Extraordinary Expenses

The human component of any particular endeavor has invariably for me been a disaster to account for. A relentless engine comprised of I don’t know what: money-want, power-thirst and an admixture of other, more elusive, ephemeral, often enough quixotic cravings of the so called heart., the damning logic of which is sometimes revealed to me, more often not. This is just as true in the offices, workspaces and laboratories of the Brain Behavior Institute where I work as it is anywhere else. My predictive insight, when aimed at my own species, wavers, succumbs, is easily overwhelmed. And so when the phone in my office rang, driving away yet another reverie that itself had scattered an effort at concentration, I saw spring before me a murky tunnel, pocked with fissures like wormholes in its near and far ends – a choice such as it was between a direct route to a fixed point and circumlocution to that same point – encompassing the change of states from the fact of my right hand left to its own accord in the periphery of my vision and the fact of that same hand clutching the receiver of my desk phone to halt the ringing. Thus marking the inevitability of a new encounter.

The phone call this time was not unexpected. I knew who it would be. The money, somewhat unexpected months earlier, an object of eased anxiety and pleasant anticipation once the license had been signed and counter-signed and circulated, had finally, now that anxious feelings were once again creeping up, on my part at least, come in. The voice on the other end, whose title I had a better recollection of, distribution analyst or manager, than his name, was to my mind redolent of beer laminated fraternity house floorboards and wispy memories of night-before hijinks steadily thickening into a cirrostratus mental fog. The distributions officer would confirm for me what he’d told me weeks before: my inventor share of the license revenue would be $20,000. More importantly, my lab would receive five times that much. By far our biggest initial fee to date. Once I picked up the phone, I would be, to my grad students at least, a rainmaker.

The phone rang and I found my right hand had made its way across my desk and was hovering over the receiver, fingers dancing lightly on its plastic shell as if punching in the code to discover what would come next. While the other hand readied my black notebook for the details it would receive. Poised in that tableau, I watched the phone bleat until it went silent. The voicemail, I thought, would be more enjoyable for both of us than a tete a tete with the distribution facilitator.

One or two Fridays a month I take my two graduate students out to 1020 for happy hour, a practice I’d adopted from my colleague and longtime friend Dr. Jameison Paul, a man who would be trailed, with the tenacity of Javert, from the depths of his upbringing through all the heights of his professional accomplishments, by the diminutive, “Jimmy P.” I’d save the voicemail for later. My custom was to arrive at the bar before my two students so I’d be in position to buy the first of typically a few rounds. The students, Heddy and Min, had been in my lab each for almost a year, and were both familiar with the Bird Song algorithm that had been bundled in a license with a device from Jimmy P’s instrumentation lab, and was now on the verge of bearing fruit. I slipped my black notebook into my backpack and resolved to negotiate my way as efficiently as I could through the departure rituals that were among my crosses to bear.

A little more than a year earlier, Jimmy and I cut a pair of incongruous figures at a welcome event for new students. He in a suit, straight from another meeting with VCs. I in a sweatshirt and beatup slacks – my usual lab uniform. Dr. Jimmy Paul was my most formidable adversary at the Institute, though he considered us the best of friends, as superficially he had every right to do considering our more than decade-long history together, reaching back to our college days where he was the only person at the fraternity meal table worth sitting across from. Then as now the two of us formed a discrete pocket from which our outside environs were readily available for discussion and first blush analysis but where, at the same time, I felt protected against its scrutiny. His father had been the best man at his wedding. But I’d organized the bachelor party.

With the late afternoon sun bursting through the broad paneled windows cresting the double high ceiling and spanning the width of the meeting space, setting aglow the taut surface tension of zinfandel-filled wide mouthed plastic cups set in evenly spaced rows on a linen clothed credenza, amidst platters from the local barbeque restaurant, Jimmy performed the alchemy of his covert new student evaluations – as he had with incoming first years lo those many years earlier from his seat at the Sigma cafeteria table – and at the same time assured me that I’d done the best thing for me by taking the greater inventor share in exchange for allotting to his maker space the more generous laboratory share for an intellectual property that to this day has not yielded much of anything. Before I was ready, our insular pocket dissipated and Jimmy set upon the grad students, among whom were Heddy and Min. His conversational style with the students was self-effacing and jokey, almost as if he were one of them. He talked up my research more than his own, mentioning the maker space only as an expression of my own research. His work was the phenotypical expression of mine, he claimed. All the while, unable to match his fervor, I sank silently to grief. A week later, I received calls from Heddy and Min, asking to work in my lab.

