Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  “I don’t know how you can be so calm about this.” I was upset. “You are exactly the kind of guy that they could pin something on if they wanted to…a weirdo loner who periodically shoves body parts into a tree?”

  “Oh, come on…I have nothing to hide. I don’t do drugs and I don’t make trouble. I positively radiate normalcy,” he said, and I had to agree that it was true, in its way. Neither of us had ever done any drugs, even during all those years at Berkeley. In fact, we didn’t even drink beer on field trips, which was practically unheard-of in the earth sciences. I had knowingly made some photocopies under the previous user’s departmental code, but I hadn’t done anything worse than that so far that semester.

  “Well, you do swear too much,” I countered, unwilling to completely concede his point. Bill agreed that this was probably fucking true. “And look at you: you look like the second coming of Eraserhead; you’re lucky they didn’t haul you in just for that.” I was angry and scared.

  Then I relented. “Listen, I know this is all my fault. It’s because I don’t pay you a living wage. But I can’t—at least not yet. But soon—soon, I think—we’re going to get a really big grant.” I searched for something to say that would make my promise sound less empty.

  “Anyway, this was the last straw,” I told him. “I’m tired of worrying about you every night. You’ve got to find somewhere to live.” I wracked my brain for a solution. “I’ll give you the money.”

  Bill did find somewhere to live. During the next week he moved into the lab. He slept in one of our student offices—the one that no one wanted to use or even wanted to enter. It had no windows and no ventilation and thus had absorbed the body odor of everyone who had ever worked in the building, fermented it within the ceiling tiles, and continuously exuded it as a rare bouquet. He called it “the Hot Box” because it was perpetually five degrees hotter than the rest of the well-heated and poorly cooled old building.

  He improvised a bed and dresser behind the cover of an old desk and took to sleeping in a T-shirt and khaki pants (his “pajakis”) so that he could rise up immediately if a secretary or janitor entered, claiming that he was just resting his eyes midway through a long lab experiment. This was nearly ideal, except for the fact that the Hot Box was located near the front entrance of the building, and Bill found it especially hard to sleep after 9:00 a.m. once the hordes entered, swinging the doors open and shut. He replaced and greased the relevant hinges, but it didn’t help much. After one particularly late night, he put up signs that read DOORS BROKEN, PLEASE USE BACK ENTRANCE, but that lasted only until Facilities was called over and couldn’t find a problem.

  He packed the biological sample freezers full of frozen dinners and kept his bulk groceries stored within the secretaries’ fridge until they complained about the three whole watermelons that had proven irresistibly cheap at Kroger. Taken all together, Bill seemed pretty content except for one thing: a lack of private showering facilities. He rigged up a sort of bidet within the mop sink of the janitor’s closet, but he had to leave the door propped open so that he wouldn’t get locked in while he was using it. Try as we might, we couldn’t come up with a convincing cover story for why he would be in there, soaped up and naked at 3:00 a.m., and I think this fed his natural tendencies toward paranoia.

  One morning at about eleven o’clock, the fire alarm went off in the building, and upon leaving my office, I saw Bill shuffling along with the many others involved in the evacuation, barefoot in his pajakis with his hair sticking up in all directions and a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. Once he got outside, he stumbled over to a windowsill planter of geraniums and spit toothpaste into it.

  I walked over and greeted him. “Dude, yuck. You look like Lyle Lovett out on a day pass from somewhere.”

  Bill began to repeatedly flick his near-empty lighter, trying to get one last flame out of it. “If I had a boat,” he mumbled around his cigarette, “I’d go out on the ocean.”

  Because he literally had nowhere else to go, Bill was working in the lab for about sixteen hours a day. By virtue of availability, he soon became everyone’s counselor and confidant. He would help the students fix their bicycles and change the oil in their old cars, go over their 1040EZ forms with them and help them figure out where to show up for jury duty—grumbling about it all the while. When the students told him about their lives, in the charming way that only a nineteen-year-old undergraduate does (“Get this: the closet in my dorm room has a built-in ironing board!” “Can you believe it? I’m going to assistant-produce the campus radio station’s Sunday-morning 3:45 a.m. post-reggae-punk music hour!” “At Thanksgiving, when my dad said he had never heard of Gertrude Stein, I was like, ‘Who are these people?’ ”), he would listen and never judge. He also never reciprocated with any stories about himself, but the students were too absorbed with being young adults to notice.

  As a rule, Bill didn’t share the students’ stories with me, but he did make sure to pass on the best of the best. Karen was an undergraduate lab assistant who wanted research experience on her résumé in order to beef up her application to veterinary school. Ultimately, she wanted to work with endangered animals that had been rescued from captivity and help repatriate them to their native surroundings. She left us for the summer in order to accept a coveted internship at the Miami zoo, only to find that most of what zookeepers actually do amounts to pretty routine hygiene maintenance, and that the only thing worse than an animal that doesn’t appreciate this is one who does.

