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By Root 1443 0

reasonably well. He hadn’t shaken too visibly; he’d managed to keep up his end of the conversation and to look at Phyllida with polite interest. That evening, when he came back to the apartment, Madeleine greeted him wearing only a bath towel. Then that was gone, too. He took her over to the bed, trying not to think too much. Taking off his pants, he was reassured to see that he had a perfectly adequate erection. He tried to move through this window of opportunity, but the practicalities of birth control shut the window as quickly as it had opened. And then, embarrassingly, he had begun to cry. To press his face into the mattress and weep. Who knew if this was a real emotion? Maybe it was just the drug doing something to him. The calculating presence who inhabited the back of his mind figured that crying would soften Madeleine toward him, would bring her near. And it worked. She cradled him, rubbing his back, whispering that she loved him.

At that point, he must have fallen asleep. When he awoke he was alone. The pillowcase was damp, as was the sheet beneath him. The bedside clock said 10:17. He lay in the dark, his heart beating wildly, seized with the fear that Madeleine had left for good. After a half hour, Leonard got out of bed and took an Ativan; soon, he fell asleep again.

The following Friday, in Perlmann’s office at Mass Gen, Leonard stated his case.

“I’ve been taking eighteen hundred milligrams since June. Now it’s October. That’s four months.”

“And you seem to be tolerating the lithium pretty well.”

“Well? Look at my hand.” Leonard held it out. It was as steady as a rock. “Just wait. It’ll start shaking in a minute.”

“Your serum levels look good. Kidney function, thyroid function—both fine. Your kidneys clear the stuff really fast. That’s the reason you need this high a dose to keep your lithium level therapeutic.”

Leonard had driven to Boston with Madeleine, in the Saab. The night before, a little after ten, Kilimnik had called Leonard at his apartment, saying that he needed a batch of new samples the next morning and that Leonard should prepare them that night. Leonard had gone over to the lab in the dark and had run the gel trays, visualized the DNA, and left the fragment images on Kilimnik’s desk. As he was leaving, he noticed that Beller or Jaitly had left one of the microscopes on. He was about to switch off the illuminator when he noticed that there was a slide on the stage. So he bent over to have a look.

Gazing into a microscope still brought Leonard the same amazement as it had the first time he’d done it, on a used Toys “R” Us model he’d gotten for Christmas when he was ten. It always felt kinetic, as if he wasn’t looking through an objective lens so much as diving headfirst into the microscopic world. From being left on, the eyepiece was uncomfortably hot. Leonard turned the coarse focus and then the fine focus and there they were: a herd of haploid yeast cells undulating like children in the surf at Race Point Beach. Leonard could see the cells so clearly he was surprised they didn’t react to his presence; but they remained oblivious, as always, swimming in their circle of light. Even in the emotion-free medium of the agar broth, the haploid cells seemed to take their solitary condition as undesirable. One haploid, in the lower left quadrant, was orienting itself toward the haploid cell next to it. There was something beautiful and dance-like about this. Leonard felt like watching the whole performance, but it would take hours and he was tired. Switching off the illuminator, he walked back through the darkness to his building. By that time it was after two.

The next morning, Madeleine drove him into Boston. She chauffered him every week, happy to spend an hour browsing the bookstores in Harvard Square. As they made their way along Route 6, under a low-hanging sky the same dull gray color as the saltboxes scattered across the landscape, Leonard examined Madeleine out of the corner of his eye. Under the leveling process of college, it had been possible to ignore the differences in their upbringing.