Page 32 of Hold Me (Cyclone 2)

I’ve thrown my new grad students in the deep end of the pool—preparation, of course, for throwing them in the ocean—and I have to make sure they aren’t drowning.

“Uh,” says Gary as I look over at them. “Hi, Jay. I—uh—we have, uh, a homework set due in stat mech and it’s pretty complex, so, uh—”

“So you have a half-hour to talk about how the experiment went,” I say, pulling up a chair. I straddle it backward.

“Um.” Soo Yin looks at Gary. Gary looks at Soo Yin. “So… Um, maybe if we talk tomorrow…?”

“Then you’ll be able to stay up all night to redo the experiment and pretend you did it right the first time?”

Soo Yin exhales and looks away.

“People.” I fold my arms. “Don’t lie to me. You’re really bad at it. This is like walking into a kitchen with a puppy and finding trash all over the floor. ‘Who, me?’ doesn’t work.”

“We’re…um, not exactly sure what we did wrong. But we’ll figure it out.” Gary is as earnest as my hypothetical puppy.

“Sure. Of course you will.” I gesture to the whiteboard. “Because we’re going to do a post mortem right now.”

Soo Yin winces.

“Step one: stop feeling self-conscious about things not working. You want a PhD? Well, guess what. You’re going to be issued a wall, with instructions to beat your head against it for a few years. If you’re lucky, the wall will crack, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of walls. If you’re unlucky, your head will break, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of heads. Either way, we have to talk about failure. If you can’t get over your ego and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four times as long. You failed. Get used to it. Some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs came about because someone failed and figured out why. Don’t worry about failing. Worry about failing wrongly.”

Soo Yin nods, and slowly, they start explaining how they set up the ion trap. I listen. I nod. I tell them to stop and check when they hesitate.

I need a post mortem for myself. I need to figure out precisely how I fucked up so badly with Em—and fuck up I did.

I get up at one point to circle something on the whiteboard. I knew I was wrong even before now. But how did I end up so wrong?

As I listen to Soo Yin and Gary, I start making a list of mental reasons. I was mistaken; that’s all. Everyone makes mistakes, right? And it’s not like she was nice to me in response. It’s not all my fault. It was a series of snide remarks and shitty blunders on both sides, and we fucked up in equal measure.

That characterization doesn’t sit well. I break it down over dinner—alone—later that night. I assumed Maria didn’t know math because she was hot and dressed well. Worse—I assumed she was a judgy bitch because of the same. Was she perfect? No. But I started it, I continued it, and I made only a half-hearted effort to apologize. This situation may not be all my fault, but I’m lying if I pretend it’s less than about ninety-five percent.

This realization takes a few days to sink in, for me to really understand it. I wasn’t just wrong or mistaken. I apparently have the notion, rooted deep in my subconscious, that women who look nice aren’t real.

I know I’m coming close to the truth because it makes me squirmy. Even after I realized Em had a point, I had to fight to remember it.

If she has time to spend on her clothes…

Of course she video chats…

If she didn’t want to be judged on her appearance…

I’m four scientific generations into quantum mechanics. Even Einstein found quantum physics too strange for his tastes. He couldn’t get his head around basic tenets of the discipline that he called “spooky action at a distance” or “God playing dice.” I’m two scientific generations removed from Eric Llewellyn, who thinks “groovy, dude” is what people my age say.

Even Einstein messed up. He knew how the world worked, and when it didn’t fit his view, he dug his heels in. He became the ninety-year-old who couldn’t figure out the remote on the VCR.

The lesson I drew from this when I was young was that even brilliant minds can stall out if they let their brain get stuck on the way they think the universe works instead of examining the actual evidence. “Bad data; reject” is how scientists miss the existence of quarks.

The actual evidence is that if I can’t wrap my mind around my own failure, I’m fucked as a scientist. If I can’t wrap my mind around this, I don’t know what I’ll say if Em—if Maria—ever decides she wants to talk to me again.

That thought, on day four after discovering that Em is Maria, is what jars me loose from my moorings.

All this time, I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain myself to Maria. How to come up with an explanation for my actions that won’t be too incriminating. I’ve been trying to figure out how to save myself. To avoid just a little bit of blame.

But come on.

She came home. There was trash everywhere. And I was the puppy sitting in front of her, panting eagerly. Em’s not fucking stupid. She knows what the explanation is.

