Knockout Mouse Read online

  “How can we be sure it was a crustacean protein? We know she didn’t eat any that night.” I told her about the dinner party. “We’re also certain there was no shellfish residue in the kitchen.”

  “Even if there was a bit of residue, it should only have made her sick. Not killed her.”

  I waited a moment before going on. “Right. So we’re thinking about other sources. What about where she works—LifeScience?”

  Dr. Nikano tilted her head. “You mean a biochemical hazard? I doubt it. They’re super careful in those companies. What Dr. Curran told me points to anaphylactic shock, not some other type of poisoning. The protein hits fast and it hits hard. If she got it at the lab, she wouldn’t have made it to your dinner party.”

  “What about after she left the party, then? She only felt a little bit ill at dinner. Maybe someone gave her the allergen afterward.”

  “Gave her?”

  “It seems unlikely, I know—if someone wanted to kill her, why not just do it the old fashioned way?”

  Dr. Nikano looked perplexed, almost hurt by the idea. She folded her hands. Lines runnelled her forehead.

  “So this doesn’t make any more sense to you than it does to us,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  On the wall I saw that she had an MD from UCSF, one of the best research medical schools in the country. “Can you find out what happened? Do some more tests?”

  “Oh, I intend to. This one’s got my neck hairs up. I’ll request samples from Dr. Curran. If an autopsy has been done, I’ll get the report.”

  I took a leap. “Her parents are on their way, but it may take a day or two. They’ve asked that everything possible be done.”

  “I’ll call the hospital right away.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Nikano. We really appreciate it.”

  “Jill,” she corrected. She gave me a small smile. “Here’s my card. Call me as soon as you find out more.”

  I started out the door. Papers shuffled on the desk. Jill’s voice called from behind me. “Sheila was… special. Life should have been kinder to her.”

  » » » » »

  I drove over Twin Peaks on the way home, just to get the view. The road carved a figure eight between the hills, and the city scrolled before my eyes, water on three sides. The line of the coast to the west was smudged by ocean haze. The towers of downtown sprouted to the northeast. Telegraph Hill and the Marina stood green to their left, the warehouses of South of Market, former home of the Web frenzy, to their right. To the east, beyond the flatlands of the Mission, a bump rose beside the bay. It was Potrero Hill, lit by the last of the day’s sunlight. My flat was on the far side, the top floor of a peeling two-story Edwardian.

  It took me fifteen minutes to cross the Mission and get home. As I clomped up the stairs, lugging the rented film gear, Jenny’s voice called from above, “Bill, I’m here.”

  She met me on the landing and buried her face in my shoulder. A long sigh left her body. “I called to say I was coming. But your machine kept answering. I just—I didn’t want to be alone.”

  “It’s all right.” I kissed her, held her some more, and put aside my reservations. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be thrilled about Jenny letting herself into my flat without checking with me first. We had different ideas about boundaries—I thought they existed. But this was different. I had to admit it felt good to have her waiting here and pressing into me so hard. I stroked her hair, kissed her again, and agreed that a beer was just what we needed.

  My apartment was a railroad flat, four rooms off of a corridor of wide-planked floors and chipped moldings. I went into a small middle room that served as my office and pressed the play button on my answering machine. Between Jenny’s messages was one from my new friend Gregory. Apparently he felt he hadn’t come on strong enough the first time.

  “Bill-boy, we need to talk. Rita’s not returning my calls. There’s something you need to know. I wanted to tell you in person, but—you’re at serious legal risk if you proceed with the Kumar shoot. Call me back immediately. For your own benefit. You’re on my dashboard and the light is blinking.”

  Jenny stood with a beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She tugged at my belt loop. “Don’t call him back right now.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  We went to the living room at the front of the flat. A sofa just fit inside the cove of a bay window. Shelves with too much camera gear and too many books took up two walls.

