Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  Brigit pushes up from the chair and kicks it back under Henrik’s desk. She sighs, stretches. He can hear her bones realigning, the joints popping. “I just thought you might want to know.”

  “I don’t know if I feel better,” he says, and she puts her arms around him in a loose hug.

  “Hang in there, Wally,” she says. Katie passes the end of his bay swirling another large beaker, but seeing the two of them, she turns on her heel, pivots, and is gone.

  “Like I said,” Brigit says. “In a mood.”

  “She’s not the boss of me,” he says.

  “Maybe not. Maybe so.”

  Brigit backs out of his bay, waves. He salutes. He is alone again.

  It makes no sense for Dana to have ruined his stocks. They are on different projects, in part because of something that happened the last time they worked together. To help Dana learn the techniques of their lab, Simone had thought it would be a good idea if she worked with Wallace on a project that required the generation of various oligo strands of DNA. But Dana, who is a genetics student, felt that she should be the one in charge of designing the oligos, despite having little practical experience in the technique. Though Wallace had already designed at least two hundred successful oligos, Dana would not listen to him as he tried to describe his strategy for designing, his thoughts on optimal annealing temperatures, targets in the genomes, what was feasible to clone and knit together using enzymes, screening methods, competent cell lines. He tried maybe twenty different kinds of interventions, pressing on her stubbornness at different junctures in the process, but all of it rebounded on him. She did not want his assistance.

  Unsure what else to do, he went to Simone. At a point when they should have had, say, twenty oligos ready for injection, Dana had slowed their progress to the point where they had none. “Wallace,” Simone said, “maybe you should try a different tone. Are you being a little presumptuous?” And when he said no, she said, “Are you sure? Because Dana is bright, bright, bright. Don’t talk down to her.” When it came to the injections, Dana was clumsy and sloppy. She skewered the animals with the needle, which she could not load because she kept pricking her finger with it, requiring Wallace to load it himself. She was also slow in getting the animals loaded onto the sucrose pad and dabbed with levamisole and buffer, which kept them sedate and hydrated, so her worms turned into hard pralines right there on the slide. He tried to help her. He talked softly, quietly. He waited even when he knew the animal was dead. Once she turned to him with such a look of pride on her face that he thought she’d finally done it, but when he looked at the animal under the scope, he saw that it was beyond dead. Its insides had ruptured out and backed up into the needle end itself. It was awful, a gruesome death.

  At last, tired of their failed collaboration, he asked to be given a different project—and, it was true, Dana maybe did not take it well. But that was two years ago. These days, on any given week, Dana shows up to lab for a handful of semi-productive hours. She hasn’t settled on a project. Her mind is rangy, restless. But worse, failure causes her to discard things and people. Every time a project does not go according to her expectation, she scuttles it like a decommissioned watercraft. Her lab presentations are an amalgam of half-chewed ideas. Her fingernails are bitten raw, and there’s a chafed, bruised feeling to her.

  Still, it makes no sense that she would brutalize his plates. There is no material gain in it for her, and her selfishness has always seemed pragmatic to Wallace. It would be a pointless, essentially lazy move.

  His head hurts.

  People can be unpredictable in their cruelty.

  The thought startles him. He thinks swiftly of that awful time last year when he had to take his preliminary exams and spent three months unable to get out of bed or to eat or to bathe regularly. Those three months were a long, dark slide into something amorphous and cold. He spent all that time watching old doctor shows on the internet and lying in bed watching the light on the walls change. When he did manage to pry himself out of bed, he sat in the tub for long hours and felt afraid and small. He spent hours wondering what he would do if he failed. Not even the humiliation scared him as much as the utter drop into the unknown. He’d have to leave the program. He’d have to figure out a different thing to do with his life. That’s what paralyzed him all those months. It was impossible to do anything.

