‘You seemed to want to think about stuff. You weren’t just going through the motions.’
‘I think I’ve spent my entire life going through the motions.’
He turns around in the window seat and plants both bare feet on the desk. He shrugs, inviting an explanation. Come here, I want to say. And I’ll explain.
‘It’s a sham, James. I’ve got to fly to Florida tomorrow for an international conference. I have to stand there in front of my poster and pretend to care what ninety-nine mice do when you fuck up a gene which controls the production of amyloid precursor.’
‘I thought you were going to find a cure for Alzheimer’s...’
‘Oh yeah. We’re going to learn a lot about human dementia from studying an animal that’s been genetically tampered with so much it has to be taught how to feed.’
He finally gets around to handing me the spliff, and I suck on it like a builder.
‘So mice aren’t a good model of human dementia?’
‘Of course they’re not. The mouse brain is separated from the human one by about a hundred million years. It’s like trying to get around Pelton with a map of Fulling.’
‘You should have come on our demo. That’s what we were saying. The myth of the mouse model. It’s like the myth of the macaque model. The chimp model.’
‘I don’t know what I should have done. Right now, I don’t know anything.’
I’m such a cliché. One look from him and whatever illusion of self-belief I still hold scatters into thin air.
‘Will Mateus be there?’
‘In Florida? I don’t know.’
‘You say he used to work on these human–machine interfaces. Maybe he’ll know something about Sansom’s special electrodes. At least if you go to Florida you can talk to him and find out more. That’s our best chance of finding Gareth.’
I feel the agony of the thought, in every part of me.
‘Alternatively, don’t go to Florida. Stay here. Join the team. We need someone who knows what they’re talking about. I don’t know one end of a mouse from the other.’
‘That would mean making a decision, James. I don’t do decisions. I just take in information and produce a response. I’ve sleepwalked through my whole life and I can’t see myself stopping now.’
It’s over. I’ve said too much. I’m standing up, putting on my coat, looking for my gloves, looking for something I can’t find.
‘Stay,’ he says. ‘Don’t go.’
I look at him sadly. ‘I was never even here.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Pereira Effect
◉
I fly to Florida with my head full of James. Along with everything else he’s done to me, he’s made me feel differently about the prospect of seeing Mateus again. I knew I was going to have to do it—go to the convention in Tampa and lay myself open—but I don’t feel it can hurt me as much as it would once have done. James might be a sworn enemy of what I do for a living, but he is on my side. I can’t help but be infected by his certainty, his confidence that the world has been put together in a particular way. His boyish contradictions are part of the appeal. If there’s a reason to be wary of them, I’m blind to it for now.
He’s right about one thing. Talking to Mateus has to be our best chance of finding Gareth. If he can let us into the secret of what Sansom are up to in the mines, we might be able to understand what Gareth is trying to do. I need that information, but I also need to understand what Gareth was trying to tell me. Perhaps talking to Mateus will jog my memory as well as jumpstarting my heart. The grand scheme to stimulate the Lorenzo Circuit, using Sansom’s new electrodes to talk directly to the nervous system. If I could work that out, I could go back to James with a plan.
At the immigration desk I get the international terrorist treatment. They’ve stood me on a duct-taped cross on the floor and made me gaze into their camera, and now they’re trying to tell me that my retinas are identical. Left and right, mirror images. It’s a biological impossibility. The genius from US Immigration is just about to whisk me into a side-room for further interrogation when the bug fixes itself and the display recomputes my security risk as zero. America is safe. ‘Purpose in visiting the US,’ he inquires, disappointment smarting in his inhumanly blue eyes. ‘Academic conference,’ I reply. ‘As in Section 3.17.’ I point to my immigration document, where it’s all down in black and white. I ought to be terrified of these guys. They do nothing all day except make towelette-fragrant travellers gaze into a convex mirror while a laser plays over their optic nerves. They don’t even use ink stamps any more. No way at all to get out that aggression.
