Hold Me

  “It can wait.”

  “No, no.” Tina smiles. “This is way better than stressing myself out. Are you going to answer? How long have you been not-texting this physicist anyway?”

  “Some months,” I say vaguely, counting back.

  Tina, however, has detected blood in the water. Her eyebrow goes up at this evasiveness. “Some months, huh?” Her fingers tap on the kitchen counter. “Would that be a few months? A couple of months? A half-dozen months?”

  Crap. Busted.

  “Nineteen months.” I give her a brief glare, pick up my phone, and type.

  I didn’t realize that physicists cured cancer, I say. Isn’t that more of a medical thing?

  “You’ve been talking to him for nineteen months and you don’t know his name?”

  “It’s not like that.” I flip my phone around and hand it to Tina. “We’re talking about his grant proposal. It’s all totally science. I consult him about physics problems and in exchange, I console him about how much time he spends at work. There’s nothing to see here.”

  Nothing I know how to examine, that is.

  As I’m talking his reply appears. You know how all science is either physics or stamp-collecting?

  “Oh, he’s one of those.” Tina rolls her eyes.

  In grant proposals, A. continues, there are really only two choices. Either it’s MOAR CANCER, ARR, RADIATION FOR EVERYONE. Or you’re saving the world from those of us who irradiate everything.

  “Maria,” Tina says slowly, “are you flirting with this poor boy about radiation?”

  “Would I do that?”

  Actual Physicist has no idea the conversation is being observed, because he continues.

  And then there’s the supreme dunderheaded confidence required to write the requisite papers: MY COMPLETE FAILURE OF A PROJECT PROVIDES IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT SCIENTIFIC FAILURE, PART 19.

  “He’s cute,” Tina says. “I feel weird eavesdropping.” She hands my phone back to me.

  I shake my head. I don’t get the impression you fail often, Actual Physicist.

  No. But that just makes the pressure worse. Inevitable reversion to the mean = I’m cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

  “You’re not eavesdropping,” I say. “Seriously. Look. Reversion to the mean. We talk statistics.”

  She shakes her head. “Maria, that is not talking about statistics. That is using the language of statistics to talk about life. You know that’s not the same thing, right?”

  I wave my hand airily. “If I can’t lie to my best friend, who can I lie to?”

  “How long has this guy been low-key flirting with you using math?”

  I bite my lip. “Maybe...eighteen of the last nineteen months?”

  “And how long have you been flirting back?”

  “About the same.”

  “And he’s never asked your name? Never wanted to see a picture? Never suggested you webcam?”

  “He said his family is weird and kind of Googleable, and he prefers pseudonyms.”

  Tina looks at me, and I feel my cheeks heat.

  “And I’m fine not giving out personal information to—”

  “To someone who flirts with you for a year and a half?” She shakes her head. “Have you considered the possibility that he’s catfishing you?”

  “How?” I throw up my arms. “He hasn’t given me a name. Or a photo or a Facebook page. You can’t catfish someone if you never tell them anything.”

  Tina sighs.

  “Or are you thinking that he’s maybe not a man?” I ask this more pointedly.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Good,” I say. “Because I asked his pronouns when we first started chatting, and a, he didn’t think it was a weird question, and b, he said he/him. That’s good enough for me. If it turns out that reality is more complicated than that, I can cope with complicated.”

  “Fair enough.” She shakes her head apologetically. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have interrupted your dorky flirtation. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I stick out my tongue at her. “You can’t get hurt if you don’t know anything.”

  She raises one eyebrow. Neither of us believe that. But she doesn’t push the matter. “I’ll let you get back to it.”

  She leaves. The kitchen seems larger without her, and maybe a little colder. Yeah. I look back at my phone and feel a fluttering in my stomach. Shit.

  Sorry, I type slowly. My housemate caught me smiling at the phone, and she accused me of flirting with math.

