Flux, chapter 18
Chapter 18: Flux Divergence
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⬅️ Previous chapter
January, 2010
“Hang on tight.” Grace and Hélène twist and fly together to Svalbard, Norway. Via Google Earth on Grace’s laptop.
“It’s so small,” Hélène says with quiet reverence.
“Right? How is there space for all those reindeer and polar bears?” Grace toggles a new feature. “Look. You can see how it’s changed since 1984.”
Transfixed, they watch the timelapse retreat of white. A raunchy satellite striptease erases ice and snow to expose buff, barren crags.
Hélène plays the timelapse again and again.
Capturing an entire planet on a laptop screen feels both triumphant and wrong. Grace remembers Dr. CJ’s rapturous stories of impossible, full immersion treks over windswept tundra to check instruments and drill ice cores. He threw his vulnerable human body into demanding, physical work with real materials. Maybe the distancing and abstraction of a tool like Google Earth is more problem than solution.
“Does it seem . . . too easy?” Grace asks.
Hélène shrugs. “It’s cool.” She replays the timelapse.
Barbara stands up from behind her laptop. “I’m getting coffee. You want?”
“Sure, thanks,” Grace says.
She lingers at the door. “You’ll . . . still be here for a while?”
Where else would Grace be at 4:15 on a Tuesday? “I’ll walk Hélène out in a few, but otherwise, yeah. Why?”
“Okay, see you then.”
Hélène looks up. “I decided not to do the sea ice experiment. I’m going to study plants. How they communicate. Or how music helps ‘em grow. Or something.”
Grace leans against a work bench, reliving the familiar anxiety in the run-up to a science fair. The last thing she wants is to pressure Hélène. Her own father’s expectations nearly crushed her. “The fair is in two months, right? Think you can get enough data and do the analysis in that time?”
Hélène pulls a spiral notebook out of her backpack and opens it to a page of doodles and scribbled notes. “I thought of this last night. Three identical pots, each planted with a seed like, maybe a kidney bean. One gets nothing. One gets classical music. And one gets heavy metal. They each get the same amount of water and sunlight. I measure and compare their growth.”
Grace ticks through the experiment design. Hypothesis, independent and dependent variables, control, procedure—check, check, check, and check. “Could work, yeah. Honestly, whatever you do will be cool. And remember . . .” She wants to tell her that none of this defines her. There will be other fairs, other contests. Her self-worth isn’t tied to a science fair medal. But that’s all too over the top. Hélène’s waiting expectantly. “Remember . . . to measure and record the amount each time you water them. How are you going to set up the music so they don’t overhear the others?”
When Grace returns from walking Hélène out, Barbara stands. She docks herself against the counter’s edge in an awkward lean that feels rehearsed.
“I have news . . .I hope you’ll be happy for me. You’ve been an awesome mentor.”
Grace tenses. “You’re pregnant. I knew it. All the sneaking around—”
“What? No.” Barbara’s laugh seems to increase her nervousness. “Brett and I aren’t even sure we want kids.” She shakes her head. “That’s crazy. Did you really think that?”
“Whatever. Just tell me. I don’t like games.”
“Okay.” Barbara flips her hair, smooths her eyebrows. Then she turns away to straighten a stack of papers on the bench.
“Geez, what is it? I don’t have much time.”
“Grace, I . . .” She straightens the papers again.
“What happened at Warbird? Did the equipment freeze? Could you get the water samples? I didn’t see the data from your last—”
“Stop. You’re making this really hard.” Barbara turns back, looking adrift. She grips the edge of the bench like a life raft.
“I am? What is up, Barbara? I’ve never seen you like this.” Cancer? No, she said it’s something happy.
Barbara resumes her bench lean and fixes her gold-brown eyes on Grace. Now there’s fierce pride in her expression. “They offered me the tenure-track position. They called this morning.”
“Oh, wow. That’s great for you. Why didn’t you tell me you were applying? I could’ve written a reference.” When Barbara doesn’t reply, she adds, “I’ll admit, I am surprised.” She’s way too green to be hired by a research university. Maybe she’s going to a small, liberal-arts college?
“Of course you are.” Her tone is oddly defensive. “The committee said they like that I bring my full self to my work.”
Oh, it’s definitely a small college. Community college? No, they don’t do tenure. “Whatever that means, I’m happy for you. Really.”
“I’m not in this just to make a living. I’m here to make a difference.”
“That would make a great motivational poster.” But Barbara’s not in the mood for humor.
“I can’t compartmentalize like you do, Grace. I have to be a whole person. I can’t choke off my emotions, my instincts, in the name of—”
Grace raises a hand. “Look, it’s great. Let’s leave it there. No need to attack me. After all I’ve done for . . .” She stops. How did this go so sideways? “Where are you headed?”
