‘I don’t want tenure. I’m quitting.’
‘You’re quitting? You are fucking insane.’
I stare at him, his open logger’s shirt and chinos, his safely dated academic’s beard.
‘Just slowly coming round,’ I say.
I go back to the room and call Effi. The poster tube rolls, defeated, onto the abstract carpet. As I’m awaiting my turn for the satellite, I flick the TV on, mute it quickly and surf through to the adult channel. Then I turn it off again, because watching porn seems offensive when the person I’m about to speak to is trapped, body and soul, in the nineteen-fifties. She comes on to the line, giggly and panting, and tells me she’s feeling fine. Her long-lost son has finally come up from Brighton to visit her and is already getting on her nerves. I wonder whether to tell her. She’s never needed to be told anything before.
‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘Tampa. Florida.’
‘How is it?’
‘Crap. I’m giving up.’
‘You need to get a new job, Yvonne. All this brainology can’t be good for you.’
‘I mean it. I’m quitting. I’m going to hand my notice in as soon as I get back.’
‘I think I guessed that.’
‘How? I’ve only just decided.’
‘Maybe you do your deciding noisily,’ she says.
I go online and check for messages. The video about the condo on Anna Maria Island is still playing. There’s nothing new. If Mateus wants me to come and find him, he’s not making it easy. I flick through the Portuguese dictionary again, trying to pick out a few more words from the well-thumbed photocopy I picked up from the bookcase in my treehouse. Probably the only such copy in existence, he used to boast. I can decipher enough of this obscure European natural history journal to confirm everything I ever suspected about the Pereira Effect. This is all I have on him. But, for the moment, it’s all I need.
I pick up the programme book and turn to tomorrow’s presentations. Mateus’ symposium is scheduled for 10 a.m. If I have the courage to see it through, tomorrow might bring some answers. If not, then I’ll always have the memory of a plan.
I dream of Sansom again. This time it’s Gareth who follows me there. He’s eating lobster with an elderly chimp while another in a maid’s uniform pours champagne. ‘Connections,’ he’s telling the chimp. ‘It’s all about making the right connections. If you can just find a way to talk to them, the birds will come when you call.’
The phone drills me back into the world.
9:50a.m. is dead time in the Tampa International Convention Centre. In all the meeting rooms on this floor, symposia are winding down, final questions are being picked out from the floor, conveners are checking their watches and sorting their index cards. In five minutes these glitzy salons will be turning themselves inside out, floods of wan and yawning delegates clattering through huge double doors, checking their programme books for details on their next two-hour session in a tube-lit, fake-flowered meeting room. For now, though, it’s as quiet as cyberspace. I shuffle past the elaborate coach lanterns that mark the entrance to the Clinton Room, trying to gauge the size of it from the spacing between the two sets of doors. I hope it’s a big one. I could do without him knowing I’m here.
As I round the corner I can hear the first people coming out of the Clinton Room behind me, the doors opening and shutting on the polite applause of an academic audience. Here, though, there’s no one. I move silently over the floral Versailles-effect carpet tiles, trying not to look as though I’m trying to hide. Plastic mock-skylights cruise by over my head. The air-con purrs out the sound of deep space. Around one corner I come across a toy-sized Latino going at the floor with a carpet-sweeper. There is no dirt to sweep up. It feels like a terrible injustice, that this harmless man should be made to waste his time on an utterly clean corridor. He’s the human slave in some apocalyptic future’s robot world, dwarfed by space-station architecture. I want to talk to him, ask how you can have your pointless tasks set out for you in the minutest detail and still manage to go about them with dignity. But his secret is safe. Behind me, the audiences are changing over. The Clinton Room is emptying and refilling. It’s time to go.
When I was revising for my finals, I had my own table in the library. I’d be there every morning at nine and stay there until my eyes were dry and my notes were a lurching blur. I knew the precise width of the table, the exact position my chair had to be in if I was to escape the late-afternoon sun. When the exams were over and I no longer had to spend days huddled over my files, I missed it like some people would miss a childhood home. I was less of a person when I was away from it. I’d left something of my strength, my certainty, there.
