And he had to explain the date was only on the second page, and referred only to those mice, not the others.
“So those other mice were from last winter?” Robin demanded. “When? November? December? Why are their numbers all three hundreds?”
“You know all the mice in that line are three hundreds,” Cliff told her.
“Why did you use the same pen, months apart?”
“Robin!” Marion shook her head in amazement.
“You still had the same ballpoint pen for three months?” Robin pressed.
Even Marion winced at Robin's pettiness. Confronted with his sloppy notes, Cliff had been defensive; he'd scrambled to explain the sloping ballpoint columns and decipher his own scrawl. He'd been ambushed and forced to interpret records he'd never meant for anyone to see. But his poor records and quick talking could hardly match the desperation, almost the hysteria, in Robin's questions. Dredging up his papers, Robin was so far out of line as to be unreasonable. How could anyone answer them? Cliff could only be grateful Mendelssohn understood that.
The others were turning away from her. They were sorry for her, but also wary; she seemed so obsessed, her behavior so erratic. Robin came in less now, and at odd hours. The others understood that sooner or later she would leave the lab altogether. Instinctively they avoided confronting her, or even discussing research with her anymore. She had talked to Feng and Prithwish, and tried to mine Aidan for information about Cliff's animals. She was spinning an intricate theory about Cliff and R-7, and all the strands came from her own mind.
One afternoon that fall Prithwish discovered Robin in the animal facility studying the log. He shook his head at her. “What are you looking for?” he asked gently.
“Nothing,” she said.
He didn't question her further, but she knew what he was thinking: Then why are you down here? Why don't you just get on with your own work? She knew exactly what the others thought, and it hurt to be treated like a hazardous material, to be isolated and manipulated with gloved hands.
At times she felt the others must be right about her. She was obsessive. She must be mad. Cliff's evidence was all there to see, published as hard fact, and she was only hurting herself by trying to chip away at what was demonstrably true. Then, strangely, the unpopularity of her position seemed to her the mark of truth, and a sign of disinterested authenticity. She had no allies; her assertions were unprofitable, detrimental to her career. Her own work was submerged in her suspicions; her days in the lab were numbered. She had already begun conversations with Mendelssohn and Glass about where she might go, or what she might do next. On the other hand, Cliff had everybody on his side. The others wanted to believe him, needed to believe him; he himself, like a scientific pilgrim, had approached his experiments desperate for a miracle, and for that very reason she was sure he'd selected data that told the story he wanted to publish.
One person in the lab still spoke to Robin freely, and that was Billie, the new lab tech. Tall, wispy, dolorous, Billie was always sniffling and gently, sadly grieved. After ten years at the Philpott, she suffered from asthma and sinus problems, which she attributed to fungus in the institute's walls. The building was indeed old, and badly ventilated, but Billie also believed that the metal wire in women's bras conducted electricity from computers and other lab equipment and caused breast cancer. Over the years her concerns had blossomed into a fanciful worldview in which the physical plant strangled its own denizens, seeding fungal parasites into researchers' bodies so that gradually the Philpott's scientists became susceptible to the very diseases they were studying. She ruminated constantly about leaving the institute, but she lingered on, a blessing and a curse, endowing the Philpott with her skills and her neuroses.
Unfortunately, the other techs were tied up with the R-7 work, and Robin needed Billie. Robin had scraped together some modest leads with her bone tumor project, and Mendelssohn and Glass were pushing her to submit a research note before she left in the spring. The lab didn't need the publication. Marion had pressed Billie on Robin with the purest intentions—to save Robin time and help her move along. But Billie needed direction, she needed guidance; and so Robin began a new phase of her exile: she and Billie working together, the lab's least wanted.
“I think I know why they attack each other,” Billie confided to Robin one afternoon as they were tagging young mice. With an instrument the size of a single-hole punch, Billie pierced each animal's ear, affixing a numbered metal tag, her movements deft and gentle as if she were fixing price stickers onto peaches at the grocery store. “You know why?”
“Why?” Robin asked stoically.
“Because the chi in the facility is weak,” Billie told her. “See how cold it is and clinical? How there's metal everywhere? On the bench top. On the cage racks. The walls.”
Robin looked warily at the windowless white walls.
“There's no earth energy here, no water energy. Just metal,” Billie said.
“Metal is easy to clean,” Robin pointed out.
“I believe this facility is a breeding ground for conflict.” Billie plopped a newly tagged mouse into its cage. “Just imagine if we brought fresh flowers into this room, and painted the walls pink.” She glanced down at the pink mice. “Or lavender. And if we changed the lighting and gave the mice little climbing structures and nests made out of natural materials.”
“Climbing structures?” Robin asked in disbelief.
“For a long while I've been looking for other people with SBS—Sick Building Syndrome,” Billie explained. “Now I see hundreds of animals are affected as well.” She tagged another mouse. “The animals are stressed. The environment is making them ill. They have no privacy. There's nowhere for them to hide.”
“Um, Billie,” said Robin. “Could you just . . . put it . . .”
Billie put the animal back in the cage, and picked up yet another. “I see myself in them,” she confessed. “They're suffering from this place. Look at this little guy.” Billie held the animal right up to Robin's face.
