A portrait of the artist as a gene pool.
I’m going to tell a story I’ve told before, which is something I try never to do. In the interests of novelty, originality. As though I’m somehow better than previously told tales. But I am retelling this story in the hopes that it proves to me that it is an important one, that in its retelling it becomes truer or better, or, better still, that it makes me better, or truer. Because I realize that I’ve never stuck to one thing long – relationships and jobs and homes and things, all replaced by the next thing, the next story. And so I’ve never really known the joy of the retold thing, the joy of evolution, the way stories are seasoned by the passage of tongues and tempered by the force of words. So this story that I’m going to tell is the invocation of muses, the second telling of my own little odyssey.
It goes like this:
The first time I got felt up was in the name of science. I was a child in Denver with my mother and stepfather and brother, he for whom this trip was happening. We were in Denver seeing a doctor because my brother has Fragile X, a genetic cause of retardation and autism. One of its symptoms is enlarged testicles, which so here I am on a table in Denver and this doctor, Dr. Hagerman, is shall we say consulting my sources, and here I lay considering how strange it is, this science thing, and how strange scientists must be to pursue answers down somebody’s skivs. A search for hidden meaning, a weird oracle of warm hands in a cold room.
Because the mutation is carried on the X chromosome, there were just about even odds that I could’ve had Fragile X – along with, or instead of, him. Such a coin toss! But of course it’s not as easy as that; the twists of the genome wrap whole families in its effects. My feelings on who I could’ve been are complex.
There are times I look at him, nearly thirty but with all the cares and conceptions of a six-year-old, times when I think it’s not bad at all, his life. He is moved about in a world of people who care about him and he is responsible only for a small glass world of hermit crabs, for keeping in mind all the things that need scrubbing come showertime. His rules are simpler ones, and have no social borders. You and I might not decide to take off a shoe and throw it out a car window, or disrobe after eating lasagna, but for him it’s only natural. (I have felt, at times, that my life is part of a massive piece of performance art.) And in his example I’ve found a freedom and expressiveness that, if not art, so closely resembles it in its power to rewrite the world that he has become a kind of shy and savage muse. If our roles were reversed, I should like to think I’d have been as inspiring to him.
This presents the harder question. What if neither of our Xs were marked? What if we were a normal family of middle class mores and clothing-required frozen Italian dinner? What art then? And who am I to wish for anything but?
It becomes a regular dimestore novel then, when in 2007 scientists at MIT discover not one, but two different ways to reverse symptoms of Fragile X in mice. Turns out it’s the neurons — those nerves that conduct the electricity of the brain and jump-start consciousness. The neurons branching ends, the dendrites, get long and spindly in Fragile X; they can’t send the signals down the line, and the result is impaired brain function. Blame it on an enzyme.
But imagine these mice whose brains suddenly opened up like tiny dams, flows of thought fixing the repetitive behaviors, the anxiety, the impaired cognition and movement. I think this is when I started thinking seriously about Science again, about the weird myths and the weird gods that always promised healing. And too about how there’s always a twist to that genetic promise.
So if there comes a pill down the road in some days hence that can reverse all this, what does it mean? Who does my brother become and who, then, do we become? Are we starting a new chapter, or are we rewritten?
This then is why I have come here to Los Angeles, which henceforth will be called Petri Town. Because it’s a science experiment, this place, a big messy one, and I’ve followed science here looking for answers, looking for ways to retell the world. Now, I’ve got my hands down my own pants.
Petri Town — a city for organisms. Petri Town — a place where culture has many meanings, where incubation makes things pretty, and virulent. Petri Town — a dish best served mold.
Oct 5th, 2009 12:36am
