by Susy Gage
“Who rewarded him for killing Marybeth with his own position, maybe?” Lori suggested.
A cold breeze came off the ocean, making Lou shiver. The grass no longer seemed refreshing, just cold, and the sun dropped ominously down towards the sea. “Why don’t we go home now?” he suggested.
Lori reached for her bike, but not without a parting shot. “Lou, I realize you have advanced powers of denial, but at some point you’re going to have to think about these things.”
“Why?” he demanded, scooting down the grassy hill to where his bike was parked. “As far as I’m concerned, the killer is dead. And every minute spent obsessing about him is just another piece of my life that he’s taken.” She made a face and he was annoyed. “Oh right, no TMI. You can handle any pestilence or revolting medical procedure, but no mental anguish permitted.”
“There’s nothing revolting about having to pee.”
“It’s revolting that I can’t do it on my own.” He held up a hand before she could interrupt. Did she think he was a font of medical horrors? He hated those more than she did. He just wanted to be normal—but he supposed he’d already failed miserably at that. “It’s all right, Lori, I’m not going to burden you with horrible stories. Want to know why my girlfriend broke up with me?” He waited for her to assent. “Old highschool sweetheart from Malibu. Tolerated me going to Chicago to do a PhD, but only barely. When I came out here for the interview, I studied all night without even asking her how her half-decade had gone. Then in the morning I took a shower, tripped over the litter box, and ran off leaving cat poo everywhere. It went on like this for three days, she couldn’t even call because I had the cell phone off, and she finally said I clearly loved STI much more than I loved her.” The bike was low to the ground and should have been easy to get into, but for some reason he struggled with it. Maybe his arms were tired.
“Duh!” said Lori, watching his effort critically. He didn’t mind; no doubt she was thinking about how to modify the bike. “What a bonehead. I hope she at least had big tits. Want to know what Radhika told me about you?” He nodded, finally getting his butt over the edge of the cushion into the seat. “She said that the one time she presented to the theory section, you leapt up, ran down the aisle to the audience microphone, wrested it away from some poor old guy and said that her multi-exponential fitting routine was garbage.”
“It was,” he said simply. “It doesn’t mean her data weren’t any good. She told you about that?”
“It was obvious that it turned her on.”
“Damn!” He punched the grass. “I miss my strutting arrogant ways.”
“I’m not sure that you’ve lost them.”
He sighed to indicate he was being serious. “I feel as if I have no body language anymore. I’m afraid to go to conferences because I’m just not me.”
“Just be glad you have arms,” she reminded him. “If you were a quad, I would have to build you a tongue-cycle.”
“Christ.” Lou was amazed once again by the depths of her flippancy. “Fuck the bike—give me a tongue-powered sniper rifle.”
She enjoyed that a lot. Too much. After laughing long and hard she kissed him on each cheek, Quebecois-style, and strapped herself in for the journey home.
“Just you and me against the world,” she announced. “And maybe Solomon Rose, if we can trust him. On y va?”
The sun was getting low over the water, so they didn’t linger or try to go to the pier. The wind was picking up and it would soon be very cold.
The wind was at their backs, though, and they raced each other across the river valley, surprisingly well-matched in speed and equally stubborn. They arrived at the dam in under an hour and a half, Lou completely out of breath and Lori screaming that her arms were going to just plain fall off. The gnarly downhill was worse in reverse, and Lori almost slid backwards from laughing when Lou muttered, “So glad I’m not doing this with my tongue.” After that they had nothing but a long sloping descent all the way to the park.
It was getting dark by the time they left the trail, but Lou sensed that there was something wrong the instant they pulled into the parking lot. The car somehow seemed too clean, as if it had been polished, and he was sure they hadn’t left the passenger window cracked.
Sure enough, the doors were unlocked and everything inside was gone, including Lori’s backpack, their extra clothes, and the small bag of Doritos they had stashed in the front seat for after the ride. “I guess we forgot we were in LA,” he remarked, trying to sound casual although he hoped the thieves were far away by now.
