17
Protein Polymer
In September, MIT held a fair for new freshmen. There were white tents on the grass. Young people followed their phones around like divining rods, which led them to their friends, whom they embraced. A sign asked, “Do You Want to Live in a Carbon-Free World?”
Adrian arrived in his black leather jacket. He stood stock-still in the center of the lawn.
After getting his possessions from his mother’s minivan, he went to his dorm, which was at the corner of the quad. A line of sycamores marched past it, creating a stony shade, like a quarry in the woods. Access was controlled by card key. Adrian did not let his mother follow him inside.
He went upstairs, carrying the Everlast bag on his shoulder. He lived in a coed pod, a set of rooms that shared a kitchen and a shower. He entered his room. There were two sets of furniture, two beds. His roommate hadn’t yet arrived. Through the walls came the sound of furniture moving, students moving in. He chose a bed and dropped the punching bag on the bare mattress. Female voices murmured throughout the building. He closed his door.
Adrian’s roommate arrived, struggling with enormous duffel bags full of clothes, and discovered Adrian sitting shirtless at his desk, doing physics problems. “Aren’t you going to get enough of that? Classes haven’t even started yet!” He introduced himself to Adrian and started unpacking clothes, computers, sports equipment. To beautify the room, he tacked up posters and set out plants—a peace lily to purify the air.
The posters were M.C. Escher prints, elaborate pencil drawings that played on optical illusions. One showed a Möbius strip stairway that somehow climbed underneath itself.
The term began. Adrian sat in physics class, up in the stadium seats, at a high angle, up by the audiovisual equipment that was recording the lecture. From where he sat, one could see a downward-sloping field of heads, and, at the bottom, the instructor, a graduate student, who was wired with a microphone. She was describing how gravity warps space-time and makes light rays bend. She had glasses that magnified her eyes. The blackboards behind her spanned the width of the room. She drew planets and erased them, leaving a messy cloud of chalk on the slate surface. Her voice was nervous—the first week of class. She left imprints in the clouds with her sweating hands.
When the lecture was over, the class stood up, shouldering backpacks fitted with water bottles, carabiners clipped to key rings, as if they were going camping.
Adrian walked across the campus in his thin-soled wrestling shoes, his large head down, the gravity book under his leather arm, to the athletic center. A pixyish brunette scanned his student ID. She wore pancake makeup, had a Massachusetts accent. She offered him fresh white towels.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’d just make them feculent.”
“Have a great workout!” she told him.
Wearing the same clothes he wore to class—leather jacket, sweatpants, knee pads, groin protection, wrestling shoes—and still carrying his textbook, he entered the quiet, clean, modern fitness room—kettlebells, battle ropes, big soft yoga balls in candy colors—found a chin-up bar and began to chin himself in a state of frenzy, wrenching his body up and down with such force he could have ripped it out of the wall—as if he were being electrocuted—as if a carnivorous animal were tearing at his legs.
At mealtimes, he sat alone in the cafeteria in his leather jacket, filling himself with food, eating piles of chicken, flicking the skin away with his fork, making a hill of bones and skin in the gutter of his tray. Late at night, he hung his heavy bag in the girls’ volleyball court and hit it with devastating punches.
In the day, as the fall progressed, he moved steadily around campus, from classroom to lab, in the tight-fitting motorcycle jacket and thin-soled wrestling shoes—always dressed the same, regardless of the temperature.
He had no friends, but he was noticed. From a distance, classmates saw him climbing the steps of the neoclassical building, three at a time, as an exercise for his knees and legs, and disappearing down the Infinite Hallway.
Midway through the fall semester, a pair of Adrian’s pod-mates met in the common area to discuss him.
“He nailed what to his wall?” exclaimed the boy.
“A burger,” said the girl, who was standing by the refrigerator with her arms crossed. She wore a plaid shirt. With her wire-rimmed reading glasses, she looked like a preacher at a West Virginia mining camp. The boy she was addressing had slender, almost translucent fingers and sculptural hands, and a tuft of hair on his head like a paddock for grazing horses.
