Lab Girl (20 page)

I lay with my eyes closed and counted the drips, soft and regular, as they fell from the bathroom faucet, until Bill finally said, “But you do know that you can never be friends with the people that you work with.”

I opened my eyes because his words had unexpectedly stung me. I ventured, “What about us? I mean, we're friends, aren't we?”

“Nope,” he answered, and then continued, “You and I are just two sorry sonsabitches stranded in the middle of nowhere trying to save twenty-five bucks on a hotel room. So shut up and go to sleep.” And so we did, on opposite sides of the big bed, with our clothes and boots on. I decided that this must be what family feels like, and I thanked God for the day we'd had, and also for tomorrow while I was at it.

The next morning we woke up late, and by the time we emerged from our room, it was a clear, sunshiny day. Teri had been waiting for me in the lobby, fuming. It didn't look as if she'd slept at all that night.

We walked across the street to the Big Rig Truck Stop and shared a single order of bacon and eggs, which provided more than enough food for four people. After Bill ordered his eighth cup of coffee, Teri looked at me and said, “I want you to take me to the Salt Lake City airport, so I can fly back home.” I nodded and got ready to tell her that I understood and that it would be no problem.

Before I could open my mouth, Bill exploded.
“What?”
He threw his silverware down and grabbed the table as if the very Earth were shaking. “You
roll the van
and now your plan is just to bail out of here and leave us to deal with it?” he asked. “
That is cold.
That shit is just fucking
cold.
” He shook his head, appalled. Teri got up hastily and left, probably to go and cry in the restroom. I considered following her and telling her that everything would be all right and that everybody makes mistakes and that the whole trip had been a stupid idea and that we'd all just go home. But my intuition as a scientist told me that it would be a mistake for us to give up that easily.

I sat at the table and thought as the dust was settling. Like everything else in the lab, the accident was ultimately my responsibility and the buck stopped with me. Last night I'd known that once morning came, I'd have to crawl out of bed and deal with the whole mess, none of which I had even remotely started to sort out. I had no idea where the van was, or my suitcase for that matter. I didn't even really know how close or how far we might be from Salt Lake City. I knew that it was now less than twenty-four hours until my presentation at the conference, and that we still had to cross three entire states to get there. But mostly I was just glad to be sufficiently alive to get to try to solve these problems. I didn't foresee anything that might kill me that day, and not getting killed was my new bar for what constituted a good day. There was nothing for it but to eat some bacon and then improvise.

Although I agreed that pushing forward was the right thing to do, Bill's reaction had surprised me. I slowly realized that he might have considered—yet never acted upon—the idea of abandoning me, and it dawned on me for the first time that he actually had the option of bailing out of his life in Georgia. Bill had taken this latest bizarre and scary episode in his usual stride and saw no way out but to put his head down and burrow out of the huge catastrophe that he'd had no part in creating. In fact, none of this had even seemed to bother him. The thing that did bother him was that someone else might consider abandoning us—the very idea enraged him in a way that all the frustrating situations we had ever encountered could not.

I finished the thought that I had started before I fell asleep: This is my life and Bill is my family. The students will come and go, they'll be what they are, some hopeful and some hopeless, but we won't get attached. This is about me and Bill and what we can do together. All the rest of it is nothing more than background noise. I released myself from the lofty, boastful, greedy expectations of academia. I wasn't going to change the world or educate a new generation or glorify an institution. It was about being in the lab and keeping it all together, body and soul. When I crawled out of that van alive, I checked my pockets and found only one currency that mattered: loyalty. I got up, paid at the register, and then held the door open for everyone as we left. “C'mon, gang, this'll get better,” I told them. “It has to.”

