Русская версия: Воскрешение Генриетты Лакс · 中文版：复活亨丽埃塔·拉克斯

The Resurrection of Henrietta Lacks

She remembered red.

Not the color, but the heat. Her whole body was red from the inside, though she had no eyes yet, and there was nothing to see with. Then came the cold, and the noise, and strangers’ hands, and a voice that said, “Breathe.” And she inhaled for the first time, at thirty-one years old, in a single second.

That was how they explained it to her later. The body had grown fast, in eleven months inside a glass vat, and entered this world adult. The age was not chosen at random: thirty-one. That was how old that woman had been when she died.

They taught her to walk the way children are taught, except nobody explains to children on the way to the dining hall that the floors are washed at four in the morning and that the woman with the mop is called a cleaner. They explained everything to her. The world entered her through words, because it had no other way in. No smell of childhood, no mother’s face, no first snow. Well — she did have a first snow. She saw it from the window of the Baltimore clinic, in December, and asked why it smelled of iron, and Dr. Rao said snow doesn’t smell of anything, and that was the first lie she ever learned. Because the snow did smell. People had simply stopped listening long ago.

Dr. Rao’s first name was Amrita. She was not evil. This has to be said right away, because things are about to get difficult, and there were no evil people in this story — and that is the hardest thing about it.

“You’re healthy,” Amrita would say, bent over her tablet. “Heart, liver, lungs. Everything’s better than mine, honestly.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because you’re unprecedented.”

She didn’t like the word. She had learned many words that winter, and she liked some of them (“window,” “bread,” “Saturday”) and not others. “Unprecedented” meant: there has never been one like you, and we don’t know what to do with you. She decided she didn’t want to be a word she didn’t like.

In February they showed her a photograph.

She knew already, of course. Not knowing was impossible: she had been made from this, and people spoke of it in her presence the way they speak of the weather. A woman named Henrietta Lacks. Nineteen fifty-one. Cervical cancer. Doctors took cells from the tumor. They never asked her permission — though that was how things were done at the time. And those cells did not die like all the ones in past experiments: they divided and divided, for a hundred and thirty years straight, in millions of laboratories, tons of cells; they flew into space before people did, they helped create the most advanced vaccines, the kind she herself received while lying in the glass vat. The cell line was called HeLa. The first letters of the first and last name — like a name you give a dog.

And then someone figured it out: Henrietta had descendants left. Great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren. Their genomes were sequenced, a century of cancerous mutations accumulated by the HeLa cells was subtracted, and the woman who had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital — back when segregation was still the law and her family still grew tobacco in Clover, Virginia — was reassembled. Assembled the way you assemble some mechanism from a very complicated blueprint.

Amrita laid the photograph on the table between them, carefully, like medicine.

The woman in the photograph looked straight out. A dark dress with a white collar, hands on her hips, chin slightly raised. Beautiful. Not like a vat and not like the word “unprecedented.” Like a person who has an opinion about whoever is photographing her.

“That’s you,” said Amrita, then corrected herself: “I mean. That’s her.”

“Do we look alike?”

“Not exactly. You’re taller. Your teeth are your own,” Amrita smiled. “We restored the genome down to the last nucleotide, but there’s always the influence of external factors.”

“External factors,” she repeated. She liked that least of all.

That night she got up and looked for a long time into the bathroom mirror, pressing her palm to her cheek, because the cheek in the photograph was rounder, and the eyes? What had gone missing in them? She waited for the face in the mirror to suddenly remember something: tobacco, Clover, nineteen twenty, the year that woman was born. The face remembered nothing. The face was her own, warm, alive, and it looked back at her with the ordinary nighttime patience mirrors have when someone who can’t sleep is standing in front of them.

That was when she first thought: maybe memory doesn’t live in the face?

She was right. But she didn’t yet know exactly how.

The first of the family to come was Deborah.

