Tizita Read online

  Fast-forward six months, five days, and six hours and twenty-nine minutes. A champagne glass in one hand and my own pale paw in the other, Assefa nodded encouragingly toward the twin meaty mounds on my plate. But it was no use. Every time I looked down at those liverwurstian circles, I saw a doleful set of goose eyes staring back at me. Feeling myself slide toward the pit of everlasting nothingness, I had to pinch the palm Assefa wasn’t holding to control the impulse to flap.

  Assefa realized he was pushing me too far. “Okay, but only for you would I do this.” Throwing me a conspiratorial look, he leaned in toward the center of the table and, skewing his elbow forward at an awkward angle, “accidentally” spilled his glass of Deutz into my plate while simultaneously crying out, “Oh, what a clumsy sod I am.” His eyes twinkling, he pulled me toward him, his sharp collarbone pushing comfortingly against my temple. When distressed, I am always a sucker for a little pain.

  A waiter appeared out of nowhere to expertly whisk away the sodden dish and rearrange the silver. I craned my neck to look up at Assefa’s copper-colored face. I still hadn’t gotten over my good fortune in finding a man whose heart was pure, but whose high forehead, leonine cheekbones, cushiony lips, and chin-sweeping goatee lit a host of impure flares across my belly. My only other sexual partner had been dark-skinned, too, but with Hector Hernandez it had been one brief moment of unexpected (and unwanted) penetration, subsidized by cheap beer, naiveté, and the synchronicity of multiple “Linda palomas” whispered in my ear just after I’d washed my hands with Dove soap. Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli would probably have turned over in their graves to learn that their notion of a-causal but meaningfully connected events (aka synchronicity) would play a role in a thirteen-year-old girl losing her virginity. But with Assefa, it was what Stanley H. Fiske liked to call “the real deal” and what Adam rather wistfully (and, as it happens, inaccurately) pronounced as “first love.”

  Not that concupiscence hadn’t made its contribution to the mix. Just that morning, the fact of my birthday a poor competitor to the dread stirred by his father’s disappearance two weeks earlier, Assefa had momentarily roused himself from his funk, convincing me to pose naked with him, hip to hip, in front of his full-length bathroom mirror. “Come, dukula,” he’d whispered, his tongue a serpent in my ear, “let us look at one another.” I hadn’t needed much persuading. I liked to see the two of us together as much as he did. The contrast never failed to stir my tweeter.

  I’m not a short woman, my father having bested six feet by several inches, and Assefa wasn’t exactly the tallest man, so our noses were at about the same level. But the resemblance ended right there. Everything about me shouted, American girl! My nose was just a bit upturned, my blue eyes studded with silvery gray flecks, my eyebrows a mere shade or two darker than the sun-bleached hair concealing my slightly pointy-shaped head—a leftover of my entrance into the world from a teenaged mother’s clenching tweeter. I’d been profoundly relieved a few years back when my thighs finally flared out to balance the bulbousness of my breasts, and I was extra glad of them these days, given Assefa’s penchant for grasping my hips like guiderails as he drove deeper and deeper into my dark mystery, crying, “Awon, awon!”

  “Yes, yes!” I’d moan back, trying not to pinch his skinny butt too hard as a mini-explosion sent waves of pleasure from my tweeter across every inch of my body. Assefa was as lean as a Watta hunter, his face hauntingly narrow, his hair a fine pattern of springy coils.

  In the mirror, I watched my hands cup his purplish-brown balls, his member rising to a breathtaking angle. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a coffee-colored woman with wild black curls staring back at me—who was that?—but when I closed my eyes and reopened them the apparition was gone. I attended to the matter at hand. Assefa and I were compelled to have a nice long go at each other, with me seated on the edge of the bathroom counter, watching his glorious backside contract rhythmically in the mirror. But this time, something unusual happened. I felt a fullness inside me as Assefa came. “Oh, no!” I cried, as I heard him shout with unencumbered pleasure.

