Lab Girl (17 page)

Toward the end of the story the Boy has turned into a very old man and has gone completely bald with age and worry. “The raccoons are having baby raccoons again; I need more hair,” says the Tree. The Boy shakes his head apologetically. “I am sorry, but I have no more hair to give you, being just a bald old man.” “Stick your arm in the hollow, then, and the raccoons will chew it. An old man's arm is good for chewing anyway,” suggests the Tree. “Yes,” agrees the Boy. “Let us just stand together then, and I will lean upon you and let them chew awhile.” As the book closes, its action is resolved into a poignant tableau of sacrifice.

“That's pure Caldecott, right there,” I observed one night after a particularly productive editing session.

Less than six months after Bill started living in the van, he knocked on my door at three-thirty in the morning. He came in, and I went to get him some of the coffee that I had just started to brew.

That summer had not been going well. “It's a hard life, living in a van,” Bill would say often, with a wistful sigh. The Georgia heat commonly exceeded ninety degrees by eight-thirty in the morning, making sleeping inside a car until any normal hour completely impossible. Bill combatted the heat with ingenuity: he found a parking spot within campus lot P3 where he could position the van sideways beneath the drape of an overgrown willow tree and obtain both cover and shade. He blacked out all the windows, including the windshield, with aluminum foil placed with its reflective side facing out. This kept the van bearably cool until the sun had fully risen.

I would cross paths with Bill as early as 7:30 a.m. and see him staggering groggily around the lab with a beaker of water in each hand. By his telling, he had been “baked out” about an hour earlier and was, as usual, “exceeding parched.” The desiccating nights he experienced were exacerbated by his habit of ceasing fluid intake at about 6:00 p.m. each evening; he had no options for urination, and he scoffed openly at the idea of using the bushes. “I have my standards,” he declared haughtily.

On the night that he showed up at my house, his sleep had been dramatically interrupted. We had always marveled that no one seemed to notice or care that Bill's creepy van was perpetually parked in P3, but in the end it turned out that someone had and did—namely, the campus police. One night, while Bill was sleeping in a pool of his own sweat, he awoke to an energetic pounding on his windshield. Outside he could hear a squad car siren chirping against staccato CB radio communications. He rolled the van's door open.

He didn't look like a particularly model citizen: he had planned to shave his head the day before but got only halfway done before the batteries in his razor ran out, which gave him a sort of escaped-mental-patient look. The van stank in the way that such close quarters usually do, and across the passenger seats were sprawled the guts of his portable television; he had taken it apart in order to tinker with the wiring. While a flashlight blinded him, he heard a disembodied voice asking, “Sir, can we see some identification?”

After they were satisfied that there was nothing sinister in the van, Bill showed them his driver's license, university ID, passport, and even the ziplock bag of hair recently harvested from the left side of his head. Soon after that, I received a call from the police asking me to verify that Bill was my employee.

“We found him sleeping in a van in a campus parking lot,” they explained to me over the phone.

“Yeah, lot P3,” I confirmed. “Under the willow.”

Once they figured out that Bill represented no threat to anyone, and that he certainly hadn't done anything criminal, the police officers were extremely apologetic for disrupting his evening. They really had no choice but to wake him up; it was their job, and, well, you know how it is. Bill assured them that there were no hard feelings. “You know there's a campus emergency phone right down the hill,” one of them reminded him in a fatherly way. “You be sure to use it if you ever need anything.” After they drove off, Bill dressed and came over to my place, supposing that I might appreciate an explanation for the phone call.

“I don't know how you can be so calm about this.” I was upset. “You are exactly the kind of guy that they could pin something on if they wanted to…a weirdo loner who periodically shoves body parts into a tree?”

“Oh, come on…I have nothing to hide. I don't do drugs and I don't make trouble. I positively radiate normalcy,” he said, and I had to agree that it was true, in its way. Neither of us had ever done any drugs, even during all those years at Berkeley. In fact, we didn't even drink beer on field trips, which was practically unheard-of in the earth sciences. I had knowingly made some photocopies under the previous user's departmental code, but I hadn't done anything worse than that so far that semester.

