Here he did his work. It was not him. On a collision course with a dozen commercial applications. Silk for tethering planes to a carrier. Body armor. Or practical scaffolding. He had been told they might soon be growing nerve cells for grafts. In the “dairy” in another building fierce ants, he was told, and a well-known golden spider were apparently milked to extract their silk, and he had a joke or two more bitter than his partner understood, who trusted his insight. Why exactly was spider silk sometimes stronger though less stretchable when milked against the spider’s will under anesthetic when we could just pull the stuff out? A sketchy thing to do even to an ant. Under CO2 was the animal asleep or just paralyzed? Meanwhile the silk lattice preoccupies his partner. How if we do our work right, later it biodegrades having done its job, leaving just bone. She listened to him and found occasion to ask about his work prior to this job. Chemistry on a monitor. Pattern at the root. Abstract. What could he tell her?
She was Dutch. “Will it be a good night?” she asked, the way she would ask if it would be a good day, when he sometimes worked days. He thought it would be. He had found himself speaking to her of the subway incident and she dismissed this woman who could say she hated science. “She doesn’t know anything. You have to do the work.” He said he thought the woman had been a little off, perhaps unwell. He wondered why she had thought he was out of work. “But it is true, you have been out of work, you know what that’s like,” said the woman at his side, and he thought that she was right as he sometimes thought there was probably very little work you could choose that was really worth it. “You were out of work, and then you have come here,” the woman was saying. A silk film is ready to come out of the tissue bath. They contemplated each other. “What you bring,” she said.
She was okay. He asked about her garden — though what did he mean, her at home, spider-silk draglines elastic with genes of genius? — and what was happening with the hives? It was polite of him. She had ordered two Russian queen bees that would be arriving in the mail, and again she suggested he come out for a visit one Saturday, bring his bike on the train. He must have had that bike a long time, she said. Ah, he had borrowed it, this at least thirty-five-year-old Schwinn one New Year’s Eve twenty something years ago where it had been left in the boisterous and cluttered basement hallway of the townhouse of the host — A New Year’s Eve party? she asked, her eyes alive — and he kept it till next day. Kept it? Oh my, she said, she caught a little intake of breath and was thinking about the story. It was the short form, he added. She left it at that. She must have only one bike up in Garrison, it occurred to him staring at photos supplied by her. Blowups of ants, puffy, monstrous, venerable showing among the folds the location of their spinning ducts. Another of a spider he didn’t know bringing the duct very close to the venom sac. Another, the ceramic gloss of a maroon and white, big-horned spider from Costa Rica, smaller than it looked, its spinning duct somewhat hidden. Spiders didn’t work well together. They ate each other.
It was late for her, though he’d just clocked in and was pondering ants again, if they unreel their silk like spiders, anchor it to something, then move away. A photo of a drab, earthen-hued garden spider showed its dragline silk for the outer rim of the web — insurance in case of a bungee bailout — strong as the golden spider’s silk but, with more amino, ten times stretchier when wet — so strong, so soft. Wasp silk they worked with, and bee. Now bee silk a real simple genes-and-protein setup — but nothing beats spider silk. She was leaving. He missed the electron microscope at the other job. Gene measurements on a screen, spectacular speculations and sure things — and now it was bacteria they could insert silk genes into and tobacco, of all things; and unlikely, unsuspecting animals. He felt her near him and turned to see her thinking. “I can see it all, what happened on the subway,” she said, her tone disturbingly new to him. He looked at her.
“She wanted to give you her bike.”
He shook his head, studying his work. A moment later, Why? he called out—why would she want to give him her bike? His coworker, gone for the night, didn’t stop or didn’t hear him call after her. He was alone tonight, as it happened. Lose your job, find one, was the philosophy. A better one than any job you could lose, though the new job doesn’t come with a certain eighty-thousand-dollar scanning device, failing which he must sometimes independently remember on his own what it was he actually already knew, or ask for help.
It was a job. Pedaling back through the park along the interior road at two in the morning, he found two kids from opposite curbs converging on him until, coasting as if to slow down, he rose and made a dash for it like a runner, his heart racing, before they could get to him, long-legged, ugly, and passed between them like prey in the deep, like a knife — he didn’t need a change of gears and didn’t have one. Out for a spin along the Meer, lamp light in the water — what is this experiment ahead, behind, around him? A tree in passing (long life and beautiful leaves, they breathe, we breathe) remembered minutes later when he hoisted the bike to clear the subway turnstile and raced carefully downstairs and up again to catch a downtown train ahead of the closing doors. He was alone in the car with one other person at this hour who watched him sit down, holding the bike before him.
Had he been drawn away from the deep shape of things into the bowels, multiple abdominal glands, ducts, dope, quaint feats of animals that supply silk for enzyme-solvent med capsules or stitch the leaves of the gingko tree he had just felt near him in the park? The train got under way. His fellow passenger stood up and came to sit opposite him. An Asian with a faded khaki knapsack on his back, he leaned forward, a bunch of brochures in one hand. He wore flip-flops showing his brown toes. His taut stare must be returned. “You ride bike on subway?” “It travels with me.” The man laughed a staccato Chinese laugh. “I give you backpack, you give me bike.” “Not a chance.”
The stations of the line seemed, afterward, when he got home, to have been contracted to one unexpected platform to come, as though what passed between the two men was too much for the actual track time.
“You have job, you wok, you study, get better job — what you study?” “I don’t know what I study. I study silk.” “Sirk!” (the man shakes his handful of brochures as if that’s what they’re about and laughs a laugh that is no laugh) “Sirk wom!” (Yes of course — the silk worm with its half-mile-long cocoon-winding.) “Sister wok in sirk factory!” “Does she make comforters? Bed covers?” “Factory!” “Good for her, good for your sister,” one adds, not feeling it, then feeling it—“in Suzhou?” Yes, yes (the brother, unsurprised, contemplating your rat trap with small black backpack clamped tight), you recall women in hygienic caps stretching an already arch-stretched square of cocoon silk across a queen-size bed — and a Dutch tour group, a few years ago now, three women among them with Chinese babies, it was pointed out to him by the woman he was with.