Tizita

by Sharon Heath

  I didn’t reply immediately, but carefully wiped as much of Bob’s semen as I could away from my tweeter, praying that I had some terrible congenital malady that rendered me infertile until I remembered Baby X languishing in the hole in my heart. I reached for what looked to be a relatively clean washcloth hanging off an uneven plastic towel rack, wetted it in the sink, and completed the job, rubbing my vaginal lips rather cruelly as if I could retroactively crush any sperm that might be lurking in the dark of my folds, biding its time before creeping toward its glistening goal. I contemplated stepping into Bob’s bathtub, but seeing its hair-carpeted, rust-streaked state, opted instead to open Bob’s tiny excuse for a vanity. I found a comb there, and it looked just as I might have imagined. I rinsed the dandruff specks from its black teeth, then painstakingly tugged it through my matted blond hair. My lips, still slightly plump from kissing, were stained a deep shade of plum by the Merlot. Baring white fangs, I hissed at myself like a wild cat, thinking the previously un-thought thought. Assefa. What in God’s name had I done?

  I closed the toilet lid and sat down. If Assefa only knew. But what was I worrying about? He wouldn’t even care. I should be grateful to Bob for taking pity on me. The fact was, he’d shown more courage than I would ever have imagined. I was the head of our physics pack, and he’d idolized me like a teenager, achingly, impossibly. Making a move on me had been a hell of a risk. Then again, I’d caved in pretty quickly. No, Fleur, be honest. Instantly. I felt my cheeks go red with shame.

  Bob had clearly given up now. I heard him padding around the apartment. The music stopped. Clinking sounds. He must be clearing up. Now footsteps re-approached. Another knock. This one less hesitant. “Fleur. Do you like to tie?”

  Really? Having had me once, the guy was getting brazen. I fumbled with the lock and flung open the door. “Bob Ballantine, I am not interested in bondage!”

  He was dressed. Me: naked. His eyes looking determinedly in mine, he laughed a little nervously. “Fleur, please. I feel terrible. Taking advantage of you like .... Anyway, I was wondering. Thai food. I asked if you liked Thai food.”

  I was mortified. Head down, I hurried past him and swung into the bedroom. The bed was made, the Wookie looking none the worse for wear, and my clothes were folded carefully in a pile, right across the chest of Princess Leah. I had to hand it to Bob. He gave me time to compose myself. I heard the toilet flush, then Bob calling out from what might be the living room, “If you don’t hate me forever, I thought I could at least offer the dinner you thought you were coming here for.” Straightening my chin, I walked down the hall. He shrugged as I entered the room. “I know I’m an asshole, but ....”

  “Bob,” I said, dropping onto the couch, “We’re undoubtedly both assholes. And I really don’t want to do that again. Ever. Not because it wasn’t nice, but for a whole lot of reasons, most of them having to do with the fact that I clearly don’t know how to do relationships. But we’re colleagues. And I’d like to be your friend. Shake?”

  I extended a hand to him and he gave it a shake that seemed a bit more confident than it would have a few hours ago. It was all a little surreal. I knew we were both thinking about where these hands had just been. I shook my head. “Oh God, what a day.” I got up and walked over to his computer, clicking on Pandora. My heart was heavier than lead. But I knew there’d be plenty of time for that. Too much time. The Foals were singing “My Number.” I turned around to face Bob, who looked as though he was holding his breath.

  “You know,” I said, “I really am kind of partial to Thai.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fleur

  EVEN THOUGH IT barely took ten minutes, the drive home from Caltech after Bob dropped me off felt interminable. I still couldn’t believe I’d slept with Bob Ballantine! But my mortification paled in comparison with my continued state of shock that Assefa had discarded me like some used plastic bag.

  Thanks to Bob, I now knew where those bags ended up—in toxic swirls like the 270,000 square miles worth of horror called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located midway between Hawaii and California. And in the stomachs of marine birds and animals. The image was so voidishly nauseating that when I arrived back at the Fiskes’, for one brief second I thought that the smell assaulting my nostrils was my imagination.

