Life's Work
Rodney has a series of notebooks crammed onto two shelves of John’s battered bookcase. The oldest one is from Rodney’s first year as a graduate student, and most of it’s already incomprehensible to people who, well, aren’t Rodney. The later ones Rodney sometimes reads to John while John pretends to sleep, a tide of letters and numbers and explanation that stretches across the day’s white noise - waves, wind, punctuated by gulls crying and the snap of the neighbor’s flag in the breeze.
* * *
Their house doesn’t have air conditioning. For Rodney, this is one step removed from mud huts and loincloths.
“Why? We don’t need it more than a couple months a year,” John says, which, as far as Rodney’s concerned, completely misses the point. “And no, I won’t get air conditioning even if you pay for it.”
It takes some getting used to, his work in a context that isn't made of metal, glass, and electronics, or surrounded by filtered and sterile air and a steady temperature.
Lab air in Siberia is the same as lab air in Colorado, which is the same as lab air anywhere else Rodney’s been: recycled, filtered, clean, a synthetic smell to it Rodney had tried to identify before he’d learned to ignore it. Windowless, immense caves buried deep in the earth - at Cheyenne, he could have (and did, sometimes) spend almost a week in the installation without once seeing daylight, the walls of a mountain between him and the rest of the world.
All the windows in their house are open, and ceiling fans keep the air moving in a constant reminder against Rodney’s skin, a reminder of out there while he’s working at the kitchen table. He can smell things now - ozone from the ocean, fish sometimes, the garden - and instead of the blank hum of central air there’s the water, birds, John’s off-key singing.
He misses that already, he realizes, staring out at Lake Michigan. It’s tiny with the city crowded up against it, confined next to the memory of their last walk on the beach, no wind off it today, nothing to shift the yellow-grey haze that envelops the industrial zones to the east. Chicago bakes in an early fall heat wave, the only air moving that belched by the buses and running in contrails off the interstate. Behind him, Michigan Avenue is a canyon of heat, the sun glittering off glass and metal and stone, and the buildings echo with city sounds.
When he marches back into the hotel, the air conditioning slides over his skin, an envelope of clammy coldness that makes him shiver. In his room, he tries the window but it won’t open, not that there’s anything beyond it that would remind him of the island.
* * *
“I have to go to Chicago.”
John opens one eye and peers at Rodney, who’s perched on the edge of the couch as though about to take off.
“For what? Pilgrimage?”
Rodney scowls. “No, conference. I…” John realizes Rodney’s holding a sheaf of papers, a small booklet that he’s waving around in typical Rodney agitation. “It’s a symposium on theoretical astrophysics being given by the University of Chicago, and I’m presenting.” The nervousness fades briefly in the face of Rodney’s ego. “Keynote lecture.”
“Oh.” John resituates himself in his armchair. “When?”
“Next week.” Rodney rolls up the papers, unrolls them, sets them down, and picks them up again. “It’s four days.”
“And you’re just finding out about this now?”
“No, I’ve known about it for a while… Since before the summer actually.” Rodney gestures with the papers again, before all this.
* * *
He still has a couple hours before he has to get ready, and Rodney really doesn’t feel like going down early to socialize with idiots. He passes the time trying not to listen to the air conditioner, going over his lecture again, but it’s his life’s work, or very nearly, and the equations have written themselves into his bones. He tries reading from his last notebook out loud, but without John sacked out next to him or a breeze through the window, it isn’t right, and he gives up.
* * *
Even though he’s really not supposed to, on Wednesday morning John flies Rodney to Logan in one of the charter company’s unmodified Cessnas. Rodney tells him the university will pay for it - they’ve already covered his plane from Boston, his hotel, and a per diem, and oh my God, you’re a fucking moocher Rodney, John says, and Rodney sniffs and tells him at least some people appreciate genius when they see it.
“Too bad you can’t come,” Rodney says, looking singularly unwilling to leave the cockpit. “Stupid charter.”
John shrugs. It’s a big deal, something the company had scored last-minute - a three-day charter helping Woods Hole track whale movement north of Cape Cod. Rob had given John the assignment, and John had too many memories of post-mortgage payment Ramen noodles to turn it down. Assuming all goes well and they don’t end up capsized by a right whale (Rodney’s current nightmare, told to John last night after desperate no-sex-for-five-days sex, and oh God, five days apart and John’s not going to be a girl about this), John won’t get back home until ten minutes before Rodney lands in Boston.
