Second Nature

Chapter 1

1 

Gen sat at a kitchen table reading a book of love poems in Bengali. She smiled at the mouth-feel of the words, tender and sweet, like the fruits in the salad she had made for breakfast.  

Gen experienced each of the languages she spoke as having its own personality. She visited different languages like other teen-age girls might spend time yakking on the phone or Facebook with different friends. She had favorites: Portuguese, for melody; Bantu, for sheer fun making the tongue clicks; Romanian, for when she pretended she was a gypsy.  

Reading the book of poems now, Gen decided that Bengali felt to her like a grandmotherly version of Hindi. She pictured the Hindi language as a white-haired sage, wise but sternly ascetic; Bengali was his kindly old wife, pudgy and overly fond of honey. It would be terrific to chat with a native Bengali speaker, but she had learned the language from tapes and no one else at the lab spoke it. She had to be content reading Ramprasad Sen's verses-which were good, she wasn't complaining. Last night, she had read a bicycle repair manual in Tagalog. It was the best she could do to break the monotony of her days and nights.  

Gen looked up from the book at the tall glass walls of her apartment-three layers of thick glass plates. A second vault enclosed the one that confined her, and on the wall of the outer vault a series of airlocks led into the main laboratory room. Beyond the lab building existed "the real world"-which to Gen was a mythical realm she visited only in daydreams. 

She surveyed the 20-foot-square glass box: her permanent quarters, her world. Stainless steel furniture-a small kitchen table, a desk, a bookshelf, a bed-occupied a stainless steel floor made of a single, seamless plate. Computers controlled the room's lighting. Video cameras mounted in the ceiling recorded her every move from various angles. A curtain on an overhead track concealed an area containing a stainless steel toilet and a shower stall. After many tearful complaints, Gen had persuaded a committee of scientists to add the curtain as a token to her privacy; the cameras still recorded her actions from above. 

She spooned up a plump strawberry and let it roll around in her mouth, feeling the tiny bumps and whiskers with her tongue. She bit into the fruit and closed her eyes at the splash of flavor. She imagined a Bengali-speaking friend-better, Ramprasad himself-sitting at the kitchen table with her. Of course, she had to imagine a chair for the poet to sit on, because the isolation chamber that served as her apartment contained only one chair. Biohazard Level Four did not permit visitors, so there was no point in providing extra furniture. More than anything else in her environment, the single chair had become for Gen a symbol of her loneliness. Sometimes, lying on her bed, she would glance around her bleak room and her eyes would fix on the solo chair; then the ache of solitude wrung her heart until she felt the muscles would fray. 

But this morning Ramprasad was telling her about his life as a boy in Bengal in the 1700s. He described in gritty detail the cottage factory where his family made incense. In a wooden press, they squeezed oils from sandalwood blossoms and mixed it with a combustible paste of rice powder, then rolled the paste onto slender stalks of grass. Gen smiled. She could feel the heat and taste the dust, and the smells were overwhelming: sandalwood paste drying, cow dung burning for fuel, and on every sultry breeze, the fragrance of cinnamon trees blooming. 

You and I have some things in common, she told Ramprasad. We both love to write poetry, though I could never hope to be as wonderful a poet as you. That made him laugh, and his laugh sounded musical, like his words. See what I mean? she said. You even laugh like a poet.  

Ramprasad Sen was unreasonably handsome. He wore a saffron-colored sarong and a simple white muslin shirt. White teeth flashed in his dark face and his black eyes shone like polished obsidian.