walking with Nana on those spring nights when the weather was just starting its quick turn from pleasant to oppressive, when the cicadas’ songs gave way to those of the katydids. I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.
Nana and I turned onto our street. One of the streetlamps was out, and so there was a minute-long stretch of near darkness. Nana stopped walking. He said, “Do you want a hug?”
My eyes were still adjusting to that patch of dark. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t tell if he was serious or just making fun of me, but I considered the question carefully anyway. “No, not really,” I said.
Nana started laughing. He walked those last couple of blocks unhurriedly, at my pace so that I could walk beside him.
23
I dreaded going back to my apartment and finding, always finding, that little had changed, and so I started spending more and more time in my lab. I thought of it as “communing with the lab mice,” but there was hardly anything interesting, let alone spiritual, about my humdrum days and long afternoons. Most of my experiments didn’t even require me to do much other than check in on them once a day to make sure no major mishaps had occurred, so I mostly just sat in my frigid office, staring, shivering, at my blank Word document, trying to conjure up the motivation to write my paper. It was boring, but I preferred this familiar boredom to the kind I found at home. There, boredom was paired with the hope of its relief, and so it took on a more menacing tint.
In the lab, at least, I had Han. He was using brain-mapping tools to observe mouse behaviors, and he was the only person I knew who spent more time in the lab than I did.
“Are you sleeping here now?” I asked Han one day when he walked in with a toothbrush case. “Don’t you ever worry you’re going to die here and no one will find your body for days?”
Han shrugged, pushed up his glasses. “That Nobel Prize isn’t going to win itself, Gifty,” he said. “Besides, you’d find me.”
“We have got to get out more,” I said, and then I sneezed. The problem with spending so much time at the lab around my mice was that I was allergic to them. A common allergy in my field. Years of coming into contact with their dander, urine, saliva, had left my immune system battle-weary and weakened. While most people’s symptoms included the regular itchy eyes/runny nose combination, I had the particular pleasure of bursting into a bloom of itchy rashes anytime I so much as touched my skin without washing my hands. Once the rash had even appeared on my eyelid.
“Stop scratching,” Raymond said whenever I absentmindedly reached for the ever-present patch on my upper back or underneath my breasts. We had been together for a couple of months, and though some of the shine had come off, there was still nothing I loved more than watching him move through the kitchen with such grace—flicking salt, chopping peppers, licking sauce from the tip of his index finger. That morning, I was sitting on a stool in his kitchen, watching him slowly stir his scrambled eggs, the movement of his wrist so hypnotic, I hadn’t noticed what I was doing to my own body.
I had asked Raymond to warn me if he caught me scratching, but that didn’t stop me from being incredibly annoyed with him whenever he did. Don’t tell me what to do. It’s my body, my mind would scream at him, but my mouth would say, “Thank you.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” he said one day after he watched me swallow my breakfast of Benadryl and orange juice.
“I don’t need to see a doctor. They’ll just tell me what I already know. Wear gloves, wash my hands, blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah? You’ve been clawing your legs in your sleep.” Raymond was eating a proper breakfast—eggs with toast, coffee. He offered me a bite, but I was always running late in those days. No time to eat, no time to waste. “You know, for someone in the med school, you’re really funny about doctors and medicine,” he said.
He was referring to the time, a few months before, when a particularly nasty case of strep throat had led a doctor at the