The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy

loves a fighter.
    No one, however, wants the anemics.
    The sickle-cell anemics are what the doctors call “frequent flyers.” Their multivolume charts are heavy, wrapped tight with thick rubber bands. When their nurses aren’t looking, one has sex with her brother-in-law and another sneaks whiskey from a mouthwash bottle. And because I’m young like them and black like them, they let me in on their secrets.
    We get a frequent flyer, a thirtysomething sickle-cell patient, admitted with a port-a-cath infection, the result of injecting heroin through the direct line to his heart. He’s lost most of his legs—both are amputated above the knee—and he’s scheduled to lose more.
    He calls the nurses’ station and tells me to come. The volume on his television is turned up high, and there are clothes all over the floor. He is jaundiced, but because his skin is dark, I can tell this only from looking at his eyes, which are yellow where they should be white. He’s sitting up in bed, basketball shorts covering what’s left of his legs. Like my mother, pain transforms him. He tells me he could strangle someone, that he was promised his morphine an hour ago.
C’mon man, c’mon man
, he says. He tells me that I better find his nurse and drag her in here. He’s bare-chested and sweaty, and when he pounds his thighs with his fists, he wants to see me jump. He wants to fill the room with the scent and heat of pain, so that it’s no longer his alone.
    A few hours later, when he’s comfortable and feeling more like himself, he shows me a school photo of one of his sons. The backdrop is autumnal and artificial, meant to evoke harvest.
    He talks to me about this son and the others, about the sports they play, their report cards, and their talents. His boys, I’ve been told, haven’t inherited his disease.
    I don’t interrupt him. I don’t return to the nurses’ station, where the intercom is ringing. I listen quietly as he describes his family, witnessing a different transformation now: from condition to man.
    Â 
    6.
    Â 
    At Yale, genetics becomes my religion. I’m a graduate student, studying kidney disease in lower organisms, namely mice and fish. Ash Wednesday arrives and my forehead is a blank canvas. My father, a devout Catholic, reminds me of the importance of going to mass. My uncle, one of my father’s many brothers, is an atheist and a professor. I remember him teasing:
What if your land of milk and honey is right here?
    What attracts me to genetics isn’t purely the validation of thought or the process of discovery but, rather, what it symbolizes. Our genomes contain our complete ancestral history, a record of where we’ve been. The history of our evolution has been transcribed and it lives in every one of our cells. And perhaps more inspiring than this record are the vast open regions that represent where we, as a species, have yet to go. These regions are wide open, ready to be filled with fortitude and endurance.
    Genetics, like storytelling, is a search for core truths, for what informs the human condition. At its best, it tells an artful story, a narrative meant to inspire and enrich our lives. But it also invokes the worst about living: misfortune, pain, and truncation.
    The genetic code is a language, written in a four-letter alphabet. I spend hours at the computer, interpreting its narrative. I read in one gene the story of an ancestor, common to both man and fish, an ancestor of the sea from which man descended. I read in another gene our similarity to other unlikely species—fish and dogs, rats and mice—similarities that make them suitable models for studying human disease. I read in a third gene our connection to chimpanzees: beyond both species having nurturing relationships and problem-solving abilities, we share somewhere near 98 percent of the same genetic material. The blueprints that govern us are nearly