Dr. Marsteller Chapter 15
15
When they
returned from vacation, Dr. Marsteller went straight into the lab to check on
how his mice were progressing. They were
all gone. He went down to the lab animal
vet office to talk to the technician responsible for feeding the mice.
-Where are
my mice?
-What mice?
-Room
A33. Where are they?
-Sir, those
mice were all sick and some of them had died when we went to check on them a
few days ago. They all had to be
euthanized. We called your lab. Are you Dr. Marsteller?
-Yes.
-We talked
to one of your students. Johnson, I
believe, and he gave us the go ahead to euthanize them. We threw them in the freezer. You can thaw a couple out and open them up to
see what the problem is.
-Thank you.
Dr.
Marsteller went to the freezer, put on some purple nitrile gloves and removed a
couple mice. He covered them up and took
them into his office. In his office, he
cleaned off his desk and set them on a plastic board. He reached into a drawer and removed a
scalpel given to him as a present 20 years ago.
He realized he’d have to go back into the lab to get a blade.
-Relax.
One of the
mice’s mouths moved. Or at least he
thought it did. They were dead and
frozen, so it couldn’t have. He
definitely heard the word, but didn’t know who said it. It looked like the mouse said it. He looked around the room to see if anyone
was there, but no one was. That was
strange, he thought. Then, as he stared
at the mice on his table, realizing he was just imagining things, a rage welled
in him like a powerful surge of electricity.
As the paroxysm culminated, he picked up his lamp on the desk and
whipped it against the wall. It
shattered all his framed pictures, awards and diploma. As he picked up the pieces he started
laughing at the symbolism of it. Then he
laughed a little harder and finally sat against the wall on the floor in a fit
of hysterics. His graduate students
rushed in to see what the smash was and why he was laughing.
-Nothing,
nothing. Get back to work.
Perplexed
by his tears, and embarrassed for him, they started to leave.
-Johnson,
stay here.
-What’s the
problem, sir?
Dr.
Marsteller pointed to the mice.
-What is
the meaning of letting the lab animal people sacrifice these animals?
Dr.
Marsteller watched Johnson’s face. God,
he can barely contain his amusement, the little prick, he thought.
-Sir, they
were in pretty bad shape. Well beyond
what usually constitutes euthanizing them.
-And you
didn’t feel the need to email me?
-You said
not to bother you while you were on vacation.
-Well, if
it’s something important like this…
-We euthanize
animals all the time, why would this be any more important?
Johnson
could barely contain himself. He was
toying with Dr. Marsteller.
-Get the
hell out of here you fucking punk.
Johnson
left quickly. Chastising himself for
venturing to be so brazen. He knew to
walk a fine line around the boss.
Finally,
Dr. Marsteller calmed down, realized Johnson wasn’t trying to sabotage his
experiment, and waited patiently for the mice to thaw out. After cutting them open, cracking the skull
and examining the brain, all five had massive tumors that quickly spread from
the point of transfection throughout the brain.
He couldn’t understand why the cancer had started if he was just
expressing one protein. But it was
obvious it caused the cells to divide aggressively. He sent the animals off to be incinerated,
then sat down and thought about what he could do to change the experiment. Maybe it was best if he tried the skin. The coat of a mouse looks noticeably
different as it ages. He could transfect
a part of the animal’s skin and see if it ages with the rest of the body. This would also be a good start for Mrs.
Viscane because she is so concerned with her outward appearance. He could show her the evidence, as the rest
of the mouse’s coat looks old and stringy while the patch where he transfected
would look young and shiny.
Who was he
kidding? he thought. He looked out the
window and watched the rain fall through the sky under the streetlight. It dropped straight down; the air was
completely still. The sky was black as a
closet in a cellar. The glow of the
light reflected the sifting strings of rain and emanated no more than five feet
around the lamp like a halo. Dr.
Marsteller wanted a cigarette. He quit
20 years ago, but now he wanted a cigarette; odd cravings for tobacco never
happened even after he would have a cigar with friends at a conference. But the overwhelming desire now grabbed hold
of his mind and convinced him to drive to the gas station and pick up a pack. He took his raincoat and umbrella off the
rack and meandered his way out to his car.
