Love Songs of Fruit Flies

E. S. Bumas

Stephanie, I ask her, if only to test my hypothesis. Don’t you find me terribly boring? Not asking for an essay but an assay, just a yes/no, a true/false, negative or positive, reactive or nonreactive, pink or blue. I avoid her big, round, coffee-colored eyes and instead look at the large, round eye of the surface of my coffee. I have heard it argued that one of our evolutionary adaptations is that when we see creatures with big, round eyes (as children have big, round eyes), we are driven to protect them. With Stephanie, who is no child, I might have a homologous reaction and need to protect her from being bored: I’m so boring it must be painful. And so impossible, I’ve already wandered in my mind from asking her if she finds me boring to wondering whether other species such as insects have analogous reactions to eye size, and how I would prove it, and whether certain animals find members of their own species boring.
    Not yet, she says, grimacing from her ginger tea (no bourgeois coffee, not like the boring brew I’m drinking), I don’t find you boring yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know.
    Fair enough. But when?
    When I think I get confused. I think my internal clock must have three hands that move at different speeds to indicate geological time, evolutionary biological time, not to mention everybody else’s time. Which is to consider the rise and fall of the Roman empire with a fifteen-second commercial for a mini- series based on The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Only more so. The time of humanity: well, take all my weight, bulging daily from spending too much time in the lab, and say that I am the time of the earth, little old me sipping boring coffee on my mattress by an open window. Oh, no, pollen spores. I sneeze. The weight removed from my body would cover all the time that humans have been alive. Humans and perhaps two or three of our ancestors: Australopithecus, Lucy. I am approximating. Biologists have little patience for geology, or for anything other than biology. Then there’s the time of fruit flies, the official species of evolutionary biology, our mascots, that live, on average, two to three weeks and in that time make the mating call hardwired in their genes and hear the mating call of other insects and reproduce and disappear forever except in the palimpsest of genes of future flies. A one-week generation, and for all we know an instant generation gap (we do not know). Love at first sight a must. Mating, more accurately.
    When I tell Stephanie this, she doesn’t quite get my point, or rather she wonders aloud if the sneeze, the head descending quickly, was in some way an inspiration for some of the African dance she has studied with a certain Mr. Cromwell, if the sneeze could represent some ancient idea of insemination from the days of matriarchy, before men realized their small but indispensable role in reproduction and messed up, in Stephanie’s approximation, virtually everything.
    I have to take off my shoes.
    I hold her ginger tea. She bangs on the floor, ball heel ball ball (I worry about the neighbors), snaps her head up (ab, she says), thrusts her head down (choo); she takes four steps backward (maybe the neighbors will know it is her and not me), then drops her shoulders and slowly lifts her head (I’ve forgotten about the neighbors), ball heel ball ball.
    You might have something there, she says, but it wasn’t really my idea. History, she believes, is preserved in movement. I stay very still.
    I ask myself, What is the probability of this thing working out, and what is the probability of my becoming a character in one of her performances? I have learned what she will say to calm me down when I get panicky, why not both? Why not both, and have some valerian tea that stinks like sweaty sweat socks; it will calm me down. I go to the lab, which calms me too.
    She came late to pick me up for lunch. I introduced her to Nellie down the hail, who is the only woman professor in the department and who works on the communication system of Jamaican fruit bats. There are more women in biology than in other sciences, but I have noticed a large attrition rate: 50 percent graduates, 30 percent postdocs, and only one professor in our department. There are very few black biologists. We are not a representative sample of the population. Nellie took Stephanie to the bat cages, where there were some Missourian insectivores that she keeps for trips to high schools, and let her pet their soft fur and fragile wings.
    Are they happy here? Stephanie asked.
    With eyes rolled in the cave of her brow, Nellie took back the bat, and Stephanie and I went out. I had a gel running and so was in no particular hurry.
    When I returned, Nellie called me into her lab, scrunched her face as though trying to look like a flying fox, the famous tropical dog-faced bat, and said, You could do a lot better. She means, I take it, another biologist.
    Stick to what you’re an expert in, I told her. Fruit bats.
    Other fields—as the Javanese say—other grasshoppers.
