Don't Disappoint (Ch. 18)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next three weeks, we’ll continue serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
It was a Friday and Jason got out of school at 3 and made small talk in the parking lot and reluctantly made his way to the gym, to the larger than usual Friday crowd, but a crowd, the Friday gym crowd, that’s the best day of the week for this crowd because you don’t want to be there but once you’re there, it’s all gravy, it’s all fucking cherry on top of the week, because you didn’t take the easy cheat day and now you feel better than those bastards that went straight to the bar and so maybe you even push a little harder since you’re here but if not no problem at least you’re here. Guys are a little easier with the nods to other guys and there’s in general less chest puffing peacock type behavior and more sweaty, if still testosterone-infused, bonhomie.
He’s inadvertently eavesdropping on two conversations simultaneously and somebody says I don’t mind if it’s just a little bit, just a little bit like on the upper lip, and he’s not sure whether it’s the conversation about lipstick or Botox or herpes or whether they’ve merged. The conversations. Whenever someone said to my father see you tomorrow or see you later he would always reply not if I see you first in what I recognized only years later to be, for him at least, not a standard issue Dad joke but rather a verbal tic he couldn’t let pass and had to do with the use of seeing as a verb being a unitary event. Something that happens at a fixed point in time. A directed action, an arrow connecting two nodes in a directed network. If someone sees you, you cannot, by this definition, see them. The seeing’s happened. It’s done and gone.
Jason is on the Hammer Strength lat pulldown and a Persian guy at the neighboring lat pulldown machine asks him to take a video of him doing lat pulldowns. Which he does. In the sauna there’s a discussion about a house in Canoga Park someone is flipping and then someone is going on about his divorce and how the lawyers are getting all the money he made for his kids and someone is going on about a cleanse of some kind and there’s a chemical smell in the sauna and someone says why does it smell like fish and someone says because someone has sprayed some shit on the heating coils hoping to get the room smelling like eucalyptus but instead just causing it to smell like a recently lacquered Adirondack chair. You have to do 18. Some guy is saying to 2-3 people that may or may not be listening. 16 is the minimum. I’ll tell you what I do. I eat my first meal all liquid at 2pm. I’ll tell you what’s in there. Fresh celery. Fresh carrots. Fresh spinach. Fresh ginger. Fresh cucumbers.
And a canned ham.
A canned ham?
Just fuckin’ with you.
Kiowa. Metamucil. No sugar. No fruit. You cannot eat the fruit.
Protein?
No protein. I want to see everything that goes in there where it came from. I don’t know where that protein came from. Why these other people…let me tell you, these crash diets, why these people, these crash diets they lose it and cannot keep it off. It is not sustainable man. I said if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to do this again I’m going to do it sustainable. If you want to eat the pizza and pasta, you have to eat the fiber first. You have to have a salad first. And I’m going to tell you why. It’s not because it fills your stomach my brother, and then you’re not hungry. No. That’s what everyone thinks. It coats your stomach and all the way through and so you cannot take it in. The pizza and the pasta and beer they just go right through. Coats. Like a lining. I’m telling you I’ve done this three times in my life. First time is during college I was backpacking around Europe and I wanted to look good. Second time is after law school. Third time is after the divorce because you know I want to get back out there. And now I have three kids, two that are 5 and a half and one is 4. And let me tell you I am in the best shape of my life. If I can do it, you can do it.
After a shower Jason is on the way out to his car when he receives a text.
<two more procedures, eat w/o me>
Each procedure ballparks at two hours and his phone tells him the message was sent at 6:23, so he heads home to fire up the grill for a steak and why not drop an edible to go with his scotch. He is halfway through the steak when it kicks in and another text comes through, this one from his neighbor.
<Hey Ed and Cindy lost their recycling bin, I recall you have extra. Can they use until replace>
He finishes the steak and pulls on a t-shirt and flip flops and walks the trash can over, they’ve got young kids, meet him at the door, sure thing no problem, yeah it took them only a few days to replace mine when it went out, well maybe yeah it must be I hit them right on the cycle.
