Then she met Alex. A new hire at Qualternion, the imaging software company she worked at. A little older than her, she’d guess. Or maybe just more easy in the world. It shows how solitary her life had been, how out of touch, that there it was, October 2015, and Alex was the first person she knew who floated free of that most grubby-finger-smeared category of all, gender. Alex was a “they.” She had to learn what AFAB and AMAB meant, and she had no idea which Alex was. Breasts or no? She couldn’t tell. Then she realized she was smearing her own grubby thoughts all over Alex, and to her intrigue was added sympathy. Not to mention self-disgust. Then she started noticing everything about Alex: their programming skill, their hilarious sly comments, their generosity, their abundant freckles, their gleaming white straight teeth, their ten different-colored baseball caps. When they looked at her. When they asked, when going out on an errand, whether she wanted something. When they remembered the way she liked her coffee. She still doesn’t know if Alex is AFAB or AMAB, or cis or trans, or if those labels apply in this case, they’ve defeated that deepest of all chimp-reflexes, Do my genes pass through you or do yours pass through me, they’ve rendered the question as stupid as it should be, and there’s something pretty fucking awesome about that.
She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a nonbinary-romantic-friend or a Platonic friend and had never wanted one, and then she found herself thinking about Alex, knowing where they were in the office, wondering what they might say to her, and did they ever think about her and what did they think. Being alone suddenly seemed undesirable, and that terrified her, and she hated herself for thinking about Alex, You must remain exactly this way for me, all ten baseball caps and each tooth and freckle in place, but argued with herself, that wasn’t true, Alex could be anything, it was their floating-free that she loved, but wasn’t that bullshit, what if Alex stopped floating free? Not just her self-respect, but her self-possession, her control, were gone. She was all she’d ever had or wanted, and suddenly she wasn’t enough. Alex, save me, Alex, I love you, by which I mean, give me exactly what I want. So, just at the time she started to give a shit about whether a person liked her, she was convinced even more than usual that no one could, because she had turned into exactly the kind of presumptuous needy private-space-invader that she detested.
She composes a snowball sentence:
I am all done, folks, really (raucous applause, gradually increasing).
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Mark wanders through the emptied house at dusk, switching on lights as he goes. He contemplates each room for a long time.
Of course this is like his old dream. Which makes sense. Even as a kid he must have known that he would be the one to clear out the house after his parents died. Susan would have had neither the desire nor the patience. He’s driven the six hours from Ithaca one last time for the closing tomorrow. He’ll spend the night in his old bedroom, in a sleeping bag on the newly polished floor.
He is fifty-six years old, a professor of astronomy. His expertise is in two subjects of little interest to the public, astrometry and galaxy formation. He prefers it that way. Let people in the spotlight worry. Strangely, perhaps, for a recluse, he’s a good teacher. He has always been excited by the implications of the big view, and he loves explaining things. (Someone once told him he loved it too much.) He has won teaching awards.
He never married, but has a daughter who is now twenty. She was raised by her mother.
The house is in excellent shape. The realtor told him that the easiest houses to sell were those owned by engineers, because they were the best maintained. Mark was tempted to remind him that his father had been a physicist, but the other man, in a way, had intuited a deeper truth.
So . . . Does Mark feel a peaceful euphoria? In fact, yes. And when he recalls the numinous words from that dream, It’s all over now, they flow through him with their old comforting power. For twenty years his father suffered terribly from Parkinson’s disease and its associated Lewy body dementia. When he died, Mark thought his mother would feel liberated, maybe rejuvenated, but instead she fell into a steady mental decline. It reminded him of something he had read years ago, comparing long-married couples to plants with interpenetrating roots. He wondered if, in fact, a shared biome was indicated. Perhaps regardless of the conscious feelings involved—the presence or absence of love, for example—long cohabitation adapts two bodies to mutually interacting pheromones, skin and mouth bacteria, intestinal flora, etcetera, on which the couple gradually grows dependent. Remove one partner, and the surviving organism weakens.
Whatever the reason, the moment his father died, his mother started dying. For six years she blurred and shrank and drifted backward into the past. She returned to the period when she loved dogs and hated cats. She forgot that Mark was an astronomer. She forgot that Susan was dead. When she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she couldn’t retain the news, so she spent her last weeks contentedly smoking her cigarettes and watching her beloved horse movies on DVD. (Severe dementia had finally enabled her to enjoy TV.) Pain only came in the last week, and was alleviated by generous applications of morphine in the hospice facility to which Mark had moved her. To the very end, whenever she was awake, she
