Sid stood outside Eliot’s Nest and knocked on the nearest box. The cardboard container sounded hollow under her knuckles.
“Yeah?” he called.
She edged around the corner. “I need serum for the killing tests. Will you be a donor?”
“Who’ll draw the blood?”
“I will.”
He jerked his head, a surprised look on his face, toward her. Had he forgotten she was a physician?
“You’d better not miss. And it better not hurt.” He didn’t look happy.
“I’ve drawn blood from many tiny babies, so getting some from big, old you will be simple. Roll up your sleeve.”
“Which arm?”
“Your choice.”
She laid her supplies on his desk and tied a piece of plastic tubing around his upper arm. “Make a fist,” she said.
She ran her fingers over the veins at the bend of his elbow. They were huge, would be an easy stick. She tapped on the main vein, felt its spongy recoil. His arm was warm and velvety, not scaly like the snakeskin she had expected. She dabbed an iodine-soaked pad over her target. “Little poke,” she muttered and then plunged in the needle.
He didn’t move. Not even a tiny flinch. The blood flowed easily into the tube. She glanced into his face as she pulled back on the syringe’s plunger. Expressionless, he stared out the window at the flakes of snow that meandered past the glass.
“I’m going to take fifty milliliters. Okay?”
He nodded.
“You’re a good sport,” she said. “You’ve got plenty of blood, you know. Won’t notice at all that this little bit is missing.”
This venipuncture was different from all the others she had performed. The others had been from patients. This was from Eliot, and it seemed a violation of some cosmic moral principle to touch him, to jam the needle onto him, to feel the heat of his blood in the syringe in her hand. They were at the forty-five milliliter mark.
“Remind me what you’re going to do with it.” He was still gazing out the window. Then he turned toward her.
“Bacterial killing test. I’ll mix the serum from your blood with the BPF bacteria to see if they survive. If they do—that is, if your serum doesn’t kill the BPF strain but kills a control strain—then something about the BPF protects it from death by your serum.”
He sat perfectly still as he stared out the window, his arm resting on his desk, the needle in his arm. “It’ll be a gene on a plasmid that makes them resistant to being killed.”
The blood had reached the fifty milliliter mark on the syringe. She pulled the needle from his arm and pressed a gauze square over the needle hole. “Here, hold this. I don’t believe for a minute it’s a plasmid. I think it’s the endotoxin.”
“Prove it isn’t the plasmid. Those little freelancing strings of DNA, and the genes they carry, leap between bacteria, you know. A rogue plasmid could certainly explain a new deadly quality to an old bacterium.”
“No, you prove it is. First I’ll prove that your blood kills the control strain but not the BPF strain. Later, I’ll prove why, and my bet is that it’s related to an altered endotoxin in the cell wall.”
He chuckled. It was a sinister, deep-throated snigger. He lifted the gauze, watched a bubble of blood ooze from the needle hole, and slapped the gauze back against his skin. “When are you doing those rat experiments?”
“I infected them yesterday and bleed the animals tomorrow.”
“Can I see how you do that?”
This was the first time Eliot had been interested in learning anything from her. Did she want him in the rat room with her? Maybe he’d be in the way and slow her down. For sure he’d offer unsolicited advice. “Why? Are you planning to do rat experiments?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I might.”
“Well … okay. I could use help with the tubes.”
Sid had just finished washing her dinner dishes when the phone rang. “Oh, hi, Mom,” she said. She pulled a chair toward the wall phone in preparation for a long, and taxing, conversation.
“I was cleaning up after supper,” she said. To her mother’s next question, she replied, “Scrambled eggs and a salad.” And to the one that followed: “The salad had an apple and walnuts in it so, yes, it was plenty. And healthy.” She wished her mother would focus on something other than her meals. But misdirected focus had been a problem for her mother for years. She’d lost appropriate focus on everything since that disastrous day long ago.
“I ran into Laurie at the drug store. Do you stay in touch with her?” Her mother’s voice was a monotone.
“Not much. We have little in common anymore.” She and Laurie had been very close while undergrads in Eugene, living in that messy, crowded room in Carson Hall. But passing time and lengthening distance had driven them apart. “I hope to see her next time I’m in Oregon.”
They talked about the weather in Michigan and in Oregon. “Remember that red raincoat you used to wear as a kid?” her mother asked. “I found it the other day, buried in the back of the closet in the front entry. That coat was cute on you.”
Through the phone line, Sid heard the clink of ice cubes against glass. For certain it was a highball. Possibly the second or third of the afternoon, and it wasn’t very late, Oregon time. The drinking was worse since Sid’s dad had died.
