“Yep, with Lucy.”
“How much did you have?” He smiles slightly.
“Oh I don’t know. Isn’t that a bit of a guy thing to count them, so you can bore all your friends with numbers later?”
“Beers?”
“Yes, dude. You know Lucy and I can’t afford spirits or cocktails or whatever bullshit mankind came up with. We are not as posh as you, my dear.”
Logan laughs. It has become a running gag to place Logan in the posh box after finding out that he was receiving a slightly higher salary from his industry funding body than the academic survival package the other PhD students in Lab 262 receive.
I walk to the lab, Logan following behind me, and get into my lab coat. “How about some music?” I ask.
“Sure. As long as it isn’t radio and I have to listen to the same news bulletin repeatedly.”
“Some people in the lab might benefit from a bit of news,” I say, presuming that Logan would understand the remark.
Very recently Barry had announced to Mark that he would be buying a house nearby, with Babette. I had overheard the conversation and the information had baffled me. I have such a powerful aversion to both Babette and Barry that I don’t understand why they do not have an aversion to each other. Then again some people also think a pit bull in the house is fun. A few wild cards out there, not overly concerned about losing fingers, are crazy enough to try taming honey badgers. So, why not Babette or Barry on your sofa?
“Is it a good idea to buy a house now?” I asked Barry as soon as Mark left the lab.
“Why would it not be?” he replied from the other side of the bench, scanning warily for Babette.
“Did you hear that the housing market is collapsing? And it might take years to recover, cheap to buy maybe but perhaps a poor investment too…”
Barry looked at me blankly.
“Economic crisis?” I tried, but still it did not seem to ring a bell.
“You do know that the economy is in tatters throughout Europe, right?” I asked this carefully while the eyes of the project student behind him slowly widened in disbelief.
“No,” Barry replied, clearly being serious. Barry doesn’t joke.
“WHAT!!?? Where the fuck have you been these past three years?”
“I don’t read news.” You are a doctor!!?? Who gave you your degree? The project student’s eyes widened even more and silently he started to mumble “what?”
“You don’t even need to read it! It’s on the front page of every newspaper. It’s all over the web, it’s everywhere! The biggest economic crisis since the 1920s!” I might have added that this helped trigger the Second World War, but refrained from it as I didn’t feel like explaining what a World War is.
“As I said, I don’t read the news, not even headlines. It makes me depressed.” You are already depressed; what news could be more depressing than Babette in your bed?
“Well, news is not like a humorous fairy-tale with a happy end every time, indeed… But you absorb it anyway, even just via comedians, no?”
“I don’t like comedy.” Of course. Silly me.
“What about Babette?”
“She also doesn’t read news. It upsets her.” People saying hello infuriate her. I’d love to see her react to a global crisis.
“In that case it might be the right time for you to buy a house,” I conclude as if there is logic in my complete non sequitur. Maybe the economy will actually benefit from clueless morons spending cash…
Barry walked off. They bought the house, which is their business and good luck to them. However, they subsequently did something truly shocking: they invited all Lab 262 inmates for a housewarming lunch. It is a perfectly tortuous prospect, especially since lunch is traditionally when we get away from the hideous dynamic of our cell – we need that respite to get through the day. This isn’t friendly overtures, this is capricious stupidity. Pleasant relations between us and the KBL gang are long dead in the water, sunk without trace, dissolved in dank ocean depths; the mere idea of trying to dredge up bonhomie is excruciating…
I search through the stack of CDs lying next to the stereo. Felix had given me a few old ones from the large CD collection in the Homer lab.
“Radiohead? ”
“If it has to be.”
I place a glass with water under the flame and await it boiling before placing my samples in it.
“Looking forward to the lunch?” Logan asks in a sarcastic tone.
“Aren’t we all?…”
Logan grins. Thom Yorke is singing Creep in the background. “Feels a bit like a Little Red Riding Hood experience… not knowing if the wolf will eat us,” I add.
The door of the lab opens quickly and the jingle of the keychain confirms my worst fear: Mark. Quickly I take my samples out of the boiling water so I can leave the lab. With only Logan and me left in the lab I know my chances of escape are low, but it’s worth a shot. Mark moans, turns off the stereo and indicates I am to stop, just as I open the door. I sigh inwardly and let the door fall closed. I try to force a smile, I really do, but I know damn well that tension will be clearly visible in my unreal expression.
“You won the prize Karin, well done!” Mark says, happily.
I’m thrown. Is he being genuine? Dare I believe he is happy with me? I don’t know about any prize…
“Which prize?” I ask resting my hands in the back pockets of my jeans.
“The best grant proposal award. You came first amongst fifteen.”
Now he sounds annoyed, so it’s real. He is annoyed I did not instantly know what he was talking about.
“Really?” I ask, excitedly.
“Yes. You won the flight to go to Toronto. You need to ask James to pay the conference fee for you.” Of course, you don’t have a penny left.
“Cool!” I say happily.
