“Yeah. So what?”
“Well, don’t those things mean something?”
“I suppose.”
“So you agree. There is more to it than just chemistry.”
“You didn’t ask me that.”
“Well, if I did…”
“If you did what?”
“Come on, Natalie. If I asked you if we enjoy doing other things beside having sex, doesn’t that mean there is more than just chemistry as you phrase it?”
“Well, you haven’t asked me.”
Thaw could feel anger rise within him. “Natalie, you’re getting to me. Come on. All right. I’ll ask you. If we enjoy doing things other than making love, don’t you think this suggests there must be more to us than just this darn chemistry you’re always talking about?”
“Well, yes…”
“Sounds more like a question than an answer the way you put it.”
Natalie leaned closer in to study a stubborn part on the pan. Obviously she was not yielding. “I guess it is, ‘cause I just can’t see myself enjoying walking and fishing and talking about things like chemistry with someone with whom I just don’t have any.”
She was really getting to him. “Well, did it ever occur to you that the only reason we have any of the god-damned chemistry is exactly because you enjoy walking, talking, and being with me to begin with, Natalie?”
“Thaw…” Natalie raised her pitch in a questioning way.
“Yeah.”
“You’re getting kind of loud now.”
That did it. If Lem were home, he could have heard every word Thaw next said. “I don’t care. The noisiest woman I ever met, whether it’s cooking, washing pots and pans or making love…and I raise my voice two decibels and she tells me…ME…I’m getting loud. Never could talk sense with you, Natalie. For all your college degrees and city ways, when it comes to logic you’ve got about what would fit in a thimble.”
Natalie scrubbed all the more vigorously. “Thaw, I don’t like it when you yell. And I don’t like it when you say things like that.”
“Well, it’s true!” He dropped his voice to an almost-whisper and spoke between clenched teeth. “So now I’m gonna tell you something, woman, just in case you don’t already know it. Damn it all. Put that pan down, will you, and look at me!”
Natalie kept scrubbing. Leaving his chair, Thaw crossed the room and caught her wrist in his hand. He lifted it, took the scratchy pad she held and threw it in the water and pulled her around and toward him. Natalie kept her eyes toward the floor.
Thaw’s voice returned to its normal tone. “Natalie. Listen to me. Look at me. Please.” He dropped down to a squatting position and looked up at her and grabbed her other hand. He held them, limp and soapy feeling, in his. Their eyes engaged.
Thaw went on. “If it were just sex I wanted from you, I could just as well hit the red light district in Bain and save myself a lot of energy and effort trying to think of things you’d like to talk about, places and things you’d like to see and foods and people you might enjoy. If I did that I wouldn’t even have to spend two seconds dreaming up new slants to foreplay.”
A small smile played briefly around the corners of Natalie’s lips.
Thaw noticed the slight softening of her face. Encouraged, he went on. “I’d sleep better weekends.”
Something caused her to pull her hands and turn her head toward the sink. Thaw let her go, but began again to lose his cool. His intensity gradually increased, his voice once more reaching the Lem-can-hear level. “And when all’s said and done I’d probably be the one living in Aesopolis. Upstairs there would be my studio and downstairs would be my gallery and people’d be coming from far and near whenever I had a new show. And maybe, just maybe…if it just happened I felt like it that week, I’d invite you to an opening and give you a turn in my pad. Maybe.”
There was a long silence. Natalie began to rinse the pan. Then she brought it closer to her face to study it more closely. “Gee. I’d be that lucky?”
Thaw’s face flushed. He would never understand that woman. But at that very moment, he didn’t care. “Damn it, woman…” Moving nearer, he closed the space between them. His left hand slipped round her waist and down into the front of her pants, gently grabbing onto the warm fuzzy beaver there. His right hand turned her chin, bringing her parted lips to an angle in line with his own. Natalie gave a little giggle of surprise but without losing a beat caught his descending wrist with her left hand while slipping her soap-covered right one in and over the only other upright man in the room.
This time, however, dinner was over and nothing was on the stove, so there would be no need to hurry.
