Lab Girl (30 page)

Bill would forever after refer to that trip as “the Wake,” whereas I dubbed it “the Honeymoon,” and we took to reenacting its climax at least once a year. Whenever we got a new recruit to the lab, his or her first task was to label empty vials, hundreds of them. We'd explain that this was a necessary preparation for a large-scale collection we had scheduled and give directions for a long and complicated alphanumeric code, rich with Greek letters and nonsequential numbers, to be inscribed on each vial in pen, along with the order of production.

After a day of steady labor on the part of the newbie, we'd hold a summit and either Bill or I would play Good Cop and the other would play Bad Cop (we traded off). The meeting would start out with our asking the newbie how he or she had liked the task and whether this sort of work was tolerable. It would then slowly morph into a discussion of the upcoming sample collection and the rationale behind its purpose.

Little by little, Bad Cop would become more and more pessimistic as to whether the proposed collection would test the hypothesis after all. Good Cop would resist this logic at first, urging Bad Cop to consider the fact that the newbie had put so many long hours into the preparation. Even so, Bad Cop just couldn't let go of the nagging realization that this approach wasn't going to yield an answer, and finally Good Cop had no recourse but to agree that starting over was as unavoidable as it was necessary. At this point, Bad Cop soberly gathered up the vials and dumped them en masse into a lab waste receptacle. The Cops exchanged a knowing look, and Bad Cop trudged off without satisfaction, leaving Good Cop to observe the newbie's reaction.

Any sign that the newbie regarded his or her time as of any value whatsoever was a bad omen, and the loss of so many hours' work was a telling trial of this principle. As a corollary, any recognition of futility was perhaps worse. There are two ways to deal with a major setback: one is to pause, take a deep breath, clear your mind and go home, distract yourself for the evening, and come back fresh the next day to start over. The other is to immediately resubmerge, put your head under and dive to the bottom, work an hour longer than you did last night, and stay in the moment of what went wrong. While the first way is a good path toward adequacy, it is the second way that leads to important discoveries.

One year I played Bad Cop but forgot my reading glasses and so returned early to the melee. Our newbie, named Josh, was busily digging his vials out of the refuse bin, separating each one carefully from the used gloves and other trash. I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I just feel bad that I wasted all these vials and stuff. I thought I could unscrew the caps and save them, and they could be extras or something.” As he continued with his task, I caught Bill's eye and we smiled at each other, knowing that we'd identified yet another sure winner.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE,
my son has a particular tree that figures prominently in his childhood. It is a foxtail palm (
Wodyetia bifurcata
) that sways amiably in the wind through the endless months of Hawaiian summer. It stands just a few feet from our back door, and every afternoon, my son spends about thirty minutes hitting it as hard as he can with a baseball bat.

He has done this for years, though not always with a bat. The scarring on the trunk starts down low and then proceeds upward, tracking my son's growth. When he was four, he would use all his tiny strength to bring our sledgehammer against it over and over, while pretending to be Thor. This was followed by a period when an old golf club served, and when the dog quickly learned to avoid the general area. My son's recent baseball obsession has furnished an agreeable cover story: he now bashes the tree exactly one hundred times a day in order to “strengthen his swing.” The wood-on-wood quality of this new approach represents an interesting parity from my perspective, and I freely admit that I don't feel inclined to intervene.

He's not hurting the palm tree; if you compare its crown with the next one over, you'll see that they both have a similar amount of healthy green fronds at the top. It also flowers and bears fruit the same way that it always has, just as well as or better than any other palm tree in the neighborhood. My son has never shown the least interest in walloping any other living thing, and as it doesn't seem to be so much about hitting as it does about ritualistic noisemaking, the beating of this living drum has become the rhythm of our lives. Every day I sit at our kitchen table and write while my son works over the palm tree.

In 2008 we moved to Hawaii, lured not so much by the gorgeous weather and lush vegetation as by a promise (in writing!) of 8.6 months of guaranteed salary per year for Bill “in perpetuity” from the University of Hawaii. That still leaves fourteen weeks of his salary that I have to beg from government contracts each year—but hey, they wouldn't want me to get lazy or anything.

