You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 16

  She is in Prof. Raetz’s research team and is tasked with working with my plasmids. Somehow, I still can’t believe that this world-leading research group is willing to work with us. I can’t help suspecting they have rumbled us and put a loser on the case; like the “researcher” who is asked to carve the Halloween pumpkin, or fill out the health and safety forms, or work with us… However, this is just weary, self-loathing prejudice; so far nothing suggests she is incompetent. I open the email:Dear Dr. McLean,

  Dear Karin,

  The plasmids you have sent over to the US are full of mutations (see the sequencing data attached). Could you please send us the right plasmids without mutations. This way, we will not be able to continue the project.

  Best,

  Wang

  I’m reading the email a second time and after the first sentence I feel the stress sending my body into meltdown. W.T.F. have I done? Oh no, this is the worst thing I could have done…

  If Mark has already built up credibility in Raetz’s lab I have definitely destroyed it utterly, by sending plasmids that are just rubbish. My whole body is shaking now and I feel deathly cold. Frantically I walk around the living room without purpose. This isn’t happening! Please tell me this isn’t happening. I will just wake up in my bed tomorrow and everything will be fine. It’s just a bad dream, nothing else, maybe I’m hallucinating, I’ve had precious little sleep for days…

  Eventually I open all the attached files. It doesn’t take long to see that Wang is correct; the stuff I sent is indeed full of mutations. Just at the moment I grab the pack of cigarettes on the window sill with shaking hands, my cell phone rings. Mark rarely phones me, he prefers email. But this is too serious. He will verbally destroy me. Like a quivering wretch who cannot face her obvious doom, I walk to the coat in the corridor and take the phone out of the pocket. On the display I see – Hallelujah – it isn’t Mark, but Daniel.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “But you were going to join us for a drink tonight.”

  Daniel sounds upset. We haven’t seen each other much in recent weeks. Most evenings I come home when Daniel is peacefully snoring. We see each other in the morning sometimes, but it’s too brief for in-depth conversation about anything. Our relationship never thrived during sunrise. When the love motor was still going we hit our heights in the evenings.

  “Drinks?” Oh fuck yes, drinks…. Ah damn… “I forgot about it.”

  “Ka! You promised me you would come. These are my goodbye drinks from the lab!”

  I’m quiet for a moment. I did promise him I’d come to the drinking session, which is finally taking place months after Daniel left the lab. The professor he worked for takes things nice and slow. He got his remarkably comfy chair by reaching the end point of the university career programme, which Mark is now pursuing. He hasn’t published for over a decade. I doubt he even noticed that Daniel’s lab book remained astonishingly bereft of writing till the day he departed. Prof. Comfy-chair seems to be happily snoring away in his safe position. I dare say if he puts his mind to it Daniel could snore away the years too.

  He has been unemployed for months now. I suspect he mostly dreams the days away, while sitting at the desk in the living room as if working. He hasn’t left the flat much since he finished at the university, and is mostly home alone. Apparently it had given him time to think and recognise that our relationship is dying. I would argue it is already dead, but Daniel still sees it more positively. “We just need to spark it all up a bit. Get involved more in each other’s lives…” he had said, desperately, on Tuesday, after one of our shouting matches.

  He was sat at the kitchen table using the empty plate in front of him as an ashtray, when I arrived home just before midnight. “I thought you would be home for dinner,” he had said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was just really annoyed or about to cry. “That’s what I had hoped as well,” I said neutrally, while staring at the second plate which was still full with pasta carbonara.

  It would be true to say that anything not directly related to my research or other obligatory PhD duties has long ago faded into insignificance for me. I could not care less about being home for dinner or not.

  “I told you I would cook something and you didn’t even bother phoning to tell me you wouldn’t show up.”

  He had almost yelled at me. His face had turned red, his neck and ears followed. With some guys I find it very sexy if they get angry. It can trigger me in a good way. But Daniel wasn’t triggering me. He looked like a beaten dog in the corner, giving one abject bark before retreating back into his kennel.

  “I forgot to call.”

  “You forgot?” he positively screeched. “When was the last time we actually saw each other?”

  “This morning,” I replied, hating myself for being so literal and superior.

  “Fuck off, Ka. We never see each other because of your never-ending experiments!”

  “I’m not sure if you’re aware of it but I’m doing my PhD, Daniel!”

  How tempted I was to add that I have, in contrast to him, finished my MSc long ago and didn’t take six months for a single PCR reaction. That I am at least doing something.

  “This stupid PhD has taken over your entire life!”

  “I know. Maybe a PhD is supposed to take over your entire life?”

  “No! It’s insane, Ka. Not all PhD students spend their whole life in the lab.”

  “Maybe they have plenty of results and I don’t? And believe me, I’m not the only one in the department in the evening.”

  “Don’t tell me that all PhD students bring a library worth of papers to read over Christmas holidays, Ka! And that they think twice before visiting a dying fr…”

  “Don’t even go there!”

  I had regretted my moment of hesitation on the phone in Venice, I had horrified myself instantly, I was in shock I think. Daniel hadn’t brought it up again – until that evening.

