Analog SFF, April 2010 (12 page)

Baltimore, 2003

Nausea pulsed through me as I prepared for the symposium, my notes laid out by the hotel-room sink. Was it just nerves? I peeked out the bathroom door to where Carl still slept, the heavy curtains drawn.

The night before had been late: sushi and sake with a dozen others from this wonderfully diverse meeting, one of the few where we could both present. Astrophysics one day, neurochemistry the next.

Carl had drunk. I hadn't.

I locked the door and slipped up a palm to touch a tender breast, my brain whirring with what I'd tell him when he woke. “Carl, I think I'm—” No, wait. There couldn't be any “think"; I had to be sure. “Hey, Carl, I'm—” No, too direct. He'd need time to adjust. “Hey, Carl; I need to talk to you about something . . .” He'd have his dark head bowed, looking at some journal, “Yeah?"

"I need to talk to you."

He'd look up. “Uh-huh."

"About something really important."

He would set the journal aside and bite his lower lip. “What is it, Julia?” There would be a hint of impatience.

I'd catch it, chicken out. “Never mind."

"No, what is it? You've got my attention now."

"I think I'm—” And then I'd do it all wrong because I'd say the first thing that came to mind, not what I'd rehearsed, which is what I do when I'm nervous.

"You're
what
?"

"I didn't say I was; I said I
think
—"

"You
think
?” He'd stand, throw his hands up in exasperation. “What do you mean you
think
? Damn it, Jules. Weren't you careful?"

"Yeah."

"Then how did this happen?"

I'd shrug, redden a little. “I don't know.” Perhaps it was a blessing.

What would
that
conversation be like?
I know we didn't plan this, but maybe it's a good thing
. This conference was the first thing we'd done together in ages. Maybe a child would pull us back together.

But even then, I knew it wouldn't work. Because what I wished he'd say was as impossible as my mother's Christmas gift.

The Christmas I turned seven, my mother bought me a doll—a nice one, with a porcelain face and features like a real child's, with raven hair and real pink silk. It must've taken her months to save the money. We were poor and she was single.

I still have it in a drawer, her hair still as black and the silk still as pink. From the start, I knew she was one of those toys that are too nice to really play with, the type adults talk about when they tell you how things used to be. Eventually, I named her Poinsettia because she came on Christmas, and would carry on long, intimate talks with her from her shelf in the darkness of my bedroom. But that was later. At the time, what I wanted was a snowflake.

Of course, that's what I told my mother. Seven-year-olds can be cruel. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate the doll. It was just that there was something else I wanted more. A perfect, feathery, one-of-a-kind snowflake like I'd seen in my grade school science book.

She could have satisfied me with a Christmas ornament, or even by teaching me to cut snowflake shapes from folded paper. But for some reason she chose to take me literally as I tried to wrap my seven-year-old vocabulary around the intricate, fractal images in my picture book. “I want a snowflake,” I said. “One I can hold forever."

She looked away, bit her lip, went to her bedroom. A moment later, she came back with a jewelry box. Once, she'd kept pearl earrings in it, earrings she'd gotten from a man she'd loved.

"Open it,” she said.

I did, but it was empty.

"Look hard."

I looked, but there was nothing.

"You can't hold a snowflake."

The box still reminds me of the earrings she used to wear on special outings with my father, but I've never dared put anything in it. I never knew what happened to them, but the earrings represent all things lost and gone forever.

I slide into the brain scanner I've moved to the basement lab, the only space my shrunken funds now justify. At least I was able to keep the scanner. It's big enough for two and fast enough to catch the play of their brains interacting. I listen to its clicks and hums as I recalibrate it, feeding it my own shifting emotions. I have the monitor turned so I can see from inside. The images are like aurora borealis, dancing curtains of color encoding joys and tragedies, sparked by a slide show of selected pictures.

