by Megan Abbott
The feeling is off, tilted. It’s in the air. A crackle of pressure, something. Is it possible for a person to change the barometric pressure in a space?
I start to walk back to G-21, but then swivel and turn the other way instead. I know just who I want to see.
At the end of the hall, I dip my key card into the colony room outer door, then again in the inside door. It’s the only part of the aging lab with truly modern security, three swipes of the card (elevator, entry to the floor, finally colony room itself), plus PIN codes even to get inside. The safest place in all the lab. All the world, maybe.
“Ah, there she is,” he says, sliding his headphones off.
Watching Serge always comforts me. The hmm-hmm from his headphones as he moves through the quiet space, tucking nesting material, an ear of corn’s gleamy floss, in the mouse cages with long gloved fingers. The skitter and scuff of his mice.
The mice love Serge more than any of the other techs and rumor is it’s because of his smell, something he wears, because usually mice don’t like men. They spike their stress hormones, or so some believe. I tease the other postdocs about it sometimes, all these men in the lab, and such smart mice.
“Are you hiding?” he asks with a wink. For a second, I wonder, and not for the first time, if he likes me a little. I’m the only postdoc whom he’s never written up for mouse-protocol violations.
Approaching him, I get a whiff, and the smell is nice. Organic. Mysterious. Loamy. He makes me put on a smock. The shoe covers too.
“You work so many hours,” I say, not answering. “Don’t you ever take a break?”
“I am not here on Monday,” he says in his formal way (Guy’s allergic to contractions, Zell always said). “I worry about them while I am away.”
“Where are you going?”
“The dentist,” he says. “Wisdom teeth. Ten years overdue, I am told.”
“Ouch,” I say. “I hope you have someone to drive you. And feed you milk shakes after.”
He looks at me, puzzled.
“That’s what my mom did for me,” I tell him.
“Of course,” he says, smiling at me in a warm, sad way.
Once, on World Cancer Day, I told Serge about my mom and he asked if that was why I worked in a lab. I told him it wasn’t, that I’d always worked in labs. But maybe it is different for you now, he said. Later, someone told me Serge’s sister had died from leukemia when she was very young, so I suppose it may be true for him. I wonder what it feels like, giving the mice—the soft squishes of mice—the same kind of poisons that had killed his sister. Sometimes it feels like life’s about understanding how much opposites meet. Kill to cure, poison to immunize, sacrifice to save.
“Do you wish for a mask?” he asks, watching me.
That’s when I start to notice other smells—mouse dander and mouse food, mouse feces. It’s heavier today than I remember. So heavy I feel like I’m swimming in it.
The swarm of pale brown coats in the cage out of the corner of my eye.
“There’s something wrong with the air today,” I say.
Serge smiles gravely and I can’t tell if he agrees or is humoring me. He reaches into his pocket and offers me a face mask, but I shake my head, not wanting to seem too delicate.
“I once read something,” he says, adjusting one of the food hoppers, the nuggets inside like miniature wine corks, “about Venus.”
At first I think I’ve misheard him beneath the low whir of the ventilated racks, the click of a drop feeder again and again.
“Venus?”
“The planet, not the goddess,” he says. “The atmosphere is so thick, we have never seen the surface. Even our most powerful telescope cannot penetrate the dense layer of clouds that surround it. Protecting it.”
“I don’t think that’s true anymore,” I say, though I know nothing about astronomy.
“At some point, it repaved its own surface. The lava is now on the outside, as if the planet turned itself inside out.” He opens one palm and flips it in front of me. “And in so doing, it erased all evidence of any old damage. It made itself new again.”
He looks at me earnestly, as if moved by the notion that one could remake oneself. Serge often seems moved, even by the rodents slinking around his hand, waiting for their estrogen, their fluoxetine.
“You sure know a lot about Venus,” I say, my hand over my nose now.
He smiles in that Serge way, somber and knowing. “I suppose I am a romantic,” he says. “But we all are.”
I pause. “Russians?”
“No,” he says. “Men.”