At the baggage reclaim I catch sight of Simon Weatherall, an old face from my postgrad days at Warwick. He’s surprised that I’ve been on the same flight all this time. He kisses me, awkwardly trying to grasp my shoulders and hold me still, and suggests we share a cab to the hotel. I can trust him not to talk about science all the way so I say yes. He’s sallow and nervous, the redness of his hair leaking into his face, his freckled complexion ravaged by a lab rat’s diet. No doubts about that grin, though. The next four days are about nothing but pleasure for Simon. Everyone knows about his conference flings, his late-night movements along hotel corridors, at play in the fields of neuroscience women. They don’t mind his bad skin and his faltering conversation; they don’t find it sad that he’s got his extra-marital excitement compartmentalised like his PowerPoint presentations and business cards. The neuroscience women have their own pressure valves and tacit understandings. They’re doing it too.
America. When I was a kid and it only existed on TV, I thought it was made of a different substance to the world I knew, each granule somehow minutely hallmarked with Americanness, microscopically starred and striped. Now it’s just bigger, wider, shinier, an upgrade you can barely afford, and it runs so quiet I can hardly hear it coming — it creeps up on me from behind the doors of mega-chain hotel rooms, through the ventilation ducts of air-conditioned conference halls, and its otherness does nothing but weary me, make me think I should be working. We whoosh out of Tampa International in a tinted-windowed people-mover, Simon beside me clutching his laptop and gazing out at the unpeeling landscape of palm trees and flimsy wooden homes, and then the traffic on the freeway slows to a halt and our driver, a politely humourless Latino, actually starts talking. A car is on fire just up ahead. He’s heard it on his radio. We join the queue and crawl past, gawping at this urban prodigy of white steel, smoke and flame. I’m deaf from the flight and dazzled by the Florida sunshine, but still I’m hypnotised, compelled by the vision of the blazing car. Even America blows up sometimes, it says; even the dream is flammable. ‘First time in Florida?’ our driver asks, as the mirrored towers of downtown wheel into view. We both shout yes and he grins, our best friend in America, proud that he himself is taxiing us into this gleaming, blue-skied world.
The convention centre and conference hotel are the last stops before the waterfront. MARRIOTT WATERSIDE WELCOMES THE XXXIIND BIENNIAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH IN BEHAVIOURAL NEUROSCIENCE. Those Roman numerals kill me. Simon pays the driver and presses a tip into his hand with a blundered handshake. Our best friend in America re-evaluates his worth. Inside, Reception is carved from marble. I’m on the XIVth floor. I resist the advances of a bellboy and haul my flightcase over to the lift, which servoes me up through the floors at a speed that makes the Roman numerals blur. I’m probably being scanned for tumours at the same time. I’m expelled onto logo’d carpet and directed by neat arrows to Room 1411. I love these American hotel rooms. The way they light up when you slot your keycard into the holster and an electronic voice welcomes you by your first name. The bathrooms are the best. You sit there and stare at the still life of the sink top, the millimetre-perfect arrangement of conditioner and shower gel, the pyramidal sculptures of white face-flannels. I want to hug the poor Latina woman who did all this. She’s given me four tiny glasses for water, individually wrapped in polythene fo
r the comfort and hygiene of each of my guests. It’s all mine, for the next seventy-two hours.
I strip off and lie back on the bed until we’re both as cool and neat as stationery. The air-con exfoliates my skin. I could unflap that fake mahogany box and watch five channels of weather or porn, but for the moment I want silence, time to savour the dull tug of my jetlag. A dead red LED on the console tells me that no messages are waiting. No one is paging Dr Churcher, no one wants to know if I’ve arrived yet. The air-con makes it sounds as though it’s raining outside, but the Florida sky is clear and blue. A sprinkler crouches above my head like an ornate robot spider that’s crawled through the skin of the room from another world. I unzip my flightcase and pull out a dog-eared journal article and a Portuguese dictionary. If I’m going to do this, I need to be sure of my facts. This is all I have on him. I just need to make sure I spend it wisely.
