Fleur
IT WAS MY half-Jewish friend Sammie who’d first called my attention to the Buddhist notion of mindfulness, but it took a pale-skinned, blue-eyed Sikh to offer me practical guidance on making the body-mind connection. Which is why I was driving like a maniac to Siri Sajan’s home studio, skidding precariously close to the butterfly-tattooed ankle of a preoccupied cellphone gabbing teenager as I swerved into a hasty right turn. I’d already detoured back home to grab my purple yoga mat, for once unbothered by its embarrassing Etch-A-Sketch of Jillily fur. I vaguely recognized the irony of driving too fast to a yoga class, but took a dark pleasure in blaming my carelessness on a series of bewildering conversations with Assefa.
Siri Sajan, as good as her name—which translates from Punjabi as friend—had offered me a private session as soon as I’d babbled into her phone, “It was either call nine-one-one or you, but I think I’m too young for this to be a heart attack.” Who better than a master of Kundalini to realize I was at risk of falling into the everlasting pit of eternal emptiness?
Did I say bewildering? Make that unsettling. Better yet, let’s call the spade what it was. Actually, that’s not the most accurate image, since the actual Greek expression, mistranslated by Erasmus, was to “call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.” I personally didn’t give a fig what to call what I was feeling. I only knew I couldn’t bear it alone.
I’d been climbing out of the tub when my phone rang the first time, and it had taken me a few minutes to register that it wasn’t Jillily I was hearing, but the new meowing cat ringtone programmed into my phone as a Christmas present by Amir. Amir himself had his own new ringtone comprised of escalating Lord Hanuman grunts recorded especially for him by Serena, and he was only too happy to install a feline counterpart for me.
I’d grabbed my cellphone with one hand and swiped my plush, orange bath towel from the closed toilet seat with the other. I managed to set the cell on speaker and began to hurriedly swab my breasts and belly until I heard the faint “Fleur? Fleur? Are you there?” At the sound of Assefa’s voice, fire streaked upwards from my tweeter. I envisioned the soft tuft of hair below his lower lip, his dark and liquid eyes. The whole time he’d been away, I’d been aching for the breathless unity of lying with him after our mini-explosions, our hearts beating in unison.
I hastily clapped the phone to my ear. “It’s me, Assefa. I’m having a hard time hearing you. God, I’ve missed you. Can you speak up?”
Assefa’s voice got louder for a few seconds then faded again. “Fleur, I need to talk to you. I want to explain ....” The line crackled. “It’s not easy ... so sorry .... Oh, hell, this connection’s terrible. Let me call you on another ...” And then he was gone. I tried to star sixty-nine him until I realized it would hardly work with a call from Africa.
I stared balefully at my image in the heavily misted bathroom mirror. With most of my face obscured by steam, I looked like a headless ghost. Was it my imagination, or was it more than the lousy connection that made Assefa sound so far away?
As I replayed the few words in my mind that I’d managed to hear, Jillily pushed open the bathroom door. Scratching her under her chin, I muttered, “It’s all right, Jillily, isn’t it?” But instead of rubbing her head against me for more, she turned her back, arched, and commenced the lurching strains of “I’m going to toss my breakfast all over the floor.” Which she did. And it was bad. It looked like she’d gotten hold of some of last night’s cauliflower curry. As soon as she relieved herself, she seemed perfectly fine, exiting the room with her question mark tail insouciantly aloft.
Usually, I mop up Jillily’s messes without a thought. It’s simply a part of having a cat. But this time I swabbed up the saffron-colored gook haunted by a gloomy felidomancy, which, in case you’re curious, is a method of divination that interprets cats’ movements as omens of future events.
I knew I was being ridiculous. Surely I was reading more into this than the occasion warranted, but I set off for Caltech with a vague unease that mounted into full-fledged alarm as soon as I took another abortive call from Assefa on my car’s Bluetooth. This time, he sounded less troubled than irritated when the static set in. I heard him mutter, “Damn it, Fleur! Maybe it’s you,” before the connection fizzled out again.
That was when panic—and acid reflux—set in. Which I tried to explain to Siri Sajan when she opened her door. But my yoga teacher wasn’t having any of it. She put a finger to her lips, guided me into her Persian-carpet-strewn living room, and gestured for me to unroll my mat. I couldn’t help but reflect that my purple yoga mat looked garish against her faded burgundy and green rugs, but I tried to let the thought go as I sat cross-legged opposite her. We sang together, “Ong Namo, Guru Dev Namo.” I bow to the Creative Wisdom, I bow to the Divine Teacher.