Science, for me, has always been a place like that: a room you could walk into and quietly occupy without anyone noticing, a place with reliable light and unchanging dimensions, to which no one ever questioned that you belonged. It was like one of these slowly filling meeting rooms, in fact: familiar, polite, unshowily welcoming. Taking your seat among all those eminent names was always going to be a test of nerves, but you knew that, in the end, you’d be OK.
When I see Mateus sitting there with his shaved-off goatee and his pony tail cropped to nothing, I wonder if I know this place at all.
But this surprise shouldn’t surprise me. If science is a place, then it’s never the same place for long. Ten years from now, most of the findings presented on this third day of the Biennial Meeting will be obsolete. In ten years, Sansom or someone will probably have found a cure for Alzheimer’s. My ninety-nine mice will have long gone up in smoke. No one will care that I sat here today, my heart thumping as its greatest tormenter was introduced by the symposium chair in the most flattering of terms. It won’t matter that I did what I did, that I couldn’t stop myself doing it, because science moves on. It’s far greater than the sum of its parts. It will forget us, and our false theories, as soon as reality proves them wrong.
Fuck it. I’m still going to do it.
The first speaker is one of Mateus’ old colleagues from Lisbon. He has fifteen minutes, plus five for questions. Mateus is on third, which puts him forty minutes away. I can wait. There must be five hundred of us in here, and only the symposiasts have lights on them. Occasionally I see Mateus tapping at his laptop, making a few last-minute changes to his presentation. He always got nervous before these big shows. Only once do I see him glance out anxiously at the room.
The second speaker is the most famous of the four of them. He got a paper into Science in the early nineties which, Mateus once told me, went on to become the most widely cited paper in its field. You can tell he’s done nothing interesting since then. These are old data he’s presenting, maybe even offcuts from that one famous study, the royalties he’s still living off. He’s proof that you can get to the top without talent, without ideas, just by plugging away and being careful who you love. If science is just a story, as James likes to say, then this one is a fairy tale.
The guy finishes early and no one has any questions. There’s an awkward moment and then Mateus puts up his hand. The audience will remember his generosity, his concern for his fellow-symposiast’s awkwardness, and his own talk will be the more brilliant for the contrast. I don’t understand the question, which is probably because I’m falling apart, but the speaker doesn’t appear to understand it either. Remembering the etiquette of the situation, Mateus just nods and smiles. Wherever he’s been, he’s learned some manners. Or maybe he’s simply learned how to be afraid.
Then he’s standing, my dark man, picking his way through the chairs to the empty lectern, and the lights go down and the first slide of his presentation ghosts up onto the back wall of the room.
‘I’m going to talk today about an aspect of neurone–silicon connectivity that has interested me now for several years. At UCSD we’ve been developing a model that tries to account for...’
So he’s at San Diego. I can live with that.
‘With this new m
odel we’ve tried to make sense of anomalous conductivity in the mammalian nervous system by considering...’
It isn’t a new model. He presented this at Quebec and it was old then. But science moves on. For Mateus, Quebec never happened.
‘We hope that this effect we’ve been studying will allow us to make some real progress towards exploiting deep brain stimulation in the creation of effective therapeutic strategies...’
I can see it clearly now. He’s cheating, like he cheated me, like he’s been cheating all these people for all these years. And yet, as scientists, we have to take our orders from reality. If the truth about his little secret is out there, it’s only a matter of time before it gets known.
The chair asks if there are any questions. Three hands go up. Not mine: I can wait my turn. Mateus sees them off easily, flattering the questioners that their comments are both apt and smart, while at the same time showing how far he is from being stumped by any of this. The chair is nosing the air, scanning the room for further questions. Mateus follows his gaze, bestowing a smile that’s pitched just this side of arrogance.
To me it’s just arrogance. I put up my hand.
