Chemistry Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Weike Wang

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard LLC for permission to reprint a lyric excerpt from “Don’t Stop Me Now,” words and music by Freddie Mercury. Copyright © 1978 by Queen Music Ltd. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  A portion of this work orginally appeared, in different form, in Ploughshares (Summer 2016).

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LCCN: 2016038012

  ISBN 9781524731748 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781524731755 (ebook)

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Part II

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Epigraph (mathematics, noun): the set of all points lying on or above a function’s graph

  The boy asks the girl a question. It is a question of marriage. Ask me again tomorrow, she says, and he says, That’s not how this works.

  Diamond is no longer the hardest mineral known to man. New Scientist reports that lonsdaleite is. Lonsdaleite is 58 percent harder than diamond and forms only when meteorites smash themselves into Earth.

  ···

  The lab mate says to make a list of pros and cons.

  Write it all down, prove it to yourself.

  She then nods sympathetically and pats me on the arm.

  The lab mate is a solver of hard problems. Her desk is next to mine but is neater and more result-producing.

  Big deal, she says of her many, many publications and doesn’t take herself too seriously, is busy but not that busy, talks about things other than chemistry.

  I find her outlook refreshing, yet strange. If I were that accomplished, I would casually bring up my published papers in conversation. Have you read so-and-so? Because it is quite worth your time. The tables alone are beautiful and well formatted.

  I have only one paper out. The tables are in fact very beautiful, all clear and double-spaced line borders. All succinct and informative titles.

  Somewhere I read that the average number of readers for a scientific paper is 0.6.

  ·

  So I make the list. The pros are extensive.

  Eric cooks dinner. Eric cooks great dinners. Eric hands me the toothbrush with toothpaste on it and sometimes even sticks it in my mouth. Eric takes out the trash, the recycling; waters all our plants because I can’t seem to remember that they’re living things. These leaves feel crunchy, he said after the week that he was gone.

  He goes that week to California for a conference with other young and established chemists.

  Also Eric drives me to lab when it’s too rainy to bike. Boston sees a great deal of rain. Sometimes the rain comes down horizontal and hits the face.

  Also Eric walks the dog. We have a dog. Eric got him for me.

  I realize that I don’t have any cons. I knew this going in.

  It is a half-list, I tell the lab mate the next day, and she offers to buy me a cookie.

  ·

  In lab, there are two boxes filled with argon. It is where I do highly sensitive chemistry, the kind that can never see air. Once air is let in, the chemicals catch fire. It is also where I wish to put my head on days of nothing going right.

  On those days, I add the wrong amount of catalyst. Or I add the wrong catalyst.

  Catalysts make reactions go faster. They lower activation energy, which is the indecision each reaction faces before committing to its path.

  What use is this work in the long run? I ask myself in the room when I am alone. The solvent room officially, but I have renamed it the Fortress of Solitude.

  Eric is no longer in this lab. He graduated last year and is now in another lab. A chemistry PhD takes at least five years to complete. We met when I was in my first and he was in his second.

  Now I walk around our apartment and trip over his stuff: big black drum bags and steel pots and carboys with brown liquid fermenting inside. Eric plays the drums and brews beer. One con is how much space these two hobbies take up, but this is outweighed by the drums that I like to hear and the beer that I like to drink.

  My pro list grows at an exponential rate.

  ···

  We had talked about marriage before. Can you see yourself settling down, having kids? Can you see yourself starting a family? I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes. We had these talks casually. Each time, he thought if actually proposed to, I would say something different.

  ·

  At least now all my cards are on the table, he says. But please don’t take too long to decide.

  ···

  It has been the summer of unbearable heat. At the Home Depot, we go up and down aisles looking for a fan. Our last fan broke yesterday and next week it is supposed to be hotter. Then next month, a hurricane.

  When Eric sees the hurricane report, he wonders if the people who wrote it are just screwing with us.

  Why would they do that? I ask.

  Because it’s funny.

  Oh, right. Then a minute later, I laugh.

  Patience is Eric’s greatest virtue. He will wait in longer lines than I will and think nothing of it. He will smile, while holding a heavy fan, at the older woman in front of him who has brought a tall stack of lampshades and at the moment of payment is having second thoughts. She asks the clerk for his opinion. She asks Eric. Do I need the magenta? Me, she doesn’t bother with, because I am the one with the furiously tapping foot. The woman considers some more, turning each lampshade in her hands, but in the end purchases nothing.

  I tell Eric in the car that if I were to reimagine Hell, it would be no different from the line we were just in. Except the woman would never decide on a lampshade and the line would never move.

