Robin's two-day-a-week teaching assistantship at Tufts provided some respite. Marion was grateful to Jacob for thinking of that. And he was pleased with Robin. She was an accurate grader and a terrific lab supervisor. She seemed to enjoy the undergraduates. Marion wished that she could let Robin go entirely to teach at some small college, but she could not spare Robin's hands and time.
Robin looked almost cheerful when she came in that Tuesday after attending Jacob's lecture at Tufts. She walked briskly down the hall, cheeks rosy with the fresh spring air.
Once inside the lab, however, Robin's good mood evaporated. She stared and stared at her cells under the microscope. She'd had no luck using R-7 on the pancreatic cancer cells, and now she was failing with breast cancer cells as well. In every case, her cells remained clumped in their abnormal divisions; the genes carried by R-7 had done nothing to change them. She had taken every care, but Cliff's virus, so effective for him, seemed impotent in her hands.
She looked up from the microscope, recorded her findings, and put her cells away. Her throat tightened. What was wrong with her? Why did he get results where she had none? The gods of science had deserted her. Great, quarreling, choosing favorites, they'd chosen Cliff. Of course they would; they preferred young men.
He was at the other lab bench, grinning at one of Aidan's stupid jokes. He stood there laughing. Robin took a breath and came up behind him. “Cliff,” she said.
“What?” Merrily, he wheeled around on his heels.
“Here.” She ripped the pages on the cells out of her lab notebook and gave them to him. “They're yours.”
He backed away, suddenly defensive. Cold. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Whatever you want,” she said. “They're your cells. Take them.”
He glanced down at Robin's neat notations. “You don't have much of anything here.”
“That's your problem.” She tried to stop her voice from trembling.
“Why is it my problem?”
“It's your virus. You figure out why it didn't work.”
“It didn't work,” he said, “because obviously you screwed up these experiments.”
“I did these experiments perfectly. How dare you suggest I did them wrong?”
Aidan tried to intervene. “Why don't we take a break . . .”
Cliff looked only at Robin. “I'm not suggesting you did them wrong,” he told her. “I'm telling you that—”
She slapped his face.
Prithwish, Feng, Aidan, Natalya all stood in stunned silence. Then they were all talking at once.
“Robin!”
“Are you okay?”
“Take it outside!”
“I told you we should all take a break. Let's all cool down now.”
The lab telephone began to ring. Still Robin faced Cliff down, furious. His face was red where she had struck him, but she wasn't sorry.
“Don't take it out on me,” Cliff said. His words taunted, but his voice was surprised. He was shocked by the force of Robin's jealousy. “It's not my fault you screwed up. It's not my fault you can't get the same results I did. Don't blame me for your mistakes.”
“I didn't make mistakes,” she countered desperately. And yet she had no evidence of that. She had nothing but her wretched notes to show him.
Still the phone rang. Prithwish finally picked up.
“Thank you,” Aidan said.
“Mendelssohn-Glass lab.” Prithwish spoke clearly into the black receiver. “Who is this? Who?” He strained to hear the little voice on the other end, a child's voice.
“May I speak to Cliff Bannaker?” the little voice inquired.
“Who is this?” Prithwish asked, confused.
“It's Kate.”
Silently, Prithwish handed Cliff the receiver.
“Yeah,” he snapped.
There was a long silence on the line, and then a timid “Hi, this is Kate Glass.”
“Oh, Kate,” he said, startled. “What's up?”
“Do you remember you asked me for a favor—to find you an epigraph for your paper?” She didn't wait for his response, but rushed on. “Well, I found one.”
He took this in at the black wall telephone, with Robin seething at his back, and the centrifuge spinning, and the others considering what they'd just seen, watching silently. He'd long forgotten his idea about the epigraph. How could he have known that as soon as Kate received the commission she'd begun searching through her books? She'd hunted for hours in the wood-paneled Hill library. Alone in the afternoons at long trestle tables lit with green banker's lamps, she'd pored over possible texts on mice: Robert Burns's “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie . . .” Roethke's “Meadow Mouse”: “Do I imagine he no longer trembles / When I come close to him? / He seems no longer to tremble.”
