You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  “I can offer you a coffee at the university as thanks,” I say to Felix while he fixes the tyre.

  “You got your own machine now?”

  “No, I’ve got bags with instant coffee,” I lie, presuming he would never opt for that.

  He smiles at me with childish purity. “We can get coffee at my office, okay?”

  “I was betting on that.”

  We cycle together to the university. Despite me finding myself quite well-trained after cycling a year over Edinburgh’s hills and a few trips to the Scottish Lowlands, it is a challenge to keep up with Felix. We can’t really talk during the journey, as the Edinburgh streets hardly allow for one bicycle and thus definitely not for two riding abreast. I am watching the scenery which still, after more than a year, impresses me. In Edinburgh it doesn’t matter if it’s raining or sunny, the city is always beguiling with its dark Harry Potter charm.

  I am totally out of breath when we reach campus.

  “You’re quite quick on that tank,” Felix says.

  “Tank?”

  “Yeah, that’s not a bike you’re riding. It’s fucking heavy.”

  I look at my bike made out of steel and totally equipped to travel the world. I never really saw the downsides of it, and could definitely not imagine replacing it with a lightweight road bike.

  “I like it.”

  We enter the department together and pass Lab 262 first to fetch a coffee mug.

  “Nice workspace…” says Felix, looking around at all the mess.

  “Lovely, I know.”

  “Why did you start your PhD here?”

  “Good university. Young supervisor.”

  “Right… carcinogenic solvents and no fume hoods… and don’t let the GMO safety officer see you pour genetically modified bugs through a normal sink!”

  “We ‘disinfect’ them beforehand.”

  “With this pink stuff?” Felix says, barely suppressing a laugh, pointing at the many flasks at the sink.

  “Yup.”

  “You will get into so much trouble if anyone sees this.”

  “No. Mark is the GMO officer of the chemistry department,” I say, giving him a wink.

  “Oh Jees.”

  I take the mug and push Felix out of Lab 262. We walk downstairs to Homer Simpson’s palace and Felix opens the door. It is quiet here. “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  “They will come. We don’t have many early birds here.”

  He places my mug under the coffee machine and checks if there are enough beans in the machine. We then have to fetch the water tank from eccentric William. We find him in the lab smashing glass valves with a golf club. Felix tells me he wants them replaced and is not happy with the patch-up job that Pipi Longstockings does with glue. As he seems to be very serious about his business, we first let him finish.

  “Right, I’d like to see Elizabeth fix those!” he says triumphantly.

  “I see,” Felix says sombre like a psychiatrist on his daily visit through the ward. “Something completely different, William. Do you happen to have the water tank for the coffee machine in your drawer again?”

  “I do.”

  “Would you mind lending it to us?”

  Without saying a word, William walks into the cubicle where Elizabeth is standing. Her eyes follow William and the golf club carefully while he unlocks the drawer. She looks a bit scared, but nevertheless keeps on whistling – the same tune as always. It seems to be a one-song-fits-all tune for happy, sad – and scary – moments.

  William hands over the water tank to Felix and utters his eternal refrain: “Please bring it back when you’ve finished.”

  “Sure.”

  We exit immediately, leaving William and Elizabeth alone.

  “What is the suicide rate here?” I whisper.

  “Why?” Felix asks, probably knowing in which direction I want to bring the conversation.

  “This whistling…”

  “I know!… It is like nerve pain.”

  “Do you think William has always been this way? You know, ready for a mental asylum?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Felix says and we both watch the last drops of coffee falling into the cup. Felix executes the coffee-making process with the same smoothness he deployed replacing the tubes below the column the other day.

  “I am not sure it is only the whistling. William has been a very successful PhD student. He published a ridiculous number of papers. But, since he came here things don’t seem to work out for him. And even if his research starts to bear fruit it won’t bring him as much as he might wish for. He has the wrong surname.” Felix pauses. What is he talking about? He looks me in the eyes and, for the first time, he does not have a playful expression. He continues in a bizarrely anguished tone: “We are the only natural science group who publishes in alphabetical order… William Rusthaus is pretty much at the end of the line.”

  “What?!”

  “It is a large lab. Homer wants to avoid conflicts.”

  “But then no one knows anymore who has done what… the order of authorship is the organigram of science…”

  “Yup. Homer is a big shot trying to play God. The result is that the wrong people are credited. But, what’s worse is that he does not ALWAYS publish in alphabetical order. Occasionally Homer breaks his own rule for whatever kind of reason. Now explain THAT in a job interview.”

  “A disaster… kind of alphabetical discrimination?”

  “If you pay attention, you’ll see that a lot of people working here have surnames starting with A or B. Some apparently knew about this rule beforehand. William didn’t.”

  “You start with an H, right?”

  “Yes,” he says bitterly. He looks disappointed as if his career took a body blow from almighty Fate. “My cards are not stacked well. Maybe I should quickly marry someone whose surname starts with A or B.”

  “Is that why you fixed my bike?”

  “Shit, you uncovered the master plan!” he says, theatrically grabbing my free hand.