  The condom had clearly not been up to its job. I felt a slow trickle of semen down my inner thigh. To my embarrassment, I began to cry until Assefa whispered, “Don’t worry, dukula. Didn’t you just finish your period last week? It will be all right.” I tended to be lazy about keeping track and wasn’t so sure he was accurate about the timing, but my worry faded as he held me even tighter. I’ve always been a sucker for a strong grip. He began to lick the tears off my cheek like a mother cat, though his tongue was much softer than Jillily’s. It broke the spell. I giggled, and he laughed with me.

  It had been almost physically painful to unglue ourselves and get dressed, he to pick up some last minute supplies for his trip, me to take off for Caltech. The burst condom didn’t give me too much disquiet. I’d learned ages ago to shove unwanted thoughts into a seeming endless number of spare cupboards in my mind.

  Actually it was precisely because of my lifelong familiarity with emptiness that I was particularly looking forward to discussing with my team certain implications of the Eridanus supervoid in an area of the universe devoid of galaxies. The void was huge: nearly a billion light-years across. It had been pretty much confirmed that supervoids were empty of all matter, including dark matter, and a few of my more imaginative colleagues were even conjecturing that Eridanus was a gateway to a parallel universe. While that sounded pretty sci-fi, serious theories of parallel universes were emerging from research into the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, famously described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.”

  I was never one to dismiss seemingly outrageous ideas out of hand; if I were, I would never have gotten this far. The phenomenal world was a tantalizing gem whose facets outleapt anything the mind might conceive. Quantum entanglement was just such a phenomenon. On a quantum level, once objects have interacted with each other or come into being in a similar way, they become linked or entangled. The fact that particles of energy and matter could interact with each other and retain a predictable connection in balancing pairs despite considerable distance between them had fascinated me ever since Adam had first described it, both of us wolfing down Krispy Kremes in a combination of excitement and awe.

  I’d been haunted by the void as a child. Not the common, garden variety childhood terror of disappearing down the bathtub drain, but a lurking pit of eternal emptiness that threatened me long before I taught myself to read Sister Flatulencia’s World English Bible and Mother’s Elle magazines when I was nearly four. It was only when Adam introduced me to Nobel physicist Stanley H. Fiske that I found a way to put that preoccupation to good use, ultimately coming up with the discovery of dark matter within all living organisms in the form of cellular black holes (I called them C-Voids), along with the potential to harness the exchange of light and dark matter to move people around with a zero carbon footprint via the Principle of Dematerialization. Those two discoveries, emerging during a feverishly insomniac contemplation of the heartache of abortion, the abominable human consumption of chimpanzees (euphemistically called “bush meat”), the self-replication of fractals, and the suspended jewels of the Hindu god Indra’s web, each one of them mirroring every other jewel in the web, won me the Prize, but not even a pro-science president had been able to budge a Congress determined to outlaw any grant that would fund our application of P.D.

  But now another angle on the topic was beckoning. Inspired by David Bohm’s vision of entanglement as a guiding wave connecting individual interacting particles, Laura Mersini-Houghton had come up with her own model of entangled universes that was just begging to be verified. We toyed with becoming the ones to do it as we waited for my father’s parting gift to me—what Gwennie Fiske called “the congressional dog and pony show to sabotage scientific progress”—to play itself out.

  I’d tried out my thoughts about the Many Worlds Theory on Assefa the first time we met, explaining how one of the myriad debates in qu
antum physics concerns what happens to the unused possibilities when a choice is made to pursue one course of action over another. Many Worlds theorists contend that those other options actually play out in parallel worlds.

  Assefa was fascinated with the idea, which proved to be a greater stimulant than the Brazilian blend I was drinking at the time. My rhapsodizing over science had been the ultimate repellent for every man Sammie had tried fixing me up with, to the point that I’d decided to forego blind dates forever. Poor Sammie had tried her hardest sell with the last one. “He looks fab, Fleur, you’ll see—and super smart. Phi Beta Kappa, Law Review, the whole enchilada.” She’d been at least partly right. Russell Glick had the look of a young George Clooney, but as we dined together at the fashionable Border Grill, he’d seemed more concerned about demonstrating how many Margaritas he could throw back and enumerating which T.V. shows he liked best than registering my increasing restlessness. When, finally, he seemed to recall that women tended to like it if you at least asked a few questions about them and I described to him the thrill of discovering C-Voids, he’d responded, “Yeah, but what do you do for fun?”

