Emerging from the claustrophobic heat and humidity of the Insectarium into the air-conditioning of the hallway was always like emerging from a sauna. Gabe headed up the three flights to the communal lab, feeling like The Swamp Thing come to sit among humans. For the last few weeks, the stairs seemed steeper, taking as much wind as climbing a bell tower. At the end of her climb, once she reached the third floor, the communal lab was airy, fluorescent-bright. And full of people moving about their own tasks, talking, or not, the way people worked together in an art studio, office, or any normal room….
“How’s it goin’ Gabe,” Meadow greeted, carrying a tray of cultures to her own station.
“Slow,” Gabe sighed, feeling more tired than she should. She went to the refrigerated case and rummaged among the vials, thimbles of lice saliva that should have been put in deep freeze, test tubes of blood, and petri dishes till she found the jar of plain yogurt that she had cultured at home. Her lunch.
Lab benches ran the length of the room forming three aisles, the cabinets and shelves above the benches packed with manuals and microscopes and centrifuges and chrome gadgets. The first time Gabe saw the place it looked like a rummage sale: beakers and aspirators, agitators and boxes of film left where they were last used. Test tubes that needed washing were heaped in the sink. Olympia was always on them—a mom on her kids for leaving dirty reactants lying around their room. “Some of that shit is dangerous!” And you’d think they’d keep the place clean themselves. The techs didn’t have offices as did ‘the talent,’ Olympia, Mohammed, Chen, and other lab managers or directors. Mostly, ‘the kids’ just camped out, gravitating to an area that housed the equipment they needed to do their part of the study. So the chair in front of the microscope that Silpa used throughout the day became Silpa’s chair; the middle section of the middle lab bench that Gretchen used to prepare tissues had become her turf. Photos of Mohammed’s family back in Venezuela were taped to the metal cabinets above the section of the lab bench where he prepared Western Blot analysis cells. While in the next aisle over, Meadow’s jacket laid across the stool before a rack of heavy protocol manuals, photos of her sister’s wedding and her hunting dog. She’d taken down the photo of her husband, Gabe noticed.
Jak was snickering at something on his computer screen—fucking around, trying to get the Tweet-a-Smile campaign to retweet meth formulas again, no doubt. She really didn’t do much in this part of the lab other than check email or jump online to order supplies. But every morning she threw her sack lunch and bike helmet on the far corner of the far bench no one used, and from habit it had become her turf: where she took breaks, where she went when she wanted to be around people instead of lice. She moved aside the paperback she’d been carrying around—Fahrenheit 451—on real paper that she liked to be seen with instead of an iReader or iFlex, the way some people positioned an arm, when sitting, so you could see their NGer tattoos. She moved the mouse to wake up her computer—it wasn’t really hers, more of a communal computer—when the screen came alive, she saw that someone had been using it to research bees.
“Check this out,” Jak said from his stool across the aisle, swiveling his monitor so she could see.