  “Did you know this beforehand?”

  “Nope! Otherwise I would never have come here.”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I want to become a professor one day and therefore I need a successful postdoc. The academic system is not forgiving towards missteps or lost time. I know it sounds naïve, but I hope that in my case Homer will decide against his alphabetic order.”

  Felix leaves a long rhetorical break. “And, like you Ka, I moved to Edinburgh; the costs attached – and I am not talking only about finances – are high.”

  I look at him not knowing what to say. It dawns on me that I completely misread this guy. Behind the optimistic, outgoing veneer is a worried person seeing his career slip down the drain because his almighty boss resists tough decisions. After a short silence I try to lighten the mood, “You think Elizabeth is still alive after we left her alone with William and the golf club?”

  He laughs and we are back to the people we pretend to be. “I better check on them.”

  “Thanks for the bike and the coffee.”

  Walking to the door I pass one of Homers’ Nature covers, and I wonder if the right person got the glory of being first author out of a list of twelve. 8% chance of fairness, not too bad after all…

  While I am getting things together for today’s experiments, Lucy interrupts. She enquires about the previous evening: what happened that I arrived with Felix this morning?… I tell her about my flat tyre and another unexciting evening on the window sill. She is disappointed by the lack of juicy goings-on.

  “Well, at least I have something to share. I got a message from someone wanting to date me.” She says this as if it is worth saying. It is an almost daily occurrence, hardly breaking news.

  “Oh really?” I say, overly surprised. “Who is it this time?”

  “You remember the French guy I told you about, the one I met at the party last week – he invited me to the cinema. I know it
’s wrong…”

  “Is he good-looking?”

  “Okay-ish. Bit small”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s an artist.”

  “Oh God,” I sigh. “What kind of artist?”

  “A writer.”

  “What is he writing about?”

  “He doesn’t know yet.”

  “He doesn’t fucking know?!”

  “He is still thinking about it. But in the meantime he wrote me a poem.”

  “Oh Jesus! A poem? A French Robert Burns… Does he also have lovely, long, triggering sideburns?”

  We both laugh. Logan watches us, disapproving as always, but with a smile on his face. He shakes his head, pitying whatever man we’re deriding this time.

  “Sorry Logan, but poets and gynaecologists are an absolute no-no,” I say.

  “Agree,” chips in Hanna, who just joined us at the bench.

  “What is this selection based on?” he asks indignantly.

  “Gynaecologists have learned to see the female genitals as a breeding ground for disease, that’s not good for anything except their job,” I say.

  “Exactly!” Hanna says.

  “And poets see a double meaning in everything and they talk in vague words; both of which are annoying habits. But even worse; happiness is destructive to their art. They need to see the miserable side of life all the bloody time to be able to get something on paper which other people want to read.”

  Logan stares at me as if he just saw an eland passing outside the window. For him the explanation doesn’t make sense. But three women glibly dismissing men out of hand stifle his will to argue.

  “What shall I tell him?” Lucy asks.

  “That unfortunately you do not have time to listen to his poem as you are busy rehearsing your role as a chicken in a theatre play.”

  “That is a good reply! I’ll keep that one,” Hanna says.

  I prepare a protein sample to measure at the mass spec service in the Darwin Building and get into a coat. It is only early November, but the snow is falling thick. I hold my hands above the small glass plate to guard the sample against the snow. Carefully I ring the bell next to the locked door of the mass spec service. I’ve never been here before but have heard that the man running the show is very friendly and competent. A thin, long, grey-haired man opens the door. “What can I do for you, young lady?”

  “I would like to make a mass spec of my protein.”

  I show him the sample in my hands. He takes it and very carefully looks at the glass plate.

  “No problem, come in.”

  He opens the door a bit further so I can pass, introducing himself as Matthew. We walk to the end of the corridor where we enter the small room with a computer and a large MALDI-TOF spectrometer. He hands me a piece of paper to fill out.

  “Where do you work?” he asks while I scribble down my details.

  “School of Chemistry, doctor McLean.”

  The friendly man starts laughing, a bit uncomfortably maybe.

  “Then you don’t have to fill that out.”

  I look at him, awaiting an explanation. Surely he doesn’t give priority treatment to Mark?! Nobody favours Mark… He explains, “Your boss doesn’t pay anyway.”

  He places a pencil between his lips, thinking about how to handle the situation. I look at him with pleading eyes. What a disaster it would be if I couldn’t use it. I need the results. Finally he asks, “You really need it, don’t you?”

  I nod vigorously. “I do.”

  “You know what, I will write you down as a member of the Johnson group instead. They pay a fixed fee per year, they won’t notice.” Thank you, Gracious Nerd!

  “Does Mark really not pay?”

  “He is a pain in the backside. He sends angry emails. That’s all.”

  Entirely inappropriately, I apologise for Mark.

  “No worries. It is not your fault.”

