by Sharon Heath
I MAY HAVE mentioned that butterflies see differently than we do. They have less visual sharpness, but they make up for it by their capacity to see in the ultraviolet wavelength. What my favorite entomologist Sally Price added to the picture is that it’s often the females’ ultraviolent coloring that attracts the male of the species, rather than the sorts of olfactory stimuli nature uses to compel other creatures to mate.
When Sally shared that piece of information with me—the two of us slathering on sunscreen before commencing a brainstorming walk around Caltech’s grassy Beckman Mall—I found myself wondering anew about the incandescent quality of light that I experienced during those two extraordinary moments of my life that I’d been sure were some sort of previews to Dreamization: my Alice-in-Wonderlandish moment at Zeki’s funeral; and again, years later, giving birth to Callay. Death and life. One of the larger debates in the scientific community revolves around the question of whether the universe is infinite or finite. It the latter were true, we could travel through the universe and eventually arrive back at where we started. Sometimes I wondered if my own experiences hadn’t contained a hint of that.
But right now, my recollection raised a more pressing question. I knew that when matter is sucked into a black hole, it emits—among other things—ultraviolet light. As Sally continued her description of the butterfly dance, I felt a little frisson of anxiety. What if humans would be at risk of absorbing damaging levels of UV rays during the process of activating their cellular black holes? That would certainly raise alarms in the Precautionary Principle department and might require that we find ways to protect our PD travelers before sending them in and out of the void.
I searched my mind for who might help us out with this. I knew that Jeff Steinhauer was doing some amazing work these days with acoustic black holes in his lab at the Haifa’s Institute of Technology and that Mike Dunne’s team was using the Linac Coherent Light Source to fashion a laser to create an atomic black hole. But none of those lines of inquiry were immediately applicable to our own project and would offer little guidance in this potential dilemma. What if Dreamization proved to be even more destructive than climate change?
I decided to speak to Adam about it that night. Lately, I was inclined to raise a new idea or concern with him before mentioning it to the rest of the team. It felt important to assuage his feelings about being taken for granted (and also, if I was honest, to make him more likely to enjoy our sex minus the porn).
Did it all come down to sex for everyone, or was it just me? I had a fantasy of Herr Freud knowingly twiddling his thumbs.
But to be fair, other types of twiddlers (and wrigglers and twirlers) were putting up a heck of a good fight for my attention these days. Mostly young ones. Callay, of course, even more so now that the word why had entered her vocabulary. Being scientists didn’t hurt Adam and me in that area, but there were still plenty of questions we couldn’t begin to answer. We could manage “Why sun not make Caycay brown like Fifa and Yes?” with a brief description of the cooling and—speaking of UV radiation—anti-UV effects of melanin in hot climates. But “Where Caycay before Moomah belly?” stumped us both. Hadn’t I wondered about that one a million times myself?
As for Callay’s browner “sisters,” their latest attention-grabbing devices were the instruments they’d been assigned at the Children’s Center: Sofiya’s half-sized violin and Melesse’s—God help us—drums. All Makeda could say when they’d first brought them home was, “What were they thinking?” I’d tried to be more sanguine myself, suggesting we install the instruments in the attic room that ran nearly the full length of the house, but it’s amazing how far squeaky, discordant, and clangy sounds liked to travel.
But those were hardly the most pressing issues children posed to us these days: there were also those 2,000 plus minors at our borders who’d been taken hostage in a policy darkly dubbed “Zero Tolerance.”