As we all walked back to the motel, I saw what looked like our van in the parking lot, but I decided that it couldn't be because it was in perfect condition. As we got closer we found that it did look perfect, if you looked at only the passenger's side. The other side was caved in like a crumpled beer can, and the driver's side mirror was nowhere to be seen, having snapped off along with one of the windshield wipers. However, none of the windows were broken, and all of the doors on the passenger's side opened and closed normally. Bill opened the van, looked inside, and commented on its “understated luxury.” The deli had flown open during the crash, and the interior reeked of piss, spoiled lunchmeat, and rancid cheese. Filth was stuck to the windows on one side because the whole mess had settled and frozen while the van had lain in the ditch all the previous night.

Bill announced that our suitcases were all there and plopped himself down in the driver's seat to try the engine. He turned the key and the engine immediately roared to life and purred while it idled. I saw Bill's face break into a huge smile. “We're in business!” he shouted. I held my nose and hopped up into shotgun position while Teri and Noah crawled into the two backseats.

We returned to the highway and drove west toward Rock Springs, Wyoming, with Noah acting as the driver's side-view mirror, silently signaling when the road was open. It occurred to me that he hadn't spoken a word during the whole trip. I put my seat belt on and checked it several times to make sure that the mechanism had caught.

We pulled onto the highway and I calculated how many hours we were from San Francisco: sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most—we'd just make it. I didn't count on the blizzard that was raging in the Sierras, but that wouldn't become an issue until later. For the moment, everything looked good. Bill suddenly exclaimed, “Oh shit! We forgot to pull over and look for the side mirror.” Then he added, “Oh well, we can do it on the way back.”

I was stunned; I had been so focused upon just getting to San Francisco, I hadn't even thought about the fact that we were going to have to drive this broken thing all the way back across the country. I started to say something about it. As if reading my mind, Bill pointed at me and said, “Nope, I don't want to hear it. You just sit there and think about your presentation.” Then he added, “After all we've been through, it had better be good.”

Compared with the trip there, the five-day conference seemed uneventful, and as soon as it ended we drove back to Atlanta, this time via first I-10 and then I-20, which included Arizona, New Mexico, and two hundred miles of Texas sans map. Each day, Bill observed that the country was beautiful, and I agreed. By the time we got to Phoenix, Teri was fully herself again, and bygones were bygones.

I returned the van late in the evening after we arrived in Atlanta, shoved the keys in the rental pool's after-hours box, and walked away. Within a month every administrator at the university was absolutely furious with me. I insisted that it had been me behind the wheel, and reassured them again and again of my complete lack of remorse, arguing that I was far too grateful to be alive to find fault with whatever miracle had granted us safety. They didn't get it, and I finally stopped expecting them to. There was one person who did get it, who got all of it, and I had finally fully realized how damn lucky I was to have him along.

THE LITTLE TOWN OF SITKA
is probably the most inviting place in Alaska. It sits on Baranof Island facing the Gulf and is kept maternally mild by the warm currents of the Pacific Ocean. The monthly average temperature never drops below freezing, making the climate benignly hospitable for the few thousand people who live there. Not much has ever happened in Sitka, except for a few days in 1867 when the whole world focused upon it briefly.

The Alaska Purchase occurred in Sitka, replete with a formal ceremony featuring both the Russian (sellers) and the American (buyers) diplomats. They were celebrating a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate under which the United States purchased half a million square miles of new territory at a cost of two cents an acre. The total sum that changed hands—$7 million—represented an exorbitant figure to the average American facing the rubble left over from the Civil War, which had only just ended. Opinions were divided: those in favor argued that British Columbia could be strategically annexed as a next step; those opposed despaired that the acquisition merely burdened America with more unpopulated territory to fill. In post–Civil War America, the treaty also served as escapist drama, yet another battle between good and evil, but this time conducted in a strange land, far away.

A second great drama unfolded in Sitka in the 1980s, but it wasn't a treaty between nations; it was a war between species.

