Afterparty (22 page)

“Not for you,” I said. “I figure a couple for me.”

“You told me you were staying clean.”

“But we also need to sleep tonight. I’m keyed up, you’re keyed up…”

“I’m not taking those pills, and neither are you.”

After another minute of silence I turned toward her. “I suppose we could try more natural remedies.”

“Natural remedies,” Ollie said skeptically. I touched her chin. She said, “Like what?”

I slid my thumb across her jaw, then down her neck to the valley of her clavicle. Her skin was no longer cold; she felt hot, almost feverish.

I said, “I think we need a little dose of sexytocin.”

She laughed. “What about the axe-murderers?”

“Fuck ’em.” I ran my palm along her shoulder, pushing aside the neck of the fleece shirt until it dropped over her shoulder. Then I bent and kissed the side of her neck. In the hospital I’d fallen in love with the taste of her skin.

She said, “I feel like we’re making out in my parents’ bedroom.”

“That’s so hot,” I said, and she laughed again.

I pushed the fleece from her other shoulder, then let my hand glide down, hovering a hair’s breadth above her breast, not touching except for tiny incidental touches, moth wing touches that raised goose flesh across her skin. Her nipple hardened and brushed my palm. I circled there, the point of contact between us so tiny, so intermittent, like neurons firing to each other.

“Hmm,” Dr. Gloria said. She jotted something on her notepad.

“You can get the hell out of here,” I said.

“Don’t mind me,” she said.

“Out!”

She put away her notepad, rather sulkily I thought, then with two beats of her wings vanished through the ceiling.

Ollie touched my neck. “Hey. Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here,” I said. I moved my hand down, firmer now, one facet of my ring tracing a path along her ribs, across the ridge of her hip, then under the waistband of the absurd fuzzy pants, then down, my ring finger dragging across her cleft. She arched her back, and her hands gripped the carpet. “Right … here,” I said.

*   *   *

Love at first sight is a myth.

I was twenty-five, two years into my PhD program and already tired of my fellow grad students, when I got roped into going to a party in an apartment on Door Street. The place was packed, doors and windows open to the humid night air, the typical low-rent shoutfest fueled by cheap beer, grocery store cheese, and Ke$ha pounding on the speakers. I was drinking my first and last beer of the party and plotting my exit when I noticed the tall black woman with the plaited hair.

She stood in front of a pair of windows, towering over a white boy, explaining how he was wrong—about the Greenland ice sheet, or fracking, or the Supreme Court, or Radiohead, or any one of the hot topics on her agenda in those days—simply
wrong
, and we’d better all get our heads out of the fucking sand
now
. She was over six feet tall in flats, slender and muscular as an Olympic volleyball player, and wore a purple maxi-dress with a slit that ran the length of her thigh.

My body reacted on its own. Dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—the whole damn monoamine family—kicked in like a band of mustangs.

Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science. The limbic system knows what it wants and does everything possible to keep the prefrontal cortex, that yammering, censorious maiden aunt, from shutting down the party. My genes clanged their tin cups across the bars of their jail cells and shouted to fulfill their evolutionary mandate: Rep-li-cate! Rep-li-cate! Not all of them had gotten the news about my sexual orientation. Genes are notoriously indifferent to details.

So with their chemical commandments pounding in my bloodstream, I pushed through the crowd toward her and the white boy. He might have been my age or older, but his mall-issue cargo shorts and American Eagle T-shirt placed him fully in Boy Territory. I eased up between them until my right shoulder was just in front of the boy’s left, setting the pick. He still hadn’t noticed this; his attention, predictably enough, was on the black woman’s braless tits and their friendly, attentive nipples. Perhaps I noticed them myself.

She reached for her wineglass, and I saw the small tattoo on the inside of her arm, a circle nested in a hexagon. I was no chemist but I’d taken enough hours to recognize what it stood for: six linked carbon atoms, each one attached to a hydrogen atom.

I stepped in front of the boy and said to the woman, “So, you’re toxic?”

She glanced at her arm, then turned her attention to me. The boy said something like “Excuse me?” but I cut him off.

