Page 19 of Spread Me

Jacques is scrubbing the lab tables. Soapy water, a soft yellow sponge, his arms rhythmically pumping across the stainless steel. His shirt hangs out of the back pocket of his cutoffs. It sways in time with the rocking of his shoulders and hips.

Mads stands in the doorway to the lab, their arms folded across their chest. They came to ask Kinsey for something—she’s at a microscope, recording the diameters of cryptobiotic fungal hyphae from the previous day’s samples. Mads loves coming to request equipment and supplies while she’s recording data, because they know she hates the distraction and will say yes just to make them go away.

But they’re not asking her for anything yet. They’re just standing there, watching Jacques work. Their expression is placid, but their head is tilted at a curious angle.

“You do this every morning,”

they observe.

“Mm,”

Jacques responds, not looking around at them.

“Nobody even used the lab yesterday. You were all in the field all day long. That table is still clean from the last time you scrubbed it.”

Jacques dunks the sponge into the plastic bin of suds, wrings it out.

“That’s true.”

“What do you need, Mads?”

Kinsey asks, adjusting the focus on the scope even though she can already see perfectly clearly. This is why she doesn’t like distractions. They make her fidget.

“I need to know why Jacques is cleaning a clean surface. Could be a sign of desert madness.”

Jacques pauses in his scrubbing.

“There’s no such thing as ‘desert madness.’”

Mads clicks their tongue.

“That’s one of the hallmark symptoms of desert madness. Denial.”

Kinsey turns around on the lab stool. She twitches her pencil between her fingers, drumming it against her thigh.

“Jacques, this isn’t fair to you, but I need to ask you to please tell Mads why you scrub the lab every morning. Otherwise, they are going to keep being annoying until I succumb to desert madness and stab them through the eyeball with this pencil.”

“Aw, Boss. You could never have desert madness.”

Mads’s face is alight with mischief.

“I’ve never once seen you scrub a lab table.”

Jacques wipes down the surface of the table with the sponge, letting the dead suds splatter against the linoleum floor. He’ll come back through with a mop once he’s finished with the surfaces, just like he does every morning.

“I like a clean lab,”

he says, shrugging his freckle-blotted shoulders and moving to the next lab table.

“A clean lab produces clean results.”

“Last night,”

Mads says.

“I watched you drink gin and canned pineapple syrup off the small of Nkrumah’s back. Since when are you dedicated to cleanliness? Of any kind?”

Kinsey stops drumming her pencil, looking between the two of them.

“Wait, you two are—”

“No,”

Jacques says.

“but Nkrumah left the door open and someone poked their head in to ask about tetanus shots.”

“Gin and canned pineapple syrup sounds good,”

Kinsey mutters.

“It was. And Mads—I clean the lab every morning because it’s the right thing to do. Okay?”

Jacques’s voice is easy, but there’s a warning on the horizon of it.

“I’m not a complete disaster, no matter what people think.”

Kinsey’s and Mads’s eyes meet briefly. Mads raises their eyebrows.

“Got it. Sorry for interrupting. Kinsey, you got a minute to talk about gloves? We need a non-latex brand, Saskia’s developing a sensitivity.”

Kinsey rises.

“Tell me about it in the exam room. I need to get away from these samples for a minute anyway.”

As they leave, Jacques starts humming to himself. It’s a song Domino has been whistling lately, and it’s in all their heads. They can hear the tune all the way down the hall.