There are days I don’t drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my hotel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says
Those are the days I don’t drink.
There is a rhythm to working in a research laboratory. Through the glass doors by 7:30, nodding to the other early arrivals, then sit in your office until 8:00, pondering this fundamental truth: even shit coffee — even mud-thick, brackish, walkin’-out-the-pot shit coffee is better than no coffee at all.
I like to be the one who makes the first pot in the morning. Swing open the cabinet doors in the coffee room, pop the tin cylinder and take a deep breath, letting the smell of grounds fill my lungs. It is better than drinking the coffee, that smell.
There are days when I feel everything is an imposition — eating, speaking, walking out of the hotel room in the morning. Everything is effort. I exist mostly in my head. It comes and goes, this crushing depression, and I work hard not to let it show, because the truth is that it’s not how you feel that matters. It’s how you act. It’s your behavior. As long as your intelligence is intact, you can make cognitive evaluations of what is appropriate. You can force the day to day.
And I want to keep this job; so I do force it. I want to get along. I want to be productive again. I want to make Mary proud of me.
Working at a research lab isn’t like a normal job. There are peculiar rhythms, strange hours — special allowances are made for the creatives.
Two Chinese guys are the ringleaders of lunchtime basketball. They pulled me into a game my first week. “You look like you can play,” was what they said.
One is tall, one is short. The tall one was raised in Ohio and has no accent. He is called Point Machine. The short one has no real idea of the rules of basketball, and for this reason, is the best defensive player. His fouls leave marks, and that becomes another game — a game within a game — to see how much abuse you can take without calling it. This is the real reason I play. I drive to the hoop and get hacked down. I drive again.
One player, a Norwegian named Umlauf, is six feet eight inches. I marvel at the sheer size of him. He can’t run or jump or move at all, really, but his big body clogs up the lane, huge arms swatting down any jump shot made within reach of his personal zone of asphalt real estate. We play four-on-four, or five-on-five, depending on who is free for lunch. At thirty-one, I’m a few years younger than most of them, a few inches taller — except for Umlauf, who is a head taller than everyone. Trash is talked in an assortment of accents.
Some researchers go to restaurants on lunch hour. Others play computer games in their offices. Still others work through lunch — forget to eat for days. Satish is one of those. I play basketball because it feels like punishment.
The atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system — you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you’ve got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent.
Satish works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he said.
A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it’s like looking at another world. What had been flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex. Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography — you’re up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you’ve been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you’re falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you’re going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never do hit the ground — like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, and never reaches the other side, not ever. That’s an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.
I zoomed in to 14,000X once. Like God’s eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.
Satish and I both had offices on the second floor.
Satish was short and thin. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His features were balanced in such a way that he could have been the fine, prodigal son of any number of nations: Mexico, or Libya, or Greece, or Sicily — until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick; and you could not imagine him being anything else.
The first time I met Satish, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then clapped me on the shoulder and said, “How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.
It was Satish who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “Make a point of it,” Satish said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”
I watched him work. He filled the SEM’s reservoir — icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down to the tile floor.
Liquid nitrogen doesn’t have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand and they’ll tend to bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you — like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you’re wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir, the nitrogen could spill down inside and be trapped against your skin. “And if that happens,” Satish said while he poured. “It will hurt you bad.”
Satish was the first to ask my area of research.
“I’m not sure,” I told him.
“How can you not be sure?”
I shrugged. “I’m just not.”
“You are here. It must be something.”
“I’m still working on it.”
He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change — his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I’d become something different to him.
“Ah,” he said. “I know who you are now. You are the one from Stanford.”
“That was eight years ago.”
“You wrote that famous paper on de-coherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”
Satish was blunt, apparently.
“I wouldn’t call it a breakdown.”
He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”
“No, I stopped.”
“Why stop?”
“Quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview after a while.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The more research I did, the less I believed.”
“In quantum mechanics?”
“No. In the world.”
There are days when I don’t drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father’s .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.
But there are also days I