His face was glistening not from the rain but from the sweat. The gas station was at the top of a ridge. The rain speckled his windshield gradually
picking spots until the entire glass was a thin veil of water and then the
wiper started with a clunk and swoosh, the water gathered in a wave at the
blade and sluiced over the edges and top of the blade as the rest was pushed to
the driver’s side wiper, but when the water felt as if it had the edge, like a horde
of barbarians attacking a roman legion, the wiper swooshed back over the
remaining water and not enough remained to be of any threat. A flash of light and a honking horn blazed
past him. He forgot to pay attention to
oncoming traffic.
The other car nearly grazed the guardrail
on the cliff side. Dr. Marsteller was
well over the center lane. He jerked the
car back towards the hillside just in time to avoid a head on collision.
-Damn, I gotta pay attention to what the
hell I’m doing.
For the rest of the drive he took a
fastidious approach to the task and watched the dotted yellow center line with
special interest, attempting to keep his driver’s side wheels about two feet
away from it on the narrow road, he judged this positioned his car in the exact
center of his lane and tried to remain in that area over the winds and meanders
of the road until he reached the gas station.
He pulled in and realized his car was on empty, so he filled it up with
gas and went in for a pack of smokes.
-Camel lights.
The girl looked at him strangely. He recognized her. It was the high school waif with the dirty
blonde hair and copious makeup. He liked
to trade barbs with her on a regular occasion when he came in for coffee in the
morning or stopped to fill up.
-Ya don’t usually get smokes, do ya?
Dr. Marsteller looked at her with a
sheepish expression to indicate he was ashamed.
Then he thought better of it. I’m
a goddamned professor, he thought, what do I have to apologize for getting a
pack of smokes for?
-No, not usually, but I really need one
tonight.
-You look like you do.
-Thanks, I bet I do, you got matches?
He noticed a butane lighter shaped like a
tiny grenade next to the register.
-Never mind, can I get one of those
lighters.
-They’re $2.50, these are only 80 cents,
she said in a manner to let him know that the price was extortionate, like
paying $100 dollars for a Snickers. She
pointed to the small 80-cent lighters of primary colors standing in a row.
-No, he said, turning the grenade over in
his hand, I gotta have the grenade.
-Whatever.
-I had gas on 8.
-I saw ya.
-Take it easy, study hard, you can be a
professor someday.
A semi with a load of hogs pulled up to
the front. The movement of the hogs was
perceptible under the lights through the holes of the steel rusty trailer.
-If it makes me look like you, I don’t
want it.
-We all get old, honey. Not too old to look at you, he said out of
habit.
-Yeah, get out of here, she laughed.
The driver walked in, carrying with him
the waft of hogshit off his dirty jeans.
-Man, it is pouring out there. I hear it’s gonna flood.
-I’d be surprised if it didn’t, said Dr.
Marsteller.
-Well, I sure as hell better be able to
get through tonight.
-Take it easy, Dr. Marsteller said to the
girl as he left.
When he reached his car, the loudspeaker
from the register came on at his pump and the voice crackled out of it.
-Nice butt.
He waved back at her, sat in his car and
drove away from the pumps. He stopped
about 20 feet away and opened the pack of cigarettes. The cellophane wrapper seemed to be a little
more intricate and tight to get off compared to what he remembered. He had also never handled anything but a soft
pack. He figured the box was sturdier
than it was and in his hurry he smashed it and flattened the cigarettes. After eventually opening it, he took out one
of the flattened smokes and lit it with the grenade. The smell of the smoke and the feeling went
straight to his head and he coughed a little.
It tasted awful and his head spun immediately. The sickening feeling rushed with nostalgia
to his head, a feeling like the first time he changed the oil in his car or
read a book cover to cover in one day.
It was oddly pleasurable but effortful, like it meant something. The smell of cigarette smoke to someone who
quit smoking is much worse than the smell for someone who has never smoked
before in their life. Dr. Marsteller
avoided it as much as he could when he was walking around campus. And the first cigarette tasted like that
smell; it immediately made him queasy and ill.
But the next one was a little better.
By his third in a row he was shaking from the nicotine and it was
starting to feel a little better. He
watched the rain splash into pools underneath his headlights and the occasional
car driving by sent a wave of water up onto his hood and windshield. The eerie lights of the gas station reflected
off his review mirror. The trucker started
up and drove slowly out the other entrance.