Trees love Sitka. The long, light summers coupled with the mild climate make Baranof Island a darn fine place to live and grow, even if the cold, dark winters prevent the plants from growing very large. There's a Sitka spruce, a Sitka alder, a Sitka ash, and a Sitka willow, all first identified during the exploration of the region. These Sitka trees have successfully colonized British Columbia, along with the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. And yet they are modest trees: the Sitka willow, in particular, is not an imposing plant. It reaches a maximum height of twenty-three feet—not exactly a forest giant. But with the Sitka willow, as with all plants, there is much, much more than meets the eye.

Whenever you stroll through a eucalyptus grove you are engulfed in a unique smell, acrid and spicy and a little bit soapy too. What you are actually sensing is an airborne chemical that is created and released by the trees, a “volatile organic compound,” or “VOC” for short. The VOCs were synthesized to be “secondary” compounds—this means that they don't provide any nutrition, and so they are secondary to basic life functions. VOCs have many uses that we do understand, and probably a host of others that we do not. The eucalyptus releases VOCs as part of an antiseptic that will keep its leaves and bark healthy if it is wounded, preventing infection.

Most VOC compounds don't contain nitrogen, thus they are relatively cheap for the plant to produce and are therefore expendable. There's no real downside for a tree to pump VOCs through the forest in lavish excess, giving rise to that characteristic eucalyptus smell recognizable to a human nose. In contrast, the vast majority of VOCs that trees produce cannot be detected by the human nose, which is just fine because that is not what they are for. The production of VOCs within a forest waxes and wanes because individual VOC compounds can be turned on and off with a signal. One common signal is jasmonic acid, which is produced copiously when a plant is wounded.

In the war between plants and insects that has been raging for four hundred million years, both sides have had their casualties. In 1977, the state university's research forest in King County, Washington, was utterly ravaged by an insect attack. Tent caterpillars led the charge: they are brutal and insatiable warriors and were able to completely defoliate several entire trees and fatally damage many more before they triggered a crash in the local tree population across many broadleaf species. We all know that it is possible to lose a battle and still win the war, and nowhere do we find this to be more true than in the history of trees.

In 1979, back in the laboratory at the University of Washington, researchers fed leaves from the trees that had survived the attack to tent caterpillars and then carefully watched them eat. They observed that these caterpillars grew much more slowly and sickly than caterpillars generally do, and they certainly did not grow as well as they had grown on the same trees only two years earlier. Simply put, there was some chemical in the leaves that was making them sick.

The really exciting thing, however, was that the healthy Sitka willow trees located a full mile away—trees that had never been attacked—were equally unpalatable to the tent caterpillars. Indeed, when fed the leaves of the distant and healthy trees, the caterpillars became just as feeble and sickly and were rendered incapable of destroying a forest, as they had done so easily over the hill just two years previously.

The scientists knew about root-to-root signaling between adjacent trees via underground secretions, but the two groups of Sitka willow were too far separated for any soil-talk to have taken place. No, some aboveground signal must have been transmitted and received. The scientists concluded that when the leaves were first wounded, the plant began to load them with caterpillar poison, which also triggered VOC production. They further hypothesized that the VOC must have traveled at least a mile and was sensed as a distress signal by the other trees, which then preemptively fortified their leaves with caterpillar poison. Through the 1980s, generation after generation of caterpillars died miserable, starving deaths due to these poisons. By playing this long game, the trees ultimately turned the tide of the war.

Given their years of observations, the researchers were convinced that aboveground signaling among the trees was the most likely explanation. They knew that trees aren't people and that they don't have feelings. For us. They don't care about us. But maybe they care about each other. Maybe during a crisis the trees take care of each other. The Sitka willow experiment was a beautiful, brilliant piece of work that changed everything. There was only one problem: it took more than twenty years for anyone to believe it.

