“Spot-on.”
He shucked his trousers to the floor and freed himself. She undid her own buttons as quickly as possible so that he wouldn’t see her hands shaking. Then a moment of genuine uncertainty. When his face vanished, she felt disappointed. But then his mouth made itself known again—not on her mouth this time, but on a different place, equally eloquent, equally unstable—and when he crawled back up the length of the bed and entered her, there was almost nothing in the way of resistance or pain. Nothing was being broken. If anything, it felt like diving into very hot water. His lips pulled, his hands worked, a blade-sharp knowledge consuming her from the inside out, his convoluted philosophies suddenly crystal clear. Time was passing, but there was no telling how fast, and when she finally stiffened and cried out, she saw light in the darkness of his eyes, his face slack with an emptiness she hoped matched her own.
When it was over, they lay there for a long while, her head on his chest. She curled her arms and legs into balls; she tried to make herself as small as possible. Soon, the sun was rising, the gulls screeching at it, calling it forth or pushing it away. Sea lions, too, what seemed like hundreds of them, barking like hounds. Beneath the ruckus, his heartbeat: the sound coming at her through a fortress of tendon and flesh and bone. Put it in a bucket, put it in your hand, squeeze it, and make it soft. He knew her name, but she didn’t know his. And the fact that this inequity barely troubled her was the first indication of something she hadn’t even expected to consider: that failure, as she had always understood it, might be something else entirely.
Then, a duet of sounds that made her jump. Footsteps climbing the exterior stairs, a voice calling her name.
She jerked away from the biologist’s body. He vaulted off the bed.
“You’ll want to freshen up?” he asked, dressing himself with remarkable speed. Her clothes still lay in a pile next to the pillow.
“Please.”
“I’ll tell him you’re in the bathroom.”
He nodded vigorously, glanced over to where the jug and the sketchbook lay upended on the floor, and left the room.
When he was gone, she rose from the mattress, the pain in her head snarling instantly back to life. She didn’t feel strong enough yet to put on her clothes, so she staggered to the bathroom naked. In the bathroom, it was very difficult to stand, so she gripped the edge of the sink and looked into its basin, the color of which seemed to be the same color as the throbbing between her eyes: a mottled white that wanted very much to be clean but wasn’t. She could hear voices from the front room, the words obscured. There was fluid running down her thighs and she needed to wipe it away, but she was afraid to let go of the sink. So she tightened her grip and stared into the mirror. The wound looked precisely the way it felt, like something out of a comic strip: deep, diagonal, a battlefield gash running all the way from her hairline to the bridge of her nose, the broken skin sealed shut with thick and uneven stitches, a patch of lurid blackish purple marking the place where her forehead had hit the rocks.
“Margot!” her father called.
She bit her cheek and looked down.
“Margot!”
“One moment!”
She looked up again. And even more affirming and more cartoonish than her wound, somehow, was the rest of what she saw in the mirror: her face and body, yes, but also the bathtub behind her. Like the sink, the tub was stained and chipped and dirty white, but instead of being empty, it was filled with the pus-colored bodies of nearly a hundred tiny crabs, their small forms scampering over and under one another, clawing at the walls as if trying to escape a catastrophe only they could predict or understand.
4
1998