9

Irene’s phone barked in her pocket. She fished it out and looked at the number.

“Hello?” she said. “Sparks.”

She crossed a two-lane street decorated with hanging baskets of geraniums, and she was standing at the head of the main quad.

“Hello,” said Belion. “Belion.”

“Oh, hi, babe,” said Irene. She looked down the quad at the glistening arcs and spires of the university’s buildings. “I’m in Toledo.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

“I’m on campus,” said Irene, “Right now.”

“What’s it like?” Belion wanted to know.

“It’s nice,” said Irene. She walked straight down the quad, across the grass and the criss-crossing sidewalk squares. She passed a tall, stately marble building on the left, and on the right a smaller one, capped with a dome and surrounded by a portico. The style of the buildings was Greek revival, because obviously, Pythagoras and everything. Yet the tallest building, the one at the end of the quad, was different. Its roofs more Persian, its spires twisted and eastern, its doorways arched. And at the top, a layered series of rectangles, each one smaller, until on the last was mounted a long dome, the only elliptical observatory in the world.

“I’m coming up there,” said Belion. “I just wanted to let you know.”

“But why are you coming?” Irene asked.

“I’m just coming. I thought I was supposed to come.”

Irene identified Herschel Hall and shoved the map into her laptop bag. She took the phone in her hand.

“You don’t have to, though. What about work?”

“Work?” Belion sounded confused.

“Or the apartment?”

“I’ll sublet it. Craigslist.”

“Well, great. You should come then. Come then.”

“Oh, I am coming.”

“Great, come.”

“And I mean that as a double entendre, where you say one thing and mean not only that thing but an additional thing.”

“I get it.”

“A sexual thing.”

“Right.”

“Let’s just say I’m dying to know what’s behind that door, but I don’t want to have to shrink myself to get through.”

“I’m entering a building, Belion. My reception may become sketchy.”

“What building could be inside that cave, Irene?”

“It’s not a cave, Belion, it’s an internationally renowned school of science and math.”

“I’m coming up there,” said Belion. “And we’re going to straighten out all this funny business.”

“Enjoy,” said Irene. “I left you my mother’s address. That’s where I’m staying.”

“I can find it,” Belion said. “I’ll see you in a while.”

*   *   *

Irene pushed the END CALL button on her phone. She opened the doorway to Herschel Hall and found the building directory between the gleaming elevators. There was her name, right beside the number 201. So, second floor. Upstairs. There might even be windows.

She stepped into the elevator alone, but once inside she was joined by a tall woman with bare feet and long brown hair. The woman hummed to herself as the elevator rose to the second floor, making no eye contact with Irene. When the car stopped, she drifted out between the opening doors and was gone. Irene got off the elevator and found a steel door marked 201. She swung the door open.

Her new lab was huge. Her heart skipped and jumped. There was a wall of windows but flat slats of metal made up shades that locked out all the light. Irene let the door swing shut behind her, and it clicked tightly. The lab was dim. Granite tables flanked one wall, and her microcollider, brought on a truck from the basement at Carnegie Mellon, sat disassembled in the middle of the room. Once, it was the shiniest thing. Now it almost appeared to have shrunk. On the far wall there was a desk, and on the desk was the only source of light: a laptop. Behind the laptop sat a girl.

“Hello,” said the girl. “So you’re here. Let the party begin.”

The girl’s voice was dry, her inflection sour.

“Who are you?” asked Irene.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl.

Irene reached out to the wall and flicked on a light. Fluorescent bulbs overhead came to life, and the room was bright.

“Ugh, switch to LED, for the love of god,” said the girl without raising her face from the computer screen.

“What?”

“It’s the switch on the left,” she said. “So move your hand a bit to the left, and there it will be. Or, you can read the label. It’s spelled L-E-D.”

Irene switched the LED lights on and the fluorescent ones off. Then she frowned and wished she hadn’t been so obedient. So automatically compliant.

“Who are you?” asked Irene again.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl again. Irene set her laptop bag on a table and walked toward the girl. She was Korean. Her hair was braided up into a bun on the top of her head. She wore a tracksuit—blue with white stripes running up the arms and legs.

“Yes, but who are you, what is your capacity here, what are you doing in my lab?”

“I’m your RA,” said Sam Beth. “Your graduate student.”

“Oh,” said Irene. “I thought I would be able to interview for an assistant.”

