23

“I am going to San Francisco, George,” said Irene. “To that conference where Lebernov invited me to sit on a panel. Then I’m moving to Bowling Green. I already found a place, on Clough. Some poor idiot already dropped out of school. Parents desperate to sublet.”

He sat at his desk. She stood in the doorway to his lab. They hadn’t spoken in days. There was, ridiculously, a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. In the floor, scratch marks and shavings outlined the holes that had been freshly drilled. Poles of varying heights stuck into the holes, and on the poles were mounted galaxies, nebulas, the major landmarks of the near universe as George knew it, set up in a 3-D model.

“I don’t understand,” said George. “I thought you weren’t going to that thing. I thought you wouldn’t fly.”

“They’re trying to apply my substrate to radiation detectors in nuclear power plants. I just got off the phone with Lebernov, and again he strongly encouraged me to go.”

“So go,” he said grimly. “But moving to Bowling Green is a little extreme.”

“Ask your mother about it,” said Irene.

“I did ask her,” said George. “You were there. She said a bunch of crap that doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t you get it?” Irene said. “They were friends. They planned the whole thing, George. Your mother and mine. All those little things you thought were fate? No. Plants. They plotted and organized it. All those things my mother said to you, you thought she was reading from the stars? No. She knew you when you were a baby. Probably if she hadn’t been so wasted by alcohol and you hadn’t been so tipsy and heartbroken, you would have remembered her, too. But whatever. You’re right; it actually doesn’t matter. We’ve been played.”

“I don’t care,” said George. “It’s not important. It doesn’t change anything.”

Irene let out a dry laugh. “It changes everything. Whatever we thought was happening wasn’t happening. The Yeats poem? They decided when we’d both memorize it. You went to Thailand on vacation—my grandmother lived in Thailand for years. Kismet? No. Thoughtful planning. Joke’s on us. You’re right—it never mattered.”

“Stop saying that. You’re being wrongheaded,” said George.

“You’re wrongheaded!” she yelled. “I’m the one that got made for you, like some custom pair of pants or a sauce recipe. I’m the one that got born for you. You can’t possibly understand what that feels like.”

“I’m sorry!” said George. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“You can say that because it’s not the same for you. I didn’t get to choose what I wanted to do. I always had to do what would make me better for you, because my mother was so committed to this—these lies—she wouldn’t stop. I never got to choose! Anything!”

He sat there behind a pile of student papers. He was wearing his reading glasses and looked utterly adorable. But for all Irene knew, she had had the idea planted in her head when she was a toddler that tall guys with brown hair and pink cheeks and reading glasses were proper mating potential. She had it planted in her head, and then she had her head discarded by the people that planted it, before they even harvested the idea. Here it was, come to fruition, and she had nothing to do with it. She only wanted to retreat. Retreat, retreat, retreat, before there was more embarrassment and more grief.

That morning she’d hired a real estate agent to list her mother’s house, and she’d hired a Dumpster company to come and park a big one in the driveway. She would empty out the house. Maybe Kate and Belion would help her. Then she would move to Bowling Green and commute. She would see George at work sometimes, maybe, but the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was a big place. She wouldn’t run into him that often, and when she did she would be professional. She would see him married to someone else, someone he could pick in the usual way, where you look around and notice someone you like, and you don’t get all hectic, throwing the word “love” around right away like a crazy person. She would work tirelessly at the Euphrates Project. She would finish setting up the experiment. If once in a while on her way home over the Anthony Wayne Bridge she stopped her car and got out, wavered a little on the edge of the river, no one would blame her for touching the railing. And when the project was up and running and the beams were firing, the detectors detecting, she would let herself fall forward, smack into the water, crush into a broken thing. Maybe they would name a particle after her. The George’s Constructed Wife particle. How glorious.

What she knew, what she knew with utter clarity, was that if she could not have George, she could not continue. She could not go through life whizzing through a pipe unhindered, endlessly whizzing and whizzing, a proton in a circuit, a hamster in a wheel, with no one to intersect, nothing to stop her. She would stop, meeting water, meeting concrete, meeting whatever would break her apart into whatever particles were no longer recognizable as her.

“You won’t do this,” said George. “You won’t leave me. You think you will, but you won’t.”

Irene bridled at this. She almost told him to go to hell. But then she felt sorry for George, too. It wasn’t just her who’d been duped. Poor man, he’d bought the long, sick story even before she had.

