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  RACHEL

  Rachel had joined our lab from the metals side; I’d been the flower girl, and Jason the synthetics, alongside three others whose work I couldn’t classify. We thought of ourselves as grungy, secular-age saviors who would eventually be able to detoxify toxins faster than ever before, the way microchips made computers smaller than ever before, and in doing so advance our society. Rachel worked on the binding of ferric hexacyanoferrate, picturesquely called Prussian blue, to thallium, its chemical enemy. Depending on hydration state and particle size, this binding could be praised with the name of antidote in its most successful cases. Rachel approached her venture with such American A+ confidence, such loony eagerness to do right, she turned away from thallium’s essential danger and focused on its weakness. She believed it to be a fallible menace and believed herself to be an agent of immunity. The upper bound for skin exposure to univalent thallium ions is 0.1 milligram per square meter of skin in a forty-hour work week. Rachel’s weekly hour totals exceeded eighty as a matter of pride.

  When exposed to air, thallium becomes clear, tasteless, and odorless. I guess even the most stringent precaution can’t protect against invisible attack. I wonder when it was that it reached her. Once inside the body’s cells, thallium binds to sulfur, damages the 60S ribosomes, and fatally disrupts the functioning of our proteins. She may have touched it, inhaled it, ingested it. She wore splash goggles, gloves, and a dust respirator. She did know the bigness of the risk.

  I didn’t know her very well, as I’ve told you. I admired her so I left her alone. I liked the short hairs on the back of her neck. I liked how her cheeks collided with her goggles when she smiled. I liked that she neither wore deodorant nor shaved her armpits. That secret hair soaked up and spread a smell so rank I’ll never unsmell it. I liked her adamance, her clarity, her wristwatch, and her gusto. I liked that she had been born. The loss is serious and I accept my piece of it. But what am I to do with the seeds in my freezer, this set of toxins unremedied, Rachel’s project incomplete, and the prospect of disqualifying myself from your absolutely necessary nearness?

  The university gave us an afternoon to empty our lab lockers. The only thing I kept in my lab locker was a stick of beef jerky that I’d bitten into over the summer and never finished. I chewed up that rock-hard half-jerky and then I stole Rachel’s tinted goggles from their peg on the wall, and the two giant Zanzibar castor seeds that I had ordered for the lab, and the monkshood sample we hadn’t collectively decided what to do with. These things were mine, by right, or at least I would best appreciate them.

  I’d become sort of frantic thinking about the physical horror of what had happened to her. Frantic, and disgusted with myself and my humdrum studies and my whole pasty anemic priceless life. I couldn’t find any way through it except to continue her project, as if that somehow preserved or resuscitated her person. But nobody else wanted to touch it, I suppose understandably so. I wanted to touch it. Not the thallium, that’d be dumb and redundant, but the other avenues, the castor, the monkshood, the other toxins we’d wanted to unwind and to heal. Rachel’s focus hadn’t been our only option, it had only been her only option. I knew that if we could quicken a detoxification starting with any other seed, set a speed record, she’d approve, she’d even celebrate, in some breathtaking, gravityless way that only dead dancers know about.

  Sam and Adrian and Jason and Evelyn emptied their nicely stocked lockers into Columbia totes and big blue IKEA shopping bags—sweatshirts and workbooks and rainboots and Nalgenes—as if this were merely a domestic disturbance, as if it were merely time to move out. They didn’t fuss, or fight, or reject the event in any way. Jason’s already been given another post in the textile fibers study. Evelyn can only function if she is doing what she’s told—she seemed to love being told to leave, it was such an easy instruction to execute. She rolled up her Science Under the Stars T-shirt so neatly it fit inside her Nalgene, and then she thunked the Nalgene into the shaft of her rubber boot. The way these things fit together seemed to hypnotize her into deep relief. Sam and Adrian were high when they came in, and in retrospect I realized they had often been high. They didn’t see or care about the beans and the seeds. I looked around the room. These were the only other four humans who knew the beans and the seeds existed, they were leaving two-by-two like the schoolgirls in Madeline, and then the lab would be professionally cleaned out and zeroed, a half hour after we left.