Siri Sajan was definitely divine herself. The session she offered me was more restorative than taxing. By the time we got to the sweet final refrain of Kundalini meditation—borrowed from The Incredible String Band’s “May the Long Time Sun Shine Upon You”—and exchanged Sat Nams, I was feeling fit for human company. I drove to Caltech with the assurance I’d been making a tempest in a teapot. (And if you’re wondering—as I did when I first heard it from Father’s thinly repulsed lips—about the derivation of that phrase, you might be interested to know that it has counterparts in Arabic, Bulgarian, Tamil, and Portuguese, with my favorite being the Greek variant that translates as drowning in a spoon of water.)
Anyway, by the time I finally poked a head into Stanley’s classroom, the crew was already breaking up for the afternoon. Stanley had a dental appointment, and the rest of the team had errands to do. All but Bob, that is. Which was how I ended up joining him for a meal at the Broad Café. It would have been just plain rude to turn him down.
The Broad is Caltech’s answer to New York delis, a California hybrid offering ridiculously caloric processed meat sandwiches coupled with organic produce. We were still debating what to order when Bob reached into his briefcase and said shyly, “Maybe when we find a table, you’d like to take a gander at this.”
I looked down and laughed. “What, more? Bob, I swear you must be the messenger of the God of Physics, doling out the secrets of the universe, article by article.”
If Bob was blushing before, he’d now attained the bright crimson of one of mother’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles roses. He looked even more embarrassed when I slid a thumb under my jeans waistband with exaggerated difficulty and confessed, “My heart longs for the Reuben, but the scale says I’d better stay with the Caesar.” I turned to the nose-ringed girl at the counter and asked, “Can you put a little chicken in it?” before muttering a quick aside to Bob, “Gwennie would kill me, but I’ve got to have a little animal protein once in awhile.”
Seeing that Bob was still a rather spectacular shade of red, I tried taking the focus away from myself, asking, “What’s looking good to you?” before I realized what I’d done. I added a hasty, “What do you have an appetite for?” Oh dear. I really did suffer from foot-in-mouth disease.
Bob made a visible effort to gather himself. “I’m going back and forth between the Lumber Jack and the Herder.” I snorted, and he darted a paranoid look at me before Nose Ring Girl turned her attention back to us and asked him, “Have you decided yet?” She actually sneezed into her hands as he replied, “Okay. Make it a Lumber Jack. But just the roast beef and turkey. No ham.”
“Is that all?” she asked, her dark eyes wandering between the two of us.
Bob looked tense. He turned to me. “Do you want anything to drink?” I shook my head. “No, that’ll be all, but”—he paused—“would you mind washing your hands?”
The girl shot him an incredulous look, gave a curt nod, and then pivoted toward the back. She wasn’t the only one who was shocked.
I beamed at Bob. “Bob, you’re not just a messenger of God, but my personal hero. I would never have had the guts to say that, but it needed to be said.”
Grinning, Bob led the way to a pine-topped table, and as soon as our food was ready we chowed down like there was no tomorrow.
Finishing my salad first, I turned to the article Bob had handed me. It was a contribution to the journal Physics Letters B written by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. My heart skipped a few beats as it dawned on me where Poplawski was going. I didn’t even mind Bob pulling his chair around so that our thighs were nearly touching. He read the final page along with me, though he obviously knew what it said.
I smiled up at him gratefully. “All kidding aside, you sure do come up with the good stuff, Bob. First Jaime Gomez, now this.” And I meant it. Bob seemed to have an unerring eye for work that would be helpful once we got our green light on P.D. The fact that Poplawski had developed mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into black holes opened all sorts of possibilities. He was proposing that a black hole wasn’t made up of matter collapsed into a single point, but was instead a kind of wormhole or tunnel into which matter was sucked before it gushed out of a white hole at the other end to form an alternate universe.
Which, as Bob excitedly pointed out, suggested that the cellular black holes I’d postulated in the human body were just as I’d predicted, bridges to alternate realities into which we might disappear and reappear according to the Principle of Dematerialization. And while Congress had virtually decreed that we couldn’t yet go forward on testing P.D., we could certainly follow up Poplawski’s ideas when the time came.