Lori, though, seemed very upset, much more so than he would have expected from an empty backpack and a bag of chips. He couldn’t think too hard about it, because he’d just learned to drive again and it took all of his concentration to navigate up the narrow winding streets to her house.
When he remarked innocently that her neighbors had a nice jellypalm, she whirled on him with a strangled rabid hiss.
“Are you OK, Lori?” he asked at last, as she prepared to get out of the car. “You had your wallet and your skates and everything with you, didn’t you?”
“Call me Wigbert,” she replied, ready to cry. “There was a CD with a copy of the proposal in the pocket of my backpack.”
Twenty-Four: Unclean
Carol should have been relieved to see Bob animated again after almost a month of depression. Instead, she was just worried.
He hadn’t lost his job over Jim Kalb’s electrocution, but he had received the lab’s two worst punishments that she knew of: his office had been reassigned to the trailers, and he had lost all his parking privileges.
Not that they lived all that far away—he could walk or bike to work. But parking at the LPR Lab was about much more than where you put your car. Spaces were assigned by rank, in concentric circles centered on the primary management building. The lab director parked in front of the building, the Chief Scientist and Engineer right behind it, and VIP visitors (Nobel laureates, president of STI) in the Visitors lot. The next nearest parking lots were a good ten minute walk from the building but still on lab property, and they housed the highest STUMPs: Colony Managers and Principal Scientists.
The great unwashed, including Carol herself, all had to squeeze into the East Lot, usually referred to as the Beast Lot because of all of the racoons, skunks, possums, and occasionally foxes and coyotes that would gather there after dark. It was off the federal property, belonging officially to the County of Los Angeles, but still patrolled by LEPER guards. Physically it was separated from the main lab by a swath of desert and a drainage ditch feeding a shallow runoff pond that was still contaminated from the rocket-fuel experiments of the twenties. Every once in a while, dead animals or even people would wash up there after slipping off trails in the mountains. Carol had heard stories of a physics professor once found there, but the most she had ever seen had been a poor old mallard floating on his side. Lured no doubt by the sparkle of water in the desert, he had been swiftly poisoned.
For the duration of his punishment, which was still undetermined, Bob wasn’t even allowed to park in the Beast Lot or to ride in with anyone else. In order to distinguish him as someone not permitted to be a passenger, his ID badge had been revoked and he had been issued a paper one with a dot-matrix image of his face and “LPR” stamped across it. Carol was even afraid to walk with him, thinking it would be forbidden.
“I’m unclean! I’m unclean!” he wailed constantly, ashamed even to meet with his managers or to go to lunch in groups because he was sure everyone was staring at his punishment badge. Their Colony Manger didn’t make things easier for him, more than once announcing in public that Bob was a fool to have hired someone from a known “loose cannon” like van Gnubbern.
Weekends were better since they were spent away from the lab, so when he got up that morning full of energy, she had attributed the improved mood to the fact that it was Sunday. The furtive phone call in the bathroom was a bit weird, though, and he had grown increasingly more a
gitated throughout the day. Around three o’clock he drove off without saying where he was going, but was gone less than an hour and returned with a canary-swallowing look that he couldn’t wipe off no matter how he tried.
“Just because he has a Nobel Prize doesn’t mean he’ll win,” he muttered several times, along with several dark comments about either destroying or saving the LPR Lab. The direction of his allegiance was unclear, and Carol was worried.
“I’m not sure I should be hearing this,” she said.
“You probably shouldn’t be,” Bob agreed. He gripped his cell phone tightly and went into the bathroom.
She thought of Lori as she pressed her ear to the door.
Bob was insisting that he himself hadn’t done anything “too” illegal—her breath caught in her throat—but that he had gotten what he wanted.
