The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [135]
“What about in there?” he suggested, nodding at an adjacent door.
“It looks like a utility room,” Maria said. “I bet it’s locked.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Martin said and reached over to push down on the lever.
The door gave way, and Maria cried out—a scream, really, but a very controlled one—in surprise and triumph, after which she followed him into a small supply room, so they were alone in the dark. As soon as the door clicked shut, she grabbed hold of him, an action he did not so much resist as envelop as he fell into her and brought them both to the floor, along with a cascade of toilet paper rolls that strangely never seemed to land. She felt nothing, really, except an odd, blissful heat, until she heard sobs and realized that they were her own. This grief—along with the understanding that Martin shared it—increased her desire, so that she pulled at his shirt and kissed him harder than she had ever kissed anyone, until she was sure her teeth had turned to dust and she tasted blood. Completely immune to any pain, real or prospective, she did not stop as he unhitched his belt and pushed his pants down while she did the same with her dress and underwear, which she left hanging on one ankle, just above a black leather pump she did not bother to remove. She twisted around on her back, and they attacked each other like starving animals. They heaved and flailed, so what they did seemed less and less like fucking than like some strange ritual of initiation Maria both wanted and did not want to stop. She was beneath and above him at the same time, surrounding him as he surrounded her, melting into him as she lost her vision and spun away from this dark room toward some disembodied space. When they were done, she returned to her body and cried new tears of relief and—somehow—resurrection, as if, it occurred to her, she had just clawed her way out of a coffin.
37
The World Is the Totality of Facts, Not of Things
PARIS, 1870. Waking up in the diffuse light of dawn, Lucien realized he had been asleep only a few hours. Still shaken by the nightmarish visions he had suffered, he could not believe he had not died from the vaccine. The beating of his heart and the heavy, humid air moving into and out of his lungs confirmed he had not, and as he slowly flexed his fingers, he felt oddly relieved; whatever else had happened—and he was not yet prepared to think about the consequences—the grief he had brought with him to Paris a few weeks earlier had been stripped away, exposing a core of resolve where before there had seemed to be nothing but despair. He crawled a few feet over to his father, still supine on the floor. While it was unbearable to think that Guillaume would never again laugh or smile or even distractedly examine a flower, Lucien’s sense of loss was tempered by the knowledge that his father had died in a manner of his own choosing, with no doubts and fully aware of the risks; his death was the culmination of decades of work, and Lucien could appreciate why he had done it.
He held his father’s hand and was reminded of what this hand had done for him, not only in his childhood but over the past month, when Guillaume’s work had inspired him in unexpected ways. He explained all of this in a low, hesitant voice, pausing here and there to allow space for his father to respond, as though engaged in a final conversation. He promised to carry on as they had discussed, in the service of truth and discovery, and as he spoke, he realized that—unlike before, when he had expected to die—he meant it, knowing he needed this kind of structure—and ideally, meaning—in his life going forward; to return to the state in which he had existed following Eduard’s death would be disastrous, whether he lived for one day or one century. At the same time, he continued, in the event his father could hear him—and in spite of everything, smiling through his tears—there would be limits to what Guillaume should expect; there was no point in pretending, for example, that Lucien would ever be a scientist, or any kind of scholar,