Nodding encouragingly, I said, “I think you’re onto something, Bob.” His face lit up like neon, and the foot of his crossed leg jiggled like Jillily beset by fleas. I was right there with him. “This opens up no end of —”
My cellphone erupted with a series of meows. As much I wanted to continue our conversation, my heart leapt at the thought that it might be Assefa. With a quick nod at Bob, I rose from my seat and moved to a quiet corner of the café.
There was static on the line again, but it didn’t get in the way of Assefa’s “Fleur, can you hear me?”
“I can! I can hear you!” I could barely contain myself.
“Listen,” he said. “Something’s come up.”
I pressed the phone more tightly to my ear. “Is it your father?”
“No. No. Abat is fine. He’s actually on his way back. The government expelled him. It’s absurd. They say he and Zalelew wanted to steal the Ark of the Covenant. As if they could even if they wanted to.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “As if it was there in the first place, and not just a fiction of my people’s inferiority complex.”
His use of the phrase “my people” gave me a moment’s pause. “Mmm, yes, sounds pretty outrageous. But why aren’t you on the plane with them?”
“That’s why I’m calling, Fleur. I’ve got a bit of sorting to do.”
“Sorting?”
For a moment the line went silent. Despite my earnest attempt not to, I began to spin, which was how I discovered that Bob had come up behind me. As I swung past him, he mouthed, “Is anything wrong,” but I just kept turning. I had to hand it to Bob. Rather than politely averting his gaze, he observed my whirling with an air of mild curiosity.
But on my next turn, I saw he’d given up. He was heading toward the curving food counter, undoubtedly seeking another multi-grained something to add to the lonely seed between his teeth.
Now Assefa was speaking again, albeit haltingly. “Well, here’s the thing, Fleur. I’ve been visiting this orphanage. You wouldn’t believe what this country has been through. Really, for more years than anyone could possibly count. And these children—so many orphans. War, AIDS, well, it’s ridiculous. There aren’t nearly enough doctors to begin to address their needs. It’s shaken up everything I thought was settled. I don’t know if I can go about my plans as if I hadn’t seen this. I need a little time to think.”
I don’t recall how I’d got there, but I found myself sitting with my legs stretched before me on the checkered linoleum floor, a catsup-streaked napkin and a few withered French fries just to the right of my knee. I responded in a mortifyingly whiny voice, “But why can’t you come back and think here?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Fleur. There’s so much more I need to find out. It would be foolish to leave and then to have to come back again to get all the data.”
“All the data on what, Assefa?” And why did he keep referring to “the thing?”
“On what it would take to transfer my studies here.”
I could barely breathe. “Why in the world would you do that? You’re interning at one of the best university hospitals in the world. Surely, if you wanted to volunteer some time in Ethiopia, it would be so much better to finish your education here first.”
“Yes, but here’s the thing,” he interjected. “What if it isn’t actually volunteering I’m thinking about but something more ... permanent?”
I have to admit, that one caught me up short. It was as though he’d just turned my head upside down and given its contents a serious shake. I fought to regain equilibrium. “Assefa, what are you talking about? What about your life here? What about us?” My head was beginning to pound. “What about me?”
I’d never heard Assefa’s voice so stiff. “Fleur, I know this is a shock. I’m a bit shocked myself. But maybe there was a meaning to my father going on his wild goose chase. Maybe he was called to do this on my behalf. Something that was never resolved. Well, anyway. You have to understand, everything’s under the microscope right now. I can’t just leave all this as if it were a bad dream.”
Why not? This was fast turning into my worst nightmare.
Anyone with any sense would have gotten the message by now, but I can be dense at the best of times. “Assefa, you didn’t answer my question.”
“Fleur,” he pled, “please. I need a little space to think.”
Space? Think? He who only a week before had told me that he couldn’t imagine life without me? Who liked to call me his little lamb? His dukula? A vast pit opened up inside me, and, unable to find purchase, I was tumbling down. Eight days after toasting my birthday at Casa del Mar, Assefa had evidently excised me from his heart as casually as a host in a crowded restaurant crossing a name off his list. I knew now what “the thing” was. The thing was me.
