He looked to her in that moment like a patient who just wanted to be given a shot. Get it over with.
“I’ve thought about it a ton,” she said, “when it all went to shit.”
She told him about a weekend they’d had in a yurt near Santa Cruz. It had been a few weeks after Lyle had been asked to speak at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. While he was there, the talk got called off because of a shooting at a nearby school. Lyle remembered that part well enough. After the shooting, he had been witness to an argument among several researchers at the CDC, one of whom had a student at the school. The kid was okay but the mom was enraged. Enraged, she’d railed against the gun culture. Another researcher took offense and railed back. They’d nearly come to blows. On the way out of the parking lot, the second researcher, giving the middle finger to the first researcher, plowed into the security hut and, while unhurt, totaled his car.
“That’s when your withdrawal really intensified,” Melanie said. “I’m not sure if what happened in Atlanta had anything to do with it. That’s what I thought. But then I started to wonder whether that was convenient and it might not be us—”
“But—”
“Listen, Lyle, I appreciate that you devoted your life to helping people and then found that people weren’t always reciprocating, weren’t always helping themselves—that they were hurting themselves.” She saw that he wanted to interrupt again. She held up her hands. “You must’ve known that all along. It’s always been a razor’s-edge fight. So I suspect it was something in you, or us. Relationships live on the razor’s edge, too. The great passion had subsided for us, the easy part. It was work, all of it; you got overwhelmed.”
“No, I—” He stopped. He didn’t have an immediate answer. Just more questions: How do I get it back? How do I work through this soup?
Something very bad is going to happen, Melanie. I need to figure out how to stop it. He hated those words and didn’t know how to ask for help.
He couldn’t get any words out.
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Melanie said.
“No—”
“Just listen. You’ve got this powerful brain, the most powerful brain. That power, any power, has a flip side. It might be that you’ve gotten off track. I think that’s what happened in Africa. You said there was a conspiracy, some terrible man-made thing. But there was no conspiracy or anything like that. Just a disease that you didn’t want to—”
“Something’s going to happen.”
Now she smiled with such love and caring that it couldn’t possibly be seen as patronizing even though she was filled with pity. “Lyle…”
A car pulled into the driveway, crackling gravel beneath the tires as it came to a stop. Melanie stared at the car and then turned as the screen door opened behind her.
“Daddy!” the boy said.
“Sweetie, he’ll be right inside. Can you go wait for us?”
The boy somehow understood she really meant this particular request. “K,” he said again, and he disappeared.
From the boxy silver car stood a tall man in a T-shirt. He walked around the front of the car with a basketball under his long arm, wearing shorts.
“What happened to your eye?”
“Elbow,” the man said. “I gotta take up chess.” He smiled at Melanie and then offered Lyle a guileless nod. Dark stubble peppered his chin. “Eh, who am I kidding? I stink at chess.”
“George,” he said. “Are you a neighbor?”
“Lyle. I’m…”
“Oh, of course.” Recognition took over his face. He nodded again, a second greeting, this one with a certain respect for the situation. “Nice to meet you, Lyle.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me interrupt, and I want to go inside and see Evan.” This was guileless, too. It gave Lyle what would be his tiniest solace when he thought about this later. At least Melanie wasn’t with a jerk. Now all he could think was, Holy shit, she’s got a boyfriend or husband or live-in whatever, maybe the father of her child, or not? The screen door closed behind the man.
“Peño.” She looked at him and he was impassive, that same ingrown look that had gotten them here in the first place.
“It’s a beautiful family.”
Tears dripped down Melanie’s cheeks.
He knew what it meant. He wasn’t the victim here.
A numb subway ride home. It wasn’t that Lyle hadn’t been expecting this when he went to see Melanie. He had been expecting anything, nothing. He had let himself walk into a situation unexposed. If he could have seen himself at a distance, with perspective, he might’ve realized how valuable that was, how necessary and, more than that, how much it was like the old version of Lyle. He walked into situations unexposed, dangerous ones, emotionally fraught ones, deadly ones, and he led with his curiosity and an essential faith things would work out. Now, on the subway, his openness left him blown apart.
“I hope they kill every one of those jerks,” a woman said to another woman sitting in a seat next to and beneath where Lyle stood with his bike. She was evidently referring to the proposed show of arms on Capitol Hill.
The other woman had her arms wrapped around herself, as if cold. She squeezed her arms. “I wonder if this is what it feels like before a civil war? You don’t see it and then it’s all of a sudden there and people are picking sides.”
The woman who had made the comment looked at her phone. Lyle glanced over her shoulder at the political website she read. He couldn’t make out the particulars but could tell it was a firebrand, lamenting and attacking the other side. The woman read and clucked her tongue and muttered to herself, bemused and irritated by what she read, increasingly furious at the other side. It brought him back to Melanie and her description of the weekend in the yurt where she said he’d lost it. That was easier for Lyle to think about than the image of the boy and the man. The yurt. Lyle could only distantly recall it. When he did, he pictured himself that weekend as a lightbulb that was flickering, losing energy, petering out. Or maybe the better analogy was to a dying star; pulsing with dead energy, poised to explode into nothing.
People got on and off the train at the last stop in Oakland. The metal tube hummed and shimmied beneath the bay. Lyle held tight to his bike’s handlebars. He found void and shadows when he tried to understand what had piqued him so much that weekend in the yurt. Melanie blamed it on that painful trip to the CDC in Atlanta. En route home at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, he’d waited three hours in security, which had been all backed up because of the shooting, and then missed his plane. Stuck there, he’d sat and watched the security guards and found he was imagining them as immune-system cells, carefully looking about the way b-cells and t-cells, the immune system’s two power brokers, combed the body and targeted foreign invaders. What a system, arguably the most sophisticated in the body. The defenders roamed freely, instantly sensing danger and then sending waves of soldiers to attack. Not just that: the soldiers adapted. They would, at the rate of a supercomputer, try out a trillion different combinations of proteins to figure out which could kill the invader. It required a system this powerful to survive in a world with a trillion different possible invaders, from flu to cancer to random toxins. A mad scramble for survival, the immune system scrapping it out against the bacteria or virus, each desperate to survive.
Any system so powerful, though, had a dangerous side. No great survival mechanism or instinct goes without its dark sibling. Autoimmune disorders had blossomed, or, at least, we were seeing more of them. Our great defense system, the man on the wall, turning around out of control and blowing everything inside the village to shit.