Rabid (25 page)

“They can’t call a foul if none is committed.” The men turned back to them. Sports were safe. Dante asked Leila, “Do you have a cigarette?”

Her eyes smiled and she licked her lush lips, enchanted as he knew she would be. Indulging in alcohol and tobacco suggested he might have other vices.

God, grant him strength.

She tapped out a cigarette and gave him her lighter. Her hand was smooth, and he brushed her skin when he took the Zippo. He flicked it open and lit the cigarette. Smoke rushed into his lungs, and those crying cells, starved for four long years, feasted on nicotine.

~~~~

At eleven o’clock, Conroy slipped into bed beside Beverly, who barely stirred. The grant was almost finished, and he needed to perform only one more experiment.

Beside Conroy in the bed, Beverly flinched, sleeping soundly, dreaming.

Conroy smiled at Beverly dreaming.

In the absence of stimuli—light, touch, sound—the brain could replay sensations and, while one can lucidly know one is dreaming, the dreaming neurons of the brain are the same ones that respond to the world, and thus a dream is a kind of reality, and thus reality is a kind of  dream.

Francis Crick, of Watson and Crick, who discovered the essential double-helix nature of DNA, had said, “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Conroy settled his pack of neurons down to sleep, and their crackling quieted.

~~~~~

Chapter Eight

Thursday in the lab, Conroy pipetted while Leila, glove-deep in an experiment, muttered incantations into the whoosh of the radioactive hood.

Joe blearily watched the PCR machine’s red and green lights blink, indicating the successful completion of each of the hundred and twenty cycles. Heisenberg should have included Taq polymerase in his watched-pot theories.

Leila flitted through Conroy’s field of view.

“Leila,” he said and she screech-stopped, startled out of her concentration upon picomoles of wing of bat and micrograms of eye of newt. “Does Danna have an exam?”

“She had a headache last night.” She shrugged, and her arms lifted her white lab coat. Twenty-two tiny vials in her hands, three between each of her blue-gloved fingers and two clutched by her thumbs, jiggled. She looked at sloshed teardrops in the tubes, “Damn,” and bent over the breadbox-sized centrifuge.

“Joe, call Danna. Yuri,” Conroy called, and Yuri paused, Groucho-Marx eyebrows raised. Conroy said, “I’m going to order the new car. I’ll sell you my old one for three thousand.”

Yuri’s eyebrows peaked happily. “Thank you, Dr. S.”

Across the bench, Leila’s mouth dropped open.

Maybe he should have sold the car to Leila, but that might look like favoritism, and he didn’t want any whiff of that, especially when the selection committee’s politics were flowing his way. Only another week and a half until Monday the fifteenth and their decision.

A frisson of happiness rippled his skin like wind-blown grass.

~~~~~

Joe and Yuri sat side by side in the tissue culture room, pipetting pink media onto Petri dishes of cells in twin hoods. Joe yelled over the hurricane-force hoods, “Did you hear the one about the professor, the postdoc, and the grad student who found a magic lamp on the beach?”

“Why would lamp be magic?” Yuri frowned.

“Like in Aladdin. The lamp had a genie, and the genie says they each get one wish.”

“They should hold out for more wishes. Collective bargaining.”

Joe continued, “So the grad student wishes to be in Las Vegas with a million dollars and a showgirl, and poof! He disappears. And the postdoc wishes that he was in the Bahamas with ten million dollars and three models, and poof! He disappears.”

Yuri shook his head. “I should have argued Dr. S. down to two thousand dollars.”

“And the genie asks the professor what he wants for his wish.”

“Da?”

“And the professor says, ‘I want those two back in the lab after lunch.”

Yuri scoffed. “Dr. S. would only have given us half hour for lunch with beautiful women.” 

~~~~~

Bev left Conroy’s supper in the fridge when he wasn’t home again. The girls had been in bed for an hour when his Porsche growled in the garage. She hid the vodka under the lettuce in the crisper and microwaved his barbeque chicken and au gratin potatoes.

Conroy walked quietly though the dark family room and stopped, startled, when he saw her in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I’d be home at seven, but you know the lab. Everything takes two hours longer than you think.”

“Fine,” she said. The microwave beeped. She felt the underside of the plate, and the warmth penetrated to the middle of the food.

“This grant will be done soon.”