  Can you imagine? I say. A worse punishment than pushing that thing up the hill.

  A boulder, Eric says.

  I realize what a hypocrite I’m being, to make him wait for an answer and then dwell on a twenty-five-minute line.

  Once home, Eric sets the fan up and the dog goes crazy.

  ···

  Two years ago, Eric and I moved in together. We do not have a dog but we are thinking about it. What kind? Eric asks. Big? Small? I don’t have a preference. How about just adorable?

  When he first brings him home, I hear the tail, long and bushy, thumping against the couch. A forty-five-pound goldendoodle. Incredibly adorable. When he runs, his ears flop. If we never groomed him, his hair would keep growing and he would look like a blond bear.

  The blond bear loves people and this is good. But then we discover that he is afraid of everything else: the hair dryer, an empty box, the fan.

  ···

  Bad tempers run in my family. It is the dominant allele, like black hair. Eric has red hair. Our friends have asked if there is any way our babies will turn out to be gingers. Gingers are dying out, and our friends are concerned about Eric’s
beautiful locks.

  I say, Unless Mendel was completely wrong about genetics, our babies will have my hair.

  But our friends can still dream. An Asian baby with red hair. One friend says, You could write a Science paper on that and then apply for academic jobs and then get tenure.

  Eric is already looking for academic jobs. He wants to teach at a college that primarily serves undergrads.

  Because they are the future, he says. Eager to learn, energetic, and happy, more or less, as compared with grad students. With undergrads, I can make a real difference.

  I don’t say this but I think it: You are the only person I know who talks like that. So enthusiastically and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving.

  But the colleges he’s interested in are not in Boston. They are in places like Oberlin, Ohio.

  I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle flying around in space.

  The lab mate often echoes the wisdom of many chemists before her. You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally.

  ·

  The friends who ask about the red-haired babies are the ones recently married or the ones recently married with a dog. Whenever we have them over for dinner, like tonight, they think we are trying to tell them that we are engaged.

  News? they say.

  Not yet, I reply, but here, have some freshly grated Parmesan cheese instead.

  Behind my back, I know they are less kind. They ask each other, It’s been four years, hasn’t it? They joke, She is only with him for his money.

  It is common knowledge now that graduate students make close to nothing and that there are more PhD scientists in this country than there are jobs for them.

  When Eric first decides to do a PhD, it is in high school. He takes a chemistry class and excels. This is in western Maryland, in a town with many steepled churches but no Starbucks. Every other year we drive three hours from the DC airport, through a gap in the Appalachian Mountains, and arrive at a picturesque place where Eric seems to know everyone. He waves to the man across the horseshoe bar, his former band teacher. He waves to the woman at the post office, the mother of a high school friend. The diner with the horseshoe bar is called Niners. There is always farmland for sale and working mills.

  Sometimes I wonder why he left a place where every ice-cream shop is called a creamery to work seventy-hour weeks in lab. He credits the chemistry teacher, who asked him often, What are you going to do afterward? And don’t just say stick around.

  ···

  A belief among Chinese mothers is that children pick their own traits in the womb. The smart ones work diligently to pick the better traits. The dumb ones get easily flustered and fall asleep. For their laziness, they are then dealt the worse traits.

  Or perhaps this is just a belief of my own mother.

  Had you chosen better, you would have not ended up with your father’s terrible temper or my poor vision.

  I don’t want to believe this but it has become so ingrained. Compared with mine, Eric’s temper is nonexistent.

  Thursday, trash day. We pick the wrong streets to go down and drive for miles behind a garbage truck. It is a one-way road. It is also a one-lane road. But not once does he sigh or complain. He puts on jazz music instead. Listen to this, he says. But all I hear is the going and stopping of the truck, the picking up and dumping of trash, the clanking of metal bins. So frustrated am I after one song that I lean over and press the horn for him. Then out the window, I shout at the truck, Excuse me, do you mind?

  ···

  The PhD advisor visits my desk, sits down, brings his hands together, and asks, Where do you see your project going in five years?

  Five years? I say in disbelief. I would hope to be graduated by then and in the real world with a job.

  I see, he says. Perhaps then it is time to start a new project, one that is more within your capabilities.

  He leaves me to it.

  The desire to throw something at his head never goes away. Depending on what he says, it is either the computer or the desk.

  I sketch out possible projects. Alchemy, for one. If I could achieve that today, I could graduate tomorrow.

  A guy in lab strongly believes that women do not belong in science. He’s said that women lack the balls to actually do science.

  Which isn’t wrong. We do lack balls.

