James Adcox - Does Not Love

Bethany gives her a look.

“Well, okay, I realized it before. Like, logically speaking, yes. I’m talking about, just… just this sense , not really at the level of thought, but the sense that the world works more like books than like, you know, the world.”

Viola and Bethany talk to a pair of men who claim to be airline pilots. Viola introduces herself with a fake name. “Have you ever almost crashed?” she asks.

“Flying is actually a very safe means of travel,” the handsomer of the two says. He is wearing a black tie with a tight blue shirt with a little bit of stretch to it, which shows off his physique nicely.

“What’s the closest you’ve ever come to crashing? Did you announce it? Did the little things pop out from overhead? The masks.”

The handsome pilot looks at her, concerned, then turns to give Bethany a smile.

Robert is already in bed by the time Viola gets home that night. He tells her she smells like smoke. “Of course I smell like smoke,” she says. “It was a bar. People were smoking. Jesus, Robert.”

“Are you drunk?”

Viola struggles to get off one of her shoes, nearly falling backwards in the process. “I’m tipsy.”

Viola gets off the other shoe, then awkwardly pulls off her tights. She clambers into bed beside him and starts pawing at Robert’s chest. “I don’t want to do this right now,” Robert says.

“You are my husband,” Viola says. “My well-formed husband and I would like you to fuck me.”

Robert goes to get Viola a glass of water.

“Jesus, Robert,” Viola says when he returns. “I don’t want to break up. I don’t want us to just be done , Jesus. Is that what you think I want?”

“Here, drink,” Robert says.

“What time is it,” Viola says, taking the glass. “Jesus.”

Robert looks up imagesof bathroom sinks on his computer at work. He’s thinking about getting rid of the countertops in the bathroom entirely and replacing them with a pedestal sink. He looks through several blocky modernist pedestal sink designs. Maybe something more classical, he thinks.

Interns mill about the offices, becoming more sure of their future success with every passing day.

At home Robert shuts off the water supply to the bathroom sink and uses a crescent wrench to disconnect the water lines. He then disconnects the drain pipe and removes the sink from the countertop. He looks for the screws that should connect the countertop to the cabinet. Try as he might, he can’t find how it is connected. He re-reads the instructions that he printed off the internet. The instructions do not offer any insight as to where the screws that attach the countertop to the cabinet should be located. One would assume somewhere around the edges. Finally Robert just tugs at it in frustration. The whole cabinet comes away from the wall.

“There seems to be quite a bit of water damage behind the cabinet,” Robert calls out. “Viola?” But she is not home.

Robert looks up “what to do about water damage” on the internet. The results are not encouraging. “I’m going to have to replace this bit of drywall,” Robert calls out. He drives to the hardware store and buys a strip of drywall and a roll of fiberglass mesh and premixed joint compound and a drywall saw.

Using the drywall saw Robert cuts out an approximately three-foot by three-foot square around the damaged section of drywall. “That’s strange,” Robert says. He goes to get a flashlight. “I can’t see the opposite wall,” Robert calls out, even though he’s pretty sure that Viola still isn’t home. He crawls through the hole, holding the flashlight beam steady in front of him, and finds that, once inside the wall, he can stand up. It’s an old house, Robert thinks, there are bound to be some surprises. Still, after living here with Viola for four years, you would think that we knew the place pretty well. Robert walks through the darkness, flashlight beam shining off into the distance, trying to figure out exactly where, in the home’s layout, he is. The air feels deathly still. There are not, as far as he can tell, any spiderwebs, there don’t seem to be any insects or animals at all. The ground is flat, featureless, and is the only thing he can see other than the hole in the drywall, receding farther and farther into the distance. Robert feels empty. The emptiness feels like a secret.

“If I keep walking, will I find anything?” he says.

“No,” says the emptiness. “This is the space reserved in every house for emptiness. It is a space that cannot be filled.”

“Once I patch up the wall, this space will continue to exist,” Robert says.

“Correct,” says the emptiness.

“And this is the space that consumes all of our efforts to fix things, to make them right.”

“Also correct.”

Robert sits down on the featureless ground and turns off the flashlight. “And if I decide to stay here?”

“You will be consumed in the emptiness. You will become part of it. This is already beginning to happen, as you have noticed. There is a yawning emptiness inside you at this very moment.”

Robert closes his eyes, opens them, closes them again. There is no difference, of course.

When Robert closeshis eyes to sleep that night, the darkness that he sees is no longer darkness, it is an expanding emptiness. He tries to find the end of it, with no success. The further you go, he thinks, the more emptiness there is. It can just keep going, he thinks. There’s no reason to think it stops.

“Prairie voles,”Robert’s friend Trey says. “Let’s talk about prairie voles.”

“Okay,” Robert says.

Robert is sitting on Trey’s slick black leather couch and Trey is sitting in the matching armchair. Between them there is a stylish black table and on top of the table is a little baggie of pills. The furniture and walls throughout Trey’s house are dark and give one the impression they were ordered, as a set, from a men’s magazine.

“Prairie voles mate for life,” Trey says. “They do all kinds of really sweet and disgusting things for each other once they’ve mated for life, like for example grooming each other and making soft comforting prairie-vole noises to each other in their nest. This is because they have an unusual number of receptors in their brain for the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Other species of voles do not have these receptors, and they have no problem leaving their mates at the first convenient opportunity. They don’t have even the slightest interest in grooming or making soft comforting noises to voles they’ve mated with. Now, if you were a biologist working with voles, and you turned down the amount of oxytocin and vasopressin inside a prairie vole brain, do you know what? Suddenly they have no interest in grooming or making soft comforting noises to each other either, and they just go wandering off to find the next available vole.”

“I’m not even sure what a vole is,” Robert says.

“Like a small rat,” says Trey. “They’re not especially charming.”

On one wall there are pictures of Trey in high school in his football uniform and there is a picture of Robert and Trey’s entire high-school football team and there is a small photograph of Trey’s ex-wife and daughter. The daughter is four or five in the photograph, and has messy blond hair. The ex-wife and daughter live somewhere in California.

Trey shows Robert the bottle of fortified pinotage that he brought back with him from his recent physicians’ conference in South Africa. He pours out two glasses. The pinotage tastes like fruit juice concentrate with undertones of paint. “A lot of people say that,” Trey says. “It can take a little while to develop an appreciation for its subtleties.”