“Well, of course you can't,” said Wendy.
“Once you go over all this with Cliff, you'll straighten everything out,” said Larry.
Robin looked uneasily at her neighbors. They really believed this was all some kind of misunderstanding.
“You're going to talk to him, aren't you?” Wendy asked.
Robin didn't answer.
“You have to talk to him,” Larry told her.
“I know,” Robin said, “but I can't.”
“Why not?”
She'd given Cliff her word that she wouldn't sneak around behind his back; she'd agreed to come to him first. How could she admit she'd broken those promises? To his credit, he'd managed to put aside his animosity and carry on calmly. If she confronted him with these notes, there would be no more keeping up appearances. It would mean war.
6
C
LIFF WAS
not an entirely unsuspecting adversary. He had suffered Robin's hostility for weeks, enduring her suspicion and prying eyes. Still, he was horrified by her new campaign against him. She had dug up some draft notes of his, and come to Mendelssohn with them, waving what was essentially scratch paper, as though she'd found a smoking gun. Sandy was out of town. Naturally, Robin had picked a time he was away. She knew Sandy had little patience for postdocs' complaints.
“This is unbelievable,” Cliff protested to Marion. “She's stealing my notes.”
“I didn't steal them,” said Robin. “They were right there in the dissecting room for anyone to find.”
“And photocopy behind my back? I can't—”
“Stop it,” snapped Mendelssohn, and the two of them hushed and stood before her like a pair of misbehaving children, shamed but unrepentant. “Robin,” Marion said, “you asked for time for your own work. In June we agreed you would begin your bone tumor project. You insisted Cliff stop making demands on you, and from what I understand, he has stopped. Why, then, have you been devoting yourself to second-guessing his results? Why have you been spending so much time studying his data? Is your own work no longer pressing?”
Cliff snuck a look at Robin and saw her redden. He was glad to see her get her dressing-down, and then again, he almost pitied her. She had always been slender, but suddenly she looked too thin. Her features seemed sharp, her expression miserable. She was such a thorny person, so consumed with doubt.
“What do you want?” she'd asked him once as they lay together, spent.
“Nothing,” he said, and he meant it.
She propped herself up on her elbow, facing him. “I meant, what do you want in science?”
He traced his finger down her neck and over her collarbone. “Oh, fame and fortune. What else?”
She'd studied him then, searching his face. He saw the flecks of sun in her brown eyes, golden specks.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“I decided to be a biologist when I was sixteen,” she said.
He'd laughed ruefully. “Didn't we all?”
Her eyes darkened; the gold was gone. She rolled over, turning her back on him.
“Hey, where are you going?” he protested. “Don't hide.”
“I don't think,” Marion continued, “that anyone should examine Cliff's private notes without his permission, and I don't want to reward this kind of behavior on your part, Robin, by passing judgment. Do you understand me?”
Robin nodded.
“Our work requires a certain amount of trust and, failing that, a modicum of respect.” Marion handed Robin back her photocopied evidence and Robin took the pages, humbled, mute. Again Cliff was glad, relieved Robin would stop spying. Then Mendelssohn spoke again. “However, I have looked at these notes, Cliff, and I'm a little puzzled by the data here. There are numbers here I haven't seen before.”
Now it was Cliff's turn to endure Mendelssohn's sharp questions and Robin's furtive glances. While Robin had been downcast seconds before, now she was alert. He had to explain that he'd used these three pages simply for jotting down notes, and that, in fact, they contained numbers from more than one data set. He'd scrawled his notes on the same pages he'd used for earlier experiments. He pointed to where one column of mice ended and the new column of mice began.
“What about the date?” Robin interrupted. “Why are they all dated March twenty-first?”
And he had to explain the date was only on the second page, and referred only to those mice, not the others.
“So those other mice were from last winter?” Robin demanded. “When? November? December? Why are their numbers all three hundreds?”
“You know all the mice in that line are three hundreds,” Cliff told her.
“Why did you use the same pen, months apart?”
“Robin!” Marion shook her head in amazement.
“You still had the same ballpoint pen for three months?” Robin pressed.
