A Slow Cold Death Read online

  Relieved to get off that stage, Lori went to go sit with the hair gang in order to find out who they were and how they knew her, but they dashed out of the room snickering before she could get near them. She returned to her old seat near the ponytail girl—a mistake.

  “Can’t you make them stop?” the girl whispered right in Lori’s ear.

  Lori jumped. “What? Who?”

  “Didn’t you see them leave? They’re going to do something really cruel. It’s just so wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lori, who by now was so curious she had no intention of stopping anyone. “It’s not my position to tell them what to do. I don’t even know who they are.”

  “They’re the Maupertuis group,” whispered the girl, “as am I,” she added with a little whine, as if used to always being left out.

  Aha, Lori thought, so you’re the problem child. “Where’s Lou?”

  “He’s not here. I’m sure he’s home sick, and he has a phobia of freeways. So do I, you know: I have a restricted visual field, and the motion makes me so disorientated.”

  Do I need a tattoo on my forehead saying NO TMI? Lori wondered, tuning the girl out by thinking of how Roger used to lecture people who used the word disorientated, explaining with a delicate shudder that disoriented was a perfect synonym without containing that discordant extra syllable.

  The skits mostly went right by her, since she didn’t know many people and was a little clueless when it came to sexual innuendo. It was obvious, though, that everyone was afraid to make fun of Kuzno. His group, all Russians, performed a song about neutron stars that was kind of cute but reeked of censorship.

  That only made it more obvious that what came next was trouble. As soon as the Russians had received their polite applause from the audience and praise from Kuzno, the lights went out. Shadows could be seen moving about the stage, and a couple of spotlights lit up the strategic figures.

  The smallest male member of Lou’s group had tied orange yarn to the sides of his head (since the rest of his hair was green, the effect was quite odd) and was sitting on the edge of the stage holding a teddy bear and sucking his thumb. Worse, the tallest member was teetering on some kind of platform shoes, and if this weren’t obvious enough, had a sign hung around his neck reading HEAD. Lori watched him intently, but he stood off to one side, arms folded, expression grim.

  Then the spot moved off towards the center and the guy with the longest hair, an immense tangle of chestnut curls, swaggered to center stage waving a sheaf of papers in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, and laughing a villain’s cackle. “With this NSF proposal, I own the department! You are all my slaves, you are mine body and soul!” He gave a resonating ominous laugh, like something from a 1940s film noir.

  Then there was the sound of a gunshot off-stage. The villain screamed, dropped the papers, and somersaulted into the stage wings.

  The guy in front with the pigtails took his thumb out of his mouth, threw down the teddy bear, and grabbed the sheaf. “Hee hee hee,” he giggled in a falsetto. “I got the proposal! I got the proposal!”

  The spotlight turned from the thumbsucker onto the HEAD who slowly, slowly unfolded his arms and started to move towards the papers. “Oh no you don’t, my pretty,” he drawled. “It’s all mine, after I have my way with you—”

  Not surprisingly, the lights and sound went dead. There were some scuffling noises, mutters of “Oh yeah, who says?” and, strangely enough, an indistinct woman’s voice. The woman held the microphone when the lights were restored on the now-empty stage. She was a very young woman, younger than any of the grad students, and not anyone that Lori could place.

  “Well, everyone,” she declared cheerily, “I think that was our last skit. The buffet will be served in the courtyard between six-thirty and nine-thirty. Please take the opportunity to get to know your colleagues. And welcome to the entering class of future PhDs!”

  What a crock, Lori thought. She turned around and noticed that the pigtail girl was crying. Not in the mood for any more TMI, she got up and ran.

  It was still hot out. Students and professors arranged themselves under parasols by the fountain, helping themselves to fruit salad and tostada fillings. Lori filled her plate with salsa and jalapenos, an old summer camp tune running through her head: I love you California in the summer when it’s hot…. In the English part of Montreal, a buffet meant little sandwiches on white bread held together with mayonnaise, potato salad drowned in so much mayonnaise that the potatoes looked like clams, greasy chips, and cheap pastries. There had been months where she would have mugged someone for a hot pepper.