  Jenny and I sat on the sofa. She said Perkins had called to tell her that he expected to reach Sheila’s parents soon. They were travelling in northern Africa. At noon she had met Marion for lunch near the small office Jenny leased in downtown Palo Alto.

  “She’d already heard about Sheila,” Jenny said. “She seemed, I don’t know, kind of distracted, until I told her about going into Sheila’s apartment. Suddenly she was all over me. She tried to get me to tell her where the keys were.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t say. I told her about the hard drive, too. That really set her off.”

  “I imagine Fay was snooping around because of Simon—but why Marion?”

  “I don’t know.” Jenny’s voice was soft and sleepy. Her head rested on my shoulder. Her finger traced a wandering pattern on my shirt. “You have the diary, right?”

  “It’s with the film gear. I’ll get it.”

  She pulled me back. “Not yet.”

  “Did you talk to Fay?” I asked, staying put.

  Jenny’s head went back to my shoulder. She answered absently. “She called, asked about Sheila’s parents…” Her hand strayed over my buttons, undid one, then went under the shirt. “Acted like nothing was wrong.”

  “I don’t really like the idea, but we ought to read the diary. It might explain some things.”

  Her other hand slid under the back of my shirt, then down into my pants. “Let’s forget about it for a minute.”

  I didn’t object. Her head rose and she pressed her mouth into mine. Her fingers kept working the buttons. When she got the shirt off, she went for the belt. Pretty soon she was doing things to me that she hadn’t done since we first got together.

  She shed her clothes and pulled me on top of her. One long leg draped over the back of the couch and the other rested on the coffee table. With her musky wine breath hot on my face and her slender hips pushing up to meet me, everything else melted away.

  As we lay entwined on the sofa, darkness crept over us through the bay window. Jenny stroked the back of my head. Her face glowed gently.

  “Bill, I’m so happy to be here.”

  “Me, too.” The statement felt true in both big and small ways. I was happy to have my limbs entangled here on the couch with hers. But I was even more happy to be here in my house, here on this planet. To have the fabric of an old sofa scraping my skin. To wiggle my toes. The keenness of the feeling was a little disturbing, given that I’d been gazing at Sheila’s cold corpse just yesterday. It seemed wrong for us to revel so carnally.

  “I feel so alive,” she said.

  “Alive,” I agreed, “and a little guilty.”

  “We have to carry on, Bill. Celebrate life.” Jenny rolled over on top of me and cupped my cheeks. Her eyes were full, a swirl of pearly blue at each center. “Let’s have a baby.”

  A thrill fluttered through my stomach, as if the universe was focused on us at this moment with just that in mind: creating a new life. But an imp of rationality still scratched in the corner of my brain. Jenny and I were reacting to the stress of a death. The impulse to procreate right now was the most natural thing in the world. But we should wait and see what other emotions followed this one.

  I just smiled at her and said, “Do you want something to eat?”

  Disappointment clouded her face. “You don’t have to feel bad about Sheila all the time. We’re still here.”

  I stood, and Jenny started to get up with me.

  “Stay,” I said. “I’ll whip up some
thing for dinner.” I wanted to be alone for a minute.

  I started some water boiling and some oil heating in the kitchen. After taking Jenny a new glass of wine, I went back to the stove. There were three or four dishes in my repertoire. I had some shrimp in the freezer. I sautéed them with some red peppers and chili flakes, and put them on noodles.

  We sat on the couch without talking, still naked, in the dark. Passing headlights slid up and away through the blinds. Now and then a car door slammed outside. The freeway hummed faintly in the distance. Before me, on the coffee table, was a bowl of shrimp that I knew would taste good. Jenny certainly seemed to be enjoying hers. I speared a shrimp on my fork, but couldn’t bring it to my lips. Instead I just stared at it. This could have killed Sheila, I kept thinking. One little shrimp. It didn’t, and yet Sheila was still dead, without having eaten a single bite.

