Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “What are you doing?” Miller asks, the edge of concern. Wallace hums, resists answering. Feels the tension in Miller’s body. He is the taut coil now, winding under Wallace’s hand. He levels their faces, aligns their lips and noses and eyes. Stares into the blank dark ridges of his own knuckles over Miller’s eyes. Miller shifts more. Surely he feels Wallace’s breath. The press of his body. Asks again, “Wallace. What are you doing?”

  Wallace almost laughs. Almost says, Exercising agency. Almost says, Let me tell you a story. But he says none of this. Closer now. Their lips touch. The soapy aftertaste of toothpaste. Sharp alcohol of mouthwash. The deeper, more stubborn residual flavors of sleep. No coffee for Miller. Wallace tastes Miller’s lips. Their soft cupid’s bow and then their corners. Then deeper through the lips into the mouth, a damp warm cave.

  Enough, he thinks. Retreats.

  Miller does not open his eyes right away. Wallace feels a little pulse of worry, that he has gone too far, too fast. That he has erred, miscalculated. But then, the slow upward sweep of Miller’s eyelids. The angular shard of sunlight across his eyes now.

  “Your hands smell good,” he says.

  “It’s the tea. Have some.” Wallace presses the lip of his cup to Miller’s mouth, and with his eyes set firmly on Wallace, he drinks. The throat works it down, swallows. “Good boy.”

  “Blow off tennis,” Miller says. Wallace sets the cup down, holds his breath.

  “Can’t.”

  “You can,” he says.

  “Sorry.”

  “What about after?”

  “Let’s play it by ear,” Wallace says, feeling gummy. His knees shake. Miller’s breath smells like the chai, like Wallace’s hands.

  “Let’s,” he says.

  Wallace gets up. Takes his book, the bag.

  “Well, work beckons,” he says, coming around the table, but Miller reaches out, takes his hand.

  “Wallace.”

  “Don’t be stupid about it,” he says. “Let’s be smart.”

  Miller drops his hand. The sunlight striking the back of Wallace’s neck and legs prickles.

  “Sure,” Miller says with a grunt. “You bet.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A WORM, proceeding through a series of gathering and unlatching motions, pulling itself along.

  Nematodes are transparent. It is one of the features that make them an ideal model organism, amenable to microscopy. Other features include a facility of genetic manipulation, a small, manageable genome size, a short generation time, and the ease of handling. They are quite hardy creatures, in fact. Capable of self-fertilization. At a certain point in larval development, their germlines switch from spermatogenesis to oogenesis. Even the little boys get to be young women, Simone likes to say.

  One worm on a single plate can give rise to thousands of progeny after just a week or so. When food is scarce, they cease reproduction to some degree. Though whatever fertilized embryos there are undergo development and hatch inside their mothers. They eat their way out, eventually rupturing the cuticle to enter the world, sometimes with fertilized embryos of their own inside them. It reminds Wallace sometimes of creation myths.

  The worm he selects just that moment is severely bagged. There are dozens of smaller worms inside it. She’s old. She’s dense with bodies. Yet she’s still alive. She’s no mere vessel. No good to pick starved animals. Their descendants are born with a signal for disaster going off in their bodies.

  Wallace can still taste Miller. It was a mistake to kiss him again. Strange that he has become a person who kisses. The coppery taste of shame at betraying oneself. Nausea, as if he must now explain this change to some higher power, some greater authority. He is surprised at himself, at his traitorous body. His mind a tumult, hazy and dark shapes opening, turning upon themselves. The ghost of Miller’s warmth in his bed, the morning light dulled by the curtains, the pale rise of his hip, his curly hair, the room sour with sweat and beer. A swirl of dark hair on his chest. Regret. At having left him in bed this morning or at having left him in the kitchen? Both. Neither. Oh, Wallace, he chides himself. There are more important things.

  The lab is bright and quiet. He hangs to the side in his chair to stare down the length of the lab, finding no one else. At the far end just bluish shadow, stillness. The part of the day when the others recede and there is just him in the quiet and the dark, and the world outside is vast and blue and beautiful. Outside, there are birds in the pine tree across the street. Small, dark birds fluttering near the top of the tree. How strange to be a bird, Wallace thinks. To have the world beneath you, that inversion of scale, what is small becoming large, what is large becoming small, the way a bird can move where it wants in space, no dimension unconquerable. He feels a small mercy at being left alone. The others will return at night, descending like a dark flock upon the building, pushing their experiments and nudging their projects toward completion in small, painful increments.