I COULD FALL ASLEEP,
but I couldn't stay asleep. Off and on, for several weeks during the early spring of 1999, I'd awaken at about two-thirty in the morning and become increasingly agitated over my inability to get back to sleep. Bill ran the lab beautifully, and each experiment succeeded like clockwork, which made it all the more frustrating when each of my proposals for grant contracts was rejected, one after the other. In order for a contract to be approved, it must pass a stringent peer review. Evaluation is heavily slanted toward “track record”—the number of significant discoveries that have resulted from previous contracts; thus a brand-new researcher is at a serious disadvantage.

It is also not uncommon for scientists to work out their personal issues under the guise of making an evaluation, and I was receiving feedback along the lines of “this reviewer is dismayed to find that the investigator's apparent capabilities were deemed sufficient to merit a graduate degree from the very same institution that produced his own credentials,” and other useless venom. During the San Francisco conference that we had nearly killed ourselves getting to, and at which I had presented my ideas about plants and water uptake, an enraged senior scientist (who years later betrayed himself to be a nice person) had stood on a folding chair and yelled “I can't believe you are saying this!” while I tried to speak. In my shock and confusion I had stuttered, “Something is wrong with you,” into the microphone, and it hadn't rendered the atmosphere more congenial.

To be fair, the trouble had really started years earlier. While taking a break from writing my dissertation, I visited a new professor whose recent arrival I had long anticipated because of her singular expertise in paleobotany. I helped her to unpack her large collection of fossils and sort, label, and store them. The rocks contained traces of the Earth's earliest flowers and she had collected them at great personal risk within the jungles outside of Bogotá, Colombia. These sediments were 120 million years old, and my colleague planned to extract the tiny pollen grains and fern spores that had collected underneath the fossilized petals. After examining them under the microscope, she would meticulously describe the shape of each grain she found and keep a record of how the number of grains changed between rocks. Using the statistics generated, she could then discern how the appearance of flowers had been related to changes in fern populations, and measure the amount of shade that was present in the dark understory that had fomented a botanical revolution.

The rock samples were jagged and crumbly, and so dark that I wondered aloud if they might still contain enough organic carbon to be measureable on a mass spectrometer. I ran some test samples and found more than enough—in fact, there was even enough carbon to perform a new type of chemical analysis, a technique that would measure the ratio of heavy carbon atoms to more normal, everyday carbon nuclei.

Our work turned out to be some of the first analyses of carbon-13 within ancient terrestrial rocks, and though I was able to finish the lab work in less than two years, it ended up taking me six full years to interpret the data and finally publish my findings. Thus my early years as a professor were spent trying to persuade the world that I had used an unusual method on unorthodox samples to gain a surprising result via an untested interpretation. The whole thing had come out of left field, and I was naive in thinking that I could win over audiences who had decades more research credibility than I did. My early career had all the makings of a long, slow academic train wreck.

As I spent those early years repeatedly smashing against a brick wall of scholarly skepticism, my bewilderment ripened into the realization that it would take me many conferences, much correspondence, and a great deal of intellectual soul-searching to successfully convince a critical mass of other scientists that I knew what I was doing. The trouble was, I didn't have years. After I ran out of the money that the university had allotted for the start-up of my lab, we began appropriating chemicals, gloves, test tubes, and anything that wasn't nailed down from the dusty abandoned basement of the building in order to keep working. My transparent justifications to the tune of “at least I am using it for something” had begun to ring hollow as our desperation drove us to scour the Dumpsters, recycling bins, and finally the teaching labs within the engineering buildings, where they seemed to be so rich in everything, we told ourselves, that they couldn't possibly miss this or that.

The money to pay Bill's salary was the last to run out, and though he always made a great show of indignation and moral offense when a student finally worked up the nerve to ask him whether he was “that guy who lives in the building,” the whole situation was beginning to wear on both of us. At first, Bill regarded his destitution as a novel adventure—a temporary bohemian phase—but it lost its meager charms as the months dragged on. Throughout the time he was homeless, my small gestures, such as cooking him dinner every night, were enough to offset much of my guilt, but lately it had become clear that I was ruining both of our lives.

