LITMIR.BIZ

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Martha’s face, I realized I’d said too much. It was one thing to believe your career is stagnating. It was quite another to advertise that fact to your staff. Dreadful idea — too demoralizing, even if I believed everything I said, and Martha knew it. I added hastily, “Oh, it’s not that. I’m just disappointed. There were a couple of spiders that I collected that were really rather exciting.”

      Martha curled her upper lip and hooded her eyes in a look of sheer disgust.

      “They’re not that ugly Martha, really,” I laughed, but it was true that I had never seen anything like those spiders before. Now I wouldn’t get the chance to find out if anybody else had seen them either.

      “I’d best be phoning around then,” Martha said. In a flurry of activity, totally at odds with her considerable bulk, she corralled some vials and jars from my desk and started to leave. I watched in amusement as her face began a one-act play. The features moulded and changed into dawning realization of something, and the something became quite horrendous until her features once again puckered in a kind of silent scream of revolt. She stopped suddenly and looked back at me, her face spewing disgust.

      “Those larvae in the lab, they’re not from …” I raised my hands in self-defence. Martha’s face grew more disgusted still. Shifting like an ocean wave battering against the sand it ebbed and waned as her thoughts raced through her head, changing her features like the skin of a chameleon. I really believed that her features might disintegrate in imitation of what she was thinking. “Oh, lord save me, Cordi, how can you do these things?”

      I shrugged, stifled a smile. “Two of them are on the far wall in the two cages by the sink. The rest are in the common lab. There wasn’t room in mine.” Not surprising, I thought — my lab was almost as small as my office. I was always having to beg for space from my colleagues who seemed to have gobs of it … but then, they all had the perks that go with tenure. Martha marshalled her features back into a more or less normal position and waddled out of my office.

      I looked at the mail piled high on the desk, sorted through it quickly — nothing from the NSERC grants people yet. God, how they kept me waiting and hoping, second-guessing myself and my competence ten times a day. I was almost out of funds, and without the grant I wouldn’t be able to fund a graduate student next fall, and without a graduate student, the department might not be interested in granting me another year. Jesus, life could be a bitch. I stashed all the mail in a big box for some future free moment, and then I returned a dozen calls and put off the lecture planning people another two weeks — how could I give them the synopsis of my course when I had no material? I’d have to fudge it and hope the Dean didn’t call me in and grill me.

      I gazed out the window, wondering how to pick up my career, feeling the dark cobwebby entrails of depression reaching out for me. My heart lurched at the horrible feeling, and I struggled to rid the thoughts from my head. I’d never get tenure if I couldn’t control my periodic depressions.

      There was a quick step and heavy breathing, and I was thankful for an interruption until the round, wrecked face of Martha reappeared in the room. I read disaster in every nuance of the wobbling, shivering flesh on her face.

      “Jesus, Martha, what happened to you? You look like a squashed spider.”

      It was true. Every ounce of flesh on her face seemed to be sagging into a puddle and her skin was as white as milk. Martha took in a great deep breath and grew rounder, like a balloon. “It’s your lab, Cordi.” It came out in a screech that set my nerves to grinding.

      “What is it? What’s happened?” I asked, moving quickly around my desk, the pit of my stomach lurching like a tugboat in a jar full of hurricanes.

      “I think you’d better come see for yourself.” I took one last look at Martha’s face as it seemed to metamorphose into even greater doom and raced out of my office, taking the stairs two at a time. There was no one in the long corridor. The doors were closed on all sides and the institutional tiles on the floor sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lighting. My door was the sixth from the end, on the right.

      It was ajar, and even before I reached it, I smelled it. What is it about smell and disaster these days? I thought calmly, in that unreality before reality hits. I walked in.

      Everything seemed to be in its place, nothing wrong except for the heavy reek of insecticide. It was everywhere — the air was glutinous with it. “This isn’t happening,” I said, trying to will it so. “It’s not happening.” I moved in a daze from cage to cage. Insect after insect, dead. The mice and salamanders seemed okay, but who knew what the chemical would have done to my controlled conditions? All garbage now. Thank God I wasn’t in the middle of any mantid experiment.

      Nothing could stop the deadly work of the insecticide. I moved from cage to cage unbelieving, touching the cages, looking in. But at least my data was safe. The insects could be replaced. I turned to my laptop computer to boot it up, but I didn’t get far. The keyboard was drenched in some sort of fluid that had spread throughout the computer. A horrible feeling crept through me as I bent to sniff the keyboard. Formaldehyde. It was swimming in formaldehyde. Like an automaton I turned on the computer, but nothing happened. I remembered the death sentence handed out to the computer of a friend of mine, who had once spilled a glass of red wine on her computer. All my files gone. My raw data, gone. But I had backups. A pain in the ass to get them reinstalled, but at least I had them. Or did I?

      I turned from the room, took the stairs on the run, and raced into my office to the drawer where I kept my computer backup disks. I yanked it open and stared at the empty drawer. No disks. I pulled it all the way out and flung it on the floor, getting a precarious sense of relief from watching it splinter and shatter. Not very well made, I thought, in that strange displacing calm that disaster spawns. With a sinking heart, I remembered doing a backup the previous week and asking my grad student to put them in my office when the backup was done. But he’d lost his key to my office and had left the disks in the lab. I raced back upstairs and flung open every drawer and cupboard, but there were no disks. I turned in desperation to the computer and started madly pushing buttons, looking for a miracle I knew I wasn’t going to get. What can I say? I’m an indecisive fatalist. Sometimes.

      It was some time before I was aware that Martha was standing in the doorway, with a handkerchief draped decorously over her nose.

      “Who would want to do this to you Cordi?” she whispered. “In all my years here I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing exciting ever happens around here, and then suddenly, in the space of weeks, you find a dead body, nearly die, and have your lab gratuitously fumigated?”

      I kicked the drawer with my foot. “Whoever it was, I’ve got to find them. I’ve got to get those disks back.” After months of lethargy induced by one of my black moods, it felt good to feel so motivated, even if it was out of fear.

      “But, Cordi, what makes you think they’ll still have the disks?”

      I looked at Martha, giving the butterflies in my stomach a ride worthy of a sailboat in six-metre waves. I took a deep breath to calm the waves and swallowed hard. I thought I was a pessimist, but this horrible thought had miraculously eluded me.

      “Because if they don’t, I’m history.”

      “You sure are, my dear Cordi.”

      The voice grated every nerve in my body as I turned to face Jim Hilson. He walked in without being invited and casually picked up one of the fumigated cages.

      “Oh, Cordi, this is just dreadful. Now you won’t be able to publish any papers.” He looked at me ruefully. You’re going to need a bit of luck, Cordi, to get out of this mess.” He smiled then and replaced the fumigated cage. “Cheers,” he said. And then he was gone. Just like that.

       chapter six

      I spent the rest of the afternoon in the zoology building with the security people and police, bottling up my anger and panic and trying to appear stoic, when I actually felt totally destroyed. The harried diminutive blond female cop

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