  Placed upon the lowest rung of the ladder, she was sent to work in the primate enclosure. Karen’s job was to apply anti-inflammatory cream to monkey genitalia, which were in need of daily soothing due to their constant and indiscriminate use. Once the monkeys had recognized her as their new vehicle of relief, they began mobbing her when she entered the room. Bill and I could hardly absorb this story when she told it to us, it was just too wonderful, but it got even better. It turns out that it is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and most monkeys proved considerably more responsive to her reluctant manipulations.

  The zoo had fitted Karen with a protective plastic shell meant to discourage her charges from clutching on to her and wildly humping her frame, but it wasn’t 100 percent effective. On the upside, her many animal behavior classes had provided her with the intuition necessary to condition these monkeys to the concept of a glory hole; the downside was that seeing them lined up and “standing at attention” through a chain-link fence first thing in the morning was enough to make her rethink a career in veterinary medicine altogether. She returned to our lab after the internship having decided that maybe botany wasn’t so boring after all.

  Even though we were always on campus, we didn’t know everyone. There was a strikingly pale fellow who used to attend the weekly seminar regularly, always sitting alone, far back in the last row to one side. His countenance was waxy white, and his hair was long and white too, though he didn’t look to be more than middle-aged. He would slip into the lecture hall at the last moment and be the first to slip out at the end, skipping any and all refreshments and conversation. We never saw him otherwise, and we never heard him speak a word nor saw him interact with anyone. We decided that he lived in the attic of the building and started calling him “Boo Radley.” I tried to follow him one day, dodging out early during the questions session so as to be ready, but he somehow lost me during the confusion of the mass exodus.

  I used to speculate endlessly about Boo—his probable reactions to each seminar, his expertise, his personal fortune—and then contrive tactics by which we could expose him, violate his privacy, and discover everything that I wanted to know. Bill never showed any interest in my schemes. One night, he sat calmly on the building’s front steps as I pressed him on the subject, pointing excitedly to the one light that still glowed out of a third-floor office.

  Bill looked up at the light and then out to the stars. He took a deep drag on his cigare
tte, exhaled, and said, “I don’t know, Scout. He is who he is. I think I’d rather not know more than that. It’s enough to know that he’s up there, and that he’ll step in and save us if anything really bad ever happens.” Bill crushed his cigarette on the pavement, looked at me, and took off his fleece jacket. He handed it to me so I could put it on before I even realized that I was cold.

  8

  A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move. Too little water, too much light, temperature too high: the desert has all of these inconveniences ratcheted up to their extremes. Biologists don’t much study the desert, since plants represent three things to human society: food, medicine, and wood. You’ll never get any of those things from the desert. Thus a desert botanist is a rare scientist indeed and eventually becomes inured to the misery of her subjects. Personally, I don’t have the stomach to deal with such suffering day in and day out.

  In the desert, life-threatening stresses aren’t a crisis; they are a normal feature of the life cycle. Extreme stress is part of the very landscape, not something a plant can avoid or ameliorate. Survival depends on the cactus’s ability to tolerate deathly grim dry spells over and over again. If you meet a barrel cactus that’s tall enough to touch your knee, it is likely to be more than twenty-five years old. Cactuses grow slowly in the desert—during the years when they do grow, that is.

  A barrel cactus has folds like an accordion, and deep within these folds are the pores that let air in and water evaporate out. When it becomes very dry, a cactus sheds its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it. A cactus can live for four days with no roots and still continue to grow. If there is still no rain, the cactus begins to contract, sometimes for months, or until all the folds have closed together. Its spines form a dense and dangerous fur protecting what is now a hard, rootless ball of plant. In this posture, the cactus can sit without growing and await rain for years, while continuously punished by the sun. When it finally rains, the cactus will either return to full functioning within twenty-four hours or show itself to be dead.

  There are a hundred species or so known as “resurrection plants.” These species are unrelated, but within each of them the same process has somehow developed. Resurrection plants have leaves that can be desiccated to papery brown shreds, feign death for years, and then rehydrate back to normal function. It is their unusual biochemistry that allows them to do this, an accidental trait and something that they did not choose. As they wither, their leaves fill with concentrated sucrose, thick sugar left behind during the drying. This syrup stabilizes and preserves the leaves, even when they are drained of their green chlorophyll.

  Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year’s worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green.

