Real Life(24)

And when he got older, he turned on the fan to drown out the snores of the man his parents let sleep on their couch because he had nowhere else to go and he was their friend, after all. Sometimes Wallace wonders if the fan was also the reason he didn’t hear when the man got up in the middle of the night, walked into his room, and shut the door.

That old anger rolls over in him. His vision swims briefly. He hasn’t thought of it in years, and yet there it is, the sound of that door closing that first night. The finality of it as the bottom of the door swept across the gritty hardwood, a scraping sound. Something awful. That jittering thud and the retreat of gray shadow as his room was sealed in darkness. Deep, inky darkness. Why does it return to him now? All these miles away. These years. His previous life cut away like a cataract. Discarded. But here, found stuck to the bottom of his mind like a piece of garbage. Here. In this place. Alone in the lab. He almost jumps at the fright of it, the wholeness of the memory. His body remembers. His traitorous body.

His father is dead—his father who did nothing for him.

Dead, for weeks now. Wallace forgot it. He managed not forgiveness, but erasure. They seem so much the same to him.

His father. A sizzling, glowing wire of hatred. Wallace’s vision is dimpled, as if pinched from the corners and pushed inward. This life drawn carefully across the other, former life. He does not think of it. Turns his mind from it entirely. They are again as strangers might be, faces fleetingly familiar in a great stream of faces. It is the kindest thing that he can do for himself and for them. There can only ever be a tenuous claim on the lives of others.

“Still working I see,” says a voice—Dana’s, he knows, before he even looks up.

“Some of us have a lot to do.”

“And some of us are self-important,” Dana says. She hoists herself up onto Henrik’s old bench. Her angular athleticism, her ascetic thinness set against her wide face. Her fingers raw and flaking. She digs into the corner of her nails, extricates a flap of skin, and chews it off. White gristle. A trickle of blood. They are silent. They watch each other. She’s staring at him from under her eyelids. She manages to look down and up at the same time. Her sweatshirt is loose, threatens to swallow her. A girl with a shell. She might vanish into it and leave them all behind. Her insult doesn’t get under his skin because the casualness of her voice is thin and reedy, a desperate feint.

“Is there something that I can do for you, Dana? I’m busy,” he says as he turns back to his bench. He adjusts the plates next to his scope. He has lost his appetite for work. His hands are no longer steady. A tremor winds its way up and down his fingers. His knuckles ache.

“Come on, don’t be that way.” A cool laugh. Wallace stretches his fingers. The smell of gas, the low blue flame burns on.

“I’m not being a way, Dana. I’m just busy. Perhaps you have heard of this thing called research. It requires work. Are these terms familiar to you?”

“You sound like Brigit. You two are such a weird little cult.”

“Friendship, Dana. It too might be an unfamiliar concept for you.”

“Admit it,” she presses on. “You two are so cliquey. You hardly talk to anyone else. You’re, like, the only two people in lab. And you talk so much shit about the rest of us.”

“We’re friends, Dana. We enjoy speaking to each other.”

“I heard what you two were saying. I know what you two talk about when I’m not around,” she says quietly.

Wallace spins so that they face each other again. He is surprised to find her looking down into the space between her thighs. Her scalp is red, dry. It is a curious position for her. As if someone set a stuffed animal on a shelf and left it. The blank vacancy of her body. He feels a flicker of sympathy, the memory of last night, being discussed like an object of communal fascination.

“Even if we did talk about you. How would you know?” he asks, though the answer is obvious. Gossip cuts both ways. Allegiances shift. He is not the only one with allies. Dana doesn’t rise to the bait. She’s back to chewing on the ends of her fingers. Wallace’s hands sting just watching. “I don’t think you ruined my plates, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he says.

A moment of silence. The flame hisses as it writhes in the air currents. It’s a soft, fluttering sound, fire turning back on itself. So deep is the silence in that moment that he can hear the impurities in the stream of gas burning.

But then a strange thing happens: An animatronic jerkiness shifts her shoulders, her arms, her legs, as if electricity were independently bringing parts of her to life. Low at first, a whisper, but then almost immediately louder: laughter. Her head tosses back suddenly so hard and fast that he worries for a moment that she will strike the shelf on Henrik’s bench. But she doesn’t. Just laughter. She grips her stomach, her thighs. Her eyes fill with tears.

“Oh my god, listen to you. How arrogant can you be? Do you think I care what you think?” Dana dries her tears. “I cannot believe this. You actually think I care what you think.”

“I don’t understand,” Wallace says, feeling more tired than he has felt in his entire life. “I don’t want to. Leave me alone.”

“Yes, Wallace. I ruined your big experiment because I don’t have enough things to do. That’s me.”

“I said that I didn’t think that you did that, Dana. You don’t have to be so ridiculous.”