Before the void enveloped me completely, I pushed up from the floor and brushed off my jeans, looking across the room to see that Bob had evidently decided to order a second lunch. He was stuffing a sandwich into his mouth with hippopotamic gusto.
I felt something nasty and reptilian climb up the back of my neck as I switched my cell to the other ear. “Thanks so much, Assefa,” I hissed, “for asking how I am. And your grandfather. Last time we talked, he was being treated for dehydration. Thanks for asking about Medr, too.”
“Ah. I’ve already phoned Enat. She’s reassured me that he’s fine. And she is so relieved that my father is coming home.” The feeling of betrayal nearly gagged me. “But you’re right. I should have asked about you, Fleur. I really am very sorry. Very. I know this must be hard for you. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel for—”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Assefa. I’m just fine. You know what they say. It’s all good.” I turned off my cellphone and stared at it, full of wonder that a tiny gadget with a circuit board at its heart could so effectively sever meaning from a life.
Somehow I made it back to the table and sat down. I have to hand it to Bob. He might have been a bit dim at times, but right now his eyes telegraphed nothing but concern. “Is there anything I can do?”
I couldn’t possibly recount my phone conversation to Bob. On the night of Chin-Hwa’s murder, he’d finally confessed his crush on me, at least in a Bob-ish sort of way, but completely unlike his namesake Uncle Bob, who’d been an utter chicken during the traumatic episode with the Boy Who’d Called Me Beautiful. That shrinkable imaginary uncle of mine had disappeared into my pocket as soon as the young stranger had dared me to remove my clothes and immerse my body in the pond near Sleeping Beauty Castle, resulting in me having a police gun stuck in my face and being put in a jail cell nearly as proportionally confining as Jillily’s cat carrier. And if you’re wondering, as I have, why cowardliness is called being chicken, you’ll have to content yourself with the fact that William Shakespeare first coined the phrase in his play Cymbeline, which happens to be about jealousy. Into whose pallid landscape I’d pretty much been thrown, for I knew quite well that the orphanage where everything was needing to get re-thought was the one presided over by Makeda, whose name muttered under my lover’s breath had been an omen I’d been foolishly trying to ignore.
So when Bob asked again if he could do anything, I eyed his plate appraisingly and responded. “Yes. Yes, you definitely can.” I held out a hand. “Will you let me have the rest of your Herder?”
It was Bob’s idea to take me to the beach. I’d broken down in the midst of stuffing the remainder of his oversized sandwich into my mouth, tears and snot drizzling down my face to make the taste of corned beef, pastrami, turkey, salami, cheese, and Russian dressing even saltier. Bob helplessly watched me cry for several minutes, finally thinking to reach into his shirt pocket for an unrealistic shred of Kleenex before I retrieved a more intact version from my purse.
As I swabbed my cheeks and chin, I could almost see a light bulb go off in his head. “I know,” he offered, “we should go to the beach.” He stood, gathering Poplawski’s paper and stuffing it into his briefcase. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I hadn’t agreed to go. But before I knew it, I was rising out of my chair like a zombie and following him out of the café.
He was talking the whole time. “It’s where I go when I don’t like what’s happening in my life. Nothing feels as bad when I’m near the ocean. Must be something about all life coming from there. It’s like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.”
I shot him a confused look. “You know,” he prompted. “‘There’s no place like home.’ Actually, she said it a few times, didn’t she? Clicking those shiny shoes of hers. I’m addicted to that movie.” He scratched the top of his head with an air of mild embarrassment, sending an avalanche of dandruff onto the shoulders of his navy T-shirt. “Actually, I watched it a few days ago and couldn’t help but wonder if the writer wasn’t secretly suggesting Dorothy had dissolved into a wormhole that took her right where she needed to go. That wouldn’t be too far from what we’re aiming for with dematerialization, would it?”
So, our Bob was a closet philosopher. If I’d been in a state to laugh, I would have. Here I was, the archetypal jilted lover, current president of the Red Nose and Wet Booger Club, and Bob was zipping along the cosmic highway.
Bob shot me a paranoid look. “What?”
“Oh, Bob, I don’t know, but anybody who could actually make me smile right now deserves his own Academy Award for kindness.”
Bob blushed so intensely I imagined his toes turning bright red.
“Actually,” he replied, managing to skirt my praise, “they lost the award to Gone with the Wind.”
