take my mind of it, will you?”

37

New York City

The wall at the foot of Rachel's bed was bathed with golden light in the morning. Rachel's pyjama bottoms and T-shirt lay on the pillow beside Benny's head. They smelled lemony like Rachel's skin and were warm against her cheek. The tinny voice on the clock radio butted up against the softness of that pile of clothes.

What started with soda bottles at The Food Emporium on First Avenue had spread, first to other neighbourhood stores, then to far-flung ones all over the city and beyond. Unlike Frankenstein's solo creation, lonely and hopelessly searching for a mate, Benny's were capable of creating themselves in their own image. They ceaselessly divided into identical daughter cells. They replicated without tiring, like machines on an assembly line, while humans fed them. People had extracted what was imagined to be an endless supply of oil, converted it to plastic, and distributed it throughout the world. To the bacteria this was food in clothing, cars, and computers. Food on the scrubbed-clean cruise ship, food under the grime of the city, and food in landfills, under sinks, on our backs. A neighbour's pacemaker, the telephone line, lunch bags, paraffin wax on store-bought tomatoes. There was food for Benny's creations wherever they roamed.

She burrowed into the sheets, bringing them up against her face, inhaling Rachel in her absence. She figured she would be all right if she didn't move from that bed. The reporter told of windshield wipers smearing slime trails of decomposing PETE on the glass and eyeglass lenses melting like crayons left out in the sun.

When she finally got out of bed, she went to the bank that held the inheritance from her father and directed them to transfer all funds to Rachel's Citibank account in four weeks.

38

Forest Garden

On my bike ride up the mountain after visiting Art at the hospital, I stop to fill my backpack with large, scabby apples from a wild tree by the side of the road. They will make fine applesauce once I cook them and squeeze the pulp through the food mill.

I see what Lina and I have accomplished when I pass between the ash trees into the clearing. The path leads to my cabin, and from my cabin to her tent, and it shows that we are married to this land. The two of us created something from nothing more than dreams and effort. We have eaten simple meals of rice and olive oil, peas, cut chives, onions, and garlic. We worked hard every day until light failed, night fell, and then we dreamed some more.

Yet it is all so fragile. August, laughing with the land's gift of tomatoes, onions, carrots, and blueberries, has passed. November is over there scolding me for thinking that such bounty could continue.

Lina is singing in the cabin. She's stayed a week longer than she had planned to spend some time with Art. But now she is packing her stuff and intends to leave early tomorrow morning.

“How is he?” she asks.

“He would've liked to have seen you one last time. Where were you last night?”

“Don't go there now.” She lays a hand on my arm.

I leave the cabin and go to the garden wall for a smoke to let her finish. The chokecherry standing sentinel over the garlic beds has lost all its leaves.

We eat supper in the last of the afternoon light, enjoying the heat radiating from the stove. She rises after we eat and it's as if I am seeing her for the first time.

“I have something for you in my tent,” she says.

She has always been slow and graceful, but now there is something careful about her movement. Can this be the same woman I once lay with above that waterfall, naked on the ledge, the two of us slippery as perch, watching water pour over us, sheets of liquid ice?

I don't know if what I feel is love or fear.

When she returns she is carrying a canvas, two feet wide and four feet tall. She hands it to me and I turn it around.

It is the finished painting of me she started the first day I met her at Art's. It's like the others I saw in her studio last summer. My face is blurry but recognizable with its large nose, two blue smudges where the eyes are, and sharp chin softened with smeared paint. The floppy hat is gone. Taking its place are the talons of a falcon, gripping a branch of my dark hair. The bird is painted precisely, perfectly in focus. Its one chocolate eye, staring from the canvas at me from its turned head, is alert as the bird spreads its steel-coloured wings to take off. Its beak mirrors the nose on the face below but is sharp-edged, piercing. What surprises me most about the portrait is the beatific smile on my face, a look I believe I haven't possessed for a long time. I am unperturbed by this bird on my head, content with wherever I am.

“Do I really look like that?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

I hug her. When she leaves to return to her tent I walk partway with her, not wanting the illusion of our union to end. The moon hasn't risen yet. Venus and Jupiter are up there. A barred owl couple calls to each other in an otherwise quiet forest.
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-u-u?
We kiss goodnight for the last time, and as I turn for home, Thunder's steps reverberate on the ground as she runs by me and through the open door. She is my cat now. I stop. The stars are brighter than usual, the air cool, no breeze. Peaceful and silent. Lina has stopped to look up as well. She calls back to me.

“See that V of stars by Leo?”

I do.

“It's calling to you.”

I hear it.

“It's telling you that you belong here.”

I know it is.

“You know I love you, don't you?” she calls.

All I can do is nod. At times like this I am learning to have faith in my ability to become a monk. I climb into my bunk and open the small window behind my head. I am in my sleeping bag, tucked inside four blankets, while outside the owls call.
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-u-u?

October 25.

The painting leaning against the wall startles me when I wake. That falcon takes me back. The anniversary of a death is like the point that a snail shell coils around year after year as it grows. The point becomes more distant, enfolded deeper within layers of living and forgetfulness, but it's always there at the centre of everything. You spiral through life, coming each year to the date where memory plays out those long-distant events, and more than likely you still don't understand. You continue to digest memory, trying to understand what happened so you can forget it. At least that's the way it is for me.

