Laurie rolled her head to one side and touched her temple to the curtains. The family always noticed Paul’s likeness to his father, but no one remarked on how much stronger a resemblance there was in Laurie. Alone among the Fleischer children, she had missed out on their grandfather’s red hair. Her face was fuller than Paul’s and far more kind. But the others didn’t expect her to take after their father—it was something only Paul noticed, something that now and then could strike him breathless with grief.
“Are you okay?” Her eyes met his, and she made a quick, matter-of-fact assessment, nothing like the rest of the family’s self-interested concern. “You look really sad.”
Paul was tired of being asked, but he was also tired of pretending the answer was what everyone wanted it to be.
“Aren’t you sad, too?”
Laurie made a noise that was a shade too angry to be a laugh.
“I miss Dad,” she said. “He messed everything up.”
“Well.” Paul tucked his glasses into his breast pocket and shut his eyes. “You’re not wrong.”
2.
He remembered the boy from freshman orientation—months ago now, but the memory still lingered. Paul had only seen him from a distance, then; he was a laughing dark-haired blur with a straight spine, perpetually surrounded by people as if he took for granted that he ought to be. He’d reminded Paul of the golden boys he knew in high school, the state-champion track teammates and stars of school plays. Paul remembered writing an elaborate life story for the boy in his head while he picked at the label on his soda bottle and spoke to no one. He couldn’t remember any details of the story now, but he hadn’t chosen them to be memorable. Paul assumed such people had the luxury of leading uneventful lives.
The boy had come to class alone, which looked unnatural on him. He sat a row back from Paul, carefully draping his satchel and wool winter coat over the back of his seat. He wore his sleeves folded back from his forearms, which he leaned on as he listened, attentive to the point of impatience. His hands were very like Paul’s, long-fingered and lean, blue delicate shadows of vein just visible. There was a winter-faded smear of freckles beneath his skin, and his watch (burgundy leather) was a shade too large for his wrist.
The professor was making a list, ethical issues in the sciences. Paul turned forward again at the squeal of the chalk. He thought he felt the other boy glance toward him, as if he’d finally noticed that he was being watched, but Paul didn’t dare look back.
“So many eager volunteers,” said Professor Strauss. He picked up the class roster again, holding the chalk between his fingers. He wore a film of eraser dust on his hand like a white laboratory glove. “Let’s see, how about—Paul Fleischer, Biology. Perhaps you can think of a pertinent problem in experimental ethics?”
His classmates were looking at him, not staring, but in that moment the distinction felt very fine.
“Well,” he said, “there’s the fact that doctors keep medically torturing people in the name of science whenever they feel like they can get away with it.”
All the air left the room. Strauss took a moment to shake himself.
“Human subject experimentation,” Strauss said to the class, “is an excellent example of what we’ll be talking about in this class. The places where the demands of scientific inquiry come up against the boundaries of human need—”
“Pardon me for interrupting,” said the boy behind him suddenly, “but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.”
Paul turned, slowly, to look at him. The boy sat at attention, turning his pen between his fingers. When the other students’ eyes landed on him, he hardly seemed to notice.
“Of course it’s an example,” the boy said, “but it’s not his example. I think what Fleischer is actually getting at is a widespread failure of the scientific conscience to consider the humanity of its subjects at all.”
“Yes,” said Paul, “yes, that’s it exactly,” but he was speaking so quietly and the words felt so thick that he didn’t think anyone heard him.
“I think that’s sort of a melodramatic way of putting it,” said a voice from the front. Paul knew the speaker slightly—Brady, an upperclassman in Chemistry who had been the student assistant in Paul’s laboratory section the semester before. There couldn’t have been more than five years between them, but he was decisively a man rather than a boy; his hands were broad and thick-fingered, nails wider than they were long. “This isn’t the Third Reich,” Brady said. “Scientists here operate under ethical standards.”
“Yes, and those standards work so well,” said Paul acidly. “That’s how we get, what, only a few decades of letting innocent people die of syphilis in Tuskegee before anybody thinks to complain—”
“Sure, there are problematic studies, conducted by a few bad apples who manage to avoid notice, but we’re doing something about it. With institutional review boards and the like, we’re imposing—”
“But you can’t impose morality from the outside.” Paul knew anger had seeped into his voice, but he didn’t care. “The whole idea of an infrastructure of ethical oversight is a symptom of the—the ‘failure of the scientific conscience.’ I’m saying there’s something about the way we conduct scientific inquiry that’s actually appealing to people who want to slice people up just to see what happens. Because they sure seem to do it the second they think the infrastructure won’t notice.”
“A review board is just a hedge on liability,” said the boy behind him. “We can’t and shouldn’t pretend it functions as a conscience. Let’s not delude ourselves that we can send Mengele on his way with a stack of consent forms and pretend that solves the problem.”
“Spirited debate!” said Strauss with a clap of his chalk-streaked hands. “Highly preferable to dull-eyed terror. Hold that thought, gentlemen, because the readings for week seven in particular will prove pertinent . . .”
Paul sank back into his chair and exhaled slowly. As the conversation shifted, he felt a stir of movement at his side. The dark-haired boy had gathered his belongings and settled at the desk beside him. Paul watched him, but the boy’s eyes were trained on the professor. They were the same shade of green as sea glass—a soft and striking color but very cold, an eerie contrast with the dark of his lashes.
Strauss had moved on to a girl from the Physics department, who suggested nuclear weapons research. Paul only half listened to the discussion as he sketched a skeleton with Brady’s barrel chest and wide jaw. He blackened the bones and haloed them from behind with the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Further achievements in American ethics, he wrote underneath. A superior system.
Something tapped at his ankle—the toe of a jodhpur boot, stained with a faint crust of sidewalk salt. The dark-haired boy was looking over at his notebook, leaning forward so he could see past Paul’s arm.
Paul felt his face flush. At first he considered turning the page, or tucking his arms around the notebook to conceal it as he’d done countless times, protecting his sketchbooks from the singsong girls who liked to pester him in the cafeteria.