You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  I raise my eyebrows enquiringly. “I quite like Venice,” he responds witlessly, unmanly…

  “Really? You should take Lucy there.”

  “I could do,” he says, looking at Lucy like a little pup begging for a bone.

  Lucy’s eyes shoot daggers at me. I know too well that Lucy would hate going for a romantic weekend away in Venice with any guy. That kind of packaged romance makes her cringe.

  “We need to go to the lab now, see you later, Louis,” Lucy declared, firmly pushing me towards the chemistry building.

  As soon as we were through the door, Lucy looked at me firmly and said: “I know.”

  “How often have you seen him?”

  “About four times.”

  “And if I remember correctly, you were at his place, in his room, yesterday evening watching a movie?”

  While we talked, I carefully took twenty-four Eppendorfs out of the table top centrifuge and placed them in a colourful rack on the bench

  “Yes.”

  “But you did not have sex with him! Right?”

  “Hell, no! He wanted to. But as soon as he came close to me I went home instead. I really don’t want to have intercourse with this dude.”

  Phew!

  “Then dump him!?”

  “I know I should dump him. But I wanted to tell my parents I have a boyfriend. They are starting to worry I’m not normal, that I’m getting too old.”

  “You just turned thirty, you’re not old!”

  Lucy didn’t look convinced.

  “Thirty,” she repeated, sinking into a whisper. “No partner, no permanent residence, no clue where my life is leading…”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  I said those words in the same voice my mum used them on the telephone after my first day at the University of Edinburgh, when I told her that there is no desk and no computer for me in the lab. They are the same meaningless words I said to Hanna before her presentation at a conference in Venice when I sensed she was nervous. Truth is, more often than not when we say those words we have no clue if things will be “fine.” And every time I say them like that I feel like a liar. I quickly add, “I am totally with them about you not being normal, though.”

  Lucy smiled. “What’s normal anyway?”

  We place a few chairs around the table and bundle all the mess out of sight. “Tell me about your Christmas,” she says, which invites me to confirm that I am as lost in life as she is.

  “Nothing special. The first evening I stayed with my sister in Amsterdam, and we had drinks with people from her law firm. It was sort of cool but it showed me how weird I’ve become in the last sixteen months. I really struggled to converse with the people there. It’s like I haven’t much to talk about, other than my research. And they are lawyers, they know little about science. Plus, it’s weird, like I am just floating, I feel like I haven’t been corrected for any behaviour since arriving here. No one has tried to place me in a box, which is good, but nobody has offered me any motive to work on my social skills either… I only hang around with chemists and a few biologists; and they don’t care much if I’m a bit off… Mark doesn’t seem to care what kind of people we are and how we behave towards our colleagues in the lab. He loves Babette and, rationally, I know that is only because she works on a project he actually likes, but it feels so wrong that she is favoured while she is a monster to everyone else… There’s no incentive for anyone in the lab to actually be a nice colleague; Mark doesn’t set an example to follow, and success does not depend on behaving decently… Maybe I have been sucked up into the Ivory Tower by my research and by other scientists, and I have pretty much forgotten about the values and unwritten rules of the real world outside… Maybe this is similar to a language you once learned but are now surprised to discover you can no longer speak because you haven’t spoken it for so long. We are living in a bubble, the science bubble. And if this is indeed the fabled Ivory Tower then I feel like deflated Dorothy seeing behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz…”

  My voice tails off lest I lapse into ranting about the limbo-land inhabited by all these lost PhD students – I’m not special, my circumstances are not even worth bemoaning.

  “You are so right! I also became super weird. I have the feeling I become weirder with every week I spend in academia. I think the only ‘normal’ person in our lab is Hanna.”

  “Yep…”

  My phone is ringing and I fetch it from my coat.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi Ka, how are you? Good trip home?” Felix says on other side of the line.

  “Fine, fine. Are you not supposed to be in Denmark?”

  “I didn’t go in the end,” he sighs.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh you won’t believe it. It is such a fucked-up situation! Your boss – of all groups in the world – just published an article on how to produce a natural product from living cells – the very same that I’m supposed to synthesise chemically.”

  “I didn’t know Mark was publishing?” I say, sarcastically.

  “Well, your dear boss isn’t publishing much but he published this article which makes my research proposal redundant. So two days before I planned to fly home, I wrote to my funding body and told them that, given this new development, I think my project should be changed. They agreed that my project doesn’t make sense any more, but said they gave the funding for the project, not the scientist. Meaning that if the project is stopped, I need to pay back all the salary I have so far received. You get the picture?”

  “But that’s months!”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry, that sounds ridiculous. You can’t know beforehand that someone from a different field will be publishing something that makes your research redundant. It was published after you got the grant!”

  “I know, it’s tedious, and unfair. They stopped my salary and now they want to decide if I have to pay them back for the previous months. They might give me a second chance after being a bad boy, but I have to deliver a new research proposal to see.”

  “You didn’t get paid in December at all?”

