What It Might Feel Like To Hope. Dorene O'Brien

form, fostering the discovery of how to make drugs found only in plants and microbes synthetically by learning the drug’s growth pattern which, like all solid matter, begins with a solitary cell. Things were, as his supervisor so eloquently stated, taking off.

      It was painful to leave behind the hope of discovery, but what more subtly nagged him was that he couldn’t allow anyone else that hope. Being selfish and proprietary are traits not uncommon in scientists, but Ben knew that he was acting like the angry child in possession of the only ball on the playground. It was his, after all.

      For weeks he stared at the cardboard box, convinced that tucked into the crystals’ translucent folds and angled pleats were answers to age-old medical questions and refutations to long-held theories that could be extracted only by someone fully connected to his intellectual and emotional faculties. But if that someone couldn’t be him, it would be no one. He hid the box in the barn and tried not to think about it.

      BEN HAD ALWAYS LOVED WORKING with his hands, playing with Tinker Toys as a child, building models with his father, constructing crystal replicas for investors from Sony and directors of the American Medical Association. Dr. Ludrow recommended that he take up some sort of craft, claiming that the concentration required in the physical act of creation would relieve his stress by focusing his attention on something other than his deteriorating brain.

      “So I can slip into mental oblivion unawares?” he asked.

      “Something like that,” the doctor said absently.

      He was a busy man, but Ben resented being dismissed while still in possession of his rational mind. “Young man,” he said, “let me tell you something: I am a research scientist. I have contributed to the perfection of the instruments you shove down peoples’ throats and up their asses in the name of medicine.”

      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”