A Slow Cold Death Read online

  Lori breathed it in like a victim rescued from smoke inhalation. “Oh my. Oh, that’s amazing. The only things that grew in my yard in Montreal were dandelions and some sort of pestiferous ground ivy. Sad to say, even that was so much better than the snow that I thought they were beautiful.”

  “You probably learned to speak French,” said Carol, who had never learned anything in a foreign language except Apaga la pinchi soplador de hojas.

  “Mmm,” said Lori. “I did. But now I can’t speak it without weeping.”

  Carol opened her mouth but then shut it again. She didn’t need to give any pruning advice—Lori was doing it exactly right, removing the dead flowers and the suckers, cutting just at the right spot as if she had the mind of a rosebush and could feel exactly what would make it bloom again. That was always what she had admired about Lori: her easy expertise with absolutely anything mechanical or physical, from screwdrivers the size of the head of a pin to the two-ton electron microscope she’d moved with a forklift. Everyone had panicked when it started to fall, but Lori had moved the vehicle an infinitesimal nudge to one side, and it stood right up again. If it had been anyone else, the thing would have crashed to the ground, probably destroying the building in the process.

  Now Carol risked making Lori mad with an insensitive comment, but curiosity had gotten the better of her. “Yeah,” she said sympathetically. “I heard Roger died.” Actually, Absinthe had told her that Roger drowned himself because Lori wouldn’t go out with him, but such details were unnecessary.

  Lori stuck the pruning shears into her pocket and ran her arms around the rosebush, checking the symmetry perhaps, but she appeared to be embracing it. “He jumped off a bridge,” she said. “In February.”

  The February part seemed superfluous until Carol thought about the water underneath being frozen, and then she shuddered. “That’s horrible. Why?”

  “Why?” Lori didn’t sound angry, just tired. “Because he had major depression; because he’d had it since he was fourteen; and because I was so arrogant that I thought I could help, that after not even speaking to him for ten years I could appear out of the blue and make everything better with my stupid advice.” She sighed and moved over to the next rosebush, a China white.

  “Careful!” Carol cautioned automatically. “You prune those gently, the dead buds only.” She was still on her first rosebush, but then, she had never moved so swiftly as Lori in anything. “You can’t blame yourself for someone else’s illness,” she said after a long moment. “You know that I was pretty messed up back then in graduate school. You couldn’t cure me, but all the times you were nice to me counted for something.”

  Lori looked baffled, as if searching her mind in vain for the shared memory. “I was nice to you?” she muttered, looking the other way and turning a bit pink.

  “Yes, you were! All I ever got from the rest of them, including Abby, was ‘Just eat!’ or comments about my fat butt, or cruel songs about me throwing up, or offers of a home lobotomy.”

  Lori laughed mirthlessly. “That’s what Roger needed. A big, fat lobotomy. And there I was telling him to stay away from the doctors.” She turned her head away and Carol closed her eyes, afraid to see her cry since she knew there could be no greater humiliation than to break down in front of a boson.

  But Lori didn’t cry, she only sneezed, and then she started laughing and sat in the grass. Henry the duck ran over and bit her ankles, but she didn’t seem to care. Carol came and sat next to her, and they howled in remembrance of the absurd cruelties and ridiculous obsessions that had run their lives for more than half a decade.

  “Maybe he needed five hundred milliCoulombs of happiness!” Carol suggested. “Do you remember that?”

  “Poor Roger.” Lori was still laughing. “He had such a phobia of psychiatrists that you had to laugh. Who would ever know that federal regulations limit not the voltage in volts, not the current in amperes, but the total charge in milliCoulombs delivered to your brain during electroshock therapy?”

  “And remember when we all visited him in the mental hospital? We tried to give him his homework, and he yelled, ‘I will never be happy, never!’”

  “`Not unless it’s five hundred milliCoulombs of happiness!’” they both chorused, rolling on the lawn.

  “It inspired Kurt so much, that’s what he called his rock band after he dropped out,” Carol reminded Lori.

