A new Mexican Day of the Dead doll lay on his pillow. Like the first doll, the skeleton wore brightly colored clothes and held a little note in its hand. The thing had a giant head and a tiny body that made it resemble a miscarried infant.
Gabriel stepped back in disgust. “Bernard, did someone come in here? Someone with a doll?”
“Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nope.”
Gabriel plucked the note from the doll’s hand and unrolled it. He had to put it under the microscope to read the small print.
They already have a name: the Schistlings.
Chapter 30:
Oh
June 1985
His brakes screeching as he pulled into the driveway, Gabriel was relieved to see Yvonne’s car missing, which meant she was still teaching her Friday-night dance class. He had just been fired from his job at San-Briggs Teaching Hospital. He had lost eight jobs since finishing school and always for the same reasons: insubordination and unauthorized use of company materials. His resume might as well have been put through a shredder.
He turned off the car and picked up the two cases of beer he had picked up on the way home. Instead of going inside, he walked out to the wraparound deck he’d built off the side of their quaint, single-story house on the seashore. He put the beer down, went over to the railing, and stared out at the ocean. He lit a cigarette, hoping it might help calm his frayed nerves, but all it did was make him cough. He felt so stupid. When Yvonne found out he’d lost yet another job, she would probably call a divorce lawyer right then and there.
Gabriel tossed his cigarette butt into the ashtray, plopped down on his deckchair, and stared up into the night sky. He reached down and ripped open the beer case.
When he popped the top off the beer can, it emitted a delicious little hiss. He hadn’t had a drink in over two months. Before Yvonne came home, he’d have to carefully bag up all of the empty cans and hide them in the trunk of his car. The last time he’d tried to have a beer, she’d dumped it over his head and thrown it at him.
“There’s no way I’m letting you become an alcoholic,” she’d said. “I love you too much to let you destroy yourself.”
Gabriel hesitated. He’d spent every year of their marriage hiding his drinking. It was hardly the most husbandly behavior, and he felt ashamed. But she just didn’t understand.
He took a sip, and the beer flowed down his throat, soothing him with all the glorious release of a pent-up orgasm. He followed up with a glorious swig. The beer was cheap and watery, but after two months of suffering, it tasted good.
Gabriel finished off the can and popped open another.
Three hours and twenty-three beers later, he lay sprawled in the chair. The empty cans surrounded him, but he couldn’t find the energy to pick them up. Let her come home. Let her see it. Let her see the real me.
Fortunately, she wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. That gave him ample time to either sober up before she got home, or failing that, he would brush his teeth to kill the beer breath and go to bed. He’d done it many times over the years. It was positively sickening how good he’d gotten at lying to the person he loved the most. For the last few months, he’d tried to stay sober, but even in his drunken stupor, he saw his attempt for the fool’s errand it really was.
But even if he hid the drinking, he wouldn’t be able to hide the news. At some point, he’d have to tell her about San-Briggs. Lying about the drinking was already straining the boundaries of his conscience, and he couldn’t lie about his career, too. He’d have to watch her face drop when she learned, once again, that her husband was a crackpot dressed in the cheap wrapping paper of a visionary.
He should’ve been less impulsive. They’d caught him using their materials for his experiments. He’d been too stupid to think of a good excuse, so he’d been fired again. The word pounded through his subconscious like a jackhammer. Fired. Fired. Fired. Fired.
Gabriel finished the rest of his twenty-fourth beer and crumpled the can, taking out his anger on the thin piece of metal. He tossed it behind him and opened the first one from the second case.
Then, he heard footsteps.
“Hey, baby!” Yvonne called. “I have big, big news!”
She’d come home early. Her gleeful tone made Gabriel feel flimsy and broken. It reminded him of how cringing and helpless his father had looked on his deathbed. Gabriel didn’t turn around because he didn’t want to see her jolt at the sight of his drunken eyes. He didn’t want to cause her joyous smile, that effervescent xylophone of white teeth, to curl up into a grimace. He didn’t even turn his head out of fear that any body language he might use would betray his drunken state. He couldn’t let her see his face or smell his breath. Suddenly, he was thankful that he’d forgotten to replace the burnt-out bulb in the porch light, as the darkness presented his only hope of keeping the beer cans hidden.
“Gabriel? Are you okay?”
He had to distract her somehow, even if it made her angry. Distraction was better than admission. “Yvonne, ahhh, I’ve been, um… analyzing things. A whole lotta things and stuff.”
Footsteps. She was walking closer.
“Stop!” he shouted, his voice quivering.
“Analyzing what, baby?” she asked.
“I just, ah, I’ve got a lotta stuff on my mind. An enormous amm… ammmount. Things that… happened.”
“Are you talking about your project?” She stepped forward again. She wasn’t far away. Only a few more steps and she’d be beside him.
He knew that she was going to climb on his lap, then she’d try to kiss him, and he couldn’t let that happen. He tried to get out of the chair, but his legs felt like solid blocks of concrete. “Wait right there. Er… I… it’s just—”
“I’m waiting,” she whispered. “Gabriel, you better not be—”
“I’m not!”
“Then what are you doing?” She was starting to sound irritated.
“Yvonne, ah, you see… it’s just that I, um, I’ve been considering the nature of the… ah… the Klein bottle in great detail.”
“The Klein bottle.”
“Yes, of course. You know what, um, what it is, right? It’s a non-orientable surface, much like the Morb… Mobe… no. Möbius. Möbius strip. But the Klein bottle, right? It has no… boundary.”
Her breathing became heavier. One more step and she’d be right beside him. He had to keep talking and pretend to be Mr. Brilliant-but-Boring-Scientist-Guy.
“Yesss… yes, no boundary, nope, none.” He rubbed his eyes. “See, a true Klein bottle, a true Klein bottle cannot exist in our three-dimensional world because it would be forced to intersect itself. See, right… this here, a Klein bottle is supposed to be a two-dimensional manifold that can only exist in f-f-four dimensions.”
“Gabriel?”
“Wait!” Gabriel trembled with fear. “See, if you think about the Möbius strip, it can be embargoed… no, no, embedded, embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space R cubed, but the Klein bottle can’t—”
“Stop it, Gabriel.” Her voice had developed a sharp edge he knew all too well. The situation was teetering on the edge of a cliff.
“Or we can discuss Maxwell’s demon, if you’d prefer?” Gabriel said. “Er… Maxwell, you remember how we talked about that before? James Clerk Maxwell? Picture a box divided into two halves by a wall, and… and… and it…”
Yvonne’s hands ran through his hair. She bent down and kissed the top of his head, her exhalations warming his scalp. With her lips pressed against his head, he felt her mouth form into a smile. She was so excited about something that she was putting aside what an ass he was being.
