Lab Girl (10 page)

THE REMAINDER OF 1995
went by quickly. Once I had passed the prerequisite and grueling three-hour oral exam that qualified me to write a dissertation, nothing was left but to write it. I did that quickly, indulging myself in long writing jags and typing with the TV on in order to supply the noise that I needed in order to focus past my loneliness. Soon after my thesis was written, I graduated. The four years that I had spent on my Ph.D. seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye. Knowing that I'd have to be at least twice as proactive and strategic as my male counterparts, I had started applying for professor jobs during my third year and had successfully secured an offer at a quickly growing state university: Georgia Tech. The next phase of my career was coming into focus, or so everyone kept telling me.

In May 1996, Bill was awarded his bachelor's degree at the same ostentatious ceremony where I was awarded my doctorate. Neither one of us had any family in attendance, and so we found ourselves awkwardly shifting about on the sidelines while the other graduates were hugged and photographed, everyone beaming over their diplomas. After an hour of this, we agreed that no free glass of champagne was worth the torture, and we walked back to the lab. We took off our graduation robes, wadded them up, and threw them in a corner. Once we got our lab coats on, everything felt more normal. The night was still young: it was barely nine o'clock and prime working hours hadn't even started yet.

We decided to spend the night blowing glass, which was our favorite late-night diversion. My goal was to seal a tiny amount of perfectly pure carbon dioxide gas into each of about thirty glass tubes. I would need them for reference when running the mass spectrometer—each tube would provide a watermark of known value against which I could compare my unknown samples. Making these “references” was a time-consuming task that needed to be repeated approximately every ten days, and like a lot of lab work that happens in the background, it wasn't very interesting, but at the same time it was key that I do it carefully and without error.

Bill sat nearby and performed the first step in the process by melting one end of a length of glass tube. In order to melt the glass, he was using a torch set to a small flame, powered by acetylene fuel and boosted by a stream of pure oxygen gas. It was like an entire barbeque grill on steroids, all blasting out of a single tiny opening—that was pointed away from his face, of course. The flame that emerges from this kind of torch is so bright that it will damage the human eye if you look directly at it, and so we were both wearing dark safety goggles.

Glass is hard and brittle at room temperature, but it softens into luminescent toffee when heated to a few hundred degrees. Melted glass is hot enough to ignite paper or wood on contact. A drop of molten glass readily burns down through the skin if you spill it onto your arm, stopping only when cooled by a bone-deep rush of blood. University policy probably dictated that I shouldn't have been giving an undergraduate such a dangerous and advanced duty, but Bill had easily learned all the lesser jobs that I'd shown him, then proceeded to fix everything that was broken, and had finally gone on to perform preventative maintenance—all on his own initiative. He was simply running out of things to do, and I couldn't justify not letting him advance to more important tasks, so I taught him the basics of how to blow glass.

While we worked during that night, I looked forward across my life and saw a future where I was making reference tubes weekly forevermore, shriveling up and turning gray while watching the dancing needle of a gauge, just like the one in front of me. The thought was depressing and comforting at the same time. I knew only one thing for certain: that I couldn't imagine any other future for myself.

Snapping out of my daydream, I looked past the liquid nitrogen trap and toward the gauge. Its needle read flat, indicating that there was no gas left in the line; it had all condensed into my tube and was frozen inside the trap. I sealed the glass tube by melting it shut and then set it down such that the molten side would cool slowly while its frozen contents thawed.

I looked over my shoulder to see Bill engrossed in producing tubes. “How about some radio?” I asked him conspiratorially, offering to break up the monotony with the rare treat of superfluous noise. As a rule, music is forbidden in the laboratory, especially during dangerous and painstaking work. We'd been trained to understand that you can't afford to have any part of your brain distracted from what you are doing when each move you make is critical to both safety and success.

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “Anything except that NPR shit. I don't want to get all worked up over the plight of fishermen in some place that I can't even find on the map. I got my own problems right here.”

