TINY TANGO
Judith Moffett
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February, 1989

Although Judith Moffett is the author of two books of poetry, a book of
criticism, and a book of translations from Swedish, she made her first
professional fiction sale in 1986. Since then, she has won the John
W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer of 1988, and the Theodore Sturgeon
Award for her story "Surviving," and her first novel Pennterra
was released to high critical acclaim. She has since completed a second
novel. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, she now lives with her husband in
Rose Valley, Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in American Civilization
from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is presently adjunct
associate professor of English, and teaches courses in science fiction
and creative writing, in addition to directing a variety of independent
study projects. She has also taught for four summers at the prestigious
Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and was given a National Endowment for
the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant for her poetry -- which she
then used to finance the writing of her first novel. "Surviving" was in
our Fourth Annual Collection, and her story "The Hob" was in our Sixth
Annual Collection.

Here she offers us a disaster story of a very personal  sort, in a
powerful and deeply moving tale that may be one of the most controversial
and talked-about stories of the year.

Tiny Tango
Judith Moffett

I

I've been encouraged (read: ordered) by my friend, a Hefn called Godfrey, to make this recording. I'm not sure why. It's to be the story of my life, and frankly, a lot of my life's been kind of grim. Godfrey tells me he values the story as an object lesson, but to whom and for what purpose he's not saying. It isn't news anymore that the Hefn don't think like we do.

I made an important choice at twenty-two. Because of that choice I'm alive right now, but I'm still wondering: was it a wise choice, given that the next twenty-five years turned out to be a kind of living death? I hoped that if I did this recording, thought it all through in one piece, I'd be able to answer that question. I need to understand my life better than I do. I'm about to be put to sleep for a long time -- forever if things go badly -- and I need to know . . . well, what Godfrey thinks he knows. What it's meant. What it's all been for.

I can't really say that this review has worked, because I still don't think I know. But who can tell? Maybe you listeners in the archive will see something in it I can't see. (Godfrey's betting that you will.)

I recall a certain splendid June morning between the two accidents, mine and Peach Bottom's -- a bright, cool morning after a spell of sticky weather. I'd hobbled out to the patio in robe and slippers with my breakfast tray, and loitered over my homegrown whole-grain honey and raisin muffins and strawberry-soy milkshake, browsing through a new copy of Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine (featuring an article I'd written, on ways to discourage squirrels in the orchard and corn patch). Then, after a while, I'd taken my cane and gimped out in a leisurely way to inspect the crops. I'd broken an ankle bone that was taking its time about healing; to he forbidden my exercise routines was distressing, but also kind of a relief.

Because the kitchen garden provided my entire supply of vegetables and fruit, my interest in it was like a gardening hobbyist's crossed with a frontier homesteader's. If a crop failed I knew I wouldn't, or needn't, starve. On the other hand, since I never -- ever -- bought any produce for home consumption, if a crop failed it would almost certainly mean doing without something for a whole year. The daily tour of the kitchen garden was therefore always deeply interesting; and if the tour of the field test plots was even more so, theirs was an interestingness of a less intimate type.

Something serious had happened to the Kennebec potatoes; I noticed it at once. Yesterday at dusk the plants had been bushy and green, bent out of their beds on water-filled stalks by last week's storm of rain but healthy, thriving, beginning to put out the tiny flowers that meant I could soon steal a few small tubers from under the mulch to eat with the new peas. Now the leaves of several plants were rolled and mottled with yellow. I pulled these up right away, doubting it would do any good, sick at heart as always to see my pampered children fail, however often failure struck them down.

The biggest threat to crops in an organic garden like mine is always disease spread by insects, aphids or leafhoppers in this case, which had all but certainly passed this disease on to other potato plants by now. The mottling and leaf-rolling meant that the bugs -- probably aphids, the flightless sort I'd been taught to call "ant cows" in grade school -- had infected my Kennebecs with a virus. At least one virus, maybe more. The ants would soon have moved their dairy herd all through the patch, if they hadn't already. Plants still symptom-free would not remain so for long. When Eric showed up I would get him to spray the patch with a Rotenone solution but it was probably too late to save the crop by killing the carriers, the vector. These potatoes already had a virus, incurable and potentially lethal.

I remember that I thought: Well, that makes some more of us then.

I left the heap of infected plants for Eric to cart to the incinerator; they must not be composted but burned, and at once, or there'd be no chance at all of saving the crop and I could look forward to a potatoless year. Destroy the infected to protect the healthy. The AIDS witch-hunts of the late nineties, the vigilante groups that had broken into testing and treatment facilities all over the country in order to find out who the infected people were, had been acting from a similar principle: identify! destroy! They wanted not just the ones with the acute form of the disease, but also those who'd tested positive to HIV-I, II, and/or III. I'd been lucky; workers in the Task Force office where my records were kept had managed to stand off the mob while a terrified volunteer worked frantically to erase the computer records and two others burned the paper files in the lavatory sink. The police arrived in time to save those brave people, thank God, but in other cities workers were shot and, in that one dreadful incident in St. Louis, barricaded in their building while somebody shattered the window with a firebomb.

My luck hadn't stopped there, no siree. I had the virus right enough, but not -- still not, after twenty-five long years -- the disease itself. (These two facts have shaped my life. I mean my adult life; I'd just turned twenty-two, and was about to graduate from college in the spring of 1985, when my Western Blot came back positive and everything changed.)

Even the sporadic persecutions ended in 2001, when they got the Lowenfels vaccine. That took care of the general public; but nobody looked for a cure, or expected that a way would ever be found to eliminate the virus from the bodies of those of us who'd already been exposed to it. The best we could hope for was a course of treatment to improve our chances of not developing full-blown AIDS, at least not for a long, long time. The peptide vaccine that had become the standard therapy by 1994, which worked with the capsid protein in the cells of the virus, was ineffective with too many patients, as were the GMSC factor injections; and zidovudine and its cousins were just too toxic. A lot more research still needed to be done. We hoped that it would be, that we would not be forgotten; but we didn't think it a very realistic hope.

The bone punch, and especially the Green Monkey vaccine which quickly supplanted that radical and rather painful procedure, meant the end of terror for the unsmitten; for the less fortunate it meant at least the end of persecution, as I said, and so for us, too, the day when the mass inoculations began was a great day. A lot of us were also suicidally depressed. Imagine how people crippled from childhood with polio must have felt when they started giving out the Salk vaccine to school kids on those little cubes of sugar, and the cripples had to stand around on their braces and crutches and try to be glad.

It didn't do to think too much about it.

The Test Site clinician who gave me the news had steered me into a chair right afterwards and said, "When the results came in I made you an appointment for tonight with a counselor. She'll help you more than you'd ever believe, and I don't care what other commitments you've got to break: you be there.' And he wrote the address and the time on a piece of paper, and I went.

The counselor was a woman in her thirties, sympathetic but tough, and she told me things that evening while I sat and was drenched in wave after icy wave of terror and dread. "We don't know why some people seem to resist the virus better than others, and survive much longer, or why some of those that are AB-positive develop the disease fairly quickly, while others can have a latency period of five or six years," Elizabeth said. "We don't know for sure what triggers the development of the acute disease, if and when it does develop, or what percentage of infected people will eventually develop it.

"But there's a lot of research going on right now into what they call 'cofactors,' variables that may influence the behavior of the virus in individual cases. Cofactors are things like general health, stress levels, life style. We think -- we're pretty sure -- that it's extremely important for people like you, who've been exposed, to live as healthfully and calmly as you possibly can. The HIV-I virus is linked to the immune system. You get the flu, your immune system kicks in to fight the flu virus, the AIDS virus multiplies; so the trick is to give your immune system as little to do as possible and buy yourself some time.

"Now, what that means in practical terms is: take care of yourself. Get lots of sleep and exercise. Don't get overtired or too stressed out. Pay attention to your nutrition. Meditate. Above all, try not to fall into a despairing frame of mind! There's a good chance they'll find an effective treatment in four or five years, and if that happens and you're still symptom-free, you should be able to live a normal life with a normally functioning immune system, so long as you keep up your treatments."

That was the gist of her talk, and some of it sank in. She was wrong about the treatment, of course. In those days everybody expected it would be the vaccine that would prove impossible to make, that a drug to control the course of infection seemed much likelier. We were better off not knowing. Even with treatments to hope for, in those days it was fairly unusual to survive as long as four or five years after infection.

Elizabeth suggested a therapy group of people like myself that I might like to join, a group that had volunteered for a research project being done by a team of psychoneuroimmunologists, though we didn't know that's what they were. They were the hope-givers, that was enough. During the weeks that followed, with help from Elizabeth and the group, I began to work out a plan -- to impose my own controls over my situation, in accordance with the research team's wish to explore the effects of an extraordinarily healthful life style on symptom-free HIV-I carriers.

My undergraduate work in biology had been good enough to get me accepted into the graduate program at Cornell with a research assistantship. Until the test results came back I'd been excited by the challenge and the prospect of a change of scene; afterwards, and after a few sessions with Elizabeth and her group, I began instead to feel apprehensive about the effort it would take to learn the ropes of a new department, new university community, new city famous for its six annual months of winter. It seemed better to stick to familiar surroundings and to continue with the same counselor and therapy group. So I made late application to my own university's graduate department and was admitted, and I stayed on: my first major life decision to be altered, the first of many times I was to choose a less challenging and stressful alternative over one that in every other way looked like the more attractive choice.

I'd caught the virus from my major professor; he'd been my only lover, so there could be no doubt of that. While I was still nerving myself up to tell him about the blood test he died in an accident on Interstate 95. Distressingly enough, I'm afraid I felt less grieved than relieved. The death let me off the hook and, more importantly, cleared the way for me to stay, for Bill's presence would have been a diffculty. I'd felt from the first instant that I wanted no one , apart from the Task Force people, to know. Not my Fundamentalist family, certainly. Not my friends, from whom I now found myself beginning to withdraw (and since, like me, most of these were graduating seniors, this was easier than it sounds.) Overnight my interests had grown utterly remote from theirs. They were full of parties and career plans; I was fighting for my life, and viewed the lot of them from across the chasm of that absolute unlikeness.

I strolled, more or less, through graduate school, working competently without distinguishing myself. I wasn't in a hurry, either. Distinction and rapid progress would have meant a greater commitment and a lot more work, and these were luxuries I could no longer afford, for my first commitment, and first responsibility, now, were to keeping myself alive.

As for how I was to use this life, a picture had gradually begun to form.

First of all it was necessary to divest myself of desire. The yuppiedom I had only recently looked forward to with so much confidence -- the dazzling two-career marriage and pair of brilliant children, the house in the suburbs, the cabin in the Poconos and the vacations in Europe -- had become, item by item, as unavailable to me as a career in space exploration or ballet. Children, obviously, were out. So was marriage. So, it seemed, was sex in any form; sex had been my nemesis, scarcely discovered before it had blighted me forever. The prestigious high-pressure career in research, which my undergraduate record had made seem a reasonable ambition, had become anything but. I was not after all going to be one of those remarkable professional mothers, making history in the lab, putting in quality time with the kids every day, keeping the lines of communication with my husband open and clear at every level no matter what. I built up the picture of the life I had aspired to for my counselor and my group -- and looked at it long and well -- and said good-bye to it, as I believed, forever. All that was over.

