by Megan Abbott
“Diane,” I call out, running now. I can hear Dr. Severin behind me, heels clicking.
Weaving past the cage wash, feed barrels, and mop racks, between the aisles of cages, the endless maze of them, I finally spot her, light catching on that shorn hair, halo white, moving through the doors.
The red exit sign, the light from the hallway beyond, and she is illuminated, her profile turning, that pale down on her cheek.
“Diane!”
Through the open doors, I see two policemen approaching from the hallway’s far end. The short one with a rain smock looks at her.
The other, very tall with fuzzy brown hair and a mustache, is saying something I can’t hear. Diane sees him too and suddenly begins running toward him. As if he were a finish line she must tear through.
“Careful!” I shout, though I’m not sure to whom.
Like an arrow, Diane thrusts herself straight at the policeman, so fast he nearly reaches for his gun. The startled look on his face as she presses herself against him, her arms curled in front of her, like a child finding a lost parent at the mall.
I stop and watch, struck, Dr. Severin behind me.
The mustached cop doesn’t seem to know what to do, tentatively touching her arm, patting her back, looking at his partner with confusion as she burrows against him. Not a hug, not an embrace, but a kind of effacement, disappearing into him, his bulky jacket, his stiff arms blotting her out.
“It’s okay, miss,” he’s saying. “You’re okay.”
Her head turns slightly toward him, bobbing back like a wounded animal’s. The sleepwalker who has woken up.
“No.” The voice is a child’s voice too, her body sinking, holding on to him for dear life. “No, I’m not.”
NOW
Once, in a neurobiology class in college, our professor showed us an MRI of a man’s brain that was covered with white blobs. He asked us what we thought they were. Everyone guessed tumors. I was the only one who got it right.
“Tapeworms,” I said. I’d seen them countless times in my mom’s clinic, in the slurry excrement of the strays she brought home. They start out as ribbons, unwinding to a dozen, two dozen feet, loping around the intestine. But before that, they’re larvae and they can drift effortlessly into the bloodstream, find their way to the brain. Burrowing in. Getting trapped in its cavities, sprouting like grapes. They can thrive there, live there for years. Pressing against the membranes, swelling the pinky-gray tissue like a tissue-paper pom-pom.
If I sliced open Diane’s beautiful, extraordinary brain, I feel certain of what I’d see: a swarm of worms, a cluster of sickly grapes, pushing against the chambers of her brain, inflaming it.
She didn’t ask for it, but it’s there. Maybe she can’t help it, a fatal combination of nature and nurture, a derelict upbringing, a feckless parent.
Maybe she can’t help it, but can’t we all say the same?
We’re in Severin’s office, waiting for our turn. Diane will take a long, long time, I think. She’s been waiting quite a while to talk. Maybe forever.
Severin brings us both coffee from her secretary’s machine and slugged with a shot of brandy from her file-cabinet drawer.
“I can’t decide about you, Kit.”
The voice, like smoke-heavy curtains rustling behind you.
“Can’t decide what?” I ask. The lights so low. The blinds half shut as in some lost film noir. The room is gray, or white, or no color at all.
“Whether you’re the luckiest or unluckiest person in the world.”
She shakes a cigarette loose from a small pine box shaped like a miniature coffin on her desk.
“Let me know if you figure it out,” I say, rubbing my neck.
Cigarette in mouth, she feels for her lab-coat pocket on instinct, but she’s still wearing her party costume, the sleek leather dress of a winner.
“Don’t suppose you have a light?” she asks, maybe smiling a little.
I shake my head: Not this time.
She opens her desk drawer and fumbles around until she finds a box of safety matches. She lights up and takes a drag, leaning back in her chair.
“Oh, Serge,” she says, cigarette dancing between her lips. “So he just tucked the body away, eh?”
“Yes. He said he couldn’t finish the job. The job was for you?”
She nods slowly. “He told me he’d taken care of it. The campus incinerator. It took eighty-five minutes, he told me. He lied.”
“So he’s the one who told you about Alex? All this time, you knew?”
“Certainly,” she says, surprised. “It’s my lab.”
“But Serge got it all wrong,” I say. “He thought Diane killed Alex.”
Dr. Severin looks at me, blinking twice. “Didn’t she?”
Her face impassive, she nods slowly as I tell her what really happened.
“And you let him run the flash column even with the crack in the glass?” she asks once, then twice.
“I told him to stop,” I say. “Over and over.”
The look she gives me is one I will feel for a long time. It’s a cold thing under my skin.
“You know how he was,” I say. “He was never careful. He didn’t have to be.”
She squints. “Maybe he did.”
“What about you?” I counter. “Look what you did. Look what you made Serge do.”
“I’m not proud of it,” she says, her voice clipped. “Who could be proud of any of this?” She sighs, looking at her hands, which I now see are shaking. “I loved them both.”
I look at her, startled. “Why, then? To protect yourself? The lab? The work?”
“Don’t moralize with me, Owens. Not now. None of us is off the hook.”
