You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  I have had a funny feeling in my stomach since I woke up this morning. I feel adrenaline pumping through my body. I am apprehensive, nervous, very nervous indeed. I might finally be on to something. I better be, because I did not inform Mark about this experiment and it devoured almost all the valuable “Raetz antibiotic” which we could never re-stock. He won’t be pleased, not in the slightest, to hear that I wasted all this precious material on an experiment that is not his baby. I will hang if it didn’t work. But I needed to do it, out of self-protection, to preserve my sanity, my hopes, my dreams. I had to pursue something I believed to be more promising than Mark’s megalomaniac, pie-in-the-sky pseudo-projects.

  I know as soon as I enter the lab and open the 37 degrees stove to take the 140 agar plates with bugs out, I will have the answer. I take another deep breath before opening the glass door of the lab. I felt my back hurt on my way to university, begat by standing in an awkward position for a full day followed by a night of insomnia. However, right now I feel nothing. Something inside me wants to run away, get on a flight to Bulgaria, any place where I can avoid this terrible risk of abysmal disappointment. But curiosity drives researchers. I have to know the result. Not knowing the answer would eat at me for the rest of my life. My nerves can contrive escapist fantasies, but I know there is no option: I must open the stove. One more quick prayer, a yearn for the promised paradise (maybe Jehovah’s are right, who knows?) and here we go…

  I lift the handle up to open the metal door, oh-so slowly… My plates are still there, that’s a start. I take a few out and look at the growth patterns. It looks good (gulp). Nervously I spread all 140 plates out, over two lab benches, knowing that if Brian comes in he will bawl at me for invading his work space. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything good or bad, I don’t care if the world is going to end tomorrow, right now all I care about – in the entire universe – is the result. I look at all the plates and compare them with my predictive notes… correct… correct… correct… correct….

  Tears of happiness are welling up in my eyes. I want to shout, scream, and throw myself to my knees on the floor. I can hardly contain it. But I do. I keep on whispering, “Got it, got it, got it… I FUCKING GOT IT!”

  A familiar groaning noise startles me out of my loving gaze at the Petri dishes (and it is love, no less). “Hi Brian,” I say, way too happy before turning round to face him.

  The expression on his face softens as soon as he meets my eyes. It is almost as if he could be a nice person. Miracles happen.

  “You got some good results?” he asks, looking at his plate-covered bench.

  “Yes,” I say, starting to stack everything on piles on the bench I share with Hanna.

  “What is it?” he asks. Since when are you interested in my work?

  Nervously I explain what I did.

  He lifts up some plates for closer inspection.

  “That’s pretty cool,” he says. Is he now even smiling, sort of? Does Brian smile?

  “Yeah. I think so, too.”

  Without words, he makes it plain that our conversation is now over and I should get the plates off his bench pronto. Once an arsehole…

  I hastily slide the piles of plates onto the corner of my bench before Brian comes up with the idea to bin them and ready myself to leave. Just before closing the door behind me, I say: “Brian?”

  “Yes Karin,” he replies, irritated now.

  “Did Celtic play?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just curious!” I need to tell Mark!

  I rush out of the lab, almost bumping into poor Sharon who has her left arm in a sling today.

  “Broken arm?”

  “No, dislocated elbow. Will be fine again in a few weeks.”

  “Rugby?”

  “Yeah, tough game on Saturday.” Crazy girl.

  “Get better soon!”

  “Thanks.”

  I cycle back to town, away from the fields that had gotten bright green after a wet May, and away from the tidy and sterile work environment. Happily I enter the School of Chemistry and rush to the lab.

  “Mark has been looking for you! He did not seem pleased you weren’t here yesterday and this morning,” Quinn says with a smile on his face.

  “Where did you tell him I’d gone?”

  “I told him you probably went shopping.” Arsehole.

  “I might wring your neck one day, but I guess you don’t mind.”

  “That would mean I escape my PhD, yip, I’m fine with it.”

  “I will do a half-baked job so you will survive.”

  Quinn laughs. “Don’t worry too much about it. It was just a joke and Mark wasn’t too bothered. Plus, Hanna kind of saved your ass by telling him you were probably in the hospital.”

  “Which I was!”

  “Yeah, right.” You are such a beefy moron, Quinn.

  I drop off my coat, walk straight to Mark’s office and knock on his door. He instantly calls me in and frees a chair for me to sit on.

  “Where have you been hanging out?” he asks.

  Even though his voice sounds friendly, I feel my hands trembling. He probably thinks I have indeed been shopping.

  “At the Royal Infirmary. I’ve got some results I’d like to show you.”

  “You got the plasmids ready?” he asks, critically. Stop asking about those bloody plasmids! We both know I don’t have to go to the hospital for that, do I?

  For a short moment I feel deeply disheartened, and consider stopping the conversation here and now; slamming his office door shut never to return. But I know it’s just another demented fantasy – they occur increasingly.

