“No, I meant why a—”
“A pencil instead of a pen? Because unlike ink, graphite is erasable. People make mistakes, Mr. Roth. A pencil allows one to clear the mistake and move on. Scientists expect mistakes, and because of it, we embrace failure.” Then she eyed his pen disapprovingly.
The photographer rolled his eyes.
“Look,” Roth said, closing his notepad. “I was under the impression that you’d agreed to this interview, but I can tell that this has been forced upon you. I never interview anyone against their will; I sincerely apologize for our intrusion.” Then he turned to the photographer and tipped his head toward the door. They were halfway across the parking lot before Seymour Browne stopped them. “Zott says wait here,” he said.
* * *
—
Five minutes later, Roth was riding next to Elizabeth Zott in the front seat of her old blue Plymouth, the dog and the photographer relegated to the back.
“He doesn’t bite, does he?” the photographer asked as he crammed himself against the window.
“All dogs have the ability to bite,” she said over her shoulder. “Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.”
“Was that a yes?” he asked, but they were merging onto the freeway and his question was lost in the acceleration of the engine.
“Where are we going?” Roth asked.
“My lab.”
But when they pulled up in front of a small brown bungalow in a tired but tidy neighborhood, he thought he must have misheard.
“I’m afraid I’m the one who now owes you the apology,” she said to Roth as she ushered them inside. “My centrifuge is on the fritz. But I can still make coffee.”
She set to work as the photographer clicked away, Roth’s mouth gaping in wonder as he took in what must have once been a kitchen. It looked like a cross between an operating room and a biohazard site.
“It was an unbalanced load,” she explained, adding something about the separation of fluids based on density as she pointed at a big silver thing. Centrifuge? He had no idea. He reopened his notepad. She set a plate of cookies in front of him.
“They’re cinnamaldehyde,” she explained.
He turned to find the dog watching him.
“Six-Thirty is an unusual name for a dog,” he said. “What’s it mean?”
“Mean?” She turned toward him as she lit a Bunsen burner, frowning as if, once again, she didn’t understand why he insisted on asking such basic questions. She then supplied a detailed description of the Babylonians, who had relied on a sexagesimal system—counting by sixties, she explained—for both mathematics and astronomy. “So hopefully that should clear that up,” she said.
Meanwhile, the photographer, whom she’d invited to have a look around, asked about the contraption in the middle of the living room floor. “The erg?” she said. “It’s a rowing machine. I’m a rower. Many women are.”
Roth laid his notepad on the table in the lab and followed them into the next room, where she demonstrated the rowing stroke. “An erg is a unit of energy,” she’d explained while moving back and forth in a tedious sort of way, the photographer snapping from multiple angles. “It takes a lot of ergs to row.” Then she’d gotten up and the photographer took several pictures of her hand calluses before they all returned to the lab, where Roth discovered the dog slobbering on his notes.
That’s how the interview went: from one end of dull to the other. He continued to ask his questions and she answered all of them—politely, dutifully, scientifically. In other words, he had nothing.
She placed a cup of coffee in front of him. He wasn’t really a coffee drinker—too bitter for his taste—but she’d gone to such extraordinary lengths to make it: flasks, tubes, pipettes, vapors. To be polite, he took a sip. Then he took another.
“Is this really coffee?” he asked, awed.
“Perhaps you’d like to see how Six-Thirty helps me in the lab,” she offered. She proceeded to strap some goggles onto the dog, then explained her area of research—abiogenesis, she called it—then spelled it, a-b-i-o, then grabbed his pad and wrote it down in block letters. Meanwhile the photographer snapped shot after shot of Six-Thirty pressing a button that raised and lowered the fume hood.
“I wanted to bring you here,” she said to Roth, “because as I want your readers to understand, I’m not really a TV cooking show host. I’m a chemist. For a while, I was trying to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of our time.”