“I'd like to finish up here.” Robin stepped back from the busy mouse marooned on Billie's fingertips. Curious, the animal explored the edges of Billie's hand, and then dashed up her arm. Billie plucked up the mouse and replaced it in her palm. “They fight because this place makes them fight,” Billie said. “That's why they bite each other. I'm not saying set them free. I'm not saying give up experimenting. I'm just starting to wonder what we can do to change the feng shui in here and give some thought to the imbalances—”
“Billie,” Robin interrupted in exasperation. “Could we get on with it?”
“In these rooms,” Billie continued.
At that moment the mouse in her palm leapt onto Robin.
She screamed. Robin was not afraid of mice, but she was so startled she shrieked. The wizened nudes hardly ever leapt like that, so high, so far. They scarcely ever acted so alive during procedures. Hearing her scream, the red-eyed mouse froze, clinging to her lab coat like a tiny monster come to life. “Get it off,” she shrieked at Billie. “Get it off!”
“Hold on.” Carefully, stealthily, Billie reached for the mouse, but it ran up the lapel of Robin's lab coat. She felt its little body through the thin material. Sickeningly, she imagined the animal was going to climb inside her collar. She thrashed and tore at her lab coat in panic.
“If you'd just stand still,” Billie suggested, but Robin ripped her coat off and threw it on the bench top. She ran out of the room to the end of the hall, and then she cried as she had not cried since she was a very little girl. She cried because she had lost control, because her situation was absurd. She wept for loneliness.
But she forced herself to stop. She knew Billie would come looking for her; at any moment someone from upstairs could come walking by. She choked back her tears, took off her gloves, and dried her cheeks as best she could with a clean tissue she found in her skirt pocket. Her face felt swollen; she knew her eyes were red. Still, she donned a fresh lab coat a
nd walked back into the animal room, where Billie was still bustling around with the mice as if nothing had happened.
“He's all right,” Billie reassured her immediately. “I picked him up and he's in there.” She pointed to the little daredevil, now tagged and caged. “And I tagged these guys. Numbers 603, 604 . . .”
“Just a sec,” said Robin, picking up her logbook.
“You see what it does to them,” Billie said. “You saw how that poor animal flew off the handle. I'm really starting to believe that they're unbalanced. They express the disequilibrium in their environment.”
That evening Robin went to find Nanette downstairs where she taught Beginning Quilting in the first-floor lunchroom. The dozen or so students were all women, some postdocs, some secretaries, along with several institute wives. They were from Pakistan, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa.
As Robin slipped inside the door, Nanette brandished a small orange-handled tool.
“Ladies,” she said, “take out your rotary cutters. Hold them gently but firmly in your favored hand. You will be drawing them across the fabric with your straightedge as your guide. Watch as I demonstrate.” Nanette adored teaching women from other countries. With their exotic color choices, they made the craft their own, piecing a magenta medallion against a background of palest green, placing bloodred triangles like origami cranes in a sea of gray. “Your rotary cutter is like a pizza wheel. It is very, very sharp. What do we do if we cut ourselves with our rotary cutter?” She paused for effect and then cried out: “For God's sake, get out of the way so the blood won't ruin the fabric.”
Nanette had always told Robin that she'd taken up quilting because her job mixing media was not geometrically challenging enough. Robin knew, however, that it wasn't just shapes and edges Nanette wanted in her life, but people.
“All right, let's take our scraps and begin.” Nodding at this one, correcting that one, Nanette walked from table to table as the women bent over their work.
“You look terrible,” Nanette whispered to Robin when she finally made her way to the back of the room.
“Thanks a lot.”
“What's wrong? What happened?” Then she took on her teacher's voice. “If you'll excuse me for a moment, ladies.” She ushered Robin out into the corridor.
“I've had a bad day,” Robin admitted.
“You look exhausted. You're still not sleeping?”
“Not too well,” said Robin.
“You know what you are?” Nanette began.
“Frustrated,” said Robin.
“Depressed,” said Nanette. “Did you know insomnia is a sign of clinical depression?”
“I'm stuck working with Billie on a dead-end paper; the lab is moving ahead with Cliff's results . . .”
“Sleep with 'em and forget 'em,” Nanette said. “Move on.”
“But I have moved on.”
“I'm getting worried that—” Nanette began.
“So am I,” Robin interrupted. “I've been thinking about going over to see Uppington.”
“Your advisor?”
“Is that wrong? I've got to get some outside advice. I just don't know whether he screwed up his record keeping by mistake or on purpose. . . .”
“I'm not worried about Cliff's results; I couldn't care less about his results,” Nanette said, touching Robin's shoulder. “I'm worried about you. This place gets to people after a while. It's poisonous.”
Robin laughed shakily. “Oh, please don't tell me about the toxins at the institute. I've been listening to Billie all day.”
Nanette peered at her. “You know you can call me anytime—day or night,” she said.
“Are you putting me on a suicide watch already?” Robin asked.
“This is not a joke, young lady.”
“You should get back to your class,” Robin said.