I was also existentially terrified. Ever since I was a little girl, I had longed to be a real scientist, and so soon after finally getting close, I was in danger of losing it all. I was working extra hours, but the inefficient all-nighters weren't helping much.

While investigating a light that he assumed had been carelessly left on, the night custodian muttered upon finding me, “However much you love your job, it ain't gonna love you back,” and shook his head in pity as he closed my office door. I didn't want to agree, but I was beginning to see his point.

The nightmare of losing the lab was all the more horrifying because it had been my only concrete dream. During my college years I had latched on to the idea that once I was a bona fide scholar (the main manifestation of that idea being a laboratory with my name on the door), everyone would acknowledge my credibility, some scientific breakthrough would logically follow, and life would be easy. I had raced through graduate school secure in my expectation of this reward.

Thus I was bewildered by my failure during these early years of professorship and deeply worried, for the first time, that my cosmic destiny would go unfulfilled and the faith of my frustrated foremothers—whom I always pictured scrubbing bedclothes while up to their elbows in lye—had been wasted on me. During the anxious melodrama of those sleepless nights, I'd start thinking about Saint Stephen—the poor bastard. How he started out all full of piss, vinegar, and the Holy Spirit but hadn't even gotten out of Jerusalem before his audience strung him up on the outskirts of town. Only a few days before that, Stephen was picked as one of the lucky seven who were expected to go forward and speak the gospel. Did they explain to Stephen that there was a very real chance that he'd enrage people with his great new take on things? Of course he was supremely pious and all that, but didn't he feel like a bit of a sucker nonetheless?

The Bible is always short on details. Didn't Stephen's innate sense of self-preservation thwart his martyrdom at all? When someone throws a stone at your head, don't you instinctively dodge it? Put your arms up? Or do you close your eyes and let it happen, waiting for a good hard smack to the temple? And where did the stones come from anyway, when they stoned people? Did people collect them on the way to the scene? About how many stones did each thrower figure that he needed? Did they examine each one they picked up, discarding and retaining them based on some criterion? Did women get to throw too, or did they just simper on the periphery, as depicted by Raphael? I thought about Saul, the elder who oversaw the whole grisly affair, and how he eventually came around to Stephen's way of thinking and gained no small amount of celebrity roaming the empire and espousing it, but only after Stephen was good and dead.

With my mind thus running in pointless circles, I'd get more nervous and then unbearably achy, starting with my knees and elbows and spreading to my ankles and shoulders. I'd sit on the edge of my bed, kneading my joints and rocking back and forth for a half hour or so, and when I couldn't stand it any longer, I'd call Bill. The ancient phone on the wall of the office where he slept had a ring not unlike an old fire alarm, and he'd answer quickly, more out of an urge to silence it than out of concern for me.

“Is it the witching hour already?” he said when he picked up the phone.

“I don't feel so good,” I muttered in a shaky voice that betrayed my cascading anxiety.

“You sound like shit. Have you eaten anything since you dropped me off?”

“I drank some Ensure,” I offered, and he sighed in exasperation. There was a long pause.

After a while he groaned and said, “I guess this is the part where I tell you that it is all going to be fine.”

I was trying not to break down. “But what if it isn't? What if I never get a grant? What if I'm just not smart enough? What if we lose everything?” I rambled in agitation.

“ ‘
What if
'? Fuck ‘what if.' None of that shit will change anything!” Bill hollered. “What if you don't get a grant? You can't exactly pay me
less
than you do now, in case you haven't run the numbers lately. What if you get fired? We've got the goddamn keys to the place; I'll go make copies tomorrow. I've developed a nagging suspicion that you don't have to be employed here to come in and work every day. You just keep putting on that power suit and hawk our wares at those interviews, and get us
out of here
for God's sake. If we built this shit once, we can build it twice. Or we'll roll up the goddamn tent during the night and just disappear—you can grind the organ in the next town over while I run around tipping my bellboy's hat and rattling coins in a tin cup.”

