Ari died on the first day in months that I took my coffee any way but black. I wanted to use up the remaining dregs of the communal milk. Our team could never finish a gallon but our director clung to the illusion of economy, and wastefulness had come to seem particularly repugnant to me. I drank from a short, compact mug covered in pictures of the art at the Vatican and clearly intended for espresso. Weeks earlier, Remy had phoned me at work to ask if she could use it for something and I’d kept it on my desk ever since.
On President’s Day, I’m working quietly alongside the other three martyrs who think themselves above the indulgence of a three-day weekend. On some level, I’m surprised that we are the only ones present besides the indefatigable construction crew. Our field tends to attract a “certain kind of person,” as the chair of the department at my college told me conspiratorially when I went to see him about placing out of a prerequisite course. He happily denied my request before embarking on his diatribe. So I consider myself thoroughly trained.
A workman in a navy blue jumpsuit is standing idly on the roof of the building opposite ours, surveying without urgency. He looks how I imagine Brian will look in about ten years: sort of stately, sort of amorphous, someone who would not look out of place standing on the periphery of the world, coughing and trembling. At my brother’s wedding in the spring, I’ll be 25 years old. One quarter of a century of my mother telling me that insulation is not protection.
“This coffee is mostly water,” Ari remarks.
“All coffee is mostly water.”
Martha turns from her laptop, typing without pause, and smiles indulgently in my direction.
This is an argument we have already seen to completion, like my preference for the commuter rail over the subway, a sentiment he derides as stuffy and classist because his idea of gritty authenticity hinges on the underground. Our office is situated just between two subway stations and we sometimes feel the trains’ quavering, rumbling jaunt just beneath us in the middle of the day, which strikes me as unsettling. Ari, whose adult personality was crafted on the 4 train between Yorkville and Bronx Science, finds it comforting.
We were both taught to meditate on the divide between study and practice, a particularly formidable fissure in our chosen field. I wonder if our time would not be better spent reforming education, which I’d hope would allow us earlier intervention, greater reach, and better outcomes. Everyone I know in a professional context agrees in the abstract that education is the root and instrumentation of all democratization, but here we are. For my part, I’ve long since given up on persuading Remy not to buy toothpaste that is advertised as fluoride-free and now I just buy my own.
I disconnect my Ethernet cable, charger, and a third cable whose function I have yet to determine, and balance a notepad and pen over my laptop as I carry it into our meeting room for a last-minute call to discuss progress on a study with which I have been only tangentially involved. Ari follows closely behind and shuts the door as he enters. I dial in and introduce us, and then he presses the mute button.
“How was your weekend?”
“Okay. I missed you.” I blushed. He smiled. I traced my pen over some notes from a previous meeting, emboldening them.
I haven’t figured out how to tell Ari that I feel like I don’t have time—time to relax, to work more, to take a step back before I throw myself exclusively into anything. I can’t pin down the root of this feeling. Remy is 26, which comforts me because I feel like next to her I always have a perpetual make-up year, although she’s been honing her skills in graphic design for the better part of two decades and I am not yet qualified to buy milk.
I don’t like the look Brian gives us as we return to our desks. I don’t indulge him with a visible reaction and I don’t look back to see whether Ari has noticed.
“It’s so fucking dark in here. This is bleak.”
For Ari, I lift the curtain on the window closest to us—still too far away—but the difference is minimal. How it remains so dark in the office is beyond me, because outside the day is crisp, sunny, and windswept: an intense, feverish winter day when everything feels impermanent.
On a much warmer day some five months prior, I met him at the horizon. Ari had turned up I don’t even know when to claim an optimal viewing point with a faded blue and white picnic blanket. It took me ages to make my way through the crowd to meet him. I had worried about that—the abundance of people, that we might run into someone we knew—but in the moment the anonymity of a crowd was a comfort. He didn’t say anything when I joined him, just nodded somewhat shyly. I had been working alongside him daily for two years by then. He got to his feet as quickly as I’d ever seen him move, not releasing the hand he was holding, and pulled me up to stand next to him. I liked looking up and seeing his face illuminated. I wondered if he knew my middle name.
Some people are afraid of the office environment; I sympathize. Ari, who has spent a full five years of his life at a job that is clearly intended as a stepping-stone, once told me that the only thing worse than being in the office is being out in the field. I had just started with our group and I had no idea what he meant but I tried to be polite, an effort I now realize was lost on him.
(I was naïve. When he advertised the glut of field work, I asked: “Is that good or bad?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Extremely.”)
Brian, who is thirty-two and in the midst of a substantial career change, asks if we want lunch. Martha calls in a group order at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks south and I offer to help pick it up.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” Brian holds the door for me. I shrug.
“Don’t like the sun, Viv?” The sound of his laughter is unbelievably grating.
“I don’t like the wind.”
We are forced to walk single-file in front of the building to avoid bumping into the brightly clad police officers monitoring the construction site. As soon as we are out of step with one another, Brian places a hand lightly on the small of my back to guide me ahead of him. A cop with close-cropped, graying hair grins knowingly.
The restaurant is cramped enough that we’re in someone’s way no matter where we stand. A soda fountain is awkwardly situated behind the register and to the left, in an alcove that ends with the bathrooms. There are decorative hand fans pinned to the walls, which are otherwise sparsely decorated. The vaguely pink, mostly mauve wallpaper reminds me of the living room in the house where I grew up. Brian pays for the food and hands me the lighter bag.