“Maybe you should get a pen,” Kate suggested helpfully. “So you can write it down.”
4
THERE WERE two of them, and they came with suitcases fitted for their camera lenses. They snapped together a tripod and planted it right in the center of the lab, so the researchers could barely get by. They wore light meters around their necks and unfurled white umbrellas to reflect the light. The one called Steve was the main photographer. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt open over a white T-shirt. His hair was long and blond, his gaze disconcerting because his eyes were two different shades of blue. The other one was Darius, Steve's assistant. He wore all black, from head to toe, even a black baseball cap, and he dashed around shaking yellow extension cords from a black bag, plugging in auxiliary lights, and holding up his meter like an indoor weatherman.
No one could concentrate. Equipment covered the floor. Robin was out, but Prithwish and Natalya turned and stared. Aidan stopped work altogether to admire Steve's cameras. Even Marion stood in the doorway, suspicious yet curious, impressed by what Sandy's PR had wrought.
“All right.” Steve pulled out a small sheaf of papers and consulted with Darius a moment. “Which one of you is Cliff?”
“Over here,” said Cliff, trying to look nonchalant.
“All right. Okay.” Steve barely looked up. “Let me see . . . Who is Xiang Feng?”
Cliff scanned the room. “He was here a minute ago.”
“He's downstairs,” Prithwish volunteered.
“What's downstairs?” Steve asked.
“The animals,” said Prithwish.
“Animals?” Steve brightened visibly.
“What kind?” Darius asked.
“Just mice,” said Prithwish.
“Oh,” said Steve.
“What did he think?” Aidan whispered to Natalya.
“Well, let's scope it out anyway,” Steve told Darius.
“Couldn't hurt,” Darius said.
But Marion folded her arms across her chest. “I'm sorry. We can't allow visitors in the animal facility.”
There was a bit of confusion, some whispering back and forth between the photographers to the effect of who's she? The professor. The one you can't shoot.
“Excuse me, could we just look?” Steve asked Marion in obsequious tones.
“No,” said Marion.
“Um, okay. Okay.” Steve shook back his lanky blond hair in resignation. “Could we bring some mice out here?”
“No,” said Marion.
Steve looked at Darius.
“I could bring them out here, but then I'd have to sacrifice them,” Marion explained.
“You'd have to . . .”
“Kill them,” said Marion. “If they come out, they can't go back.”
“Well, um. Okay,” Steve spluttered, reconciling himself to this bit of news. “Great,” he said to Darius with mock self-pity, “the blood of these animals will be on my hands.”
“Don't worry, I'm not bringing them out,” Marion said.
Steve sighed. “Let me think. Cliff, could you come over here and look at something under the microscope?”
“Look at what?” Cliff asked.
“Does
n't matter. Just come over by the microscope and sort of adjust it.”
Cliff came over.
“Just, you know, fiddle with the knobs. Pretend you're discovering something.”
The others snickered as Cliff gazed down into the eyepiece.
“No, don't look straight down. Sort of look up from it. Just look up, say, forty-five degrees. No, that's too much. Move your chin about an inch. That's it. Stop! Don't move. How's the light?” Steve asked as Darius held his light meter right at Cliff's forehead.
Cliff's back was starting to hurt. The black and silver camera clicked and clicked and clicked.
“Could I have the green filter?” Steve asked Darius. “The one we used at MIT.”
Cliff stared into the camera's dark glass eye. Millions of people would see his picture, read his name, learn about his results. He had never dreamed he could do anything in the lab to warrant this kind of attention. With a fleeting superiority, he sensed the others watching him, and then, just as quickly, he felt like an idiot. He dared not rub his itchy nose.
Then, suddenly, the photographers forgot about him. Steve tossed his film cartridges into a bag, and like a bored undergraduate began looking around the room. He walked over to Robin's lab bench, picked up some glassware, then put it down. He paced the tight space until, suddenly, his eye fell on Feng, who had just come upstairs and waited next to Marion in the doorway.
