III. The Weeks
La dolce vita it was fucking not. It was especially depressing to see a woman like Eve fall to the sanctioned Stockholm syndrome of motherhood, babbling in falsetto, obsessing over BPA-free binkies and poly-blend Björns—and constantly filming Mercy sleeping, oozing, sucking on Duplo blocks, hours of baby B-roll as the chubby enigma hazed itself into subjectivity. With scary nonchalance Eve would walk around with vomit on her shoulder or tickle her constipated baby until it ejected its rancid mudslide. And she served up all the postpartum clichés about upended priorities and falling of scales. “My whole life used to be about, ‘Is this decision going to be good for me? Will this make me happy?’ And now it’s, like, ‘If I stay up an extra hour, am I good for tomorrow? Is it Jared’s turn or my turn?’ The decisions are just so clear now.”
But by her second glass of wine Eve would start complaining about never going out anymore, not being her own person, forget art, she had stretch marks, everything was over. “Linda, it’s so good you left New York. Jared and I barely survived. And now we work all day. I mean, I love her, I just hate that I had her. Anyone can raise a kid, you don’t gotta be good at it.” For his part, Jared had cleaned up—he was no longer the guy who’d squirt you with syringes of his own blood. Instead he’d surrendered his art for Thursday pickup basketball, the crack pipe for the Crock-Pot.
Linda was angry that they could settle so easily into prescribed social roles, down to the smallest exchange—arguments over buying single-ply toilet paper or refilling the Brita pitcher, then collapsing together to watch reality TV in silence, too exhausted to even make fun of it.
They were pulling Linda down. Accidental parents constantly had a telescope trained jealously out into the social universe, were always checking on the latest from Planet Abortion, and Eve would pornographically interrogate Linda about social goings-on. But Linda hadn’t even gone out in weeks. And hadn’t written in years, though she knew it was what she had to do. Since graduating, whenever she tried to write something hard, some diamond unscratched by sentiment, her pen went soft. But still she was too judgmental to be anything but an excellent writer. The question was whether she could be a world-historical genius for the canon—the real canon, not the dead-end Austen/Mansfield/Brontë ladycanon of apology. The last thing she wanted was to submit another callow bildungsroman, a neglected chapbook, one more helping of crème brûlée for the General Reader. She had no form and no subject. But she did have guilt—and guilt, especially Roman Catholic guilt, even shorn of belief, could never be underestimated.
Guilt, and the lack of anything to do on a Sunday morning with Mercy sleeping and Eve and Jared at work, brought her back into poetry. She could feel her poetics arriving, strong, immanent, in words hot enough to curl the paper. Poems were short. She could probably finish one before dinner. She picked up her pen, opened her notebook, put down her pen, and browsed on Eve’s laptop for music. Not classical, and nothing with lyrics. Ambient drone DJ mix? Sure—whoops, don’t wake Mercy. Once it was playing, she got up to collect her piss for later retail before it slipped her mind, then returned to her notebook. Her breathing was annoyingly noticeable.
Linda pressed the searing tip of her pen to the page and wrote:
Time
and gazed at it for two minutes. The blue ink looked unserious. Her handwriting was wobbly with disuse. She looked at it longer, and then she was forty-three and shortlisted for the Pulitzer and reading the introduction to the first anthology of her works: Time, known to wend in curious directions in Troland’s verse, revealed its clock face early to the American belletrist, as we discover in this volume of unerring journal writings selected from holographs held at the Ransom Center, Time: A Life, Vol. 1, Early Works, a ruthless conte philosophique, polymythic, polymathic, polyphonic . . .
Linda’s jaw clicked when she yawned. Afternoons were bad for writing, with their sunshine and lunchy torpor—but evenings were booked for living, and mornings for recovery. She got up for a glass of water, intuiting that her mental cloudiness was probably dehydration. She looked again at the notebook. Where was the crisis in Time? Some exposure to language would prime her, so she turned off the music and caught up on the LRB and Bookforum and fucking Jezebel. Silence was distracting her. She went out for an iced coffee and a smoke, returned with a stomachache.
She started over: Time. Outside, a skateboarder coasted down the asphalt sounding like a far-off jet, just as Mercy’s baby monitor made a crackling exhale. In a poem, that would mean something; in life it was dumb synchronicity. In the top margin she wrote: Time as birthed. Time as noise. Time skating by.