“If STI submits and wins a Polar Institute Proposal, it will destroy the LEPERLab,” he was saying. “They’ve already threatened to take away our special status and make us civil servants. You think we’re militaristic now! Just wait until we can’t submit any of our own projects or choose who works for us.”
She still couldn’t tell which side he was on. The call ended and she prepared to tiptoe away, but he called another number.
“I need to be able to get this to someone who can move fast,” he said in a very different voice, one that verged on a nervous giggle. “Obviously I can’t go running to the Chief Scientist myself. I’m not even a manager, and with my punishment badge! Besides, no—the Chief Scientist would be a mistake. Remember how he stood up during the PIP kick-off and said that LEPERs weren’t allowed to do biology? He’s still in bed with Gerson. Yeah, that was all a disaster, never should have hired a biologist! Trouble is, I have no standing at the LEPERLab right now. People at STI who’d like to see this thing stopped? How do you spell that? That’s an impossible name… Why would he help us? I suppose ‘Hates Solomon Rose’ is enough for me. Guess it has to be at this point.”
The door flung open, and Carol managed to eclipse herself into the neighboring bedroom just in time. Bob closed it immediately, no doubt suspicious, and she again heard the beep of the cell phone.
She was relieved in some ways that it sounded as though he were acting to protect the LPR Lab rather than destroy it. Still, getting involved in intrigues was always a bad idea, and to do it when you were on Unclean status was suicidal. If he were even seen in the same building as Ben Gerson, his career would be over.
She knew that when Bob got an idea in his head, it was no use arguing with him. Still, it hurt when he said he was having “some professors from STI” over for supper and that she was not invited. He even went so far as to tell her to make herself scarce.
“It’s just to protect you, baby,” he said. “I see it as my only way out right now. If I don’t do something to redeem myself, they’ll keep me on Unclean status until I quit. But you have a career there. I don’t want you to hear things that might hurt you.”
It’s my choice, she wanted to argue, but he was blowing all of this out of proportion anyway.
But now she had no one to talk to. Lori was furious that her video cameras had disappeared from the microscope lab where Kalb died, and blamed Carol for it. She claimed those cameras had to hold the key to everything—whether the death had been a murder, a suicide, or just a very unlucky accident coming at a really bad time.
No matter how much Carol tried to explain that she hadn’t been on campus, and that the LEPERLab had locked down the microscope room right after the incident, Lori wouldn’t listen. She didn’t understand that sneaking into a cordoned-off room, after hours, when you were married to the person blamed for the incident, was not just impossible but literally dangerous.
Carol didn’t believe that there was some “second murderer.” She was sure that Kalb had been trying to booby trap the room to kill someone else—probably her. How someone could die of electrocution in a room not supplied with electricity was a mystery, but maybe he had just managed to get Facilities to turn the power on. He’d probably hoped Carol would try to plug in the ratty old microscope and die.
Of course Lori didn’t want to hear any of Carol’s boson theories. She could be insufferable, but Carol was used to it. Besides, Lori was the only one in LA who had known her almost all the way through grad school. Lori had seen Carol struggle to succeed, studying by herself because the top students didn’t want her and the bottom ones had ulterior motives: they wanted to get in her pants or for her to help them get in someone prettier’s pants, or to convert her to their religious cult. The more stressed she was, the more her bulimia took over her life, making her obsess about weight and calories rather than quantum mechanics and electricity and magnetism.
Still, through all of that, she had had passion, and Lori was the last person left who could confirm what Carol feared: that the LEPERLab had taken her zeal. She had everything she was supposed to want, but she would be forty-two this year, and life was passing her by. She had never dated anyone but Bob Drift. She never traveled outside of the country; even inside the country, she had only traveled to conferences in Miami, Minneapolis, or Washington, DC. Her greatest triumphs at work were filling out her time card and getting to leave early. Lori and Radhika, although they had also stayed in science, seemed to lead lives that were much more exotic and exciting.
