You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  “You probably do.”

  I open the fridge and take out an opened bottle of fruity white wine that has been sitting in there for a week. “It is really bad wine, so your story better be good.”

  “Is a Russian causing an explosion in a hotel in Japan during the G8 Summit a good story?”

  “You caused an explosion? You? An explosion?…”

  “Yes.”

  I sit opposite, leaning my elbows on the kitchen table, staring at him with wide open eyes – anyone else and I would think this is nonsense or exaggeration. But not with Vlad. He looks back at me, blankly.

  “Tell me!”

  “Well, you know that I often go on trips.”

  “I am aware you suck all funding pots dry.”

  He sighs: “If they are stupid enough to grant it to me…”

  “Just tell me about the explosion.”

  “So, yes, I get all those samples from beaches and sometimes I need to take samples to places as well. I transport them in dry ice, you know, in one of those huge Styrofoam containers. It takes a lot of space in my bag and that started to annoy me; I could never bring nice souvenirs, for Tatjana and Lucia.”

  “Recent targets from the Internet?”

  “Yes. So, during my last trips, I decided to bring a travel mug instead and hope for the best, that it would all arrive still frozen. It worked, but not super good.”

  “Like… they arrived at room temperature?”

  “Yeah, something like that. So this time, I decided to buy a high quality travel mug – a very nice Japanese one. I filled it to the top with dry ice and my samples. I travelled with my coffee mug from the lab I visited in Osaka, which took a few hours. Late in the evening I booked into a hotel, placed the mug in the minibar fridge to keep it as cold as possible and went to bed. The next thing I can remember is a big bang, a fridge door flying over my head into the wall and other random pieces of god knows what flying around. It was so loud and such a mess! I was scared… really scared! I had no clue what was going on until I saw the coffee mug stuck in the plaster in the corner of the room. I tried to pull it out, but it was impossible. I tried to find the samples, but that was also hopeless in the dark. Then the next thing that came to my mind was I am a Russian building a bomb in Japan during the G8 summit in a hotel where I checked in under the false name. That will be a few nights of prison!”

  “You checked in under a false name?”

  “I know; sounds strange.”

  “Not at all, why would anyone use their real name – so boring!”

  I take a large sip of the horrible wine.

  “Yeah, that was pure coincidence. I paid the hotel in cash at arrival, so they did not need to see my passport. I just wrote something… Anyhow, I decided to run because the whole hotel would be looking for what was going on. I took my bag and hurried nine floors down. Nonchalantly I walked out of the hotel and continued walking until I managed to stop a taxi. He drove me to the airport, where I waited seven hours for my flight to take off. I was so afraid the Japanese police would come to fetch me. Paranoid!”

  There is a moment of silence in the room. Vlad sips from his tea, I drink my wine.

  “The explosion could have happened on the plane!” I state.

  “Yup. Scary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “I didn’t sign a confidentiality agreement, did I?”

  “Please.”

  “No worries. Take the mouse to the graveyard and I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I am not bringing that mouse to the graveyard! All I can offer is to throw it out of the window.”

  “No! Leave it. I would love to tell people though. It’s a good story.”

  “You can tell my sweetheart, Lucy. Maybe she marries me thereafter.”

  “Oh yes, definitely. A done deal, I’d say…”

  He looks sad in exactly the same childish way as Mr. Bean looks sad. “What will you tell your boss?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What if he asks about the samples?”

  “He won’t. He is too busy teaching Benjamin, the chubby Chinese noodle chap, to write his name. And the research doesn’t matter to him – of course.”

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_29

  Chapter 29

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  Frantically, Barry looks at the list of telephone numbers hanging on the wall next to the office door. It hasn’t been updated properly for years. I scribbled my number at the bottom and Logan wrote vertically along the side, and so on. Barry isn’t in the lab much lately, but when he is here, a student is invariably hanging on his tail. He is burdened, by Mark, with one student after another, and sometimes several at once. Today he is alone, looking for one of his student’s phone number. “You’ve got an hour free?” I joke.

  Before his reply, Barry quickly scans to see if his lord and master is around, but Babette is absent.

  “Yes, finally. I can’t wait till term finishes and I can focus on my own work for a bit,” he says, clearly uncomfortable about talking to me; possibly an act of treason under Babette’s rule of terror.

  “I wouldn’t look forward to it too much. Mark told me this morning that there will be a German student coming for a summer internship. He didn’t say who’d supervise him, but it might be you.”

  Barry shakes his head and slaps the table. “Fuck!” Wow, that looks very unnatural, Barry just ain’t dude-ish enough to let loose with attitude…

  He recovers from his gesture, looking like he might have scared himself a bit with it. “You’ve got Gamon’s phone number, per chance?” he asks.

  His teeth chatter. His panic is sincere. Oily-looking sweat is visible on his cheek bones. He knows the answer to his question. He is clutching at desperate hope. And all for a student’s phone number?