I thought I understood this remark, but I kept my mouth shut and did not comment. I had recently dropped Bill off in front of a dingy apartment complex on the border of what was known to be a crime-ridden neighborhood in Oakland, so while I was pretty sure that he wasn't actually homeless, I still suspected that it wasn't a good scene. For all the time that we spent together, Bill had mostly remained a mystery to me. I had been around him enough to know that he didn't do drugs, skip class, or litter on the street—incongruously enough, considering his disaffected comportment—but I didn't know anything beyond that.

I took off my safety goggles, bent down behind the stereo, and began to search the frequencies, looking for an AM radio talk show that might entertain us for a while. The broken knob was not well engaged with the tuning mechanism, and so I had to fiddle with the dial in order to get it to move at all. The last thing I remember hearing clearly was an unbelievably loud, sharp pop, as if someone had set a firecracker off inside my head. After that I didn't hear anything at all for about five minutes. Nothing. Not my own breathing, not the buzzing of the building's airflow system, not the whoosh of my blood pulsing through my head. Nothing.

Terrified, I stood up and saw that the side of the lab where I had been working was now showered in splintered glass. I careened my head around and saw then that I was alone. Bill wasn't where he had been sitting. I panicked and yelled his name. When I didn't hear my own yell, my panic increased. Then I saw Bill's head slowly rising over the counter, looking at me with his eyes wide as saucers. When he'd heard what sounded like a gunshot at close range, he dove under a desk and remained crouched there until he heard me shouting his name.

All at once it dawned on me what had gone wrong. I had condensed more carbon dioxide into that glass tube than I intended to. I had left it a minute too long while daydreaming and far more gas had been trapped than the tube could hold. After I sealed the tube, the frozen gas had warmed up, expanding quickly and exploding like a pipe bomb. Moreover, it had exploded into Bill's stockpile of other glass tubes, shattering several days' worth of work and sending glass splinters flying throughout the room.

Embedded in the back of the radio were hundreds of tiny shards of glass, and some not so tiny. The stereo had miraculously shielded my face from the explosion; had I not been occupied in finding a station, the shower of glass would no doubt have hit me in my eyes. I was struck by the irrational fear that everything in the room might explode and I looked around wildly, finally understanding that we were now safe, if only because all our glass was already broken. My hearing started to slowly come back and with it came a mighty earache, which made every whispering sound burn the inside of my head as if my ear canals were raw and bleeding.

I cannot do this,
I thought, and then:
What the hell did I think I was doing here?
I had fucked up. This was bad.

Bill turned off the torches and then walked systematically around the room, unplugging everything. I stood there wondering what to do. I felt as if my whole world had exploded along with the tubes.
Scientists don't do things like this. Fuck-ups do things like this,
I thought. I couldn't even look Bill in the eye.

“Hey, can I take a cigarette break?” Bill asked at length with a surprising calm that served to make the whole thing even more unreal.

I nodded, wincing. My ears hurt like crazy.

Bill shuffled through the glass splinters that lay like hailstones all around us, toward the door. When he got there, he stopped and turned around. “You coming?” he asked me.

“I don't smoke,” I answered miserably.

Bill jerked his head toward the hall. “That's okay,” he told me. “I'll teach you.”

We went outside, walked a few blocks down Telegraph Avenue, and then sat down on the curb. Bill lit a cigarette and we shivered in our T-shirts, queasy in the chilly Northern California night. The usual nocturnal characters who meandered around Berkeley were out and we watched them walk by, some talking frantically to themselves.

I drew my knees up to my chest and began to chew on the backs of my hands. It was a habit that I worked diligently to hide from other people. In the lab I could usually just wear gloves, but at that moment a great anxiety was overtaking me. I worked the knuckles of my right hand with my teeth until I felt the thin scabs open, and the taste of blood and the feeling of tearing skin began to calm me in a way that nothing else ever did. I ground my teeth into the raw skin between my knuckles, teething on my bones, sucking desperately for comfort. In a few short months I would be a professor, but that night I was pretty sure I couldn't do anything.