The first are neutral. A fluffy cat on a gingham couch. A black-and-gold barge on a stormy sea. A skyscraper flashing sunlight from blue-tinged windows. Then I move up the emotional scale to an old green Volkswagen, a yard with grass yellowed by August sun, a tiny figure on a twilight beach. Another notch and it's my father's young, handsome face with the playful smile. A Christmas tree with ornaments from the 1970s. My mother's hands and the knit blanket she made when I started kindergarten. What do I see? Reds, oranges, and yellows. Heat. Energy. Soul. Me at my best, and worst. Humanity's core.

I shut the slide show off, close my eyes. Breathe. Shove myself out and look again at the images of my brain on fire. I wipe a tear, rain after the blaze, and gaze at the color, the topography of my life, wishing it were different.

"Julie?"

I'm caught in a memory, six years old.

My mother's face is gilded in candlelight. She's trying not to cry. “Daddy wanted me to tell you how much he loves you.” Her voice breaks and I feel her arms around me. Too tight. “He had to go away, you know..."

I look up, into her face. “Where?"

"Far away."

"But where?"

She looks at me. “Europe."

"Where's that?"

"Across the world."

I try to imagine it. Fanciful birds and exotic animals. Fantastic buildings. Tall people. “Why'd he leave?"

"He had something important to do."

I go to bed dreaming of Europe. Does it smell different? Is the grass a different color? What about the sky? I can't sleep. I peer through the skinny crack in the door, watch as my mother cries at the kitchen table, the tiny flame dancing with her breath. I wonder why she's so sad; Dad's doing something important. She must miss him. I feel a pang. I miss him, too.

On the final night of the conference, a dozen of us celebrated in the hotel bar: martinis, imported microbrews, wines from half the globe. I drank a virgin margarita, still thinking I had a secret. I looked around, wondering how many of the others once had similar secrets. In nine months, I was going to be one of the lucky few who danced between the tenure track and the baby track. One of the few who found and held love. I touched my belly under the table, looking over at Carl as he discussed string theory or the first picoseconds of the Big Bang or something equally incomprehensible. He made it sound like gossip, exciting and juicy. More exciting to him, I suddenly knew, than the news I was waiting the right moment to tell.

I got up, went to the bathroom, and that's when I saw it. Blood. One small, damning stain. My heart sank, the realization setting in that maybe the miracle wasn't going to happen, that maybe it was for the better, anyway. The baby hadn't really been what I'd wanted. The real dream might as well still be a snowflake.

I returned to the table a different person. I flagged the waiter. Deadpan, I said: “One Manhattan and a Long Island Iced Tea."

He looked at me. Hesitated. “You want both?"

"Both."

"At the same time?"

I held them up. “I've got two hands, don't I?"

Thirty minutes later I left, both drinks next to my plate, untouched. In the room, I couldn't stop crying, even when I heard Carl's key card in the door.

"What the hell's wrong, Jules?"

"I hate this."

"Hate what? This room? This hotel? The sushi roll? What?"

I sat up. Drew a breath. “I want more, Carl."

He sighed, long and hard, melodramatically. “This again."

"Please listen to me."

He shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it on a table. “I'm tired, and we've been through this before.” He kicked off his shoes. “You cling, Jules. You try to grab so tightly that you crush the life out of whatever you're trying to hold."

I sat up straighter, as though slapped. But when we got home, it was Carl who filed for divorce.

What is love? Whatever it is, it starts with neurochemicals. Maybe that's all it is: snowflakes meeting snowflakes. Link them the right way and something beautiful happens. Pair them wrong and they melt and disappear.

I type the ad:
Researcher looking for students willing to participate in study about love. What makes for good and lasting relationships . . . ?

They will kiss, I decide. And as they kiss, I'll look at the sparklers in their brains. Love will exist as neurological firecrackers, snared on a machine, if only I can tease it out of the background of exams, car payments, soccer kids, or whatever else might be going on at the same time. I've been doing this now for seven years. Ever since Carl. Mapping brain activity against neurotransmitters, trying to tease out the secrets of the emotion that binds . . . and destroys.

I glance around the lab. For years it's been a storeroom and private work space, collecting an amazing assortment of detritus: a three-year-old horse calendar still turned to giant Belgians; mystery novels for the chemistry experiments that had to be babysat overnight; snow boots from the big snowstorm . . . how many years ago?