  She realized now that of course she knew who Lou was. The combination of the way Americans butchered his name and the lack of his trademark long hair had confused her, but of course someone who’d come to STI as a professor at the age of twenty-eight was known throughout the field. She still didn’t think she’d ever seen him in person, but she had once spent an hour on a train with a graduate student who raged nonstop about the asshole jerk in their group who was nothing but a lazy theorist and who kept insisting the data were inconclusive, thus forcing hardworking experimentalists like himself to return over and over to the South Pole. Somehow, this bum of a theorist kept winning all the awards and getting all the recognition while he suffered, froze to death, and got called “Beaker” by the scientist-hating hardhats at the Pole.

  Ordinarily this would have been a forgettable conversation, but it had remained in her mind all these years (when was it? Four years ago, maybe) because the guy had had dirty, somewhat bluish, four-inch fingernails. Of course he caught her staring, and he had told her that at the South Pole, something about the cold and altitude made people’s fingernails not grow. Somehow, this had inspired him to swear not to cut them until he finished his PhD.

  “So what does the asshole theorist do?” he sneered, clacking the appendages together. “He tells me if I don’t cut my nails, he won’t cut his hair, and we’ll see who gets the most chicks! There’s plenty of girls who like long nails, right, baby?”

  Lori had fled the compartment retching, and even now in the heat of the desert she shivered to remember it. She went up for seconds and looked around for a group to join, thinking that she should at least try to meet the new students even if she didn’t hire them. She couldn’t just hide behind van Gnubbern—he was not really her colleague. Physics had been different when he was getting established, when all a theorist needed was a pencil and a sheet of paper. Now it took two million dollars of NSF money and your soul.

  “Dr. Barrow!” bellowed a voice from a large table. It was the guy with the curls, the one who had played Lou in the skit.

  Lori took her plate over but didn’t sit down, thinking it might be disreputable to be seen with them. There were four of them, the three from the skit and a Chinese guy who listened carefully but didn’t seem to speak.

  “Hi, everyone,” she said, struggling with the line between formality and over-friendliness. “Um, thanks for cheering for me. I didn’t have a chance against Professor Rose.”

  “You were awesome,” said the fake Lou, slapping the table like the real one always did. “Especially since you shut up Marybeth.” He shoved a fragment of tostada into his mouth.

  “Marybeth,” squeaked the guy who’d played her. He was still carrying the teddy bear. “Oh, poor Marybeth.”

  Lori waited a minute for explanation as to who Marybeth might be. When it wasn’t forthcoming, she demanded bluntly, “Who?”

  “`That is so demeaning and sexist,’ they all mocked as a chorus, doing a very good job of capturing her strangely raspy voice.

  “Oh,” replied Lori. Not even mildly interested in what this crew knew about that sad and sorry girl, she asked, “How’d you know who I was?”

  There was a pause—then the table erupted in howling laughter. “How did we know who you were?” squealed the guy who’d played Kuzno. “Oh! She asks it with a straight face!”

  Lori felt her cheeks get
hot and made a show of sniffing her fruit punch. “What’s in this stuff? Damn.” Her stomach began to get the better of her social insecurities, so she finally tugged over a chair and pushed her way in between the Chinese student and the Marybeth. “At least tell me who you guys are,” she commanded, chomping into a Serrano chili. “Since I don’t know your names, I keep thinking of you as the characters you played, and it’s screwing with my head.”

  The fake Lou cackled. “Weren’t we the best?”

  “Till we were interrupted—”

  “By that bitch—”

  “Kuzno’s ‘wife’—”

  “Formerly his undergraduate assistant—”

  “Say it all together, kids: EEeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww.”

  “I’m Sam.” The fake Lou offered Lori his hand. His voice must have been a fake too, because when he was himself he had a New York accent. “Did you like my Demon Laugh? And the Memorial Walk?”