‘Mateus,’ I say, ‘I was looking again at the 1983 article by Pinheiro and I wonder if you could explain how your model differs. He seems to be describing the same basic effect, even down to the size of the action potentials that he was trying to transmit, and what he says about the importance of a steady voltage supply is very similar. I’m assuming you’re aware of Pinheiro’s paper, as it was originally published in your native Portuguese.’
Five hundred neuroscientists look at me, and then at Mateus. Mateus just looks at me. He recognises me now, I hope. I haven’t aged that much in two years. He didn’t destroy me just by walking out on me; I’m alive and kicking, and briefly enjoying the kicking part. He’s still smiling that politician’s smile, but it’s edged with white now, hardened by embarrassment and, very gradually, anger. My voice came out calm enough, but it’s the only part of me that isn’t shaking. I’ve got the sick aftertaste of bad sex, of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable only making me feel cheap and empty. Revenge doesn’t agree with me. I’d rather just let the thing go.
So I’m getting up calmly, waiting for the people in my row to clear bags, knees and programme books from the passageway, and then, without even glancing at the podium, I’m out of there.
A minibar is a beautiful thing. It gives you no anxiety of choice. You start with the ready-mixed cocktails, move on to the beer and macadamia nuts, and finish with Toblerone and whisky.
Effi’s number is just beeping at me.
I get pissed and fall asleep in my clothes. I get up and take my clothes off. I can’t get warm and I can’t cool down. Butt-naked and shivering under the ruthlessly efficient air-con, I order a Marriott-burger with onion rings and eat half of it. I drink one more beer then turn the air-con off. I sit in the armchair by the window and let the reflux heat of the building rise around me like a lover’s smell. The sky looks crisp and beautiful. I stare out of the sealed fourteenth-floor window, watching the through-traffic of Tampa International take off into the late afternoon sky. At the edges of the window, patches of tinting material have peeled away, and you can see the true colour of the world, the real-life, carcinogenic glare that the hotel authorities want to protect you from. It’s shocking and satisfying, the glimpse of that chink in the façade that could bring the whole illusion down.
There’s still no answer from Effi.
It’s dark when I’m woken by a knock at the door. I wrap a towel around myself and put my eye to the little viewing hole. He floats past like a goldfish, absurdly magnified. A troubled goldfish, on his fifth divorce. The loss of his goatee reveals more of his face; more of him, you might say. I wouldn’t say. His face was always the biggest liar of all. I let him in, anyway.
He stands at the window, looking out over the rooftop pipework of the building next door.
‘Stay away from the window,’ I quip. ‘This is a dangerous city.’
‘Don’t worry. You don’t get bad guys this high.’
He sits down on the sofa, leaving me standing there in the towel. I’m trying to pretend that I’ve just had a shower. But I probably look too dry.
‘I’m going to put some clothes on,’ I say after a bit.
‘Clothes are good,’ he says, lifting his hand and turning his face away.
This concern for my modesty amuses me. I go into the bathroom and come back in an embroidered Marriott robe.
‘You’re not angry with me?’
He laughs. ‘You got your revenge, Yvonne. I just hope you enjoyed it.’ So it was just a game. He hits me and I hit him. If only I’d known.
‘It was OK. Anyway, you don’t have to worry. No one will have read that obscure Portuguese thing.’
‘They will now. Ten years of my life have been based on trying to explain that effect. I’ll have to publish a clarification.’
‘That’s easy enough to do.’
‘Maybe. I knew this would happen one day. But things get their own momentum. Maybe somehow I wanted to take the fall.’
He takes the hand from his face and turns to the window. He looks younger now than when he first fixed my bike in the rain on Libet Avenue. I used to tie his hair up in bunches, for a joke; now it sits in an inoffensive trim, neatly tapered to the collar of his regulation denim shirt. I can’t resist a secret smile: my dark man has turned into Doug. For all his strutting bravado, his only real concern is to please the boss, impress the editors, be patted on the head and told he’s a good boy. I think of the list we drew up, all the things we would do together before we settled down. I wonder if he’s managed one of them.