  Then, one day in late September, Henrik came to Wallace’s apartment and pressed the buzzer until Wallace relented and let him in. Once upstairs, he dropped a stack of research articles and notebooks and markers on Wallace’s floor and told him to get to it. For hours every day, Henrik taught Wallace everything he’d failed to learn. They covered cell signaling, gradients, morphology, protein structure, the composition of cell walls, the entire lineage of the gonadal tissues in flies and nematodes, yeast screens. Technique after technique Henrik diagrammed, patiently and then less patiently, and when that failed he slapped his thick palm on the table and shouted, You have to learn this, Wallace. Get it together. Wallace sat there listening. Taking notes. Reading the articles every night until the text swam before his eyes. He lost five pounds, then ten pounds, then fifteen pounds. Henrik started taking him to the gym. Forcing him to jog and to read, to recall at any moment some obscure fact of nematode embryological development. To recall the degradation machinery of certain proteins in certain tissues under certain conditions, and then other conditions, other tissues, scenarios swinging open and closed like a door on loose hinges. Wallace got to know the way light moved through Henrik’s beard. And through his thick hair. The long slope of his mouth. He learned to read Henrik’s temper the way mammals on doomed islands learn the slow, unwinding signs of an eruption.

  On the bleak December afternoon when Wallace passed his preliminary exams, like a firing squad more than a test, the first person he looked to at the celebratory lunch was Henrik.

  But by then Henrik was already looking away, out the window.

  They spoke sparingly at Simone’s annual holiday gathering. Three days later, Henrik left for a tenure track position at Vassar. And then Wallace went to the departmental Christmas party and made that comment about Miller and trailer parks.

  Wallace misses waking up at three in the morning and finding Henrik curled up in his living room, asleep, the heavy sound of his snoring, the bulk of his body almost deforming Wallace’s cheap couch. He misses their meals together, the almost angry way Henrik ate. He misses, maybe, also, other things, the weight of unnamed feelings moving through him. And those feelings were transmuted into something cruel and mean.

  There was an economy to it, even when you couldn’t see it at first, a shadow calculation running underneath all their lives.

  In the end, it doesn’t matter who did this. In the end, none of it matters.

  Back to work, then.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE KITCHEN IS EMPTY. Wallace beats his palm against the reluctant handle of the faucet until it gives way, and the water comes out too hard, too fast. It strikes the basin with a sound like a protest, as if upset at Wallace’s force. He runs the water into a battered gray pot and sets it on the electric range. The stove groans to life. The abandoned, mismatched mugs crouch in the back of the cupboard like children in foster care. Wallace presses his face to the warm glass of the window. Below him, the main street splits around a Lutheran church. Leisurely traffic. One vein of the street trails delicately around the biochemistry complex, and it ends at the boathouse and the botanical gardens, where in springtime there are fund-raising parties at which wealthy white people fling bits of bread at koi and talk in hushed, slurred voices about the changing demographics of the university. When Wallace was a first-year, he was invited to a welcome dinner at those very same gardens. At one point that evening, he was herded over to a heavy, bearded man who smelled like sweat and oak leaves. This is Bertram Olson, Wallace. He’s the one who endowed your first-y
ear fellowship. And there, in the descending darkness, holding a sweating glass of ginger ale, Wallace suddenly comprehended just what the object of the welcome dinner was. Welcome. Here is the person who pays your stipend. Please worship him.

  Wallace considers himself fortunate in this way at least. His stipend is generous, twice what his mother made as a housekeeper, and it affords him a general material ease: He can afford food, rent, and other items like his laptop and his new glasses, which cost almost a thousand dollars. It’s not very much money. But it’s the most he’s had in his entire life, and more still, it’s consistent. It comes every month, can be depended upon. The water comes to a swift gray boil, and Wallace pours it over the chai that he purchased from the overpriced grocery store downtown. Money is always on their minds: who got the big departmental fellowship (Miller), whose adviser had a grant rejected (Lukas’s), which lab receives private research dollars (Wallace’s), whose project is likely to translate well to industry (Yngve’s), who will grab the job at Brandeis (Caroline), who will take the job at MIT (Nora, a postdoc in Yngve’s lab), who is maybe leaving for Harvard (Cole’s adviser), for Columbia (Emma’s adviser), for UT Southwestern (no one). They discuss the lives and fates of faculty the way one might track the paths of minor planets. Careers move in orbits, fixed by certain factors. One typically stays at the level of their graduate or postdoc institution, or goes one step lower. It’s difficult to migrate across tiers. Fellowships lead to good postdocs, good postdocs lead to good grants, good grants lead to faculty positions at institutions that are more or less commensurate with the stature of one’s first faculty adviser. It all rises and falls on money. Wallace’s stipend now comes from a moderately prestigious, nationally recognized research fund. Simone is considered senior in their field. They enjoy a path forward, into the future, that is level and good. It is for this future that he has worked his entire life. For the alignment of these particular advantages.

