A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
Page 5
I tried not to sound too judgmental, but I don’t think I succeeded.
He sighed. “My mother-in-law. She adds little sparkles and rhinestones to reading glasses she buys in bulk. She has a stand down at Cowtown, but she asked if she could display some here, and she’s taking care of my two-year-old son right now, so there’s really no saying ‘no.’”
I laughed. “Is she also responsible for . . .” I gestured at all the ancient Egypt, and then felt a little self-conscious—maybe this guy was just super into Egypt.
He smiled a big smile. “No, that’s just Wolton!” He did not explain further before saying, “I’m Derek.”
“Uh, I’m Maya,” I said, a little unnerved by his enthusiasm. “Is there a Wi-Fi password?”
The enthusiasm vanished. “It’s ‘cleopatra,’ lowercase c. But it’s not good. We’ve been having weird outages for over a month now.”
“I think I read about that!”
“Honestly, you don’t want to get me started. Carson has given me a refund, but people expect coffee shops to have internet. This isn’t 2007. I’m really sorry.”
“Do they know what’s causing it?”
“Aside from incompetence?” His voice rose a little. “I’m sorry, I’m just frustrated. No, they say they’ve hired somebody who knows these systems from the top all the way down, but apparently even they’re stumped. I’m looking into getting satellite internet, but it’s more expensive and slower. I understand it’s complicated, but they’ve figured out how to do it everywhere else, I don’t get why it’s not working here.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get my latte to go then!” I said. He looked despondent, so I continued, “You’re the only shop in town, so as long as I’m here, caffeine is more important than internet.”
I left the coffee shop with my latte and did something that any trained professional would agree was a worrying sign that I was not recovering well from my loss. I stalked cable repair trucks.
MIRANDA
Constance Lundgren is a legend. Her list of research awards is short only compared to her list of teaching awards. Back in the nineties there was a lot of shouting about her not being named on a Nobel Prize that built on her work, and the only person in the materials science world who didn’t say a thing about it was Constance Lundgren. Getting her as an advisor was like getting an internship with Yoda. I had imagined her as a kind of idol to science before I met her, but after I’d worked under her for a year, she had mostly become a person. She was thoughtful and methodical and always a little tense. Every tendon stood out on her sun-browned, age-freckled hands, which she often pressed to her lips as she thought, like she was praying to her own mind. Which, why not. But she was also forgiving and sweet and would invite students to go hiking with her, which I had done. There was literally no one else in the world who I respected more, and leaving her lab to go chase after the weirdness of the Carls was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. Her keeping my place open to return to is a gift I won’t ever be able to repay, but at the same time, I was lost. I was angry and sad and having a harder and harder time finding my work meaningful. If I was ever in need of advising, it was now.
“Professor Lundgren?” I asked, knocking on her open door a couple days after I first read the article about Peter.
“Miranda!” She slid a small book she had been staring at to the side of her desk. “How are the Toms?”
Tom is what I named my first lab rat, who had . . . passed on several years ago. Some of my classmates found out that I’d named him, and they’d never let me live it down. So now all of my rats were named Tom and there had been several dozen since. I don’t love the part where we experiment on animals, especially because it only ever goes one way for the animal in the long run. If there was another way, I would take it, but there isn’t.
I smiled. “The Toms are good. Six weeks now and no sign of rejection, even among those with no maintenance therapy. But that’s not why I came in. I wanted to ask you about this.”
I handed her a physical copy of the magazine with the Peter Petrawicki article. “Have you heard about this lab?”
Science can be a small town. People in the same field, especially at the top of the field, all know each other. And they certainly know when people are leaving tenured university positions for high-paid jobs that didn’t exist six months ago.
Dr. Lundgren looked up at me and said, “I know this has to suck for you. Even I got angry when I found out who was tied up with that business. But yes, I’ve heard about it.”
She was quiet for a moment as she thought and then she continued, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they offered me a position. I was talking to my husband seriously about moving until I found out who was involved.”
She looked me in the eyes as she said, “I told them to go fuck themselves.”
It has never taken much to make me cry, but it takes even less since the warehouse. So I sat down and lost it a bit.
She grabbed some tissues from inside her desk. Crying students weren’t that unusual. “Thank you,” I said after a moment. “Not for the tissues but . . .”
“It wasn’t because of you.”
“Good, but still, thanks.”
She smiled at me, and then I asked my real question: “Do you know what they’re doing there?”
“No. They weren’t going to tell me any details until they had a contract. But you read that article, so you have some idea, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Some of it is confusing. Why so many computers? Why AI researchers? But optoelectronics, biomedical engineering, cellular neuroscience? They figured it out, didn’t they?”