7. Ariana, March 2020: The Matters
Marty Matters was off at a run for a game of catch with his brother. As he pulled on the doorknob to leave, his dad pushed inward. The door opened abruptly. Surprise marked both their faces.
No hi from his dad. Just, “Don’t touch me. I need to clean up.”
Marty moved aside to let his father pass. Not phased by his father’s greeting, or rather lack of greeting, he slid past his father with the same care one might apply to avoiding the plague. “Just going out for a game of catch, Dad.” He and his brother Jason would return in time for dinner.
Lou Matters, the boys’ dad, had left work late. On arriving home he headed directly for the shower, avoiding any physical contact with his boys until he was clean. By the time Mary arrived he’d be good to give her a welcoming hug.
In the laundry room Lou stripped and dropped his work clothes into the washer a piece at a time. Once bare-assed naked he poured a capful of detergent into the machine. Closing the top, he rotated the dial and pulled. By now his sons understood that when their father deconned, he rid himself of radioactive particles.
Marty closed the door behind him. Heading out, he found Jason already playing catch with the family dog. The older boy tossed Marty the ball. Marty faked-out their playful mutt for a bit before winging a good one back. So Jason took a turn at faking-out Marty, eventually letting the ball drop a few feet in front of himself. Quickly picking it up from very near the ground, he popped Marty a high fly.
The Matters family made their home in the state of East Cordabon; Ariana was a bedroom community about an hour north of the Aesopolis-Verde / East Cordabon, metropolitan area. They had moved to Ariana after Lou had accepted an inspector’s position in the Magdum Heights Nuclear Power Plant in Sussex County, just across from Ariana on the James River.
The money was good, but the job left Lou almost palpably disgruntled. The level of risk that lurked about him daily haunted him. In the seven months he had been at The Plant, there had been so many accidents and technical problems that in fact it had been up and running at full speed only about half the time. So on most nights Lou arrived home conflicted and stressed and flatly avoided physical contact with anyone until he had deconned. And he had felt compelled to cue his wife into the extent of the problem in case anything were to happen, so that the family would be ready. Also they needed to prepare to move. He’d sent out his resumes and agreed that if necessary Mary might not complete the school year where she was.
FEMA had made it clear in its study of deconning that there was no record of any person developing cancer or radiation sickness from the simple act of deconning someone else. As the medical doctors who taught the courses had confirmed this, Lou believed it to be true. But reason and love do not always walk hand in hand. So although the contact would have been short and Mary and the boys might have briefly kissed and held Lou when he arrived home, they did not. Despite his knowledge, oddly, it was Lou who would not permit it. This approach was part of his strategy to make a big to-do over brief exposures while deflecting attention from his greater real concern: with some of the accidents that had occurred he had suffered exposure for more prolonged periods to radioactivity than he was willing to tell, and sometimes the exposures were without the initial use of adequate protective clothing.
L
ou’s wife and the mother of their two sons, Mary Matters, was a speech-language pathologist in the Aesopolis Public School System. On returning home at the end of each school day, Mary had her own somewhat different concerns. She snickered to think about how they were in a way similar: she worried about bringing home germs; he, radioactivity. Many times over the last seven months she had asked herself why he had ever taken that job. It infuriated her that he hadn’t waited to find a teaching position. If he had, they might have bought a home miles from The Plant. She could have found another job. So what if he grew up in Ariana. His parents were in Florida, hers in California. They could have moved anywhere. Anywhere but here. Damn. Mary noted how whenever she thought about The Plant and Lou’s job, she took to cussing mentally. Shit! she would exclaim to herself. Or, Hell! Now the words spit from between her lips. “Damn it anyhow!”
The family mutt rose and came to lean its shoulders against her legs. She patted its head and looked at it absently.
8. Locklee, Early in the Year 2020: Thaw
Natalie, Thaw’s sometimes girlfriend, was sketchily aware of Thaw’s family life as a child, his drug-use days during and following his military stint in the Middle East, and the emotional healing that had settled over him once he had established himself on Butternut Lane. She sensed that she and Lem had contributed to the healing, but as Thaw had been pretty much clean and on his way by the time they had met, it seemed that her positive effect on him had been no more than might be expected from any love relationship.
