Day in the life
Tension's brewing. You can feel it; kids start sitting up straight in class, legs jiggling. Those who've kept their crushes under wraps all semester know it's now or never. Put up or shut up. Lust and terror percolate like static in the rugs, anticipating gruesome discharge.
Funny being on this side of the electric fence. A decade ago, we were clomping around in Birkenstocks and touting our lice-infested lumberjack flannel, unkempt as vagabonds and reeking of patchouli. Now, I lecture to an audience of scowling nihilists, clean shaven and poisonously beautiful, hair a gel-sculpted tousle.
"Science is a textual pastiche, Dr. Bloom," a girl recently informed me during class, "in the Jamesonian sense."
Tough crowd. Post-everything. All theory, no source. Media-saturated, overtly sexed, inoperably gangsta. I see pink thongs and bejeweled midriffs where once were paint-splattered coveralls and scratchy, tattered sweaters. At some point hippies became hipsters, the latter more unapologetically retro than the former.
Which is all by way of saying I have aged.
The other post-docs are beginning to show their wear and tear. In my lab alone there are baldings and saggings (my own?) and a not-inconspicuous double-chin. I worry my eyes have lost their ping. Other hand, I think I'm better suited for 30 than 20. I can back up my opinions with facts!
Most of my work involves running between things. Stuffy, fluorescent-lit classroom, race across the frost-brittled quad to the dining commons and discuss the X-ray scattering results with Steph over "crazy alfredo," drive to building C (the medical building) to retrieve samples, then to the lab with its empty Doritos bags and crumpled pages of The Onion used as paper towels (who started the myth that scientists wear lab coats?), the squalid cinderblock pen they call my office to grade papers and return emails, the gym, and back to the Hotel St. George before the kitchen closes.
Today it was my turn to pick up a cow's brain. Really. Once a week, one of us from the lab has to drive way out to the slaughterhouse to retrieve a fresh sample. (We actually have a work wheel to keep track of whose turn it is.) Going from one place to the other, an ivory tower to a dungeon, is quite harrowing. Between the two is nothing but sprawling slabs of dead mustard weeds and razed cornfields cut by a long narrow road. Then, about two and a half hours later, what look like post-apocalyptic ruins begin to take shape out of the flatland ramshackle factories and beaten chrome silos, motionless pea-green freight trains. The slaughterhouse itself is a wide, low, unpainted consortium of corrugated metal structures. The killshed is positioned so you can't see the dreadful queue of conveyer-belted livestock from the road, but you can certainly smell the excoriated remains of their morning's companions. And you can hear much too clearly the falsetto moos, the whining buzz of serrated metal through bone. One grad student passed out before stepping inside.
A portly man with liquid blue eyes and a yellow coat greets you in his office. You hand him the cooler, a regular red picnic cooler padded with toweled ice. He takes it to another room, returns it to you moments later, now about thirteen pounds heavier.
You drive back with a severed cow brain riding shotgun.
And you feel it there. You actually feel the thing sitting next to you, this eerie, not quite inanimate presence. Back at the lab, you scoop out the contents like a bulbous chunk of tofu into a tupperwarish plastic bowl filled with solution. Literally, a brain in a vat.
You cannot help wondering, What am I about to cut? Are these memories that I am holding under the knife dreaming glances of a morning underbrush, the distant bleating of a newborn calf that I am banishing to oblivion? Is there a self, an identity somehow inscribed into the little rivulets and convolutions of this slimy grey mass?
You slice the tissue. You ever-so-delicately peel the sample from its base it's like a tiny jellyfish now, or a slippery contact lens and "paint" it to the surface of the papertab with a fine-needled brush. You play with the sample under the microscope. You weigh down the slide, you find your focus, you connect the pin to the cell body, you inject the dye, a fluorescent stain called "Lucifer Yellow" (CH/H2O), and you watch it glow like some magnificent galaxy deep in space, its long, root-shaped dendrites bifurcated and luminous.
And here is where it starts getting weird.
You move the slide to the digital microscope. You line everything up. You snap your video pics, send your files to the computer, set your parameters, generate your models
What you are doing is moving fluidly from the vividly tangible (the physiology of a nervous system) to the abstract and otherworldly (the chemical architecture of ion channels, the slender Euclidean body of proteins) to the purely and irreducibly mathematical (sine waves, algorithms, binaries. Simulcra). And somehow during this process, at no particular point, you realize its soul has slipped away.
This is the thought that keeps neurobiologists up at night.