‘Your work is still valid,’ I tell him, doubting the reassuring tone. ‘It’s just that you can’t claim the effect for yourself.
‘Yeah.’ He manages a weak smile. ‘I’ll publish the clarification in Neuroscience. I’ll still be famous before you.’
I sit down on the chair opposite him, but feel too exposed. I get up and put the air-con back on, and then try the chair again.
‘I’m not going to be famous at all. I’m packing it in.’
He doesn’t revise his expression. I can’t expect him to start caring, just because I’m selfish enough to start having a life.
‘Why did you just fuck off like that? I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.’
‘Dead,’ he says quietly. ‘Without you.’
He stares at me with those huge wounded eyes. I’m not even sure he’s putting it on. He’s a stranger, a face from the year before last; I can’t judge him any more. For a moment I think he’s going to get up and do something dramatic, but he thinks better of it. This is drama enough for me: the too-late heart-spilling, the against-all-odds declaration of undying things. It’s fantastic that this is what we’ve sunk to: a tea-time tearjerker, tugging the usual heart-strings in all the usual ways.
‘I’m sorry, Yvonne. I can never even begin to explain it to you.’
‘Come on. You could explain the Pereira Effect.’
He gets up and goes over to the window. I see him holding the curtain aside and staring out like a stake-out victim.
‘I was afraid,’ he says. ‘I know that’s what everyone says, but it’s true.’ ‘You’re right. Everyone says that.’
‘But it’s true.’
‘Remember, a theory has to account for the evidence. How about the month I was in such a state about you that I couldn’t be bothered to wash my hair?’
I catch him looking down at my phone, which I must have left on the windowsill after calling Effi. He turns back from the window and stares at the desolation of my executive room.
‘Do you remember what I told you that one time? About fear?’
I remember it. That summer night, on the roof of my treehouse, the warm hand of love. I could feel his heat inside me, still taste him in my mouth. I’d just told him about my balcony fantasy. Me, standing at the r
ail in a red dress, telling my story to the dark forest. A man behind me, whose face I would never see.
‘Tell me again,’ I say.
He glances at me. I can sense something shifting. The memory has laid me open. He remembers that night too.
‘I was trying to explain to you how a person gets to be afraid. You didn’t want to hear this, but I had to tell you. You had this amazing sense of loyalty to your ideas. It was a moral position, not a scientific one. But you were so gorgeously unknowing. Almost gauche, I would say.’
‘Yes, well. It was a long time ago.’
‘I know you, Yvonne. Nothing you do surprises me. Not even today.’
‘You used to know me. Then you lost interest.’
He shakes his head, eyes closed, smiling.
‘So this is what I told you. This is how I tried to tackle your certainty. You didn’t want abstract theorising. That used to drive you crazy. You wanted examples, illustrations, some facts you could put your finger on. So I asked you to think about fear. I asked you to imagine being out there, alone, in that forest. Just you and the noises of the night. Every cracking twig or rustling leaf would have your heart leaping. There’s nothing you can do to stop your brain from making its hypotheses. But you can be aware of how that three-pound lump of nervous tissue is processing your experience for you. Even as you feel yourself jumping at these tiny sounds, these little signals of danger, you can imagine all this going on in your limbic system. If you could visualise it, you could control it. I was trying to tell you that fear was a material response, a neural circuit. It could be brought under control like any other bodily activity.’
‘Never a good theory,’ I say. ‘The fear circuit’s out of bounds to consciousness. It’s on a floor the lift doesn’t stop at. The lizard brain, millions of years old.’
And my lizard heart remembers the night he told me that, flat on our backs on the roof of my treehouse, the sky sticky with stars.
‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But this philosophy seemed to work for me. I’m asking you to remember what we were like, what I was like, back then. I had gone through my life afraid of nothing. I was a straight-A student, my teeth were perfect, I knew how to make cozido. I knew I was good, and I could get anything I wanted. Then you came along, and I began to learn what fear really was.’
A Box of Birds Page 14
