Sid was smearing the dead flies on agar plates when she saw Eliot walking toward her bench. He perched on a stool, hooked his heels on the cross bar, and folded his hands in his lap.
“Welcome back,” he said.
She told him about meeting the frosty Karla Geiger in Serrana and described Karla’s refusal to share the Serrana strains with her. Eliot nodded in agreement at her description of Karla as solid ice. She explained her newest idea for obtaining additional BPF strains and her decision to return to Promissão to collect the tiny flies that swarmed around the children’s eyes. As she spoke, she continued to spread dead gnats across the agar with her sterile wire loop. She needed to process them before they dried any further.
Eliot listened without interrupting. She couldn’t read his deadpan face.
When she finished her story, he slowly shook his head. “What were you thinking, Sidonie?” He stood up and began to pace between the window and her lab bench. “Even if the BPF bacteria are carried from one child to the next by a few gnats, what is the probability you’ll find those bacteria on the minuscule number of insects you sampled? Consider the gazillions of little flies that live in Promissão.”
Would his criticism of her never end? She took a deep breath, but before she could speak, he added, “The probability is a hair—a very slim, microscopically thin hair—this side of zero.”
“It’s true the likelihood is small,” she said, “but if I find our bacteria, that’s important. A negative result means nothing, but a positive result—if I show the gnats have BPF on them—means a lot.”
“What?” he asked. “What, exactly, would it mean?”
Her ire was growing, blocks of irritation with him were piling, one after the next, on top of each other. “I’ll see if the gnat bacteria are identical to the BPF strain. If that’s the case, then we have additional bacteria to study.”
He shook his head. “Now you’re really making no sense, Sidonie.”
She was tired. And frustrated by the BPF project in general. And angry with Karla Geiger for standing in her way. And furious with Eliot for being such a know-it-all. “That’s your opinion. I have work to do. You may be excused.” She turned away from him and dropped another dead fly onto another agar plate.
It was late in the afternoon when Sid put on her coat and mittens and headed for the river. She sometimes went there to empty her mind of troubling, confusing clutter. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on writing the abstract to submit for the meeting in Boston. The words wouldn’t come out right, and her ideas tangled together into a meaningless mess. The river’s edge was a good place to sort things out.
As she wandered the path between the lab and the park, she watched the sun hover above the treetops until it was swallowed by a passing cloud. Several steps later, after the cloud had moved on, the sun once again glimmered in her eyes.
The path led to a bridge that led to an island. She rested her elbows on the wooden rail and watched the usually silvery swells, now dull in the fading sunlight, flow far beneath her feet. An empty Vernors can floated past. Then a plastic bag that billowed like a jellyfish. A gray feather. A pine twig. A bigger twig. The water and all the flotsam it carried were relentless in their rush to Lake Erie. Relentless. It was a strong, determined word. Like the GHA in their pursuit of her strain. Like Eliot’s insistence that a plasmid, but not endotoxin, explained the BPF toxicity. Paul would say her ambition bordered on relentless.
Would other scientists, or Eliot for that matter, view her as relentless? She didn’t see herself that way. She was committed to her work but that was different from relentless. She saw herself as motivated by curiosity—she simply, fervently, passionately wanted to understand how bacteria made people sick and, particularly now, why the BPF strain was so deadly. They—all bacteria—were so very clever. They’d figured out how to live in the most inhospitable places on the earth: high temperature, low temperature, high acidity, high alkalinity, no oxygen, inside people’s guts and vaginas, under people’s toenails. They lived in the river below. Even in the late fall. Their ability to live anywhere was the fruit of their relentless determination to survive.
Ever since she first learned about bacteria, she’d been fascinated by the ways they maneuvered around every immune assault a body could mount. That’s what had happened to Mariana, Luiza, Gilberto, Izabel, and the other dead children in Promissão. Their bodies had labored hard to fend off the bacteria but, in the end, the children lost the fight. Why had it been impossible for those healthy kids with their healthy immune systems to conquer the BPF strain?
The answer might be in bacteria’s ability to change the faces they presented to the world as quickly, and as dramatically, as an actress could change her costume between scenes. Dr. Bausch’s lecture, so many years ago, had taught her that bacteria were able to add a protein here, remove a carbohydrate there, turn a gene off, turn one on, and each change could alter the topography of the bacterial surface. She was fascinated with the way bacteria could shuffle the chromosomal deck into many combinations of genes, ultimately yielding a large army of bacterial factors, which were sometimes killer proteins, made by killer genes. That’s what had likely happened to the BPF strain. One bacterium picked up a killer gene, or changed an ordinary gene into a killer gene, and then that bacterium multiplied and spread among the children in Promissão. She lifted a leafless stick from the floor of the bridge and tossed it into the water. It landed in an eddy and spun three times. Then it headed downriver. Relentlessly.
