Night Soul and Other Stories (24 page)

It was late for her, though he’d just clocked in and was pondering ants again, if they unreel their silk like spiders, anchor it to something, then move away. A photo of a drab, earthen-hued garden spider showed its dragline silk for the outer rim of the web—insurance in case of a bungee bailout—strong as the golden spider’s silk but, with more amino, ten times stretchier when wet—so strong, so soft. Wasp silk they worked with, and bee. Now bee silk a real simple genes-and-protein setup—but nothing beats spider silk. She was leaving. He missed the electron microscope at the other job. Gene measurements on a screen, spectacular speculations and sure things—and now it was bacteria they could insert silk genes into and tobacco, of all things; and unlikely, unsuspecting animals. He felt her near him and turned to see her thinking. “I can see it all, what happened on the subway,” she said, her tone disturbingly new to him. He looked at her.

“She wanted to give you her bike.”

He shook his head, studying his work. A moment later,
Why
? he called out—
why
would she want to give him her bike? His coworker, gone for the night, didn’t stop or didn’t hear him call after her. He was alone tonight, as it happened. Lose your job, find one, was the philosophy. A better one than any job you could lose, though the new job doesn’t come with a certain eighty-thousand-dollar scanning device, failing which he must sometimes independently remember on his own what it was he actually already knew, or ask for help.

It was a job. Pedaling back through the park along the interior road at two in the morning, he found two kids from opposite curbs converging on him until, coasting as if to slow down, he rose and made a dash for it like a runner, his heart racing, before they could get to him, long-legged, ugly, and passed between them like prey in the deep, like a knife—he didn’t need a change of gears and didn’t have one. Out for a spin along the Meer, lamp light in the water—what is
this
experiment ahead, behind, around him? A tree in passing (long life and beautiful leaves, they breathe, we breathe) remembered minutes later when he hoisted the bike to clear the subway turnstile and raced carefully downstairs and up again to catch a downtown train ahead of the closing doors. He was alone in the car with one other person at this hour who watched him sit down, holding the bike before him.

Had he been drawn away from the deep shape of things into the bowels, multiple abdominal glands, ducts, dope, quaint feats of animals that supply silk for enzyme-solvent med capsules or stitch the leaves of the gingko tree he had just felt near him in the park? The train got under way. His fellow passenger stood up and came to sit opposite him. An Asian with a faded khaki knapsack on his back, he leaned forward, a bunch of brochures in one hand. He wore flip-flops showing his brown toes. His taut stare must be returned. “You ride bike on subway?” “It travels with me.” The man laughed a staccato Chinese laugh. “I give you backpack, you give me bike.” “Not a chance.”

The stations of the line seemed, afterward, when he got home, to have been contracted to one unexpected platform to come, as though what passed between the two men was too much for the actual track time.

“You have job, you wok, you study, get better job—what you study?” “I don’t know what I study. I study silk.” “Sirk!” (the man shakes his handful of brochures as if that’s what they’re about and laughs a laugh that is no laugh) “Sirk wom!” (Yes of course—the silk worm with its half-mile-long cocoon-winding.) “Sister wok in sirk
fac
tory!” “Does she make comforters? Bed covers?” “Factory!” “Good for her, good for your sister,” one adds, not feeling it, then feeling it—“in Suzhou?” Yes, yes (the brother, unsurprised, contemplating your rat trap with small black backpack clamped tight), you recall women in hygienic caps stretching an already arch-stretched square of cocoon silk across a queen-size bed—and a Dutch tour group, a few years ago now, three women among them with Chinese babies, it was pointed out to him by the woman he was with.

“We have some problems with silkworms.” “Sirkwom no pobrem.”

“We love the silkworm, but—” “No pobrem!”—“Spider silk’s more…” The Chinese traveler’s knapsack in his lap now, there is something about it. Sirkwom! (Its silk, the sutures, he’s learned plodding through surgical applications, regrettably provoke immune reaction, it’s the ancient glue that it wraps around a protein). “Your sister in Suzhou packs the silk inside the comforter.” There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe, a poet said.

