“So,” I said. “Benzene.”
“The mother of all hydrocarbons,” she said. “It’s crucial in everything from plastics to … opiates.”
“And it’s also really flammable,” I said.
She smiled. “The best things are, honey.”
Maybe she didn’t say “honey.” But that’s how I remembered it.
When after three years of living together we decided to marry, we of course—Mikala being who she was, and me being who I was—set about defining, redefining, contextualizing, and negotiating everything about what our marriage would mean, and what the ceremony would communicate about that meaning, down to venue, flowers, wardrobe, and the most important props of alclass="underline" the rings. What to do about the rings? We were not chattel. Traditional symbols held no weight for us, but the hex and circle was something we could get behind. The benzene ring, we decided, would represent stability and creativity, but also danger: the rings would remind us to be careful with each other.
When we told the Sprouts what we were looking for, Rovil nodded as if this made perfect sense, Edo laughed his Santa Claus laugh (a back-of-the-throat chortle he deployed at every opportunity—as greeting, as filler, as disarmament tactic in business negotiations), and Gil shook his head at us. “Nerds,” he said. This from a man who spent $2,000 for a Joss Whedon T-shirt. Not a shirt with a picture of Joss Whedon, mind you, but a shirt that had been worn by him. (It was blue.) Gil was five-two, over two hundred pounds, and flew into rages when Stupid Humans fucked up his equipment. Not even Mikala would cross him when he was in a mood. So we were shocked when a few days later he presented us with two petri dishes, and in each rested a hand-forged brass ring. It was the most touching thing anyone had done for us.
Years later, at the trial, Gil would tell the jury that he was jealous of our relationship. He was in love with Mikala, but Mikala wouldn’t leave me. That’s why, he said, when the dosage took hold in that suite at the top of the Lake Point Tower, he stabbed my wife to death.
* * *
Dr. Gloria was not in the bedroom when I awoke the next morning. But Ollie was. She woke as soon as I slipped off the bed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah, that was pretty good,” I said.
“No,” she said. “For trusting me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Part of me wanted to take it all back, untell the story of my crime. Go back to where we were before. “I smell breakfast,” I said.
It was seven in the morning and the house was jumping: Linnie and two women who might have been her daughters packed lunch bags in the kitchen; older kids helped younger kids pull on shoes; teenagers appeared, ate cereal standing up, then left without saying good-bye. At least three TVs yammered away. The dining room table had been turned into a buffet, loaded with loaves of white bread, Pop-Tarts burning in the toaster, a Crock-Pot of steaming oatmeal, and jugs of juice and milk. Roy sat at the end of the table reading from a real newspaper, undisturbed by the noise and chaos.
A girl who was perhaps three years old ran toward us and happily slammed into Ollie. Ollie looked at me in alarm. The toddler glanced up, realized that these legs did not belong to the mother/cousin/grandmother she thought they did, and ran into the kitchen.
“I’ll be outside,” Ollie said. She shouldered her backpack, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and headed for the front door. We had finally been able to fall asleep last night—thank you, oxytocin and prolactin, you were great—but the anxiousness had returned. Her mind was back to writing worst-case scenarios, and she wanted to be out of there.
I took the seat beside Roy and made small talk about children, a topic I knew nothing about. The oatmeal was too salty for my taste, but I was happy for more hot food.
Linnie gave me a pair of plastic travel mugs filled with coffee, and I took them out to Ollie. It was there I noticed a shimmer of pure white hovering above the trees.
“Hark,” she said. “Your ride approacheth.”
A black sedan with tinted windows pulled into the driveway. I checked my pen: 8 a.m. on the dot. “That’s my boy,” I said.
Roy and Linnie came out to say good-bye. Linnie said, “Are you going to be okay? We can lend you clothes.”
“You’ve already done too much,” I said. I shook Roy’s hand. “Sorry again about the boat—and the dummy.”
He laughed. “My son Jimmy already uploaded the video,” Roy said. “That was worth it.”
“We aren’t visible on that, are we?” Ollie asked sharply.
Roy frowned.
I said, “Of course not; that would be crazy.”
The car pulled to a stop. A brown-skinned man stepped out, looking dapper in a blue dress shirt and charcoal wool pants. And then I noticed the bruises on his face, and that several fingers of his left hand were wrapped in bandages.
“Oh Jesus, Rovil!”
Despite his injuries, he still smiled at me and held out his arms. I was surprised; in the old days Rovil was uncomfortable with physical contact. We exchanged a quick hug. His haircut looked expensive. In person he was a little fuller through the torso than I expected, but not fat. Our Rovil had been working out. And he smelled like aftershave, like a man.
“Are you okay?” I asked. His left eye was bloodshot, the cheek puffy and yellow. It looked painful.
“I’m fine.”
“I can’t believe you came. This is Ollie.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said to Ollie, and held out his unbandaged hand. She nodded without shaking and climbed into the backseat.
Rovil seemed to take this in stride. “No luggage?”
“Just Ollie’s backpack,” I said. “It was kind of a quick exit.” I got in the front seat. As we started to roll away I lowered the window. “Watch out for the tax man, Roy.”
The couple watched us go, standing side by side in the sunlight: American Indian Gothic.
It took only a few minutes to leave the Smokes’ neighborhood and turn onto Highway 37. The car accelerated smoothly, and I settled back into leather seats that already seemed more comfortable than the mattress we’d slept on last night.
“Holy shit, Rovil, I do believe you could get laid in this car.”
He laughed. “I may have tried once or twice.”
Rovil, kidding about sex! A breakthrough. After another mile I said, “So, what happened?”
He glanced down at his damaged hand. “I … I don’t want to alarm you.”
“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “I know about the cowboy.”
He looked surprised, then nodded. “He knew about you. He wanted the sample you sent. He wanted to know everything I knew about the making of Numinous. Which was very little, though he did not believe that at first.”
“Oh Christ. What did he do to you?”
“Nothing I can’t recover from,” he said. “Ganesh was with me, and I was not afraid.”
“But he let you live,” Ollie said. “And he let you live, too, Lyda.”
“Because he thought you were covering him with a fucking sniper rifle or something.”
“Or maybe he had orders not to touch you,” she said.
“Excuse me,” Rovil said. “You have met him? What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
He glanced at the navigation screen. “We have seven hours.”
Seven hours? That would exceed our Total Lifetime Talk Minutes by at least six hours. At Little Sprout I’d never broken through his force field of shyness; it was Mikala who knew him best. But I’d dragged him into this, and put his life in danger. He deserved to know what was going on.
I didn’t tell him everything. I left out the fact that we’d broken into the church and made it sound like we’d just walked into the building and found the bodies. I also neglected to mention that Ollie may have killed a girl. But I laid out everything else, including our theories about Numinous, the Church of the Hologrammatic God, and those custom, highly expensive chemjets.
“I can’t believe Edo would do this, not without talking to us,” he said.