The next step was to create an alternate picture of a life that would be possible. We discussed my abilities and my altered wish list. I toyed briefly with the idea of a career in AIDS research -- but AIDS research in the late eighties was about as calm and unstressful a line of work as leading an assault on the North Face of the Eiger in winter, and I had no yearning for martyrdom, then or ever. Through the hours and hours of therapy it emerged that what I wanted most was simple: just to survive, until the other scientists working that field had found a drug that would control the virus and make a normal life possible again. It wasn't hard to work this out in group, because we all wanted the same thing: to hang on until the day -- not too far away now -- when some hero in a white coat, mounted on a white charger, came galloping up to the fort, holding a beaker of Miracle Formula high like a banner.

But how to hang on? For each of us the answer, if different in particulars, was also the same. We wanted to he able to support ourselves (and our families, if we had them) in reasonable comfort, and to keep our antibody status secret. Achieving this, for some of us -- the older ones -- meant giving up practices in law or medicine, or business careers, or staying in but lowering our sights. Some of us quit struggling to save troubled marriages or get custody of children.

For me the obvious course seemed to be a teaching job in an academic backwater, preferably one in that same metropolitan area. Accordingly -- at a time in my life when I'd expected to be at Cornell, cultivating a mentor, working with keen zest and keener ambition at my research, developing and pursuing a strategy for landing a classy position at a prestigious eastern university -- I quietly looked into the several nearby branch campuses of the Pennsylvania State University Commonwealth Campus System and made a choice.

My personal style altered a lot during graduate school. I'd done some acting in high school and college, and that made it easier -- though you mustn't suppose it was easy -- to put my new persona over by turning down invitations ("too busy") and so on. Before long my department, which had been so delighted to keep me, had lumped me in with that breed of student that fizzles out after a promising undergraduate takeoff, and the rest of the RA's had given up on me too.

My therapy group speedily became my complete social universe. Nobody in the Bio Department could possibly have shared the intensity of common concern we shared within what we came to call the Company (after the thing Misery loves best). When as time went by one or another of us would lose the battle for wellness, the rest would push aside our own fears and rally round the ailing boon Companion, doing our best to make the final months as comfortable as we could. That wasn't easy either, let me tell you. But we did it. We were like a church family, all in all to one another. Elizabeth, who had given her life to helping us and the researchers at Graduate Hospital -- she was our pastor and our friend, and yet, even so, a little bit of an outsider. When she asked what I meant to do for fun -- since life could not consist entirely of the elimination of challenges and risks -- I could only reply that just staying alive and well seemed like plenty of fun for the present, and think privately that no true Companion would ever need to have that explained to him or her.

We never told our real names, not in a quarter of a century, and stubbornly refused all that time to evolve from a collective into an assembly of intimates, but we knew each other inside out.

But to the people in my department, who did know my name, I appeared by the age of twenty-nine to have contracted into a prematurely middle-aged schoolmarmish and spinsterish recluse, and nobody there seemed surprised when I accepted a job for which I was grossly overqualified, teaching basic biology and botany at a two-year branch of the Penn State System, fifteen miles out in the suburbs of Delaware County.

My parents in Denver were also unsurprised. Neither had known how to read between the lines of my decision to stay put rather than go to Cornell. To them all college teaching seemed equally prestigious, and equally fantastic. They liked telling their friends about their daughter the future biology professor, but they knew too little about the life I would lead for the particulars to interest them much or invite their judgment. After the first grandchild came they'd been more incurious than ever about my doings, which had seemed less and less real to them anyway ever since I left the church. My new church was the Company, and of this they knew nothing, ever.

My job was a dull one made duller by my refusal to be drawn into the school's social web. But it was tolerable work, adequately paid. I stayed in character as the reliable but lackluster biologist; I did what was necessary, capably, without zest or flair. My pre-tenure years were a balancing act, filled but not overfilled. I prepared and taught my classes, swam a mile or ran five every day, meditated for half an hour each morning and evening, carefully shopped for and cooked my excruciatingly wholesome and balanced meals, and took the train into the city one night a week to meet with the Company, and one afternoon a month for my aptly named gag p24 treatments. Every summer for five years I would spend some leisurely hours in the lab, then sit in my pleasant apartment and compose a solid, economical, careful paper developing one aspect or another of my Ph.D. research, which had dealt with the effects of stress on the immune system in rats. One after another these papers were published in perfectly respectable scientific journals, and were more than enough to satisfy the committee that in due course awarded me tenure.

By the time they had approved me, in the fateful year 1999, my medical records had been destroyed. No document or disk anywhere in the world existed to identify me by name as a symptom-free carrier of the HIV-I virus, though no other personal fact spoke as eloquently about the drab thing I had become.

The fourteen years had thinned the ranks of Companions, but a fair number of us were still around. Just about all of us survivors had faithfully -- often fanatically -- followed the prescribed fitness/nutrition/stress management regimen, and it was about then that our team of doctors began to congratulate us and each other that we were beating the bejeezus out of the odds. If you're wondering about the lost Companions, whether they too hadn't stuck to the routines and rules, the answer is that they usually said they had; but it was easy enough for us to see (or suppose) how this or that variable made their cases different from ours.

I myself hardly ever fell ill, hardly had colds or indigestion, so extremely careful was I of myself. My habits, athletics aside, were those of a fussy old maid -- Miss Dove or Eleanor Rigby or W.H. Auden's Miss Edith Gee. They were effective though. When a bug did get through my defenses despite all my care -- as some inevitably did, for student populations have always harbored colds and flus of the most poisonous volatility -- I would promptly put myself to bed and stay there, swallowing aspirins, liquids by the bucket, and one-gram vitamin C tablets, copious supplies of which were always kept on hand. No staggering in with a fever to teach a class through the raging snowstorm -- no siree, not on your life. Not this survivor.

After tenure I bought a little house in a pleasant development of modest brick tract homes on half-acre lots near the campus, and settled in for the long haul. For years I'd subscribed to the health magazine Prevention , published by the Rodale press; now at last I'd be able to act on their advice to grow my own vegetables instead of buying the toxin-doused produce sold in the supermarkets. I mailed off my subscription to Organic Gardening , had the soil tested, bought my first spade, hoe, trowel, and rake, and some organic fertilizers, spaded up a corner of the back yard, and began.

That first post-tenure summer I made a garden and wrote no paper. My mood was reflective but the reflections led nowhere much. The next year of teaching was much the same: I did my job, steered clear of controversy, kept in character. But as the following spring came on -- spring of the year 2000 -- I became restless and vaguely uneasy. Even as I loosened the soil in my raised beds and spread over them the compost I had learned to make, I had dimly begun to know that the cards I'd been playing thus far were played out, that it was time for a new deal.

What I felt, I know now, were the perfectly ordinary first stirrings of a midlife crisis, prohably initiated by the "marker event" of successfully se- curing my means of support for the foreseeable future. Ordinary it may have been, hut it scared me badly. Uneasiness is stressful; stress is lethal.

I've stopped to read over what I've written to this point. It all seems true and correct, but it leaves too much out, and I think what it mainly leaves out is the terror. I don't mean the obvious terror of the Terror, the riots of 1998-99, when I might have been killed outright had the mob that stormed the Alternate Test Site on Walnut Street gotten its talons into my file and learned my name, when the Company met for months in church basements kept dark, when threatening phone calls woke Elizabeth night after night and she didn't dare come to meetings because the KKK was shadowing her in hopes of being led to us. I certainly don't deny we were scared to death while that nightmare lasted, but it was like a nightmare, born of hysteria and short-lived. In a while, we woke up ftom it. I'm talking about something else.

It's true that we all know we're going to die. Whether we're crunched by a truck tomorrow while crossing the street, or expire peacefully in our sleep at ninety, we know it'll happen.

Now, as long as one fate seems no more likely than the other, most people manage to live fairly cheerfully with the awareness that one day they will meet their death for sure. But knowing that your chances of dying young, and soon, and not pleasantly, are many percentage points higher than other people's, changes your viewpoint a lot. Some of the time my radically careful way of life kept the demons at bay, but some of the time I would get up and run my five miles and shower and dress and meditate and drive to school and teach my classes and buy cabbages and oranges at the market and drive home and grade quizzes and meditate and eat supper and go to bed, all in a state of anxiety so intense I could scarcely control it at all.

There were drugs that helped some, but the best were addictive so you couldn't take those too often. The only thing that made years of such profound fear endurable was the Companionship of my fellow travelers. Together we could keep our courage up, we could talk out (or scream or sob out) our helpless rage at the medical establishment as years went by without producing the miracle drugs they'd been more or less promising, that would lift this bane of uncertainty from us and make us like everybody else -- mortal, but with equal chances. Now, terror and rage are extremely stressful. Stress is lethal. I had said so over and over in print, my white rats and I had demonstrated it in the lab, statistics of every sort bore out the instinctive conviction that we had more to fear from fear itself than from just about anything else; and so our very terrors terrified us worst of all. But we bore it better together than we possibly could have borne it alone.

A few of my Companions in these miseries took the obvious next step and paired off. One or two probably told each other their real names. I wasn't even tempted. But sexual denial is stressful too; so on Saturday afternoons I used to rent a pornographic video or bob. A lot of these were boring, but trial and error taught me which brands showed some imagination in concept or direction, and voyeurism in that sanitary form did turn me on, it worked, it took care of the problem. Miniaturized in two or three dimensions, the shape-shifting penises of the actors seemed merely fascinating and the spurting semen innocent. No matter that a few spurts of semen had destroyed my life, and that a penis, the only real one I'd ever had to do with, had been the murder weapon; these facts did not feel relevant to the moaning and slurping of the young folks -- certified AB-Negatives every one -- who provided my weekly turn-on.

For a very long time I was content to release my sexuality, for hygienic reasons, into its narrow run for an hour or so each weekend, like some dangerous animal at the zoo. A few of the guys in the Company were straight, and maybe even willing, but a real relationship -- a business as steamy and complicated as that -- would have been out of the question for me. Others might have the skills; I lacked them. How much safer and less demanding the role of voyeur in the age of electronics, able to fast-forward through the dull bits and play the best ones over!

The Company, directed by Elizabeth, seemed to understand the force of these feelings. At any rate I wasn't pushed to try to overcome them.

Well, as I was saying: the beginning of my thirty-seventh summer, one year after receiving tenure at the two-year college where I seemed doomed to spend the rest of my life, however long that proved to be, and a year after the worst of the rioting ended -- the beginning of that summer found me jittery and depressed, and very worried about being jittery and depressed. Probably I wouldn't have acted even so; but at about the same time, or a bit earlier, I'd begun to exhibit a piece of obsessive-compulsive behavior that until then I'd only heard about at Company gatherings: one morning, toweling down after my shower, I caught myself scrutinizing the skin of my thighs and calves for the distinctive purplish blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma, the form of skin cancer, previously rare, whose appearance is a diagnostic sign of the acute form of AIDS.