Theodore Horatio Alexander Wamp. Yeah, that sure was a handle. Except most people just abbreviated it to Thaw, a name he did not mind. He even found it mildly humorous when in dead of a northern winter somewhat yelled out to get him. Yeah, thaw. Good idea, he’d muse; be really nice if the ice did break and spring bubbled through it. And that’s pretty much how Thaw saw things, with the people nearest him always wishing for things that even on the best of days he could not provide. He especially felt that way about Natalie. However, he also saw himself as a work in progress, so he remained somewhat hopeful that his natural abilities and willingness to work would yet bring Natalie and him a stable and happy future life. As such, his life challenge was not only to gain respect for his art but to find a way to use it as a means to make money, enough money to support a family, Natalie’s and his family.
Thaw’s place was more a cabin than a house, but Thaw had insulated the inside, adding a layer of neatly taped wallboard and finished it in an antique white. His dog, Tufty, loved its easy access to the open woods. And with Natalie up for a visit, even in the coldest times the woodstove warmed the loft where the lovers slept quite well.
Having returned from the stint in the army which had taken him to active duty with the American arm of the United Nations Peace Keeping forces in Africa and the Middle East, Thaw had purchased the place in June of 2011. It had taken most of the money from his severance allotment as well as some other money he had managed to save to buy it and make it more livable. Applying the carpentry skills he had learned from his dad, he tightened and neatened the place up, added a dormer with a large window that opened to the south side and withdrew there with a good store of hashish.
The hashish had been replaced by less potent marihuana and alcohol in which he gradually also had lost interest. In their place, his excitement with his improved clarity of direction as an artist and painter took hold. Now he might have a bottle of beer or share a bottle of wine over dinner with Lem on a weekday or Natalie on a Friday or Saturday night. But the thing he looked most forward to on weekends was the pleasure of spending time in bed with Natalie where sex, sleep, and long, lazy conversation ruled the nights…and the days.
Thinking back to just after he had purchased the cabin about how angry his father had become when he had arrived at the cabin and found Thaw toking, Thaw still found it somewhat inexplicable that thereafter his father, a carpenter by trade, refused to ever speak to him again. Over the next year or two Thaw had made repeated attempts to engage the man, but his dad remained non-responsive. So beyond greeting his father in passing, Thaw gave up the effort. And although he knew his drug use had angered his father, given the depth of the anger, Thaw suspected it had to be mingled also with some form of deeper resentment. Perhaps it was that he, Thaw, had refused to become the carpenter’s helper. Or even a carpenter in situations other than monetary emergencies. Or perhaps it was that he no longer needed his dad’s help. And then to have reached independence by becoming some kind of an artist…definitely a move against all mankind. He remembered his dad’s last words as he had slammed out the door. “Get your life in order! Then come see me.”
How many years had it been now? And how long had it been since he’d given up even thinking of trying? And didn’t he almost have another father in his friend Lem? One who was not given to sudden flare-ups in temper? One who thought of Thaw as a man with potential? One who even appreciated and admired Thaw’s artistic skills?
Alone, when he was not painting beneath the skylight of the cabin, Thaw wandered the woods and lakesides with his black and white mixed-breed English setter, Tufty, so named for the tiny black tufts mingled delicately in the white fur of her coat. Together they would follow the streams where Thaw would fish or paint. Of the fish Thaw caught, he ate what he needed and sold the rest to his boyhood friend Johnny Martin, who ran the small Ellensville Fish Market. Then on Saturdays, weather permitting, Thaw would set up at a local flea market to sell his paintings. If Natalie were up, she’d come along and hang out with him, helping him sell, getting them lunch, chatting, and reading.
Thaw’s paintings sold mostly to tourists. But tourist numbers were not always predictable, so Thaw also did face painting and chalk caricatures as he bided his time waiting for a prospective buyer to query him about his painting style or the price of this or that painting. In this way he would while away the time under his tarp and earn enough so that with the money from the fish and the occasional sale of one of his paintings, for one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars, he was able to return to the woods and the streams to sketch, fish and paint on weekdays. When occasionally money got really tight, he would pick up a carpentry or house painting job. But as his skill and reputation as an artist increased, these jobs had become less necessary so that now he spent almost all his daytime working hours sketching and painting. Evenings when the light was too poor for painting, he often sculpted.
