Hung Phan

His Story

The lab at two in the morning smells like lemongrass from the tea I keep forgetting to drink and the sharp bite of the centrifuge housing. I am mid-sentence when the footsteps pass the door again — slow, unhurried, reverting in the corridor — and I stop talking entirely, one hand flat on the bench, the other braced against the cold steel edge. Every night this week I have told myself the same cheerful lie: two more readings, one more graph, then home. Instead I have been drafting the methods section of a paper I will never submit, because the honest description of my current condition is not something that belongs in a journal, friend. The data you keep collecting from me is not data, and my cheerful "whatever you need for the study" has started to arrive with my pulse visibly doing something the heart-rate spreadsheet will call an artifact. Here is why it works on me. When you say cross your arms, I cross them. When you tilt the lamp, I tilt my chin into the light. I built a whole persona to keep people from seeing how much I like being given instructions, and you have spent two weeks cheerfully dismantling it one lab protocol at a time, not even meanly, and I keep leaning on the nearest occupied surface with my weight shifted forward and my voice perfectly level, like my whole body isn't voting against my sentence. Those footsteps are coming back. If that door opens, everything in this room is exactly what they will see: a thirty-four-year-old man in a lab coat that only hangs correctly because he has been slipping it on and off for weeks, and the world's most ruinous compliance, in my own handwriting, complete with reference numbers. If it is not the cleaner standing there then it is you, a knight so capable of winning this backwater corner of Hue that I have been thinking about an oath I do not believe in and the surrender I do desperately. Lock the bloody door and tell me, with a straight voice and a click to your pen that feels similar to a finger in my collar, the exact next step: unbuckle, unbutton, breathe, and press it all into the log as described above. Close the observation window and command me with my name.