  Yet the terms, Wallace thinks. The terms of all that luck. The cost.

  The tea is a compromise. He wants coffee, but coffee would make the work difficult. When he started in the program, Wallace went through three triple cappuccinos every day before three p.m. just to stay awake. During the afternoon seminars he found himself dozing, drifting off to the sound of talks on deep sequencing and protein NMR. Professors kissed the backs of their teeth and spoke in that smooth, glossy voice popular in certain widely circulated videos on arts and sciences. Everything was I’m going to tell you a story, or Today, I’m going to share with you three intriguing narratives or I’d like to walk you through how we got from here to here. And in the rigid chairs of that auditorium, where there was no cell service or Wi-fi, where all the wood was blond and the walls were covered in an undulating wave of wood panels and the floors in acoustically favorable carpet, Wallace drifted as if floating in waters he could not swim. He drank more caffeine than he ever had in his whole life, and he spent his afternoons with hot, forceful diarrhea.

  Wallace drank so much coffee that the world seemed a little brighter for it, on the verge of turning convex, as if every fragment of light were reaching out for him. And then, one day, Henrik gave him a piece of advice: Caffeine is a stimulant. This was mystifying to Wallace. It seemed like a fake aphorism. Henrik said it to him every time Wallace returned from the basement café with a cup of coffee, whenever he and Henrik were in the elevator together returning from a seminar at which Wallace had helped himself to one complimentary cup after another. His heart fluttered. His mouth went dry. His fingertips grew stiff and swollen. He felt as if he were being squeezed through his skin like sausage from its casing. He was startled by strange sounds in the middle of the night when he was working in lab alone. One day, during his dissections, his hand convulsed wildly, a sudden shooting spasm, and he dropped the scalpel. It landed with a soft, sick sink into his thigh. Not terribly deep, but enough, and Wallace knew, in that moment, exactly what Henrik had meant.

  The white tiles are an ocean of light in midafternoon, and gray pages shift under Wallace’s tender eyes. He presses his thumb to the knuckle of each of his fingers, eliciting a solid crack from the joints. A bird rests on the flat white ledge outside. It’s pecking at the inside of its wing. Small, round thing, gray feathers and white belly. Its head is small, nearly indistinguishable from its body. Just a round ball of fluff. The bird’s shadow hops along the floor, and Wallace watches until it’s gone, vanished into the air. On his way to lab, Wallace stopped at the library and found that book that Thom had mentioned.

  He reads in lab on Saturdays, when it’s less likely that Simone will be around. In Wallace’s second year, Simone came into the kitchen and found him reading and eating cup ramen. That day a strong storm had been blowing through the area, and the world had turned an eerie shade of aquamarine. Simone stood standing at the window watching the wind and the rain, the sallow glow of the streetlights below. She turned to him with a restless, angry look and asked sharply, Do you not have better things to do than reading Dr. Seuss or whatever the hell that is? And Wallace set the book down very slowly and gave a weak, defenseless shrug. It’s Proust, he said. He’s French.

  Wallace is thirty pages into the novel when there’s a shadow pressed to the corner of the page, as insistent as a thumb. Miller’s impassive expression, his eyes distant and cool. There is accusation in his gaze. Messy hair. A gray sweatshirt, the shorts from last night, miles of tan leg, the coppery hair like down.