Barbara blinks and draws a breath. She steps away from her lean on the bench to face Grace like a prize fighter, tension coming off her in waves. “Here, Grace. It’s here.”
“But that’s not—”
“They’re announcing it tomorrow. I told them I wanted you to know now, since . . . Well, all your stuff around not being interviewed.”
Roaring thunder fills Grace’s head. Her skin flames. “Get out.” She sweeps a pencil holder off her bench and stalks to the far wall, blinded by rage. She spins. “Why are you still here? I said, leave.”
“Grace—” Barbara holds up her hands as if to parry a wild animal. “What are you—”
“Get OUT!” Grace rushes at Barbara, focused on her glossy hair. She will pull it all out by the roots. “You manipulating, lying, two-faced BITCH!”
Barbara dodges, lurches sideways. A stool clangs to the floor. “Fuck, Grace. You’re nuts.”
Grace leans against a low bookcase, panting. “You played me for weeks. You stole my work and passed it off as your own.” She sounds throaty, unrecognizable, like a serial killer.
“I would never do that.” Barbara backs to a wall and sidles along it, hands out, eyeing escape. “I made certain to give full credit.”
“Oh, you gave credit? My ass. You were nobody. I took you in as a favor to your dad. Taught you everything—”
“Bullshit. You know I’m way overqualified for the scut work I’m doing.” Barbara peels her body off the wall and stands, swaying slightly from foot to foot.
“You insinuated yourself into my life, stole my work—”
“You made me co-PI, remember?”
Grace rubs her forehead with both hands, then rakes it, drawing blood. “You asked me how you could help while my mother is . . . dying. She’s dying and this is what you pull?”
“That’s a cheap shot. It was all your choice. Nobody made you do anything.”
“I trusted you. Thought you were on my side.”
“What side? I’m over here advancing my career, like anyone else. Like you.”
Grace hefts a stapler. One shot and she goes down. “I taught you everything you know.” She hurls it. Barbara ducks to one side. The stapler shoots past and crashes into the framed diploma on the far wall. Broken glass tinkles down.
“Geez, Grace.” Barbara reaches out to snatch her laptop. She holds it against her chest like a shield. “I never expected you to lose it like this. But I should’ve. You’re so completely self-absorbed, wrapped up in your problems.”
“Holy shit, look who’s talking. At least I never stabbed my mentor in the back.”
“Yeah, sleeping with them is more your style.” Barbara’s face flushes deep red. “Sorry, that was low. I really was hoping we could part on good terms.”
“In what world? You stole my work, set yourself up on my sites, now what do you need me for?”
“Good question.” Barbara flips her hair. “If I’m being honest, I’m relieved that it came to this. It’s exhausting listening to you complain and whine all the time. You’re so negative. You’re . . . too much.”
“You fucking whore!” Grace lunges at her, but Barbara darts away to the door.
“Get help, Grace,” is her parting shot behind the slam.
Grace’s body is manic with rage. She shakes her limbs like a rabbit escaped from a hawk. What just happened? How did she not see this coming? She can’t possibly finish out the semester now. She can’t stay here one more day. What is wrong with her?
She paces breathless circles around her lab. Touches every bench, every instrument, shelf, book, stool, table, machine, computer, binder. All of it bought with her money and placed by her hands. She built this. Groveled for funding, made promises, shopped catalogues, ordered, assembled, amassed, arranged. And for what?
She stops at one of the three windows. As visiting faculty, she rates only a parking-lot view. The senior faculty overlook the forest ravine. She scoffs at her pride. She’s never had a lab with windows and these don’t even open. The afternoon glare burns her eyes.
She paces and paces in a gyre of anger. This room is everything and beyond it, no world. She is caged. Her pacing is a ritual dance about an abyss. A black hole where her future was.
As she passes, she begins to push things off benches, off tables, off shelves. Instruments clatter to the floor. Glass beakers shatter. She stoops to unplug the printer and heaves it from her like a boxy plastic shotput. It clangs off a stool and bounces to the floor with a satisfying crunch. She topples every stool, shoves every monitor, sweeps every book and binder and instrument off every shelf. In a blind frenzy, she stomps glass, kicks metal, tears posters from walls, pages from books.
A raving cyclone, she curses and bellows and screams her throat bare, heart hateful, brain brittle, skin singed. And bashes on, liberating every mute, defenseless object in the airless room until—
Sweaty and spent, she slides to the floor to sit and survey her undoing and wish for a lit match.
The room is full of quiet. Silence and the exhausted sun of a January afternoon.
