4
The coffee pot bubbled upstairs, its thick morning smell slithering down the cellar steps to bring my thoughts back to earth. I had been elsewhere, it seemed.
I set eight-six-one back in his cage and changed the water, the food. Then I checked the other cages to make sure the other creatures were still visible, or alive. They were both. I stumbled over to the rack of coats and robes that hung under the basement window and behind the stairs. Then I tied the rope around my naked body and heavily mounted the steps.
It was no use to a logical mind to think, what had I done? I knew perfectly well what I'd done and I'd enjoyed it. A little too much in fact. My fingers kept making contact with the smooth pine of the bannister and feeling the soft down of Amber's stomach flexing under my grasp. Halfway up the stairs I stopped and drew my fingers to my face.
Her smell was almost gone, replaced by eight-six-one and the familiar aroma of wood and must. What if I had fathered another child tonight? What if I was unfaithful to Margaret?
What if that was just a malevolent spirit who haunted the neighborhood?
I smiled. My heart pounded under my chest from confusion and excitement and fear. And yet I was giddy; innocent; powerful and yet humbled by either the girl's bold concupiscence or my own singular triumph. Hell, why not make it a double. Amber certainly left a good deal of restraint at the window; I couldn't speak for the girl but there was certainly an aura of triumph about her all throughout her several climaxes... And I, what had I achieved? Everything.
I traipsed into the kitchen in my bare feet, my wife catching my eye over her pointed shoulder and simultaneously smiling into her phone and glowering at me. She was speaking enthusiastically - far too energetically for so early on a Saturday (was it Saturday?) but it was none of my business, or I chose to leave it as none of my business.
As I poured the coffee I suddenly realized that I felt shell less. Naked, obviously, beneath the robe, but that in itself was not uncommon. Rather, before no matter the woes and hormonal highs of Rebecca or the cold reluctance or alien sociability of my wife the words seldom penetrated because the latest failure, theorem, confounded hypothesis, existential convolution of algorithmic righteousness, boredom, numbers and dead mice were cloistered about my brain like cotton pulled over my ears and eyes.
"Ha!"
My wife spun on me.
I had laughed aloud. She gave me a dirty look and stomped out of the kitchen, all the while carrying her high, boisterous enthusiasm over the conversation. I smiled bashfully to myself. I had not meant to let that escape but the wave had washed over me all at once.
I was suddenly free from that. Because it worked. After so long.
Not that I held the illusion that I was free from scientific (or perhaps moral, at this point) inquiry. There were still years of tests ahead of me, ahead of the Institute, of all of us. But... Hell...
"Ha-ha!"
5
I didn't see Margaret for most of the day. We went to bed in silence that night (I having slept most of the day, waking briefly to drive Rebecca somewhere that was going out of business or going on sale, then coming home and devouring most of what remained in the refrigerator). In the morning of course she was already awake and straightening her hair.
Margaret, my wife, hated her curls. I had always loved them, the original trait that spurred my attraction to her, but she straightened them whenever she could; I disapproved but said nothing; she straightened them more. I sensed that in this, like in so many minute conflicts between us, there was always the brief opportunity for resolution. But we had been married a long time now, almost nineteen years (as long as I had lived without her) and we gradually let the unsaid stay unsaid, the gulfs of unpleasantness that could erupt at the mildest comment soon growing so wide that there was little to bridge the gap between what we had in common - which was little. Ultimately we, like her parents before us, stopped trying. It was easier and happened as naturally as one year following another. I knew this before now and simply not cared.
I continued to stare at her through the high french doors of the bathroom. I rolled over to my side and watched her in the bright light of the morning window; that heavenly light dwarfing the harsh artificiality of her vanity mirror. Her hair was shorter than when we first met, darker too because she dyed it. Her mother went gray at a young age and she was adamant to never find out what that meant for herself.
Margaret was older than I. She had been a Junior in college at the same time I was completing my accelerated sophomore year. Because I had graduated high school early she had been fascinated with me. Maybe, I thought, in bitter moments when I wondered how it had come to this, she gravitated to me because she was less intimidated by a younger man, thinking too that my intelligence and drive would render me low maintenance. She was right. But I wondered, as I was told by men who were not quite friends but nevertheless valuable companions in my final bachelor days, if she had planned it all. The sudden sexual bouts, the demure outer Catholic mask shed the moment we were far (far) away from students and teachers who knew her and safely ensconced in my dormitory where she unleashed herself on me. She needed very little in return and rewarded my occasional attentions with all that my studies could not relieve. It was perfect.
But I'd never asked about the precautions she was taking. I certainly wasn't.
I was a young and selfish man. But smart enough to know when I was in trouble. Was I stupid enough to be duped? I always wondered.
But I had to smile now. Because it didn't matter now. I stared at Margaret in the mirror, at her long lashes that her girlfriends endlessly coveted, telling me how lucky I was to have a wife with such bedroom brown eyes, telling me how impressively she had kept her figure. Margaret was a vegetarian, thin though never much for fitness, with teardrop breasts that sagged but in a full, heavy fashion. She had softened some, from her eyebrows to her ears and her nose, her pale lips. It did her complexion good, the way her chin no longer seemed so cruel or her long neck so strained.
I had been with another woman last night but I... I couldn't tell where my new happiness sprouted from. Was it finally realizing I had won? Was it conquering that young, brazen runner? Was it just staring at my wife in her mirror? Perhaps it was all these things and more, or less.
"Where were you last night?" she asked.
I cleared my throat. "I worked late in the lab. You probably heard me..."
She pulled the iron away from her hair and squinted at me. "You weren't in there."
"I ran. Intermittently."
"Oh," she said, and turned back to her mirror. I rolled awkwardly in the bed and her voice floated back to me. "Has the Institute called you?"
She wanted me out of the house. "Not yet," I said. "But I'm going to speak with some of the lab tomorrow."
"After the carpool."
"After the carpool," I agreed.
"I'm going grocery shopping later. Do you want anything?"
"No," I said. And that was our last conversation of the day.
6
I sat behind the wheel in our slanted driveway wondering how it would be to see Amber again. Rebecca had dashed next door to go get her, as she did every morning, and the two would walk back to the car - slower or faster depending on all the important events I was too square to hear.
They came back breathless, both of them wearing enormous grins and Amber especially looking healthy, happy and mischievous. "Well?" she asked my daughter after giving me a hurried hello. I put the car into reverse and rolled into the street while Rebecca pondered aloud.
