Vadim looked back to the popcorn in my hand. “No thanks,” he said, and then slunk over to watch the movie, leaving me standing there alone, copping an adolescent pose for no one. Hadn’t he heard my pledge? Didn’t that mean anything to him? I sighed and ate the rest of my popcorn, which tasted like a long drive down a dusty road.
Yulia was looking sharply at Vadim, slouched on the sofa. She turned her eyes to me. Her look might have been apologetic, or she might just have been seeking my scientific attention when she engaged my eyes and put a kernel in her mouth. She held one hand up, authoritatively, and closed her eyes. For a long time, she just chewed. We all watched her. She was the paleobotanist on duty, after all. I loved the way her facial muscles moved, how they flexed and articulated.
“What’s your opinion?” I asked her.
She opened her eyes. “What is yours?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She studied me a moment, and then lifted her fingers to my face. Nails red, fingers lean, she placed one kernel in my mouth.
“Don’t chew,” she said. “Just wait. Wait, and we will test this Ice Age kernel.”
I stood there, a spitty piece of popcorn in my mouth. I looked around the room. Farley lifted his eyebrows and went to join the party watching the movie. Yulia remained focused on me.
“Cooking has transformed the kernel’s pulp,” she said. “The initial starchy taste comes as the enzymes in your saliva begin converting sugars. Now feel the hull with your tongue. It should have the texture of cellulose. Note the bitter taste. That is from potassium and alkaloids, which give the outer casing its impermeability. This bitter taste suggests the seed was intact. At the heart of the corn is the germ, where the protein is stored. Here the texture is more oily, like a nut, and the flavor is slightly rich. When that flavor is strong, the seed is likely to be viable.”
I opened my eyes — when had they closed? Eggers and Trudy were also watching the movie. Dad and Lorraine were nowhere to be seen.
“What is your opinion now?” Yulia asked me.
“I have much to learn about botany,” I said. “And your assessment?”
“I conclude that perhaps you take direction well after all.”
I studied Yulia. I wasn’t so good at picking up on notes of conciliation, let alone invitation. Yet, in Yulia’s eyes, in the way her coffee-dark irises fixed upon me and opened some to show me other colors — cumin and gold — there was some kind of welcome.
I buttoned the toggles of my coat.
I said, “Maybe I’ll test this Ice Age coat, see how it performs in the elements. Would you join me for a promenade around the federal prison camp?”
Yulia looked to Vadim, who was sandwiched between the other kids on the couch. She walked over to him, said something, then grabbed her white jacket.
“Let us bring our minds to bear upon this coat of yours,” she said.
* * *
Outside, the night was quiet and still. The cold was a force, a pressure you felt against your eyes, and along the frosted buildings the prison lights shone sodium and shrill, casting stiff, cement-colored halos off the corrugated roofs. The rising moon had its say, too — upon open expanses, in the branches of trees, its tincture recast the night in hues of indigo, iodine, and tulle.
We walked along a grated path. It was good to see Yulia’s breath in the air again. I hadn’t forgotten that. We passed a building where the prison choir was practicing. As we approached, they were doing the chorus of “Home on the Range” before breaking into a sprightly “Buffalo Girls, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”
We stopped only once, so Yulia could souse her nostrils with saline spray. Her throat, when she leaned her head back, was the underside of white.
When we started walking again, Yulia pointed to the old observatory on top of the hill. She asked if it was operational. I said I didn’t know, but we kept walking toward it anyway. Yulia’s jacket had no pockets, so she crossed her arms as she walked. “Here,” I said, and opened my coat, so the two of us huddled together under the fur. This made our steps awkward in a youthful way, and though I knew where I was and why, I ignored the criminals out smoking their evening cigarettes, I ignored that buried wire not far from our feet, and I pretended that Yulia and I were undergraduates, crossing a college campus by the river. I’d never written The Depletionists, I imagined. She’d never married Ivan.
The observatory was silo-shaped, with a lens window on the dome that made it resemble a lighthouse on the prairie. The door was small and metal, the kind you’d find on a ship. The hinges and handle suffered from disrepair, but inside, the heat was on and the light switch worked. In the warmth, Yulia pulled away from me, but for some reason I didn’t panic. A circular flight of stairs rose to a landing, where a ladder led through a trapdoor in the floor above. Yulia climbed it first, and, watching her hips sway as she ascended, observing her legs pump above me, I became aroused. By the time she squeezed her buttocks through the trapdoor, my groin was fully involved.
The observation room was hemispherical, with plastered walls and hardwood floors. A lone notation desk sat beside the crank you used to turn the dome, and aside from a rolling chair, the room contained only a suspended telescope — longer, sleeker than you’d think.
Yulia sat in the chair and rolled to the eyepiece. She peered into it, squinting.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“I cannot tell,” she said, adjusting the knobs. “The lens is fuzzy.”
I knelt next to her chair, so our arms were touching, and gave it a go. The image in the viewfinder was a haze. It looked gaseous and nebular, though we were most likely inspecting galactic birdshit.
“I don’t know how to work this thing, either,” I said.
Yulia rotated in her chair to face me. Right there, at eye level, her jacket hung open, and I witnessed the play of her breathing as it, ever so slightly, raised and lowered the hem of her shirt. Before me were Yulia’s dark jeans, legs slightly parted. She put a finger to her mouth and studied me with curiosity and intention. She rocked forward and back in her wooden chair, deciding, it seemed to me, at least to entertain my advance.
I was close enough to smell her clothes, clean and womanly, and this was the point in the evening where a man could get premonitions of the events to come, where a guy might begin to think that, if he said the right words and conjured the right look in his eye, ardor was imminent. This is the point where the old Hank Hannah would’ve applied his magic touch. Moves would be made, garments would be shed, and after he’d paid a little lip service to the nipples, he’d locate the vagina, introduce himself, and attempt to speak its tongue.
But tonight, this prospect sent a wave of fear through me. Yulia would be flying back in the morning, and I didn’t know when I’d see her again. Already I felt gripped by uncertainty and speculation. I’d spent my life learning to tolerate great unknowns, and yet of Yulia even the tiniest, most frivolous one seemed unbearable.
I took hold of the arms of her chair. I pulled her upright and close. “I have a question to ask,” I said. “It sounds stupid, I know, but I need you to tell me where you rent your videos.”
“You mean movies?” she asked.
“Exactly,” I said. “Where do you rent your movies?”
A spark of amusement flashed on her face. “There’s a little place in downtown Croix, a couple blocks from our house. An old man runs it. Mr. Wong.”