I smile, though I’m guessing not for the same reason as Serge.
“Well,” I say. “They’re not all as sincere as you.”
He lifts one of the mice, examining its coat. Its smell is sweeter now, just being in Serge’s hand. “You know the tall one, the messy one—Alex—he was in here looking for you earlier.”
“Oh,” I say. “I saw him.”
“There is a feeling about him,” he says. “I am generally correct.”
“He’s okay,” I say, but my brain is going places. “You just don’t like him since you caught him clipping tails.” You weren’t supposed to clip mouse tails for a DNA sample without permission, but Alex never followed protocol. It is barbarism, Serge said, walking into G-21, mouse in gloved hand. Alex laughed and then apologized. I don’t think Serge will ever forget it. There’s a rumor he keeps a Log of Animal Cruelties in his office.
“He is very confident, that one,” Serge says now. “I am not sure he understands Dr. Severin. What guides her choices.”
“What do you mean?”
He strokes the mouse, turning it around, looking for something: a fight wound, a patch of missing fur, a sign of the hair-chewing that can happen with mice housed in groups.
“My sense is that he believes her a political animal. She is not.”
“Hold on,” I say, my hand in front of my mouth, the smell perfumy now, whatever Serge is injecting in the mice, some ketamine cocktail for Irwin’s study. “What are you talking about?”
“His uncle is on one of the boards at the National Institutes of Health.”
I drop my hand. “How do you know?”
“I have heard him tell Dr. Severin, more than once. He thinks it is significant to her. To others, such a connection would be. But to her…” He shakes his head. “No.”
I shift my feet a little, the shoe covers crinkling. One of the feeding tubes clacks, a mouse straining beneath it.
“He is the political animal,” Serge says. “He is the one.”
“He never said anything,” I say, keeping my voice even. “We talk a lot. He never said anything.”
Serge looks at me and holds my gaze. “Didn’t he?”
What does it feel like? the young woman on the screen says, her aerated voice wobbling gently. Is that really what you want to know?
In the library, in one of the plywood carrels, smelling thickly of glue and loneliness, I watch PMDD videos for the rest of the afternoon, far away from the lab.
This interviewee has freckles, sweet curves, the small white face of Kathleens and Fionas everywhere. But something is wrong. She’s rubbing, tugging the space between her eyes like a woman in an old aspirin commercial.
Yes, says the unseen interviewer, Dr. Severin herself. What does it feel like?
The woman smiles. Well, first you get hungry. Then you get hormonal. And then—she pauses, her eyes darkening—you want to die.
The next woman is older, African American, with glasses she keeps taking on and off.
I couldn’t stop eating. I threw up all day and drank all night. One night, I threw up so I hard I tore my esophagus and had to go to the ER. It was like red ribbons, that’s what the doctor said.
The last one is tanned and bright-teethed, big enamel hoops clicking at her ears.
What does it feel like? she whispers, her lip gloss glinting, the girl at the health club, the hostess in the sho
rt dress at the low-sofa, throbbing-music restaurant. It feels like there’s a bomb inside me. It’s about to explode.
Her eyes grow large and confused.
The last time, on the last day, just one hour before the blood came, I’m cooking eggs and my boyfriend is asking me, for the hundredth time, where his phone is. I don’t even remember throwing the frying pan at him. His head is, like, collapsed in the center. And his skin is, like, sizzling.
Her hand stretched before her, her bracelets clattering like cymbals.
And then, while I was sitting in the police car, the blood came. Right there on the back seat.
The knock on the door comes late, near midnight, and I’m afraid it’s Alex. No one else knows where I live.
It’s raining outside at last. Serge told me it would start at ten p.m. and it does.