  “You promised me you would put in an effort,” Daniel says sadly, on the other side of the line. Did I?

  He adds, “Our relationship needs a spark, but you don’t do anything for it!” A spark?

  I think ten thousand volts might be insufficient, but I don’t say that. Our lives, which had been compatible in our undergraduate days, had diverged since the start of my PhD or maybe since the end of my masters. It was hard to separate the whys and wherefores but oh-so easy to play the blame game, for both of us. It was sad, in the old-fashioned sense. And of course my stress levels helped nothing. I had promised to put an effort into getting back on track with him. Drinks tonight – that was the first planned step in that direction. And I had forgotten about it. Maybe I didn’t really care enough to remember. It had been a tough week in the lab and, in the way of these things, I do not know if that signified a lot or not a jot…

  “I’m sorry, but this is not the right time for me to give a shit,” I reply sadly.

  “Are you okay?” Daniel asks, in a compassionate tone.

  “Nope! I screwed up, made a major mistake.”

  I tell him about the email, about the Raetz lab and how gutted Mark will be. “What are you worrying about? Just send them the right tube.”

  “There probably is no right tube, Daniel. I believe I might have forgotten to check the sequencing data altogether. Mark is not going to like this!”

  “Oh, your supervisor has other stuff on his mind, Ka.”

  “No he doesn’t.”

  As I say this, I realise that Daniel still doesn’t grasp what Mark is like; that my boss is an unpredictable, short-tempered and utterly inept helicopter supervisor. He crossed a line one day and shouted at me. Since then he has worked up to barking at me freely, regularly, with no restraint. He is not unlike a parent who dirties his hands by beating his child and soon he “has hands so steeped in blood it’s easier to go on as go back,” as Macbeth sort of said. With every new baby the parent might resolve n
ot to fall into the same habit but, like the lab chief with a new underling, the tempting day duly arrives… Bad habits die hard.

  I used to share stories with Daniel but I haven’t shared much lately. I’ve left him in the dark about Lab 262. And this was not the right time to clue him in, to share how worried and stressed I have felt since the start of my PhD – not tonight.

  “Are you still coming for a drink?” Oh God, no. I prefer to drink alone.

  “It’s already late, Daniel. By the time I could get there the pubs will be closing.”

  “Okay.”

  He sounds sad and hangs up without saying bye.

  “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” I want to throw my laptop against the wall, ideally against Daniel’s stupid picture of a sailing boat. Everything is just bearing down on me and I feel like a failure every which way. There is an alternative plan to dealing with all this; the simpler, and probably much nicer one, of disappearing without a clarifying word to anybody. I could go to Alaska, naively playing Into the Wild… Continued. Or anywhere else really, just as long as it would be remote enough that no-one would come up with the idiotic idea to follow me.

  But I know I’m going nowhere far, or near for that matter, or in my career either… if I don’t buckle down like a good girl – like Pavlov’s dog – and look for the source of the mistake before Mark contacts me. On my laptop I search for the link I must have received from the sequencing service in Edinburgh before sending the sample to the US. I open email after email but can’t find the right link. Via the link in an email from months earlier I enter the network in which the data must be stored. I scroll through two weeks of sequencing data which the lab produced. There are at least three hundred samples listed but none of them are mine. I really forgot to bring it and check it. How was this possible? After so many months of trying to create the plasmid, I had forgotten the last and most important step. Where is my mind?!

  I pour another glass of wine. Alcohol might not solve any problems but it can shrink them quite well. I hate myself for cocking up and I hate myself for the happiness I had felt when I finally had a plasmid worth more than zip. I hate myself for being able to continue my PhD while Karel had died. I hate myself for not going to Karel’s PhD supervisor to punch him in the face. And I hate myself for hurting someone with bad-tempered, selfish words. I hate myself. I feel tears welling up in my eyes and just let them spread mascara over my cheeks. I drink. I smoke. I listen to the music.

  My head aches and eventually I lie down on the bed. Mark has caused me some worrying hours but this is the first time in many months that I lie in bed with my eyes wide open, completely unable to sleep. Over and over again I excuse myself to Karel for blocking him out, and I rephrase explanations for Mark.

  There was no way round it; I had to tell Mark the truth. I cocked up. I cocked up big time. I try to push it out of my mind by thinking about other things but it doesn’t work. For hours I lie there in torment, still awake when Daniel returns. I don’t want to talk so I feign sleep. When he enters the bed he wraps his arms around me. Finally I fall into dread-laden dreams.

  When the morning rolls round and the alarm clock fills the bedroom with its terrible sound, it feels like my sleep has been exhausting rather than replenishing. With stiff muscles and make-up everywhere, I seat myself behind my laptop. No email from Mark.

  I get myself ready, down a coffee, and cycle to campus, slowly. As per every morning, it’s only Babette in the lab, abusing some equipment. She doesn’t greet me, and for the first time ever I don’t greet her with my friendly “good morning” either. The last couple of weeks I had started to vary the pitch of the words “good” and “morning” and I confess I derived malicious pleasure from the fact that she got progressively more aggressive with the amount of melody infused into my unwanted greeting. She particularly loathed it when I personalised it into a jaunty “good morning Babette.” But today I don’t care to pour crumbs of salt on her psychopathic wounds. For what was I doing it anyway? What vile traits has this PhD stirred in me?

