The best sunsets she’s ever seen live outside the windows that reach from floor to ceiling along one wall of the lab. But as she stands in the kitchen on the opposite side of the building, reheating her last portion from the Indian buffet—the one down the street where she’s learned how to fit five small meals into one to-go container—she can only see the sunset as squares of tangerine light, reflections in the windows of the houses that pepper the hills. Some other grad students live in the hills, but why pay so much money when she’s going to spend all of her time here anyway?
Her dinner pops dramatically and she notes the arc of fresh splatter as she removes it from the microwave. She doesn’t bother wiping it up. The microwave’s interior already looks like it’s in a paintball tournament and losing to every team. No one bothers. The real lapses in etiquette—the ones that turn to lectures in lab meetings—are forgetting to order more pipette tips, using the last of the TBE buffer, leaving a plant out on your desk during a safety inspection. Anything that could stop the progress of science, whatever little part in it each of them might play.
Finishing her last bite, she drops her bowl into a dishwasher that someone else will eventually run. She never has. The lights click back on as she passes their motion sensors, the hallway vibrating with fluorescent light. In the brightness of the lab, neither Matteo nor Hanh look up, each engaged in their own tiny cities of tubes. Praveen doesn’t look up either, but she’s come to expect that. He’s hunched over, the hood of his sweatshirt protruding from his lab coat, large headphones conspicuously stretched across his ears.
He’s supposed to graduate in two months, but this has been true for at least a year. She can’t remember exactly when during that year this silent routine began, when he stopped eating lunch with everyone or joining her for coffee—or when they still grabbed coffee together but it was no longer the same, when it became a rushed event and she could see on his face that every sip was a lost moment, a missed opportunity to finish his experiments.
The timer on her lab bench beeps. Everyone but Praveen turns, briefly, to check whether the alarm is theirs, a forgotten experiment calling for attention. She shuts it off and, with freshly gloved hands, joins the silent motions of her labmates. Tubes snapping open, then closed, the oily swirls of the tiniest injections of liquid, pipette tips ejected against the plastic side of the waste bucket, clattering like dry rice in the bottom of a pot.
She sets another timer. Five minutes.
The sun has slipped below the San Francisco hills, which sit in relief to the still-rosy clouds, almost red from wildfire smoke, which she breathes in. They all do. The building recirculates outside air to vent out any harmful chemicals. They are rescued from the open bottles on their benches by inhaling someone’s car engine burning hundreds of miles away.
This time, no one turns when her timer chirps. She resets it after she repeats the same actions—which she will repeat again in another twenty minutes and then in another thirty, and maybe again tomorrow because all of this might not work. It didn’t yesterday, and a mild dejection had fallen over the rest of the day like a veil. But that was it, because despite all she gives this place, she can’t actually believe her work is worth anything.
With a confidence that can only be born from a lack of understanding, her parents tell people that she’s curing cancer. They aren’t that wrong in substance, only by a matter of scale, and in that respect, their error is incalculable. She also used to think she was doing something important, even if her goals weren’t that lofty, but such a hope would be embarrassing to admit. It would be unscientific. Because she has the data, from all of the other graduate students who’ve stood in sunless labs. Her experiments will fail and fail again, until she abandons the project for a less ambitious one, and then maybe, one day, she’ll succeed. Her name will be stamped at the top of a paper that she will write over countless coffee-drenched evenings, and it will come out a few years after she graduates, after she’s been asked to revise it and collect more data, only to be told it’s not enough again and again. Still, when it’s all done, she’ll feel proud for a moment, seeing her name hover above the paywall. And if she’s lucky, twelve other papers will cite it. Maybe some people will even read it too.
She looks across the aisle at Praveen, his face touched by the blue glow of his computer, which he leans toward, his spine bent like a flower just beginning to wilt. What are they working so hard for? There are the easy answers—passion, fascination—which are not completely untruthful. But there are also the unspeakable ones—glory, approval. Those still somehow seem better than the simplest answer: that objects in motion stay in motion. That they were only ever taught how to operate the gas pedal, never the breaks, and they continue to press down because this is what they’ve always done, what they assume they’re supposed to do.
Matteo leans over her bench to say that he and Hanh are going to have some of the ice cream and beers leftover from an event for the first-year grad students, whom the department still gives things, who have yet to see the sunset out the lab windows as a consolation prize. Over Matteo’s shoulder, she watches Praveen briefly lift his own timer before setting it back down—still too far away from the moment it will go off. Almost without realizing it, her mouth begins to open. Maybe all he needs is an invitation. But she knows this isn’t true. She says nothing and takes her timer with her back to the kitchen.
Hanh scoops pure white mounds into barely washed bowls. A rice grain swims along her ice cream’s melting edge, hardened and slightly orange. She thinks she recognizes the particular hue from the Indian buffet.
The three of them turn to the easiest subject of conversation, their work, how many hours they have left tonight. Hanh thinks about three, but this protocol works best with a shorter overnight incubation, so she’ll be back at seven tomorrow morning. Matteo is almost done with his lab work, but then he has to finish grading his students’ weekly quizzes.
She tries to generate a plausible estimate, but she has no idea how many hours she’ll be here, which is the longest answer of all.
People had warned her when she joined this lab, had shown her emails written by the professor they all nominally work for, sent to the whole lab to let them know he’d been disappointed not to see more people in on a Saturday. But she can’t even remember when in recent memory she saw the professor. He was in Belgium last she heard, but that was weeks ago. At least in her tenure, his presence has never been as tangible as an admonishing email. If he sent one now, it wouldn’t make any difference. She would still be here this evening, so would Praveen and Matteo and Hanh. So would all the grad students and postdocs whose shadows play along the lit windows of the other lab buildings below. Their worlds even brighter now as the houses in the hills begin to fall dark.
Her timer goes off, and she heads back towards the lab, silencing its trill, but only briefly before she will need to reset it. Before she will measure the next few years in little incubations, small periods she’ll just need to wait through, until the timer beeps again.
