A Slow Cold Death Read online

  Ordinarily, Lori could handle this situation just fine. But interspersed with the desire to do experiments, Marybeth offered details of a childhood and adolescence so horrific that it was like a sick joke, the blind crippled kid who got cancer for Christmas.

  It couldn’t possibly all have been true. There were contradictions right and left—Marybeth had allegedly survived 9/11 as an infant—but if even 10% of the abuse she described were remotely plausible, it was a miracle that she was alive, free, and in graduate school. Besides, the tone of her voice was all wrong: she sounded blithe and flippant, emphasizing each horrific event with a slow, grating enunciation of every word. It was enough to make Lori want to pour acid in her own ears, but some horrible fascination kept her rooted to the spot.

  “This is a souvenir from my mother!” cried Marybeth, raising a left arm that presumably was supposed to be scarred and twisted in some way, but which looked perfectly normal. “She didn’t approve of left-handers, so when she caught me writing with my left hand she broke my wrist in seven places. It still doesn’t move right, and so I write with my right. I’m actually perfectly ambidextrous, but I can’t write in cursive. I got away from her when I was fifteen, but I was homeless in Santa Monica for seven years….”

  A train wreck would have been more pleasant. It was such a relief when Lou showed up that she didn’t notice at first that he was covered with dust and furious.

  “You guys are in here!” he exclaimed, talking way too fast. “Dammit, Lori! I dialed your number but never thought of calling my own. The elevator is now officially out of order.” He held up his hands to show them how dirty they were.

  “What did you do?” Lori inquired, impressed. “Climb the cable hand-over-hand?”

  “Yeah, right. It was a lot less dignified than that. Christ, I have to print out the proposal budget and look over it. It made no sense at all to me last night.”

  Interrupting herself in mid-tale, Marybeth was suddenly all business. “I did that, Dr. Lou,” she declared proudly, holding up the printer output. “And then what I did, I underlined the people in red, the numbers for the first year in blue, the overheads in green—I made a copy for everyone, I re-did all the figures for the raises….”

  She only knows one pronoun, Lori thought, feeling the ball of horror in her stomach slowly begin to dissolve. Clearly those two didn’t need her and she could leave, but she stayed anyway, uncomfortable somehow with the fact that Lou didn’t know anything about his own budget. The administrative part of proposal writing wasn’t Lori’s forte either (pronounced with a silent e because it was a French word; Oh Roger, how I miss thee!), but she had always had help from secretaries who were trustworthy, not Marybeth.

  “I am such a retard when it comes to arithmetic that it is not even funny,” grumbled Lou, dusting off his white shirt. Marybeth stood far, far away, as if he were trying to hit her. “See what happens when I attempt to look respectable? But seriously, it seems as if the subcontract to LPRL is too big. I’m not going to have enough left to support my group.”

  “I recalculated it, and it’s because of the overhead expenditures, I put those in green,” Marybeth repeated in her strident voice.

  Lou finally acknowledged Lori. “Oh my Gawd,” he said, establishing once and for all that he was a native of Southern California. “Barrow, I am so sorry we missed our meeting. This department is too flaky to get us courses to teach, because if you cross the old guys, watch out. Look, fast: you can take graduate level classical mechanics or Math Methods, easier for me if I do MM since I did it last year.”

  Lori enjoyed making prof-talk too fast over Marybeth’s head. “Classical uses Goldstein?”

  “Of course. First class is Wednesday. Can you handle it on such short notice?”

  “No problem. I have my notes from sixteen years ago—if the moving van shows up.”

  “You’re my hero. Do it well and I will kiss your feet.”

  “Ew! Anything but my feet, I have blisters the size of a loonie. Good luck with the lawyers, rich boy. Don’t let the LEPERLab bleed you dry.” She wanted to make eye contact, to try to signal Don’t trust Marybeth!, but he was already absorbed in the color-coded printouts as his student explained once again what she had done.