“My unsolicited advice: don’t sleep with her,” he told me when I called to let him know about my two new students, “lab and bed is a bad mix. I wouldn’t, even if I weren’t married. But if you do…”

“If I do, what?”

“I was going to say be sure to tell me about it. But I know you will.”

And yet, in our time together up until now, I had not slept with Heddy. But our talk went well beyond training concerns, laboratory concerns, in both range and physical proximity. Heddy had learned as I had that the very noblest French was but a catchy mishearing of Latin; that family could own you like a gun; that the most sublime help you could offer someone was a tall pour to the brim of a shot glass.

The darkness in 1020 was relieved only by the street level window up front. Beyond that window and the booth submerged like chitin in its amber until the clouds rolled in or the streetlights switched on, a shadow strewn pathway cut through the bar on one side and a column of silent booths on the other. Rising out of the pleasant gloom of that corridor was, light of light, Heddy looking at only me from a the second booth in the way that sometimes, in the doorway of an unlit and empty office, I’d find that we were facing one another close enough to touch; but we didn’t touch, just looked, as if in that moment anything could happen. Her drink was half finished. The one across from her, whole and untouched.

“I’m afraid your ice has melted some.”

“Looks like I’ll need to catch up. But first I want to show you something. Where’s Mim?”

“He was here and left. Had something to take care of.”

“Oh.” I sat down and pulled out of my bag the black notebook and opened it to the page I needed. Like its many predecessors, this one had a shipwrecked look, a beached galleon, cover warped, mottled with an echo of debris, pages curdled and stiff. They go with me everywhere, these books. The rain inevitably gets to them one way or another.

“Revenue is in for the bird song project. This is how it all breaks out. $100,000 for the lab.”

“Wow,” she said but her color didn’t change. “Is that split between our lab and Dr. Paul’s?”

“Jimmy? No. We made a deal. He took most of the inventor share. I took the lab share.”

I waited for her praise. Instead, she said, “Makes sense, considering the Chicago move.”

“Chicago move?”

“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know about that.”

“He’s been off-campus last couple of days.”

“Right, VC meetings. Well I’m sure he’ll fill you in, himself, when he can. I really just wanted to let you know that I’m going with him. I wanted to do it here instead of at the lab, because I’ve learned so much from you and feel like we have a really good personal rapport. So a setting like this…”

She swallowed the rest of her drink and brought back two more from the bar. As she went on, summing up her academic experience at the lab, a line of rhetoric interspersed with profuse thank yous, I thought back to the way the Bird Song share agreement negotiations with Jimmy had gone. He’d said maybe it was time for me to play the hero. “You can let your cohorts know you chose the lab over personal monetary gain. They’ll respect you forever for it, I promise you. In the long run, it’s more profitable to do that once in a while. At this stage, these things aren’t market ready in any case.” And now he was moving halfway across the country? (With a $105,000 inventor share to my $20,000.) And Heddy knew, when he hadn’t said a word even to me?

“But if your experience here has been as you say, why are you leaving?”

“He got me in at Chicago. That was originally my first choice before here. And, well…” I could see the ellipses had nothing to do with me.

“He’s taking me to Belize with his family. After the semester’s over. Sort of a spur of the moment thing. But I guess the Bird Song money is coming at the perfect time. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me. I’ll nanny his son a bit. Read on the beach.”

Back in my office that evening, I listened finally to the voicemail, an anticipated pleasure that had now been drained of all of its savor. But the voice on the recording had bad news for me. Apparently the distribution person had been premature in his projections for the parsing out of revenue. The University was aggressively patenting the Bird Song IP. The licensee had not yet reimbursed any of the University’s legal expenses. Per policy – too Byzantine to explain in a voicemail, the voice assured me – the entire license fee amount, less the University’s 20%, would be eaten up by extraordinary expenses. I knew I should call Jimmy and let him know. Perhaps he’d need to quickly rearrange the logistics of his trip. Or even cancel. But I did nothing.

The algorithm, developed from my thesis study of juvenile long-tailed finches’ auditory response to the songs of select bird species, and coded into a device engineered in the lab of Dr. Jameison Paul, would perform a sort of braille translation of what I thought of as the subtext of human conversation in real time. It would extract and relay, through tiny sensations pulsed to the user’s palm, the intent of the sounds it’s tiny microphones picked up, though not their linguistic meaning. The user would with some experience learn to associate the device sensations with feelings akin to contentment, satisfaction, anger, fear, shame. Or sometimes nothing at all.