You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  He quickly checks something on a computer.

  “Mark came in before,” I say.

  I feel the urge to talk to someone. I need to reduce my stress levels somehow. But Quinn and I never really talk. So far, my only good contact in the lab is Lucy.

  To my surprise, he turns his chair around and smiles. He has a lovely smile. It is lively, friendly. “You got the shits, didn’t you?”

  “Yes!” I say, even more surprised.

  He laughs and turns back to his computer.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  He shakes his head the same way Mark does, except that Quinn smiles.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  His smiling is somehow contagious, but at the same time annoying.

  He walks to the lab and starts to search for a chemical. He looks my way several times, very playfully, relishing my need for explication. From his secretive smile I sense there is no chance of an explanation any time soon. He is teasing me and I am not going to gratify him. I ask no further questions and go back to work.

  A few minutes later, Erico walks in. Finally and mysteriously there seem to be more people arriving. It is lunch time, and it is getting lively here. I look at the sweater Erico wears; slightly too large for his short body. Neutrally, I ask him if I missed something this morning. I have obviously disturbed his concentration but he answers: “No. Why?”

  Before I can reply, Quinn walks toward us, still wearing that knowing smile, and says: “Mark gave her the shits.”

  Now Erico laughs. What the hell is wrong with these people?

  “You were in early?” Erico asks.

  “Well, not that early, but much earlier than you guys,” I say, feeling more frustrated.

  Now Quinn openly laughs. He regards me pitifully. I’m feeling emotional, desperate, almost like crying. “Can anyone tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  “Celtic lost, Ka. Celtic lost.”

  I look at Erico, no doubt with my blue eyes wide open like a very stupid child.

  “That’s Mark’s football team. Never come in early when Celtic lost.”

  What the fucking fuckety-fuck?!

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_12

  Chapter 12

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  Gorgie Road is teeming with cars and buses when I shove my bike out of the hallway into the street. Over time the faces of the people at the nearby bus stop take on a reassuring familiarity. I am another regular face, part of Edinburgh, or so I tell myself, despite my peripatetic lifestyle and nebulous work.

  I cross the street and cycle straight up Henderson Terrace; the toughest part of my journey to the university in this very hilly city. By the time I reach the next incline my leg muscles are at least lukewarm. After this uphill, which lasts about ten minutes, it is payback time when I turn right onto Morningside Road, charge full speed downhill and break to turn left into mysterious Newbattle Terrace. This residential street is stone-walled to the height of about nine feet, with weeping willows hanging over the big coping stones at the top, almost entirely concealing the villas behind; it is expensive privacy rather than ostentatious wealth, but it is striking just the same. Due to the high walls, the street is dark and has its own microclimate; moister and two to five degrees colder than the rest of town. The pothole-rich tarmac only dries for a few days in spring and autumn. Looking at the sky, I think it might actually be sunny today – spring is in the air. As I near the university, the eerie atmosphere disappears slowly – but, in Harry Potter city, never completely. When I glimpse that classic Victorian edifice, the Royal Observatory, perched upon Blackford Hill, I know I will only once more have to stand on my bike pedals to reach King’s Buildings campus. The journey was exciting at first. Now it is merely pleasant. Even so, it is sometimes the highlight of my working day.

  I park my bike on the small meadow in front of the Joseph Black Building and see an undergrad pacing up and down outside his car, parked right at the entrance. Beneath his matted blond hair, his face is liberally decorated with red spots and blotches suggesting chemical research of the ill-advised sort. If he wasn’t too young for it, this would be the guy who you think wrote the movie script for Frankenhooker. He wears a white T-shirt below a denim jacket, and relatively wide trousers offering an undesirable view of the top of his bum-crack. More and more, he is there when I arrive at the university in the morning. He seems uncomfortable, nervous maybe. The way he checks his trunk over and over again makes me wonder what he is hiding in there – obviously a corpse springs to mind, though it could be a heroin shipment too. The only reason I know that he is indeed a student and not a random freak is that I saw him at the PhD open day when Logan and I presented our lab. He chatted to Logan and I took an immediate, unreasonable and yet passionate dislike to him.

