The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  "Yeah," Cindy said. "I've been reading a book about depression. It says that whenever people talk about suicide, in any way, you should let them talk about it. They want to talk about it, like, they're asking for help."

  "Okay," I said. "Keep talking, Eldon."

  "Well, you know there are magazines that advertise how to do it. There are books. There are mail order kits."

  I tried to reassure him. "Look, can't you go to one of your professors and have him help you understand the material better? You can still probably pull a B out of each of the classes and go for the A next term."

  Eldon answered, "I tried that. But the guy had this attitude about him, like he kept asking me questions, and it was like he enjoyed making me feel stupid. Then I went to another professor and the same thing happened. I figured I'd stop at two strikes. It's like 'If you can't figure it out for yourself, kid, you don't belong here. Nobody's going to take you by the hand when you're in the middle of that big room full of drafting tables and computer terminals in the real world.'"

  "Did you write that poem?" I asked him.

  He did Katharine Hepburn. "Poem, what poem? I have no idea what you're talking about...."

  "Come on, Schweetheart. Admit it." I went back to Bogie.

  "No, seriously though, I don't know what you're talking about." It wasn't Eldon.

  Dianne went into her room and brought out a nylon noose. "I picked this up as a hack my sophomore year. I carried it around on April Fools Day. Really freaked out the tutor; he took it away from me and gave it back at the end of the year. Just look at it. High-quality nylon-it'd probably carry 500 pounds."

  Eldon perked up. "With that, two or three of us could get together and have a gang hang."

  "Come on, guys. Let's be happy. This place isn't so bad," I said.

  "Oh, yeah?" Eldon answered. "Well, how about my day today? I already told you I'm well on my way to two C's. That was based on the two tests I got back today. Both were 15 points below class average. My mother called tonight and she said how proud they are of me and how happy they are I'm so successful and how it's rough working at Sears nights to pull together the money for tuition but it's worth it. Then on the way back to the avionics lab three people I knew or thought I knew on the infinite corridor didn't say hi; their eyes were just beaming forward."

  "They were probably just preoccupied with some problem set or something," I said. "We all have bad days."

  "Yeah, I guess you're right," Eldon said. "But sometimes it feels like MIT is a dragon I have to slay."

  November 22

  The tutor meeting was to prepare for "The Day After," the madefor-TV film about being nuked.

  "Now I want you all to be on the lookout for any warning signs after it's aired," John Dorsey said. "You might want to have some kind of discussion group about it. Let the students talk through it. The film contains material that may be offensive. Viewer discretion is advised. The institute is worried that it might depress people, that there may be mass suicide. We have to take steps to prevent that."

  I spent the evening of the movie reading, not watching TV. On the way back from the student center library, there were signs up and down the infinite corridor. WHY IS THERE No HOPE? one said. WHY IS THE INSTITUTE HOPELESS? I wondered whether it was somebody's idea of a sick joke, a way to push the reader into a life-threatening depression. I ripped down every one I could put my hands on.

  I hosted a milk and cookies break after the movie. "It wasn't that great," Dianne said. "The character development just wasn't there."

  "Yeah," Eldon said. "And the special effects were like totally fakey. If they wanted to be really effective they should have shown the real films from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the real thing happens the destruction will be a lot worse than they showed in that movie."

  "Would, Eldon, would. Always use the conditional when talking about these kinds of things."

  November 23

  The Tech, the student newspaper, ran a story about the firing of Dean Hope, a black woman. That explained the signs.

  November 24

  My office mates and I were telling dirty jokes. The door to the hall was open. Sometimes you forget that women are in the lab, too; that what you say might kill someone. But the jokes were funny, and I felt like one of the guys when the other guys laughed at mine. The conversation drifted toward ranking the looks of the various women in the lab, and in the Mech E department in general. Women do this kind of thing when they're together, right? It's natural, right?

  One of the guys said, "Yeah, Mary's got a nice body but her face isn't that great." We all sort of chuckled. She walked by the open door, didn't look in. I wondered whether she heard it. It was the last time I saw her.

