Page 42 of Cava with My Colleague

He shakes his head. “The screen cracked a couple of weeks ago and it’s on back order. We’re definitely going to complain, but . . .”

But there’s nothing we can do right now.

Carlos takes a step closer. “You know the material. You’ve read this a hundred times. A thousand times.”

“I know.”

His eyes bounce back and forth between mine. “I’m going to go back out there and keep trying, okay?”

I nod, and as the door is swinging closed I remember that Rebecca will be in the audience today.

The presentation is already set up on the slides behind me when I walk out. The room is bigger than I remembered from the site visit—the chairs extend farther back, the lighting is brighter, the ceiling higher. All of it conspires to make me feel very small at the podium.

I find a point above the audience’s heads and fix my eyes there. Don’t look at the faces. Don’t look at Rebecca in the fourth row. Don’t look at Carlos to my left, steady and unreadable as always.

Just get through it.

“Good afternoon,” I begin, and my voice sounds like someone doing an impression of me—technically correct, no warmth at all. “Thank you all for attending today’s presentation on advances in hair loss prevention for oncology patients.”

Carlos translates to Spanish. I click to the next slide.

The opening section—the one we spent three training sessions making human—comes out of my mouth like a technical report. I know it’s happening. I can hear myself doing it, the sentences too measured, the pauses in the wrong places. Like I’m reading terms and conditions out loud.

Start with a story, Carlos had said. Show them why it matters before you show them how it works.

I start with methodology instead. It’s where my brain goes when I’m frightened—into the data, into the numbers, into the things I know for certain. Facts don’t require me to be present. Facts just sit there.

“The methodology employed a double-blind randomized controlled design with a placebo arm consisting of⁠—”

In the third row, someone looks at their phone. I see it in my peripheral vision and don’t let myself register it.

Five minutes in, I say something I shouldn’t. A statistical model we cut—one of the original seventeen slides Carlos made me remove—comes out of my mouth before I can stop it. I feel the mistake leave my body before I’ve consciously recognized what I’ve done.

I look at Carlos. Just for a fraction of a second.

His face doesn’t change. He keeps translating. But I know he heard it.

I try to recover. “As I was saying—the results showed a significant decrease in hair loss—” But I’ve already said this. I’m circling back over material I covered three minutes ago, and I know it, and I can’t stop doing it. The thread of the presentation is somewhere ahead of me and I can’t find it.

“The patient satisfaction scores—” I stop. Click forward. Back. Forward two.

Where am I?

“Sorry,” I say, too quietly for the microphone. I find the slide. I keep going. “Quality-of-life improvements were measured using the validated FACT-B scale⁠—”

I’m speeding up. I can feel it happening, the sentences compressing, the slide clicking faster than Carlos can translate. Some distant professional part of my brain is observing all of this with horror. The rest of me is just trying to outrun the thing that’s coming.

I don’t outrun it.

Mid-sentence—something about confidence intervals—my mind goes completely white.

Not blank. White. Like a light too bright to look at. I open my mouth and nothing comes out and the slide behind me just sits there, and I hear the silence in the room shift from polite attention to something else entirely.

One second. Two.

Carlos’s voice fills the space. Smooth, professional, elaborating in Spanish on something I was apparently trying to say. I hear him but I can’t attach the words to meaning. I’m standing at the podium with my mouth still open and my hand still on the clicker and my mind still white.

The patient testimonials are on the next slide. The photographs. Maria, fifty-three, two years in remission. The part we were supposed to make human.