“You don’t know me, George. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I do know you,” he said. “I recognize every part of you. I knew you when I first saw you, before we figured out about all these stupid intersections they planned. I knew you when I first saw you in the banquet hall. Just because our mothers did some stupid crap back in the eighties. Come on. Two people meet and fall in love. Then they’re happy forever. That’s the story. That’s the whole story.”

“That story is not real!” she screamed at him.

“What in the time we’ve known each other has not been real? What about me is not real? What about you?

“Forget all the schemes and the intersections, all these little coincidences they planned. They also made us, on some deep and basic place, to work together. You’re the lover, I’m the fighter, you’re the believer, I’m the pragmatist, you’re the heart, I’m the head. They built that. We can’t ignore it—it’s who we are.

“Then let’s not ignore it. Maybe that is love.”

“Of course you still believe that stupid crap! It’s you that believed it this whole time! You’re the believer, George, right? And I’m the scientist. We fit together like a puzzle! Except now, surprise! The thing you believe in so much means that our big fancy ‘true love’ romance story is bullshit, just a bunch of planted ideas, manipulation, hypnosis, whatever!”

“Irene, what if it’s even lower than that, even deeper, beneath all that stuff? We’re not the believer and the scientist. We’re not the folk music and the travel and the birthday. We’re two people who are loyal, and ambitious, and honest, and we both are scientists—hello? We both are believers—don’t deny it. The girl who believed she could create a black hole in a lab? The guy who documents the location of distant stars—with actual math, thank you very much. We aren’t puzzle pieces. We are actually the same.”

She listened to him, her breath coming hard. He must feel such a fool, having sat with her mother, her drunk and devious mother, listening to a ridiculous prophecy of a girl with brown hair, astronomer, dreams, and nonsense, who was really hardly worth the use of a pregnancy test. How long had the mothers’ plot survived, even six years? And then it fizzled. They were too crazy. They were too drunk. Or somebody changed her mind, and somebody else was too drunk to argue.

“Why are you trying to ruin everything? Why can’t you just be happy?” He sounded so sad. She felt so sorry. She wanted to fix it. But how could she?

“I don’t even know what happiness is,” said Irene.

“I do,” said George.

She should have let her mother burn their house down with both of them in it. She should have taken a deep, cleansing breath of the smoke and rolled over in her bed to pass out and expire right there. Then George would be with Kate Oakenshield right now. Or George would be with Sam Beth. And Sam Beth would take care of him properly. She, Daughter of Babylon, would know what to do with George. She was an astronomer, a brunette, and a dreamer in the most literal sense of the word.

“You don’t belong with me,” said Irene.

“You’re not in your right mind,” said George. He carefully made a mark on one of the papers in front of him and set it off to the left.

“Maybe you belong with Sam Beth,” said Irene.

“Who?” said George. “Patrice?”

Irene began to move distractedly between the pieces of his universe model. She touched a galaxy with her left hand, a galaxy with her right hand. She stepped carefully around a single star, though she had no idea what it was doing out all on its own. She had seen George’s calculations, his attempts at solving for a plane of symmetry in the universe, his attempts to fold it back on itself across a single plane and find that each half had a match on the other side. She felt the magnetism in his body, felt it pulling on her, making her try to find his words sensible, convincing. She felt she could almost let go, just nod, smile. She had to fight.

“Now you’re being crazy,” said George.

“No, you’re being blind. Maybe Patrice really loves you,” said Irene. “Just by chance. Real love. Not by design.”

“You love me,” said George.

“No, I don’t.” Irene corrected him sharply. “George. It’s not how we thought. I am conditioned to feel something for you, but it’s not love. It’s training. Maybe Sam Beth loves you for real. Reach out to her. Why not? She’s smart, and she believes in you.”

“So do you,” said George.

“I believe in nothing. No, correction,” she added. “You’re right. I believe in my experiment. Which is the only thing that’s ever been what it’s supposed to be. That’s what I believe in. Observe. Collect data. Record that data. Make conclusions dependent on the data and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.”

George shook his head. “I’m not going to fall in love with Sam Beth just because you tell me to,” he said. He smiled and she felt her heart lurch. She could just say OK. She could just laugh and forget the rest. But then, but then, there was still the fact of who her father was, who her mother was, who she was. She couldn’t just laugh and forget that.

“At least give her a try. You’d be stupid not to.”

“Not stupid, just happy,” said George.

“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Irene admonished him. “You embarrass yourself and you embarrass me. Don’t you understand that we’re fools? We’re tricked. We’re misled. You’re gold and I’m dross. You’re teak and I’m fire. The fact that you don’t know that is an embarrassment to both of us. It was a trick, George. It is. A trick.”