  He enthusiastically starts explaining how the machine works. Most of what he says might as well be in Swahili, but I respect his effort and passion. This mass spec is clearly his baby and he is pleasant company. However, the incomprehensible content of his non-stop talking combined with the claustrophobic setting – a small room without any windows – soon reduces me to stifled yawns. I am not a strong spirit these days and the history of mass spectrometry interests me as much as the history of Boy Band B-sides. After thirty minutes craving for oxygen and a different topic of conversation he finally puts my sample into the machine. We let the mass spec shoot lasers at the target, which looks surreal, almost like being in a computer game. I wonder how much of his fascination with the topic derives from the intellectual thrill and how much from the boyish joy of firing a laser at things. It doesn’t take long before a beautiful spectrum appears on the screen. “Hallelujah! That’s my protein!”

  I save the file and print a hard copy to be sure it won’t get lost. It occurs to me that my successful results were begat by way of financial subterfuge. And, miserably, that feels normal enough now.

  “Okay. Let me show you a few other tricks that you can do with the machine,” Matthew says, eagerly moving the mouse over the screen to change some settings. Oh no, not again…

  “I am terribly sorry. I would really love to learn more, but I have to go back to the chemistry building. We have a lab meeting starting in five minutes.”

  “No worries. I can explain next time. Or you can give me a ring and we can make an appointment for the rest of the explanation.” You are a good guy, but I would need a gallon of wine to make it through the rest of the explanation.

  “Do you happen to have a clarifying text file for dummies you could send me instead? Or a YouTube movie I could watch?”

  He thinks for a while, then hurries to a shelf at the back of his office and picks up a book the size of a breeze block. “Here. You can borrow that if you promise to return it. Everything is in there. It is like the mass spec bible.” Whoopee.

  “Oh I think this is not a good idea. Look at the weather outside, it will be destroyed. That would be such a shame.”

  He opens a drawer and takes a Farmfoods plastic bag out. You really think I am going to cross campus with a mass spec bible in a frozen food specialist’s plastic bag? Bye bye intercourse! He carefully puts the bag around the book while I clutch for another excuse.

  “Wait, wait! I will check in our lab first. We have so many books we might have it ourselves. If not I can still come back.”

  “I don’t think McLean has it.”

  “Oh, he might, really, he loves mass spec.”

  The poor man looks crushed. I feel bad. I consider taking the breeze block after all. Me with a Farmfoods plastic bag that screams poverty… No, sorry, I’m not overly vain but I do have limits… And I feel terribly unattractive already…

  Empty-handed I leave.

  I walk back to the lab and ask Lucy, “Did you send it?”

  “Yes, he already replied. He is keen to see the chicken play.”

  We both laugh. Logan looks on despairingly.

  Late afternoon Mark walks into the lab. He has my first year report in his hands, which I gave him months earlier, just before breaking up with Daniel.

  “Good stuff,” he says, laying the report in front of me.

  I don’t say anything. I wouldn’t know what to say. Actually I never expected he would bring the mandatory report back up again.

  “You will get some publications out of your PhD, I’m sure,” he adds.

  He looks enthusiastic, the same way he looked at me at the start of my PhD, but I haven’t seen him like this for months. I remain silent, unsure what to think. “You can continue the LpxC project if you wish.”

  “I would like to,” I mumble.

  I really do want to continue that project, as it was my own idea – it’s my baby; the research for which I risked using up all the valuable antibiotics.

  Mark follows up with a crazy number of new things he wants me to do. He really seems to t
hink that I am a super-dextrous octopus never in need of sleep. But at least he is friendly for a change. After listening to him for about a quarter of an hour I realise he has something else on his mind, which he only now conveys because he wants to leave the lab, “Oh, Karin, your first year exam is next week, on Wednesday. It will be James, Prof. Gilton and myself taking it.”

  For a moment I freeze. I knew that this exam would come sometime, in fact we are months late with it, but I’m not ready. I haven’t prepared or studied or spared it a thought. I spend endless hours repeating hopeless experiments, trying to make the plasmids I still don’t have. And I celebrate my single status with buckets of booze. And now he gives me a week’s warning. It is understood that to protest or criticise is a declaration of long-term hostilities with the boss. Silence seems the best – and only – reply. He smiles, insofar as he ever smiles, sort of de-grimaces anyway, and saunters off.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_24

  Chapter 24

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  As Prof. Gilton draws the next chemical formula on the piece of paper in front of me, I feel my hip bones hurting from sitting on this hard orange plastic chair for too long. My exam nerves faded and now aggression is creeping in; I want to crumple the paper up and stuff it down Prof. Gilton’s shirt- this man just in front of me who is rumoured to be a notorious alcoholic. I don’t know if it’s true, gossip spreads like germs at work, and he looks quite sober to me now. For sure Prof. Gilton is nourished by his own mysterious reputation. Why did he give his lab to Mark so long before retirement? And why does he not supervise PhD students anymore? Most days he sits in his office, but apart from reading PhD theses which Mark refuses to touch, and puffing away like a steam machine despite the smoking ban within the building, one can only speculate what he gets up to in there.

  “Explain how that reaction works,” Prof. Gilton says, pointing at the piece of paper.