Even Marion winced at Robin's pettiness. Confronted with his sloppy notes, Cliff had been defensive; he'd scrambled to explain the sloping ballpoint columns and decipher his own scrawl. He'd been ambushed and forced to interpret records he'd never meant for anyone to see. But his poor records and quick talking could hardly match the desperation, almost the hysteria, in Robin's questions. Dredging up his papers, Robin was so far out of line as to be unreasonable. How could anyone answer them? Cliff could only be grateful Mendelssohn understood that.
The others were turning away from her. They were sorry for her, but also wary; she seemed so obsessed, her behavior so erratic. Robin came in less now, and at odd hours. The others understood that sooner or later she would leave the lab altogether. Instinctively they avoided confronting her, or even discussing research with her anymore. She had talked to Feng and Prithwish, and tried to mine Aidan for information about Cliff's animals. She was spinning an intricate theory about Cliff and R-7, and all the strands came from her own mind.
One afternoon that fall Prithwish discovered Robin in the animal facility studying the log. He shook his head at her. “What are you looking for?” he asked gently.
“Nothing,” she said.
He didn't question her further, but she knew what he was thinking: Then why are you down here? Why don't you just get on with your own work? She knew exactly what the others thought, and it hurt to be treated like a hazardous material, to be isolated and manipulated with gloved hands.
At times she felt the others must be right about her. She was obsessive. She must be mad. Cliff's evidence was all there to see, published as hard fact, and she was only hurting herself by trying to chip away at what was demonstrably true. Then, strangely, the unpopularity of her position seemed to her the mark of truth, and a sign of disinterested authenticity. She had no allies; her assertions were unprofitable, detrimental to her career. Her own work was submerged in her suspicions; her days in the lab were numbered. She had already begun conversations with Mendelssohn and Glass about where she might go, or what she might do next. On the other hand, Cliff had everybody on his side. The others wanted to believe him, needed to believe him; he himself, like a scientific pilgrim, had approached his experiments desperate for a miracle, and for that very reason she was sure he'd selected data that told the story he wanted to publish.
One person in the lab still spoke to Robin freely, and that was Billie, the new lab tech. Tall, wispy, dolorous, Billie was always sniffling and gently, sadly grieved. After ten years at the Philpott, she suffered from asthma and sinus problems, which she attributed to fungus in the institute's walls. The building was indeed old, and badly ventilated, but Billie also believed that the metal wire in women's bras conducted electricity from computers and other lab equipment and caused breast cancer. Over the years her concerns had blossomed into a fanciful worldview in which the physical plant strangled its own denizens, seeding fungal parasites into researchers' bodies so that gradually the Philpott's scientists became susceptible to the very diseases they were studying. She ruminated constantly about leaving the institute, but she lingered on, a blessing and a curse, endowing the Philpott with her skills and her neuroses.
Unfortunately, the other techs were tied up with the R-7 work, and Robin needed Billie. Robin had scraped together some modest leads with her bone tumor project, and Mendelssohn and Glass were pushing her to submit a research note before she left in the spring. The lab didn't need the publication. Marion had pressed Billie on Robin with the purest intentions—to save Robin time and help her move along. But Billie needed direction, she needed guidance; and so Robin began a new phase of her exile: she and Billie working together, the lab's least wanted.
“I think I know why they attack each other,” Billie confided to Robin one afternoon as they were tagging young mice. With an instrument the size of a single-hole punch, Billie pierced each animal's ear, affixing a numbered metal tag, her movements deft and gentle as if she were fixing price stickers onto peaches at the grocery store. “You know why?”
“Why?” Robin asked stoically.
“Because the chi in the facility is weak,” Billie told her. “See how cold it is and clinical? How there's metal everywhere? On the bench top. On the cage racks. The walls.”
Robin looked warily at the windowless white walls.
“There's no earth energy here, no water energy. Just metal,” Billie said.
“Metal is easy to clean,” Robin pointed out.
“I believe this facility is a breeding ground for conflict.” Billie plopped a newly tagged mouse into its cage. “Just imagine if we brought fresh flowers into this room, and painted the walls pink.” She glanced down at the pink mice. “Or lavender. And if we changed the lighting and gave the mice little climbing structures and nests made out of natural materials.”
“Climbing structures?” Robin asked in disbelief.
“For a long while I've been looking for other people with SBS—Sick Building Syndrome,” Billie explained. “Now I see hundreds of animals are affected as well.” She tagged another mouse. “The animals are stressed. The environment is making them ill. They have no privacy. There's nowhere for them to hide.”