I have to admit, the diversion momentarily rescued me from my apocalyptic loss. “You can’t be serious. That piece of revisionist crap?” Bob looked taken aback. “Sorry,” I pleaded, embarrassed. “I do believe I just channeled Gwennie Fiske. You know how she likes to rant about the insidious impact of racism in books and films.” I paused. “But, you know, it was Sammie who first taught me about racism. I’d never imagined such a thing could exist. You met her, so you know that beautiful olive skin of hers. One time we spent a week with her grandparents in Orange County, and her dark skin prompted a disgusting volley of nasty racial slurs from a mischief of mall rats at the South Coast Plaza.”
Bob flushed with anger. “Assholes!” But then he cocked his head quizzically. “A mischief of ...?”
I laughed. “Never heard the expression a ‘mischief of rats’? How about a ‘murder of crows’?” He shook his head. “How about a ‘shrewdness of apes’ or—actually, I hate this one—‘a nuisance of cats’?”
By the time I’d described to Bob the running contest Stanley H. Fiske and I had over who knew the most elusive group names, we’d arrived at Bob’s car, a bird-poop-bedecked dark blue hatchback that proclaimed itself a Festiva.
Now, we physicists might just be ranked as royalty in the realm of absentmindedness. Which is why I wasn’t insulted when Bob proceeded to unlock the back door with a click of his key, throw his briefcase onto the back seat and shut the door, open the driver’s door to slide inside, and glance into his rearview mirror as he started up the motor. Only when he heard me tapping on the passenger side window did he peer over at me, still standing outside the locked passenger door. Mouthing his mortification, he hurriedly exited the car to open my door for me, fussing around to make sure I was belted in and inadvertently brushing his hand across my breast, which made me reflect upon how readily Bob’s complexion transmuted from pale pink to neon red.
Returning to the driver’s seat, he shot me a look that said something like, I’m hopeless, aren’t I? and then valiantly started up the car again, exuberantly breaking into the familiar tune, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Who could be depressed around a guy like this?
Under the circumstances I certainly could, but since he was being so kind at a time that Assefa most definitely was not, I felt I owed it to him to tie my misery to the mast. I resolved to keep myself from jumping overboard until I got home.
Bob wasn’t a freeway kind of guy, so I had a lot of opportunities to distract myself on the way to Santa Monica Beach. Since Adam and the gang had taken me to the beach numerous times during my first summer in SoCal, this drive was like being in a time warp, tracking bits and pieces of my history. Here are some of the more memorable neighborhoods we passed through:
1. Griffith Park. Actually, as soon as Bob’s car neared the vicinity it occurred to me that the last time I’d been there was with Assefa. My heart rate accelerated as I recalled dragging Assefa to the park’s world-class observatory on a Friday night for a book signing by Harvard’s Lisa Randall, who’d responded to a question about multiple universes that our own universe might be merely “a three-dimensional ‘sinkhole.’” Which made a heck of a lot of sense to me now.
2. West Hollywood. The first time I’d seen it was when I was twelve years old. I’d been in the car with Adam, who was driving me to my first interview with a local paper about my discovery of C-Voids. We’d passed two blue-jeaned men with John Edwards hair walking down the street with a hand in each other’s pockets. I’d started screaming, and Adam had to explain to me that the men weren’t trying to pick each other’s pockets, but were actually demonstrating affection.
3. Beverly Hills. The only people out on the sidewalks fronting rows of imposing Spanish, Tudor, and Mid-Century Modern homes were brown-skinned gardeners, brown-skinned nannies pushing fancy prams with white-skinned babies, and two alarmingly skinny, sunburnt female runners—one who looked to be older than Mother, wearing a canary yellow tracksuit and a sequined baseball cap, and the other with the biggest mouth I’d ever seen outside of a National Geographic issue that featured the plate-like adornment fashioned for the lips of Mobali women of Northern Congo. Which, when I pointed it out to Bob, elicited from him an excited, “Yeah, but have you seen pictures of what the Mursi and Suri women do to themselves? Their lips get stretched so far from their faces that you could serve drinks on them!”
Frowning, I felt around inside my mind to see if I recalled any knowledge of the Mursi and Suri tribes. Failing, I asked Bob what country they inhabited.
