Tension’s brewing. You can feel it; kids start sitting up straight in class, legs jiggling. Those who’ve kept their crushes under wraps all semester know it’s now or never. Put up or shut up. Lust and terror percolate like static in the rugs, anticipating gruesome discharge.
Funny being on this side of the electric fence. A decade ago, we were clomping around in Birkenstocks and touting our lice-infested lumberjack flannel, unkempt as vagabonds and reeking of patchouli. Now, I lecture to an audience of scowling nihilists, clean shaven and poisonously beautiful, hair a gel-sculpted tousle.
“Science is a textual pastiche, Dr. Bloom,” a girl recently informed me during class, “in the Jamesonian sense.”
Tough crowd. Post-everything. All theory, no source. Media-saturated, overtly sexed, inoperably gangsta. I see pink thongs and bejeweled midriffs where once were paint-splattered coveralls and scratchy, tattered sweaters. At some point hippies became hipsters, the latter more unapologetically retro than the former.
Which is all by way of saying I have aged.
The other post-docs are beginning to show their wear and tear. In my lab alone there are baldings and saggings (my own?) and a not-inconspicuous double-chin. I worry my eyes have lost their ping. Other hand, I think I’m better suited for 30 than 20. I can back up my opinions with facts!
Most of my work involves running between things. Stuffy, fluorescent-lit classroom, race across the frost-brittled quad to the dining commons and discuss the X-ray scattering results with Steph over “crazy alfredo,” drive to building C (the medical building) to retrieve samples, then to the lab with its empty Doritos bags and crumpled pages of The Onion used as paper towels (who started the myth that scientists wear lab coats?), the squalid cinderblock pen they call my office to grade papers and return emails, the gym, and back to the Hotel St. George before the kitchen closes.
Today it was my turn to pick up a cow’s brain. Really. Once a week, one of us from the lab has to drive way out to the slaughterhouse to retrieve a fresh sample. (We actually have a work wheel to keep track of whose turn it is.) Going from one place to the other, an ivory tower to a dungeon, is quite harrowing. Between the two is nothing but sprawling slabs of dead mustard weeds and razed cornfields cut by a long narrow road. Then, about two and a half hours later, what look like post-apocalyptic ruins begin to take shape out of the flatland – ramshackle factories and beaten chrome silos, motionless pea-green freight trains. The slaughterhouse itself is a wide, low, unpainted consortium of corrugated metal structures. The killshed is positioned so you can’t see the dreadful queue of conveyer-belted livestock from the road, but you can certainly smell the excoriated remains of their morning’s companions. And you can hear much too clearly the falsetto moos, the whining buzz of serrated metal through bone. One grad student passed out before stepping inside.
A portly man with liquid blue eyes and a yellow coat greets you in his office. You hand him the cooler, a regular red picnic cooler padded with toweled ice. He takes it to another room, returns it to you moments later, now about thirteen pounds heavier.
You drive back with a severed cow brain riding shotgun.
And you feel it there. You actually feel the thing sitting next to you, this eerie, not quite inanimate presence. Back at the lab, you scoop out the contents like a bulbous chunk of tofu into a tupperwarish plastic bowl filled with solution. Literally, a brain in a vat.
You cannot help wondering, What am I about to cut? Are these memories that I am holding under the knife – dreaming glances of a morning underbrush, the distant bleating of a newborn calf – that I am banishing to oblivion? Is there a self, an identity somehow inscribed into the little rivulets and convolutions of this slimy grey mass?
You slice the tissue. You ever-so-delicately peel the sample from its base – it’s like a tiny jellyfish now, or a slippery contact lens – and “paint” it to the surface of the papertab with a fine-needled brush. You play with the sample under the microscope. You weigh down the slide, you find your focus, you connect the pin to the cell body, you inject the dye, a fluorescent stain called “Lucifer Yellow” (CH/H2O), and you watch it glow like some magnificent galaxy deep in space, its long, root-shaped dendrites bifurcated and luminous.
All history is now historiography; soon it will be only histostoriographography, the history of historiography.