How long I'd been doing this half-consciously I couldn't have told you, but from that morning I was never entirely free of the behavior. I'd reached an age when my skin had begun to have its share of natural blotches and keratoses, and I gave myself heart failure more times than I can count, thinking some innocent bruise or lesion meant this was finally it . After several weeks, growing desperate, I gave up shaving my legs -- and shorts and skirts in consequence -- and suffered through the hot weather in loose overalls, just to avoid the chronic anxiety of seeing my own skin. I nearly drove myself nuts.

The Company assaulted this symptom with shrewd concern and a certain amount of relish. Your unconscious is trying to tell you something, dummy, one or another of them would say; I used to do that when I got so freaked out in the riots -- sloppy about doing my Yoga -- too busy chasing the bucks -- into a bad way after I lost my mother -- upset because I couldn't afford to keep the house but didn't want to sell. Remember when I did that? they'd say. Just figure out what you're doing wrong and fix that , then you'll be okay. For starters, try deciding whether it's something you need to work into your life, or something you need to get rid of.

I didn't see how it could very well be the latter, since my present life had been stripped to the bare essentials already. But what they said made sense. It was this sort of counsel that made us so necessary to one another.

Elizabeth, moreover, had a concrete suggestion. On her advice I rented a condo in the Poconos near the Delaware Water Gap -- almost the vacation spot of my former Yuppie dreams -- for a couple of weeks. The Appalachian Trail, heavily used in summer unfortunately, passes through the Gap. I spent the two weeks of my private retreat hiking the Trail, canoeing on the river, and assessing the state of my life.

So how was I doing?

Well, on the plus side, I was still alive . Half the original Company of sixteen years before, when I'd just come into it, were not, most from having developed the disease, though in a few cases more than a decade after seroconverting. In the early days it had been hoped that if a person with HIV-I antibodies hadn't fallen ill after six or eight years or so he probably never would, but it hadn't turned out like that. So far, the longer we survived, the more of the virus we had in us; to be alive at all after such a long time was pretty remarkable. I tried to feel glad.

I'd chosen a suitable job and fixed things so I could keep it; I'd also managed my money intelligently during the years before getting tenure. My salary, while not great, was adequate for a single person who hardly went anywhere and whose expensive tastes ran to top-of-the-line exercise equipment and holographic projectors. Raises would be regular, I would be able to manage my house payments easily. I'd already bought nearly all the furniture I needed, and had assembled a solid reference library of books, tapes, and disks on nutrition, fitness, stress management, and diseases, especially my own; and the gardening and preserving shelf was getting there. In short, all the details of the plan I had devised for myself sixteen years before were in place. And it had worked out: here I was.

So how come I felt so lousy?

At first, when I tried to tot up the negatives, it was hard to think of any at all. I was alive, wasn't I? Didn't that cancel out all the minuses right there?

As a matter of fact, it didn't. Once I got started the list went on and on.

As a bright college senior I had planned to make something really dazzling and grand of my life. That dream had been aborted; but I began to see that all these years I had been secretly grieving for it as for an aborted child. However obvious this looks now, at the time the recognition was a terrific shock. Years and years had lapsed since my last conscious fantasy of knocking the Cornell Biology Department on its collective ear, and I really believed I had ritualistically said goodbye to all that, early in my therapy.

Just what was it I'd wanted to do after Cornell, apart from becoming rich and famous? I could hardly remember. But after a while (and an hour of stony trail, with magnificent views of New Jersey) I had called back into being a sense of outward-directedness, of largesse bestowed upon a grateful world, that differed absolutely from the intense and cautious self-preoccupation which had governed my life from the age of twenty-two. Once, I had craved to be a leader in an international scientific community of intellectual exchange. Now, I thought, planned, and worked for the well-being of just one individual, myself -- for what was the Company but just myself, mutiplied by fifteen or eleven or nine? I'd hardly given a thought to normal people, people not afflicted as we were, for a long, long time, and certainly I had given them nothing else -- not even a halfway decent course in botany.

It was an awful shock, remembering what it had been like to take engagement with the great world for granted. I turned aside from the Trail and its traffic to climb a gray boulder shaggy with mountain laurel, and sat staring out over the summery woods, remembering the hours I'd spent talking with Bill -- my professor, the one who'd exposed me to the virus -- about world population control and sustainable agriculture. No details came back; but the sheer energy and breadth of vision, the ability to imagine tackling issues of such complexity and social import, now seemed unbelievable. How had I shrunk so small?

At that moment on the mountain my triumph of continuing to live looked paltry and mean. I'd died anyway, hadn't I? Wasn't this death-in-life a kind of unwitting suicide? But I knew at bottom that it was no ignoble thing to have gone on living where so many had died. My fit of self-loathing ran its course, and I climbed down from the rock and started back down the Trail toward the Water Gap, three miles below, where I'd left my car.

I pondered as I went. What was missing from my life now seemed clearer. Meaningful work, first and foremost. Engagement. Self-respect, if that wasn't asking too much -- not simply for having survived, but for contributing something real to society; and perhaps even the respect of others.

And last of all I let myself remember, really remember, those springtime afternoons in Bill's sunny office with its coffee machine and little refrigerator and daybed, and added one more thing: intimacy, social and sexual. Not the Company, that bunch of neutered and clairvoyant clones, but I and Thou: intimacy with the Other.

It was a list of things necessary to a fulfilled and happy life, and it bristled like a porcupine with potential stresses.

The trail was rough and steep, and I was wiped out from both my journeys, the inner more than the outer. When I let myself back into the condo the sun had set, and I thought with a fierce rush of resentment how nice it would be, just for once, to microwave a box of beans and franks and open a Coke, like a normal American citizen on holiday, instead of having to boil the goddamned homemade pasta and cook the spaghetti sauce from scratch. The strength of this resentment astounded me all over again: how long had I been sitting on the powderkeg of so much rage against the virus itself?

Enlightenment came early in the first week of my retreat, so I had plenty of time left to process my insights and form conclusions.

About personal intimacy first. Essential or not, I found that I still just didn't feel able to risk it. The potential trouble seemed bigger than the potential payoff, as I've mentioned, I lacked the skills.

About engagement. More promising. The thought of connecting myself in a meaningful way to society by some means that didn't threaten my own stability appealed to me a lot. I could teach in a more engaged fashion, but that felt far too personal, too exposed and risky. Then I thought of something else, something actually quite perfect: I could volunteer to work with AIDS patients. This may sound uniquely stressful for someone in my position, but the prospect oddly wasn't. I already knew everything about the progression of the disease, I'd been through it half a dozen times with dying Companions, so could not be shocked; I needn't fear infection (being infected already); and I felt certain my powers of detachment would be adequate.

Then about meaningful work. I pondered that one for the whole ten days remaining, pretty much all the time.

In the end it was a dream -- the holo of the unconscious -- that showed me what to do. I dreamed of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who invented modern genetics while serving obscurely in a monastery. In my dream Mendel had the mild wide face with its little round-iensed spectacles of the photograph in the college biology text I used. Sweating and pink-faced in his heavy cassock, he bent tenderly over a bed of young peas, helping them find the trellis of strings and begin to climb. I stood at a little distance and watched, terribly moved to see how carefully he tucked the delicate tendrils around the strings. As I approached, he looked up and smiled as if to say, "Ah, so there you are at last!" -- a smile brim-full of love -- and handed me his notebook and pen. When I hung back, reluctant somehow to accept them, he straightened up slowly -- his back was stiff -- and moving closer drew me into an embrace so warm and protective that it seemed fatherly; yet at once I was aware of his penis where it arched against me through the folds of cloth, and of his two firm breasts pressed above my own. He kissed the top of my head. Then he was gone, striding away through the gate, and I stood alone among the peas, the pen and notebook in my hands somehow after all -- in my own garden, my own back yard.

It had been a long time, literally years, since I'd last cried about anything; but when I woke that dawn my soaked pillow and clogged sinuses showed that I'd been weeping in my sleep, evidently for quite a while. Not since childhood had I felt such powerful love; not since childhood had anyone loved me, or held me, in just that way. To be reminded broke my heart, yet there was something healing in the memory too, and in the luxury of crying.

I lay in my dampness and thought about Mendel -- how, having failed to qualify as a teacher, he had returned to the monastery; and there, in that claustrophobic place, in that atmosphere of failure, without the approval or maybe even the knowledge of his bishop, he planned his experiments and planted his peas.

In its way Mendel's life was as circumscribed, and presumably as monastic, as my own. Yet instead of whining and bitching he'd turned his hand to what was possible and done something uniquely fine.

Me, I'd written off further research because the campus lab facilities were so limited and so public, and applying for funding or the chance to work for a summer or two in a better-equipped lab seemed incautious. It was also true that I'd done about as much in the area of stress and the immune system as I cared to do, and that white rats got more expensive every year and the administration more grudging each spring when my latest requisition forms went in. But if I could change directions completely --

Well, the Company had a perfect field day with that dream. You can imagine. They were all sure I'd been telling myself to do exactly that: shift directions, devise some experiments for my own backyard garden and publish the results. About the symbolism of the hermaphroditic monk, opinion was divided; one person thought him a fused father/mother figure, breasts and gownlike cassock muddling his obvious identity as Father Mendel. ("Monks are called Brother," a lapsed-Catholic Companion protested.) Others suggested variously that the dream message concerned repressed bisexuality, incest, plain old sexual frustration, even religious longings. They all seemed to have a clearer idea of that part of what it meant than I had myself. But I thought they were right about the other part: that I seemed to want to turn my garden to scientific account in some way, then write up the results (the pen and notebook, both anachronistic types) and disseminate them.

II

This was the year 2000, when four separate strains of HIV virus had been isolated and more than a million people had died. There was a desperate need for qualified volunteer help, for the hospital wings, hastily thrown up by the newly organized National Health, were bursting with AIDS patients. The great majority of new cases now were addicts and the spouses and infants of addicts, and most of these were poor people. Except among the poor, sexual transmission of the virus had become much less common for a variety of reasons. So there were far fewer groups like ours being formed by then, but still plenty of old cases around -- people exposed years ago who had survived a long time but whose luck had finally run out. As mine might any day.

Perhaps I secretly believed that by caring for such people I could somehow propitiate or suborn the Fates -- "magical thinking" this is called -- or perhaps my bond with them, which I refused to feel, demanded some other expression of solidarity. I don't know. I told myself that this was my debt to society, due and payable now.

So, soon after returning from my retreat, I attended an Induction Day for volunteers at the AIDS Task Force office in the city. The experience wrung me out and set me straight. I'd vaguely pictured myself helping in the wards, carrying lunch trays and cleaning bedpans, but it was plain from what the speakers told us that I would find this sort of work more emotionally demanding than I'd expected and more than I'd be at all able to handle. I had already known better than to offer myself as a counselor or a "buddy" assigned to a particular patient; I'd been "buddy" to too many Companions already, with more of this bound to come, and even in that collective and defended context it was hard. That left the dull but essential clerical work: getting new patients properly registered and identified within the bureaucracy of the National Health, processing and filing information, explaining procedures, taking medical histories.