  “No, sorry. What do you need it for?”

  Barry stares out of the window in the direction of the empty parking lot. It is a lonely view with just a few trees blossoming at this time of the year.

  Barry moves his eyes from the parking lot to my face, biting his tongue before he replies: “He is giving a presentation about his work at midday.”

  “Oh. What work?”

  “That’s what I wonder as well,” says Barry, somewhat tightly. “And that’s why I would like to see his presentation beforehand.”

  I refrain from asking any further questions, for fear of falling into the same argument we had before about Gamon. He is an overseas student who, for six months now, is supposed to be working full-time on a research project in our lab, in order to complete his master’s degree. He introduced himself to Mark and visited the lab the week before he was supposed to start. He didn’t show up on his first day, or his second or third… After three weeks, Mark announced that Gamon had sent a message saying he would finally be starting, the next day. The reason he had not shown up thus far was that unfortunately he had been unable to find our lab. Mark laughed it away, in a rather forced style. He did not announce any sanctions for this blatant lie coupled with incompetence.

  I had made an off-hand joke about it, “He couldn’t find the lab he had been to the week before? He is either demented or as vital and motivated as the decaying corpse of a long-dead sloth…”

  “The decaying corpse of a long-dead sloth?” Logan had repeated my words in disbelief, resting his head on his hand.

  “Just saying: Whatever it is, he doesn’t seem suitable for a master’s.”

  “He is a paying customer,” said Mark, dry and business-like.

  “He’s not a customer, he is a student!” I blurted.

  It bores me having to treat undergraduate students like precious princes and princesses. Some seem to be allowed to do whatever they want, including showing up
for practical classes only when the mood takes them. I have often had to stay in the teaching lab after hours – sometimes for hours – just because students “rock up” late. Really weirdly, their exams are not their responsibility; it is, apparently, our problem if they don’t pass. We have to make them pass no matter if they are good and motivated, or completely hopeless oinks. Alas, some of them are good at one thing – filing complaints, or at least threatening to do so, at which time we run after the deceitful little brats like fawning office juniors.

  For some it seems that if they enrol at the University of Edinburgh, they have completed the only vital part of the course already – job done, time to party. The degree will be yours unless you refrain from “rocking up” at the graduation ceremony. Actually, even then you will get your certificate by post. I do not think this is unique to Edinburgh; I fear it is the way much of paid-for academia is going – down the plughole with my ex-student’s vomit. It is sad. And it is down to money-grubbing of course. The students who get away without studying are overseas students paying for their course. Kicking them out after a year or two – and there are some who should cheerfully be kicked out after a week or two – means the university would forego another year or two of hefty tuition fees from their rich foreign parents.

  “Gamon is coming to our lab, Karin, starting tomorrow,” Mark had insisted.

  “It will be a disaster.”

  Mark leaned forward on the table, into confrontational mode. “Students from abroad pay very high tuition fees, they keep the university running. We need them and they want to go home with a degree…”

  In all fairness to Mark, his tone clearly stated; “Get off my back. I know it’s a pile of immoral, greedy crap whereby lazy, thick, rich brats get awarded degrees they don’t deserve in a month of Sundays. But I can’t do anything about it. And neither can you!”

  Barry didn’t object when he was told he would be supervising Gamon. Barry never objects to anything. Now six months have passed, or rather five months and one week because Gamon never had to make up for the three weeks he spent searching for the lab. Since that three-week struggle to find a room any fool could find, Gamon has graced us with his presence roughly once a month. At one point, I suspected he came into the lab at night. When I would leave last, late in the evening, and then be there first in the next morning, I occasionally got the feeling someone had been here, in between times. An ice bucket standing somewhere I could not remember leaving it, a light left on, or a window open… I could never truly say for sure that someone had been in, because the mess in the lab is hard to keep tabs on. But I’m not the only one who had the impression that our lab was being used in the small hours. Lucy and Logan had also remarked on it. And we all wondered if it could be Gamon fiddling around. In his country the clock runs nine hours ahead so maybe he never adapted to the “local” time, we speculated. It is a spooky thought, sending faint chills down my spine; not only because there is someone working alone in a chemistry department in the deepest night, but also because he is a student who does not have a clue what he’s doing with tricky chemicals.

  Barry leaves the office, looking desperate. “Good luck!” I say.

  As soon as I hear the lab door fall close I ring Lucy, “Where are you?”

  “Glasgow. I told you yesterday. Mark insisted. It’s to work on 3D pictures of my proteins.”

  A short silence; I’m disappointed she is not here.

  “Why?”

  “No one is here today, no people in the office. It’s a bit boring.”