Since moving to Hawaii, I've learned that palm trees are not really trees: they are something different. Inside their trunks you won't find hard wood growing outward, new tissue added ring by ring. Instead you'll find a jumble of spongy tissue, scattered instead of arranged. This lack of conventional structure is what gives the palm its flexibility and makes it supremely adapted to my son's favorite hobby, as well as to the gentle island breezes that periodically coalesce into ruthless hurricanes.

There are thousands of different palm species, and they all belong to the
Arecaceae
family. The
Arecaceae
are important because they were the first plant family to evolve as “monocots” about a hundred million years ago. The first real leaf of a monocot is a single blade, not a double sprout as in the “dicot” plants that came before. My son's palm “tree” is much more closely related to the blades of grass within the lawn beneath it than it is to the monkeypod tree beside it.

The very earliest monocots soon evolved into grasses, and grasslands eventually spread across the vast areas of the Earth where it's just a little too wet to be a desert and still a little too dry to be a forest. With some breeding help from humans, grasses were evolved into grains. And today, just three monocot species—rice, corn, and wheat—provide the ultimate sustenance for seven billion people.

My son is not me: he is something different. He is naturally cheerful and confident, and he has inherited his father's emotional stability, whereas I tend toward nervousness and brooding. He views the world as a racecar and assumes that he should be driving, while I have always focused upon not getting run over. Indeed, he is happy with what he is and does not question it—at least not yet—whereas I will forever be stuck in the in-between.

I am neither short nor tall, and neither pretty nor plain. My hair was never quite blonde; nor was it brunette either, and lately it has become only sort of gray. Even my eyes are neither green nor brown—everything about me is hazel. While I am too impulsive and aggressive to think of myself as a proper woman, I will also never fully shake this dull, false belief that I am something less than a man.

Because we are so different, it took me a long time to figure out what my son had to do with me. I am still learning the answer. I had worked so hard for so many years trying to
make
my life into something that it was a surprise to see all the truly valuable pieces simply fall from the sky undeserved. I used to pray to be made stronger; now I pray to be made grateful.

Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given—indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could. Before my son was born, I anguished over whether I would be able to love him. Now I worry that my love is too vast for him to understand. He needs to know a mother's love, and here I am, impotent to express the fullness of it. I realize now that my son was the end of a waiting that I didn't even know I was doing. That he was both impossible and inevitable. That I have been given one chance to be someone's mother. Yes, I am his mother—I can say that now—for only after I released myself from my own expectations of motherhood did I realize that they were something I could fulfill.

Life is funny that way. While my son was growing inside me, I did the breathing for both of us. Now I go to his little school pageants, sit in the audience, and see only his face, though the stage is filled with children. I breathe in heavily after he sings each stanza, convinced that I can oxygenate his body from a distance, just by the sheer force of my love. He is growing up, and I have to let him go a little more each day. I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go. I am comforted by my suspicion that all my private maternal ecstasy is really nothing more than what every mother feels for her son.

And for a daughter? I'd like to think that it's also felt for her, but this will not be mine to know. Being a daughter was so difficult for both my mother and me; maybe our line needs to skip a generation in order to extinguish the cycle such that it cannot be repeated. So I've set my heart on a granddaughter—as always, my greed for love is unreasonably premature. Based on my projections, there's more than a small chance that I'll die before she's born, particularly if our line continues to skip or bifurcate. And perhaps this is the way that it was meant to be, for me anyway.

Nevertheless, here on this sunny day, I can't resist my temptation to put a message in a bottle: Somebody remember. Somebody someday find my granddaughter and tell her. Tell her about the day that one of her grandmothers sat looking out of her kitchen window with a pen in her hand. Tell her that her grandmother didn't see the dirty dishes or the dust on the windowsill because she was busy deciding. Tell her that in the end, she decided to go ahead and love her granddaughter several decades too early. Tell her about the day that her grandmother sat in a sunbeam and dreamed of her to the soundtrack of a tree being flogged.