Now that the sun had plunged behind the trees, she was cold. The color of the river had turned from muddy coffee to lead. She huddled on the bridge and watched the water surge beneath the wooden planks.
She tied her scarf tighter around her neck. The wind had kicked up the water, and the ripples slapped against the bridge posts. Over and over. The rhythm of the waves. The chilly evening air. The memories in her head. All that, too, seemed relentless. And powerful. She turned away from the river and wandered home to once again work on the abstract for the Boston meeting.
After she changed from her work clothes to her relaxing clothes, she brewed a cup of tea and tackled the day’s mail. At the bottom of the stack was a letter from Cibele.
My dear Sidonie,
Greetings, again, from Promissão. We all enjoyed seeing you again and hope your experiments with the samples you took from the children here were successful. The kids still talk about the lady from America who put cotton sticks in their eyes. Most of them thought it was fun.
Ana sends greetings; so do Marcelo and Dona. Their baby will come any time now. They are so very worried about that little one; worried he or she will get sick, too. Dona can’t sleep and doesn’t eat much. Marcelo is as worried about her as about the baby. He tries to tell her that the baby can’t be healthy if she doesn’t eat, but she can’t seem to hear him.
Shortly after you left, another little one died here. Same as the rest of them. Red eye followed by fever and purple patches and then they die. It just doesn’t end.
We all hope to see you again in Brazil, soon.
My warmest blessings,
Cibele
“Say, what did you find on those flies?” Eliot asked.
“Nothing,” Sid said.
“Nothing?”
“Right. No additional BPF strains.”
“Too bad.” he said. His eyes were soft, his voice gentle. “So goes another great scientific hypothesis.”
He started to leave, then turned back to her. “Say, where’s Raven? I need to borrow that huge pipettor of hers.”
“She and Doug are in Monterey for a few days. A gift from his parents. They must be rich.”
“Yeah, they are.” Eliot chuckled. “The first time I met his folks, I was caught completely off guard. We students lived the lives of paupers in our hovel above a professor’s garage, yet Doug’s parents showed up in a rented Bentley and drove us all to dinner at the priciest restaurant in Palo Alto. They are very rich. His dad is a financial guy. From New York. Doug doesn’t give a rat’s ass about money, which suits him well as a starving microbiologist.”
“Interesting. Go ahead and borrow the pipettor. It’s in her top drawer, and the big tips are on the shelf above the Bunsen burner.”
Sid still had trouble imagining Raven and Doug as a couple—Raven, a California girl who was comfortable with her backwoods ways, and Doug, an East Coast elite trying hard to shed his elite-ness. But then, reason didn’t always apply to love. “What are you doing next weekend?” Paul asked over the phone.
“Hmm. I really haven’t thought much about it,” Sid said. “Probably work.”
“Want some company?”
“Huh?”
“I was thinking of a visit to Michigan. How about it?”
So sudden. So unexpected. She hadn’t seen him since her last visit to Portland last August. Four months ago. So much had happened since then. Her trips to Brazil, the discovery of the BPF strain and everything that entailed, the GHA mess.
During that visit to Oregon, they had gone to a play called Two Gals and a Guy. She laughed at the two old maid sisters who shared an ancient house and the bachelor who lived in the upstairs apartment. Toward the end of the first act, Paul had wrapped his fingers around her hand. She edged toward him. She had treasured the warmth and strength of his hand. He was so solid, so reliable.
But the next day, he started lobbying for her to return to Portland. She had chatted on and on about the lab and the results of the experiments, but when she mentioned a problem with an experiment, he said, “See, it isn’t all perfect.”
“Of course it isn’t all perfect. Nothing is,” she had said. And the lobbying had continued through all those phone calls.
“Sid, are you still there?” Paul said now. His voice sounded worried.
“Yes, I’m here.” She had been thinking. Next weekend he might come. She had nothing planned. Did she want to face the inevitable? No, but that had to happen sometime. “Sure. A visit would be great. Bring a heavy coat. It’s winter here.”