“So, what do you hear from Paul?” her mother asked. “When is he moving to Michigan? Surely there are jobs for engineers in Michigan.”
Sid took a deep breath. “It’s complicated, Mom. Paul’s work is very specific to the plant operations in Portland. And the promotion he recently received makes it financially impossible for him to move to Michigan.” She desperately wished her mother also wouldn’t focus on Paul. Something—anything—other than Paul or her meals. “We’re trying to work it all out but …”
“It’s sure taking a long time. I still don’t understand why you left Portland.”
“My fellowship is in Michigan. You know that.”
“Yes, but I don’t understand it, and your father wouldn’t either, if he were still alive. Are there no research fellowships in Portland? You could have gotten a good job as a doctor there. And leaving Paul …” Her mother’s voice trailed off. Then she caught it again. “He’s such a good man, Sidonie.”
“No, there are no fellowships in my field in Portland.” Sid sighed. They’d been over this before. “The situation is difficult for both of us, Mother. Maybe too difficult to resolve. It’s not like we’re engaged or anything.” She sighed again and said, “Oh … thanks for the check. Cute card.”
Sid should have dropped the conversation right there, but something in her made her push it further. “That was very kind of you, but not necessary. My fellowship stipend is enough to pay the bills, so you really don’t have to send me money. I never thought of Labor Day as a gift-giving holiday.”
“Well, I don’t need it. Your father would want you to have it. Besides, that fellowship stipend of yours can’t be terrific, especially since Paul isn’t there to share the expenses. Buy yourself something special.”
As Sid opened the heavy door to the rat room, she heard the skittering of little feet on the bottoms of the cages. A rodent head hit a water bottle with a clunk. Then another. They were spooked, or maybe curious, wondering what she had in mind for that day. The light from the fluorescent lamps overhead, programmed to make the animals think it was now midday in the windowless basement room, cast shadows that stretched and dipped and turned on the cinderblock walls as she shoved the equipment cart over the rubber threshold and between the cages to the procedure table. Eliot followed.
The smell sent a clutch into her throat. No matter how many times she had entered that room, she gagged at the stink of the rat poop, feed pellets, disinfectant, and cage bedding. The rodent dander made her eyes itch, and the mother rats would bite if she came too close to their razor-like teeth. Her isolation gown and rubber gloves were hot and clumsy, and the mask would grow soggy from her moist breath within a half hour. Why did she do this? To unearth the mysteries of the BPF strain. Success at that was worth the discomfort of getting there.
While she arranged the tubes and needles and syringes, along with the Sharpie pens and notebooks on the stainless steel table, she said, “Want to bet on whether or not the BPF strain has survived in the baby rats’ blood?”
Eliot stared into the cages, at the nervous rat mothers and their wiggly, six-days-old offspring. “I’m too impoverished to do any betting.” He held up his thumb—same size and shape and color as the infant rats. “How the hell will you get blood out of them? They’re teeny.”
“Intracardiac,” she said. “We’ll stick a needle into their hearts and withdraw a milliliter of blood.”
He stepped backward and leaned against the handle of the cart. His face was the color of an eggshell. His eyes were huge.
“You okay?” she asked. He’d better not pass out while they were taking the samples. She didn’t want to have to revive him as they worked. She needed his help.
“I guess so.” His voice was thready.
“Look … I’ll draw the blood from their hearts. You’ll handle the tubes.” He hadn’t fainted yet. “It’s a tiny needle. They tolerate it pretty well.”
She set a cage on the table and lifted the lid. The mother rat glared back, her beady eyes glistening and suspicious. Her whiskers twitched, and her tail slapped the cage’s mesh wall. “It’s all right,” she said to the rat, “we’ll be gentle with your babies.”
She grabbed the mother rat’s tail and, in a smooth, swift arc, swung her into a clean cage. Then she lifted one of the babies out of the dirty bedding material. Shortly after they were born, she had cut two little notches in that baby’s left ear and none in the right. “This is infant number L2R0 from mother M1,” she said to Eliot. “See, it says ‘M1’ on her cage.” He seemed stable now, unlikely to collapse. “Label a tube with the mother’s and the little rat’s numbers and hand me one of those syringes—one with the needle attached.”
The mother rat raced in circles across the walls of her clean cage. A frantic look twisted her face. She knocked against the spigot of the water bottle. “Settle down,” Sid said to the scared rodent. “Your babies will be back soon.”
She cradled the tiny animal in her left hand. Its skin was warm and soft, and its belly as pink as a rose petal. Its eyes were closed, and it wiggled in places one wouldn’t think an animal could wiggle. She gripped the skin of its back, immobilizing it against her palm. Only its tiny fingers and toes could flex. Then she ran her pointer finger along the bottom of its ribs, searching for her target.