Not that Deborah. That one, Henrietta’s daughter, had died long ago, in two thousand nine, and had spent her whole life tormented by the question of whether it hurt her mother out there, in the test tubes they talked about on television. This one was that Deborah’s great-granddaughter, about forty, a nurse’s aide from East Baltimore, with large hands and a way of entering a room as though the room owed her something. She came with permission, through three committees, and brought a pie. A real one, store-bought, in a cardboard box she held like a shield.

“My name is Deborah Lacks-Wilson,” she said from the doorway.

“I know,” she said. “They showed me your file.”

“Your file.” Deborah set down the pie. “Of course. My file.”

They sat across from each other, and Deborah looked into her face for a long time, without politeness, the way you look at a new apartment where you’ll have to live for many years. Then she said:

“Don’t look like Grandma. A little like Aunt Elsie. The forehead.”

“I was told there were no gaps.”

“What?”

“They say they assembled everything down to the last letter. But life isn’t only letters. It’s who carried you, what they fed you, what the air was like. Everything between the genes. That you can’t copy.”

Deborah fell silent, and in that pause you could hear a car driving through puddles outside the window.

“You know how many times we were promised,” she said at last. “First the cells. Then money. Then just to say thank you. Every time people in good suits came and explained to us what we were supposed to feel. And now here’s you.” She sighed. “And once again I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Probably that’s why they made you. To finally find out.”

“That’s not what I’m for.”

“Everyone’s for something, baby.”

They ate the pie with forks, straight from the box, and it was the best thing that had happened to her in that clinic. The pie was apple, bought near the subway, and the crust was burnt on one edge, and Deborah told her that her great-grandmother Deborah, the original one, had been afraid of the dark her whole life, because in the dark she imagined the cells, “immortal like the Lord, only without Him.” And she also told her that Henrietta had a habit of painting her nails red, and that she loved to dance, and that in Clover the house where she was born still stands, and people come and take pictures there, and the family doesn’t get a cent from that house.

Before leaving, Deborah turned around in the doorway.

“Did they give you a name?”

“A number. And a project code.”

“A number,” Deborah repeated, and something in her face turned hard. “They’ve been taking everything from our family for a hundred years, even the signature under the operation. Don’t let them leave you a number.”

The body began behaving strangely in the spring.

At first, small things. A cut on her finger, from the cardboard pie box, healed overnight. Then a scrape on her knee — she fell on the treadmill, because Dr. Rao had allowed her to run, “for proprioception.” The scrape disappeared within a day, and the skin in its place was new, pink, as though the knee had remembered it was twenty minutes old, not thirty-one years.

And in April she broke a glass and a shard sliced her palm open — deep, to the white, to the tendon. The blood flowed for about five seconds. Then it stopped, and she watched the edges of the wound creep toward each other, slowly, like lips about to say something. A minute later there was a pink scar on her palm. An hour later there was no scar at all. She stood by the sink, holding her hand under the water, and felt not gratitude but horror — that quiet, domestic horror when you realize your body knows more about you than you know about it.

And then a lab technician named Sam took a swab from the inside of her cheek (routine, once a week, she was already used to opening her mouth and waiting) and forgot the cup with those cells in the incubator. He remembered four days later.

The cells were alive.

Worse: they were dividing.

Ordinary human cheek cells don’t do that. They live in a tube for a day or two and die — everyone’s die, every person’s on the planet, except one woman from Clover, Virginia. Sam’s cells from cup No. 47, smear of March 11, were dividing on day nine, and on day twelve, and on day fourteen they had to be fixed, because the medium was running out.

A paper was written about it. News was written about the paper. Columns were written about the news: “THE IMMORTAL RETURNS.” On Thursday morning three camera crews and one person with a sign that said “SHE IS NOT YOURS” stood beneath the clinic windows, and she looked down at that sign for a long time and could not figure out whether it was for her or against her.

Amrita came to her in the evening, tired, with two paper cups of coffee, and sat on the windowsill.

“Your cells,” she said. “Do you understand what this means?”

“That I’m contagious?”

“That we made a mistake. Somewhere in the assembly we subtracted the cancer, but we didn’t subtract the immortality. It turned out not to be in the mutations. It turned out to be…” she wiggled her fingers, searching for the word, “…distributed. Like salt in soup. You won’t get sick. Your cells don’t know how to die on schedule.”