  “Awwww,” said Lori, not sure if she was being sarcastic or not. “Isn’t that sweet? You’ve immortalized his swagger for posterity. I haven’t heard him laugh like that, though.”

  “You will,” promised Sam. “That he can still do. The Walk is trickier. Ideally, it’s done with a twenty-ounce coffee cup with no lid, and you can’t spill.”

  “We felt so bad when he was paralyzed that we all grew freaky hair.” It was the first time the fake Marybeth had spoken in a normal voice, but he addressed his teddy bear instead of Lori. His own hairdo was a rather simple bowl cut, but dyed a scary transgenic green. At least the yarn was gone. “‘Cause he cut all his off in the hospital.” He clammed up again and had to be prompted gently for his name, which was Brian. “Or Brain—I’m dyslexic,” he offered cordially.

  “Sam, Brian, Chun, and I’m Alexander. Easy to remember: I have the same first name as our six-foot-eight embodiment of evil, except I’m Alex and he’s Sasha—to both his friends.” The HEAD, who had blond dreadlocks and was eating pineapple squares out of bowl with his fingers, put a hand on Lori’s shoulder. After glancing around once, he brought his pineapply lips all the way to her ear and barely expelled air as he spoke. “I know for a fact that Kuznetsov was stealing Dr. Lou’s pain pills when he got out of the hospital. Fact.”

  “To take himself?” Lori wondered. “Or to sell?”

  “No, dummy,” he said out loud. “To fuck our boss up so he could get his cash and us.”

  “You guys are scaring me,” she admitted.

  “Be scared,” said Brian. “And take our advice—don’t hire just anyone because you have money. Otherwise you end up with—”

  “Marybeth,” they all squealed at once.

  “The first-years are right behind us at that table,” Sam pointed out. “There are six of them, waiting to be adopted.” He folded his hands into paws and panted.

  “I know,” replied Lori, who didn’t really need the visual. “I even know their names.”

  “But are they any good?” Alex quizzed.

  “On paper, well—”

  “Never mind on paper.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Lori admitted. “I’m still feeling kind of traumatized.”

  “Let us do it!” They were the first words out of Chun’s mouth.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “We’ll go talk to them, and then we’ll tell you who’s good and who sucks.”

  Lori had a feeling that this was a very bad plan, but she was certainly not up to speaking to the first-years tonight. All she wanted was to bounce a bit in the swimming pool, drink some more fruit punch, and crawl off to bed.

  Fortunately, the pool was all the way around on the other side of the hotel, so she could sneak off without anyone stopping her. The boisterous voices became more and more remote, and she started to relax as she thought that no one would be in swimming and that she would be left alone.

  But no, there was one person there, swimming laps ceaselessly and seemingly without tiring. He was an excellent swimmer but didn’t seem to know how to do flip turns: he did them funny and pushed off the wall with both hands.

  It was Lou, of course. Refusing to acknowledge the presence of anyone or anything, he continued swimming, and finally Lori slipped into the water and swam beside him. The pace seemed easy at first, but after twenty minutes or so she was getting pretty tired. Radhika always told her that her technique was wretched and that she relied on brute force and ignorance.

  That combination did at least get her to a pause. “Aha,” said Lou, emptying out his swim goggles, peering at her intensely before replacing them. “Thought it might be you.” His chest was tan and muscular without any trace of a scar.

  “What are you doing out here? You missed the skits and everything.”

  To Lori’s immense surprise, he grinned and treated her to a perfectly executed example of the Demon Laugh. “Are you kidding? I was the one working the spotlights. Weren’t they wonderful?”

  “The spotlights or your students?” It was hard to imagine what was wonderful about implying that he had been shot on purpose, or that the department head had raped Marybeth.

  “My juvenile delinquents. I’m so proud.”

