He keeps forgetting what the breath of a summer morning smells like. The smell of warm summer air is like something that tickles the edges of his memory, like a word on the tip of his tongue that he can’t spit out.

In Boston where he lives, he can’t smell a thing some mornings except the damp. He can always smell the damp. Sometimes in the mornings, the fog rolls off the Harbor, beheading the buildings with grayness, oozing damp into his pores, into every orifice, until he is eating the damp and all he can smell is the damp.

He hates the damp.

He is still getting used to living in the Northeast, even after four years. He can’t understand New Englanders who tell him that they find New England weather "bracing." After almost four years of living in New England, he thinks maybe he doesn’t need to understand, he just needs to make it through. In a couple of years, he’ll graduate with his doctorate, and he’ll become just one more ghost passing through Beantown, like Babe Ruth who preferred the win-lucky Yankees to the loss-cursed Red Sox.

But until he graduates, he’s stuck in Boston. So until he graduates, he’ll just keep making it through. It’s what he does best.

Every day, whether it’s foggy or not, he walks to work part-way, then takes an M2 Paul Revere Bus the rest of the way. He works in a lab in the Longwood Medical Center on the south side of the Charles River, and it takes him a while to get to work, although technically he doesn’t "work" because technically he "studies" -- he is a graduate student, and his lab is technically a Harvard University laboratory.

Usually during the walking part of his trips to and from his lab, he watches his feet for cracks in the pavement. He carefully steps over all the cracks, not because he believes the old nursery rhyme, but because it keeps his mind busy. Sometimes he counts the cracks, but he doesn’t do that often because he has never been able to make it all the way to or from the bus without losing track of his count at least once, and it ends up being frustrating after a while. Before he leaves Boston, he has promised himself, he will count all the cracks in the pavement between his various destinations and their respective bus stops.

Sometimes during the walking parts of his trips, he listens to music on his Walkman and he doesn’t count cracks, but he doesn’t do that often either. Once when he was wearing his headphones, he closed his eyes and nearly stepped into traffic (which is perilous in any city but especially in Boston where cars are driven by people who believe in automotive Darwinism). Although he didn’t get himself run over, he did miss the M2 Paul Revere Bus, which made him late for work, which meant that he couldn’t complete an important experiment he had planned to do that day, which delayed a paper he had hoped to send out that week, all because he missed his window for harvesting virgins. After that near-accident, he decided that he could listen to his Walkman only if he were truly desperate to keep his mind busy. That’s why usually he watches his feet for cracks in the pavement.

Sometimes, even though he’s concentrating hard, his mind wanders while he’s watching for cracks. Sometimes he finds himself wondering if somewhere high above the fog, aliens hover, watching, observing humans the way he observes his drosophila, as if through a microscope. Sometimes he wonders what the aliens think of the humans they observe, whether they take copious notes on human behavior and whether they follow the scientific method.

When he observes his drosophila (commonly known by non-scientists as flies), he takes copious notes and he always follows the scientific method. He likes to think that his copious notes and his following the scientific method are talismans, proof that he is doing something important, but sometimes he isn’t sure. Sometimes he thinks maybe he should be doing something else, something bigger. Wasn’t that why he came here, to Harvard, to Boston? he wonders sometimes. Didn’t he come here to do something big? Will his little flies with their alien eyes and translucent bodies really help solve the meaning of life? he wonders. And if they won’t, why is he working on them?

One foggy day, he feels desperate enough to ask his friend -- the girl whose lab bench faces his, who sometimes borrows his supplies, and who talks to him sometimes in the lunchroom -- this question.

"Don’t you feel sometimes...?" he begins.

"Feel sometimes what?" she asks absently as she pushes her sleek brown hair behind her ears and leans forward to peer at her cell culture in her microscope.

He smiles as he watches her. She is humming tunelessly under her breath and tapping her foot lightly; he used to think that she could have been a ballerina with her small delicate feet but then he discovered that she can’t carry a tune to save her life....

Realizing the silence has gone on too long, he says, "Don’t you feel like sometimes, sometimes ... I don’t know, like sometimes it would be nice to, I don’t know, to work on something big? Really big."

She looks up from her cell culture to study his face. For a moment, her eyes are assessing, her face expressionless. Then her eyes warm, and she smiles, and he feels the odd dropping sensation in his stomach that he always feels when she smiles. He hardly hears her when she asks, "What do you mean, Patrick?"

Instead of answering, he avoids her gaze. He busies himself with tidying his bench, putting away his pipetteman, his microfuge tubes, his bottles and flasks and graduated cylinders.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her blink then turn back to her microscope.

So he stops tidying his bench. "I mean," he begins to say and stops.

"Spit it out, Patrick," she says mildly, but he thinks that she sounds preoccupied. He watches her scribble her observations in her lab notebook.

