Should your innate inclination be to make quick and incomplete studies of essential facts in learned histories such as the one you have been reading, or moreover if your long ingrained habit is to steal hurrisome looks ahead as you toil, which is to say you like to skip over pages you judge are standing in the way of reaching some culminating and final finish, then in my estimation you will have likely turned too soon to this Epilogue, which I have received the honor of writing and appending to the earlier chapters of the full account of matters. For without the detailed facts and knowledge contained within those earlier and ascending Chapters, a state of unsettled confusion is certifiably assured. And so it is to be recommended that a person in such a position as you may find yourself — you have set sail but left behind your oars — might remedy the situation by turning back at this time to re-study and fully absorb the protean portraits of character and action provided in the preceding pages. For what can an Epilogue append should there be nothing in a reader’s mind to append It to?
Call me Manual. Or simply call me by my nickname, Manny, as does the Professor. This final tale, or Epilogue as I was saying earlier, is one I know as well as the bonds tying me together! One hundred and fifty-three residues strong am I! Or so I was, until my ruinous encounter with that hydrolyzing, proteolyzing monster whose toothsome active site I had the displeasure of encountering one day in the far reaches of the musculature. He savagely jawed off seven of my residues, leaving me grateful enough with the remaining one hundred and forty-six, subtracting to this day from my birthright nearly two complete turns of my otherwise healthy and full-length terminus.
But that is not the scar that matters! I would be bit a thousand more times by the worst that MoBi has to offer, rather than to re-live the tortures of my earliest days. Nor am I presently beset by latent or debilitating fears in consequence of the great and episodic history you have just read — of the sudden breech through the skin, of the swift and deadly attack of the invaders, of the valiant sacrifices of our heroic guardians! None of those memories cause me the same recoil of pain as the memory of her.
Yes, I now understand that she was but one of the many millions of Hemoglobin girls who worked in the area, but she was my first, and she remains the loveliest creature ever glimpsed by this poor and single, rust-begot, porphyrin eye of mine. As I pen my tale — this Epilogue — from this dust-covered shelf, those early memories begin to take over. I can still hear the echos of the refrains of the songs we used to shout and sing in full choral ecstasy as we labored in the working depths of the child’s anterior tibialis:
“Heave Ho! Pass me that gas and I’ll pass it on too!”
We were of course of cheerful servitude then. I was fresh and as compared to today, my color was good and ruddy. As a vigorous and well-ordered fold — and yes, brothers and sisters, what you see in me today still harbors if in imperfection that same burly form— I was full-length (never having yet met the aforementioned beast that shortened my terminus), well-attached to my prosthetic, and fully ready and reddish, as they say — fit to hold the dancing oxygens that came our way, expelling them like fish back to the waters when in the next tick of the clock the time came to release them came nigh! Ahoy! I would have endured in that proud if tiresome profession had my life not changed so suddenly and abruptly and magically. It was in that moment, when I first saw her, that I was immeasurably changed and never again the same. Now, to be strictly truthful and honest, and to fully confess to you what in me that was changed is something that I cannot accommodate. To see great beauty, to be handed an oxygen by her gentle hands, to touch her for just a nanoment — that is all there was to it. I was simply a youth enthralled by her beauty. I have nothing more to tell you about what changed within me. Let’s talk of other things. The pain of her memory is simply akin to those minor pains we all feel at not seeing an old friend for quite some time. We miss someone, and feel a small hurt because of their absence.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Blast! You have wrung it out of me! I am compelled to say more.
You see, as a fresh young fold, with the blessings of the organelle of my creation, I had my employment, I had my duty to serve, and I had my neighbors by my side, all of whom, like myself, were satisfied in our friendship to one another and to the advanced working mechanicians who, like wizards with blinding movements, took to their mission to engage themselves in cooperative movements so elegant I can hardly give their account, yet for which they in their strength needed what we could provide, the oxygen that we held like balled lighting and then tossed away to the hungry infernos of the contracting muscles. All that should have provided a sufficient for one, like me and my kind, to claim satisfaction with such a life to be so destined to live.
