Orfeo (6 page)

Listening?
She laughed
. I listen to Bloomberg. When I have time. Swear to me you aren’t moving anywhere.

He swore.

I’m so sorry about Fidelio,
she said.
She was a good one.

She’s only gone out, he wanted to say, and doesn’t feel like coming home.

I’ll find you another. I’ll get on it tonight. How do you feel about border collies
?

He could hear her clicking keys, already searching, even before he said good night.

I wanted to believe that music was the way out of all politics. But it’s only another way in.

The thermal cycler, acquired for a few hundred dollars online, was getting some good PCR product yields. He couldn’t wrap his brain around what happened inside the quarter-thimble reaction tube: the fragments cleaving, the jumbled bases assembling themselves onto the exposed templates, the strands of DNA doubling and redoubling, exploding into incomprehensible numbers. The thought of it made him feel religious.

For raw materials, Els relied on a pair of online shops that would have struck him as insane two years ago. One was named Mr. Gene
,
like some bargain reseller or used-car salesman. Between the two sites, he could buy all kinds of made-to-order materials without breaking the bank. Do-it-yourself bio: the latest mushrooming cottage industry. A computer, a credit card, and a little patience, and a person might customize a living thing.

Life at the smallest levels, its pointless overabundance, the sheer profligacy of its chemical signaling: he had no wilder an art to witness, before he died. As he worked, a line from a letter that Mahler once sent to his faithless Alma hummed in his head:
We are brought back to ourselves by solitude, and from ourselves to God is only a step
. . .

He went to bed late and woke soon after falling asleep. Fortunately, he needed little sleep anymore. When the sun came up the next morning, it was almost as if nothing at all had happened in the night.

Once, I’d hoped to make thousands of runaway pieces. They failed to run away. This one did. It’s all around you now, in the billions.

Two men in navy two-button suits, one of them holding a leatherette portfolio, appeared at the front door a little past eleven o’clock, the morning after the improvised funeral. They looked like counterfeit Jehovah’s Witnesses. Electioneering was still months away, and the pair were too well dressed for fund-raising.
Someone must have been telling lies about Peter Els
. The line occurred to Els and broke across his lips. He was still grinning when he opened the door on the overdressed duo.

They handed him business cards: Coldberg and Mendoza, with the Joint Security Task Force. Coldberg rubbed the fingernails of his right hand with his thumb. Mendoza had a tiny smear of egg yolk in the crook of his lips.

Mendoza said,
We’ve received a police report about bacterial cultures in the house.

I see.
Els waited for the question.

Coldberg fiddled with his ear, searching for some miniature audio hardware that had been swiped while he wasn’t looking.

Is that accurate?
Mendoza asked.

Yes
, Els said.
That’s accurate
. Lots of bacterial cultures in the house
.

Can we come in?
Coldberg asked.

Els tipped his head sideways.
It’s a hobbyist lab
.
I’m not stealing anyone’s patents.

The agent asked again. Els stepped aside and watched two pairs of Blüchers cross the transom.

At the sight of the back room, Mendoza stopped.
What’s all this gear for?

Els’s turn to be nonplussed.
You don’t know?

We’re not scientists, Mr. Els
.
You’re the expert, it seems.

Els showed them the PCR machine. He tried to explain how it worked—the cycles of denaturing and annealing—but the agents lost interest.

Coldberg pointed.
That’s your centrifuge?

I made it from a salad spinner. And I modified the rice cooker to distill water.

And that over there, with the wires?

That’s for gel electrophoresis. It’s . . . it tells you how big your molecules are.

Your molecules?

Your snippets of DNA. What have you.

You work with DNA?

The question was so artless it made Els laugh.
It’s everywhere, these days.

What’s behind the door?

Before Els could object, the two agents stepped into his clean room and contaminated his homemade laminar flow hood.

Coldberg waved a thick black pen around the room.
Where’d you get all this?
His voice had a note of admiration.

Els told him. There was nothing—nothing at all—that a person couldn’t get from some obliging five-star vendor.

How much did this set you back?

Less than you think. It’s amazing what you can get for nothing, in auctions. All those bankrupt biotech start-ups . . . Penn State was dumping a bunch of perfectly good scopes just because they were a few years old. I picked up a three-thousand-dollar cell incubator for two hundred and ninety bucks on eBay. The low-temperature freezer was my biggest-ticket item, believe it or not. Everything together cost less than five thousand dollars.

Five thousand?

Els shrugged.
That’s one Mediterranean cruise. Or one big-screen television, five years ago. Of course, the reagents can add up, depending on where you get them.

The word had a bad effect on Mendoza. Els regretted using it. But he’d broken no laws. No serious ones, anyway.

What reagents do you work with?
Mendoza asked.

Els listed a few. Coldberg drew a pad from his portfolio and addressed the tip of his pen.
What kind of bacteria are you stocking?

These days?
Serratia marcescens
. It’s a motile, short-rod anaerobe.

Coldberg asked for spelling. Mendoza ran his finger across the top of a twenty-four-well microplate sitting on the table.

Is it a pathogen?
Coldberg asked.

Els stood still and composed himself.
No offense, but this stuff is all over your bathroom. The grout in your shower. The water line in your toilet tank . . .

You don’t know my wife,
Mendoza said
.

Coldberg glared at his partner, then at Els.
Is it harmful to humans?

Everything was harmful to humans.

It can give you infections, yes. Urinary tract. Conjunctivitis. But you’d have to work hard to hurt yourself with it. They used it in school labs, back when I was a kid. The Army sprayed it on San Francisco.

