Read an Excerpt

I

I am a woman who wakes up hungry. Tom touched only ­coffee till noon. You do what you’re capable of at some point, so Tom and I left each other. I wanted breakfast, he wanted liberty, and who could blame either of us. I live alone now in a large rancid blown-­out loft in outer Red Hook, where I pad around the soft wood floors like a toddler: I’ve taken my pants off, my rings, earrings, it is quiet and bright, I haven’t gotten any lamps, I can hardly move, I’m drunk and I take a probiotic. My name is Nell Barber. I’m five foot five and 130 pounds which is not in any way remarkable. My daddy was a nice Jewish boy who married a nice Christian girl and raised me in Kansas and got on with it. Neither of them observed anything ever again. I was born observant. They gave me the original, fearful, organized minds of their childhoods and no religion of my own to honor. I suppose I turned from the celestial to the dirt. I study plants and I live in order.

Just because Rachel Simons made sustained contact with thallium and absorbed its toxins through her potassium uptake channels and died, the university expelled all six members of our lab. They couldn’t tolerate another ounce of our hazard! The disciplinary committee stood in choral formation and issued what sounded like whale tones run through a vocoder. Be-­gone, be-­gone, they groaned. Our experiment in toxicology had taken the life of a valued graduate student and would no longer be institutionally condoned. I wore a hazmat suit to the hearing, to promise future caution. The chairman found this disrespectful and I could hardly see his apoplectic face through the scratched plastic front of my secondhand helmet.

Columbia couldn’t accuse us—Rachel had oxidized the thallium of her own volition, at her own risk, and to her own demise—but it could close down the environment in which she’d endangered herself and rescind our schoolwide welcome. We had broken the contract of care and common responsibility that characterized the Columbia student. If we couldn’t study safely, we couldn’t study. It made good sense but it deleted me. The finalized verdict came via a specially assembled summer committee, via Priority Mail, to Tom’s address, which I’d just kissed goodbye without any tongue. August is supposed to be a lazy month but it pummeled my partnership and my PhD.

The biggest loss is you: my chime, my floorboard. You are my night milk. You are my unison. You believe in the periodic table. Your book sold eight thousand copies in its first week. Columbia will separate you from the Simons case and nurture your celebrity. For five years I have been your smaller self, your near-­peer, your sane challenger, your favorite. For five years I’ve trailed you as you approached success. Then Rachel reached for the rat poison and Whole Thing reached its readers and my room lost its pillars in one coordinated catastrophe and neatly fell down. You and Tom have both conclusively shaken me. Look, Joan, I’m shaking.

Tom and I lived in a rectangle of jewels, his mother’s. A small palace they called an apartment on the Upper East Side, a good all-­weather walk across Central Park to the university. Each morning I’d emerge from that snow globe and enter the open air feeling forward-­moving and weightless. Each morning I’d be a beetle creep­ing over the park’s grass blades without bending them, so light was I. Now, when I step onto Van Brunt, my entire body weight rests on the sidewalk, but only and exactly my weight, not lifted not burdened. I’ve returned to my skeleton’s original fact. If you asked whether I like it, I think I’d tell you I do. When you climb out of something you’re very deep inside, the daylight is first a blank, and then it reveals itself to be life as you knew it before you climbed into that thing.

Everything has come around. Against the huge solitude of my schoolwork came the romance of Tom; against the romance of Tom came our utter lack of sex; against our nonsexual partnership came our easy, childlike living together; against our shared life, now, again, huge and unschooled solitude.

How undercutting, how generous of the world, to provide each thing with its inverse, to test each version of life we choose with a vision of its opposite. How perverse, and unpeaceful. I want more than anything to love the choice I make. Love it with abandon, proudly, building a temple upon it. But how can you do it, how can you really give yourself up and praise anything, when the world is too balanced to allow for a lopsided devotion, when each thing is always reckoning with its anti-­self? Perhaps they’re all the same, your various choices, and committing to one is the same as committing to any. Your only job is to build a temple.

In memoriam to the temple torn down, to my years of studiously laid bricks kicked over, to a classmate and all her skin, I close the old books and open this one. These savage castor beans and monkshood seeds are no longer the lab’s property. Rachel’s experiment is now my own; I can destroy it or it can destroy me, as I please. I please! As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan. What isn’t for you? More life collected, documented. You’d like that, wouldn’t you like that?

You

You dusted the edges of your shelves as I picked scrambled eggs out from under my fingernails. I had expected to find your office swarmed. Being alone with you now felt supersonic.

“So what,” you said.

“Well, the whole what,” I said, wanting you to comfort me.

You hate comfort and I know that. I watched the end of your braid fuss against your collarbone.

“I have nowhere to work,” I said.

“Work anywhere.”

“I have no control, therefore I have no experiment.”

I had to speak clinically in order to speak passionately. At the rate we were diverging, I soon wouldn’t be able to speak to you at all. A mouse shot out from under your desk and seized the inch-­long cylinder of string cheese you’d cut for it.

You clapped your hands once in satisfaction. Then you looked at me and forgot the success and moved down to study the gray, claw-­footed saltcellar now resting emptily on your floor. The day flew in at us through your closed window. I wanted your inch of string cheese.

You said, “You have cold and temperate environments in your own home.”

I said, “You have cold and temperate environments in your own intestines.”

You blinked at me maliciously as if your eyelids could slap my cheeks.

“That lab was only extracurricular,” you said, emphasis on the ric. “I let you play with it because you’re a slobber toddler who needs a toy. What are you telling me—you’re changing fields now to what, to botanical toxins?”

“I’m trying to neutralize botanical toxins.”

“I thought you were generating a fossil-­calibrated phylogeny of the American oak.”

“No department in the country needs an oak specialist.”

“What do they need?”

“Healed evil.”

You made a face, a sanguine, unruffled pout. Your boredom made me cringe. I knew your every cue so well I might have become a bacterium in your gut. You coughed into your hand. I missed you and saw you changing into someone I would lose.

“I’ll keep to my work and you keep to yours,” you said.

“I need pizzazz,” I said to your carpet. “I’m no star.”

“Your oak work was reliable.”

“I have to blow minds to keep up with you, Joan.”

You looked at me as if I’d invited myself to your house. I looked at you as if through a screen door.

“Forget the oak work. I want to do Rachel’s work. Doesn’t somebody need to do it? We’re just going to let her die?”

“She died, Nell.”

“I’m saving her soul.” What I didn’t tell you is that I should have saved her life. That I go to bed at night certain her soul is going to grab my soul by the neck and strangle me from the inside out, because I was standing next to her and did nothing, and because why should I be allowed to keep living? “I’ve advanced her methods,” I said, to stay on your track. “I think if I keep it going, I could speed up the disarming of poison to a rate that would almost undo the fact of the poison in the first place. You would call me The Great Undo.”

“I never call you.”

“And even if I kept on with the useless oak thesis,” I said, “which I’d only do to satisfy your soul, your majesty,” I curtsied, “I no longer have a school.”

“That’s your current problem.”

You rank problems as current, finished, or irrelevant; it usually makes them smaller. This one didn’t shrink.

“They expelled you precisely to stop you from continuing ­Rachel’s work,” you said. Action verbs like expel aren’t spoken in Kansas and my shame swelled. You leaned toward me without any tenderness and said, “Take no for an answer. Her experiment is over.” I could smell the deep soapy center of your still wet braid and stood there with panting nostrils. “If you’re reasonable about it, and you get back to your own, unobjectionable little project, some other institution may accept you again somewhere, someday.”