  9

  If Potrero Hill had a center, it was Scoby’s Cafe on 18th Street. After sleeping in the next day, Jenny and I walked up three blocks to the cafe. I brought Sheila’s diary with me.

  You could see the strata of history in the clientele. The newest stratum was the laid-off dot-com kids, in fleece and sandals, drinking coffee to no point, itemizing their severance deals and the hardship of living on unemployment. Just below that layer were the ones still plugged in by various gadgets on their belts, gulping coffee to propel them through a day of coding, milestones, delivery of deliverables, and the general job of monetizing the Internet. Then there were the artists, ambitiously scruffy in drab browns and greens. I’d moved in seven years ago during an earlier artist phase, just before the high-tech invasion, when rents were still sane. Actually, artist types had been moving to the neighborhood since the sixties and the days of the hippies. A few of them remained, too, hair turned the color of ash. Some Hell’s Angels still lurked down in Dogpatch, and increasingly the hill was subject to the legions of cutthroat mothers aiming strollers of Jacobs and Madisons at your knees, as they did in the more affluent Noe Valley.

  Now and then you’d see the guys with lunch pails stop in for a coffee to go: men who worked in the machine shops, warehouses, and piers at the base of the hill, a reminder of the days when the neighborhood was all about longshoremen and light industry. Before that, it had been a pasture called Goat Hill, with a great view and plenty of salmon in a creek long paved over.

  Jenny and I got our coffee and some banana bread and squeezed into a table in the corner. A big storefront window was behind us, and we could see the dogs and smokers who loitered on the benches outside.

  The black cover of the diary stared up at us from the little square of faux-marble. I turned the book over. “Let’s start at the end.”

  I flipped through unfilled pages to the last page of writing. Sheila’s tiny, neat script had a slight backward slant, as if braving a strong wind. I scanned for something—I didn’t yet know what—that would help us figure out what had happened. Acronyms jumped out—MCl24, Fc, FAb, HAMA—along with a slew of scientific terms. The page was dotted with small drawings as well, many of a Y-shaped figure that looked as though it were reaching to the sky like a Joshua tree.

  “Maybe it’s a work notebook,” I said. That reminded me of the zip disks. I’d transferred them to a pocket in the case of my camera, which I’d left at Rita’s for the Monday shoot.

  “No…” Jenny was peeking at the previous page. “Listen to this: Another letter from Simon. He wants a decision. I feel I’m in a tightening vise. How can I explain to him the decision is not mine, but was written generations ago?”

  Jenny hit the page with her fist. “How do you like that? She was fucking Simon after all!”

  “How could she be fucking Simon if he’s in Australia? But this does tell us that Sheila still had some interest in him, which might also explain why Fay stole the diary.”

  Jenny flipped through the pages. “I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone could be threatened by this girl. Look at these.” She held up a page of inky self-portraits. The mouth was a thin, wavering line, the hair anguished wriggles, the eyes downcast dots. It made me think of how, in the medical literature I’d read, almost everyone who had experienced anaphylactic shock described a sense of impending doom as it came on.

  We got some more coffee and kept scanning. Some pages were dense with writing, some contained only a few brief, melancholy entries. Drawings were sprinkled throughout. Some were strange figures that had appeared in her dreams. One was a mouse, surrounded by more of those Y shapes, and various calculations. I got the feeling she was trying to work out a scientific puzzle.

  “I knew Sheila was shy,” Jenny said. “I didn’t realize she was so… sad.”

  “She was just struggling, Jenny.”

  “She had no self-esteem. Look at this business with Simon. Let’s say, for a minute, it’s true that he wanted to hook up with her again. It seems like she wanted to, too—but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Or wouldn’t decide. Or whatever.”

  “There’s something else.”

  Jenny waited, but I couldn’t explain it to her yet. I’d seen something at the dinner party, a pungent wit and an inquisitive mind. I saw it in the journal, too. Her hesitations came, in part, from being open minded, wanting to inspect things from every angle. The journal entries read like a series of investigations, even when she was analyzing the dark clouds of her own psyche.

