Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,18

Columbia admit they gave up on us too fast, make Joan admit that I’m, or I don’t know, make her, you know, proud, but first I have to grow them both from seed and without the lab’s lamps and bases that’s probably impossible.” I didn’t want her to stop looking at me. I said, “I don’t know if that counts as doing anything.”

She said, “Carlo’s taking me to Bermuda for Christmas.”

I pushed the pillow into the corner of the sofa arm and lay my head deep into it. Mishti stood up, turned off the lights, and went to bed, as if she were going right then to Bermuda. Avenue C hummed outside, it wasn’t late, I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t cold.

LIZARDS

In the morning I went uptown instead of downtown partly because of habit and partly because of you. I sat on the steps of the library for a while waiting for somebody to drop an ID card, the way bums wait for swipes at the subway turnstiles, or Tom plucks Met admission badges off the rotunda floor (“I don’t owe them anything, I’ve given them my mother”). Nobody dropped one because these are highly competent minor scholars carrying zippered wallets in a variety of peach tones. They marched right into the library as if going to the library were so easy. I went to your office.

You sat inside talking on the phone, and Barry and Carlo sat outside in the hall. In a video game I would have had 2.5 seconds to draw my ether pistol from the master belt I’d recently earned in the Nether Woods and zap them for twenty points each, but I’d woken up in real life at Mishti’s, and carried only half a banana. I never want more than half a banana, but I always want half a banana. Bananas really back you up into a corner this way because all and nothing are both unacceptable options. I saw the three yellow peel parts flopping down over my jeans pocket and lifted the poor thing to finish it. It was brown and mushy by now, and too much banana. Barry and Carlo only noticed me by the sound the peel made hitting the bottom of the trash can between us.

“Nell, right?” Carlo asked. He could remember the name of his girlfriend’s professor’s husband’s visiting colleague, but not of her best friend.

“Who are you?” I asked, showing him the masticated fruit in my mouth. Carlo neither answered nor laughed, confirming my total uselessness.

“Mr. Parada here is going to be helping out around the dean’s office,” Barry said. “Mendelson took an instant liking to him.”

“Which shocked me, you know,” Carlo looked less than shocked, “because I’ve heard Mendelson is a lizard.”

It was five after nine in the morning and overnight new alliances had formed. I had only slept, Mishti had only sung, Barry had only burped I was sure since we’d met the afternoon before. Carlo had been in action.

“Well these guys never really want the administrative roles,” Barry said. “It’s an honor, and a bonus, so they take them for a term or two, but they need someone with a head like yours to execute.”

Carlo dropped his shoulders and lengthened his neck, as if to emphasize that he had a head. I’d met guys like Carlo before, guys who had more means of executing their will than will, guys who lived therefore in a showroom of execution, their walls covered in thickly framed stock photography. I looked at Carlo and felt his brain operated inwardly—it wasn’t love from others that fed him, it was a kind of problem solving that left him feeling clean and actual. Maybe he wouldn’t suffocate Mishti after all. Maybe his distant father and fawning mother had left him suspicious and bored of love altogether. It was a shame he had such a great body. He might have been a circus star, had the determining forces of his childhood allowed for that as an outcome. He might have loved the way it felt to fall from a trapeze.

“Nell,” you surprised all of us by being right there and speaking loudly, “for Christ’s sake,” you looked at your phone, “it’s October third.” I didn’t know what to say, you were right. “Go home. Do you have a home?” You untied and retied the elastic at the bottom of your braid while I failed to answer this pretty difficult question. In mercy you kept going. “Finish your little reproductive interference piece by the fifteenth

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