  “Well… no. I am totally on it, and think I might almost have them… but I would like to talk about something different. From home, with my laptop I analysed over twenty genome sequences of all the available Burkholderia strains and predicted, based on the presence or absence of one particular gene, which type of superbug would show resistance to the antibiotic we got from Prof. Raetz and which would be killed. Yesterday I went to the hospital to actually prove my hypothesis with some self-made disks…. and it worked.” Please don’t ask how much antibiotic is left.

  I show him all my notes and repeat a second time exactly what I have done, and how the results support my hypothesis. Mark inspects them carefully before he finally says: “Fantastic! We need more data, but that – together with the plasmids – might lead to a nice paper. Well done! So you see… you fail, and fail, and fail, and eventually you have success. You’re doing a great job here, Karin. Let’s send all the data to James, he’ll love it. I’ll ask him straight away to pay a flight to Venice for you.” Awesome!

  “Venice? To the Burkholderia conference?”

  “Yes, it’s in two weeks. It’s too late for you to give a presentation, but you can join us. Hanna and Brian will both give a talk.” Porchetta, smoked pancetta, Rosso di Montalcino, ore di sole… At least I learned something from my posh in-laws!…

  “I would learn a lot,” I say.

  “Okay, I’ll get an email ready for James and cc you in.”

  I stand up to go back to the lab. “Oh, by the way Karin,” Mark half-shouts now as if I were not standing just one step away from him but already down the corridor. I turn to him. “Yes Mark?”

  “I’ve been wondering if you could redo the marking of this practical course you have been teaching,” he says, handing me a pile of papers containing the exercises the students had filled out during the first year chemistry class I taught. “You can’t let them fail,” he adds. Separating the wheat from the chaff just to bag them together anyway. Sisyphus would appreciate our pointless exercise in Bully-The-PhD-Stooge…

  “I only let the students fail that either didn’t show up, were extremely demotivated and didn’t even bother to answer the questions, or really did not have a clue what they were doing.”

  “I know, Karin. But you can’t let them fail. You have to make sure they show up and give you all the answers.”
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br />   “I beg your pardon? I guess that is the responsibility of the student?”

  “It used to be.”

  “I’m not a babysitter, Mark!” I say, upset now.

  “Sorry, I can’t do anything about it,” he says lifting his shoulders and pressing his lips together. “Make them pass,” adds he. Oh Jesus, you must be kidding me, but I know you mean it because you are long past caring about truth and moved in a political world where integrity is just a handicap.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_16

  Chapter 16

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  With two small bumps the plane makes friends with the ground. We taxi to a quick halt in front of the airport building which is really just an outsized shed. This is not Amsterdam or Paris, and even little Edinburgh Airport is more imposing than the grandly titled “Aeroporto Marco Polo Di Venezia.” It’s desolate outside the cabin window; just a few men wearing orange safety jackets driving luggage carts through sheets of rain while the windsock indicates a near-gale. The pilot probably announced the weather before landing but I didn’t understand a single word. I’m not sure whether this was due to his Italian accent or because my eardrums had sort of shut down after three hours of Mark talking at me, pinned like a lab rat in a metal tube eight kilometers above sea level. My spirits are low. This might be Italy and it might be late spring, and we might supposedly be in the exclusive, high powered world of international scientific confabbing… but leisurely notions of sipping Soave on the hotel balcony in the evening warmth have evaporated in boredom and rain.

  Hectically, Mark starts to stuff the preposterous amount of papers which he had taken out to read back into his bag. I doubt there is one single person on Earth who can read so much in so little time. In Edinburgh it had been – for a very short moment – reassuring that he had brought all this reading matter; certainly no time to chat, I thought. Optimistically I had gotten out my headphones, but he started his monologue before I could plug them in. At first, he talked a bit about my project and latest results. However, with great enthusiasm he very quickly moved on to Babette’s work with cofactor-dependent enzymes which is apparently quite dazzling, though he never explained why. Maybe it is because it is the only project with which he has experienced some (very minor) successes in the last couple of years. After all, it was this project that recently convinced some funding body to donate a handful of pounds to the research pot and the finances to hire Barry; his new academic star with remarkably well-hidden talents. Mark showed me 3D structures of proteins Babette is working on and, about an hour into his bragging about how good she is, I got bored enough to risk a comment, “You do know that Babette is not the easiest to work with?”

  “Yes,” he said in a tone that suggested this was as important to him as a light breeze in the summer of 1452.

  “She doesn’t talk to anyone unless we have a lab meeting. She stamps through the lab like an elephant. She slams doors. She groans loudly, wheezing and making other noises that stop anyone from concentrating,” I added, in the hope that it might yet trouble him.

  He just nodded as much to say, ‘receipted and filed and forgotten already.’ He immediately flicked to the third page of another paper and started to talk about how the cofactor fits into the enzyme pocket.

  “Have you read this paper?” he asked, after a lengthy explanation.

  “No, I’m working on a different project.”

  He shook his head. “You should read this!”