  No, something else had her in a twist. She appeared to be in a crisis about work. She described being transferred out of her group two weeks ago and being stuck with tedious titration tasks in the new post. It made her question her future at LifeScience and her sense of purpose in general. One of the last entries mentioned that she was going to talk with Karen about it—the same Karen, almost certainly, that Perkins had mentioned at the hospital. Sheila was very nervous about having set up that meeting, though she didn’t spell out why.

  But there was more to it than work. Something else between the lines—I took the diary from Jenny and looked for an entry that might unlock it. “Here,” I said, “read this.”

  Called Mother tonight. Hard to tell if she understood me. Could barely make out her words. At first her responses seemed non sequiturs, but then I began to feel she had something incredibly wise and insightful to tell me, something just on the edge of my understanding, if only I could make that one last leap of logic with her. A leap beyond my scientific mind.

  Father says she is fine, no change, no need to worry. But each time I call I feel she has drifted a little farther from my reach. The calls are painful. Why do I live so far away from her? I know the answer. It’s not to do with her at all. I feel so bad for her—maybe because I fear seeing myself in her. I wonder if I’m just fleeing from my own fate? Not the one I have the illusion of shaping, but the one written in my DNA. Maybe what it comes down to is that I am afraid to face up to my own future. Mother’s helplessness, our shared destiny.

  We humans owe our existence to our genes, yet they will betray us for the smallest selective advantage. We’re built for reproduction, and once that is done, our genes could care less what happens to us as an organism. Does the world really need more babies? No, it’s our genes that do. They code for chemicals that make us want to propagate. From the gene’s point of view we’re just temporary vessels in which to ride until passed to the next vessel. The vast majority of mutations are disasters for individuals, but for genes they’re the engine of immortality. One comes along every so often that happens to improve the species’ survival and genes are all over it, like investors in a new technology. Most of the candidates are losers, but the winners win big.

  Of course, genes don’t think or plan. Like all life, they plunge ahead blindly. Their self-seeking nature is theoretical. Who’s to say the theory is “right”? It’s a choice, a glass through which to view the world. I never bought into the idea until I saw it in action here, but technology does have a logic and force of its own. Look at how the people in Silicon Valley drive themselves. Eighty-hour weeks, and
that’s when no deadline looms. Half of them barely exist in their bodies: their real lives take place on a screen. The other half tone and polish their bodies like sports cars.

  I suppose my own work is a way of wrenching unwanted destinies away from nature. Taking them into our own hands, refusing to be cast as one of the losers. Yet even as I do this, I see how it can be twisted by others, turned to their own purposes. I see how unpredictable the effects of my actions are, as unpredictable as the effects of engineering a new molecule into an organism. As unpredictable as people are, even the ones who came into our field with the best intentions.

  I know I’m only sabotaging myself, and yet I can’t stop identifying with Smidge and her lonely fate. Mine may well be the same. By the time it comes, my mother, the only one who would understand, will be long gone.

  “Jeez,” Jenny said. “She really is kind of morose, don’t you think?”

  “Do you know who Smidge is?” I asked.

  “No, she never mentioned her. Do you have any idea what she’s talking about with this destiny stuff?”

  I leaned back against the window and took a sip of coffee. “She’s trying to recast her role, rewrite her script.”

  Jenny only shook her head.

  Closing the book, I said, “Well, I don’t see any obvious answer to what happened to Sheila. Unless it’s in a language we don’t understand yet. I do want to find this Karen. She might be able to tell us what is really going on at LifeScience.”

  » » » » »

  The walk back to my flat reminded me of why I live in San Francisco. There had been a few wisps of fog in the morning, but they were gone now. The sky was brilliant autumn blue, the bay a luminous mirror. A red and white container ship slid up the Oakland channel.