Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  Today, the other desk in Wallace’s bay is empty. This would not be the case, he thinks, if Henrik were still here. Henrik would be striding from his desk to his bench and back again, half starting a dozen tasks before settling finally on one. Henrik was a thick-necked former football player who had attended a small college in central Minnesota, where he studied chemistry and also was a tight end. It was Henrik who taught Wallace to dissect, to do it in the dish rather than on the slide because it gives you more time and range of motion; how to wait for the worms to grow still; how to time everything just right so that you could cut through a mass of nematodes, severing their heads in a single stroke, fifty at a time. He taught Wallace the perfect angle at which to slide the slender needle into their germlines, that mass of beautiful cells, like roe. He taught Wallace many things, including how to put slides together for presentations and how to calm down right before, running your hands under cold and then warm water. (Get the temperature up, Wally, bring the heat.)

  Sometimes, Wallace saw Henrik’s face when he closed his eyes, or heard his voice, warm and Muppet-like, silly sounding, a man who would always be a boy, perhaps. There was something vigorous and rough about him, like he might wrap his arm around your neck and dig his knuckles against your scalp at any moment. But there were moments, too, when Henrik drew to his full height and towered over you, moments when you were suddenly aware of his strength. Wallace had once watched him fling a five-gallon jar to the ground in a rage because someone had left the lid off. Another time, Wallace had been inoculating colonies, and Henrik shoved him aside and slammed the gas off and said, “That’s not right, that’s not aseptic technique.” He slapped the wooden spindle from Wallace’s hand so that it clattered with a pathetic little noise on the bench top. During lab presentations, everyone in the room could feel Henrik’s body in the dark, as if they were all keeping one eye on him, waiting, waiting. It was strange to hear him raise his voice because it didn’t lose the Muppet quality. It just sounded like an unhappy Kermit, shouting down conclusions that he thought were facile or uninteresting: What is this, a goddamn campfire? The data do not support it! They don’t! They don’t support it! Wallace was always a little ashamed when Henrik made him jump. It made him think of the days when he was young and his brother used to clap his hands in front of Wallace’s face, suddenly and really hard, then call him a sissy for flinching. What you jumping for? You think I want to hit you? Wallace hated the way his body reacted to Henrik. Against his will. Again and again, like hands clapping at the edge of his nose.

  But Henrik is gone now, at Vassar running his own lab, teaching undergraduates the same way that he taught Wallace. Is it envy that Wallace feels? There’s a bit of dust on Henrik’s old desk, a green highlighter; it’s no shrine. Wallace swivels back to his own desk, piled with papers: protein alignments, plasmid library forms, strain sheets, some articles he’s been meaning to read for months. His computer is asleep; an amber-tinted version of himself glints back at him. His coffee from yesterday is covered in a skin, the creamer gone rancid. He is dithering, he knows. He can’t bring himself to look at his bench, though he knows he must, and so finally he lifts his head and forces himself to look, to really look, to see.

  Wallace’s is one of the larger benches in lab, inherited four years ago from a departing postdoc who had left for Cold Spring Harbor to study stem cells in the gut of mice. The bench is wide, black, and smooth, made chalky from years of sliding the hexagonal bases of Bunsen burners or the hard feet of microscopes across its surface. A set of blond wood shelves is set farther back on the bench to divide it from the bench on the other side, Dana’s bench. Bottles of fluids, colored and clear, sit in stubby white plastic racks like peering children. Tools, implements, stuck into every open space, jeer at him. And on the open space of the bench are the towers of plates, the agar dishes solemn and silent, like some miniature slum. His microscope is dark, waiting, and Wallace feels its weight like an albatross or a warning.

  Katie watches him over her shoulder in an act of indifferent surveillance, and it is then that he remembers the other thing. Among Wallace’s ruined experiments: immunostaining and immunohistochemistry data he had been tasked with generating, because it is the one experiment that Wallace can do better than anyone else in the lab. Like a savant or a trained circus seal, to hear Simone and Katie tell it: a perfect seven hundred dissections in under eight minutes, a precise accounting, all variables and conditions marked and measured, the microscopy penetrating and clear. Wallace’s talent is not for looking, exactly, so much as it is for waiting. He can pass hours in the embryonic dark of the microscope room waiting for the confocal to take its z-projections, slicing in micrometer-width sections through the bulk of the germline, each cell a perfect kernel through three channels of fluorescence. That his gradients are clearer, sharper than even Katie’s, does not reflect a superiority on his part—a greater mind, for example—so much as it demonstrates that Wallace has the time to burn, time for the idle stupidity it takes to sit in front of a scope and wait for hours. Sometimes an entire day passes without him leaving the dark, pausing only to change the slide, look for more germlines, focus the beam of the laser as he waits for a shape to emerge. Simone asked him to perform this task for a publication meant to sit at the heart of Katie’s thesis, and he agreed because they so seldom turned to him for things he felt equipped to handle. And he was preparing to do that, aging the nematodes just so—and it’s now, watching Katie watch him, that he understands why she’s so irritated with him. Those worms are gone now too, lost to the mold and the contamination. It’s not the worst thing in the world. He can restart the experiment. But it is lost time, which is precious to Katie. She is closer to the end than he is. She expects more from her hours, can expect more. Bitter regret, then. Katie turns from him, pops open the centrifuge. The brown sediment of pelleted cells. She slots in another.