“How long do you think you’ll be here?” I know what he means.
“Another year or two. I don’t know.”
“Good, good. Don’t end up like Ari,” he jokes, watching me closely. I don’t want to indulge him but I feel a bit indignant despite myself. Brian used to run a needle exchange in Roxbury. I couldn’t tell you what he did before that.
Martha had already set out plastic cutlery and napkins by the time we returned to the office. Martha was our group’s second health outcomes-oriented hire, and the first to have graduated from an Ivy League institution. Her father, she told me once after a holiday party ended abruptly, still worked at a discount chain store specific to her distant, unnamed hometown. She is an only child, but at one point was not.
Ari asked if Jack, formally known as Dr. John Porter III, was still pestering me for access to our databases. Jack, a colleague and proto-friend of our boss, had an extremely well documented thing for studies that had already been completed.
“His whole group has been breathing down my neck. They want to get started on their post-hoc analyses before our paper is even finished.”
“Just give it to him. Who cares? Aren’t we supposed to be democratizing access to this stuff?” Brian shrugged, underscoring his point, fiddling absently with a container of corn salsa.
Martha laughed. “If Jack is the first beneficiary of our great evening up, we might be failing.”
Brian shrugged again, unaffected, and turned back to his food.
Ari was smirking strangely. “Maybe you could talk to him, Bri. Wean him off his data parasitism, right?”
Before Brian could respond, Martha pushed a plate of chips and guacamole into the center of the table, loudly encouraging everyone to partake, but I saw his eyes narrow. I’m not a callous person, but I’m happy to see that feigned levity punctured. I excused myself when my phone buzzed, though I had no desire to answer it. I walked a few steps back to my desk and leaned rather heavily against the divider between my workstation and Martha’s.
“Hello?”
“Vivian?” My mother.
“Yes.”
“Did you get the letter I sent you? Vivian, what was that noise? Where are you?”
The phone slipped from my hand and fell into a recycling bin.
I don’t know if I reacted right away or if I waited to see what Ari would do because he had been there longer. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m saying the same things over and over. I try to stand after the first boom but in my haste I trip over my own work bag, stuffed with dried fruit and reading materials for my commute, and after my own thud I see fluorescent light fixtures shaking and flickering overhead.
On my walk to work, I saw a dead rat smushed face-down into the sidewalk just outside the bus shelter on the corner. My mother asked if we could stop fighting. Asks what I’m trying to fix. Asks what I think is broken. Remy was screaming. To be the object of desire is to be—brace yourself—fundamentally unknowable. Fireworks burst prematurely in my chest and fizzled. In the spring, I will be 25 and my brother will marry a trauma surgeon with perfect teeth. Over Labor Day weekend, Ari and I stood side by side, pressed up against the fence enclosing the boardwalk, and watched the harbor sparkle and flash together. He placed his hand heavily over mine. We both stared out at the water. In that moment I thought everything was so beautiful I could die there, or get married. Last week, an aimless Sunday morning run took me past the same spot, and in the severe daylight all I could see was litter and the dregs of a series of modest, noncommittal snowfalls that had disappointed both those who hated snow and those who craved a proper storm.
I think of infections, damage control, and triage. Everything innate is intransigent. At BU, my Bulgarian professor used the word “challenge” for the action of vaccines, because an inoculation is a trial.
My ears are ringing from the crash but I feel Brian’s tortured moans against my stomach, where his head landed, and with his left hand he grips the back of my knee so tightly I feel his sinewy arm shaking. It’s probably minutes before I realize he’s mouthing words into me that I can’t hear or comprehend. I pull his head up by handfuls of thick, wavy hair and hold his face in my hands as I try to rise but I know we’re trapped, and he hugs my legs together like a child and looks up at me, mouthing don’t go don’t go. We are both motherless. I rest my hands on his shoulders to keep them from wandering. I think of the burden of proof and hypothesis testing and Dr. Porter—Jack—trying to make something graphic and compelling of our hard work.
I’m numb when they pull me out, hands dirty, squinting against debris and light, and tears burn streaks of clean down my cheeks. I feel a tense negative pressure because someone is still struggling to hold my arms down against my sides well after I’m retrieved. Hot, urgent tears flush out potential pathogens. I can’t hear a thing but in my head I know I’m still screaming over the thunderous crash and the rubble is absorbing, deafening. My blurry forearms are scratched and bloodied and I struggle fitfully, loathe to be carried away. Midday sunlight leaves everything falsely saturated so that we’re not safe until we’re under the cover of the train station behind our crumpled framework.
The fake holiday had allayed my usually fraught commute and, instead of reading, I watched. There were birds chirping for the first time in months, forty-five degrees in mid-February Boston, and couples roamed the streets in sweaters and jeans. Light, fizzy and swaying. Off-duty professors sipped tea in a coffee shop. College students celebrated in the borrowed backyards of single-semester sublets, courting each other and themselves. Pinning their hopes on things that wouldn’t be there in the morning.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Haleigh Yaspan is a Master’s student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a graduate of Tufts University, where she studied English and biology. She grew up on Long Island, NY and currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband.