“They figured something out, yes. What ‘it’ is, I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. Some kind of high-bandwidth interface, right? It has to be. I’m sitting over here with the Toms, stimulating one or two nerve clusters at a time. They’re down there in Puerto Rico getting ready to dump people’s immortal consciousnesses into a computer or something, and you could be there! But instead we’re here, a decade behind wherever they are, and you didn’t go.”
She clasped her hands together and brought them up to her lips. I’d seen that face a hundred times before. Every time we were confused, when the spectrometer wasn’t booting up, when a Tom was suddenly having seizures.
“Miranda, I have been at this a while. I’ve seen revolutions in science, and I know that sometimes moving fast and breaking things is how progress gets made. But it’s also how things get broken, and sometimes those things are people. This is not the strategy of careful scientists. I agree, they are likely messing with the human mind. I don’t know what they’re doing, but if they weren’t close to human tests, they wouldn’t be scaling up so fast. And they’re setting this up in Puerto Rico, which tells me they’re trying to avoid health and safety regulations. These men—sorry, but it usually is men—don’t care who gets hurt because they’re telling themselves a story in which they’re the hero. I’ve listened to that story too many times to see anything in it but vanity.”
“But isn’t ambition how all of this gets done? I’m ambitious. I think you are too.”
“That’s a good point, Miranda. I don’t have anything against ambition. Wanting to work hard to achieve something great, yes. Yes! You’re so young and you’ve already done that. You should stay hungry. But what does ‘great’ mean to you?”
“It means something better than good.” That sounded a little stupid, so I kept at it. “So good it improves the lives of more people than I will ever hope to meet.”
“Good. That is what it means for you. But for some people, ‘great’ just means ‘big,’ and if it’s big enough, they’ll convince themselves either that it’s good or that it’s inevitable, so it might as well be their names that get into the history books.” Her voice was getting louder.
She sucked in sharply through her nose and looked at th
e ceiling before she continued, more quietly.
“I can smell that kind of ambition. It’s not about making the world better, it’s about using marvelous potential and intelligence to . . .” She paused to think. “To feel like they matter. I won’t work with people like that, because if they don’t think they matter despite being some of the most successful, important, influential people on earth, what must they think of the rest of us?”
I sat there and thought about that for a moment before I said, “It sounds like you’ve worked with a lot of people like that.”
“Miranda, I’ve been a person like that. And I could be again if I let myself.”
That was a lot of raw Constance Lundgren. It was amazing—it felt almost historic, to hear her open up like this. I wanted to write down every word of it, but I also wanted more information about this lab.
“Do you know anyone who’s working there?” I asked.
“You know I do, why are you asking?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
“Do you really want to do this?” she asked. “You have a lot . . . a LOT to do in the next few months if you want to defend in the spring, and obsessing over billionaires futzing around in the Caribbean is not going to help that work get done. Plus, I want to see you socializing more. You never come out. We’re doing Grizzly Peak this Friday.”
She was right, I hadn’t been spending time with anyone, and the topic change was uncomfortable for me. I had a hard time reconnecting with my labmates after I’d gotten back. They went out for drinks or karaoke or met up for board games, and I told them “Next time!” every time. I had had friends here before the Carls. But somehow, after I’d come back, I just didn’t feel like I had anything in common with them anymore. It was a kind of culture shock. I felt like I was living some old version of my life.
“You’re right, forget I said anything. Thank you for talking through this with me.”
I absolutely was not going to drop my interest in Peter’s lab, and I think we both knew that. But I let the lie out because it felt like the safest thing to do. And Dr. Lundgren accepted it because what else was she supposed to do?
“It really isn’t any trouble. I know you aren’t wired to recognize it, but your research could be world-changing, and your ambition is being put to great use here. We’re proud to have you.”
She was right: I wasn’t wired to recognize praise. The only thing I could feel was that she was lying to protect my feelings and that nothing I did would matter ever again.
Unless I figured out what they were doing at that lab.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT: THE WARM SEAT PODCAST WITH BLAKE WOLFF
Blake Wolff: Andy, I talk to a lot of people on this podcast, and I hope you don’t mind if I say something here . . . A lot of people listen to you, and you have a way of getting to the root of things really fast and, OK, you just do not seem like a twenty-four-year-old.
Andy Skampt: Yeah, you feel like I’m more of a teenager?
BW:
AS: I guess I had to grow up. I know this isn’t how it actually works, but I think people, if you give them a chance, they grow to fit their fishbowl.
BW: I’m not going to let you get away with that. That’s too easy. There has to be something more to it. Give me something . . . How did a twenty-four-year-old get the kind of insight you have on other people?
AS: Do you know Hamilton?
BW: The musical or the founding father?
