Half Life
Eliot cleaned the glassware slowly, which is the only way to clean glassware if you'd like to keep your funding. The lab was empty except for Eliot, the low electrical groan of the lab equipment that was never fully off, the kind of sound you stop noticing after a few weeks and start needing after a few months.
On the whiteboard behind him a half-erased differential equation from Thursday's group meeting was still visible, Dr Tavares had circled one of Eliot's steps and written "elegant" in her sharp handwriting. He hadn’t erased it yet. He told himself he just hasn’t gotten around to it.
Phone buzzes on the work bench, Marcus.
“Still at the lab?“
“Yep.”
“It’s Friday my guy, come have some fun for once.”
Eliot set a beaker upside down on the drying rack and lined it up with the others. He had no reason to still be at the lab. His experiment would have to run all weekend and wouldn't have his data ready till Monday. He was just present, the way a lamp is present in a room nobody’s in.
“Leaving soon” he typed, which was almost true.
The place Marcus picked was the kind of bar that tried hard to feel like it wasn't trying, exposed brick, filament bulb, chalkboard menu that someone with an art degree had spent too long on. Eliot ordered a ginger ale and didn't explain it, he’d stopped explaining it about 5 months ago, which was about five months after he had stopped drinking and a month after realizing nobody cared what was in his glass nearly as much as he assumed they would.
Marcus was already two beers in and talking about his advisor who was either a genius or clinically insane depending on the week. Tonight they were a genius.
“She looked at three months of my data and just said ‘what if you inverted the axis’ and I wanted to throw something but she was right. She was completely right.
“It’s INFURIATING” Marcus said.
There were four of them tonight. Marcus, who had been Eliot's lab neighbor who refused to stay a stranger. Priya, who was theoretical and reminded everyone of this constantly and with great joy. And David, who was finishing his PhD and carried the serene, hollow expression of a man who had recently stopped caring whether his dissertation was good and started caring only that it was done.
Priya was explaining something about her advisor’s latest paper and Eliot was following it about seventy percent, which with Priya was respectable. She paused mid sentence and pointed at him.
“you'd actually understand this. You're the only person here who’d actually understand this.”
“I'm following about seventy percent,” Eliot said.
“That’s more than these two combined,” she said.
and Marcus raised his glass with a “to the cold truth” cheers.
Eliot felt the shape of the moment, warm. Easy, the kind of Friday night that people are supposed to have. He cataloged it the way he always did, from a half-step outside, the way you might press your hand against a window to feel the sun without feeling the air. The ginger ale was too sweet. He drank it anyway. Around him, his friends were loose in a way he had once been loose and now had to approximate. The distance was slight. It was also total.
David asked him how the simulation was going and Eliot told him, and David nodded in the way that meant he actually thought it was interesting rather than the way that meant he was being polite, and Eliot noted the difference and then wondered why he was translating people instead of just hearing them.
Marcus bumped his shoulder in the way to the “you good?”
“Yeah,” Eliot said. “I’m good.”
And he mostly was. That was the strange thing. He wasn't unhappy tonight. He just wasn’t all the way here.
He walked home because the weather was good and because the alternative was accepting a ride from Marcus, which would mean another ten minutes of being perceived. The campus was quiet in the way it only got on Friday nights, everyone either out or sealed away somewhere with someone. His footsteps sounded deliberate on the pavement. He didn’t put his earphones in and listen to his usual playlist, just listened to the wind and his steps.
He got home and filled a glass and stood at the counter drinking it. The ginger ale after taste was still in his teeth. There had been a version of Eliot just a year prior where that single glass of ginger ale was replaced with a fifth of bottom shelf whiskey, and he could feel that version standing next to him in the kitchen like a draft from a window that was already shut. One year, he was told it would get easier and it had, mostly, in the way that carrying something gets easier. The weight doesn't change. You just stop noticing your posture.
His phone buzzed twice. The group chat. Marcus had sent a picture of David asleep on the train, mouth open, laptop bag hugged to his chest like a stuffed animal. Priya had responded with a string of emojis Eliot didn't care to decipher. He smiled at it but did not respond.
He brushed his teeth. He set his alarm for no reason, he'd be up before it anyway. He got into bed and lay there with his eyes open for a while, while not thinking about anything particular, which was its own kind of thinking.
The feeling was hard to name. It wasn't sadness exactly. It was more like a frequency, a low, constant hum beneath everything, so familiar that he sometimes forgot it was there until a night like this one, when the contrast between the noise of other people and the silence of himself became measurable. He had been eleven, maybe twelve the first time he understood that other people were not doing this. That the effort he put into being a person in a room was not universal. that something in him had been assembled slightly wrong, not broken enough to be visible, but just enough to for him to feel
He closed his eyes. Sleep came the way it always did, not as rest but as a door closing.
Saturday broke clear and cold and Eliot was up before his alarm by forty minutes. He laid there for a moment and then didn't, which was unusual. Most mornings he negotiated with the ceiling for a while before getting up for the day.
He ran. He hadn't run in weeks but today his body wanted to move and he didn't argue with it. The campus loop was two and a half miles and he did it twice without stopping, which surprised him. The air tasted like pine mulch and cold stone and his lungs burned in a way that felt honest, which was a strange word for it but the right one. By the second lap he wasn't thinking at all, which was the closest thing to peace he had a name for.
