Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(109)
He looks at the other sheets. The University of Oregon emails. Ndesai. Ndesai. Ndesai. Over and over again. Correspondence traded back and forth for what appears to be two years. Neal. It was Neal, the old college friend his father was always talking about, always chatting with on the phone, always telling Patrick to visit. The footer at the bottom of each email identifies Desai as a university professor and the director of the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. He would be hearing from Patrick as soon as he could get to a computer.
At that moment the door creaks open and reveals a black rectangle. A snow-caked animal, what could be a dog or a wolf, trots through it—followed by the old woman. A cold wind rushes inside and gutters the candle and freezes Patrick where he stands. The dog shakes off a cloud of snow and ducks its head and flattens its tail and growls. The old woman shoulders the door closed and secures the latch. She carries three bloody white rabbits by the ears. She uses her free hand to unwrap her shawl. She stares at Patrick a moment—her eyes dropping from his face to his body—and only then does he remember his nakedness. He tries to cover his crotch with the paper. The wind rises to a whistle outside. Then her face breaks into a smile with no teeth.
She turns away from him and peels off her mittens and kicks off her boots and shrugs off what seems more like a robe than a coat and arranges it all near the fire to steam. It is an odd dance, her undressing and him dressing. She is slowed by age—and he by injury—and they finish around the same time and look at each other across the room as if to say, what now?
“You’re hungry,” she says, not a question. She knows he is. Terribly hungry, aching inside, as if he has been pitted.
He watches as she skins a rabbit. Yanking out its guts and splatting them on the floor for the dog to gobble up. Peeling away its pelt to reveal its candy-red musculature. Fingering the meat from the bone, knifing it into cubes, tossing it into a pot filled with snow and roots and bones that boil down into a stew on top of the woodstove. Together they sit at the table and she clunks a steaming bowl before him and he says, “Thank you.”
*
Claire feels, no other word for it, happy. Buoyant even. As though, if she opened her window and spread her arms, the wind might puff her away. For the first time since arriving on campus people know her by a name other than Hope. For the first time she has a sense of community. For the first time she has friends, if that’s the right word for it, someone to sit with at the cafeteria, wave to across the quad. Were they her friends? Would they say the same of her? She thinks they might.
She barely notices the election signs that pop up all over campus—signs that read VOTE NADER or IMPEACH WILLIAMS. She barely registers the conversations about the vaccine program under way or the spike in voter approval ratings for the Oregon governor now that he has departed for the Republic.
She knows it is irresponsible of her, but after months of gut-tangled anxiety, she has momentarily lost herself to pleasure. She feels as she did, so many years ago, when traveling a nighttime highway with her parents. One minute they were tunneling through the black, listening to NPR—and the next minute, her father was wrenching the wheel, screaming, “Son of a bitch!” Out of the darkness tumbled bicycles. Dozens of them. Claire didn’t know this at the time, but up ahead, at seventy-five miles an hour, a trailer hitched to a church van on its way to the Northwoods had come undone. When it flipped and crashed against the asphalt, bicycles spun every which way. Her father cranked the wheel hard right—and then left—dodging a pink Huffy, a white Trek—some of the bicycles skidding along with a trail of orange sparks, others bouncing wheel over wheel, haloed by their headlights only a second before vanishing. The red flash of a reflector. The dark rush of pavement. Their screams turned to laughter, when they swerved their way down the highway, thrilled and enchanted and somehow unscathed—alive!—after so many near misses.
The past week, she has joined them every night in the gym. The three men, all teaching assistants for Reprobus. The Pack, he calls them. They wore clothes at first, unsure how she would feel, but after two nights she said, “Can I trust you?” and Matthew said, “If we don’t have trust, we’re no different than the pure breeds.” She was fairly certain this was a line stolen from Reprobus—who was always muttering platitudes and prophecies that felt somehow half-baked and devastatingly true—but if so, it was a good line and one worth repeating, because that was one of the things most lacking in her life, trust.
She stripped naked and they did the same. A guttural rumbling filling their throats. She knew, if she was going to be all college textbooky, that modesty was a by-product of human intelligence, irrelevant when the animal took over. Transformation was all about tapping into impulse, forgetting about what was outside you. She knew this. She did. But she still felt, with her clothes in a pile at her feet, as if she might throw up.
The hours spun away on the wall clock as she ripped at the heavy bags, leapt over sawhorses, swung from ropes, eventually stumbling away from the gym feeling languid and frayed and emptied, as if she had just screamed her way through the greatest orgasm in world history. She has forgotten the goodness of letting go, unleashing herself. How the adrenaline rushing through her feels like the hit of some delicious drug. How coordinated every sensation becomes. She remembers reading, in an anatomy and physiology course, about how the senses operate at different speeds—the mind processes light more slowly than sound—and then tastes and smells, slower still. That does not feel true any longer, every signal seeming to spark her brain at once.