  The quiet is really the amassing of noise. The protests from the agitating machines like the cries of an unruly populace. In this building, he is outnumbered. But the noise soothes something in him. When Wallace was very young, he kept his fan on all the time, even in winter, because its regular rhythm made something about his life easier. When he turned the fan toward the wall, it sounded like the ocean, or like the creek, when you were approaching it from the south through the pine forest at the edge of his grandparents’ farm. He worked on math and science homework that way, getting better and better at it until he was the best student in the whole state of Alabama at doing long division in his head and estimating the weight of a bowling ball in metric units. When the fan in his room was going, he couldn’t hear his parents arguing about who had taken the last Natural Light from the fridge or who had eaten the last piece of fried chicken or who had let the greens burn on the stove, a charred mess stuck to the bottom of their one good pot. He couldn’t hear his brother and his girlfriend next door, the constant rap on his wall drowned out by the seascape. He could, if the window was open, hear the baying of wild dogs in the woods, their lonesome yips and howls rising up out of the trees like ghosts or birds. He could hear the echoing crack of rifle fire and the explosion of canisters tossed into the burning barrel out back. It wasn’t the world outside that he had needed to drown out, then, but the world inside, the interior of the house, which had always seemed so much wilder and stranger to him than anything he found walking alone in the woods.

  And when he got older, he turned on the fan to drown out the snores of the man his parents let sleep on their couch because he had nowhere else to go and he was their friend, after all. Sometimes Wallace wonders if the fan was also the reason he didn’t hear when the man got up in the middle of the night, walked into his room, and shut the door.

  That old anger rolls over in him. His vision swims briefly. He hasn’t thought of it in years, and yet there it is, the sound of that door closing that first night. The finality of it as the bottom of the door swept across the gritty hardwood, a scraping sound. Something awful. That jittering thud and the retreat of gray shadow as his room was sealed in darkness. Deep, inky darkness. Why does it return to him now? All these miles away. These years. His previous life cut away like a cataract. Discarded. But here, found stuck to the bottom of his mind like a piece of garbage. Here. In this place. Alone in the lab. He almost jumps at the fright of it, the wholeness of the memory. His body remembers. His traitorous body.

  His father is dead—his father who did nothing for him.

  Dead, for weeks now. Wallace forgot it. He managed not forgiveness, but erasure. They seem so much the same to him.

  His father. A sizzling, glowing wire of hatred. Wallace’s vision is dimpled, as if pinched from the corners and pushed inward. This life drawn carefully across the other, former life. He does not think of it. Turns his mind from it entirely. They are again as strangers
might be, faces fleetingly familiar in a great stream of faces. It is the kindest thing that he can do for himself and for them. There can only ever be a tenuous claim on the lives of others.

  “Still working I see,” says a voice—Dana’s, he knows, before he even looks up.

  “Some of us have a lot to do.”

  “And some of us are self-important,” Dana says. She hoists herself up onto Henrik’s old bench. Her angular athleticism, her ascetic thinness set against her wide face. Her fingers raw and flaking. She digs into the corner of her nails, extricates a flap of skin, and chews it off. White gristle. A trickle of blood. They are silent. They watch each other. She’s staring at him from under her eyelids. She manages to look down and up at the same time. Her sweatshirt is loose, threatens to swallow her. A girl with a shell. She might vanish into it and leave them all behind. Her insult doesn’t get under his skin because the casualness of her voice is thin and reedy, a desperate feint.

  “Is there something that I can do for you, Dana? I’m busy,” he says as he turns back to his bench. He adjusts the plates next to his scope. He has lost his appetite for work. His hands are no longer steady. A tremor winds its way up and down his fingers. His knuckles ache.

  “Come on, don’t be that way.” A cool laugh. Wallace stretches his fingers. The smell of gas, the low blue flame burns on.

  “I’m not being a way, Dana. I’m just busy. Perhaps you have heard of this thing called research. It requires work. Are these terms familiar to you?”

  “You sound like Brigit. You two are such a weird little cult.”

  “Friendship, Dana. It too might be an unfamiliar concept for you.”

  “Admit it,” she presses on. “You two are so cliquey. You hardly talk to anyone else. You’re, like, the only two people in lab. And you talk so much shit about the rest of us.”

  “We’re friends, Dana. We enjoy speaking to each other.”

  “I heard what you two were saying. I know what you two talk about when I’m not around,” she says quietly.

  Wallace spins so that they face each other again. He is surprised to find her looking down into the space between her thighs. Her scalp is red, dry. It is a curious position for her. As if someone set a stuffed animal on a shelf and left it. The blank vacancy of her body. He feels a flicker of sympathy, the memory of last night, being discussed like an object of communal fascination.

  “Even if we did talk about you. How would you know?” he asks, though the answer is obvious. Gossip cuts both ways. Allegiances shift. He is not the only one with allies. Dana doesn’t rise to the bait. She’s back to chewing on the ends of her fingers. Wallace’s hands sting just watching. “I don’t think you ruined my plates, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he says.

  A moment of silence. The flame hisses as it writhes in the air currents. It’s a soft, fluttering sound, fire turning back on itself. So deep is the silence in that moment that he can hear the impurities in the stream of gas burning.

  But then a strange thing happens: An animatronic jerkiness shifts her shoulders, her arms, her legs, as if electricity were independently bringing parts of her to life. Low at first, a whisper, but then almost immediately louder: laughter. Her head tosses back suddenly so hard and fast that he worries for a moment that she will strike the shelf on Henrik’s bench. But she doesn’t. Just laughter. She grips her stomach, her thighs. Her eyes fill with tears.

