Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room.

makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way

He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the phone.

Gang Lu looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if he is a dog; the student Shan, whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes.

We are in this together, the dying game,

He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough.

Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.

Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his coat. He doesn’t answer, and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.

Chris’s picture.

We’re breaking each other’s heart. I draw a picture of her on the blackboard using brown chalk. I make “X”s where her eyes should be.

“You can decide how long she suffers.”

Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring.

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I’d grab her long nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears

Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.”

my husband

I realize it took courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist

He’s going to kill himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few travelling companions to accompany me to the grave.

And then I weaken and say what I really want: for her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world.

He’s going to kill himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few travelling companions to accompany me to the grave.

I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom.

The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard

Click, dial tone, rewind.

I have the distinct feeling there is something going on that I can either understand or not understand. There’s a choice to be made.

The Midwest is very brown

she drops like a shoe onto her blanket

carrying zucchini

She’s always been older than me.”

a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the top, a big piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and, once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets made from the hide of an elephant.

Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

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Holy fuckoly,

The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard.

No matter how much you miss them. They never come back once they’re gone.

summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor.

“I’m not letting it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere and he has all the pens over on his side of the room. “It just is, is all. Throw me a pen.” He does, I miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying.

He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,”

the constant barrage of paper hypnotic and soothing

The Labrador, who understands English, begins howling miserably.

My friends think I’m nuts.

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It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life.

“If it’s plasma, make it in red,”

Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the department chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns, walks back up the stairs, and enters the seminar room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head.

In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence.

He’s hip in a professorial, cardigan/jeans kind of way.

She is Pavlov and I am her dog.

The face of love.

For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day.

The Fourth State of Matter

Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister in China.

Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these things. “Plasma is blood,” I told him. “Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me

“I’m weary,” I say, in italics.

the husband

And for an instant I saw myself from their vantage point across the room—Jo Ann—and a small bubble of self-esteem percolated up from my depths.

I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.

Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

Space physicists

She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen,

the dog on the blanket