Love on the Brain

I’M NOT SURE how I spend the night after reading the letter. It’s all a blur. The hours go by, and I cry. I breathe. I try to figure out what this mess is. I feel angry, shocked, beaten, lonely, sad.

Levi calls me, twice, but I remember Rocío’s lone tear glistening down her cheek and feel too dirty and tainted to make myself pick up. What would Levi say if he knew? Would he believe me? How could he, if STC has my real name? I’m not sure I’d believe myself anymore.

The following day it takes all of my compartmentalizing skills to focus on work—and they’re not very many. Pushing things out of my mind is not one of my talents, but I give a moderately good performance. Levi calls again in the morning, and again I don’t answer, but I text him that I’ve been swamped with BLINK (terrible excuse, since we work together) and that I’m busy picking up Trevor at the airport (not an excuse, but equally terrible).

“Kramer couldn’t come—something about a WHO symposium—but he’s very happy,” Trevor says instead of Hi or How are you? or other things normal, decent people start a conversation with. “And you know what happens when Kramer’s happy?”

He gives me a lab far away from you. At least down the hallway, possibly on a different floor, ideally in another building. If I even have a future in academia. If I don’t get outed as a grossly hypocritical racketeer. “Nope.”

“He funnels funds to our lab, that’s what. When will the suits be ready?”

I roll my eyes, driving out of Arrivals. “They’re helmets. And theoretically the prototype is ready. Some adjustments will have to be made for each individual astronaut.”

“Right, you mentioned as much in one of the reports.” I talk about this in all the reports, but reading comprehension was never Trevor’s forte. “The Ward guy, the one who’s leading on NASA’s side? Must be a damn genius for getting this done so quickly.”

I exhale slowly. I’m having a shitty enough day that I probably shouldn’t complicate it by telling my boss that he’s a urinal cake. Then again, because I’m having such a shitty day, I might not be able to help myself from telling him that he’s a urinal cake. What a quandary. “Dr. Ward and I are co-leads,” I say, my tone harsher than it’s ever been with Trevor. He must realize, because he gives me an irritated glance.

“Yeah, but—”

“But?”

He looks out the window, chastised. “Nothing.”

Better be.

Trevor the Urinal Cake is the smallest of the big shots in attendance. There are two Texas congressmen, at least three of Boris’s bosses, and lots of Space Center employees who aren’t directly involved in BLINK. I’m introduced to everyone, but don’t retain anyone’s name. There’s a lot of Impressive, and Can’t wait to see the helmets in action, and This is history in the making being thrown around, which makes me nervous and apprehensive, but I tell myself that it’ll be fine. Right now, my job is the one thing I have under control—thank Dr. Curie for that.

The goal of the demonstration is to show that the helmet improves Guy’s attention during a flight simulation. Guests will observe on a large screen from the conference room next door while Levi, the core engineering team, and I will be in the control room to make sure everything proceeds smoothly. I toy with the idea of taking five minutes alone with Guy to come clean about the marriage thing, but the throng and chaos make it impossible.

I’m double-checking my protocols when Levi comes in, making a beeline to me. “Hey.” His eyes are serious. Dark green. Beautiful, like the underbrush of a forest. He drags a chair next to mine, the distance between us blurring the line between colleagues and something more. I should pull back, but no one’s looking at us, and the sight of him overwhelms me anyway: it’s like all those mysterious pangs elevated to the tenth. I realize that last night was the first we spent apart since . . . since whatever us is happened, and that being with him again feels like . . .

No. It does not feel like home. Home is something else. Home is the new lab this gig is going to get me. Home is the publications I’ll write about today. Home is the community of women in STEM I made for myself that I’ll somehow have to fight for. That’s home, not Levi.

“Hey,” I say, averting my eyes.

“You okay?”

“Nervous. You?”

“Fine.” He doesn’t seem fine. I must be communicating it because he adds, “There’s a mess. Not work related—I’ll explain later.”

I nod, and for a wild, reckless second, I have the weird impulse of telling him about my mess. I should, shouldn’t I? My name will get out sooner or later. If I tell him now, he’ll . . .

Believe that Marie—and therefore me—is a crook. Like everyone else except for Shmac. No, I can’t tell him. He wouldn’t care anyway.

“I have something for you,” he says, the corner of his lip curving in a small smile. The back of his hand brushes mine, and my heart squeezes. It likely seems accidental from the outside. It feels anything but.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll show it to you later. It has to do with your imaginary cat.”

I smile weakly. “I can’t wait for Félicette to puke on your keyboard.”

He shrugs. “Imaginary vomit’s my favorite kind.” He presses his knee against mine and stands, stopping midway to whisper against the shell of my ear, “I missed you last night.”

I shiver. He’s gone before I can answer.

•   •   •

“—LONELINESS IS KILLING me, and I must confess, I still believe.”