Yet the bards and poets all refer to youth as a troubled age, and I was no different. I had somehow come to see myself as being less than who and what I hoped to be. I bore a heritage that troubled me greatly and made me feel less than full in and by comparison to my brethren molecules. You see, I had been born a monomer, a lone chain, like every myoglobin before and after me. I saw myself as a small singleton in a cellular society brimming with multimers and supramolecular assemblages, and my stature, tiny by comparison, cut me down to a self-estimated ranking of low importance, lowering me in elevation and leaving me in continual doubt of having sufficient merit to draw not even acclaim but mere notice. And of all whom I wished might notice me, there was no other claimant to my heart than her, that lovely Lady Hemoglobin who touched me once and forever, and whose momentary attention I now confess turned me even more toward self-doubt and degradation of my self-worth.
She, of four beautifully arranged subunits, was above my grade. She, of two alpha subunits and two beta subunits, made me — a single globin unit — seem pitiful and inferior by comparison, or so I was told by that innermost voice telling me I was of secondary status from the tertiary structural level on down:
“Look in the mirror of symmetry, Manny. Why would she have any affinity toward you?”
And then, as it so happened, my luck changed. In the epic event that changed all our histories, the child’s stab wound was dressed by the physician. I was drawn by swab and stick onto the glass slide where I now reside. Countless others came with me, too, but it is thanks to those of us like myself who are simplest in nature and who have found themselves circumstantially mounted onto scientific instrumentation and have then been examined further by human intelligence, that my story — indeed all of our stories — became widely understood and known. Simple as I am, and as one of the chosen who has lent himself to scientific and medical study, my contribution has been made. Certainly the drying and staining steps were painful, but preserved as I am on this glass surface, I am referred to from time to time by the Professor in his demonstrations to students. Others, in even more advanced serendipitous and technical positions than me are currently under examination by all glorious manners of photons and light beams and glancing X-rays. But we all are in service as the Manuals, so to speak, from which knowledge is built. The Professor says that were it not for my family — my brethren Myoglobins — there would be hardly any knowledge at all of the more advanced structures, of those cited in the above Chapters, and, ever to my heart, the one of whom I have now confessed to loving from my early youth and have now spoken of in honest and cherishing length. Yo ho and sink me! Manny, a scientific contributor of a knowledge greater than myself. It wets my reddish eye to think of it!
I do miss her, of course. I now know she and I did have and still have much in common to this day, though we remain apart. Perhaps, like me, she is mounted on a slide somewhere. As a soothing exercise I like to imagine the two of us mounted together, revealing the depths of our innermost commonalities: Me, streamlined and efficient. She, voluptuously folded. Our missions, functionally connected. Lady Hemoglobin, I feel we are destined to meet again one day, in that great lysosome of the cell where our building blocks will reassemble in a life renewed.
Addendum to the Epilogue
I had already completed my tale – the Epilogue I had been requested to compose — only to realize that one other note needs to be added, about that Professor that I began to tell you about. He evidently has been guiding several interested students down an uncertain path of investigation. As far as I can determine, these students have been assigned substantial accredited workloads that remind me of my days in the working muscle fibers, where we heaved those gas molecules into the pits and then repeated the process for days on end. Evidently the students have been held in such a fashion of bondage for the vicinity of several weeks, perhaps as many as ten, which is well beyond the interval of the lifecycle of many a microbial taxon whereby one is born, lives and reproduce to number in the thousands, and then dies, all within that same interval or less. These two-legged upright multicellular animalia confound me in their slow and tardy ways, with this half-dozen students having much less to show for the time spent. Should their chapterized accounts qualify not so much as Honors but as Hot Airs? I will leave the decision of which of these two choices they qualify as, for others, besides me, to determine.