The girl was watching Dr. Marsteller closely out the window; standing
there behind the glass behind the rain in the bright lights of the store like a
modern gypsy, with electric glow in place of oriental robes and offering
plastic packaged artificial foods instead of a palm read or fortune. He put the car into gear and drove down the
road in second gear along side the cliff.
The car slid a little on new uneven
patches of blacktop recently laid to cover potholes. The road had needed to be repaved a
generation ago. He lit another cigarette. None of the experiments were working. Damn cancer ridden fleabag rodents. But the idea is what mattered, he thought. The ideas were valid, and they would possibly
be proven to be true in the long run and he would be vindicated. My techniques are likely limited. But it’s still falsification. He knew it.
No matter how he tried to justify it, he knew it was fabricating,
falsifying. It was lying. Everything he had done in his life had been
straight and narrow. Well, he thought
about it, there were a few incidents in papers from grad school where I lost
some of my data and made it up the best I could from memory. But the results of those papers were
basically the same as what the experiments told me. So what if I falsified information? It wasn’t like I raped anybody or murdered
anybody. That’s what people always say
when they try to get themselves out of a bind, he thought. A murderer says, at least I didn’t rape anybody
and the rapist says, at least I didn’t murder anybody. They should lock me up and throw away the
key. But they won’t. What am I saying? This isn’t a federal crime. I won’t go to jail. I’ll be ostracized from the scientific
community, my wife will lose any respect she once had for me and my son will
turn into some jaded loser with no faith in humanity, but other than that I’ll
be all right. Alexandria was the only
key. As long as I can keep her
quiet. She’s probably told every other
grad student in there. But they don’t
want to lose their positions either, because then they’ll have to start new in
a different lab and go another five years.
And Alexandria would never tell her friends from other labs because she
doesn’t want to seem like a hypocrite for once praising someone she now
despised. But if it was all just over
now and I could be at square one like I never started it in the first
place. He looked at the guardrail. The cliff on the other side was a forty-foot
drop. What if I just drove this damn
thing right off the road and ended it? he thought. What am I clinging to? This is just life. It’s all right mom, it’s life and life only,
Bob Dylan used to sing. No one knows
what it means and no one knows why we’re here.
Every religion is based in nothingness, he thought, what does it mean,
what would it matter if I just drove off the road and killed myself. It wouldn’t matter at all; if I don’t, I’ll
live for 10 or 20 more years. The only
thing I’d care to see is my child grow up, but would he grow up any worse or
better if I were not around? Eventually
he’d figure things out. And everything
would be over. I’d die some hero; they’d
blame it on the rain. They’d say that
the conditions were too bad for me to be driving on this treacherous road and I
wouldn’t even have the stigma of suicide on my name if I died. But so what if I did, what if they had some
detectives come up here and analyze it and realize it wasn’t the rain and I
actually did commit suicide. I’d be
dead. I wouldn’t give a shit whether or
not they said I committed suicide or whether it was an accident. Other people would say it was a conspiracy,
and I’d be a hero. They’ll think
government can’t handle the logistics and nightmare of eternal life and has to
get rid of me. What does anything matter
when you’re dead? What does anything
matter when you are alive? It’s all the
same. And when you’re in a bind like
this, you might as well not be around to see how the bricks get laid on top of
you. Because then you’ll be wishing you
could go back - not to the time when you made the decision to publish a
falsified paper, but you wish you could go back to the time on this road right
here in this rain smoking this cigarette and you’ll wish you took this fucking
Audi and drove it right through that fucking guardrail and killed your
worthless piece of shit.
Dr. Marsteller watched the steel rail
like a ribbon sling past the side of his car and the rain and he decided he
made up his mind and once he made up his mind there was no turning him
back. He gritted his teeth and cringed
and jerked the wheel as hard as he could to bear right into the guardrail.
Sparks flew off the bumper as it drilled
the rail and his tires screeched at a 45 degree angle to the road, his car
bounced off and swung back and the rail took the paint off the passenger door
as more sparks flew up. But it bounced
off again and he stomped down hard on the brakes. The car screeched to a stop in the middle of
the road with steam rising off the hood in the rain. He put his head on the steering wheel in
frustration and then slowly pulled out another cigarette and lit it with the
grenade lighter.
-Goddamnit!
This originally appeared in Dr. Marsteller