Once again, everyone in the control room laughs at Guy’s bellowing. The situation in the conference room is probably the same.

“That was lovely. Thank you, Britney,” Levi murmurs through the mic, amused. We exchange a brief look. My heart’s aflutter. I feel like I’m about to go onstage for a school play I’ve been practicing the whole year. But I’m an adult, and what’s at stake is my professional hopes and dreams. Which, I remind myself, are the only sort of hopes and dreams I allow. “Ready to start?”

“I was born ready, baby.” Guy lifts one eyebrow under the visor of the helmet. “Well. After a labor that my mother often refers to as the most harrowing forty-three hours of her life.”

“Poor lady.” Levi shakes his head, smiling. “You know the drill, but this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to start an attention task on the screen.”

“I’m being paid to play video games. Excellent.”

“Then we’ll activate the helmet when we’re ready and measure your performance under both conditions, for reaction time and accuracy.”

“Got it.”

“Starting in a few seconds, then.” Levi turns off the mic. He and I exchange another glance, this time lingering.

This is it.

We did it.

You and I.

Together.

Then Levi turns around and nods at Lamar to start the routine. There isn’t much I have to do since the protocols have been programmed and are loaded to go. I lean back, eyes on the monitor, fixed on Guy’s sitting form.

I’ll need to buy him a present, I think. A bottle of something expensive. Britney concert tickets. For being so patient when I kept shooting theta bursts at his brain. For being so nice. For lying to him. Then the task loads, and I’m too busy observing to think much of anything.

It starts like usual. Guy’s job is to detect stimuli as they appear on the screen. He’s an astronaut, and at baseline he performs about ten million times better than I, a regular everyday wimp, ever could. A few minutes later Levi gives another signal, and the brain stimulation protocol I wrote is activated.

Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Thirty. I eye the estimates for the performance metrics—nothing happens. Accuracy and reaction times are hovering around the same values as before.

Shit. What’s going on? I squirm nervously in my seat. The lag between the inception of the stimulation and the improvement in performance is usually over by now. I glance at Levi with a worried expression, but he’s calm, sitting back in his chair with his arms folded on his chest, alternating looks between Guy and the values. The only sign of impatience is his fingers, drumming on his bicep. He does that when he’s focused. Levi. My Levi.

I’m stimulating Guy’s dorsal premotor cortex—why the hell is he not improving—?

Suddenly, the numbers start to change. Accuracy skyrockets from 83 percent to 94. Median reaction times decrease by tens of milliseconds. The new values oscillate, and then keep steady. I swear the entire room sighs in relief in unison.

“Sweet,” someone murmurs.

“Sweet?” Lamar asks. “That’s epic.”

I turn to grin at Levi and find him already staring at me with a happy, undecipherable expression. This, at least, is going great. The rest of my life’s a shitshow, but this is working. We made something good, and useful, and just plain badass.

I told you, didn’t I? What’s reliable, and trustworthy, and never, ever abandoned Dr. Curie? Science. Science is where it’s at.

Until it’s not.

I’m the first to realize something’s wrong. Most of the engineers are talking among one another, and Levi’s eyes are still clinging to me with that curious, earnest expression. But both the values and the monitors are in my line of sight, so I notice the numbers changing to values we’ve never before seen. And the twitchy way Guy’s elbow is jerking.

“What’s—” I point at it. Levi immediately turns. “Is he okay?”

“The arm?” Levi’s brows knit. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“It’s similar to what would happen if we stimulated his motor cortex, but we definitely aren’t— Whoa.” The twitches get significantly larger. Guy’s entire body starts shaking.

Levi turns on the mic. “Guy. Everything okay in there?”

No answer.

“Guy? Can you hear me?”

Silence. And Levi’s deepening frown.

“Guy, do you—”

Guy falls out of his chair with a loud thud, his body at once rigid and slack. The control room bursts into chaos—everyone stands, half a dozen chairs scraping against the floor.

“Stop the protocol!” Levi yells, and a second later he’s out of the room and into the lab. I see him appear on the monitor and kneel next to Guy’s spasming body, taking him into his arms. He turns him to the side and clears the floor of nearby objects.

A seizure. Guy’s having a seizure.

Other people barge into the room—NASA physicians, engineers—and ask Levi questions about the stimulation protocol. He answers as best as he can, still holding Guy in his arms as the doctors work around them.

It’s because of Penny. Levi knows what to do because of Penny.

There’s mayhem everywhere. People running in the hallways, in and out of the control room, screaming, swearing, asking questions without replies. Some are directed at me, but I cannot answer, cannot do anything but stare at Guy’s face, at the way Levi is cradling him. I collapse back in my chair. After a minute or an hour, my eyes drift away.

The helmet is on the floor, rolled to the farthest corner of the room.

•   •   •

“—IS KOWALSKY?”

“He was driven to the hospital.”

“—going to be okay?”