  “Hello? Is anybody home?” No Stanley. No Gwennie. No Jillily—bad girl, she was undoubtedly hiding. The previous year, on my way to giving a talk on the Higgs Boson at Paris Descartes University, I’d passed an ancient urinal on Boulevard Arago whose stench was unbelievable. This was worse. Who knew that female cats could spray at all? It had happened the first time back in November, when we babysat Sammie’s Midge here at the house for a week while Sammie and Aadita flew to Delhi for Aadita’s mother’s funeral.

  The name Midget was the ultimate misnomer. These past years, the butter-colored creature had put on even more weight, and as soon as we brought him home with us, he put paid to our delusion that he and Jillily would get along by actually lumbering over to sit on top of her. Jillily had barely managed to ooze out from under Midge’s rump like a slow-moving black turd.

  Since then, I’d been trying to explain to Jillily that lifting her tail to let loose a great arc of foul-smelling liquid was no longer necessary to persuade us to evict the uncouth intruder from the house. But alas, spraying turned out to be an attraction that, once discovered, had an atavistic life of its own.

  The thing was: the stench was so pervasive that we had no idea where it was actually coming from. Closing the front door, I flung my backpack onto Stanley’s favorite leather chair and—not for the first time—dropped to my knees, sniffing my way from the book-cluttered living room to the book-cluttered den to each of the three book-cluttered bedrooms. The good news was that Jillily didn’t seem to have sprayed the books. The bad news was that I (a) banged my head as I came up from a knot of old Christmas ribbon and a ratty catnip ball under my bedside table, (b) managed to snag my favorite jeans on a nail protruding from the hardwood floor in Stanley’s bedroom, (c) and still could not find the source of the smell.

  It was only after I’d showered, changed into a fresh pair of pants, and opened the freezer to get some ice for my head that Jillily deigned to make an appearance, winding her way in and out of my legs and making enough eye contact to guilt me into a little snack of Ritz Crackers and cheese. And if you think that’s an odd treat for a cat, consider Midge’s favorite snack in his vegan home—curried cauliflower and broccoli—not to mention the Fiskes’ long-departed Moggy’s preference for Gwennie’s spinach omelets.

  It was when Jillily was cleaning off every lick of cheddar with gourmandish gusto that I heard the key in the lock.

  Gwennie called out, “Halloooo?”

  I found her in the living room, reaching a plump arm toward the bent shoulders of an odd incarnation of Stanley, one with a frantically winking eye and what looked like a giant white shower cap clamped against his jaw.

  When he saw me, Stanley tried to smile, his face looking more froggish than ever. “Hawawa ma soro,” he garbled.

  Gwennie laughed, and then inclined her head toward him in apology. “Poor dear,” she explained. “Emergency root canal went south. The tooth turned out to be rotten through and through. They had to pull it right away.” Gwennie’s face was a mask of worry. “I think it took the stuffing out of him.” She led him to his favorite chair and helped him into it. Stanley stunned the both of us, I think, by commencing to cry.

  “Ish the damned painkillers,” Stanley managed to get out between sobs. “They futz with the brainsh executive function.”

  Fighting hard against the impulse to flap, I forced out a panicky, “What can I do?” I knew what I could do: spare them seeing me fall into a full-out fit of pinching and banging. I adored Stanley H. Fiske and could not bear seeing him in such pain.

  “There’s a love,” Gwennie said, laying her battered black purse and a sheaf of papers onto the sofa. “Fetch us some fresh ice, will y
ou? I’ll get Stanley into bed and we can prop the ice pack against his face and see if he can sleep. It’ll be the best thing. The endodontist said that, by tomorrow, he’ll be right as rain.”

  I didn’t know what rain had to do with it, but I rushed off to the kitchen, happy to fend off the void by doing something useful. It was only then that it occurred to me that I hadn’t managed to ice my own aching head, but given how Stanley looked, I’d merely been a tourist in the ice-needing department.

  Stanley conked out as soon as Gwennie tucked him in, his face propped against the ice pack and his body curved into a long cocoon. As luck would have it, the phone rang as soon as Gwennie and I were settled into our favorite perches in the den, feet overlapping from opposite ends of the sofa and Jillily stretched luxuriously across my belly and chest.

  “Oh, shit,” hissed Gwennie. “And he just got to sleep.”