  The tone of his voice was unfriendly, harsh. However, he actually corrected himself and abruptly reverted to a friendly tone, showing that he was aware we were just adults on a plane chatting publicly. Alas, he didn’t read on the journey and he didn’t change the topic of conversation, so it was an awful flight.

  Both of us had been unhappy at check-in when we realised that we would be sitting next to each other during the flight. But what can you do if you find out that the cute flight attendant behind the desk gave you the wrong seat? For both of us, at least for my poor eardrums, it would have been better if he had simply said, “Karin, I have no desire to sit next to you whatsoever, can you please swap with James?” He could have even wrapped it in something nice like, “I do not want to be rude, but I have to discuss some things with James. Would you mind…” I wouldn’t have minded one bit… However, for me to say something like that to him – the man who asserts his authority with his every utterance – would have been signing my own death-sentence; “Mark, would you mind swapping seats with Hanna because I think your one-sided, self-important monologues which I am supposed to regard as engaging conversations might actually make me weep…” Of course I would have worded it politely but deep down he would know that is what I meant. At some level Mark must be aware of the world’s low estimation of him – it’s a fact he seems to fight hard to keep out of his reality. My hopes had rested on James to save the day but I suspect James was secretly delighted to sit four rows behind us.

  The seat belt sign is still on but Mark’s body language strongly suggests he wants me to stand up so he can do the same.

  “I find it funny to watch all those people standing up in an airplane. All those bodies pressed into a somewhat bended state due to the slightly tilted seat in front of them and their heads getting pressed awkwardly against the low luggage compartments. They look like crippled giraffes with broken necks. It’s pathetic. And for what? It doesn’t go any faster…” I say, pretending that I did not notice his urgency.

  Mark laughs a bit too loudly, and actively presses his arse cheeks into the seat again. He is inferring he never wanted to get up but we both know better. For one fleeting moment I feel empowered over Mark. I made him feel uncomfortable – wow. It’s a curious little moment, unique in our relationship thus far.

  At passport control Mark strides over to James and Brian. Hanna gives me a friendly smile and whispers, “I felt sooo sorry for you all the way…”

  “I felt sorry for myself. But hey, I got a three hour lecture about cofactor-dependent enzymes and have a new reading list…”

  We reconvene at the exit and together rush through the pouring rain to the shelter next to the taxi stand. A short, slightly fat man looking like a clot crumpled into a striped shirt drops his cigarette on the pavement. With cheap leather-look slip-on shoes he taps on the smoldering cigarette and opens the door of the little taxi bus for us. When we are all in, James hands him a piece of paper and Clotty signals that he understands where we need to go and without any words being exchanged, we depart the airport.

  Hanna and I sit on the rear bench-seat of the little taxi bus while James, Mark and Brian are on the seat in front of us. For the first ten minutes it is quiet. Mark and James exchange a few random sentences about the weather, their previous Italy experiences, Sharon’s injuries and football. James couldn’t care less about football but for Mark that doesn’t matter. The first few meetings I had sat with both James and Mark, I thought I was too stupid to follow their conversations, but then I realised that their speeches run parallel and mostly don’t connect with each other. They both broadcast their own stories, they just happen to be in the same room.

  It is all so innocuous but then Mark suddenly turns round to Hanna and me. Out of the blue, he issues an anxious and utterly bizarre warning: “Don’t talk to anyone about your research!”

  James slightly shifts his upper body, also towards Hanna and me. He turns his head, with some difficulty, to look over the back of the seat to face us. “Be careful. Do not share what we work on. Your data isn’t safe here.”

  From the expression on his face I think I read that he has difficulty with this message; he looks sad somehow. Brian nods along without looking at us. He always agrees with Mark and James, his factory-set reaction to superiors of any kind.

  �
�Alright,” Hanna and I mumble simultaneously.

  I feel confused. Were we not, as I understood it, four generations of scientists – PhDs, postdoc, lecturer and professor – attending a “scientific working group” representing a university renowned for its scientific excellence? Were we not travelling to Italy to meet researchers from all over the world working on the same superbug? A bug that uses penicillin as a carbon source, a bug that forces paediatricians to separate siblings, a bug that kills; a bug that matters somewhat more than petty academic rivalries – no? Were we not going to this meeting precisely to share our know-how? To discuss working towards a treatment together? Apparently not… Those few words with the Italian radio in the background altered my simple perceptions entirely; it now seemed we aren’t far from bit players in a Godfather movie driving into the lair of the enemy…

  We head up the driveway of a hotel that looks like a lonely outpost – sort of plonked in the middle of a field. Apart from the torrent falling from the sky, there is no water in this part of Venice. There is also a distinct absence of Gothic arches, Byzantine domes, Baroque grandeur, Renaissance windows and indeed anything to do with Venice. There is however, wispy grass aplenty. They really oversold the conference: “Scientific working group in Venice?” This is not Venice! This is the neighbouring town of Marco Polo! It is like promising someone London and sending them to Dartford. Clotty opens the doors for us and starts to pull the suitcases out of the trunk. His arms are just so too short to make it look effortless. It’s the only entertaining bit in all this weirdness.