  “Oh man,” Lori gasped, “I am so glad I’m not in grad school anymore. But you know what?” She tugged at the grass. “I hate the people I work with. We’re all so shallow—we’d watch babies being trampled and just think ‘How will this affect my grant proposal?’”

  “You need friends away from work.” Carol couldn’t believe that she was giving advice to Lori or, even worse, that Lori just nodded in response. “If I was with engineers all the time, I’d go crazy. I know it’s different for you because you have to work so hard to get tenure, but you have to give yourself some ‘me time’ now and then. I’m almost ten years older than you, you know.”

  Lori half smiled and half frowned, as if not sure whether she was being called a kid or a not-so-old lady. “I know.”

  “And I’ve found that one of the most important things in the desert is to take care of your skin. My friend makes organic natural sunscreen; I’ll give you some. Would you like a duck-egg facial?”

  In an instant they were giggling in the way that Bob hated, rooting in the duck pen to get that morning’s eggs and cracking them in a little bowl to smear all over their faces. Carol had never heard Lori giggle, but right now there was nothing more fun than playing at being shallow SoCal girls and letting the thick, gooey duck egg stretch away the decade that had passed since they had last met.

  “You deserve to be happy,” said Carol. “You deserve to find someone who loves you.”

  Lori laughed and smiled and hugged her—things she wouldn’t have done for anyone back in graduate school, not even for Radhika. The charm lasted until she left, but once she had washed her face and strapped on her orange skates and disappeared, Carol figured she’d never see her again unless it was in a TV broadcast from Stockholm.

  Four: Pound Puppies

  Worse than the dream about having signed up for a class and forgetting to do the homework was the dream about being in elementary school again. Lori had only begun to have that dream after turning thirty, and for some reason the imagined humiliation was overwhelming. She’d be squished into a little desk, knowing full well she had a PhD in physics, but somehow no one else would realize it and would continue to make her recite the multiplication table.

  The situation could have felt comparable, crouched in the backseat of an ancient Honda Civic driven by a Russian postdoc, on her way to Palm Springs and the new student retreat. She was sandwiched between between the Father of Quantum Gravity, Professor Rose, and his wife, with her first advisor Dr. van Gnubbern riding shotgun. Seatbelt-less, knees hitting her chin, she was a kid again, but it made her feel warm and fuzzy the way nothing had since she had left the embrace of STI sixteen years ago. She could forget how she was supposed to betray and stab van Gnubbern, and recall the kinder and gentler physics department of days past, where they were all just there to learn and play the occasional prank.

  This same weekend, she knew, the incoming freshmen were off on a deserted island being picked for their Houses.

  “Do they still do the Selection the same way?” she wondered out loud, remembering her night in a pine tree thinking there was a bear lurking below. “With the tents that are impossible to pitch and starting fires by rubbing sticks?”

  “They’ve made it easier for the younger generation,” sighed van Gnubbern.

  “At least they’re left in the wilderness with nothing but a topo map and a compass, I hope!”

  “Well, sure,” said Rose, “but they have their cell phones now.”

  “Last year they manage to get pizza delivery,” chortled the Russian postdoc.

  “Lori, you were t
he last of the true Buboes,” said van Gnubbern wistfully. “Do all of you remember the papaya incident?”

  “Exaggerated,” Lori protested.

  “You didn’t rappel off the library carrying a twenty-pound Mexican papaya?”

  “Sure I did. But the part afterwards is apocryphal. Does anyone remember what we did to the elevator in the physics building? I remember it breaking, but I can’t remember why.”

  “You weren’t just riding on top?” Rose suggested.

  “It’s the Fucking Ferret Freaks who do that.”

  “An obviously unworthy prank,” Rose smiled ironically. Seventy years after he had been a freshman, he still wore a black sweater with a tiny embroidered ferret clutching a capital letter F in its paws. “I seem to recall that you were going to try to disguise the elevator as a classroom, so that people would seat themselves and then panic when it began to move.”

  “That’s right!” Lori couldn’t believe she’d forgotten that one. “The cable broke when we dragged the desks in there. I still feel bad when Lou has to wait five minutes before the thing starts working.”