“I didn’t—”
“There’s a reason, after all, you feel so comfortable in that vivarium,” she says. “With the mice, and the rats.”
Rats. The word stings, rings in my ears.
“So you know everything,” I say. I take a breath, thinking of sitting across from Ms. Castro all those years ago. “I should’ve gone to the police.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” she says. “Clever girl.”
I reach for the pine box, take a cigarette.
“Well, everyone has her weaknesses,” I say. “Is Diane yours? First she’s your case study. Then she’s your intern. And once again you found her.”
“If you prefer to phrase it so romantically.”
“Are you lovers?” I ask, taking a long drag, my first-ever cigarette. It smells like my dad.
Severin crosses her legs, black leather dress like an oil slick catching the light.
“Oh, Kit,” she says, smoke swarming us both, “you are still so young.”
NOW
This is how she tells it.
It was more than eight years ago, before she had this lab, her own lab, when she was still climbing hard, knuckles pressed against rock.
She was recruiting participants for a new intramural study on possible genetic factors and PMDD. All day long, her grad students interviewed potential subjects, mostly undergrads drawn in by flyers posted across campus promising UP TO $800 for taking part in the diagnostic testing and interviews. Students were so easy. They’d come just for wax-cup coffee and orange Milanos. And it seemed nearly every college girl who’d ever read Sylvia Plath, which was nearly all of them, longed to be told she suffered from PMDD.
She sometimes watched the interviews through the one-way mirror like a police inspector on a television show. None of the students ever seemed to notice as they nibbled on their cookies, or pretended to. Talking about their bodies and their blood. Their feelings and the heat of them. They were all the same, with their oversize sweatshirts and downy cheeks. Their uptalk and their justs and their I guess, I mean, maybe and their equivocations (I don’t know, maybe it’s just normal to feel this way? To cry all the time for days and days and eat and eat until I’m maybe just gonna die from it?).
Eased into comfort by the female grad stu
dents in their crisp shirts and stylish eyewear, the cool and measured tones she’d trained them to use when interviewing, the undergraduates opened up like loose-hinged clams. (Ice the muscle first, her father used to tell her on summer trips to Mustang Island, and they’ll pop like a prom date.)
But Diane was different. She came on the last day. Everything about her was reserved, even the way she held the proffered cookie, fingers barely touching its edges, like it was a foreign object. She never took a bite, never drank any of the coffee or aromatic tea. Back straight, her head high, her voice low, deep, thoughtful, she spoke clearly, sparingly. She never shifted in her chair, twirled her hair, or tugged her sleeves over her hands like all the others did, girlish and coy. She never spoke in anything other than a low purr.
Yes, anxiety. Tension? Yes. Mood changes? Yes, those too. Yes, hostility. Hostility and other feelings as well.
Because there was a music to it, like a hypnotist’s voice. Or like someone who spent most of her time talking to herself, talking in her own head.
Urges that I can’t seem to manage. Often, I have this feeling of…disorder inside.
When she spoke, she faced not the graduate student interviewing her but the mirror behind. The only one of dozens those first few days who understood what it was all about.
But, after all the tests and interviews and forms, Diane didn’t meet the diagnostic criteria for PMDD and so her name did not appear on the list of chosen subjects posted outside Dr. Severin’s door.
But I need help, she insisted to the departmental secretary, her fists clenched at her sides. I must be chosen. I need to be chosen.
Watching from her office door, Dr. Severin, for reasons still murky to herself, ended up inviting Diane inside. She said she was sorry but there was nothing that could be done. Diane’s symptoms did not align with her menstrual cycle.
Simply put, she said, there’s no evidence of a connection between your blood and your feelings.
But there is, Diane kept insisting, her voice never wavering. There absolutely is. You’re wrong about me. Everyone’s wrong about me. I have it.
It has me.
Dr. Severin listened to her, overcome by a wave of feeling. This is someone, she thought, who has learned something very troubling about herself and does not know what to do.
That evening, the experience kept humming in her head. The name, it was familiar. Diane Fleming.
It wasn’t until she, somewhat unethically, looked up Diane’s student record that she began to put it together. Diane had graduated from one of the high schools in her scholarship pool.
Had she applied? Indeed she had.
She turned to her scholarship files and found it. That odd letter forwarded to her by the committee chair two years ago. The confidential missive from some guidance counselor at one of those chem-chugging, dying towns by the state line.
It pains me to have to tell the scholarship committee members this. A student has come forward with some upsetting information about Diane Fleming. I cannot confirm the details, but I find this student to be very trustworthy. I do believe her. I realize that the scholarship awards are based on academic excellence but a key guideline is the “integrity and ethical values” of the applicant and these areas are very much in doubt.
Attached was the obituary. Diane’s father. That brush of a mustache and gloomy expression. Medical examiners in those parts don’t have elaborate equipment. No mass spectrometer, which could run you a hundred grand. But they do have assumptions, and they assumed. If no family member asks, they assume. Cardiac failure. His heart stopped. Sad, really.
Her first thought had been: Skip it. Who knows if it’s even true? This could be the poison-pen letter of a jealous competitor. Maybe even the other scholarship finalist.