  I leapt from the couch, displacing an indignant Jillily, who was forced to vault with me. Snatching up the phone, I heard Mother’s voice, a little breathless. “You’ll be happy to know he’s on his way back.” I froze. Mother began to giggle, sounding a little unsteady. “The thing is, I had to get off the phone with Abeba before she could tell me when he’ll arrive.”

  I quickly tiptoed down the hall to the kitchen and pulled the door closed. “Why in the world did you get off the phone?” My heart was thudding a mile a minute.

  “Well, the thing is ....” Why was Mother dawdling? “How could I have known? I hate call waiting. It was one of those annoying political calls. I suppose I could have called Abeba back, but I thought that letting you know was the first priority? It’s wonderful, isn’t it—you two lovebirds reunited.”

  I was speechless. Looking down, I saw that Jillily had spied the ball of Christmas ribbon. Her ears lay flat against her head, and her mouth had that puffy expression that signified she was in touch with her inner murderer. She pounced on the ribbon and, with a low growl, held it in her front paws while her back legs scrabbled fiercely against it.

  I lay the phone down on the kitchen table next to a nearly dead vaseful of the unnaturally early-blooming Austins and left the room, barely aware that Mother was still speaking.

  As I stumbled up the hall, Stanley poked a head out of his bedroom. His remaining hair stood straight up from his scalp like Bob’s had after sex.

  There was nothing for it. I backed up against the wall, slid down, and began banging my head until Gwennie rushed over and shouted at me to stop. She pulled me up and hugged me as Mack-truckishly as Nana would in the old days, and, just as it had then, it did the trick.

  Stanley insisted on joining Gwen and me at the kitchen table. Over a cup of chamomile tea, I ended up spilling the beans about everything—Assefa, Bob, Mother’s call. I had to hand it to Stanley. He took the news about me sleeping with his newest assistant without batting an eye. Of course, the fact that he was grimacing in horrible pain and had an ice pack covering half his face might have masked his true feelings. Then again, he’d been the one who’d handled the job of taking me back to New York to inform my anti-abortionist father that I was pregnant at thirteen. Forget Bob Ballantine; Hector Hernandez had managed to seduce me with two words, “Beautiful dove.”

  I wasn’t feeling so doveish right now. More like clumsy and crowy. But thirteen again, for sure.

  It didn’t help that Gwennie was managing to be a bit clumsy herself. “Sweetheart,” she said, sliding a hand across the table to take mine, “You know, not everything is solved by ... getting physical.”

  Stanley flung his ice pack onto the table and jumped out of his chair, stretching his froggish figure to full height. “Gwennie Fiske. You sound like a god damned old maid. Give the girl a break. She needed to know she’s still desirable.”

  I stared at him and only shut my mouth when I realized my jaw was hanging open. Stanley was right. That was exactly what had happened. I felt both mortified and relieved and more than a little guilty that I’d used Bob Ballantine to salve my silly vanity. But then I remembered how triumphant Bob had looked after we’d slept together and wondered who’d used whom.

  Of course, by now Gwennie was filled with remorse and had to make more amends than a roomful of Bill W’s.

  Feeling a post-banging headache coming on, I fled to my room, averting my eyes from the wall mirror while stripping naked, and slid gratefully under the covers. Well, actually, what I slid under was Nana’s old cave-scented robe that I’d rescued when Sister Flatulencia was cleaning out her belongings after the accident. Jillily rewarded my efforts not to pinch by spooning tightly next to me, motoring like a house afire. As if I were channeling Nana, I gave her a thousand little chicken peck kisses all over her sleek black head. To which Jillily responded with enough rough-tongued face washings to rival the best facialist in L.A.

  At last I could have my nice, long cry. But the tears refused to come. So Assefa was coming back. For what? To what—a lover who’d layered sex over the shock of rejection like a cat sweeping litter on its poop? What finally loosened the floodgates wasn’t the shame of having had intercourse with someone I didn’t love, nor the confusing loss of the one I did, let alone his imminent return. When the void sucks you in, every bit of the world’s misery dives in with you. Old hurts and current dreads swirl amidst stories of child abuse, oil spills, women across the globe being treated as chattel. Ultimately, my tears released themselves over the lonely end of the pelican on the beach—the grotesquery of its plastic-entwined entrails being treated with the averted eyes of all but a few Bob Ballantines of this world and a flurrying business of flies.