“Stop right there. You're Xiang Feng, right?”
“Yes. Right,” Feng said. He had the abstracted, slightly stunned look that came of spending several hours with the mice. The photographers took him in. Cliff was handsome; he could have been an up-and-coming actor or lead singer in a minor band. But Feng's shoulders hunched, the expression on his face was altogether otherworldly as his glasses shone in the fluorescent light. Feng was a scientist to wake the dead!
Marion moved quickly from the line of fire, but Steve ordered Feng, “Just stay right there! Don't move.”
At home Mei had teased Feng about the photographers. “You're going to have paparazzi now.”
“Right, because we're all so famous.”
“Maybe you can all advertise for different companies.” She giggled. “You could endorse spectrometers.”
They'd joked, but then he'd forgotten about the photo shoot. He stood perfectly still, watching as the two of them dragged over their tripod, umbrellas and extension cords, extra lenses, silver reflecting disks. Feng sighed. Publicity mattered a great deal to Mendelssohn and Glass. He knew that the institute was poor, and the lab poorer. He understood that knowledge might be parlayed into money, and so he played the game, observing the photographers as he stood still, posing for the lab's greater good.
When Feng was a child, he'd sometimes imagined that his own eyes were cameras. He'd played at remembering things that way, imagining that when he blinked, the shutters came down and he recorded what he saw forever. The light in the trees. His mother's face. The sun setting at home in reds and oranges, flamboyant in the silty air. He played that he might remember these things, but of course, over time, he could only remember pieces of them. He'd read a book once, in English, about a boy with a photographic memory. The boy could glance at a page and learn every word by heart. He could look at a table of numbers once and recall every digit perfectly. Feng had been much intrigued with this story, and yet he'd thought, how much more interesting it would be to have a photographic memory for faces or for landscapes. How much more valuable to possess perfect recall of the people that you loved, or the most beautiful places you had been. To lie in bed and watch them over and over in your mind, like a slide show before sleep. Memorizing digits was mundane; there were techniques for that. But what was the mnemonic for experience? Only art.
He would have loved a proper camera of his own. His hands itched to touch the black and silver equipment arrayed in front of him. He'd seen such lenses in the windows of Ferrante-Dege and wondered what pictures he might take with materials like these. Photographs of icicles melting drop by drop, precisely as liquid from pipettes. Pictures of a hundred yellow school buses, parked side by side by side in their school-bus parking lot near his apartment in Somerville. Bicycles in a blur of light. Banal, banal, he chided himself even as he conjured these images. He was romantic enough to fantasize about trying photography or painting, or even film, but not foolish enough, or self-indulgent enough, or perhaps American enough, to think that he'd be any good.
He was skilled at science, careful when he had to be, crafty when he had to be, but science did not move him. He was different in this way from Marion. She cared passionately about her work; she craved discovery. She tried to hide her feelings, and she succeeded with many people, but Feng knew better. He had worked long enough with her to see that research was her life. Experiments were beautiful to her; she lived for the chase. He could not live that way, pining for truth with an unrequited love. He was a little proud of his diffidence; he wore his nonchalance all the time, like safety glasses. He was imaginative, but at work he would not allow his imagination to seep out. Patience, diligence, sarcasm, pessimism, all protected him from failure and hurt. He was patient now, standing there, stock-still in the doorway.
A great relief came over Cliff as he watched Darius light Feng. He could go back to work. And yet he hovered at the periphery of Darius's umbrellas. Somehow, he could not stop watching the photographers. He could not entirely shake the experience, finding himself center stage, lit up like a movie star. He was one of the principals in the scene, and he half believed, half hoped that Steve would call him back again for more shots. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't help noticing how much time the photographers spent on Feng. Steve repeatedly called Darius to look through the viewfinder; he seemed so pleased with the startled Feng, hesitating there in a pool of light, his glasses shining with a kind of alien glow.