And of course there are pictures. One in particular: sweat-stained and grubby. Small enough that I'd carried it in my purse for years. I'm not sure how it got here and have no idea what to do with it now, so I stuff it randomly in a drawer, an emotional land mine I'll stumble over again some time, but out of sight for the moment.

Every day I asked about Europe. By then, I knew the people were no taller, that the sky was still blue and the grass still green. In my history classes people crossed the ocean in sailing ships and returned in less time than Dad had been gone.

I was eight when I found out the truth.

By then, I knew people went to Europe in airplanes, so I decided to skip school and walk to the airport, which had to be on the south side of town, since that was the only direction I'd never been. Mom was still sad and whatever Dad was doing couldn't be as important as she was. As I was. The picture was to show people so they could help me find him once I got there. It was of him and my mother on a camping trip, smiling, sitting on a log. It was the first picture I'd ever snapped, something magical I could hold forever.

I passed Benjamin Kendall's white picket fence, then waved at Ralph, Mrs. Jergin's old basset hound. I walked by the municipal pool and the park with the yellow swing set. I went up on the hill and looked for them, all those planes flying to Europe. But there weren't any. No runways, no shiny jets, no tall traffic towers. Nothing but wheat fields and distant mountains.

I sat down, buried my head in my arms, and cried.

I woke to crickets and frogs, the moon, full and bright in the east. I picked my way home, through branches and gloom, and found my mother crying at her table. She looked up and was suddenly furious.

"Where have you
been?"

I couldn't answer; there was no excuse good enough.

"Not you, too, Julie. I can't lose you, too."

I'm still trying to regain my composure when I hear a knock at the lab door.

"Are you Julie Rasmussen?"

I look up and see a man with clear blue eyes and sandy, shoulder-length hair.

"You're the researcher, right? Sorry; I didn't mean to—"

I stand, shoving my hair out of my face. “Yes. I'm Dr. Rasmussen—Julie. Just call me Julie. Jules, if you want . . .” I stammer, take a breath. “Sorry. Yes—you've come to the right place.” He reminds me of the perfect son or husband or father, soft-spoken, smart. “Do you have a girlfriend?"

He laughs. “You don't beat around the bush, do you?"

"No, I mean . . . what category?” I grab my clipboard, hold it up. “I need to put you in a category."

"Oh . . .” He grins. “Single."

I feel something in my gut. Apprehension. Sadness. Hope. I imagine my neurons firing, producing the color my scanner would see.

"How about you, Doctor? Boyfriend?"

"Not exactly."

He walks over to the machine. “What is it you're looking for? Love?"

"Sort of."

He moves closer. “What does love look like?"

I imagine it. Dendrites and neuro-pathways lighting up. Snowflakes building . . . melting.

He is too close, looking at me now, not the machine. “You think maybe you've found it?"

I turn away, embarrassed. “Please leave."

"
What
? What'd I do?"

"I'm not a test subject."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I'm not interested."

She comes in with black hair tangled around her shoulders and an attitude to match. The first thing I hear is her gum.

"You pay?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"They didn't renew my grant."

"Don't you know that's what separates us from them? People get paid. Guinea pigs don't."

I feel myself smile. “You're in it for love
and
money, huh?"

She shakes her head. “Nope. Just money."

Sadness swells through me as I notice a butterfly tattoo on her left ankle, the wings green, blue, and purple—colors that, on a scan, would mean inactivity.

"How do you know it's not just lust?” she adds.

"I take both single people and people who are in committed—"

"Bring in a john."

I stand there with my mouth open, like an idiot.

"You think of that?” She comes closer. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe the variable you think you're measuring isn't there at all?"

I feel my face redden. She is not stupid, not uneducated. “Where do you go to school?"

She snaps her gum. “Here.” Her gaze is hard, accentuated by black liner circling two piercingly blue eyes. “I'm going for my Ph.D. in physical education.” She grins. “Get it?"