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“Even better.”

  “Couple times a year, at least.”

  “I’ve never been with a man who suffered from chronic ear infections.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not surprised. We’re a special breed. Born, not made.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which ear?”

  “This one.” He pulled her hand to the side of his head.

  “It’s hot,” she said, and her tone changed slightly.

  “Mmm.”

  “I thought only little kids got this way.”

  “You should have seen me when I was a kid.”

  She pulled away from him and sat up.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” She flipped the covers over and slipped across the room, her naked body shining in the half-light as she jiggled to the bathroom. He wanted her again, in that instant.

  The bathroom light clicked on, and a moment later he heard her rummaging around in his cabinets. “What are you looking for?” he called.

  “Found it.” She returned with a satisfied smile. In one hand she held a little brown bottle; in the other, a towel.

  “Peroxide?”

  “Your ear,” she said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “In Brazil, doctors and antibiotics were expensive. Peroxide is cheap everywhere.”

  “Will that really work?”

  “My mom used it on us, so probably not. Now lie back.”

  He did as he was instructed, and she slid the towel under his head and sat on the bed next to him. She gently tilted his head to the side, bad ear up. The chemical smell stung his nose as she twisted the lid off the brown bottle. She turned the lid upside down, then poured a thimble-size draft into the little white cap.

  “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  “Whoa. Why are you bringing pain into this conversation?”

  “Because it isn’t going to hurt.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about it hurting until you said that.”

  She pushed his head back to the towel. “Baby,” she said. The tip of the lid touched his earlobe, and then she upended the contents into his ear canal.

  Sound exploded, an apocalypse of hissing and popping and static, so loud it drowned out everything else. The sensation of cold ran deep into his head, driving away the familiar soreness. He wasn’t sure if it was working, but the ache was gone, replaced by something too weird to be called pain, exactly.

  “Is it supposed to sound like that?”

  “You don’t have to shout. You’re the only one who can hear it.”

  The hissing continued, growing softer, quieter. She poured again, and sound exploded anew. She wiped the foam from the edges of his ear, where it had overflowed.

  “There’s a lot of bubbling. That means a lot of bacteria. Haven’t you ever gone to the doctor for this?”

  “About a dozen times. I just haven’t had time lately. You kind of get used to the ache.”

  “You might damage your hearing.”

  “What?”

  She slapped his shoulder.

  “When I was in college, my sister talked me into taking scuba lessons with her,” he said. “During the training, the instructor casually mentioned that a small percentage of people are incapable of diving because their inner ears can’t handle the pressure changes.”

  “What does this have to do with your ear?”

  “I think I would have liked diving if it hadn’t hurt so damned bad.”

  “You were one of those people?”

  “Yeah. I went exactly twice. The first time was in Lake Minnehaha, to a depth of twenty feet for my open water certification. It nearly split my ears to go that deep, but I forced myself. The water was murky, and I followed a line down to the dive platform as slowly as the instructor would let me, trying to get my ears to equalize. I pinched my nose and blew, tilted my head back, and swallowed hard against the regulator, all the tricks they taught us, but nothing worked. Once I was down long enough, things evened out and I was fine. When we were out of our wet suits, I told the instructor about my problem, and would you like to know what he said to me?”

  “Tell me,” she said, dabbing at his ear again.

  “Small eustachian tubes.”

  “Diagnosed you on the spot.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “Well, that and ‘Don’t ever dive again. Sorry you wasted your money.’ ”

  Vidonia laughed and poured another lidful of peroxide into his ear. “But you did.”

  “With my sister, about a year later. This time in a flooded rock quarry in Indiana. I forget what they called the lake. I took a bunch of decongestants, hoping it would open my pipes enough to equalize the pressure. There was supposed to be an old school bus at the bottom we were going to explore.”

  “What was a school bus doing at the bottom of a quarry?”

  “You know, I’m still not sure. But it was in forty feet of water. My sister heard about it at a dive shop and bought a map of how to find it. God, the place was beautiful—sheer rock slopes, clear green water.”

  “Clear green water?”

  “Like I said, it was Indiana. Green is about the best you can hope for. The other option is brown. It was a beautiful day. We climbed down, suited up, and paddled out into the middle. My sister could drop like a stone if she wanted to. I don’t know if she even knew what equalizing was. Her ears did it by themselves.”

  Vidonia poured the peroxide again and dabbed at the foam with the towel. Silas noticed that the roar was getting quieter every time.

  “I had to go so slow, looking down at the top of her head, watching the fish go after her hair. The decongestants helped, but the pinch started at about eighteen feet or so. By the time I was down to thirty, I had to stop for five minutes to let my ears catch up. The last ten feet felt like an ice pick in the sides of my head.”

  “Why didn’t you just stop?”

  “A Williams doesn’t throw in the towel simply because of pain.”

