A Slow Cold Death

by Susy Gage

“And what would he like?” asked the saleslady, looking askance at Louis.

  Lori was somewhat appalled, but honestly her new colleague was doing very little to dispel the image of being a drooling dement. “I think he wants a lobotomy. Hey, Louis! Earth to Dr. Maupertuis! Are you going to order something or are you just going to sit there?”

  He got himself coffee and a bagel but didn’t snap out of his fugue until they were outside settled under a tree at one of the rickety wire tables. “Lori,” he said quietly, stirring a packet of sugar into his coffee, “you should really, really not say those things out loud in public.”

  “Huh? What?” To humor him, she lowered her voice. “Does Kuzno have spies? I thought everyone hated him.”

  “They do, but they’d be delighted to see his wrath directed elsewhere.” He added another packet of sugar without tasting and continued stirring. “It’s not a joke, I’m afraid. We really do have to get rid of him, and because he’s tenured, it’s not easy.”

  “So we have to drive him mad?”

  “That’s an option.”

  “Or kill him?”

  “That’s going too far.”

  Maybe he’s the one who shot you! she thought, but suppressed the idea quickly. Perhaps he had post-traumatic stress disorder and was a little paranoid. Lori groaned silently to herself—she couldn’t bear any more lunatics. She’d left Canada to get away from lunatics, both those she loved and those she loathed. “He told me I should give up trying to do experiments this year,” she informed him, trying not to regret her past life, which already seemed so far away. She forced herself to think of the sun, the heat, and the roses; the roses in Montreal were sad, fuzzy things, all spindly branches with chronic fungus infections from being kept under styrofoam shields all winter long.

  “He did what?” Louis clearly intended to leap to his feet but had forgotten he no longer had the axonal connections to do so, and nearly fell forward before slapping his hands on the table in a gesture half of self-arrest and half of outrage. Coffee jumped out of both cups. “See what I mean?” he demanded in a low voice. “He’s the spawn of Satan. You have the infrastructure grant for the collaborative center now. If you start moving right away, you’ll have experimental results in three months. If you miss hiring the incoming students, you’ll have nothing for a year. Don’t let him foist his loser theorists off on you, and don’t let him make any excuses for not giving you lab space appropriate for your microscopy and lasers. And don’t let him make you fire Fang Li. She’s one of the best.”

  Lori’s head was spinning. He knew too much already. “The theory students this year are losers?”

  “You’ll see for yourself. They want to do string theory, but he can’t afford to hire them so he’s trying to make you do it. Did he say anything about lab space?”

  “Nothing immediately realizable. He promised me space in the new building.”

  “He lied. It’s been taken by biology even though the building won’t be finished until after you get tenure. You need to look in our basement.”

  The choice of breakfast hadn’t been the best. Lori had forgotten how hot and dry California was, and now she was feeling a bit ill and stricken with a raging thirst. “I don’t know who or what’s in the basement. That’s where the electron microscopy used to be.” She remembered she had an apple in her backpack and pulled it out, caressing it gently. A Quebec McIntosh, smuggled unwittingly into California on the airplane, a relic of les produits de chez nous.

  “Used to be?” Louis hadn’t touched his coffee or bagel up until this point. He seemed to suddenly notice they were there, tasted the coffee, made a face, and picked up the bagel. “Still is.”

  “Still is? You mean van Gnubbern hasn’t retired yet?” It took her a long, long moment, and rather pitying look from Louis, before she realized the truth. “Oh, no.” She bit a huge chunk from the apple. “No, no, no,” she garbled, chewing. “Kuzno I can handle, but van Gnubbern taught me how to do electron microscopy when I was a freshman. He got me on my first paper. Forcing him out would be like stabbing my grandpa.”

  “That’s why you were hired,” he said with no trace of emotion. “We all know Lori Barrow can stab her grandpa.”

  That was too much. Lori could leap to her feet, so she did, and threw her empty coffee cup on the table. “Fuck you, Louis. You’re an asshole!”

