16

Toledo comes alive at night. It really does. While the city sleeps and dreams and dies a thousand deaths, the young and intelligent people come out to play, like constellations bursting out in the darkness of the black sky.

Irene remembered being a teenager, sneaking out of her house, and meeting up with kids from her school in the city. Toledo was like a university town on steroids, where tourists had animated conversations about quasars and tall hotels filled up with guests hoping to hear a lecture from an aging astronomy superstar or visiting mathematician. Tourists flocked the marina at Summit Street to do a night cruise of the Maumee River and Lake Erie. Restaurants overflowed with stargazers smoking long cigarettes and eating dumplings. Toledo isn’t big, but it can hold everyone interesting in the world of astronomy at the same time. It is a gathering place for people who want to know what’s out there. It’s a home for rocket scientists and numerologists. For people who see a face on Mars and people who want to analyze Martian soil with an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. All those people, together, make Toledo great.

The river cruise was popular because at certain points on the map there were nighttime blackout laws in effect to protect the institute’s stargazers from the distractions of ambient light. The boats would head south through the lights and sounds of the city and the harbor, and then suddenly the banks and the boats would both go dark, sending travelers slipping up the river to loop around the Audubon Islands State Nature Preserve and loop back. Irene could remember sliding by the murmuring darkness outside town and then stepping back out of the yacht at the Summit Street Marina, back into the lights and noise of the city. The feeling of urgency from the tourists, the excitement of being downtown with honking car horns and radios leaking out of buildings, the chance of spotting a higher-up at NASA or one of the program directors from the launch facility in Dayton. The endless SETI@home frequency-time-power graph on an LED billboard on Madison and Superior. She hadn’t realized she missed it, but being there brought back memories that weren’t entirely terrible.

Teenage Irene would sneak out just to sneak out, not to drink or party or rebel, but just to be away. And did it really even count as sneaking, if her mother was passed out in her bed with her arm crooked over her eyes, saying she had a sinus headache, falling asleep in the middle of the sentence?

“I have a sinus.” And that was the end.

Irene could sneak out the front door, clomping along in her roughshod boots, hitching a backpack full of booze on her shoulder for everyone else to drink. Bernice’s supply would intoxicate the world, and Irene knew all the hiding places, all the secrets of the stash. If a few were missing, would Bernice even care? And what would she say, if she figured it out? “I’m sorry, but have you seen several pints of gin that I don’t drink and wasn’t hiding in the brick cavity behind the laundry room garbage bin?”

No, they never talked about the drinking. And they never talked about the fire. Everything else in the world was OK to talk about but never seemed as interesting as those two things, or as deadly. If something’s not likely to kill you, why mention it at all?

*   *   *

By the time Irene and George arrived at the nightclub, it was two o’clock in the morning.

“It’s here? Where should we park?” she asked him. “On the street?”

“Valet, baby,” said George.

Irene pulled up to the curb in front of the door, and a man in a black jumpsuit vaulted over the car’s hood and opened the door for her. She put the keys into his hand. The valet gave her a hand out, and she stood up into the street. Looking down at herself, she realized she was wearing her black jeans and a button-down shirt, work boots. The man in the black jumpsuit drove away with her car after handing her a plastic ticket, which she stuck into her backpack.

“Come on,” George called. He was looking at her as if she were a knife. Or a sandwich. Or a knife about to cut open a sandwich. She liked the way he was looking at her. He motioned for her to follow him, and she said, “Am I dressed for this? When you said, ‘nightclub for astronomers’ I thought you were kidding. I thought it was some back room at the institute.”

“Why?” said George.

“Because it sounds like something that wouldn’t be real!” Irene said. She smoothed her shirt and kicked the dirt off her boots.

Then she was standing on the sidewalk, and there was George, big and tall, with a questioning look on his face, like what the hell is wrong with you, lady? And then he was shaking his head. He said, “Are you kidding? You are perfect. Just like you are.”

George’s hand wrapped around her arm and she was pulled out of the street. The astronomers’ club had no name on the front. They stepped through an iris door into an airlock, and the door closed behind them. There was a hiss of silence and frozen air, and cold steam surrounded them. Quiet.