Although I found the plight of those little ones unbearable to think about, it was pretty hard to avoid just that in this heaving, hot mess that our country had become. The children fleeing violence and crippling poverty in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala had rightly captured the headlines and continued to take center stage in Gwennie’s political rants, which had gotten increasingly operatic in volume and dramatic fervor. One recent political aria, performed for the team prior to a Sunday morning brainstorming session at the Fiskes’, had been accompanied by sweeping hands that each held a piece of toast slathered with melting butter that literally flung itself into yellow Rorschachs on the floor as she cried out, “Those mother fuckers! They’re a real-life version of Swift’s rich Englishmen. This administration might as well barbecue the darlings on skewers for what they’re doing to their developing brains with this fucking traumatic separation from their families. You do know, don’t you, that the stress hormones being released in these poor kids can do lifelong damage?” The fact that we all shook our heads in assent didn’t stop her. “Too much cortisol completely fucks with the immune system, and the kind of fear and anxiety those children are enduring will screw them up forever. Do you know that Australian aboriginal kids ripped away from their families actually showed less white and gray matter in their brains, indicating decreased ability to process information?”
Now that was news to me, and I found it particularly alarming. I’d known about Dr. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal—officially titled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick—ever since Adam had assigned it to me as a lesson in satire when I was thirteen.
“Wait, Gwen. What are you saying about those Aboriginal kids?”
Gwen flushed. I’d caught her mid-rant, and it was as if she had to pour herself back into her body, head last, in order to consider my question. “I’m sorry, guys, it’s just that I can’t stand it.” She collapsed into the nearest chair and grabbed a napkin to wipe buttery spit from her lips. “I read about it recently in an op-ed. The Australian government tried to ‘improve’ aboriginal children’s lives right up to the nineteen seventies in a policy they called ‘Assimilation.’ They were actually aiming to eradicate what they thought was an inferior race and culture. Many of those kids ended up being raised in institutional care when they had perfectly loving parents desperate to have them back.”
I felt my eyes tearing up. It wasn’t all that different from what was taking place right now, but having the information delivered in calm tones made it seem all the worse. I shook my head. “God. Mother lived in the same house with me, but before she got sober, she’d lock herself in her room for hours at a time, completely inaccessible. Even those small separations were torture. I’d bang at her door for what felt like forever until Nana would drag me off to try and distract me. But if strangers had come and stolen me away from her over some impersonal agenda? I can’t imagine it. At least I knew she was alive and breathing in that bedroom of hers—especially since she snored like an elephant when she was drunk.” Nervous laughter rippled the room. I saw Adam eye me with alarm.
Gunther chimed in, “Ja. I’m proud to come from a country where the government actually cares about kids.” We all looked up in acknowledgment of this unusual burst of patriotic pride. “Sweden was the first to ban corporal punishment of children. I know it was in nineteen seventy-nine, since my teacher had to inform my father of that fact when I showed up at my preschool with a black eye and welts on my legs and arms.” None of us knew quite where to look, including Gunther, who seemed to have shocked himself at his outburst. His wandering eye was working overtime. It took one of the non-scientists in our midst to have the good sense to voice aloud what we were collectively feeling.
“How terrible for you, Gunther,” offered Gwen, her voice lowered in tenderness. Only then did the rest of us offer our own commiseration, resulting in Gunther blushing bright red to the roots of his white-blond hair. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who recognized that her
ein might lie at least some of the cause of our colleague’s moodiness, which sometimes descended into crippling depression.
At that moment I was swirling down a pretty deep pit of it myself. You’d think that, after Father, I would have been an old hand at acknowledging the dark capabilities of our species, but there seemed to be no end to my ingenuity in bypassing the most ominous aspects of the void.
Which was how I ended up attempting to deflect Adam’s decidedly disconcerting comment while we lay in bed that night. “That was a hell of a doozy you shared this morning,” he said. “I’d forgotten how bad it’d been for you as a kid. I’m so glad you two had a chance for a little re-do these past few years.” He paused. “You must be missing her.”