  “Oh my god, listen to you. How arrogant can you be? Do you think I care what you think?” Dana dries her tears. “I cannot believe this. You actually think I care what you think.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wallace says, feeling more tired than he has felt in his entire life. “I don’t want to. Leave me alone.”

  “Yes, Wallace. I ruined your big experiment because I don’t have enough things to do. That’s me.”

  “I said that I didn’t think that you did that, Dana. You don’t have to be so ridiculous.”

  “I hate you, Wallace. And do you know why? Do you know why I hate you? Because you walk around like you’re so important because you spend all of your time working. You dump all of your precious little time into this lab, and into these dumb little experiments that don’t matter, and you have the nerve to say to me, Some of us work. Imagine, you, saying that to me. Of all people. You aren’t Katie. You’re certainly not Brigit. And yet you think you have a right to lecture me.”

  Wallace can smell his own blood. He touches the end of his nose to see if there is blood there, but no, he isn’t bleeding. There is just the metallic sheen of blood coating everything. Its heat. Its bitterness. He can taste it too.

  “Oh, no one could lecture you.”

  Dana sits up straight. The laughter is gone, though the room rings with its ghost.

  “You know what I think, Wallace? I think you’re a misogynist.”

  The word flicks by him, a shooting dart of silver. There’s a momentary grit of bitter regret at the back of his throat.

  “I am not a misogynist.”

  “You don’t get to define what misogyny is to a woman, asshole. You don’t get to.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “So, if I say you’re a misogynist, then you’re a misogynist.”

  Wallace turns from her. There is no arguing. This is why he keeps to himself. This is why he speaks to no one and does nothing.

  “Fucking gay guys always think that they’ve got the corner on oppression.”

  “I don’t think that at all.”

  “And you think that you get to walk around because you’re gay and black and act like you can do no wrong.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You think you’re fucking queen of the world,” she says, slapping her palm on the bench, which makes Wallace jump.

  “Dana.”

  “I’m fed up with your shit. I’m fed up with you always talking down to me and treating me like I’m beneath you. I’m tired of it.”

  “No one did that to you, Dana. No one has done anything to you except try to help you, but you won’t be helped because you have to prove yourself.”

  “I have to prove myself because you and men like you are always counting me out. Well, fuck it, women are the new niggers, the new faggots.”

  A sour, wet taste spackles the roof of Wallace’s mouth. The world is momentarily illuminated by something coarse and bright. He blinks. He grips the back of his chair to keep himself still, steady, even. He thinks of Brigit, her warmth, her kind voice.

  Dana pants like a winded, wounded animal. She has worked herself up into a froth, into a violent anger. She is making fists over and over, her small hands turning to hard white knots. It isn’t sympathy he feels. They are beyond that now. But it is the first part of sympathy: recognition. White foam sticks to the corners of her mouth. Her eyes flash and narrow. He recognizes himself in the futile, thrashing heat of her rage. The unfair thing, he thinks, is that she is afforded this moment to vent herself. She will be fine. She will be all right. She is gifted, and he is merely Wallace.

  None of this is fair. None of this is good, he knows. But he also knows that the point is not fairness. The point is not to be treated fairly or well. The point is to get your work done. The point is results. He could say something to her, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because no one is going to do his work for him. No one is going to say, Well, Wallace, it’s okay if you don’t have your part of the data. You were being treated poorly. And there is the other thing—the shadow pain, he calls it, because he cannot say its real name. Because to say its real name would be to cause trouble, to make waves. To draw attention to it, as though it weren’t in everything already. He tried once, with Simone, to talk about the way Katie talks to him as though he is inept. He said to Simone, She doesn’t talk that way to anyone else. She doesn’t treat them like this. And Simone said, Wallace. Don’t be dramatic. It isn’t
racism. You just need to catch up. Work harder.

  The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

  Wallace does not talk about it anymore. He learned his lesson in third year, when, after he had passed his preliminary exams, Simone pulled him into her office to debrief. She sat behind her desk with her legs crossed, a beautiful winter day lying white and smooth behind her, all the way to the lake, that blue-white churn and the trees like delicate woodwork in a diorama. He felt good about himself. He felt, for the first time since coming to grad school, like he was finally doing what she always urged him to do—catching up—and he imagined that he saw pride in her eyes. He was excited. He was ready to begin in earnest—to really begin. And she asked, How do you think that went? And he said, Oh, well, I thought it was okay. And she shook her head grimly. She said, You know, Wallace, that was . . . frankly, I was embarrassed for you. Had that been another student, it might have gone differently. You might not have passed. But we talked a long time about what was feasible for you, what was reasonable for your abilities, and we decided we’d pass you, but we are going to watch you, Wallace. No more of this. You need to get better. She spoke as though she were bestowing blessings. Bestowing beneficence. Bestowing irrefutable grace. She spoke as though she were saving him. What could he say? What could he do?