“Couldn’t they give it a name? Like The Comet or The Milky Way or…”

“Or The Black Hole?”

“Yeah.”

The cold steam hissed again. She could barely see George. She shivered. The silence, after the noise on the street, was weird.

“That’s what the gay secret astronomers’ club is called.”

Irene said nothing.

“Because of the gayness,” George explained.

“I get it,” said Irene.

“I bet people kiss in here sometimes,” said George.

Then his hand was on her shoulder, and she felt his thumb hard against her collar bone. What strange energy was in his hands, she did not know, but it made her feel as if he was leaving fingerprints on her, marking her, turning little parts of her alive at a time, wherever he touched. She heard his breath in the cold steam.

“You bet or you know?” said Irene.

Then he was kissing her again, and she felt herself rising up off the floor to meet him, like she was inhaling through his face, one long breath in. He put his hands in her ponytail and tugged the scarf away that was holding it, shook out her hair behind her head, pulled two handfuls of it up beside her face, grinning.

“Now you look more like a scientist,” he said.

“George, that thing doesn’t actually work where the boy pulls the girl’s hair out of a ponytail and she shakes it out and she’s magically transformed into hotness.”

“Actually it’s pretty reliable,” said George. “You were hot before, but you should see yourself now.”

The second door of the airlock swooshed open, and George and Irene spilled into the room. It was cavernous and dark, with a blues band taking up the stage. A singer in white was bathed in a spotlight, crooning at the microphone. Tables and chairs were scattered around the place, and there was a dance floor, where several couples were standing.

“I look too much like a scientist,” said Irene.

George waved at people who were calling to him from the bar. There were astronomers of both genders draped around the place, locked in conversation, moving to the slow jam, or showing off big smiles.

“Let’s get a drink,” said George.

“I don’t drink,” said Irene.

“You’ll drink this,” said George.

He led her to the bar and motioned to the bartender, who turned around and started mixing.

“Uh oh, I think our favorite Daughter of Babylon is here,” George said into her ear. The proximity of his mouth to her ear made her body tighten up into a spiral. When he said, “Over there,” his lips brushed against her earlobe and a passing group of guys pushed her into him. His rib cage was broad and strong, his shoulders wide. He caught her up and held onto her. She raised her face to him, wanting just to kiss him and not to think about it, but he was pointing.

Sam Beth wore a long white dress, flowing and puddling on the floor. Her pigtails were drawn up fiercely into two buns, one on each side of her head, her arms were wrapped with gold bracelets, and under each eye the three dots glowed a bright white. It seemed like there were stripes in her hair. She approached them sedately.

“Princess Leia,” said Irene.

“Nice boots,” said Sam Beth.

“Thanks, Patrice,” said Irene pointedly.

“Are you here together?” asked Sam Beth, motioning to George.

“Have you been drinking?”

“The Daughters of Babylon do not drink alcohol,” said Sam Beth, but she took a crystal atomizer from the bar and gave herself a brisk shot in the face. Her eyes widened.

“What is that stuff?”

“What is that stuff?” Sam Beth imitated her.

With a rustle of fabric and a slow nod, she moved on through the club, and then the bartender was ready with the drinks and George was leaning over the bar. His shirt came untucked. She saw the waistband of his khakis and underneath the waistband of his underwear, heather gray. What was it about this man that made her feel so possessive, as if she should reach out and tug that shirt down into place or slide her hand under it. He turned and smiled at her, holding a blue drink in a tall glass. Inside the drink was a flutter of white blobs, floating between the surface and the bottom and then back again, like a lava lamp.

“I said I don’t drink,” said Irene.

“This isn’t alcoholic,” said George.

Irene took the drink out of his hand. It felt cool in the glass, but there were no condensation droplets around it.

“What’s in it?”

George rolled his eyes. “Do you want a recipe? I can have someone print one out for you. Or you could just drink it. It’s pretty good. If you don’t like it, I’ll get you something else.”

“It’s not alcoholic, really? I don’t drink alcohol, like ever at all.”

