Real Life(23)

“What are you doing?” Miller asks, the edge of concern. Wallace hums, resists answering. Feels the tension in Miller’s body. He is the taut coil now, winding under Wallace’s hand. He levels their faces, aligns their lips and noses and eyes. Stares into the blank dark ridges of his own knuckles over Miller’s eyes. Miller shifts more. Surely he feels Wallace’s breath. The press of his body. Asks again, “Wallace. What are you doing?”

Wallace almost laughs. Almost says, Exercising agency. Almost says, Let me tell you a story. But he says none of this. Closer now. Their lips touch. The soapy aftertaste of toothpaste. Sharp alcohol of mouthwash. The deeper, more stubborn residual flavors of sleep. No coffee for Miller. Wallace tastes Miller’s lips. Their soft cupid’s bow and then their corners. Then deeper through the lips into the mouth, a damp warm cave.

Enough, he thinks. Retreats.

Miller does not open his eyes right away. Wallace feels a little pulse of worry, that he has gone too far, too fast. That he has erred, miscalculated. But then, the slow upward sweep of Miller’s eyelids. The angular shard of sunlight across his eyes now.

“Your hands smell good,” he says.

“It’s the tea. Have some.” Wallace presses the lip of his cup to Miller’s mouth, and with his eyes set firmly on Wallace, he drinks. The throat works it down, swallows. “Good boy.”

“Blow off tennis,” Miller says. Wallace sets the cup down, holds his breath.

“Can’t.”

“You can,” he says.

“Sorry.”

“What about after?”

“Let’s play it by ear,” Wallace says, feeling gummy. His knees shake. Miller’s breath smells like the chai, like Wallace’s hands.

“Let’s,” he says.

Wallace gets up. Takes his book, the bag.

“Well, work beckons,” he says, coming around the table, but Miller reaches out, takes his hand.

“Wallace.”

“Don’t be stupid about it,” he says. “Let’s be smart.”

Miller drops his hand. The sunlight striking the back of Wallace’s neck and legs prickles.

“Sure,” Miller says with a grunt. “You bet.”



* * *



? ? ?

A WORM, proceeding through a series of gathering and unlatching motions, pulling itself along.

Nematodes are transparent. It is one of the features that make them an ideal model organism, amenable to microscopy. Other features include a facility of genetic manipulation, a small, manageable genome size, a short generation time, and the ease of handling. They are quite hardy creatures, in fact. Capable of self-fertilization. At a certain point in larval development, their germlines switch from spermatogenesis to oogenesis. Even the little boys get to be young women, Simone likes to say.

One worm on a single plate can give rise to thousands of progeny after just a week or so. When food is scarce, they cease reproduction to some degree. Though whatever fertilized embryos there are undergo development and hatch inside their mothers. They eat their way out, eventually rupturing the cuticle to enter the world, sometimes with fertilized embryos of their own inside them. It reminds Wallace sometimes of creation myths.

The worm he selects just that moment is severely bagged. There are dozens of smaller worms inside it. She’s old. She’s dense with bodies. Yet she’s still alive. She’s no mere vessel. No good to pick starved animals. Their descendants are born with a signal for disaster going off in their bodies.

Wallace can still taste Miller. It was a mistake to kiss him again. Strange that he has become a person who kisses. The coppery taste of shame at betraying oneself. Nausea, as if he must now explain this change to some higher power, some greater authority. He is surprised at himself, at his traitorous body. His mind a tumult, hazy and dark shapes opening, turning upon themselves. The ghost of Miller’s warmth in his bed, the morning light dulled by the curtains, the pale rise of his hip, his curly hair, the room sour with sweat and beer. A swirl of dark hair on his chest. Regret. At having left him in bed this morning or at having left him in the kitchen? Both. Neither. Oh, Wallace, he chides himself. There are more important things.

The lab is bright and quiet. He hangs to the side in his chair to stare down the length of the lab, finding no one else. At the far end just bluish shadow, stillness. The part of the day when the others recede and there is just him in the quiet and the dark, and the world outside is vast and blue and beautiful. Outside, there are birds in the pine tree across the street. Small, dark birds fluttering near the top of the tree. How strange to be a bird, Wallace thinks. To have the world beneath you, that inversion of scale, what is small becoming large, what is large becoming small, the way a bird can move where it wants in space, no dimension unconquerable. He feels a small mercy at being left alone. The others will return at night, descending like a dark flock upon the building, pushing their experiments and nudging their projects toward completion in small, painful increments.

The quiet is really the amassing of noise. The protests from the agitating machines like the cries of an unruly populace. In this building, he is outnumbered. But the noise soothes something in him. When Wallace was very young, he kept his fan on all the time, even in winter, because its regular rhythm made something about his life easier. When he turned the fan toward the wall, it sounded like the ocean, or like the creek, when you were approaching it from the south through the pine forest at the edge of his grandparents’ farm. He worked on math and science homework that way, getting better and better at it until he was the best student in the whole state of Alabama at doing long division in his head and estimating the weight of a bowling ball in metric units. When the fan in his room was going, he couldn’t hear his parents arguing about who had taken the last Natural Light from the fridge or who had eaten the last piece of fried chicken or who had let the greens burn on the stove, a charred mess stuck to the bottom of their one good pot. He couldn’t hear his brother and his girlfriend next door, the constant rap on his wall drowned out by the seascape. He could, if the window was open, hear the baying of wild dogs in the woods, their lonesome yips and howls rising up out of the trees like ghosts or birds. He could hear the echoing crack of rifle fire and the explosion of canisters tossed into the burning barrel out back. It wasn’t the world outside that he had needed to drown out, then, but the world inside, the interior of the house, which had always seemed so much wilder and stranger to him than anything he found walking alone in the woods.