Real Life(17)

Today, the other desk in Wallace’s bay is empty. This would not be the case, he thinks, if Henrik were still here. Henrik would be striding from his desk to his bench and back again, half starting a dozen tasks before settling finally on one. Henrik was a thick-necked former football player who had attended a small college in central Minnesota, where he studied chemistry and also was a tight end. It was Henrik who taught Wallace to dissect, to do it in the dish rather than on the slide because it gives you more time and range of motion; how to wait for the worms to grow still; how to time everything just right so that you could cut through a mass of nematodes, severing their heads in a single stroke, fifty at a time. He taught Wallace the perfect angle at which to slide the slender needle into their germlines, that mass of beautiful cells, like roe. He taught Wallace many things, including how to put slides together for presentations and how to calm down right before, running your hands under cold and then warm water. (Get the temperature up, Wally, bring the heat.)

Sometimes, Wallace saw Henrik’s face when he closed his eyes, or heard his voice, warm and Muppet-like, silly sounding, a man who would always be a boy, perhaps. There was something vigorous and rough about him, like he might wrap his arm around your neck and dig his knuckles against your scalp at any moment. But there were moments, too, when Henrik drew to his full height and towered over you, moments when you were suddenly aware of his strength. Wallace had once watched him fling a five-gallon jar to the ground in a rage because someone had left the lid off. Another time, Wallace had been inoculating colonies, and Henrik shoved him aside and slammed the gas off and said, “That’s not right, that’s not aseptic technique.” He slapped the wooden spindle from Wallace’s hand so that it clattered with a pathetic little noise on the bench top. During lab presentations, everyone in the room could feel Henrik’s body in the dark, as if they were all keeping one eye on him, waiting, waiting. It was strange to hear him raise his voice because it didn’t lose the Muppet quality. It just sounded like an unhappy Kermit, shouting down conclusions that he thought were facile or uninteresting: What is this, a goddamn campfire? The data do not support it! They don’t! They don’t support it! Wallace was always a little ashamed when Henrik made him jump. It made him think of the days when he was young and his brother used to clap his hands in front of Wallace’s face, suddenly and really hard, then call him a sissy for flinching. What you jumping for? You think I want to hit you? Wallace hated the way his body reacted to Henrik. Against his will. Again and again, like hands clapping at the edge of his nose.

But Henrik is gone now, at Vassar running his own lab, teaching undergraduates the same way that he taught Wallace. Is it envy that Wallace feels? There’s a bit of dust on Henrik’s old desk, a green highlighter; it’s no shrine. Wallace swivels back to his own desk, piled with papers: protein alignments, plasmid library forms, strain sheets, some articles he’s been meaning to read for months. His computer is asleep; an amber-tinted version of himself glints back at him. His coffee from yesterday is covered in a skin, the creamer gone rancid. He is dithering, he knows. He can’t bring himself to look at his bench, though he knows he must, and so finally he lifts his head and forces himself to look, to really look, to see.

Wallace’s is one of the larger benches in lab, inherited four years ago from a departing postdoc who had left for Cold Spring Harbor to study stem cells in the gut of mice. The bench is wide, black, and smooth, made chalky from years of sliding the hexagonal bases of Bunsen burners or the hard feet of microscopes across its surface. A set of blond wood shelves is set farther back on the bench to divide it from the bench on the other side, Dana’s bench. Bottles of fluids, colored and clear, sit in stubby white plastic racks like peering children. Tools, implements, stuck into every open space, jeer at him. And on the open space of the bench are the towers of plates, the agar dishes solemn and silent, like some miniature slum. His microscope is dark, waiting, and Wallace feels its weight like an albatross or a warning.

Katie watches him over her shoulder in an act of indifferent surveillance, and it is then that he remembers the other thing. Among Wallace’s ruined experiments: immunostaining and immunohistochemistry data he had been tasked with generating, because it is the one experiment that Wallace can do better than anyone else in the lab. Like a savant or a trained circus seal, to hear Simone and Katie tell it: a perfect seven hundred dissections in under eight minutes, a precise accounting, all variables and conditions marked and measured, the microscopy penetrating and clear. Wallace’s talent is not for looking, exactly, so much as it is for waiting. He can pass hours in the embryonic dark of the microscope room waiting for the confocal to take its z-projections, slicing in micrometer-width sections through the bulk of the germline, each cell a perfect kernel through three channels of fluorescence. That his gradients are clearer, sharper than even Katie’s, does not reflect a superiority on his part—a greater mind, for example—so much as it demonstrates that Wallace has the time to burn, time for the idle stupidity it takes to sit in front of a scope and wait for hours. Sometimes an entire day passes without him leaving the dark, pausing only to change the slide, look for more germlines, focus the beam of the laser as he waits for a shape to emerge. Simone asked him to perform this task for a publication meant to sit at the heart of Katie’s thesis, and he agreed because they so seldom turned to him for things he felt equipped to handle. And he was preparing to do that, aging the nematodes just so—and it’s now, watching Katie watch him, that he understands why she’s so irritated with him. Those worms are gone now too, lost to the mold and the contamination. It’s not the worst thing in the world. He can restart the experiment. But it is lost time, which is precious to Katie. She is closer to the end than he is. She expects more from her hours, can expect more. Bitter regret, then. Katie turns from him, pops open the centrifuge. The brown sediment of pelleted cells. She slots in another.