  Oh, god. Why did I hit send? Why isn’t there a take-back button on this app? Flirting is one thing. Labeling my dorky flirtation as flirtation is another. The label strips the entire conversation of plausible deniability. Up until now, I could pretend. What, me? I just like math jokes.

  But I just made it real. Reality makes me vulnerable. My hands feel cold; I try not to stare at my screen, waiting for his response.

  Nonsense, A. types. My heart sinks. You weren’t flirting with math. You were flirting with statistics.

  I exhale slowly. That you… It feels very singular. Almost exclusionary. We would have been fine. You makes me feel like I’m all alone in this.

  Hell, maybe I am. I shake my head and try not to sound bothered. Hate to break it to you, but statistics are a form of math.

  Do we live in the days of Gauss? he writes back. What is the point of treating interdisciplinary study as a lesser endeavor if we don’t separate our disciplines?

  Here’s the thing: Admitting I’m flirting is a big step for me. I don’t want to be ignored. It hurts, like I’m being told that it’s just me. That I’m flirting, and he’s just handing out equations.

  But if it’s a big step for me, it probably is for him as well. If he doesn’t want to give what we do a label, fine.

  I exhale. I see. You’re a purist.

  I’m a physicist, he responds. I’m pure as the driven snow. But you can corrupt me with biology if you want.

  I stare at those words, my nose wrinkling. He doesn’t have to tell me his name. Or send a picture. Or friend me on Facebook. But I do have limits. He can’t flirt and pretend it’s only me doing it.

  Corrupt your own damned self, I suggest. The rest of us have work to do. I slap my phone down.

  7

  JAY

  November

  Rain is falling in slashing fits, and the backsplash against the pavement is soaking my ankles. Even though we’re high up in the Berkeley Hills, the clouds obscure any hint of a view. Beside me, Rachel, my postdoc, is swathed in a giant blue nylon raincoat, huddling under my umbrella. None of this helps. By the time we make it from the parking lot to the building a few hundred yards away, we’re soaked.

  The rain seemed like an annoyance down on campus; up here in the hills where the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is nestled, water lashes down with nothing to stop it.

  It’s six o’clock, and the clouds outside make the cement hallways gloomy. But Gabe’s office on the third floor—one he shares with a grad student and another postdoc—is warm and smells like something savory.

  I’m suddenly starving. Cold and starving.

  “Hey,” Gabriel greets me as I come in. “Thanks for coming by. I know you had to run after my practice job talk, and I appreciate your taking time to talk this through.”

  “Dude. It’s what I’m here for.” I set my umbrella outside the hall. “This is Rachel. I told you about her.”

  “Yeah.” Gabe reaches out and shakes her hand. “Rachel. You’re on the market next year, right?”

  Rachel shakes out her giant raincoat and nods. “I read your slides. And your paper.”

  Gabe nods. “Okay. So I was thinking that everyone keeps asking me about quantum coherence. And—”

  “Seriously?” says a voice behind us. “Gabe. I’m sitting right here.”

  I haven’t seen Maria Lopez in almost two months. I still recognize her voice. I feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as
I turn around.

  She’s seated in an oversized armchair, probably donated to the office when some previous occupant moved across country a decade ago. She’s wearing a skirt with sparkly patterns and a light blue blouse. There’s no evidence that she even knows about the rain outdoors; she’s dry, and her hair is blown perfectly straight.

  I bet the rain doesn’t dare fall on her. Gold hoop earrings sparkle in the fluorescent lights. The way she’s sitting makes me think she could sell that chair in any magazine.

  She has a pile of paper on her lap, and she’s frowning at me. At all of us.

  “What?” asks her brother.

  “First, they’re dripping wet. At least offer them… I don’t know, a towel or something.”

  Gabe looks at her with a frown. “I don’t have a towel. Do you, um…” He looks around the room wildly. “Do you want some Kleenex? Or a napkin?”

  Maria looks at me. I can tell she is thinking about the time we ran into each other out on the plaza. About the shit I said to her. Her jaw works. Then she sets her papers aside, stands, and pulls a black bag out from under a desk.