  There were two messages on her office phone. The first, strangely formal and sheepish, was from Lou: “This is Lou Maupertuis, you know, your new colleague. It’s five to eight, and if you would come to the south stairs, I could use your brain or brawn or both.” The second (At last!) was from her movers, Les Déménageurs assidus. “On s’en vient chez vous cet après-midi,” said a working-class Montreal voice, already sounding so foreign. “Tcheke pour qu’il y ait pas de neige dans ton stationnement.”

  She laughed: making sure her driveway was clear of snow for the moving van was a request she would have no problem fulfilling. Teaching a graduate-level class at STI was another matter, but it was exactly the kind of challenge that filled her with joy. Leaving the building in a state of euphoria, like a kid let out of school, she stopped at the bookstore for the newest edition of the textbook by Goldstein.

  The book was so heavy that it made her tip forward twice on the way home, and she didn’t attempt the driveway at all. This way she would appreciate Goldstein even more, like everything that had cost her an effort to haul or drag or push home. She had just made herself a peanut butter sandwich and settled down to refresh her memory of tensor calculus when she heard the grinding of gears in the driveway that told her the stuff had arrived at last.

  She’d moved the cheap way, getting one-third of the space in a truck and five hours to unpack it herself before they took it away to its next destination. Living it a split-level with the house down the stairs didn’t make things easy, though, especially because it was nearing one hundred and ten degrees in the sun. She was recovering from Canada, but this was ridiculous. She was lucky not to be a furniture person—there was a bed (single) and a coffee table, and apart from that it was sports equipment, tools, and books. Five bikes, spare wheels, the work stand, and all of the tools just got shoved into the garage to be dealt with later. She’d forgotten how many books there were, though, even with all the physics texts being sent directly to work. After the dozenth trip down the stairs and her half-dozenth glass of lemonade, she started to wonder if Roger’s old linguistic treatises really had that much sentimental value after all. She hadn’t wanted to leave anything of his behind, but face it, he had read some dull shit, half of it in Finnish, Urdu, or Serbo-Croat.

  She imagined he was there with her—he would be telling her all about the history of the boring books, each with its story or purpose. He would talk about the time he was in Prague and met Vaclav Havel, and had wanted to ask a question about The Garden Party but had forgotten the neuter plural declensions in the instrumental case. Naturally this would be exaggerating for dramatic effect, since Roger never forgot his instrumental plurals, even though he sometimes forgot how to find his way home on the metro. They would have a clever method to pass the boxes down the stairs, minimizing the number of steps they each had to take in the hot sun.

  Actually, it was Radhika she wanted for this, Radhika who, like a mango tree, thrived better the hotter it got. The swimmer with biceps like coconuts who would take three boxes of books or more, limited only by the length of her arms. She, who used to get so pissed when guys would offer (insist!) to help her carry things but had learned to say sweetly and patronizingly, “Oh no, it’s much too heavy for you.” There had been a time, in the first year of grad school, where Lori had had to force her to go to the gym instead of studying all night, but no doubt she was incredibly fit over there in Darwin. Her shoulders were probably bigger than Lou’s, even.

  It was a good thing she didn’t like Lou, because this brick path would be really something for him to navigate. The tree roots had grown under it and destabilized all the bricks, which wobbled and broke loose under her feet like decayed teeth. She should fix them anyway, even if he was a jerk.r />
  She was pathetic. It was one thing to be a sixteen-year-old virgin, quite another to be a week away from thirty-three (Lou wouldn’t even be thirty for nine weeks!) and to have had only two partners in her entire life, both of them classmates from graduate school. Why did it always seem as if her last real emotions had been felt in graduate school?

  By the time she was done, the sun was starting to set. It was cooling off a little, and she was out of lemonade. The tree in back still had lemons, but she needed sugar— she needed groceries, period. Now that she had the mountain bike with the trailer she could roll into town and get everything; it was just too bad she lived on top of the hill.

  When the phone rang, there was a long pause after her “Hello?” She figured it was a wrong number or telemarketer and was about to hang up when a man spoke.