“They're fine,” Nanette said. “Can I tell you a secret about this place? The institute is not worth diddly-squat. Can I tell you about the research that goes on here? People are saving lives every day in theory, in the future. They think their work is the most important thing in the world, and they don't have a clue about what really matters. And you know what matters? The here and now. That's all. The rest is zilch, but scientists can't see it. Their own postdocs call for help, and they don't care.”
“I'm not calling for help,” Robin said, offended.
“Yes you are,” Nanette told her.
“No, I'm pointing out problems in Cliff's data.”
“Robin, Cliff's problems don't matter,” said Nanette. “Compared to your mental health, this research really doesn't matter.”
“I disagree,” Robin said simply.
“Be careful,” Nanette warned her.
“I have been careful,” Robin said, “and it doesn't work.”
7
JOHN UPPINGTON was English, and overstretched. He had many students to support and futures to settle. When Robin finished her degree, Uppington had suggested that she go to work with Mendelssohn at the Philpott, because Mendelssohn's lab was so small. “I think you might be less neglected there,” he'd told her in his self-deprecating way. He was a short, stocky, slightly deaf advisor, close to seventy. His black hair had almost disappeared, and then sprung up again hopefully in little tufts in his ears and nose, and especially atop his eyebrows. The peak of his career long past, Uppington had settled on a medium-size eminence from which he viewed the field and pronounced upon the future of biological research. He was a member of every academy and society devoted to the national welfare and the greater good. His lab was always bustling, although, like Uppington himself, the place was not what it had been twenty years before.
As he listened to Robin in his office, Uppington was surprised by her story and, although he didn't say so, shocked by Robin's account of Marion's cool response. He had sent Robin to Marion precisely because he'd felt they had so much in common. There was a purity about them, a desire for truth as an end in itself. They were both perfectionists, exacting and patient. It distressed him to discover the two were out of sympathy. Marion, who worked with such care and concentration, should have given more time to Robin. She, of all people, should have respected Robin's opinions.
“Well, Robin,” he said when she had finished. “I don't like to interfere where it's not my business.”
She studied his desk.
“This is really a matter for Marion and Sandy to discuss together. I shouldn't like to interpose my own opinions. However . . .”
She looked up in an agony of suspense.
“The data do seem odd,” he conceded.
She breathed again. “You don't think I was wrong to point it out?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “I would certainly have pointed out the discrepancies myself, although I'm sure there's a very good reason for them. Generally, in cases like this—and they do come up—I would suggest a meeting with the principals, as it were, and one or two scientists outside the institute, for the general purpose of untangling what may be tangled, and clarifying what might be muddled. A great many difficulties can be avoided with the infusion of a little fresh air. I chaired a little committee like this just the other day at MIT, where we mediated some internal differences, and by the end, everyone was smiling, and everyone shook hands. It's really quite remarkable what a quiet conference room and a box of pastries can accomplish.”
Sandy rejected Uppington's idea outright. “Don't you see what she's doing?” he said to Marion. “She's sneaking around behind our backs, slandering us to anyone who'll listen.” It was a brilliant October day, and after finishing their lunches the two of them had stepped out to stroll down Oxford Street, past Harvard's brick Peabody and Semitic Museums, their stately maples green and crimson. “She's trying to undermine the integrity of the lab.”
“Possibly,” said Marion calmly.
“Do you think it's any accident that just as our new paper goes out for review, she's wangled this public interrogation?”
“Priv
ate seminar,” corrected Marion.
“You don't mind, do you?” He stopped walking for a moment and viewed her in amazement.
“Of course I mind,” she told him. “But I have confidence in our work. I have nothing to hide.”
“You know that this is all about her obsession with Cliff.”
“You mean their falling-out.”
“Of course.”
Marion thought for a moment, then said, “I think her motives are confused.”
“God, Marion, stop acting so high and mighty.”
“Stop panicking,” she said. “It serves no purpose.”
“I warned you they'd be trouble.”
“Yes, and you seemed to be looking forward to it,” she said drily.
“I don't think you understand how much she hates him.”
Marion refused to let this ruffle her. “We'll sit down together and separate her legitimate concerns from her private grievances. I think it will be a useful exercise.”
“Therapy session, you mean,” Sandy grumbled.
“And if in fact Robin has found some errors worth correcting, so much the better.”
“It's not good, Marion.”
“No, it's very good for the work,” she contradicted. “Maybe it's not good for the marketing of the work.”
Hurt, Sandy turned away. There was an inequality in their partnership, and he felt it keenly just then, the assumption that Marion was the true scientist and he only the workaday clinician.
“You always overstate your case,” she told him earnestly. “Why not accept criticism, whatever the source? Why should we always rush to dismiss any opposition to our ideas? Take the objections seriously and use them to make the work stronger.”
“So you want to reward Robin's behavior.”
“I want to engage her in a proper forum.”
“Give her ammunition.”
“No, diffuse her anger.”
“It's going to be a disaster—you know that,” he grumbled.
“No, it won't,” she said.
He shook his head at her faith in criticism and academic rigor. She was imperious, but also innocent, and he knew he must protect her.