Eliot handed a syringe to Sid. She stuck the needle’s tip into baby rat L2R0 beneath its breastbone and slid the needle into its heart. The animal, locked in her fist, didn’t move. She pulled the plunger of the syringe and watched the blood, red as rubies, inch up the inside of the syringe’s barrel.
If, as she expected, the baby rat’s blood didn’t kill the BPF bacteria she had injected two days earlier, those bacteria would be circulating inside the animal, just as they had circulated inside Izabel, from her little heart to every cell in her body and then back to her heart. Round and round, like a ring within a circle, like a wheel within a wheel. That’s what had killed Izabel, earlier generations of the bacteria that were now in this rat’s blood. Generation after generation, like another wheel within a wheel. The rhythm of her favorite song rang through Sid’s head.
When the blood reached the one milliliter mark, she pulled the needle from the rat’s chest, massaged its rosy skin—“to speed up repair of the needle hole,” she told Eliot—and then loosened her grip. The animal squirmed, realigning its shoulders and pelvis. When she set the baby in the clean cage, the mother poked her nose against its back and then flipped it over.
Sid twisted the needle off the syringe and squirted the blood into the tube in Eliot’s hand. “Give it a shake to keep the blood from clotting,” she said.
One by one, she bled each baby rat. Ten rats per mother, three mothers. Repeatedly Eliot handed her a labeled tube. Repeatedly she squirted in the blood. On about the thirteenth baby rat, her mind began to wander. Maybe it was the heat and dank of the stuffy rat room. Maybe the fact that she was tired following her mother’s phone call and a sleepless night thinking about Paul. He was a man every mother would want her daughter to marry. Kind. Thoughtful. Responsible. Stable. More than adequately gainfully employed.
Was that enough? Sid also wanted him to be proud of her tenacity and scientific expertise and to admire the commitment with which she approached her research. She wanted him to value the results of her work and, if necessary, to be willing to sacrifice parts of his life for it. She knew it was a big order.
Eliot started to talk. At first, she ignored his muttering. She couldn’t hear it very well. His sodden mask and the whir of the ventilation system blurred his words.
Two baby rats later, his chatter began to irritate her. “What are you saying?” she asked.
He raised his voice. “I was a child and she was a child/In this kingdom by the sea.”
His jabbering continued while she felt along the rib edge of the rat in her hand and stuck a needle into its heart. “And this was the reason that, long ago/In this kingdom by the sea.”
When she handed Eliot the syringe full of blood, she said, again, “What on earth are you saying? And, to whom?”
His voice was louder. “A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling/ My beautiful Annabel Lee.”
Annabel Lee? By the sea? Then she remembered. The dreary tone, the ominous rhythm, Poe at his finest.
“That’s kind of creepy,” she said, laughing.
“Creepier than standing in this cave and sticking needles into baby rats’ hearts?” His eyes peered from above his mask and glittered.
He must be the first person ever to recite poetry in a rat room.
When Sid had her results, she knocked on the cardboard box outside Eliot’s nest.
“Yeah?” he called. He was back to being grumpy. Maybe her new data would sweeten him up. Or maybe he’d dismiss it as rubbish. No matter what, he’d have lots of suggestions for how she should have done it differently.
“I’ve got the results from the rat experiment. And from the killing tests with your blood. Want to see them?” She handed him two pieces of paper.
“That’s impressive.” Eliot was smiling. Truly smiling. “You don’t have to be a statistical wizard to see that the rat blood killed the control strain but didn’t touch the BPF strain. And,” he shuffled the papers and read the final one, “my serum didn’t kill those steely BPF bacteria. You’ll run a chi-square test to know for sure that the differences are significant, right?”
There it was. The predictable suggestion. Did he think she wouldn’t do the appropriate statistical analysis? Did he think she was an idiot? She pulled the paper from his hand. “Of course.” She heard the bitterness in her voice, wished she didn’t have to be bitter, wished he weren’t so controlling.
She looked, again, at the results. She thought of the hours and hours of work devoted to those experiments. It all boiled down to only two data tables, each containing four squares, with one number per square. Suddenly she felt very tired.
He might have sensed her disappointment, because he said, “Actually, this is great, Sidonie. These results are astounding. They securely clinch your case that the BPF bacteria survive in blood.”
“And can kill people.” As she spoke, she tried to hide the sadness in her voice from him.
He smiled again. “Could be.” It wasn’t a patronizing smile this time. Was he, indeed, capable of a genuine smile? Apparently, the answer was yes, rarely, for she’d just seen one.