When it was over, she flopped next to him on the mattress, dug her sharp chin into his chest, staring into his face, wanting something. He closed his eyes, listening to her breathing as it slowed. He wrapped an arm around her and they rested.
She’d been impatient for hours. Earlier, when he got home from his shift, she’d been waiting for him on the bed wearing a T-shirt, reading the dog-eared Sleight book. “You know, this is so great,” she’d said then, closing it gently. “Really great. How could the world do without this?”
She never read for pleasure; she’d told him as much when they met. He remembered how they’d been when they were first together, both of them disconsolate with grief and loss. They’d ride the subway trains for hours. Underneath the earth was the only place where Vikram’s pain felt sufficiently muffled; how jarring it had been to emerge. Once, when the G train they were riding climbed unexpectedly from the tunnel—the tracks running aboveground for a few blocks in Brooklyn to cross the Gowanus Canal—the sudden pain of it, of that slice of dark sky and the spreading landscape studded with lights, had cost him the last of his fragile control over himself. He’d cried for his mother, then, for his two sisters. His boyhood best friend, Keith Chen, whom he hadn’t talked to in years. His job. His city—the real one—with its velocabs and duple buses, its efficient elevated tramways that looked so much like this short stretch of track.
Hel never cried, not even in the first months. Instead, she walked around all day, picking vicious fights with the people who didn’t seem to be real to her—the trainee social worker, the assimilationist housemates she’d lived with before moving into Vikram’s apartment, the junior agent with the tape recorder who’d questioned the UDPs from her entry group, even the tired old men sitting out on their stoops. When Hel wasn’t arguing, she was obsessing. At a certain point, Vikram had felt obligated to take that old medical journal away from her for the sake of her sanity, removing it from her custody before the pages softened to illegibility. “Careful,” he’d joked. “Someone else will want to read this artifact someday.”
That remark might have been the start of it. Her preoccupation with documentation. Her conviction that some outsider might actually care about their stories.
“Wake up,” she said, after a time. She nudged him. “I was telling you, I found it.”
One by one, Vikram stretched out his limbs. He flexed his fingers and toes. “What? What did you find?”
Hel threw a leg over him, then sat up, obviously ready for more. “Sleight’s house. You won’t believe it when you see it. It’s full of junk.”
“You want to switch?” Vikram asked. He still felt spent, inebriated, unable to think clearly, which put him at a clear disadvantage; she never seemed to have that problem.
“No, I don’t want to switch.” She rocked on top of him. “The house where he would have lived, if he hadn’t, you know, died.”
“You know, that’s not remotely sexy.”
She leaned close, breathing in his ear. “It should be a museum, Vikram. I’m going to make it happen.” Now she moved his arms, positioning them above his head and pinning his wrists in place with one hand. She knew what he liked. “What do you think?”
The ends of her hair tickled his shoulders. “No one would care,” he told her. “Who would want to go to this museum? Literally no one.”
She leaned forward, increasing the pressure on his wrists. “Why not?”
Helplessly, he bucked up with his hips. “Because everyone who isn’t a Bible Numericist hates us. You know that UDP who’s all over the news for cutting up the old lady and then stabbing her thirty-seven times? That’s the association people have. They think we’re unhinged.”
Hel had released her grip; he began to bring his hands back down to his sides, intending to risk a touch, to stroke her thigh, but she shook her head, admonishing. “No. You don’t move. Stay still.” Her warm, dry palm on his erection. “1909. You know why I think it’s important.”
“You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to be a scientist.” He was finding it difficult to maintain focus. “Just because two things happened doesn’t make them related.”
Her hands roamed up and down his chest as she shifted her weight on top of him. “Shh.” She twisted his left nipple. “I told you to stay still.”
“Hel. That hurts.”
“What else explains it, if not Sleight’s death?” She guided him inside her. “What else could it be?”
“Chaos theory,” he said, the words coming out half-choked.
“What did you say?” she asked. But he couldn’t answer. They moved with each other, then against each other. She rode him with head thrown back and he knew her eyes were closed. She always closed her eyes. He watched a muscle in her jaw jump. Experimentally, Vikram released one of his hands from its imaginary bonds and placed it on her hip. This time, she didn’t say anything, so he moved the other one up too, slowing the pace.
“More rain,” he forced out. “More rain in Asia breaks a dam. Crop prices go up. People starve. Births decline. Population dives. And the person who was going to invent flying pods never gets born.”
“Shut up,” Hel said. “There’s still no flying pods.”
Afterward, he lay in her arms, her face right next to his. He could see the clumps of mascara in her eyelashes. Taste her breath, that mint-and-Helen taste. “What’s your biggest regret?” he asked. “Your biggest regret in life.”
What did he expect? For her to jump out of bed. For her to slap him, for her to rake her nails down his chest. For her face to go slack, or tight. For her to say something about Jonas, whose name was taboo, spoken by her only when she was asleep. To say nothing at all.
What he didn’t expect. Her hand moving up to pet his hair, and her answer: “The books. All the books I never read.”
And after she left to shower, he lay alone in the bed and he couldn’t fall back asleep. He rolled over and opened the window to smoke a cigarette. At home he’d used sniff, but they didn’t have that here. Hel, who used to be an otolaryngologist, said sniff was also bad for you, but at least it didn’t reek like smoking. So he leaned his whole head out.
He watched the beginning of the October day unfold for the kids down on the street walking to the subway with their school backpacks on and for the store owners unlocking and rolling up the metal gates over their premises. A shirtless guy wearing some kind of head covering with long ties that looked like it was made of black panty hose was trying to shake the dirt out of the floor mat from his enormous car. Vikram wondered what the head covering was and why the man wore it. He wished there were a way to look that kind of thing up on his phone. The guy banged the mat against a sickly tree. The tree shook. Synched traffic lights on Jerome Avenue flicked to green, one after another—green lights to eternity.
She was back from the shower, a towel around her hips, her breasts rosy-tipped. She took her comb from the dresser. “The kid who owns the Sleight house? He’s maybe twenty-five. The place was a bequest. He would love to have it taken off his hands.”
Vikram threw the cigarette stub out the window. “Leave it alone. OK?”
“I can’t. What dam, Viki? Find me the dam that did it.”
He grabbed her right hand and kissed it, tracing with his lips the mysterious scars that crossed all four of her fingers. “I don’t know what dam. I made the dam up.”
“There is no dam. There’s just Sleight. His death.”
Every UDP agreed that something had gone wrong. Only she had it narrowed down to a day, a minute. A singular event, dividing Before from After. Her fascination and her talk about another world worried Vikram. Next thing he knew, she’d take out those Tarot cards he’d bought her in the Village as a joke.