Macquarie Institute Annual Research Symposium

The foyer of the Macquarie Institute was a sea of people for the annual research symposium. I was planning on leaving the festivities early as Hyun had texted me the night before about Blade Runner.

Movie starts at 8.30pm – meet you out the front at 8? After that he put a series of pictures: a robot, the sleeping face, a sheep, a carving knife and a man running.

I checked my watch: it was six o’clock. I would have to leave in an hour. Sounds good, I wrote back. See you there. Can’t compete on the emoji front.

I’d had my hair trimmed during the week and had settled on an outfit that would pass as professional but transition for the night out: a high-waisted skirt with a low-cut shirt tucked in and ankle boots.

Looking down into the atrium from the ninth floor I saw my colleagues as they mingled at the reception after the talks were completed. They shifted and clumped and broke apart like weed on the surface of water. I made my way down in the elevator to join them. The brassy blow of the band’s trumpet drowned out the sounds of chatter. Wait staff in black ties weaved between professors, lecturers and PhD and honours students.

I found Serey, who ushered me towards the drinks table and claimed two glasses of red wine for us.

‘I have to show you something.’ She cocked her head in the direction of the scientific poster display set up along the northern wall. We saw Jonathan’s poster: he had been having a difficult time. He had put in a lot of work but the function of his gene was not easily determined. We tacked between the displays until we reached Serey’s poster, which had a large blue ribbon affixed to it.

‘My little Frankenstein mice,’ she said like a proud parent, ‘won a prize!’ She tilted her head towards my ear. ‘And two thousand dollars!’

‘Well done you,’ I said and raised my glass to meet hers. ‘You know Frankenstein was actually the doctor, right?’ A waiter interrupted and offered arancini balls, but eating was something that remained difficult. The red wine seeped down my throat and into my empty stomach.

‘Dr Donohue. Wonderful to see you here.’ Professor Olsen had found me in the crowd. ‘I’m so sorry we had to hold back on presenting your research,’ he said, ‘but your data is too exciting. It’s risky to present it publicly before we have it accepted for publication.’

‘Of course,’ I said, my chest expanding slightly with the praise. ‘I decided on a name, for the gene,’ I added.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Bough – you know, like a tree.’

Professor Olsen paused to think about it. Then the left corner of his mouth turned upwards.

‘Bough1,’ he said, ‘yes, that’s good, I like it.’

‘Bough1?’ I asked, confused by the number.

‘Well, yes: there may be other genes that are important for dendritic structure and maintenance, but yours will be the first.’

The feeling in between my ribs was still there. It tingled beneath the numbness. I pulled my shoulders back and straightened my spine.

The Chairman of the Board interrupted us and led Professor Olsen away.

People were starting to dance in front of the swing band as they picked up the tempo and the music got louder. The drum beat reverberated on the floor. After my third glass of wine I started to feel relaxed; the room too seemed to sway on its axis. I looked at my watch and it was already past seven. How had that happened? I’d lost track of time. I felt the urge to go to the toilet. I would do that and then jump in a cab to meet Hyun in Newtown.

I bypassed the long queue outside the ladies’ room on the ground floor and snuck into the lifts to the top floor. I passed a window into our group’s level, which was dark and quiet. The laboratory was a still life; the chemicals and reagents stood in silent watch. The bench coat was unruffled and the pipettes unmoving. Only the fridges and freezers reverberated and hummed. They shuddered and clicked their thermostats off.

This building had a diurnal rhythm – it was so unlike the hospital, where the doors were perpetually open and corridors were endlessly trodden by staff, patients and visitors. Linoleum rolled over around the clock by trolleys carrying food, medications, defibrillators, patients. Hospitals remained awake and open to the city, in a continued state of hypomania from the time they are commissioned until they are condemned.

When I exited the bathroom, I looked down the building’s central void into the library below: a bird’s-eye view of the desks and shelves full of journals.