“That’s so weird,” he said.
“Ajay wants me to go to the dean about him. Apparently, he’s done other bizarre stuff.”
“He’s not in there now, is he? Listening to us?”
“Oh my God, that’d be freaky.” She knocked on Adrian’s door. “Is anyone home? Hello? Nobody’s answering. He can’t be there.”
“Unless he’s in there pretending to be asleep.”
“Don’t say that!”
The pod door opened with a click and they started.
“It’s Ajay,” Robin said. “Hey, Ajay, come here for a minute. Tell us what’s been going on with your roommate.”
Ajay was a six-foot-tall youth—boyish, soft-skinned, serious. He carried his book bag on one shoulder. The weight of his bag was pulling open his MIT warm-up jacket, popping the buttons open, giving him the half-dressed just-rolled-out-of-bed look of a genius hacker who slept late and had to run to work in the morning to report to a job where his true identity was unknown and his true abilities unguessed at. He walked up, looked at them expressionlessly and let loose a gush of speech, which he had been holding in for hours.
“The hamburger? He puts this burger patty on the wall. I’m like, ‘What’s that for?’ He tells me it’s an experiment.”
“To play devil’s advocate, could it have been for class?”
“I’m like, ‘Okay, if it’s an experiment, what’re you testing for?’ I actually asked him, ‘What’s your null hypothesis? What’s your control?’ He had no answer.”
“I’m not in chem. Is that, like, a dead giveaway if he doesn’t know that?”
“That’s the deadest giveaway in chem. In any empirical discipline. In anything. The case is closed. He’s just putting rotten meat in the room for its own sake.”
“Did it smell?”
“Hell yeah, it smelled! It’s gross.”
“I can verify it smelled. I walked by Ajay’s door a few times when it was open, and I definitely smelled something weird.”
“He’s always working out, he doesn’t wash his clothes, and he doesn’t like to shower. He brags about being dirty.”
“Why don’t you tell him to cut it out?”
“He’s a little intimidating. He bench-presses like five hundred pounds. I don’t bench-press, but I know that’s a lot of weight!”
“That’d be like a world-record bench press if he could do that. If that’s true, he could lift all of us at one time. Add it up. I’m one-sixty. Ajay, what are you? One-eighty? Robin’s like…?”
“I’m not telling.”
“What? This is for math. Like one-ten? One-twenty? I don’t know! Tell me! I don’t know what girls weigh! Like, one-twenty-ish? That’s five hundred. He could totally lift all of us!”
“What happened when his mother came by? Did he really lock you in his room?”
“Yes! His mother barges into the pod last week when I was studying for my computer science test. I’m like, ‘Adrian, your mom is here.’ And he barricades us into the room.”
“What for?”
“She wants to give him a cheese basket. Wait, let me back up. This is the story. First of all, his mother was calling him all the time, and it was getting him really upset, to the point that he stops answering his phone and he’s just letting it ring constantly while I’m studying. He tells me it’s because she’s pressuring him about getting a girlfriend or something. So he picks up the phone and tells her that he’s not interested in the opposite sex anymore, to shut her up. Basically, he claims to be gay. Then she—apparently she has some kind of background in the sciences—she thinks his body isn’t making enough testosterone to allow him to get aroused. His body fat is too low. This part is semi-legitimate physiology, at least. So she brings him a cheese basket to raise his cholesterol, cholesterol being a precursor of andro-steroids.”
“And he locks the door on her?”
“Not only does he lock the door and refuse to accept his mother’s cheese, they have this ten-hour hostage negotiation through the door. She’s like, ‘Let me in!’ and he’s like, ‘Just go away!’ While this is going on, he picks up a whip—I shit you not—that he keeps under his bed, and he starts whipping the door.”
“He’s whipping the door while he’s talking to his mother?”
“Precisely.”
“And you’re…”
“Cowering in the corner. I went on Twitter to post a cry for help.”
“Do you want to show us the burger?”
