Chapter Six
I blink at the spot in the third row where Lewis and Vivienne murmur something to each other, suddenly feeling too hot despite the blasting AC.
“What’s the issue, Doc?” someone pipes up. A guy in the first row who wears his hair tied into a thick knot at the back of his head.
The issue is rather obvious. My academic competitor has sat down next to my ex’s fiancée, in a perfect position to dish to her about the insane plan I concocted to remediate the misconception I should’ve cleared up when it first arose. My throat is heavy with humiliation.
“List learning is more of a semantic memory process, right?” someone else calls.
I clear my throat. “What?”
“The issue that you mentioned. I thought you wanted us to guess?” Same voice. It belongs to a girl with a purple-dyed undercut and a pink T-shirt that reads Babe with Power. She blows a bubble with her chewing gum, and as it pops, I snap back into myself.
Right.
I have a class to teach.
Behind my back, I pinch the soft flesh between my thumb and index finger.
“Correct,” I say, my voice less steady than I’d like it to be.
“Except for when we’re learning for vocabulary quizzes in school or trying to remember our grocery lists, a lot of our memories are formed as by-products, without intention.
Take today, the first day of this summer program. ”
And maybe the last for me, if Lewis tells Vivienne that her assumption about us was plain wrong.
That I lied to her face and have been lying ever since.
A glance tells me they’ve stopped talking to each other, and instead, Lewis is leaning forward, elbows on the table and crystalline eyes boring into mine, as if whatever I have to say is riveting.
Maybe he did change his mind?
I focus on the hope curling in my chest and clear my throat.
“Sure, you came here to gather new information about the brain. But throughout the day, you’ll pick up so much more: names of the people around you, the layout of this building.
The encounters you’ve had today. Your brain saves all these bits of information from your day-to-day life without any conscious effort. ”
Most students have their heads down, scribbling on paper or typing on their laptops, but I spot the bob of several heads nodding in agreement.
“The truth is, everyday life is much more complex than what we investigate in our carefully controlled experiments in the lab, and we need to bring them closer together. Because, after all, the memories you form throughout your life… They are what really makes you you, right? That’s where virtual reality and computer games come in, because they allow us to bring lifelike complexity into our experiments. ”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see students drawing forward, impatient to get started.
I clap my hands together. “What do you think, should we try out some code?”
“Do you have a moment?”
Lewis leans against the side of the instructor’s desk, where I’m getting out of my chair and packing up my bag in a very determined attempt to keep calm and not hope too hard that he might’ve changed his mind.
With the workshop over, chattering voices and shuffling students have replaced the sounds of scraping mouse wheels and key taps of the past two hours.
“Sure,” I answer, and slide my water bottle into my bag. I’m going for nonchalant, but then I realize that this is it—the moment that decides how the rest of the Sawyer’s, and my career, is going to go. The bottle falls with an ungracious thunk.
Lewis glances down at where his fingers are drumming a rhythm into the tabletop next to my laptop. “Your desktop is a mess,” he notes.
I continue closing the open applications on my laptop, before snapping it shut. “Are you here to criticize my work style or did you actually want to talk to me about something?”
“Vivienne asked if we had any food allergies or preferences. For tonight’s dinner.”
I don’t have any allergies, but as my boyfriend, he would know that I’m a vegetarian. But he’s just a colleague, and who knows what he told Vivienne. While I contemplate whether I’d eat meat to keep up the ruse, I peer at him, but his face betrays a whole lot of nothing.
I bite my lip. “What did you say to her?”
“No fish or meat for you.” Relief untangles right between my shoulder blades. When I don’t say anything, his eyes search over my face. “Right?”
Does that mean what I think it means? He could’ve told Vivienne to ask me herself if he really wanted out of this scheme.
I wave goodbye to the last students leaving the room before turning back to him. “How did you know?”
“Your meal on the plane.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s observant, not when it’s literally part of our job.
But so far, he’s only ever used his attention to detail to point out my shortcomings, not to learn more about me.
I busy myself with packing up my laptop and zipping my bag shut, hoping he won’t see the heat climbing to my cheeks.
“You didn’t tell Vivienne I lied,” I state, keeping my voice even. After our conversation this morning, I didn’t think he’d turn around at all, never mind so quickly. “What made you change your mind? You said you wouldn’t lie for me.”
“I said I wasn’t sure if I could,” he corrects with a glint in his eyes, but he keeps his reasons for agreeing to himself.
