Chapter Two #2
The Sawyer’s gets hosted by a different university every year, with topics varying according to the location.
In my more than ten years of studying and then working as an academic, the Sawyer’s has edged around my research interest, with topics that were adjacent but never close enough to my own focus to warrant an application.
So when the email announcing a seminar on the neuroscience of memory as one of this summer’s topics landed in my inbox before Christmas, it was like a dream come true.
I had to close and open it twice, but when I finally believed my eyes, they registered the catch—Jacob was organizing it.
It set up a whole new cycle of rereading the email and hoping I’d gotten something wrong.
Because as much as I wanted to avoid Jacob, I knew I had to risk a shot at one of the limited spaces.
A talk at the Sawyer’s meant new ideas and having all these high-profile scientists from my field to network with. I couldn’t pass it by.
As I rifle through my bag for eye drops, then lip balm, I try to remind myself of the resolve I felt when first applying.
I yank the scrunchie out of my hair and pile my curls into a fresh bun, giving myself a little pep talk along the way.
It’s not that I’ve never dealt with asshole colleagues in my life, it’s just that they’ve never been able to push all my buttons the way he does.
Back in our row, as I squeeze past him, Lewis hovers his hand over my shoulder, stress written all over his face.
“What?” When I scowl at him, his gaze darts away.
“I could actually use some help,” he admits with a sigh. “Your help.”
Huh. So much for laser focus.
“You’re not afraid it will end up being too flashy?”
He frowns, as if those weren’t literally the words he used to describe my work in his last review. Yet another quip I try to breathe through.
“As long as it’s within the word limit,” he tells me.
“Can I quote you on that? Print it out and hang it up in my office?”
He glares at me. “Will you help me or not?”
The satisfaction that he needs my help is almost enough to make me say yes. But not quite. No way am I going to let him take advantage of me again. “You didn’t have the decency to credit me when I helped you back then,” I point out, narrowing my eyes.
His mouth ties into a dissatisfied knot. “Do you want to be on the abstract?”
It needles me how the same person who just talked me through my panic can say this so carelessly, as if he’s joking about his action that brought on our rivalry.
Even if being credited on a conference abstract for the minuscule help of cutting down on words is laughable, he’s failed to credit me for my work before.
“No. But—” As I sit down, different options shoot through my head.
Access to the data of that paper he published last spring, a truce on social media, a formal apology for what he did.
But the truth is, I barely have enough time to analyze the data I’ve been collecting, and as annoying as our public discussions are, they put me and my papers on people’s radar.
As for the apology? He just showed how little he cares about his actions four years ago, so it’s highly unlikely I’d get an apology even if I spelled it out for him. “I’m not sure yet. But you owe me one.”
His eyes swivel to the corner of his screen and he grimaces as though he realizes how little time he has left until his deadline. “Alright,” he finally agrees and angles his laptop so I can see the mess on his screen.
The flight attendant wasn’t kidding: 1,045 words.
“Did you write this while you were asleep?” I scoff, skimming through the text.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he grumbles.
“Why all of these details?” I highlight three sentences and delete them with a satisfying smack on the backspace key. Lewis’s fingers twitch as if to restrain my hands. “Doesn’t feel so great to have your work criticized, does it?”
“Without introducing this concept first, the rationale won’t make any sense.”
“Theodore—”
His gaze sharpens murderously. “Don’t call me Theodore.”
“What should I call you then?” I hiss out a laugh. “Your friends call you Lewis. Don’t you think describing us as friends is a gross misinterpretation?”
“We can make an exception.”
Lewis. The name gets stuck somewhere between my vocal cords and my lips.
Lewis is the man who kindly let me squish his hand through a panic attack and who smells of pine needles and blushes easily.
He of the incredible hair. Definitely not the person who pulled that stunt four years ago, and whose idea of a fun Saturday night is to tear apart every piece of work I produce in long threads that make me wonder if I’m cut out for this career.
Lewis. I try again.
Nope, not going to happen.
“Dr. North,” I settle on instead, to which he turns his eyes to the ceiling. “In its current form, nothing in your abstract makes sense. Save all those things you have to say for your lecture.”
“I know what an abstract is and isn’t supposed to do.”
“Well duh, Dr. Nature Neuroscience. But this abstract is too long, and it needs to be accepted first. And for that we’ll need to spin it into a nice little story.” I smile sweetly.
“Jesus.” He winces, pinching the bridge of his nose. I pull two sentences into one, then condense an entire paragraph into a relative clause. Next to me, Lewis takes a deep breath. “Fine. Do whatever you need to do.”
Forty-five minutes later, with three minutes to spare, Lewis uploads his abstract, now at 498 words—499, if you count hyphenated words as two.
Now that we’ve finally stopped arguing about whether he violated one of the commandments of science (correlation is not causation), the hum of the airplane seems quiet.
Lewis slips his laptop into his backpack, folds up his table, and reaches up to fiddle with the controls of the AC outlets. This close, I notice the curve of his biceps and my fingers twitch as if remembering the firmness from accidentally touching it earlier.
“Wake me up if there’s turbulence,” he tells me, sinking against the headrest. It takes me by surprise, how he has slipped back into this thoughtful version of himself—which is inconveniently also the one that slowly chips away at my base of anger and frustration.
His eyes look droopy, like he can barely keep himself awake, but only when I nod does he blink them shut.
How is it that only a few hours ago I was racing to catch this flight, and now I’ve worked with my competitor and get to watch him sleep, after hand-holding and entrusting him with my deepest vulnerabilities?
A blush climbs into my cheeks as I tear my gaze away from the softened expression on his sleeping face.
I pick at my veggie stir-fry and distract myself with the movie playing on my screen, but I’m still mortified about the fast-track intimacy with Lewis when another bout of baby turbulence hits, so I take deep breaths on my own and let him sleep.
At the airport, Lewis gives me a micro-nod when we get off the plane and I lose sight of him when I queue for immigration.
I’m relieved to have him out of my sight, but the confusion about our encounter dominates my thoughts.
With my passport freshly stamped, I wait for the air train as I activate my international data plan and scroll through my contacts until I find Karo; her picture showing a white beach and sparkling blue sea in the background, smiling gray eyes, and curly hair in the red dye she’s been using since she was nineteen.
I snapped the photo on St. Lucia thirteen months ago.
Our last holiday together, between dreamy beaches, seafood buffets, and refills of rum.
Or, in my case, fresh coconut water because I’d get up early the next morning to draft the paper I was writing at the time.
A paper Lewis no doubt thinks is flashy.
My brain has been looping over the ways I could summarize this strange flight to her, yet all I get out when she picks up the phone is, “I ran into him.”
“Who?”
The train rumbles onto the platform and when the doors open, I push my suitcase into a car that’s already occupied by a woman with a stroller and a man in a suit.
I switch to our native German whenever I talk to my sister, though English terms for words spanning the scientific and academic realm remain pebbled throughout.
“Academic enemy number one,” I clarify. “The one I complain to you about, like, every other week. My reviewer two.”
The latter is probably the most useless descriptor to my nonacademic sister, who, unlike me, hasn’t gone through the peer-review process more than twenty times thus far.
Whenever I submit papers for consideration to a journal, other experts in my field evaluate the quality of the work to judge whether it’s worthy of publication.
There’s always one who errs a little too far on the side of nitpicky and rude, and although the reviews are anonymous, I know that in the review process of my last paper it was Dr. North—Lewis—who pointed out all the shortcomings with an extra pizzazz of snark.
Sometimes, the words “uninspired and lacking any substantial contribution to the field” still echo through my dreams at night.
And that’s not even the worst of what he did.
His snotty review comments are just the cherry on top of the pie. The base is a chunky layer of anger and resentment that formed after he failed to credit me on a paper I helped him with four years ago.
“Oh. That guy!” My sister’s voice grounds me in ways only few other things can.
A neat line of code, an empty lane in the swimming pool, a warm, perfectly pressured shower after a long day in the lab.
I saw her this morning, but it feels like a lifetime ago.
The turbulence has shaken up something in me, and meeting Lewis has, too.
“What was his name again? Theodore… West?”
“North,” I say before she rattles off any other cardinal points. “Anyway, we sat next to each other on the flight.”
“Oooh,” Karo coos right as I hear something clanging in the background. “Goddammit. I’m kind of busy packing. But I can talk to you while I finish.”
“When’s your flight?”
“Tomorrow morning. And I can’t find Lennart’s stupid sleeping bag. Anyway, go on, I’m listening.”
“Well, I had to sit next to him, for seven hours. Ended up helping him with his abstract, even though I probably shouldn’t have, with how he made my work hell these past months. Or years, really.”
“You work too much,” is all my sister has to say about that.
She’s right, but how else am I going to solve the puzzle—or at least a tiny piece of it—of how our memory works?
I’ve been sifting through the pieces for so many years that I’m not going to stop now.
Even if it means moving every two years, skipping dates because I had a breakthrough in my analysis, and taking my laptop with me wherever I go. She knows why it’s so important to me.
The air train pulls into the next terminal. I squeeze into a corner of the car as a family with three blond children gets on, and I watch the youngest of the kids drive his palm-size toy car up and down a metal pole, over my knee and his brother’s back.
“Not on people, Damian.” His mother makes a desperate grab for his T-shirt.
I cup a hand around the mic of my phone to shield off their voices, pressing the phone closer to my ear, to hear Karo ask, “What’s he like in person?”
Lewis’s annoyingly attractive face pops up before my eyes, while the feeling of his hand between mine ghosts over my somatosensory cortex. I push them aside. “As expected.”
It’s a lie so blatant that I’m happy the older kid in the family decides to rip the car out of his brother’s hands.
Damian’s ensuing screech and the scolding by their mother makes it impossible to carry on with the conversation, so I tell Karo to call me when she’s landed in California for her honeymoon before we hang up.
Hours later, as I ride the train into the city, drag my suitcase through Penn Station and onto the subway uptown, my cheeks still heat up over Lewis’s unexpected kindness, when he was just a stranger on a transatlantic flight.
I knew Dr. Theodore L. North and I were bound to meet at some point, but I’d never thought it would happen like this.
In a lecture hall maybe, in a symposium at the Sawyer’s, where we’d argue about science and exchange a tense handshake after, glad to go our separate ways.
Not on an airplane, where panic made me frazzled and he was the only one with the instruction manual to slow my racing heart.
I’m not sure what’s more disconcerting: that I’d let someone in in the first place, or that it was Lewis who’d pulled down my walls with patience and empathy, making me question why I didn’t open up more often.
He listened and cared, coaxed me into breathing normally.
Even his voice, warm and deep, was hard to reconcile with the clipped tone in his emails.
He was nice.
And I don’t know what to make of that.