  Almost nine months after their stipends ran out, Hanna, Quinn and Erico had left Lab 262. If there wasn’t a university rule stipulating that students must submit their thesis within four years of their starting date, I guess Mark would not have let them go. I recently learned that – thankfully – the School of Chemistry is hitting its staff hard for crossing the four year line. What “hitting hard” exactly means is unclear to me, but in my imagination naughty supervisors get their bare buttocks publically whipped in the large lecture theatre (I know that’s a long shot). But whatever it is they do, it caps the phase of unpaid slavery at twelve months; a protective measure many PhDs around the world don’t have.

  Without Hanna, Quinn and Erico, it is quiet in the lab. There is just Logan, Lucy, myself and the project students. At the start of this academic year, Mark did not take any new PhD students up. I know not why, but assume either money or moodiness got in the way. Had Linn, an undergraduate, not announced she would like to stay on for a PhD, we would not have had any new blood in the upcoming year either.

  The lab is dead today. I love seeing Lucy any time but today I arrange evening drinks with her simply for the sake of human contact with anyone.

  The timer beeps on the desk in front of me. It is time for the next experimental step. I head to the lab and sit on an empty bench. There is a tray in front of me with Eppendorfs numbered 0-23. I open the lids and pipet a few microlitres of Coomasie Blue solution into each of them. Four hours and a lonely lunch later, Barry comes in. “Did Gamon show up for his presentation?” I ask.

  “He did.”

  Barry sounds relieved.

  “How was it?”

  “Strangely enough it was excellent. He got very good results. Very clean gels, he purified a difficult protein, and he presented it well.”

  I can feel my eyes widening while he is talking.

  “That can’t be!”

  “Well, apparently so.” You don’t actually trust this, right?

  “That can’t be!” I repeat.

  “He must have done it during the night.”

  “Seriously, Barry, IT CAN’T BE! An undergraduate cannot purify a protein during the night without help. And no one ever showed him what to do. I just don’t believe it.”

  Barry shrugs his shoulders.

  “It doesn’t matter, he’s finished now. Back to Thailand.”

  “With his undeserved master’s degree…”

  Barry walks to the fridge, digs through a few boxes and takes some samples out. He holds them against the light.

  “This should contain the protein Gamon purified,” he says.

  He takes a microlitre out of one tube to quantify it in our newest piece of equipment – bought from Barry’s grant – the nanodrop. He presses a few buttons and looks at the display. His smile is bitter.

  “It’s water, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  The late evening sun is projecting shadows of fluttering leaves on the wall of the lab, in exactly the same patterns as it did last year of course, but it’s no less gorgeous for that. Lucy finally arrives, two hours later than she expected.

  We walk over to KB House where lots of undergrads, PhDs, lecturers and professors are celebrating graduations and the end of the academic year. For me, another PhD year has passed and I am determined that no matter what happens, I will stay no more than one more year in the lab. Then the practical part is over and done, and hallelujah, I will write my thesis.

  This is an ambitious plan given that the research results garnered thus far are, to put it as politely as possible, a bit crap. The entire last year has yielded nothing beyond a very short paper based on the results of my first year. Reading that paper, a reader might reasonably think it had just been a little side project, with sweet results of a smoothly ran antibiotic assay on superbugs; worth publishing purely as an end in itself, a minor point of interest for the super-diligent student. That would be to disregard all the hours, days, weeks and months I have spent desperately trying to prove a hypothesis about why some bacterial strains are susceptible to the antibiotic and some are not. It doesn’t reveal how I have been drifting from one disastrous experiment to the next or how often I have banged my head on the table out of desperation; or how many bottles of wine I downed on the window sill with Lucy or alone to just escape the reality. Scientific articles show success, not failure. In a way that’s all good with me – that’s science, that’s endeavour and that’s why the
breakthroughs are so rare and beautiful. However, I also know now that in this lab, with this supervisor, I don’t have a chance of success.

  The thought of leaving the University of Edinburgh to re-start my PhD elsewhere crosses my mind regularly, but I know it is fantasy. Leaving and failing is not an option. I have lived into hope too long. The investment has been too big – time, money, time, relationships, time, and wine – I want a doctor title in return. Plus, I like Scotland. I like Edinburgh.

  My relationship with Mark has neither significantly improved nor worsened – it’s been flat-lining along in desultory style. He stopped helicoptering me and adopted an extreme form of “free-range supervising,” meaning that most days I don’t exist for him, or at least am no more significant than a budgerigar’s daydream.

  It’s been fine. More and more, Mark has been sucked into an obsession with the KBL project, existing in a troika with Babette and Barry, and taking little or no interest in the rest of his postgrads. In the past, to vent steam, stress and frustration, he shouted mostly at the senior PhD students; Hanna, Quinn or, very occasionally, Erico. But now that they are gone and I am the next inmate in line, I know it is just a matter of time before I get placed in the pillory.

  I order myself and Lucy a large glass of wine and an alcohol-based warmth soon infuses my biological body. Methinks I’ve been conducting this experiment too much of late but, hey-ho, it stops me fretting about being pilloried throughout the coming year.

  Part IV: Year 3

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_30

  Chapter 30

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com