AS I WALKED INTO THE LABORATORY,
the look on Bill's face told me two things: first, that he'd been up all night, and second, that today was going to be a good day.

“Where have you been? It's seven-fucking-thirty.” Bill's version of “good morning” has changed very little over the past twenty years. When he was living in his car, it was the suffocating heat of the Atlanta sunrise that drove him into the lab at this early hour. These days if he's here before ten, it's because something happened last night that was too good to leave. And on that particular morning, he had called me.

“Sleep is for the weak!” I barked out. “What's up?”

“It's C-6,” he answered. “That little bastard is doing it again.”

He led me past the growth experiments, where eighty radish plants had been growing for twenty-one days under precisely controlled levels of light and moisture, within chambers of perfectly still air. One of the biggest ironies of C-6 came from our assumption that we weren't going to see anything interesting. In fact, the experiment was designed to let us measure something we couldn't see.

For any given plant, the part that can be seen is only about half of the whole organism. The roots that live under the soil have nothing in common with the green foliage that extends above the surface; they are as different as your heart is from your lungs and are likewise adapted for two completely different purposes. Aboveground plant tissue works to capture light and gases from the atmosphere, which are converted to sugars within the leaves. Belowground tissue strives to absorb water and the rich nutrients that are dissolved within this water, in order to further build sugars up into proteins. Green stem gracefully morphs into brown root at the soil's surface, and somewhere inside that interface important decisions are made. If both ends of the plant succeed, there is then the question of what to do with that day's winnings. The making of sugars, starches, oils, and proteins is all possible, but which ones of these should be constructed?

Upon gaining new resources, a plant may perform one of four actions: it will either grow, repair, defend, or reproduce itself. It can also delay its choice indefinitely by storing its earnings for remobilization later, and thereby put off the commitment implied by choosing one of the four. What controls a plant's decision as it chooses among these different possible scenarios? Many of the same things that control our decisions regarding what we do with new resources, it turns out. Our genes limit our possibilities; our environment makes some courses of action wiser than others; some of us are inherently conservative with our earnings; some are prone to gambling; even our fertility status might be considered when evaluating a new plan for investing.

One atmospheric gas in particular—carbon dioxide—is a vital growth resource for plants. Due to the burning of fossil fuels, the level of carbon dioxide within the Earth's atmosphere has increased dramatically in the last fifty-odd years, flooding the plant economy with fast cash and easy credit. Carbon dioxide is the currency of photosynthesis, and plants have now seen decades of an increasingly lavish excess of their most basic resource. We were asking the following question with our radish experiments: What is this going to do to the balance of aboveground versus belowground investment by crops around the world?

Months before, Bill had attached his computer to an inexpensive video camera, and we had been using it to film a set of test plants while they were growing within the chamber. “Check this out,” he told me when I arrived in response to his early-morning wake-up call.

The video was a time-lapse compilation of photos taken once every twenty seconds, condensing all of the previous day's growth into four minutes of video. The screen was dark and shadowy at first, indicating that the timed grow lights had not yet switched on. All at once the image lit up and revealed sixteen small potted plants, their stems and leaves limp and relaxed. Shortly into the film, the lights came on and all the plants jarred awake, raising their leaves up toward the light.

One plant located near the edge of the chamber was conspicuous: it twisted and writhed, stretching both upward and outward, shoving the leaves of the adjacent plants out of the way, rudely slapping its broadest leaves down over the central stem of its neighbor. This plant was labeled “C-6” and had started life as a seed of exactly the same size and species as all of the other plants in the chamber. But somehow it
acted
differently from the others while it grew, and at that moment, while watching the video, we were forced to accept what we saw. For several nights now, we had moved C-6 around, changed its neighbors, measured and compared it endlessly, and taken video after video, and the
only
thing different about C-6 was the way it moved after sunrise. While the other plants stretched smoothly and gracefully toward the light, C-6 jerked its smaller leaves feverishly, as if trying to pull itself free of the soil that was holding it.