  There was a slightly uncomfortable pause, followed inevitably by the rush of gossip that only physicists could provide about an absent colleague. Most of it was rubbish, the sort of “he’s so brave” nonsense that made Lori’s stomach turn, but she listened assiduously for any real information.

  “Can’t say he’s not dedicated. He managed to finish his big NSF proposal in the ICU,” commented Rose.

  “Even better, it got funded.” Van Gnubbern sounded envious. “Maybe I’ll try writing my next grant in a morphine haze.”

  “But he had to spend the money right away, so he kept on grad students rather indiscriminately,” Mrs. Rose observed. “They were really a handful for a while from what I hear.”

  Van Gnubbern made a snort of disgust. “I refuse to believe that second-year physics graduate students need close supervision. They’re adults, and all they do for the first two years is take classes, especially the theorists. Why, Lori here was only thirteen years old, and I used to leave her alone at the microscope all day long in that cold room in the basement. She worked until her fingers were blue. I had to buy her a parka.”

  “Is that why you used to walk across campus in the parka?” murmured Rose. “I thought you were concealing something.”

  “I probably was,” Lori admitted. Only a small stab of remorse assailed her as she casually asked van Gnubbern, “Who does the microscopy now? Do you have any students?”

  “You were my last and best,” replied van Gnubbern. “No one funds that kind of thing anymore. If I want to do a little electron microscopy, sometimes the technician in the basement helps out, but mostly I do it myself.”

  “The problem, Bert,” Rose persisted, “is that the grad students are adults, and they have adult problems. You can’t just fail them out, or they’ll have you in court. That one of Lou’s we couldn’t shake, he kept coming back wanting to re-do his thesis proposal even after he’d clearly failed. And then there’s the woman—”

  “That’s who I was thinking of,” his wife admitted. “Maybe now that we have a female faculty member we can prevent some of that.”

  “Oh no!” Lori blurted. “Don’t palm off the nutty nymphos on me!”

  They all laughed, but in a good way. “You haven’t changed a bit, Lori,” said van Gnubbern.

  “Of course I haven’t.”

  “But you must,” Rose warned. “Things are different now. Don’t fail anyone; don’t insult anyone; and for heaven’s sake, don’t sleep with anyone.”

  “And please no killings,” added van Gnubbern. “Unless we order them, of course.”

  That was in somewhat bad taste, and everyone grew quiet. Lori turned to look out the window—the desert had changed as much as she had, and as much as she could never be a careless little Bubo again, nor would the broad expanses of sand between LA and Palm Springs ever recapture their wild barren beauty. The dunes were now pockmarked with hideous mini-mansions, each sporting a lawn and a swimming pool. Not even God knew where the water came from. Mega shopping malls, flat and reddish like Kaposi’s sarcomas, sprouted within SUV range of what had used to be ghost towns.

  Palm Springs was teeming with human activity, but at least it was torrid. Lori liked torrid. Even the concept of torrid was reassuring since it could never, under any circumstances, be applied to Canada. The very first thing she did when they arrived at the hotel was put on her bathing suit, walk slowly to the pool in the unbelievable heat, and bounce about for a while. She didn’t even bother to swim, just enjoyed the feeling of her unsubmerged parts desiccating and baking instantly before being plunged into the warm water yet again.

  She didn’t feel like changing into real clothes, but was still a little needled about the idea of her blue and orange Roller-Montreal skinsuit becoming the next tutu-man costume, so she waited a couple of minutes in the sun to dry out before putting on a pair of jeans and T-shirt (“MIT” on the front; “they’re losers, STI” on the back) over her bathing suit. It turned out to be the perfect outfit, because the first order of fun in the pound-puppy show was a game of Strip Integration.

  They were in a big theater room with padded carpeting, foldy chairs, and a deep stage with velvet curtains. There was seating for about five hundred; it was hard to gauge how many people were there—or which of them she knew—since everyone was so scattered about. The six-foot whiteboard and laptop projector on the stage seemed too technological for the setting, as did the six new graduate students, whom the stage lights rendered paler and geekier than usual. Clutching the famous Table of Integrals, Series, and Products, they would write a chosen problem on either side of the whiteboard and two professors would start solving it simultaneously. The last to finish had to take off an item of clothing.

