Real Life(16)
“Stop watching me; I’m getting self-conscious,” Miller mumbled around the glass.
“I’m sorry,” Wallace said, and made a show of looking away, back into the building across the alley, to where the man was still ironing at the sink. Had he seen them fucking on the couch?
“More please,” Miller said. Wallace lifted the carafe and poured the last of the cold, clear water into the glass. Miller watched him as he poured, and he watched Miller watch him. The water level rose and rose until it was almost overflowing, spilling down their fingers. But it didn’t. Wallace stopped just short of that point, the point at which the water wavered on the very cusp of the container that meant to hold it, the point at which things swell to an unbearable height before giving way, the point at which something must either recede or break and extend.
“There,” Wallace said. “Enjoy.”
“Thank you,” Miller said, and he drank it all in one big gulp with his eyes closed, as if in ecstasy.
2
The other labs on the third floor of the biosciences building are empty, as if after the rapture. Strangely, it’s also not dissimilar from catching a glimpse of someone undressing when they think they are alone, the twin thrill and shame of the voyeur. The air carries the salty scent of yeast media. Wallace’s mouth waters. Below him, the atrium is filled with gauzy light. Dry yellow vines wrap around the railings, the floor glossy with wear. If he jumps, he thinks, he will plummet, a slow sweep through empty space, a horrible way to die. He feels, momentarily, the heat of the impact, the ghostly wet of his skull collapsing. The illusion of weightlessness gives way. The elevator slides shut with a rebounding clang.
It’s a little after ten a.m. on a Saturday.
At the end of the hall, light spills out of Simone’s lab. Katie stands at the table centrifuge. It is an enormous gray machine, emitting a high whine that rises in pitch until it bleeds into the mechanical noise of the lab: rattling cages and clinking glass beakers strapped to agitators, mewling coils behind the incubators, the dull roar of the air conditioner overhead. Standing there is like being in the peristaltic system of some large animal, amid the sounds of a body adjusting itself. Katie does not look at him. She’s blond with quite small features, as if someone had wiped away her original face and painted in its place a delicate, miniature facsimile. She balances a green ice bucket on her hip and she’s slapping a pair of pale blue nitrile gloves across her thigh. Impatience. Boredom.
Wallace walks quickly by her, as if he might slip her notice, but she says, “Let’s get this shit done.”
“Let’s get it done,” he says gingerly. He’s been caught, he knows. From up the lab—for it is really three rooms linked end to end, two benches per bay and five bays per room—a chorus of Let’s get it done comes back at them. The others sweep in and out of his line of sight as he makes his way to his bench. They are all here in this bright cluster in the middle of a cool dim building, for a moment its vibrating core. A minor comfort.
In the lab, there are only women: Katie, Brigit, Fay, Soo-Yin, and Dana.
Katie is almost feral with a desperation to graduate; she emits a kind of raw and blistering energy. They all look away from her. She is their senior, just ahead of Brigit and Fay. Brigit is a natural, curious and dynamic, but with a preternatural memory that feeds on whole bibliographies of developmental biologists. Fay is awkward and nocturnal, short and so pale that when she pipets, you can almost see the shadow of blood sweeping up her forearms to her muscles. Her experiments are precisely designed if inconclusive, with minuscule error bars, something Wallace admires to the point of envy. Once, in lab meeting, Simone commented that Fay was trying to deduce some subtlety too fine to matter. Soo-Yin lives in the small lab among the chemical reagents and the tissue culture closet. There she plates thousands of tiny cultures, clumps of grayish cells that grow and divide, or else die, in pools of brilliant red media. Wallace once found her there, like stumbling upon a spirit in a myth. She had been dabbing tears from her eyes with her bare forearm, dabbing and pipetting simultaneously in one unbroken motion. She had a heavy scent to her, like salt water. The youngest is Dana, taken in the year after Wallace. Their adviser has not taken another student in some time. Every couple of months, the group hears whispers of rumor: retirement, migration to the Ivy League, leaving for an adviser position in government, consulting work. Rumors as insubstantial as they are numerous and temporary.
For the most part, the lab is quiet. Clipped questions dart through its cool, bright air: Do you have any 6.8 Buffer? Did you make new TBE? Where is the DAPI? Why are we out of scalpels? Who forgot to order dNTPs?
Two floors up, in Cole’s lab, Wallace has heard they play Frisbee together on weekends and sometimes visit each other outside the lab. Most of Cole’s lab came to his barbecue with Vincent, and when he asked Cole about it, Cole gave him a look of profound confusion: Of course I invited them! They’re my lab! When Katie showed up with Caroline, then just a few weeks postgraduation, Wallace went to stand in a corner with them. He was drawn to them out of a kind of loyalty, although the room was full of people he knew better and liked more. Caroline and Katie talked, but only to each other, not to him. Caroline let out a sigh and said, “Here we are again.” And Katie nursed her wine, looking through the glass out onto the patio, where the grilling was happening, watching a fifth-year swim lazy strokes in the pool. They languished there for hours, no more than a handful of words passing among them, but instead of making an excuse and heading off to find a friend, Wallace stood there with them the entire night—even after Caroline, having drunk perhaps too many beers, started scowling openly. Even after Katie rudely told Vincent that the meat looked undercooked and she wouldn’t be having any. He stood next to them because he had felt no impulse to leave.