I meant rent out the back bedroom or hire a girlfriend. Not move into some assisted living death trap.
This house has a million stairs. You don’t want me falling and breaking a hip.
Please. No one falls and breaks their hips. That was, like, a nineties television scare campaign. You’re seventy years old. Seventy’s nothing. Seventy is the new forty-five.
Do you remember how you could never go to bed without hearing Saint Anthony preach to the fishes?
Don’t change the subject. You don’t need this. You’re young. Healthy. I can get you a new dog.
How’s your mother? he asked.
She has a Facebook page, Dad. You can stalk her there.
What are you listening to these days? He’d always relied on Sara to tell him what was happening in the world of real music.
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.