He was wrist-deep in mud, his fingers grappling with the roots of a sedge, when a small child appeared at his side and chirped, “L’acqua.”
“Sì, sì,” he replied.
The child had dark hair clipped in a circle around its chin and stared at him with a stout, unblinking face. At four-ish years, its boyness or girlness was beside the point. It was wearing clogs, a half apron over a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt that said, in English, I Am Grease Monkey! It must have snuck in through a hole in the fencing. The child fell to the earth in a sudden heap and plunged its hands into the muck. Its tiny feet kicked behind, paddling on dry land.
Tom wasn’t sure how the child’s personal bacteria would affect the microorganisms that must now be fleeing the turbulence.
“Nuotiamo!” the child said. We swim.
He looked over his shoulder to see if a mother or uncle was near, but in this particular dip of the meadow, they were the only humans. He had just resolved to unveil his Stern Face, which needed no translation, when the child let out a sharp cry. It pulled a hand up from the water, and in its palm a diluted strand of pink wove into the clear water running off the skin. It looked slack-jawed at this violation of the body’s wholeness, and then began to shriek. Tom dug into the side of the bank where the child had been splashing and felt a hard protrusion in the rootball of a club-rush; he wrestled out a short piece of bent metal.
“Guarda,” he said, look, but the child was now on its feet, wailing at a distant figure who was trotting heavily toward them.
He wiped the mud away with his shirt and found the hook at the end that must have grazed the child’s palm. The metal was scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust. It had a tall stem—a proud capital J—and a sharp little barb on the upswing. About two inches long, all told. For a fishhook, it was rather Gothic.
The child was now in full flight, its pudgy legs kicking up lumps of clover. Tom waved an awkward hand as the caretaker flung herself onto her charge, swaddling its body against her chest, glaring across the field at the foreigner holding up a white rubber glove.
Tom put the fishhook in his pocket and reached for his collecting cup, now listing in the water. His eyes were creating diamonds from the light. A quick veil fell over his vision, in sync with a razor crossing his brain. He winced, and then saw the world again.
Daphne had made him promise to see the Important Sights, so he stayed in the city on Tuesdays, avoided parks and puddles of water to observe instead the buildings rising yeastily out of cobbled streets, frescoes depicting the gory and divine, a million men on mopeds. This too was an environment. Nuns suckered on chapels like remoras, Renaissance plaster wrapped around imperial columns like grapevine. What would Daphne most want to hear about? [Here’s a softball! The scheme for my seduction of the species: knowledge, same as ever. Give that girl her ancestors, the warrior women: that palazzo you just passed with its faux-cave façade, its wildness in this urbanity? Plautilla Bricci, first female architect. Tell her not of the Gianicolo cannon, shot by men in drab, but of the cannon on top of Hadrian’s tomb that Queen Christina of Sweden set off without aiming—what is aiming if not a form of misogyny?—blasting a hole in the Villa Medici, her belly laugh sending waves across the Tiber. Offer secrets. Tell her of your failed love; tell her of her unborn brother.]
At the Fontanone he found a seat between two lovers and a Chinese tour group and leaned toward the water, the clear and shadow-cut water. The spurting fountains pushed it toward him in panels, like quilt squares being continuously chopped and resized, matched up and shuffled on. Here they come; here they come again.
When the mustard Citroën slowed and honked, he had one hand half-dipped and was thinking that testing this fountain for ostracods wasn’t the worst idea—the chloride the city pumped in would’ve prevented most algal growth, but his crustaceans were steely colonizers, able to withstand months of being cased in dry mud. A colleague once unwittingly carried four species home from an overseas research trip on his unwashed boots.
She cranked down the window and shouted at him. He grabbed his hand back.
“Need a ride?”
It was a scene from the movie in his head, the Technicolor version of a near-bachelor in Rome. It was so unlikely to be her, except he’d climbed enough steps to be near or at the Janiculum, and if she was some kind of nymph, her spirit tethered to an umbrella pine by the slumping statue of Garibaldi, then of course her range would include the Fontanone.
