by T K Kenyon
Dante, flayed professionally, felt his jaw click, but he smiled at her. She was a landmine, this woman. If he trod wrongly, she would tell Sloan that his priest had been pub crawling, and gossip in this town ricocheted like a laser in a hall of mirrors.
Yet, an information source about Sloan might be valuable. “You are thorough.”
Leila shrugged and smiled again. “So how can you be a priest and a scientist?”
Dante said, “There is an artificial divide between the rational and the spiritual, yet most people believe in God.” He watched Leila’s eyes flicker upward, an aborted roll of her eyes. Ah, an unbeliever. “But no one studies faith. It’s too abstract.”
Leila said, “I’ll believe in God when you show me a molecular mechanism for it.”
Sloan had used practically that exact phrase, wanting the molecular mechanism for possession. Dante kept his face passive. Like confession, counseling did not exist outside the room. “We believe the Srk kinase pathway is involved.”
Leila laughed, and the men joined in. The Srk kinase pathway is involved in everything, from replication to apoptosis, and they got the joke. Dante stretched his legs under the burnt, graffiti-scrawled table. He could exit as soon he finished this scotch. It was foolish of him to go to a bar in this small, gossipy town.
Leila leaned on the table. Her challenging eyes didn’t flirt. “Really, how can you be a scientist, work in neuroscience, and still believe in God?”
Joe and Malcolm blocked the uncomfortable conversation by raising their inside shoulders, turning away from Dante and Leila and in toward each other.
Dante smiled back. In the seminary, holier-than-thou priests had disparaged science, rounding on him in stone-faced hallways and demanding to know where the Bible mentioned quarks or neurons or the hippocampus. His secular colleagues latched onto him in the tiled, sterile hospital halls and cited studies that equated religious practice with obsessive-compulsive behavior. “Why are a religious belief and science incompatible?”
Leila held her cigarette just beyond the edge of the table but shielded it with her elbow jutted out so no one would back into it. “Because religion used to be all-powerful in all areas: origin of man, creation of the Earth, structure of the universe, and we had to worship Him or else He would smite us.” Her capitalization was audible and nearly spittle-flecked. “Science stole all that. The universe began with the Big Bang, and all the stars are red-shifted. The Earth coalesced from a swirling disk of dust around a third-generation star. Humans evolved from apes, which evolved from other chordates, back to fish, back to cells, back to chemical reactions around thermal ocean vents. There is no reason for it. There is no one to smite us. So there is nothing to worship.”
Dante smiled. “Reductionism. Interesting. But you can’t prove that there is no God.”
Leila’s joking manner sublimed and re-crystallized as anger that stretched her black eyes and her lovely mouth. “In that you can’t prove a negative statement, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, Just-Dante, it’s still absence. We have found absence.”
“If one apple falls up…”
She finished it for him. “It will disprove the theory of gravity, but apples don’t fall up.”
Dante quoted, “‘The Bible teaches us how to go to Heaven, but not how the Heavens go.’”
“Galileo,” she said, identifying the author of the quote and startling Dante. “The Inquisition imprisoned him and forced him to recant the truth.”
Dante flinched at the Inquisition reference.
“Guys, guys,” Joe broke in. “How ‘bout them Knicks?”
“Oy,” Malcolm said. “The Knicks are overpaid, Neanderthal poof-kahs. The Suns, now there’s a basketball team.”
The ash from Leila’s cigarette drooped, and she slid the ashtray out of the table’s back corner to flick the cigarette. She smiled at Dante. “Basketball is skewed by the officiating.”
“They can’t call a foul if none is committed.” The men turned back to them. Sports were safe. Dante asked Leila, “Do you have a cigarette?”
Her eyes smiled and she licked her lush lips, enchanted as he knew she would be. Indulging in alcohol and tobacco suggested he might have other vices.
God, grant him strength.