He showered and made eggs and ate them standing at the counter reading paper Dr. Tavares had forwarded him with a note that said “Thought of your work when I read this.” He read it twice. The second time he started scribbling in the margins then he was at his desk, and then an hour passed without weight.
This happens sometimes. The hum would quiet and the distance would close and he would catch himself just being somewhere, doing something, without monitoring it. It never lasted. But it was real while it was happening, and today it kept happening.
He called Jonas. Jonas was one of the two who remained from before, from the town he grew up in and the person and Eliot had been then, which were not entirely the same as the town and the person that existed now. Jonas picked up on the third ring, which meant he’d debated not picking up, which meant he was glad he did.
“Eli, what's up man.”
“Nothin. Just calling”
“You never just call.”
“I know.”
They talked for twenty minutes about nothing that matters and everything that did. Jonas was working at his uncle's shop and thinking about trade school and had broken up with the girl from Raleigh, or she had broken up with him, the distinction seemed to depend on which sentence he was in the middle of. Eliot listened and aligned and told him trade school was a good idea and meant it.
“You sound good” Jonas said, and it landed oddly because it implied a comparison to some other time when he hadn’t
“I feel good today,” Eliot said, and it was true.
After he hung up he sat at his desk for a while with the paper still open in front of him and the margins full of his handwriting and he felt, briefly but entirely, like a person who was going to be fine. Like the hum was something he could outlast. Like the distance was closable and the weight of was losable and the glass he’d spent his whole life pressing his hand against was thinner than he’d thought.
The light in the apartment was yellow and warm and fell across his desk in a way that made even the clutter look intentional.
He didn't know what to do with a day this good. That was the thing. He stood inside it and didn't trust it. Not because he was cynical but because he had learned, the way you learn that a stove is hot, that these days were loans, that the repayment was always coming. That the hum always came back, and when it did it brought interest.
But today he set that knowledge aside and let the afternoon be what it was.
Sunday was unremarkable and that was fine.
He went to the lab in the morning because he wanted to, not because he needed to. The sim had finished overnight and the results were clean, cleaner than he’d expected, and he spent an hour organizing the data into something presentable for Tuesday's meeting. He wrote Dr. Tavares a short email summarizing what he’d found and then deleted the last line, which had been “thank you for everything you've taught me” and replaced it with “let me know if you want me to run the second parameter set before Tuesday." He read the email twice and sent it.
He returned Priya’s copy of the Feynman lectures that he'd borrowed in October. She was in her office and seemed surprised to see him on a Sunday.
“You could have just held onto it” she said
“I know. I just finished it and didn't wanna forget it.”
“Did you dog ear any pages? Because if you dog eared any pages we cant be friends”
“I used sticky notes.”
“Then we can still be friends,” she said, and turned back to her screen, and that was the whole conversation.
He cleaned the apartment, which he did on Sundays anyway but today he had the energy to do it right. He took out the trash even though the bag was only half full. He made the bed properly. He wiped the bathroom mirror and then wiped it again because he could see streaks and today that bothered him enough to do something about it. It felt good to be in a clean space, it felt like the kind of thing a person with momentum does.
He texted Marcus: “Thanks for last night. Glad I came out.”
Marcus replied almost immediately: “bro you say that like you're 50. See you Tuesday.”
He texted Jonas: “Good talking to you yesterday. Seriously look into the trade school thing. You’d be great at it.”
Jonas didn’t respond right away, which was normal.
He sat on the edge of his bed. The apartment was quiet and clean and the light was going gray through the window. He looked at his phone one more time and then sat it facedown on the nightstand.
The apartment was very clean, the light was gone from the window.
Eliot sat for a while longer and then stood up and opened the medicine cabinet.
It was not dramatic. It was mechanical. He’d thought about it long enough that the thinking was over and what remained was just a sequence; open, dump, swallow, wait. The water from the tap was cold and he used a glass from the drying rack, one of the ones he'd cleaned on Friday, and he almost laughed at that.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Set the glass on the nightstand next to his phone. He waited, because that was the last step, and he was good at being thorough.
It took about fifteen minutes for the warmth to start, and it came on wrong, too heavy, too low, like the room was tilting a few degrees in a direction that didn't exist. His hands felt far away. He looked at them and they were still his hands but the connection between looking and feeling had started to stretch, like a signal losing strength over distance.
And then he thought about the run.
Not the idea of it. The actual feeling, his lungs burning on the second lap, the pine mulch smell, the way his body had moved without permission or apology and for ten minutes the hum had stopped completely. Not quieted, stopped.
He thought about Priya saying “Then we can still be friends” without looking up from her screen. He thought about Marcus bumping his shoulder. He thought about Dr. Tavares writing "elegant" in her sharp handwriting and circling it.
He thought about Jonas picking up on the third ring.
Something cracked open in him that was not the pills. It was small and desperate and it said; not yet. I am not done.
He stood up and the room swung sideways. He grabbed the nightstand and his phone fell and heard it hit the floor without seeing where it went. His legs understood what he wanted before his body agreed and made it to the bathroom and dropped to his knees in front of the toilet and pushed his fingers into his throat and gagged and tried and tried.
Nothing.
He tried again. His eyes were streaming and his hands were shaking and the warmth was spreading and he thought about the light on his desk yesterday afternoon, the yellow light on his handwriting, and he wanted to see that again. He wanted to see it so badly.
He reached for his phone and couldn't remember where it had fallen. He was on the bathroom floor now and wasn't sure when that had happened.
He thought about the run.
The tile was cold on his face and then it wasn't.