The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [12]
Standing on the shore, swaying on the long shoes, Bigelow imagines these things in the water, his among what others have lost, his maps and equations and longings erased by the tide.
TO SLOW HIMSELF DOWN, to give her time to come, he has to stop moving altogether.
He has to call upon his whole repertoire of calming images, one especially, he has no idea its source, of an empty chair in a road—a simple wooden chair, the kind you’d expect in a kitchen, and yet it sits alone, without table, lamp, or occupant, in the middle of a straight, paved road, a road going nowhere. Green fields on either side and a range of mountains in the distance. An altocumulus, maybe two.
Once he adds the clouds, he runs through classifications of their forms, starting with the lowest, the nearly earthbound stratus and fractostratus, up through cumulus and nimbus and all their subclassifications, even those textbook clouds that he never sees, like altocumulus-castellus, up and up through all the layers of the air until Bigelow reaches the high, high cirrus, clouds spread at thirty thousand feet like a frayed veil between earth and heaven, between coming and not coming.
Aloft, he swallows his breath, in control now, almost.
The habit of ice.
The habit of ice.
The habit of ice will hold him where he wants to be held, frozen at that most delicious point. The basic pattern of ice is hexagonal, a union of six tetrahedra, but the formation of crystals varies with temperature. From zero to negative three degrees centigrade, it is the habit of ice to form thin hexagonal plates. With the subtraction of one or two degrees, needles result. Take away three and get hollow prismatic columns. From negative eight to negative twelve: thicker hexagonal plates. The dendritic forms—fronds of ice, like botanical growth—occur from negative twelve to negative sixteen.
Bigelow keeps his eyes closed until she cries out. He wants to watch her as she comes, the way she seems for a moment to swim beneath him, her legs kicking in some rhythm he can almost understand.
But she’s too quick; it’s over before he has a chance to see.
“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a balloon and a kite is that a balloon can be blown off course.”
He sits across from her at the table as she examines the raccoon he has brought. It’s still warm; he shot it in the station, cornered it under his bed, where he keeps—used to keep—his cornmeal and his sugar.
“And,” he says, “to fly a balloon, you need good weather. That’s not true for kites.”
Her clothes are off, folded on the chair. She has only the one dress, and sometimes removes it before cutting up game. He’d like to believe this is to please or tempt him, but she’s no more flirtatious than she is modest. It must be that she doesn’t want to get it stained. He watches as she picks up the carcass, turns it over, looking for the place where the shot entered, a way to predict how it will bleed when she butchers it. Her breasts move with the rest of her, not so small that they don’t sway prettily when she stoops to retrieve a fallen knife. Still, he knows better than to interrupt her when she’s working.
“The first thing that was wrong with the Nairobi experiment was the balloon, because balloons have no line, no