  He seemed genuinely delighted at this. “Why, thank you, Lori. You don’t know how much that means to me. But quit it with this Louis nonsense: I’m Lou.”

  “As in Le Grand Méchant?” she asked automatically.

  “Oooh, I like that.” He gave a toothy grin. His canines seemed particularly long. “They of course hired me because I’m an asshole. Didn’t even have to do a postdoc. You know I’m younger than you are? By three years and eight weeks. Unfortunately, a random act of LA street violence made me hors de combat for most of the last year.”

  Without any idea why, Lori sat back down and burst into tears into what remained of her McIntosh. The words that came with the tears were hopefully as unintelligible to him as they were in her own mind, a mix of how she didn’t want to know about him, she didn’t want him to know about her, and for God’s sake she didn’t want to hear anything at all in French.

  Lou waited patiently and handed her a napkin. “Sorry about that,” he said perfunctorily.

  She listened in horror as the phrase she had hated all of her life came out of her own mouth. “You’re just a kid, you don’t understand,” she sniffled. Not surprisingly, he looked as outraged as she felt. “When do you come up for tenure?” she tried to amend.

  “Not for four more years,” he admitted.

  Lori took a shaky breath. It was hard to explain to someone who hadn’t been through it yet what the tenure process really meant. After six years, a professor went through a grueling procedure of preparing a dossier containing her entire life’s work, including research, teaching, and “service” to the university and community—which could mean everything from hosting high school students to being on committees to preparing a display for a museum. To this were added long, meticulous reports from at least three scholars in the field who had to claim that the candidate was, or at least would become, a world-class expert in some desired field. The whole package, which could easily be upwards of a thousand pages, then passed from the departmental tenure committee to the faculty-level committee, to the university-level committee, and finally to the president of the institution. Usually… but not always… the higher-level committees supported the department’s decision, but secret enemies could derail an application at any stage. During the twelve to sixteen months that it took for the entire process, everyone started to look like one of those secret enemies.

  If your tenure was refused, you had to leave the university. There were no second chances. The level of ignominy depended upon the school, but in the very best case, a professor refused tenure would start the process again at a new institution at least one step down on the prestige scale. For a lifelong overachiever, it was a big fat F—and a new beginning in what was often a miserable bumfuck place, with trailing spouse and children angry at the move, and competing for jobs with bright-eyed optimists ten years younger.

  In the worst case, it meant you were forty, unemployed, and unemployable. It had happened to too many people she knew to count.

  But if the answer was positive, a tenured professor could be as big of a pain in the ass as she wanted. Nothing short of a major felony could get you fired, and sometimes not even that. Most people—especially most young professors—didn’t understand that winning tenure was less about being a great scholar than about convincing your colleagues that they wanted you down the hall for the next sixty years.

  Lori had fled Canada after submitting her dossier but before the university had reviewed it, and STI had asked her simply to hand them the same dossier to put through their process. It was as close to being hired with tenure as she could expect, but it was light-years away. For the n
ext year she had to please everyone—or go down in a (hopefully figurative) duel to the death with Kuzno. She was certain now that someone had set this up on purpose, and there weren’t a lot of choices for who the mastermind might be. Only four of the Twelve were full professors with the right to sit on a tenure committee. “You don’t understand,” she insisted again. “I am just hosed. I’m going to end up homeless in Santa Monica giving handjobs for change, or dead and washed up in the drainage ditch like Silverman.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Lou said reassuringly. “I’m sure they’ll give you tenure even if you fuck up.” He showed the ends of his teeth in a villainous grin. “You’ll just have to take the place of the tutu man. As of this morning, you even have the costume.”

  Three: A New Spin on Boson

  Carol nearly choked on her protein shake when she saw Lori Barrow’s name on the weekly Astrophysics mailing list. It took her three days to get up the nerve to send her an e-mail.

  They’d gone to graduate school together in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Carol felt as though she knew Lori intimately even though she feared that her colleague wouldn’t remember her at all. Lori, of course, had been the star, worlds away from the nameless, faceless sea of mediocre students whom the elite clique always called bosons.