“Oh,” Steve murmured, gazing through his viewfinder. “Oh, I think I love this picture.”
The third-floor bulletin board began to fill with clippings, articles from The Boston Globe and The New York Times. There were interviews with Sandy, and even Marion. But the People magazine photograph of Feng took pride of place in the center of the board. There he stood, full length in glossy color, and alongside him ran a full column of print, headlined: “Can This Man Cure Cancer?” There was no mention of Marion or Cliff, and only the briefest reference to Sandy. The article spoke, instead, of Feng's childhood, his late-night discovery and long hours in the lab.
Raised in a remote northern village in China, Xiang Feng had little idea what a university was, let alone scientific research. He lived in a two-room apartment with his parents—Cheng, 58, a retired chemist, and An-Ling, 56, a school guidance counselor. Then, at 12, he aced a national exam to win a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. “My mom and dad were sorry for me to leave home,” he recalls. “However, they were happy for me to get an education.”
A star student at Beijing University, Feng, now 28 and married to college sweetheart Mei, left China for the first time to work at the famed Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “Strange food,” he says of his first days in the U.S. “I got a lot of stomachaches.” However, his culture shock did not last long.
“Extraordinary,” his boss, Sandy Glass, describes him. “Brilliant, and hardworking beyond anything I've ever seen.”
The hard work paid off when Feng stayed late one night to care for the lab's many cancer-stricken mice. He realized then that a group of mice infected with the R-7 virus were actually getting better, not worse. Quickly he told others in the lab, and began to plan experiments to see if the virus might work as a natural cancer-killing drug. A second and third group of mice began to show the same amazing results after injection with R-7.
“Their tumors were actually melting away,” says Glass. “We were astounded. Feng has made an extraordinary discovery that just might change the way we look at cancer and remission.”
What does the future hold for this young researcher and his
bold new approach?
“Sky's the limit,” says Glass.
“Who knows?” Feng laughs.
“He is as modest now as when he got here,” his colleague Prithwish Amirthanayagam comments. “He hasn't changed at all.”
Except, perhaps, for one thing. Xiang Feng now counts falafel and hummus as his favorite American foods. Clearly, his stomachaches are a thing of the past.
The other postdocs teased Feng so much about this article that he took it down from the bulletin board several times. Still, despite his efforts, the article kept reappearing in the hall.
Techs from the second floor salaamed to him in the stairwell.
“Congrats,” the postdocs from the lab next door called out.
“Disaster,” he said, every time Prithwish or Aidan or Cliff mentioned his newfound celebrity.
“He hasn't changed at all,” Aidan and Natalya would chorus sweetly.
“Oh, you guys,” Feng muttered. “Will you please give it a rest?”
“I'm writing that down,” Cliff said, opening his lab book to the lexicon of Fungi in the back. “Let's see. Disaster: noun meaning ‘national celebrity in People magazine.'” And then: “Give it a rest: idiomatic phrase meaning ‘I'm too busy curing cancer to listen to your bullshit now.'”
Cliff tried to hide his own disappointment that he did not appear in People. He was a coauthor on the journal article, but People made it seem as though R-7 came from nowhere. In the magazine, Feng's discovery was purely serendipitous, instead of something Cliff had been working toward for years. Feng was even more upset than Cliff. He made light of it, but he was horrified by his picture, and his dumb comments about food.
Glass was moved to address the issue at a lab meeting. “Ignore the media.” He spoke to the group, but he looked at Feng in particular. “People is in the business of selling fairy tales, that's all. Bottom line is, you can't buy publicity like this. The first reporter who ever wrote about me got everything wrong. Every single thing, including my birthday.”
Naturally, the more Feng ignored them, the more journalists loved him. They adored his shyness, his foreignness, his sudden seemingly inexplicable brilliance. They loved that he came out of nowhere—or nowhere they'd been. They loved Feng for being Chinese. And, of course, Cliff could never compete with that. There he was, the sandy-haired, freckled Californian, the Stanford grad, inescapably American.