After a nap, it was evening, then it was night. She regarded her notebook with groggy dread, with loathing that her bottommost yearning right now was for yogurt. It was absurd that she could articulate exactly how she wanted to write but couldn’t write it: both dirtbag lowbrow and Olympian highbrow (that was how she faced the world: one brow low, the other arched high). Not a voice of her generation, but the voice of degeneration. She could even name her antecedents—Melville, Dickinson, Nabokov, Eve-via-Edie-Sedgwick, half Mann half Woolf. It bummed her out. Kierkegaard said man, as a synthesis, suffered anxiety, which bore sin and greatness. She was slightly encouraged to recall that quote, if not verbatim. In the top margin she wrote: Kierkegaard. Man. Anxiety.
At least Time was the proper magnitude, a top-tier human condition, like Form, Memory, the Real. Not quite Death; but Time was big news. There were Larkin’s Days and Woolf’s Hours and Years. Minutes and seconds were too small. But weeks—aha!—the only unit of time based on literature! Her ballpoint pen made flimsy rattles as she drummed it on her teeth.
She wrote:
Time is weak
She stared confusedly, then accusingly, at her writing hand. She was better than this, better than . . . herself? Desolation sat like an uncle on her chest. She swept her notebook off the desk and googled her old bitch-bun workshop instructor; a story collection with a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Ew. Linda moved to write down something about the eros of envy but then was like fuck it. She was twenty-one, would realistically produce her mature work at twenty-five, and win awards at thirty—and then there’d be no point. Barthes said the bliss of the text was a precocious bliss. Greatness was a moated metropolis you were born into or not. Linda occupied its exurbs; she was bridge-and-tunnel to genius, faux poet, proseur. Maybe she could translate. Edit. Copyedit. Serve superior souls. Art was so useless that effort meant nothing without overwhelming success. Process was the booby prize.
The baby monitor picked up Mercy’s precrying hiccups, and with some relief Linda went to the crib. She picked up the convulsing screaming body. The child’s cry / melts in the wall. Babies: Why? It felt absurd to even name them; they were Platonic, all hardwired rootle and suckle. Kids were ids, expecting you to translate screams and smells into need: why here, what this, I want—NOW. Looking after a baby, you realized you used to be one; then, that you still were one, screaming to be fed, held, changed.
Mercy went soft again and Linda laid her in the crib, rested her cheek on its cool rail. Expectations of reproduction and child-rearing underlaid women’s historical shit and shackles; in her innocent way, the baby was Linda’s failure. Linda switched the light off and saw, across the room, a blue-and-white nightlight in the precise sailboat shape of her exhaustion.
CHAPTER 4
Intro to Basics
I need to think about it some more.
—Joseph-Louis Lagrange
I. Soft Lab
Henrik was at the lab all night picking at his arm, which lay severed and splayed across its sterile blue diaper on the brushed-steel exam table. The hand was still intact but the cutaneous tissue on the forearm was a gouged yellow pulp, too frayed for the retractors to hook onto. He only had one cadaver limb for analysis, and he’d mutilated it. He glanced toward the closet where they stored the extra arms and legs in red bags. Behind the metal doors in the half-lit lab, the freezer c
ompressors gulped. He wondered how long it would take them to notice a missing arm.
He gave up, peeled off his latex gloves, and dozed off on the couch in the break room. At eight he woke and went to the bathroom, combing his unbarbered blond curls flat with their own oils. He ate a ramen cup and bagged up his arm. It smelled.
At nine his labmates arrived. Henrik was a known nontalker, so nobody said hi. Luke and Tim stood at the conference room window, observing the parabolic romp of a black squirrel on a scrap of grass thirty feet away, speculating on its average lifetime migratory range. Collectively the lab spun out these hypertechnical hypotheticals for weeks, devising metrics for the crispness of apples or back-of-the-envelope budget estimates for building robotic pop stars. Henrik was trying to fix the projector so it didn’t display as a big headachy trapezoid.
