The Recipe That Reads Both Ways

The costume shop smelled like hot glue and old velvet. Maya was untangling a rack of coats when she found the script.

"Look at this," she said. "Somebody wrote two plays on the same pages."

Soren took it. The pages were printed in plain black. But in the margins, one person had crossed out whole chunks in blue, and a different person had crossed out different chunks in red.

"Read the blue lines only," Maya said. "Skip everything blue crosses out."

Soren read down the page, jumping the crossed parts. "It's a comedy. The king trips on the carpet."

"Now read the red one. Same page."

He went again, skipping the red cuts instead. His mouth opened a little. "The king dies. It's a tragedy." He flipped back. "Same words. Same order. They just cut different pieces out."

"Two plays," Maya said. "One script."

Mrs. Okafor came through carrying a bin of props, half her attention on the ceiling fan she wanted turned off. "That's the old rehearsal copy," she said. "The director could never decide. Comedy Tuesdays, tragedy Fridays. Same actors, same lines, one set of pages." She kept walking. "Leave it on the table."

Maya did not leave it on the table.

"Soren," she said. "My cousin does gene stuff at the university. She said one time that people have way fewer genes than anybody expected. Like, not enough."

"Not enough for what?"

"For everything a body does. She said there's twenty thousand-ish genes but way more than twenty thousand proteins. Way more. She said it like it was supposed to bother me."

Soren looked at the script. He looked at it a long time.

"Did it bother you?"

"It bothered me then. It's not bothering me now." She tapped the blue line, then the red line. "What if a gene is this? What if it's one long script and the cell cuts different pieces out?"

Soren pulled his notebook from his back pocket. He copied one sentence from the page, then drew two arrows off it, one curving over some words, one curving over different words. He wrote comedy under the first and tragedy under the second.

"So the gene is the whole printed sentence," he said slowly. "And the cell reads it like a director. Cut here, keep this, skip that."

"And you get a different protein out the end."

"From the same gene." He set the pencil down. "That can't be right. That's too much. That would mean one gene isn't one thing."

"Test it," Maya said. "You always want to test it."

"Test it how? We can't cut DNA in a costume shop."

"We can cut the script." She was already grabbing scissors from the sewing table. "Photocopy first. Mrs. Okafor will kill us otherwise."

They copied a page twice. On the first copy Soren cut out the blue-crossed sections and taped the survivors together into one clean strip. On the second copy he cut out the red-crossed sections and taped those survivors together.

Two strips. Same original page. He laid them side by side.

"Read them," Maya said.

"First one's the comedy. Whole thing, top to bottom, makes sense." He picked up the second. "Second one's the tragedy. Also whole. Also makes sense." He set them down like they were hot. "Neither one has a gap. Neither one looks like it's missing anything. If you only saw one, you'd swear that was the whole play."

"That's the part," Maya said "You'd never know the other one was hiding in there. You'd have the tragedy in your hand and think, this is the script, this is the only thing these words can be."

Soren stared at the taped strips.

"So when your cousin says twenty thousand genes," he said, "that's not twenty thousand answers. That's twenty thousand scripts, and every one of them can be cut more than one way."

"More than two ways, even. Blue, red. Why stop at two colors?" Maya spread the original flat. "Green. Yellow. However many the cell wants. Same page. Different play every time."

Soren did the arithmetic in his head and then out loud because he didn't trust it silently. "If one script can make three plays, and you've got twenty thousand scripts, that's not twenty thousand. That's way more. That's the extra proteins. That's the thing that was supposed to bother you."

"It's not enough genes," Maya said, "unless the genes read more than one way. And they do. So it is enough. It's more than enough."

They sat with that.

"There's something I keep thinking," Soren said. "About me. My whole life people go, why do you write everything down, why do you need the steps, everybody else just gets it. Like I'm reading the slow way and there's a fast normal way I'm supposed to already have."

"Yeah," Maya said. "People say the same thing to me. Different words."

"But there's no already-way. Look at this." He held up the two strips. "Nobody's reading the whole script straight through. Everybody's cutting. Everybody. The cell doesn't read one right version and skip the wrong ones. It reads it different ways on purpose and every way is real."

Maya took the original page back from him. She held it up to the light from the window so both colors of ink showed through at once, blue crossings and red crossings overlapping, the comedy and the tragedy stacked in the same paper.

"So which one's the real play," she said.

"Both. That's the whole thing. Both, at the same time, in the same words, and it depends who's reading."

Mrs. Okafor came back for the prop bin. "You two still on that old script? I told you, the director never picked."

"He didn't have to," Maya said.

Mrs. Okafor stopped, one eyebrow up, waiting for the rest. Maya didn't give it to her.

Soren was already photocopying the page a third time. He uncapped a green pen, laid it against the first uncrossed line, and started to cut a third play out of the same words.