She tapped out a cigarette and gave him her lighter. Her hand was smooth, and he brushed her skin when he took the Zippo. He flicked it open and lit the cigarette. Smoke rushed into his lungs, and those crying cells, starved for four long years, feasted on nicotine.
~~~~
At eleven o’clock, Conroy slipped into bed beside Beverly, who barely stirred. The grant was almost finished, and he needed to perform only one more experiment.
Beside Conroy in the bed, Beverly flinched, sleeping soundly, dreaming.
Conroy smiled at Beverly dreaming.
In the absence of stimuli—light, touch, sound—the brain could replay sensations and, while one can lucidly know one is dreaming, the dreaming neurons of the brain are the same ones that respond to the world, and thus a dream is a kind of reality, and thus reality is a kind of dream.
Francis Crick, of Watson and Crick, who discovered the essential double-helix nature of DNA, had said, “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”
Conroy settled his pack of neurons down to sleep, and their crackling quieted.
~~~~~
Chapter Eight
Thursday in the lab, Conroy pipetted while Leila, glove-deep in an experiment, muttered incantations into the whoosh of the radioactive hood.
Joe blearily watched the PCR machine’s red and green lights blink, indicating the successful completion of each of the hundred and twenty cycles. Heisenberg should have included Taq polymerase in his watched-pot theories.
Leila flitted through Conroy’s field of view.
“Leila,” he said and she screech-stopped, startled out of her concentration upon picomoles of wing of bat and micrograms of eye of newt. “Does Danna have an exam?”
“She had a headache last night.” She shrugged, and her arms lifted her white lab coat. Twenty-two tiny vials in her hands, three between each of her blue-gloved fingers and two clutched by her thumbs, jiggled. She looked at sloshed teardrops in the tubes, “Damn,” and bent over the breadbox-sized centrifuge.
“Joe, call Danna. Yuri,” Conroy called, and Yuri paused, Groucho-Marx eyebrows raised. Conroy said, “I’m going to order the new car. I’ll sell you my old one for three thousand.”
Yuri’s eyebrows peaked happily. “Thank you, Dr. S.”
Across the bench, Leila’s mouth dropped open.
Maybe he should have sold the car to Leila, but that might look like favoritism, and he didn’t want any whiff of that, especially when the selection committee’s politics were flowing his way. Only another week and a half until Monday the fifteenth and their decision.
A frisson of happiness rippled his skin like wind-blown grass.
~~~~~
Joe and Yuri sat side by side in the tissue culture room, pipetting pink media onto Petri dishes of cells in twin hoods. Joe yelled over the hurricane-force hoods, “Did you hear the one about the professor, the postdoc, and the grad student who found a magic lamp on the beach?”
“Why would lamp be magic?” Yuri frowned.
“Like in Aladdin. The lamp had a genie, and the genie says they each get one wish.”
“They should hold out for more wishes. Collective bargaining.”
Joe continued, “So the grad student wishes to be in Las Vegas with a million dollars and a showgirl, and poof! He disappears. And the postdoc wishes that he was in the Bahamas with ten million dollars and three models, and poof! He disappears.”
Yuri shook his head. “I should have argued Dr. S. down to two thousand dollars.”
“And the genie asks the professor what he wants for his wish.”
“Da?”
“And the professor says, ‘I want those two back in the lab after lunch.”
Yuri scoff
ed. “Dr. S. would only have given us half hour for lunch with beautiful women.”
~~~~~
Bev left Conroy’s supper in the fridge when he wasn’t home again. The girls had been in bed for an hour when his Porsche growled in the garage. She hid the vodka under the lettuce in the crisper and microwaved his barbeque chicken and au gratin potatoes.
Conroy walked quietly though the dark family room and stopped, startled, when he saw her in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I’d be home at seven, but you know the lab. Everything takes two hours longer than you think.”
“Fine,” she said. The microwave beeped. She felt the underside of the plate, and the warmth penetrated to the middle of the food.
“This grant will be done soon.”
