My counsellor was a friendly, overworked woman with fuzzy auburn hair. I told her I’d heard that philosophy applicants were “screened” for mental health issues in the Cambridge admissions interviews, but I was still worried: surely we were not screened in expert fashion, since those interviews were conducted by College Fellows, who often sent along their grad students as stand-ins. There was no reason they’d be able to tell if I was okay, was there? It did occur to me to wonder how many philosophers were really entirely sane. Have you read Nietzsche? I can see why they would want to check up on us, before letting us come up to Cambridge. I told her about the headache bridge, and about the breakup, taking care to skirt around any details that would give away The Cop’s gender. I told her about the What’s missing from this picture incidents. I didn’t mention the bath afterwards, because that was my own fault and it was obvious how to prevent that from recurring.
She didn’t think any of it was a big deal.
“I know migraines can be nasty, but they are very common,” she said, in a sweet, slightly Scottish accent. “Just take some ibuprofen if it’s really bothering you. As for these funny déjà vu things,”—she pronounced it déja view—“they happen all the time. Especially when you aren’t sleeping too well. Or if you’re under pressure, like when your romantic life is a bit rocky.”
She told me to do some relaxation exercises, and gave me a CD of bird noises. She said as long as I was worrying about myself, I was probably okay. Maybe she was right. Nietzsche, you know, thought he was fine.
I resolved to stay worried, and I didn’t see her again.
—
The next clue came from an entirely unexpected quarter.
Back in my first summer, Gin had told me she was formally transferring into the Department of History and Philosophy of Science so she could work with a new supervisor—someone “less awful” than the guy she’d been assigned in the Philosophy faculty. During our conversations in the library, she’d started talking about some of the HPS lecturers and what they taught for Tripos. Some of it was interesting enough to stick in my mind, and that’s how I found myself sitting in on a series of HPS lectures in my second year. And then when money got very tight near the end of that year, one day after lecture I noticed a sign in the lobby of the HPS building: Cleaning staff needed.
What I had learned to call “outside work” wasn’t permitted during term time. This rule was justified as ensuring that undergraduates would not be distracted from their studies. Only the few of us who needed the work knew what the rule really meant, what it did. But it made it even more important to work over the holidays. I opened my ring binder, and in the margin of my notes from the day’s lecture, I jotted down the contact name and number from the ad. A cleaning gig could be a way to earn money that involved absolutely minimal contact with other people. A precious opportunity.
I am extremely good at cleaning and I take pride in it, for all it’s a skill that no one else seems to value. Not at more than £3.40 an hour, anyway. People will pay almost any price for novelty, for creation. And destruction is its own industry. But I always thought the secret star of that trinity was maintenance. When I think of originality, I see a line passing through the origin: keep it running smooth, clear, and straight, and you can find your way to anywhere and back. If you’ve lived in a very small space you might understand that anything’s enough if you know how to maintain it. And if you don’t, nothing will ever be enough for you—you’ll always need somewhere new to make a mess of. Medicine is just maintenance when it comes down to it, and people will pay enough for that when they need it.
The HPS department was down on Free School Lane. The building had itself once been the eponymous “Free School,” and now housed the Whipple Museum and Library—a rather unspectacular collection of dull books and rusty, gangly-looking instruments, all connected in some way to what its curators considered the history of science. A history in which certain objects mattered. Probably full of fakes. My routine was to mop all the floors, empty the bins, clean the toilets and handbasins, then restock the soap and the toilet rolls.
I’d arrive to make my rounds at ten o’clock sharp, three nights a week, letting myself in with the satisfyingly huge metal front-door key entrusted to me. I’d proceed directly to the cleaning cupboard in the basement—to which I had another, much smaller, metal key—and emerge minutes later armed with my blue apron, red bucket stuffed with cleaning products, and yellow CAUTION sign to warn the world of what I was doing. I never saw anyone else in the building.
In the daylight of the teaching term I had entered through that same door, but it was already open for me and I wore my own clothes. I’d sat in the back row of the building’s biggest brick-sided lecture hall, on the highest of its tiered wooden benches, while mild-mannered Dr. Lemon spoke passionately and peered at us over his tiny spectacles. He taught me about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, retrograde motion, epicycles, degenerating research programs. The search for explanations and for the meaning of explanation. I wrecked my wrist muscles taking notes, never understanding why the other students around me were content to let it all float past them, as if it did not matter. Washed in on the tide of Lemon’s thinking, all these things he cared about. I suppose they let him care so they didn’t have to.
It was from Lemon
