Lab Rat

In the morning the city is silent. Even the cranes in the construction yard across the street are sleeping, granting a reprieve from the incessant beeping of backing monsters. From her third floor window, Sara can see cruise ships at rest in the harbor.

It used to be that, while the city slept around her, Sara would feel the words rising up in her like air through water. She felt as though she could read the hidden secrets of the neighborhood pulsing behind the facades of buildings. Sara was a wound in the city’s skin through which its history had bled. That wound was scabbed over now.

Shortly, Sara will put down the black kitten purring against her ear, scratch the dog behind the ears, wake her partner long enough to kiss good bye, and head out through the kitchen door to work.

* * *

Yesterday, the doorknob on the “front” door (the one leading into the living room) had come off in her hand. Until the landlord fixed it (which, let’s face it, could be never), they had to use the kitchen door. Becca, being the kind person she was, had put helpful notes on the living room door (Sara—keys, wallet, phone, badge?) so Sara would be sure not to forget anything she needed for the day. The kitchen door remained blank so Sara was already one flight down before she realized she had forgotten her work badge. At least this time, she was still close enough to the apartment to go back for it. Last time she had already been on the subway before noticing the absence. Then she had been late for the morning meeting because she had to go through the whole rigmarole of getting a temporary badge with the security guard before he would let her into the building.

As she stepped onto the street Sara could smell the ocean, that fresh salt smell that blew in from the east on windy autumn days. She smiled at her electric blue 1965 Huffy Galaxie, pleased to see that it had survived another night chained to the dead tree in front of her building. Becca had already had two bicycles stolen in the course of the summer and Sara’s Huffy was irreplaceable. She turned left deciding against the lazy morning wait for the bus, in favor of the seven or eight block walk to the subway. She savored these fair, mild, October mornings. There were few enough of them and the walk was one of the four opportunities she had to be outside during the course of the day.

Southie was beginning to wake up. The two homeless guys who lived in the alley off Bolton Street were already shouting at each other and seven or eight men were hanging around waiting for the daily labor place (Work Today, Paid Today!) to open. These men, attempting to support their families in the only way available to them, made her thankful for the comfortable little life she led. They stepped aside and apologized for blocking the sidewalk and being in her way.

* * *
Morning meeting used to take about seven minutes. Since the advent of the new manager,however, they were lucky if it took less than thirty. For the most part the conversation remained business oriented, but occasionally it degenerated into a discussion of who won the ball game last night. Lisa, the new manager liked the sound of her own voice. This morning was no exception.

“Look what was waiting for me when I woke up this morning!” She cooed, passing around her camera phone. On it was a picture of her husband and baby asleep facing each other. “Aren’t they adorable?” All business stopped as the photograph was duly admired by each member of the department. Sara allowed herself to zone out until the day’s assignments were given.

“…you’re ready.”

“Huh?” Sara blinked, rapidly returning her focus to her immediate surroundings. She stared, confused, at Dan.

“We’re downstairs today, kid. Meet you in there whenever you’re ready,” Dan said, mildly irritated at having to repeat himself. “I’m gonna have a smoke before we get started.”

Great. That meant a half an hour before he wandered into the work suite, forty-five minutes before she got any work out of him.

* * *
Like I don’t feel enough like a lab rat already, Sara thought, jogging down the back hall with her arms full of equipment and spare parts. The white nylon coveralls and bouffant cap did nothing to dispel the image. All she needed was ears and a tail. Outside the one bank of windows in the suite, a row of construction workers sat drinking coffee and peering in at her. Geek watching was a favorite break pastime for the men working on the building next door. They seemed to spend a majority of their time standing around watching each other and the lab workers. The construction, which had been going on for the past several months, did not appear to have progressed beyond the original hole in the ground dug in the spring. Sara stopped her trip down the hall and stared back at the hard-hatted men out side. Eventually, most of them became uncomfortable and found something else to do.
***

Eleven o'clock is the most important time in Sara's day. This is when Sara allows herself her first cup of Pepsi, to which she is badly addicted. Also, Sara takes her medication. To everyone, except Sara, this medication is a miracle drug. It allows her to live like a sane person, suppressing the host of mental illnesses and anxieties that live inside her skull. Zoloft keeps her calm, allows her to act rationally, to succeed, to not slit her skin and burn her flesh when she goes home at night. Sara hates her medication.

When Sara cracked, as she puts it, she was in her last semester of college. Her trip on the disoriented express had started years before but wasn't recognized until she nearly killed herself quietly in her dorm room one Sunday in January of 2000. They gave her little yellow pills that, at first, made her feel better, and then made her feel nothing at all. She completed her studies, graduated with honors, and the well of stories in her heart dried up to a mere puddle very far down the well shaft. The pills are merely a chemical strait jacket.

***

"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" Sara ran across the room and slapped her hand on the speaker of the eardrum piercing alarm that had just sounded for the fourth time in the last twenty minutes. She stood with her hand above her head, palm flat against the speaker until one of the operators responsible for that piece of equipment came to the rescue. Biotech operators scurried toward the wailing machine like bugs under an overturned rock, surprised by sudden sunlight.