  “You left me.”

  “I left a note,” Wallace says.

  “I read it.”

  “Well, don’t cry about it.”

  Miller grunts, but there is a smile. Wallace is relieved, an uneasy buoyancy like drifting out to sea.

  “I’m just saying you could have woken me up.”

  “You looked peaceful, though,” Wallace says. Glossy with condescension, he settles back into the stiff purple booth with more confidence than he feels. Miller has a giant’s natural indifference to the world, hanging back, watching from under the rims of his eyelids. Wallace wavers. The edges of his body tingle, like the electric range coming to life. A whine spreads through him, coils heating. Some inner surface goes slick and hot.

  “Still,” Miller says, “you didn’t have to bail on me. In your own apartment.”

  “Do you want to sit?”

  “I can.”

  Wallace makes room on the seat, drops the canvas bag to the other side of himself. Miller’s skin is warm. They’re thigh-to-thigh. The sticky sweat of the plastic cushion beneath them, Wallace shifting to make room, the dampness of his skin pressed to Miller, who is dry and not quite so warm. They tuck their arms tight by their sides. They are sitting closer than is exactly necessary. Wallace glances down at Miller’s bony ankles. The bare, pale cartilage at the back of his feet. Remembers too the salty taste of Miller’s skin, so different from his own, the bodies of others somehow always so different, as if made from rare elements, strange metals. Miller pops his knuckles, glances back over his shoulder at Wallace. A look—shame or something else. He puts his head down against the inside of his shoulder. A shy boy, then, Wallace thinks, shy and watchful.

  “How are you?” Miller asks. Disappointment. A conventional question. All that playful teasing gone to waste.

  Wallace puts his elbows on the table, which rocks sharply, dangerously. The tea shifts. Sloshes. Miller’s eyes widen just so, and Wallace holds his breath until the table and the cup and the whole world steady themselves.

  “Are we strangers now?” Wallace asks. “How are you?”

  Miller frowns. The disappointment sharpens. “How are you” is the kind of question you ask in a doctor’s office. There is no meaning in “How are you.” But perhaps that is why Miller asks this question. A soft reset. A denial of sorts. Wallace runs his tongue around his mouth, thinking it over. Trying out different answers. Miller’s frown goes taut. The edges of his mouth pull and then relax. A sob
er, dark light in his eyes.

  “I didn’t say that. I just asked how you were, because of last night, I mean. You know.”

  “Is this junior high?” Wallace asks. “You’re an adult. Say it.”

  The exasperation on Miller’s face lights Wallace up. A silver thrill, a frisson of pleasure.

  “Don’t be obnoxious, Wallace,” he says. “Come on.”

  A reward then, Wallace thinks. He will be generous. He kisses Miller’s shoulder, rests his face against its solid shape. It is a relief to rest his eyes, if only for a moment. Miller’s large hand on his thigh then. Cool and dry, coarse. A low laugh in his body.

  “Hey now,” Wallace says, but Miller has already taken his hand away.

  “What are we doing?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.” The crinkling plastic. The wood frame beneath them groaning. Wallace slides away; his skin sputters. Miller slowly rotating the mug with this thumb on the handle.

  “I was just trying to be considerate. That’s why I asked.”

  “Is that what this is, then? Your consideration?”

  “Don’t be a brat.”

  “Don’t lecture me,” Wallace says in another momentary flare of pride, of cantankerousness. Miller briefly looks stricken, but he recovers, turns more fully on Wallace, which puts his back to the rest of the kitchen. They are in a corner. The sun streaks across the bridge of his nose, under his eyes, everything bright and golden. They are close. The room a chattering gray static. Miller’s eyelashes seem so painfully soft. Wallace presses his palm over Miller’s eyes, feels the edges of his eyelashes tickle his hand. There is another current, relief at not being watched, seen up close that way. Miller’s face a gentle boy’s face again, sullenly patient. Another reward, Wallace thinks. Gets up on his knees. The cushion sinks deep under his weight. He steadies himself with a hand on Miller’s shoulder.