  “Nope!”

  “Wow, you are being white-washed out!”

  “Green washing would fit better as your lab is producing the product biologically.”

  “Nerd… What does Homer say?”

  “That I am an absolute idiot for telling the truth to my funding body and that I should have just lied about the project I’m working on. You know, work on the redundant project here and there to be able to write some rubbish final report, but spend most of my working time on something else.”

  “Constructive.”

  “Anyway, I’m in Edinburgh now and after spending Christmas in the office I wouldn’t mind spending New Year with you guys.”

  “Come over. I’m at Lucy’s. Others should be coming soon.”

  “Cool.”

  “Felix?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope William left you the water tank over Christmas?”

  “He did!”

  Less than an hour later we sit with six people from five different nations around Lucy’s makeshift dinner table. We store all the lovely dishes everyone brought from their home countries on the window sill. There are a few bottles of wine on the table, and conversation flows with ease. It is so much easier talking with my PhD peers than with the lawyers and family back home. To varying extents, it’s the same for everyone round the table; we’re bonded by our similar life situation and concerns which might seem peculiar, horribly stressful and a bit daft to most people. We have all come to understand that our academic success strongly depends upon the resources we can access, the amount of money being spent on the specific project and publication; and towering over these is our boss. Our intelligence, work rate and burning desire to make a difference to the stock knowledge of mankind are all but trifles. My mum had looked surprised when I said that I was nowhere near developing a new antibiotic and my dad had looked downright disappo
inted. They didn’t understand and I didn’t feel I could explain. It was as if I had drifted away from the world outside of academia – too far away to communicate my slightly absurd reality.

  After leisurely finishing the food, Maggie and Joanna go home in order to be fresh for the lab tomorrow. The rest of us pack the leftover wine and head to Princes Street to see the magnificent firework display emanating from Edinburgh Castle at midnight. The Scots are BIG on New Year’s Eve, better known as Hogmanay.

  After all the starry explosions and dreamy escapism of the whish-bangs Abel, the cute English guy from the Johnson group, makes a suggestion- “We could go to my place, my flatmates are having a party tonight… I truly don’t know what to expect though. They seem a bit odd.”

  Abel has beautiful eyes, perfectly groomed black hair and a sporty body packed into a classy outfit. Also, he talks with an accent I absolutely love like music. But, through my discerning eyes, he is somehow too perfect to be manly.

  “I wouldn’t mind checking out what’s going on there anyway,” he adds, looking rather worried.

  “I’d love to but I really need to go home so I can work on this research proposal,” says a dejected Felix, who has oddly deep wrinkles under his eyes, from fatigue and sorrow.

  Lucy and I follow Abel through the Meadows to the south side of town. It’s a long walk but it’s a lively scene. I notice Abel getting increasingly nervous the closer we get to his flat. Several times he mentions that his flatmates are a bit off, and he has no clue what kind of party to expect. He only moved in two weeks ago when his previous landlord decided he wanted to use the flat for another purpose.

  We finally pause in front of a building that looks to be mostly inhabited by students. There are numerous bikes out front and a mix of loud music blares from several windows. He opens the front door and leads us up to the second floor, looking shocked at the piles of clothes and toilet paper decorating the staircase. There are shirts, socks, underpants and trousers hanging sadly on the banisters, as if someone has thrown them down from the top floor. The toilet paper looks even more desultory as the product of lowbrow hi-jinks. It is not amusing, just weird. Abel raises his brows and mumbles something I don’t hear.

  The door to the flat is open and there are people sitting on the floor everywhere. Some are smoking peacefully, some are just sleeping, some are half undressed and all seem to be on a totally different planet. None of us says a word. Have I been downgraded to a bad Trainspotting film set or am I still a PhD student? Are the two worlds so close these days?…

  We try to avoid stepping on bodies as we follow Abel to his room. The door is ajar and the handle is broken. “They broke into my room!” he whispers, carefully opening the door.

  The room looks tidy and a guy with long greasy hair, wearing open sandals in the middle of winter, is sitting on the bedside. His clothes are very old but they look clean enough to suggest he is not actually homeless. “Fuck off and shut the door,” he says, gesturing in a manner that manages to be both dismissive and aggressive.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you Jesus, but this happens to be my room,” says Abel.

  “There’s someone in your bed,” I say, pointing at the big bunch of red curls extending from the sheets.

  “She must be huge, or maybe they are two,” Lucy whispers.

  “A whale,” I hypothesise.

  “What’s that lady doing in my bed?” Abel shrieks, before carefully lifting the sheets off the creature.

  She looks like a Disney figure. She is wearing stockings and a cartoonish red dress which I doubt you can purchase in an ordinary clothes shop, set off with a Minnie Mouse hairband – a sort of crown of self-ridicule.

  “She just needs a rest, buddy,” says Jesus.

  “Did you have… I mean… did you penetrate her in my bed?”