“I think it hates itself,” said Bill.

“I like the little guy. He's got balls,” I offered.

“Yeah, well, don't get attached,” he advised.

While Bill downloaded and reset the video camera in anticipation of another experiment, I rewatched the video seven or eight times, unable to resist the “smackdown” at about two minutes in, for which we had started to cheer.

“I think he does a little fist-pump right afterward,” I observed.

“You're nuts,” Bill agreed.

We heard the grow lights switch on behind us, signaling a new day within the chambers, and a vision of the untended paperwork festering on my desk appeared before me.

“Damn it, we'll break him,” I decided. “No water for C-6, turn up the lights—and put him in the middle, next to that really big one. Keep the video going.”

“Of course,” agreed Bill, “it's really the only humane thing to do.”

By then the students and postdocs had filtered in, making the whole place confused and busy. From the room behind us we heard a loud clatter and someone hissed, “Ohhh crap,” while Bill and I exchanged wry smiles.

“This lab is a well-oiled machine,” I announced. “You may as well take your weak ass home and get some sleep.”

“Naw,” Bill said as he leaned back in his chair. “I want to see how this shit turns out.”

C-6 was not part of a formal study, but it changed everything. I had journeyed over some kind of intellectual hill and I could see new territory. We instinctively claimed it using a new language, one that flouted the old rules. Not content with referring to C-6 as “him,” we gave him a real name, “Twist and Shout” (which later reverted to “TS-C-6”). We got used to greeting him first thing in the morning and took a kind of sick satisfaction in his ability to endure the torments to which we subjected him. He didn't live for all that long, eventually becoming one of the casualties of Bill's horrible migraine headaches. While Bill was curled up under his desk in the fetal position for ten hours holding his aching head, nothing got watered, fertilized, or filmed, and I tossed C-6 unceremoniously into a waste bin.

Our fascination with C-6 was not a scientifically legitimate experiment, we never officially “wrote it up” for anything, and yet that small plant growing in a Dixie Cup changed my thinking more than anything I had read within my dog-eared textbooks. I had to conclude that C-6
did
things—not just because he was programmed to do so, but also for reasons known only to him. He could move his “arm” from one side of his “body” to the other; he just did it about 22,000 times slower than I could move mine. His clock and my own were forever out of sync, a simple fact that had placed an untraversable canyon between us. While it seemed that I experienced everything, he appeared to me to passively do nothing. Perhaps, however, to him I was just buzzing around as a blur and, like the electron within an atom, exhibited too much random motion to register as alive.

I stood back and smiled at Bill and all the silly undergrads, and felt the joy that accompanies a new thought as my mind picked up speed like a commuter finally passing a traffic bottleneck. My own spirit had been fed, and at the very least, the day's work ahead of me would be happier because of it. Perhaps that was enough of a scientific accomplishment in itself.

A few hours later I convinced Bill to break for lunch. I told him it would be my treat but that I also had to stop by Whole Foods on an errand. “Me too,” he answered, and then explained, “I'm looking into homeopathic remedies for my hand.”

We got in my car and drove across the island. Having never actually been inside of a Whole Foods, Bill was immediately enthralled after we walked through the door. He went directly over to a plastic package that cost about thirteen dollars and contained six capers, each the size of a golf ball. He held it up toward me and asked, “Do rich people really eat these things?”

“Absolutely,” I answered without looking at what he was showing me. “They love nothing better.”

I was occupied in poring over the seven different types of wheatgrass extract available. When I finally identified and selected the greenest one, I noticed that Bill had wandered off, but not before placing the capers inside my cart. I found him marveling at a refrigerated trough of soft French cheese and all at once a plan presented itself. “Let's get all this stuff,” I suggested. “Why the hell not?”

“You serious?” Bill had narrowed his eyes dubiously, but his body was tensely hopeful.

