Tim sunk his bulge deeper in his glass of smoked ale. He unbent. He felt a rush of companionability, and wondered why he’d never unburdened himself to Edwina before.
“I do care about partnership,” he said. “I care about trust and, well, about mutual reliance, just like Hannah said. But I don’t want that with someone like her, someone who needs that, who can’t rely on herself alone. I want someone who can take care of herself if she has to, but who wants to rely on me instead. I want to be chosen.”
Edwina rubbed his back sympathetically. “I absolutely hear you, Tim. I want that, too.”
Tim smiled at Edwina. As much as he loved the crackling clarity of Wal-Mart’s fluorescents, he had to admit that the dim solar lights of Menagerie softened her muzzle and her pointy tufts in a way that somehow physicalized the kindness and warmth that had always been part of her personality. Her eyes glowed yellow, like Sunny’s phosphorescence, but deeper, wholly mammalian. Her fur smelled of moss and autumn leaves, although as far as Tim remembered, she’d lived in the same subterranean housing complex since coming out of the nursery. He felt an almost anguishing tenderness. He remembered that although he’d always found her a little intimidating, a little quicker than he was, a little sharper, she’d always treated him as an equal. Maybe, thought Tim, he could be that equal. He imagined coming home from work with Edwina. He imagined them making extravagant chilis together. He squeezed her paw.
Edwina squeezed back and smiled. “In fact,” she said, “I’m going to share something with you, Tim. Something I haven’t told anyone.”
Tim squeezed harder.
“This has to be an absolute secret,” she warned him. “If anyone finds out, it could definitely get me fired and, I don’t know, possibly prosecuted.”
A momentary hiccup blipped across Tim’s personal time-space continuum. But before he had time to react and adjust, Edwina leaned over and lowered her voice, her eyes dancing. “I’m in a relationship now, Tim. Not a chaste relationship. Not a procreative alliance, obviously! I’m not crazy. A relationship with another female. She’s a kinkajou. Her name’s Delia, and we are absolutely in love. And, if I may, in lust. It’s so amazing. It’s the new individual radicalism. Awakening the sexual urges that animate creativity and forge interanimal bonds with actual energy, with actual stakes, without endangering the evolutionary control our ancestors fought so hard for.”
It seemed to Tim that he and Edwina had the same look of disbelief on their faces at that moment, except that hers was giddy and thrilled, and his sick and defeated.
“I’m telling you,” said Edwina, “sex is the best thing in the world. Except for Delia! She’s the best thing in the world, really. But she wouldn’t be who she is, she wouldn’t be Delia to me, without intercourse. Without that intimacy, Tim. Without that risk. Not the political risk, of course. The personal risk. The vulnerability.”
“I have to go,” Tim said. He lurched up from his stool.
“Hey,” said Edwina. Her expression was concerned and then, he saw, suddenly fearful. “Tim? What’s wrong? Hold up. Listen, please—”
But Tim was gone.
He got a taxi home. On the way, he made the cab driver stop at a corner store, and he bought three tubs of ice cream: butterscotch, wasabi, and red velvet cake. He got a bag of puffpods and a for-humans comic about a girl who marries a moth and travels to the moon with him. He and Mimi would pig out and read the comic and fall asleep together on the couch, he thought. Back in the cab, he devoured the puffs and concentrated hard on how nice it would be to have Mimi in his lap. When they pulled up outside the house and Tim thanked the driver, his voice shook. Both of them pretended not to notice.
Mimi was in her bathrobe in the kitchen. Yoyo was there, too, with a pair of pliers, prying off the shockbands. The one that had been around her neck already lay mangled on the table, and Yoyo had the left wristband half off, too. They stared at Tim in alarm.
He put the ice cream down, next to the ruined neckband. “Please go,” he said to Yoyo.
Yoyo put down the pliers and took a step back. Mimi yanked urgently at the wristband, and the twisted metal edge bit into her skin, but it stayed put. Tim handed Yoyo the tub of butterscotch. “Run along now,” he said.
Yoyo ran. Tim followed him down the hall and closed the front door. When he came back, Mimi had scurried into the living room and was huddled in a corner of the couch, wrapping the afghan around her.
Tim retrieved the comic from the kitchen and sat down beside her. He had forgotten to bring the ice cream, but things were still almost as he had wanted them to be. He opened the comic and began to read to Mimi.
She said, “Tim.”
Tim kept reading. He held up the comic to show her the picture.
“Tim,” she said, “what’s wrong? Everything’s wrong. What’s wrong?”
Tim stopped reading and went into his bedroom. He got the keycode from his dresser drawer, returned to Mimi, and unlocked the shockbands. He set them gently on the arm of the couch.
“No more sex, okay?” he said. “Just no more.”
Mimi rubbed her wrists. She stared at him, perplexed. “Why not?” she said.
“It’s not allowed,” said Tim. “It’s just not. Just stop it.”
She frowned. “But it’s so nice,” she complained. “Tim? It’s so nice. It feels the best.”
Something enormous and heavy and wet welled up in Tim, a huge choking bubble, a balloon full of dead, empty air.
“I brush your hair and give you baths,” he said, suddenly very loud. “I tickle your feet and rub lotion on your skin. I pet you, Mimi.”
Mimi scooted over and nestled into him. She kissed a nodule. “I know you do, Tim,” she said falteringly, “but only on the outside.”
Tim’s bubble burst. It had not been full of dead air, after all. It had been full of blood, rotten blood, and he tasted its iron in his throat, felt it stinging and needling hot behind his receptors, gagged as it hammered his organs, gushing down through him, flooding the whole blob of him. He was drowning in blood. His bulges swelled with an unendurable ache.
He pushed Mimi onto the floor, and her head hit the carpet with a crack that made her face go white, so he must have pushed her hard. He fell down on top of her. He was afraid he might burst. He could not let the blood go spraying all over the house, he thought, or he would die. He needed to save it. He needed a safe place. He pushed into Mimi.
“Tim” was what she was saying. “Tim Tim Tim.”
He really could not pin down her tone of voice.
And nothing he was doing was helping. In fact, things were getting worse for Tim; they were getting much worse. He was in danger, terrible danger. Suddenly he was afraid for Mimi. What would happen to her when his body inside became too enormous for his body outside? She would take the full force of the explosion, he realized, and he tried to crawl up her, to drag himself over Mimi and spare her. But he was pinned; he was caught.
Then it was too late.
It was an explosion, but it wasn’t fission as Tim had expected; not a splitting asunder. It was fusion, so much deadlier, white and blazing, and he almost forgot the enormous pain and relief of what he was experiencing in the wonderment of actually seeing the atoms of Mimi and the room and his own nodules swim up into vision, getting larger and larger, and closer and closer together, until many of the pulsing points occupied the same space at the same time, in repudiation of everything natural and possible, and physics revolted, and the world ceased to be. Or Tim did.