  If they had been grad students, the workout would have been immediately forgotten in a passionate exchange of intimate details about their fellows—who was smart, who was dumb, who was slutty, who could not be trusted. Lori felt poignantly how different this was. As the only two non-tenured members of the faculty, she and Lou were there to judge each other, not only to decide whether they could tolerate working together for a half-century but whether they could remake a dying department in their image. They weren’t in direct competition—if they succeeded, the university would almost certainly tenure them both—but they were in a lot of trouble if they couldn’t get along.

  “You seem to enjoy being a pain in the ass, Lou,” Lori remarked in her best older-and-wiser tone. “That’s fine if you’re smart and productive enough to justify it, otherwise…”

  “Otherwise you’ll try to kill me, too?” he wondered, with an expression she couldn’t read because of the goggles. “Just do a better job than the first guy, OK?”

  Lori hid her shock by pretending she hadn’t heard that and by reminding him that they were there to exercise. “Another thousand meters?” she suggested, looking at her stopwatch.

  In the end they swam much further than that, forgetting for a blissful hour that they were STI’s youngest physics professors as they reveled in the warmth of the water and the glint of the setting crescent moon in the clear desert sky.

  Five: Yellow Jack

  Lori got Marybethed.

  She was going to slap Lou. He had asked her to come in really early so they could arrange their teaching assignments for the term, since he had a big meeting with the lawyers for the NSF subcontract all the rest of the day. Nothing was going to get in the way of that meeting, which had apparently been delayed several times already, usually due to his own health. Not by any means a morning person and still sleeping on the floor because the moving van had been delayed somewhere in the Midwest (weather already), she had only motivated herself out the door and down the hill by thinking that she would be teaching physics at Feynman’s university.

  There was hardly a course that she hadn’t taken as an undergrad, and every one had been such a classic that it seemed heresy for her to even imagine taking one over. Rose, of course, taught field theory and general relativity. If anyone other than Kuznetsov had non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, the world would come to an end. Senior/ graduate quantum mechanics was and had always been van Gnubbern’s, and she was already preparing to betray him once; that was enough.

  There were always the freshman and sophomore classes, which would put her in contact with another generation of Buboes, Ferrets, Thorns, and Snots and show how undergraduate life had been transformed by such recent inventions as the Internet. There were at least three tracks for Physics 1, including the honors section, which was usually not worth it because the students, 80% Bubo, thought they were
above going to class and would leave tape recorders or nothing at all (were tape recorders Ancient Geek History now?). A regular section could be fine, since the “average” STImpy was still in the top 0.5% of graduating seniors.

  So long as it wasn’t Physics P. She recalled with a shudder of horror, almost not braking in time for a stoplight, that Solomon Rose had told her the new administration had insisted upon the creation of a remedial physics class for those who came unprepared (unprepared! To STI!) or more to the point, those who were (his words) “kind of hopeless.”

  The class was 100% female and 80% Snot. Call it prejudice, but to Lori’s mind the residents of Snodgrass would never be good for anything except working at the gym. If Lou so much as breathed the words Physics P to her, she was going to put a bullet in him. Another one.

  Lori had arrived way too early—she was getting better at descending, even though it turned her feet to hamburger—and had changed and washed her face in the downstairs bathroom. There would never be a women’s room on the theory floor. Wearing normal clothes and having tucked her skates away in her backpack (washed of its Canadian dirt), she mounted the stairs like a responsible and grown-up physics professor, albeit one with slightly bloody socks.

  Lou’s office had been open and his light was on, and—pleased that he was early, too—she’d marched in without knocking. She froze as she caught sight of the orange pigtails.

  Marybeth was printing something from Lou’s computer and jumped slightly when she saw Lori. “Dr. Barrow!”’

  “Ms Coleman,” said Lori curtly, thinking, Oui, on se vouvoie, ma ‘tite maudite.

  “I was just printing out some stuff for the meeting this morning. But I really wanted to talk to you.”

  That’s when Lori started to smell a set-up, because as eight o’clock came and went, there was still no sign of Lou and Marybeth was begging her for a job.