If I want to know if Mateus is here, I’m going to have to go and register. According to the events screen in the foyer, the desk has been open since early this morning. In my delegate’s pack there’ll be an up-to-date attendance list. He wasn’t on the draft programme, but he might have got his proposal in late. All I have to do is go across to the convention centre and queue up for my pack, and then find a quiet place to go through it. I wouldn’t want an audience if I had to read his name.
I’ve searched for him, obviously. For a year I was going on to Web of Science twice a day, to see if the latest update showed his name on any new publications. The fact that it didn’t was my strongest proof that he was dead: Mateus would never have allowed this much of a gap in his CV. I tried all the general search engines. I couldn’t work out how to stop my new browser remembering the search details, so every time I typed in an M it came up with his name. Mouse, memory, Morris water maze: they all turned into Mateus. At last I found something. A paper had come out in Neuron, with M. Pereira as fourth author. It was something on anomalous conductivity in a titanium–neurone interface, another potentially momentous application of the Pereira Effect. His affiliation was still down as Sansom Europe, which meant it was old stuff, research he must have done when we were still together. I scrolled down to the end of the paper, where they give current contact details. Only the first author was listed. I checked the Acknowledgements. Thanks to Yvonne Churcher for all her support, encouragement, love, great sex while this paper was in preparation. Nothing, actually. If Mateus was still in academia, his new work had not yet shown up in print. The thought that he might have lost his inspiration when he left my bed set my heart sparkling with guilty thrills.
I have to spell my name out for the woman at Registration. She trots over to the back of the booth and comes back with a monogrammed canvas bag. I can’t wait. People are queueing around me, sidestepping. The attendance book is green, sick with anxiety. A, D, M, P. Paddy, Panic, Petrified, Pereira. Mateus Pereira. He’s here.
Simon’s got a paper into Nature. He came all this way with me in a taxi and he didn’t say a word. This is like saying, I’m so unfazed by getting an article into the leading scientific journal that I’m actually going to neglect to tell you, even though we’re sitting together on a gridlocked freeway and we’ve completely run out of things to say. I’m being told this by an irrepressible blonde from Bundaberg. I can’t remember where I’ve met her before, but I know she’s called Alyssa because her name badge tells me so. Usually you hear news like Simon’s and you go straight back to spend an hour at your laptop, too drunk to do anything useful, probably, but still fired up with blurry possibilities. Tonight, it just feels like further proof of my failure. Alyssa asks me about my research and I lie and say it’s going OK. The Grand Ballroom of the Tampa Marriott Waterside is athrob with rumours, greetings, important news, all of which are conspiring to make me feel small. People mill past, glance at my name badge and hurry on. I feel like a bargain basement offer, condemned to a thousand iterations of conference indifference, of being picked up, examined briefly under chandelier light, and then dropped, world without end. I can see Simon over by a publisher’s stand, already smooth-talking a post-doc from Yale. I don’t imagine they’re discussing the impact factor of Nature, either. I’m trying to scan the room while still listening to Alyssa, which unfortunately means not looking at her. She’ll drift away eventually and hate me for ever, but I need to know which of these eight thousand delegates is Mateus Pereira, once of Portugal, probably of somewhere else by now. Simon comes over and asks us if we want to come out to dinner with a big bunch of them, and I can see that the girl from Yale is invited because he’s got her cellphone number written on his hand.
‘Can’t,’ I say, with a genuine yawn. ‘I’ve got to conserve my energy.’
He winks. ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’
‘I’ll tell you, once I’ve found him.’
‘Well, take your pick. There are eight thousand hot neuroscientists here.’
I smile. ‘That’s just going to make him harder to find.’
I dream of Sansom. Chimps are being unloaded from cattle-trucks at the light railway depot and herded into the mine-shaft, where an elevator takes them down. Mateus leads me underground. Carbide lamps make everything the colour of video. Behind one glass-panelled door a chimp is undergoing surgery. Its scalp gleams white with analgesic cream. ‘These experiments are being done for the benefit of mankind,’ Mateus is telling me. ‘I don’t need to tell you the attractions of that argument.’