“Well?” Her voice like a trumpet, the silver kind played in clubs. He still couldn’t place her—Haitian, or Barbadian, or Malagasy. He could ask, but he was still resisting attachment. Her skin absorbed the sun, sent it back in dark flames from her head.
He jumped up, wet-handed, and jogged to the Citroën.
“Where are you headed?” Her hair puffed around her face cumulously.
He should’ve replied Wherever you’re going, but this wasn’t, in fact, a film. “Oh, thataway,” he said, waving his arm weakly.
“Get in.”
He circled around the chattering car, keeping his body close to the yellow metal as mopeds zoomed past and a bearded man on a bicycle worked his legs up and down like an arthritic grape-stomper.
She weaved back into traffic as he fumbled for a seat belt. Not finding one, he held on to the door handle, watching the cannon overlook bend past on his right, a tight pack of tourists turning their heads toward him like an audience. “I met you there.”
Her hands were at ten and two, thumbs tapping. Her hair buffeted her face in the gusts from the open window, and he wanted to reach over and pin it back, to pin her back, to throw something heavy on the brake and jerk the steering wheel so they’d roll to a stop under a stand of Pinus pinea, the smell of which through the open window would remind her of when she’d reached out a hand to salvage his dignity, and she would take his face in her hands and with lit eyes declare, “No, I met you there.”
He’d been given space in a small laboratory in the basement of the Environmental Biology department, where he shuttled vials of muddy water from the Caffarella Valley and sat on a metal stool and alternated between the scanning electron microscope and the high window that showed tree roots and human ankles. It felt like a crypt with aquaria. He took his sandwich out to a concrete bench beside the building’s entrance, the world around him made of blond brick and young people. They were future echoes of his daughter; he studied them as if to pinpoint confidence, tie it to some trait he could teach, some accessory. If he bought Daphne a black leather jacket . . . A fritillary helixed from column to column, folding beneath drafts, flurrying when someone walked by.
A young man with a satchel across his back stopped and reached a hand up to catch Tom’s attention. The butterfly went glancing off. He wanted directions. Tom pointed out the cafeteria with a series of short words and gestures, his left hand trembling. He finished his sandwich quickly, that soft Italian cheese that nearly liquefied the lettuce, and waited for his blood sugar to equalize. He slid his hand under his leg. Trembling was the wrong word. Vibrating, maybe. Like his body was singing a song through closed lips.
Another young man emerged from the building and looked so similar to the first—black jeans and a too-small collared shirt—that Tom almost said, “Non trova?” But he didn’t have a satchel, only a sheet of paper.
“Water lab?” he asked.
Tom nodded, uncertain if he should be answering in the affirmative.
“I am assigned,” he said, and stuck his hand out. “Aldo. Tell me the things you need.”
Savelli, another basement researcher, had mentioned the department would be doling out assistants for the fall as the work-study kids were shuffled around. Tom pulled his hand out from under his thigh; it still felt as if each cell was sending up flags of electrical alarm.
“Orange juice?” he asked.
The boy shook his hand. “Nope. Anything else?”
“Nope.”
“See you soon
in underground,” and the boy waved a farewell.
After lunch, Tom rinsed his beasts in distilled water, scrubbing the algae from their beards, and separated them. Some would live out the rest of their lives with no other nutrients; others would be assaulted with a volley of human-made chemicals and additives; and others would be given sweet green things on which to latch themselves and feed, babes at the teat. The tanks lined up beneath the window like a train of water waiting for its engine. Tom was too—what’s the word? [craven]—to enjoy playing God. He preferred the secondary thrill of playing artist. In a petri dish atop a sheet of white paper, he arranged an island of duckweed and diatoms and eyedropped in two ostracods. To round out the tableau, he rested on one side the old fishhook he’d found, a pirate’s anchor. He snapped a pic for Daphne. The little beans went circling, dizzy, like bumper cars, their segmented legs too filamentous to spot, the hinges on their valves silently creaking. He’d tried marking them—identification being the first step toward identifying with—but they were too bitty for the tinted pen, and the synthetic canthaxanthin he borrowed from the flamingo keeper at the zoo bled right through them. The pair motored to the tip of the submerged hook, fussed with the rust in hopes of something edible. He was a better father six thousand miles distant than he was in the flesh.