Jason walks next door and finds Mark in his backyard. Mark’s wife is a structural engineer and she’s talking about how construction is like confection. Building buildings is like thinking about heating and cooking. Everyone coming to work at the same time is like simulating an earthquake. There’s only so many days a year you can do this. The buildings have ratings. Yeah I stole your, no I’m kidding. Yeah maybe one cold one if you’re going to twist my arm. No I didn’t see it. I understand. I’m listening. He’s saying, it’s just unfucking believable. What the Buddha said to the hot dog vendor. Make me one with everything. I mean the message is anyone who’s brown we don’t care about you. You don’t matter. You look at what Sessions has been doing and now this guy. Another white guy. This guy will basically fuck up the judicial system in this country for what, 25 more years? And undo everything that really matters, the judicial legislative achievement from a lifetime. It’s a colossal disaster. There can’t be any upside to this, I’m sorry, you’re not gonna convince me that we are not headed for the apocalypse. I’m sorry. Pretty much every day there’s a new insult to common decency and a new assault on the constitution. Excuse me ok. I may be a dark-skinned woman but let me tell you I am not looking for a handout. I came here I could barely speak any English and I worked for everything I have. But don’t tell me what he is doing is totally bad for this country. Many of these people coming here from countries in the Middle East, I don’t know that they are coming here because they want to work for something, I don’t think they are coming here because they want to live like we live. They are coming here because they know in this country people are not going to bother you, they are not going to tell you how to live, they are going to let you practice your religion to dress how you want to dress. And I am not saying there is no discrimination but it’s not like that ok. There are always stupid people. But you are not going to be put in prison for what you believe. And I don’t think that people are coming here to assimilate. I think that they are coming for a handout because they know they can take advantage of this country. I am going to be honest with you: I don’t want to see their women walking around dressed like that ok. I don’t want to see them, I don’t want my daughter growing up seeing these women covering their bodies and faces and walking their kids to school with my kids in the stroller. That is not right. I come from a culture where the man’s opinion is always right and the woman’s is not valued. I don’t want that in this country for my children. That is not why I came to this country, so I can tell you when I’m listening to the guy talk about affirmative action is racist and blacks have never had it better in any other country in the history of the world you know I can’t say I disagree with him.
Mark is saying that if you really pay attention, Jeff Daniels actually has most of the funniest scenes in Dumb and Dumber and that somehow this is very sad and makes him feel like the world is unfair.
<where are you>
He makes semi-deranged eye contact with his neighbor’s wife after this soliloquy, the alcohol and THC making her face suddenly disheveled, her eyes wild and liquid, her hair seeming to move on its own. How is it she treats me like such a prince and then turns around and treats him like a prince right in front of everyone when he is so obviously a colossal douche bag, Mark is saying. Jason is seriously lightheaded, he needs to go home. He texts her back:
<Marks>
Do you have to actually say hashtag me too era? Or it’s just me too. I mean come on. It’s not like they had any effect on Trump. I mean look at him, with the grabbing them by the, I mean come on.
He makes Slick Willy look like Fred Rogers. Double or nothing he’s reelected, who wants some action on these odds?
Hold on don’t, I’m trying to make a point, the guy’s not going to be reelected. There is, literally everything he’s done has been a complete disaster. What a nightmare.
The next day Jessica has a gathering for a colleague receiving some award or retiring or both and uncharacteristically, because he is not teaching that day perhaps, she has invited Jason to join her. Waking late morning with only a hazy recollection of the prior night’s visit to Mark’s, he decides to go to campus early and get some reading or writing done. He’s sitting in the university library and there’s sun coming in through the 25 foot east-facing windows that plays across the backs of the thatched chairs throwing shadows and light on periodicals. Sustainability, Enigma, SciFi Fantasy and Zine. There are cobwebs of Raiders proportion on the windows which have no screens and are open—unusual, and unwise, this strikes him, inviting a bird to become trapped in the room’s cathedral spaces. This will be the year he redoes all the lesson plans, says fuck it and throws out the lesson plans and just presents the books to the kids and they respond. They want it. They’ve been waiting for this, for him, for someone to push them, inspire them, o’captain my captain them. He will glide over all the grading, it will inspire him again and he walk around the room amongst them nudging encouraging challenging but mostly marveling at their hunger, their creativity, their blossoming passion, he will help them open up, he will help them develop, he will help them be tough on themselves and he will stand back and watch them advance boldly.
Ok maybe next year. What 10am sun on Tuesdays really does is bring on a flood of every vacuous statement you’ve ever made, not even in your whole life, just in the past week. All the times you’ve said boy it’s hot out here and the 405 was a nightmare or it’s good to see you or I love you. Try sitting in a room with expensive stereophonic headphones with only these statements playing again and again and it’s all your voice and it’s not the same recording every time but it’s the actual fucking times that you said these things, some asshole recorded every single time and made like some mix tape out of it, except there’s no fucking music, it’s just your voice. I can’t believe the summer went so fast and we should get together soon and how’s it going and living the dream over and over and over. Because it’s in the library with the 10am sun coming in from an expressionless white sky when you can really contemplate what a library is, all the ramblings of so many other people with things to say that really have not amounted to anything other than entertainment. Fleeting. That have not changed anyone’s behaviors or beliefs. Have not made anyone a better person. The totality of modern civilization, that is. All of science and medicine, literature and philosophy, politics and social science is just masked entertainment to distract us from the fact that like all other living things we seek principally to live and reproduce. If not the latter, why the former?