  I guess you could say that I like revenge and they like common decency. I guess you could say I don’t approve of myself enough to protect myself. I guess you could say to each their own. The biggest difference between us is that nobody else in our lab had you to lose—you, too botanical for metals or synthetics, you, flowers-only. They studied by the light of their own Joans, no doubt, but I live by you.

  Your class continues this semester, indifferent to my absence, as if I weren’t its blood, pumping minerals and force from the second row. Admit that I make you possible. Admit, at least, that you make me possible. So much you already know. Tom and Mishti are taking your class because I told them to. Because they thought we would take it together. They now get to sit in whichever row they pick, in your presence, in your presence that suffers in its luster from the lack of me, because some destinies are kind and some are pickled.

  KANSAS

  When you grow up in Kansas wearing very large shorts, thinking not very much of yourself, thinking mainly of your knees, looking mainly at your knees, your face a frisbee that can’t fly, your teeth buck, your eyebrows rectangles, your forehead more than half of your face, your shirts shapeless, your shape shapeless, your Kansas shapeless, your lust absent, your legs bowed, your arches flat, your chest flat, your ears your only curves, your ears never pierced, your denim never dazzled, your sneakers white, your socks white, your teeth turquoise with rubber bands, your cheese orange, your milk whole, your bread wonder, your luxury a tuna casserole, your pale a neon pale, your fantasy to race a Mario Kart over the desert and into the final oasis, your earthly oasis a salted pretzel, your solitude total, your urges not even visible to you on the clearest days at the farthest horizons, your blank magnificent, your inertia wild and authentic, your nothing your preference, and then into it somebody walks, a Joan, this sudden hero can really take control.

  You’re susceptible first to idolatry, then to study, to apprenticeship, and finally to a kind of patient love that makes fun of itself and believes in itself without limit. Imagine being a pudding cup of a person and encountering a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders. Imagine encountering you.

  You don’t wear any kind of coat until the first snow of the year. You eat milk chocolate for breakfast and canned pineapple for lunch and sweet potatoes for dinner. You are a very ambitious ice skater. You can count to twenty in four languages and say “God Save the Queen” in Hungarian. You considered joining the Russian Orthodox Church after learning that the ballerino Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train. You ask your students to read Kafka’s diary entry about the Apple Seller before the semester begins to show that administration is everywhere and genius is possible. You celebrate Flag Day. You’re afraid of turtles. You don’t know that I know you’re afraid of turtles. You climbed the Matterhorn. You can drain the insides of an egg through a pinhole. You paint perennial vines onto drained eggs. You watch The Godfather Part II when you’re sick. You scrub your shower grout. You get your students good jobs and give them terrible grades. You love your dog. Once upon a time you loved your mother.

  It’s acceptable to admire you. Admiration is the natural starting point and I did start there. Admiration is love without expectation and I’d be psychotic to expect. It was only when you told me to admire myself—that I was capable, that you noticed me, that I stood out, that I deserved, who knows what I deserved—that I began to imagine myself as an adult human with arms and legs. I began wearing pants that fit me around the waist. I began wearing lo
ng-sleeved shirts when it was cold outside as opposed to several stacked short-sleeved Hanes undershirts. I began to brush my teeth at night and in the morning. I began to hold myself responsible for myself, so that I could hold myself accountable to you. So that you wouldn’t change your mind about me.

  You never minded all that much, altogether. It’s always been such a lukewarm encouragement between us—you are essential to me and I am okay to you—but lukewarm is about as hot as I get. What thrilled me about you was your absolute needlessness. You didn’t seem to need anybody’s approval, friendship, witness, or opinion. You didn’t need color, flavor, vacation, or exercise. There was this crystalline and atomic permanence in your center that I knew you’d inherited from some original lord. It made me feel that if I worked very hard, I could be as alone and as perfect as whatever that thing is inside you. You made me feel irrelevant and totally free.