Right now, I'm out on the terrace having a cigarette. Sun went down about 40 minutes ago and a rich alpenglow rides the hills, shimmering cymbals in a lusterless sky. The sounds of my transient neighbors are audible from out here. Childrens' clamoring.
Weather forecasts, plumbing clanks. I can now tell if it's a guest's first time in the suite by the pace of the footsteps. First-nighters have a more staccato rhythm. They proceed cautiously, half-expecting occupants. They survey the space, breathe in the baseboard fumes, click on and off the lights. Richly textured information from all the senses is absorbed, decrypted. By the second night, they've gained confidence; they've tamed the space. Air molecules vibrate with their frequency. Curtains and carpets have soaked up the scent of open luggage and aftershave. The guy next door has been here for a week. I've never seen him, but I can hear his cello-toned phone murmurings at night.
What is it about hotels that I love so? Like airports, there's something mysterious lurking behind their banality. Strange things brew here. Each room is a box of ghostly secrets, the walls hum with whispering memories stored up over months and years.
What happens to the clandestine histories that are washed away with disinfectant? I imagine they don't vanish, but are crushed into a fine powder; they vaporize and condense, quivering through columns of air, warping mirrors and charging magnets. I imagine they crystallize and sail on microtones and empty into the dreams of amnesiacs.
The sky is now bathed in gunmetal grey. Threads of fog unravel across the yawning riverbed.
Premonition of snow.
Taxonomy of Genius
The Professor is a man of imposing girth paunched, broad-shouldered, jowly, weathered and British. (I couldn't think of a fitting pseudonym, so I'm just going to call him, "The Professor.") We all look up to and fear him. He worked on cellular automata networks in the 80s, made ducats, has been duly accredited by all parties. Each day he enters in full stride, grumbles a collective greeting. His features reliably map his mood when perturbed, his flaxen eyebrows angle downwards toward a crinkle lodged above his nose, which looks exactly like an exclamation point; when he laughs (a delectable rarity), his cheekbones rise, blood flushes his pallor, hundreds of secret tributaries crackle out from under his eyes and lips.
"Ms. Bloom," he booms every morning, looking over my shoulder. "What's doing?"
"Hey," I say. Because what do you say to that.
The Professor moves through the lab with a graceful brusqueness. I've seen this before in other veterans, the sort of terse fluency with which they navigate the space and handle equipment. Their authority is a well-worn mitt. Casual but not perfunctory, curt but not impatient. If there is a problem with, say, the seven-hundred-thousand dollar electron microscope, Duncan or Steph will approach the machine with virgintile timidity, whereas the Professor will get right in there, take 'er apart with the gentle, measured pace of a lion tamer guiding his beast. No wondrous insight or voluminous knowledge begs reverence like the skillful manipulation of a wrench. The rest of us look on like the star-fuckers we are.
"Pacers lost. Travesty, damnation."
He's careful not to exploit our admiration. Male authority figures often bestow nicknames to their minions, a veiled signifier of dominance, of ownership. But the Professor does the opposite dissolves the gender distinction by using last names only.
"You catch the game, Park?"
Duncan Park shrugs. "I don't follow sports."
"You don't follow sports."
"No."
Is the Professor a genius? Hard to say. A lot of famous scientists are not geniuses; a lot of important scientists are not geniuses. People tend to apply terms of intelligence loosely and interchangeably, but in science it's very important to recognize the difference between brainy and smart and insightful and brilliant and the rest of it. [For my own abbreviated taxonomy, click here.] Rather, the Professor belongs to a sub-class I would deem the Once-Brilliant. Like reformed alcoholics, their eyes are sunken with regret or longing. They carry a wistfully thoughtful air. Headstrong, judging. You have to choose your words carefully around them. They wear their age with the dashing virility of a bygone war hero, a sea captain, a baseball manager accomplished, occassionally avuncular, though more often ornery as hell and every once in a while, or maybe just once, you get the sense their pride is an affectation, and really they are desperate children eager for approval and love, sinners seeking salvation, widowers-in-mourning. And they see in you both that which they once were/could have been, and that which threatens to subsume or bleach-out their small place in history.
"Neilson, what happened to your face."
Steph Neilson blinks. "I'm
wearing glasses?"
"So you are."
The Professor was 27 when he published his paper on Mandelbrot sets. Watson was 26 when he discovered the double helix. Einstein, 24, when he wrote Special Relativity; Heisenberg, 25, Uncertainty. List goes on. Never are numbers more deadly than when they represent Age of Achievement. Marie Curie with Radium: 31. That gives me three months.