“Not assistant. Research assistant.”

“Still, I should be able to interview—”

“Trust me, there’s no one better,” said Sam Beth. She looked up from the laptop finally, and stared down Irene. “That’s why you got me.”

“Oh, I see,” said Irene. She noticed, seeing Sam Beth full on, that the girl had tattoos or face paint under her eyes, three red dots marking each cheekbone.

Sam Beth rolled her eyes and went back to her laptop.

Irene continued her inspection of the room. The tables were clean and bare, but there were holes drilled in a circle in the floor, holes that appeared to have been recently vacated, as if the room had been recently rearranged and something had been taken out.

“What was here?” Irene asked.

“Oh, the universe,” said Sam Beth.

“What universe?”

“This one,” said Sam Beth. “A model. The best model we could make anyway. It rotated. It had axes.”

“Where is it now?” Irene asked.

“It’s getting set up in his new lab. In the basement. It barely fits.”

The sourness of Sam Beth’s tone folded in on itself and became hatred.

“Whose lab was this?”

“George Dermont,” said Sam Beth. “My old boss. He was a physicist. You’ve heard of him?”

“Yes, yes,” Irene said. “My mother sent me clippings. I know who he is.”

“Awww, that’s cute,” said Sam Beth. “Your mother sent you clippings out to Mississippi, so you could read about real astronomers and what they do? Your mother must be a nice lady.”

“She’s dead,” said Irene, biting the word off tight and savoring it in her mouth, like a cherry.

Sam Beth snapped her laptop shut. “Oh, sorry,” she said.

“You can go,” said Irene. “You won’t work. I’ll interview for an assistant.”

“So emotional,” said Sam Beth on her way out the door. “Did you get to be a big important scientist like that? I doubt it.”

The door closed behind her. Irene switched back to fluorescent lights. “This is how we do it in the basement,” she muttered.

Irene had not gotten to be a big important scientist by being emotional. Nor by opening doors smoothly on their hinges, walking through those openings, head held high. Rather, she had got in by chewing relentlessly at the place where the wall met the floor, chewing from the outside always in the dark, chewing and chewing while the spit ran down her chin, until there was a hole big enough to pry at, and then prying relentlessly until she could squeeze inside. It was relentless, what she did.

She walked around the lab, circling the holes in the floor. She imagined a body outlined in the center, sketched in with masking tape. Outside the body and inside the circle of holes, there would be words where someone had scribbled, “Mysterious body found on this spot. Cause of death unknown.” The scientist who had worked in this lab, did he feel defeated and wronged? Did he feel like, Fuck it, I’ll never get it right. Or was he right on the verge of something, too?

Probably Sam Beth would go and tell him now what a bitch she was. Irene should have been more authoritative.

“You’ll never make friends by being such a smart-ass, Irene,” her mother had said. “Be lovable. Be small. You’re so small, you’re barely alive. Can you stand to be nice to someone at some point in your life, just to be nice?”

Irene rewound the conversation with Sam Beth in her head. She imagined how the conversation would have gone if her mother’s body inhabited the imagined masking-tape outline on the floor in the center of the universe.

“Hello, who are you?” Irene would have said.

“Oh my god, it’s a body!” Sam Beth would have said.

Not better, just different, thought Irene. She still runs from the room, and I am still here alone.

“I’m sorry,” said Sam Beth from the doorway.

“For what?” Irene asked.

“For being bad,” said Sam Beth. “It’s just that I’d rather work for George.”

“That’s fine,” said Irene. “I’m not bothered.”

“If you weren’t here, he would be,” said Sam Beth. She threw one booted leg up on the door frame and pushed at it, her back pushing against the other side.

“Yeah? Hey, it says here on this sheet that I’m supposed to work with an RA called Patrice.”

“That’s me,” said Sam Beth.

“Your name is Patrice?”

“My name is Sam Beth. That’s my Chaldean name.”

Irene looked up at her with a measured stare.

“Chaldean?”

“Babylon. The Persian Sibyl? Don’t you know anything about the Daughters of Babylon?”

“No,” said Irene. “Do they all have eye dots?”

Sam Beth did not get angry. “If you read those articles your mother sent you, and the work of Dr. Dermont”—she coughed a little bit—“of George, you would know about the whirlwind, and the stormwind, and the significance of the mystic called Sambethe to the room you are standing in, the universe you are inhabiting.”

