Shmac: There isn’t much to tell.
Marie: Did you just meet her?
Shmac: No. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and now she’s back.
Shmac: And she is married.
Marie: To you?
Shmac: Depressingly, no.
Shmac: Sorry—we’re restructuring the lab. Gotta go before someone destroys a 5 mil piece of equipment. Talk later.
Marie: Sure, but I’ll want to know everything about your affair with a married woman
Shmac: I wish.
It’s nice to know that Shmac is always a click away, especially now that I’m flying into the Wardass’s frosty, unwelcoming lap.
I switch to my email app to check if Levi has finally answered the email I sent three days ago. It was just a couple of lines—Hey, long time no see, I look forward to working together again, would you like to meet to discuss BLINK this weekend?—but he must have been too busy to reply. Or too full of contempt. Or both.
Ugh.
I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, wondering how Dr. Curie would deal with Levi Ward. She’d probably hide some radioactive isotopes in his pockets, grab popcorn, and watch nuclear decay work its magic.
Yep, sounds about right.
After a few minutes, I fall asleep. I dream that Levi is part armadillo: his skin glows a faint, sallow green, and he’s digging a tomato out of his boot with an expensive piece of equipment. Even with all of that, the weirdest thing about him is that he’s finally being nice to me.
* * *
—
WE’RE PUT UP in small furnished apartments in a lodging facility just outside the Johnson Space Center, only a couple of minutes from the Sullivan Discovery Building, where we’ll be working. I can’t believe how short my commute is going to be.
“Bet you’ll still manage to be late all the time,” Rocío tells me, and I glare at her while unlocking my door. It’s not my fault if I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my formative years in Italy, where time is but a polite suggestion.
The place is considerably nicer than the apartment I rent—maybe because of the raccoon incident, probably because I buy 90 percent of my furniture from the as-is bargain corner at Ikea. It has a balcony, a dishwasher, and—huge improvement on my quality of life—a toilet that flushes 100 percent of the times I push the lever. Truly paradigm shifting. I excitedly open and close every single cupboard (they’re all empty; I’m not sure what I expected), take pictures to send Reike and my coworkers, stick my favorite Marie Curie magnet to the fridge (a picture of her holding a beaker that says “I’m pretty rad”), hang my hummingbird feeder on the balcony, and then . . .
It’s still only two-thirty p.m. Ugh.
Not that I’m one of those people who hates having free time. I could easily spend five solid hours napping, rewatching an entire season of The Office while eating Twizzlers, or moving to step 2 of the couch-to-5K plan I’m still very . . . okay, sort of committed to. But I am here! In Houston! Near the Space Center! About to start the coolest project of my life!
It’s Friday, and I’m not due to check in until Monday, but I’m brimming with nervous energy. So I text Rocío to ask whether she wants to check out the Space Center with me (No.) or to grab dinner together (I only eat animal carcasses.).
She’s so mean. I love her.
My first impression of Houston is: big. Closely followed by: humid, and then by: humidly big. In Maryland, remnants of snow still cling to the ground, but the Space Center is already lush and green, a mix of open spaces and large buildings and old NASA aircraft on display. There are families visiting, which reminds me a little of an amusement park. I can’t believe I’m going to be seeing rockets on my way to work for the next three months. It sure beats the perv crossing guard who works on the NIH campus.
The Discovery Building is on the outskirts of the center. It’s wide, futuristic, and three-storied, with glass walls and a complicated-looking stair system I can’t quite figure out. I step inside the marble hall, wondering if my new office will have a window. I’m not used to natural light; the sudden intake of vitamin D might kill me.
“I’m Bee Königswasser.” I smile at the receptionist. “I’m starting work here on Monday, and I was wondering if I could take a look around?”
He gives me an apologetic smile. “I can’t let you in if you don’t have an ID badge. The engineering labs are upstairs—high-security areas.”
Right. Yes. The engineering labs. Levi’s labs. He’s probably up there, hard at work. Engineering. Labbing. Not answering my emails.
“No problem, that’s understandable. I’ll just—”
“Dr. Königswasser? Bee?”
I turn around. There is a blond young man behind me. He’s nonthreateningly handsome, medium height, smiling at me like we’re old friends even though he doesn’t look familiar. “ . . . Hi?”
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I caught your name, and . . . I’m Guy. Guy Kowalsky?”