  “What about possible debilitating injury?”

  “That, either.”

  “You didn’t want to give up in front of your little sister, did you?”

  “How did you know she was younger than me?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Anyway, we found the bus at forty feet, and my ears finally settled in. The bus was sitting on the bottom like it had been parked that way. We stayed down until our clocks told us it was time to head up.”

  “Running out of air?”

  “No, we still had a thousand PSI, but at forty feet, you have to keep an eye out for the bends.”

  “Lovely sport, diving.” She dabbed his ear again with the edge of the towel.

  “That’s when the real fun started for me. It seems that the decongestants I’d taken had worn off. My ears had adapted to the pressure at forty feet and wouldn’t equalize at all on the way up. The trapped air made my head feel like a new helium balloon. I thought my eardrums were going to blow out.”

  “What happened?”

  “One of my eardrums blew out.” Silas smiled. “Well, sort of. I heard the tear as a little squeak of escaping air from behind the drum. Then came the pain. I knew I’d done some damage.”

  “Were you okay?”

  “I was lucky. After a few weeks, the hearing came back, although it felt like I was carrying a gallon of water in my head.”

  “Is your hearing the same as it was?”

  “Twenty-twenty.” Silas smiled again.

  She pushed the towel hard against his ear. “You’re done. Roll over and let it drain.”

  Coolness slipped from his ear in a trickle. The ache was still there, but at least his ears were clean now. His head felt strangely empty and hot.

  Vidonia lay down beside him and ran her fingers through his thick hair. “So are you still close to your sister?”

  “Yeah. We get together every couple of
months. She lives just outside of Denver.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “There’s too much to tell about one of them, too little about the other.”

  “We’re a lot alike, then.”

  Silas’s hand found the groove at the small of her back, and he rubbed the slickness that had accumulated there. He allowed his hands to wander, and they found her constructed of gentle curves—the slope of a hip, the sweep of a thigh, the full roundness of a breast. Her shoulder was just another bend beneath his fingers as he stroked her arm.

  “Mother was well-stirred Looziana Creole,” he said in his best New Orleans accent. “But probably at least as French as black, I think, by the look of that side of the family. She was a teacher for thirty years. Died a few years back.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He died in a refinery fire off the Gulf Coast when I was young.”

  “You’re an orphan.”

  “He was an engineer on the Grayson platform.”

  “I heard of that.”

  “Yeah, not quite as bad as the Valdez in terms of environmental damage, but close. Having a relative who worked the Grayson platform wasn’t something you talked about much if you grew up along the Gulf Coast back then. It could make you unpopular real quick.”

  “Did they ever determine what actually happened?”

  “Yeah, roughly. A profitable flow of flammables met an unlucky spark. The specifics went up in smoke along with the dozen or so lives.”

  They were silent. The night and the darkness seeped between them, and they became breathing for a while. Silas thought she had slipped off to sleep when she said, “Keep talking. I like your voice.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me something you’ve never told another woman before.”

  There was silence again. He thought of giving her a smart-ass answer, but when he spoke, the words that came surprised him. “The state gave me a broad track early on: math and science without any sort of specification. I was lucky; my scores qualified me for almost everything without being quite good enough in any one area to pigeonhole me.” Why tell her this? “I was smart but no savant to be whisked off for specialization. I could choose the path my life would take. My mother never let me forget how fortunate I was. For a variety of reasons, I had nearly settled on engineering when I saw the photo in my textbook. It must have been fourth grade.”

  Her finger traced his jaw again, encouraging.

  “It was in a history book,” he continued. “I was sitting in class, flipped the page, and there it was. I still remember the page number: one-ninety-eight. The photo was dated 1920, two men smiling side by side on the African savanna. The shorter man wore khakis, a safari hat, a rifle slung over his arm. The taller was bare-chested and had a face remarkably like the portrait hanging in my mother’s living room.”

  Silas gave her a moment to say something, and when she didn’t, he went on. “Some of the soft parts were different: the mouth, the nose, but the angles of the face were the same. The cheekbones were the same. The man who looked like my father had a red cloth draped around his waist. The caption under the photo read: On Safari, Ernest Stowe and Maasai warrior. I studied that old picture until I thought I’d wear my eyes out on it. After that, I took an interest in anthropology.”

  “Are you saying the guy in the picture was some sort of long-lost relative?”

  “No, nothing like that. Not in the way you mean. More like a lateral connection to a whole people. At the time, scientific periodicals were the only outlet for my curiosity, and almost by accident I became a kind of amateur expert, reading everything I could find.”

  Silas’s eyes sifted through the darkness as he recalled the scientific journals. It had seemed he couldn’t take it in fast enough, and the data went back thousands of years. As one of the deep-clade African lineages, the Maasai were an ancient people, in many ways as divergent from other African populations as they were from all the relative cladistic homogeneity found north of the Red Sea. And this is one of the secrets of Africa: that it is as divergent from itself as it is to the rest of the world.