Man doesn’t question the Suzhou coincidence but he is unpredictable, and where he’s coming from produces truth too. He points irritably at the bike with his brochure hand and the brochures scatter multiplying on the subway car floor, or did he fling them? Is he beside himself? His fellow passenger bad news? He would not inquire how this American in the leather jacket picking up a brochure asking him if he’s a
messenger
knows about his sister who packs great ropes of silk into duvets in Suzhou we’re quite sure. Americans travel but are not immigrants. The Chinese repeats his proposition, not quite a joke. Why should he not speak? The knapsack—something in it. “Messenger?” you ask again and the doors open at the station you now see you’ve been drawn to, the downtown platform this time.

The Chinese man stands, the rider rolls the bike toward the door. “Messenger,” he says, he reaches for the bike too late, the rear rack. “
Messenger
!” Of strewn brochures.

The station, a platform, has been imagined wrapped in a waiting memory where the woman and her bike left a train hours ago; but before the Chinese traveler in his ire can get his recyclables together, not that it’s his stop, doors do their job. And when, in the train’s empty, then humming, pause, wheeling the bike briskly alongside stopped cars finding across the tracks the uptown change booth now dark while on this side our conductor promising on the loud speaker we would be moving momentarily materializes at a cab window looking down this platform, a strange routineness now in his reply to the man with the wheels—the same MTA guy from five o’clock?—“Yeah the green bike, they told me over there—supervisor he—” “Supervisor?” For this is not quite the same guy. “She told me where she need to get off uptown like I’m a bus driver”—conductor looked at his palm, dignified—“I said just watch the station comin’ in. She goes, Don’t you know your job, how did you get your job?”

“She ill?”

“Ill you say.” Conductor frowns like a half grin. “Supervisor said she had like—” (Conductor’s personal like your friend for a second) “—she had two days.” “Two days?” “To give her bike to somebody, that’s it. She told him.” “What did she tell you?”

“Where she has her coffee in the morning seven o’clock, like we had it together and she’s reminding me.” The breakfast place uptown familiar after all by the subway where you used to catch the bus.

“Supervisor looks like you.” “He’s my brother.” “How you got your job?”

Checking a black and white monitor in the cab, “You know her,” the conductor said.

The doors? Much obliged.

It’s going to be two-thirty in a minute, the need to get to bed leaning back into the seat of the moving train, hands on the bike, the brochure in a coat pocket, still on the same train with the Chinese guy. But you’re looking at his brochure, a dark green hillside of tea bushes, a stage full of gymnasts balancing a stack of chairs, 212 phone numbers for evidently a travel agency, and a memory of cocoon, a shroud wrapped all from one thread, the caterpillar of the silk moth, hardly remembering a book or two in your backpack.

It will feel like the crack of dawn, not seven-twenty, when a figure in the coffee shop window observed him, he knew, whatever she knew of him as he walked his bike and locked it to a stanchion where the sound of a familiar bus exhaling told him the woman with the bike, brighter, slower than he recalled though dogged by a shadow, was not herself. The green hybrid not in evidence, it was not at stake—as if, at the café’s inner doorway, what was in the balance was what he took in—the shining Silex glass over-and-under pots, the murky, gleaming griddle and its smoke of sausage and piled hashbrowns, aluminum pitchers reflecting silver light, booths and the hiddenness of men and women in them, hunched shoulders at the counter, two cops, a table or two by the window. And an opened-up laptop lid she peered at, the small, fine scarf protecting her neck. Scents of coffee, sausage links, uncanny toast, a grease of some hunger his gift might take the structure of along with some life out of sight but right behind him as he held the inner door a second about to step across the threshold.

“You!” from the woman—a chair waited for him and all but spoke to him and then he was above her, the planes of her face alight with faint blame. “On my way to work,” he said.

He started to explain, but a bird had exploded into the restaurant, swooped in, a sparrow, flapping around the ceiling lights whirring less like a hummingbird than an out-of-sync fan, now flew at the window, cut past the woman, her face, and out again past two girls in school uniforms who’d run to push open the inner and outer doors. “Sparrows don’t do that,” said the tall one. “That’s a young song sparrow,” the man said. The cops had spun around at the counter. The woman undid her sheer scarf. She said, “The bike’s not here.”