Without a beat, I responded non-sequiturishly, “I wonder if they’ve advanced Callay to the front of the waiting list for the Children’s Center yet. Gunther reminded me this morning that they’ve had free, universal preschool in Sweden for nearly ever. The whole preschool situation in the US is ridiculous. Particularly in cities like ours. To start with, they’re so bloody expensive. I don’t know how people without means manage it. And then having to go on a waiting list almost as soon as a baby is born—”
Adam, however, was quite used to my capacities for obfuscating diversions. Throwing a somewhat sweaty leg across my thigh, he cupped my cheek with his hand before repeating a slight variation of his initial query. “You’ve seemed a little distressed lately, love. Is it your mom? Are you missing her badly?”
Reflecting that it was rather selfish of me to be suffering the absence of my mother when my own dendrites were already well-developed, I responded in some surprise, “Well, actually, I suppose I am. Her absence is like a nagging, background ache. It’s irrational, really. It wasn’t as if we were that close when she was alive, though it really was getting better. A lot better. I’m so grateful for that. But even at our best times, we never quite achieved the kind of easy relationship that some women have with their mothers. The kind that Sammie and Aadita have. Or Dhani and Angelina.” The kind that I hoped to create with Callay. “But there’s still something about having someone on the planet who’s known you forever. Someone who’d die for you.”
Adam pulled back a bit and stared at me, his green eyes big and round. He said huskily, “I would die for you.”
“Would you?” I stared back at him, then looked away. “I guess you would.”
I knew I was blushing. How insensitive of me to complain about missing my mother when Adam had lost his own at birth. A wave of compassion washed over me that was almost physical. “I would die for you, too.”
He regarded me soberly, as if trying to discern whether or not to believe me. He looked tired. I noted for the first time that dark semicircles had begun to form beneath his beautiful eyes. There were faint lines beginning to etch into his skin from his nose to the corners of his mouth. It hit me like a burning coal. He would grow old. Whether I felt that I’d die for him or not, he would die.
I grabbed his hand and put it to my mouth, held it there in a near-bite, as Buster occasionally did to me, presumably to ensure I knew he’d claimed me.
I was hardly prepared for Adam’s whispered, “Do you still love me, Fleur?”
I sat up. “Adam. How can you even ask me that?”
His eyes shifted away and back again. “The porn. I worry that I killed it. Killed your love for me.”
In a weird mental association, the image of Cesar, dancing in his thong, flashed before me. “No. Well, no. But ...” I paused. “Something did change for a while.”
“It felt like a weakness to you, didn’t it?”
His line of questioning was too earnest for me to give him anything but the most honest response. “If needing is a weakness, then I guess it did. And it did start to feel like an addiction, like a need with a life of its own. But, really, I worried that I wasn’t enough for you. It made me feel so sad. And rejected.”
“Fleur, you will always be enough for me. But, let’s be fair: I did try to explain. I didn’t always feel that I had you.”
“You have me.” I laughed nervously. “You’re stuck with me.”
“No, really, Fleur. This isn’t funny.”
It wasn’t. I looked at him, saw his naked devotion and, yes, his naked need.
“Really,” I said. “You are stuck with me forever. If you want me.” I knew it was true as I said it. My love for Adam had initially been sparked by his beautiful maleness. It was an intelligent maleness, shot through with tenderness, patience, and persistence. But over time he’d become something close to what Grandfather had been to me. And Mother, in her own way. To the bone and bowel and breath of me, he was my family.
And I knew that I needed him. Desperately.
Afterward, I realized what a precarious place we’d been in. The love that Adam and I made that night put all those porn videos to shame. There was no mad scrambling to penetrate or be penetrated, but rather a protean dance of two bloodstreams, two rivers burbling and surging toward confluence. He was in me, and I in him, and between us there was a nearly unending vista of discovery and deepening, as well as the certainty of eventual loss to remind us that every single moment of it mattered.
Time, as Einstein would have us believe, is relative, but death, for those of us who love, is not.
Chapter Eighteen
I MAY HAVE gotten to a whole new place in my lovemaking with Adam, but I’d completely forgotten to discuss with him the challenge that ultraviolet rays might pose to our project. That question came back to me as soon as I saw Sally Price at the lab. We were the first ones there that morning, and I helped her carry in the second batch of boxes of dead butterflies.
