Berkeley Mad-Labs

This is an older work of mine (four years or so).

“I want the first fiddle” -- Chris van Belle

Berkeley is a wild, postdiluvian, postmodernist anachronism, which is to say, Berkeley is purely a theme park, or at minimum a buffet for the abberant class. What does this precisely mean in precise terms? The answer to this question lies in the bistros and used bookstores, the arteries of Telegraph and Shattuck, and the varied philosophies of the very vocal homeless population.

All of this fierce essentia gave me an opinion of Berkeley as a sheer, disjointed madness rather than a traversable space. These first impressions, however, belie another nature; the research laboratories, while also possessing some form of an unfamiliar psychedelia in their experience, represent a sort of social Masada. These havens separate out the cream from the general milk.

It was half past nine p.m. or thereabouts when I was introduced into this catacomb, this meandering corridor of incredulous saints, this hive of stinging theorems, this empire of the empirical Tao. My guide was my brother, Chris - who deserves one paragraph of description, written in a language he might fathom.

Chris van Belle, in conversation, is analagous to a very user-friendly front end for higher processes, a cascading menu of brevia that refers, if you so inquire, to a distributed information matrix. From ASCII to EBCDIC to Unicode, Chris’s storage of information has been superlative, and inferring from his range of supplementary data, his RAM is updated on a semidiurnal basis. IOW, Chris is a smart card. Our network of memories have had their emoticons, and our personal digital signatures, but its the EDI and the native file formats that truly stir my CPU with a residual and recurring Shockwave.

After several security clearances, such as code-pads on laboratory doors and card scanners, I was finally in the promised land. Amongst this peculiar and verboten habitat, a humorous punchline involves the molecular architecture of the KvAP voltage-dependent K+ channel in a lipid bilayer. What is God? Vibrational submicrogal transfer across a reverse micelle surfactant proBDNF. What is for lunch? Stable low-pressure hydrogen clusters stored in a binary clathrate hydrate.

I have forgotten the room number to this lab, so I am going to refer to “Chris’s” lab as the X_BioHazard_Boom_Boom (XBBB). XBBB is located on the second floor of a brownish, unassuming building (The Building of Doom) on the fringes of the university’s campus. Though the entire floor is dedicated to research in infectious diseases, XBBB is specifically concerned with the virus CMV; another pleasent, though non-biological anacronym ending in “-MV” is the DMV [CMV and the DMV are functionally synonymous].

I noticed with furrowed brow that XBBB was ornamented with warning stickers, biohazard signs, and an emergency washing apparatus. Initially, given this flourescent and multicolored decor, the lab assumed an inviting aura reminiscent of Wonka’s most secret confectionary lab, replete with concoctions able to inflate troublesome gluttons and guttersnipes and gobblers, O my. In XBBB, an errant taste might result in paralysis, cancer, or death, but without the melodious requiems of the Oompa-loompa. There was much danger, too much to chronicle, but suffice it to say that radioactive and mutagenic substances were in my immediate reach. This was a charnel-house, a cloistered fun-farm of many godless lucubrations.

Nonetheless, this is the love of the subject. It is this love, the love of resolving this world in a lucid fashion, that is the understructure of this entire account. The obsession and concentration of these few toilers surpasses the language within which their findings are deciphered. The inspiration that compels such sacrifice on the altar of correct explanation comes to the multitude, but only a smattering perservere to realize some portion of their ends. I wanted to make this declaration outright and without concealing it inside an abstruse quip or simile. On the other hand, abstruse quips and similes are my choicest weapons.

Chris is exceptionally consumed with the sickness, or rather, the virus; he is the guilty monk, repenting for any truancies from his monastery. My visit was brief, but if my visit gives me any representative insight at all into Chris’s normal schedule, then I can rightly infer that Chris has dissolved his total life into that monastic order of the sciences. I was dragged, in the name of progress, to this lab for nearly the whole of my vacation. Moreover, the hours were steadily longer, which is to mean, our nights in the lab went “progressively” later into the morning.

