The first time Clem told me about his love for tanks I thought he meant the top, then the armored vehicle, before I realized he was talking about the glass-sided vessel. We were riding home from dinner on the bus. He scrolled through his compendium: fish tanks, dunk tanks, claw machines, terrariums, MTA customer service booths, buffalo diorama at the Natural History Museum. Those handheld water toys played with by children, where buttons shot sunken ringlets upwards, and the container could be swiveled so that the wheels floated down onto hooks. I let my head rest against his arm.
A few summers later, I traveled to Glasgow to visit him. The plane remained perched on the tarmac for hours due to an unspecified mechanical issue. Once finally cleared for departure, we watched with thrilled obedience as the attendants performed their standard pantomime of catastrophe in the aisle. I think no group of passengers had ever been so delighted to begin a seven-hour redeye—everyone fell asleep after that, me included.
I left the airport in Glasgow with only my purse. My luggage, despite the additional hours on the runway, had somehow missed the flight. It was June, rainy and hushed, and I’d used a repository of paid time off from my job at the archive. I hadn’t seen Clem since a year and a half before, when he’d left me for a woman I’d never heard of named Regina. Together, they’d moved to Glasgow, an episode that ended almost as soon as it had begun when they’d broken up abruptly only a few months in, Regina subsequently returning to New York. No one in our lives could keep track of this sequence, and sometimes I hardly could, either. But it mattered to me, the chronology did, the triumphs, the failures. Perhaps this had been one source of our potential reconciliation, Clem and mine: we stewarded a shared set of facts.
My taxi tunneled University-ward through the soot-blackened streets, depositing me on an inclined avenue from which the red sandstone tenements of Glasgow surfaced uniformly. I looked up to ensure I was headed in the right direction. There, a few houses ahead, was Clem. He raised his dark eyebrows in a goofy look of recognition. We walked haphazardly towards each other on the quiet street, smiling stupidly. When I reached him, he pulled me into his arms, cradling the back of my head in his hand, shushing someone—me, or himself—as one might a crying baby.
“It’s really you!”
My rabbit heart raced against his sweater.
Clem led me upstairs to his flat, which had belonged to his late grandmother. He’d moved to Scotland last summer to study physics at the University. I knew little of his absconsion. When we were together, he’d been an affable and directionless technical writer, someone I’d find with his head between his hands during the long arm of a summer afternoon, asking questions like, “What do people even do?” Of leaving New York, he’d made only the compulsory threats: the UK was still part of the EU, then, so in addition to Philly or upstate he could also brandish Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. But we weren’t in touch when the decision was inaugurated and, as with his choice to leave me, I was mostly surprised by his resolve.
Inside there was an oriel window, an indigo couch, plank floors, Persian rugs, glass lamps. Textiles, shades, shams—attempts to subvert the austerity of the tenement, its churchy high ceilings and metallic light. Off the living room was a closet-sized bedroom, filled entirely by a lofted bed that stood at nearly my height. A bizarre object, white and entirely solid beneath the mattress except for a closed door, the structure formed four wide steps on its leftmost edge. I figured it must have been constructed within the room. It was larger than any threshold.
The bedroom was attached to a tiny kitchen, where a compassionate salad awaited me. Snap peas, mint, radish—exactly the crisp thing I wanted after the night of transit. Clem watched me carefully as I ate.
“I just had to think about what someone stuck on a grounded plane for four hours might want,” he said. “I had to really inhabit the mind space of ‘waylaid girl.’”
He’d always been like that, eager to please.
That night, I poked around his medicine cabinet, looking for face wash or some evidence of a woman having lived there. And what I searched for I found: at the back of the second highest shelf was the residue of a girlfriend’s skincare routine. Glass vials of acids and oils, perfumed creams, serums. I used them all. And when I ascended into bed with Clem, all the nervousness of the day falling away as we came to know each other in that forgotten way again, that way we hadn’t in over a year, and when he entered me, holding the crest of my shoulder with his lips, then grazing his teeth along my collarbone and neck to my earlobe, which he first took into his mouth, then whispered, “You’re mine now,” I couldn’t help but wonder if he recognized the aqueous, floral scent of my face as hers.
