~ ~ ~
Viola's body naturally expels the pregnancy. The doctor hands the strange blue child to Viola without asking if Viola wants to hold it. She cradles the strange blue child. She puts two fingers over its closed transparent eyelids. “I’m not very good at mourning,” Viola says to the strange blue child. “I’m not sure how to mourn you. I’ve had dreams about you, but it wasn’t like this.” Robert stands beside her in the scrubs the hospital has given him. He can’t figure out what to do with his hands, whether he should be touching the strange blue child, what. “Robert, it’s okay,” Viola says. “You can cry too. No one is going to feel strange about it. You’re allowed.”
They pass the strange blue child around the room. Everyone kisses it, gently, on the forehead.
“I thought this one was going to make it,” Viola’s uncle tells Robert, in the hallway afterwards. “We bought all these baby toys. We were pretty sure this time. Like we had this feeling, she seemed to be doing so well. And then when we had to take all those toys and things back… ”
Robert’s mother and father, who live in Geist, a suburb north of Indianapolis, arrive at the hospital bearing beautiful boxes of expensive Chinese takeout.
~ ~ ~
they give the child a name. There is a small ceremony.
~ ~ ~
robert and viola go to the new grocery store that has just opened in Indianapolis. It is a wonderful grocery store, two stories, with a rooftop parking deck. They pick up kale and nori and a pair of grassfed steaks. “It’s a little too far to come regularly,” Robert says. There are beers in the cold beer aisle that Robert has read about on craft brewing blogs: ninety-minute IPAs, one-hundred-and-twenty-minute IPAs. Next to the refrigeration unit is a table set up for a beer tasting. A tall black man wearing a serious expression hands Robert a small plastic cup of beer. “It’s infused with basil,” he says. “I think it actually tastes quite remarkable.”
Viola and Robert sit at the coffee and wine bar at the front of the new grocery store, drinking coffee and flipping through a copy of NUVO, the free weekly. There’s an arts festival at Eagle Creek Park.
“Those are always horrible,” Viola says. “Some band playing like covers of Steppenwolf and a bunch of booths selling pictures of trees.”
Robert gives her a look. “I don’t mean it wouldn’t be fun,” Viola says. “It might be fun. We can go, if you want.”
They get lost, momentarily, in the vast expanses of parking lot, but soon orient themselves, and find their car.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a sign,” Viola says.
“What is?” says Robert.
Viola makes a gesture in the air that means, You know. “We both know I’d be a terrible mother,” she says. “This is like God saying, Viola, honey, you and I both know you’d let the poor thing drown in a bathtub.”
“I don’t think that’s funny,” Robert says.
“Neither do I,” says Viola.
That night they sit on their back porch and Robert drinks a glass of the quite remarkable basil-infused beer. “It’s kind of wheaty,” Robert says. “In addition to the basil.” The night is so clear through the trees.
“Do you remember how things were when we first moved here together?” Viola asks. “When we were first married?”
“In what sense?”
“In a general sense.”
“I think so.”
Viola stands and walks off towards the little wood on the edge of their property. She stands between the trees, and turns to face Robert. Moonlight illuminates her face. “The laws of physics work equally well in both directions; what we interpret as entropy is, perhaps, only our preference for one state of matter over another. When you and I were first married, there was a great sense of possibility in the world. We were in love with this possibility, as much as we were in love with each other. Which is to say: we did not know what was to come. Perhaps we still would have married each other, if we knew what was to come. Perhaps we would have married each other in any case. Contemporary science teaches us that all moments in time exist simultaneously. It is imaginable that some other beings, beings greater than us, could look across points in time the way we look across points in space. For such a being, the idea of loss would be unimaginable. For us, however… ” Viola gestures, as if trying to capture something with her hand that she could not quite fit into words. After a moment she walks back, and resumes her seat on the porch.
That night Viola sleeps fitfully. Robert keeps having to wake her up to get her to stop flinging her limbs all over the place.
~ ~ ~
Viola’s aunt and uncle wave goodbye from the security gates of the newly remodeled Indianapolis airport, while Viola clutches a wad of tissues in her fist.
At home that night, Robert makes linguine with peanut sauce, using three tablespoons minced fresh garlic, a half tablespoon ground ginger, one half cup honey, a quarter cup soy sauce, three tablespoons rice vinegar, a quarter cup peanut butter, and a good helping of chili powder to make the sauce.
On television a man is saying, “That’s what I really like about this city, if you have an idea, you can just go out and do it. This is a city that is always looking for the next new thing.”
Later, in bed, Viola pushes Robert away. “I don’t want to be touched right now. It’s okay for you to be nearby. But I don’t want to have someone else actually touch me right now.” What she cannot explain is the way it is overwhelming, how his touch is connected to the thing she is feeling right now. Robert of course cannot help feeling hurt.
“It will be better later Robert.”
Robert is quiet. Viola can feel the hurt radiating off of him like heat.
~ ~ ~
viola returns to the ancient neighborhood public library where she works. Now a young FBI agent is there. No one seems to talk about him. He is a sudden, accepted fact, as indisputable as the shelves or the wheezing computers. Every once in a while he catches Viola or one of the other librarians on their breaks, and tries to talk to them about the secret law.
“I feel like we haven’t done a particularly good job of clarifying our position, with regard to libraries and the secret law,” he says, “and if there’s anything that the Bureau hates, it’s needless animosity based on simple misunderstandings.” He is very charming. Yearning, Viola thinks. There’s something about him that yearns.
Of course there have been news stories about FBI agents in libraries around the country. But it seems weird, she thinks, for there to be one specifically in my library, which after all is not even the main library branch in Indianapolis.
Viola tells Robert about the FBI agent that evening. “He’s a slick fucking fascist,” she says. “Very personable. A fascist for the new millennium.”
“Fight the power,” Robert says.
“Robert I’m serious.”
Robert looks up from his work. Robert is a “fiscal conservative.”
Viola feels as if she has been handed a mission, now that the FBI agent is there. There are once more things in the world to do. She prints up a set of quarter-page fliers that say, “Do you know what your child is reading? The FBI might.” She begins distributing these to patrons. Because she’s a children’s librarian, and nearly anything in the vicinity of her desk immediately becomes covered in crayon, before long every one of the fliers she had printed up is decorated with a smiley face, flower, or shaky but recognizable dog, all of which, Viola feels, somewhat dampens her message.