She pulled the hood of her tracksuit around her face as if it were a monastic cowl. Irene put it together then. This nutbag Dermont, whom her mother kept trying to impress her with, had grand ideas about the shape of the universe as defined by ancient concepts of transformative symmetry. It was stupid stuff, the kind of thing that gets lapped up by pop culture magazines and young people who don’t really understand math.

“Doesn’t he believe that Toledo is built on the ruins of ancient Babylon or something? Like, the Maumee River is the Euphrates?” Irene asked with a gentle sneer.

“The Maumee River is the Tigris,” said Sam Beth. “On an axis of asymmetry defined by the prime meridian, Toledo and Babylon are phenomenological twins.”

“That is just utter bullshit,” said Irene, looking at the paperwork in front of her. “Utter and complete drivel. We need a scouring pad and a bucket, right away. I can smell the ridicule of such a nutty idea still bouncing around in here.”

“It’s OK,” Sam Beth purred. “I know it’s hard to understand. Maybe when you meet him, you’ll discover—”

“Wow, so this is what sycophantic opportunism looks like from the front,” said Irene, staring down Sam Beth who was still standing in the doorway.

“I will always take care of him,” Sam Beth replied. “But how will I take care of you?”

*   *   *

When Irene got back to her mother’s house, Belion was already there, sitting on the sofa, his laptop on his knee.

“I went ahead and set up a hotspot,” he said. “Your mom didn’t have Wi-Fi.”

Later, the lights were out, but the streetlight sent an orange glow into her mother’s bedroom. Irene had changed the sheets, had changed the pillowcases, but the laundry soap was lavender, the fabric softener lavender, and lavender permeated the room. Irene shut the door and closed the blinds. Belion was naked on the bed. His huge bulk sank into the center of this bed, made of high-density foam, conforming to his irregular contours, embracing him. Irene walked over to the bed. She slipped a ponytail holder around her hair and pulled it high and tight on her skull.

“Is it too soon?” he asked her. His words sounded like a prayer, thin and hopeful.

Irene didn’t respond, but climbed onto the foot of the bed and approached him on her knees. She smacked her left hand onto one meaty thigh, her right hand onto the other thigh, and pushed his legs apart sharply. She hooked her elbows under his knees.

“Oh, God,” said Belion. His hand shot out and grabbed a lacy pillow, pressed it against his face.

“Go ahead and yell,” said Irene, making words against his skin. “Alarm the neighbors.”

He stiffened under her, this huge block of flesh that was following her around. If she was being cruel, driving into him only to pull herself away, she felt it was justified, with him being so bold. He brought himself here with his legs wide open, her mother not even buried. So she was cold with him, pulling back just when he needed her most, but in the end she became merciful and sweet. She felt herself unspool inside, a warmth emerging, a generosity of spirit, and she got softer, she let her understanding take over. Then her hesitation wasn’t mean but thoughtful, her mouth not full of teeth but full of tongues.

Why not? She felt herself standing on the side of the bridge, her hair blowing this way and that, looking at the water. Why not unloose her tongue, let it wrap around the first thing that could save it?

“This is all about control with you,” one guy had said, who wanted to feel her breasts against him while they slept.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” she had said. And then she’d dumped him for a guy with a little less enthusiasm for introspection and analysis.

When she was done with Belion, she left him sprawled on the bed and went to the bathroom to clean up. Irene had a saying about mouthwash: “Know Listerine, know oral sex. No Listerine, no oral sex.” It wasn’t snappy, and it wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker, but it went through her head every time she spilled the burning liquid into her mouth and imagined all the little germs popping like balloons. She could hold Listerine in her mouth forever. But then she spit it out. It was full of alcohol.

Irene loosed her ponytail, washed her face, and went back to bed. When she saw Belion, he had pulled the sheet up. She thought he was asleep, and tucked herself as quietly as possible into a corner of the bed. But he was not asleep.

“Babe please, can I feel inside you?”

“No,” said Irene. She imagined a large, blunt finger scrubbing around in her underwear. Pushing itself against her pubic bone. Thumping away at her.

“I’ll make you feel better, I promise,” said Belion.

“I don’t feel bad,” said Irene. “I feel glad.”