“And that I needed some time to think,” he adds, crossing the room to shut the door.
Then he pulls something out of his back pocket: a small journalist’s notepad with the stub of a pencil tucked into the metal loops at the top.
Perched against the door, he crosses his legs in front of him. I stare at his long fingers as he removes the pencil and flips through the pages. “You brought notes?”
“They help me think,” he says distractedly.
“What else is in there? A running list of arguments against fMRI research? Quotes from my papers that you found offense with?” I deepen my voice in imitation of his.
“How do you know that your effects are not driven by blood vasculature artifacts? Maybe you’re just measuring the throbbing of a big-ass vein. ”
He snorts. “I don’t generally tend to think about big throbbing veins, but no. It’s more for personal stuff, decisions, mind maps. Things I need to see laid out on the page.”
“Really? You journal?”
“Yes.” He sighs. “Essentially, I journal.” Finally at the page he was looking for, he glances up, as if to check if I’m listening. “I’ll be your boyfriend—fake boyfriend—under a few conditions.”
Air rushes out of my lungs. I haven’t been able to breathe this deeply since I arrived here. “Thank you, thank—”
“First,” he goes on, eyes shifting between his notes and me. “No espionage about projects we’re working on. Or any upcoming papers.”
I grimace at him. Funny request, since he was the one who piggybacked off of me with that paper four years ago, and not the other way around. I force myself to relax my jaw. He’s building a bridge here, and I don’t want to burn it down.
“Good luck finding anything.” I try to sound jovial. “You just said it yourself, my computer is a mess.”
He bites the inside of his cheek.
“Fine,” I say. “Consider it done. Though I’m still allowed to complain about past projects of yours, right?”
He ignores me. “Second, and this one worries me a bit more. We’ll need to exclude each other as potential reviewers from all future papers.
” A sigh escapes him. “Even if it’s fake, we’ll have a conflict of interest, since supposedly we’ll have a close social relationship that precludes an unbiased opinion. ”
“Did you just quote the reviewer guidelines?”
“I looked them up before I came here,” he explains. “Don’t look at me like that. We have to consider these things to every last detail.”
Is this another one of his hidden jabs at how much more detail-oriented I should be? Building bridges, building bridges, I remind myself in an attempt to let the comment slide. “Well, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m looking forward to you not being able to tell me what to do with my statistics anymore.”
“And here I thought I was helping you make the best out of your publications. Anyway, I also need your help, which brings me to my third and last point.”
“I’m all ears.”
He tucks his notepad into the back pocket of his chinos and pushes himself off the door. With hunched shoulders he wanders to the opposite wall and taps a hand on one of the tables, before he turns around to me. “Do you have any formal clothes? Here?”
Odd. “I brought the dress I wore at my sister’s wedding before coming here.”
“Your sister lives in Berlin? That’s why you were on that flight?” He squints at me, waiting for my nod, before he continues, “Wednesday evening—it’ll be my brother’s graduation. And I’d like you to come.”
“As your date?”
“As my girlfriend,” he clarifies.
Wow. Things must be bad with his family if he’s willing to pretend to be my boyfriend and risk his career in the process just so he doesn’t have to go to this graduation alone. But also, who am I to question it when he’s agreeing to help me out.
“So you decided to go, after all?”
“Let’s say… The decision was made for me,” he answers, cryptic and half-hearted, like it truly is a chore to see his family.
“Shouldn’t I know a little more about your family if I’m to act as your happy girlfriend?
” I make another attempt at puzzling out what can be so bad about them, but he doesn’t take the bait and just stands there with his cuffed shirtsleeves and muscular forearms, the unanswered question bothering me like an incomplete line of code.
I’m going to accept all of his conditions, of course.
It’s a no-brainer. But I’m also dying to find out what the deal with his family is—and with that defined body shape of his.
Between putting my research under the microscope and working on his own, when does he have time to work out?
He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. That I’m doing this.”
I rise to meet him at the windows, the nervous tone in his voice tapping into some unknown reserve of confidence within me. “It’s going to be fine,” I say. “And fun, maybe. And helpful for both of us.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
I force some cheer into my voice. “Well, I am. P-value smaller than 0.001 sure. Bonferroni-corrected sure. This Sawyer’s will be a blast, you wait and see.”
But doubt is etched into his features, mirroring the unease I feel deep inside.