Chapter 3: The Real Story

The following Monday Jimmy arrives to his rehab appointment a few minutes early to find Sharon waiting for him at the receptionist’s desk. He initials and signs where needed and then doesn’t protest when the wheelchair appears at his side.

The first exercise is once again the bicycle, but this time he is able to make a full rotation within a minute. He is then able to slowly pedal for the rest of his ten minutes. As he rides the bike Sharon stands nearby and wastes no time in getting to the continuation of his story.

“To recap, you went to the junior / senior dance, then back to Julie’s house where your shenanigans went further than you may have expected, finishing unexpectedly with an early orgasm and an irate mom with a shotgun.”

Jimmy blushed slightly at the somewhat crude, but accurate, description of his first sexual experience.

“And you said you didn’t see her again. When did you get back on the horse, so to speak?”

Jimmy considered staying quiet, but he’d already told Sharon more about his personal life than anyone, so why stop now?

“I went through a very long dry spell. I didn’t date anyone else throughout high school. I skipped the dance my senior year.”

Sharon tsk’ed at the admission.

“But,” Jimmy said, “the discussions I had with Julie about the honors physics class set me on my lifelong career. The atom bomb had been dropped on Japan less than ten years before I started college. Nuclear anything was a hot topic – weapons, energy, you name it. It was an easy choice for me to go to college and major in physics.”

“OK, so no girlfriend in high school, and now you’re in college. No girlfriends?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No. I went on a couple of blind dates that my roommates or classmates set up. It wasn’t for me as much as for them – to be their wing man.”

“Seriously? Senior year of high school and four years of college and you didn’t have a girlfriend?”

“Actually,” Jimmy countered, “it was only three years of college. Because I was so focused on my classes I was able to get enough credits in three years and graduate, but then I went straight into graduate school.”

Sharon gives him a playful slap on the shoulder. “Here you are some kind of genius and I never knew.”

Jimmy replies that he does indeed have a doctorate in physics, but that he’s by no means the smartest man in the world.

Sharon gets them back onto the first topic as they move to the next exercise station. “So when did you have your next girlfriend?”

“It was my third year of graduate school. I had just defended my master’s paper and was working on ideas for my doctorate. As I said, nuclear anything was big so the department was growing. Somehow they had managed to lure a high profile researcher, Dr. Victor Benjamin, from a larger school. When he arrived he brought with him two of his students.”

Jimmy pauses for a few minutes as Sharon starts to work his leg more aggressively.

“Sorry,” she says, “but you know what they say, ‘No pain, no gain.’”

Jimmy clinches his teeth and nods. When she relaxes between exercises he continues with his story.

“One of the new students was Bina Cohen. She was originally from Israel, but had come to America with her family when she was only three or four years old. Even though she lived most of her life in the US, she clearly did not look like an American. She was gorgeous, even with the scar that extended across her forehead ending just below her left eye. If anything, the scar made her more exotic. I later learned when she was born the doctor was a bit aggressive with the forceps when he repositioned her in the womb for an easier delivery.”

Sharon jumps the gun by asking, “And this is going to be your first real girlfriend?”

This time Jimmy’s pause is longer and the look in his eye matches what she saw during their first session.

“Yes, Bina will eventually become my first real girlfriend.”

Sharon looks surprised, “It sounds like it wasn’t a foregone conclusion?”

“Not at all. Philosophically we were on opposite sides of the nuclear debate. All my work was being done to harness nuclear power into a source of energy. There were all kinds of theories on how nuclear fusion could be used instead of nuclear fission. It was such an incredibly hard problem that progress was very slow, but the possible payout of a practically unlimited source of fuel via the salt water in the oceans kept everyone focused.

“And Bina didn’t want that,” asks Sharon somewhat dubiously.

“Of course she wanted that outcome, but it wasn’t what she wanted to focus her research on. She was interested in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons. She wanted to help build a bomb that could be delivered by hand.”

Sharon’s eyes went wide, “Is that even possible?”

Jimmy laughed more to himself than at Sharon as he said, “Oh my, yes. This was over fifty years ago and the solution would be found in a few years. I don’t think you want to know what research has shown to be possible in the last half century.”

“I think that would be fascinating, but right now I’m more interested in hearing how the two of you connected with you coming from such different perspectives.”

“You’re right, we had different perspectives, but we were identical in our work ethic. It meant that many nights, and even on weekends, we would be the only two in the department building after hours.”

Sharon raised her eyebrow at the thought of the two students hooking up on a lab table.

Jimmy sees her reaction and pulls back her expectations. “Nothing like what you are probably imagining”

“She had been on campus for about three months. We were both trying to define our topics for our dissertations and seemed to be on pace to get past the initial committee review at the same time. It was almost two in the morning when I heard a primal yell from the adjacent lab.”

Jimmy describes running across the hallway to find Bina staring at a large blackboard covered in figures and equations. Her hair was askew and her eyes were bloodshot from what he could only assume was a prolonged session in the lab without a break.

“Bina, are you OK?”

She turned, startled to see that she wasn’t alone in the building.

“No, I’m not OK,” she fumed.

Jimmy tentatively stepped into the lab and focused on the blackboard.

“This looks like your idea for a dissertation we talked about a few weeks ago.”

She continues to stare morosely at the scribbles.

“It is. Was. It’s not going to work. I made an assumption early in the logic that’s wrong. It means everything breaks down before I can actually execute a test.”