  Delivering me to my doorstep, Russell had looked shocked that I’d averted my face as he aimed his lips at mine. I’d phoned Sammie as soon as his shiny black Mercedes sped away. “I appreciate you looking out for me, Sam, I really do, but if one more idiot tells me I need to lighten up, I’m going to spit ... or something worse.” Sammie snorted, and in an instant we were giggling over how we’d repaired a major clash in our teens by shooting rice pudding out of our noses.

  Russell Glick turned out to be the perfect opening act for Assefa, not that he needed one. Yakking away as we huddled together at the Coffee Club, I explained to him how black holes and voids had been a major part of my life since my earliest days as Mother’s unwanted only child in a household full of eccentric women and cast-off children. Assefa’s eyes stayed locked onto my face the whole time. One sure sign you’re being listened to is that your companion actually asks relevant questions, though Assefa would have to have been more than a little crazy if he hadn’t needed to ask questions after my meandering description of how the unpredictable variability of the Butterfly Effect had led an eleven-year-old girl to attempt to resurrect her beloved Grandfather by plumping his withering testicles with water, the failure of which had energized her then-alcoholic mother to finally wrest the two of them away from her abusive husband’s Main Line estate.

  “Which,” I’d confessed, “was followed by my arrest for skinny dipping in someone’s private New York garden, moving in with my physics mentor Stanley H. Fiske and his sister Gwennie here in Pasadena, and getting pregnant by a boy who had matching Jesus and Mary tattoos on the backs of his hands. My abortion was the last straw, as far as Father was concerned.” Assefa winced, and I hastily appended, “I know, I know—it was horrifying. Even though I was just thirteen, I’ll never be at peace with what I did.” I felt my eyes moisten, but even the lump in my throat couldn’t seem to stop my verbal Vesuvius. “I call her Baby X,” I said, hastily brushing tears from my cheek. I daren’t look Assefa in the eye or I’d simply implode, so I stared at his coffee cup, which had a slight nick in its Styrofoam rim in the shape of a probability distribution sign. “You’d think killing your child would ruin your life forever, but I’d tucked her into the hole in my heart, and not too long afterward I had my epiphany about C-Voids and the next thing I knew I got the call telling me I was being awarded the Nobel Prize. Really, it was a team effort. But now we’re at a standstill on P.D.’s application, thanks to this lousy economy and too many members of Congress convinced my project has something to do with human cloning. Which it doesn’t. You’d think they might believe me about it.”

  That one still irritated me. I was imperfect in more ways than I could possibly calculate, Baby X a case in point, but I wasn’t a liar. At least not about anything so consequential. Contrary to the beliefs of the flat-earthers wanting to drive us back to the Stone Age, scientists generally tell the truth. The fact that I’d been the youngest scientist ever to receive a Nobel Prize seemed to be as irrelevant to certain members of Congress as had the jailed Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize to the Burmese government while she still languished under house arrest.

  As Assefa burst in with a series of penetrating questions, it dawned on me that I had to be either pretty nervous or something I couldn’t quite put my finger on to natter on like that—especially the abortion part, which might have been in the public record after my catastrophic Nobel speech, but not something I typically talked about with anyone, let alone an attractive stranger. Looking back now, I don’t think it was nerves at all, but Assefa’s gift for absolute acceptance.

  Once he finally managed to get some sense of what I’d been talking about, he pronounced gravely, “Enat—my mother—was right. You are quite brilliant. I do believe you’ve just managed to compress your whole life story into three minutes.” He shook his head wonderingly. “And what a life it has been!” Without warning, he stood up, and I was afraid he was going to walk out on me, but instead he leaned forward, whispering, “Tell you what. I’ll get us another couple of coffees and you can fill in the holes”—he flashed me a knowing grin—“and give me the expanded version.” I watched him walk toward the busy counter, his body displaying a kind of feline grace in a tangled loop of fluidity and tension.