“It doesn’t matter what it was or what it is. It only matters what it does.”

“This is what it does,” said Irene. “This is how it ends.”

“No, it’s not!” He slammed his hand down on the desk and glared at her, eyes full of fire. “You think you know yourself, but you don’t. I know you. I see you.”

“No, you don’t!” she screamed back at him, suddenly ferocious. “You see nothing. I am just the ruins of their plan. I am the hopeless residue of everything that they did wrong, George. I’m not worthy to be yours, and if you weren’t brainwashed by them to want me, you would see it. I can’t drink, because I’m too scared of falling down drunk. I can’t have sex—I am too scared of falling in love. I stand on bridges, stand there and stand there, scared to death of falling. I can’t even fall asleep without controlling my dreams. Dreamer? Oh, yes I am. I’m falling, falling, falling all the time. I’m half an inch from suicide, whichever way I turn.”

“You adorable idiot,” said George, now quieter. “Is that what you think?” He stood up from his desk and came toward her, but she held her hand up for him to stay away, and he stopped.

“You’ve had sex, if you didn’t notice. You’ve fallen in love. Done.”

Irene said nothing. Her jaw worked back and forth.

“You think you stand on bridges because you are afraid to die? Baby, you’re the least afraid to die of anyone I have ever known, and the place you stand up on that bridge, that’s the place where you should know that more than any other time. Suicide? Hell, no. That bridge is where you know your impulse is to live. Walking around in our normal lives, on sidewalks, on floors, on the ground, we don’t have to make that decision to live or die. But on the bridge, you’re making that decision: LIVE. With your whole body. That’s where you show how strong you are, Irene. I get that the bridge is where you meet your demon, yes, but that’s why you go there, to kick its ass.”

Irene was breathing heavily. She said, “Well, I’m still afraid to drink.”

“Drink or don’t drink,” he said. “I promise you, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

She leaned against the door frame, trying to think about everything he had just said.

“My head hurts,” said George. “I just want things to go back to how they were.”

But Irene turned and walked away.

*   *   *

When she had gone, George felt sick. He believed that she would come back. But he would miss her in the interim.

He picked up his phone and used a remote to switch off the light in the room. Instantly, his head felt better, and he felt less worried about encroaching visitations. He felt his way over to the middle of the room and lay down on the cool concrete floor in the center of his universe model. He looked up through the pieces of his model and saw nothing. One benefit to being in the basement: total darkness. He swiped a finger across his phone and dialed his mother, the bright screen lighting up his face and the poles right around his body.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Hi,” she said.

“Mom,” he said. “You have to fix this.”

“I did fix it, baby,” she said. “This is it after it’s fixed.”

“No, this is wrong,” he said. He felt so tired.

“I’m sorry you are having a hard time,” she said. “But this is right.”

“I want her back,” said George. He felt like he might be five years old. How could she have gone? How could she have left him? “You did this. You fix it. I miss her!”

“George, let’s not go back over the same territory.”

George pressed his hand around his forehead and squeezed.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Of course not. But it’s OK. You don’t have to understand everything. Just let me fix it, and move on.”

“But you’re not fixing it. You’re ruining it.”

“George, you think you love her, but you don’t. You’ve had your head turned by some crazy woman with a crystal ball. I know you like that sort of thing, George, but it’s just irresponsible to make your life decisions based on some fortune-teller.”

“She cared about me. I felt it. She knew me. She was Irene’s mother.”

“She didn’t know you, and she wasn’t capable of caring about anyone. I’m sorry she was Irene’s mother. That was a mistake I made that I will never forgive myself for.”

“A mistake?”

“I used to be kind of an idiot, George. But I was young, and I won’t apologize too much for it, because I was only trying to love you, to save you.”

“Save me from what?”

George heard his mother’s voice tighten up. “You’re better off free from this entanglement, darling. Let’s just say I acted in your best interests, then and now.”

“I want to talk to Dad. Is he there? Are you with him?”

“Actually, no,” she said.

“Where did he go?”

“George, forget about your father right now! He has been nothing but a disappointment.”

“To you, Mom. He was a disappointment to you, never to me.”

She stopped talking.

“Let’s return to the point, OK?” George said firmly. “When were you acting on my best interests, exactly? When you trained up this girl to fall in love with me, or when you told her it was all a trick and made her leave me and go to California?”

“George…”

“As if she couldn’t love me on her own? Am I so broken—” He coughed and realized he was about to kick something. He sat up and scootched across the floor, away from his model. He didn’t want to kick it or punch it.

