Chapter 12
I had picked Brad up in the morning, so we went to the cross cancer institute using my old Buick. There was no AC in my car, and we drove through the summer heat with the windows down and the breeze blowing on our faces. I felt as if I was taking a holiday, driving out on a Monday in the middle of the day. I loved the feeling, it seemed to me as if I had the freedom to drive back home anytime, and that I had chosen to go and analyze the samples for leisure.
But when I entered the cross cancer institute the cheerfulness froze on me like cold sweat after a bad dream. It wasn’t the appearance of the place as much as what I knew happened in there. In the elevator there was a woman on a wheelchair, so thin she looked like she could break anytime. I tried to focus on the numbers lighting up as we moved from one floor to the next. When we reached the fifth floor I had to squeeze past the wheelchair to get out, and I felt guilty without knowing why.
When I stepped out I stood staring at the signs directing to the different rooms, without really reading them.
“This way”, I heard Brad saying, and I followed him to Sandeep’s lab.
When the guy came to open the door for us I slipped back in my role, and became aware of the polymer samples I was carrying.
Sandeep was a trim guy with courteous manners and a mild Indian accent. I could see why Mike liked him. He didn’t speak more than necessary and seemed to dose every gest, limiting all he did to what was strictly functional to his purposes.
The machine we needed was in a separate room, divided from the main lab by a glass door. I had never seen a nuclear magnetic resonance device this size before. To place the sample in the chamber Sandeep climbed on a stair, while Brad and I looked at him from below, fascinated.
“The analysis will take a while to run”, he told us after starting the machine, “if you have time to come back tomorrow afternoon we can discuss the results then”.
I was disappointed to leave, I would have preferred to sit there, one, two, three hours, whatever it took to know what had happened to the pudding and then go home happily owning my piece of information. When I told Brad he laughed, and said that he had a better idea.
“Do you have more polymer?”, he asked me.
I said I had plenty.
“Well, since this worked so well on the pudding we should see what it does to other foods”, he proposed, “Pull up at the next grocery shop, there’s one few blocks from here. Let’s get a bunch of food types and see what it does to them, just for fun”.
I hadn’t thought about it, and the idea thrilled me. To us this was a game and we wanted to score on at least another three items. We picked yoghurt, ice-cream and tomato sauce. Tomato sauce was my idea. Brad was skeptical about it.
“You’re asking too much”, he told me, “tomato sauce has to be heated and at that point your polymers will change completely. People will buy a liter of sauce and will end up with nothing after they warm it up for their meal”.
I insisted that it was worth trying and we bet a pasta dish, seasoned with tomato sauce.
Our mood had turned light and happy after leaving the cancer institute behind, and after setting up all our samples with the polymer we left earlier than usual. There was nothing else we could do other than give the polymer time and hope it would do some more magic.