    I am checkers to Stephanie’s chess, though, as she reminds me, she does not even know how to play chess, and I do, not too shabbily in fact. She is if anything above my station, and wouldn’t she prefer someone who knows more about what she does, who could do it himself, or maybe herself, someone she could collaborate with., someone skinnier?
    We sort of do collaborate, she insists. Her new piece is called If Fruits Were Meant to Fly They’d Have Wings. She has glued plastic angel wings onto grapefruits, oranges, mangoes, and a melon, suspended them from bouncing bungee cords, and accompanies them with a metallic dirge played on her loud electric harp. A clock behind her runs very fast, and when it has made two full twelve-hour rotations, she stops playing and cuts a string so the mobile falls to the floor. Do I find my fruit flies boring?
    She always starts off interested in my work, but then changes the subject until it is more interesting to her. I don’t necessarily mind, but I wonder if she finds what I do with grasshoppers sick, some sort of insect rights stance. What prebiotic pond did I ooze from, anyway? In my own defense, it’s not as though I am using their fur.
    Did you ever hear of this one experiment, I ask her, when some researchers isolated the fruit fly gene for producing eyes? Now we can stimulate the development of eyes in non-eye tissue and grow eyes anywhere on a drosophila, on the legs, on the wings.
    When I was a kid, she says, I used to trace my hand with a crayon and put a big blue eye where the lines of the palm ought to be. If it was pencil, I’d just make the eye lighter. I stopped when I thought it was silly, then years later I saw some cave paintings with the same idea, but it was too late.
    To Stephanie, any science seems as practical as changing light bulbs. I often wonder what the relation of my work is to the rest of the world, whereas all my colleagues seem convinced that they are involved in the most important project on the planet, and that their funding problems only indicate the rest of the world’s inability to fathom what is truly important. Evolution is not, as my harder colleagues from biochemistry point out, a hard science. Instead, it is a self-proclaimed squishy science, dealing with the probable instead of the predictive, which is all right by me. Some evolutionary biologists do have this totalizing problem that we only rid ourselves of over time, this attitude that we can explain the existence of anything off the tops of our heads. Any characteristic of a species, we tend to figure, must have taken so long to develop that it had to have helped the species survive. From there our logic works backward over millennia. To survive, it is as though a species must grow its own adapter kit to fit the ill-shaped world. Just-so stories, as senior ecologists call our explanations. Many of them believe that populations change at random, because of sampling errors. I believe everything, having an almost instinctual understanding of freak errors, but I still consider adaptation and selection important enough to justify some just-so stories.
    Stephanie’s latest project, Sleeping on the Street, involves her living in the display window of a local gallery. She comes in when the gallery closes, wearing my pajamas, and watches TV in bed. Then she brushes her teeth and goes to sleep. I am a little jealous because really, I think though I do not say it, only I am supposed to see what she looks like in my pajamas (much better than I do) and when she sleeps (like a gentler harp player). People turned out for the opening, but soon there is only me and the occasional stragglers who stumble by drunk and do double takes, but no one who will literally be sleeping on the street. With my can opener that I had been looking for, Stephanie opens a can of peas and offers me a forkful. The fork bangs into the window, and the peas spill. She shrugs and picks up the peas.
    At first I was skeptical. Some of these performance artist types—I believe the word is whooboy—rubbing themselves with paint while spewing excerpts from their diaries, sticking pins through themselves as though they were the insect and the entomologist. And what did they even know about sterilizing instruments? Less than any self-disrespecting Saint Louis junkie. Mind boggling. I would rather not think about it. The kind of artists that laminate their dogs and then complain if labs use a white mouse to test a medicine. Not that I am opposed either to the rights of animals I will never study or to art I will never see. Other fields, other grasshoppers. I don’t, I have to admit, understand the urge to get on stage. Teaching lab techniques is enough to give me leather tongue. Lecturing makes me hyperventilate. I think of the stage on my microscope and try unsuccessfully to imagine that the grasshoppers’ DNA is performing for me there, that the stains are abstract painting, but they are saying something specific usually, if I know how to phrase the question. Grasshoppers I have a chance of understanding in ways they could not just as easily tell me.