  He came back to the table carrying two steaming cups, which he carefully set down before going back for a couple of napkins, taking the time to fold them into perfect little triangles. He pulled his chair closer to mine. I caught the faintest whiff of something—a mixture of cinnamon and Roquefort cheese?—and took a long, relaxed breath. Who wouldn’t feel reassured by such interesting smells?

  Unconsciously stroking his goatee, Assefa shot me a teasing look. “Now, let’s start with that grandfather of yours. You didn’t really think you could resurrect him, did you? By pouring water on his ... body?”

  I felt myself flush. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it made perfect sense to me at the time. The thing is, I was raised in an extremely religious household. Mother’s companion was actually an ex-nun. My father was the foremost crusader against abortion in the Senate, and the house was drenched in stories about Jesus. My mother hadn’t gotten sober yet, my nanny was busy most of the time taking care of a revolving door of foster children, and my grandfather, who was mute from his stroke, was the only one who actually had any time for me.” Nervously pressing the pleat in my napkin, I paused. “Well, no way around it, he was everything to me. I felt I had to bring him back to life. Somehow—well, not somehow, but that’s a whole other story—I got it into my head that his balls, which went from swollen to shrunken with congestive heart failure, were somehow the key to bringing him back again, so I poured a bunch of water on him—actually, onto the crotch of his best blue suit—while he lay in his casket.”

  I waited for the inevitable derisive laughter, but Assefa seemed preoccupied. “Your grandfather,” he said slowly, “he was a good man?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah.” How can one word—less of a word, really, than a sound—convey so much?

  That was when I sensed that there might be a connection between Assefa and me far stronger than pheromones.

  He grunted, and in that moment his narrow face seemed to fold in on itself. “My grandfather Medr, my father’s father, hasn’t had a stroke, but the result is the same. He hasn’t uttered a word since his wife—my grandmother—was raped and murdered by Eritreans when they invaded our homeland.”

  My mind reeled, but my mouth assumed an idiotic life of its own. “Medr. What an interesting sounding name. Does it have a particular meaning?” As soon as the words came out, I wanted to scoop them back again.

  Assefa looked understandably taken aback, but responded politely, “Earth and Fertility,” at which point I burst into tears. “Oh, God,” I cried, “what a beautiful name!” He looked both alarmed and confused. I wanted to run o
ut of the coffee house, but was paralyzed. “Forgive me. I’ve always been socially backward. What you’ve just told me is horrible. I am so sorry. Please forget what I just said. Believe me, it’s no accident my nickname used to be Odd Duck.”

  God bless him, Assefa actually laughed. “Odd Duck? As in ‘quack, quack?’” He put his thumbs side by side with his fingers splayed flat on the table, and, wriggling his wrists, waddled his hands toward me. But now a shadow overtook his smiling eyes. “There is nothing right to say when there is too much pain. Perhaps that is why Medr has chosen not to speak at all.”

  I know it goes against the grain, but I’ve decided that shared suffering can actually be an aphrodisiac. That night, in the back seat of his father’s yellow cab, Assefa kissed my forehead, brought his soft lips to mine, and, reaching into my organic white cotton bra, fondled my breasts, which seemed to have developed a rather pushy life of their own.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry with how much my tweeter was aching for him, but Assefa turned out to be old school. We managed to hold off moving into the mini-explosion phase until we got engaged. It was a different story as soon as a simple silver band with its hard-purchased zirconia and sapphire ring encircled my fourth finger. In his brand new double bed in his brand new duplex apartment, Assefa made up for lost time, establishing what would soon become a ritual of commenting enthusiastically on various electrified parts of my body as he nibbled at them. Surrounding my lips with his own fuller ones, he traced their shape with the tuft at his chin, pulling back to proclaim, “My little Nobelist, whose mouth is a fount of wisdom.” Moving down, he licked every inch of my breasts, coming up for air to pronounce like a connoisseur, “Abundant! Delicious! Fit for a king!” As if he weren’t already sending spears of fire across my belly, he tantalized me with little chicken peck kisses, inching his way down to my tweeter. Coming up once for air, he murmured, “Mmm, could this pussy be the source of all that genius?” before diving back in again.