  “Don’t be friendly to him,” I had whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “Logan, he is a freak!”

  “Oh Ka, you can’t say such things about other people.”

  “He has a dead body in his trunk… or at least a dead dog.”

  “Shoosht… not so loud.”

  Chills run down my spine and I briefly wonder if it would not be better to turn around and run. He is such a freak. What is he doing here at this quiet time?

  I quickly pull my student card through the card reader at the front door and type my entrance code. When I hear a short zooming noise, I know the door is unlocked for a few seconds. I am relieved to hear someone whistle in the corridor. There are more people in the building, and the freak did not follow me.

  The whistling is getting closer. It is the red-haired lady I saw in the chemical stores for the first time a few days after starting my PhD. During that first encounter and during every regular sighting since, she has been whistling the very same tune. She smiles at me and turns abruptly to the left to walk down the hallway to the back of the building. With each step she forces her heels a little too far up as though her tendons, like her jeans, are just too short – a faint homage to Monthy Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks, or a weird crossbreed between Heidi and Pipi Longstockings, I can’t decide, but it is a jaunt that makes me smile every time.

  “Good morning, Babette,” I call brightly when I open the door of Lab 262 and see my PhD peer, who is one year ahead of me, violently crushing the keys of the keyboard attached to the HPLC machine.

  She responds with frosty silence, as is her wont. For weeks that’s been our little ritual for starting the working day. It is not uplifting, it is comically depressing. Despite her not being much of an early morning person, Babette is probably getting up before the rooster crows to avoid colleagues, to avoid human interaction. I have realised that in a busy lab, with students and researchers conducting similar experiments, it is survival of the earliest; leastways if you don’t want to crack up waiting for your turn to use some cheap, mediocre equipment. So I come in early, like Babette. It is like an unofficial time-war between her and me – let’s see who is in first today, as if it matters a broken Bunsen. Win or lose, Babette detests my presence, but I don’t have time to care. I am here to get a job done, I am going to be a doctor…

  Briefly, I let my eyes rest on her long, light brownish lanky hair that hangs around an ashen face with unremarkable eyes for a moment. During the dark winter in Edinburgh I hardly noticed the transparency of her skin, but on a bright day like today the network of blood vessels shining through the epidermis is all too visible. By now, I can judge her mental state by the pulse on her temple. And today doesn’t seem to be a good day, even by her dreary standards. She is groaning loudly, puffing and making other curious noises expressing displeasure. I should really have arrived before her. She will badly abuse the precious few pieces of lab equipment we have such that she is the last one to ever use them.
Mark really does not seem to have a single penny left to buy us a new keyboard, and definitely not another HPLC.

  I switch on the stereo on top of the −80 degrees freezer. Irish folk music fills the lab puncturing the tension, or so I choose to believe. I open my lab book containing all the notes that seem to have become my sole reason for living. I take a falcon tube with a muddy mass of E. coli out of the freezer and slowly start sucking the cells up and down an ice cold buffer with a pipette until a defrosted homogenous mixture has been created. Meanwhile, the falcon tube needs to stand on ice, making the process even slower. If you don’t mind watching a washing machine running through a full programme, then you wouldn’t mind this job. Alternatively, if you are sane then you will wonder how your life came to this sad pass.

  Just as I have the bugs swimming, in walks skinny Barry; the recent recruit to the postdoctoral ranks, funded by that money pot which came and went in the fizzle of a struck match. Babette might be comically depressing, but Barry embodies academic misery without a whiff of light relief. Just watching him is saddening. Every day he drags himself up the hill to campus, shoulders hanging and puppy-eyes pleading to escape this wearying existence. He is already utterly sick of the job he just started. His forehead is furnished with astonishingly deep worry lines; these do not auger well for the ageing process which he has prematurely embarked upon in every sense. It’s his second postdoctoral position in academia; a sort of reluctant stumble into an accidental career. Lack of success with other job applications sucked him in – again. He tries, and fails, to hide that he hates it here. I’m delighted he is here: Mark adores stressed and defeated Barry, and thus he has adopted him as his new target for evening monologues.