    Though every day I think I understand more of the genetics of grasshopper behavior, I don’t know anything about any one grasshopper. I can’t learn the name of any of them. Not the grasshopper with the most beautiful song. Not the grasshopper that mates like ten. Not the grasshopper that all other grasshoppers shun. What if I found that they had names for each other, not necessarily given names, but genetically destined names written out in the alphabet of nucleotides: adenine, cytosine, thymine, guanine, or as we label them, A, C, T, and G. When Stephanie calls me Eric, I am Eric, for what it’s worth. But the word Stephanie feels so good to speak, to have in my mouth, starting out stiff and getting funny, I might call all the grasshoppers Stephanie. At least the females.
    I’m learning Stephanie.
    We met at Idem’s, the bookstore-café at the corner, where the books smell like coffee and cigarette smoke, where she serves mediocre cakes and exotic teas and specialty coffees also available with syrups that no one orders, ever. Actually, we met at the dictionary that sits on its own stand next to the counter. I had just been hoping for coffee and a muffin and a book in the evening after a (failed) experiment. There was this young man talking into a microphone, performing, that is, who said he was salacious, and he and his friends knew what that meant because they were English graduate students. An English graduate student, I was suddenly happy to say, I was not. I went to the big unabridged because I hate that people might consider me stupid. I especially hate thinking myself that I am stupid. I hate it so much that I forget to resent the people who wanted me to feel stupid in the first place.
    He thinks it means he’s horny, she said, leaning over the counter and closing the big fat book on my hand. It also means he’s a jerk.
    The salacious English graduate student said, This is what I think of the canon, and he dramatically brought up phlegm that sat on the floor and looked like a gob of DNA thrown clear of a centrifuge. Then he apologized to the canon and fell to his knees and begged its forgiveness.
    Stephanie put her elbows on the counter and held her face until it was over.
    When no one wanted coffee or tea or cake, she came over and sat at my table and explained to me that she was not bourgeois, while I glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one wanted coffee or tea or cake. We talked about dictionaries. She was opposed to them on principle, some stuffy old book telling her what a word meant. To me, like all big books—the Bible, Gray’s Anatomy, the encyclopedia—it is a thing to be in awe of and deserves to lie open on its own stand because it is always in use. She smelled of salted corn chips. I like salted corn chips.
    She assured me that she was much more interesting than the salacious English grad student and that I should come see her perform.
    Perform? Oh, perform, so you’re a—I pointed toward the microphone—a performer.
    And you don’t perform. . . . Oh, you do perform.
    I perform, well, I perform experiments.
    Oh, experimental.
    In a lab.
    Oh, that’s interesting, she said, without making an effort to decide what kind of experiments or what kind of a lab.
    I stayed until closing and helped her clean up. She had to scrub the floor where the salacious English graduate student performer had spat.
    I was in no hurry to go home and watch talk shows, and neither was she. Her roommate was seeing the English graduate student who was indeed salacious and who had practically moved in, and their apartment was getting a bit small. Stephanie was looking for a new place.
    Where do you live? she said, and I told her the address. Oh, she said, maybe I’ll move in there.
    I said nothing. I walked her to her place, shook her hand, and then when I finally went home, I noticed a For Rent sign on the front lawn. I was relieved. I had thought Stephanie had wanted to move not into my building but into my apartment. I had a corn chip and slept.
    Three hours later I was up for work and in the lab by the coffee machine, waiting for itto drip and feeling as I imagined a zombie would.
    Late night? said Mike, the professor I work under.
    Don’t let it interfere with your project, said Nellie. Your work is important. She means well, I realized. She would like to instill in me the massive egotism required for success in the field.
    Thanks, Nellie.
    Stephanie came in my pickup truck, which her roommate had helped her load. I helped her unload. There were boxes and boxes of books and paints and fabrics and cassettes, and my truck never seemed to empty. She had framed posters that looked like schematics of a computer with a technology I couldn’t quite grasp and that turned out to be a notation form for certain dance steps: meringue, twist, pony. She cradled what looked like a zither without a soundboard.
    It’s a mini-harp, she said as would a mini-angel.
    But she doesn’t play it like a normal harp. She hooks it up to several distortion boxes and to pedals and to an amplifier. This music is all but random. Aeolian, she says, bouncing a ball off the strings, which make a sound like raucous dolphins. I don’t think she could repeat a song if she wanted to. Aeolian feedback and aeolian reverb. The wa-wa she has to pedal. Doesn’t sound like a harp, more like some laboratory with a future technology. She took a comb and combed the strings, then she brushed them with a toothbrush and flossed them with dental floss. It sounded like words, and then it sounded like it was screaming in pain (those times it hurt to hear), and then it sounded as though it were laughing.
