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.
“I have some big news for ya, big guy,” Yvonne whispered, giggling. “I’d like to share it if you’re done talking about demons, walls, and bottles.”
“But the Klein bottle, it…”
“It can wait.” Yvonne stepped to his side. “I have to tell you something, maybe the most important thing I’ve ever told you.”
Oh no. Not now! Tomorrow, maybe. The day after, perhaps. Any time but right now. Not right now, please, not right now. Please, Yvonne…
Yvonne walked in front of him, an enormous, spirited grin on her face. Gabriel quickly lowered his hand, holding the beer can underneath the chair just before she jumped on his lap. She leaned forward, inches away from his lips.
“Gabriel, I—” She sniffed. Her face crinkled up as if she’d bitten into a lemon. Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God.” Yvonne stood up and backed away. He felt lower than a cockroach. “Gabriel, I… I’m pregnant.”
Pregnant. And he’d ruined the moment. Mixed emotions of happiness, angst, and despair swam through his mind. He searched desperately for a suitable response, thinking that there had to be some strange combination of words he could put together that would put the shattered pieces of his life back together.
Gabriel cleared his throat. No magic verbal solution revealed itself. Only a single word spilled from his lips. “Oh.”
Chapter 31:
Misplaced
Summer 2018
“Yvonne!” Gabriel woke up with a start, drenched in sweat and aching. He leapt out of bed and almost slipped to the floor as his legs buckled beneath him.“Yvonne! No, Yvonne, don’t do it. I didn’t mean what I said. I didn’t mean it.”
He saw daylight. It took him a moment to figure out where he was, and once the realization took hold, his horror became even greater: he was in prison, a cold, ugly white cell. He tried to figure out how or when he had been sent there. He didn’t remember committing any crimes or getting arrested. But he somehow knew that Yvonne was also in the prison, locked in another cell.
“Yvonne! Where are you?” Spinning around, Gabriel was amazed to see that the guards had accidently left his cell door open.
Outside in the hall, inmates screamed and rattled their bars while prison guards yelled orders. Gabriel rushed to the door, stumbling like a cripple, though he didn’t remember getting injured. He stepped into a long hallway lined with metal doors. All of the doors were open, just as his was. The concrete floor was dotted with gaping black holes, and spider webs hung from the ceiling.
“Yvonne? Can you hear me?”
Two prison guards in bright-blue jumpsuits rounded the corner and ran toward him. They looked concerned rather than angry, but Gabriel wasn’t going to stick around to verify that. He turned and hustled in the opposite direction of the guards. He peeked inside each door he passed and saw more prisoners sitting in their cells.
At the end of the hall, in the last cell on the right, he found her. His wife, his beautiful young wife, lay peacefully in bed. Wait. She was in their bed, in their bedroom, the same bedroom they’d once shared in their little white house on the shore. Despite the oddness of it, seeing her there made him feel calm and happy. He’d found her at least. After so many years, he’d finally found her. He stepped into the room.
“No, Gabriel!” one guard shouted.