“Sure,” I announced. “Today we will eat like people with mutual funds.”

I often feel guilty that I make more money than Bill does, because our work feels like two halves of one thing. I also like to randomly buy things, and when he's around I can rationalize it as munificence instead of impulsiveness.

“Thank God they had all that crap next to the checkout,” Bill observed while reading the label of an organic chocolate bar containing cold-pressed cocoa from the Dominican Republic and açaí berries. “I shudder to think how close I came to missing this thing,” he said with his mouth full.

Bill loaded our two-hundred-dollar lunch into my car by himself, shooing away any help from me. He had plans for the four “real thick paper” grocery bags and had begun to hover guardedly over them. He got in on the passenger side and as I started the engine he mumbled, “I sure hope this shit is fair trade,” while preparing to unwrap a second chocolate bar, this one flavored with rambutan.

Two hours later we were sitting in the lab and eating “Rockefeller Hot Pockets,” which are composed of a slice of
jamón ibérico
wrapped around a spoonful of sturgeon caviar and microwaved for ten seconds. “Crap,” I said, startled from checking my watch, “I gotta go, but I'll be back tonight.”

Bill waved goodbye with a wedge of Camembert. “See you later.” His words were muffled by the baguette that was stuffed in his mouth.

I jumped into my car and raced over to pick my son up from his school, which was just letting out for the day. I traded him his swimsuit and towel for his backpack, and we drove directly to the beach, as was our habit. On the way, I asked him how the third grade was going and he shrugged. We parked in our usual spot across from Kapiolani Park.

Walking across the park, we passed by clusters of great banyan trees, and I stood and waited while he swung from what look like vines but are actually the unanchored roots that grow streaming out of the branches. When we got to the beach, we laid our towels over our shoes and went straight into the ocean and played monk seals for a while, diving and rolling around in the shallows together.

Afterward we sat on the sand and I checked myself for bruises. “Baby monk seals are more rambunctious than the storybooks suggest,” I mused while massaging my middle-aged neck. “It's strange that such good swimmers feel the need to ride their parents for locomotion.”

My son was digging in the sand. “Are there really animals in there so small that you can't see them?” he asked, referring to the handfuls of wet sand that he was throwing back into the shallows.

“Absolutely,” I affirmed. “Tiny animals are everywhere.”

“How many?” he asked skeptically.

“Lots,” I specified. “Too many to ever count.”

He thought for a while, and then said, “I told my teacher that the tiny animals find each other with magnets that are inside their bodies and she said she didn't think so.”

I immediately overreacted and retorted defensively, “Well, she's wrong. I know the person who discovered it.” I was getting myself worked up.

Like a judge trying to preempt an annoying trial lawyer, he changed the subject. “Well, it doesn't matter anyway because I am going to be a major-league baseball player.”

“I promise to come to every single one of your games.” I asked my usual question: “Can you get me free tickets?”

He paused for a while, thinking. “Some of them,” he finally agreed.

It was getting toward six o'clock, so I stood up, shook out the towels, and gathered up our things, getting ready to leave.

“What's for dessert tonight?” he asked me.

“Your Halloween candy,” I replied, and added, “Duh.”

He smiled and punched me in the arm.

We went home and I made dinner while he wrestled with our dog, Coco, who is Reba's successor and who, like her, is a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Reba lived to almost fifteen years and was greatly mourned, but through Coco I have come to learn that the entire breed shares her best qualities.

Industrious and indestructible, Coco never hesitates to go out into the rain and is constantly trying to figure out a way to be helpful toward whatever we are doing. She prefers lying on hard cement to lying in her bed, and she will go out back and munch on driveway gravel if she gets hungry before we remember to feed her. She will also run and hurl herself into a seven-foot-high crashing ocean wave if I throw a coconut beyond it and then command her to retrieve, which is what our family does on the weekends. When we travel, she goes and stays at Uncle Bill's house, where she deals severely with the rats that threaten his favorite mango tree.