    Hearing the strange random noises, some soothing but mostly grating, and following the changing keys and tempos and timbres was a bit of a revelation because I had never suspected that anything might be as crazy and all over the place as my own brain, that anyone else’s brain might produce such noisy thoughts.
    She screeched to a halt. What do you think? she asked.
    You know exactly what I think.
    Too loud? The neighbors? Do they hate me already?
    That’s not what I mean. I mean I think exactly what your harp said.
    It’s true that my brain can get a little confused. That’s part of the trouble with having three distinct senses of time. That’s the security of the measured order of the lab—everything is graduated, everything is gradual, all hypotheses can be proven or at least proven wrong. Outside of the lab everything is unquantifiable, everything overflows, like Stephanie. It’s a good thing really that I am so boring. Otherwise my brain might spontaneously combust. The gradual feeling of lab work is very calming. And then when your hypothesis is proven, there is the feeling that in some way your brain has connected you to the world, in some way you are right. That’s also how I felt when Stephanie first played her harp.
    She gave me a housewarming present: a vial of sand from the Sahara. Last summer, before I knew her, she went out riding a jeep through the desert, where guerilla fighters let her fire a machine gun, a huge machine gun, into the apparent emptiness. In a tobacco tin, she rattles spent cartridges she plans to use one day, though she doesn’t say what for. How did she get them through customs? I would love to go to the Sahara. The number of variations in the insects would be fantastic. Many of the species haven’t even been named. Maybe I could shoot off a machine gun if I were absolutely sure no one was coming and no animals or plants might be injured. My last field trip I had hunted down a herd of grasshoppers on the Arkansas-Missouri border. I brought back samples, as I suppose Stephanie did. I knew enough not to remind her that she, and not I, was the one with the new place, because if I had, she would have taken back the sand.
    We celebrated her move by making sandwiches, opening cans of food, and going to a movie that was French and about a romantic triangle, as she assured me all French movies were. They are all shown at the artsy movie theater that was about to be condemned—not for showing artsy French movies about romantic triangles, but for structural flaws—and we signed a petition for clemency handed to us atop a clipboard by a skinny bald man in spectacles.
    Oh, you’re at the same address? Then you’re, he said, continuing by pointing at her then at me so that, inadvertently I suppose, he made a gesture of disapproval.
    Same mail slot. I get journals and magazines, she gets invitations to openings and calendars of events. Different apartments, usually. She comes in when she wakes up to ask, referring to my degree, What’s up doc? and for just a sip of my coffee that she smells more than drinks, as though caffeine works by inhaling. Why is she here? I ask myself, and try to find an answer that is scientific, that is predicated on testable hypotheses. She marches right in without having to knock because: this is Saint Louis and we have no need to lock the doors to our apartments (a type two error, acceptance of fallacy, adopted civic pride reminds me that this year we had the nation’s highest homicide rate); or at least that is a habit I have left over from growing up in Arkansas (type one error, rejection of truth). Actually, I like that she comes right in while I am drinking coffee on my mattress on the floor (a more reasonable hypothesis, and perhaps she likes to come in without having to knock). She walks right onto my mattress in her kimono and stiletto heels and sits down. I wouldn’t like it any less if I had a water bed. I’ll brush off the mattress later.
    Eric, she asks inquisitively, massaging moisturizer into her palms, aren’t we going to sleep together?
    Yeah? I guess correctly.
    She says I ring her bell. When she says that, I think of her as one of those strong-man tests at a fair—I’ve seen these only in cartoons, never at state fairs—where 1 pound on her feet and a visible impulse rises up her body to her head where her bell is. But I am not a strong man. Instead, I hold her feet a lot, not that they are so beautiful; in fact, they are rather torn apart by twenty years of dancing, and before that she was hammertoed, so her littlest toe bends underneath her foot. Her feet look like the result of the kind of foot binding the Chinese communists illegalized. And for good reason. Yet her fingers are long and elegant; I can hardly believe that the hands and feet belong to the same person. I stroke her feet a lot because I think she’s very beautiful except her feet, and that makes me love her feet more. These are the feet of someone who would be with me.