“Why?” asked George. “Why no drinking?” A simple question, asked in innocence. One she had never answered.

“My mother was an alcoholic,” she said suddenly. She reached out for him and grabbed his hand. The air went whooshing out of her. She couldn’t believe she had told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Well, I would never give you alcohol without telling you.”

“I feel like you wouldn’t,” she said. “I believe you.”

“But it’s hard for you,” George said. “I get it.”

Irene took a deep breath and a little drink of the blue liquid. It tasted like raspberries and cucumbers. Very fresh. She let one of the white bubbles into her mouth and it burst with a little fizziness against the roof of her mouth. She felt a tickle in the back of her throat, and then she seemed more able to breathe than she had been before. The band finished their song and set down their instruments to take a break. New music came through the speakers, some kind of strange world house music or something. It thumped in the bar. She looked up to see that George was watching her. She had told him about her mother. And nothing bad had happened.

“You look beautiful,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

“I’ve only known you for three days,” said Irene. “I’m not going to marry you.”

“You will,” said George.

“Whatever,” said Irene.

“Tell me everything about yourself. Favorite color, favorite food, what you want from life, what you want from me.”

“Black, don’t have one, some sort of publication like everyone else, and—” Irene stopped.

“I want publication, too,” said George. “You see, we’re not so different.”

“I want something from you,” she went on, her breath coming fast.

“You told me,” he said, smiling. “I mean—”

“I think I just want you to be real,” said Irene. Whether it was the bubbly drink or the music thudding in her sternum or the proximity of George and the skin she wanted to touch, kiss, press against, she felt herself telling him something serious.

“I am real,” said George. They were leaning against a column, George ducking down to hear her and speak into her ear, Irene clutching her drink, wanting to inhabit the space between his arms.

“But this is—” she began, “This can’t be real. It’s too silly.”

“It’s not silly! We are meant to be together. We’re twin souls! I swear it on Compton and Batteau and Yeats and Toledo General.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not.”

“But George, you’re a cosmetologist! You of all people should know.”

“It’s cosmologist, actually.” George rolled his eyes, and smiled, all too familiar with this intentional jibe on his branch of astronomy.

“You’re a cosmetologist! The first axiom of cosmetology—”

“Cosmology!” George corrected her gently.

“Is that there are no special places. The universe is heterogeneous. This place”—here Irene pointed to her heart—“cannot be special. See?”

George shook his head.

“The second axiom of cosmology,” she went on, “is that there are no special directions. So no special places, no special directions. No soulmates. No twin souls. Random intersection of lives, sexual attraction, mating. Just like lizards.”

“Lizards don’t have sexual attraction for each other.”

“You don’t know.”

“So you admit you have sexual attraction for me.”

“Do you need me to say it again?” said Irene.

“Come with me,” shouted George into Irene’s ear. “I need to take you in a special direction and show you a special place.”

She followed him across the dance floor, where it was possible to feel the house music thumping through her feet.

“What is this music?” she shrieked up at him.

“Chaldean house music,” he answered. “Base six or something. The DJ is a Ph.D. in anwa. You know what anwa is, right?”

Irene nodded but didn’t.

“If you listen close, there’s a sample of frequency in this song,” George told her, “that comes from a black hole. You know, like the black hole is singing.”

“Black holes don’t sing,” Irene shouted, over the buzz of the music. “It’s periodic oscillation. That’s not song!”

“You don’t know,” George grinned at her, pulling her by the hand. “You don’t know everything.”

She knew that every girl in the place was giving her a once-over and lots of people were calling out to George. People recognized them, maybe wondered why they were here together. Sometimes he shouted back random things like, “Hey!” or “Yeah!” Other times he appeared to be staring up into the rafters and then shaking his head. Irene followed him closely, and then the stairs opened up and they were headed down. Downstairs was quieter. There was a woman in the corner playing a mechanical harp. Dancers writhed in glass tubes.

“I want to get to the part where we’re alone,” said Irene.

“Are you sure you want to?” said George.

“Yes,” said Irene. “I’m sure.” She felt herself begin to laugh or cry. Was this what sexual frustration felt like?