Out of habit, he tries to read her notebook over her shoulder. There is something about her handwriting that he finds fascinating. She writes quickly, neatly, as if she has a lot of practice writing by hand. Her small hand flies over the page as if she doesn’t have time to waste, as if she has better things to do, better things to write.

"Forget it," he mumbles.

Sighing, she puts down her pen. She flashes an encouraging smile at him but doesn’t turn all the way around to face him. "Patrick. Just say what you were going to say."

"Really?" He pauses, giving her time to change her mind. She doesn’t, so he clears his throat and begins to ask his question again. "I mean, okay. I was going to say that we spend so many hours here, working on tiny things, things that don’t mean much in the large scale of the things--" his voice gathers confidence the way it always does when he talks with her about science-- "like apoptosis. I know why we’re studying apoptosis. I know why programmed cell death is important to understand. I understand why understanding it can help us understand genetics and immunology. But sometimes, sometimes, I wish ... don’t you wish we could be working on something big right now? Something important right now? I don’t know. Like a cure for cancer or AIDS or something. Something big." He looks at her closely. "Don’t you think about it?"

She spins around on her stool to face him. Her eyes are dancing, twinkling, and he thinks maybe he is in love with her. "Oh, Patrick, I’ve done all that, big things like saving the world." She laughs softly. "It’s not all it’s cracked up to be."

For one shattering minute, he thinks she’s serious, then he notices the smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. He watches the smile spread to her lips, and for a long minute he forgets who he is and who she is.

He stares at her lips too long.

"You’re too serious, Patrick," she tells him, apparently not noticing his stare or maybe being too kind to comment on it. "I’m just kidding." She smiles once more then turns back to her microscope.

They are quiet for a while as he continues to tidy his bench and she continues to record her observations in her lab notebook. They are quiet until suddenly her head rears up, her dark hair swinging back like a curtain, and she looks towards the door. Watching her, he thinks that her entire being seems to be lit up, almost shimmering.

She glances at him briefly and nods towards the man and small girl who have just entered the lab, then she gets up from her stool, closes her lab notebook, and shuffles her papers together. She turns to leave, reminding him, "Here’s my ride," letting her words float over her shoulder as she hurries towards her husband and daughter.

He watches her bend down to scoop up the little girl and say, "How’s my girl? How’s my Claudia? Did you have a nice day with Daddy?" and he marvels at the depth of feeling in her voice. She is not like this usually, he has observed. When her husband and daughter come to the lab to pick her up, it is as if she is a different being, luminous, somehow transcendent.

Her daughter, a small perfect replica of her, nods to tell her that she did have a nice day and hugs her back tightly.

"And what have you been doing today?" she asks her daughter.

"Growing taller, Mommy," the little girl replies solemnly.

She laughs, and he thinks her laughter is the sweetest thing he has ever heard.

"She missed you," her husband says. "We missed you." And then her husband, who is only a medical school student, not a real scientist at all, kisses her.

He doesn’t like her husband.

"Ready to go?" her husband asks.

She smiles up at her husband. Even from where he is sitting, he can see that her eyes are soft with love, unutterably beautiful.

"Of course," she nods as she squeezes her daughter close one more time. "Just let me put my cells into the freezer." After she does this task, she crouches down again to look her daughter in the eye. "Are you ready to go, honey bear?"

Smiling shyly, her daughter nods, and they leave.

As he watches them leave, he hears her husband say something in a low voice which he can’t hear but which makes her laugh again, then the elevator dings once, and she and her husband and her daughter are gone, and he understands what it means to be green with envy.

And that thought reminds him of the little green men that he wonders about sometimes, the little green men who might be hovering above the fog, who he imagines sometimes might really exist when he is trying to keep his mind busy on his way to and from work and he is bored with watching for cracks in the pavement.

Sometimes he wishes that if there were aliens hovering above, they would swoop down and abduct him, take him aboard their beautiful ship and show him the world they see, show him the stars and the meaning of life.

Then, he thinks, he could tell people what they are like -- the stars and the meaning of life -- and people would listen to him.

***

END

***

Author’s Note:

This story was inspired by the Radiohead song, "Subterranean Homesick Alien," from their 1997 record, "OK Computer." These are the song’s lyrics:

The breath of the morning i keep forgetting. The smell of
the warm summer air. I live in a town where you can’t smell
a thing, you watch your feet for cracks in the pavement.

Up above aliens hover making home movies for the folks back
home, of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits,
drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets.

They’re all up-tight.

I wish they’d swoop down in a country lane, late at night
when im driving. Take me on board their beautiful ship,
show me the world as id love to see it. I’d tell all my
friends but they’d never believe, they’d think i’d finally
lost it completely. I’d show them the stars and the
meaning of life. Theyd shut me away.

But i’d be alright. i’m just up-tight.

© Radiohead, 1997

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