She heard stairs being taken at a hurry, and then Arthur was in the doorway, panting. When he saw the two of them sitting together on the bed, his eyes widened.
“Some of the Styela are still in the m-menthol,” he stuttered.
“It’s all right. I’ll finish up.”
“And I’m afraid one or two of the Okenia got a bit . . . flattened.”
“It’s all right, Arthur.”
“I’ll be happy to stay if you need some—”
“No, no, no. We don’t want you on the foreman’s bad side. Again.”
Arthur nodded at the biologist and then at Margot, a great seriousness on his face. For a moment, she felt serious, too, as if a piece of crucial information were about to be revealed, but then Arthur was gone and so was the feeling.
The biologist let out a long exhale, lips fluttering.
“My God, did you see that look he gave you? Someone needs to inform him you’re not a damsel. And you’re certainly not in distress.” He squinted at her forehead. “Or are you?”
“I’ve endured worse.”
“You certainly have.”
She held his gaze until the aforementioned shaking began, until the tension that had existed prior to the whistle blast reknotted itself. Then she looked out the window. The green curtains were almost perfectly translucent now, the fabric dissolved by the streetlights, the canneries’ rattling seeming to both solidify the enclosure and erode it.
“It’s all my fault,” he said.
“What is?”
“We were really starting to get along, but then I pushed too hard. And you told me too much.”
“I don’t require careful handling.”
“But you do require something. A balancing of the confessional scales, I think.”
He stood and scanned the room in what looked like desperation. Then he went over to the bookshelf, retrieved the manuscript, and dropped it onto her lap.
“I wrote it,” he explained.
He sat down next to her again. She looked at the first page, which was blank except for a title. Breaking Through.
“You showed me yours,” he continued. “And now I’m showing you mine.”
She flipped to the second page, expecting to be disappointed. But from the very first sentence, she couldn’t look away. It was like reading the transcript of something she had dreamed and then lived and then dreamed all over again. There was almost nothing in the way of economy, even less in the way of design, the hand-scrawled edits in the margins nearly equal in volume to the typewritten text. The images created by his words, however, were indelible: the ghetto inferno, the split-open head, the tragedy, he wrote that someone else had written, that breaks a man’s face and a white fire flies out of it. A trinity, but not necessarily the Christian one, opposing forces meeting in honesty and a new magic birthing itself in the juncture. Most of all, there was his description of the aftermath. She had felt it before, and in otherwise disparate parts of the world: how communities acquired harder outlines following near erasure; how individuals, in moments of shock, catapulted themselves into unearned clarity. She had felt it, but she had never voiced it, and seeing it on the page was like seeing her own reflection in the harshest possible light.
When there were just a few paragraphs left, most of which praised the trade unions in a way her father would have derided, she stopped reading.
“So?” he asked.
She returned the manuscript to him. Her brain didn’t feel right anymore. The synapses were firing a bit too fast, the ideas too big and loud.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
“About what?”
“Tragedy doesn’t always clarify. And pain doesn’t always produce.”