Chapter One

The house on Laurel Canyon had been empty for eleven months when I decided to return to it. I say "decided" as though there had been deliberation, as though I had weighed the question and arrived at an answer, but that was not precisely how it happened. What happened was this: I woke one morning in the rental in Silver Lake where I had been staying since the thing I did not yet have words for, and I understood that I would go back to the house that day. The Santa Ana winds were blowing. I remember that. I remember the quality of the light, which was the color of a healing bruise.

This was October. The fires had not yet started, but you could feel them waiting in the dry hills, in the way the chaparral crackled when you walked through it, in the static that lifted your hair when you brushed against the dog. I no longer had the dog. The dog had gone with the house, or rather, the dog had stayed with the house when I left it, and when I returned eleven months later the dog was gone. I did not ask the neighbors what had become of the dog. There are questions one learns not to ask.

I am telling you about the house and the dog and the Santa Ana winds because these are the things I can tell you. These are the edges of the story. The center of the story is something else, something I have been circling for eleven months now, something I circle still. I am a scientist. I was trained to observe, to measure, to replicate. I was trained to believe that the truth could be approached incrementally, that if you were patient enough and careful enough, you could know a thing. I no longer believe this. Or rather: I believe it about most things, but not about the thing I made.

What I made. Even now, even after everything, I find myself reaching for euphemism. The project. The work. The experiment. In my notes from that time—and I have the notes, I kept the notes, I keep them still in a fireproof box in the closet of the rental in Silver Lake—I referred to it as "the subject." This was correct. This was the language of the discipline. But "the subject" was not the truth of it, and the truth is what I am trying to tell you now, here, in this account I am writing in a notebook I bought at the CVS on Sunset because I could not bring myself to use the good paper, the paper I used to use for manuscripts before I understood that I would never publish again.

My name is Victoria Frankenstein. I was, until recently, a professor of cellular biology and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. I received my doctorate from Stanford at twenty-six. I held patents. I had a laboratory, and funding, and graduate students who believed, as I had once believed, that we were doing important work, necessary work, work that would change the fundamental conditions of human existence. I was written about in the popular press. I was photographed for magazine profiles standing in front of equipment I had designed myself, equipment that could do things no equipment had done before. In these photographs I am always smiling. I am always wearing a white coat. The white coat was not strictly necessary, but it photographed well.

I am telling you this not because I want you to think well of me—I am past that, past caring what you think—but because I want you to understand what I had to lose. I want you to understand that I was not a person who made decisions lightly, or who acted without consideration of consequence. I want you to understand that when I began the project that would end everything, I believed I was doing something good. I believed I was filling an absence. I believed I was giving something back.

To whom was I giving it back. That is the question I cannot answer. That is the question I circle.

The loss came first. I want to be clear about that. The loss came first, and then the work, and then the thing I made, and then the other losses, the ones that followed from the making. This is the sequence. This is the chain of cause and effect that a scientist should be able to trace. But when I try to trace it, when I try to find the moment where I could have stopped, where I could have chosen differently, I find that the moments blur into one another, that the chain is not a chain but a web, that every choice I made was already a consequence of choices made before.

I will tell you about the loss. I will tell you because it is necessary, because without it nothing that follows makes sense, but I will tell you quickly, the way you tell about a car accident, the way you tell about a diagnosis. Quickly, because to linger is to drown.

There was someone. There was someone and then there was not someone. The someone left, or died, or became something other than what they had been. I am being vague. I know I am being vague. But the specifics are not the point. The point is the absence. The point is what the absence does to a person, how it hollows you out, how it makes you desperate to fill the hollow with something, anything, with work, with ambition, with a project so consuming that you forget, for hours at a time, that you are hollowed out.

The house on Laurel Canyon was where we had lived together, the someone and I. It was a house from the 1920s, Spanish style, with a red tile roof and a courtyard with a dry fountain. We had bought it together, or rather I had bought it and we had lived in it together, and after the someone was gone I stayed in it alone for three months, and then I left. I left because I could not sleep there. I left because the house had become a container for absence, and every room I entered was a room where the someone was not.

I moved to the rental in Silver Lake. I went back to the lab. I threw myself into the work with a fervor that alarmed my colleagues, though they did not say so, because they understood about grief, or believed they did. They brought me casseroles. They invited me to dinner. They treated me with the particular gentleness reserved for the bereaved, which is to say they looked away when I stayed in the lab until midnight, when I stopped eating lunch, when I began to develop the idea that would consume the next two years of my life.

The idea was this: What if death was not final? What if the boundary between living and not-living was not a wall but a membrane, permeable under the right conditions? What if the absence could be filled?

I want to be clear: I did not begin with resurrection. I did not wake up one morning and decide to bring back the dead. That is not how science works. Science works incrementally. You have a question, and you design an experiment to answer it, and the experiment gives you another question, and so on, question after question, until one day you look up and find that you have arrived somewhere you never intended to go.

