I'm Thinking of Ending Things (6 page)

It threw me off a bit, made me rethink things. I was going to break up with him that night—maybe. It's possible I was. I wasn't planning to. But it could have happened. But he put my pills in the Kleenex.

Are small, critical actions enough? Small gestures make us feel good—about ourselves, about others. Small things connect us. They feel like everything. A lot depends on them. It's not unlike religion and God. We believe in certain constructs that help us understand life. Not only to understand it, but as a means of providing comfort. The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It's a belief we want to be true.

Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn't it? To find another person to spend all your life with?
To age with and change with? To see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?

It's funny that Jake brought up intelligence earlier. His question about the smartest human in the world. It's like Jake knew I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about all of these things. Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret? It's been on my mind a lot, Jake's intelligence. Not just now. I've been thinking about it for a while.

His intelligence initially attracted me, but in a committed relationship, is it a good thing for me? Would someone less intelligent be harder to live with or easier? I'm talking long-term here, not just a few months or years. Logic and intelligence aren't linked with generosity and empathy. Or are they? Not his intelligence, anyway. He's a literal, linear, intellectual thinker. How does this make thirty or forty or fifty years together more appealing?

I turn to him. “I know you don't like talking about actual work stuff, but I've never seen your lab. What's it like?”

“What do you mean?”

“It's hard for me to envision where you work.”

“Picture a lab. That's pretty much it.”

“Does it smell like chemicals? Are there lots of people around?”

“I don't know. I guess so, yeah, usually.”

“But you don't have any problems being distracted, or concentrating?”

“Usually it's fine. Every now and then there's a disturbance or something, someone talking on the phone or laughing. Once I had to ‘shhh' a colleague. That's never fun.”

“I know how you are when you get focused.”

“At those times I don't even want to hear the clock.”

I think this car must be dusty, or maybe it's just the vents. But my eyes feel dry in here. I adjust the vent, aiming it fully toward the floor.

“Give me a virtual tour.”

“Of the lab?”

“Yeah.”

“Now?”

“You can do that and drive. What would you show me if I visited you at work?”

For a while he doesn't say anything. He just looks straight ahead, through the windshield.

“First, I'd show you the protein crystallography room.” He doesn't look at me as he talks.

“Okay,” I say. “Good.”

I know his work involves ice crystals and proteins. That's about it. I know he's working on a postdoc and thesis.

“I'd show you the two crystallization robots that allow us to screen a large area of crystallization space, using sub-microliter volumes of difficult-to-express recombinant proteins.”

“See,” I say, “I like hearing this.”

I really do.

“You'd probably be interested in the microscope room that contains the setup of our three-color TIRF, or total internal reflection fluorescence, as well as the spinning disk microscope that allows us to accurately track fluorescently tagged single molecules, either in vitro or in vivo with nanometer precision.”

“Go on.”

“I'd show you our temperature-controlled incubators in which we grow large volumes, more than twenty liters, of yeast and
E. coli
cultures that have been genetically engineered to overexpress a protein of our choosing.”

As he talks, I'm studying his face, his neck, his hands. I can't help myself.

“I'd show you our two systems—AKTA FPLC, fast protein liquid chromatography—that allow us to purify any protein quickly and accurately using any combination of affinity, ion exchange, and gel permeation chromatographies.”

I want to kiss him as he drives.

“I'd show you the tissue culture room where we grow and maintain various mammalian cell lines either for transfection of specific genes or harvesting of cell lysate . . .”

He pauses.

“Go on,” I say. “And then?”

“And then I feel like you'd be bored and ready to leave.”

I could say something to him right now. We're alone in the car. It's the perfect time. I could say I've been thinking about a relationship in the context of only myself and what everything means
to me. Or I could ask if this is irrelevant because a relationship can't be understood sliced in two. Or I could be completely honest and say, “I'm thinking of ending things.” But I don't. I don't say any of that.

Maybe going to meet his parents, seeing where he comes from, where he grew up, maybe that will help me decide what to do.

“Thank you,” I say. “For the tour.”

I watch him drive. For now. That messy, slightly curled hair. That fucking exquisite posture. I think about those three tiny pills. It changes everything. It was so nice of him to wrap them up for me.

WE'D KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR
only about two weeks when Jake left town for two nights. We'd seen each other or spoken almost every day since meeting. He would call. I'd text. But I learned he hated texting. He might send one text, two at most. If the conversation went any further, he would call. He likes talking and listening. He appreciates discourse.

It was weird to be all alone again for those two days when he was away. That was what I'd been used to, before, but after, it felt insufficient. I missed him. I missed being with another person. It's corny, I know, but I felt like a part of me was gone.

Getting to know someone is like putting a never-ending puzzle together. We fit the smallest pieces first and we get to know ourselves better in the process. The details I know about Jake—that he likes his meat well-done, that he avoids using public bathrooms,
that he hates when people pick their teeth with their fingernails after a meal—are trivial and inconsequential compared to the large truths that take time to eventually reveal themselves.

After spending so much time alone, I started to feel like I knew Jake well, really well. If you're seeing someone constantly, like Jake and I did after only two weeks, it starts to feel . . . intense. It was intense. I thought about him all the time those first couple of weeks, even when we weren't together. We'd had lots of long talks while sitting on the floor, or lying on the couch, or in bed. We could talk for hours. One of us starting into a topic, the other picking up on it. We'd ask each other questions. We'd discuss, debate. It wasn't about agreeing all the time. One question would always lead to another. Once, we stayed up all night talking. Jake was different from anyone else I'd ever met. Our bond was unique. Is unique. I still think that.