  I don't know why she did it. Who knows whether it was that last little comment? Who knows whether it was the fact that I didn't say anything in her defense? We'd sort of drifted apart since the first term. I'd say hello and she'd give me that Senior House forced smile that is really a parody on a smile because how could anyone possibly be happy at this place? But she had her friends in the outdoors club and rumor had it she had a boyfriend, so it wasn't my responsibility to ask her why she wasn't talking to me much anymore. We're the masters of our souls, right? It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault, was it?

  It wasn't the pressure. She was too smart to let that do it. Maybe it was the loneliness. But she had a boyfriend. Perhaps it was the hopelessness spurred on by MIT's overmechanistic worldview, in which logic and reason are gods and spirituality, soul, and humanity are dismissed as irrelevant at best and nonexistent at worst.

  The following morning Chet asked me into his office. He closed the door behind me.

  "Have a seat," he said. "I've got some very bad news. Last night Mary took her own life."

  Where'd she take it?

  But seriously. "How'd ... How'd ... ?" I asked.

  "They found her in her Chevette this morning. I've checked with everyone. Campus police, her landlord, Cambridge police, the dean's office. I keep getting the same story, but I can't believe it happened. It's Mary all right," Chet answered. His eyes blinked a little. "She put some tubing from the tail pipe of her car into the passenger section. She was parked over on Albany Street. And she just sort of fell asleep."

  Let's see, I wondered. If the car is idling at, say 800 rpm, and the displacement is, say, 2 liters, then the volume flow rate into the car will be 400 liters per minute, times the percentage of carbon monoxide in the exhaust gas. We'll have to set up a differential equation for the concentration of carbon monoxide in the passenger section of the car, assuming equal inflow rates and exhaust rates. It's sort of like filling up a leaky rigid balloon with a hole in the other end. We'll have to make another assumption about the breathing rate of the passenger. Figure a 2-liter lung capacity and 20 breaths per minute, that means 40 liters per minute of passenger compartment gas. Now to model the rate of carbon monoxide uptake into the lungs we need to ...

  Nerdalert. Mary's voice was almost audible, like the time she said, "Nerdalert" when somebody's watch beeped at the top of the hour in Thermo class. That's it. I'm done. They've got me.

  The knot in my stomach tightened. I couldn't believe it, either. By the time you're twenty-six you may have heard of death, maybe lost a few pets, but if both your parents are still alive and no one you know really well has passed away, you still feel kind of immune to it.

  "The memorial service will be next Sunday night," Chet said, "in the chapel. Hey, kiddo, by the way, I've had my criticisms of your work, but the reason is to help you learn so you can go out of here and be competent and do the good professional work that people expect out of people with MIT degrees. You've really come along in your experimental techniques. You're good at solving problems."

  He paid me a compliment. I couldn't believe it. Chet paid me a compliment. And what he said must be true, because Chet is incapable of lying, even under duress.

  I went downstairs to take some Polaroi
ds for the apparatus section of my thesis. Nick was at the drill press.

  "What's New?"-the Billie Holiday version-played on the radio.

  Nick put his hand on my shoulder and said, "That's a terrible thing that happened, just a terrible thing. Don't ever let anything like that happen to you, OK, Cap'n? The Lord just wants you to keep doin' the best you can; that's all that matters. You'll have some bad times but you'll make it through. It happens too fast by itself."

  I didn't cry then. I was tough; I could take it. I could take anything the institute could dish out. I delivered the Polaroids to Charlotte Evans; she was typing my thesis for me and helping with the figures for $3 a page. She had just heard the news from Chet as well.

  "The poor thing," she said from behind her desk. "I feel just awful about it. Do you have any idea why she did it?"

  "No, not really. We didn't talk a lot recently. I feel kind of bad now, like I should have asked her whether something was bothering her. But we drifted apart and now we'll never drift back together, not here anyway."