The name clicks immediately. I break into a grin. “Guy! It’s so nice to meet you in person.” When I was first notified of BLINK, Guy was my point of contact for logistics questions, and he and I emailed back and forth a few times. He’s an astronaut—an actual astronaut!—working on BLINK while he’s grounded. He seemed so familiar with the project, I initially assumed he’d be my co-lead.
He shakes my hand warmly. “I love your work! I’ve read all your articles—you’ll be such an asset to the project.”
“Likewise. I can’t wait to collaborate.”
If I weren’t dehydrated from the flight, I’d probably tear up. I cannot believe that this man, this nice, pleasant man who has given me more positive interactions in one minute than Dr. Wardass did in one year, could have been my co-lead. I must have pissed off some god. Zeus? Eros? Must be Poseidon. Shouldn’t have peed in the Baltic Sea during my misspent youth.
“Why don’t I show you around? You can come in as my guest.” He nods to the receptionist and gestures at me to follow him.
“I wouldn’t want to take you away from . . . astronauting?”
“I’m between missions. Giving you a tour beats debugging any day.” He shrugs, something boyishly charming about him. We’ll get along great, I already know it.
“Have you lived in Houston long?” I ask as we step into the elevator.
“About eight years. Came to NASA right out of grad school. Applied for the Astronaut Corps, did the training, then a mission.” I do some math in my head. It would put him in his mid-thirties, older than I initially thought. “The past two or so, I worked on BLINK’s precursor. Engineering the structure of the helmet, figuring out the wireless system. But we got to a point where we needed a neurostimulation expert on board.” He gives me a warm smile.
“I cannot wait to see what we cook up together.” I also cannot wait to find out why Levi was given the lead of this project over someone who has been on it for five years. It just seems unfair. To Guy and to me.
The elevator doors open, and he points to a quaint-looking café in the corner. “That place over there—amazing sandwiches, worst coffee in the world. You hungry?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? It’s on me. The egg sandwiches are almost as good as the coffee is bad.”
“I don’t really eat eggs.”
“Let me guess, a vegan?”
I nod. I try hard to break the stereotypes that plague my people and not use the word “vegan” in my first three meetings with a new acquaintance, but if they’re the ones to mention it, all bets are off.
“I should introduce you to my daughter. She recently announced that she won’t eat animal products anymore.” He sighs. “Last weekend I poured regular milk in her cereal figuring she wouldn’t know the difference. She told me that her legal team will be in touch.”
“How old is she?”
“Just turned six.”
I laugh. “Good luck with that.”
I stopped having meat at seven, when I realized that the delicious pollo nuggets my Sicilian grandmother served nearly every day and the cute galline grazing about the farm were more . . . connected than I originally suspected. Stunning plot twist, I know. Reike wasn’t nearly as distraught: when I frantically explained that “Pigs have families, too. A mom and a dad and siblings that will miss them,” she just nodded thoughtfully and said, “What you’re saying is, we should eat the whole family?” I went fully vegan a couple of years later. Meanwhile, my sister has made it her life’s goal to eat enough animal products for two. Together we emit one normal person’s carbon footprint.
“The engineering labs are down this hallway,” Guy says. The space is an interesting mix of glass and wood, and I can see inside some of the rooms. “A bit cluttered, and most people are off today—we’re shuffling around equipment and reorganizing the space. We’ve got lots of ongoing projects, but BLINK’s everyone’s favorite child. The other astronauts pop by every once in a while just to ask how much longer it will be until their fancy swag is ready.”
I grin. “For real?”
“Yep.”
Making fancy swag for astronauts is my literal job description. I can add it to my LinkedIn profile. Not that anyone uses LinkedIn.
“The neuroscience labs—your labs—will be on the right. This way there are—” His phone rings. “Sorry—mind if I take it?”
“Not at all.” I smile at his beaver phone case (“Nature’s Engineer”) and look away.
I wonder whether Guy would think I’m lame if I snapped a few pictures of the building for my friends. I decide that I can live with that, but when I take out my phone, I hear a noise from down the hallway. It’s soft and chirpy, and sounds a lot like a . . .
“Meow.”
I glance back at Guy. He’s busy explaining how to put on Moana to someone very young, so I decide to investigate. Most of the rooms are deserted, labs full of large, abstruse equipment that looks like it belongs to . . . well. NASA. I hear male voices somewhere in the building, but no sign of the—
“Meow.”
