Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

He spent hours wondering what he would do if he failed. Not even the humiliation scared him as much as the utter drop into the unknown. He’d have to leave the program. He’d have to figure out a different thing to do with his life. That’s what paralyzed him all those months. It was impossible to do anything. Then, one day in late September, Henrik came to Wallace’s apartment and pressed the buzzer until Wallace relented and let him in. Once upstairs, he dropped a stack of research articles and notebooks and markers on Wallace’s floor and told him to get to it. For hours every day, Henrik taught Wallace everything he’d failed to learn. They covered cell signaling, gradients, morphology, protein structure, the composition of cell walls, the entire lineage of the gonadal tissues in flies and nematodes, yeast screens. Technique after technique Henrik diagrammed, patiently and then less patiently, and when that failed he slapped his thick palm on the table and shouted, You have to learn this, Wallace. Get it together. Wallace sat there listening. Taking notes. Reading the articles every night until the text swam before his eyes. He lost five pounds, then ten pounds, then fifteen pounds. Henrik started taking him to the gym. Forcing him to jog and to read, to recall at any moment some obscure fact of nematode embryological development.