  Like many of the tribes of Africa, the Maasai made their share of involuntary contributions to the burgeoning gene pool of America. It was no surprise, really, that now and again evidence of that contribution could be seen.

  “So what happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why aren’t I lying in bed with an anthropologist, instead of the world’s most influential geneticist?”

  “The problem with anthropology—at least the branches I was interested in—is that it’s a finite endeavor. I learned everything there was to learn, but ultimately, once I had this knowledge, I realized there was little I could actually do with it. Most of the populations I was interested in existed only in pictures and in bits and pieces of people like myself. From anthropology, it was a simple step up to population genetics, and finally to genetic engineering.”

  “Where you could actually do something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “An interesting story. So all this started as an attempt to understand where you came from.”

  “That’s where all science starts.”

  “And all religions.”

  He looked away from the oval of her face and lay back on the pillow. She nuzzled against him, the sharp bone of her nose angling into his neck.

  He shut his eyes. He waited for her to speak again, but she didn’t speak; she traced circles across his chest with her fingers. After a while, he slept.

  HE AWOKE sometime later, driven from sleep by sheer anxiety. By dreams that weren’t dreams but extensions of his waking self, circular thoughts that he couldn’t get out of his head.

  Vidonia’s leg was still draped across his, her arm still lingering on his torso. He was surprised his beating heart had not awakened her. Every nerve in his body crackled.

  The gladiator wouldn’t leave his thoughts, an image burned in his mind’s eye, partly seen, partly invented. So much blood, but it was different this time, in his mind. This time the gladiator stood at the bars over the same torn body, Tay lying in blood, but there were more bodies, too, scattered at its feet. A multitude of people who had paid a price for what Silas had done.

  He tried to shake off the image but knew he wouldn’t be sleeping for a long while.

  He glanced down at Vidonia. The welcome distraction of her body. He could lose himself in that. Retreat to it, forget his fears for a while.

  Instead, he slithered out from under her and stepped to the window. The night was still deep in itself, and a breeze shuffled the branches of the trees in his backyard. He looked up into the sky and concentrated but still couldn’t see the stars. Somewhere up there, the archer was still shooting blind.

  Silas padded down the hallway to the kitchen phone. He dialed the numbers.

  “Hello.” The voice was groggy.

  “Ashley, it’s Silas.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but I had to call. Listen, you still have the tickets, right?”

  “Yeah, we haven’t lost them. Your nephew practically sleeps with them under his pillow.”

  “Rip them up. Throw them away.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Please, Ashley. I can’t really explain. I just don’t want you to go to Phoenix. After the competition, I’ll come by your house and I’ll stay a month. I’ll stay until you kick me out.”

  “Silas—”

  “I’ll make it up to Eric—get him a great souvenir like nobody else has. Something that he can show his friends. But please don’t come to Phoenix.”

  “Okay, Silas.” Her voice was soft, careful. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Thanks. I’ll call you as soon as this is all over.”


  “Are you in any kind of trouble?” He paused.

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t worry. Now get back to sleep.”

  “Good night.”

  “Night, Sis.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Evan connected the last fiber-optic cable and stood back to admire his handiwork. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly pretty. The liquid-crystal screen was bulky and primitive—almost three feet tall and two across—but it would work. Of that he was certain. Or at least he hoped he was certain. The holographics could come later. Right now, time was the limiting factor to be dealt with.

  Multicolored coaxial bundles sprouted from every orifice of the assembly and coiled upward into the plug booth like vines climbing the trunk of an old oak. The plug booth itself had been partially disassembled and now stood as a skeletal frame, drooling tangled cords across and behind the screen. It was sad to see it so reduced, but he’d needed the parts; and after the stink the economists had made after the last run, he knew they would never let him fire up the booth again, anyway. They had yanked his funding, cut his staff. The facilities would be next. He was working on borrowed time, and he knew it.

  Evan sat at the console. There was no fanfare, no hesitation, no moment of quiet introspection. He simply placed his finger firmly on the button, depressed it momentarily, then waited for what came next.

  Nothing.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Slowly, the screen began to fade up from black to gray. Then a beep, a flash of white, both come and gone so quickly that Evan could doubt they’d happened at all if he chose. He chose to believe. The seconds ticked on. Light flickered. Or he thought it had. A moment later, he realized the screen hadn’t changed; it was the fluorescent lights in the ceiling that had stuttered. Beyond the windows on the far wall, even the streetlight hesitated in its only job, then glowed strong again.

  What happened?

  Evan wasn’t a patient man, but he sat for a long while, motionless, watching the screen with the intensity of obsession. He watched for any tick, any stray hint of color or movement. Meanwhile, behind him, the night wore on.