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Soo-Yin lives in the small lab among the chemical reagents and the tissue culture closet. Once, in lab meeting, Simone commented that Fay was trying to deduce some subtlety too fine to matter. Her experiments are precisely designed if inconclusive, with minuscule error bars, something Wallace admires to the point of envy. Fay is awkward and nocturnal, short and so pale that when she pipets, you can almost see the shadow of blood sweeping up her forearms to her muscles. Brigit is a natural, curious and dynamic, but with a preternatural memory that feeds on whole bibliographies of developmental biologists. She is their senior, just ahead of Brigit and Fay. Katie is almost feral with a desperation to graduate she emits a kind of raw and blistering energy. In the lab, there are only women: Katie, Brigit, Fay, Soo-Yin, and Dana. They are all here in this bright cluster in the middle of a cool dim building, for a moment its vibrating core. The others sweep in and out of his line of sight as he makes his way to his bench. From up the lab – for it is really three rooms linked end to end, two benches per bay and five bays per room – a chorus of Let’s get it done comes back at them. Wallace walks quickly by her, as if he might slip her notice, but she says, ‘Let’s get this shit done.’

She balances a green ice bucket on her hip and she’s slapping a pair of pale blue nitrile gloves across her thigh. She’s blonde with quite small features, as if someone had wiped away her original face and painted in its place a delicate, miniature facsimile. Standing there is like being in the peristaltic system of some large animal, amid the sounds of a body adjusting itself. It is an enormous grey machine, emitting a high whine that rises in pitch until it bleeds into the mechanical noise of the lab: rattling cages and clinking glass beakers strapped to agitators, mewling coils behind the incubators, the dull roar of the air conditioner overhead. on a Saturday.Īt the end of the hall, light spills out of Simone’s lab. The illusion of weightlessness gives way. He feels, momentarily, the heat of the impact, the ghostly wet of his skull collapsing. If he jumps, he thinks, he will plummet, a slow sweep through empty space, a horrible way to die. Dry yellow vines wrap around the railings, the floor glossy with wear. Below him, the atrium is filled with gauzy light. The air carries the salty scent of yeast media.

Strangely, it’s also not dissimilar from catching a glimpse of someone undressing when they think they are alone, the twin thrill and shame of the voyeur.

The other labs on the third floor of the biosciences building are empty, as if after the rapture.