  Charlotte said comfortingly, "Now don't you go blaming your self. Everyone is responsible for his own actions and no one else's. Besides, a lot of people have a hard time this time of year, what with Christmas coming up and all. You can't get near a psychiatrist these days they're so heavily booked. Christmastime and springtime, a lot of people get depressed, especially if they're single."

  I raised my hand and said, "Guilty." I wondered how she knew it was hard to schedule time with a psychiatrist.

  Charlotte got down to business. "So I've typed the introduction and the description of the experiment. And I've typed the blank headings for the photos of the lab. Here's the manuscript for you to read through and proof." She handed me the full manila folder.

  "Thanks, Charlotte. I can almost taste Chet's signature."

  "No problem. That'll be eighty-one dollars. I'd prefer cash if you have it."

  "I'll have to go to the bank. I'll be back by five."

  "Good," she said as I left the office. "And Pepper," she added, "don't work too hard."

  "There's no such...." I paused from my standard response. "Uh, OK. I'll try not to."

  Three days later. Two women who looked a little like Mary, only older, looked lost in the corridor near my door. I remembered feeling lost in the corridor near my door. They could have been my older sisters. Their eyes were still red.

  "Do ... do you know how we can get into this office?" the older one asked. "Mary Patterson was our younger sister, and we've come to go through her belongings."

  "Uh, gee, I don't know. I can run downstairs to the lab to see whether any of her office mates are around." They weren't.

  "Let me call campus police and they can come and open up the door for you," I said. "By the way, my name's Pepper White."

  "Oh, so you're Pepper," the older one said. "Mary talked a lot about you; she said she really liked you, and she told us about some of the things you'd done."

  What is this, a variation on the It's a Wonderful Life theme? Look, I feel bad enough as it is without knowing that she thought of me as a good friend even when she didn't say hello to me. This place is a salt mine and there's no time to do anything but mine salt, much less try to pull someone who sent me a postcard from her vacation in Acapulco and signed it "Love, Mary," who gave me the originals for the notes for the Thermo and Fluids classes I missed two years ago and made photocopies for herself, who went out on a couple of dates with me, out of a depression. It wasn't my fault, was it?

  I said, "Uh, yeah. We all miss her very much."

  "Our father's a physicist," she said. "We'd like to go through her notebooks to give him some examples of what she was working on.,,

  The campus policeman arrived and opened the door. We assembled the cardboard boxes they'd picked up from U-Haul, filled them with Mary's notebooks, carried them to the rented van.

  "What about the fish tank?" I asked them.

  "We'll leave it for now," the older sister said. "Could you make sure someone feeds the fish and cleans the filter for a couple of weeks?"

  "Sure," I said. "Say, I'm uh . . . really sorry about what happened. Have a safe drive home."

  "Thanks. Bye."

  That night. The radio in Ben and Mary's office played loud rock music from WBCN and the office door was open.

  "Yo, Ben. Could you turn that down a little bit?" I asked him.

  "Huh?" he said, looking up from his problem set. "Oh. Yeah. Sure. Sorry it's so loud. I guess I want to sort of ward off any evil spirits that might be in the area; I mean it's kind of spooky here late at night now with Mary gone. Every time I walk into the office, I expect to see her at her desk or walking the other way, and she's never there anymore. I still can't believe it happened. The only thing that's left is the fish tank. I wonder whether the fish know what's going on," he said.

  "Oh, that reminds me. Do you know where she kept the box of fish food? I promised her family I'd take care of them for a while," I said.

  We both sprinkled the food on the water and the fish scurried up to the surface to eat.

  Ben continued. "It's like I'm trying to imagine her pain, you know, how she felt, what made her do it. She was so smart, too. That's the scariest thing. She read the New York Times every day, knew everything about what was going on in all these little countries around the world. It's like I wonder whether she knew something we don't know."

  I answered, "Who knows, maybe we'll see her again on the night shift and we'll be able to ask her. For now it's past my bedtime. If you want to turn the radio back up, go ahead."

