Give Me Your Hand

The halls are quiet, soothing.

I always try to get there at least an hour before the others, if I can. Sometimes, I skip the elevator, slow and halting. Take the stairs two at a time, coffee splashing up my wrist and arm, trying to beat the clock, beat the relentless ambition of the other postdocs and near-postdocs.

Dr. Severin probably won’t be in for hours, her schedule mysterious and unpredictable, but we swipe security key cards to get in, so she’ll know I’m here. Somehow, I think she’d know anyway. The hardest worker I’ve ever seen—that’s how all my past advisers always described me. I want her to know too, and the card is proof.

In the fourteen months I’ve been working at the Severin Lab, I’ve been the first to arrive every day but two, once after being sideswiped by a pickup truck en route and once when I was stuck in the elevator and the lab tech with the sequoia-thick arms had to pry the doors open.

But today, it’s more important than ever to be first.

In the custodian’s wheeled trash can, I spot the plastic cups from the day before, champagne foam dried to fine powder.

I smile a little just thinking about it. A nervous smile.

We’d been summoned to the conference room at five o’clock for the announcement we’d all been waiting for. It was delivered by Dr. Severin in her usual dispassionate tone.

“We’ve received news,” she said, back of her hand smoothing the skunk swoop in her black mane. “Our NIH grant application was successful. Planning will begin immediately.”

As if by magic, Dr. Severin’s assistant arrived with a jumbo bottle of California’s finest and a sleeve of plastic flutes.

We all tried to match Dr. Severin’s cool, but it was a losing battle. Me with my dumb grin. Zell’s face Swedish-fish red. Juwon, unable to stop rocking back on his heels. Even Maxim, reserved and watchful and the most senior of us all, looked like he might weep with joy. We’d all been waiting so long. I can’t pretend my heart didn’t lift like a fist in my chest.

There were toasts, tongue-tied. Here’s to snagging that last fleck of fat on the federal budget!

After one twitchy-mouthed sip of Barefoot Bubbly, Dr. Severin made her excuses and we all drifted back to work, keeping our excitement to ourselves.

I imagined Dr. Severin going home, popping open a bottle of real French champagne with her lover, whoever that was, sliding off her expensive shoes, and tasting sweet victory from one of those special glasses shaped like Marie Antoinette’s breast.

For us, it had been different, all of us heading home to our various postgrad shoeboxes, eating microwaved burritos, hovering over our laptops. All night, we’d engaged in a group-text crop-dust, the announcement like a starter’s pistol firing. The news was the best we could hope for. But now came the big decision: Who among us would be chosen for the research team?

The rumor is there will be only three of us on the grant. Someone saw the staff line on the proposed budget. It’s a collaboration with Neuropsych, which will eat up most of the funds, leaving room for only three postdocs out of a pool of nine. Inside, we were all surely thinking the same thing: It should be me. All of us toiling years in the lab, our necks permanently crooked over microscopes, our faces cadaverous from never seeing the sun. We all felt we’d put our time in, and we all shared one thought: This chance should be mine. All of us, the rest of the day, watching one another over our slide trays, through our Erlenmeyers, our clamped columns of ether. This is mine. I thought it, a lot.

Eh, Alex, the newest among us, teased, who really wants to spend two years delving into the dark heart of PMDD?

We all do, I said. And you know it.

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, that’s the subject of the study. A set of symptoms with no agreed-upon cause. Some kind of catastrophic monthly dance between hormones and the feeling and thinking parts of the brain. Striking every month, it’s like PMS only much, much worse. Debilitating mood swings, uncontrollable rage. Abnormal signaling among cells, that’s what scientists only recently discovered. An intrinsic difference in the way these women respond to sex hormones. After decades of doubt about whether it even existed, now science has proven PMDD is not only real, it’s part of the genetic makeup. The women can’t help it, are slaves to it.

Behind their hands, behind their smirks, some of the postdocs call it Hatchet PMS. Medusa Menses. They’re all men except me, and they can’t even talk about it without twisting their mouths or ducking their heads or making Carrie or Lizzie Borden jokes.

But they all want in on the grant. It’s the sexy one, maybe a career-maker. I’ve been waiting for it, working for it so long.

It’s not even seven a.m. when I ride up in the elevator. With the grant news strumming through my head all night, I couldn’t fall asleep and finally gave up trying.

The minute I step off the elevator, I notice the smell.

Hot, sharp, scalding, it gets stronger as I head down the long, frigid hallway, its browning ceiling tiles and peeling plaster, the mausoleum feel.

At first I think it’s some unholy mix of Cheese Nips and the off-brand champagne. But the smell coming from the animal unit is too powerful, powerful enough to feel like a warning.

“Don’t go in the feed room,” a low voice calls out, and it’s Serge, my favorite fellow early-lurker, fluttering like a skipper moth down the hallway toward the colony room.

Serge is the head lab tech: tall, Russian, with a severe jaw and black eyes. Quiet and fastidious and always a little sad. Alex calls him the Cat because he moves so silently—slow, stealthy, his feet never making any sound. Once, over tea in the break room, he told me he took ballet until he was fourteen and his father got a good look at the dance belt he was supposed to wear. He informed me it was time to start looking like a man.

And he smiled that sad Serge smile.

Despite his warning, I can’t help but stop at the door of the feed room, propped open by a biohazard bin.

Coffee cup against my chest, hand over my mouth, I see it, the slick pile of rotting mice on the floor, tumors splitting their violet skin, loose and massing.

There must be a dozen of them.

Serge arrives behind me, the only sound the slight squeak of the lab gloves he’s putting on.

“Watch your head,” Serge says, pointing one long gloved finger to a browning ceiling panel. “There may be more.”

