The drive from Darwin back to the School was long even on a good day. The road was infrequently used, indifferently maintained, never clogged by traffic. On this day in particular, it was downright pleasant if monotonous in tone. Ter Borcht seemed oblivious to it all, which was odd given that during their time as labmates, he had been the one most enthusiastic about the Mojave.
One fall evening he'd dragged Jeb outside with a six-pack of beer to watch the turkey vultures swirling overhead. Their major west-coast migration pattern passed directly over the School, he had explained, as the birds rode thermals far above. For about a week every fall you could count them by their hundreds as they flooded south.
Back then when they'd had cause to make the drive to Darwin, ter Borcht spent most of it glued to the window like a child, watching the scenery pass by with single-minded observation. The desert seemed to fascinate him on some deep level. He'd grown up in Ingolstadt in Bavaria, surrounded by forest, foothills, the floodplain of the Danube. The Mojave, he had said when Jeb pressed him once about his interest, was totally unlike anything he had seen before.
Today he was slumped against the window, apparently dozing, his briefcase between his knees. He had slung his duffel bag into the back seat, protesting against Jeb's attempts to help, and silently folded himself into the passenger seat. Neither of them had ever been very talkative, but it felt as if there was some unspoken conversation they ought to be having instead of driving without speaking to each other.
It had been almost exactly five years since they'd last seen each other. Maybe a little more. It wasn't like he'd been marking off the days on a calendar or something - they had no longer been working in the same lab when ter Borcht vanished, only exchanging emails and occasional phone calls. But just before his disappearance they'd crossed paths at a conference in Washington, DC. They'd complained about work, ter Borcht had joked that the catered food was quite the step up from the cafeteria stuff, and parted ways at the end of the day. And Jeb's next email had gone unanswered.
He hadn't worried at the time. It was often the case for both of them that emails and phone messages went ignored for weeks on end, until noticed or until they could drag themselves away from a current project long enough for a proper response. He waited a month before sending the next email, joking he hoped that ter Borcht hadn't got pulled into some secret project. Waited another month for an answer that never came, and then he had called ter Borcht's superior, a woman named Janssen, to ask after him.
"He's not here anymore," she had said, and refused to give any more information. And that was that. It was as though he'd vanished off the face of the earth. For a while Jeb had thought that perhaps he didn't want to be found, that he had disappeared deliberately to start over again. He had talked occasionally about dissatisfaction with Itex, never in a way that was exactly actionable in a disciplinary fashion, but implying that he wished he had never taken their offer of a place to pursue his line of investigation into plant-cell regeneration. Jeb had agreed with him, and still did in a vague way. The opportunities that Itex had given them both were unique and valuable, but when called up before a board of directors who knew more about stock and investors and shareholders than they did biology or cytokine storms or how to keep rats, he often felt a chill down his spine, an idea that he had chosen the wrong path in life.
So Jeb had let the subject drop. Ter Borcht had been courted on and off by innumerable other companies that wanted to get their hands on his work or on him for their own projects. He had turned them down for various reasons that Jeb had long since forgotten, but he had admitted that every offer brought with it a brief wish to leave Itex. Money wouldn't have been an issue, he had said - always frugal, he had put away enough money over the years that if he wished he could retire at any time, though it wouldn't be an easy life for him, only living on savings. Being able to work fueled him. They had had colleagues for whom the job was just a job, who could leave it behind when they went home for the night.
Jeb and ter Borcht could not. This had been part of how their early friendship formed; finding themselves the only two people in the lab after dark because they wanted to be there, not because they had to be there.
Jeb smiled a little to himself as he slowed to make the turn onto the dirt road that was the back way to the School. The first time they'd met would be twenty years or so ago now, at a conference, and he had long since forgotten the exact occasion. But he remembered the first time they realized they'd been assigned to the same lab.
It had been a late night in 1993. Jeb had wandered out to the breakroom for a fifth cup of coffee, found that he had at some point consumed the cold coffee already there, and set about making a new pot. The smell of a freshly perking pot had attracted a figure who, at first sight, made him wonder if he was starting to hallucinate from sleep deprivation.
Well, until he spoke, and then it was obvious - no one else at the School had a Bavarian accent. And looked enough like Jeb to make him wonder if he needed to call things off for the night.
"I'll take a cup, if you don't mind," he had said.
Jeb had found himself without words for a moment. "Go ahead," he managed at last, having recovered some of his subroutines regarding human interaction. "How long have you been here?"
Ter Borcht gave him an odd look, and Jeb felt a moment of irritation. His lab coat looked perfectly bleached and pressed, while Jeb's was stained on one cuff with inopportune coffee spill and wrinkled from being worn all day. He'd gotten used to feeling like a country bumpkin around his European colleagues, but it was nearly ten o' clock. He shouldn't be the only one showing signs of a long day at work. "Since this morning. I held the door for you when you came in from the parking lot. You thanked me."
Now I look like an asshole. "I just mean it's kind of late," he said.
"I didn't really notice," ter Borcht said. "I got a little carried away in what I was doing."
"So did I," Jeb admitted. He really could have left at 5 with everyone else. All he'd been doing then was playing solitaire while he waited for the mainframe to finish processing, but after that had finished he'd persuaded himself to just work a little on the next stage of this problem and one thing had followed another. And here he was at 10 having another cup of coffee.
He was a little surprised to see ter Borcht there too, though. When you got to know a person primarily via their reputation, you tended to forget that impressive scientific accolades weren't collected by keeping banker's hours.
The coffeemaker burbled on, and Jeb found himself casting about for topics of conversation. Ter Borcht had leaned against the counter and was staring out into the black night beyond the windows. Come on, talk to him, act normal, don't be weird...
His inner monologue when trying to approach new people had not, in essence, changed since middle school.
In the end it was ter Borcht who broke the silence. "I read your article," he said, and added when Jeb didn't react at first, "The one about augmented regeneration in Caenorhabditis elegans."
This is ridiculous, he speaks Latin. "Oh. Thank you," he muttered, turning to the coffeemaker as its burbling ceased and gave him somewhere to direct his attention. He was certain that ter Borcht was trying to make polite conversation, and also certain that he'd brought up the article in preparation for truly tearing into it.
"I thought it was good," said ter Borcht as Jeb tipped the coffee grounds into the trash can, carefully cradling the basket over the pot to keep it from dripping on the carpet. Startled, he put his hand down on the hot plate where the coffee pot sat, then jerked it back with the speed of reflex.
"Thank you," Jeb managed.
Ter Borcht gave him a look of sympathy. "How about I pour the coffee and you run some cold water over your hand? And try not to touch hot things anymore."
Overall, it hadn't been a bad first meeting, he considered. Ter Borcht had graciously not brought up the coffeepot-burn incident afterwards, and over late-night coffee they had begun to form a friendship.
It was impossible to be certain how long ter Borcht would remain at the School this time. Jeb wasn't even certain why he was there this time. But he did hope that they could, with time, begin to re-forge the friendship they had shared.
