Felix played basketball and soccer, but his favorite sport was walking with his head down and stopping to look at a fallen leaf or worm cast that attracted him and sometimes picking it up, bringing it close to his frank Irish face — a physiognomy unusual in the Flaxbaum family but occurring often among the Reillys. He particularly admired a lifeless bug trapped between the two panes of stormproof glass in one of his parents’ bedroom windows. Their bedroom was just off the living room.
“Can’t we liberate him?” Felix had wondered. “How did he get there?”
“It’s an adult longhorn beetle,” said Flax after some research. “My guess is that its pupa was blown between two sheets of glass when the workmen in the yard of the glass factory were jamming them together. We have double panes on our windows to keep the cold out, Felix, and they can’t be separated — they’d have to be broken. And for what purpose? — to extract the cadaver of a common insect. I know you’d like to add him to your curiosities, so please consider our room your annex.”
“Thanks. What killed the dude?”
“Insufficient oxygen. In one way or another that’s what kills us all. Uncle Jack…”
“He had a blood disease.”
“Yes, in the end his blood couldn’t carry oxygen to his heart and he died.”
“Oh. The bug didn’t disintegrate,” said Felix. Flax guessed that the boy was thinking of Uncle decomposing in the earth. He treated himself to a measured look at his son’s eyes. If sincerity had a color…“Lack of oxygen again,” Flax explained. “He was preserved in an accidental vacuum.”
Every morning Felix opened his safe and took out one of the crosses. Then he stashed it again, gave Plant a fish-flakes treat, and took a quick look at the beetle to see if it had been resurrected yet.
IV.
On Wednesdays, Leo’s first class was at ten. Godolphin’s progressive high school mandated attendance at classes but allowed freedom at other times. On Wednesdays Flax didn’t teach at all. So at eight o’clock the two were home, alone with each other. And on this Wednesday, already afternoon in the UK, Professor Harry Worrell was probably alone in a pub booth, empty steins accumulating around his laptop, sending messages to distinguished Americans.
While thinking of the blessed professor, Flax was enjoying a lethal breakfast of pancakes and syrup and bacon, Leo a life-enhancing one of muesli and tea and several colorful capsules. There was a resemblance between these two — limp brown hair, abundant in the son and scanty in the father; gentle voice; slow smile; a talent and love for teaching. Leo at sixteen was already helping the ninth-grade teacher explain logarithms, in so modest a manner that his classmates were unoffended; and on late-afternoon visits to the local elementary school, he tutored some kids who were called intellectually challenged. He hated the term. It was mathematics itself that was challenged. There was something wrong with numbers, their incarnation on paper. They were flummoxing these dear children, preventing them from doing more than count. The children were good at counting when they used words, one, two, three; they also loved gazillion. But the shapes for numbers made their eyes fill. And the visual aids some sadistic pedagogue invented: handcuffs for 3, a hook for 5, an ax for 7; 4 was a cruel pitchfork… “I’ve come to hate number shapes,” Leo said.
They washed the dishes. Leo did not feed Plant but he did stand looking down at it. “I wonder if Buddy could really have learned to count,” he muttered. He was still thinking about numbers, Flax realized. Might Plant be numiverous? Leo slanted his head forward and Flax imagined ungainly symbols tumbling into the pot; good-bye, 2, 5, 17; good-bye, 9, you noose.
Then Leo picked up his backpack, father and son got their bikes out of the garage. Beneath the helmet Flax’s beret flapped onto his forehead. In overcoat and headgear he looked stately on wheels, Leo noticed, though a button appeared to be missing from the coat. Flax noticed the angularity of his son and experienced that cold dread that someday Leo’s dormant disease would dispatch tubers to his organs and turn him into wood. They rode, Flax first, into the empty street and bicycled side by side until at the second intersection Leo with a wave turned toward school and Flax with an arm raised in answer went straight ahead, toward today’s job, selling shoes at Dactyl.
V.
Though Bonnie’s days were packed with obligations, she nonetheless devoted an hour every Wednesday to minding her man. After work she took the underground as always from the hospital to the central metro station and then, instead of trolleying to the section of Godolphin where the Flaxbaums lived — firm wooden three-deckers, mostly firm families within — she trolleyed to Godolphin’s commercial area, Jefferson Corner. Dactyl, where Myron worked Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons, was on the historically registered block that included Forget Me Not, an antiques shop; Roberta’s Linens; Dunton’s Tobacco; and the Local, a restaurant. This stretch of stores stood behind a brick colonnade. Each store had inner doors opening to its neighbors. Historians guessed that the whole arrangement had been part of the underground railway. The door between Forget Me Not and Dactyl had a square glass window. At three o’clock, Bonnie, wearing a bowler she kept at Forget Me Not and rimless glasses with no refraction, took possession of the window after first exchanging nods with Renata, Forget Me Not’s proprietor. In her long years of storekeeping, Renata had seen far more peculiar things than a wife keeping an eye on a blameless husband.
Bonnie’s habit had begun on a July Saturday. Coming out of the bookstore across the street, her arms full, she had glimpsed Myron inside Dactyl. She swiftly crossed the street and took a spy’s position behind one of the columns and peeked out. She could see him better now. He was standing with his hands behind his back. His chin was slightly lowered as if he were looking down, but his glasses pinching the tip of his nose indicated that his eyes were raised in order to see over them. She watched for a while. And then, bending the rules of physics and physiology, she entered him. She burrowed between his ribs; she spread her substantial self within his smaller periphery. The scraps and scrolls of his knowledge occupied their now-shared frontal cortex. His lively interest employed four optic nerves. His disappointments made four shoulders slump. She knew his shame at having to sell footwear in order to increase the family’s comfort, and she knew the secondary shame that so respectable an extra job should cause that first shame. And so whenever she watched him on Wednesdays — watched only; she couldn’t occupy him after that first exalted melding — she was able to feel again what was felt by this father brother husband nephew teacher protector salesman patron of a botanical curiosity lover of Ovid…