Out in the hall, she works fingernails between her Evans Lab nameplate and the wall. A brief, feverish struggle yields only three bloodied fingernails. She wades back into the maelstrom to extract a screwdriver. She’ll deface it if she can’t free it. But it pops off after two jabs and clatters to the floor. She pockets it, her sight blurred by hot tears.
She follows her buzzing beehive body to the empty faculty lounge. She crams the last three brownies in her mouth and chases them with hours-old coffee. The burnt bitterness co-signs her mood. What now?
Her boots carry her into the dean’s office. Joan is away and his door is nearly closed, but she knocks and enters without waiting for a response.
He’s annoyed. Good.
“I figured something out,” she says.
“Make it quick. I’ve got dinner with the provost.”
Dark energy courses through her. Sitting is impossible. She must move. “When Adam and Eve ate the apple, they changed the human project.” She doesn’t bother to look at him.
“Grace, I—”
“It wasn’t the apple, no, that was pure curiosity and I’ll always be on the side of curiosity.”
“Make an appointment with Joan. Tomorrow—”
She paces in front of his desk. “One of them decided—we both know who—that now, the special purpose, the why, for human beings is this: Here’s a unique, fully functioning, complex, creative system called Earth. Your home. My gift to you. Feel free to adapt and find your place; then move on to conquer lands and people; exploit every animal, mineral, plant, and water body you encounter; invent new chemicals never imagined—”
“That’s enough. I have work to do—”
She punctuates her points by pounding her fist into her palm. “Burn, dig, crush, pulverize, bury, excavate, enslave, crack and break, desiccate, flood—”
“Stop. This is—”
“Hear me out. Build power plants to burn the guts of shattered mountains—”
He’s about to rise. “No, that’s enough—”
“Nearly there. Invent a new kind of power plant that uses radioactive fuel with a half-life in the six figures—”
“Stop. Really, I—”
“Let me finish. And do all that at an ever-accelerating rate with certainty of entitlement and a fervent belief in your superiority. Right?” She stops pacing and stands, hands on hips, staring at him.
He pushes his glasses up with an index finger and blinks. “And this . . . this nonsense is what you came here to tell me?”
“That? No, that’s just a theory I’m working on.”
He leans back in his chair and sighs. “What then? I’m busy.”
“I quit.”
He shakes his head. His expression has shifted from annoyance to ice. “Your contract is through June.”
“So sue me.”
He leans forward on his elbows and steeples his fingers. He stares at her scuffed, cracked boots. “You’re . . . under tremendous pressure right now. I can offer temporary leave for . . . family matters, but—”
“Nope. I’m done. It’s really that simple.” She’s tired of standing but can’t possibly sit. She fingers the key in her pocket.
“This . . . this isn’t like you, Grace. Take a day. You don’t want to regret. . .”
When he sees the state of her lab, will he say that’s not like her? No. He’ll press charges. “You don’t know me, Ian.”
His eyes widen. She’s never once addressed him by his first name. “I can’t let you throw away such a promising career. This is not the time to make important life decisions.”
“Setting aside what you will or won’t allow me to do, I have to ask, what do you know? Sitting here in your paneled office, fronting for power and privilege, promoting sycophants and stringing me along with empty promises. My research—”
He stands, all bluster and puffery. She forges on, fueled by the fish-gaping mouth in his reddened face. Damn, burning bridges is better than sex.
“I thought my research was an existential threat to the status quo, but you know what?”
“That’s enough.” He moves around the desk toward her. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Go home—”
“My research—all of our work here—is nothing but window dressing. It’s—”
“Do I have to call Security?”
“It’s a pinkie Band-Aid on a decapitation. On a disemboweled, dismembered—”
“Joanie,” he calls to his admin.
“Have a nice life, Ian.” Grace dodges a surprised Joan on her way out of the dean’s suite.
She pushes through the front doors. The finality of it. The frigid air is a body blow. Her coat is back in the lab, sacrificed to her old, dead life. Stunned, confused by cold, she freezes. What now? With closed eyes, she feels more than hears the stream in its winter ravine. Fellow beleaguered sufferer.
She surrenders to the watery summons to slip and stumble down the bank, treacherous with icy duff.
Ice edges muffle the stream’s song to a mumble, a suggestion. But she hears it. With a whispered Yes, she pulls the key from her pocket and turns it over in her hand. Soft, hot tears fall into her bare cupped palms. She turns the key over and over until it’s coated with her grief. Then she kisses it and hurls it into the stream. For the briefest moment, her feet lift and she is free.
Next chapter ➡️
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Holy shit! A personal fantasy lived vicariously through Grace. How will we be able to wait for chapter 19?!
Shit! I didn't see that coming!!