◆
I had a mind filled with chatter, a continuous stream of babble that propelled me, sweating and sleepless, through many long nights. I found relief in whispering. To speak, at very least, gave the thoughts movement and form. Clem was a great sleeper, long ago I’d learned I was at liberty to do or say much of anything without rousing him. I watched his still face, the precious flush of his cheeks in sleep. The love I receive will be imperfect, I thought repeatedly, then whispered, “Imperfect, imperfect, imperfect.” Above all else, I wanted to feel lucky.
Each time Clem stirred, he reached for me blindly, pulling me into his arms. I had the distinct sense he was trying to bury something within me—something unbridled and desperate, much too large for either of us to contain.
◆
I slept in the next morning and was only driven out of bed by the doorbell. My bags, returned by an airline courier. Clem hauled them upstairs. Afterwards, I sat on his lap while he finished a report about quantum entanglement, intermittently running his palms along my nipples. Eventually, he closed his laptop, announcing he was done.
For breakfast we ate leftover snap pea salad, each component made uniform by refrigeration. It was Clem’s final week of classes, and soon he would leave for the day. But that weekend we would be together, he assured me, and then there would be Portugal, where we were taking a two-day beach getaway towards the end of my stay.
I washed our dishes while Clem readied himself for his lab.
“Come look at this,” he called to me from the bedroom. I came in drying my hands on a dish towel. He stood at the solid base of his bed, the door to its underneath compartment ajar.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Come see.”
“Is it storage?”
“Just look.”
An emerald glow illuminated his outstretched arm. I came to stand beside him and found that, into the underside of the bed, he’d built a wood-framed glass tank. Contained within was a jungle so green and wet and pulsing I felt I’d dived deep down into a summer pond and opened my eyes. LEDs needled light through a canopy of bromeliads and ferns, down into a sinuous tangle of vines, and onto a mist-shrouded moss floor. I stared, discovering new life as my eyes adjusted to its blackness: decaying leaves, the husks of seed pods, colorful rocks, seashells. Tiny, simple creatures—lily white with bulky, egg-shaped thoraxes—inched purposely across the detritus.
Clem told me it was a vivarium. He’d built the frame from plywood and tempered glass after Regina left six months prior. But what at first appeared an alive universe, he revealed, was actually an artistic interrelation made from carved foam, cork, paint, and fiber-coated rope, held together by carefully concealed wires and zip ties.
“Is it all fake?”
“No,” Clem said. “At its substructure it’s artificial, but on top it’s alive.”
Alive: curled fingers of fern and aquamarine and isopods collecting in dirty notches. A substrate made from boiled leaves, black sand, and orchard bark. Soon Clem would introduce vampire crabs. Once the ecosystem had established itself, he said, vampire crabs and maybe salamanders. But while the animals were interesting to Clem, they did not represent his grandest ambition. “I have a different fantasy,” he said.
He held me in front of him by the hips as we peered inquisitively within. Clem spoke quickly when excited and was the opposite of condescending, grossly overestimating what a person like me might know about science. He described the water cycle of the vivarium: how the water could be manually added, absorbed by roots, carried by leaves, evaporated, and reformed into droplets. To control the moisture level, he’d installed timed fans, vents, and a fogger, creating the sapphire, misty effect.
“Your ‘different fantasy,’” I made the quotes with my fingers. “Is what?”
“I don’t want fog or condensation,” Clem said. “I want to create a rain cloud.”
◆
When Clem left for class, I took a meandering walk along the River Clyde. It was drizzling. Friends in New York had begun to wake and text me, asking how it was going, texts I ignored, my brain still waterlogged by jet lag. Besides, I wasn’t ready to defend Clem yet from their skepticism. Other than my best friend, who was tolerant and much crazier than me, most people in my life seemed to regard my openness to reconciliation as the result of low self esteem or weakness. On the contrary, I thought that my decision to take Clem back—which I wasn’t even sure of yet, but hoped the trip might elucidate—represented a great exercise of will. Because I was interested in second acts. Not the question of cheating, but what comes after.