Another bolt crossed his vision, a quick frying of the eye. He grabbed the edge of the table and waited for it to pass. If he were still Catholic, he’d attribute the ramping symptoms to his own sins, but these days he had trouble determining what a sin was. He groped for a stool and sat, one hand against the side of his head, as if to hold his brain in. He’d been raised in a culture that valued autonomy over duty, self-actualization over kindness, and any therapist except a priest would tell him his emotional disloyalty was a vital expression of personal need that should be explored, even indulged. The modern condition.
During the Gulf War, they found ostracods in Kuwait covered with oil, with the heavy metal pollutants of war, still making their circuits: consuming, reproducing, aging. Tom wanted to know what soul stopped in that landscape to look for the smallest life-forms, and who would stop to look for him, and what they’d see.
“Do you miss me?” She had two fingers hooked in her lower lip, displaying her gums like a chimp.
“Not even a little.” He pressed his nose to the camera at the top of his computer, so her screen was darkened by the forest of his nose hairs. “I hear you’ve been turning off your silly switch at school.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s different from last year, though, huh?”
She’d taken her phone out to the city she was building beneath the eucalyptus. There were four car washes and one high-rise. “I don’t know,” she said, propping the phone against the tree and beginning to deepen her moat with a screwdriver. He could only see her chin now, her thin shoulders.
“Your friends are still friendly?”
“Yeah. It’s more, like, the boys. It’s like they’re playing some new game and didn’t tell us the rules.”
“Mom said you stopped wearing your favorite skirt.” The one they had to wash twice a week, because asking her to put on something else was like asking her to avoid mud, or trees, or ditches.
“Girls wear skirts.”
“Well—” His mind scrambled. He felt sharply his own absence from her developing consciousness in the years preceding this moment.
“I just want to be part of the secret.”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s a very empty kind of secret. It’s not that you’re getting less fun to hang out with, it’s that they’re getting—I don’t know, weird? It becomes harder to talk about stuff, feelings, that sort of thing. For boys.”
“Why?” She’d grabbed the phone again and leaned forward, screwdriver aimed at him like a knife. “Tell me the password.”
“Look, just treat everyone like they’re a human, rather than a subspecies. Maybe when those turds grow up, they’ll do the same.”
“Is that what you do?”
“What I do?” What did he do? [You treat everyone like a crustacean.] He looked over at his open suitcase, the stacks of printed articles, the unmade bed.
“I got to go fill the moat with fruit punch. Believe me, Dad, I know I’m fun to hang out with.”
The man building the satellite tower had a guest. It was the plummy time of the evening, and Tom hadn’t turned on the lamps or closed the shutters, so all that lit the dusk of the apartment was his laptop’s cold glow and the wilting moon. The tinker pulled out a seat for the lady, lit the candles on the patio table. Tom could make out her head turning from left to right and imagined her speech: “Ma, tutto é bello!” The man tightened the knot in his tie. Their laughter reached Tom in a delayed wave, and he closed his computer. How easy to be a certain kind of man: a man who could identify a problem (lack of acceptable television reception, or lack of a giant astronautical sailing ship) and then choose to solve it, a man who had enough pride in his surroundings to bring a woman home, serve her wine and candlelight, assume that a closely knotted tie was a step closer to seduction.
Tom’s last successful seduction had been at an academic conference in Minneapolis the year before he met his wife. He’d had an article out already that modeled a minor shift in the way scholars wrote about miniature organisms—even if anthropomorphism was a sin, it needed to be a sin broadly shared—and because the piece had been scorned for its “lyrical” tone (a stretch; he’d used a handful of adjectives outside the accepted set), he had earned some notoriety among grad students, who hungered for invisible dramas.