  9

  FULL-BLOWN MANIA LETS YOU SEE the other side of death. Its onset is profoundly visceral and unexpected, no matter how many times you’ve been through it. It is your body that first senses the urgency of a new world about to bloom. Your vertebrae seem to detach from one another and you elongate as if toward the sun’s light. You can’t hear above the sloshing roar of blood pushed through your head by some impossibly sustained orgasm within your beating heart. For the next twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours you will have to yell to hear yourself over this whooshing. Nothing, nothing can be loud enough or bright enough or move fast enough. The world appears as if through a fish-eye lens; your view is fuzzy with sparkling edges. You have received a grand, systemic injection of Novocain and your entire body tingles briefly before it becomes flaccidly foreign and unreal. Your raised arms are the fleshy petals of a magnificent lily bursting into flower. It deeply dawns on you that this new world about to bloom is you.

  Deep night is no longer dark and why did you ever think it was dark at night? The darkness of night is like all of the other impossibly simple things that you used to believe but against which there is coming a revelation of multidimensional glory. Soon you don’t register day versus night because you don’t need sleep. You don’t need food or water or a hat against the frigid weather, for that matter, either. You need to run. You need to feel the air on your skin. You need to take off your shirt and run so you can feel the air and you explain this to the person holding you that it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay to do this but he doesn’t get it and his face looks worried like someone died and you feel pity for him because he doesn’t realize how wonderful and okay and okay and okay everything is.

  So you explain how it is and he doesn’t get it and you tell more and more in a different way and he isn’t really listening and he says don’t you have anything for this and why don’t you take some of it and you explain that you don’t want that stuff you need to feel this and he doesn’t get it and he doesn’t get it and so you viciously order him to go go go away. And he finally does. But it’s okay because you didn’t mean it and you’ll explain it all later and he’ll see because it will all make sense and he’ll be glad too once he understands that something wonderful is about to happen and it would be a sin to keep it from coming.

  Then comes the best part. It is the final lifting. Not only has the weight of your body dissolved but all the collective trouble of this ancient, weary world as well. The hunger, the cold, the misery, the hopelessness of every human hurt the world over seems manageable and solvable. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that will not be transcended. And you are the exalted, the one person out of billions utterly free from the burden of the existential pain that all must carry. The future will be splendid and full of miracles and you can taste its coming.

  You don’t fear life and you don’t fear death. You don’t fear anything. There is no sadness and there is no grief. You feel your subconscious formulating the answers to all the collective miserable searching that man has ever done. You have indisputable proof of God and the creation of the universe. You are the one for whom the world has waited. And you will give it all back; you will pour out all you know and then wallow knee-deep in thick viscous love, love, love.

  When I die I will identify Heaven only secondarily by these feelings, and primarily by their failure to end. While I am constrained to this life they will always end, and what comes after, like any resurrection, is not without cost.

  While this great cosmic fire hose bathes you in epiphanies, you are overtaken by your urgent need to document them and thus generate an inspired manual for all perfect tomorrows. Unfortunately, this is also when reality closes ranks and conspires to thwart you in earnest. Your hands shake such that you can’t hold a pen. You pull out a tape recorder and push “record” and fill cassette after cassette. You talk until you are hoarsely coughing blood, you pace like an animal confined until you faint. Then you get up, change the cassette, and continue on because you are so close to something, some proof or some desperate hope that your own little life was actually meant for something less confusing and more worthwhile.

  And then it’s too loud and it’s too bright and there’s too much too close to your head and you scream, scream, scream it away. And then someone is hold
ing you saying oh god how did this happen and what is this hair and sweet jesus one of your teeth on the floor and they dab at the blood and snot. And they feed you a single sleeping pill and you sleep and wake to one more sleeping pill and you sleep and wake to one more sleeping pill as if they were feeding with an eyedropper a broken baby robin that had fallen out of its nest. Hours or is it days later you wake to a gray sadness that mutes you into a silent weeping numbness and you wonder why, why, why you are being punished like this.

  Finally fear overcomes sadness and you roll back the stone, crawl out of the tomb to assess the damage, and then do what needs to be done. Fear overcomes shame and you make a doctor’s appointment to beg and wheedle for more sleeping pills as your only stockpile against next time, next time, next time.

  And by luck, by stupid luck, or time or chance or Providence or Jesus or who cares, your appointment happens to be at the best hospital in the world and a doctor looks at you hard and he says, “You don’t have to live this way.” And he asks questions until you’ve told him everything and he’s not horrified or disgusted or even surprised; he says people have this and they manage it. He asks you how you feel about medicine and you tell him that you aren’t afraid of anything made in a laboratory. He smiles and describes the drugs one by one and you want to get on the floor and kiss his hand like a dog because you are so grateful. This doctor is so smart and so sure and has seen this so many times that you begin to dare to hope that maybe it’s not too late to finally grow into what you were supposed to be.