A paper Lewis no doubt thinks isflashy.
My brain has been looping over the ways I could summarize this strange flight to her, yet all I get out when she picks up the phone is, “I ran intohim.”
“Who?”
The train rumbles onto the platform and when the doors open, I push my suitcase into a car that’s already occupied by a woman with a stroller and a man in a suit. I switch to our native German whenever I talk to my sister, though English terms for words spanning the scientific and academic realm remain pebbled throughout.
“Academic enemy number one,” I clarify. “The one I complain to you about, like, every other week. My reviewer two.”
The latter is probably the most useless descriptor to my nonacademic sister, who, unlike me, hasn’t gone through the peer-review process more than twenty times thus far. Whenever I submit papers for consideration to a journal, other experts in my field evaluate the quality of the work to judge whether it’s worthy of publication. There’s always one who errs a little too far on the side of nitpicky and rude, and although the reviews are anonymous, I know that in the review process of my last paper it was Dr. North—Lewis—who pointed out all the shortcomings with an extra pizzazz of snark. Sometimes, the words “uninspired and lacking any substantial contribution to the field” still echo through my dreams at night.
And that’s not even the worst of what he did.
His snotty review comments are just the cherry on top of the pie. The base is a chunky layer of anger and resentment that formed after he failed to credit me on a paper I helped him with four years ago.
“Oh. That guy!” My sister’s voice grounds me in ways onlyfew other things can. A neat line of code, an empty lane in the swimming pool, a warm, perfectly pressured shower after a long day in the lab. I saw her this morning, but it feels like a lifetime ago. The turbulence has shaken up something in me, and meeting Lewis has, too. “What was his name again? Theodore… West?”
“North,” I say before she rattles off any other cardinal points. “Anyway, we sat next to each other on the flight.”
“Oooh,” Karo coos right as I hear something clanging in the background. “Goddammit. I’m kind of busy packing. But I can talk to you while I finish.”
“When’s your flight?”
“Tomorrow morning. And I can’t find Lennart’s stupid sleeping bag. Anyway, go on, I’m listening.”
“Well, I had to sit next to him, for seven hours. Ended up helping him with his abstract, even though I probably shouldn’t have, with how he made my work hell these past months. Or years, really.”
“You work too much,” is all my sister has to say about that. She’s right, but how else am I going to solve the puzzle—or at least a tiny piece of it—of how our memory works? I’ve been sifting through the pieces for so many years that I’m not going to stop now. Even if it means moving every two years, skipping dates because I had a breakthrough in my analysis, and taking my laptop with me wherever I go. She knows why it’s so important to me.
The air train pulls into the next terminal. I squeeze into a corner of the car as a family with three blond children gets on, and I watch the youngest of the kids drive his palm-size toy car up and down a metal pole, over my knee and his brother’s back.
“Noton people, Damian.” His mother makes a desperate grab for his T-shirt.
I cup a hand around the mic of my phone to shield off their voices, pressing the phone closer to my ear, to hear Karo ask, “What’s he like in person?”
Lewis’s annoyingly attractive face pops up before my eyes, while the feeling of his hand between mine ghosts over my somatosensory cortex. I push them aside. “As expected.”
It’s a lie so blatant that I’m happy the older kid in the family decides to rip the car out of his brother’s hands. Damian’s ensuing screech and the scolding by their mother makes it impossible to carry on with the conversation, so I tell Karo to call me when she’s landed in California for her honeymoon before we hang up.
Hours later, as I ride the train into the city, drag my suitcase through Penn Station and onto the subway uptown, my cheeks still heat up over Lewis’s unexpected kindness, when he was just a stranger on a transatlantic flight.
I knew Dr. Theodore L. North and I were bound to meet at some point, but I’d never thought it would happen like this. In a lecture hall maybe, in a symposium at the Sawyer’s, where we’d argue about science and exchange a tense handshake after, glad to go our separate ways. Not on an airplane, where panic made me frazzled and he was the only one with the instruction manual to slow my racing heart.
I’m not sure what’s more disconcerting: that I’d let someone in in the first place, or that it was Lewis who’d pulled down my walls with patience and empathy, making me question why I didn’t open up more often. He listened and cared, coaxed me into breathing normally. Even his voice, warm and deep, was hard to reconcile with the clipped tone in his emails.
He wasnice.
And I don’t know what to make of that.
Chapter Three
My drive to understand human memory goes all the way back to a ski trip my family went on during my senior year of high school, when a snowboarder drove into Karo. Although her concussion was minor and she was otherwise fine enough to be released from the hospital after a few days, her memory got wonky. We would sit with her and recount the accident, but her memory reset whenever we left the hospital room. I’d get back with a glass of water, a bag of chips, or after a visit to the bathroom, and she’d be confused about who I was and why she was stuck in a hospital bed. It was scary, disconcerting, and worrisome—until I started looking into it back home, on the bulky desktop computer we shared as a family.
Googling concussions brought me to amnesia, to a structure in the brain called the hippocampus. I didn’t get half of what I was reading, but I was eager to understand everything, even after Karo recovered. So instead of studying computer science in college, like I’d planned to, I applied for psychology with a minor in computer science. Undergrad taught me that despite decades of advances in uncovering the mechanisms ofthe brain, we still couldn’t draw clear conclusions about how any of these structuresreallyworked. More studies were needed. Neuroscience was lagging behind the older sciences like physics and chemistry and it didn’t have the clarity of medicine. As a species we’d been on the moon, but we didn’t understand the tiny universe right inside our skulls. Over and over again, I read about how future research should study this and examine that, and I decided then that I would be the one to fill these gaps in knowledge. At this point, Karo had long recovered from her temporary amnesia, but I knew there were countless people who weren’t as lucky.
Helping those people became my objective. To get there, I studied harder, went for a semester abroad to Edinburgh, landed a summer placement in Denmark, and finally asked two professors to write me outstanding recommendation letters, which got me an international grant for grad school in the States. Now, my battered suitcase carries stickers of all my stops from the past decade: six years of grad school at Columbia, a postdoc in Zurich for eighteen months, then a year in Singapore, six months at my old lab in Denmark, a year in Phoenix, and then another in the Netherlands.
Thanks to the unstable funding academia is based on, I’ve completed more international moves than first dates. It’s not just that dating is hard, but even friendships are hard to build if your time in a place has a clear expiration date from the get-go, determined by the local funding agency or the fixed-term contract of your university. Add to that a research question so compelling that it blurs the boundaries of my workday and consumes my weekends more often than not, and maintaining those relationships becomes almost impossible. The few friendships I’ve managed to sustain are with other researchers—those I can count on running into at various conferences throughout the year, those who understand what it’s like.
