I'm Thinking Of Ending Things Part 4

"Fine. But still, I don't know, I mean, how could there even be a smartest person?"

"There has to be. Whatever algorithm you create, or whatever you decide makes up intelligence, someone has to meet those criteria more than everyone else. Someone has to be the smartest in the world. And what a burden it is. It really is."

"What does it matter? One smartest person?"

He leans a little toward me. "The most attractive thing in the world is the combination of confidence and self-consciousness. Blended together in the proper amounts. Too much of either and all is lost. And you were right, you know."

"Right? About what?"

"About the best kisser," he says. "Thankfully you can't be the best kisser alone. It's not like being the smartest."

He leans back his way, rea.s.serts both hands on the wheel. I look out my window.

"And anytime you want to have a fence-building contest, just let me know," he says.

He never let me finish my story. I never kissed Doug after our lesson. Jake a.s.sumed. He a.s.sumed I kissed Doug. But a kiss needs two people who want to kiss, or it's something else.

Here's what really happened. I went back to the car that time. I leaned in the window and opened my hand, revealing the tiny wrinkled candy wrapper, the one Doug gave me. I uncrumpled it and read it: My heart, my heart alone with its lapping waves of song, longs to touch this green world of the sunny day. h.e.l.lo!

I still have the candy wrapper somewhere. I saved it. I don't know why. After reading those lines to Doug, I turned and ran back into my house. I never saw him again.

-He had keys. He wasn't scheduled to be here, but he had keys. He could do whatever he wanted.

-Wasn't there supposed to be some revarnishing done during the break?

-Yes, but that happened right at the start of the holidays. So the varnish would have time to dry. The varnish scent can be pretty strong.

-Toxic?

-Again, I'm not sure. Maybe, if that's all you were breathing.

-Are we going to see any autopsy results?

-I can look into that.

-Was it . . . messy?

-You can imagine.

-I can.

-We shouldn't get into the details right now.

-I hear they found a breathing apparatus, a gas mask, near the body?

-Yes, but it was an old one. It's unclear if it still worked.

-There's so much we don't know about what really happened in there.

-And the only one who could tell us is gone.

Jake has started talking about aging. I didn't see it coming. It's not a topic we've ever discussed before. "It's just one of those culturally misunderstood things."

"But you think getting old is good?"

"I do. It is. First of all, it's inevitable. It just seems negative because of our overwhelming obsession with youth."

"Yeah, I know. They're all positives. But what about your boyish good looks? You can kiss those good-bye. Are you prepared to be fat and bald?"

"Whatever we lose physically as we age is worth it, given what we gain. It's a fair trade-off."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm with you," I say. "I actually want to be older. I'm happy to age, seriously."

"I keep hoping for some gray hairs. Some wrinkles. I'd like to have some laugh lines. I guess, more than anything, I want to be myself," he says. "I want to be. To be me."

"How so?"

"I want to understand myself and recognize how others see me. I want to be comfortable being myself. How I reach that is almost less important, right? It means something to get to the next year. It's significant."

"I think that's why so many people rush into marriage and stay in s.h.i.tty relationships, regardless of age, because they aren't comfortable being alone."

I can't say this to Jake and I don't, but maybe it's better to be alone. Why abandon the routine we each master? Why give up the opportunity for many diverse relationships in exchange for one? There's plenty of good with coupling up, I get it, but is it better? When single, I tend to focus on how much the company of someone would improve my life, increase my happiness. But does it?

"Do you care if I turn this down a bit?" I ask, adjusting the radio before waiting for his reply. I've turned it down multiple times on this drive; Jake keeps turning it back up. I think he might be a bit deaf. At least some of the time. It's like all absentminded ticks-there sometimes, but other times, not so much.

One night, I had a headache. We were chatting on the phone and he was planning on coming over to hang out. I asked him to bring me a couple of Advil. I wasn't sure he'd remember, even though I'd repeated it. It was one of the bad headaches I've been getting recently. I a.s.sumed he'd forget. Jake forgets things. He can be a bit of a scatterbrained professor cliche.

When he arrived at my place, I didn't say anything about the pills. I didn't want him to feel bad if he'd forgotten. He didn't say anything, either. Not at first. We were talking about something else, I can't remember, and he just said out of the blue, "Your pills."

He pushed a hand into his pocket. He had to straighten out his legs to get his hand in. I watched him.

"Here," he'd said.

He didn't just pull out two pills from his linty pocket. He handed me a small ball of Kleenex, all wrapped up in itself and sealed with a single piece of tape. The package looked like a large white Hershey's Kiss. I undid the tape. Inside were my pills. Three of them. An extra, in case I needed it.

"Thanks," I said. I went into the bathroom for water. I didn't say anything to Jake, but to me, the wrapping was significant. Protecting the pills like that. He wouldn't have done that for himself.

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 G.o.d. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 f.u.c.king 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."