The chatter died down as Volger entered, his first appearance in six weeks. He’d just returned from a “vacation”—likely prospecting for a new job. In spite of his tenure, he was notorious for private-sector defection. Ken Volger’s career had been launched out of Stanford in the late seventies with his plantar-pressure gait analysis research that dovetailed lucratively with the jogging craze, and he’d made several TV appearances as a “jogging expert” without any increase in fame. He’d left his postdoc to draft sneaker schematics for Nike, discovering that his research (conducted in a lab through which visiting stockholders were guided, as a demonstration of Nike’s R&D supremacy) was mainly to produce meaningless radial graphs and buzzword garbage like total-range dorsiflexion and ambulatronics for use in creative. He left after his first product design, a resistance sling joining the ankles to the waist, bombed in consumer trials.
He returned to academia only to forsake it twice more on unpaid sabbatical, each time professing disgust with the pony-racing and lapdogging of department politics, each time returning when his ventures tanked. He squeaked out of junior professorship on the strength of three publications and friends in the department faculty. After nine years in mechanical engineering, he reigned over the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory, which it now seemed he was once again ready to leave.
Volger liked hovering behind whoever was presenting and looking directly at the laptop screen instead of the wall projection; he leaned on the back of Henrik’s desk chair, uncomfortably constraining its degrees of freedom. Henrik bullshitted his progress report for twenty minutes, gaining sympathetic stares from Luke and Becca, while Dian-Han and Tim smacked at breakfast burritos. Volger was squinting at Henrik’s slides with a finger-mustache of scrutiny. It didn’t go too badly, Henrik thought, in spite of some fudged findings, in spite of saying this whole part over here when he meant the energy dissipation zone surrounding the keratin filament debond. The gist was clear.
But Volger emailed him later that morning: Henrik, come over for a powwow.
Henrik walked to Volger’s office, down the hallway he traversed forty times a day: doors plastered with quotes from Darwin, Mendel, Euler; field-specific webcomic printouts; Stanford Magazine clippings about the Soft Lab’s research; overhead lighting and gray-green carpet with a faint stench of toluene; ten-key access panels whose steel keypad buttons had their digits rubbed away; loud old computers with one important function; tireless new computers that did all the hard thinking.
In his office Volger sat behind an oak desk the size of an air hockey table, the only wooden furniture in the building, and he reached across to offer a handshake as limp as an earlobe. Volger’s hairline was in retreat, with a defiant gray wisp in the unicorn-horn region. The pointiness of his occipital bone made his head vaguely anvil-shaped, and his breath made you hold yours. His thick celluloid glasses shrank his eyes to gel caps. A ketchup-red folder sat on the desk with Henrik’s project title written on a sticker: COMPUTATIONAL MODELS OF VESICANCE DELAMINATION IN [NATIVE?] TISSUES AT THE SUBQ BASAL LAYER–PAPILLARY DERMIS JUNCTION UNDER SIMULATED CONDITIONS OF [INDUCED?] NIKOLSKY I.
“How was your trip?” Henrik said.
“Fine. Good fly-fishing.”
“Did—did you get any—”
“Henrik, there’s lots to discuss.”
“Okay.”
“I want to talk big picture.”
Henrik couldn’t recollect any time, except on camera and during the first and last lectures of a semester, that he’d heard a physical scientist talk big picture.
“I believe science is value neutral,” Volger began, “and operates on history like an enzyme, speeding us along to our destiny. If that’s good, all the better; if not, you could say we’re getting what we’ve got coming. I’d say this obliges us to work on impactful projects.” Volger snapped and finger-pistoled Henrik. “What’s this project achieving?”
“Well, uh. We’re developing finite element models for the deformation of dermal tissue under deteriorative conditions, studying the structure-function relationship—” Henrik was regurgitating his abstract. Really he was just making a poster—one of those foamcore placards representing years of research and tens of thousands of grant dollars, which he’d bring to a two-day conference and then hang in the lab’s hallway. A dozen people might read his paper, assuming it was published. Henrik opened and closed his mouth while his synapses hung fire. “I’ve been thinking about how our insights into bullous pemphigoid could be used to develop methods to aid the proceduralization of . . . of contributing to novel understandings of poroelastic tissue delamination that could possibly overturn,” Henrik said, seizing a minor updraft as he sighted the end of his sentence, “the prevailing wisdom. Of the last twenty years. I’m sorry. That was sort of unfocused.”