‘I thought I saw you coming up here.’ There was a moment before I turned when my body leant instinctively towards him, and then back again.

When I swivelled, I saw Jonathan leaning against a pale blue pillar, his hands behind him and the top two buttons of his shirt undone. I felt a shiver through my body; my skin prickled with an eagerness I had not felt in the three-and-a-half months since Elijah’s disappearance. During that time it was as if a small animal had curled up inside of me and died.

There was a mechanical chime inside my bag and the rhythmic vibration of my phone. When I got to the screen Hyun’s name was lit up in white.

I was confused by the situation I was in, caught between a slow-growing connection with Hyun and an illicit crush on Jonathan I’d never imagined would be acted upon. Yet somehow on this night, when I’d semi-emerged from the underworld of hopelessness, they both seemed within reach.

I flicked the switch of my phone onto silent and tried not to think of Hyun waiting for me outside the Dendy. We barely know each other, I told myself, trying unsuccessfully to justify my behaviour. I was attracted to Hyun but in that moment it didn’t seem like enough to leave where I was. I’d spent more time with Jonathan, I was more familiar with him than Hyun, and those parts of Jonathan that were callous also struck me as authentic. There was something else, too, which I couldn’t quite identify.

I looked back to Jonathan, who watched me intently. Everything felt urgent and the edges of inanimate things turned alive: it was the something else – a flooding of adrenaline that reminded me of being younger, and on a coastline, and with Zed.

‘Is everything okay? Do you want to go somewhere?’

I put my phone inside my bag and faced Jonathan.

Later I would come to understand that the start of a relationship, having chemistry with someone, didn’t have to feel like climbing an escarpment and taking off a safety harness. But at the time, the exhilaration of being with Jonathan cut through the numbness of the grief that had surrounded me, and I welcomed the freefall.

‘Do you want to go somewhere?’ Jonathan said again, and I recognised the high-pitched hollowness of his sibilance as the very sound of my undoing.

We spilled out of the taxi and kissed in the doorway of my building. The night was hot with darkness, the heat of our bodies. His hands were under my clothes as we fell on the foyer staircase, laughing. I’m not sure how but his palms were able to permeate the exoskeleton that had encased me since Elijah left.

There seemed a rightness in our togetherness. As we fumbled up the narrow hallway and into my bedroom, I was emerging from that subterranean world I had been inhabiting. We made it to my bedroom, and Jonathan managed to undo his cufflinks and put them on my nightstand. As I waited for him I tried not to think of Hyun at the cinema: whether he’d gone in to see the film alone, or abandoned it. I struggled to completely squash my guilt.

I lifted Jonathan’s shirt over his perfect hair and ran my fingers over his body, which was hard and muscular. In my bed he undressed me, and my skin was no longer thick and deadened. He kissed the inside of my legs, starting at the ankle and working his way up; we touched as if this had all been planned, as if our bodies knew each other already. When I was above him my hair dropped down like curtains, filtering the outside night. He grabbed me around the waist and flipped us over in a way that released a gentle shriek from me.

In bed, Jonathan was much like he was in life: often generous and then occasionally selfish; as he moved above me there was vibrancy and something else falling down on us like rain: wonder.

Afterwards he propped himself up on his forearms and looked down at me lying beneath him. He looked over my hairline and eyes, my chest, stomach and down to my waist. His eyes were wide open, honest and satisfied. He lowered himself onto me, brought his mouth onto my neck and then moved it up towards my right ear. I felt the stubble of his regrowth on my cheekbone, grazing me like sandstone. He started to whisper in my ear and for a moment I thought he might tell me he loved me.

Jonathan said, ‘You know that this can’t happen.’

After that we fell asleep. I was curled on my left side and he behind me, the outline of him fit to mine perfectly, as if we had been designed with each other in mind. The sun woke me in the morning when it fell from between the blinds across my eyes, and Jonathan had already gone and there was no note or any trace of him.

Some lovers try positions that they can’t handle.