I signed up for that, one afternoon a week. Compared to the burdens other volunteers were shouldering I felt like a coward, but within the Company itself I was a sort of hero, though resented also for what my action made the rest face anew: their fear. Several of the gay men who had gone to Induction Days in years past, but had not felt able to sign up for anything at all, felt especially put down; but everyone reported a sense of being implicitly criticized. "You're, like, the teetotaler at the cocktail party," said one of the gays, making us all laugh.

We were no band of activists and saints, the nine of us left of the original Company. Nobody new had joined us for a long time. When the National Health was chartered by Congress, the mandatory anonymous universal blood tests establishing who was and who was not a carrier had brought in a few fresh faces for a time, but those just-identified AB-Positives had mostly preferred to form groups of their own. The rigors of psychoneuroimmunology didn't appeal to everybody, nor did the medical profession agree unanimously that avoiding stress should be a First Principle for the infected. But it was ours; and by making my Companions feel guilty I was guilty myself of stressing them. I understood their resentment perfectly.

At the same time I did feel a first small flush of self-respect to find that none of the others could face this work, relatively undemanding though it was, and that I could.

And almost at once I had my reward. The obsessive blotch-hunting stopped, I could again bear with composure the sight of my own skin; but a stranger and funnier reward was to follow. One day in the hospital outlet shop, on an errand for a busier volunteer, my eye fell by chance upon an object invented to make life easier for diabetic women: a hard plastic device molded to be tucked between the legs, with a spout designed to project a stream of urine forward, the more conveniently to be tested with litmus strips. In a flash a bizarre idea sprang fully developed into my head, exactly like one of those toads that lie buried in dried-up rnudholes in the desert, patiently waiting out the years for the rains that tell it the time had come to emerge and mate. I bought the thing.

Back home I dug out an old electric dildo whose motor had long since burned out -- a flexible rod with a "skin" of pink rubber. This I castrated, or rather circumcised. I then glued the three inches of amputated rubber foreskin snugly to the base of the plastic spout and snipped a hole in the tip.

I now had an implement capable of letting female plumbing mimic male plumbing, at least from a short distance, unless the observer were very sharp-eyed or very interested.

Inspired, my next step was to go out and buy myself a complete set of men's clothing: socks and underwear, trousers generously tailored, shirt, sweater, tie, and loosely fitting sport jacket, all of rather conservative cut and color and good qttality. I even bought a pair of men's shoes. I'm quite a tall woman -- five feet ten and a half inches -- with a large-boned face, a flat chest, and the muscular arms and shoulders you build up through years at the rowing machine. And I found that the proverb Clothes make the man is true, for my full-length bathroom mirror confirmed that I made a wholly creditable one. Last of all, into the pouch of my brand-new jockey shorts, right behind the zipper of my new slacks, I tucked the plastic-and-rubber penis. The hard thing pressed against my pubic bone, none too comfortably.

Dress rehearsals went on for a whole weekend. By Monday, based on comparisons with certain water-sports videos I had seen, I thought the effect hilariously realistic. Where Brother Mendel leads , I said to myself with reckless glee, I follow! I can tell you for sure that this entire undertaking -- making my dildo, buying my disguises, learning to fish out the fake penis suavely and snug it in place and let fly -- was altogether the most fun I'd had in years. The only fun, really, the only bursting out of bounds. The thought of beans and franks was nothing to this.

When I felt ready for a trial run I put on my reverse-drag costume and drove to a shopping mall in a neighboring state, where for three hours I practiced striding confidently into the men's rooms of different department stores. I would hit the swinging door with a straight arm, swagger up to a urinal, plant my feet wide apart . . . I kind of overacted the role, but I could do this much with a flourish anyway. What I could not do was unclench my sphincter; I was all style and no substance in the presence of authentic (urinating) men. So I flunked that final test.

But my first purpose all along had been voyeuristic, and in this I was wildly, immediately successful. It was a mild day in early autumn. Lots of guys in shirtsleeves, with no bulky outer clothing to hinder the eager voyeur, came in and struck a pose at urinals near mine. For three hours I stole furtive glances at exposed penises from within a disguise that no one appeared even to question, let alone see through. It was marvelous . I drove home exhilarated quite as much by my own daring as by what I'd managed to see. To have infiltrated that bastion of male privilege and gotten away with it! What a triumph! What an actor!

All that year, the year 2000, I worked by fits and starts on my role of male impersonator, adding outfits to suit the different seasons and practicing body control (roll of shoulders, length of stride) like a real actor training for a part. I cruised the men's rooms less often than I'd have liked, since it seemed only prudent to avoid those near home, and I was kept fairly busy. But over time by trial and error I gained confidence. I learned that large public men's rooms in bus and train stations, airports, interstate rest areas and the like, were best -- that men visiting these were usually in a hurry and the rooms apt to be fairly crowded, so that people were least likely to take notice of me there. It was in one such place that I was at last able to perfect my role by actually relieving myself into the porcelain bowl, and after that time I could usually manage it, a fact which made me smug as a cat.

Every cock I sneaked a look at that year seemed beautiful to me. The holos were so much less interesting than this live show that I all but stopped renting them. I also made some fascinating observations. For instance, young gay men no longer rash enough to pick somebody up in a bus station or whatever would sometimes actually stand at adjacent urinals, stare at one another, and stroke themselves erect. Wow! I felt a powerful affinity with these gays, whose motives for being there were so much like my own. Alas, they also made me nervous, for my prosthesis couldn't hold up to fixed regard, and sometimes, if I lingered too long, someone would show more interest than was safe.

The Company had been three-fourths gay men in the beginning, five of whom were still around, yet not one had ever said a word to the rest of us about mutual exhibitionism in public toilets, and it seemed possible that most straight men had never noticed. After sixteen years of weekly group therapy I'd have sworn none of us could possibly have any secrets left; but perhaps the gay Companions simply preferred not to offer up this behavior to the judgment of the straights -- even now, and even us. Perhaps it was humiliating for them, even a bit sordid. I could see that. This behavior of mine had its sordid side. The recreational/adventurous side outweighed that twenty to one; but I took my cue from the gays, and kept my weird new hobby to myself -- learning in this way that withholding a personal secret from the Company, retaining one exotic scrap of privacy, exhilarated me nearly as much as having live penises to admire after all the dreary years of admiring them on tape.

But if the dream image of Gregor-Mendel-as-hermaphrodite was present to me through much of this experience -- for I knew that in some deep way they were connected -- Mendel was a still more potent icon in the garden that summer. At first thought, backyard research seemed very small beer. I knew as well as anyone that the day had long since passed when a single white-coated scientist, working alone amid the test tubes in his own basement laboratory, could do important research. Mendel himself had had a larger plot of ground at his disposal.

Yet examining the unfamiliar literature of this field, and browsing in Biological Abstracts, forced me to revise my view: there were some very useful experiments within the scope even of a backyard researcher. Some of the published papers that interested me most had been written by amateurs. It appeared that master gardeners, like amateur archaeologists and paleontologists, had long been making substantial contributions to the fields of plant breeding, pest control, cultivation practices, and the field trials of new varieties. Organic methods of gardening and farming, which were what interested me, were particularly open to contributions from gardeners and farmers, non-scientists who had taught themselves to run valid trials and keep good records. Genetic engineering and chemical warfare were clearly not the only ways to skin the cat of improved crop yields.

The more I looked into it, the more impressed I was, and correspondingly the more hopeful. Though but a beginning gardener I was a trained scientist; if these other people could do something useful in their modest way, I should certainly be able to.

I'd lost my first two crops of melons to bacterial wilt and/or mosaic virus, I wasn't sure which, and both years my cucumbers bad also died of wilt. (The first couple of seasons in an organic garden are tough sledding.) The striped cucumber beetle was the probable vector for both diseases. God knows I had enough of the little bastards. Now, you can grow Cucurbita -- the vining crops, including all melons, squashes, cucumbers, and gourds -- under cheesecloth or spun-bonded floating row covers, which exclude the bugs, but you have to uncover the plants when the female flowers appear so the bees can get at them, and if the bees can, so can the beetles. Besides, half the fun of gardening is watching the crops develop, and how can you do that if they're shrouded under a white web of Ultramay?

No, the thing was to produce a cultivar with resistance, or at least tolerance, to one or more of the insect-borne diseases. After reading everything I could get my hands on about bacterial wilt and cucumber mosaic virus, I concluded that a project of trying to breed a really flavorful variety of muskmelon strongly resistant to bacterial wilt would make the most sense. Wilt was a bigger problem in our area, and some hybridization for wilt resistance in muskmelons had already been done. But I was much more powerfully attracted to the mosaic problem. It took the Company about half a minute to point out, once they'd understood the question, that cucumber mosaic is caused by a virus. There's no cure for mosaic; once it infects a plant the plant declines, leaf by leaf and vine by vine, until it dies. (Just like you-know-who.)

There's no cure for bacterial wilt, either, but I couldn't help myself: I began to plan an experiment focusing on mosaic.

I didn't want to waste time duplicating the research of others, so I made several trips that summer to Penn State's main campus at University Park to extract from their excellent library everything that was known about all previous efforts to breed virus resistance into muskmelons. These trips were fun. For one thing it pleased me a lot to be doing research again. For another I did the trips in undrag, stopping at every highway rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Valley Forge and Harrisburg to investigate men's rooms -- and in fact simply to use them too, as this was, prosthesis and all, easier, quicker, and less grubby than using the ladies'.

It turned out that the breeders had never made much headway against virus disease in muskmelons, and since the introduction of row covers and beetle traps the subject had been generally slighted. Commercial growers had been getting around the problem of pollination for quite a while by constructing great tents of Ultramay over their fields and putting a hive of honeybees inside with the melons. As this was hardly practical for the home gardener, the state agricultural extension services recommended several pesticides for use on the beetles (and aphids, another serious virus vector for cucurbits) during the two or three weeks when the plants would have to come out from under cover to be pollinated. Spraying at dusk was suggested, to spare the bees. But these were persistent toxins and I doubted all the bees would be spared, though they might pollinate the vines before they died.

I also read up on the life cycle of the striped cucumber beetle, then built a clever cage in which to rear as many generations of virus-bearing beetles as necessary to carry the critters through the winter -- they hibernate in garden trash, but I wanted to guarantee my supply. When the cage was ready I rigged a shelf-and-fluorescent-tube setup in which to raise a sequence of zucchini plants to feed the beetles -- nothing grows faster than a zucchini, and nothing's easier to grow, and the beetles love them. As each plant in turn began to sicken I would transplant a new, healthy seedling into the soil on the bottom of the rearing cage, then cut through the stem of the sick zucchini, shake off the beetles, and remove the plant. The roots had to he left undisturbed, because the soil around them contained eggs, feeding larvae, and pupae, but by the time the space was needed for a new transplant the roots would have died or been eaten up.

It worked beautifully. My quarter-inch black-and-yellow beetles spent that winter, and the next four winters, living the life of Riley.

And throughout that hard late winter of 2001 I spent all my spare time thinking out my project, its objectives and procedures, until I knew exactly what I wanted to do. By April a small ranked and labeled army of cantaloupe seedlings stood waiting in my basement, under lights, for the day when they could safely be set out in their carefully prepared beds and tucked under Ultramay. Assuming no spectacular early success, the plan would organize my summers for the next five years. Plant breeding is not an enterprise for impatient people. It is a gesture of faith in the (personal) future.