Laptop open in bed, I’m watching the reality show about the women with the shiny legs and tight faces. All of them live in the same glamorous city filled with rooftop bars and white-lined spas and the thump-thump of rose-gold limousines, champagne from gold bottles. Everything is theirs, yet they are always drinking and fighting, and when they do, it feels the same as many of the women back in Lanister—my mom’s coworkers at the rescue clinic, the assistant managers at the Golden Fry—except usually the Lanister women were softer and sad, beaten smooth by various disappointments and eager, always, to seek the corners of joy available, the Bloody Mary bar at Tomfooleries after church, the pet-photo contest at the clinic, a bridal shower in the covered smoke patio behind Mama Cuca’s.
The knocking at my door goes on for some time. Finally, I rise and move from bedroom to doorway, fingers curled, across the rasping wall-to-wall, edges stiff with decades of tenants.
As I get closer, I hear rustling behind the door, and something wet.
“Why are you here?” I’m peering through the yellowed peephole in the door. The fisheye shows only her golden head, the glassy black of a wet trench.
“Kit, let me in.” Through the peephole, Diane’s face, broad and white as a moon.
I open the door.
“How did you find me?”
“You can find anybody,” she says, standing there dripping sheets of rain from her coat, black and sleek as a crow’s wing. “Do you have newspaper?”
“What? No.”
But she’s already inside, sliding off those expensive loafers, now rain-swollen and unhappy-looking.
“Maybe some paper towels?” she asks, holding both dripping shoes between her long fingers, her eyelids dewy with rain.
I take a breath. “Yes.”
The entryway getting wetter and wetter, her whole raincoated body like a flicking butterfly, a black witch moth, I let her in.
She’s so wet that it’s as if her wetness is her only response. Little pools caught in the folds and furrows of her raincoat. My floor beneath her glossing.
“Diane, why are you here?” I say. “We have nothing to talk about.”
She looks up, pulling off her coat. “You know that’s not true,” she says. “We have everything to talk about. Everything.”
We settle on my sofa, the smell of rain and Scotchgard. She’s slipped her hat from her head, and that hair, so short and pale and drenched, reminds me, fleetingly, of my dad after a stormy night working security at the speedway, soaking my mom’s wall-to-wall like an old kitchen sponge. My mom would run a hair dryer over the spots so we wouldn’t get mold again.
Except really this is nothing like that because, as always, Diane is beautiful, and not exactly real.
“You live alone?” she asks.
I nod. “Do you live with someone?”
Diane shakes her head, almost a smile at the very thought.
“I guess it’s hard for us,” she says.
Something bristles inside me. For us.
“I was engaged,” I find myself saying. “After undergrad.”
“Oh,” she says. “What happened?”
His name was Greg and we met in biochem. After graduation, he started teaching middle-school science while I raced straight into the fast-track PhD program. He wanted to get married and have little science-nerd kids, but after missing our romantic getaway to the redwoods so I could get my professor’s grant application in on time, after my hours-late arrival at his parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary party and forgetting the gift in my lab locker, after falling asleep at the library too many times and not coming home…
“It didn’t work out,” I say, wishing I’d never brought it up.
The longer you’re with someone, the heavier it all is, on top of the heaviness you carry inside yourself. It was too much, taking on all of someone else’s feelings.
That was four years ago. At some point, without ever really knowing when, I’d stopped taking on new passengers. There didn’t feel like room enough.
Diane looks at me. “You asked me about my mom,” she says. “Today. In the lab. You asked how she was. That’s all over. She’s gone.”
Something creaks inside me, a forgotten crawl space reopened.
“Oh no,” I say, my voice losing sound as I talk. “Mine too. Cancer. Cervical.”
She leans back against the sofa.
“Kit. I’m so sorry,” she says. “When?”
“Two years.” Apart from my cousin Scott, she’s the first person who knew my mom that I’ve told. Scott had to chase down my dad at a dog track in Hialeah to let him know. That was it. I have no one else to tell.
She nods, eyes darkening, hands folded in her lap. An amnesiac tenderness momentarily hovers between us, but neither of us was ever the hugging type.
“How about your mom?” I say. It seems impossible, both our mothers so young.
