Once or twice, or maybe a thousand times, it has crossed my mind that outwardly, our fake dating will look like real dating. Which means risking my professional independence onceagain. A blurring of lines between Lewis’s and my work, to the point that my achievements could be seen as his, which is far from ideal, but less bad than tanking my reputation altogether. Even if I don’t like putting myself back into this position, at least it would allow me to get the resources I need to continue with my research.
His question is surprisingly thoughtful, though, given that the optics would be worse for me than for him.
“It’s notthatuncommon,” I cite the counterargument I’ve used to rationalize myself out of my doubts. It’s the truth—from fellow students back in grad school, all the way up the hierarchy, academics date each other all the time. Probably because it’s the easiest way to find someone who understands the drive to ponder the tiniest and trickiest of questions, and the long hours needed to get there.
It doesn’t seem to be enough for Lewis though. “That’s not what I meant,” he says, shaking his head. So, heisworried for himself?
“The alternative would be much worse,” I point out. “I’d rather have people think you had something to do with any good piece of work I do than be seen as a liar. Remember that whole paragraph on directionality of replay you made me put into my discussion in the last paper? The one where I suggest using probabilistic classifiers in future research?”
His nod sends his hair toppling onto his forehead. “Yeah, that was an important point,” he concedes, but then catches himself. “Though may I remind you that the peer-review process—”
“… is anonymous, yes,” I finish. “I still know it was you. Anyway, that point? I can only do that future research if the grant I submitted works out, or if another lab takes me in and lets me work on my own projects. If word gets through and people doubt my integrity, I won’t be able to answer anything.”
I pause and wait for his rebuttal, but when it doesn’t come, I go on, “It’s not just about my integrity, though, but my professionalism in general. Day in, day out, it’s a balancing act. I try not to speak my mind too freely and avoid firm boundaries because then I’d have an attitude problem. But if I’m too quiet, I get passed over. Maybe if you were the one who’d slipped out a lie, it wouldn’t matter so much.” I shrug. “Boys can be boys, right? But if people learn I lied about this one thing, who’s to say I’m not equally dishonest in my research when it suits me? A change of labels in my data here, a little p-hacking there.”
When he wrinkles his forehead, no doubt thinking of the many fights we’ve had about whether I’m flashy or not, I quickly add, “I know you have your qualms with how I do my research, but I’d never do anything unscientific. But letting Vivienne know about my lie would absolutely harm my reputation, and I can’t risk that. Not when I’m waiting on the outcome of that huge grant I applied for, and not ever.”
Four years ago, we built an easy connection over email, which he then went on to destroy. Ever since I met him on the plane, his empathetic side has gleamed through the cracks of our conversation, and it’s that part of him I speak to, when I catch his gaze and say, “I know that what you took away from all our emails four years ago was something else, but you must remember how much my work means to me. Please. I can’t lose this now.”
Lewis stares back at me, and something shifts in the blue of his eyes, like maybe he’s actually contemplating my words. But then he breaks his gaze away. When he lifts a hand to push his hair off of his forehead, he presses his eyes shut for a moment, looking almost as exhausted as I feel. I know I’m probably the cause of his exhaustion, having chewed his ear off and kept him out of the first lecture of a summer school he traveled across an ocean for.
He turns away but stops himself before walking off and sighs. “I don’t think I can lie for you, Dr. Silberstein.”
As he ambles toward the heavy doors of the lecture theater, I call out, “Dr. North.”
He throws me a glance over his shoulder.
“You… you owe me one,” I remind him, though I know what I’m asking of him is nothing compared to the few hours I spent editing his abstract.
He pinches his lips. “I’ll think about it.”
It’s not the answer I was hoping for, but it’s not ano, either. I let out a long breath—maybe there’s still a chance he’ll turn around. My eyes flit to the large clock embedded into the paneling high on the wall. “I need to get started on the workshop materials.” I try to sound calm as I hook a thumb over my shoulder, but I know some of my desperation is seeping through. “I’ll be in one of the computer rooms. Find me there if you change your mind?”