In early May, just as the azaleas were at their peak of bloom, a week before the last frost date in Delaware County, Jacob Lowenfels and his team of American and French researchers announced their discovery of the AIDS vaccine.

The announcement threw me, and the rest of the Company with me, into a profound funk. Except for us and several thousand dying people, the whole city seemed to rejoice around us; even the war news yielded pride of place. Thank God the spring quarter had ended, except for some finals I could grade with one hand tied behind me. Watering cantaloupe seedlings before turning in, on the night of May 15, I came within a hair of wrenching the table over and dumping the lot of them, smash , onto the concrete floor. Why should these frivolous Cucurbita live when so many innocents were dead?

I know, I know: the Lowenfels vaccine was of enormous importance even to us -- even, for that matter, to those who had developed the disease but would not begin dying seriously for months or years; for overnight the fear of discovery and persecution ended. We were no longer lepers. People could acquire immunity to us now. Only those already in the final stages of dying from AIDS benefitted not at all, so that the AIDS wings of the hospitals lay for weeks beneath a blanket pall of sorrow.

And of course I knew all this really, even at the time. I carried out my trays of cantaloupes and honeydews on the sixteenth after all, and planted them on schedule. The beds beneath their Ultramay covers looked so peculiar that I decided to fence the yard, discourage the neighbor's curiosity. I planted with a leaden heart that day, but the melons didn't seem to mind; in their growing medium of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite dug well into my heavy clay soil they soon sent out runners and began to produce male flowers. When the female flowers appeared about ten days later I pulled the Ultramay off of some beds just long enough to rub the anthers of the male flowers against the pistils of the female ones. At other beds I sent in the beetle troops. At the same time I was growing a year's supply of vegetables in my kitchen garden. My computer kept daily records for both garden and field trials. In August I gave my control melons away by the cartrunkload to the Companions, ate tons of them myself, froze some, saved the rest to rot peacefully till they could be blended with autumn leaves into a giant compost tower. (The vines that died of mosaic, and the malformed fruit they produced, if any, went out with the trash.) And I preserved, packaged, labeled, and froze my hybrid seeds.

None of the varieties I'd inoculated with the virus that first year had resisted it worth a damn. I saved seed from only one mosaic-stunted hybrid cultivar, a Cucumis melo called "Mi ting tang," which had shown good resistance to cucumber mosaic (plus gummy stem blight and downy mildew) in field trials in Japan. That one had managed to struggle to maturity and produce a crop despite its illness. The fruit, though dwarfed, had a fair flavor and good thick flesh, and I thought I might backcross and then cross it with other varieties after I saw the results of my hybridizing the following year. Resistance in the Ano strains of muskmelon appeared to vary according to the weather; I wanted to find out more about that too.

Between times I canned and froze and dried my garden produce as one after another the overlapping crops came in. Once I'd gotten over the shock of the vaccine it was a wonderful summer, the best of my life, full of pleasurable outdoor work; and the four that followed resembled it pretty closely.

Each fall and winter I would overhaul my records and revise my schedules; compost plant residues; treat the soil of the inoculated beds to kill any leftover beetles; care for the next year's beetle crop and manage their supply of zucchini plants; clean and oil my tools; consume my preserved stock of organically grown, squeaky-clean food; teach my classes and run my labs; put in my afternoon at the hospitals every week; meet with the Company; and take my treatments. In a small way I'd also begun to write for gardening magazines, mainly Rodale's and National Gardening , though occasionally for Horticulture or even Harrowsmith. I'd never been so busy nor interested nor free of anxiety, and I think now that unconsciously I'd come to believe that I was safe. "Magical thinking," sure -- but it was a much healthier and better-rounded way of life, no question.

It was the fifth year of the research, the spring of 2006, that two events occurred to shatter the even tenor of my days. The arrival of the ship from outer space was the big news; but the Hefn delegation was still in England, and in the daily headlines, when devastating news broke upon us in the Company: for our counselor Elizabeth had developed the bodily wasting and red-rimmed eyes of AIDS-Related Complex, and confessed at last that all this while she had been keeping a secret of her own.

One and all we were stricken anew with terror, my eight surviving Companions and I. Elizabeth who had been our mother, our guardian, our stay against destruction, who had held us together and wedged the door shut against the world's cruelty, could not be dying -- for if she were dying we could none of us feel safe. Our reaction was infantile and total: we were furious. Who would take care of us when she was dead? When an accountant who called himself "Phil" promptly developed skin lesions, we all blamed Elizabeth.

"Phil's" symptoms turned out to be hysterical; his apparent defeat had been the medium through which we had collectively expressed our virulently reactivated panic and dread. After that episode we pulled ourselves together and stopped whining long enough to think a little of Elizabeth, and not so much about our miserable selves.

She had been admitted to Graduate Hospital, the one our psychoneuroimmunology team was affiliated with. I sat with her for a while one afternoon, a sulky, resentful child and her mortally ill mother. When I apologized for my behavior Elizabeth smiled tiredly. "Oh, I know how you all feel, you're reacting exactly like I thought you would. Listen, Sandy, this had to happen sometime. You folks have all been much too dependent and you know it. Now's your chance to stand on your own, ah, eighteen feet -- but I'm sorry you feel let down." She grimaced. "I feel pretty bad about that myself."

Her generosity dissolved my frefful resentment; and love, shocking as the dream-love of Gregor Mendel, flooded into the vacancy. I choked and burst into wrenching tears; Elizabeth patted my arm, which made me cry harder; in a moment I was crouching beside her bed, my hot, wet face pressed against her shoulder, the first time in twenty years that I had touched another human being intimately. A surreal moment. It was glorious, to tell the truth, though I felt as if my chest would burst with grief.

When I forced myself to report this scene on Company time, the story was received in a glum silence tinged with embarrassment. Finally "Larry," a balding, thickening physical therapist I'd known since he was a skinny teenager, puffed out a breath and said disgustedly, "Well, don't feel like the Lone Ranger, Sandy. I never touch anybody either, except on the job. Hell, we all love Elizabeth! But I never let myself know that. I haven't taken an emotional risk in so many years I literally can't remember when the last time was, and you people aren't any better than me."

"I've often thought," said "Phil," "that it's funny we don't love each other. I mean, as much as we need each other, you'd think . . ."

He trailed off, and we glanced obliquely (and guiltily) at one another, except for the two couples present -- who naturally couldn't help looking a little smug -- and the one father who blurted defensively, "I love my kids!"

"Elizabeth knows we love her," said "Sherry," over against the far wall. "Maybe she does," "Larry" growled, "but we need to know it. That's my point, goddammit."

"Other groups do better. Some of them are really close," I put in. "Maybe we fuss over ourselves so much we can't connect, except to spot weaknesses."

"Other groups don't have our survival rate either," "Mitch" reminded me. Breaking the gloomy silence, 'Phil" roused himself to say, "What about these spacemen, anything doing in that direction?"

When the Hefn first arrived, half the world's people had recoiled in panicky dismay; the other half had seemed to expect them to provide a magical cure for all our ills: war, cancer, pollution, overpopulation, famine, AIDS. So far they had shown no interest in us whatever. The landing party was presently in London because the mummified corpse of one of their relations, stranded here hundreds of years ago, had been discovered in a Yorkshire bog; but suggestions that they set up some sort of cultural and scientific exchange with humanity had been politely ignored and I doubted there was any chance at all that Elizabeth's life was going to be saved by ET intervention. The AIDS Task Force in New York had already sent them a long, pleading letter, but had received no reply. We were all aware of these facts. Nobody bothered to answer "Phil," and after a while the hour was over and we broke up; and when the Hefn ship took off from the moon a few weeks later, having neither helped nor harmed us by their visit, we weren't surprised. It was what we'd expected.

Just as we expected Elizabeth to waste and decline, and finally die, and she did -- leaving the Companions rudderless and demoralized. At least we'd rallied and borne up pretty well throughout the last weeks of her dying. We must have done her, and ourselves, a little good.

Surprisingly, despite even this trauma none of the rest of us became ill. Apparently we who were still alive were the hardiest of the lot, or at least the ones who had taken the best care of ourselves. But the emotional jolt of Elizabeth's death -- the one death we had not protected ourselves from being badly hurt by -- showed me, as the dream of Mendel had showed me all those years ago, that something was still wrong with my life. It was still a loveless life, and just when I seemed to need it least it now appeared that I was no longer willing to do without love. I'd failed to acknowledge Elizabeth alive; now that she was dead I wanted at least to keep alive the emotion -- the capacity for feeling and showing emotion -- that she had released in me at the end.

It didn't have to be romantic love, in fact I rather thought that any other sort would probably be preferable, though I was still determined not to teach lovingly. It seems odd now that I never thought of getting a pet -- or maybe the image of a dog wouldn't readily superimpose itself upon the image of a backyard carpeted with melon vines? And I'm allergic to cat dander anyway, whatever the reasons, the idea never crossed my mind. The months glided by as usual, and became years, before anything changed.

III

What happened was that I broke a small bone in my left ankle in a common type of running accident: one foot came down at the edge of a pothole and twisted beneath me as I fell. The X-ray showed a hairline fracture. They put me in a cast and crutches and ordered me off the foot for a month, and this was May.

May 2010; Year Four of my second five-year plan. With the whole season's research at stake I had no choice but to hire some help.

A bright, possibly talented sophomore in my botany course took the job. His name was Eric Meredith, and he was the first person other than my unobservant parents, a dishwasher repairer, and the water meter reader to have entered my house in the ten years I had owned it. I bitterly resented the need that had brought him there; but I knew the source of this bitterness (apprehension: what other infirmities would be violating my privacy in future summers?) and made a perfunctory effort not to work it out on Eric.

He seemed not to take my unfriendliness personally -- I had a certain reputation at the college as a grump -- and willingly did what I told him to without trying to chat me up. I showed him once how to handle the transplants, how big and how far apart to make the holes, how to work fertilizer and compost into the loose earth, dump in a liter of water, and firm the soil around the stem. He never forgot, never did it wrong, even beneath my jealous eye; he seemed to discover a knack for the work in the process of performing it that pleased him as much as it mollified me. He was scrupulously careful with the labeling and weighed the Ultramay at the beds' edges with earth, leaving no gaps for wandering bees or beetles to find. In a week the entire lot of transplants was in the ground. I recorded the data myself -- I could sit at a keyboard, anyway -- but Eric did everything else.

He grew so earnestly interested in the experiment, what's more, that after the second week he couldn't help asking questions; and I found his interest so irresistible that before I knew it I'd invited him to review the records.

For I did, finally, really appear to be getting someplace. Several hybrids of the "Mi ting tang" (Ano II) strain had done unusually well the previous year; I thought I knew now which of their parents to cross with Perfection and Honey Dew to produce at least one variety which would show exceptional tolerance to mosaic in the field. Immunity now looked impossible, resistance unlikely; but I felt I would be more than satisfied with a strain that could tolerate the presence of the virus in its system without being killed or crippled too much -- that could go on about its business of making a pretty good crop of sweet, firm-fleshed melons in spite of the disease.