“I mean, it would be tragic if we enabled people to dematerialize only to have them develop melanoma years afterward.”
“Crikey,” she commented, setting down her own burden. “I’m out of my depth on that one, but I don’t know how you can predict something like that ahead of time.”
“Right?” I slid my box next to hers, then walked toward the lab sink. Even though I hadn’t personally handled the deceased lepidopterans, I felt the need to cleanse myself after carrying them. I spoke to Sally over my shoulder. “I don’t know if we can, but I’m going to raise it with Adam. I meant to do it last night, but we got ... busy with other things. If anyone might have an insight on how to exercise the Precautionary Principle on this one, he will.”
Sally met my comment with silence, then said, “You’re lucky to have someone at home to talk to. Now that Cat’s gone, I’ve taken to talking out loud to myself.” I knew that her beautiful calico had died fairly recently of old age, but she hadn’t spoken much about her loss. Now, scooting a rolling wooden chair toward me—we’d convinced Caltech to dispose of the fossil-fuel-based polypropylene ones—she grinned painfully. “And what’s worse is that I’m answering back. Sometimes I have whole conversations.” She made a face. “Pretty weird, huh?”
I plonked myself next to her, hooking my toes under the foot ring. “Not really. I’ve managed to be odd even while living with others all my life, so lord knows how weird I’d be if I lived alone.” She looked dubious. “I mean it. It sounds painful. Actually, what is it like to be on your own, day in, day out?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Cross my heart.”
And then Sally proceeded to open a window into her mind and beckoned me inside. As Adam had informed me early on, “The way to feel closest to someone is to know what they’re struggling with.” Sally amplified her experience in such detail that I ended up quoting her verbatim in a new list I composed that very night, titled, “Ways in Which Other People Vanquish Their Voids, Subset Sally Price.” And in case you’re curious, here it is:
1. “You’re so full of unshared thoughts that you tend to yack the head off of anyone who’ll listen to you.
2. “Any odd habit you’ve ever had will now dig in and become something of an old friend. Me, I like to tear off little b
its of napkins and twirl them into long strands to relieve what I guess must be my anxiety. It must be a holdover from the Greek side of my heritage, sort of like worry beads. Or, now that I think of it, Buddhist malas. I find the damned things in pajama pockets, unconsciously tucked into books as book marks, wriggling like little white worms on the floor. Cat used to love to steal them and swallow them whole; I’d find them spiraled inside his dried poops in the litter box.
3. “I really do talk to myself. Actual conversations. And tell myself jokes. And laugh at them.
4. “I think about earthquakes too much. I can’t fall asleep until I’ve put slippers and my robe right next to my bed, along with a flashlight and house and car keys and ID information on a necklace I can quickly fling over my head. Back when Cat was alive, I kept a cat carrier with food in it right by the front door.
5. “I walk around in my jammies most of the time. Can’t stand bras, and there’s no one here to make my titties de-sag for. And I find myself sort of slumping on the sofa like an old lady, as if the gravity in my home is heavier than outside.
6. “I don’t brush my teeth, or my hair, for that matter, as often as I would if I were breathing on someone and they could see me. I worry that that means that I’m either a primitive at heart or that I don’t matter as much to myself when I don’t matter to someone else.
7. “Which leads to the worst of it. And this one gets reserved for late at night. After I’ve pummeled myself to exhaustion with some obsession like Sons of Anarchy or the enzymes in dead butterflies, I think about death. A lot. How I’m going to die. When I’m going to die. If it’ll be quick and relatively painless, which would have the downside of preventing me from saying goodbye to the people I love, or if I’ll suffer the long, drawn-out death of some incurable cancer or Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, which always struck me as like living in a torture chamber. I try to remind myself to keep some pills in stock so I can save myself from such misery, but when the morning comes I forget all about it.