Lewis gives me a curt nod before he disappears into the lecture theater.
A few hours later, I hack at my keyboard in panic as the clock ticks away at what has to be double its normal speed. How could I ever believe I’d get the workshop materials ready within a few hours? And why did I think Lewis would help me now, after everything that happened four years ago?
I should’ve known better—no matter how good he was at talking me through my panic, this man is not to be trusted. He seemed nice four years ago, too, when we started following each other on social media, reposting each other’s new publications and commenting on other groups’ new research findings. He seemed nice when we started emailing back and forth,sharing our struggles as newly minted postdocs and our hopes and dreams for our research.
We both thought we’d have it easier once we graduated, and we bonded over the many ways in which we didn’t. Lewis had just moved to a lab at Oxford, where he worked on a massive project, for which he had to coordinate between different, stubborn professors to make progress. I confided in him about all the extra work that got piled on me but not my male colleagues. Like organizing lab meetings and other social outings, checking in on all the internship and thesis students, even if I wasn’t the one supervising them, or presenting at internal conferences that weren’t worth putting on my CV, while being skipped over for prestigious talks.
But what made me truly look forward to eachpingof my inbox was how Lewis made me feel less lonely, when it had only been a year since my breakup with Jacob. I loved science more than anything else, but as the only postdoc in a small lab with a professor fully engaged in teaching, I barely had anybody to share my passion with. Our emails not only made me hopeful that self-absorbed Jacob was the exception to the rule of collaborative, well-meaning scientists, but also reassured me that I’d made the right decision in leaving him to go after my own future.
Lewis patched up my loneliness, until he excavated it even deeper.
For months, we exchanged long email threads discussing future directions in memory science and volleyed replies back and forth that culminated in sudden silence on his side. Then, a few weeks later, an opinion paper on a preprint server came out. It held the arguments I’d provided Lewis with over the course of our exchanges. He hadn’t copied my emails word for word, but half of my rationale was there, the references I’d suggested, the whole paper an echo of our conversation, except it only readNorth, Theodore L. on the author line, along with his professor’s name at the University of Oxford.
My name was nowhere in sight.
Postdoc life can be akin toThe Hunger Games(Karo’s words, not mine, but she has a point). In the few years after you graduate with a PhD, you have to publish incessantly, preferably in respected, high-impact journals, and build a list of good publications because those will land you the recognition needed to transition from underpaid, fixed-term contracts into a faculty position. Publications can make or break your career, because grant panels and hiring committees like to see papers in renowned journals and with a high citation score. Academia is full of people with great ideas, but those aren’t worth much if you can’t reel in the money to test whether those ideas actually work.
My dream of using computational models as a fine-grained template to uncover the fingerprints of memory could only come to fruition if I had the money to pay for all the research expenses, and didn’t need to worry about applying to new labs every year. It wouldn’t have cost Lewis anything to list me on that publication that carried half of my thoughts. Because, really, people got included in papers for much less than that. He used my thoughts, but not my name, and while his career skyrocketed as a result, mine was left behind. As attentive, understanding, and outraged on my behalf as he had seemed whenever I told him about the challenges I faced, he finally showed his true colors with that paper. Instead of becoming a companion in this lonely system, he treated me like everyone else: a rung on his ladder to success. Useful, until I wasn’t.
I waited for an email from him, for some kind of reasoning behind why he left me out of the paper, but my inbox stayed empty. Several months later, when I came upon the published paper in a prestigious journal, I raided the minibar of the hotelroom I was staying in and decided never to waste my energy and intelligence on collaborations with idiotic men again.
For the next four years, throughout long threads of arguments on social media and nitpicky peer reviews of each other’s papers, the only reminders of Lewis’s human side were the things he posted online to make himself look good, like public access to the data he collected and the monthly Q and As to mentor younger academics.
But then the flight happened, and the news about Jacob and Vivienne, and my panicked decision to nod along. For a moment, I thought the man who held my hand to slow down the chaos might help me this time around.