  “Here.” I hear the noise of a zipper; she brandishes a bright yellow towel. “Unused. I didn’t get to the gym today.”

  Of course Maria Lopez goes to the gym on a regular basis. I don’t say this.

  She holds it out to Rachel, pointedly not looking at me. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Maria, Gabe’s big sister.”

  Gabe makes a noise in his throat. “She’s my younger sister.”

  “And you’re shorter than me,” Maria says, “so suck it up, little brother.”

  Rachel takes it. “Thanks. You’re a real hoopy frood.” She wipes water off her face, and then hands it to me. For a second, I consider not using Maria’s towel. But umbrella or no, I’m drenched. I don’t say anything as I rub my hair dry.

  She takes the towel from me with thumb and forefinger when I hand it back, dropping it into a plastic grocery bag like it needs to be quarantined and disinfected. Apparently, I have cooties.

  “What’s your field?” Rachel asks Maria.

  “Actuarial math.” Maria gives Rachel a friendly smile. “This is not exactly my ballgame here, but I muddle along.”

  Rachel lights up. “Oh, yay! That means we have a chance for science-free conversation.”

  “Good luck.” Maria zips her gym bag and lets it fall to the floor with a thump. “Have you met my brother? Or this guy?”

  “I’m this guy?”

  Maria doesn’t skip a beat. “Have you met Professor Thalang?”

  I roll my eyes at her. “Are you in my quantum class?”

  “No.”

  “Then you aren’t going to call me Professor Thalang. That’s weird.”

  “You know what’s weird?” Rachel interjects. “I don’t know if you’re Professor Thalang or Professor na Thalang. I mean, I always figured it was the latter. But then it says Thalang group on our lab door…” She trails off. “God, that sounds really dumb. Sorry to interrupt.”

  I don’t really want to go into details right now, but I also don’t want to brush her off.

  “Both right,” I say after a pause. “Long story short. When my grandfather came to the US fifty years ago, immigration recorded Thalang as his last name, and na as a middle name. He thought it was funny, and besides, he didn’t expect to stay after he finished college, so he never bothered to change it. Now it’s a family joke. Na is legally my middle name, but actually it shouldn’t be.”

  I don’t look at Maria. Still, I can see her wrinkling her nose out of the corner of my eye.

  “You were born in the US?” She doesn’t wait for my answer. “Of course. I should have known your accent was a put on. The pretentiousness fits you.”

  There’s an uneasy silence, broken only by Gabe’s sigh.

  “Oh,” Rachel says with a determined smile. “That’s, um, really interesting, Jay. We can be non-middle-name twins. People think that Ramirez is my middle name all the time. But we’re getting distracted. We were going to go over Gabe’s job talk.”

  We start in on Gabe’s slides.

  The thing that surprises me is that Maria participates.

  “This should be r-squared,” she points out on the second slide, indicating one equation. And then, two slides later—“This should be h-bar here, unless you dropped a factor of two pi earlier.”

  I glance at her, this time for a little longer.

  She sees me looking at her. For a second, our eyes meet. The lights glint off the hoops in her ears, which are the brightest things in the room.

  “Don’t make anything of it,” she says with a half smile. “You’re not going to have to reevaluate your world order, Three Sigma. I’m mostly average. I just happen to be an equation proofreading savant.”

  It takes me a moment to remember why she’s calling me “Three Sigma”—that stupid conversation when we first met, when I implied that she wasn’t extraordinary enough to work with me.

  Gabe winces. The sarcasm in her voice cuts sharper than a diamond blade. “You’re more than that,” he mutters.

  “True,” Maria says brightly. “I’m also a towel service. And pizza delivery girl.”

  “Oh my god,” Rachel says. “Pizza. Is that what I’m smelling?”

  There is pizza. Apparently, Maria brought pizza for us.

  Halfway through, Gabe calls a short dinner break. We find paper towels. The pizza is mushroom and green pepper, which likely means that Gabe told Maria that I don’t like meat on pizza, and she was nice enough to comply.