“Trying to restore a critical balance,” Jake says. “That's something we've been thinking about at work lately. Critical balance is needed in everything. I was thinking about this in bed the other night. Everything is so . . . delicate. Take something like metabolic alkalosis—a very slight rise in the pH level of tissue, which has to do with a small dip in hydrogen concentration. It's just . . . it's all extremely subtle. It's only one example, and yet it's vital. There are so many things like this. Everything is impossibly fragile.”

“A lot of things are, yeah,” I say. Like everything I've been thinking about.

“Some days, a current runs through me. There's an energy in
me. And you. It's something worth being aware of. Does this make any sense? Sorry, I'm rambling.”

I have my feet out of my shoes and they're up, resting on the dashboard in front of me. I'm leaning back in my seat. I feel like I could doze off. It's the rhythm of the wheels on the road, the movement. Driving has this anesthetic effect on me.

“What do you mean by the current?” I ask, closing my eyes.

“Just how it feels. You and me,” he says. “The singular velocity of flow.”

“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DEPRESSED
or anything?” I ask.

We've just made what felt like a significant turn. We'd been on the same road for a while. We turned at a stop sign, not at a light. Left. There are no traffic lights out here.

“Sorry, that was out of the blue. I'm just thinking.”

“About what?”

For years, my life has been flat. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I've never admitted it before. I'm not depressed, I don't think. That's not what I'm saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It's been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.

“Sometimes, I feel sad for no apparent reason,” I say. “Does this happen to you?”

“Not particularly, I don't think,” he says. “I used to worry when I was kid.”

“Worry?”

“Yeah, like I would worry about insignificant things. Some people, strangers, might worry me. I had trouble sleeping. I'd get stomachaches.”

“How old were you then?”

“Young. Maybe eight, nine. When it would get bad, my mom would make what she called ‘kids tea,' which was pretty much all milk and sugar, and we'd sit and talk.”

“About what?”

“Usually about what I'd been worried about.”

“Do you remember anything specific?”

“I never worried about dying, but I did worry about people in my family dying. Mostly it was abstract fears. For a while I worried one of my limbs might fall off.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we had sheep at our farm, lambs. A day or two after a lamb was born, Dad would put special rubber bands around its tail. They're very tight, enough to stop the blood flow. After a few days, the tail would just fall off. It's not painful for the lambs; they don't even know what's happening.

“Every so often, as a kid, I'd be out in the fields and I'd find a severed lamb tail. I started to wonder if the same thing could happen to me. What if the sleeves on a shirt or a pair of socks were slightly too tight? And what if I slept with my socks on and I woke up in the middle of the night and my foot had fallen off? It made me worry, too, about what's important. Like, why isn't the tail an important part of the lamb? How much of you can fall off before something important is lost? Right?”

“I can see how that might be unnerving.”

“Sorry. That was a very long answer to your question. So to answer, I would say that no, I'm not depressed.”

“But sad?”

“Sure.”

“Why is that—how is that different?”

“Depression is a serious illness. It's physically painful, debilitating. And you can't just decide to get over it in the same way you can't just decide to get over cancer. Sadness is a normal human condition, no different from happiness. You wouldn't think of happiness as an illness. Sadness and happiness need each other. To exist, each relies on the other, is what I mean.”

“It seems like more people, if not depressed, are unhappy these days. Would you agree?”

“I'm not sure I'd say that. It does seem like there's more opportunity to reflect on sadness and feelings of inadequacy, and also a pressure to be happy all the time. Which is impossible.”

“That's what I mean. We live in a sad time, which doesn't make sense to me. Why is that? Are there more sad people around now than there used to be?”

“There are many around the university, students and profs whose biggest concern each day—and I'm not exaggerating—is how to burn the proper number of calories for their specific body type based on diet and amount of strenuous exercise. Think about that in the context of human history. Talk about sad.

“There's something about modernity and what we value now. Our shift in morality. Is there a general lack of compassion? Of
interest in others? In connections? It's all related. How are we supposed to achieve a feeling of significance and purpose without feeling a link to something bigger than our own lives? The more I think about it, the more it seems happiness and fulfillment rely on the presence of others, even just one other. The same way sadness requires happiness, and vice versa. Alone is . . .”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“There's an old example that gets used in first-year philosophy. It's about context. It goes like this: Todd has a small plant in his room with red leaves. He decides he doesn't like the look of it and wants his plant to look like the other plants in his house. So he very carefully paints each leaf green. After the paint dries, you can't tell that the plant has been painted. It just looks green. Are you with me?”

“Yeah.”

“The next day he gets a call from his friend. She's a plant biologist and asks if he has a green plant she can borrow to do some tests on. He says no. The next day, another friend, this time an artist, calls to ask if he has a green plant she can use as a model for a new painting. He says yes. He's asked the same question twice and gives opposite answers, and each time he's being honest.”

“I see what you mean.”

Another turn, this time at a four-way stop.

“It seems to me that in the context of life and existing and people and relationships and work, being sad is one correct answer. It's truthful. Both are right answers. The more we tell ourselves that we should always be happy, that happiness is an end in
itself, the worse it gets. And by the way, this isn't a very original thought or anything. You know I'm not trying to be brilliant right now, right? We're just talking.”