“Don’t say broken. That’s not what you are,” she said.

“You didn’t believe that she could love me without you making her do it?”

“I was wrong,” she said. “I said I was wrong then, but I have fixed it now.”

“It doesn’t feel fixed!”

George felt his hand clench together as if he was going to punch something immediately.

“And I’m going to punch something!” he added.

“Well, go ahead and punch something,” his mother said. “Do it. I dare you.”

“Fine!” said George. He pointed his phone around the room like a weak little flashlight and lit on a pile of folded cardboard boxes, the remnants of his move down to the basement from his lab upstairs.

“Fine!” his mother said. George made a fist and slammed it into the pile of boxes. They slid around and crushed beneath the weight of his arm.

“I did it,” said George. “I punched something. I’m serious!”

“George, you need to punch everything! And start with yourself! Look, we just need a reframe. You can see this as a positive, eventually, and you’re going to end up thanking me.”

“Bullshit,” said George. He punched the boxes again. He felt strong and angry. Almost like he might stand up on his feet, turn on the light, storm around.

“You’re free, George!” she said. “You know everything now. You know what happened, what I planned for you, what I did. So hate me. That’s fine. Hate me all your life. But now you’re free to find someone you can love that’s not all tied up with that nightmare. Someone good. Someone new. Think of how many girls are out there, George: smart, pretty girls with no skeletons in the closet. This girl’s not worth it, George. You think she is, but she’s not. I tried to make her something worthy of you, but I failed. So now you try it. Find someone on your own—I promise to stay out of it. George, you’re a handsome boy, so beautiful and funny, and you’ve got everything you need to find a wonderful wife and have a happy life. Happiness, George. Not with some crazy, twisted, little accident from Toledo.”

“I want her back,” said George. He punched the pile of boxes one, two, three, four times, one for each word. “And I’m going to have her. This has nothing to do with you. Do you hear me? Nothing to do with you.”

*   *   *

Irene sat on the plane in a window seat. The flight would take four hours. She had never been on an airplane before in her life, but now that her mother was dead, she felt released from her solemn promise that she would not fly. She had a young man next to her in a coat and tie, a woman in sweatpants next to him on the aisle. They were both reading magazines. They had been in the air for thirty minutes when someone announced that drinks would be served. The flight attendant stopped her metal cabinet in the aisle next to Irene’s row and asked if they would like anything to drink.

“I’d like a gin,” said Irene.

“Gin and tonic?” asked the flight attendant. She was a redhead, her bright hair pulled back into a stiff bun, her lipstick very crisply applied, a dull burgundy.

“No,” said Irene. “Just gin.”

Irene passed over her credit card. The business-suit guy next to her was having tomato juice. The woman in sweatpants was having Diet Coke. So they didn’t have to pay anything, but Irene had to pay because she was having gin. The gin came in a little bottle, and the flight attendant gave Irene a clear plastic cup with five rounded, hollow ice cubes in it. Irene twisted the knob and let the tray fall from the back of the seat in front of her. She set the cup with the ice on it but kept the gin in her hand.

“I’m going to drink this,” she said to the man next to her.

“OK,” he said. He was reading a magazine about running and competing in triathlons. The article he was looking at talked about how it was a good idea to finish every run really strong because it would give you a good feeling about starting up your next workout.

“I’ve never had a drink before,” she said. “Not even wine. Not even Communion wine.”

The man next to her turned the page to read more of his article, and then reached into the pocket of his suit coat to retrieve some earbuds, which he applied to his ears without bothering to turn on any sort of music-playing device. The woman in the sweatpants was sipping her Diet Coke and reading In Style.

Irene twisted the cap off the gin, the noise from the plane making a low hum in her head. She put the little bottle to her lips and paused, knowing that a whole life of keeping herself in check was about to end. She had not wanted to be like her mother. She had never had a drop to drink, never taken a puff on a cigarette or a lick of a line of coke, even after it had been sniffed away, and never hovered, breathing deeply, around a group of people smoking pot. She had not wanted to lose control.

Her lips parted and the gin went in. It didn’t taste like much. She swallowed it, and it felt warm inside her esophagus, like it had left a trail of heat down it that could be detected by an infrared camera applied to Irene’s chest. This is where the alcohol went. With the second swallow, Irene had a black realization and understood herself a little. I thought it was the same as sex, she thought. I thought drinking was the same as sex, and it makes you lose control, and that’s why I didn’t ever want to do it. She emptied the rest of the little gin bottle into her mouth and then followed up by crunching the ice in the cup between her teeth, letting it slide in slivers into her throat. This is why I wanted to stay a virgin, thought Irene. It’s because drinking is like sex. Except it’s not. Is it?