  The machine cries softly again.

  * * *

  • • •

  AT HIS MICROSCOPE AT LAST, Wallace slides plate after plate under the objective. Only mold, like a cotton field in late fall, dark and muddy, prickly with stalks. Clumps of bacteria. Bad enough, these terrible environmental conditions. Bad enough the pits in the agar through which the nematodes sometimes slither and find themselves pressed flat to the plastic base of the dish, which sucks all the moisture from their bodies. But there is also something more worrying to Wallace: dead eggs. Nematodes whose germlines are fisted and gnarled. On some plates, tiny larvae struggle, winking glyphs. Their numbers are smaller than he expected, as though there was some other, underlying problem at work even before the carnage took hold. Some invisible calamity. They are not just drenched in spores, which makes it hard enough. The mold has made them sterile, their bodies filled with vacated spaces, as though their delicate reproductive tissues have been puffed with air. Vacancies in the body cavities. Unusual morphology. He knows it when he sees it. There is a chance that his strain is sterile, that the combination of genetic modifications has rendered a nonviable organism; it will die out. This might be an answer to a question. Or it might be the result of contamination, mere noise. He will have to be careful. Even more careful.

  Picking twelve worms from fifty plates means six hundred plates, all of which have to be passaged multiple times to free them of the mold, which means something like eighteen hundred plates. And on top of that, more screening. This is why he fled—the weight of the work it will take to fix this. It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must. For a moment he’s tempted by the notion of giving up, starting fresh, not trying to make heads or tails of the mess before him. He looks from the scope at the stacks of plates. They creak when he adjusts them. He could throw them away. Wallace rests his forehead against the eyepiece of his scope.

  “Goddamn. Go
ddamn. Goddamn.”

  Henrik would know what to do, Wallace thinks. Henrik would say, Get to it. What are you waiting for? Wallace reaches for his pick, a glass capillary melted around a flattened segment of titanium wire. He holds a metal striker over the burner, turns on the gas, strikes. The rotten, faintly sweet smell of natural gas, then, ignition, orange glow, a few sparks dissolve, fire. He burns the end of the pick to sterilize it. He takes a fresh plate, coats the end of his wire in E. coli to use like glue, and slides under the objective one of the old plates. It’s like staring down through the top of a canopy. He waits for signs of movement, rotates the glass in the base of the microscope to change the angle of light so that things shift into curious metallic shadow, searches, waits, searches, rotates, waits, searches.

  At last he sees a worm, the briars of spores stuck to its back, and he sends his pick down through the air, lowers it like the claw machine, and taps it gently, softer than gently, and up the worm comes, from its world into the air, swimming back up, attached to the pick. He sets it down on a clean plate, all that open space; it’s surreal.

  One worm.

  Five hundred ninety-nine to go.

  He lowers the pick. Begins.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ANIMALS ARE NOT DEAD—this is a relief. He expected worse. They are more sterile than he anticipated, shriveled oocytes and empty sperm ducts, which magnifies the task. These he burns in the flame like an angry deity.

  Brigit, in soft gray clothes, sweeps past Wallace into his bay and pours herself into Henrik’s old chair.

  “Wally,” she says, exasperated. “Mom’s in a mood today.”

  “She’s pissed about my plates, I bet.”

  “Tough break.” Brigit is full of compassion. She has always been good to him, in an uncomplicated sort of way. She gives off no sense that she expects anything for her kindness or feels she is treating him in any remarkable way. Which is perhaps what seems so remarkable to Wallace, who is not accustomed to uncomplicated offers of help, to generosity. Brigit tosses her legs up on Henrik’s desk. She folds her hands smoothly across her stomach. “Funny thing about that, huh?”

  “What?” Wallace asks, glancing back at her from the scope. Something in her voice catches inside him, a note of cool suspicion.

  “No, nothing,” Brigit says. “It’s just funny how your plates got ruined that way. I mean, and out of nowhere, yet everyone else’s in that incubator was— No, I’ve said too much.” She puts her arm over her eyes, feigns being overwhelmed, sighs.

  “What do you mean, their plates are fine?” Heat and the low murmur of fury. He rotates fully on his chair. Brigit is a little shorter than Wallace, dark haired and freckled. She is Chinese American, from Palo Alto, where her mother is a cardiologist and her father took early retirement from one of those primordial tech start-ups eaten by Google. She had been a dancer before she settled on science—bad ligaments, she said—and she retains a gummy flexibility, much solidity beneath the softness of her good nature. Her expression at the moment is one of conspiratorial glee. They have a tendency toward gossip, these two.