Was my father in that league? Was he a genius is the true sense?
Again, hard to say. I grew up an army brat; Dad was a military cryptanalyst stationed in the Pacific, and we hopped from island to island, sponging little dabs of language and custom here and there until he died of a strange Alzheimer's-like illness several years ago. I was never let in on his actual research, his actual work it was all classified but I did know his mind, and I know that it was unlike any other. Many people have asked me over the years if I thought his dementia had anything to do with his intellect, as if it were possible to answer a question like that. His brain was his brain, that's all I know. I mean, look. Yes, there's an undeniable connection between creativity and eccentricity Aristotle didn't write that book for nothing and, yes, sometimes that eccentricity has a neurophysiological basis, but I don't see any direct causality between brain disease and a high IQ. Scores of brilliant artists and philosophers throughout history were gay does that presuppose a link between homosexuality and intelligence? Many were dyslexic. Many were depressed. Many were left-handed. Many were just plain different. If there's a connection at all, it's that. Difference itself is most likely where the chain originates: people with a different temperament, with this or that distinguishing trait which for whatever reason sets them apart simply have to work harder at assimilation. This forces them to see the world from a unique perspective, which they are free to develop and cultivate on their own or not, and this may help equip them with a more finely-tuned analytic or creative brain.
Anyway. Dad left an illuminating, if excruciating, record of his mental decline in his personal journal, which I keep locked in a safety deposit box. Even towards the end, there were islands of clarity, like a schizophrenic in remission. It was clear to me that he was working on something. Nestled in those mimsying borogroves, those nonsensical lists and Latin conjugations, were the pieces to a magnificent puzzle he was solving in his mind, even while it deteriorated. From what I could make of it, he was close to solving what is known in consciousness studies as the Binding Problem (something I'll get into later on), a task I've somewhat audaciously taken on myself ever since, transposing his numbers into neural networks. The work I do at the lab is just the brick-laying, the number-cruching, the neurobiological stamp collecting. The Binding Problem is the real deal, and Cowboy, you better believe I got my eyes on the prize.
Black Box
Speaking of journals, I should probably give you the full disclosure: I'm not here because I want to be. In the hotel, I mean. To be sure, there is a certain old-world expatriate granduer to the lifestyle (elevator operators, spitoons), but that's not why I moved. The truth is, I was driven from my last apartment by a series of break-ins. The first happened just over a month ago. I was in a deep sleep when a rattling from the living room woke me. I thought it was the shutters thwacking the storm windows in the breeze, but I heard a creak as well, a few nimble footfalls. I sprang up, groped around in the dark for my broom (what was I going to do, sweep him to death?), and slipped into the other room to find nothing. Nothing there, nothing gone. I thought little of it until the second time it happened, a week later. Luckily, I was working late in the lab when he (?) broke in, and I wouldn't have known except for two indicators of an intruder's presence: 1) an unlatched window catch, and 2) a fine rectangle of dust under my bed marking the absence of a cardboard box. It was one of many unopened boxes I'd had lying around since Dad's death; his haphazardly packaged belongings scarves, silverware, old coffee makers and lamps, books, so many books. No idea what was in this particular one, but how important could it have been? The third time, though, I woke up to find my journal missing. I wouldn't have thought too much of it, only this "analog" journal contained the computational notes I'd been composing since June, among them, the lemma to my Binding proof. This creeped me out; it was like he'd known.
That day, I made two decisions: 1) that I'd begin a "digital" journal that I'd never have to worry about losing, and 2) that I'd move out as soon as possible.
I promptly confessed my predicament to the Professor (beneficent grand-poppa to us all), who graciously offered me a place to stay, but I declined. The thought of accidentally seeing him naked frightened the hell out of me. So the next day I got my stuff together and moved to the St. George.
Tomorrow, it's down to the second floor.
Call me ridiculous, but I still don't feel totally safe, so I keep moving. Every couple weeks I call the concierge and the bellboy helps cart my stuff to a new room and I begin afresh.
In the meantime, it's 4:19 PM and I am eating a banana. I like bananas. I'm at work typing this on a grey 2002 Pentium with a sticky "S" key. When I'm done composing this entry, I will go to my website, type in the access code and add it to my blog.
For the most part my life is simple, contained. To put it romantically, I concern myself with the physical at work, the metaphysical in dreams, and the mysterious golden glue between them with whatever time is left over, when I'm not reading detective novels.