AS:
BW:
AS: Exactly. Well, I was in the middle of all of the madness last year, and I mean really . . . in the middle of it. And I was listening to Hamilton and I heard that song and I realized that, well, not everyone is ambitious enough to want to be the one making the thing happen, but everyone, I think, to some extent wants to be in the room where it happens. They might not want to write their favorite book, or paint their favorite painting, or vote the bill into law, but everyone wants to be in the room. We want to witness it. We want to feel like we are part of these things that, like, really matter.
BW: Hmm.
AS: And I realized that I was in the room. So many people wanted to be me. But it wasn’t really special to me because the room just felt like my room. But that wasn’t the big insight. The real insight was that I still wanted to be in the room where it happens, it was just a different “it.” We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don’t so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that’s when we’re really lost.
ANDY
April dying was the best thing that could have happened to my career.
Was it the worst thing that ever happened to me? Yes. Was it the thing in my life that I regretted more than anything else? Also yes.
But!
I also got to be massively respected, well paid, and powerful, and, yes, I liked it. It was also annoying. I felt boxed in by my own brand, and I hated watching people who were more reactionary or radical getting traction with ideas that would totally get me in trouble. And, yeah, I worked a lot. But also I didn’t want to take breaks. I wanted to feel good, and having the world listen to me felt good.
I did everything I could to say useful things without getting myself in hot water. It resulted in tweets like these:
Andy Skampt
@AndySkampt
If you can do it in one human lifetime, it’s not a big enough goal.
293 replies 3.4K retweets 9.3K likes
@AndySkampt
Nothing has ever been done alone, or, if it was, it was immediately forgotten. We’re only here for each other.
104 replies 6.9K retweets 14.8K likes
@AndySkampt
Watching “Pose” on Netflix and it’s amazing. I’m done with antiheroes, I love watching families love each other.
1.3K replies 1.4K retweets 4.7K likes
I was getting comfortable with this persona. But I was also noticing that it worked less and less as time went on. I knew what was getting the most attention on Twitter, and it was angry stuff. But I couldn’t do angry stuff because my audience expected me to make them feel better, not worse.
At the same time, there was plenty to be angry about. The Carls hadn’t ended the housing crisis, or student loans, or medical debt. America still had mass shootings. In fact, with people losing a clear path and the economy losing steam, all of these things seemed worse than ever. I wanted to make things better, and sometimes that meant I wanted to shout hot takes into the void. But I also had no idea if that would actually help.
If I was at the top of my game, I probably would have resented The Book of Good Times coming in to take over my life, but I wasn’t.
My new mass was nothing compared to the gravitational pull of that book. I think I knew that, once I opened it, I was going to lose my agency. There was a part of me that wanted nothing more than that—the simplicity of tumbling down April’s gravity well again, not the complexity of real, important decisions, constant uncertainty, and existential dread.
Down I tumbled! Why not buy $100,000 in a stock I had never heard of?! If you get tens of billions of views, you make tens of millions of dollars. So a hundred grand was a lot, but bizarrely enough, it was no longer a lot.
I did what any self-respecting twenty-something would do. I called my dad, and he told me that I absolutely should not invest in strange unknown stocks. He was appalled at th
e entire idea. I think he felt a little like he’d failed as a father if I thought that buying stock in a random tiny company was a good idea. I hadn’t even told him the tip was delivered by a book I found in the trash.
But then, like any self-respecting twenty-something, I ignored him.
IGRI itself didn’t look suspicious. It was a company that had once been big enough to be publicly traded but that had gotten smaller and smaller until it fell off the major exchanges, but no one was interested in coming in and buying the whole thing. The company, in this case, was a cobalt-mining company that had mines in Canada. At one point it had been massively productive and valuable. But as IGRI mined what it had, the stock price dropped.
Why would someone want me to buy this stock?
The obvious answer was that someone was trying to manipulate the price of a penny stock. Like, convince a bunch of people that a book could read their future, get them to go on a date with a nice girl, and then tell them to buy the stock and sell it four days later. Except the fraudster sells it three days later and walks away with ten times more cash than they went in with.
None of this actually mattered, though, because this wasn’t about money or stocks or magic books; it was about April being alive. I wanted so badly for the mystery to end. I wanted my friend back. I wanted the piece of me that I’d lost put back so desperately that I would happily throw $100,000 into the hole of that hope.
Afterward, to distract myself from constantly checking the stock and researching cobalt, I watched video essays from a few of my favorite YouTubers and stressed out about when and what to text Bex. I was and am a firm believer that you shouldn’t wait to text someone after a first date. I will always be who I am, and I am not a person who thinks strategically about relationships. So I texted to tell her that I had a really great time. And then immediately after that I sent the best joke I could think of.