Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

He sighed and ran his hand over the back of his head, where the hair was just beginning to thin. We stood there in the silence, looking away from each other and listening to the house empty itself. We heard the front door slam, the click of heels down the flagstone walk, the soft rustle of clothes being gathered into bags. The fence gate creaked, opening and closing. Walter parted the white curtains and stared out the window until the car below started and drove away.

‘She did it,’ he said, his voice full of disgust. ‘She’s gone. Good riddance.’

‘I have to go too,’ I said nervously. ‘I’ll call you later, maybe, and we can talk some more about this …’

He sighed again and squared his shoulders, and after a minute more he turned to face me. I couldn’t tell if the lines in his face were from pain or age. ‘I’m going to need some help here,’ he said. ‘Cleaning, laundry, perhaps some shopping and cooking. Would you be interested in doing that in exchange for rent?’

It was too strange to be true. I knew I shouldn’t have seen any of this, shouldn’t be in this house, but I had hardly any money and no other place to live. I leapt on his offer before he could change his mind, before I could think what I was getting into.

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep to my room, you’ll hardly know I’m here, and whatever I find for a summer job won’t get in the way of the housework.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Move in whenever you want.’ He reached down and straightened the rose-print quilt on the bed, which was already perfectly taut.

A Curtain Lined with Bats

I spent most of that first summer at Walter’s house alone.

Walter and his herd of graduate students stayed at his research station at the Quabbin Reservoir, collecting numbers: how many yellow perch lived in a certain part of the reservoir? How many trout? How many bass? How many square feet of algae, how deep the mud, how warm the water, how high the levels of pesticides, organophosphates, dissolved oxygen and nitrogen; along the shores and in the surrounding woods, how many rabbits, voles, moles, shrews, hawks? Each member of Walter’s team was tracking something, and all of them generated numbers. Walter brought the numbers to me.

I was working for him — my title was ‘Laboratory Assistant’ and he’d arranged to pay me for the summer from his research grant. Once or twice a week, he drove the twenty miles back from the reservoir to pick up some clean clothes and drop off his raw data. I didn’t understand his work, that first summer, and I blinked vaguely when he explained how he hoped to feed all his data into the university computer and build a simulation model of the reservoir’s ecosystem. But I didn’t have to understand. All I had to do was to transcribe the data he brought me each week onto index cards and careful graphs. Walter praised my neatness and accuracy and I was neat — I had my Rapidograph and some lettering templates, and the graphs I made were better than he’d ever had.

When fall came and I started school, Walter encouraged me to study biology rather than art. ‘You already know how to draw,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you learn something new? You have a real flair for biology.’ I was so lonely then, so eager for praise from anyone, that I took his advice. I took general zoology, introductory chemistry, and botany my first semester; when spring came I took genetics and physics and math. The work came easily to me, more easily than I expected, and by my second summer I was beginning to understand what Walter did. My hard work was repaid, then — Walter asked me if I’d like to join the summer team at the reservoir. This was an honor, he let me know; I’d be the only undergraduate there. And because the two of us had shared a house all year as innocently as siblings, sticking to our separate rooms even though I cooked, cleaned, did laundry like a wife, I didn’t think to question Walter’s motives.

‘I could use another pair of hands,’ he said. ‘You could stay in the trailer with me and help out with the perch study.’

I was glad to be asked. I was glad, at first, to stay in the trailer and not in one of the shabby tents. The trailer, ugly and green, was parked on a grassy slope fifty yards back from the reservoir. When the wind blew, the undersides of the maple and basswood leaves near us shone soft and silvery, and at dusk swarms of swallows darted low over the water. The canvas tents where the students slept were surrounded by scrub and had no view at all. The students made fires down there in circles of blackened stones, and they played their radios and danced on the silty shore. Sometimes they pulled their sleeping bags out and slept under the stars. At night their voices would drift up to me, along with the sweet smell of marijuana and occasional shrieks of laughter, and sometimes I wished that I could join them.

The trailer had two bedrooms — one for me and one for Walter — along with a combination living room and kitchen and an attached laboratory that ran the trailer’s whole length and held the deep freezers, the scales, the dissecting equipment, the microscopes and buckets and nets and poles. Walter’s students had parceled out the birds and mammals and amphibians among themselves. Walter and I were working on the fish. Each day we rose at dawn to row across the reservoir and haul the nets we’d set the night before. The water was so cold that it numbed my hands, and often I wouldn’t feel my stabs and scratches until later, back at the dock, where we hunched together over the net and disentangled the fish from the meshes. Trout, yellow perch, sunfish, suckers, bass. Their scales, under the dissecting scope, showed rings like trees.

Walter, wild with enthusiasm, lectured to me all day. In the boat, on the dock, during the afternoons in the makeshift lab as we dissected hundreds of fish in the shimmering heat and weighed testes and ovaries, determining fertility indexes and rushing to get through the day’s catch before the fish rotted in our hands. We froze the reproductive organs so we could test them for pesticides later. My hands always smelled of fish. I never felt clean. At night I dreamed of legions of perch standing up on their tails and chasing me, and during the day I listened in a trance as Walter colonized my brain, transplanting huge wads of knowledge from his head to mine. When I sat at my lab bench he stood over me, wrapped his long arms around me, used his fingers to guide the scalpel in my hands. He leaned his thighs, cool on the hottest days, against my back. He told me I had a wonderful mind and lovely hair, and he made me first author on the paper we wrote together. He fed our data into the university computer, cross-matching it with his students’ data on insecticide use, acid rainfall, wind patterns, temperature change, and one night he said he couldn’t imagine how he’d lived without me.

That was the night of July Fourth, and so everyone everywhere was celebrating. In the small towns surrounding us, people marched in parades and waved flags and roasted themselves at cookouts. Aging men injured themselves at softball games. We worked, a day like any other, and when the fireworks splattered the sky that night, Walter looked up from his papers and cupped his ears and identified the displays by sound. ‘Ware,’ he said. ‘Barre. Athol.’ He might have been a bat. He listened rather than looked because we weren’t outside, standing in the water with his students and waving sparklers and catching the occasional high explosion over the trees. We were inside the trailer. I was lying on the floor, my legs up on the arm of the couch where Walter sat, reading his manuscript to me. It was sixty-three pages long and had to do with the effects of changing water pH on the reproductive success of various fish. The effects of acid rain.