“That’s good. I’m going up to bed.” She went upstairs, carefully navigating the gray-carpeted staircase that rose and slid like the sea and fell into her bed, which spun in both directions at once as if the her body and her soul looped around and converged.
~~~~~
Friday afternoon, Leila met Conroy at her place for a quick fuck. “I’ve got to load that gel by eight,” she locked the door’s deadbolts, “if it’s going to be finished tomorrow morning.”
“Run it hotter.” He sat on the couch in the living room and bent to untie his oxford shoes.
“I don’t want to run it hotter. I want to run it at exactly the same voltage as my other two hundred gels. It messes up the molecular weight markers to run them at different voltages.”
“They’re standards.” He dropped his shoe on the floor. “They should run the same.”
“I don’t know how you ran that perfect gel, Conroy.” She stripped off her shirt. Cool air washed her back. She unzipped her jeans. “You do everything wrong.”
“It’s the washes, not the gel.” He dropped the other shoe and it bounced, thump-uh.
Leila pried her shoes off and rolled her jeans down, the opposite of a condom. She unhooked her bra and dropped her underwear on the floor. “Are you still dressed?”
Conroy folded his socks on top of his shoes.
Leila grabbed his shirt, unbuttoned it and tossed it on the floor. He said, “It’ll wrinkle.”
She unbuttoned his pants, pushed him back on her couch, and climbed aboard.
~~~~~
Conroy leaned his head back on Leila’s couch, the toss into the sky from his orgasm still draining away. At least the casual fucking with Leila was still the same. He didn’t have to pussyfoot around to appease her. It was all just hot sex. And some dirty talk.
“Wow,” Conroy said. “I don’t care if I go to Hell for this.”
Leila slumped on his shoulder. “You don’t believe in Hell,” she whispered. “Even priests don’t believe in Hell. They make up rules and invent punishments to keep superstitious people in line.”
She untangled. He lifted his thigh to free her ankle.
Ah, the cold and the freedom. Sadness at the end, and yet, still, the exhilaration of cheating, of winning, of fucking the entire society who sought to repress his instinct to fuck. When he fucked Leila, he fucked every woman in the world, and he gloried in that moment.
“Come on,” she said, “I’ve got to go back to the lab.”
As she opened her bedroom door, her old black dog who had never paid much attention to Conroy sauntered out of her bedroom and toward the kitchen.
Leila came back, denim-clad, pulling a clingy silver shirt over her braless chest. Her nipples impressed the shirt like machine-stamped rivets in silver metal.
She said, “Let yourself out, Conroy. I’m running late.”
“Thought you were going back to the lab to run a gel.”
“I’ve got plans for after.” She pulled her gray coat out of the closet and patted her dog, who had walked over to see her out.
Conroy stood and buttoned his pants over his messy groin. His underwear gummed onto his skin. “Who with?”
“Friends. Just lock the doorknob and pull the door closed. Same as usual.”
He padded across the laminate wood to her. “Who with?”
“None of your business, Conroy.” Her hand grasped the doorknob.
“Who?” He grabbed her wrist.
Her dog barked near his leg.
Leila twisted, an ampersand of black motion on the white wall, and Conroy’s arm twisted backwards. His wrist and elbow creaked, pulling to the tolerance of his joints. She held his wrist cranked into that position and asked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The dog barked an angry streak of obscenities.
Conroy’s attention rooted in his elbow. His ligaments strained against the pressure from her hand. A tremor increased the strain. He said, “I don’t know.”
“Don’t ever grab me again,” she whispered. “Next time, I’ll break your arm.”
A small tendon just inside of his elbow pinged, almost tearing. “Okay.”
“I could kill you, you know that? I could snap your neck or shoot you in the head.”
“All right, all right.”
Leila released his hand and stepped back, wary. The dog watched. Its yellow eyes shifted in its black, heavy head.
She said, “Don’t you ever, ever grab me again.”
~~~~~
Saturday afternoon, Bev arrived late for counseling.
Conroy’s black Porsche was parked away from the other salty cars, near the bare trees that sliced the sky like swords.
