Dr. Dosselmeier reached for the FPBOS-9, a small amber vial perched upon the top shelf. Dr. Dosselmeier was a horrible figure; lanky and ill-looking, his skin was thin and coarse like parchment paper, hardly obscuring the red and blue veins that crisscrossed his body. Many of Neogen Corporation's exotic ingredients—uncommon dilutions, insolvent powders, and scarce minerals from the farthest corners of the earth—were only within the reach of Dosselmeier and his prawn-like fingers. 

 

María Antonia had never seen Dr. Dosselmeier pull this vial before, and she thought, puzzled, how FPBOS-9 might factor into the gene editing of milk-producing cows, her assigned project at Neogen, L.A.'s largest employer. Chemical compounds had always felt like family to María Antonia. Growing up in the Colombian highlands, she sank herself into the seminal texts of organic chemistry, her pointed nose tracing each line like a bloodhound, and only occasionally did she break her focus to join her brothers, sisters, mother, father, and first cousins for lunch (but never dinner). Cradled in a nest of worn-out book spines and loose pages which had begun to disintegrate from the fumbling of her fingers, on the rare occasion that María Antonia moved about the house, the nozzles of household cleaning sprays pivoted to track her wide hips, and dish rags stretched from their dowels, yearning for her delicate touch and turquoise-painted nails. When she tried to cook, the kitchen would fill with the pungent aroma of burnt mustard seed, and she once turned an unlabeled meat into a pot full of bleach. 

 

"Is that FPBOS-9, Doctor?" María Antonia asked. "What would we—"

 

"Although multiplex genome editing is not feasible in cattle," Dosselmeier interrupted without stopping corralling bottles, vials, and jars into a plastic tub, "specific, single mutations of the genes associated with certain amino acids, when combined with the last element of the growth hormone receptor and the smallest trace of FPBOS-9, may quicken cattle's absorption of mutated genes."

 

María Antonia stood silent, lost in the first phrase of Dosselmeier's proclamation. Dosselmeier curled his large hands around the plastic tub. His white coat was spotless and stiffly starched.  

 

Ironically, it was not in her homeland of cumbia, salsa, and merengue where María Antonia found her joie di vivre but in the low-density, urban sprawl of L.A., a gray-scape of mostly vacant shopping centers and restaurants on the cusp of foreclosure. Together, these right angles of concrete stretched to the horizon in all directions. With the rare park being littered with trash and the bike lanes cratered with potholes, L.A. could hardly compete with the lush mountains and valleys of Colombia. There, María Antonia would ride on horseback with her family to taste different preparations of the region's arabica beans. Always pulled askew by the weight of her neoprene bag, which never carried less than three books on organic chemistry and a whimsical collection of pens and markers, María Antonia found the dances and polyrhythmic percussion of her family members, crazed off of the Colombian bean, distracting. Although it may have just been the literal misalignment of her spine, she felt out of place, and the ornate world of chemical compounds became her mental space of solace.

 

"Ready to go?" Dosselmeier asked María Antonia, finally meeting the dark brown eyes that sat deeply in her skull. Lost in thought about the compound structure of FPBOS-9, María Antonia took a moment to emerge from her mental fog. "I'll drive," Dosselmeier said, already halfway out the door. 

 

María Antonia felt a sense of privilege being the selected student from thousands of applicants, eager and qualified chemists all vying for a moment beneath the dark yet intense light of Dosselmeier's tutelage. María Antonia was then finishing her Bachelor of Science in Northern California, however, and working with Dosselmeier was a shock following four years of small class sizes and intimate relationships with her professors. Although the Neogen posting had been advertised as a lab assistant position, it turned out to be nothing more than labeling and relabeling the innumerable bottles at Neogen in a hierarchical system of naming none other than Dosselmeier and a few tenured scientists understood. This sent María Antonia spiraling in the first months after her arrival, wondering why she'd chosen to come to L.A. All was not lost, however, for her moving to L.A. would prove to be the catalyst for a lifelong change in pace. 

 

María Antonia followed Dosselmeier out of the building and climbed into the passenger seat of his van. Dosselmeier hit the gas before she could close the door, and the momentum of the van swung the door shut and threw María Antonia's languid frame into the recesses of a seat cushion witness to many such torrents of adventure. The seat, a mosaic of mossy green and rufous stains that merged into a murky black, hugged her nape; Pink Floyd's Brain Damage shot from the speakers.

 

As the van raced west for Charlotte, where a community of Amish dairy farmers awaited, María Antonia watched the dilapidated houses of L.A. pass by; a gray blur tinted with tired pastels, the vibrant colors of the seventies and eighties whitewashed by years of neglect and nostalgia for the boom of the auto industry. Porches and lawns were decorated with the leavings of warm-weather enthusiasm, and damp sofas dug holes into the grassless mud, which after soaking in November rains always coagulated into the clumpy, telluric puddles of December and callused across the top in the wintry depth of January. It is hard to imagine that such a lifeless landscape could inspire meaningful change, after all, it coaxed most of L.A.'s inhabitants into an ascetic solitude, but for María Antonia, it was this lack of human activity that helped her uncover an internal rhythm much slower than the caffeinated allegro of her kin.

 

María Antonia often wandered the streets of L.A. contemplating her choice to come to Neogen. The hospital was the only landmark in L.A. before the Capitol building, which María Antonia regularly confused to be the seat of congress, and so her wanderings were often aimless to-and-fros between the lone points of attraction. The whistle of highland grasses in Colombian winds was replaced by the white noise of freeways, which crisscrossed L.A. in such a fashion that one was hardly able to hold a conversation on the sidewalk. The white noise drowned out María Antonia's anxieties around work, however, and the sirens that rang around the local hospital would pull her consciousness from the sheltered observatory of chemical compounds in her brain, into the soles of her feet which treaded on uneven asphalt. 

 

Wandering slowly and listening to the passing of cars, sirens of ambulances, and the occasional song of an American Robin, this engagement with life massaged María Antonia's knotted brain; it provided respite from the murky tonic of arabica-induced fever dreams and an anxiety-induced obsession with organic chemistry in which it sat. Gradually, María Antonia expanded the circle of her wanderings, and her brain ceased its anxious feast on the knowledge of organic chemistry to explore what was in front of her. Her stride shortened and her chin turned up when she walked; her dark eyes reflected the occasional warmth of an L.A. sun, peeking through the clouds, saturating the tired pastels into the colors of her favorite dessert, rainbow sherbet. In this heightened state of presence, cemented as she marveled at L.A. from a dingy van headed west for Charlotte, María Antonia unknowingly began an eternal quest for inner peace that led her to spend the final one billion, eight-hundred-and-twenty-nine million, three-hundred and forty-three thousand, two-hundred and fifty-nine moments of her life at a confluence of rivers beneath the Longquan Mountains in China, living amongst a vibrant community of Taoists.