“Gifty!” Nana shouted without turning, and I ran to catch up.

I’d left our house when it was still light out, but by the time the two of us got outside it was a hot and humid night. Fireflies flashed their greetings all around us. Nana’s long strides meant I had to hustle to keep up with him, a half-shuffle, half-jog that I had perfected over the years.

“Do you think it’s weird we don’t hug?” I asked.

Nana ignored me and quickened his pace. These were the Nana-ignores-everybody days, when my mother and I would steal commiserating glances at each other after one of his moody groans. To Nana, my mother would say, “You think you and me are size? Fix your face.” To me she would say, “This too shall pass.”

We lived about a mile and a half away from the school, an easy walk by our mother’s standards, but one we dreaded. Sidewalks in Huntsville were mostly decorative. People drove their SUVs to grocery stores two blocks away, their air-conditioning on full blast. The only people who walked were people like us, people who had to walk. Because they had one car, one parent who worked double shifts even on game days. Because walking was free and public transportation was either nonexistent or unreliable. I hated the honking, the slurs yelled out through rolled-down windows. Once, while I was walking by myself, a man in a pickup truck had driven slowly next to me, staring at me so hungrily I grew afraid and ducked into the library, hid among the books until I was certain he hadn’t followed me. But I liked 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 urgent care clinic to prescribe me hydrocodone in addition to the usual antibiotics. Raymond had gone with me to pick up the medicine from the pharmacy, but when we got home I flushed the painkillers down the toilet.

Now, I said, “Most people’s immune systems are highly capable and efficient. Overprescription is a huge problem in this country, and if we don’t take charge of our own health, we’re susceptible to all kinds of manipulation from pharmaceutical companies who profit off of keeping us ill and—”

Raymond threw his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, if a doctor prescribes me the good stuff, I’m taking it.”

The good stuff. I didn’t say anything to Raymond. I just walked out of the apartment, got in my car, and drove to the lab, my skin screaming, weeping.

* * *

—

I had grown more careful about how I handled the mice after my first year of graduate school. I washed my hands more often. I never touched my eyes. It was rare for me to get reactions as serious as the ones I used to get back when I thought I was invincible, but still, spending hours there communing with the mice left me a little worse for wear by the time I finished up each day.

Staying in the lab for that long worked on my mind as well. The slowness of this work, the way it takes forever to register even the tiniest of changes, it sometimes left me asking What’s the point?

    What’s the point? became a refrain for me as I went through the motions. One of my mice in particular brought those words out every time I observed him. He was hopelessly addicted to Ensure, pressing the lever so often that he’d developed a psychosomatic limp in anticipation of the random shocks. Still, he soldiered on, hobbling to that lever to press and press and press again. Soon he would be one of the mice I used in optogenetics, but not before I watched him repeat his doomed actions with that beautifully pure, deluded hope of an addict, the hope that says, This time will be different. This time I’ll make it out okay.

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?

24