Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

I laughed. “That's only in the clean room.”

“I worry about you,” he said. I had the feeling he was stalling for time. “I wonder what is in those chips that you have to wear the suit. What you are being exposed to.”

This made me laugh again, and my laughter had an edge to it. “Jean-Michel,” I said, “it's to protect the chips and keep them clean. It's not the chips that are dangerous. It's the humans. It's us.” In the rawness of the night my eyes were watering. I wanted to kiss him badly, as badly as I've ever wanted anything, even Phil.

“Sweetpea is dead,” he said.

“What?” I said, like an idiot.

“Your husband killed our dog, and my niece is very upset.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Jean-Michel?”

“I don't know so much how it started,” Jean-Michel said. “I guess he gets the call from the animal-control officer, and he is very upset or something, because you know the insurance requirement is waived, and he comes over to the house, saying that the dog is very dangerous and must be insured for the sake of others it could injure, and he has a baseball bat with him, and he starts to hit the dog, and then kick it, and it is attacking him back and howling, and my niece is screaming holy murder, and he hits the dog on the head over and over and kicks it in the stomach also, until it lies quiet and dies.”

The night was dark except for the pale yellow glow of a streetlight. On the other side of the parking lot an early-shift worker clambered out of her car, slow and groggy, and waved. I could not reconcile the Phil of this story with the Phil of my life, yet I didn't doubt that it was true.

“I thought maybe you already knew,” Jean-Michel said.

I shook my head.

“He hasn't been here?”

I shook my head again.

“I'm supposed to be out looking for him, but I came here to see you instead,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”

“What will happen?” I asked him.

“I don't know,” he said.

I thought of Phil on the day he found Blister, how he rolled around with the dog in our backyard, for all the world like two children, and I thought of him on our wedding day, too, how he cradled my face between his two hands and kissed me gently, too gently, and I said, “I won't break,” and made him kiss me again, harder, in front of the minister and everybody. I thought that however much Phil loved Blister, which he did, he would not have exploded into violence over just the dog, and that this is what it means to live for six years with a person who loves you: if you take one step away from that person, even just one step, he knows. He can't stop it, but he knows. Another car pulled into the parking lot. Inside the building someone was stepping into the clean room and looking at the scanner, where the chips rose and presented themselves for inspection, each of them blue and pink and shining, containing in their beauty some remote, possible flaw.

The first time my father played tennis with Frank McAllister, it was a cool, sunny, the-best-of-summer-is-yet-to-come afternoon in the middle of May. The McAllisters had moved to the neighborhood six months earlier, into a three-bedroom, split-level, single-car-garage ranch identical to ours, and joined the tennis club before it even got warm enough to play. As soon as my father saw Frank hitting practice balls in the frigid spring weather, he decided that he'd found a new and noteworthy opponent. Frank was a broad-chested man with short red hair, pale eyebrows and pale legs, and when he played his face turned as red and wide as a beefsteak tomato, the freckles standing out like seeds.

“That guy looks all right,” my father told me, pointing at him unsubtlely with his racket. “Might even pose a challenge.” The thing about my father was that he had no perspective whatsoever on his own game. He thought he was a fair player who compensated for his less-than-stellar fitness with a strong intellectual grasp of the sport. None of this was true, but it took me years to figure it out.

“Please don't ever play with that guy,” is what I said to my father at the time. I recognized Mr. McAllister from a drug and alcohol presentation he'd made at my high school earlier that year. He was a drug counselor and made us all yell slogans back at him—“We're not sheep! We don't sleep!” which had something to do with peer pressure — and showed slides. It was the kind of forty-five minutes that made me dread going to school.

“I know what you're thinking,” Mr. McAllister had said about the slide that showed a joint. “Peace and love, right? If they'd just put this stuff in the water, there would be no more war.” We were supposed to laugh. Throughout the presentation I stared at his daughter, Ivy, who had enrolled at the start of the spring term. Like him she was redheaded, unlike him she was beautiful, and I had a furious crush on her.

“What's the matter with you, son?” my father said. He only called me son when we were playing tennis. The game brought out the patriarch in him. I told him the “there would be no more war” line, and he laughed.

“We'll have no rush to judgment,” he said. “On the court he might be all right.”

He walked up to Frank, welcomed him to the club — where my father considered himself an elder, as at a church — and invited him to play the following Saturday. Frank pumped my father's hand in his enthusiastic, drug-counselor way, and said, “Hey, that sounds great! ” As the days wore on, my father kept mentioning the match and rubbing his hands in anticipation. His previous tennis partner had wrecked his left knee diving for a ball one day and, after an expensive operation, had elected to take up water aerobics instead, a phrase my father went around repeating, in a disgusted, wondering tone, for weeks after he heard the news. He'd been at loose ends ever since, with only me to play with; he just didn't have the heart, he said, to whip me.

When the afternoon finally came, I went down to the club to watch. Mostly I was hoping that Ivy would be there, and we'd strike up a casual yet witty and flirtatious conversation about our fathers and their foibles, a conversation that would lead to a date, and then to another, and, eventually, though my vision here got cloudy, to sex. Of course she didn't show up. She was above watching her father play tennis on a Saturday afternoon. I, sadly, wasn't.

But it was pretty interesting to watch. Frank McAllister had a strong serve and a pretty good backhand, and for a solidly built guy he could cross the court fast. My father, who was neither fast nor solidly built, hung back, waiting for opportunities to show off his killer forehand, which was the centerpiece, and maybe the only piece, of his game. Frank kept coming up to the net, harassing my father with his backhand, and my father kept running back to the baseline as if it were home base and he'd be declared safe once he got there. It turned into a close contest. Both of them hit the ball with audible, satisfying thwacks, and it arced fast and clean across the net. The sound of the game was like music: their shoes made rhythmic, percussive sounds on the asphalt, and the ball hit and bounced in beats, the measured pace of a serve, the sustained pause of a lob, the staccato shock of an overhead smash. Soon they were sweating mightily, their foreheads dripping, their thinning middle-aged hair damp. By the time they were done their shirts were translucent. Frank beat my father in two sets, 6–4, 6–4.

My father shook his hand. “Get you next time,” he said.

They took to playing regularly, once or twice a week in the evenings, and a longer match on weekends. The tennis club wasn't fancy — just a set of private courts with a changing room attached — but my father talked as if it were. “Going down to the club, darling!” he'd announce to my mother as he left the house— the only time he ever used the word darling —and for years I pictured the place as a gentlemen's establishment, with leather armchairs and Oriental rugs and gin and tonics on the balcony. The first time I went there with my father, I couldn't believe what a letdown it was.