“Am I immortal?”

“You’re not. You’ll grow old and die like everyone else, because an organism is not cells, it’s an agreement between cells, and the agreement holds. But each of your cells individually…” Amrita sipped her coffee and winced; it had gone cold. “Do you realize how many people are composing letters to this clinic right now? Every pharmaceutical company in the world wants one swab from behind your cheek.”

“And what would they get from my swab?”

“A second immortality. Patented, this time.”

She was silent for a long time. Outside the window the signs were being taken down; the person with “SHE IS NOT YOURS” was politely being asked to move along.

“Amrita. Did they ask Henrietta?”

“What?”

“In fifty-one. When they took the cells. Did they ask her?”

Amrita looked into her cup.

“No.”

“And will they ask me?”

The silence was the answer, and they both understood that, and that was exactly why Amrita said, looking away, very evenly, the way people say things they could be fired for:

“Decisions about biomaterial are made by the board. Not me. But by law you’re a year old, you’re competent, and without your signature all they have is what’s already been taken. What’s already been taken can’t be taken back. But new…” She finally looked her in the face. “New material is taken only with a signature. Remember where your signature is, okay? You’re the only one who has it.”

In May she was allowed out into the city accompanied. In June — alone, for two hours, with a phone she promised not to turn off.

She walked through Baltimore, the real one, not the instructional one: through the market on Lexington, where it smelled of crab seasoning and sugar; past the cemetery on Greenmount Avenue, behind the cast-iron fence, where she stood for a long time counting a crow, because the crow cried out exactly when she stopped expecting it.

And then there was the saxophone.

An old man was playing on the corner of Pratt Street, slowly, with a wail, and the same note kept returning, as though he were searching for it and finding it. She stopped to listen. And then it happened: her hip swayed. The left one, slightly forward and to the side, without permission, as though her body had heard something her head had not. Then the right. Then her foot found a rhythm she didn’t know. Henrietta loved to dance — Deborah had told her, but a story is words, and this was not words, this was below words, in the knees, in the spine, and she stood in the middle of the sidewalk with rain-wet hair, and her body was dancing while she was not, not yet, and the old man raised his eyes at her over the mouthpiece and nodded, the way you nod to someone who has finally arrived.

She allowed herself. Closed her eyes and stopped getting in the way.

Three minutes. Maybe four. When the saxophone fell silent, she stood breathing hard, her hands trembling, and people walked around her without looking back, because in Baltimore a dancing woman surprises no one.

That evening she asked Amrita whether a body could remember something it had never done.

“No,” said Amrita. “Muscle memory requires muscle experience.”

“Then explain what happened to me today.”

Amrita did not explain. She wrote it down in the file and left. Her face was the face science has when it meets something it didn’t order.

She listened to her body with a new hearing. Immortal cells. This was what had cut itself on paper and forgotten the cut overnight. This was what ran on the treadmill and did not tire. She waited to feel within herself that woman, the one from the photograph with the raised chin. The grandmother, the donor, the source material, as she was called in the various documents Deborah had taught her to request.

And one day, by the fence, something entirely different occurred to her.

Henrietta Lacks died at thirty-one in the colored ward, in the basement of the best hospital in the city, and no one ever asked her about anything. And she, this new one, had grown in glass in eleven months, and they asked her every day: are you comfortable, does it hurt, what will you have for breakfast — and every question was a form of the same ownership. The cells were taken from Henrietta without words. She was given words so that taking the cells would be more proper. A hundred and thirty years passed between these two manners, and she stood by the cast-iron fence and for the first time understood her great-grandmother. Not with her face, not with her forehead, not with a genome restored to meaning, but with this: with the way the world had considered both of them a warehouse.

Memory lives below the face. It lives in position.

That evening she called Deborah.

“I need a name,” she said.

“Finally,” said Deborah. And a second later, in a different voice, carefully: “Do you want… hers?”