    Her fingers are full of lines, and when I look closely at them, she pulls back her hand. Then she realizes she should not try to hide her aging and lets me look. About aging, she says that, yes, she hears her biological clock going tick-tock-tick but has rolled over and hit the snooze button. The lengths of her fingers are striped with shallow furrows, wavelike patterns, a lake of time. The tops of her fingers spiral like jetties or reaction to magnets, and her knuckles and the web between her thumb and forefinger are in a grid pattern like a slide used for counting cells. I point out that clocks that go tick-tock-tick do not come with snooze buttons. She rubs in moisturizer like Lady Macbeth.
    I watch her practice the zombie step barefooted. I wouldn’t have to learn that one. Comes natural to me. I’ve been working on walking like the living. Up until recently I have not spent that much less time in the lab than the flies and bats and grasshoppers do. She pounds the floor and I worry about neighbors—so bourgeois am I. The dance she is learning, she explains, is a ritual that reenacts the creation of the world. That is, in this tribe’s explanation of it. When perhaps they thought sneezing had something to do with insemination.
    Instead of killing time in the lab waiting for a culture to grow, I stop by her dance class in a hot and sweaty high school gym. The teacher is Mr. Cromwell, an impossibly tall and muscled man, what’s left of his hair kept very short, a striking beauty in need of some restoration, sweatpants pulled a little higher than maybe they used to have to be because Mr. Cromwell has a bit of a stomach, paunch by no means, not paunch as I have paunch, but on this body anything imperfect is obvious. He tells the bongo drummers to begin with a samba rhythm. When he counts time, one-two-three—bare foot pounding on the floor, shaking the right side of the muscles all the way up to his bald head—four-five-six-seven, his stationary body seems an elaborate choreography in which each muscle is a separate dancer. Stephanie is good, that’s for sure, though she never believes it for more than a minute, but when Mr. Cromwell shows the students their parts, he is a beautiful woman then again a beautiful man, changing gender as do some species of frog.
    Move that jelly butt, he tells Stephanie. To another who is too stiff, Don’t save it, don’t be afraid to give it away, there’s an unlimited supply, child. And he splendidly demonstrates hips I hardly noticed before. Then he is a strict disciplinarian, Drummers—they slow to a halt—Drummers, I said samba. Is that samba? And then they begin again, and now it is apparently samba. The class began just a few weeks ago, and the students do the movements I know from my apartment—the zombie, the ape walk—only they are completely asynchronous, and it is rather painful to look at them, keeping their hips as though they were in a limited supply. The other two dozen women (and two fit men) are bigger than Stephanie is, more muscular, but they are not her, so I iris in on her. Stephanie’s crooked feet clasp the wooden floor, heel ball heel, her arms not quite in the circle Mr. Cromwell has asked for, then she is lost between a centrifugal explosion of braids and the more generous swing of another woman’s pelvis.
    The dancers provide encouraging applause to each other.
    Nuh-uh, I think you’ll have to save it. Back in line, says Mr. Cromwell.
    And back in line they go.
    After class they go all sweaty to the local bar to smoke and drink, which I would not have thought so many dancers do, but we must hurry home because we have to get up early the next day for one of Stephanie’s projects. Mr. Cromwell is disappointed, and Stephanie and I each defer to the other. If you really want to. If you really want to. And Mr. Cromwell buys us each a beer.
    Is he okay? Mr. Cromwell asks Stephanie, and she asks me if something is the matter.
    It is just that the dance was about creation myths and has got me thinking about what we know from science about our creation, that our existence as a species is predicated on the sheer luck that sixty million years ago our ancestors, unlike so many mammals, did not go extinct in the cold meteorite shade.
    Mr. Cromwell and Stephanie look worried, as though I am going to, if not just bore them, perhaps even embarrass them.
    Let us bring the scale down to our fruit fly size. Had I seen the microphone and embarrassedly stepped Out of Idem’s, then I would never have met Stephanie. I suppose I would be sadder, or perhaps some other life might have opened up like a major motion picture. Had our species died out, I don’t know how much sadder the world would have been. I am thinking of the ozone and the rain forest. Me for sure. I don’t know, our species’ existence is so unlikely as to seem implausible.