Most of the time I live a well-bounded life, striving to constrain change and make each day like the preceding one. That's how I maintain the illusion of stability and security I so desperately seek in this chaotic world. But then today comes along, Lina leaves, probably for good, and that illusion is revealed as a fraud. I am separated from routine, floating in the present. There is no such thing as stability.

It is time for me to let go.

Chucko's piece-of-crap car stutters to a halt on the road and doors open and slam shut. There is laughter. I consider not getting up. Lina taps on the cabin door and opens it. Thunder jumps from the bed to greet her. Lina speaks quietly to her and scratches her ear.

She comes to the bed and kisses me. I am gripping my cheek with my teeth so that I almost draw blood. We walk together to the road and put her pack in the back seat. I try not to look at Chucko.

“Will you see Art?” I say.

“We'll go by the hospital on our way through town.”

The love she and I shared this summer was like that ball I used to shoot against the garage door back home. There was a moment when time stopped, when we both recognized that love existed, and then it was gone. She asked me to marry her; I was afraid. After that instant, our trajectory took us away from that door, into new territory. The love was gone.

She hugs me and gets in beside Chucko. Then the engine turns over and the yellow car moves away from me. They sputter along Lily Lake Road and go up the little hill at the end of my property. She is turned around in the passenger seat to wave to me through the rear window and then the taillights disappear from sight between the two banks of trees.

39

New York City

Rachel stood in front of her bedroom mirror, a red lipstick in her hand, colouring her lips. She buttoned her green silk blouse.

“He's going to jump your bones as soon as you walk through the door,” Benny said.

“The way you cock-tease him I wouldn't doubt it.”

Benny laughed and got off the bed from where she was watching Rachel dress in front of the mirror for her date with Leroy. Benny reached around her waist and hugged her from behind. Rachel turned her head and kissed Benny.

“Do you mind me going to see him?” Rachel said.

“He's a good guy.”

“Please come with me.”

“It's you he wants to see.”

Rachel took her wallet out of the top drawer of her dresser and put it in her back pocket.

“I'll see you later.” They kissed again. Rachel was at the door.

“Rachel?”

She turned around.

“You're a good friend,” Benny said. “I'll miss you.”

“I won't be late coming home.”

After Rachel left the apartment, Benny found a pair of scissors in the kitchen and chopped her hair ragged. Then she dyed it black like Rachel's. She phoned United and used her credit card to buy a one-way ticket to Seattle out of Newark for the next day, to throw people off her trail. She sat down at Rachel's desk and wrote a letter to Leroy:

My dear friend,

This is the way the world ends. At least for us. It's not the end I had in mind. You've been a good friend and you deserve better than what you got from me. I'm sorry I lied to you. Rachel knows about my genetic disorder. Ask her. Maybe then you'll understand why I never loved you like you deserve. Maybe not. I think you two would be good together.

I'm leaving. I've done what I needed to do. It's been heartening to have such a cheerleader as you this past year. Kick ass in Gabe's lab.

love,

Ben

She would mail it on the way to Penn Station. On another scrap of paper she wrote,
I can't keep running. I have to stop.
She folded it and wrote
Rachel
on it. She ruffled through Rachel's drawers and found her passport beneath her underwear. She left the note for Rachel where the passport had been and went to the bathroom mirror to compare her new look with the photo in the passport. She thought it would do. She opened the medicine cabinet and found a travel sewing kit. She put it, along with the passport, in her backpack.

She hesitated at the door, wanting more of a goodbye than she had time for. Better to stop thought and, she hoped, feeling and get on with her journey.

At Penn Station she caught a bus to Newark airport, then had a cab take her to the Port Newark terminal on the waterfront. She waited until the driver was out of sight and walked to the offices of Maersk. They had a container ship leaving that night, bound for Göteborg via Halifax, to deliver empty containers that were to be refilled with lumber and returned to the States. Maersk took on the occasional passenger willing to pay for the luxury of a cabin smelling of bleach and paint, both of which were meant to cover up the scent of vomit, urine, and diesel that pervaded the ship. She bought passage with them to Göteborg and was told to come back at six to board.

She went down to the waterfront, an industrial wasteland that looked over Newark Bay into Bayonne, hoping to catch a glimpse of the city she was leaving. She couldn't see it. Clouds had covered the sun at her back, but the sky was a deep blue near the horizon to the east, where she was headed. A light wind brought the smell of sea water, diesel exhaust, and a complex mixture of industrial chemicals to her.

At six she boarded the ship and went to her cabin to stow her backpack before returning to the deck to watch their progress out of the harbour. The clouds had made their way over Newark and it was drizzling. A tug piloted them through the Kill Van Kull and into Upper Bay. Off the port side in the distance was the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. The tug pulled the ship slowly through the Narrows and under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. In place of the huffing and pounding feet she and Rachel had heard the previous November was the whirr of cars and trucks crossing into Brooklyn. Then came the myriad streets of Staten Island on the ship's starboard and Coney Island and lower Brooklyn on her port side and they were beyond the New York she knew. The tug left them at Ambrose Seabuoy and the ship continued east, then north, on its way to Halifax.