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By Root 2413 0

suit, RadioShack megaphone in hand, always reliably among them. But even Reverend Jeb was no longer an expected fixture in front of our door. Then finally a weekend came and went during which they did not show up at all, and we surmised they had forgotten or grown tired or bored with us, and we were finally free of them. Tal had fully moved in at this point. She had broken the lease of whatever Humboldt Park dump she had been inhabiting and relocated her whole gypsy bazaar of personal possessions, all her knickknacks and ornaments and gruesome lacquer-polished puppets into the cramped and uncarpeted bedroom that had once been Lydia’s stillborn son’s intended bedroom in days much different than these, and then, for a time, my bedroom, and then, for a time, my painting studio. Tal was crowded out of the room by her things, as if the puppets wanted the living space, and they kicked her out so they could spread out their spindly wooden arms and legs, and she obeyed them, and did not sleep in that room.

At first she slept on the living room couch. But Tal spent only a night or two on the couch before Lydia, in what few words could still come to her, haltingly and stutteringly and pointingly and gesturingly invited her to sleep in “the big bed” with us. Lydia needed as much comfort, as much human warmth, as much skin next to hers as possible. Of course I would have preferred Tal to sleep alone. Before Tal came to stay with us, before the period during which every night all three of us were sealed in like a row of sardines in the bed, Lydia and I would make love in a sluggish, dreamy way—she, silent, pregnant, brainsick; both of us groggy and sweaty. Because of her sensitive belly it was only possible to conduct intercourse in a limited number of arrangements. That was one thing that was possible without words, one thing that was perhaps enhanced by wordlessness: the physical act of love. But Lydia seemed more and more often to not be in the mood for it, and there was no sex after Tal joined us in the bed. Lydia seemed to prefer that Tal be near to her, and so I, rather nobly I think, refrained from complaining of this sleeping arrangement.

It was a crowded bed all right, with me beside Lydia and Lydia beside Tal, or more often Lydia and Tal on the right and left sides of the bed and me monkey-in-the-middle between them, this to facilitate Lydia’s semisomnambulant night ramblings that came from spending the daylight hours drowned in sleep, so she could get out of bed without waking me or Tal. And who can say what she might have done during our slumber? Certainly not Lydia herself. More and more she found that she could not say anything. The disease in her brain lay heavy on her tongue, rendering it numb, slow, a useless slab of meat in her mouth. The bed wasn’t an uncomfortable place to sleep. I’m not a sleeper who craves contactless bodily solitude. Especially with my then newly hairless body, I loved the way another’s flesh felt pressed against mine. If the two women ever caught me—perhaps from the thin slit of vision between almost-closed eyelids—surreptitiously, feverishly masturbating once I believed they were both asleep, they never said anything to me about it. When the necessary act was finished, I would quietly smear away the result on the hem of Lydia’s nightgown, roll over and submerge myself in dreams, falling asleep listening to the steady shallow rhythms of two human women breathing softly beside me.

Then in the morning murk of winter, Tal and I would rise together, prepare ourselves for the day and set out for the lab, leaving Lydia still asleep. Tal and I would make that walk of twenty or twenty-five minutes together from our home to the lab, our place of employment, side by side, buried in winter coats, our breath bouncing against our scarves back onto our faces for warmth. It wasn’t an unpleasant walk, anyway: a left turn on Fifty-second, a right on University, four blocks down, across the wide bustling expanse of Fifty-fifth just as the sun was breaking into full light over the road, past the white vastness