“Well, you do swear too much,” I countered, unwilling to completely concede his point. Bill agreed that this was probably fucking true. “And look at you: you look like the second coming of Eraserhead; you're lucky they didn't haul you in just for that.” I was angry and scared.

Then I relented. “Listen, I know this is all my fault. It's because I don't pay you a living wage. But I can't—at least not yet. But soon—soon, I think—we're going to get a really big grant.” I searched for something to say that would make my promise sound less empty.

“Anyway, this was the last straw,” I told him. “I'm tired of worrying about you every night. You've got to find somewhere to live.” I wracked my brain for a solution. “I'll give you the money.”

Bill did find somewhere to live. During the next week he moved into the lab. He slept in one of our student offices—the one that no one wanted to use or even wanted to enter. It had no windows and no ventilation and thus had absorbed the body odor of everyone who had ever worked in the building, fermented it within the ceiling tiles, and continuously exuded it as a rare bouquet. He called it “the Hot Box” because it was perpetually five degrees hotter than the rest of the well-heated and poorly cooled old building.

He improvised a bed and dresser behind the cover of an old desk and took to sleeping in a T-shirt and khaki pants (his “pajakis”) so that he could rise up immediately if a secretary or janitor entered, claiming that he was just resting his eyes midway through a long lab experiment. This was nearly ideal, except for the fact that the Hot Box was located near the front entrance of the building, and Bill found it especially hard to sleep after 9:00 a.m. once the hordes entered, swinging the doors open and shut. He replaced and greased the relevant hinges, but it didn't help much. After one particularly late night, he put up signs that read
DOORS BROKEN, PLEASE USE BACK ENTRANCE,
but that lasted only until Facilities was called over and couldn't find a problem.

He packed the biological sample freezers full of frozen dinners and kept his bulk groceries stored within the secretaries' fridge until they complained about the three whole watermelons that had proven irresistibly cheap at Kroger. Taken all together, Bill seemed pretty content except for one thing: a lack of private showering facilities. He rigged up a sort of bidet within the mop sink of the janitor's closet, but he had to leave the door propped open so that he wouldn't get locked in while he was using it. Try as we might, we couldn't come up with a convincing cover story for why he would be in there, soaped up and naked at 3:00 a.m., and I think this fed his natural tendencies toward paranoia.

One morning at about eleven o'clock, the fire alarm went off in the building, and upon leaving my office, I saw Bill shuffling along with the many others involved in the evacuation, barefoot in his pajakis with his hair sticking up in all directions and a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. Once he got outside, he stumbled over to a windowsill planter of geraniums and spit toothpaste into it.

I walked over and greeted him. “Dude, yuck. You look like Lyle Lovett out on a day pass from somewhere.”

Bill began to repeatedly flick his near-empty lighter, trying to get one last flame out of it. “If I had a boat,” he mumbled around his cigarette, “I'd go out on the ocean.”

Because he literally had nowhere else to go, Bill was working in the lab for about sixteen hours a day. By virtue of availability, he soon became everyone's counselor and confidant. He would help the students fix their bicycles and change the oil in their old cars, go over their 1040EZ forms with them and help them figure out where to show up for jury duty—grumbling about it all the while. When the students told him about their lives, in the charming way that only a nineteen-year-old undergraduate does (“Get this: the closet in my dorm room has a
built-in
ironing board!” “Can you believe it? I'm going to assistant-produce the campus radio station's Sunday-morning 3:45 a.m. post-reggae-punk music hour!” “At Thanksgiving, when my dad said he had never heard of Gertrude Stein, I was like, ‘Who
are
these people?' ”), he would listen and never judge. He also never reciprocated with any stories about himself, but the students were too absorbed with being young adults to notice.

As a rule, Bill didn't share the students' stories with me, but he did make sure to pass on the best of the best. Karen was an undergraduate lab assistant who wanted research experience on her résumé in order to beef up her application to veterinary school. Ultimately, she wanted to work with endangered animals that had been rescued from captivity and help repatriate them to their native surroundings. She left us for the summer in order to accept a coveted internship at the Miami zoo, only to find that most of what zookeepers actually do amounts to pretty routine hygiene maintenance, and that the only thing worse than an animal that doesn't appreciate this is one who does.

