Real Life(20)

“No way.”

“Like I said, I didn’t see anything. That’s just what I heard.”

“What sense would that make?”

“It doesn’t have to make sense. She’s gifted,” Brigit says, spitting out Simone’s favorite word for Dana but meaning the opposite. Wallace laughs. Gifted is the sweetness meant to make the bitterness of failure palatable—that a person can fail again and again, but it’s all right, because they’re gifted, they’re worth something. That’s what it all tracks back to, isn’t it, Wallace thinks. That if the world has made up its mind about what you have to offer, if the world has decided it wants you, needs you, then it doesn’t matter how many times you mess up. What Wallace wants to know is where the limit is. When is it no longer forgivable to be so terrible? When does the time come when you’ve got to deliver on your gifts?

Brigit pushes up from the chair and kicks it back under Henrik’s desk. She sighs, stretches. He can hear her bones realigning, the joints popping. “I just thought you might want to know.”

“I don’t know if I feel better,” he says, and she puts her arms around him in a loose hug.

“Hang in there, Wally,” she says. Katie passes the end of his bay swirling another large beaker, but seeing the two of them, she turns on her heel, pivots, and is gone.

“Like I said,” Brigit says. “In a mood.”

“She’s not the boss of me,” he says.

“Maybe not. Maybe so.”

Brigit backs out of his bay, waves. He salutes. He is alone again.

It makes no sense for Dana to have ruined his stocks. They are on different projects, in part because of something that happened the last time they worked together. To help Dana learn the techniques of their lab, Simone had thought it would be a good idea if she worked with Wallace on a project that required the generation of various oligo strands of DNA. But Dana, who is a genetics student, felt that she should be the one in charge of designing the oligos, despite having little practical experience in the technique. Though Wallace had already designed at least two hundred successful oligos, Dana would not listen to him as he tried to describe his strategy for designing, his thoughts on optimal annealing temperatures, targets in the genomes, what was feasible to clone and knit together using enzymes, screening methods, competent cell lines. He tried maybe twenty different kinds of interventions, pressing on her stubbornness at different junctures in the process, but all of it rebounded on him. She did not want his assistance.

Unsure what else to do, he went to Simone. At a point when they should have had, say, twenty oligos ready for injection, Dana had slowed their progress to the point where they had none. “Wallace,” Simone said, “maybe you should try a different tone. Are you being a little presumptuous?” And when he said no, she said, “Are you sure? Because Dana is bright, bright, bright. Don’t talk down to her.” When it came to the injections, Dana was clumsy and sloppy. She skewered the animals with the needle, which she could not load because she kept pricking her finger with it, requiring Wallace to load it himself. She was also slow in getting the animals loaded onto the sucrose pad and dabbed with levamisole and buffer, which kept them sedate and hydrated, so her worms turned into hard pralines right there on the slide. He tried to help her. He talked softly, quietly. He waited even when he knew the animal was dead. Once she turned to him with such a look of pride on her face that he thought she’d finally done it, but when he looked at the animal under the scope, he saw that it was beyond dead. Its insides had ruptured out and backed up into the needle end itself. It was awful, a gruesome death.

At last, tired of their failed collaboration, he asked to be given a different project—and, it was true, Dana maybe did not take it well. But that was two years ago. These days, on any given week, Dana shows up to lab for a handful of semi-productive hours. She hasn’t settled on a project. Her mind is rangy, restless. But worse, failure causes her to discard things and people. Every time a project does not go according to her expectation, she scuttles it like a decommissioned watercraft. Her lab presentations are an amalgam of half-chewed ideas. Her fingernails are bitten raw, and there’s a chafed, bruised feeling to her.

Still, it makes no sense that she would brutalize his plates. There is no material gain in it for her, and her selfishness has always seemed pragmatic to Wallace. It would be a pointless, essentially lazy move.

His head hurts.

People can be unpredictable in their cruelty.

The thought startles him. He thinks swiftly of that awful time last year when he had to take his preliminary exams and spent three months unable to get out of bed or to eat or to bathe regularly. Those three months were a long, dark slide into something amorphous and cold. He spent all that time watching old doctor shows on the internet and lying in bed watching the light on the walls change. When he did manage to pry himself out of bed, he sat in the tub for long hours and felt afraid and small. He spent hours wondering what he would do if he failed. Not even the humiliation scared him as much as the utter drop into the unknown. He’d have to leave the program. He’d have to figure out a different thing to do with his life. That’s what paralyzed him all those months. It was impossible to do anything.

Then, one day in late September, Henrik came to Wallace’s apartment and pressed the buzzer until Wallace relented and let him in. Once upstairs, he dropped a stack of research articles and notebooks and markers on Wallace’s floor and told him to get to it. For hours every day, Henrik taught Wallace everything he’d failed to learn. They covered cell signaling, gradients, morphology, protein structure, the composition of cell walls, the entire lineage of the gonadal tissues in flies and nematodes, yeast screens. Technique after technique Henrik diagrammed, patiently and then less patiently, and when that failed he slapped his thick palm on the table and shouted, You have to learn this, Wallace. Get it together. Wallace sat there listening. Taking notes. Reading the articles every night until the text swam before his eyes. He lost five pounds, then ten pounds, then fifteen pounds. Henrik started taking him to the gym. Forcing him to jog and to read, to recall at any moment some obscure fact of nematode embryological development. To recall the degradation machinery of certain proteins in certain tissues under certain conditions, and then other conditions, other tissues, scenarios swinging open and closed like a door on loose hinges. Wallace got to know the way light moved through Henrik’s beard. And through his thick hair. The long slope of his mouth. He learned to read Henrik’s temper the way mammals on doomed islands learn the slow, unwinding signs of an eruption.