*   *   *

In the morning, when Irene opened her eyes, he was still there. That night, at a welcome banquet for new faculty and students, he would be her date. The institute would announce her addition to the staff, welcome freshmen and new graduate students. She was content with taking Belion as her date. With him in town, she felt more like herself. She was Irene Sparks, girlfriend of Belion, virgin from the neck down, scrapper, chewer, magic bean eschewer.

She got up, opened the blinds. Belion lay inert on the bed.

“Get up, Belion! Time to wake up!”

Irene stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower, then began to count in her head as she brushed her teeth. Irene finished brushing her teeth and put her hand against the glass shower door. It was still cold.

Belion had rolled over to her side of the bed and had buried his face in her pillow, her mother’s pillow.

“You know what’s funny,” he said. He rolled over again and was lying on his back. “Is when people say, like, ‘He took it in the shorts’ or ‘I stabbed you in the shorts.’”

“Those aren’t real phrases,” said Irene.

“Yes, they are,” said Belion. “You know, ‘He took it in the shorts.’”

Irene stopped fiddling with things on the sink and stood with her hand on the shower stall’s glass pane. Just waiting for it to heat up so she could get inside. Belion giggled to himself. She could see his balls, so ponderous, lolling against his thigh.

“Belion,” she said, “there is no such phrase.”

“There is so,” he said belligerently.

“No, there’s not,” she said.

“Fine,” said Belion, “let’s do a search on ‘took it in the shorts.’”

Belion reached his hand over to the floor and pulled his laptop up onto the bed. He rolled over onto his stomach, so she could see his furred butt and the broad expanse of his back as he typed into the tiny machine. One thing about Belion: for a big fat guy, he was really very lithe.

Irene felt the glass get hot. She shed her robe and slipped into the shower. She could no longer see him.

“Here it is,” hollered Belion, “Listen to this: ‘As a consequence, I think the foxes kind of took it in the shorts. They ended up getting persecuted by coyotes.’ And that’s on the PBS Web site!”

Irene poured shampoo into her hand. “You’re making that up!” she said.

“Here’s another one,” he called to her. “‘Needless to say, fame was not to knock this time around, and the boys took it in the shorts!’ Two is proof! Your rule!”

There was a pause. “OK, well, I must have made up ‘stabbed you in the shorts’ because there’s nothing on that. But it would be funny, if there was.”

Irene rolled her eyes.

“Baby, can I take a shower with you?”

Irene said nothing.

*   *   *

Scrabbling through her mother’s desk, looking for the keys to the garage, she found this poem:

How did I get you? I’ll tell you.

I bought an old crock at an auction, a brown crock marked with a five, for five gallons. I paid twelve dollars for the crock. The crock was dusty inside with cobwebs and plaster, and I reached in, down deep inside, and I felt you in there. You were warm and dry, curled in the bottom. My hand touched your back. I wanted to see what was in there, and so I found you. Dust in your eyelashes and spider web sticking your eyes shut tight.

I knit you out of my own hair. I made you out of three hundred daisies strung together. I collected your pieces for years, and then put you together, click by click, until you suddenly cried.

Out on a farm there is a long line of sunken spots where an underground spring runs down the hill underneath the grass and topsoil. In the middle of summer, I found deep holes in some of the spots, damp and mossy—not animal holes. And I lay down on the grass, and stuck my arm down deep inside, to see if I could touch the water. But I touched your hair, stuck with earth to your head, and you were damp, and when I brought you out, there was water on your face that looked like dew.

That’s how I found you.

Irene looked at the artifact in her hand and found herself wondering who the woman was who had written this poem, and for what child it had been written. Even as she wondered, she knew: it was written by her mother for her. Death is final, and there is no going back to ask questions. Her mother was gone from the world and gone from the dreamworld. But Irene had questions, questions she could never ask the drunk woman who was her mother, but maybe when she was dead, and they were both just dead people on equal footing, Irene would be able to ask all the questions: Why set a fire, and burn down our house? Why have a baby, if you didn’t want one?

What is my emotional connection to the dead person that was my mother? Irene wanted to know.

She picked up her own keys and drove to her favorite bridge for the first time since her return to Toledo. Maybe standing on the bridge, in the quiet space before the fall, everything would make sense.

*   *   *

Toledo’s Anthony Wayne Bridge is blue and white and wide. Two tall towers are draped with huge suspension cables, and the bridge rises in a high arc over the Maumee River. It is ninety years old. In Pittsburgh, Irene had spent many moments on the George Westinghouse Bridge, an arch bridge made of concrete, staring down at where the train tracks crossed the brown water of Turtle Creek.