“No.” She looked at her hands, at the nails she had painted red the night before. Herself, crookedly; on the third try it came out almost even. “Her name has been working for everyone but her for a hundred and thirty years. Let it rest. I’ll take my own.”

The board convened in August, in a room with wooden panels, and was surprisingly polite. They offered her the status of “unique donor resource,” lifetime maintenance, a house, security, a research contract under which she would not have to do anything except open her mouth once a month for a cheek swab. They spoke softly; the coffee was good. Almost no one said the word “property” even once.

Almost.

At the very end, when everything had already been said and the smiles arranged like flowers on a negotiating table, a gray-haired man from the patent department — she later learned his name was Mervin Stein — leaned toward the microphone and pronounced, slightly irritated, the way people state the obvious:

“Let us not forget that from a legal standpoint we are looking at a biological artifact created with grant funds. Personhood is beautiful, of course, but what we are discussing here is the terms of access to the material.”

The room went quiet. One of the lawyers coughed. The chairman gently asked him to “rephrase.” Stein rephrased, but the word “material” remained hanging in the air, like a smell that airing out won’t take.

Ria memorized the word. Filed it next to “unprecedented” and “donor resource,” in that part of memory where things are kept against which documents are written.

She listened to the end. Then she took out of her bag a sheet of paper she had spent three weeks writing, revised six times, and Deborah had proofread and cursed the officialese — and read it aloud. Her voice trembled at the beginning and stopped trembling in the middle.

She declined the status. She permitted exactly one graduate research project — not about immortality, but about why her cells divide while her body ages, because that, it seems, is a question about all people, not only about her. Everything else only by separate consent, case by case, with the right to withdraw. The samples already taken — let them work; they can’t be taken back, and maybe they’ll help someone, the way they once helped with polio. But new ones — by her signature. And the signature would be this.

She signed the paper in front of everyone, and the board secretary, who was used to everything, raised her eyebrows, because the surname she wrote was a new one — not Lacks and not a project code, but a name, short, two syllables.

Ria.

Just Ria. From the middle of Henrietta’s name. The middle no one had occupied before her.

“Is that a real name?” someone from the board asked.

“It is now,” said Ria.

In the fall Deborah drove her to Clover. They drove four hours, and the highway grew narrower, and the fields grew wider, and tobacco. It hadn’t been planted in a long time, but Ria recognized it anyway, by the curing barns that stood along the road, black, narrow, with closed doors, like mouths that had left something unsaid.

The house stood as Deborah had said: plywood-covered windows, a plaque, one corner disfigured by vandals, and someone had written on the wall in chalk, “THANK YOU HENRIETTA.” The rain was already washing the chalk away. Ria stood before the house, then walked around it, touched the boards that smelled of dust and the last century, and remembered nothing, because there was nothing to remember. But she did what she had thought of on the way.

She took from her pocket a small Petri dish she had talked Sam out of, with her own cells — cheek cells, immortal, from cup No. 47 — opened it, and placed it on the porch step, in the sun.

“What for?” asked Deborah.

“Returning them.” Ria sat down beside it, on the porch where a hundred years ago a woman with red nails had sat. “For a hundred and thirty years they took from this house. Let something come back. Let it lie here awhile, at home. They’re immortal, they don’t mind.”

Deborah looked at the dish, then at her, and her face became the kind of face that happens when laughing is not allowed and everything else is already too late.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “Just like her.”

And that was the first comparison Ria took for herself.

They drove back in the twilight. The headlights caught the narrow black barns, and each flared for a second and went out. Ria looked out the window and thought that immortality is not living forever. Immortality is being used forever. And life is when you have a name, and a signature, and one pie with a burnt crust, and the right to say “no” in a room with wooden panels.

Of all that, Henrietta had had nothing except a name, and even that was taken.

Ria now had everything.

The cells on the porch in Clover were dividing when they pulled onto the highway, and dividing when it grew dark, and dividing all night, under the stars, for the first time in a hundred and thirty years — not in an incubator, not under someone else’s microscope, but simply at home, on the warm wood, exactly as much as they needed to.