Her eyes sparked with recognition when he introduced himself at the hotel bar, and because she had a mess of brown hair piled in curls atop her head, he was flattered. He asked about her own research; she offered to buy him a drink. Two whiskeys in, they had gone upstairs because she claimed to have some graphs on the vitamin B consumption of phytoplankton, but had run into her dissertation advisor in that long shameful hallway where the staggered doors reminded Tom of a brothel. She shook Tom’s hand and said loudly, “Thanks, I’ll check out that journal!” and then cleaved to her advisor, retreating back to the elevators. He was stranded on a floor that wasn’t his. An hour later, he heard a dainty rapping at his door. So perhaps she had seduced him.
But he’d enjoyed waking up with her body in the sheets. Her hair, no longer artfully tangled, looked disastrous, and there was a coin-sized dampness on the pillow beneath her mouth. He folded over her ear, so gentle, to glimpse the tiny bones there. What an organism. She twitched and snuffled. He slid out, took his clothes into the bathroom, and washed his face and armpits at the sink with the biscuit of soap and a silent stream of water.
He left a note on his pillow—Do ostracods get cranky when they’re hungry? Downstairs, it occurred to him the note might be read as a flirtatious reference to shared breakfast plans. This he had not intended. He spent the rest of the day in stomach-locked terror lest he should run into her—there weren’t huge numbers of aquatic ecologists—but by sitting in on the least likely sessions (“Advances in Coastal Hypoxia Modeling,” “The Oligotrophic Levantine Sea: State, Challenges, and Management”), he managed to elude her. He even left for the airport three hours before his flight was scheduled—why? He’d found her attractive; he’d done kind but exciting things to her body—and spotted her at gate C10, flipping through an Us Weekly. She glanced up; he jerked toward the men’s bathroom.
Even with his wife, she’d been the one to rest her hand on his leg when making a point, to stare into his eyes rather than answering a question. That afternoon in the mustard Citroën he had wanted to wrap his hands around the driver’s neck, just to feel her pulse, and what had he actually done? [The same thing God does when I send Him my apologies, my ardency, a bouquet of bleeding souls begging for salvation: nothing. You’ve managed to combine my errors with His cowardice.]
As dark fell, the wavering points of light on the far-off patio looked like a runway in f
og. Tom had expected the woman to excuse herself before the wine was done, but no, the engineer had gone downstairs for another bottle. He heard a thin strain of opera. The two were dancing. Slow, mostly in the hips, as if a wind were twisting two bodies. Tom felt her skin vicariously. Her hands positioned just so around his neck, the fingers hesitantly riffling at his curls. Her breath, two breaths. Trying to align so their chests moved together like a bellows. O Lola, ch’ai di latti la cammisa . . . His leg finding its way between her feet, to the space there. Humans were only halves.
He could call his wife now and spill out all his muddled thought. Tell her he was afraid of looking in the mirror one day, surrounded by the trappings of grown life, and seeing in his place a child. That what he wanted was an unleashing, which is what a child wants. Tell her his recoil from love was not incompatible with love. (He heard his own whine.)
He closed the shutters, turned on the lamp, retreated to the kitchen to set a pot of water on the stove. When it began to boil, he shut off the burner and watched the water slowly deflate. He poured it into his mug for tea, but the little left over he took to the sink and splashed across the back of his hand. There was the body! There it was.
They met at the Ponte Garibaldi and leaned to the east to lap up the evening lights of the hospital on the Tiber’s island. “If I’m struck by a moped,” he said, “will you tell the ambulance to take me there?” This kind of talk presupposed a two-ness about them; the forming of such a unit was always an intimacy, but it felt good and warm to let the words summon the image: him in a tangled heap of limbs on the sidewalk, her kneeling over him, hands pressing his chest and face, telling the medic with authority what the remaining plans for his life would be.
“I don’t think they take Americans,” she said, walking on. A nutria paddled along the banks below them. “I’d have to stitch you myself. Yank out strands of my hair for thread. You’d look a bloody shambles after I’m done.”
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