“Oh.” She looks newly stricken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean my mom’s dead.” She pauses. “Just gone. As far as I know, she’s somewhere in South Florida right now. Singing her twins back to sleep, kissing that husband of hers good night. I haven’t talked to her since college.”
She stops and looks at me.
“But your mother,” she says. “She was so kind. That must be so hard.”
I don’t say anything. Somehow it all feels like a dirty trick.
For a moment, she stares down at her hands, stretching her fingers. They were always the only unpretty thing about her. The way they’d turn red, tight and veined, like an organ, a liver, or a heart.
“I’ve thought about you a lot,” she says. “About what you did for me. I never forgot it.”
What I did for you.
“Kit,” she says, “you’re the only one who really knows me.”
I feel that old, familiar clasping, grasping inside me. The desire to lift the drawbridge, sharpen the battlement spikes, raise up the walls so high I can’t even see the killing field.
“I didn’t ask for it,” I say, coolly. “It’s a curse.”
She smiles a little. “I forgot how you talk,” she says. “How you say things.”
But it’s Diane who always talked that way. Her words so big, like the Shakespeare tomes we read together, like the Technicolor melodramas I used to watch with my mom, florid skies and desperate clinches, long-lashed and golden-skinned doomed lovers.
“By telling me, you trapped me,” I say through my teeth.
“By telling you,” she whispers, rain still glistening on her, “I was free.”
Her face beatific, the shorn blond saint, her eyes glowing and sanctified. A kind of rapture.
THEN
“I’m not going to English today.”
It was the Monday after the news about our Severin scholarship eligibility, after our Barrelz and Bootz night. (The morning after, groaning like the rattle of a spoon in a coffee can, I’d looked down and found my sleeping bag rolled tight and Diane gone.)
She looked at me now, wan and slightly greasy in a way Diane never was.
“You never miss class,” I said. “Didn’t you read act three?”
“Of course I did,” she said. “I read the
whole play.”
“So come on, then,” I said, putting my hand on her arm harder than I meant to—I almost never touched her; who could?—her body shuddering into the classroom, its lights so bright.
Maybe I was mad still about the things she’d said Saturday night. Maybe I was mad because Sunday morning after she left, I sat and stared at those sneakers Stevie Shoes had given me, buried in the back of my closet. Finally, I dumped them in the trash beneath coffee grounds and potato peels. No running for me until payday.
“There you are,” said Ms. Cameron, smiling at us, her star pupils. “Now we can begin.”
“Class,” Ms. Cameron announced, “something is wrong in the state of Lanister High.” It was just the kind of so-lame-it’s-cool thing at which Ms. Cameron, with her Call of Cthulhu T-shirt and her Buddha bracelets and her thick sandals even in the winter, excelled.
“Ugh,” moaned Ashley Moon, barely looking up from her phone. “Ms. Cameron, it’s too late for Shakespeare. We graduate in a few months.”
“That’s why it’s exactly the right time,” Ms. Cameron said.
She loved to tell us that Hamlet was the ultimate adolescent. Childhood suddenly over, disillusioned by adults, lust-conflicted, seeking to supplant his parents. All of which made adolescence sound so dramatic, which maybe it was and maybe was why I wished it were over.
“Can we talk about when Ophelia gives Hamlet back all the stuff he gave her?” asked Melissa, chewing hungrily on her pen. “And he tells her to become a nun?”
All the girls in class loved Ophelia because in paintings and in the DVDs we watched, she was so fragile and ethereal and doomed, one after the other, pale blond nymphs with long wispy tendrils and flowers falling in slow motion, Ophelia sinking into a stream, a swimming pool, a bathtub. One glorious, glamorous scene after another of Ophelias erasing themselves.
She was not for me. My legs were thick and strong and I never spun languorous in floral dresses or let a boy call me a whore. Even my mom—once a pliant woman, or why else did she put up with my dad for all those years?—was still the type who, when not bagging dead cats and taking hacksaws to rabid dog brains, might choose to wield a hot clothes iron rather than let my dad sneak off with her car after his got impounded. We were not Ophelias, even though we had our weaknesses.
