A Stranger's House Read Online Free PDF

not to spill it. Paige and Wendy have enough stuff out there to do, what with the grant and everything else. They don’t want to be retyping manuscripts for spilled coffee.”
    He looked up at me, a piece of printout in his hand, his face without expression, but then he smiled and looked back at the paper. He said, “That coaster’s around here someplace.”
    I said, “I think you broke it two years ago. The last time you tried to clear off the desk.”
    He only shook his head, smiling.
    I pulled running rabbits to start out the day. It wasn’t such a bad job, considering the option: sitting at the computer and punching up references for a paper Will would be delivering at a convention up in Montreal later this year. That was the chore Sandra had beengiven, and when we left Will’s office for the black of the hallway, I had seen her look at me, her mouth all tight, her eyes wrinkled up to give me a death look, one side of her face lost to shadow, the other illuminated by the light from Will’s office.
    â€œSorry,” I said. “Life in the world of Neuroscience and Behavior.”
    â€œReferences,” she said, and her face went back into the dark as she looked down the hall and away from me. She looked down, and her shoulders fell.
    â€œSee you at lunch?” I said.
    She was silent, and turned to me. I could see her face again. This time there was no expression, no look at all.
    I placed my hand on her shoulder and gently rubbed it. “What’s wrong?” I said. I paused a second. I smiled. “You got your Wheaties today, remember?”
    She shrugged, though the movement, I knew, meant nothing. It was only a sign to me that she could tell I was trying to make her feel better.
    She said, “There’s nothing wrong, but then there’s plenty. Sure, we can have lunch.” She looked at me. “In the computer room.” She paused. “But if I told you it was my period, would you believe me?” She smiled. “If I told you I was part of that clinical study on PMS they’re doing over at Tobin, would you believe me?”
    I laughed at her, at this woman I’d thought had been hired by Will because she was pretty, because she was beautiful in her athletic way. At first I’d been jealous, not for any secret love I held for Will, but because, once I’d gotten to work with her in the laboratory, I’d seen how professional she was, even though she was only a senior back then; how meticulously she learned to block brains, slice and set and mount and stain, all within a week and a half, when it had taken me three. Since then Will had had her co-write three papers, the latest with her name listed first, when the closest I had come had been the second name on two papers, the third on two more.
    But that jealousy had disappeared over the last two years, when I had seen in her that this was her career, that co-writing papers and staining cresyl-violet thin slips of rabbit brain were what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She wanted to be here in the laboratory, her white lab coat on, her eyes peering into a microscopeto trace lesions made in single cells of the Red Nucleus, all this to contribute to a larger canvas, that of Artificial Intelligence. She wanted to try to find exactly
where
in the brain reaction occurred, which particular neuron fired which particular neuron and on and on into the circuit that would inevitably make a rabbit blink.
    There had been a time when I, too, had felt that way, when I couldn’t wait to get here in the morning, to get things rolling, to go downstairs to the basement and run rabbits so that I might contribute to the whole of science, but that, like the jealousy I had felt toward Sandra, had been lost, too. Now I merely came to work—
work
—and assisted in research. I would stay here, I knew, as long as grants from the government held out, and, judging from the success of the