“Brian is going as well, so you can travel together.” Right…
When he leaves I sing more than speak, “Canada, here I come.”
It is not that I am particularly interested in the conference, though of course I might meet some good people, but whether I do or not, I am flying away from Lab 262 for a few days – I’m on cloud nine already…
I walk downstairs to tell Felix the exciting news and score myself a coffee. I enter the cubicle where Elizabeth is sitting, whistling her endlessly annoying tune. She holds a monkey hand puppet which normally sits next to her computer, letting it play with a few tomatoes on the desk. I suspect the tomatoes belong to William; he eats three tomatoes and exactly eight slices of rye bread for lunch – every day without fail.
“Good you’re here, flower, I need a coffee too,” Felix says.
“I get to go to Toronto,” I say excitedly and tell him about the competition I won.
“I’m jealous! Homer doesn’t let us go to conferences, unless we publish a world class paper first,” Felix says.
He knocks on the window to the lab to indicate to William, standing at his fume hood, that we need the water tank. William takes off his lab clothes and approaches us with a smile.
“Hi Ka,” he says friendly, but the moment he sees Elizabeth behind me playing with the puppet the smile leaves his face.
He walks towards her, rips the tomatoes out of her hands and throws them all in the bin. “Never ever touch my stuff again. Do you have a clue how dirty and contaminated this disgusting monkey is?” he shouts, pointing at Elizabeth.
“Sorry,” she says neutrally and continues to whistle the all-too-familiar tune from her remarkably limited repertoire.
William joins us for coffee in the small kitchen and I’m struck that I wanted to celebrate my good news with inmates of another lab rather than my own.
I head back upstairs to prepare buffers, which I need for experiments in the hospital this afternoon. At midday Mark storms in.
“We will walk together to their new house and will all be ready to leave in fifteen minutes,” says he, to Logan and me.
“Okay.”
He che
cks the empty office and walks back to the lab. “Where is Lucy?” he barks, looking at me.
“She is at home, writing her thesis,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he asks, implying I said something terribly wrong.
I wonder how I can elaborate on a self-evidently simple and comprehensible statement. “Eh, she is writing up her thesis,” I repeat, trying to sound much more secure than I feel.
“She is not ready yet!”
He is properly shouting. Yet he knows Lucy’s stipend ran out in summer, and he knows she is writing up her thesis. He knows fine and well she is not being paid to work in here – that is long understood.
“Um. She is actually moving into my living room this weekend, to save money,” I dare to say, hopefully getting the message across that Lucy’s life without a salary is tricky.
Mark sighs loudly – as if Lucy’s predicament was his inconvenience – and storms out.
During the lunch in Babette’s and Barry’s small house, decorated in the style of a recently deceased curmudgeon, I notice the seating arrangement; the same as for lab meetings. Mark, Barry and Babette talk about KBL. Linn, Logan and myself are designated figurants as usual. I regret that I came, Lucy had been right. What are we doing here?
Sad fact is: I didn’t dare to not show up. I pour Logan, Linn and myself a glass of wine from the bottles on the table. I take a few large sips, and Logan is in position to give me a re-fill before I see the bottom of my glass. I know that, with the alcohol in my body, my experiments in the hospital will have to wait till tomorrow, but I don’t care. All I care about is making the here and now bearable. The alcohol does its job. I dutifully listen to the incessant prattle of Mark in a house of people I loathe. I’m not really here, of course. My mind is far away, in a world where people just might take a polite interest if I dared to speak.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_35
Chapter 35
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
“I seriously don’t even know the names of the different types of glassware which chemists use,” I say to Logan, crossing the glass bridge to the new part of the chemistry building, to the teaching labs. Logan laughs. In the lab he has been mostly surrounded by females for the last one and a half years of his life. He has become accustomed to faint hysteria about stress.
“It’s just redox reactions you’re teaching. You’ll be fine.”
“That’s my problem, I might as well teach ballet. I don’t know anything about redox reactions!”
Logan laughs even louder. “You know more about them than the students know.”
During the previous two semesters I taught biological chemistry to first year students. Perhaps that went a little too well because this time I’ve been signed up, by Mark, to teach chemistry to second year students instead. Following my first year exam, I put in an effort to get to grips with chemistry but if this qualifies me as a teacher then God help the future of chemistry. I am, after all, a biologist. Rationally, I know I probably have nothing to worry about; undergrads don’t ask much. But even so, I fear some overly enthusiastic student could shoot me down in flames.
We manoeuver through the hallway, between groups of students sat on the floor. They are waiting for the class to start. As soon as I see them I feel less nervous. None of them looks terribly motivated and the course manuals are peacefully sitting in colourful backpacks – if indeed they are even here.
“Why did Mark sign me up for this?” I ask before entering the large, new teaching labs.
“To bully you.”
Logan is teaching at a bench near the front of the room and I am right at the back. The two ladies running the teaching labs give us a few more instructions before they open the large white doors and let the students in.