Clearly pleased to know something I didn’t, Bob shot back an exultant, “Ethiopia.” At which point, despite my best efforts, I burst into tears all over again, Bob pulled to the side of the road and, looking like a lost dog, muttered pathetically, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How dumb can I be?”
It took seven minutes and thirty-five seconds for me to calm down. I knew, because I’d been staring at the digital clock on the dashboard to avoid Bob’s eyes, which were full of enough pity to fuel a day’s worth of non-stop tears.
By now, I’d given up on finding enough tissues to do the trick and pulled up the bottom of my T-shirt to wipe my face. Unsurprisingly, Bob forgot to politely turn his head, and when my eyes caught his staring at the lacy bra barely containing my breasts, he merely shrugged with the hint of a not-overly-guilty grin.
“Bob!” I chided.
But Bob was clearly getting more comfortable with me. “You didn’t ask me not to look,” he said. And he was right. I hadn’t. Bob turned on the ignition, I backed away from the void, and we darted into traffic to the sounds of the Shins’ “It’s Only Life,” which should have been depressing, but somehow wasn’t.
I should probably mention that riding in Bob’s car was a singular experience, and not just because it was being driven by Bob. When I’d first flung my purse into the back seat, I saw it was jammed with books, what looked to be about a hundred loose physics articles, and scores of folded brown paper bags. Unsurprisingly, it smelled of smoked fish, which made me wonder how Bob would respond to the idea of ferrying Jillily and me to the vet the next time she needed to go. The smell might be a comfort to her while she was trapped in her pink jail cell of a cat carrier.
But the corker was that Bob had hung on his rearview mirror a miniature mobile of Mobius strips made of rainbow-hued satin ribbon that danced to the beat of the music on his CD player. He claimed he wasn’t distracted by it, but I myself found it mesmerizing as Bob and I sang along with James Mercer about going down the rabbit hole.
After deciding that it might be interesting to park near the palisade and cross the bridge over Pacific Coast Highway to get to the beach, Bob led me through an obstacle course of homeless humanity toward the urine-reeking concrete steps leading to the bridge. We passed several people minus teeth, others minus company, still others clearly minus their minds. Which took my own mind back to the (very) few days when Father and I had actually enjoyed each other. It had been after he’d lost his original mind in his nervous breakdown and before he’d taken refuge in the old one—the one that hated me enough to crusade relentlessly against my scientific research.
When we’d exited the car, Bob had grabbed a few paper bags from the back seat, and now he let them carelessly dangle from his hand, as if he’d done this a million times before. By this time, realizing I was fighting a losing battle, I’d given up worrying about hurting Bob’s feelings and was so carried away with telling him about Assefa’s call that I didn’t even ask what the bags were for. Instead, I took poor Bob with me on every repetitive spin of my mental wheel.
But crossing the pedestrian bridge over the Pacific Coast Highway put an end to my chattering. For a void-fearer, it was terrifying. The wind was brisk and whipped my hair across my eyes and around my chin with gusty slaps. Bob’s paper bags became low-slung kites flapping from his fingers. Traffic surged beneath us like a herd of steel beasts. A vagrant strain of music reached my ears from the beach below. I made out Jackson Browne’s mournful, “Fly away, linda paloma!” as I set foot on a bottom step layered in hieroglyphs of sand. The words “linda paloma” led, as words will do, to a host of memories: the painful penetration of my virginal tweeter by Hector Hernandez’s bulging member, followed by the murder of Baby X, which in turn handed me right over to the realization that Assefa and I would never conceive the brilliant child I knew we were meant to create. That was, unless our recent condom collapse had proferred its own fateful vote.
That possibility caused my eyes to release another burst of tears. Looking by now a little wary of my emotionality, Bob shot me a sideways look, but kept on walking, so I did, too, noticing that his bags were brushing against his jeans with a kind of ‘shhh shhh, ba da shhh’ in time to our synchronized steps. Now that we’d shifted from cement to sand, our stride slowed, and the omnipresent roar of the ocean drowned out all other sound. By the time we reached the shore, my monkey mind had pretty much chattered itself out.
Reaching the shoreline, we removed our shoes to walk on the wet sand. Bob held out one of his bags for my tennies, depositing his own loafers inside. “You know,” he ventured, “my dad always told me I didn’t need to stick around people who treated me badly. He said there were way too many human beings in the world to waste my time with people who weren’t worth it.” Bob squinted up at the sky. “At that point, it was probably somewhere around five-point-three billion.” He shrugged. “Of course, he wasn’t reckoning on the fact that most people didn’t find my company particularly appealing, so I had plenty of practice assessing my worth on my own.”