“I have a bike.” He pointed. “It’s at home,” she said, meaning hers—“two blocks,” she bobbed her head westward. She recited the address off the laptop’s screen, he thought.

“It’s not a
bike
I need,” he said.

The tall girl asked how he knew it was a song sparrow. The young ones didn’t have the spot on the breast, he told her but she frowned. He was content to order. The other girl, the little, sturdy one, asked amazingly what it
was
he needed if it wasn’t a bike. “A daughter?” he joked. “You should have a daughter,” the woman said, “nowadays they can do that.” They all thought about that. Why had he ordered oatmeal, the raisins surviving above the milk? How much had she paid for that hybrid? he asked with his mouth full. Oh yes, someone had given her the bike, she said—her husband, wherever he was—if he was still or had ever been her husband—thinking it would help. The waitress smiled. The waitress knew her.

“Help toughen you up?” “Why, yes.”

The schoolgirls standing with their paper bags would miss their bus, he thought. “When you were already tough,” he said to the woman. “You understand me,” the woman said. A panel truck advertising “www.REPAIR” backed in and the driver came around and kicked the man’s bike locked at the very lip of the curb, and he stood up, and the schoolgirls in their pleated skirts started speaking, laughed, and started again. The little one said, “You had a right to be there.”

He had ignored the tall one, who was fretting about that bird—not cold, not hungry, certainly not crazy, was it the door opening that had pulled it in? she asked. The kids stood waiting, but for what? The waitress over at the counter sipped her coffee and watched.

“You understand me,” said the woman again. He understood nothing of the kind he said. He understood chains of molecules under an electron lens; he could see code fold into double-coil proteins of bulldog ant silk; bee silk was simpler, four genes, four proteins. Science was beautiful, the woman said and added something typical he almost understood but didn’t. “I’m quite well-known,” he said. He looked at her and she shook her head as if he were hopeless.

“How did you lose your job then?” she said. “I was cruel to someone.” The woman made a sound. “Is that all?” “She lost
her
job.” “She wasn’t thinking well.” “No.” “But you lost yours.” “I let it lose me.”

“What does that make you?”

She shut the laptop and stood up and spread a ten-dollar bill next to a slice of toast. “Working days now?” Time had lengthened around them overnight. He started to explain about today but it was none of her business. But then he did, about the message on his machine last night from his lab partner that they would need him early this morning.

“It’s you she wants.”

Were the schoolgirls about to leave? The little one alerted him, the man who’d kicked the bike was coming back.

“That stop you got off at,” he said. The bike had told her to, she said. The bike had not told her anything. “Or I
let
it tell me,” she said. No, that wasn’t the reason, the man said. “I was hysterical.” “You were not,” he said. “Where
I
was coming from yesterday.”

The waitress had her arm around the woman’s shoulders, asking her how she was doing. The woman added a five and took her bag and went thinly to the restroom. The waitress went with her. He dropped a quarter, it landed on end and rolled and the tall girl picked it up. “You leaving?” she said. She was irritated. Some shift had occurred simple as looking out his bedroom window one day and seeing what he hadn’t seen.

He was telling the tall girl that a song sparrow would never come in here for food, it foraged on the ground. It wouldn’t sing in here either, there was a sparrow with a song like it that began differently but you’d never see that bird in the city. He held the door for her, but she was waiting for her friend. The cops left with him.

In a dark hallway his partner took his arm. They came to a small room. On a table a transparent box lighted by a single UV. In the box a yellow spider, legs out front, legs behind, Alone here. His partner had remembered. An inlet tube from a cylinder evidently of CO2 outside the box. A contraption for reeling out the silk hooked somehow to an orifice point back along one side of the thorax was ingenious. Silk strong enough given a thickness of an inch to reel in a 747 from the sky. Strong enough to catch a careless finch. Stronger than Kevlar. Strong as steel. Good to go as parachute cord. The animal seemed absolutely still. A burly technician joined them and explained. Then the Dutch woman said this spidey was venomous but not seriously so and bites only if put next to your skin and bothered; it was her own, a female, and it had come from her garden. The males are so busy they forget to eat and can starve themselves.