I reached an imposing, armadillo-shaped building formed by eight overlapping, aluminum shells, resembling the oblong hulled backs of the colorless bugs Clem and I had watched earlier. The building was so similar in hue to the sky and river that, as the rain deepened, blurring my vision, the cityscape appeared briefly two dimensional, like the embossed image on a coin. I watched for a while, feeling a sort of unplaceable peace, alone and soaked on the Scottish streets while Clem learned about quarks somewhere proximal. I loved him, I always had, a major component of which, I decided, was proximity and my interest in his.
For a little while longer, I watched the rain slide off the building’s shells. Then I made my way back.
◆
I had a lot of ideas about redemption. Mostly that it was good, something our bodies wanted and moved naturally towards. I was interested in absolutes. I liked the virtues temperance, mercy, and grace. In Scripture, the Prodigal Son is welcomed back into his father’s house even when he doesn’t ask for restoration, nor sufficiently repents for his misconduct. The only precondition for the forgiveness of debt is its existence, and I wanted to be someone who forgave.
Before Clem’s infidelity, our relationship had been sufficient and largely unremarkable. There were punctures of my own doubt, I saw those clearly now, alongside Clem’s furtive attempt to plug them. Otherwise, we’d rarely bickered, surmounted all difficulties with understanding, admired each other. Clem was not an infelicitous person—if anything, our relationship had been defined by his abiding devotion. For a while after his infidelity, I was mutilated by rage, frightened, even, by the extent of my own devastation. But I was not the abandoned bride who never removes her wedding dress and stops all the clocks. I didn’t want to be in pain forever. Eventually, something new took hold of me: a ravenous desire for amnesty, for Clem’s redemption and my own.
That winter, Clem apologized. It took the form of an email and contained the line: Nothing this serious has ever happened to me, before this I was not a serious person. He informed me that he and Regina were no longer together. I replied before I finished reading: Clem, I forgive you.
“It’s a blank check,” I’d said on the phone that spring. Following the apology we’d spoken with increasing frequency until, in the month leading up to my visit, we’d talked every day. The crisis was our perennial topic, a site for continued analysis, appraisals, and reinterpretations. We did not avoid it. It was something we loved and could spend afternoons debating. I often switched sides: I could be empathetic, merciful, moral, devious, or punishing, depending on my mood. The crisis made me feel robust and capable.
Clem remained firm. He described his relationship with Regina using the language of gambling, addiction, and excess (representations that only made me jealous). His whole life he’d been porous, always wide-eyed scanning rooms for the next thing to submit himself to. Something supremely lovable to this dulcet impressionability, his tendency towards being impacted by the world. He was always getting into situations—it was for him the beggars begged and zealots street preached and abandoned men sat alone at bars. He was an ideal audience. He had the gift of recipience. That spring, I found myself trusting him reflexively, and not because he demanded so.
The whole endeavor filled me with vim and shimmer. Romance, even. What was romance if not unexpected ardor in the face of challenge? Falling in love, as Clem had with Regina, was reverie, the stuff of childhood complexes, transference, misidentification. To love the person who had done the worst thing to you—now that was something ambitious! That was to love the world and not fantasy, and I wanted to love the world.
Eventually, Clem decided there should be no more theories. “Will the Reverend stop suggesting?” he’d teased (the Reverend: a nickname given to me in childhood by my father, the son of a Presbyterian minister). I don’t think he ever supposed he could have been exonerated. It seemed too good to be true. But mercy bound him to me, and he began to ask for my approval on everything, choices related to his students, family, friends. Small failures and misinterpretations became calamitous. Once, in a tab-related dispute with a bartender, he called me crying, “Sometimes I worry I’m just a bad person.”
I denied reassurance. I answered, “Oh, really?”
◆
That weekend we went to see the collection of a famous anatomist. Clem loved the insect section, a chain of rooms ringed in glass displays where butterflies were pinned by their large wings like laundry fanned out on lines. Clem disappeared into the exhibition, towards the giant scorpions and amber-preserved spiders. He was particularly elated by one bug, floating in a column of fossilized tree resin. He called me over to look. It was a katydid, according to the adjacent plaque, a cricket-like insect that, as he clumsily explained, words accelerating with enthusiasm, was the earliest known animal to echolocate.
“The earliest known animal to echolocate!” I repeated dubiously. Because wasn’t I the first animal to conceive of proximity?