    Think of all the stories, Stephanie says, that just miss happening, the movements no one choreographs.
    What’s so nice about you two, Mr. Cromwell says from his great height, a hand on Stephanie’s shoulder and his beer on mine, is that each one can’t believe the other would even look at you—which I don’t find funny, but he laughs his drag queen laugh until the muscular professional surfaces, finds himself funny, and then he laughs deep.
    I ask rhetorically if that means we are good together and by accident mention mating and then realize that I mean being a couple, but I use the word coupling, and the right word, I try to correct myself, is marriage.
    Mr. Cromwell actually looks shocked, as though he could accept that heterosexuals have the right to lead their own lives, even to mate and to couple, but that the institution of marriage is too sacred for them.
    Stephanie doesn’t answer for me.
    I have exposed myself as bourgeois.
    My brain is overflowing, and I would like to have peeked in on the lab.

We drive silently except for the motor’s hum, until she asks me, What is it? and I say, Nothing, and she says, But what is it? and I ask her if she finds me as boring as I find the question I always ask her. Not an essay, just an assay.
    Yum yum, she says. These are the oppositions I love to deconstruct for breakfast. Can we stop for a muffin and tea? You think I’ll get it on my dress?
    Of course she will get it on her dress. She leaves no beverage unspilled. She deconstructs my heart: left ventricle on the right and right ventricle on the left; atria orbiting like satellites. Then she reconstructs it in a heart shape and strings the veins and arteries tight as harp strings. I should mention that Stephanie is wearing a wedding dress, which does not add to my comfort.
    Can’t I like the way you bore me? she says.
    I know I shouldn’t keep talking, but my paradigm of the way the world should be and is is taking on some very serious anomalies. How could she love me when I’ve not received any genes implanted from someone better looking and with some talent?
    A multiple choice. Take out a sharp number two pencil. If you don’t know leave it blank, or at least guess c.
    C.
    Oh, c, I say. What is c?
    Just when you ask these boring, boring questions.
    So right now you find me boring.
    Eric, stop.
    I pull over. I can’t see, and I can’t breathe.
    That’s not what I meant, she says, then realizes she can get a muffin where I have stopped.
    When she gets back in, she rubs my knees, and I can see and breathe and drive. Seventy-five-mile-per-hour wind rushes into my lungs and works like inhaled coffee. Just getting out of the city and driving this far southwest makes me feel more peaceful because of all the trees, just like in the four-hectare patch of pine that my parents had until they sold it to pay for my college. She asks what it was like growing up. Childhood was a modest affair. I can barely remember when I learned to ride a bike or hunt, but, at fourteen, when my dad said I had become a man and taught me integral calculus, I knew I was onto something.
    We have no reservations and end up in the Transcendence Encampment, which looks less like a nature-buff preserve than like some refugee camp, wall- to-wall tents from the highway to the river, company store selling plastic cases and beef jerky and cold canned beer at outrageous prices. The plastic cases are to keep cigarettes and sandwiches dry on the river. A man with a wheelbarrow brings a load of wooden blocks that he and some other men pile into a tall pyramid for a bonfire. There are a few cabins, really one cabin divided into rooms with beds and stoves, of which we take one, feeling bourgeois, especially as we are only two people, whereas there seem to be families in the neighborhood of dozens crammed into the others. Stephanie is a dart board for mosquitoes, slapping her arms, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her wedding dress and, as we walk to our part of the cabin, using the hands gloved in cuffs to lift the dress above the mud. Around her I am safe from bites. Skinny blond children sit out on the porch as though they have never done anything other than sit on porches. When we go inside, they peek through the windows to get a glance at our honeymoon.
    Here the sport of choice is floating. Those who splurge rent a canoe and are driven upriver. The aluminum canoe is dropped in the water and the passengers given oars, not to row (where’s the hurry?), but to steer away from fallen trees, though still some canoes thwack hard against the trunks, waking and sending box turtles diving off branches. The better deal is getting a huge inner tube from some ancient truck and sitting with one’s jelly butt in the middle through the whole trip. I wear a large bathing suit, and she the wedding dress hitched up around her thighs; and because there are pointy rocks in the riverbed, I wear plastic shoes, and Stephanie old sneakers she should have thrown out long ago but had hoped to use for some installation. I have on sun- block and she, despite my protest, nothing. It’s cold at first, but you get used to it, and cold is always better during ninety-odd-degree Missouri summers that are only pleasant if you happen to be a mosquito.