I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to the melancholy turn of Bob’s last remark. Instead, I fixed on his father’s message. Bob was implying that Assefa was one of those time wasters. Could that be true? Everything my lover had said and done before now had proclaimed he was decent down to his long and perfect ebony toes. Hadn’t he listened to my lengthy, multiple-alleyed stories without a hint of impatience? Accepted the presence of Jillily’s litter box in his own home without complaint? Worried constantly about his parents, his grandfather? Had as his passion in life the repair of people’s hearts? But then it occurred to me that perhaps it was his goodness that was causing my current problem. He was worrying about those orphans more than he was worrying about me.
But a more cynical voice balked at my rationalization. What if Assefa was what Sammie liked to call a dog? At first, I’d assumed the term was a compliment. If men could be referred to as cats—in my book the highest praise possible—and given that Sammie herself used to call the two of us birds, and since dogs were generally thought of as good-natured (though I wouldn’t exactly have applied that to Chin-Hwa or one particularly sharp-toothed creature who’d lunged at me rather terrifyingly when I was a child), then why was “dog” such a dismissive epithet? Sammie had sorted me out on that one with a certain savage intensity, no doubt attributable to the two men she’d dated before Jacob, each of whom had cheated on her with far inferior partners.
But now a stranger’s face was suddenly sticking itself just a few inches from my own. The woman’s long straight hair was being swept dervishly around by a sudden gust of wind. “You’re Fleur Robins, aren’t you? I hope those right wing bastards get thrown out and you can start up your project again.” I actually felt her spit splatter my cheek with the word “bastards.”
Though I agreed with her sentiment, there was something in her eyes that scared me, and when Bob pulled me away, he said, “Don’t pay her any attention. Fame brings out the roaches of every stripe.”
Before I knew it he’d shoved a Ralphs’s bag into my hand. Actually, as soon as he got the bag into one of my hands, he took my other hand in his own and tugged me toward a spot where a frothy wave was being sucked back out to sea. He knelt, and since he had my hand, I knelt with him, our knees knocking against each other on the ground, which was surprisingly firm given the fine dusting of sand—soft as powdered sugar—layered at the top.
Within seconds, he’d scooped out a little crater of sand to reveal a spread of tiny shells—most of them broken, but some decidedly not: delicately crafted little exoskeletons whose twists and whorls had been crafted by an unseen hand into something as precise and perfect as a baby’s lips. He reached into one of his bags and pulled out a pair of crimson faux-velvet pouches, handing me one and pantomiming what I needed to do. The ocean was making conversation an unrealistic option. I deposited my first beige-and-white-patterned shell inside its soft new home with solemn care and placed the pouch at the bottom of my Ralph’s bag as I saw him do with his own. A sudden shaft of sunlight speared the horizon, giving the brown grocery bag a golden hue and illuminating the letters L-P-H like an ancient manuscript.
So this was what Bob did with his bags. I didn’t want to move. The sound of the sea was mesmerizing. If we could find such gems right here, why go anywhere else? Ever. We could inhabit this moment eternally, impermeable to anything outside this sun-kissed spot, never again bothered by worthless friends or faithless lovers.
But words like never are folly in this incarnate world. In this case, the change agent was Bob himself, who insisted we’d find more of such beauties, and larger ones, if we walked north, past the crowds of families and kids hugging the shore.
“Besides,” he shouted against the roar of a breaking wave, pointing to an admittedly stinky pile of seaweed-wrapped jellyfish drawing more flies than the largest of Chin-Hwa’s pansy bombs. I nodded and followed him.
I was sweating profusely by the time we reached Will Rogers State Beach. It was hotter than hell. So much for the climate change mumpsimusses. It had taken us about an hour’s walk to get there. We’d long passed the last family crowded near the Santa Monica pier with their broad umbrellas, broader smiles, and ice chests packed with Coronas and Cokes, and were now in the land of bikini-clad girls and surfer boys whose toned, athletic bodies brought me right back to dark thoughts of Assefa. But Bob was intent on getting me safely seated on a large rock jutting onto the sand so we could show and tell about the stashes of shells we’d each accumulated on the way.