The morning sun was bright as fire behind the dark tree branches outside the window. She was working alone in the lab. Eliot, cloistered in his cardboard cave to write yet another grant application, had issued an edict that no one should pester him unless a tornado was headed their way. After the trip to Monterey with Doug, Raven had gone to Santa Rosa to spend a three-day holiday with her mother. She had planned to return to Michigan last night and was probably sleeping in this morning. As Sid gazed out the window at the cemetery, a thick cloud shaded the sun, and the lab turned dreary.
She was working on her slides for the upcoming meeting in Boston when she heard Raven’s desk drawer slam shut. “You’re back,” she called.
Raven’s answer sounded muffled.
Sid walked around the corner. Raven, seated at her desk, was bent over, her head buried in her folded arms that rested on top of a pile of papers. Her shoulders quivered beneath her sweater. Quiet, stuttering noises dotted the air.
“What’s wrong?” Sid crept toward her. “Are you okay?”
Raven shook her head and continued sobbing into her arms.
“When you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.” She rubbed Raven’s trembling back. Raven nodded.
Sid returned to her bench. What could be wrong? Had Raven and her mother gotten into a fight? Was it about Raven’s father? Sid didn’t know much about him except that he was an impoverished artist, a dreamer who wandered from one failed adventure to another. Boyfriend trouble? Not likely. There was never trouble between Raven and Doug. She didn’t understand how two highly independent and different people could be so compatible. They seemed to draw sustenance from each other, and when one stumbled, the other was able to break the fall. River? Must be about River.
Just outside the lab window, a chickadee perched on a swaying twig of the sycamore tree. His little feet curled around the thin wood in such a tenuous way that she worried he would fall. His beak was like a wedge in the wind. Yet he didn’t leave. And he didn’t fall. He just clung to the twig. And swayed.
“Sid?” Raven wandered toward Sid’s lab bench and stopped. Her voice was one notch above a whisper. Her bloodshot eyes glistened behind the tears.
“Sit down,” Sid said. “What happened?” Raven looked depleted, like an old woman, broken from despair.
“River made a surprise visit to Santa Rosa.”
“How wonderful …”
Raven shook her head and held up her hand to stop her. “No, no. It wasn’t wonderful. It was terrible. When you were in Promissão, did River say anything about coming home for a visit?”
“Not a word.” Instantly, Sid knew the problem. She could have written the script of what was to follow.
Raven explained that River had shown up unannounced in California. He was irritable and didn’t eat anything, not even the ham their mother had baked. They had never seen him that way. She paused. “I don’t know how to tell you what happened.”
Sid knew what had happened. But she couldn’t tell Raven that she knew or how she knew it. “Take your time,” she said.
Raven drew a deep breath. “I couldn’t stand it any longer and asked him what was up. He didn’t answer, so I asked if he had the flu or something. When he said ‘no,’ I asked, ‘What kind of trouble are you in, anyway? The law? Drugs? A wicked woman?’”
Sid shook her head. Poor Raven.
“He said not the law and not drugs. And definitely not a woman. Then he said, ‘See, I don’t go for women, Raven.’” She choked up and then, gulping for air, continued. “He told me he could keep secrets from the world but not from me. Then, he said, ‘I’m gay.’” A sob burbled from her chest. “He said he couldn’t hide himself from us any longer.”
Somehow, listening to Raven talk about her brother’s sexuality made it even more real and more difficult. The repercussions would extend beyond River’s life in Brazil and would deeply touch his sister and their mother. So much heartache over one person simply loving another.
“The thing is, he’s my twin brother, and I was oblivious to the real him. I teased him about finding girlfriends, didn’t even consider he might be gay. There were plenty of clues, but I didn’t tune in to them. Poor River had to play along with my naïve, fairytale picture of him for years. Heck, I wouldn’t care if he were making love to a wolf, but I can’t stand to have been so stupid about him. So obtuse.”
Sid shook her head again. It was all so complicated. “Raven, you’ve been the best possible sister for River. Please don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“And when he was finished telling us, he said to me, ‘Don’t worry. I’m always aware of the octopuses, Raven.’ What a guy. I’m so lucky to have a brother as great as River.”
Sid squirmed in her chair. Which octopuses did he mean? The risk of living in the world as a gay man, in general? Something else? Raven didn’t mention AIDS. Neither did she. It was like the thousand-pound, smelly, sweaty goon in the room that everyone refused to acknowledge. AIDS was always a coda to any discussion of being a gay man.