It sucks, but there it is. John lets Rodney out, double-checks to make sure he has his paper and laptop, kisses him hot and deep and desperate on the tarmac and doesn’t care if the ground crew sees.
* * *
Rodney’s lecture isn’t until the second day - Friday - of the conference, early evening because that’s when the most people are going to be there, which means he’s been stuck here for the better part of three days: a Wednesday of boredom, a Thursday of listening to various papers and eviscerating both them and their presenters (which had been fun at first but had become repetitive), lunch with important people he couldn’t remember but were probably idiots, and a Friday consisting of more of the same.
He wanders through the small collection of publishers and ignores people trying to talk to him, breathing in dry, recycled air and wondering when all of this stopped being important.
Probably, Rodney thinks, when he’d woken up on John’s couch that first day (a day that, Rodney thinks now, had been almost like starting over), his neck killing him and the damp, smelly black dog resting his head on Rodney’s thigh and wagging his tail when Rodney had woken up, John sitting up in his armchair, elbows braced on his knees, watching.
Someone comes up to him, introduces himself as someone from Rodney’s class in the CalTech doctoral program, and Rodney has no idea who he is. He tunes out the strange voice, tries not to think of being back home with the windows open and John slouched low in a deck chair while Rodney tells him about the universe.
* * *
The problem with government grants, the director of the Woods Hole project tells John, is that they come from the government, which means bureaucracy. The rest of the funding package hadn’t come through, and won’t be processed until next week - which means two days, not three, of whale-watching.
John takes two of the scientists out and keeps a right whale from capsizing them. He asks if there’s such a thing as a wrong whale, but the cetologists look at him like he’s a moron, and they’ve probably heard that joke a million times before.
He returns home Friday morning to a jubilant Cash, an indignant Planck who scowls at him from his perch on the back of John’s armchair (where he isn’t allowed because he sheds all over the goddamn place and gets fur in John’s hair), and no Rodney.
He looks at his watch for a moment, pulls out his cell phone to call the neighbors.
* * *
Rodney double-checks his laptop to make sure everything works - there are certain invariances in the world and one of them is that presentation software will fail when needed most - and cleans his glasses off with his shirt cuff. Despite the tedium of the past three days, the sudden and strange alien quality to something once as familiar as air conditioning, his heart thumps with excitement, with satisfaction.
The chair of the university’s physics department is giving the introduction, and Rodney rocks back on his heels and listens to his life’s work: graduate studies, his postdoctoral work, research, publications, what he does now - politely phrased as “independent consulting,” when Rodney’s office is a sunlit kitchen with ill-disciplined sea roses and honeysuckle growing in the backyard, the seabreeze blowing, and his research assistant who smells of sweat and sand and only occasionally brings him coffee and distracts him from his work with teasing hands and let’s go upstairs.
* * *
John persuades (read: bribes) Rick into flying him to Logan with some regular clients, another thing they’re technically not supposed to do, but non-licensed passengers aren’t allowed to ride in the cockpit anyway so it’s not like John’s taking up space that can be used by customers.
He hasn’t been in a large commercial airplane for ages, and he remembers how much he hates it: narrow, sadistically hard seats, the guy next to him who thinks John actually wants to sit by him (instead of being compelled by virtue of scoring the last ticket on the flight) and wants to tell him his life story, the lumps of salt that pass for peanuts.
The waiting is the worst, and the entire day consists of moving and waiting: landing on the tarmac and waiting for clearance to approach the gate, waiting for the shuttle train downtown, waiting on the train as people file on and off and stupid teenagers make the mistake of eyeing him until John smiles at them, the smile that he hasn’t worn since - since - and the kids finally get smart and back off.
Waiting at an internet café across from Millennium Park because he’s forgotten where the lecture's being held, waiting for a taxi, waiting at an ATM because fucking hell it costs a lot to get back south of downtown to the university, waiting for traffic, waiting, waiting.
* * *
Until now, the only person who’s heard any of what Rodney’s about to say is John. He’s mentioned it here and there to Radek and Sam, but otherwise kept quiet because of the Air Force’s draconian non-disclosure agreements. And this, this is going to be his Nobel one day, this is him, this architecture of symbols, the thoughts that lie under their scaffolding.