  I fell asleep praying there was a parallel universe, one where humans were kind and rational and uncomplicated and life was actually fair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fleur

  THE EMBRYONIC HUMAN heart begins beating about 21 days after conception, which is generally about five weeks after the last normal menstrual period. But what was normal if you tended to be irregular, couldn’t recall when your last period had been, and hence had no idea when your window of fertility had been left wide open?

  One thing I did know: I still hadn’t bled by the time I finally decided to return Assefa’s calls.

  I’d managed to avoid him for a week and a half, telling myself I was too busy with my team’s debate over what direction to take after the idiots in Congress—consistent with their penchant for fiddling while our planet burned—killed all possibility of pursuing P.D. in the coming year by a measly majority of one vote.

  Far from fading from memory, the dead pelican on the beach that I’d come to think of as Pelican X had become a kind of totem, reminding me that every day our project was stalled, the more likely it was that we humans would take millions of species with us into oblivion. My team continued to be split between pursuing research that would feed into P.D. when the time came and exploring new territory entirely. It all came to a head during one of our Skype sessions with Adam.

  Gunther started it this time, rubbing his pale, slender hands with an unaccustomed glee, his wandering eye having a field day. “I’m for investigating Eridanus. You never know what the implications of parallel universes might mean for our understanding of the exchange of matter in C-Voids.”

  Tom shot him a withering look, which I prayed Gunther’s strabismus prevented him from seeing. “Oh, come on. Let’s get real. By the time we make useful connections between Eridanus and C-Voids, the planet’ll be fried.” As if he’d realized he was being a bit harsh, he turned to Gunther and laid a hand on his arm, “Listen, bro. If we’re going in the direction of supervoids, we might as well go whole hog and see where Nikodem Poplawski’s idea that the universe exists within a giant black hole takes us. You’ve got to admit that his idea that we’re sharing a Darth Vader condo with a bunch of other universes is pretty cool.” It was intriguing, and for a few minutes the group spun into an excited hive of speculation, until Stanley hopped a few times and held up a hand.

  “Okay, I like Nick’s ide
a as much as the rest of you, but let’s face it: it’s too theoretical and still beyond our current capabilities to verify or confirm.” He grinned. “We’re consigned to the fate of a tuna. Nobody’s blinder to the existence of the ocean than the fish.”

  That was when Katrina broke in, her eyes alight and her shiny brown ponytail swinging as she spoke with some vehemence, “That’s why I like keeping it simple and staying with quantum entanglement. We were going to include it in our project, anyway, since it feeds right in to C-Voids and Congress has no idea how relevant it is for P.D. The more we learn, the readier we are to apply it next year if the elections go our way.”

  That, of course, led to one more round of ranting about the Know Nothing party that had a grip on Congress, until Adam piped up—speaking of tuna, his face disturbingly flattened into a narrow fish-face shape by the Skype camera. “I think Katrina’s right. Nothing has a greater potential to make a dent in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than P.D. That’s why Fleur got the Nobel for it and why the Cacklers and Big Oil and their congressional minions are determined to kill it. We’ve got virtually all the scientific community and every major environmental organization behind us, and with any luck the mid-term elections’ll get us the votes next year. I say we focus on entanglement, stay the course, and kick carbon ass next year.”

  Amir weighed in with a quick, “I’m with Adam. We’d be stupid to get off track from what we’re about.”

  Amir’s support was a nice surprise, but I already knew I could count on Adam. Sammie liked to say that Adam and I had a “history with a capital S-E-X.” Which was a typical Sammie-ism, one that distorted objective reality for the sake of emphasizing an emotional element that I preferred to sweep into a distant corner of my mind. Over the years Adam had been my comforter, my tutor, my friend, and one of the most essential members of my physics team. However many mini-explosions I’d given myself in response to his perceptive green eyes and distinctive Campbell’s Chicken Soup B.O., my feelings for him were far more complicated than S-E-X.