  I guess Abel’s Southern English accent doesn’t allow for a less selective choice of words, but it seems strangely formal amid the scenery.

  “No!” Jesus says, shocked, and evidencing disgust at the creature sleeping next to him.

  Abel looks suspicious. “Would you mind taking her somewhere else?”

  “She’s too heavy, mate!”

  Abel looks disturbed. He walks to his desk and lifts an empty bottle of whiskey. He reads the label carefully, looks at Lucy and me, and says: “They drank Steve’s special whiskey.”

  “Who is Steve?” I enquire.

  “My only sane flatmate, a maths PhD.”

  “And he is sane?” Lucy asks in disbelief.

  “Isn’t he here?” I ask.

  “No, he’s visiting his parents in the US. He got this bottle from this granddad for his graduation. He is not going to be pleased.”

  “See the positive; he still has the bottle,” I say.

  “Yes, he could put water in it, or cold tea to look like whiskey…” Lucy adds.

  The numerous bookshelves above and around the desk are filled with novels, chemistry and biology books, CDs and a few pictures of Abel with his siblings and parents. One of them is of Abel holding flowers and a master’s certificate in front of prestigious University College London.

  Abel, who normally doesn’t smoke, asks me for a cigarette with a shaking voice, and adds, “This is really quite fucked up!”

  The people still able to move have now decided Abel’s room is the place to hang out. More and more filter in. A tall guy, with considerably less metal adorning his skin than the party average, walks up to Lucy and enquires, “You got acid by any chance?”

  Lucy takes a step back. “What’s that you are looking for?”

  “Acid.”

  Lucy looks confused. “We have hydrochloric acid in the lab, not here.”

  The guy stares at her uncomprehendingly, but he quickly surmises that Lucy is probably not the sort to be carrying a stash of illegal drugs.

  I ask Abel, “Do you mind if I walk around a bit? I’m curious to see what else is going on in your flat.”

  “Me too!” says Lucy, excited.

  “Go for it.”

  We step over the people in the hall and enter a room that is probably the living room. It is tiny, crowded with about ten people in it. Most are sleeping or at least dozing away. There’s a topless girl sitting on the sofa with a guy next to her touching and licking her boobs in a highly unmotivated fashion. She lets her tongue circulate around her lips. Despite these sexual motions between them, it is so perfunctory it reminds me more of a battery-powered Christmas toy moving mindlessly in a shop window than of anything that might lead to sex. It’s a drug-driven default setting, repeating the same moves over and over again.

  “You think they are always like this?” Lucy asks.

  “I guess they are not on GHB all the time, no.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “It’s a bad movie.”

  “Poor Abel.”

  “The monster in his bed…”

  “And living here all year round…”

  “They’ve got a karaoke machine!” I say, pointing at the box next to the sofa.

  “Cool. Let’s sing!”

  Lucy sounds very excited, as if her dream for New Year was to perform karaoke songs to a zonked-out shower of faintly sinister stoners.

  We turn off the music coming out of the stereo and start singing our lungs out.

  Lucy and I are both far from talented, and our voices are not enriched by the amplification of a cheap karaoke set. The faces of some of the people lying around express physical pain when our singing fills the room, but they are bereft of the ability to move. It’s incredibly loud.

  “It’s good to have such a grateful audience,” I say to Lucy.

  “Yes, it’s fantastic.”

  Abel joins us. It turns out that he too wouldn’t survive ten seconds at a provincial audition for Britain’s Got Talent. Does he want to participate in the party or take his musical revenge?

  We sing till sunrise. We feel like we belong here as much as anywhere in the real
world…

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_26

  Chapter 26

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  I take the SDS-PAGE gel out of the gel chamber, patiently peel it off its glass plate, and lay it in a box with staining solution. In a few minutes the protein fingerprint becomes visible. The big spot of overexpressed protein I am looking for is clearly missing – not a trace of it. I press my lips together and sigh. Just another failed experiment. How much easier and more satisfying it was as an undergraduate to do science, where the practical classes were designed for easy success. We got a manual and just followed the experimental procedure; only people who could not read would fail to yield yoghurt from milk or isolate that one single bug from the university pond. The experiments got more challenging during my master’s, but still I was jumping onto running projects, or I was working in industry labs with unlimited funding. This is different, the almost daily pay-offs are long gone; for months I make no progress. Despite sharing a lab with other people, my research is in complete isolation and it makes me feel stupid. How could I possibly design experiments leading to significant discoveries with limited lab funds and equipment? And who is there to help? Where is the brain pool, the people who passed through the muddling stage and could actively help me with the design and interpretation of failed experiments? Obviously I would like to discuss them with my supervisor but that is a no-no. The moment we touch upon something he doesn’t know well, or tricky problems are even hinted at, he lets rip with random insults, as if afflicted with the protein chemist’s version of Tourette’s Syndrome.

  I take the pellets of E.coli cells I collected yesterday out of the freezer and throw them in the large yellow bio-waste bin, like throwing yet another week of my life away…