He went to meet her for the reception, which turned out to be for the graduating class of fellows later that evening. The entryway to the hospital led to an overlook to the lower level where the reception was taking place. Jessica walked through the crowd in her scrubs and white coat, looking down at her phone and the people parted as she passed through, not in courtesy but as though she were buffered by some not entirely benevolent envelope of energy. Kept away by something other. She came to rest on the outskirts of the crowd and around her this radial force field maintained like the black robed mage walking among the peasants. But when Jason approached her, the spell was broken, she smiled and they were talking and people bumped into her while they passed.
How John Billiard got to this point was: six and a half years of graduate school on top of four years of undergrad and living like a pauper for all this time in a studio apartment. Because it takes 18 months to generate each of the knockout alleles (this was in the days before CRISPR, so old school homologous recombination had to be employed), and to cross breed them once generated, and the protein he’s studying has 5 isoforms in the brain so that’s 10 alleles and his committee told him he needed a clean system, adenoviral knockdown was not going to get him into a top tier journal and if he wanted to go the academic route it needed to be a first author CNS1 paper, plus one other double digit impact factor paper. So it had to be the knockouts and the breeding, an hour sometimes two every single day in the mouse facility with hundreds of cages and thousands of mice and the genotyping because the undergrad volunteers invariably fucked it up or just stopped coming without notice and then he gets all 10 alleles, 2 for every gene so they’re all homozygous and all the mice are ready and he does all the phenotyping all the in vivo work behavioral tests, including zero maze (for anxiety), open field (motor impairment, skeletal muscle weakness, neophobia2), neurophysiological screening (tests vary between labs but most are based on the methods of Irwin3 and include but are not limited to body posture, piloerection, palperbral closing or exopthalamus [a.k.a bug eyes], grooming behavior, tail or pelvis elevation, whisker reflex, tremors/convulsions [can be scored digitally or with a 0-4 scale], grip strength, pole climbing, wire hang, and standard vitals like temperature, weight, heart rate, BP, skin tone [vascularity of footpads], respiratory rate and lacrimation), plus isolated cell patch clamping. And no phenotype. Nothing. Jack fucking shit. And he goes back to his committee and they’re all like yeah yeah it’s a lot of work and a powerful model that can be used by others but it’s going to be hard to break into a top tier journal with all negative results.
And so he goes back to the bench and does more histology and some injury models (stroke, barbiturates, blunt trauma) and then around this time a new post-doc joins the lab and has experience with transcriptomics and proteomics and his advisor says hey why don’t you give your mice to the new post-doc and let him have a go. And what choice does he have, he gives the guy the mice and this guy runs off and does 3 months of jack off work on the things and now they have a bunch of pretty heat maps of gene expression and hairball looking interaction graphs of the proteins and it’s time to write up the paper and his advisor says he has to share first authorship with the new post-doc who can’t fucking remember which pronoun to use when he addresses someone and who did 3 measly months of work and who sits smugly by himself and laughs too much when he doesn’t know what to say and is deferential to everyone.
He, John, presents this new data to his committee and they love it, they’re just lapping it up and they say it’s the best work he’s ever done and see what all this persistence has gotten you and it’s definitely CNS or at least maybe one of the sister journals, except he didn’t do the work they’re loving and his advisor is just sitting there all self-righteous and says that when this new post-doc came on board, the smug bastard who packs his last night’s leftovers for lunch and stinks up the break room when he microwaves them, really took things in a new direction and jump started the project, the fucker just can’t say enough wonderful things about this smug, stuttering, smiling, dickless cunt. So this is how we get to this point where he’s shown up to his final pre-defense committee meeting with a piece after staying away from the lab to write up his thesis as he was asked to by his craven advisor after having shouted down this smug interloping faggot of a post-doc, only to come back and find that the paper was written up and sent out with the bastard’s name first and his second.
Cell, Nature or Science, the top-rated pan-discipline scientific journals as judged by impact factor, roughly approximated as the number of citations an article gets for every page in a journal. Publication in these three journals is the ticket to a tenure-track assistant professor position at a Major University with a 7 figure start up package.
Considered a soft quantitative endpoint indicative of poor rearing.
Irwin S. Comprehensive observational assessment, 1A: a systematic, quantitative procedure for assessing the behavioural and physiologic state of the mouse. Psychopharmacologia. 1968;13:222.