Eric sat for an hour while the screen scrolled through the records of a near-decade. I jumped when he spoke. "This whole thing is just beautifully conceived." His amazement was understandable; why expect anything good from a professor as mediocre in class as I? "You're just about there, aren't you?"

He had a plain, narrow face, much improved by enthusiasm. I felt my own face growing warm. "Mm-hm, I think so. one more season. Of course, this isn't a very exciting experiment -- not like what they do in the labs, genetic manipulation, that sort of thing."

"Well," said Eric, "but it's not so much the experiment itself as the experimental model. Heck, you could apply this model to any traits you were trying to select for. Did you work it out yourself?" I suspected that this was doubt, but when I nodded he did too. "I thought so, I never came across this system of notation before and I bet everybody'll be using it after you publish."

I'd been working in isolation a long time, without admiration, and the traitorous balloon of gratitude that swelled my chest undid me. "Come have something cold to drink," I offered gruffly, and as I went before him into the kitchen the rubber tip of my crutch slipped on a wet patch of linoleum and I fell, whacking my head hard on the corner of a shelf on the way down.

For a few seconds the pain in both ankle and scalp was blinding. Then as I struggled to rise, embarrassed and angry, and as Eric leaned over me to help, I saw the drops of blood on the floor, brilliant against the pale tiles. "Get away!" I shouted, shoving him so hard he stumbled against the counter and I fell flat on my back. In rage I hauled myself upright, holding to the counter, and managed to rip off some paper toweling to blot my head with. Again Eric moved instinctively to help, and again I snapped, "No, get back I said, keep away from me. Did you get any blood on yourself? "

"Unh-unh," said Eric, looking at his hands and arms, bewildered and then -- bright student -- suddenly comprehending. "oh, hey, it's okay -- I'm vaccinated."

I froze and stared at him, my head singing. " What did you say?"

"I'm vaccinated against AIDS. A bone punch in the sixth grade, see?" He pulled down the neck of his tee shirt and showed me the little V-shaped scar on his collarbone.

Vaccinated. Immune. Of course he was. Everybody was vaccinated nowadays. Eric had been in no danger from me -- but in my instinctive panic I'd given myself away. For exactly the third time that decade I burst into tears, and I couldn't have told you which of the two of us was the more embarrassed.

I don't remember how I got him out of the house. I spent that evening raging at myself, my situation, the plague that had blighted my life, aborted my career, turned me into a time bomb of thwarted need. So what if it came out that I was a carrier of the virus? Nobody gave a damn anymore. During the past few years, the deadly microorganisms that had built up strength in my system throughout the first ten had begun to decline. I might never die of AIDS now, might not even be infectious, nobody knew. Even if I were, the world had been immunized against me. Yet I felt infectious, consumed with longing for something that would certainly be destroyed if I tried to possess it. No amount of rational certainty that this was not so acted to defuse a conviction which had for so long been the central emotional truth, the virtual mainspring, of my life. For the past nine years I had abstained from sex for my own reasons of stress-avoidance, not to protect others; I had known this and not-known it, both.

The truth was, I had lived as a leper too long to change my self-concept. Now here was this boy, who had guessed my guilty secret just like that and spoken it aloud without batting an eye. He would have to be replaced, possibly bribed . . . no, that was crazy thinking. Yet the thought of facing him was unendurable. I'd pay him off in the morning and dismiss him. The pain of this thought astonished me; yet I couldn't doubt it must be done.

I had not, however, factored in Eric's own attitudes and wishes. The next day he showed up at the usual time and went straight to work in the kitchen garden, spreading straw mulch on the tomato and pepper beds, whistling the noble theme from the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh. From the kitchen window I watched his tall, bony frame fold and unfold, gather the straw from the cart in armfuls and heap it carefully around the bases of the plants; and gradually I became aware that here was the only living being, not one of the Company, who knew The Truth. Gradually, it even began to seem a wonderful thing that somebody knew. Eric dragged the empty cart across the yard for more straw bales, then back to the nightshade beds. I regarded his back in its sweat-soaked tee shirt, the play of the shoulder muscles, the stretching tendons at the sides of his knees as he folded and straightened -- and something fluttered and turned over in my middle-aged insides. "Eric," I murmured in wonderment; and as if he had heard he turned his head, saw me at the window waved and grinned. Then he stooped to gather another armful of straw and I fell back out of view.

That grin . . . I dropped onto a stool, hearing in my head the incongruous voice of my best high-school friend: "He looked over at me from the other side of the class and it just really boinged me." Boinged, I'd been boinged! By Eric's cheerfulness, the wave of his long arm with its brown work glove at the end. I knew by then, I guess, that I wasn't going to fire him; but I couldn't see how to do anything else with him either.

At noon Eric came to the house to wash up under the spigot before leaving, in his khaki shorts and old running shoes. He had taken off his shirt, and dust and bits of straw had stuck to the sweaty skin of his chest and back, and in the curly golden hairs of his legs and the blond mop on his head. He was a very lanky guy, pretty well put together, not a bit handsome. I regarded his long body with awe,

"I'll be late tomorrow, got a dentist appointment," he said. "Listen, I wanted you to know I'm not going to say anything to anybody else about yesterday. In ease you were worrying about it. I mean, I don't go in for gossip much anyway, and even if I did I wouldn't spread stuff around about you."

I managed to reply, "Thanks, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't."

Eric started to say something else but instead stuck his head under the faucet for a minute, dried himself on his shirt, and slipped away around the house. There was a paperback novel crammed into the back pocket of his shorts, its title Sowbug! scrawled diagonally across the cover in screaming colors, and water droplets spangled his bare shoulders.

And so we went on as before, but nothing was as it had been for me. Once again I became an actor, for I found myself against all sense and expectation carrying a blazing torch for a boy considerably less than half my age: a clever, nice, probably not terribly remarkable boy who (as the Companions agreed) was serving now as representative object of the pent-up love of half a lifetime. Eric, the wick for this deep reservoir of flammable fuel, became "Lampwick" in Company nomenclature: Lampwick the boy who went to Pleasure Island with Pinocchio and turned into a braying jackass before the puppet's horrified eyes.

I felt like the jackass, let me tell you. Knowing the passion that so rocked me to be symbolic and categorical, hardly about Eric-the-singular- individual at all, made exactly zero difference to my experience of it. In the Company we'd been talking and thinking more about love since Elizabeth's death, and they all thought it was great. All loves are part personal, part associational, the more worldly among them assured me. Go for it! Get it out of your system. Wasn't your primary sexual involvement in the past with a teacher? Hey, the unconscious is a tidy bastard; naturally yours would think it fitting to pass the baton to the next generation by making you fall for a student of your own.

And I have to admit that even the hopeless misery of this passion was, in a weird way, kind of fun. It rejuvenated my libido, for one thing. It took me out of myself. I no longer feared the lethal effects of stress so much, and in any case this stress was salutary too.

I did take enormous care to protect myself from the humiliation of letting Eric catch me out, as he had caught me out about my antibody status. He never dreamed I seethed with lust for him, I feel quite sure of that. I think he did regret my aloofness -- he was a sociable boy, and truly admired my work -- but not so much as to be pained by it; and in any event Eric had other fish to fry that summer.

My ankle had healed well enough by late July for mc to take over the kitchen garden, and a bit later the processing of its produce, when that began to roll in; but I pretended a greater disability than I really had just to keep Eric around. And when my old mother in Denver had a stroke, making a visit unavoidable, I was happy to leave him in charge of both kitchen garden and melon plots. The special hybrids were looking great, but records on rainfall and hours of sunlight during this crucial month would have to be kept. I asked Eric to come live in the house while I was away, and promised him a bonus if he did a meticulous job of keeping the records.

I decided not to fly, and drove west in an erotically supercharged state of psyche, sleeping in the car-bed, peeing in the men's rooms of seven states, feasting my eyes on hundreds of penises and fantasizing that this or that one could be Eric's . . . I hadn't done much of this recently and suspect I made a less convincing man as I grew older but I had a terrific time for a while, although to tell the truth I rather wore my imagination out. My mother was feeling better and received my attentions with gratified complacency; but the five grandchildren had become her life, and we regarded one another, benignly enough, through a glaze of mutual incomprehension. It seemed likely that I would see her next when I flew out for the funeral.

All the same I stayed a week before returning by easy stages across the hot, dry, dusty plains, eager to get back but pleased to think of Eric still holding the fort in my stead. No point in pretending I couldn't handle the work now, not after a drive like this. Anyway, the term would be starting soon. When I got back I'd have to let him go; and so I dawdled and fantasized across Kansas and Missouri, and late in the afternoon of August 30 was approaching Indianapolis when I told the radio to turn itself on and was informed that early that same morning there had been a meltdown at the nuclear power plant at Peach Bottom, on the Susquehanna River downstream from Three Mile Island.

Luckily traffic was light. I managed to pull off the road without smashing up, and sat gripping the wheel while the radio filled me in. The disaster was unprecedented, making even Chernobyl look paltry. The Peach Bottom plant was fifty years old and overdue to be shut down for good. It had been shut down in the Eighties, then reopened in 1993, when improved decontamination technology had reduced its radioactivity to acceptable levels. Though the plant had a history of scandalously inept management, technicians asleep on duty and so on, stretching back a long way, it didn't appear that the meltdown had been caused by human error.

From the standpoint of damage to nearby populations the weather could not have beem much worse, given that it was summer. A storm system with a strong south-southwest wind had pushed the enormous radioactive plume across the fertile Amish farmland of Lancaster County; then a westerly shift had carried the plume over the continuous urban sprawl of Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton. Heavy rains had dumped the hot stuff on the ground across that whole area. The storm had also put out the fire at the plant; damage was therefore horrific but, so far, highly localized.

The plume bad been washed to earth before it could enter the upper atmosphere -- but in one of the most densely populated regions of the world. A very high death count from acute radiation poisoning was expected; the Amish farmers, working in the fields without radios to warn them, were especially at risk. Eight million people , more or less, had to be evacuated and relocated, probably permanently, for the Philadelphia-Wilmington area would be a wasteland for at least a decade to come, perhaps much longer.

Terry Carpenter's name was mentioned again and again. A moderate Republican Congressman from Delaware County, Carpenter was being described by reporters as a miracle worker. His understanding and the speed of his response suggested that Carpenter had planned carefully for just this sort of emergency. Because of him the cost in human lives would be far less, though no one person could cope with every aspect of a disaster as great as this one . . . (I'd crossed over and voted for the guy myself, last election. Good move.)

People who had not yet left their homes had been urged to keep doors and windows shut and air conditioners turned off, to reduce inhalation uptake, which would be reduced somewhat anyway by the rain, and to draw water in their bathtubs and sinks before the runoff from the storm could contaminate the supply. Each was to pack a small bag . . .

The radio went on and on as I sat by the highway, shocked beyond thought. My house, my garden, the campus, the hospital where I worked and the one where I had my monthly treatments, the Company, the experiment -- all the carefully assembled infrastructure of my unnatural life -- had melted down with the power plant. What in the world was I going to do? My trip had saved me from radiation poisoning, and from being evacuated and stuck in a Red Cross camp someplace; my car and I were clean. But my life was in ruins.

