Satish studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Thomlin’s Field Programmable Gate Array. The array’s internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There’s lots of modeling.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked.
Satish was a genius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty-eight. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. After that, Harvard, and patents, and job offers. “I am just a simple farmer,” he liked to say. “I like to challenge the dirt.”
Satish had endless expressions. When relaxed, he let himself lapse into broken English. Sometimes, after spending the morning with him, I’d fall into the pattern of his speech, talking his broken English back at him, an efficient pidgin that I came to respect for its streamlined efficiency and ability to convey nuance.
“I went to dentist yesterday,” Satish told me. “He says I have good teeth. I tell him ‘Forty-two years old, and it is my first time at dentist.’ And he could not believe.”
“You’ve never been to the dentist?” I said.
“No, never. Until I am in twelfth grade in my village back home, I did not know there was special doctor for teeth. I never went because I had no need. The dentist says I have good teeth, no cavities, but I have stain on my back molars on the left side where I chew tobacco.”
“I didn’t know you chewed.”
“I am ashamed. None of my brothers chew tobacco. Out of my family, I am the only one. I try to stop.” Satish spread his hands in exasperation. “But I cannot. I told my wife I stopped two months ago, but I started again, and I have not told her.” His eyes grew sad. “I am a bad person.”
Satish stared at me. “You are laughing,” he said. “Why are you laughing?”
Hansen was a gravity well in the tech industry — a constantly expanding force of nature, always buying out other labs, buying equipment, absorbing the competition.
Hansen labs only hired the best, without regard to national origin. It was the kind of place where you’d walk into the coffee room and find a Nigerian speaking German to an Iranian. Speaking German because they both spoke it better than English, the other language they had in common. Most of the engineers were Asian, though. It wasn’t because the best engineers were Asian — well, it wasn’t only because the best engineers were Asian. There were also simply more of them. America graduated four thousand engineers in 2008. China graduated more than three hundred thousand. And Hansen was always hungry for talent.
The Boston lab was just one of Hansen’s locations, but we had the largest storage facility, which meant that much of the surplus lab equipment ended up shipped to us. We opened boxes. We sorted through supplies. If we needed anything for our research, we signed for it, and it was ours. It was the opposite of academia, where every piece of equipment had to be expensed and justified and begged for.
Most mornings I spent with Satish. I helped him with his gate arrays. He talked of his children while he worked. Lunch I spent on basketball. Sometimes after basketball, I’d drop by Point Machine’s lab to see what he was up to. He worked with organics, searching for chemical alternatives that wouldn’t cause birth defects in amphibians. He tested water samples for cadmium, mercury, arsenic. Point Machine was a kind of shaman. He studied the gene expression patterns of amphioxus; he read the future in deformities.
“Unless something is done,” he said. “A generation from now, most amphibians will be extinct.” He had aquariums filled with frogs — frogs with too many legs, with tails, with no arms. Monsters.
Next to his lab was the office of a woman named Joy. Sometimes Joy would hear us talking and stop by, hand sliding along the wall — tall, and beautiful, and blind. Did acoustical research of some kind. She had long hair and high cheekbones — eyes so clear and blue and perfect that I didn’t even realize at first.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I get that a lot.” She never wore dark glasses, never used a white cane. “Detached retinas,” she explained. “I was three.”
In the afternoons, I tried to work.
Alone in my office, I stared at the marker board. The great white expanse of it. I picked up the marker, closed my eyes, wrote from memory.
When I looked at what I’d written, I threw the marker across the room.
James came by later that night. He stood in the doorway, cup of coffee in his hand. He saw the papers scattered across the floor. “It’s good to see you working on something,” he said.
“It’s not work.”
“It’ll come,” he said.
“No, I don’t think it will.”
“It just takes time.”
“Time is what I’m wasting here. Your time. This lab’s time.” Honesty welled up. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s fine, Eric,” he said. “We have researchers on staff who don’t have a third of your citings. You belong here.”
“It’s not like before. I’m not like before.”
James looked at me. That sad look back again. His voice was soft when he spoke. “R&D is a tax writeoff. At least finish out your contract. That gives you another two months. After that, we can write you up a letter of recommendation.”
That night in my hotel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. I imagined calling Mary, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. I imagined her voice on the other end.
Hello? Hello?
This numbness inside of me, strange gravity, the slow accretion of things I could have said, not to worry, things are fine; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself at the railing outside, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. Thunder advances from the east, from across the water, and I stand in the dark, waiting for life to be good again.
There is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I see myself outside myself, an angular shape cast in sodium lights — eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal. Because once you’ve learned something, you can’t unlearn it. Darwin once said that the serious study of math endows you with an extra sense, but what do you do when that sense contradicts your other senses?
My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness — the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else.
The lab.
Satish said, “Yesterday in my car I was talking to my daughter, five years old, and she says, ‘Daddy, please don’t talk.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I am praying. I need you to be quiet.’ So I asked her what she is praying about, and she said, ‘My friend borrowed my glitter ChapStick and I am praying she remembers to bring it back.’ ”
Satish was trying not to smile. We were in his office, eating lunch across his desk.
He continued. “I told her, well, maybe she is like me and she forgets. But my daughter says, ‘No, it has been more than one week now.’ ”
This amused Satish greatly — the talk of ChapStick, and the prayers of children. We finished our lunches.
“You eat the same thing every day,” I observed.
“I like rice,” he said.
“But every day?”
“You insult me. I am a simple man trying to save for my daughter’s college.” Satish spread his hands in mock outrage. “Do you think I am born with golden spoon?”