She had started to have her doubts about her job and what it had done to her, but she didn’t want to be forced to leave unprepared. Carol had worked her entire life for this position. It had taken Lori a week to pass their qualifying exams in graduate school, but it had taken Carol two years; Lori four and a half years to complete her PhD, and Carol eight, and she was lucky that it hadn’t taken her even longer. After that she had done a postdoc in Indiana, where she had worked with radiation physicists who were trying to develop new treatments for brain cancer. A couple years into it, Bob Drift had joined their group as a theorist, and when he left for a second postdoc two years later he had asked her to marry him. They had ended up splitting a salary, since Northeastern University didn’t want her, and although she loved Boston she would always remember that year as squalid.
Even though the LEPERLab hadn’t wanted her right away either, Bob’s position was enough to get her a one-year temporary assignment. It was little more than a postdoc, but for once they both had real salaries. When she was made permanent a year later—the Colony Manager loved her!—she had at last begun to relax, allowing herself to hope that she had truly seen an end to the days of ramen noodles, trading off a single bus pass, wearing coats in the house, and painstakingly balancing the checkbook every month. They had gone a bit overboard in the other direction, with the plane and everything, but it seemed that their savings always grew.
She had so many friends who were still postdocs. In their forties, often with kids, they went from position to position with little hope of permanence. They said only 2% of physics PhDs got faculty jobs. If she had to leave the LEPERLab, where could she go? She could never be a professor since LEPERs weren’t allowed to publish.
“I’m a LEPER!” Carol cried on the phone to Abby.
“Can a LEPER change its spots?” Abby wondered rhetorically. “I think a LEPER can… but the LEPER needs to stop associating with the Unclean.”
Carol knew the call was a mistake when Abby started talking about the guy she’d met last Friday. She had always been able to make Carol blush, and now it sounded as if she was trying to make her come along on some kind of double date.
“Abby,” Carol spoke in a whisper, even though Bob wasn’t home. “I can’t betray Bob like that.”
“What about Kirk?” Abby leered. “I saw you ogling him all night.”
Did people truly never grow up? Carol didn’t find any of this amusing or titillating in the slightest—it just gave her flashbacks.
Abby used their grad school locker-room time to regale Carol with the details of the progressing relationship with her investment-banker boyfriend. At first
it was exciting, when they kissed and talked about engagement rings, but as it progressed to body parts Carol didn’t know too intimately and positions she wouldn’t have thought were geometrically possible, the young Carol was terribly confused. They had both been raised Lutheran, and she had always assumed that none of her female friends would lose their virginity before marriage. Abby quickly dispelled her illusions, making Carol feel that she herself was not so much moral as unattractive and undesirable.
“I’m telling you, bigger around than my wrist.” Abby held out a slim arm. “The first time, I thought I was going to bust open. And longer than Paul’s arms!”
Carol had blushed for more than one reason. Paul was the only male in their twenty-three-person, nineteen-man entering class to pay her the slightest attention, and he was only five foot three with unfortunately short limbs. They weren’t going out—hadn’t even had a date, really, other than bowling and coffee—but that didn’t stop Abby from teasing her about Paul-with-the-short-arms or from asking if other things were short, too.
Carol, who had not gone all the way with Paul or anyone else in grad school, who had known Bob and only Bob, couldn’t really understand any of Absinthe’s jokes or her practiced cruelty.
“Can you just help me get Bob out of trouble?” she wondered now, trying not to sound as lost as she felt.
Abby gave a disgruntled sigh. “You’re the only one who can keep him from digging in even deeper than he is. I’d keep him on a tight leash if I were you—there are things he’s messing with that even I shouldn’t know about.”
Twenty-Five: The PARIA Project
It was nearly noon by the time Lori rolled up to the physics building on Monday. Every muscle in her body ached. She’d ridden her winter bike as some form of punishment, wearing the Roller-Montreal skinsuit that really wasn’t made for the skinny saddle but which had symbolic value.
“Uh oh,” said Lou seriously when he saw her in it.