And all the while, still in shock, I thought about Eric, whom I'd left to mind the store, who might be in my house right now with the doors and windows shut, waiting to be evacuated. Abruptly snapping out of it, I drove back onto the road and went off at the next exit, where I found a pay phone that worked and put the call through.

But the phone in my house rang and rang, and finally I hung up and stood shaking in the already-sweltering morning, unable to think what to do now, stranded. Impossible to go back to Denver. Impossible to go home. Impossible also to find Eric, at least until things settled down. Eric, of course, would go to his parents' house -- only what if they lived in the evacuation zone? A lot of our students were local kids; it was that kind of college.

I knew not even that much about Eric's personal life, I realized with a furious rush of shame, and at this moment all my uncertainty and powerlessness fused into a desperate need to find him, see him, make sure he was all right. Of all the desperately threatened people I knew in the area of contamination, only this one boy mattered to me.

I got back in my car and started driving. I drove all night, stopped at a western Pennsylvania sleepyside for a nap the following morning, drove on again. The radio kept me posted on developments. All that way I thought about Eric. Half of my mind was sure he was fine, safe in his parents' (grandparents'?) home in Pittsburgh or Allentown; the other half played the Eric-tape over and over, his longness and leanness, the grownup way he'd handled my breaking down, his careful tenderness with the melon seedlings (like Mendel's!), his reliability, his frank, unstudied admiration of my trial model, his schlock horror novel Sowbug! Why hadn't I been nicer to him while I'd had the chance? Why had I played it safe? My house and garden were lost, my experimental records doubtless ruined by fallout, the work of the past decade all gone for nothing, yet worse by far was the fact that I had squandered my one God-given chance to come close to another person, thrown it away, out of fear. I beat on the steering wheel and sobbed. Eric, Eric, if only I hadn't been so scared.

Whatever happened now, I knew I would never again watch him fold that long body up like a folding ruler to tend the crops or sic the virus-loaded striped cucumber beetles onto a melon cultivar. That life was finished. There was nothing to connect us now, because I had wasted my one chance and would never get another. I was hardly thinking straight, of course; I was in shock. I'd heard my colleagues speak often enough, and wistfully enough, of promising former students from whom they rarely or never heard anymore. Students go away and teachers stay -- that's the way it's always been, they'd say. Put not your faith in students. A card at Christmas for a year or two after they leave, then zip.

But I wasn't thinking of what Eric might or might not have done in some hypothetical future time; I was thinking of what I myself had failed to do and now could never do. I cried, off and on, for hours, being forced once by uncontrollable weeping to stop the car. I shed far more tears during that nightmarish trip than in my whole previous life since childhood, If I'd only put my arms around him, just one time, just held him for a minute, not even saying anything -- if I'd just managed to do that -- As the hours and miles went by my grief became more and more inconsolable, as if all the tragedy of the meltdown, and even of my life, were consolidated into this one spurned chance to become human. It didn't matter whether Eric wanted to be befriended (let alone held) by me, diseased middle-aged spinsterish schoolmarm and part-time pervert that I had become; what mattered, beyond measure or expression, was that I'd been too cowardly even to consider the possibility of closeness with another person and now it was too late.

I drove and wept, wept and drove. Gradually traffic going the opposite direction began to build up. Just west of Harrisburg a bunch of state troopers were turning the eastbound cars back. Beyond the roadblock only two lanes were open; the other two, and the four going west, were full of cars fleeing the contaminated zone. I pulled over, cleaned my blotchy face as best I could with a wet cloth, and got out. A trooper was directing U-turns at the head of a line of creeping cars. I walked up to him. "Excuse me, do you know how I can find out where somebody is?"

The trooper turned, gray-faced with exhaustion. "You from Philadelphia?" I nodded. "I dunno, bud," he replied~reminding me that I was still in my traveling costume of undrag. "In a coupla days they'll know where everybody's at, but it's a madhouse back there right now, there's eight million people they're trying to evacuate. You had your radio on?"

"Yeah, but -- "

"Maybe it's too far to pick it up out here." He took off his cap and rubbed his hand over his face. "Everybody that's got someplace to go, that has a car, is supposed to go there. Relatives, whatever. That's what all these people are doing. These are the ones from Lancaster and thereabouts -- Philadelphia people were supposed to take the Northeast Extension or else head down into south Jersey or Delaware along with the Wilmington people. The ones that don't have noplace to go, they're all being sent to camps up in the Poconos or down around Baltimore. The Army's bringing in tents and cots."

"For eight million people?"

"Naaah, most of 'em'll have somebody they can stay with for a while. They figure a million and a half, two million, tops. Still a hell of a lot of campers. Who ya looking for?"

"A student of mine, he was house-sitting for me."

"Local kid?"

"I don't know, actually."

The trooper looked me over, red swollen eyes and rumpled, slept-in clothes, and drew his own conclusions but was too tired to care. "Probably went home to his folks if they don't live around Philly. They're telling everybody to call in with the info of where they're at as soon as they get to wherever it is they're going. There's a phone number for every letter of the alphabet. A couple more days, if the kid does like he's supposed to, you'll be able to track him down."

"Sounds pretty well worked out," I said vaguely. A couple of days, IF he was okay, and no way to find out if he wasn't.

"It's a goddamn miracle is what it is," said the trooper fervently. "That goddamn Congressman, Terry Carpenter, that son of a bitch was just waiting for something like this to happen, I swear to God, must of been. He had everything all thought out and ready to go. He commandeered the suburban trains in Philly, the busses, all the regular Amtrak trains and the freight trains too, that were anywheres around, and had 'em all rolling within a couple hours of the accident, got the hospitals and so forth emptied out, and look at this here -- " he waved at the six lanes of cars contracting into four, but moving along pretty well, at about forty " -- it's the same back in Philadelphia except at the ramps and like that." The trooper put his cap back on. "I got to get back to work here. Don't worry about your little pal, he'll be okay. You got someplace to go? I can give you directions to a refugee camp.

"No thanks, I'm fine." It was stupid to resent the trooper for what he was thinking but I did all the same.

I edged my car into the stream of traffic being guided back the way it had come, but at the first exit slid out of formation and onto a little road that headed off into the mountains. I drove along for several miles, looking for a town with a phone; but when I finally found one, in front of a closed-up shop in a closed-up town, there was still no answer.

That was crisis time, there and then. I don't know how long I stood beside that phone kiosk while the battle raged. At one point several busloads of Amish families went by, probably headed for relatives in Ohio; they stared out, faces blank and stony; for them too it was the end of the world. The wind had only held SSW a little while before shifting to southwest, but that was long enough.

Finally I got back into the car, turned it around, reentered the turnpike by the eastbound ramp, drove back to the roadblock, and found my trooper. He stood still and watched me walk up to him, too beat to show surprise. "Look," I said, "I'd like to go in and help search for the people that got missed. They must need volunteers. I'm volunteering."

Very slowly he nodded. "If that's what you want. Go on into Harrisburg and talk to somebody there. Get off at the Capitol, there's a trooper station set up around there somewheres, you'll see it. Maybe they'll take you. I'll radio ahead so they know you're comin'." I thanked him and started to leave; he called after me, "Listen up a minute, bud. Later on it might be too late to change your mind. We might be moving people out of York and Harrisburg if the wind shifts again."

"I understand," I called back, and felt him watch for a minute before moving to his car to use the radio.

In Harrisburg I talked fast and they took me -- took me also, at face value, for a youthfully middle-aged man. They issued me a radiation suit, and minimal instructions, and flew me into the contaminated zone along with a batch of other volunteers, a few Quakers and some workers from Three Mile Island.

We were dropped in Center City, fifteen miles from where I needed to be. They didn't like to spare any people for the suburbs, but emergency volunteers are hard to control and some of the others were looking for friends or relatives too. In the end they let each of us take a police vehicle with a loudspeaker and told us to make a mad dash for home, then drive back slowly into the city, keeping the siren on and picking up stragglers as we came.

I'd only made it a little more than halfway home when I ran out of gas. The damned van burned ethanol and I'd been driving some kind of electric or solar car for thirteen years, but even so . . . I tore off on foot in my radiation suit to find a filling station, looking I'm sure exactly like a space invader in a B-grade flick, trying to run along the deserted street -- not deserted enough, though: when I got back with a can of ethanol half an hour later, streaming with sweat and nearly suffocated, the van was gone. Like an idiot I hadn't taken the keys. I heaved the can into a hedge and started walking.

I was seven miles from home, give or take half a mile. Just as I set off, the sun caine out. I had to pee badly and didn't know how (or whether) to open the suit, and I was already terribly thirsty.

That walk was no fun at all. I had to rest a lot. I also had decided that wetting the suit was preferable to the consequences of any alternative I could think of, which made the hike even more unpleasant than it would have been in any case. It was more than three hours from the time I'd left the van when I finally got home. The key was in my pocket but I couldn't get to it; I ended up breaking my own basement window to get in.

Eric wasn't there.

I knew the house was empty the instant I got inside. In the basement I leaned against the cool wall, overcome with exhaustion and letdown. After a while I fumbled with the suit till something came unfastened, and crawled out of it, drenched and reeking; I left the suit in the basement with all my seed-starting equipment and insect cages and dragged myself on wobbling knees upstairs, shutting the door behind me.

The kitchen sink was full of water. So were both bathroom sinks and the tub. My feeling of letdown lifted; he'd followed instructions then, that probably meant he'd gotten safely away. Good old Eric. I drank a couple of liters of water from the sink before stripping off my vile clothes and plunging into the full, cool tub. Might as well die clean.

Almost instantly I went to sleep. When I woke an hour or so later with a stiff neck I took a thorough bath, got dressed again (this time in my own clothes, some shorts and a shirt), realized I was famished, and raided the refrigerator for a random sampling of Eric's abandoned provisions: cold chicken, supermarket bread, a banana, a tomato from the garden. The power was off, but the doors had been kept shut and nothing had spoiled. I drank a can of Eric's Coke, my first in nearly thirty years. It was delicious. In a cabinet I found a bag of potato chips and ate them all with deliberate relish: exquisite! There were half a dozen boxes of baked beans in there -- and pickled herring -- and a box of cheese -- Irrationally I began to feel terrific, as if the lost chance with Eric were somehow being made up for by his unintended gifts, the last meals I expected ever to eat. I meant to enjoy them, and I did.

Sated at last, I wandered into my airless bedroom and fell across the bed. Strange as it may sound, I never thought to switch on the transistor, so wholly had I crossed over into a realm governed by the certainty of my own imminent death. I had been fleeing my death for so long that on one level I actually felt relief to believe I could give in to it now, stop twisting and doubling and trying to give it the slip. Nor, still stranger, did I even glance into the garden.

The house was stifling, must have been shut up for many hours. It had been many hours too since people had been told not to run any more water or flush their toilets, though both of mine were flushed and clean. These things pointed to Eric's safe escape and relieved my mind of its last burden. I sank like a stone into sleep. When I woke it was dark, and the house was being battered by the amazing racket of the helicopter landing in the little park a block away.