“OK,” said George. “Right this way.”

Down a hallway, down another flight of stairs, they came to a little room and went inside. It was paneled, like a sauna, but there was a cool breeze coming from a vent. She set her drink down on a little table. George shut the door, and Irene’s heart raced. There was a desk in the corner, some papers, a laptop. A sofa pressed against the wall with a lamp on each side.

“Whose office is this?” she asked.

“The owner. Don’t worry,” he said. “No one will come.”

For a moment she was shy. She couldn’t look at his face. He was so near to her, so captured in this privacy, she wanted to take each breath from him, think about it, see it, experience it. When she did look at his face, he was looking at her. She saw the skin of his neck, so close, the blood vessels beneath it. His chin bent down close to her. She saw the muscles behind his ear. It didn’t make her uncomfortable. It moved her. She felt a significant inner peace, inside some dark place of her body, cooling and spreading out, as if it was overtaking her with calm. She felt good.

“Are you claustrophobic?” he said.

She laughed. She touched one of his hands with hers and he clasped it, so they were holding hands. His face looked smooth and young, and she thought, It’s so improper. Me the damaged, soulless thing. Him this beautiful boy that everybody wants to be next to. Why is he here with me? Why is he holding my hand? She could see something in him that was hers, something beckoning to her to find it, take it, use it. Irene watched him unbutton the collar of his shirt, and his hair fell down over his forehead, and she wanted to reach out for it, that piece of shirt, that curl of hair, to touch it and make sure that it was real. She felt that each of her breaths was fighting to leave her lungs. She felt her ribs fighting to pull the air back in. She sat back against the desk.

“Take off your clothes,” said George. His hands on his own buttons.

A burst of fresh air came from the vent, smelling a little bit of cucumber, like the drink she’d barely touched. What was in her blood right now, making her lose her grip on twenty-nine years of keeping her legs crossed? Making her want to open them, tear off her shirt, spread her breasts across the room for him, feel the cucumber air make her shiver? George reached inside the collar of her shirt and touched her just above her heart. It was the simplest touch, not a stroke or a caress, or even really purposeful, but just a finger moving from up to down, touching a little stretch of her. Maybe he did not even notice it. She said nothing. But she knew that she would remember that touch forever, until the day of her death, as the moment she woke up. It was a moment of total danger and fear followed by a moment of complete surrender.

“I want you to take them off,” he said. His voice was deep.

She knew in that moment there were two Georges: the wisecracking, sunny-smiling George whom she could tease and ridicule over fish tacos, who made jokes and made things easy for her. And then there was another George, inside that George, that was darker, and more strange, and she felt in that one finger pulled down across her chest that the animal George inside had reached out through the human George and touched her.

All men are just this way, she thought. Until now she would have looked upon this animal with contempt or just disgust, with a glowering, impatient desire to bring out that animal and tame it and destroy it. But now Irene felt a new thing: a desire to meet that animal and to know it. Her own animal rising. This was the danger: the animal inside her, pushing to the front. This was the surrender: but she didn’t care. She could growl and snap if she had to; she could wail and moan. He wasn’t going to look on her with anything other than the best of love. He wasn’t going to let her out of this room until she was done. This was where it was all going to come apart: here in safety, here with George. She put her hand over his heart, inside the collar of his shirt, and pressed her fingers into his skin. When she looked up at his face, it was her real face looking up, her animal face from dark inside, and his animal face responded.

He made a noise inside his chest, she felt that noise as a vibration in her hand, and it was the most powerful stimulant she had ever felt in her life.

Gone the snide remarks. Gone the lifetime of making men subservient before her. Gone the wide cracks in her, the bitterness with which she filled the cracks. She looked into his face and she knew him, and she let the cracks fall wide open. She began to undo his belt. He lifted her shirt up and pulled it over her head. She yanked the buttons of his shirt. He pulled her jeans to the floor. They moved like automatons, held in each other’s notice, and frantic to get more close, more near.

Irene was naked now, the clothes gone. The light was bright, and she stood there in that little room, exposed and raw but closer, closer to him and his body. She wanted to be close. She could see all of him, open to her. He put his hands gently around her and she took in a deep breath. There was no place to go but onward. There was no reason to it, and no sense. Then he was moving her to the sofa, his hands fully locked around her rib cage, his mouth on her neck, and the feel of him was pure other-George, the George behind the sun, the dark animal she had felt moving the hand over her heart. She felt him so acutely that it made her cough. This black animal, grappling with her blackness. Bathed in the brightest light, naked to each other, locked in.

She felt the pressure as he pushed against her, heard a soft moan, was it him or her with mouth open, making sounds come out? And then he pushed on inside. It was so easy, and it was done. She lost herself immediately, her legs wrapped around his thighs, her belly against his, her breasts against him, hands raking along the cushions of the sofa to get herself closer and closer. She wanted to scream, This is how a vagina should be! Full. How stupid I’ve been carrying around an empty one for all this time.

“You can never take it out again,” she said to the side of his face. “Just remember that. Never never. I never want to lose you again.”

He began to move inside her in a way that was rhythmic and thrilling, and she felt her mind tripping away. She was spinning in this world, on the point of him in her, and as she felt herself joined up with him, there in her depths, in the geometric depths of her round cervix, her mind spun again, and she saw what was entirely mathematical. A vision before her face of a circle and a point and a line, and the way they moved together, up and down, back and forth. One circle inside another circle becomes a point that moves just up and down.

“It’s the Tusi couple,” she said to him. “It’s the Tusi couple. It’s happening inside me.”

“Oh,” he said. “Good. Can’t talk now.”

“It’s the Tusi couple, George!” she said. “It’s happening inside me!” Rolling around, rolling around. Up and down. He wouldn’t tell her no, his forehead was pressed into the fabric, his hands around the back of her, and the feeling she was having inside her only grew.

“You know about the Tusi couple, George,” said Irene. She was grasping, grasping to hold onto her words. “You know what it is.”

“Shhh,” said George. She glanced at him, her eyes open wide in the light. Was he smiling or was that a grimace? Was his head thrown back in laughter, or was it pain? What was happening inside her, between her legs, so sweet and urgent.

“Copernicus,” she gasped. “This is Copernicus we’re talking about! Copernicus!” How can Copernicus be wrong?

“Copernicus, shhh…” said George, his voice rough and low. His hands now found her breasts, and he rolled her nipples roughly between his fingers. He sank his teeth into her shoulder, his tongue following the line of her collarbone, and the firmness rubbing between her legs, shooting up into her and drawing down again, sending electric shocks out into her extremities, tunneling into her body and filling it with energy.

Then Irene found she couldn’t talk either, and the Tusi coupling inside her found its own rolling rhythm, and she and George, pining for each other, and finding each other, pressed together on themselves. In the dark behind her eyelids, she lost track of who she was, and who was with her, and who was not her. She felt him through her body, inside her body, and she could feel the whole of him. And there, down inside, she met him, quiet and slow and dear.

“George, there’s something wrong with you,” said a voice inside them.

“No, there’s not,” said another voice.

“I can feel it. I can see it. I can’t be this close and not see it. I can’t be so near, and not feel it.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“It’s you, not me,” said a third voice. “It’s you there’s something wrong with.”

The Tusi couple went on spinning in itself, one circle rolling inside the other circle, the point on the line going up and down, up and down, and the deep conversation hovered on the edge of her consciousness, until she could hear that it was just repeating. When it was over, Irene locked her arms around him. “You can’t take it out,” she said again, her voice sounding strange to her now. “I already told you that.” She felt likely to cry. She felt likely to shut off the lights, yank off her face, crawl under a rock. The fan blew its cucumber air. The sofa creaked behind her back. Had it always been creaking? “Please don’t leave me,” she cried. She calculated the effort it would take to pull her clothes back on, yank the door open, march back up through the club and out, give the ticket to the valet, get her car, drive to the Anthony Wayne Bridge, stop the car, get out, climb over the railing, jump off, and die. Or the effort it would take to stay here, entwined with this creature who was so strange and so familiar, whom she did not know she had been missing so much.