The explanation is that she was right in front of me the whole time and I didn’t see her. “I don’t think women are stupid per se; I reserve that judgment only for the women that engage in overt displays of socially constructed femininity” is an inherently wrong belief. It wasn’t a one-time mistake or an accident that I applied it to her.

It was a fundamental flaw.

All this time, I’ve been wondering if she’ll be able to get over what I did.

Wrong question. What I need to know is this: Will I?

* * *

On my way home that night, I drop into a shop. Behind the cones of incense and the specialty cards, there’s a display of handmade paper—delicate pieces with texture and fibers you can feel, sold by the sheet for almost as much money as an entire ream would cost from an office superstore.

I pick out three sheets of light brown paper and a matching envelope.

I go home.

I don’t message. I don’t email. I don’t call. All of those feel invasive. They have read receipts and time stamps. None of them feel right at the moment.

No; there’s only one thing that seems to fit.

I write Em a letter.

* * *

MARIA

* * *

There are some times when soup is not enough. For those times, I have my grandmother. After nursing complicated, broken feelings for days on end, disappearing for the weekend seems like a better and better idea.

Just getting on the BART makes me feel better, like I’m going some place where the revelations of the last week can’t touch me. A train ride and a bus transfer later, and I’m walking up to her apartment.

When I tell people that Nana is a Catholic Latina, they tend to take a certain view of her. They imagine her speaking only Spanish, answering to abuela, wearing a cross around her neck and spending her weekends at mass praying her Rosary. They also imagine her as an infinite source of tamales.

The truth is…not like that. Yes to the cross. Yes to mass on the weekends, and yes to the Rosary. But my dad’s mother was always abuela instead, and as to everything else? My grandparents got a divorce when she was in her twenties, and that was long enough ago that it still had a whiff of scandal.

Nana had been a stay-at-home mother up until that moment. She finished an undergraduate degree after the divorce was final and went to law school. Now she works for the City Attorney of San Francisco, and when I say she works, she works.

Standing in the hallway outside, I get a whiff that brings me back to my high school years—a hint of the powdery stuff that she sprinkles on her carpets to make them smell rain forest fresh, or whatever manufactured scent this is.

I don’t knock. She doesn’t expect me to, and if she’s working, she won’t appreciate the interruption. I get out my keys, and the door opens to reveal a maze of white cardboard evidence boxes.

“Nana?”

&nb

sp; No answer, but her heels are right by the door, so she’s here. I follow the trail she’s left behind—nylon stockings, colorful silk scarf, pieces of mail—until I find her on the couch. She’s still wearing the business casual outfit she wore to the office. She has a legal pad and a voice recorder—she’s old enough that she hasn’t adapted to the ubiquity of computers—and a white cardboard box in front of her. I could chart my high-school years by the case names on the boxes.

She doesn’t notice me entering. She doesn’t see me sorting the mail, tossing the junk, setting aside the power bill that she won’t put on Autopay because she doesn’t trust bank computers. She’s skimming, making notes, and occasionally speaking into her recorder. The only way that she’s let technology change her is that she now uses a tiny MP3 recorder to take dictation. She only switched to that because she stopped being able to buy cassette tapes in the grocery store.

I know better than to interrupt her when she’s busy. Instead, I go to the fridge and open it.

Moldy cheese. A withered apple. A round plastic tub that proclaims that it can’t believe it’s not butter. A carton of eggs. I open the latter; a single brown egg sits forlornly inside. I peek in the plastic tub, because I, too, do not believe it’s butter. I am correct. It holds two pieces of gross, dry pizza.

In other words, Nana has a case that is going to trial, and she hasn’t paid attention to anything around her for weeks.

She taps her recorder again. “Affidavit of David Caftan, white. File thirty-seven, box six. Pertinent facts: Contacted Infinity Housing on May 11, 2015, regarding the apartment listed in the paper. Was told the apartment was available, and Infinity made an appointment to show him the place.” She will be at this forever.

I slip back out the door and head down the street. If this case goes like her cases usually do, she’s going to live on apples and cheese, eaten hastily only when she remembers to look up from her work. I’ve tried to get her to take breaks for meals, but she even forgets about microwavable dinners.

It’s been a little less than four years since I left for college, but in that short space of time, Nana’s neighborhood has changed. The painted, ever-changing mural that used to face her building has been torn down and replaced with a glass-walled organic ice cream shop. The bodega down the street has turned into an upscale market.

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