“May I?” Bob asked, reaching into my bag to select a small spiral shell with a dark circle on the outside. “You know what this is, don’t you?” I shook my head. “It’s a moon snail. Also known as a Shark’s Eye.” Well, that made sense. The black center was surrounded by a milky aura that looked uncannily like a staring eye. “Actually, its real name is neverita reclusianus, and it dates back to the Oligocene. Can you imagine this fragile-looking home of a tiny carnivore surviving at least twenty-three million years?” Of course, I couldn’t. Not when we comparative giants barely made it to a hundred.
The soft creature who’d inhabited this dainty home had undoubtedly been protected by the intimidating ocular image on its outside. I wondered how many heartbeats the ferocious shark eye façade had bought the shell’s inhabitant. A billion? I asked Bob, who seemed to know everything there was to know about aquatic life forms.
He frowned and enthusiastically took up the question. “Well, let’s see. I think your average mollusk lives at least five years. They’re about as slow moving as you get, so I’d guess they have a heartbeat of about ten a minute. So, what does that work out to?”
“Something like twenty billion beats. That can’t be right.”
Bob nodded in agreement. “Sounds like a lot.” I knew this one was going to drive me nuts until I tracked it down.
We resumed sorting through our haul. Bob pulled out a couple of spectacular specimens, including a couple of perfect turtella ocayas, long spiraling cones without a single chip. After oohing and aahing enough to turn his skin just the side of fuscia, I marveled at the floral design on the outside of the one sand dollar I’d found. I speculated whether it was a fossilized imprint of a flower that the sand dollar had been lodged against. Bob smiled indulgently. “Actually, what you see as a flower is actually the fivefold radial pattern of its exoskeleton, which we call a ‘test.’”
I felt more than a little humbled as Bob revealed the scope of his knowledge. Back at Caltech, he’d come in (and come across) as the acolyte, and I admitted to myself I’d looked down at him a bit. Well, actually, a lot. But in the open air Bob actually looked an inch or two taller, as if here at the beach he was one of its natural denizens. Which, I was soon to discover, had its dark side, too. On our walk back, we came upon a largish piece of plastic with indistinct blue lettering wrapped in and out of the ribcage of a rotting dead pelican. The bird had undoubtedly ingested the plastic before it died. Without warning, Bob sunk to his knees and pounded the sand, shouting, “I hate humanity!”
I had to resist the temptation to flap, but I knew what he meant. The implications of the corpse were disgusting and all too familiar, signs of our species’ utter lack of concern for our biosphere. It stirred my own utter frustration at the standstill forced upon my P.D. team by a body of 379 men and 93 women blindly committed to an ecologically disastrous status quo. My team and I had discovered a potentially revolutionary means of getting from one place to another that might obviate the most egregious uses of fossil fuels, and Congress was blocking our research as a sin comparable to human cloning. Which it wasn’t.
But I was yanked out of that familiar internal rant by Bob’s visibly heaving chest. I hesitantly put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right. It’s awful. With all our vaunted intellect, we’re a short-sighted species.”
He shrugged me off, his face twisted. “No, Fleur. That’s too kind. We’re the suicide bombers of the planet, willing to take down more than eight million other species with us.” So this was Bob’s void. I stepped back, but Bob grabbed my hand, putting it against his chest, saying, “No, no. Listen, I’m sorry. It’s just that it gets me so fucking mad.” I didn’t have the heart to pull away, but was more than a little relieved when he finally let go of my hand. He seemed to be staring at something behind me. The slight smile playing at his lips took me by surprise.
I turned to see. Why was he grinning? The bird carcass really was awful, as was the enthusiasm of the flies encircling it. I heard Bob say, “You know what they are, don’t you?”
I looked back at him. It took me a minute. “The flies?” He nodded.
“A swarm.”
“What else?”
“A cloud.”
He motioned, “More,” with his hand. I grimaced, frantically scouring my mind, but I didn’t have it. I sighed. “Okay, I give.”
His expression was victorious. “A business!”
Damn! I had read it somewhere. Ages ago. “You’re right,” I said with a grudging groan. “A business of flies.”
Bob rewarded me with a sly expression I wouldn’t have imagined he was capable of. “I think that entitles me to cook you some dinner. Why don’t you come back to my apartment and hang out?”