  But if he had said that to me at the start of grad school, I would have punched him. Coming in, I think myself the best at chemistry. In high school, I win a national award for it. I say, cockily, at orientation, Yes, that was me, only to realize that everyone else had won it as well, at some point, in addition to awards I have never won.

  The lab guy is still around. He works with the lab mate. If all goes well, they will have another paper next year and then they will graduate.

  Women lack the balls to do science, he still says. With the exception of your lab mate. She has three.

  Later I ask Eric, How many balls do you think I have?

  It is poor timing. We have just gotten into bed and started to kiss.

  Uh, none? he says, and the kissing is over. I was hoping he would have said something along the lines of three and a half.

  ···

  A Chinese proverb: Outside of sky there is sky, outside of people there are people.

  It is the idea of infinity and also that there will always be someone better than you.

  Eric says the proverb reminds him of a story from Indian philosophy.

  Three hundred years ago, the world was believed to be a flat plate that rested on an elephant that rested on a turtle. Below that turtle was another turtle and below that turtle was another one. It was turtles all the way down.

  ···

  I call the best friend whenever I can. She is a doctor in Manhattan. Her husband, a businessman. Together they have money, a housekeeper, and a midtown condo, twelve stories up in the air.

  Compared with my other friends, they are the longest married, having married right out of college and then continued onward in their careers.

  At the time, they decide this way is best, logistically, because she does not think she will have time to plan a wedding in medical school or residency. And what if residency ruins this figure, she says on her wedding day, a hand on her flat stomach, in the room where I am helping her dress.

  She is a beautiful bride. Residency ruins nothing.

  I have known this girl since third grade. We grow up in adjacent Michigan towns and meet through family friends. I don’t know her that well before I know this—by second grade, she has taken an interest in rubber cement. She likes to pour it on her hands and lick it off.

  Now she tells her patients to stop eating trans fats for the sake of their clogged arteries and, thoughtfully, prescribes drugs. Let me give you a checkup, she says whenever I call, and I must vehemently decline. Not because I doubt her skill but because I have seen her eat rubber cement.

  That was a long time ago, she says.

  Yes, but who knows what the long-term effects are. No one has ever studied them.

  What’s this about your chemistry? she says today. Why isn’t it going well? You put in the hours, then how is it that you get nothing?

  The way I have explained it is through LEGOs. The chemistry that I do involves putting many LEGOs together and having another LEGO come out. The LEGOs are molecules, but unlike real LEGOs, I cannot see them or touch them.

  I am a senior in college when I decide to go into synthetic organic chemistry. I am mesmerized by the art of it. The purpose of this kind of chemistry is to build a molecule that is already present in nature, but to build it better than nature, in the least number of steps, with a beautiful key step. Technique is everything. Percent yield is everything. For months I am running the same reaction over and over again, the seventh step of a twenty-four-step synthesis, just so I can get
the yield up from 50 percent to 65 because anything under 60 is unacceptable to the advisor. Then for months, I am running step eight. Then for years, the advisor is asking, Do we have it, the molecule? And I say, No, it is still at large.

  In time, you find yourself no longer mesmerized.

  I do not always like talking to the best friend about my work.

  She sometimes starts to say, Well, when I was in orgo lab, I remember it being fine. Don’t LEGOs come with a manual?

  And this makes me a little mad.

  Once I finish writing it, they will hand me a PhD.

  Your orgo lab was for a class. You had a partner. The experiments you were asked to do were supposed to work. You weren’t trying to discover anything new.

  Okay, okay, she says.

  Out of the blue, she asks if I have been writing anything else.

  Like what?

  I don’t know. Didn’t you used to write things?

  That was a long time ago, I say.

  In college, I took some writing classes and for one semester thought, If this wasn’t so blatantly impractical, I would go into writing.

  An ideal world: money falls from the sky and into my lap for each word that I write. A one-dollar flat rate. A twenty for a real zinger.

  ···

  I am an only child, and so is Eric. This is not a deal breaker, but it does make me fear for our future.

  Imagine two only children marrying, staying together, and then our parents getting sick. Imagine us flying out to see these parents, four in total if they get sick at the same time, as Murphy’s Law would allow, and only two of us. Imagine if we have children, how many people we would have to see and tend to. And then who would walk the dog?

  If this dog dies from neglect, I will never forgive myself.

  Eric has mixed feelings about being an only child.

  This is because he has a family that loves him too much. From kindergarten to sixth grade, his mother puts handwritten notes in his lunch box. She writes things like You are my sun and stars.

  That’s sweet, I say, until I think more about the phrase.

  You cannot be two things at once: You are not light, both wave and particle. You are not Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive.