Chapter Five #3
It’s not the answer I was hoping for, but it’s not a no, either.
I let out a long breath—maybe there’s still a chance he’ll turn around.
My eyes flit to the large clock embedded into the paneling high on the wall.
“I need to get started on the workshop materials.” I try to sound calm as I hook a thumb over my shoulder, but I know some of my desperation is seeping through.
“I’ll be in one of the computer rooms. Find me there if you change your mind? ”
Lewis gives me a curt nod before he disappears into the lecture theater.
A few hours later, I hack at my keyboard in panic as the clock ticks away at what has to be double its normal speed. How could I ever believe I’d get the workshop materials ready within a few hours? And why did I think Lewis would help me now, after everything that happened four years ago?
I should’ve known better—no matter how good he was at talking me through my panic, this man is not to be trusted.
He seemed nice four years ago, too, when we started following each other on social media, reposting each other’s new publications and commenting on other groups’ new research findings.
He seemed nice when we started emailing back and forth, sharing our struggles as newly minted postdocs and our hopes and dreams for our research.
We both thought we’d have it easier once we graduated, and we bonded over the many ways in which we didn’t.
Lewis had just moved to a lab at Oxford, where he worked on a massive project, for which he had to coordinate between different, stubborn professors to make progress.
I confided in him about all the extra work that got piled on me but not my male colleagues.
Like organizing lab meetings and other social outings, checking in on all the internship and thesis students, even if I wasn’t the one supervising them, or presenting at internal conferences that weren’t worth putting on my CV, while being skipped over for prestigious talks.
But what made me truly look forward to each ping of my inbox was how Lewis made me feel less lonely, when it had only been a year since my breakup with Jacob.
I loved science more than anything else, but as the only postdoc in a small lab with a professor fully engaged in teaching, I barely had anybody to share my passion with.
Our emails not only made me hopeful that self-absorbed Jacob was the exception to the rule of collaborative, well-meaning scientists, but also reassured me that I’d made the right decision in leaving him to go after my own future.
Lewis patched up my loneliness, until he excavated it even deeper.
For months, we exchanged long email threads discussing future directions in memory science and volleyed replies back and forth that culminated in sudden silence on his side.
Then, a few weeks later, an opinion paper on a preprint server came out.
It held the arguments I’d provided Lewis with over the course of our exchanges.
He hadn’t copied my emails word for word, but half of my rationale was there, the references I’d suggested, the whole paper an echo of our conversation, except it only read North, Theodore L.
on the author line, along with his professor’s name at the University of Oxford.
My name was nowhere in sight.
Postdoc life can be akin to The Hunger Games (Karo’s words, not mine, but she has a point).
In the few years after you graduate with a PhD, you have to publish incessantly, preferably in respected, high-impact journals, and build a list of good publications because those will land you the recognition needed to transition from underpaid, fixed-term contracts into a faculty position.
Publications can make or break your career, because grant panels and hiring committees like to see papers in renowned journals and with a high citation score.
Academia is full of people with great ideas, but those aren’t worth much if you can’t reel in the money to test whether those ideas actually work.
My dream of using computational models as a fine-grained template to uncover the fingerprints of memory could only come to fruition if I had the money to pay for all the research expenses, and didn’t need to worry about applying to new labs every year.
It wouldn’t have cost Lewis anything to list me on that publication that carried half of my thoughts.
Because, really, people got included in papers for much less than that.
He used my thoughts, but not my name, and while his career skyrocketed as a result, mine was left behind.
As attentive, understanding, and outraged on my behalf as he had seemed whenever I told him about the challenges I faced, he finally showed his true colors with that paper.
Instead of becoming a companion in this lonely system, he treated me like everyone else: a rung on his ladder to success. Useful, until I wasn’t.
I waited for an email from him, for some kind of reasoning behind why he left me out of the paper, but my inbox stayed empty.
Several months later, when I came upon the published paper in a prestigious journal, I raided the minibar of the hotel room I was staying in and decided never to waste my energy and intelligence on collaborations with idiotic men again.
For the next four years, throughout long threads of arguments on social media and nitpicky peer reviews of each other’s papers, the only reminders of Lewis’s human side were the things he posted online to make himself look good, like public access to the data he collected and the monthly Q and As to mentor younger academics.
But then the flight happened, and the news about Jacob and Vivienne, and my panicked decision to nod along. For a moment, I thought the man who held my hand to slow down the chaos might help me this time around.
But his lack of a reply proves what I should have known all along: he didn’t help me then, and he won’t help me now.
Granted, it’s only been a few hours since I asked him to be my fake boyfriend, but each minute cements my lie further into reality.
I picture him out there telling people the truth and taking down my career in one swipe.
My fear seeps into mistyped lines of code, switched up words in my instructions, and mixed-up version copies.
“Goddammit!” My outburst is met by the whir of dozens of computers on standby and the impatient blink of my cursor.
Closing my eyes, I breathe into every frazzled nerve end.
I need to get myself and my interactive code together, otherwise it won’t be my lie that makes people doubt me.
I grab my empty coffee cup and speed down the corridor, hoping to gain some liquid focus.
But the coffee only adds another layer to my spiral of worry, and churns in my stomach as I insert the last screenshots into the instruction documents and load my scripts into the cloud.
By the time the first students filter into the lab, it’s been four hours since I’ve last spoken to Lewis and I’ve come up with, and discarded, six different excuses to skip the faculty dinner.
His absence all throughout the morning tells me that he’s not willing to help me out.
Instead, Vivienne breezes into the room, and that’s when it gets truly hard to tamp down my panic.
Either she’s here to tell me there’s no space for me at the Sawyer’s anymore because Lewis has divulged the truth, or…
What is she doing here?
“Vivienne, what a surprise,” I say, trying to keep my voice light.
“I’ve read about the task you use in your experiments in your last two papers, and I’ve been wanting to see it for myself. This is going to be so exciting,” she singsongs and claps her hands together as she heads to a workstation in the third row.
Huh. Vivienne really is just here to learn. Apparently, and very much to my relief, it looks like Lewis hasn’t given me up yet.
Maybe he decided that the truth can wait until after my workshop.
Pressing my back into the lip of the desk, I survey the rest of the now-packed room.
A few known faces have dropped in: a postdoc from Japan who I met at a conference in Vienna two years ago, a girl wearing a LEGO Star Wars T-shirt who started her PhD when I left the lab in Singapore, and a tall, gangly guy who interned with me in Zurich for a summer.
I check the time on my phone, slide off my blazer, and clear my throat to get everyone’s attention. “Welcome,” I announce, “and thanks for joining this session on virtual reality for researching human memory processes.”
Few things glue my attention to the moment like teaching does, and as I introduce myself, this morning’s tension dissipates. By the time I get started on today’s topic, my shoulders have melted down.
“You might wonder what computer games have to do with neuroscience research in general, and memory research in particular.” I begin to pace the front of the computer lab.
“After all, a lot of memory research has been done differently. Give people lists of words to learn, for instance. Those experiments can show us how new associations are built.” I use my fingers to count as I speak.
“Which brain regions are involved in learning. We can also look at what goes wrong when we don’t remember. There’s an issue though.”
I give the class time to absorb my words and take a few steadying breaths. No matter what Lewis decides, this is what I came here for: learning and teaching, networking, meeting Professor Alderkamp. A shot at carrying on my research after my current contract expires.
I almost manage to convince myself, but then a latecomer pushes through the door, nods tightly at me, and strides down the rows of the computer lab. Lewis, tearing down my fragilely constructed confidence as he sinks into the last available chair next to Vivienne.