  Freedom can be hard to come by when you grow up in landlocked Kansas, located exactly at the midpoint between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which means you have the farthest way to go either way to get out, which means you must get out, eventually, after you grow out of Kansas, which you didn’t, which I did, which is the first plain fact about me, the place I will perpetually be in the process of exiting, just as you are the far and temperate and coastal state I am always and never entering.

  MISHTI

  Mishti Singh wore ten necklaces to your class and I hear you didn’t like them. What you need to understand about Mishti is that she doesn’t wear necklaces because she’s making an effort, she wears necklaces because her neck deserves them. Her complete beauty is demanding and it’s an act of respect on both her and our parts to oblige it. Think of Mishti as full. This is the perfect opposite of your austerity and I find the thought of you standing near each other entertaining. Mishti grew into not only the common assets of a full chest and hips, but full brows and full eyelids, full muscular shoulders, full mustache hair she waxes bimonthly.

  I saw the ruby leotard she wore, tucked into an ankle-length skirt that showcased her plummy ankles. Mishti does things to improve herself and believes that she can be improved. The little galaxy she releases herself into repeatedly assures her that she is not only improved but ideal. You’ll confuse her if you scoff at her. Besides, she’ll execute your work immaculately and you will never find a solitary point to deduct.

  Mishti grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, the middle child of many, daughter of a chemist and a doorman. Her mother is named Anjali, she is the Senior Protein Expression and Analytics scientist for Pfizer East Coast. Her father is named Gopi, he is the early morning shift doorman at 60 West 13th Street and his name means “protector of cows.” Her siblings are all academically accomplished and aesthetically darling, and she’s differentiated herself via this galactic style. Personally I cheer for her. I hope you’ll eventually join me, because until you do, I’m going to hear about it.

  She came over to my place after your class to talk about Tom. It became, of course, a conversation about the death and the verdict and the degree and only much later about the breakup. This makes it sound like there are things going on in my life when in fact there is nothing. But Mishti (whose name means “sweet person”) has been in Cincinnati all summer, interning for Procter & Gamble. I hadn’t bothered to catch her up because I haven’t, as a matter of principle, been bothering.

  I told her I had stolen the beans and the seeds. She told me I’d lost my mind. I told her that for the first time in my long drab studies I had some new and exciting work to do, Rachel’s work. She asked if castor and monkshood were as deathly as thallium. I told her no, not as deathly, mostly scary if swallowed. She asked if I thought I’d be able to bring them back to a different lab. I told her it’s hard to sell a stolen painting. She asked how my parents had taken it and I said I hadn’t told them. My parents are retired now and I try, as I said, not to bother them. Mishti finds this puzzling because she’s better friends with her parents than with her friends. Her mother has fun within herself and manages to bring Mishti in on it. The Anjali Singh of Mishti’s childhood came home from the lab and started whistling, flinging her shoes around, frying things, pummeling the cat, encouraging all her children to crawl under the kitchen table and see what they could find down there.

  My parents, to their credit, built a fun of their own, one to which I have never been openly invited. Their bi-religious marriage provoked such loathing from both sides, I think they coped by building a code, a secret language of defiance that I could hear them speaking to each other, and admire, but never really learn, having nothing of my own to fight against, having not earned the badge necessary to enter their rebels’ club. I don’t know whether getting expelled counts as a badge. I didn’t risk anything, I only lost everything. Loss doesn’t earn you any kind of dollar.

  It was only after we’d talked about Tom and how distressed he’d looked in class and how he’d refused to tell her anything that she admitted you hadn’t liked her necklaces.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “She pursed her lips at me.”

  “Joan’s lips are naturally pursed.”

  (You can roll your eyes here without missing the next line.)

  “No, but, she looked at my necklaces, and then she pursed.”

  “Joan rejects embellishment.”

  “What about her braid?”

  “Her braid is her weapon.”