Now Irene parked her car in a back corner of the Owens Corning lot and walked up the bridge’s long ramp toward the river. Cars went whizzing past her, decelerating as they left the bridge, and Irene felt her body relax a bit. On the Anthony Wayne Bridge, there is a tall cyclone fence along the walkway. This fence is too high to climb without attracting attention and curves inward at the top for extra safety. Irene always found it funny that when you get farther along and the bridge is over water, this fence just stops. Between the two towers, you can lean over the railing as far as you like. If you lean far enough, you can fall right in. It is as if the people who define the safety regulations for bridges did not consider the idea that a person would ever go near the railing of a bridge over water, that they would only be in danger of spilling off a bridge over land.

Irene knew that Bernice had killed herself—maybe not through a tumble down some stairs, but through an intentional consumption of a poisonous amount of alcohol, over days, hours, or years. She knew the impulse that led her mother down to death. Or did she? Where did it start? With the fire? With the birth of her daughter? What was the moment that led to the rest of her life, and how could Irene steer past that moment, guide herself to safety?

Suicide has an event horizon, Irene thought. Death does not. Death can take you quickly, and you are gone, but suicide has a slow approach. It takes years sometimes, or it takes a whole lifetime. But there must be some pivotal moment, a moment that goes by as quickly as any other in your life. A point of no return: the trigger is pulled, the body tips forward or backward off the bridge, the chair is kicked. After this moment has passed, you keep on living, but it’s a different kind of life. A life in which nothing you decide or think or do can change what is happening. Time stretches, as you pass through it. Some say you see your life pass before your eyes. That would take a long time. Longer than the four seconds it takes to fall from a bridge and be crushed on the water’s surface. But because of the special behavior of light and time around the singularity of a death, there is enough time. There is unlimited time. And then you are dead.

If you crossed the event horizon of an actual black hole, and your friend was standing safely outside the event horizon, watching you, it would be the same. You pass an invisible threshold. You cannot tell when you are beyond hope. There’s no signpost. You might be saying something, like, “I can’t handle this pain anymore. I want to die.” To you, traveling toward the singularity, the words would come out like normal, and you would hear them coming out of your mouth one after the other, a perfectly rational explanation for what you were doing. But to your friend, outside the accretion disk, the words would come at increasingly perplexing intervals. The gaps between the words would stretch and stretch, until years passed between “I” and “want” and then decades until “to,” and maybe your friend would age and sicken and die herself before the word “die” managed to reach her. At which point she would have already found out what you wanted to do.

Some physicists had written about how a person entering a black hole might experience the entire future history of the universe, wrapped around that endless last moment of life. Irene just wanted to know … when did her mother begin to want to die?

“I see you falling,” Irene’s mother had told her. “I see you falling to your death. It’s happening, almost every time I close my eyes.” This was when she had forbidden Irene to travel by air, insisted Irene drive everywhere, never visit Europe. They had been to South America by boat. “Airplanes are not for you,” her mother said. “Trust me.” And while Irene had nodded and complied, she had privately thought it was all part of the same bullshit. And yet when your mother tells you you are going to die, and how, can she really be ignored? What kind of mother tells her daughter this, and then dies falling down the stairs?

I don’t miss you at all, Irene thought to her mother. Whenever I start to think I’m missing you, I remind myself that it is nonsense.

Irene passed the first high tower, and a jogger went huffing past her, going toward the center of the bridge. She slowed and watched him go, and then she went up there herself, stood in the middle, where the suspension cables dip down to the bridge’s deck. From here you can hoist yourself up onto the main cable, and using the guide wires you can walk your way up it right to the top of the tower. Most jumpers think they have to climb these cables to get high enough to die, but Irene knew that this was not the case. You could die just as well from the drop at the center of the bridge. Everyone knew that climbers didn’t really jump, and real jumpers didn’t climb. Irene stood there at the center of the bridge, listening to the cars hissing past behind her. A whiff of the harbor reached her nose as she leaned on the railing, her body pressing out into the air, probing for the transition between standing and falling, the point at which impact becomes inevitable.

She looked down at the shallow water on the west side of the river, where a pair of fishermen had managed to upend their boat. They struggled with it, sinking into the sand, trying to get it right.