“Um, Billie,” said Robin. “Could you just . . . put it . . .”
Billie put the animal back in the cage, and picked up yet another. “I see myself in them,” she confessed. “They're suffering from this place. Look at this little guy.” Billie held the animal right up to Robin's face.
“I'd like to finish up here.” Robin stepped back from the busy mouse marooned on Billie's fingertips. Curious, the animal explored the edges of Billie's hand, and then dashed up her arm. Billie plucked up the mouse and replaced it in her palm. “They fight because this place makes them fight,” Billie said. “That's why they bite each other. I'm not saying set them free. I'm not saying give up experimenting. I'm just starting to wonder what we can do to change the feng shui in here and give some thought to the imbalances—”
“Billie,” Robin interrupted in exasperation. “Could we get on with it?”
“In these rooms,” Billie continued.
At that moment the mouse in her palm leapt onto Robin.
She screamed. Robin was not afraid of mice, but she was so startled she shrieked. The wizened nudes hardly ever leapt like that, so high, so far. They scarcely ever acted so alive during procedures. Hearing her scream, the red-eyed mouse froze, clinging to her lab coat like a tiny monster come to life. “Get it off,” she shrieked at Billie. “Get it off!”
“Hold on.” Carefully, stealthily, Billie reached for the mouse, but it ran up the lapel of Robin's lab coat. She felt its little body through the thin material. Sickeningly, she imagined the animal was going to climb inside her collar. She thrashed and tore at her lab coat in panic.
“If you'd just stand still,” Billie suggested, but Robin ripped her coat off and threw it on the bench top. She ran out of the room to the end of the hall, and then she cried as she had not cried since she was a very little girl. She cried because she had lost control, because her situation was absurd. She wept for loneliness.
But she forced herself to stop. She knew Billie would come looking for her; at any moment someone from upstairs could come walking by. She choked back her tears, took off her gloves, and dried her cheeks as best she could with a clean tissue she found in her skirt pocket. Her face felt swollen; she knew her eyes were red. Still, she donned a fresh lab coat and walked back into the animal room, where Billie was still bustling around with the mice as if nothing had happened.
“He's all right,” Billie reassured her immediately. “I picked him up and he's in there.” She pointed to the little daredevil, now tagged and caged. “And I tagged these guys. Numbers 603, 604 . . .”
“Just a sec,” said Robin, picking up her logbook.
“You see what it does to them,” Billie said. “You saw how that poor animal flew off the handle. I'm really starting to believe that they're unbalanced. They express the disequilibrium in their environment.”
That evening Robin went to find Nanette downstairs where she taught Beginning Quilting in the first-floor lunchroom. The dozen or so students were all women, some postdocs, some secretaries, along with several institute wives. They were from Pakistan, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa.
As Robin slipped inside the door, Nanette brandished a small orange-handled tool.
“Ladies,” she said, “take out your rotary cutters. Hold them gently but firmly in your favored hand. You will be drawing them across the fabric with your straightedge as your guide. Watch as I demonstrate.” Nanette adored teaching women from other countries. With their exotic color choices, they made the craft their own, piecing a magenta medallion against a background of palest green, placing bloodred triangles like origami cranes in a sea of gray. “Your rotary cutter is like a pizza wheel. It is very, very sharp. What do we do if we cut ourselves with our rotary cutter?” She paused for effect and then cried out: “For God's sake, get out of the way so the blood won't ruin the fabric.”
Nanette had always told Robin that she'd taken up quilting because her job mixing media was not geometrically challenging enough. Robin knew, however, that it wasn't just shapes and edges Nanette wanted in her life, but people.
“All right, let's take our scraps and begin.” Nodding at this one, correcting that one, Nanette walked from table to table as the women bent over their work.
“You look terrible,” Nanette whispered to Robin when she finally made her way to the back of the room.
“Thanks a lot.”
“What's wrong? What happened?” Then she took on her teacher's voice. “If you'll excuse me for a moment, ladies.” She ushered Robin out into the corridor.
“I've had a bad day,” Robin admitted.
“You look exhausted. You're still not sleeping?”
“Not too well,” said Robin.
“You know what you are?” Nanette began.
“Frustrated,” said Robin.
“Depressed,” said Nanette. “Did you know insomnia is a sign of clinical depression?”