matchbook

ri tells me studies exclude female mice because their body temperatures vary too much. “Consistent sample sizes make the best data,” she states. Bri can go days without showering when she finds a contradiction in her datasets, ecstatic when her initially surefire hypothesis is disproven by another mystery to unravel. 

“You can’t run experiments on 50% of the population,” I reply. “Else who knows if your medicine works on our bodies? We could die.”

          “Sure,” Bri waves off. She has paper deadlines and a conference in Paris coming up. No time to feel hopeless about the world like I do. 

          I cross my legs under the seat and fish for the melon candy in my pocket. 

          “This experiment is nearly wrapped up,” Bri says.

          “We’ve got all the time in the world.” I unwrap the candy and let it melt on my tongue. 

          Bri shares an apartment with me although we rarely see each other. I leave for work before she wakes, and she returns after I fall asleep. Her presence lingers even when she’s gone: an empty cup on the table, a stack of envelopes next to the recycling bin. On Fridays, we try to hang out. My idea. Bri agreed. She has never argued with me for the few years I’ve known her. Not when I housed my dad in the shared living room for six months while I tried to find him an acceptable senior center. Not when I triggered the smoke alarm for three consecutive weeks trying to stir fry chicken hearts. In return, I keep our lives together: fixing light bulbs when they die, buying new cookware that I burn. 

          “What if we make candles tonight?” I propose. 

          “Sounds like a fire hazard.”

          “Cooking dinner?” 

          “Is there anything to cook?”

          “We could look for that stray dog I saw the other day.”

          Bri wrinkles her nose.

          “We could bring it home…” I trail off. I don’t know what I’m saying. We don’t want pets. 

          “Did you know signals in the brain are quantized?” Bri asks. “It depends on the number of synaptic vesicles binding to a neuron at a given time.”

          “This was discovered through mice?”

          “All of our brains are brains at the end of the day.” Bri clacks at her computer. “Maybe there’s something wrong with this data. The models output nothing meaningful.”

          “I dunno, try sleeping on it?” I pull my jacket zipper to my throat. The lab temperature could preserve a body. Bri likes it cold—claims it helps her burn calories and prevents her from falling asleep—and I like to save money. We keep the heater off at home when it’s just the two of us. The building loses heat like a straw basket loses water. 

          “I don’t think this place is conducive to mental breakthroughs,” I add. 

          “I don’t want to context-switch.” Bri types on her computer as I resign myself to contemplating how many levels of quantization exist in the brain. Bri cranes her head and squints, the bones in the back of her neck like tiny beads protruding from her skin. Her long, spindly fingers stretch across the keyboard like dancing spider legs. Bri rarely uses a mouse or touchpad. Instead, she has an album of keyboard shortcuts that, used in sequence, sound like her keys are made of ice, shattering along the fault line of her computer. 

          “Did you forget to eat lunch again?” I frown. 

          “Food is a nuisance. I don’t want to have to use the bathroom in the middle of work.” 

          Bri balances on a slippery slope. The day she moved in, she had just been released from a hospital after a cardiac arrest episode. Her parents pleaded with me that I ensure she ate, so I tried my best to leave food around for her to graze: a container of cream wafers, piles of Shin ramen, Rockit apples. When my dad stayed over, he’d cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and force all of us to eat together after work. Afterward, Bri and I would clean up while he dozed off to the sound of a YouTube Short on why journalism is dying in China. Our fridge still contains bags of frozen pomfret and chicken feet that he bought in bulk before he left, but all the bones are too high effort for Bri to eat. He should’ve saved the money for luxurious vacations. He and my mom were supposed to revisit Alaska the summer before she died. They loved the riverboat cruises, canned salmon meat, fresh crab legs, and eerily quiet glaciers. 

          “Too many inconveniences,” Bri murmurs. I doubt she’s listening to me. “…depends on the number of receptors and their turnover rate at a single synapse....”

          During the weeks my dad stayed at our apartment, we alternated weeks where we’d work from home to keep him company. Bri insisted she could do plenty from our tiny place and its pathetic bandwidth. 

          “Most of my code runs on my computer, so I don’t need wifi,” she reasoned. My dad liked to talk to her about her research. If you stimulated my dad’s intellect enough, he’d put his phone down for once and stop complaining about the cleanliness of the carpet. But you could never predict his mood. The moment I returned home, Bri would flee to her room in case my dad and I enacted World War III, flinging caustic jibes the moment our patience thinned. “Mom died early because of your nagging” and “If only we had a son who was actually competent”— Bri heard everything through our thin walls, though she never complained once about the noise.

          “Of course not,” Bri says. “The thesis has a long way to go. Just give me one more minute before we head home.”

          I concede. The first step is to take it slow, even though Bri looks particularly brittle from this angle, where the light hits her bones in all their protrusions, accentuating shadows and dips into impenetrable hollows.