For Chris, these intensely unhealthy late night sessions were only exacerbated by his habit of waking up around six or seven in the morning. This round-the-clock chicanery had been the norm for several weeks prior to my coming, and yet Chris exhibited no signs of physical collapse. How long can the human body tolerate such methodical neglect? The answer to his physiology’s fallout might require more of his engagement in lab, more engagement with the catalyst to this general break-up.

I digress. I wish now to desribe Chris’s superior or overseer in the lab, a man by the name of Walter. I was hesitant at first to meet Walter, because I felt it was intrusive and perhaps innappropriate that I be in this relatively high-security lab while important work needed to be done; in short, I felt like some silly tourist in need of some kindergarten-like tour through this shiny, neat place. Fortunately, Walter is a cool goose, a witty kitty, a nice slice, a pleasent pheasant, a humorous tumor, etc, etc.

Near the end of my first night, I had become very comfortable with being in the lab. More importantly, I had became more natural and honest with Walter; the first, second, and third night had become like comedy time in a viral containtment dock. We would joke about Chris’s upstart ways, his insistence on ignoring protocol -- a protocol assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, billions of hours of research at thousands of labs in locations all about the globe. Walter, in a lighthearted fashion, would recount all of the infinite travails Chris’s sense of entitlement had brought him. He said that if Chris was under the tutelage of a different graduate lab worker, he would have been either relocated to another building or simply murdered.

The waggeries and lampooning did not end there, but it is impossible to convey the grandeur of these gatherings. So, I should ask that you recall your own glib great times with fellow glib great persons, and project your happiness into this chronicle; this is the only way to grasp such occasions that fail the phrase. All in all, any adequate description would demand that we include the word, “chortling.”

Chris, Walter, and I...three amigos in the cosmic enchilada, burning the midnight oil with some brainy guacamole. Three musketeers in the caramel core of man’s profoundest search for meaning in the universe. Three domains of cellular civilizations with this feature of consciousness that permits our communion. What is it that orchestrates these unplanned, yet purposeful events? What is it that guides the human body into these non-repeatable situations, this unspeakably joyous happenstance, which ties together with other blisses to unfold like Indra’s pearls? On my present plateau I can glimpse my former trails, and guess at those trails yet to come. The final frontier is always personal.

My last visit to XBBB was like the others, and better than the others. Chris and I arrived, chatted with Walter some, then stepped out to pick up some dinner. We asked Walter if he wanted to come, or at least if he wanted anything to eat; he declined the first, but accepted the latter. Whatever we were going to bring back, he would surely enjoy. I opted for a Chinese dinner. Chris and I inevitably returned, and set out all the take-out packages in a cute buffet-like pattern on the table. The three of us ate heartily and spoke heartily. Though the setting - a cramped laboratory lunch room with flourescent gamma rays - was banal, our collective serenity perceived it as the coolest dive in town, a tower at the edge of reality.

I left early that night, about two in the morning, and walked to Chris’s apartment, nearly seven-thousand miles from the lab. Chris arrived home at five-thirty that morning. We exchanged closed-eyed mumbles before melting into the linoleum floors. My meltedness, however, was short-lived; I arose at seven a.m. in order to meet my ride back to Port Hueneme. Chris, utterly exhausted, mustered up a farewell; the whole visit, at that departure, had seemed to have transpired entirely in that farewell, entirely in one minute. I was off, off, and off a little further.

And so it goes, as with all first-hand accounts of living life, that one must mention how incomplete the narrative is, and ever will be. Therefore, I must capitulate to language, that gloriously helpful hindrance, and confess that no semanteme is capable of denoting or connoting one iota of the my terrific time. It endures in my memory, and in Chris’s memory, but Chris’s telling (if he were to tell it) would differ radically. He would omit this, or emphasize that, or include this other thing. In the end, two divergent paintings would be created, which is to say: how do you know I am giving you the truth?