  “And the earrings?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve come to think of them as her ears.”

  “They’re big hunks of stone.”

  “Embellishment for the severe.”

  “A severe celebrity botanist? I want her to like me.”

  “I’ve been trying for five years.”

  “She’s, like, your best friend.”

  “From your lips to her ears.”

  I looked just then at Mishti’s lips. There was a total and profound sculptural rightness to her face she had neither elected nor destroyed. I felt the honor of participating in the brief, biological fact of this sweet person’s tiring existence.

  “Do the work,” I said to us both, “Joan’s only in it for the work.”

  “In what?”

  Mishti ran off with a clang of her bangles to meet Carlo at Hungarian Pastry. I knew it would take her over an hour on the F to the A B C to get from Smith-9th up to 110th and I didn’t think the B was running. It was absurdly inconvenient that I had moved down here, she hollered, halfway down the stairs. Then, from the bottom, “You’ve got mail.” I skipped down after her, forgetting the unscrewed screws that cover the steps and taking a nice deep poke in the foot. There it lay, half under the door and laughing at me, my last check from the registrar’s office. It felt like setting an egg. I’d deposit it, then boil myself until the timer beeped zero.

  CARLO

  Carlo Parada burst into our lives as if on horseback, one Sunday night, his jaw straighter and firmer than the line at a base of a triangle. If beauty loves beauty, he and Mishti could not have avoided each other for long. Back in April, when the Callery pears had flowered and Mishti had decked herself in blushes and golds, we walked past this guy crossing 117th. He stopped, turned, and followed Mishti’s scent back to its source. There she was, only half a block farther up Broadway. He overtook us and then cut across me, stopping and facing us. It seemed he was our combined height.

  He extended a hand to Mishti and said, “You’re incredible.”

  “I’m Mishti,” she actually replied. I kicked her calf to express my disappointment. I found him as sexual as an Amtrak train. They shook hands. At that point I might as well have lifted her onto my shoulders so that she could see him better. She began rolling up her sleeves, which had fallen loose and now gave her an excuse to reveal her twig-wide jeweled wrists. I wondered what more she would do with her hands now that they had been prepared. She rested one on each hip, assuming wha
t the life coaches call a “a power position.” And to the extent that his sturdy architecture permitted it, he wilted.

  Throughout the courtship month that followed, I’d get intermittent sexual progress updates, biographical data points, fresh letdowns, triumphant reassurances. His second year of business school would soon end and he was preparing for a career in General Affluence.

  “You know the path,” Mishti rattled, mouth full of wonderful mushrooms at Sal and Carmine’s. “Texas, Harvard, Blackstone, the obligatory two years of hard labor at SAC, checking all the boxes, but he didn’t get along with Steve.”

  “Who’s Steve.”

  “Never ask him who Steve is.”

  “Shan’t.”

  “Now he’s got to figure out somewhere else to go because they’re not going to hire him.”

  “And yet he looks with confidence into his future, knowing he will land where he lands, cat-footed.”

  “Basically.”

  I can eat about four times as much pizza as Mishti can.

  She leaned back defeated by her one stupid slice and wiped all the grease off her chin. “But,” and then I got the full story: how it all began in Galicia, how his parents had bravely but reluctantly moved from Spain to Argentina, where his father would direct the Banco Galicia of Buenos Aires.

  “Then what?”

  “Then they didn’t like it.”

  So from South America to the American South, where Texas startled them with its everything. They’d tried Houston, seat of the Argentinian consulate, only to find it oppressively uncivilized, and landed in Austin, which meant a demotion for Carlo’s father but an integrated, respectable high school for Carlo. Mishti thinks this nonprivileged public education tempered Carlo’s international flair but I think it only confirmed his superiority. He was better than the American boys. He could do more: he knew how to waltz, he knew how to surf, he knew how to shake someone’s hand with a frankness uncurbed by American puritanism. The Austin taco culture had chilled him partly out, but it had also accentuated his elegance, the way salt releases the flavor in ice cream.