Ajay unlocked his door. His room was a rectangular box with a modular closet unit in the middle, which divided the living space in two. The far end of the room belonged to Adrian.
Adrian was sitting at the far end of the room. His desk lamp was on. The rest of the room was dark, and he was framed in darkness.
“You were here?” Robin said.
Ajay flipped the light switch, and the overhead light came on. Adrian turned.
“Do you want something?”
Shirtless, his torso looked like a Roman gladiator’s anatomical breast plate. His chest had two U-shaped slabs of muscle on it—his pectoral muscles. The U’s were rounded at the bottoms in a way that recalled a childish two-dimensional drawing of a woman’s breasts—a strangely shaped musculature, thick as porterhouse steaks lying on his rib cage. He had no fat. His skin followed the contours of the structures under it. His stomach muscles—a rack of iron cannonballs. A Texas-shaped region of black hair grew in the center of his chest. There was hair on his shoulders. His arms didn’t bulge: the bicep and tricep looked like blocks of wood. His body fat was so low you could see the grain in his muscles even at rest. Red pimples dotted his shoulders, skipped over the smooth, thick column of his neck, which tied into his clavicle, and reappeared on his sweaty oily forehead above his glasses. Some of him was beautiful and smooth, and some of him was dirty, pungent, rashy and unshaven.
Robin called over her shoulder, “Jeff, could you join us in here for a minute? I’d like a witness.”
But Jeffrey, the boy with translucently delicate fingers, said, “This is too weird for me,” and left, which left her and Ajay confronting Adrian. The room was sour and pungent.
Robin said, “Hey, Adrian, we wanted to talk to you. Do you think you could put your shirt on?”
“Why?”
“I’m asking you to.”
“Why?”
“As a member of your community, I’m asking you to, to respect me.”
“Just do it, man. Put your shirt on. She’s asking you to.”
“You should give me a reason if you want me to do something,” Adrian said. “The whole point of everything we’re learning at MIT is to use reason. What if I said, ‘Take your shirt off to respect me’?”
“Okay, Adrian. Whatever makes you happy. I was going to say this nicely, but since that’s the way you want to be, we’re here because everyone can smell you.”
“Let me see.” Adrian picked up his shirt and crushed it to his face. “Aaahhh! That’s ambrosial.”
“You have to wash.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“Or what?”
“Or we’ll go to the dean. Do you still have a hamburger on your wall?”
“No.”
“Yeah, he does. It’s right there.” Ajay pointed over Robin’s shoulder at a grayish disc of meat nailed to the wall next to the row of books standing upright on Adrian’s desk.
“What’s that?”
“Let’s see what it says. Hmm. It’s my protein polymer experiment. My long-chain protein polymer experiment.”
“Why do you even have that?”
“Maybe I want to see it grow.”
“You’re going to have to take that down.”
“Why?”
“You’re not allowed to take food out of the dining hall. It’s not very nice to Ajay.”
“That’s not nice to me. You’ve got your posters. I don’t have anything else on my walls.”
“It’s got to come down.”
“If I have to take it down, then you have to take something down too, something that’s special to you. Think of something that’s special to you, and then we’ll trade.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Robin said.
“It should,” said Adrian.
Despite this controversy, which provoked a letter to the dean, a round of meetings, and a formal apology from Adrian, it seemed that no one had yet noticed Adrian’s affinity for the basement of the dorm, let alone what it could mean. In general, the only people who went down there were the guards. The guards at MIT worked for a rent-a-cop company, utterly distinct from and not to be confused with the MIT Police, who were a genuine police agency. The police uniform had red piping on the trouser legs; the guard uniform had blue. Guards had no special skill or training. They didn’t carry weapons—at least, they weren’t supposed to. Most were not intellectuals or even intelligent. A social barrier obtained between them and academic people. Generally, a guard passed his shift in solitary silence. When a student swiped in, her face came up on a computer screen behind his desk. He could pass the time by reading a book or looking at the students’ faces, except when he left his post and did rounds throughout the building.