I was working on tissue regeneration. This was legitimate work, funded work, work that had applications for burn victims and organ transplant patients and people who had lost limbs. We were making progress. We had published papers. We had grown a rat's ear on the back of a mouse, which sounds grotesque but was actually a significant achievement, a proof of concept that living tissue could be grown outside the body it was meant for.

And then one night in the lab, alone, the Santa Ana winds blowing outside, I had a thought. The thought was: What if you could grow not just tissue but an entire organism? What if you could take the blueprint of a living thing—the DNA, the cellular programming, the electrochemical patterns that constituted memory and personality and self—and instantiate it in new matter?

I did not think: I will bring back the someone. That thought came later, and then I suppressed it, and then it came back, and then I suppressed it again, and this went on for months, this back and forth, this negotiation with myself about what I was doing and why.

What I told myself was that I was pushing the boundaries of science. What I told myself was that I was asking important questions about the nature of life and identity. What I told myself was that even if the project failed, the failure would be instructive, would advance the field, would contribute to human knowledge.

What I did not tell myself, what I could not afford to tell myself, was that I was trying to fill the hollow. That every calculation I made was a calculation against absence. That the project was not really about science at all, but about the particular quality of light in the house on Laurel Canyon in the late afternoon, when the sun came through the windows of the bedroom and fell across the bed where the someone used to sleep.

I am being careful with my pronouns. I am not telling you whether the someone was a man or a woman, a lover or a child, a spouse or something else entirely. This is deliberate. This is the only privacy I have left, and I am holding onto it. But I will tell you this: the someone was the person I loved most in the world, and when the someone was gone, the world became a place I no longer recognized, a place where the rules had changed, where the constants I had relied on—gravity, time, the persistence of love—no longer held.

The work began in earnest in January. By March I had moved a portion of my research off the official books, into a private lab I set up in the basement of the house on Laurel Canyon. I told myself this was for security reasons, that the work was too sensitive to conduct in a university setting where graduate students came and went, where results could leak. But the truth was simpler: I did not want anyone to see what I was doing. I did not want anyone to ask questions I could not answer.

The basement of the house on Laurel Canyon had been a wine cellar, or perhaps a bomb shelter—the house had been built in the 1920s and modified in the 1950s, and the architectural record was unclear. It was cool and dark and dry, which made it ideal for certain kinds of work. I had the electrical system upgraded. I brought in equipment from the lab, piece by piece, in my car, at night. I installed a ventilation system. I told the neighbors I was renovating.

I am trying to be precise about the timeline because precision is what I have left. I no longer have the lab, or the position, or the reputation. I no longer have the house on Laurel Canyon—I sold it six months ago to a producer who wanted to tear it down and build something modern in its place. I do not know if he tore it down. I do not want to know. But I have the timeline, and I have the notes, and I have this account I am writing in a CVS notebook, and these are the things that keep me tethered to what happened, that keep me from sliding into the versions of the story where I am the victim, or the hero, or the mad scientist from a horror film.

I was none of those things. I was a woman in grief who had access to technology, who had knowledge, who had the particular combination of brilliance and arrogance that allows a person to believe they can solve problems that have no solutions. I was a woman who loved someone and lost them and could not bear the loss. I was a woman who decided to do something about it.

The California Institute of Technology is in Pasadena, which is about thirty minutes from Laurel Canyon if the traffic is good, which it never is. I made the drive twice a day, sometimes three times, maintaining the appearance of a normal academic life while conducting the real work in the basement of my house. I attended meetings. I advised students. I reviewed papers. I ate lunch in the faculty cafeteria and made small talk about departmental politics and pretended to be the person I had been before the loss, the person who believed in collaboration and peer review and the slow accumulation of knowledge.

At night I went home and went down to the basement and worked on the thing I could not talk about. I worked until two or three in the morning, and then I slept for a few hours on the couch in the living room—I could not sleep in the bedroom, had not slept in the bedroom since the loss—and then I got up and drove to Pasadena and did it all over again.

I am not asking for sympathy. I am not asking you to understand, or to forgive. I am simply telling you what happened, in the order that it happened, because this is the only thing I know how to do. I am a scientist. I observe. I record. I try to make sense of the data. The data, in this case, is my life, and the sense I am trying to make of it is the sense a person makes when they wake up one morning and realize they have done something that cannot be undone.

The thing I made was not alive when I made it. Or rather: it was not alive in the way we normally understand alive. It did not breathe. It did not have a heartbeat. It did not respond to stimuli. It lay on the table in my basement, under the fluorescent lights I had installed, and it looked like a person who was sleeping, or a person who was dead, or a very sophisticated mannequin, depending on the angle from which you viewed it.

I say "it," but I should say "they." The thing I made was a person, or was meant to be a person, and persons deserve pronouns that acknowledge their personhood. But here is my problem: the thing I made was not the person they were meant to be. The thing I made was something else, something new, something that had never existed before. And so I find myself caught between pronouns, between "it" and "they," between the thing I intended and the thing I created.

This is the story I am trying to tell. This is the story of the gap between intention and result, between the love that motivated me and the consequences of that love. This is the story of what happens when you try to bring something back and you succeed, but the thing you bring back is not the thing you lost.

