dirt, right at the spot where saliva dripped from the many mouths of Cerberus, hound of Hades, dragged by his leash out of hell and into the sunshine.
See Dracula: if the lady Mina will keep aconite in her bedchamber, she will be safe from the vampire. Rudolph Bloom, father of Leopold, kills himself by an aconite overdose.
No plain antidote is yet known. I’m designing its antidote, or at least I’m designing a tiny botanical firefighter who can climb the poison’s ladder and hose it down, put out the flames, save the cat. I need to cold-soak and freeze the monkshood seeds for three weeks before I can sow them. They’re in the freezer right now. I’m building, if you’ll help me, a new aconite that accepts its own opposite. Think of it as me and you alone together. A poison that undoes itself.
RACHEL
Rachel had joined our lab from the metals side; I’d been the flower girl, and Jason the synthetics, alongside three others whose work I couldn’t classify. We thought of ourselves as grungy, secular-age saviors who would eventually be able to detoxify toxins faster than ever before, the way microchips made computers smaller than ever before, and in doing so advance our society. Rachel worked on the binding of ferric hexacyanoferrate, picturesquely called Prussian blue, to thallium, its chemical enemy. Depending on hydration state and particle size, this binding could be praised with the name of antidote in its most successful cases. Rachel approached her venture with such American A+ confidence, such loony eagerness to do right, she turned away from thallium’s essential danger and focused on its weakness. She believed it to be a fallible menace and believed herself to be an agent of immunity. The upper bound for skin exposure to univalent thallium ions is 0.1 milligram per square meter of skin in a forty-hour work week. Rachel’s weekly hour totals exceeded eighty as a matter of pride.
When exposed to air, thallium becomes clear, tasteless, and odorless. I guess even the most stringent precaution can’t protect against invisible attack. I wonder when it was that it reached her. Once inside the body’s cells, thallium binds to sulfur, damages the 60S ribosomes, and fatally disrupts the functioning of our proteins. She may have touched it, inhaled it, ingested it. She wore splash goggles, gloves, and a dust respirator. She did know the bigness of the risk.
I didn’t know her very well, as I’ve told you. I admired her so I left her alone. I liked the short hairs on the back of her neck. I liked how her cheeks collided with her goggles when she smiled. I liked that she neither wore deodorant nor shaved her armpits. That secret hair soaked up and spread a smell so rank I’ll never unsmell it. I liked her adamance, her clarity, her wristwatch, and her gusto. I liked that she had been born. The loss is serious and I accept my piece of it. But what am I to do with the seeds in my freezer, this set of toxins unremedied, Rachel’s project incomplete, and the prospect of disqualifying myself from your absolutely necessary nearness?
The university gave us an afternoon to empty our lab lockers. The only thing I kept in my lab locker was a stick of beef jerky that I’d bitten into over the summer and never finished. I chewed up that rock-hard half-jerky and then I stole Rachel’s tinted goggles from their peg on the wall, and the two giant Zanzibar castor seeds that I had ordered for the lab, and the monkshood sample we hadn’t collectively decided what to do with. These things were mine, by right, or at least I would best appreciate them.
I’d become sort of frantic thinking about the physical horror of what had happened to her. Frantic, and disgusted with myself and my humdrum studies and my whole pasty anemic priceless life. I couldn’t find any way through it except to continue her project, as if that somehow preserved or resuscitated her person. But nobody else wanted to touch it, I suppose understandably so. I wanted to touch it. Not the thallium, that’d be dumb and redundant, but the other avenues, the castor, the monkshood, the other toxins we’d wanted to unwind and to heal. Rachel’s focus hadn’t been our only option, it had only been her only option. I knew that if we could quicken a detoxification starting with any other seed, set a speed record, she’d approve, she’d even celebrate, in