Placed upon the lowest rung of the ladder, she was sent to work in the primate enclosure. Karen's job was to apply anti-inflammatory cream to monkey genitalia, which were in need of daily soothing due to their constant and indiscriminate use. Once the monkeys had recognized her as their new vehicle of relief, they began mobbing her when she entered the room. Bill and I could hardly absorb this story when she told it to us, it was just too wonderful, but it got even better. It turns out that it is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and most monkeys proved considerably more responsive to her reluctant manipulations.

The zoo had fitted Karen with a protective plastic shell meant to discourage her charges from clutching on to her and wildly humping her frame, but it wasn't 100 percent effective. On the upside, her many animal behavior classes had provided her with the intuition necessary to condition these monkeys to the concept of a glory hole; the downside was that seeing them lined up and “standing at attention” through a chain-link fence first thing in the morning was enough to make her rethink a career in veterinary medicine altogether. She returned to our lab after the internship having decided that maybe botany wasn't so boring after all.

Even though we were always on campus, we didn't know everyone. There was a strikingly pale fellow who used to attend the weekly seminar regularly, always sitting alone, far back in the last row to one side. His countenance was waxy white, and his hair was long and white too, though he didn't look to be more than middle-aged. He would slip into the lecture hall at the last moment and be the first to slip out at the end, skipping any and all refreshments and conversation. We never saw him otherwise, and we never heard him speak a word nor saw him interact with anyone. We decided that he lived in the attic of the building and started calling him “Boo Radley.” I tried to follow him one day, dodging out early during the questions session so as to be ready, but he somehow lost me during the confusion of the mass exodus.

I used to speculate endlessly about Boo—his probable reactions to each seminar, his expertise, his personal fortune—and then contrive tactics by which we could expose him, violate his privacy, and discover everything that I wanted to know. Bill never showed any interest in my schemes. One night, he sat calmly on the building's front steps as I pressed him on the subject, pointing excitedly to the one light that still glowed out of a third-floor office.

Bill looked up at the light and then out to the stars. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and said, “I don't know, Scout. He is who he is. I think I'd rather not know more than that. It's enough to know that he's up there, and that he'll step in and save us if anything really bad ever happens.” Bill crushed his cigarette on the pavement, looked at me, and took off his fleece jacket. He handed it to me so I could put it on before I even realized that I was cold.

A CACTUS DOESN'T LIVE
in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move. Too little water, too much light, temperature too high: the desert has all of these inconveniences ratcheted up to their extremes. Biologists don't much study the desert, since plants represent three things to human society: food, medicine, and wood. You'll never get any of those things from the desert. Thus a desert botanist is a rare scientist indeed and eventually becomes inured to the misery of her subjects. Personally, I don't have the stomach to deal with such suffering day in and day out.

In the desert, life-threatening stresses aren't a crisis; they are a normal feature of the life cycle. Extreme stress is part of the very landscape, not something a plant can avoid or ameliorate. Survival depends on the cactus's ability to tolerate deathly grim dry spells over and over again. If you meet a barrel cactus that's tall enough to touch your knee, it is likely to be more than twenty-five years old. Cactuses grow slowly in the desert—during the years when they do grow, that is.

A barrel cactus has folds like an accordion, and deep within these folds are the pores that let air in and water evaporate out. When it becomes very dry, a cactus sheds its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it. A cactus can live for four days with no roots and still continue to grow. If there is still no rain, the cactus begins to contract, sometimes for months, or until all the folds have closed together. Its spines form a dense and dangerous fur protecting what is now a hard, rootless ball of plant. In this posture, the cactus can sit without growing and await rain for years, while continuously punished by the sun. When it finally rains, the cactus will either return to full functioning within twenty-four hours or show itself to be dead.

There are a hundred species or so known as “resurrection plants.” These species are unrelated, but within each of them the same process has somehow developed. Resurrection plants have leaves that can be desiccated to papery brown shreds, feign death for years, and then rehydrate back to normal function. It is their unusual biochemistry that allows them to do this, an accidental trait and something that they did not choose. As they wither, their leaves fill with concentrated sucrose, thick sugar left behind during the drying. This syrup stabilizes and preserves the leaves, even when they are drained of their green chlorophyll.

Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year's worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green.