  I walk straight to the office. From the corner of my eyes I see Babette lifting her head and looking in my direction. She doesn’t look as angry as she normally does, but rather confused. The absence of a greeting foxed her. After a few seconds pause she mumbles something that could resemble “morning”. Did she just greet me? Bizarre. Feels ominous somehow…

  The office comes to life just before 9:00 a.m. When Hanna arrives, spot on at 9:00 a.m., I immediately tell her about the plasmid. I’m not sure why I picked her to tell? Probably because she is working on a similar project and is definitely aware of the importance of Prof. Raetz. Even after the Angewandte paper, Hanna and I get along reasonably well, and she will definitely supply some soothing words.

  “Don’t worry too much about it,” she says. “It’s shit, but it could have been worse.”

  “I don’t know how it could have been worse.”

  “Me neither! You hang big time!” Quinn says, sitting next to her with a big smile on his face. Does your mum know she raised a dick?

  “Don’t say that! It took her months to make the plasmid. You know how frustrating it is and how unreasonable Mark gets.”

  Hanna sounds upset on my behalf.

  “Sorry,” Quinn says.

  Hanna addresses me: “Ask Mark to buy you the plasmid instead. It only costs a couple of hundred pounds and it would mean you’re not wasting your time.”

  It really was a waste of time. I hated myself for spending hours and hours on creating something that could easily be purchased. In fact buying it would have been much cheaper than all the consumables I was wasting to unsuccessfully create the blasted plasmid.

  “Forget it,” says Quinn, more to Hanna than me. “Wrong research project. If she was working on KBL he would fork out, but she isn’t.”

  We all know Mark is spending most of the available money on a single project and is very unwilling to invest in the others.

  “Just try, he might,” Hanna says.

  At half past nine I see Mark enter the building through the chemical waste entrance below our office. He normally drops off his coat and bag in his office, then visits the lab while his computer is booting up. I wait a few more seconds, trying to psyche myself up for the showdown.

  I hold my breath as I knock on his door. He barks me in without even knowing who it is.

  “Morning,” he says and taps the power button on his computer.

  “Hi,” I respond feeling a horrible lump in my throat.

  “What happened with the plasmids you sent to Raetz’s lab?”

  His voice is loud, but the tone is friendlier than I anticipated.

  “I sent them the wrong ones.”

  He must sense my nerves. He just smiles, perhaps wishing to calm me down. Perhaps my evidently nervous state has gratified him already.

  “That’s incredibly stupid. But just send them the right ones.”

  “That’s the problem. There are no right ones. I forgot to sequence them.”

  “Then you have to make new plasmids.”

  “I know, but it took me months and months to get a PCR product at all. Making new plasmids sounds easy, but it isn’t.”

  He looks concerned, slightly angry but not as if he might start shouting. I suspect he is worried I might start crying. He doesn’t like that kind of emotion in his office. It fazes him.

  “What about buying the gene?” I dare to ask.

  Mark starts laughing as if this is the funniest thing he has heard in a month of Sundays. “Buying the gene?” he mimics. “No. Just keep on trying!”

  I press my lips together. Mark is leaning over his computer and a quick fantasy flashes forward, one in which I smash his head into his computer screen. The tingling noise of his keychain when Mark stands up brings me back to the sad reality – in which he doesn’t get his head smashed in. I step over the high stacks of papers on the floor and leave his office.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017
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  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_18

  Chapter 18

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  With a new undergraduate following closely behind, Barry enters the office precisely five minutes after I sat down on the chair that I can now finally call mine. Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl have created space in the office – by leaving, forever. Almost a year after their stipends ran out – i.e. one year out of their lives doing unpaid work – they defended their theses and finished their degrees. Pffuuh.

  The PhD “ceremonies” were deeply unexciting. They sat their exam behind closed doors in both cases, with only the two examiners; one internal and one external, as is the established practice. After their defence, they came into our office with the examiners to celebrate their success. On each occasion Mark bought a bottle of Brut to celebrate. That there was only one bottle to share between about twelve people rather suggested, to some of us, that our presence was not much desired. But at the same time we were meant to be there, at work. It was awkward, in fact downright embarrassing all round; such a paltry and token homage to an endeavour which took years, a celebration as glamorous as an “employee of the month” bash in the back room of a provincial McDonald’s.

  I think it was those two occasions, which are supposed to be among the most memorable experiences in someone’s life – for some scientists even more important than marriage – that made me realise just how broken and disturbing our lab actually was. Maybe it wasn’t Mark’s responsibility to organise a nicer ceremony, maybe it was our responsibility? As colleagues spending the whole week together, all with the same aim, the same limited funding, and the same lack of work space, perhaps we could have pulled together for a party, but we didn’t. Could we not wish joy to each other? Were we a lab of individualists doomed to grudge one another any limelight? Or was it just Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl whose negativity soured the atmosphere like an odourless toxin?