  The voice made her blood run cold in the summer twilight. She had forgotten how militaristic the United States had become, and hadn’t heard a tone of voice like that in five years. “Is this Dr. Lori Barrow from the physics department at Superior Technological Institute?”

  She had to fight the instinct to deny it. He was obviously a cop. “Who is this?”

  “We need you to come down to St. Vitus’s Memorial Hospital. There’s been an incident.”

  It wasn’t the police station. It wasn’t the police station even if the guy was a cop. “An incident? Was anyone hurt?”

  Her heart thudded against her ribcage even though, honestly, what did she care about anyone in this town? “We’re not sure yet,” he said at last. “We need you to drive down here and talk to us.”

  Drive, of course, being Angeleno for “displace by any means.” Hesitating between her road bike (faster) and her winter bike (worth fifteen dollars at best, in Canadian), she chose the latter. The rate of bike theft in this town wasn’t astronomical —who would bother when there were Lexus SUVs to steal?—but the hospital was in a crummy neighborhood and losing her racing bike would be a tragedy. She’d built it herself from parts, including the wheels; it was a work of art.

  Not so for the rusty, salty wreck that she’d ridden for five winters. It wasn’t even salt they used on the roads there but what they called calcaire, chalk dust that encased everything in a whitish cast. The drivetrain barely turned, and there was a big hook off the left handlebar that she’d installed to carry her Christmas tree each December, which she didn’t bother to remove even though it threw things a little off balance. It was going to be an adventure coming back up the hill, especially since she’d brought the trailer for groceries, but it certainly got her down and for now that was all that mattered. Consumed by curiosity, she avoided the slow roads with the speed bumps and barreled down one of the main drags, the beginnings of rush-hour traffic going the same speed three feet to her left.

  The whole thing seemed surreal from the moment she entered the building. The emergency room had used to be open—she remembered sitting there once with a broken finger and giving her medical history to a kindly nurse who wrote everything down. Now the receptionists were behind bulletproof glass and seemed unable to hear or understand anything, pushing insurance forms at her without listening to her explanation of why she was there.

  Finally she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around to find Kuzno. He was accompanied by a couple of doctors in scrubs and a fat guy with a LEPERLab badge whose role was unclear but who spoke with the cop voice she’d heard on the phone. “Follow me,” he commanded. “We’re in here.”

  The interview was surreal, too. They kept treating her as if she were an undergrad, asking if she thought “it” could be an undergraduate prank, if students had been known to “make use of biohazardous materials.”

  “I can’t form an opinion unless I know what happened,” Lori kept repeating, wondering how on earth they could imagine she had the pulse of the STImpy student body in 2007.

  Things gradually became clearer as they reluctantly parted with the details. It seemed that several people—the group of lawyers and LEPERs who had come for the grant proposal meeting—were walking past van Gnubbern’s lab in the basement when they stepped in a puddle of pink liquid. The technician ran out, screamed that the freezer holding the biosafety level-3 samples had exploded, and called an ambulance to take them to St. Vitus’s.

  Lori realized suddenly why they had called her. She had been van Gnubbern’s last student, and probably the last person at the university to go into the old BSL-3 containment lab, so long ago yet so clear in her mind. “The BSL-3 area is tiny and attached to the electron microscopy room,” she recalled. “That was so the guy who was there before van Gnubbern could look at his viruses without having to carry them down the hall. He was working on”—the words came out before she could stop them—”yellow fever.”

  “Yellow fever!”

  And then she was in a gown, mask, and gloves, being ushered into a quarantine room where they had put the remnants of the morning’s leak. There were a couple of fifty-milliliter plastic Falcon tubes containing some viscous, watermelon-colored gunk and a whole bunch of smaller tubes in a plastic rack, the tape labels little more than dust after twenty-five years in the minus-eighty degree freezer.

  It certainly looked like the samples she vaguely remembered, but pink liquid was pink liquid; it could have been fruit punch for all she knew. “Unless you want me to put some under the electron microscope,” she offered excitedly, thinking, Maybe you can come home again.

  “Oh no!” Kuzno exclaimed. “We’d better leave that to the experts.”