“That’s good. I’m going up to bed.” She went upstairs, carefully navigating the gray-carpeted staircase that rose and slid like the sea and fell into her bed, which spun in both directions at once as if the her body and her soul looped around and converged.

~~~~~

Friday afternoon, Leila met Conroy at her place for a quick fuck. “I’ve got to load that gel by eight,” she locked the door’s deadbolts, “if it’s going to be finished tomorrow morning.”

“Run it hotter.” He sat on the couch in the living room and bent to untie his oxford shoes.

“I don’t want to run it hotter. I want to run it at exactly the same voltage as my other two hundred gels. It messes up the molecular weight markers to run them at different voltages.”

“They’re standards.” He dropped his shoe on the floor. “They should run the same.”

“I don’t know how you ran that perfect gel, Conroy.” She stripped off her shirt. Cool air washed her back. She unzipped her jeans. “You do everything wrong.”

“It’s the washes, not the gel.” He dropped the other shoe and it bounced,
thump-uh.

Leila pried her shoes off and rolled her jeans down, the opposite of a condom. She unhooked her bra and dropped her underwear on the floor. “Are you still dressed?”

Conroy folded his socks on top of his shoes.

Leila grabbed his shirt, unbuttoned it and tossed it on the floor. He said, “It’ll wrinkle.”

She unbuttoned his pants, pushed him back on her couch, and climbed aboard.

~~~~~

Conroy leaned his head back on Leila’s couch, the toss into the sky from his orgasm still draining away. At least the casual fucking with Leila was still the same. He didn’t have to pussyfoot around to appease her. It was all just hot sex. And some dirty talk.

“Wow,” Conroy said. “I don’t care if I go to Hell for this.”

Leila slumped on his shoulder. “You don’t believe in Hell,” she whispered. “Even priests don’t believe in Hell. They make up rules and invent punishments to keep superstitious people in line.”

She untangled. He lifted his thigh to free her ankle.

Ah, the cold and the freedom. Sadness at the end, and yet, still, the exhilaration of cheating, of winning, of fucking the entire society who sought to repress his instinct to fuck. When he fucked Leila, he fucked every woman in the world, and he gloried in that moment.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ve got to go back to the lab.”

As she opened her bedroom door, her old black dog who had never paid much attention to Conroy sauntered out of her bedroom and toward the kitchen.

Leila came back, denim-clad, pulling a clingy silver shirt over her braless chest. Her nipples impressed the shirt like machine-stamped rivets in silver metal.

She said, “Let yourself out, Conroy. I’m running late.”

“Thought you were going back to the lab to run a gel.”

“I’ve got plans for after.” She pulled her gray coat out of the closet and patted her dog, who had walked over to see her out.

Conroy stood and buttoned his pants over his messy groin. His underwear gummed onto his skin. “Who with?”

“Friends. Just lock the doorknob and pull the door closed. Same as usual.”

He padded across the laminate wood to her. “Who with?”

“None of your business, Conroy.” Her hand grasped the doorknob.

“Who?” He grabbed her wrist.

Her dog barked near his leg.

Leila twisted, an ampersand of black motion on the white wall, and Conroy’s arm twisted backwards. His wrist and elbow creaked, pulling to the tolerance of his joints. She held his wrist cranked into that position and asked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The dog barked an angry streak of obscenities.

Conroy’s attention rooted in his elbow. His ligaments strained against the pressure from her hand. A tremor increased the strain. He said, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t ever grab me again,” she whispered. “Next time, I’ll break your arm.”

A small tendon just inside of his elbow pinged, almost tearing. “Okay.”

“I could kill you, you know that? I could snap your neck or shoot you in the head.”

“All right, all right.”

Leila released his hand and stepped back, wary. The dog watched. Its yellow eyes shifted in its black, heavy head.

She said, “Don’t you ever, ever grab me again.”

~~~~~

Saturday afternoon, Bev arrived late for counseling.

Conroy’s black Porsche was parked away from the other salty cars, near the bare trees that sliced the sky like swords.

She trotted through the cold church. Afternoon sunlight struggled through the stained glass windows and left scarlet and turquoise smears on the oak floor.

At the library, she knocked and heard Dante say, “Yes?” so she opened the door.

Dante was sitting in his chair, reading, alone. His black cassock draped from his Roman collar over his shoulders to the floor.

She asked, “Isn’t Conroy here?”

Dante shrugged and his black robe rippled.

Bev closed the door and leaned against it. She scraped her courage together like spilled salt on a countertop. “We need to talk about the other day.”

Dante stretched his long legs and smiled at her. “It was nothing. We did nothing, and we were right to do nothing. I’ve had women friends. Occasionally, you feel a little tug, but nothing happens.”

“Yes, of course.” Her heart jumped up. Oh, and thank the Virgin Mary, Dante didn’t hate her, and he didn’t even think she had sinned or tempted him or been evil or anything.