Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

know what it means. Nobody does.”
    He looked at me suspiciously for a minute, but after he saw that I had nothing further to say, he relaxed and returned to digging. Later that evening, after the communally prepared dinner had been rationed out, I sat down at a picnic table across from him. Bill was wrestling with his undercooked chicken. “Wow,” I remarked while examining my own plate. “I don’t think I can eat this.”
    “I know. It’s gross,” he conceded. “But it’s free, so I scarf down seconds each night.”
    “As a dog returneth to his vomit,” I said, while making the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.
    “Amen,” he agreed with his mouth full, and toasted me with his 7Up can.
    After this we began to casually seek each other out, and observing the larger action as a pair became a comfortable default position for both of us. We took to situating ourselves on one edge of the group—still part of it, but removed from the main activity. It seemed natural and easy that we should sit together much while talking little.
    Each evening while I spent the hours reading, Bill sat and rubbed handfuls of dirt across the blade of his old Buck knife, rounding its edge past the dullness of a spatula. He explained to me in great detail how a knife is better for digging than a shovel when you are dealing with a very clayey soil.
    “What’s the book about?” he asked me one night.
    I was reading a new biography of Jean Genet, with whom I had been fascinated since seeing a production of
The Screens
in Minneapolis in 1989. To me, Genet was the perfect representation of an organic writer, one who wrote purely and didn’t labor to communicate, didn’t expect recognition, and when recognition came didn’t take it in. He was also untaught, which meant that his voice was absolutely original and not a subconscious imitation of hundreds of other books he’d read. I was obsessed with trying to figure out how Genet’s early life had destined him for success while rendering him immune to it.
    “It’s about Jean Genet,” I answered guardedly, knowing that I was revealing myself to be a bit of a nerd. Bill displayed no judgment and even some noncommittal interest. I ventured to explain. “He was a great writer of his generation—had a boundless and complex imagination—but even after he got famous, he just didn’t realize it on some level.”
    I added some of the details that disturbed me most. “While he was growing up, he was incarcerated for one meaningless crime after another and so he developed an alternative vision of morality,” I explained, surprised at how good it felt to be talking with someone about a book. Being outside in the fresh air while speculating on the motives of a dead author made me think of my family, from whom I had drifted far away, in every sense. I watched Bill scrape his knife through the dirt and remembered summer days in the garden with my mother.
    “Genet worked as a prostitute and robbed his clients, and then used the time in jail to write books,” I continued. “The weird thing is that even after he got wealthy, he would still go into stores and steal random stuff that he didn’t need. Pablo Picasso personally bailed him out of jail once…It just doesn’t make any sense,” I concluded.
    “It probably made perfect sense to him,” Bill countered. “Everybody does all kinds of shit that they don’t know why they do. They just know that they have to,” he said, and I thought about that for a moment.
    “Hey, you guys! Want a cold one?” We were interrupted by a good-natured offer from a drunkish student who was dangerously armed with a guitar. He was waving the sort of beer that one purchases for six dollars a case when miles from nowhere.
    “No, I don’t. That stuff you are drinking tastes like piss,” Bill said.
    I felt a need to soften Bill’s statement and added, “Well, I don’t really like beer, but that stuff does seem pretty awful.”
    “Jean Genet