Once the ear shattering noise had ceased Sara returned to her post at the cold room door. Her job for the day was to peer through a small window in a stainless steel door and watch the head of a peristaltic pump, a mechanical heartbeat forcing production of engineered cells, spin to a rhythm of revolutions per minute. Sara's responsibility: make sure the solution in the carboy, a large white plastic drum, did not run out. For this Sara had endured four years of college, racked up enormous debt, and needlessly cluttered her brain with organic chemistry formulas.

***

When you are on the floor in a biologics plant, it is very easy to lose track of the fact that there is an outside world. Your focus becomes completely bound by stainless steel, mammoth machines, and the constant droning noise of HEPA filters. Twelve hours on the floor is akin to twelve hours in a sensory deprivation tank. Except for your face, you are completely divorced from your environment, from the steel toed shoes on your feet to the gloves on your hands and the bouffant on your head. Even your sight is starved as everything around you shades from white to grays, with little to break up the monotony.

When Sara first began working at this particular job, her mother had naively asked why Sara did not simply wear hospital scrubs to work as Sara had to wear "the suit" over her clothes anyway. "Because," Sara had answered, "I don't want to freeze to death." Sara spends most of her twelve hour shift in rooms that are temerature controlled to four degrees celsius. For the uninitiated, this means just slightly above freezing. The low temperatures are intended to ensure that no nasties are able to grow in the biologic medications Sara's company produces. The idea of spending twelve hours at just above freezing on a January morning is enough to make one wish to slit one's wrists.

***

All production had ceased. Every single operator in the plant was crowded up against the windows in the back hall. For once Sara and her crew were staring at the construction workers instead of the other way around. One of the heavy machinery drivers had tipped a dump truck the size of a semi over onto the pedestrian walkway. The noise of the accident had not even penetrated into the suite. Phil had spread the word on his return from break. Disjointed conversation floated down the hallway.

"Can you imagine that call home?"

"Yeah...How's your day going dear, I think I might be fired."

"No one was hurt, right?"

"I heard that Charles was nearly killed. The thing came down right in front of his face."

"They are going to have to bring in a pretty big crane to get that thing upright again.

A few minutes, no more, and it was back to work like nothing had happened. They were all well trained. Process first.


***
Sara and Sue turned away from the window to stare at their two co-workers. The word "pregnant" like "sex" is always an attention getter.

"Have you ever gotten a girl pregnant?" Bella was asking Marc.

"No, I'm more of your fuck 'em, kill 'em, and roll 'em into ditch kind of guy," mild mannered, self-effacing, Marc replied, clearly joking.

My god, we have corrupted him, Sara thought, remembering how reserved Marc had been when he first joined their shift. There were no secrets and no shame among the members of Sara's crew. When you spend twelve hours a day with a group of people with little outside stimulation, you will talk about anything to pass the time and kill the boredom. No subject, relationships, family, sex life, was off limits. Conversations tended toward the raunchy as workers attempted to distract themselves by testing their teammates boundaries.

Marc's married-without-children state was often a topic of discussion when boredom set in. This life choice was especially interesting to Bella who had just come back from maternity leave with her fifth child. Actually, the only topic Bella found more interesting was...

"What about you, Sara? Are you and Becca ever going to have kids?" Right on cue Bella focused the conversation on Sara's own not quite mainstream lifestyle.

"Well...Becca has issues with the idea of getting pregnant and I can't. Though she is thinking more seriously about it now, since she found out adopting can take two years," Sara said. Sue seemed a little uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. Apparently, she had been unaware of Sara's lesbianism. Which was odd since when most people mentioned her, the sentence usually began "Sara, she's a lesbian".

"Is it better for you guys to adopt or for one of you to get pregnant? I mean, legally. What if you split up and all."

"The legal issues are pretty much the same in either case. If we want to adopt a child from overseas then one of us has to do it as a single person and the other has to then do a second parent adoption once the child is a US citizen. If we want to adopt here in the US then we would probably get married first because they are more likely to want to send a child to a two parent household. If one or the other of us got pregnant then the other would have to do a second parent adoption, but we could only do that if we first got the father to cede his parental rights."

"It's kind of weird that Becca is afraid to be pregnant," Bella replied.

"It's not so much that she is afraid as that she never actually considered it. Becca is far more masculine than I am," Sara said. "I don't think it ever occurred to her that she would have a partner who couldn't get pregnant." She glanced through the window at the running column. "Shit, twenty-eight liters. Let's go." She grabbed a pair of bright purple rubber gloves from the dispenser and headed into the cold room.
***

Sara closes the kitchen door behind her. She leaves her bag, badge, jacket, and shoes in a heap on the study floor. She tries to ignore the little dog jumping around the living room as she slumps onto the couch with a sigh. She is rewarded for her day by being covered in wet dog kisses. Only twelve more hours to go.