  “Nothing concrete. No. Not at all, but I heard from Soo-Yin, who as you know has plates on the racks right below yours, that her plates were totally fine. In the clear. Not even a mote of dust.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense,” Wallace says. He sounds hoarse even to his own ears, his voice a pitchy jangle. Brigit raises her eyebrows and shrugs. But then her expression tightens, closes slightly. She drops her feet from the desk and rolls in the chair to him. Up close, the harsh light of the lab throws a glare across her dark hair, caught up in a messy bun.

  Her voice is low when she speaks. “I think someone fucked with your plates, Wally. I’m not saying I saw anyone. Or anything like that. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Because Fay saw you-know-who here late all week, and you know that you-know-who hates working after five sharp.”

  “You-know-who being Dana?”

  Brigit shushes him loudly, makes a big show of looking around pointedly. “What do you think?”

  Dana, who comes from Portland or Seattle or some more minor city out there. Once, in her early days in lab, Wallace saw her running her protein preps through the wrong column. She had used the kits for a DNA purification. He went up to her and said, as casually as he could, “It looks like you’ve got the wrong box there—it’s an easy mistake, they look so similar, I know.”

  Dana put her hand flat on top of the blue-and-white box and frowned at him.

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  “Oh,” Wallace said. “Well, it just says DNA prep there, on the side, I mean.”

  Dana, her eyes hazel and wide like a cat’s, had pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth three times in quick succession, a disapproving sound.

  “No, Wallace,” she said, her voice slow, steady. “I’m not retarded. I think I’d know if I were using the wrong kit.”

  Wallace stood there, a little shocked by the intensity of the response, but it was her bench, her experiment. She could do what she wanted. So he backed away from her, his face hot.

  “Okay, well, if you need anything.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  He watched her for the rest of that day. He was in his second year then, she her first; they were young and still finding their way. What did Wallace know? After all, he’d always felt a little uneasy in the lab, a little uncertain. And he thought everyone felt that way. Insecure. Unwilling to ask for help because it meant baring your belly. He had wanted to say something to her about that, that he knew it could be scary to say you didn’t know something, but that people wanted to help, mostly. He had wanted to be a good lab mate, a supportive person. But instead Dana had drawn a thick, dark line between the two of them. He was one way. She was another. She was gifted. He was not.

  But at the end of that day, Dana stood staring at her columns, wondering what had gone wrong. She stood there, staring at the printout of the purity readings, which made no sense, of course. The spec reading said that there was no protein at all in the tube. But she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she followed the directions? Simone stood at the end of her bench looking at the data with her. She waved Wallace over, and he went shyly. Night had been falling in a smooth dark veil beyond the window. He saw all three of them reflected there in the light of the lab.

  “Do you know anything about this, Wallace?” Simone asked.

  “About what?”

  “Dana’s results. She says that you mixed up the kits.”

  Wallace frowned and shook his head. “No. I think Dana was using the wrong one.”

  Simone turned the box around and pointed, and Wallace saw there in the neat print that the kit was the protein one. He felt an inky, slippery feeling inside.

  “Did you maybe put the DNA purification reagents in the wrong box when you were doing those simultaneous cleanups? Wallace, you have to be careful.”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Well, these numbers don’t make sense otherwise.”

  “And you tried to warn me,” Dana said with a high yet flat tone. She shook her head. “I guess maybe you felt like you’d messed up.”

  “You have to pay more attention,” Simone said. “I know you want to be ambitious and get things done, but you have to be careful.”

  Wallace swallowed thickly.

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  Dana put her hand on his shoulder and said, “You know. If you need anything.”

  Wallace looked at her. He looked at her, and tried to understand what sort of person she was, but all he saw were the flakes of dead skin collecting in the gingery hair that grew between her eyebrows.

  Simone had him sort out the reagents again, in front of her. She made him sort them into two neatly divided groups on his bench. And when he was done, she made h
im do it again, just to make sure, just to make sure.

  “She wasted her whole day on it, Wallace. Her whole day. We can’t lose that kind of time because of carelessness.” Simone stood at the end of his bench and watched him sort out the reagents and the columns, their neat white bottles, again and again. He could have done it with his eyes closed. Because he was careful. “This isn’t to punish you. This is to make you better.”

  Still, even for Dana, ruining his plates on purpose seems excessive. She is not entirely malicious, just lazy and inattentive to detail.

  “How late?” he asks Brigit. “I’ve been here till midnight at least. Every night.”

  “Two a.m.,” Brigit says, and Wallace jerks up from her.

  “No way.”

  “Like I said, I didn’t see anything. That’s just what I heard.”

  “What sense would that make?”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. She’s gifted,” Brigit says, spitting out Simone’s favorite word for Dana but meaning the opposite. Wallace laughs. Gifted is the sweetness meant to make the bitterness of failure palatable—that a person can fail again and again, but it’s all right, because they’re gifted, they’re worth something. That’s what it all tracks back to, isn’t it, Wallace thinks. That if the world has made up its mind about what you have to offer, if the world has decided it wants you, needs you, then it doesn’t matter how many times you mess up. What Wallace wants to know is where the limit is. When is it no longer forgivable to be so terrible? When does the time come when you’ve got to deliver on your gifts?