You Lost Me There Read Online Free PDF Page A

all the sacrifices, assume a much larger value. Those moments were fewer in recent years.
    Instead, there were banquets to attend, too many banquets. Departmental politics, silent auctions, air travel to foreign conferences. And the environment was colder, less collegial. Colleagues were more frequently in other countries than down the hall. There were a few researchers remaining in our world who had their own lab and two technicians and they wrote their own grants and spent their days ruminating, but for the rest of us, we competed for bread rolls and roll-over funds, we worried about inflation, we got into bed with the wrong partners and had to get out again. It was mechanical and political, and it made accounting sound fun.
    Partially I blamed it on technology. I hadn’t signed up to become a computer programmer. Strong friendships had dwindled in the age of e-mail. Some colleagues had adjusted, but I knew many who refused to read their e-mail at all. Others asked assistants to print out their messages, passing along only ones deemed significant. Some got trapped in loops of responding to people who couldn’t compose logical sentences, and felt compelled to reply, “By saying that, did you mean this, or this, or that?” But we were dying out, those of us who felt encumbered by all the data. E-mail was necessary now that research was distributed globally and then published on the Internet, and my staff was comfortable in the new channels, thrived in them, and claimed that they improved their work. I didn’t say so, but I found it all isolating. Brain science as I practiced it meant studying mental processes in the context of a human’s experience of the natural world, not a virtual one. I longed to return to my graduate days in Chicago, working beside short Austrian men in three-piece suits. Back when our mysteries demanded magnification and the axons of giant squid, not Microsoft Outlook.
    As a full professor at fifty-eight, a tenured graybeard at Soborg’s Aging Research Center, I was to be a master of memory, an expert at our mechanisms for retaining information. And half the time I couldn’t remember the log-in password for my own computer.
    After lunch, I spent an hour reading e-mails, then settled down for an afternoon of grant review. But I couldn’t focus. In the glare of my desk lamp, a vision of youth and lingerie intruded. I could easily dial Regina’s extension. The risks of our affair were gigantic, they might cost me the legacy of my career. But excitement lingered.
    I put my hand over the keypad and noticed the voice-mail light blinking.
    “Victor, it’s Russell. Look, I’ll be in Boston Friday, thought maybe you could put me up for the weekend. Let me know. Oh, and I had a question: What was that restaurant we went to last time, you knew the guy? I think I saw something about him in the paper, figured maybe I could fit in some business. Anyway, call me, dearie, hugs and kisses. And Connie would say she misses you, except she only instant-messages. She has dreadlocks. My daughter the Jamaican, believe you me. Ciao.”
    Russell Caratti, wine dealer, womanizer, I’d known since we were kids. He was my closest friend, by that point probably my last remaining one outside the lab. My schedule didn’t allow for much of a social life. Connie was Russell’s daughter from an earlier marriage, also my goddaughter. Her real name was Cornelia, but Russell insisted on calling her Connie, to spite his ex-wife, who’d named her at the hospital.
    It reminded me, I still needed to thank Russell for his birthday present, an unopened case of wine in my garage.
    My associate director, Lucy, walked in without knocking.
    “If you are not busy at the moment.”
    “I’m yours.”
    “Well, this is potentially groundbreaking,” Lucy said, swinging in, her voice sounding hoarse. “In the big scheme of things?”
    “What am I looking at?”
    “What’s your expertise on dating?”
    I laughed. I’d been expecting