  Maria being nice to me, even if in so limited a fashion, makes me feel like more of a dick than ever.

  Gabe takes a slice and sits on the desk. “Rachel, did I hear you promising to talk about nonscience stuff for fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We can do it! Go team!”

  Maria glances at me, as if she expects me to blame her for this development. “Don’t let me stop you,” Maria says. “Talk about whatever you want.”

  “No.” I sit down. “Please. We all know how important it is to be well-rounded. Come to think of it, Maria, I don’t remember where you are in grad school. Are you past the qualifying exam stage, or…?”

  She looks at her brother in annoyance. Then she looks back at me. “I’m a senior. My major is officially statistics and international relations, but I’m studying for actuarial exams.”

  There’s a long pause. I try to calculate her age. This involves me staring at her. Into her eyes. Medium brown, sparkling with a malicious humor, winged in black liquid lines.

  I swallow. “A senior.” My words come slowly. “As in, you don’t have a bachelor’s yet?” I look at her, then at her brother. “I didn’t realize there was that large an age difference between the two of you. What is that, nine years?”

  She flushes. “Three years. I’m twenty-four.”

  “I see.” I look up. “You’re just slow.”

  Rachel frowns and shakes her head. “Seriously? Why are you being so cold? Gabe, I work for him. You have to kick his ass.”

  Gabriel shrugs and looks at his sister, who shakes her head. “Maria can take care of herself. She’ll let me know if she needs to tap out.”

  “I had some stuff I wanted to do before I started university,” Maria says. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Trying to get your modeling career off the ground,” I guess. “I’m actually shocked that it failed.”

  Rachel blows out a breath. “Hey,” she says with a forced smile. “So speaking of none of my business, how long did it take you to get your PhD, Jay?”

  I let her change the subject. “Three and a half years.”

  Maria blinks. “Are you serious? I’m not sure you’re an actual human being.”

  “I’m human.” I fold my arms. “I’m just focused. Directed. Laser-like.”

  She purses her lips. “Laser-like.”

  “Yes.” I raise an eyebrow in her direction. “You know. My actions ten
d to be in phase with each other. I don’t dillydally all over the place.”

  “I wasn’t disagreeing.” She’s almost smirking. In fact, she looks amused. “I was just trying the idea on. Laser-like is actually a really appropriate description for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure.” She shrugs. “First, you’re an unnatural phenomenon.”

  I tilt my head. “Unnatural.” I consider this. “Sure. Civilization is unnatural in the first place.”

  “Second, you only manage to be as coherent as you are by dumping an abnormally large amount of energy into the system.”

  “His nickname at Harvard,” Gabe puts in, “was Negative Temperature.”

  I ignore this. “Okay,” I say to Maria. “Sure. I’ve had less favorable descriptions.”

  “Which,” Maria continues, “means that system-wise—what is it that laser stands for again?”

  “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” Rachel chimes in helpfully.

  She snaps her fingers. “Right. It means you end up in a near-perpetually excited state, and the only way you know how to deal with it is by stimulated emission.”

  Rachel’s mouth falls open a fraction. Gabe coughs into his fist. I look at Maria, feeling utterly blank. It’s not…entirely untrue. I do have hookups when I have the time, but…yes, stimulated emission is often easier and more effective.

  I’m surprised for a more basic reason. Maria knows what a laser is. And not just the sci-fi version of a laser beam. She knows how a laser works.

  Gabriel blows out a breath. “Burn.”

  Rachel slides lower in her chair. “Sick burn.”

  “Hey,” Maria says, with a shrug. “I’m not dissing stimulated emission.”

  I haven’t looked away from her. “Bullshit you aren’t.”

  “I’m not,” she says. “But you called me slow. What exactly was your course?”

  “Graduated college at twenty,” I say. “PhD by twenty-three. Tenure track position at twenty-five. And the department will recommend me for tenure by the time I’m thirty-one.”

  “So what’s the rush?” she asks me.

  I lick my lips.