  Today, he is quickly – sort of obsequiously – followed by a spoiled brat, the new project student he is supervising. The contrast between the overly enthusiastic girl, speaking with a posh Cambridge accent, and the disillusioned and depressed Barry is bewildering – like an accident you have to watch. They go into the office to deposit their coats and bags and return to start the procedure I had just followed. Theoretically we could join forces, not to all repeat the same, mostly pointless, exercises, but that is unthinkable in Lab 262. This is a work environment where dislike and suspicion are cooked up as efficiently as any compound in a test tube. By now, I credit Mark with this atmosphere, these people, the draining ennui and all the time-wasting: this toxic mix will, I suspect, be his biggest contribution to the world of science. But, hey, I’m going to be a doctor…

  I watch the couple for a while from the other side of the bench. She pushes the pipette into the frozen cells and pours a bit of buffer into the tube. I wonder if her tank top, presenting the upper halves of her spotty boobs, disturbs Barry as he patiently shows her how to suck their E. coli mixture up and down, but then I decide that Barry probably has got other things to worry about. Though accustomed to the Theatre Bizarre mornings, I feel uncomfortable and am happy when Lucy, Hanna and Logan slope in and we move away from Act I; things start to “normalise.”

  At 9:30 a.m. Mark comes in and a deep sigh goes through the office. Barry rolls his eyes the same way Lucy does sometimes. He knows too well that Mark will capture him like prey, and half an hour of his life will pass, never to be seen again. Despite me being pretty sure Mark will ignore my presence, I feel my underbelly contracting and a weird tingle shoots from my elbows to my fingers. I know my limbs will feel slightly shaky until he leaves. Since Barry’s arrival, I have got into the habit of sneaking out for a cigarette as soon as Mark starts droning at his victim. Today is no different.

  While walking downstairs, I hear loud footsteps behind me. It is Babette, also on her way to smoke a cigarette. Also escaping Mark, I suppose. Babette can’t walk, she can only stomp like an elephant. It wouldn’t surprise me if she shatters her tibia one day by way of this thunderous exertion.

  We opt for the same nearby exit, ignore the non-smoking signs and suck on our fags next to a container with empty chemical bottles. It being a day of the month, Babette doesn’t look like she is up for a chat. Neither am I. It is a pointless exercise; putting in the effort of breaking breath with a grumpy person who feels put upon if you say anything to her.

  I walk back upstairs, and see Mark still has Barry in his grip. As I pass them, Mark abruptly turns round, facing me. “You checked your email?” he asks in his typically demanding tone. The carrier pigeon has not arrived yet to deliver our daily basket of emails to Lab 262… Already he has an expression on his face that no matter what my answer will be, he will be disappointed by it.

  “Not yet, no.” Wrong answer.

  Mark presses his lips together and sighs through his nose. Of course, wrong answer. Do I now endure a rant about when in the day I actually should read emails, or about the content of the email he sent? Just bring it on, dude!…

  For a moment it looks as if he is actually about to shout, but he sighs another time instead, to get himself together. “Prof. Raetz agreed to send some of the antibiotic he synthesised. It’s precious material, so be careful with it. You can send your LpxC plasmids to the US, to have his researchers assay them for us, this week,” he says, much more enthusiastically.

  I fall silent. In terms of LPS research, Raetz’s is the most famous lab in the world. He is the world’s leading researcher on the pathway I am working on. In fact, the pathway is even called after him, “The Raetz Pathway.” He was the first researcher to publish every single step of it – he drew it and he mapped it. He is a Big Cheese and it rather amazes me that he is giving Mark – a nobody in the field – any attention. I guess the attention must be based upon Mark boasting about results which do not, as such, exist yet.

