Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

“I hope that motherfucking bastard dies,” Stephen said. “If I had a gun I would shoot every motherfucking sparrowhawk in the whole goddamn Alps.”

When Rudi died, Stephen stopped raising his eyes above the horizontal. He stopped going out at night or to the marsh. He read every word of the newspaper, offering lengthy, cogent commentary on the financial news as if he had been asked to join the president’s council of economic advisers. He enlightened me on the relations between oil-producing and — consuming states as if he were grooming me for a position on his staff. His personal interests were sub-rogated to those of the mass media, and he began to seem like a nearly normal person. He stopped shaking. He never got excited. When he went to bed his face turned into a slack, unhappy mask and he never looked at me before he closed his eyes.

Stephen’s grief humanized him. I began to fall in love.

While Stephen was out on Saturday morning buying ingredients for a salad, Omar’s wife appeared at our door excited and trembling. She blew her nose and told me Omar had applied for a transfer to Topeka and she couldn’t imagine life without us. “Now I’m sorry I never touched your red-hot husband,” she said, flopping down on the couch.

It was clear that she meant to imply that her failure to seduce Stephen created a major obligation on my part. She could easily have taken him, who was my sole and only meal ticket as far as anybody could tell, but she hadn’t and now I owed her one.

“I didn’t realize how much you meant to me until Omar’s news came through,” she said. “My heart just tore in little pieces. I couldn’t figure out why. I felt so forlorn and disoriented. I ended up walking around until I was standing under Stephen’s window at the lab, just hoping to see him. That’s when I realized you’re the only people I care about in this town. I’m going to miss you both so much!”

Stephen’s lab was a solid car ride away and his office was on the ground floor of a modernist R&D-campus building that overlooked a compensatory wetland like an amphitheater, so what she said made no particular sense. She had probably tried to get his attention through the window because she couldn’t get past the security at the doors in her jogging outfit, and probably eight hundred guys saw her, and so much for Stephen’s plan of professional advancement via the chi of an irreproachable family life. Maybe they had been sleeping together, before Rudi died and Stephen withdrew from everything and everybody? Or did it make more sense if they had been doing it afterwards? Stephen had been very distant.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I can’t speak for myself, but Stephen’s definitely a very special guy. It’s sweet of you to think you’ll miss us.”

“Oh, Tiff. The truth is, Stephen means the world to me.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry,” she added. “It’s unrequited love. I don’t think he knows I’m alive.”

I shook my head again, mostly because I couldn’t imagine an adult woman claiming to be in love without having slept with the guy first. But you never know. Maybe she was the kind who feels guilty when she commits adultery in her heart?

“Omar is a wonderful man,” she explained. “But you know how sometimes one person can, what I mean is, I think my relationship with Omar was working mostly because Stephen was giving me something Omar just can’t give me. I mean Stephen’s way of talking, that sort of wild side he has. Omar’s a very conventional guy. Sometimes I feel like he’s kind of two-dimensional.” She stumbled along, obviously unused to explaining her actions or motivations to anyone and therefore making them as transparent as frog spawn. She wasn’t up to prevaricating with every word, the skill she so admired in Stephen. It takes a lifetime of practice. She had found her master, her teacher, too late. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

I more or less stopped listening and filled in for her. Stephen, I thought to myself, is like a comet in near-earth orbit whose magnificent tail, streaming in the solar wind, defies long-standing questions regarding its ultimate composition, and compared to him Omar doesn’t even seem quite human — I mean in the classical sense of being made in the image of a god or God — whereas Stephen possesses the indefinable divine spark that arises from friction between an infinitely complex universe and the unfathomable enigma of subjectivity, plus Omar is compulsive and getting seriously chubby from all the overtime he does. According to Stephen, he basically lives in the lab.

“I have a big crush on Stephen,” I said. “I can see where you like him. But I bet there are plenty of cool guys in Topeka. I mean, out there they don’t have any choice! People in Topeka can’t stumble around like culture zombies following all the latest trends. They have to get creative. You’re going to like the Midwest, I swear. There’s more real art going on in one square inch of Midwest than in all of New York City. We’ll come see you! Who knows, maybe Stephen will end up getting transferred there, too. What’s Omar working on?”

“The contraption. The regulatory environment is better in the U.S.” she said.

The contraption was somehow based on the stent, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with animal health, or even what it was.

She told me, if not in so many words: “The female-to-male transsexual market is much more lucrative when it’s not covered by health insurance. You know how the companies negotiate the prices down.”

“Right,” I said.

“And you can’t do experimental surgery on higher primates in Switzerland. It’s impossible. I mean, this place has a formal policy on the dignity of plant life!”

She wanted to be sardonic but conveyed only vain indignation. Incapacity for irony was another thing keeping her from coming across, where Stephen was concerned, as anything but horny.

“In Topeka they can probably get human volunteers,” I said. “They’re cheaper than pygmy chimps.”

“In my opinion the transsexual indication is one big smokescreen. The contraption is for everybody.” She held my gaze steadily. “Once it has regulatory approval, it’s going to be an off-label gold mine.”

I realized she was offering me an insider stock tip. I asked her how far the contraption was down the pipeline.

“It’s not even phase one, but it’s two years to launch,” she said. “It’s accelerated because the application is so exotic nobody cares whether it’s safe.”

“It reminds me of, like, a Kurt Vonnegut story,” I said. “No way it will sell to anybody in his right mind. I remember they tried to move Stephen to the contraption six months ago and he said no way.”

“I wish Omar were as smart as Stephen,” she sighed.

“Omar’s going to have a way bigger career than Stephen,” I assured her. “I mean, you already said this project has huge potential, right? And he’s got a lead position, right? So where’s he going to be coming off it? Looking pretty good! It’s definitely a step up from the beagles. You can kick back and play tennis in Topeka for a couple years, then come back here with vice president Omar and live the life of Riley! Stephen will still be futzing around doing God knows what when you get back. You’re not going to miss anything. His amazing brain isn’t going anywhere. He’ll be fat and bald with a heart condition because he never gets any exercise except driving and eating tater tots” (tater tots, known as Rösti , are a staple of the Swiss diet), “but trust me, he’ll be here.”

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Irony was truly not her forte.