  Rose and Kuzno were at each other’s throats by the end of it, scowling and slashing with their pens. Lori was pleased to see the department head finally reduced to his half-length European style bathing trunks while Rose still sported his “What Part of [the equations of General Relativity] Don’t you Understand?” T-shirt and Bermudas. Cheers and jeers erupted from various parts of the room, presumably reflecting the two professors’ research groups, but whether their loyalties lay for or against their bosses Lori couldn’t tell.

  Rose held his signature pink pen aloft and began to re-don his clothing. “Who’s the next challenger?”

  “That is so demeaning and sexist,” snapped a voice from behind Lori’s shoulder.

  Lori spun around to find a woman of twenty-five, give or take, with two sharp little pigtails poking out of the sides of her head. The pigtails alone had been dyed bright orange; the rest of her head was an ordinary brown. She had braces on her teeth. Student? Postdoc? Secretary? Paramour? “What, you think there should be a women’s division?”

  “There’s not a single woman here who would take place in such a humiliating exercise.”

  So of course Lori was on the stage, waving her arms and challenging the Father of Quantum Gravity to an integration contest. Half in jest, she asked for special dispensation as a member of the “unfair sex.” “At least give me the pink pen.”

  “No way,” Rose objected, hugging it to his chest. “It’s lucky.”

  A chant of “Barrow, Barrow, Barrow” started up in the opposite corner from the pigtail girl. She didn’t know any of her fans; from this distance, they all seemed to have ridiculous hair, curled or dyed bright colors or extraordinarily long.

  If she’d known she’d be up against Solomon Rose, she would have studied. And she lost. It was close only because she moved a little quicker and the pink pen seemed to be running out of ink, forcing him to stop and shake it now and then. In the end, she was left in her bathing suit (one-piece and black, thank God) while he retained his tie and a single flower-topped rubber slipper in addition to the Bermuda shorts.

  “Cheat! Cheat!” yelled the weird-hair gang. “He dropped an i!”

&
nbsp; “Complex analysis is all just fun and games till someone loses an i,” Rose scolded through the microphone as his group came up to crown him champion. He had apparently won for years in a row, which made Lori feel a little better, because the crown was some kind of deformed quasi-religious relic, a crown of thorns made of plastic roses. It sounded like a group of students had found it one year in a gay sex shop in town and bought it assuming that Rose would win the contest as usual.

  “And now,” Rose continued, beaming from under the crown, still wearing only one flip-flop, “I’d like you all to meet Lori Barrow, the newest member of our faculty. She was an undergraduate here, a Bubo of course, and is famous for many reasons. I’ll only mention the good ones.” The weird-hair contingent hooted and cheered horribly. “First of all, she was the youngest undergraduate to ever finish a physics degree at STI—though only the second-youngest to ever matriculate. I’ll leave it to you all to look this other person up. Second, she once rappelled off the library, dangling from her ankles and carrying a papaya about yay big.”

  Lori stood behind Rose, shaking her head and making “loony” signs around her temples, but there was no stopping him.

  “Now, it just so happened that the President of our esteemed institution was having a meeting with some trustees a couple floors down. He looked out just as our favorite undergrad here decided to smash the papaya all over her head. Thinking that he was seeing the remains of blood and brains, the President fainted dead away. And,” Rose concluded over the laughter, “the very next week announced his retirement! We now have a new President—and no more rail around the roof of the library. With that, Lori.” He handed her the microphone.

  It was all a bit overwhelming, and gazing out over the shadowed faces she suddenly felt shy. She stammered a few lines about her research; was sure she’d made a terrible gaffe by saying she looked forward to working in the basement, allowing van Gnubbern to see her treachery from a mile away; and then gave up before she lost her composure completely. “But this day is for the students,” she said, only slightly hypocritically. “I understand you’ve been preparing skits for a while, so come on up.”