By then I was laughing weakly, soothed by his admonitions. There was a long silence.

“Shall we have a reading from
The Book of Marcie
?” I offered.

“Finally you begin to talk sense,” Bill assented, and I dug the thick volume out from under my bed and flipped it open to a random page.

We had nicknamed one of my recent master's students “Marcie” after her own favorite
Peanuts
character. In the end, however, she proved to be more like Peppermint Patty, tending toward the same good-natured resignation with respect to her multiple D-minuses. She had recently left the lab on decent terms, having decided against improving her work enough to make it passable. Her parting gift to us was the draft of a “thesis” that had swollen grotesquely with each revision, and I kept arguing that it heralded an emergent literary style. Everything about it was ridiculous, from its fourteen-point Palatino font to the unfortunate fact that some of the pages had been shuffled in upside down prior to binding. While we waited out my insomnia, I read a three-page paragraph of Marcie's nonsense and followed it with a section of
Finnegans Wake.
Then I asked Bill to identify which one was which and to justify his determination through critical analysis. The night before, I had compared and contrasted the “Methods” section of
The Book of Marcie
with the famous “Lucky's Think” monologue from
Waiting for Godot.

Anticipating the singular catharsis that comes of conspiring in something despicable, Bill and I provoked each other with feigned erudition. Lately these long, bantering phone conversations with Bill had become the only thing that could harness my racing thoughts so that I might sleep.

A break in our conversation led to a long pause, and when I looked out the window I could see no indication of a sunrise. I checked the clock and said, “Wow, four a.m. and I think we're there. New record.” My anxiety had subsided.

“You know what's the worst part of this for me? It's that I am sure you are keeping the Beast up, damn it,” lamented Bill. I looked over at Reba, who was indeed lying in her basket at the foot of my bed, quietly awake and watchful.

Another long pause followed. “Cripes, why don't you go to a doctor or something?” Bill asked me, in a voice that was almost tender.

I laughed off his suggestion. “No money, no time, and for what?” I answered. “So he can advise me to reduce my stress level?”

“So he can prescribe you some fucking Prozac.”

“I…I don't need it,” I said.

Bill's answer came quickly. “Then don't take it,” he said. “Give it to the homeless guy who lives in your laboratory.”

A new wave of guilt crashed over me as I realized that this was as close as Bill had ever come to admitting to me that he was unhappy.

“I'll think about it,” I promised. I put my hand over the mouthpiece so Bill wouldn't hear me choke back what I wanted to say. Finally I gave voice to part of it and said softly, “Thank you for picking up when I called.”

“That's why you pay me the big bucks,” said Bill, and then he hung up.

Things would get better. Six months later, we rented a moving van, packed it with scientific equipment, loaded Reba into the front seat, fastened our seat belts for a change, and drove north toward Baltimore. I had secured new jobs for both of us at Johns Hopkins and convinced the two universities that it made more sense to simply transfer laboratory instruments than to discard them. After we moved, I took Bill's advice and went to the doctor. I got on the right medications and started eating healthy and sleeping regularly, and I got stronger. Bill quit smoking. We both kept working, kept pounding on doors, and kept believing that eventually they would have to start opening.

Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted. I left Atlanta knowing more than I had when I arrived. To this day, I need only close my eyes to summon the smell of a crushed sweet gum leaf, as pungent as if I were holding it in my hand. Point to any object in my laboratory, and I can tell you how much I paid for it down to the penny, and which company sells the cheapest version. I can explain the theory of hydraulic lift so that every single student in the room understands it on the first go-round. I know that there is more deuterium in soilwater from Louisiana than there is in soilwater from Mississippi, although I am only about halfway done figuring out why. And because I know the transcendent value of loyalty, I've been to places that a person can't get to any other way.