When was this?

I don’t know. Fifty years ago?

You’re not the Army,
Coldberg said. And Els realized that he might be in trouble.

Coldberg waved the pen again, as if it were a laser pointer.
What exactly are you doing with all this?

The question that should have been asked some time earlier hung in the air. Els waved toward the pipettes on a wall rack he’d made from kitchen clamps.
Learning about cell biology. It’s a hobby. It’s a whole lot like cooking, to tell you the truth.

You’re not a biologist?

Els shook his head.

But you’re manipulating the DNA of a toxic organism?

I . . . If you want to describe it that way.

Why?

There were scores of good reasons, and not a single one would be credible to this pair. In the year of Els’s birth, no one had even known what a gene was made of. Now people were designing them. For most of his life, Els had ignored the greatest achievement of his age, the art form of the free-for-all future that he wouldn’t live to see. Now he wanted a little glimpse. Billions of complex chemical factories in a thimble: the thought gave him the cold chill that music once did. The lab made him feel that he wasn’t yet dead, that it wasn’t too late to learn what life was really about.

He said nothing. Coldberg picked up a petri dish.
Where’d you learn how to manipulate microorganisms?

You know, genetics is not all that hard. It’s a whole lot easier than learning Arabic.

A grace note passed between the agents. Coldberg’s scribbling stopped.

Where’d you learn Arabic?

I don’t know Arabic,
Els said.
It was a figure of . . .

Then what’s that?

Coldberg pointed to a framed manuscript page hanging on the wall in the dining room: half domes with smaller half domes tucked in line underneath them, like the scalloped arches of a Sinan mosque. Each niche was emblazoned in flowing Arabic.

Els pressed his right temple with two fingers.
That’s a sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscript showing an old system of musical notation.

Coldberg took out his phone and began snapping pictures.

Mendoza asked,
You called Emergency Services last night?

Els nodded.

Your dog died? The police told you to call Animal Control?

Els shut his eyes.

Animal Control has no record of any call from you.

God
, Els said.
You think I nerve-gassed my dog?

Where’s the body?
Mendozza asked.

The body. The evidence.
I buried her out back.

You were instructed not to do that
.

I was,
Els agreed.

They’re in there?
Coldberg pointed at the incubator with his chin.

Els considered the question. He crossed over to the unit.
They’re harmless, if handled right.
He moved to open the cabinet door. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do. Open up a cell culture flask and sniff it, maybe. Prove that it was no worse a threat than most pets
.

The agents rushed him. Mendoza placed his ample body between the incubator and the seventy-year-old anemic composer. Coldberg came up behind. Els froze.

Coldberg shut the incubator with one thick hand.
We’d like to take this with us
.

Els stood waiting for the request to make sense.

Are you saying I . . . ? Do you have some kind of a warrant?

No
, Coldberg said.
We do not.

Is this legal? Am I being charged with anything?

No
.
You are not.

Everyone waited. The agents didn’t move. Their deference surprised Els. He seemed to have some kind of power of refusal, a power that might be fatal to use.

It shouldn’t be unplugged,
Els said.

The agents waited. Els clasped the back of his neck and nodded.

Coldberg and Mendoza unplugged the incubator, wrapped it in duct tape, and carried it off. Els stepped aside, hearing the stacks of culture flasks rattle as the incubator went by. The colonies would be smashed and scattered before the two opera buffa extras got the box down to Anti-Terror HQ.

They passed the cloud chamber bowls, that seven-foot rack of sinister-looking, sawn-off carboys invented by Harry Partch, the hobo outsider. The agents set down the incubator long enough for Coldberg to snap more pictures. Els tapped the chimes, which rang out with excruciating microtones. It reassured no one. The agents carried the incubator out to the trunk of their black sedan. Els followed them out.

We’re going to ask you not to go anywhere for a couple of days,
Mendoza told him.

Els stood in the parkway, shaking his head.
Where in the world would I go?

Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found an instrument free of all such bars.

He sat at the dining room table, stunned. He had to do something, but there was nothing useful to do. It crossed his mind to call an acquaintance, Kathryn Dresser, who worked on constitutional law at the college. But home invasion wasn’t Dresser’s field, and Els didn’t know her all that well. He’d never engaged a lawyer for anything, not even his divorce. Calling one now felt criminal.

He felt like suing. But righteousness would only incriminate him. Coldberg and Mendoza’s cards bore the address of a government building in Philadelphia, a generic email contact, and a phone. He’d failed to get any other information. He’d let two strangers come into his house and walk off with his lab equipment, no questions asked.

It wasn’t clear how much trouble he might be in. Perhaps the impounding was a routine precaution. The best thing was to keep still and see how things played out. Let the Joint Security people run their checks on him and on
Serratia
, his bacterium of choice. Let them comb through every datum collected on him in the course of seventy years and discover that he’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. Nine or ten days from now, long enough to punish him for making them waste valuable public resources on a false alarm, they’d ship the incubator back, dinged up and emptied out.

The day was shot for any real effort. His last week of work was ruined. Els drained off his nervous energy in the yard, deadheading daffodils and splitting the early hostas. He moved half the huge Blue Angel that filled the bed under the front bay window to the center of Fidelio’s grave. It would be beautiful there, by this time next spring.

When he could move no more plants around without doing damage, Els went inside and got on the computer. There, he made the rounds of his bookmarked DIY bio sites, to see whether the community of amateur researchers had any advice for a situation like this. One site mentioned a recent rise in legal confrontations. It linked to a grassroots group for citizens’ rights to do science.