They'd caught the person who had pinched my van as he was trying to cross the Commodore Barry Bridge into New Jersey. A police van is a conspicuous object to steal, but he'd been offered no alternatives and didn't mind being apprehended at all, so long as his captors took him out of danger. He'd seen me stop and leave the van, waited till I was gone, then poured fuel from some cans in his landlady's garage into the tank and taken off, while I'd still been hoofing it up the road. Inside the helmet I hadn't heard the engine start. It seemed less reasonable to steal the van outright than to beg a lift, but people act oddly when their lives are at stake and that was how he'd chosen to play it -- a white man in his fifties, no family, a night-shift worker who had somehow slept through the evacuation. In fact, the very sort of person I'd been sent to pick up. All this I learned later.

It had taken time to trace the van, and everybody was plenty busy enough without coming to rescue the would-be rescuer, and they didn't even know my name. But I'd mentioned the name of my development to one of the other volunteers, and its general location near the campus, and eventually they sent the helicopter out to find me. It wasn't till I was out of my suit again that anybody realized the man they'd come to find had metamorphosed into a woman.

The rest is all aftermath, but I may as well set it down anyway.

I lived for a month in a refugee camp near Kutztown, Pennsylvania, on land owned by the Rodale Research Center; I chose it for that reason. By month's end it was obvious that Greater Philadelphia was going to be uninhabitable for years -- maybe a decade, maybe more.

A month to the day after the accident they sighted the returning Hefn ship.

I took a pretty high dose of radiation. My chances of developing leukemia in fifteen or twenty years aren't bad at all. However, I don't expect to be around that long unless I accept the Hefn's offer (of which more later).

One day in the camp they paged me, and when I got to the admin tent, who should be standing there in pack, tee shirt, and shorts but Eric Meredith. I'd found out, quite quickly, that he had indeed gone to relatives in Erie with the first wave of the evacuation, and had sent him a letter saying how relieved I was that he'd gotten away safely. I'd mentioned that I would be staying at the Rodale Camp for a while. Eric had come all that way, not to collect his bonus (as I thought at first), but to deliver the contents of his backpack: a complete printout of the records of my experiment, this season's preliminary notes on disk, and six seriously overripe cantaloupes containing the seeds of Cucumis melo reticulatus var. Milky Tango, the hybrid melon I'd had the highest hopes for, saved by his quick thinking from the radioactive rain. "I didn't know how to get the tough disk out of the computer," he apologized.

I stared at the bagful of smelly spheres on the table before us with the oddest emotion. For part of a day not long before I'd surrendered, I'd given up my life. By purest luck my life had been restored to me; but I had crossed some psychic boundary that day, and had never crossed back again. And Eric and the experiment both belonged to the time before the accident, when fighting viral diseases had been most of what I cared to do.

It only took one step to close the distance. I took it, put my arms around that bony, sinewy, beanpole torso and held myself against it for a moment out of time. Eric stood stiff as a tomato stake, and about as responsive, but I didn't mind. "Eric, do me a favor," I said, letting go of him and stepping back. "I'll take half of these, you keep the others. Plant them in your grandparents' back yard next summer. Finish the experiment for me."

A coughing fit made me break off, and Eric unstiffened enough to say, "Are you okay? That cough sounds terrible."

"I'm fine now. I had a cold, then bronchitis. Listen: the soil at my place will be contaminated for years, and God knows when I'll get another yard to grow things in. The college may reorganize, but it hasn't been decided whether or where. Not in Delaware County, though. Will you be going on down to University Park?"

He nodded. "Next week. They're letting us start late."

"Good, then you just have time to collect yourself a supply of cucumber beetles. You can expose them to mosaic later if they haven't already picked it up." The poor kid was staring, unable to believe what was happening. "I'm perfectly serious. Look: you saved the data and the seed. I was in the house for eight hours or so myself and it never crossed my mind to try to rescue either one." This was true. The only thing I'd thought to rescue, when the helicopter came, had been my fake penis. "You've earned the right to finish the work. But don't feel you have to, either; the Rodale people will be glad to take over, or a seed company would."

"Oh no, I want to! Really!" he protested. "If you don't that is -- but you could make money from this. It isn't right."

"Tell you what. For safety's sake, let's have another copy of these records made and print out the ones from this summer. I'll hang on to half the seed, as I said. If you don't produce salable results I'll see that somebody who might gets my copy and the seed; and if you do get results we'll split the money down the middle. How does that sound?"

The camp had several notaries. We wrote up an agreement and got one of them to notarize our signatures. I wasn't even sure it was legal -- Eric was only nineteen or twenty -- but never mind, I thought, never mind!

I walked him back to his car. Still bedazzled by the turn of events, he let the window down to say earnestly, "Nobody ever gave me anything this important before. I don't know what to say."

"You gave me something important too."

"I did? When? What was it?"

I thought of trying to tell him just what, thought better of it. "Cold chicken. Potato chips. Baked beans. Coke."

It took him a minute to realize what I was talking about, but then he objected, "That's different! That's not the same thing at all!"

"Less different than you know. Think about it, eh?" And then, a bit rashly, "Think about me once in a while."

Last month I attended Eric's graduation from Penn State: Magna cum laude in biology and a graduate fellowship to Cornell. For a boy from the nether regions of academe, not bad at all. Maybe he'll do with his life what I'd have done with mine if things had been different. Eric's final proof of Milky Tango's tolerance to mosaic under a wide variety of growing conditions earned him his classy degree, though be gave me full credit for my own work, to which his was only the capstone -- but a beautifully cut and polished capstone, every bit as good as the one I might have cut myself. I wore a long-sleeved shirt to the commencement, too warm for such a sunny day, to cover the Kaposi's lesions that have spread now over much of my body.

My own research has taken an unexpected turn.

Early last summer I donned a radiation suit and went back home to see my abandoned garden and my field trial beds. Everything was a disheartening mess, but that wasn't what I'd come to see. Erie had ripped loose the Ultramay cover on the Milky Tango beds to harvest those six melons. Remnants of the stuff flapped around me as I knelt to look, imagining his haste and fright as he'd scrabbled frantically among the vines while behind him in the house the printer pipped and pinged. But such thoughts weren't what I'd come for either.

The rest of the Milky Tango seedcrop had eventually rotted where it lay, and the seeds had been directly exposed to the elements all these months. I'd been reading a lot about using fast neutrons, X-rays, and gamma rays to induce desirable mutations in plants, including disease resistance, and had begun to wonder what effect the fallout might have had on my own already highly resistant muskmelons. I wanted to know whether any of the accidentally irradiated seed had made it through the winter and germinated, and so did my new bosses at the Rodale Press, who were paying for this expedition. Our Hefn observer was interested too -- enough to come along and help.

Sure enough, there were about two dozen volunteer seedlings growing in the Milky Tango plots. Some leaves showed signs of moderate beetle damage but not enough to set the plants back much. With Godfrey's help I transplanted each seedling, radioactive soil and all, into its own large peat pot brought along for the purpose. Back at the Research Center we planted the lot of them at a special site set apart from the other trials and waited to see what would happen.

While we were waiting I got sick. Before that, the eighteen months between the Peach Bottom accident and my illness were my happiest ever.

When Penn State made the decision to disband the Delaware County Campus, they offered to try to place the tenured faculty at other branches of the system; but by then the Rodale Press had offered me a job. I'd been writing for their magazines for years and knew a number of Rodale editors and writers through correspondence, so it was natural enough that they should think of me when an editorial slot opened up that September at Backyard Researcher magazine, the newest member of the Rodale family of publications.

I can remember when all this part of Pennsylvania was farmland, and Kutztown a tiny college town with one main street, one bad motel, and one decent restaurant. But high-tech industry like AT&T and Xerox had moved in, changing the character of the area completely. When I came here to live, the Research Center had become a green island in a sea of development. I moved into one of the old farm buildings at the Center and commuted to my job in Emmaus, where the Press was located. Living out at the Center made it easier to keep an eye on my new experimental garden. No more battling with diseases now; the project I devised had to do with increasing yields in several kinds of potatoes. No more hyperpure living, either; the potato chip and I were strangers no longer. No more Companions; we were scattered to the winds, but the new friends I made here knew about my condition. No more celibacy: for a while, one of these friends became my lover.

When the Hefn returned and decided to take charge of us, they looked around for pockets of sanity and right action in the general balls-up we'd made of things, and so they were interested in the Rodale enterprise and in sustainable agriculture generally -- enough to assign us a permanent observer/advisor, and that was Godfrey. He moved into the farmhouse with me. When I got sick he knew about it; when the lesions appeared he asked about them, and the disease they meant I had. It's because of Godfrey that the search for a "cure" -- fallen on very thin times since the numbers of still-living victims had dropped below ten thousand -- has taken off again.

It looks pretty promising, actually. They've found a way to paralyze the enzyme that the virus uses to replicate in the cell -- not like zidovudine and its kindred, which only slowed the enzyme down, but a drug that stops it cold. There's no way I'd still be alive by the time they finish sanding the side effects off the stuff, not in the natural course of things. But Godfrey's had another idea.

You know that, like cucumber beetles, the Hefn hibernate -- and that their bodies use chemicals pretty much the same way ours do? Well, Godfrey figures it should be possible to synthesize a drug -- using a chipmunk or woodchuck model in conjunction with a Hefn model -- that would put the ninety-five-hundred-odd AIDS patients and AB-positives to sleep for a couple of years, until the cure can be perfected. There's a problem about testing the stuff if we all take the cold sleep, because of course the bosses, the Gafr, won't let them use animals. So we might be asleep for quite a while -- or forever -- or be damaged by the procedure. But the Gafr have given the go-ahead, and I'm thinking seriously about it. The Kaposi's can only be treated effectively with radiation, and I've had much more than my fair share of that already. I'll die of cancer anyway, probably sooner than later; in a month I'll be forty-nine. But I'm thinking about it. I wish they'd come up with this before, is all.

I have to tell you something funny. One of my irradiated melon plants turned out to be one hundred percent immune to mosaic! It's peculiar in other ways that make it useless for commercial purposes at this point, but the Rodale breeders are sure to keep working on improvements. I mentioned before that like all cucurbits melons produce separate male and female flowers, the male flowers bearing the pollen-producing stamens, the female flowers the pistil and ovary. Ordinarily it's easy to tell which is which, because the ovary behind the female blossom is a large hairy structure and the male flower has nothing behind it but a stem.

Well, the immune melon bears male and female flowers that look exactly alike! You can't tell them apart, except by peering closely at the inner structures or tearing off the petals, because the ovary is tiny, and concealed entirely within the flower. The fruit is correspondingly tiny, about the size of a small orange -- much too small to appeal to growers, though I'd think home gardeners might raise it as a novelty.

I've given this new cultivar the official name of Tiny Tango, a name to please the seed catalogue writers. Privately I think of it as Male Impersonator (or sometimes -- a pun -- Atomic Power Plant). Its rind is tan and thin, netted like the rind of an ordinary cantaloupe, and its flesh is a beautiful deep salmon-orange, as sweetly, intensely delicious as any I ever tasted.