  Carol hadn’t even known at first that the word referred to a type of elementary particle, a type that had spin zero or one rather than one-half, which naturally had made things even worse. “What’s a boson? You are!” echoed in her head as she composed her e-mail message, trying to remember with equal vividness Lori’s small acts of kindness and reassurance that had often warmed Carol’s heart and kept her going the way nothing else would have.

  In a way, then, she was contacting her to thank her; in another way, deep down where she was ashamed to admit it, she was contacting her to show off. For a boson, Carol had managed to make something of herself. She worked four-day weeks as an engineer for the Lobo Peak Rocket Lab and pulled in nearly $200,000 a year. Her husband, who was one grade above her in the department next door, made even more. They had a New Century Modern style house in the foothills, a small plane that they took to the beach on weekends that weren’t too foggy, and a full-time caretaker for their show ducks and Australian Shepherds.

  Nonetheless, she was astonished (stupefied!) when Lori replied to the message almost immediately, saying that she wasn’t officially working until Monday and that certainly she’d be free on Friday for lunch. Nothing could beat her amazement, though, at seeing her old classmate roll into their driveway at two thousand feet elevation on a pair of bright orange rollerblades.

  All her old feelings of inadequacy returned as she watched Lori bend over to undo her skates, flexing six-pack abs that showed through her shirt and thighs even more perfect than they’d been when she’d won the Minnesota cross-country collegiate mountain bike championship. It was as if the laws of aging didn’t apply to her, as if no matter what happened in the world, Lori Barrow would always be sixteen. She was about ready to regret the invitation when Lori stood up, spotted her at the end of the driveway, and ran down in just her socks to kiss her on both cheeks and exclaim, “Carol, my God! You look wonderful!”

  Carol took a deep breath and then relaxed into a laugh. Up close, Lori was as human as the rest of them; she looked fatigued and even had some gray in her light brown hair. The house and garden were having their mesmerizing effect, too, and Carol waited for her to take in the yard before she launched into her explanations.

  “It’s a California chaparral garden, designed by the native plant nursery,” she said. “This keeps the live oaks happy because that way there is no summer water, and it’s more ecological too. This oak here is probably three hundred years old. You can see the way they had to cut away the walkway to accommodate the growth. It’s very low-maintenance, I leave all of the leaves in place.” She was gratified by Lori’s effusive praise, which prompted her to continue, “The kennels are back here. I have an Aussie Shepherd bitch and some pups that are almost ready for sale, and yes, these are the duckies: that’s Weber, Henry, Billie, and Bob.”

  Lori, of course, appreciated immediately that “Henry” was a unit of inducktance. “That’s good. The puppies are killing me! The cuteness is lethal. Do you have a boyfriend? Any kids?”

  “No kids,” said Carol, “but I am married.” She flinched instinctively, since the Lori she knew would have berated her mercilessly for selling her soul to the State and her body to the Man. At least she hadn’t changed her name—but mostly because his name was kind of silly. Bob Drift was a good name for a guy who looked at transport in ice floes, but she didn’t want to be a Drift. Dugoni was born and Dugoni she would stay, even if the nickname “Dugong” hadn’t remained in third grade where it belonged.

  But it had been fifteen years, and by now even Lori would know that ideals won’t warm your toes on a winter’s night or rub your back after a hard day. “Is he a physicist?” was all she asked.

  “A former student of Professor van Gnubbern at STI,” Carol said proudly. “We work in the same Colony, but different Cells. In fact, he’s trying to hire one of his advisor’s old students right now.”

  “Van Gnubbern?” Lori wondered idly, running her hand along the thickly curling trunk of the wisteria. “I thought he hadn’t had students since I left. What a beautiful house.”

  “Well, it seems to me it was a huge project Bob wanted this guy for—he has all his own money and everything. Even the Colony Manager interviewed him.” Carol felt, as always, like a boson.

  “Hmmm,” Lori mused, and Carol could almost hear the gears whirring in the conspiracy lobe of her brain. “Bizarre. I love the way the rear windows open into the garden. It’s as if the outdoors were part of the living room.”