I turn around. A few feet away, staring at me with a curious expression, is a beautiful young calico.
“And who might you be?” I slowly hold out my hand. The kitten comes closer, delicately sniffs my fingers, and gives me a welcoming headbutt.
I laugh. “You’re such a sweet girl.” I squat down to scratch her under her chin. She nips my finger, a playful love bite. “Aren’t you the most purr-fect little baby? I feel so fur-tunate to have met you.”
She gives me a disdainful look and turns away. I think she understands puns.
“Come on, I was just kitten.” Another outraged glare. Then she jumps on a nearby cart, piled ceiling-high with boxes and heavy, precarious-looking equipment. “Where are you going?”
I squint, trying to figure out where she disappeared, and that’s when I realize it. The piece of equipment? The precarious-looking one? It actually is precarious. And the cat poked it just enough to dislodge it. And it’s falling on my head.
Right.
About.
Now.
I have less than three seconds to move away. Which is too bad, because my entire body is suddenly made of stone, unresponsive to my brain’s commands. I stand there, terrified, paralyzed, and close my eyes as a jumbled chaos of thoughts twists through my head. Is the cat okay? Am I going to die? Oh God, I am going to die. Squashed by a tungsten anvil like Wile E. Coyote. I am a twenty-first century Pierre Curie, about to get my skull crushed by a horse-drawn cart. Except that I have no chair in the physics department of the University of Paris to leave to my lovely spouse, Marie. Except that I have barely done a tenth of all the science I meant to do. Except that I wanted so many things and I never oh my God any second now—
Something slams into my body, shoving me aside and into the wall.
Everything is pain.
For a couple of seconds. Then the pain is over, and everything is noise: metal clanking as it plunges to the floor, horrified screaming, a shrill “meow” somewhere in the distance, and, closer to my ear . . . someone is panting. Less than an inch from me.
I open my eyes, gasping for breath, and . . .
Green.
All I can see is green. Not dark, like the grass outside; not dull, like the pistachios I had on the plane. This green is light, piercing, intense. Familiar, but hard to place, not unlike—
Eyes. I’m looking up into the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. Eyes that I’ve seen before. Eyes surrounded by wavy black hair and a face that’s angles and sharp edges and full lips, a face that’s offensively, imperfectly handsome. A face attached to a large, solid body—a body that is pinning me to the wall, a body made of a broad chest and two thighs that could moonlight as redwoods. Easily. One is slotted between my legs and it’s holding me up. Unyielding. This man even smells like a forest—and that mouth. That mouth is still breathing heavily on top of me, probably from the effort of whisking me off from under seven hundred pounds of mechanical engineering tools, and—
I know that mouth.
Levi.
Levi.
I haven’t seen Levi Ward in six years. Six blessed, blissful years. And now here he is, pushing me into a wall in the middle of NASA’s Space Center, and he looks . . . he looks . . .
“Levi!” someone yells. The clanking goes silent. What was meant to fall has settled on the floor. “Are you okay?”
Levi doesn’t move, nor does he look away. His mouth works, and so does his throat. His lips part to say something, but no sound comes out. Instead a hand, at once rushed and gentle, reaches up to cup my face. It’s so large, I feel perfectly cradled. Engulfed in green, cozy warmth. I whimper when it leaves my skin, a plaintive, involuntary sound from deep in my throat, but I stop when I realize that it’s only shifting to the back of my skull. To the hollow of my collarbone. To my brow, pushing back my hair.
It’s a cautious touch. Pressing but delicate. Lingering but urgent. As though he is studying me. Trying to make sure that I’m all in one piece. Memorizing me.
I lift my eyes, and for the first time I notice the deep, unmasked concern in Levi’s eyes.
His lips move, and I think that, maybe—is he mouthing my name? Once, and then again? Like it’s some kind of prayer?
“Levi? Levi, is she—”
My eyelids fall closed, and everything goes dark.
Photo courtesy of the author
Ali Hazelwood is a multipublished author—alas, of peer-reviewed articles about brain science, in which no one makes out and the ever after is not always happy. Originally from Italy, she lived in Germany and Japan before moving to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She recently became a professor, which absolutely terrifies her. When Ali is not at work, she can be found running, eating cake pops, or watching sci-fi movies with her two feline overlords (and her slightly-less-feline husband).
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The Love Hypothesis Page 34