doing addiction research at a university in the great state of California was the result of the thousands of pioneers who had climbed into their wagons facing disease and injury and starvation and the great, brutal expanse of land that ranged from mountain to river to valley, all for the sake of getting from one side of this enormous country to the other. They knew that there was risk involved, but the potential for triumph, for pleasure, for something just a little bit better, was enough to outweigh the cost. All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.
In my work I am trying to ask questions that anticipate our inevitable recklessness and to find a way out, but to do that I need to use mice. Mice don’t seek danger, not the way we do. They, like everything else on this planet, are subject to the whims of humans. My whims involved tests that could greatly advance our understanding of the brain, and my desire to understand the brain superseded every other desire I had. I understood that the same thing that made humans great—our recklessness and creativity and curiosity—was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us. Because we were the animal daring enough to take boats out to sea, even when we thought the world was flat and that our boats would fall off the edge, we discovered new land, different people, roundness. The cost of this discovery was the destruction of that new land, those different people. Without us oceans wouldn’t be turning to acid, frogs and bats and bees and reefs wouldn’t be heading for extinction. Without me, the limping mouse wouldn’t limp; he would never have succumbed to addiction. I grew up being taught that God gave us dominion over the animals, without ever being taught that I myself was an animal.
When the mouse with the limp was finally ready for optogenetics, I pulled him out of the box and anesthetized him. Soon I would shave his head and inject the virus that contained the opsins. Eventually, if all went according to plan, the mouse would never press the lever again, would lose that recklessness I’d trained him to exhibit.
47
Dear God,
Today, Ashley and I were trying to see who could hold their breath the longest underwater. I took a deep breath and sat down at the shallow end of Ashley’s pool while she timed me. I held my breath for so long my chest started to hurt, but I didn’t want to lose cuz Ashley wins everything, but then I got lightheaded and dizzy and I thought maybe I could just walk into the deep end, just for a second. I must have passed out because Ashley’s mom pulled me out of the pool and started slapping my back until water came out of my mouth, and she just kept saying, “Are you crazy? You could have killed yourself!” But you wouldn’t let me die, would you, God?
48
I have always been slow to recklessness, afraid of danger and of death. I spent years avoiding the red Solo cups and punch bowls at the rare high school parties that I was invited to. It wasn’t until my sophomore year at college that I took my first drink. Not out of curiosity, but out of desperation. I was so tired of being lonely. I just wanted to make friends, something I had never been particularly good at. Ashley, my childhood best friend, had become my friend through the sheer force of will and directness that only young children display. She asked, tapping me on the shoulder the day she found me playing in our neighborhood playground by myself, “Will you be my friend?” I said yes. It never happened that easily again.
For Nana, friendships had been different, easier. The sports teams helped, the way they sealed those packs of boys together, giving them names with which to define their togetherness—the Tornadoes, the Grizzlies, the Vipers. A herd of predators, prowling. Our house used to be overrun with basketball