There were no effects. The plane landed safely. She had flown for the first time in her life, and nothing bad had happened. Her mother had been terribly, wonderfully wrong about the plane crash predictions. When she got off the plane, she only felt a little tired. She registered for the conference at the hotel, checked in to her room, undressed, and went to bed. I drank alcohol, she thought. I had sex. I’m just like my mother. I’m just like everyone.

In that moment, Irene felt sorry for her mother. What if, after all, she had only been trying to do something good? What if she had always been working for Irene’s benefit, even in her drunken way, and Irene’s success? Irene had judged her harshly, and that was fair. But if it was fair, it was also cold. In the shadow of the gin in her body, Irene felt a bud of warmth for her mother, a bud of something she might someday recognize as forgiveness.

*   *   *

I lie on the ground in the Hinterland. The sky is pale over Dark House. Since I threw myself into that broken hole, it has closed over. My mother’s house, Dark House, and the wishing well stand like silent sentinels on the square. The buildings are crumbling and fading, and I know they’ll soon be gone, along with all the evidence that I had ever shared this dream with my mother or allowed her to collaborate in its shape. I lie there on the scrubby, dry grass missing her, missing George, missing everything I have lost, gained, and then lost again in such a brutally short amount of time. I want to sleep, but I am already asleep.

I sit up and look around the town square of this place that I’ve built. I’m the only resident of it now. I’m the only resident of my entire life. George is gone. He was my love, and I his golem. I was built for him by a stranger and then yanked away from him by that same heartless stranger. Now even Sally is gone. I had not realized she was even there, but she was, moving the pieces around on her stupid chessboard. I was not even a pawn. I was a red checker chip, invading the black-and-white board. I resent her. That’s an understatement.

Now I’m all alone. What do I want?

I stand up to play Mother’s old game with the wishing well. I close my eyes and say, “Show me something pretty.” I pull out a handful of brightly colored fall leaves. I toss them into the air and they float away, dissolving into puffs and fragments. “Show me something funny,” I say. I reach deep into the well, and my hand touches something rough. I pull out a carrot that’s grown two knobs and a peg, so it looks like genitals. This makes me laugh. I toss the carrot up as high as I can, and it dissolves as well. I reach my hand back into the well. “What do I want?” I say. “What do I want? Show me what I want.”

My hand brushes against something soft, like fabric. I tug on it, and I pull it up out of the well. It is a shirt, and it is attached to a man. George. George is here in the Hinterland with me, and I lift him out and set him down. He is sitting on the side of the well. He’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and no shoes, and he’s smiling, but his eyes don’t focus.

“George,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

“George,” I say. I take him by the arms, pull at him, shake him a bit. Then I feel that his body is so close to me, and I press myself into it. I put my arms around him and pull him close, and I feel how big he is, and how alive, and how good he feels being there with me, just another human being that I happen to love. He puts his arms around me, too, without saying anything, as if it is an autonomic reflex. He doesn’t even need to engage his brain to do it.

“Are you dreaming, George?” I say, my chin tucked over his shoulder and my chest against his. He is sitting on the well and holding me close. He says nothing.

I run my hands up his back, stroking him. I feel the length of him, up to his neck, his head, and I bury my hands in his soft shining hair, and my face in his neck. He is so dear, so precious. How can I ever give him up? Then my hand touches something bad. It is wet and spongy, and I pull away. I stare at him and really try to focus through the dreamspell, and get some clarity in my eyes. I see that something is coming out of George’s head. I examine him. I pull apart his hair. There on the side of his head is a terrible wound, a deep aberration in his beautiful head, and it is spewing ganglion and bloody membranes and bits of something that I don’t understand.

“George, something is wrong with you,” I say. “Something is wrong with your head. Are you OK? Are you OK, George?”

He just smiles and sits there, with this hideous blob coming out of his brain, and I become frantic and try to shake him and pry his mouth open. But he doesn’t listen. I hit his face.

“George,” I say, and I am crying. “I need you to understand me. There is something wrong with your head. Please listen. Wake up, George. I see something. I need you to listen.”

But George does not wake up, and neither do I. We just stay there holding each other in the Hinterland, and I know that the well has not failed me, and that this is what I want, for sure, forever. The terrible fact is, however, that I cannot have him. And in the Hinterland my dreaming self knows this. And I’m crying by the well, holding my boyfriend, and he’s got bloody brains coming out of his head, and there’s nothing I can do.