the box

I stepped into the tube station with a heavy box in my hands, carrying it awkwardly in front of me like a precious treasure, one eye on the way ahead and one on the box. A bulky gentleman of placid complexion turned his heads towards me slowly and gaped for a second. This was more than the kids at the bus stop had done. Those lads, not old enough even – and this is a reference these days – to have been involved in the rioting last week, didn't move their heads as I moved by. They stared straight ahead at the lawn of the council estate where a football game between an inept dad and his uncoordinated sons wasn't going anywhere. There hadn't been a bus in a while but they were more bored than anxious to get away.

I was anxious too. The train was a few minutes off when I stepped into the tube station and the gentle giant astonished me with his question. "Is this a heart?" he asked. I held the box up questioningly, tilted me head and brought an ear to its side. "Is it still beating?" I asked back, trying to look worried. "I thought the guy was dead." The man's face fell, his mouth opened but no words came out. I climbed the stairs to the platform, the box tugging heavily on my carefree gait. I sat down on the wooden bench and studied the box.

It was white and quite obviously Styrofoam. The edges and corners were rounded to emphasize its innocuousness. Each side was about a foot long. It was covered all over with Life Technologies stickers and a paper trail of shipping labels. Before leaving the institute where I had picked up the box I had surveyed it for Toxic or Radioactive labels that might spook my fellow passengers or even get me arrested by transport police. I had no desire to feature in the kind of story that's used to impress and educate rookies.

Long ago, a box outwardly very similar to mine but boldly labeled HIV and containing mysterious samples in clear plastic trays was discarded at Long Island airport by overworked researchers returning from a few days of sleepless experimentation at a national facility. The researchers, who could have been colleagues, were detained two hours later at O'Hare airport and only released after fierce and protracted negotiations when their boss – who would be my boss a few years down the road – offered to fly to Long Island and ingest the discarded samples to prove their benignness.

Much less long ago, another researcher who is a colleague got ready to board the train to Paris when he noticed that the shipping Dewar containing his samples leaked steam. He had forgotten to pour off the excess liquid nitrogen after cooling the interior. For lack of a better alternative, he poured it in the gutter on the quiet side of St. Pancras station, creating a cloud of vapor so thick that he didn't even see the cops coming for him. He learned the hard way that after the terror attacks on London's buses and the tube in 2006, the British don't take suspicious activity around their transport infrastructure lightly.

I knew that my box posed no danger to anyone, but for a second time I made sure that it couldn't possibly appear dangerous to anyone else either. For all I could see, it was just a box, featureless for the most part, but as the platform filled, I noticed more startled looks and furtive glances than public transport in London normally provides. I was waiting at a station so far out of the way that the pocket tube maps for grabs by the stairs showed a picture that had gone out of fashion quite a while ago. October 2010, it said on the cover, and Tottenham Court Road was still shown as a Northern line stop. How would the reaction be once I reached the busy center of the network?

The train pulls in, people get on, I take a seat and put the box between my feet. My backpack goes on top, a thin cover. Minutes later I start traversing London like the courier of kidneys in Dirty Pretty Things. But not carrying organs, I'm in much less of a rush. The tiny tubes of protein and DNA that I've picked up from a collaborator are good for hours on the five pounds of dry ice that fill the box. As the anonymity of the tubes pulls its invisibility cap over me, I relax. No one even sees me.