I step back quickly, lifting my eyes to the ceiling tiles, swollen with age, heat, air.

“I don’t think I’ve ever looked up before,” I say. And it’s true. At least, not in a long time.

We walk together, Serge carrying the mice in one of the red biohazard bags.

“At least it wasn’t the ferrets,” I say. We had a pack of them for the gonadal study. All the techs hated them, their heavy musk and screeching.

“These are not our mice,” Serge says. “Ours are secure. And much more refined. These are mutts. Maybe visitors from Panda Garden across the street.”

“Do they really think our feed is better than theirs?” I say, smiling, but inside I’m thinking about the bits and pieces still on the floor. Serge will have to go back with a mop.

“So I guess you heard about the big grant?” I say.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “I can smell it.”

“What?” I pause. “The adrenaline?”

But he merely smiles in that way he has. “Have a good day,” he says, heading toward the animal-waste dock, waving the bag slightly, like a bullfighter’s cape.

When I step inside G-21, Alex is already there, Styrofoam cups in hand, a pouchy-eyed wink.

Alex.

Alex always brings me a milky second coffee from the Snack Hut. Just like he always has gum in his pocket for me and will join me in my takeout order from the egg-sandwich place. And when Zell makes one of his Mother, you be trypsin puns, or Maxim unpacks his fastidious, girlfriend-prepared bento boxes for lunch, or that time one of Dr. Irwin’s postdocs was spotted walking the old man’s sheepdogs, we share knowing glances.

Alex doesn’t usually come in early, but he often stays late. A few times we’ve found ourselves in the lab alone together close to midnight, both working under the fume hoods, our faces close. We are the only ones who don’t seem to have anyone waiting at home.

“Thanks,” I say now, taking the cup, “early bird.”

A few gulps and I start working, checking my cell cultures under the microscope, then carefully returning every flask to the incubator.

He’s watching, glancing at the newspaper, sipping.

“You are so damn precise,” he says. “The way your hands move. In ascending order, I like to watch you cutting, scraping, tweezing, pipetting.”

“And with my dainty girl hands,” I say. “How could I possibly get them to do such complicated things?”

He leans down closer, his elbow to my elbow alongside our gray coffee. “Don’t take this personally, Kit, but your hands are really big. Did you rassle steer?”

“No steer,” I say. “Only small-handed men.”

“I figured you for one of those 4-H champs on some Kansas prairie. Five brothers and you. Hands like wooden paddles.”

“It’s amazing I can even button my own shirt,” I say, splaying my fingers.

“Sometimes you miss a button,” he replies. “But don’t worry. No one ever notices.”

He’s like that, the strangest kind of flirt, and I love it, used to so much worse, the shoulder-squeezing predations of the older researchers. The fumbles and porn-slicked joking of the postdocs, never sure what to do with females around. When you meet the women in their lives—Maxim’s multilingual, opera-singing girlfriend, Juwon’s dazzling mathematician wife—it becomes more confusing.

Moments later, when Alex has turned back to his coffee, which slaps all over his lab bench when he sets it down, I sneak a look at my hands, palms up. I can’t tell if they’re small or large; they’re just hands, blue-gloved and functioning. But it makes me think about touching him, or him touching me, or something.

Which, I’m sure, was the idea.

In my secret thoughts, I imagine Dr. Severin will pick Alex and me for two of the three slots on the PMDD grant. Together, we’ll devote ourselves to the potentially groundbreaking work that she and her colleagues over in Neuropsych will produce. Together, we’ll toil, head to head, for two years or more. It will fill our days and evenings and inspire and frustrate and impel us. It will be a thing we share. And it is, as Maxim once admitted, the kind of study that can make your career. Make your name.

I think about it a lot because the nights are long and lonely and I’ve always been partial to men like Alex. The ones whose eyes dance when I appear, who so clearly like me but also never bother me about it. Never demand too much from women, least of all from a woman who works sixty hours a week and has the lab hands—rough, scrubbed raw-red—to prove it.

If I didn’t know better, had I never heard the Ivy League ease in his voice—the voice of someone who’d always been listened to, whatever he said, his whole life—I’d think Alex was nearer to one of the boys from back home, the Golden Fry, the speedway, a million years ago. Because he’s easy. Carefree. Or is it careless?

He’s the only one in the lab without a coal-miner cast to his skin, all of us sealed up in there, seldom seeing high noon, our bodies like the skin under an old Band-Aid, puckered and tender.

But not Alex, with his golden skin, a look of striking health.

Give him time, Zell insisted when Alex first started a few months ago. He’s still got blood in his veins.

I always know I like a man if I can’t remember what he looks like when he’s not around. When Alex isn’t here, all I can picture is how tall he is, and how he’s always smiling at me.

There’s the sound of swooping wings in the air just before ten a.m.

It’s Dr. Severin arriving, her coat open, billowing behind her.

“I heard Irwin’s postdocs conspiring in the men’s room,” Juwon says. “They’re angling hard for the PMDD slots. When do we find out?”

“It might be today,” Maxim says, feigning nonchalance. “But it might be next week.”

“It better be soon,” Juwon says, shaking his head. “I’ve been at labs where the longer the wait, the more people start to go crazy.”

“Crazy?” I ask.

Juwon nodded. Maxim did too. I didn’t like the looks in their eyes. I’d heard their tales from other labs, postdocs contaminating each other’s reagents, mislabeling bottles, swapping lids on cell cultures. Labotage.

“There will be blood,” Zell says, grinning widely, nearly swirling his tongue, never tiring of menstruation jokes as long as Dr. Severin isn’t around. But the excessive delicacy and squirminess of the other men, except Alex, is even worse.

The truth is, we all know PMDD’s hot stuff. Rumor is Dr. Severin is closing in on something,