  And what am I? Just a theorist. “Well,” she said to one of the doctors, deliberately turning her back on the department head, “if you want to titer it, any hepatic cell line will work, HepG2 cells if you have them.”

  “How do you know this?” Kuzno sounded panicked.

  There were many possible responses, but she chose the most obvious. “I’m an experimentalist now, Dr. Kuznetsov. One thing that isn’t right, though—the BSL-3 facility was always under negative pressure and the doors are sealed underneath. Stuff can’t just leak out.”

  There was another one of their long pauses, and no one said anything until they had left the quarantine room and disposed of their “contaminated” gowns, masks, and gloves.

  “We better let her talk to Jim Kalb,” said Kuzno.

  There were several long minutes of ridiculous discussion about whether it would be safe for them to go into the quarantine rooms. Finally the MDs decided that it wasn’t, since even if yellow fever wasn’t spread person-to-person, there could have been “other things” in the samples.

  They were wrong, of course, but there was no point in arguing, especially because Jim was a lot easier to deal with behind glass. He was a creepy-looking guy, in his forties, with a scraggly little beard with pimples between the hairs. It was quite a few moments before Lori realized that the parka he was wearing had been hers, the one Dr. van Gnubbern had bought for her so long ago, now faded from a pale blue to a scabrous off-white. What looked like a trail of nacho cheese dust trailed down the front. He also had a scarf, little mittens, shorts and sandals.

  “Aha!” Lori exclaimed. “You must be electron microscopy technician.”

  “I’m a lot more than that,” spat Jim. Flecks of spittle stained the glass.

  She jumped back, feeling as if she were at the zoo. “I just meant,” she stammered, thinking, Watch out, or I’ll tell them the samples contained rabies.

  “I have a PhD from Chicago,” he declared. “I do everything for the basement labs: electronics, programming, microscopy—”

  Repulsively, Kuzno came to her rescue. “Yes, and Dr. Barrow is a new professor in our department, so I’m sure you will be able to be of great use to her,” he interrupted dryly. “To begin, we were just wondering what exactly came to pass this morning.”

  Lori recollected herself quickly. “Right. First of all, what were the lawyers even doing in the basement?”

  “Ha!” Jim rejoiced. “That was Marybeth. She wanted to use
the color printer that Bert—Dr. van Gnubbern—has down there.”

  So they were on to the next cage, containing an even worse animal. After the histrionics of this morning, Lori expected some elaborate tale, but Marybeth didn’t even try. “He made me go in the basement!” she whimpered.

  “Who did?” Lori and Kuzno wondered at once.

  Marybeth made pointing gestures at the wall to her right. “Dim Bulb!”

  Lori bit back a laugh at the nickname, but didn’t buy Marybeth’s explanation for a second. “You and all the lawyers?”

  “He said he wanted to show us something.”

  It was clear who the liar was. Sick of the zoo spectacle, she was ready to go home and write her lectures in peace, but got the final shock of the day passing by the last isolation room.

  Absinthe McRae hadn’t finished her first year of graduate school. She hadn’t even passed the qualifying exam. Sexually harassed by a professor and stalked by at least one fellow student, she had left bitter and angry, threatening to become an intellectual property lawyer and spend her life rich, successful, and happy while the rest of them languished as postdocs. If Carol could be believed, Absinthe had held true on this threat.

  So here she was, pushing forty but just as slim and blond as ever. No doubt she had had Botox, because her look of My God, it’s YOU! fixed itself to her face and froze there.

  “Hi, Abby!” Lori exclaimed. If only she had a bag of peanuts! “Isn’t this cool? We’re all in California now. Bummer about the yellow fever.”

  Laughing cruelly to hide her utter confusion at the day’s events, she left the high-security hospital, got her bike, and set off in search of a grocery store.

  Six: Please SLAP Me

  “That woman is a menace! Oh my God, I thought I had got away! What’s her body count now? Five?”

  Carol held the phone away from her ear. Absinthe should have been an opera singer: she had the voice for it. “Abby, it’s not Lori’s fault that—”