The students shuffle in slowly, as motivated as a herd being hounded to an abattoir. They search the lab quite leisurely, looking for the number on the bench which indicates where they are supposed to be taught. During the next few weeks they will circulate in groups of ten throughout the room, ensuring they partake in all the experiments. As PhD students in teaching roles, we will stay at the same bench running the same experiment every week for a full semester. Gratifying, it is not.
“What did they smoke?” whispers Rostek, a tall Polish guy, doing his PhD in the inorganic chemistry section.
“They probably had a party last night,” I say.
“Yes, too much vodka.”
It takes several minutes for the students to accomplish the apparently Herculean task of changing into lab coats and putting on safety specs. I explain in three sentences what we are going to do this afternoon and how long the experiment is supposed to take. Logan, who taught the experiment last semester, told me that my group should be finished first. That prospect pleases me enormously. As both the students and myself are keen to get this over as soon as possible, I encourage them to start pipetting the mixtures together straight away which, in fact, they do with commendable obedience.
While I wait till the students on my bench complete their work, I hear Rostek talking in an engaging manner about the experiments. Bursting with enthusiasm and passion, he writes chemical structures and experimental set-ups on the whiteboard as if there is nothing more interesting in this world. He is a born teacher, a born chemist. It is right and fitting that he is here. It is wrong and ill-fitting that I am here. I wish I could be as happy and passionate as Rostek, but this subject simply isn’t my bag…
My students are making quick progress, as Logan predicted, and no one comes up with the idea to ask me about the theory behind what they are doing. The first couples are packing up to leave within two hours of us starting. Just as the last two are finishing, one of the ladies running the lab appears at my bench with two more students. Their eyes are red and they walk as if they just stepped off a boat after a long voyage in stormy waters.
“These two gentlemen are in your group,” she announces.
“It’s too late now, we’re finished,” I say, sort of knowing I probably won’t get away with it; I will be penalised with an extra two hours of teaching, for this pair partying too hard to get to class on time. “Let them come back another time.”
“Tomorrow the groups are full,” she says, at length, as if presenting me with a problem I should care about.
“Maybe there is a spot free next year,” I say, knowing the pair will never be sent back a class.
The students stand there with eyes wide open. It is obvious they are accustomed to being treated as valued customers at the university, and have never come across such outrageously shoddy service before.
“I’m afraid they have to do it now,” says she, pointing at two empty seats on my bench before striding off. Learning that it is fine to behave like useless brats; that’s “ education ” in this charade…
I sigh and regard the students with much derision, but they don’t know or care. They change into lab coats slowly, like we have all the time in the world, and conduct the experiment. I’m sitting, waiting and looking around a bit. Rostek walks around very actively, answering all kinds of questions. There are two students standing at the fume hood, and Rostek decides they need help too. He takes the separating funnel filled with solvents out of one student’s hand and says: “You really have to shake it properly with two hands; not just swaying, like you just did.”
He holds the funnel at both ends and shakes it vigorously in all directions to mix the solvents. “Like this,” he adds, before handing the glassware back to the undergrad.
“But Rostek,” says the girl. “I only have one hand.”
My eyes and Rosteks’ eyes move down at the same time, me observing her from a more comfortable distance. The girl indeed only has one hand, the other arm stops just before her wrist. What on Earth…
Rostek st
ares at her in disbelief, not knowing what to say. I’m sure he is wondering how someone with only one hand can be sent to an organic chemistry lab class. He looks in my direction as if I might have a clue how to handle the situation. I shrug my shoulders and shake my head slightly. “What is happening to this world?” he says in a much stronger Eastern European accent than he used before. “That is quite dangerous,” he adds, after a few seconds of silence during which he took the funnel back out of her hand.
There are audible traces of shock in his voice and manner, “What are you doing in a chemistry lab?”
The girl looks crushed, but anger creeps into her expression. “Ever heard of equality laws?” she squeaks as if she has been properly offended.
“Equal rights is all good and fine, but a blind person can’t become a bus driver. And in my opinion someone with only one hand can’t go into a lab without help. Theoretical chemistry, yes, but enrolling for a strongly lab-based chemistry degree is not only endangering yourself but everyone around you. Did nobody tell you this is not a good idea?”
“No,” she says upset, but she sits back in her chair and awaits her study buddy finishing their experiment.
Around 5:00 p.m. all students, apart from mine, have finished. I am still sitting at the bench, with Loser One and Loser Two, when Mark walks in to fetch the attendance sheet. When he sees me sitting at the bench, he walks towards me. He is smiling in a jolly way, as he usually does when there are “outsiders” around. I haven’t seen him for over two weeks; I had been in Canada and then he had been at a conference in Turkey.
“Hi, how are things going?” he asks enthusiastically.
“Fine, those guys just decided to sleep in so we aren’t finished yet,” I say, pointing at Loser One and Loser Two.
“Hmmm, next time you come in time, will you? You are wasting the time of my PhD students.”
Mark speaks in a tone that brokers no objections. They nod and continue the experiment like two beaten dogs. Wow.
“How was the Toronto conference?”
You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 31