He stared harder down the barrel of the microscope. The cells looked like indistinct clumps on the slide. He blinked several times, his eyelashes brushing the lens. But the cell outlines did not appear to sharpen. He could not deny that his poor sight was due to lack of sleep.
With a sigh, he ripped off his mask and gloves, pulled off his lab coat, and left it all in a heap on the floor. He flicked off the lights and stumbled toward his cot. Just a few hours of sleep would do the trick, he thought, feeling his way forward. His hand hit an aluminum rod, and he felt along the nylon fabric to the pillow resting at one end. As he climbed onto the cot, it groaned under his weight and sank low. He could sense the concrete coolness of the ground below his back.
On the night she had found him in his apartment, a year ago, he had been lying in darkness, coming out of an intoxicated stupor. The memory of those first few minutes was vague: a haze pinpricked by the sound of a doorbell he did not realize he had. He had picked himself up off the couch and staggered to the door, cursing the doorman for allowing an unannounced visitor to drop by. Damn tax collector, he had thought. But hadn’t he paid the bills? Or was that last month?
He opened the door. The sight of a beautiful woman standing there made him shut it. Wrong apartment. The bell rang again—a sharp note, like a dog’s cry. Hesitating, he opened the door a second time.
“Sam Lisio?” the woman said tentatively, a hopeful smile on her lips.
And then she had shifted into focus: those long black waves covering her shoulders, the high cheekbones and the intelligent blue eyes, but now with tiny crow’s-feet at the corners, the only testament to the intervening sixteen years. He wondered later how he must have looked to her then, with his thinning white hair and sallow skin, and the scent of whiskey permeating the air between them.
“Arianna Drake?” he ventured.
“Sam, I can’t believe I found you!”
“After all these years…,” he mumbled, fighting the mental fog of alcohol and memory lapse to recall the last time he had seen her. It must have been at one of her staged rallies at Columbia, right before the DEP swept in and arrested him. Oh, how quixotic they had been at that rally—he, a respected professor, and she, his admiring student—to believe that logic would prevail. Only three months later, he had stepped into his prison cell, fifty-four square feet of helplessness.
“What are you doing here?” he blurted.
Her proposition, and the reason for it, had shocked him out of his daze. The risks involved did not bother him; returning to jail was not much worse than the way he was living, in purposeless, endless solitude. And the thought of having his own lab with fresh embryos—it was like handing eyes back to an artist so he could paint his masterpiece. Of course, he would have to study his neurobiology texts again, to be sure he remembered all the procedures correctly, and he would have to examine the pathology of multiple sclerosis in particular. Years before, his peers around the country had been starting to develop theories about MS and embryonic stem cells that could help him get started, and he knew just which scientific journals to consult.
“You’ll do it?” she had gasped. “You really want to do it?”
“I want nothing more,” he had replied.
* * *
As he lay asleep on the cot, Sam’s lips moved to form the words in accordance with the memory. The image of her unbridled elation sprang to mind, on cue, as the familiar sequence progressed. How she had looked at him in tears, with so much gratitude, so much hope, as if he were the only person in her world worthy of a hero’s reception. Only one other woman had ever looked at him like that.
Never did he think he would look back again. Shame and joy chafed within him, an inseparable pair, yet each dulled the other. A woman three decades his junior; a woman who had likened him to her own father; a woman whose life he had the power to save.
He almost told her once, a few months back when they had shared a steak dinner at her apartment. Though their lives flowed from the same high-pressured well of uncertainty, together they found reason to smile; together they laughed. With her, time simply slipped away. Sam remembered thinking that life used to be like this, that it still could be. It saddened him to say good-bye to her even for a night—and so, on that night, he had hovered outside her apartment, daring himself to chase his heart back inside. And even then, he knew he was fooling himself. As long as she did not know, he could keep clinging to the hope that perhaps one day, after he managed to solve the biological lock on those cells, she would see him as the man he really was—a man full of brilliance and passion and life. And not just as the old hermit he had become, the emotional coward who fended off human closeness with irritability.
A trilling noise startled him awake. His cell phone was ringing somewhere on the counter next to his microscope. He jumped out of the cot, swearing at the darkness. While the phone