  "Thanks," he said. "Take it easy."

  Before bed I took the bulletin board's handwritten poem out of my filing cabinet at Senior House and compared the handwriting to the first-semester Fluids notes that Mary gave me. The handwriting in the notebook didn't match the handwriting on the wall. It wasn't hers, but whose was it?

  I lay in bed with "Soft Hits" playing on the radio and gradually drifted off to sleep.

  It was night and Mary was standing in front of the chapel, across from Kresge and the student center.

  "Hi, Pepper," she said.

  "Hi, Mary. What's new?"

  "Oh, not much, how about you?" she said.

  "Me neither. Gee. You haven't changed a bit."

  "What do you mean?" she asked, reaching toward me.

  "Wait a minute," I answered. "You're dead."

  "Huh? Oh. Yeah. Sure. Adieu...."

  And as when Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk are beamed up to the Starship Enterprise, she shimmered for a few moments and disappeared.

  My head jerked up from the pillow. Linda Ronstadt sang the soft hit with the Nelson Riddle orchestra:

  ... but seeing you is grand, and you were sweet, to offer your hand ...

  C H A P T E R

  20

  Quality Control

  "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.... ..

  -JOHN 3:8

  "... and the wind . . . cries . . . Mary"

  -,IIMI

  December 18

  I asked Professor Heywood to recommend me for the doctoral qualifying exams.

  "Hmmm," he said. "And just what is it that you'd like to do with a Ph.D.?-

  My friends could call me Dr. Pepper. Besides, the exams should make for a really good chapter in the book.

  "I want to consult. I want to advise industry on how to save energy. That's why I came here in the first place, and I think the Ph.D. would help," I answered. "It would give me a certain credibility."

  "Yes, it would," he said. "But it may not really be necessary for what you want to do. In fact, it may be much more advan tageous for you to go out into industry now and see how things work in the real world. The three years or more you'd spend on a Ph.D. would involve that opportunity cost."

  "I don't know; I'd still like to give the qualifiers a shot now. If I don't try now, I'll never do them. Beside
s, you have to admit it would be a great opportunity to review what I've learned here."

  "How are your grades?"

  "Uh, er, I, uh ... well, I have three C's, two A's, and the rest B's. But two of the C's were my first term and the third was in a summer electronics class so they shouldn't really count, should they?"

  "Everything counts. You'll be going in with two strikes against you. But if you really want to do it, I'll write the letter. You'll have to do remarkably well on the oral, written, and presentation components of the examinations, so I advise you to prepare well."

  "Thank you, Professor."

  That afternoon, Chet shook his head.

  "You really want to go through with it?" he asked.

  "Yeah, Chet. I have to try. I know it's a long shot, but darn it this is America and we love an underdog, and we love to be underdogs. I'll be humming the 'Theme from Rocky' all month."

  "Well, I'll sign your application. But be careful. Study hard, and know what you're talking about; otherwise they'll eat you alive. "

  "Okay, Chet. I'll do my best."

  The qualifiers are the barrier they put between graduate students and the ability to be called "Doctor So and So." The examinations exist for several reasons. First, they give the sadistic elements of the professors' characters an opportunity to express themselves. Second, they separate the chaff from the wheat of the graduate student body. See, if they made it easy for everyone to pass, more incompetents would be called "Doctor So and So." If they let anyone pass, he or she might finish a Ph.D., glibly sleaze through an interview for an assistant professorship at Princeton or Stanford, and, when teaching Intro Thermodynamics, be eaten alive by some bright nineteen-year-old. And that would be more devastating than being eaten alive by some MIT professors, so the cruelty is kind.

  The examinations are in four areas. Friday is the written section. One hour of testing in each of four areas of specialization. Each student has some choices in the test subjects, and I chose the basics: Fluids, Thermo, System Dynamics and Controls, and Mechanics. Then the weekend comes just to make you sweat. I mean, I'd rather have it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then you disappear and go skiing and find out whether you passed, but it's their ballgame and they make the rules.