    Floating is not, I dare say, a sport for the bourgeois. We did it on vacations in Arkansas when I was a kid, even had our own tubes, but Stephanie’s family went sailing in Illinois, as they have today, without inviting me. Sailing with Stephanie’s family, she has explained to me, would be too much work to leave energy for real work. Here we float with other hillbillies, the best prepared of whom have, tied to their own, an extra tube, a spare tire, in which a cooler of beer has been wedged, and tied around their necks, water-resistant plastic cigarette holders, like the bright orange one in which Stephanie is keeping her poems dry.
    The river winds through pines. The water is clear and cold, and we get used to the cold and drag our hands and wrists, and folks paddling by in the convex mirrors of canoes look at us enviously and do not even congratulate us. The heat has evaporated much of the Transcendence River, though, and sometimes we can see the rocks that will grate against Stephanie’s bottom. She takes out her poems and, with the pages veiling her face from the sun, reads her ever wetter words.

Were I to praise you properly
I would have to sing the beauty
of all your cells
(doing whatever cells do),
and in their nuclei
read out every strand of DNA
each as long as this float trip
and sing the genius of every gene
(whatever they happen to do right).
The poets, they’re okay, but
the scientists have some idea
of what’s going on.

Her project is called Transcendance. I think she intended to weird folks out, but only I am a bit embarrassed, and it is much too hot between banks of baking mud to care too much. I doubt they lynch performance artists. In these parts, evolutionary biologists are more scandalous. Here we are cosmopolites from Saint Louis, city slickers with our slick jelly butts in the water. And besides, the people floating around us seem to like the entertainment, or at least they humor us. It’s her or the trees.
    This is better than a TV in a tube, says one woman, continuing portentously. I had a swimming suit just like yours, honey, but I almost drowned.
    Love your poem, says a man floating backward in a floppy fishing hat and wet T-shirt. He is firmly planted in a tire that says Barney’s. Have a dry cigarette.
    Thank you, Barney.
    Take one of these cold ones, says his friend to me, and let’s drink a toast to your wonderful genes.
    My job is to snap photos with a disposable camera in a plastic bag. The floaters ham it up, while the canoeists are aloof and expose just their dignified profiles. Stephanie runs out of poems quickly, but the trip takes us several hours.
    My poetry is short, she apologizes, and the river is long.
    We stop at several embankments to seek out shade because Stephanie is turning pink, and at deep patches of water to swim in and to jump into from rocks. I take pictures of a bride jumping off a cliff screaming, I do.
    The next day we return to Saint Louis early because I have to get back to the lab—the grasshoppers do not know of weekends—and Stephanie has practice with Mr. Cromwell, who is dancing a solo piece accompanied by several drummers and Stephanie on harp.
    The gym is full, and everyone seems to know each other. Mr. Cromwell wears long, loose priestly robes. The drummers begin, and Stephanie shakes bubbles of sound from her harp. Mr. Cromwell does what he has been trying to tell his students to do. Over your toes, he said last time, and now he is way Out over his toes, moving like evolution in reverse, his knuckles grazing the floor. The drums get louder. And jump, he told them, and he jumps so high, his arms straight up, a leap really, so high that I remember we are in a basketball court, and Mr. Cromwell could easily slam like a pro. And side, he said, and he jumps again and drops his arm to touch his bare foot and lands with the bang of his impact muffled by the factory screech of the harp. And side, and he jumps and this time touches his left foot, and for a moment, he is suspended in midair, frozen like a bow about to release its arrow. All this with Stephanie’s music, so it seems as though this dance is a clarity somewhere within my rattled brain, too distracted to understand evolution. I know these steps, but I don’t know the power, and I’m seeing the movements Stephanie practices only now in some improved form, some abstracted version where they are virtually perfected. On the level of form, there is Mr. Cromwell defying gravity. Then he falls loudly to earth. On earth, there is Stephanie.
