“Friday night in Geneva.”
“Then, yes. I slept Wednesday.”
“Yesterday was Thursday.”
“Then I slept the day before yesterday.”
I shook my head, a frustrated grin on my face. “Mona. You have to take better care of yourself.”
“I can’t help it. I only get so many hours with the LHC, and then I have to go through the data. It’s too much to backup, and my project isn’t priority. And then there’s the inevitable white whale hunt, which only seems to yield anything of value when I’m exhausted and my brain stops overcomplicating everything.”
White whale hunt was what she called her process of choosing which hunch to follow, how to prioritize her time and energy searching for answers to the unknown, something about understanding or explaining quantum mechanics within the frame of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Although, maybe that wasn’t it? Most of the time, when she spoke of her research, it sounded like a different language.
Over the last several weeks, I’d come to the conclusion that Mona didn’t sleep enough. She worked herself until she was exhausted or manic with exhaustion, and this was because Mona DaVinci both was and was not her genius.
Her genius was a paradox, terrifying in its complexity and beauty, but also severe, punishing, rigid in its demands of her. It didn’t care about the frailty of the body. It didn’t care about her relationships, even with herself. It explored, relentlessly, dragging her along—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—often at the expense of her health and wellbeing-.
“I understand the urge to work through the night and into the next day. I get it.” I paced to the window, staring at the blue sky. “I’m not going to tell you what to do—obviously—I’m just going to say, as someone who cares deeply about you, I hope you get a chance to take a night off the whale hunt.”
“I will. I’ll be sleeping in tomorrow. I already packed, so I’ll wake up, catch my flight, arrive in New York Saturday evening, and then I’ll see you early Sunday.” The unmistakable smile in her sleepy voice encouraged me to smile.
“Sunday.”
“Yes. Sunday.” She yawned again. I didn’t take it personally. “I can’t wait. But—uh—was there something else? You said two things?”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded, almost forgetting. “I asked you to send me a picture of yourself, and you sent your faculty headshot from Caltech.” I couldn’t stop my smile from growing. When she’d sent it, I’d laughed on and off for an hour. I wasn’t even mad. It was such a Mona thing to do.
It did, however, leave me unsatisfied. I’d sent her a few shots of me lying in bed, wearing nothing but my boxers, and she sends me a picture of her in a lab coat, smiling with no teeth. I wasn’t looking for reciprocation, but, man, a candid maybe? A genuine smile?
She was quiet for a beat. Then she cleared her throat. “You didn’t like the picture?”
“You are sneaky. You know what I mean.”
“Are you saying it’s a bad picture?”
Sometimes she was too fucking smart, especially when we debated. I loved it. I also hated it.