We bought a microscope together — and half our youth
Two young roommates split the cost of a secondhand microscope, signing a contract on a cigarette pack. Ten years of joint telescopes, radio licenses and rocket-launch trips. A partnership in useless, wonderful things.
My friendship with Old Zheng began with a negotiation over how to split a bill.
Ten years ago we shared a rented flat. Both of us were engineering graduates in our first jobs, and both of us were broke in the particular way of people who have just discovered how much a decent pair of shoes costs. One Saturday at the flea market we spotted the same secondhand microscope at the same moment. Imported, eighty percent new, and the vendor wanted two thousand two hundred. I had twelve hundred in my pocket. Old Zheng had a thousand. We looked at each other and said it at the same time: "Buy it together?"
The negotiation was more formal than a company financing round. He was putting in more money, so he took the larger ownership share. I proposed equal rights of use: three and a half days each per week, alternating weekends in full. We also agreed that whoever married and moved out first would leave the microscope with the one who stayed, and be bought out at a depreciated price. We wrote the terms on the back of a flattened cigarette pack and pressed our thumbprints into the margin.
After that we were the microscope partners.
The instrument redrew the after-work routes of two office workers. We took turns carrying it to the pond in the housing compound, the lake in the park, the seafood stalls at the wet market. We would bring back a drop of water in a glass vial and look at what lived inside it: rotifers spinning, paramecia gliding, water fleas carrying their eggs under their bellies. We argued for three nights about a protozoan that seemed to dance in circles, and when we finally looked it up it was a scuticociliate. We wrote everything into one notebook and called it The Shared Flat Biology Annual. One volume a year.
The microscope also sat in the room for the turns our lives took. The year I studied for the graduate entrance exam it was his to use without restriction, and he ran little science demonstrations for the children downstairs, collecting a fan club of eight-year-olds. The year he started going on blind dates I helped him turn the flat into something with a presentable bookshelf, and the microscope went in the most visible spot. His wife says the thing that got her was the contrast: a man who repaired phones for a living, with a microscope at home.
In the third year I married first and moved out. Per the contract I was acquired: he paid me a thousand in depreciation and I cashed out my share. The partnership did not dissolve. The microscope became common property, available to whoever asked. He found live vorticella in the nature corner of his daughter's kindergarten and sent me photographs as a formal report. I brought water samples home from business trips in dedicated bottles, labeled, so he could add a new specimen.
Two adults buying a microscope together — are they buying equipment? They are buying the agreement that we are allowed to do pointless, absorbing things together. That agreement costs far more than the microscope.
Over ten years the partnership quietly upgraded itself. From the microscope to an astronomical telescope, also jointly bought, with the terms of agreement now in a second revision. From the telescope to both of us sitting the amateur radio licensing exam. From that to an annual science outing. Last year we went to watch a rocket launch and stood on a hill outside the site, wedged in among a crowd of enthusiasts with tripods. During the countdown Old Zheng cried, and so did I, and neither of us said anything about it afterward.
Each of our homes now has a partner corner. In mine: a photocopy of the cigarette pack, the two volumes of the Annual, and a box of mineral specimens we collected ourselves. Old Zheng has the original framed and calls it the company's founding document.
Last year his daughter started primary school and asked him whose the microscope was. "Your father's and Uncle Ke's," he said. She kept digging. "Then when can I buy shares in your microscope company?" We looked at each other and laughed until we had to sit down. He said, "When you can focus it yourself, the first share is yours."
In the end
Adults open friendships in many ways: over drinks, on runs, by telling each other the truth at two in the morning. The sturdiest kind may be this — going into business together on something useless and completely absorbing. Partners have accounts, terms, a shared body of work, and questions they will still be arguing about at seventy.