“Get the lady a drink,” I said. Her wineglass was half-full, but being an optimist for my own chances I decided it was half-empty. Mikala seemed amused by my cheek, which was what I was going for. She looked me up and down, barely moving her eyes.

“So,” I said. “Benzene.”

“The mother of all hydrocarbons,” she said. “It’s crucial in everything from plastics to … opiates.”

“And it’s also really flammable,” I said.

She smiled. “The best things are, honey.”

Maybe she didn’t say “honey.” But that’s how I remembered it.

When after three years of living together we decided to marry, we of course—Mikala being who she was, and me being who I was—set about defining, redefining, contextualizing, and negotiating everything about what our marriage would mean, and what the ceremony would communicate about that meaning, down to venue, flowers, wardrobe, and the most important props of all: the rings. What to do about the rings? We were not chattel. Traditional symbols held no weight for us, but the hex and circle was something we could get behind. The benzene ring, we decided, would represent stability and creativity, but also danger: the rings would remind us to be careful with each other.

When we told the Sprouts what we were looking for, Rovil nodded as if this made perfect sense, Edo laughed his Santa Claus laugh (a back-of-the-throat chortle he deployed at every opportunity—as greeting, as filler, as disarmament tactic in business negotiations), and Gil shook his head at us. “Nerds,” he said. This from a man who spent $2,000 for a Joss Whedon T-shirt. Not a shirt with a
picture
of Joss Whedon, mind you, but a shirt that had been worn by him. (It was blue.) Gil was five-two, over two hundred pounds, and flew into rages when Stupid Humans fucked up his equipment. Not even Mikala would cross him when he was in a mood. So we were shocked when a few days later he presented us with two petri dishes, and in each rested a hand-forged brass ring. It was the most touching thing anyone had done for us.

Years later, at the trial, Gil would tell the jury that he was jealous of our relationship. He was in love with Mikala, but Mikala wouldn’t leave me. That’s why, he said, when the dosage took hold in that suite at the top of the Lake Point Tower, he stabbed my wife to death.

*   *   *

Dr. Gloria was not in the bedroom when I awoke the next morning. But Ollie was. She woke as soon as I slipped off the bed.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Yeah, that was pretty good,” I said.

“No,” she said. “For trusting me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Part of me wanted to take it all back, untell the story of my crime. Go back to where we were before. “I smell breakfast,” I said.

It was seven in the morning and the house was jumping: Linnie and two women who might have been her daughters packed lunch bags in the kitchen; older kids helped younger kids pull on shoes; teenagers appeared, ate cereal standing up, then left without saying good-bye. At least three TVs yammered away. The dining room table had been turned into a buffet, loaded with loaves of white bread, Pop-Tarts burning in the toaster, a Crock-Pot of steaming oatmeal, and jugs of juice and milk. Roy sat at the end of the table reading from a real newspaper, undisturbed by the noise and chaos.

A girl who was perhaps three years old ran toward us and happily slammed into Ollie. Ollie looked at me in alarm. The toddler glanced up, realized that these legs did not belong to the mother/cousin/grandmother she thought they did, and ran into the kitchen.

“I’ll be outside,” Ollie said. She shouldered her backpack, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and headed for the front door. We had finally been able to fall asleep last night—thank you, oxytocin and prolactin, you were great—but the anxiousness had returned. Her mind was back to writing worst-case scenarios, and she wanted to be out of there.

I took the seat beside Roy and made small talk about children, a topic I knew nothing about. The oatmeal was too salty for my taste, but I was happy for more hot food.

Linnie gave me a pair of plastic travel mugs filled with coffee, and I took them out to Ollie. It was there I noticed a shimmer of pure white hovering above the trees.

“Hark,” she said. “Your ride approacheth.”

A black sedan with tinted windows pulled into the driveway. I checked my pen: 8 a.m. on the dot. “That’s my boy,” I said.

Roy and Linnie came out to say good-bye. Linnie said, “Are you going to be okay? We can lend you clothes.”

“You’ve already done too much,” I said. I shook Roy’s hand. “Sorry again about the boat—and the dummy.”

He laughed. “My son Jimmy already uploaded the video,” Roy said. “That was worth it.”