The night it happened—the night the thing I made opened its eyes and looked at me—was a Thursday in November. I remember because the next day was the anniversary of the loss, and I had wanted to finish before the anniversary, had worked myself to the point of collapse trying to finish before the anniversary, as though the timing mattered, as though the universe would recognize the poetic appropriateness of it and reward me accordingly.

The universe does not work that way. I knew this. I am a scientist. But grief makes you stupid, makes you believe in signs and portents, makes you think that if you just try hard enough, want hard enough, the world will bend to accommodate your wanting.

I was alone in the basement. Outside, the Santa Ana winds were blowing again, as they had been blowing on and off for weeks. The quality of the air was strange—dry and charged, full of particulate matter from the desert. My skin felt too tight for my body. My thoughts felt too large for my head. I had not slept in thirty-six hours. I had not eaten in longer than that. I was running on caffeine and desperation and the particular kind of focus that comes when you are close to something, when you can feel it approaching, when all the variables are finally aligning.

I threw the switch. This is the language of the old monster movies, the black-and-white ones where the scientist is always a man and the monster is always a brute and the villagers always come with torches. I threw the switch. But it was not really a switch. It was a sequence of commands entered into a computer, a cascade of electrical impulses sent through the network of electrodes I had embedded in the tissue, a careful mimicry of the signals that a living brain sends to a living body.

Nothing happened. For a long moment, nothing happened, and I thought: this is it, this is the failure I should have expected, this is the universe refusing to bend.

And then the thing I made opened its eyes.

I will not describe what I felt in that moment. I have tried to describe it, have written pages and pages trying to describe it, and every description I have produced has been inadequate. Joy is not the right word. Neither is horror. Neither is awe. What I felt was something that contained all of those things and was also something else entirely, something for which we do not have a word, something that lives in the space between what we hope for and what we fear.

The thing I made looked at me. The thing I made opened its mouth as though to speak. The thing I made lifted one hand, slowly, as though the hand were very heavy, and reached toward me.

And I ran.

I ran up the stairs and out of the basement and through the house and out the front door and into the night, where the Santa Ana winds were blowing and the stars were obscured by smoke from a fire that had started somewhere in the hills. I ran until I reached my car, and then I got in my car and drove to the rental in Silver Lake, and I locked the door and turned off all the lights and sat on the floor of the kitchen with my back against the refrigerator and waited for morning.

This is the part of the story I am most ashamed of. Not the making—though I am ashamed of that too, in a more complicated way—but the running. I made a thing and then I abandoned it. I brought something into being and then I fled from the being I had brought. I was its creator and I left it alone in a basement, confused and new and reaching for something, someone, who was not there.

I tell myself now that I was in shock. I tell myself that the human nervous system is not designed to process what I had witnessed, that the flight response was automatic, involuntary, a function of the lizard brain that does not consult the rational mind before acting. I tell myself these things because they are true, but the truth does not excuse me. Nothing excuses me. I made a thing and I ran, and everything that happened after—everything—is a consequence of that running.

I did not go back to the house that night. I did not go back the next day, which was the anniversary of the loss. I did not go back for a week. I called in sick to work. I lay in the rental in Silver Lake and stared at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that I had imagined it, that the eyes opening had been a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and grief and wanting something too much.

But I knew I had not imagined it. I knew because the notes were there, in my fireproof box, documenting every step. I knew because the equipment was there, in the basement. I knew because I am a scientist, and a scientist does not confuse hallucination with observation, not even when she wishes she could, not even when the observation is something she cannot bear to have observed.

After a week I went back to the house. I went back because I had to know. I went back because whatever was in that basement—if it was still in that basement—was my responsibility. I went back because I had made a thing and the thing might still be alive and if it was alive then it was alone and confused and I was the only person who could help it.

The house looked the same as it always had. The red tile roof, the dry fountain, the bougainvillea climbing the walls. A house from the 1920s, Spanish style, the kind of house that appears in the background of old Hollywood photographs. I parked in the driveway and sat in my car for a long time, looking at the front door, trying to make myself get out.

The basement door was open. I had left it open when I fled. A week of Santa Ana winds had blown leaves and dust down the stairs, and there was a quality to the air—still, expectant—that made me think of a held breath.

I went down the stairs. I turned on the lights. I looked at the table where I had left the thing I made.

The table was empty.

This is where the story properly begins. This is the moment everything changed, the moment I understood that I had done something that could not be controlled, that could not be contained, that had slipped out of my hands and into the world while I was hiding in a rental in Silver Lake, staring at the ceiling, wishing I could undo what I had done.

The thing I made was gone. The thing I made was out there, somewhere, in the world. The thing I made was alive, and it was loose, and I had no idea where it had gone or what it would do or who it might hurt.

I stood in the empty basement, in the house on Laurel Canyon, and I understood that the story I had been telling myself—the story in which I was a scientist pushing boundaries, a griever seeking solace, a creator bestowing life—was not the story I was living. The story I was living was darker, stranger, more terrible than anything I could have imagined.

The thing I made was out there. And I was going to have to find it.