working in the vipers’ nest, although you could use a little blush. I like the hair, though. Very nice.” She reached out and lifted a lock at the side. When Sylvia had left Ottawa my dark, wavy hair had been shoulder length, but I’d recently had it cut short in a layered style that was fashionable, easy to care for, and stayed out of my eyes.
“Yours looks spectacular.” “Well, thanks sweetie. Then I’ll leave it on. I think it goes well with my bone structure, don’t you?” She patted her hair, looking coy, then she caught my expression. I hadn’t realized it was a wig. “Get used to it, babe. If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. Anyway, I’m in remission, sort of. On my last CAT scan the little bugger’d stopped growing.”
“Just like that?” “Apparently they do that sometimes. Might be the radiation, but I’m also off estrogen. Which is a drag, so to speak, because I’ll start to grow a beard. Won’t the undertaker get a surprise.”
I hated these conversations. When I had first met Sylvia, she had been David: brilliant, sensitive, and doing a Ph.D. in the macho world of physics. Over the years, as he gradually went through the process of changing sex, I was witness to the taunts, the threats, and the intolerance of our learned colleagues. It sickened me. A year ago, when she was diagnosed with a tumour embedded deep in the cerebellum, the surgeon had been blithe.
“Probably the hormones,” he’d said. “Guess you shouldn’t have tinkered with God’s work.” And he’d turned and walked out of the examining room. So, while she still had the strength for humour, I couldn’t say the same.
“So what’s that mean… in the long term?” “Who knows. Who cares. Anyway, lighten up. Order a beer. I’ve got lots to tell you, and we have to get through it fast before Elaine the drain gets here.”
“Sylvia — “ “She’s such a downer. She was better for a while — I swear she was bonking someone but she wouldn’t tell me who — but now she’s back to her usual obsessive-compulsive self. Boring. And around me? Too depressing. I don’t need that.”
I smiled. “So things haven’t improved.”
“I tried. Asked her out for lunch a few times. But honestly? Mutual avoidance works for me. I invited her here for you, for old times’ sake, but if she slips and calls me David she’s dead. Of course, being Elaine, she could-n’t make it for dinner. She’s much too busy. But she said she’d come for dessert.”
When the waiter came over he gave his full attention to Sylvia. She was remarkably beautiful as either a man or a woman: fine boned with curly black hair, pale skin, and an eye for dramatic detail. Tonight, she was wearing a red scarf in her hair, a snow white cotton peasant shirt that almost glowed in the dim lights, and, although I hadn’t checked under the table, I assumed she had on her signature tight black jeans with elegant black boots. Like any self-respecting woman she avoided panty hose unless driven to it by some social necessity. I resigned myself to being invisible for the remainder of the evening and passed on my order to her. In record time the squid salad had appeared.
“They know you here?”
She glanced at the waiter disappearing into the kitchen and smiled. “Him? He’s not my type. I like a little bit more on the feminine side.”
That was a change, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the gory details so I busied myself with the salad. After finishing her Ph.D. in physics, Sylvia left the labs to get a second doctorate in Library Science, where the level of tolerance for sexual diversity was higher than in the sciences. She quickly became an expert in large scientific databases and is known for her ability to pluck a single molecule from a sea of information. While officially there is no such thing as a forensic librarian there should be, because Sylvia’s online searches could expose scientific fraud like an x-ray reveals bone. So, while I ate the squid salad Sylvia picked at her food and talked.
“I started with three searches, comprehensive. Riesler, Edwards, and the third guy you named: Jacobson. Edwards looks clean. Only publishes in first-tier juried journals. Doesn’t publish a lot, but he’s consistent. No duplication. The progression of articles looks reasonable, one experiment leading logically to the next. No surprises here.”
“Is he a team player?” “Guarded team player, I’d have to say. He publishes alone, or sometimes with two or three other people, all well regarded. One is his ex-advisor in California. He doesn’t go in for group gropes with a hundred names on the publication, if that’s what you mean.”
“Graduate students?” “He hasn’t been out that long. Probably has a couple now, but they haven’t published yet.”
“What about the work?” “Hey babe, I only do titles and abstracts. Read the fine print.” Then she bent down, rummaged in her briefcase, and came up with a small pile of journal articles neatly bound with an elastic band and labelled Edwards.”But I do pull articles. Your bedtime reading. It beats a cold shower.”
I took the bundle and slipped it in my briefcase. “How would you know?”
“Ooh. Nasty. But I’ll take that as a compliment.” She looked like she was about to say more, then stopped, gave a small shake of her head, and got back to the topic.
“I can give you a snapshot, but don’t sue me if some error creeps in.” I nodded. “Edwards works on salmon — all these boys do — and Edwards’s schtick is stock identification. He’s developing some kind of technique to determine the stock of a salmon by removing a scale and zapping it with a laser. If it turns out that it works, you could tell, for instance, whether a particular salmon came from Canada, Washington, Oregon, or Alaska. Russia or Japan for that matter. Just by zapping its scale. In fact, if his recent stuff proves out, you could even go so far as to say what stream the fish hatched out in and when, which in salmon, tells you very precisely what stock it’s from. I gather Fisheries needs this kind of information to monitor endangered stocks.”
“But you could also use it to enforce quotas on particular stocks.”
“That’s an interesting interpretation.” She thought for a moment, then continued. “I’d say it’s too preliminary for that, but if it works… “ she let her voice trail off and leaned back in her chair.
I’d finished the squid salad, which was seriously spicy and wonderfully divine, when the waiter arrived with the noodles and curry. I ordered another beer. I motioned to Sylvia’s plate with the curry spoon, but she waved it away. “You eat, I talk. We’re on billable hours here.”
When I was about to protest, the eating, not the billable hours, she averted her gaze, so I let it go.
“What about Riesler?”
“He was fun. Must publish twenty papers a year, and he’s first author on every one. What a guy.”
I smiled. Both Sylvia and I knew that a man in Madden Riesler’s position spent about as much time in the lab as I did at the dentist, and I have good teeth. As the head of a large university research lab his time would be fully booked with teaching, committees, grant applications, and the endless paperwork generated by any large bureaucracy. So the science was coming from his students: a legion of post-docs and graduate students toiling away at lab benches in an almost medieval system of apprenticeship. The fact that Riesler’s name appeared first on all the publications told me a lot about the man. A more enlightened supervisor would have given the privilege of first authorship to the student who designed and carried out the work. It wasn’t as though Riesler needed the recognition. So he was either greedy, despotic, or insecure, none of which were particularly appealing