  “Isn’t that great?” he says, now almost manically, like he just unwrapped his Playmobil Pirate Boat to play with back in his office. What kind of drug blend is he taking?

  I take a few seconds to think about an answer. “Yes, it is great… But, we don’t have the plasmids yet.” And we are bloody far from having them!

  “Then… make them!” Of course… Bippity boppity akawaka alakazoo dippity doo and boom it’s done!

  “I have been on this project for eight months, and so far it mysteriously didn’t work.”

  “I will help you.” Oh please, don’t help me! I bet you don’t even know how to turn the machine on and off. “We must get that done!”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He slaps me lightly on my shoulder, smiles and walks out of the lab.

  Hectically, I start digging through the freezer to get out all the stuff needed to start a PCR. As our PCR machines are of a similar vintage to the autoclave, I run downstairs to ask another group if I can use theirs. Thankfully, I can.

  Around midday, I’m hanging in the office waiting for Lucy to go for lunch. I am resting my head on the table. It feels like it is seven in the evening. The whole plasmid thing now needs to be top priority, just when I was fully engaged on a different project; the one Mark had told me last week to focus on. As we walk to KB House and climb the stairs to the canteen, Lucy and I chat, like friends, and this somehow feels like life-enhancing therapy today. We both decide to opt for a cheeseburger with potato wedges, buy an overpriced coffee to help digestion and forty-five minutes later return to the lab.

  In the lab we follow the same pattern as this morning. It is Babette first on the machines, then me (running the plasmid experiments in between), then our dear tear-inducing Barry. I am quietly waiting for my turn and watching Babette from a distance. Her blood pressure has dropped a fair bit during the last few hours but the compressed eyebrows, together with that aural punctuation of odd and disturbing noises, indicate that she is angry or grumpy; in other words, back at her default setting – in a cold war against the world and against herself.

  While still waiting for her to finish, Mark enters the lab chatting with a young, Mediterranean-looking man I have seen a few times before in the department, but never in our lab. This guy is a group leader I believe. Mark
is making large gestures as he talks. He bins some used paper towels that lay spread over our work bench, as if that might disperse the stifling mood of abject misery which forever hangs in the air of this lab like a stale gas.

  “Hanna here?” Mark asks.

  “No, she’s at lunch.”

  He shakes his head in disbelief, as if lunch at lunchtime were a bridge too far. Outraged incredulity is his favoured expression when he wants to spread bad feeling among lab inmates. Still, I’m surprised. Normally he doesn’t mind us taking breaks. He never joins us for lunch, but during coffee time he is mostly there, resting his ass on one of the dirty couches of KB House – holding a monologue about football or research. The first few times I tried to contribute to the conversation, but it was made very plain that I am not supposed to talk. Only Erico can talk, and now Barry as well I suspect, but he doesn’t want to. Erico is able to make Mark laugh with supposedly engaging stories, served up with Italian style. The rest of us are apparently bereft of charm. Our role is to nod and listen. Over the months, these breaks – which are harder work than our actual work – get to me; I am a number, selected for this PhD position based on my CV and letters of recommendation. The actual human presence behind the documents seems to be of no consequence whatsoever.

  “You happen to know where she keeps the Sal-1 LPS?” he asks.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Oh god, he looks so annoyed, so I nervously add, “But if you urgently need some, you can have some of mine.”

  “You have Sal-1 LPS as well?” he asks, incredulously of course.

  “Yes. Hanna just happened to show me last week how to isolate LPS.”

  I didn’t know if it would actually ever be worth something for my PhD, but after spending weeks unsuccessfully repeating my own experiments, I needed a break from the constant frustration. I had joined Hanna on a trip to the hospital, where she showed me yet another experiment. The LPS came out of it.