“What does that make you?”
She shut the laptop and stood up and spread a ten-dollar bill next to a slice of toast. “Working days now?” Time had lengthened around them overnight. He started to explain about today but it was none of her business. But then he did, about the message on his machine last night from his lab partner that they would need him early this morning.
“It’s you she wants.”
Were the schoolgirls about to leave? The little one alerted him, the man who’d kicked the bike was coming back.
“That stop you got off at,” he said. The bike had told her to, she said. The bike had not told her anything. “Or I let it tell me,” she said. No, that wasn’t the reason, the man said. “I was hysterical.” “You were not,” he said. “Where I was coming from yesterday.”
The waitress had her arm around the woman’s shoulders, asking her how she was doing. The woman added a five and took her bag and went thinly to the restroom. The waitress went with her. He dropped a quarter, it landed on end and rolled and the tall girl picked it up. “You leaving?” she said. She was irritated. Some shift had occurred simple as looking out his bedroom window one day and seeing what he hadn’t seen.
He was telling the tall girl that a song sparrow would never come in here for food, it foraged on the ground. It wouldn’t sing in here either, there was a sparrow with a song like it that began differently but you’d never see that bird in the city. He held the door for her, but she was waiting for her friend. The cops left with him.
In a dark hallway his partner took his arm. They came to a small room. On a table a transparent box lighted by a single UV. In the box a yellow spider, legs out front, legs behind, Alone here. His partner had remembered. An inlet tube from a cylinder evidently of CO2 outside the box. A contraption for reeling out the silk hooked somehow to an orifice point back along one side of the thorax was ingenious. Silk strong enough given a thickness of an inch to reel in a 747 from the sky. Strong enough to catch a careless finch. Stronger than Kevlar. Strong as steel. Good to go as parachute cord. The animal seemed absolutely still. A burly technician joined them and explained. Then the Dutch woman said this spidey was venomous but not seriously so and bites only if put next to your skin and bothered; it was her own, a female, and it had come from her garden. The males are so busy they forget to eat and can starve themselves.
“You’re silent,” said his partner when they were back in the main building where one of the silk lattices, slow as these things are, was degrading faster than the bone could grow and they had wanted him to look at something close up. “Thinking of a horror film we could go to,” he said. “Oh, the old one about the ants?” Yes, that was the one. “This weekend?” Not this weekend, but he thought he would take that bike woman up on her offer, though why him? “She’s dying,” said his partner.
“How would you know that for god’s sake, how do you people know any such thing?” He calmed down. “Science is beautiful now, she says; it lets you go so far.”
It was two days later, a Friday. It was the waitress who came to answer the door of the drab little townhouse near the river drive. She looked worn out. She indicated the bike in the hall. He made a sign with his hands. “She’s gone,” the woman said. He shook his head, “Where?” “She’s gone to join her husband. She’s sick.”
He had the green bike on the step outside. The woman touched the rear rack. “She said you were like family. I don’t know anything about it,” the woman said. “She said you were uncanny. You said something. That you probably knew her. She said you knew where she was coming from.” “Where?” “The doctor’s?” The woman seemed to come into focus. “We say things. People are affected by them.”
“Who knows why?”
“They’re true? I was the best friend she ever had,” said the woman, stepping back into the doorway. It was what she thought. A dark mole lingered about the corner of her expressive mouth. She’d drunk a lot of coffee. Close up, she did not look worn out, she looked English or French. They wanted to talk but were not going to, a risk rising in her breath and in her interested eyes drawn from her limitlessly, he thought.
“Will you return your old bike?” the Dutch woman asked him. Who would he return it to? The owner, only an acquaintance, had died that stormy New Year’s early morning coming home through the sleet in a cab.
A lab had transferred spider silk genes into the mammary glands of a goat, and his partner asked him to go with her one long weekend to Montana, paid for by the company. It took six hundred gallons of goat’s milk to produce the silk for one bullet-proof vest, so far. He decided to let her go alone; she would be back the Monday night. The following weekend he would be visiting her in Garrison.
THE UNKNOWN KID
“Then why did you bother to have me?” my daughter asks, and I think of funny answers, which she deserves. Her question isn’t a question. Her words aren’t to be taken seriously. But they stick, they linger and malinger, in the dreamwork that gets us from this day to the next.
She came rushing through the house, her friend Val close behind. What a rush, fast forward, pursuit of friendship.
So was that an emergency dance that just went by? An advance guard of a tribe to whom I am unknown? What a racket of final things between them: forget it, friendship’s off, finished! don’t you ever call me up again — rage rushing, falling headlong.
But into what? Discomfitingly into that gap which is an absence of anything remotely like not caring. I might say it better. I am back from three business trips in a row — tired, lagging, coming down. I mean, their fight will break up in an enchanted awkwardness. This I predict, having witnessed it and witnessed other absences between them. Half of July and all of August they didn’t see each other, and when they met in September they stood in front of each other, facing head on with a great deal to choose from, hands for the moment not busy doing things like the hands of inexperienced actors, but at rest at their sides: till they laughed and laughed again, like idiots.
But today at the age of eleven, rushing through the house — the apartment — they are on the move and if I try to keep up, there’s hardly time to tell about what’s happening.
“Liz!” her friend Val remonstrates — screams, they’d say nowadays—“Liz, I didn’t do anything!” Val is older by a few months, yet younger.
They trade skirts, mingle laundry, think like old lovers alike. A. A. Milne’s been on the shelf for years. They sit drawing for an hour — turn the box on, turn it off — then at one selfsame instant they get the idea to dress up out of a closet, dress up, dress up.
Used to be me who put the record on, not now. But who did? Because here they come high-kneeing past like the hoofers they are and the orchestra’s conducted not by quick fingers on a tone arm but by the real world which they take for granted will accompany them.
High-knee it, Folies Bergère, no less; and the music that no casual intruder at this moment could hear unless the girls pant it out half under their breath — for I’m wrong, the record’s not on, not really — is Offenbach’s stately hysteria and it’s in their mind because I have sometimes put it on for them, a record scratched and replaceable. They slide to my right, out of sight arm-in-arm, and I stare straight ahead at all this (which isn’t so interesting to an outsider as to me, home from a business trip, three business trips), and yet divorced as I am from everything but this moment, interesting’s not altogether what it is to me. (Is that so? Well, if you’re not interested, “then why did you bother to have me?”) They’re sliding back into my seat; they’ve used the entire room, the walls, the ceiling — so why don’t I, too?