“Thank you,” he says, adjusting his glasses (stupid glasses) again, trying not to squint in the stage lights. Beyond the brightness, a full, expectant stillness waits, and Rodney can see the first few rows of his fellow scientists and researchers.
He gets the thanks over with quickly, and begins to speak, and he doesn’t need his notes for this beyond the opening words to frame the paper (I would like to start with a recapitulation of the implications of Dirac’s equation, which, while well-known, form the theoretical foundations of the work at hand) and excitement heats him like the sun.
* * *
John’s known, even before he knew Rodney’s name, that Rodney’s a researcher, that science runs in Rodney’s blood the way flying runs in his. But it’s one thing to lie lazily on a sun-drenched afternoon and let Rodney walk him through a maze of theories, guiding him with enthusiastic gestures and kiting off on digressions, another to lurk in the back of a packed lecture hall with the light bright halogen and Rodney half-silhouetted by the technicolor display projected behind him.
He recognizes the equations, sort of, the cleaned-up version of what’s in Rodney’s notebooks, minus the wrinkled pages and coffee-stained margins, Rodney’s impatient scribbling and erasures. And he knows the words very nearly, can follow like following a half-remembered song.
And it’s Rodney, which is maybe what clinches it, the familiar press of his enthusiasm, being in his element, like maybe the way John had felt when he’d started flying again, as at home here as John is in the air. John’s known intellectually that Rodney’s had a career, a long, involved career before washing up in Nantucket, sandy and exhausted and burnt out, a life charted by the notebooks crowding John’s travel books into the margins of their shelves, but it’s one thing to know and another to see.
It’s hot, not only the math, the science, but Rodney’s confidence, the submissive silence of the auditorium that isn’t John’s half-dozing silence but instead one of quietly building excitement that pulls John’s heart along a little faster, makes Rodney keener in his sight - quick gestures, moving around because all that energy has to go somewhere, sweat maybe coming out on his brow, an absent hand coming up to adjust his glasses.
John shifts in his shadowed corner and waits.
* * *
When he finishes, his words echo into the quiet darkness, his heartbeat chasing after them for a long moment until the applause comes. And when it comes it’s a fierce grey wave on a windy day, buffeting, unexpected. There’s even a piercing, thoroughly unprofessional whistle from someone in the back.
He answers questions, too elated to remark on the idiocy of some of them, half-hearing the rustle of speculation among the audience. It’s all theory, of course, no immediate practical application, but it’s the implication that makes Rodney’s heart beat faster, another way of looking at the bones of space and time.
A half-hour later he staggers into the reception, carried on the high of triumph and pushed along by people wanting to talk to him, and trying not to think about how much he wishes -
“Rodney? Rodney!”
He grinds to a halt, turns to search the crowd.
* * *
“John?”
Rodney’s staring at him, flushed, amazed, struck almost silent. The scientists behind him pause, clearly wondering who the crazy-haired guy in the jeans and t-shirt is, who doesn’t have a nametag and is grinning like an idiot.
“Hey, Rodney.”
“You’re here,” Rodney says, still staring, frozen where he’d been all movement not a minute ago, eyes flickering over John and face painted with disbelief. “You’re supposed to be whale-watching.”
John shrugs it off. “Good lecture.”
“Thanks.” Rodney shakes his head as though shaking off awkwardness and regains himself. “I mean, of course it was.”
“Did you hear me whistle?”
“I did,” mutters a sour-looking, ponytailed scientist.
“Dr. McKay,” says the guy who’d been helping Rodney field questions, “the reception is due to start?”
Rodney doesn’t even look at him - I’ve got somewhere else to be, he says, and John’s hung up somewhere between relief and arousal, both of them locking him in place until Rodney reaches for him, fingers tight around his own, leading him from the bright room and the crowd.
* * *
“So, life’s work?” John asks, shivering against him, hot and brilliant in the chill of Rodney’s hotel room, moving elegantly into Rodney’s touch, and one day maybe Rodney will write an equation for the deep structure of John’s body - flat arc of his torso, the intricacy of his hands, what moves under his eyes when John looks at him.
“Something like that,” Rodney says, and pulls John’s mouth to his.
-end-