Posted on Saturday, 06/29/24.

Last Friday morning a physics graduate student at MIT was killed on a bicycle at the intersection of Hampshire and Portland. I bike through this intersection whenever I go to campus. I live on Prospect, take a left onto Hampshire, and take its protected bike lane nearly all the way down until it merges with Broadway, turning right onto Galileo, and then Vassar, which intersects with a corner of campus. Portland is the last cross street before the Broadway merge. I biked that morning also, although closer to 10am, while the accident had been around 8:30, and hadn’t seen what must have been only recently vacated. A truck had taken a right without slowing. It’s the corner on which they had been building a new biological institute, clad in white marble, for the last year or so. I watched it go from a bare lot to an I-beam skeleton to an austere little ‘center for life sciences,’ across from the Dante center for Italian studies. Because of this the bike lane had only recently been freed, painted in green. Cars block it constantly, or park at infringing angles.

I learned about the accident from an email sent internally within the physics department that afternoon; this was before the online news sites reported the name. They listed the lab she was working with, the supervisors, and though I had not met her before, it seemed obvious she worked on my floor. Her advisor had been on my defense committee; all of the collaborators’ names were familiar, though on the experimental side of atomic physics.

Yesterday I biked to campus again. Piles of flowers at the corner of the white building. Large day-glo green cones placed along the boundary of the bike lane and the street proper, all the way to the intersection with the cross street. When this is done more substantively it is known as ‘hardening’ the turn, preventing the type of fast casual cornering that causes accidents. The outsize scale of the cones, their strange color: they imply anger.

When I walk back from Stata to my office I pass by a door, maybe five or so down from mine, which is also surrounded by flowers. That I missed this taking the same walk out to Stata feels strange. This must have happened on my Friday bike also. One of the three names in the placard by the door is the student’s name, and a picture of her (the one seemingly decided on by all of the news organizations, perhaps contributed by family) is affixed to the door’s center inside a clear plastic sheath. I have the sense that my daily activities are superimposed or run directly parallel to death, which is a self-focused response, though it is otherwise so difficult to feel death in one’s daily actions that I try to feel it more obviously for the rest of the day. The department keeps sending emails of events relating to (or happening in spite of) the student’s death. It is the second cyclist death in a month in Cambridge, in two weeks: both trucks making rights. There is a demonstration outside the Cambridge City Hall on Mass Ave and Inman.

The rest of this post is about me; the beginning of this post has also been about me. One evening a few days ago I watched the entirety of ‘The Holdovers’ on my computer on the floor of my room. A period drama about a New England boarding school in the 1970s with Paul Giamatti. It feels too long; like an hour-twenty film with forty minutes of bookends and additional characters in some attempt to round or mature what should otherwise be a two-character, three act play. Near the end of the movie Giamatti and the boy he’s supervising go to the Brattle bookstore in downtown Boston, which has an outdoor area for browsing cheap books on rolling metal shelves. The movie attempts to include only period cars and outfits in its on-location shots, but it is so clear that the 2020s lurk out of frame. The telephone poles are modern. I can see the corner of a modern chassis behind a retaining wall. But the bookstore must evoke 70s Boston, and is old enough to have plausibly existed then. I resolve to go there the next day, in the middle of the afternoon. The selection inside is well-maintained, with yet unsorted books at good prices in piles on carts. I buy first editions of ‘Whores for Gloria’ by Volmann and ‘Snow White’ by Barthelme. I buy books while slowly emptying my apartment of other items. I have to fit my life through a keyhole.

I’m typing this in Broadsheet; I am editing it now in 1369, the Monday after the Friday it says it has been posted. I had meant to type more then but hadn’t, and need to post this. Enough time has passed that the local newspapers by the door devote the entire front page to the bicycle deaths. Two separate articles, which both detail the same names, times, professions, and deaths. after continuous heat for days, the day before yesterday brought a large thunderstorm, after which the atmosphere has been calm, the sky clear, and the temperature low, as if the Earth’s fever had broken. Outside a man in a Broadsheet tee-shirt (slightly faded from use) is reading massive hardback with a serious expression (he has a Broadsheet mug and a Warby Parker glasses case on his two-top, and must be an employee; I catch sight of a large tattoo of a Roman numeral clock face on his left forearm). The cafe has emptied and refilled slightly after a midday lull. I may walk toward Harvard afterward; the weather encourages something between calm and lethargy.

1369 has filled and emptied over the course of Monday morning. It was 9:00 when I got here and it is now 10:00. The rhythm is so fixed, and I have been here many times over this same period. The barista who appears to be an owner or manager (older than the rest, soft Italian accent, and wild, curly hair) clearly recognizes me, but asks sheepishly for my name (which I don’t mind; the recognition is still implied). They play Snail Mail and Phoebe Bridgers, which doesn’t happen all of the time, and feels pleasingly cliche for the type of cafe it is, especially as the crowd thins past 10:00 to those with non-standard jobs. A lesbian couple across the cafe speak conspiratorially; both have tattoos but only one has bleached microbangs, the other settling for a straight bob. A man in noise cancelling headphones with a branded highlighter and Bic pen, idly reading. Yesterday I spent part of the day at Faro café; an older man read and marked up two heavy books simultaneously (their columnar format made me think scripture). A month ago I saw a pale young person on a bench near this cafe reading a physical copy of ‘House of Leaves.’ I break up my day reading ‘Prozac Nation’ and the books bought at Brattle. As I type this the man with the parrot comes in (the parrot says something, I’m not sure what, which is why I look up). Occasionally, but not today, a man, perhaps homeless, comes in and orders coffee or food; he speaks only Portuguese, I’ve gathered, and very loudly and unclearly, with some sort of stutter. The staff has learned a little, and has to talk him down sometimes.