Real Life(18)
The machine cries softly again.
* * *
? ? ?
AT HIS MICROSCOPE AT LAST, Wallace slides plate after plate under the objective. Only mold, like a cotton field in late fall, dark and muddy, prickly with stalks. Clumps of bacteria. Bad enough, these terrible environmental conditions. Bad enough the pits in the agar through which the nematodes sometimes slither and find themselves pressed flat to the plastic base of the dish, which sucks all the moisture from their bodies. But there is also something more worrying to Wallace: dead eggs. Nematodes whose germlines are fisted and gnarled. On some plates, tiny larvae struggle, winking glyphs. Their numbers are smaller than he expected, as though there was some other, underlying problem at work even before the carnage took hold. Some invisible calamity. They are not just drenched in spores, which makes it hard enough. The mold has made them sterile, their bodies filled with vacated spaces, as though their delicate reproductive tissues have been puffed with air. Vacancies in the body cavities. Unusual morphology. He knows it when he sees it. There is a chance that his strain is sterile, that the combination of genetic modifications has rendered a nonviable organism; it will die out. This might be an answer to a question. Or it might be the result of contamination, mere noise. He will have to be careful. Even more careful.
Picking twelve worms from fifty plates means six hundred plates, all of which have to be passaged multiple times to free them of the mold, which means something like eighteen hundred plates. And on top of that, more screening. This is why he fled—the weight of the work it will take to fix this. It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must. For a moment he’s tempted by the notion of giving up, starting fresh, not trying to make heads or tails of the mess before him. He looks from the scope at the stacks of plates. They creak when he adjusts them. He could throw them away. Wallace rests his forehead against the eyepiece of his scope.
“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.”
Henrik would know what to do, Wallace thinks. Henrik would say, Get to it. What are you waiting for? Wallace reaches for his pick, a glass capillary melted around a flattened segment of titanium wire. He holds a metal striker over the burner, turns on the gas, strikes. The rotten, faintly sweet smell of natural gas, then, ignition, orange glow, a few sparks dissolve, fire. He burns the end of the pick to sterilize it. He takes a fresh plate, coats the end of his wire in E. coli to use like glue, and slides under the objective one of the old plates. It’s like staring down through the top of a canopy. He waits for signs of movement, rotates the glass in the base of the microscope to change the angle of light so that things shift into curious metallic shadow, searches, waits, searches, rotates, waits, searches.
At last he sees a worm, the briars of spores stuck to its back, and he sends his pick down through the air, lowers it like the claw machine, and taps it gently, softer than gently, and up the worm comes, from its world into the air, swimming back up, attached to the pick. He sets it down on a clean plate, all that open space; it’s surreal.
One worm.
Five hundred ninety-nine to go.
He lowers the pick. Begins.
* * *
? ? ?
THE ANIMALS ARE NOT DEAD—this is a relief. He expected worse. They are more sterile than he anticipated, shriveled oocytes and empty sperm ducts, which magnifies the task. These he burns in the flame like an angry deity.
Brigit, in soft gray clothes, sweeps past Wallace into his bay and pours herself into Henrik’s old chair.
“Wally,” she says, exasperated. “Mom’s in a mood today.”
“She’s pissed about my plates, I bet.”
“Tough break.” Brigit is full of compassion. She has always been good to him, in an uncomplicated sort of way. She gives off no sense that she expects anything for her kindness or feels she is treating him in any remarkable way. Which is perhaps what seems so remarkable to Wallace, who is not accustomed to uncomplicated offers of help, to generosity. Brigit tosses her legs up on Henrik’s desk. She folds her hands smoothly across her stomach. “Funny thing about that, huh?”
“What?” Wallace asks, glancing back at her from the scope. Something in her voice catches inside him, a note of cool suspicion.
“No, nothing,” Brigit says. “It’s just funny how your plates got ruined that way. I mean, and out of nowhere, yet everyone else’s in that incubator was— No, I’ve said too much.” She puts her arm over her eyes, feigns being overwhelmed, sighs.
“What do you mean, their plates are fine?” Heat and the low murmur of fury. He rotates fully on his chair. Brigit is a little shorter than Wallace, dark haired and freckled. She is Chinese American, from Palo Alto, where her mother is a cardiologist and her father took early retirement from one of those primordial tech start-ups eaten by Google. She had been a dancer before she settled on science—bad ligaments, she said—and she retains a gummy flexibility, much solidity beneath the softness of her good nature. Her expression at the moment is one of conspiratorial glee. They have a tendency toward gossip, these two.
“Nothing concrete. No. Not at all, but I heard from Soo-Yin, who as you know has plates on the racks right below yours, that her plates were totally fine. In the clear. Not even a mote of dust.”