“Yeah, he regained consciousness. It’s just a checkup, but—”

“—they gave him a fucking seizure, what is—”

“What a disaster—”

“—the end of BLINK, for sure. God, the incompetence.”

I’m a fortress. I’m impenetrable. I’m not even here. I don’t look at anyone. I try my best not to listen as I walk to Boris’s office after he hissed at me to be there stat. It was four and a half minutes ago. I should hurry.

I knock when I arrive, but enter before being invited to come in. Levi’s already inside, staring at the pretty green of the Space Center outside the square window. I ignore him. Even when I feel his eyes on me, the prickle of a glance asking for a response, I ignore him.

I wonder what he’s thinking. Then I don’t wonder anymore: it probably cannot be borne anyway.

“Where was the error?” Boris asks from behind the desk. He always looks tired and disheveled, but if he told me he was just run over by a truck, I’d believe him. I can’t begin to comprehend the repercussions of today’s events. For him. For NASA. For Levi.

“Yet unclear,” Levi says, holding his eyes. “We’re looking into it.”

“Was there a hardware malfunction?”

“We’re ascertaining whether—”

“Bullshit.”

A brief silence. “As soon as we know, you’ll know.”

“Levi, you see me as a paper pusher—you’re probably right, I have become one. But let me remind you that I do have a degree in engineering, plus a couple of decades of experience on you, and while I’m by no means the creative genius you are, I’m well aware that it won’t take you three weeks of system analyses to figure out whether there was a malfunction on the hardware side or—”

“There wasn’t,” I interrupt. They both turn to me, but I only look at Boris. “At least, I doubt it. I haven’t run any analytics, but I’m sure the error was in the stimulation protocol.” I swallow. “On my side.”

He nods, tight-lipped. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. My guess is that the stimulation was too intense or too high-frequency, and either displaced or too diffuse. This caused widespread neuronal misfiring—”

“Okay.” He nods again. “How did it happen?”

“That I don’t know. We spent weeks mapping Guy’s brain, and nothing like that ever happened. The protocol was tailored to him.” I bend my head, staring down at my hands. I’m wringing my nonna’s ring. As usual. “It won’t happen again. I’m sorry.”

“No, it won’t.” He runs a hand down his face. “BLINK’s over.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath—Levi’s. I look up. “What?”

“This is not a mistake I can tolerate. You took someone who went through years of astronaut training and had him in a puddle on the floor. Guy’s fine, but what if the next astronaut isn’t?”

I shake my head. “There won’t be a next astronaut—”

“There should have been no astronauts. Especially not in front of half of NASA!”

“Boris.” Levi is standing behind me. Probably a little too close. “We tested this protocol over ten times. Nothing similar ever happened. You rushed the demonstration when we could have waited weeks—”

“And you vouched for Bee when NIH sent her here, and she gave a seizure to one of my astronauts!” Boris clenches his jaw, trying to calm down. “Levi, I don’t blame you—”

A loud knock. The door opens, and things get even worse.

No. Not Trevor, please. Not when I’m at my lowest.

And yet, Boris gestures for him to come in. “We were just discussing . . .”

“I heard.” He shrugs darkly. “You weren’t exactly quiet. So,” he says, clapping his hands, “I smoothed things over with the congressmen. Told them BLINK’s still salvageable.”

“Wait.” Boris frowns. I might throw up. “I understand there are many interests at play here, but not so fast. Clearly something went very wrong, and—”

“Someone,” Trevor interrupts. The look he gives me is full of contempt. “I heard what you were saying. Clearly the problems were with one specific person, and they can be solved by eliminating the weak link and putting another NIH researcher on the project. Josh Martin and Hank Malik applied for the position, too.”

“Are you an idiot?” Levi takes a step toward Trevor, looming over him. “You have no knowledge of your own scientists if you think Dr. Königswasser is a weak link—”

“Excuse me,” I say. My voice is shaking. I can’t cry, not now. “I don’t think I’m needed for this conversation. I’ll check on Guy and . . .” Clear out my things.

Yeah.

I get out as fast as I can. I’m not ten steps from the door when I hear feet running behind, then around me. Levi stops in front of me, a near-desperate expression in his eyes. “Bee, we can still fix this. Come back in there and—”

“I—I need to go.” I try to keep my tone firm. “But you need to stay in there and make sure that BLINK actually happens.”

He gives me a disbelieving look. “Not without you. Bee, we have no idea what really went wrong. Boris is overreacting and Trevor’s a fucking idiot. I’m not going to—”

“Levi.” I let myself reach for his wrist. Close my hand around it and squeeze. “I’m asking you to go back in there and do what you have to do to make sure BLINK happens. Please. Do it for Peter. For Penny. And for me.” It’s a low blow. I can see it in his narrowing eyes, in the set of his jaw. But when I start walking again, he doesn’t follow.

And right now, that’s all I want.