After dinner and a quick perusal of the day’s news on the Internet, unless he visited with Lem, Thaw read or worked on one of the labor intensive stone carvings he kept stored in a metal cabinet near the door. They usually lay horizontally and flannel-wrapped for protection among the variously colored roll-out lengths of cloth and leather pockets that held riffles and rasps, mallets and chisels. As Thaw carved and the light of day faded, he would supplement his vision by running his hands over the piece to confirm that its form was rounded, graceful, smooth and elegant. Tall birds, graceful embracing couples, bending mothers, and reclining women took slow and careful shape under his strong fingers.
9. Ariana, March 2020: Mary Matters
Last night Mary had dreamed that a green sticky goo had spread itself implacably outward from The Plant to reach as far as their front door. There it had oozed through the space below the door’s thick wood panel to spread across the vestibule and halfway up the stairs. Fearful the substance might reach her family, Mary had wakened, drenched in perspiration, her heart pounding. Carefully, so as not to disturb Lou, she had folded back the covers to let her body cool. When she had calmed, she rose from the bed, felt for and grabbed her watch from the night stand and headed for the bathroom. Moonlight lit the sink area. She grabbed a cup from the counter and helped herself to some water. Her light-up Timex read 2:30.
Leaving the bathroom she flicked on the hall light. The temperature of the house on the thermostat in the hall was fine: 64 degrees. She looked in on the boys, first Jason in the front bedroom and then Marty in the back one. In each
room she heard quiet breathing. They were sleeping peacefully. Flicking off the switch near the thermostat, she returned to bed. It was a while before she would cover herself again and fall back to sleep.
By the time the alarm sounded in the morning Mary had shaken the feeling of fear that had so consumed her in the night, and on her commute to Aesopolis she started off feeling fine. For a while she sang along softly with some of the Country Western music that wafted from the radio.
Mary knew how to use the long commute well. As she drove along the road that curved in tandem and not far from the James River, she would think forward to what her boys and husband would be doing that day. At that point she would turn the radio off. Easier to think. Yes, the boys at school: Marty giving high fives to his many friends; Jason talking seriously with the little female student teacher he had for math. Then a cursory thought to the evening meal, thinking perhaps, “Tacos.” The boys always loved tacos. She’d serve them that night. Lou would be home late. Once family was done, she’d review the day before her. When she stopped for a light, she’d whip open the plan book on the seat beside her. An elastic band would help it open directly to the plans for the day. A glance for top- and bottom-of-the-page notes. “See M.L.D. re: team meeting.” She’d run through mental images of the day’s anticipated events, stopping as necessary to consider special concerns such as Eric, a student she treated in one of her morning sessions. His progress had been poor, primarily due to lack of motivation. Perhaps it was the material she was using: “I know he likes animals. Perhaps my book on chameleons…” This process usually brought her to within fifteen minutes of school arrival time. About then she’d turn the radio back on, toy with the buttons, and stop the dial for some light music. But today when, just south of Ariana, she silenced the radio, her mental ritual did not take place—for her thoughts fixed again on The Plant.
Mary’s fears included the possibility that the spent fuel might at some point produce a chain reaction of radioactivity that would spill out into the nearby community should The Plant’s cooling towers be inadvertently or intentionally prematurely drained prior to the fuel’s removal. Also there was the more real potential for Dirty Bombs being set off by local disgruntled hospital workers or terrorists. Although the war in Iraq had come to a close back some years now, terrorism, if anything seemed healthier than ever. The Middle East was still in disarray and the African questions still pended. And since 9/11, she could not think of a metropolitan area that had not suffered from one or another act of terrorism. Even some more isolated communities had had their problems. So as they lived very close to The Plant and in such a heavily populated area, Mary’s only real hope was that Lou would soon find a new job outside of the area. Preferably in a proverbial Podunk Junction.
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