“We aren’t visible on that, are we?” Ollie asked sharply.

Roy frowned.

I said, “Of course not; that would be crazy.”

The car pulled to a stop. A brown-skinned man stepped out, looking dapper in a blue dress shirt and charcoal wool pants. And then I noticed the bruises on his face, and that several fingers of his left hand were wrapped in bandages.

“Oh Jesus, Rovil!”

Despite his injuries, he still smiled at me and held out his arms. I was surprised; in the old days Rovil was uncomfortable with physical contact. We exchanged a quick hug. His haircut looked expensive. In person he was a little fuller through the torso than I expected, but not fat. Our Rovil had been working out. And he smelled like aftershave, like a man.

“Are you okay?” I asked. His left eye was bloodshot, the cheek puffy and yellow. It looked painful.

“I’m fine.”

“I can’t believe you came. This is Ollie.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said to Ollie, and held out his unbandaged hand. She nodded without shaking and climbed into the backseat.

Rovil seemed to take this in stride. “No luggage?”

“Just Ollie’s backpack,” I said. “It was kind of a quick exit.” I got in the front seat. As we started to roll away I lowered the window. “Watch out for the tax man, Roy.”

The couple watched us go, standing side by side in the sunlight: American Indian Gothic.

It took only a few minutes to leave the Smokes’ neighborhood and turn onto Highway 37. The car accelerated smoothly, and I settled back into leather seats that already seemed more comfortable than the mattress we’d slept on last night.

“Holy shit, Rovil, I do believe you could get laid in this car.”

He laughed. “I may have tried once or twice.”

Rovil, kidding about sex! A breakthrough. After another mile I said, “So, what happened?”

He glanced down at his damaged hand. “I … I don’t want to alarm you.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “I know about the cowboy.”

He looked surprised, then nodded. “He knew about you. He wanted the sample you sent. He wanted to know everything I knew about the making of Numinous. Which was very little, though he did not believe that at first.”

“Oh Christ. What did he do to you?”

“Nothing I can’t recover from,” he said. “Ganesh was with me, and I was not afraid.”

“But he let you live,” Ollie said. “And he let you live, too, Lyda.”

“Because he thought you were covering him with a fucking sniper rifle or something.”

“Or maybe he had orders not to touch you,” she said.

“Excuse me,” Rovil said. “You have met him? What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

He glanced at the navigation screen. “We have seven hours.”

Seven hours? That would exceed our Total Lifetime Talk Minutes by at least six hours. At Little Sprout I’d never broken through his force field of shyness; it was Mikala who knew him best. But I’d dragged him into this, and put his life in danger. He deserved to know what was going on.

I didn’t tell him everything. I left out the fact that we’d broken into the church and made it sound like we’d just walked into the building and found the bodies. I also neglected to mention that Ollie may have killed a girl. But I laid out everything else, including our theories about Numinous, the Church of the Hologrammatic God, and those custom, highly expensive chemjets.

“I can’t believe Edo would do this, not without talking to us,” he said.

“You promised never to touch the stuff,” I said. “And he knew I’d never go along with it.”

He nodded. “So we have to find him.”

“All right,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon, at the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan, I’m going to march into Edo’s room, hold a gun to his head, and make him confess to organizing the murder of a couple of dopeheads, as well as illegally manufacturing NME One-Ten.”

“What?!”

“A metaphorical gun,” I said. “But still.”

Dr. Gloria, if she were in the car, would have scowled at me for being so blunt. But I couldn’t help it; even after ten years, I still enjoyed shocking the Rat Boy.

THE PARABLE OF

the Man Who Sacrificed Rats

Once there was a shy young man who needed a job. He was twenty-one years old, and among his few possessions were a smile that a classmate once called disarming, a mountain of debt, and a freshly minted yet completely unmarketable bachelor’s degree in neuropathology. A BS in any neuroscience without a master’s or PhD was a three-legged dog of a degree: pitiable, kind of adorable, and capable of inspiring applause when it did anything for you at all. When the two women who ran the biotech startup chose him to become their unpaid intern, he told them he felt very lucky, and tried not to think of the monthly payments on his educational loan.