Real Life(21)

On the bleak December afternoon when Wallace passed his preliminary exams, like a firing squad more than a test, the first person he looked to at the celebratory lunch was Henrik.

But by then Henrik was already looking away, out the window.

They spoke sparingly at Simone’s annual holiday gathering. Three days later, Henrik left for a tenure track position at Vassar. And then Wallace went to the departmental Christmas party and made that comment about Miller and trailer parks.

Wallace misses waking up at three in the morning and finding Henrik curled up in his living room, asleep, the heavy sound of his snoring, the bulk of his body almost deforming Wallace’s cheap couch. He misses their meals together, the almost angry way Henrik ate. He misses, maybe, also, other things, the weight of unnamed feelings moving through him. And those feelings were transmuted into something cruel and mean.

There was an economy to it, even when you couldn’t see it at first, a shadow calculation running underneath all their lives.

In the end, it doesn’t matter who did this. In the end, none of it matters.

Back to work, then.



* * *



? ? ?

THE KITCHEN IS EMPTY. Wallace beats his palm against the reluctant handle of the faucet until it gives way, and the water comes out too hard, too fast. It strikes the basin with a sound like a protest, as if upset at Wallace’s force. He runs the water into a battered gray pot and sets it on the electric range. The stove groans to life. The abandoned, mismatched mugs crouch in the back of the cupboard like children in foster care. Wallace presses his face to the warm glass of the window. Below him, the main street splits around a Lutheran church. Leisurely traffic. One vein of the street trails delicately around the biochemistry complex, and it ends at the boathouse and the botanical gardens, where in springtime there are fund-raising parties at which wealthy white people fling bits of bread at koi and talk in hushed, slurred voices about the changing demographics of the university. When Wallace was a first-year, he was invited to a welcome dinner at those very same gardens. At one point that evening, he was herded over to a heavy, bearded man who smelled like sweat and oak leaves. This is Bertram Olson, Wallace. He’s the one who endowed your first-year fellowship. And there, in the descending darkness, holding a sweating glass of ginger ale, Wallace suddenly comprehended just what the object of the welcome dinner was. Welcome. Here is the person who pays your stipend. Please worship him.

Wallace considers himself fortunate in this way at least. His stipend is generous, twice what his mother made as a housekeeper, and it affords him a general material ease: He can afford food, rent, and other items like his laptop and his new glasses, which cost almost a thousand dollars. It’s not very much money. But it’s the most he’s had in his entire life, and more still, it’s consistent. It comes every month, can be depended upon. The water comes to a swift gray boil, and Wallace pours it over the chai that he purchased from the overpriced grocery store downtown. Money is always on their minds: who got the big departmental fellowship (Miller), whose adviser had a grant rejected (Lukas’s), which lab receives private research dollars (Wallace’s), whose project is likely to translate well to industry (Yngve’s), who will grab the job at Brandeis (Caroline), who will take the job at MIT (Nora, a postdoc in Yngve’s lab), who is maybe leaving for Harvard (Cole’s adviser), for Columbia (Emma’s adviser), for UT Southwestern (no one). They discuss the lives and fates of faculty the way one might track the paths of minor planets. Careers move in orbits, fixed by certain factors. One typically stays at the level of their graduate or postdoc institution, or goes one step lower. It’s difficult to migrate across tiers. Fellowships lead to good postdocs, good postdocs lead to good grants, good grants lead to faculty positions at institutions that are more or less commensurate with the stature of one’s first faculty adviser. It all rises and falls on money. Wallace’s stipend now comes from a moderately prestigious, nationally recognized research fund. Simone is considered senior in their field. They enjoy a path forward, into the future, that is level and good. It is for this future that he has worked his entire life. For the alignment of these particular advantages.

Yet the terms, Wallace thinks. The terms of all that luck. The cost.

The tea is a compromise. He wants coffee, but coffee would make the work difficult. When he started in the program, Wallace went through three triple cappuccinos every day before three p.m. just to stay awake. During the afternoon seminars he found himself dozing, drifting off to the sound of talks on deep sequencing and protein NMR. Professors kissed the backs of their teeth and spoke in that smooth, glossy voice popular in certain widely circulated videos on arts and sciences. Everything was I’m going to tell you a story, or Today, I’m going to share with you three intriguing narratives or I’d like to walk you through how we got from here to here. And in the rigid chairs of that auditorium, where there was no cell service or Wi-fi, where all the wood was blond and the walls were covered in an undulating wave of wood panels and the floors in acoustically favorable carpet, Wallace drifted as if floating in waters he could not swim. He drank more caffeine than he ever had in his whole life, and he spent his afternoons with hot, forceful diarrhea.

Wallace drank so much coffee that the world seemed a little brighter for it, on the verge of turning convex, as if every fragment of light were reaching out for him. And then, one day, Henrik gave him a piece of advice: Caffeine is a stimulant. This was mystifying to Wallace. It seemed like a fake aphorism. Henrik said it to him every time Wallace returned from the basement café with a cup of coffee, whenever he and Henrik were in the elevator together returning from a seminar at which Wallace had helped himself to one complimentary cup after another. His heart fluttered. His mouth went dry. His fingertips grew stiff and swollen. He felt as if he were being squeezed through his skin like sausage from its casing. He was startled by strange sounds in the middle of the night when he was working in lab alone. One day, during his dissections, his hand convulsed wildly, a sudden shooting spasm, and he dropped the scalpel. It landed with a soft, sick sink into his thigh. Not terribly deep, but enough, and Wallace knew, in that moment, exactly what Henrik had meant.