  “Yes, we looked and looked for weeks, and then when the agent brought us here I just knew. I stood rooted to the spot, crying, ‘It’s mine!’” She laughed nervously, a bit taken aback by her classmate’s look of envy. She remembered hearing something about what had happened to her in Canada and suddenly felt very guilty. “But go ahead and get comfortable. Sit in a chaise longue or in the hammock, and I’ll go get our brunch. You must be starving if you came up that hill on rollerblades.”

  Carol hadn’t known what to serve for lunch, so she’d just bought some prepared trays of fresh fruits and vegetables, bread and cheese. Back in graduate school, when she had been bulimic, she had been too caught up in her own anxieties to notice how healthy women ate. Now she had a psychotherapist and a personal trainer, but it was still rare that she had to choose food for someone else all by herself. She was immensely pleased that Lori was happy with the food, and she watched Carol serve herself with what could only be described as compassion.

  “You look really amazing,” Lori repeated. “I’m so glad you managed to conquer your demons, get your degree, and come out here. I mean, of all the people in our class, who would have thought it would be the two of us sitting in California, rich and powerful and gloating?”

  Carol laughed easily. As a boson, she couldn’t expect real confidences from Lori, but they could certainly play remember-when. “What ever happened to Radhika?” she wondered.

  “Radhika dumped me like a rotten potato when I took a job in Canada,” Lori declared too cheerfully. “She said, and I quote, ‘If I ever see snow anywhere again, even on a remote mountaintop, it will be too soon.’ She lives in Darwin. It’s hard even to have conversations by e-mail with the time difference; it’s about been reduced to `Don’t envy you, going surfing, neener.’”

  “Darwin? Where’s that? What does she do there?”

  “Northern Australia. Femtosecond spectroscopy.”

  “Good for her.”

  “For dumping me, or for Darwin?”

  “Darwin, of course!” Carol exclaimed, but Lori didn’t seem too upset. “I mean—she’s Hawaiian. Come on! She was completely traumatized by Minnesota—Canada would have killed her. Absinthe—you remember Abby?—She’s a lawy
er here in town. She does IP issues for STI.”

  “Are you serious? Oh man, she’s richer and more powerful than all of us. Hey, the women in our class rock.” Lori helped herself to handful of baby carrots and stretched herself out in the chaise longue while she munched. “Too bad about most of the guys, though. I heard from Gus the other day. He’s at a government lab in Texas, and he hates it. Says it’s like San Quentin. They get the anal probe every morning when they go to work; the guards search the scientists and take away their pocketknives even though they’re coming onto labs with nuclear weapons. It’s not quite that bad at the LEPERLab, is it?”

  “I hate that name!” Carol felt her face grow hot. “I always say `Lobo Peak’ or the `LPR Lab.’ I don’t know if it’s that bad; it comes and goes. Usually when there’s a crackdown I take a personal day off and miss out on the worst of it.” She stood up to gather up the trays. She’d had enough to eat, and had to fight annoyance at Lori for making all Carol had accomplished suddenly seem hollow and vain. She knew that the professors on the STI campus saw the rocket lab as a bastard step-child, despising them for their militarism and limits on intellectual freedom, but she hadn’t expected Lori to have assimilated the attitude quite so quickly. The rest of the world only saw the glamor: it was LPR who landed things on Mars. “Hey,” she suggested suddenly, “do you want to help me prune the roses?”

  “You bet I do!” exclaimed Lori as if she hadn’t touched plants in years. Maybe she hadn’t.

  “What’s it like in Montreal?” Carol asked.

  “Freezing,” said Lori. “Dank, wet, humid, cold. I tried to have a garden, believe me.” She took the shears that Carol handed her, and they both went out back past the kennel to where the rose bushes were.

  Carol put on a baseball cap to shield her face from the sun and a pair of leather gloves; the only pair she could offer Lori were her husband’s and much too big. “This is my favorite cultivar,” she said, touching an intricate cluster of mauve petals. “Lavender Pinocchio—I got it at the Huntington last year at their sale. Here, sniff.”