Love on the Brain(11)
To be fair, there isn’t much to think about. I only remember up until the moment I fainted. Yes, I swooned in His Wardness’s manly arms like a twentieth-century hysteric with penis envy.
It’s nothing new, really. I faint all the time: when I haven’t eaten in a while; when I see pictures of large, hairy spiders; when I stand up too quickly from a sitting position. My body’s puzzling inability to maintain minimal blood pressure in the face of normal everyday events makes me, as Reike likes to say, a syncope aficionado. Doctors are puzzled but ultimately unconcerned. I’ve long learned to dust myself off as soon as I regain consciousness and go about my business.
Friday, though, was different. I came to in a few moments—cat nowhere in sight—but my neurons must have still been misfiring because I hallucinated something that could never happen: Levi Ward bridal-carrying me to the lobby and gently laying me on one of the couches. Then I must have hallucinated some more: Levi Ward viciously tearing a new one into the engineer who’d left the cart unattended. That had to have been a fever dream, for several reasons.
First of all, Levi is terrifying, but not that terrifying. His brand is more kill-’em-with-icy-cold-indifference-and-silent-contempt than angry outbursts. Unless in our time apart he’s embraced a whole new level of terrifying, in which case . . . lovely.
Second, it’s difficult, and by “difficult” I mean impossible, to imagine him siding against a non-me party in any me-involved accident. Yes, he did save my life, but there’s a good chance he had no idea who I even was when he shoved me against the wall. This is Dr. Wardass, after all. The man who once stood for a two-hour meeting rather than take the last empty seat because it was next to me. The man who exited a game of poker he was winning because someone dealt me in. The man who hugged everyone in the lab on his last day at Pitt, and promptly switched to handshakes when it was my turn. If he caught someone stabbing me, he’d probably blame me for walking into the knife—and then take out his whetstone.
Clearly, my brain wasn’t at her best on Friday. And I could stand here, stare at my closet, and agonize over the fact that my grad school nemesis saved my life. Or I could bask in my excitement and pick an outfit.
I opt for black skinny jeans and a polka-dotted red top. I pull up my hair in braids that would make a Dutch milkmaid proud, put on red lipstick, and keep the jewelry to a relative minimum—the usual earrings, my favorite septum piercing, and my maternal grandmother’s ring on my left hand.
It’s a bit weird to wear someone else’s wedding ring, but it’s the only memento I have of my nonna, and I like to put it on when I need some good luck. Reike and I moved to Messina to be with her right after our parents died. We ended up having to move again just three years later when she passed, but out of all the short-lived homes, out of all the extended relatives, Nonna is the one who loved us the most. So Reike wears her engagement ring, and I wear her wedding band. Even-steven. I shoot a quick, uplifting tweet from my WWMD account (Happy Monday! KEEP CALM AND CURIE ON, FRIENDS ) and head out.
“You excited?” I ask Rocío when I pick her up.
She stares at me darkly and says, “In France, the guillotine was used as recently as 1977.” I take it as an invitation to shut up, and I do, smiling like an idiot. I’m still smiling when we get our NASA ID pictures taken and when we later meet up with Guy for a formal tour. It’s a smile fueled by positive energy and hope. A smile that says, “I’m going to rock this project” and “Watch me stimulate your brain” and “I’m going to make neuroscience my bitch.”
A smile that falters when Guy swipes his badge to unlock yet another empty room.
“And here’s where the transcranial magnetic stimulation device will be,” he says—just another variation of the same sentence I’ve heard over. And over. And over.
“Here is where the electroencephalography lab will be.”
“Here you’ll do participant intake once the Review Board approves the project.”
“Here will be the testing room you asked for.”
Just a lot of rooms that will be, but aren’t yet. Even though communications between NASA and NIH indicated that everything needed to carry out the study would be here when I started.
I try to keep on smiling. It’s hopefully just a delay. Besides, when Dr. Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, she didn’t even have a proper lab, and did all of her research out of a converted shed. Science, I tell myself in my inner Jeff Goldblum voice, finds a way.
Then Guy opens the last room and says, “And here’s the office you two will share. Your computer should arrive soon.” That is when my smile turns into a frown.
It’s nice, the office. Large and bright, with refreshingly not-rusted-through desks and chairs that will provide just the right amount of lumbar support. And yet.
First of all, it’s as distant from the engineering labs as possible. I’m not kidding: if someone grabbed a protractor and solved for x (i.e., the point that’s farthest from Levi’s office), they’d find that x = my desk. So much for interdisciplinary workspaces and collaborative layouts. But that’s almost secondary, because . . .
“Did you say computer? Singular?” Rocío looks horrified. “Like . . . one?”
Guy nods. “The one you put on your list.”
“We need, like, ten computers for the type of data processing we do,” she points out. “We’re talking multivariate statistics. Independent component analysis. Multidimensional scaling and recursive partitioning. Six sigma—”