“The funding committees thought so too,” Volger said, resting two fists on his desk as if waiting for Henrik to guess which one had his future in it. “The NSF and NIH flat-out rejected the grant renewal, and Dermavar cut half their give. F&A jacked up their take. The postgrant officer has got his arm way up my ass this year.” Volger said this at such an even keel that Henrik almost expected good news. “Maybe we should’ve played the BME angle. Tissue grafts. Funding’s all about telling the right kind of story.”
Henrik didn’t think that was the issue. Funding was more a mix of feudal patronage, Soviet bureaucracy, and star-system capitalism. Between Henrik and his money were the interests of eleven committees, public and private, prospecting for wonder pills and killer apps. Every joule of work had to be directed toward saving or justifying money, though money needed neither. Besides, what story could you craft around the infinite shrewdness and nauseating inelegance of matter?
“Unfortunately that all’s woulda-shoulda-coulda,” Volger continued. “The plug is pulled. Our focus kept shifting and we’ve been consistently dodgy about bench-to-bedside applications. Plus we’re not modeling from live tissues. It adds translational work and makes the findings less robust.”
“You’re saying we should’ve used live subjects?”
“At this juncture, that’s not our concern. Here’s our problem. There’s no money for your living stipend until we reapply.”
“So, uh”—Henrik’s heart went up like a balloon released outdoors—“how do I live?”
Volger picked up a pen for no reason and said, “You have a couple options.”
They could give Henrik more teaching hours for up to $300 a month. Another $150 if he could swing an ASB student grant. Outside funding? They wouldn’t get any more from MORF and NIH under Bush. Same with state research grants. Soft tissue delamination didn’t technically qualify as orthopedics, so OREF and OSRF were out. “We still have enough to continue the project,” Volger said. “Just not to keep you on it.”
Since the last budget tightening, moths were swarming out of Henrik’s wallet; he’d racked up $8,000 in Sallie Maes and $2,400 more across three credit cards. And for what? His work was useless. His labmate Tim was building software that took MRI scans of shattered bones and solved for optimal reconstructions. All Henrik’s research would do was earn him a degree. It seemed impossible that he could�
��ve gone this far down a career path without meaning to. He had $500.
Volger twirled his pen. “In my time I’ve worn lots of hats I never thought I’d wear. Corporate gigs, internships, night shifts. Bartended at a Mexican restaurant. Stole equipment from other labs. Some hats fit tighter than others.”
Could Henrik get a research assistantship in another department? Any landscaping experience? Babysit? Something online? No? Really? Was he on food stamps, because if not—
“These are my options?” Henrik said.
“Henrik, I’d hate to lose you. Nobody’s kicking you out, but I know you’ve got to eat. We all hit potholes. If you care about our research as much as I do, you’ll figure something out.”
It was clear that Volger had delivered this spiel so many times he could do it under general anesthesia. Henrik was here by Volger’s charity alone. Junior year, Henrik had taken ME 281 and 287 with him, and some well-timed manic episodes enabled him to ace the classes and volunteer for cell segmentation grunt work for eight hours every weekend. Senior year, when things went bad with Linda, Volger encouraged Henrik to apply for the grad program; Henrik had warned him that his grades weren’t perfect and he still had reqs to fulfill. Volger, with a nod of his anvil, said grades were moot and helped Henrik graduate early by liberally counting transfer credits from Yale. He’d overseen Henrik closely in his first grad year—triple-check those inputs, use these tensile grips on the Instron. But then Volger left for conference season and a two-quarter sabbatical, stonewalling with his email autoresponder, and Henrik realized Volger might have a bipolar streak himself, with his sinusoidal veerings of commitment.
“Give me your decision by let’s say end of month,” Volger said, smiling a gray barricade of teeth. “Remember: hats.”
Henrik left Volger’s office scratching his beard and walked back through the bright hallway, past rooms containing the rheometer that looked like a cappuccino machine, the Instron like an upended lathe, machines far harder to replace than he was. Suppose he transferred again. He’d have to start another project from scratch. He’d have to scratch up scratch, from scratch. He took the stairs down and went into the evening. If he had no real options, it didn’t matter what he did now. And when it didn’t matter what he did, he read books. At Green Library, Henrik swiped his student ID and cranked through the turnstile. As a scientist you implicitly checked your dualist beliefs at the door and accepted that free will and consciousness were side effects. But it didn’t feel right, that mass was just mass.
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