I wake up in a buzz of sleepy certainty, because I know I am close. Somewhere on one of these twenty-one floors, Mateus Pereira is looking out on the same untroubled dawn.
It’s true: I needed an early night. I have to be up at six to get my poster up by 7:45. American conferences don’t schedule sleep. But jetlag has kept me awake since four, watching CNN and the build of traffic on the freeway. At six a computer named Sally telephones me and invites me to enjoy my day. I’m reaching for a tissue in the bathroom when the metal dispenser falls out and bangs me hard on the toe. America is attacking me. The shower is so powerful that I come out expecting to see hail-damage on my skin.
There’s no sign of him at breakfast, nor at the queue for velcro tags in the poster hall. I stand in the thousand-voice roar and watch the crowds file past, glancing at the banner of my poster and then down at my name badge and then, occasionally, at me. A conference is supposed to be about talking, but with eight thousand delegates the real communication is visual: the skimming of name badges and poster abstracts, the placing of business cards to request offprints. By nine o’clock I’ve made eye contact with precisely three people and actually spoken to two. A few more have glanced at my title banner, looked puzzled, and then excused themselves by leaving a card or a mailing address label. They’ll never read what I send them. They’re just marking out their territory, the eager puppies of the scientific frontier, showing the big wide world where they’ve been.
A guy called William T. Daniell comes up to me. His name badge says he’s from Wayne State. I’ve never heard of him, but he’s heard of me. He’s surprised to see me doing this stuff. It seems he’s been doing the same thing for a couple of years now, but using a rat model instead of my less satisfactory mouse one. I ask him how he has managed to breed transgenic rats to show signs of behavioural inflexibility when several groups around the world have already tried and failed, and he refers me to his recent paper on the subject. Even in my own field there’s stuff I haven’t managed to keep up with. The hall is resonating like a hellish cocktail party. Huge grey serpents hang from the roof, processing the air. I look at William T. Daniell’s pewterish hair and hothouse complexion and realise that he has been sent here from my future to scare me away. He proves that there is a hell specifically for academics, that you can spend your whole life banging away at a problem and there can be people on the other side, banging away at the same rock, whom you’ve never even seen. It shouldn’t surprise me: we’re looking at big problems, big rocks. I’m just not sure I want to be banging any more.
> A collaborator from Ohio State drops by, wanting to talk about the paper we’ve been writing together. Doug is in his element, scanning the whole bright hall and keeping track of who’s who, who’s coming, who’s been. There are diamonds of sweat in his fastidious goatee. He says he’s forwarded me the reviewers’ reports from some journal we apparently sent our paper to, but I don’t remember seeing them. I can’t tell him that I haven’t been back to my lab in two weeks. I feel like my career is over and I missed the announcement. I’ve let him down. I’ve let everyone down.
‘That’s Mapsy Panij,’ he says. ‘I’ve cited her three times this year and the bitch still hasn’t returned the favour.’
What am I doing here?
‘Alyssa says she saw Remko Kamlic,’ he continues, staring at my name badge as though even he needed reminding of who I am. ‘He’s on his way down here.’
‘Kamlic,’ I say. ‘Great.’
‘It certainly is great. The genius of animal learning theory is gonna see your poster, Yvonne.’
‘No, he’s not.’
Surprise, or this industrial lighting, gives his face a sickly gleam. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m taking it down.’
The title banner comes away quite easily.
‘Are you crazy?’
The laminated paper coils like a spring. It doesn’t want to be here any more than I do.
‘What’s the point? No one’s looking at it. It’s an unimaginative answer to an impossible question.’
‘Remko Kamlic is going to look at it. He’s going to dig your funky transgenics shit.’
‘Then he’s as stupid as the rest of them.’ I’ve got the velcro off the bottom now. ‘There’s more to life than the neuroscience of spatial memory.’
‘But not much more. C’mon, Yvonne, people’s careers are made at this convention. People get tenure from sucking cock with these guys.’
A Box of Birds Page 13