“I can’t agree with this,” Ollie said. “You may be right about how the brain works, but I don’t want to live in a world where no one’s responsible.”

“I keep saying, we are responsible, just not in the way—”

“Stop,” Ollie said. “Please stop.” She took her hand from mine and looked out the passenger window.

I noticed Rovil looking at me in the rearview mirror, his eyebrows raised questioningly. I shook my head. I’d thought I was distracting her, relieving the tension, but I’d only packed the powder a little tighter.

*   *   *

We pulled off the interstate at Amarillo, short of the New Mexico border, an hour before sundown. It was Saturday night, and the instructions had been to wait until at least Sunday. I wanted to do the last leg of the trip so that we arrived at Edo’s place in daylight.

We found a motel a quarter mile from the interstate. When we stepped out of the refrigerated capsule of the car, the heat slammed us. We’d left spring up north; Texas was well into summer.

Rovil bought his dinner from a vending machine and said he wanted to hole up in his room and do work, leaving Ollie and me to find supper on our own. We started walking toward the nearest restaurant on our maps, and immediately began to sweat. In two blocks we reached La Cantina, a rundown brick building squatting between a Discount Gas & Liquor Drive Thru and a shop with a sign that said simply INCOME TAX.

Ollie thought the place looked sketchy, but I argued that it was impossible to get bad Mexican in Amarillo. And yet: enchiladas microwaved to hell, salsa from a can, Velveeta cheese coating everything. Only tequila could have saved the meal. Ollie, however, seemed to barely notice the food; her eyes were tracking the restaurant staff and the handful of other customers. She would not be surprised by the cowboy again.

She stayed on guard after we returned to the motel. She sat on the bed, turned sideways so she could watch the door, her pen screen unfurled across her lap. I was on my own pen, watching a free version of Pride and Prejudice. I flashed on a memory of Mikala and me lying beside each other like this, our minds somewhere else, our bodies touching, while we wondered whether certain cells were dividing and growing inside my body.

I said to Ollie, “I’m going to check on Rovil.”

She started to get up, and I said, “Please. Stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Don’t let the Clarity get the best of you,” I said.

She didn’t like this, but she let me go. Outside I half expected Dr. Gloria to be waiting for me with a disapproving frown on her face, but no.

Rovil’s room was to the left. I turned right, toward town. It was 9:40. I had twenty minutes to make it. It should be plenty of time, but I walked fast just in case. The night was still alarmingly muggy, and by the time I reached the Discount Gas & Liquor, sweat was rolling down my ribs.

The sign on the door said 10AM–10PM MON–SAT. I was there with minutes to spare.

I walked the aisles, considering the rows of glass bottles. Not a big bottle, I decided. Just enough to get me through the night. I circled back to the front of the store. The pocket sizes were on the shelf behind the cash register. The clerk was an old Latino with wild tufts of gray hair. His eyes tracked me from beneath the shelter of an imposing monobrow.

After a minute he said, “We are closing.”

“I know, I know.”

“Are you buying or not?”

“Just relax, okay? I’m deciding.”

He stared at me.

“Smirnoff is on sale,” he said.

“I fucking hate Smirnoff’s.”

Another minute passed.

“Wild Turkey?” he asked.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” I said.

I stalked out. The skies were as empty as my hands.

*   *   *

The human egg is a Mrs. Bennet, desperate to marry off her daughters. She starts life with as many chromosomes as any other cell in the body, but when hormones sound the alert she divides herself, making poor little daughter cells, impoverished things with only one set of chromosomes, each in great need of a long-tailed prince to make her whole. The male germline cells were just as desperate. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sperm must be in want of a matching strand of DNA.

Well, fuck Mr. Darcy, and his sperm too. A couple of eggs could do the job on their own, thanks to modern science.

Mikala and I decided to make a child out of only ourselves, pairing up two half sets of chromosomes. The process was a few years old, created by a (female) scientist in Melbourne, Australia. It could create only daughters—and debt. The $85,000 bill was not covered by any insurance and was definitely not something Mikala could ask her family for. We emptied our savings and cashed in our 401ks, gambling on a long shot. The success rate was somewhere below thirty percent. But we were optimists.

Both of us became pre-pregnant together. We gave each other shots of Follistim to stimulate our follicles and Cetrotide to stem the tide of ovulation. And when it came time to mix our eggs, we flew to Australia, and in a hotel room loaded up the so-called “trigger shot” of chemicals extracted from the urine of pregnant women. We giggled and made jokes about pissed-off fat ladies. Then we counted to three and pulled the trigger together.

They put us under during the egg extraction. By the time we awoke in adjoining recovery rooms, our sides aching from the puncture wounds of long needles, the lab techs were already at work, trying to get our girls to pair up: one set of chromosomes from Mikala’s eggs, one set from mine. Twenty-nine of these hybrid eggs fertilized. The doctors chose the dozen best prospects and put the second-stringers in the freezer. Then, on the third day, a catheter slid into my vagina and shot the lucky eggs into my uterus. The catheter, satisfied, immediately dozed off.

We flew home. For the next two weeks Mikala and I waited for an egg to implant and start growing into our girl. We were so nervous. We’d traveled so far, and sacrificed so much, that we could not admit that we’d made a terrible mistake.

I don’t know now whether Mikala even wanted children. She told me she did, but it was clear to both of us that my desire for a child far outstripped hers. I was older, and my longing bordered on a biological imperative. For a long time I thought that she went through the process with me—shot by shot, appointment by appointment, over the course of a year—to make me happy. But that wasn’t it, exactly. She wanted to prove she could make me happy. Mikala did not permit herself to fail at anything.

As for me, I powered forward on the plan with the certainty that a child would be the final catalyst to bind us together permanently, the last link in the benzene ring. Those two weeks after the implantation were the happiest I’d experienced in a long time, and the most nerve-racking. On several nights, Mikala and I fell asleep holding hands.

Then, nothing happened.

All but one of the eggs failed to implant, and that sole survivor clung to the placental wall for days before, inexplicably, letting go. They’d warned us that pregnancy was unlikely. We were scientists, and understood statistics. But the loss struck me like a judgment, like its own proof.

I went into mourning, but I didn’t recognize it as that. I took a job as a fixed-term instructor at Loyola and stopped coming to Little Sprout. The lab didn’t need me, and neither did Mikala. She’d become consumed by NME 110.

This latest iteration was performing amazingly well in animal tests. The rats refused to die or develop tumors, and in fact were prospering. They were happy, energetic, and smart. Memory tasks, especially visual memory, became trivial for them. They navigated mazes as if someone were whispering in their ear.

Months after, when it was too late, I realized that Mikala had been in mourning too. I understood why, when she saw those happy rats, she tried the drug, and why, after she had tasted it, she decided to use it again. Just a little touch of the God. A glow that told you that you weren’t alone, that you were connected with all living things. And once that door to Heaven opened a crack, who could blame her for pushing it wide?