But her committee chair seemed concerned. We can’t afford to cast a pall over our women-in-sciences scholarship. Our mission is too important.
And so no one had done anything. And no one told anyone either.
It’s not our business, she’d thought.
But now, having seen Diane Fleming, she supposed it might be true. Something was consuming the girl. I need help.
She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.
It wasn’t until two years later that her name came up again, in a stack of applications for summer internships in the Severin Lab. With an appointment to lecture in Grenoble, she knew she wouldn’t be there, but she didn’t hesitate to give the slot to Diane. She had all the bona fides and Dr. Severin couldn’t help but feel sorry for her in some quiet way. She too understood something about the ways people—women—had to isolate themselves to protect themselves. To keep going.
It turned out, however, that there was some trouble in the lab in her absence. Diane hadn’t really fit in and hadn’t participated in any of the group extracurriculars. And then there was the matter that had to be addressed: the incident report one of the junior lab techs had filed about her treatment of the animals.
“Serge,” I say. “That was Serge.”
“He couldn’t let it go. That’s why he was the best.”
I look at her.
“Poor Serge.” She shakes her head. “He was always burdened by a kind of male rigidity. Black and white, right and wrong. It’s harder for men to understand. Some men.”
I nod, putting my cigarette out.
“Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.”
Serge’s incident report was faintly hysterical, but it was Dr. Severin’s duty to follow up. She hoped she might talk seriously with Diane. Encourage her to get some kind of treatment. And, if Diane was resistant, perhaps move the report forward to the dean.
But when she arrived at the lab and saw Diane—that soft golden leaf of hair, the delicately blinking eyes, the steady hands as she held the test tube up to the light, studying it—Dr. Severin found herself inexplicably moved.
The girl, she thought, has no one in the world looking out for her.
So she took her to dinner. Diane had a late train that would take her far away, to graduate school on the opposite coast, and so they sat at the station diner and drank coffee and ate hot turkey sandwiches and talked about the work Diane would be doing next, studying gender differences in parent-child bonding, injecting oxytocin into the brains of voles.
Finally, as she was paying the check, Dr. Severin decided to ask. Had she ever gotten help for the things she’d been feeling two years ago? The disordered thoughts?
Diane smiled faintly and said yes.
Leaning forward, she confided she’d had that all taken care of.
Taken care of?
It’s all gone.
Gone.
And she confided that she’d had a radical hysterectomy, elective.
The keyhole surgery, she said. I used an inheritance and had it all taken out.
Just shy of eleven o’clock, they stepped out onto the dusty train platform. Staring up at the sky, Diane said it reminded her of the first time she ever saw micrographs of astrocytes, those exquisite star-shaped brain cells, and discovered the strange beauty of science.
It was astonishing to me to think the human brain has more cells than there are stars in the Milky Way.
But as they waited, spotting the train’s smoke swirl in the distance, all Dr. Severin could think of was this girl, this young woman, had chosen to have her womb cut from her body for no reason at all. Or, at least, no reason that made any sense.
Untimely ripped—the phrase came to her.
The train approaching, whistles and horns screaming, Dr. Severin found herself moving toward her to hear, closer and closer until their faces were inches apart.
You know I saw you once, Diane said, grabbing for her bags. I was just a high-school stu
dent, fifteen, she said, but you talked to us about women and science. You were showing these brain scans and I knew what I wanted to do, to be. The blood is the life, you said.
As the train thundered in, enveloping them both in the manner of a Russian novel, she found herself placing her hand on Diane’s gleaming forehead.
Show them what you’ve got, she said, show them what you have in there.
She wasn’t even sure what it meant.
As Diane stepped onto the train, Dr. Severin was thinking that the brain was a monstrous and beautiful thing. A ravishing chaos.
Shouting over the chugging train, the brake pipe and conductor’s cry, the crackling intercom, Dr. Severin reached for her arm, thin as kindling.
Dr. Severin, do you remember the first time you held one in your hands? A brain?
Yes, Dr. Severin said. Of course.
How did it make you feel?
Humbled, she said honestly.
A quizzical look came over the girl’s face.
Really? Diane replied, just as the train began pulling away. It made me feel powerful.
“Last year, in the hiring pool, her name came up, and then came up again. A rising star,” Dr. Severin says to me. “I don’t know. Call it curiosity, call it something else, something…”
She cleared her throat, hiding her eyes from me.
I don’t say anything, still thinking of Diane, her womb plucked out. Her shorn hair and shorn body. The wormy logic of her wormy brain.
“It’s best,” she says, “to think of Diane as a sick person like any other kind of sick person. She can’t help what she is.”
What she is. But what was she before?
Or did I already know?
I think about her that first time at camp, before everything with her dad, before her exile at her mother’s hands. In the hotel room, how sick she got after all our secrets were told, everyone’s but hers, and how I held that hair in my hand, like a fistful of silk, and the way, sleeping in our shared room’s bed, our bodies curled, the only time we were ever so close, front of knee to back of knee.