    At the bar to celebrate, Mr. Cromwell is in a mood so wonderful one fears its end. What did you think? he asks. I tell him, and he asks, So then what is the matter, Baby? More about your job, isn’t it?
    My brain sounded like Stephanie’s harp. More biology.
    You’ve seen what I do. What do you do? Miss Stephanie, you know what he does all day, presumably.
    I don’t want to bore anybody, and Stephanie, stalled halfway through her beer, seems already exhausted from performing and from sunburn.
    He’s a molecular biologist, with training in population genetics.
    I see.
    He works with grasshopper DNA, she says, but I guessed she did not know either what I do, and that she was realizing that she did not know exactly what I do. She asked me to say what I was trying to accomplish anyway, and, as I was not trying to accomplish anything, what I was trying to prove. Okay, somewhere between prove and accomplish.
    There was a very famous experiment done with Drosophila, this was years ago, that isolated the gene involved in mating song production. The gene was then transposed to a drosophila of another species. Do you follow still? The drosophila of the second species now had the first species’ mating-song gene. Well, a drosophila from the first species heard the song and went to and tried to mate with the drosophila from the wrong species.
    I don’t think this story has a happy ending, says Mr. Cromwell.
    Well, they tried, but no go.
    Looking for love in all the wrong places, he concludes, tsk-tsking.
    What I’m doing is the same thing, isolating song genes in one species of grasshopper and implanting them in another to see if they’ll try to mate. If the experiment works, it means that there are other species that sing their own songs and not just Drosophila.
    Our love songs, Stephanie says, pointing to her chest, are in our genes?
    Very unscientific of me, but sometimes I think I know what goes on in the mind of an insect, although I know they don’t even have brains. I can’t believe I’m admitting this. Even my fantasies are boring.
    Poor poor Drosophilum, Stephanie says, and I shrug my shoulder. Singing love songs and nobody can hear them right. Singing the wrong song. And the other one flies right by and doesn’t even know he’s being serenaded.
    She really was exhausted. She starts to cry, and Mr. Cromwell says, There there, not turning away from the soft stalactite that extends from her nostril until she retracts it.
    You guys, she says, you like my songs, don’t you?
    We love your noisy songs, Baby.
    Another evolutionary adaptation of our species, I have heard it argued, has been that, when we see other members of our species crying, we want to comfort them, to make them stop crying. Probably this keeps us, when it works, from hurting children, as with the large-eye theory. Though this sounds like just another just-so story, perhaps some hormone could be isolated and eventually the gene that signals its production. I try to calm Stephanie, but I guess I’m not evolved enough to cheer her up. I guess I’m not well adapted. But I want to hold her and stop her crying and, if possible, get my shoulder loose so I can rub away the tear that is welling up in my left eye for the poor flies and my poor grasshoppers and for poor us who are lucky to have heard each other’s songs and almost did not.
    I can’t say what one drosophila sees in another drosophila except rightness, appropriateness, you’ll-do-ness. Drosophila sing their own songs, and we sing ours with varying degrees of musicality. And even when Stephanie’s song is played by a harp that feeds back or drums in the wrong rhythm, it is the song that I want, I want her, I want to get into her genes. I know that it is impossible to see human things in other species, but there is no other way for me to see than, at best, humanly. I know it is impossible to apply what other species do to what we do, but I know that Chinese martial artists have had some success imagining themselves cranes and grasshoppers and mantises and dragons. Everything is impossible, and yet we go on. Human life seems so improbable that we sing it to each other if only to reassure each other that our lives could exist at all. When that does not work, we resort to just-so stories.
    I get loose and blow my nose.
    All mankind, Stephanie says, puff.
    Can’t you just say bless you?
    Mr. Cromwell wraps his long arms around both of us and tells us, There there.
    Someone must have done something with our genes because we may not be the same creatures. But for some reason, her songs go right to my very genetic blueprint, especially when she sings them throatily in my ear. We are together like a café attached to a bookstore, not the same, but not a bad idea, like our two names in the same sentence: Eric loves Stephanie.
    I am willing to consider love an evolutionary adaptation.

E. S. Bumas is the author of The Price of Tea in China, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award for best collection of short fiction and was a finalist for the PEN American Center West Award for the year’s best work of fiction.

“Love Songs of Fruit Flies” appears in our Spring 1999 issue.