Bill took a drag. “We used to have a dog that chewed her paws,” he reflected.

“I know it's gross,” I said, flooded with shame. I doubled over my hands and pushed them into my stomach in an effort to keep them out of my mouth.

“No,” he said, “she was a great dog. We didn't give a damn.” He continued, “When you have a dog that good, you let it do whatever it wants.” I rested my head on my knees with my eyes shut tight. We sat in silence while Bill smoked.

At length we walked back to the lab and swept up the glass, working carefully to hide all traces of what had happened. I was glad that it was the middle of the night, but felt guilty when it became clear that I was going to get away with such a serious mistake.

“Hey, what are you going to do next year, do you know?” I asked Bill as we swept. I had been unsurprised to learn that Bill had earned honors for his bachelor's degree in soil science, and I naturally assumed that he had some job lined up, as our department was known for its ability to place its graduates.

“My plan,” explained Bill matter-of-factly, “is to dig another hole in my parents' yard and move into it.” I nodded in acknowledgment. “And smoke,” he said, “until I run out of cigarettes.” I nodded again. “Then I guess I'll probably chew on my hands,” he added with a shrug.

I hesitated, and then I took the plunge. “Listen, do you want to move to Atlanta and help me build a lab?” I asked, and then added, “I can pay you. Well, I'm pretty sure I can, anyway.”

He thought for a while. “Can we bring that radio?” he asked, pointing at the shredded plastic stereo we were about to ditch in the Dumpster out back.

“Yes,” I said. “We'll get a bunch of them.”

Two months later we loaded up all of our belongings—which fit easily into my pickup truck—and drove to Southern California, where I dropped Bill off with his family at his childhood home. We had agreed that I would move first, in time for the fall semester to start at Georgia Tech, and that he would join me a few months later.

Bill's parents were extremely warm and friendly, generous and hospitable hosts, who from that first meeting treated me as a long-lost daughter. When I met him, Bill's dad was about eighty years old and had fascinating stories to tell, having worked his entire career as an independent filmmaker, documenting firsthand accounts of the Armenian genocide from which his family had fled when he was a boy. Supported in piecemeal fashion by the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill's whole family had worked to make these films happen, and Bill and his brothers had grown up serving as the film crew while hard-traveling through Syria. In their family home near Hollywood they edited footage in the studio and tended a huge garden; his dad could make anything grow and his mom insisted that I eat only the oranges from their very best tree.

On the final night of my visit, I lay on the bed in Bill's sister's bedroom, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about my future. The next morning, I would drive up to Barstow, merge onto Interstate 40, and leave California for good. It wasn't the first time that I would walk away from everything I knew and everything to which I'd become attached, knowing that I could never go back. It was the same way that I'd left home for college and then left college for graduate school: everyone but me was sure that I was ready to go. It was, however, the first time that I'd have a for-sure friend at the place where I was going, and I knew enough to thank God for that.

On August 1, 1996, I officially became an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, and I was expected to look and act like one, even though I was only twenty-six years old and I had no concrete idea of how one does either of those things. There were many days when I'd spend six hours preparing a one-hour classroom lecture. Afterward, I'd reward myself by sitting in my office choosing and ordering chemicals and equipment, feeling like a giddy bride picking out her gift registry. When my purchases arrived, I piled them up in the basement, and soon they formed a mountain of cardboard boxes. The central mailroom had scrawled the word “JAHREN” on each box when it was received, and it struck me as beautiful when I leaned against the wall and stared at the giant tower bearing my name lettered in twenty different hands. Bill was scheduled to arrive in January and then we would begin to set everything right, to make real the dreamscape that we had so often described to each other back in California. I didn't want to open any of the packages until we could do it together—but I was like a little kid waiting for Christmas morning. I would pick up a box, shake it, try to guess exactly what was inside, start to open it, restrain myself, and then return it to the pile.