She trotted through the cold church. Afternoon sunlight struggled through the stained glass windows and left scarlet and turquoise smears on the oak floor.
At the library, she knocked and heard Dante say, “Yes?” so she opened the door.
Dante was sitting in his chair, reading, alone. His black cassock draped from his Roman collar over his shoulders to the floor.
She asked, “Isn’t Conroy here?”
Dante shrugged and his black robe rippled.
Bev closed the door and leaned against it. She scraped her courage together like spilled salt on a countertop. “We need to talk about the other day.”
Dante stretched his long legs and smiled at her. “It was nothing. We did nothing, and we were right to do nothing. I’ve had women friends. Occasionally, you feel a little tug, but nothing happens.”
“Yes, of course.” Her heart jumped up. Oh, and thank the Virgin Mary, Dante didn’t hate her, and he didn’t even think she had sinned or tempted him or been evil or anything.
The Blessed Virgin was silent on the subject.
Behind her, the door knocked against her shoulder blades.
~~~~~
Conroy could hear them inside that library, his wife’s alto and the priest’s rough voice, but he couldn’t distinguish words. He knocked on the door and there was a hesitation before the priest shouted, “Yes?” and the heavy door nudged away from the frame as if a secret had been lifted from it.
Conroy pushed the door open. “What’s going on in here?”
His wife stood across the room from the priest, who smoothed his robes as if they had been hiked up around his waist. Beverly looked inordinately happy. She was hiding something.
Conroy repeated, “What’s going on?”
Beverly smirked and sat in her chair. “Nothing.”
The priest raised a groomed, Italian eyebrow.
Conroy sat in his chair, but the two of them, his wife and the priest, seemed to be sending each other subtle signals, flickers of eyebrow and eyelash, curves of mouth and fingers and hip.
“So this is how it’s going to be,” Conroy said. “The two of you, ambushing me.”
“We didn’t discuss you at all, Dr. Sloan.” The priest steepled his fingers, a pose designed to be benign and thoughtful, but it looked like pondering harsh judgment.
Beverly said, “Conroy, we need counseling more than once a week.”
Conroy shrugged. “I’m too busy.”
Beverly said, “You weren’t too busy to have an affair.”
The priest said, “We need you here, Dr. Sloan.”
Trust this creampuff who had allowed himself to become God’s prison bitch to not understand the battlefield of marriage, the subterfuges and feints. Trust him not to know that talking about a relationship is the woman’s cavalry and field artillery. If, by some miracle of morale, if the battle tide turned and the man made some headway, her territory was mined with bouncing betties, old arguments that she somehow remembered and tossed up that shot off bamboo spikes, and the guy would be tweezing out eighteen-inch splinters of sneaky allusions for days afterward, and he would still lose the fight.
~~~~~
Dante rubbed his aching eyes. “Dr. Sloan.” He used the title to reduce antagonism. The skin on Dante’s face itched and tightened as though he were driving while exhausted. He couldn’t relinquish control of the conversation and reinforce Sloan’s obstinate behavior. “Dr. Sloan, what do you want to be the result of this counseling?”
Sloan’s forehead pleated.
Bev breathed quietly, leaning forward, and Dante watched her watch her husband.
Sloan drew a breath and said, “I want everything back the way it was.”
Perhaps there was more to that answer than a mere wish not to have been caught screwing another woman or irritation that he must make an effort to save his marriage. “Yes?”
“Routine,” Sloan said. “I want everything to be calm and routine. No blow-ups. No worrying if I’ve done something that looks suspicious.” He looked up at Dante, glaring. “She’s holding a grudge.”
As if it had been suspended in a spider web, Dante’s heart fell. “It has been less than two weeks since you were caught having sex with another woman, and you want everything to be normal?” Air rushed into Dante like the anger of God. “You think that people are like puppets dangling before you, but we’re not.” Dante pointed to Bev, whose brown eyes were shocked wide. “She’s not.”