“You see—” Clem continued, pointing to the poor creature who seemed to have lost at least two legs in the millions of years it had spent suspended in that sorry sap, “It’s a tank, too!” He met my eyes, the plainness of his gaze bringing me to laughter.
“No more bugs!” I announced on the bus back. We stopped at the necropolis, where we snacked on red currants and read each other’s books. We’d swapped upon my arrival. Clem was reading a famous mystical novel, something I liked but did not love, in which he’d reliably underlined every passage about punishment. We sat on the ground in a symbiotic shape, back-to-back, passing between us the vine of berries. Eventually, we made our way to the Botanical Gardens, where we meandered through a collection of tropical plants contained within a palatial glasshouse. This, too, was a tank, although neither of us mentioned it.
The entrance to the interior jungle was guarded by a startled-looking Eve: pearl-bodied, face cupped to palm, gazing suspiciously over right shoulder. On the perimeter we passed a statue called Stepping Stones, where a young, chiton-wrapped girl touched one toe into a stone-frozen brook. It was accompanied by a couplet:
Pausing with reluctant feet
Where the stream and river meet
Afterwards we had dinner and whiskey at a pub on the South Side where, according to Clem, young people were. We left in a taxi drunk, playing and flirting. Back at the flat, he put my face between his hands.
“No one has this,” he said. The room spun round.
“What!”
“No one has this perfect face!”
I swatted his hands down. “I do!” I contested. “I have my face!”
We fell backwards through the room, kissing and spinning, down onto the couch. Clem, kneeling before me, moved his hands up my thighs, pressing his palm to my crotch. I closed my eyes, relaxing against him briefly, before something disturbed me: the distinct and ardent pattern he rubbed, which was, and I received it for a moment longer to confirm, not my own mark. But the instant I had that thought the motion twisted into something familiar, the flutter of fingers he knew brought me to climax, and did.
Afterwards, I lay in the loft while Clem showered. Had I imagined the brief discrepancy? Or had I caught Clem, in a drunken lapse, writing into me the signature of another woman?
“I don’t think of you as someone who would move abroad with a new girlfriend,” I said to him when he re-emerged, toweling his hair.
“I’m not.”
“It’s so shortsighted. It’s just dumb.”
“I know!”
“Well then why did you do it?”
He paused, on his face a look of rapid calculation. He put on navy boxers, climbed into the loft, and sat across from me, radiating the clean heat of the shower. “It was horrible. The whole thing was really bad. It started fast and ended even faster. Why are you asking? Did something upset you?”
I pushed my mouth to the side. “I just wish you would speak that ruinously about me.”
“No,” He cupped my chin in his hand and kissed my temple, “No, you don’t.”
◆
That night, in a fit of sleeplessness, I opened all the drawers in the flat. I worked methodically, top to bottom, left to right. I wasn’t sure what I was searching for, only that when I found an envelope in the desk addressed to Clem I stopped looking. It bore a German stamp and a date from September. I split its gummed throat and slid out only a few sentences, beginning to read before registering I was doing so:
I know we’re not meant to talk while I’m here! But Angel and I just laid the Stolpersteine and oh, what if I miss you! I always thought of myself as an independent woman. But I just love you, Clem, and I miss you when we’re away. I’m afraid to say how much. Because what if I don’t just love you, but need you, too. How horrible! I feel like I’ve been paddling on sea waves and must finally submit myself to the roil, this great, tidal pull…I didn’t even know all of this was possible for me! I’m not beautiful or very smart—
I shoved the letter back in the envelope; I threw it in the drawer; I slammed the drawer shut. I stood in front of the desk for a while, breathless, teeming.
I paced. I already knew the story, I reminded myself, it had only become populated by words—that was it, nothing more. Nothing more—words like that die as soon as they touch paper. They are not cornerstones on which to build lives. I stood in front of the living room window. In my ears, my blood beat. I looked out over the city, tenements as they met cobbled streets, that rain-slicked basin of stone. Regina had left Clem in December, only a few months after the letter was sent. I watched the rain granulate the orb of a street lamp, attempting to square the letter’s contents with their relationship’s impending downfall. I remembered a note Clem had left on my kitchen counter a month before our own unhappy ending. He’d signed: For us I hope there are years, Clem. Did these notes share some secret, doomed insignia?
I wondered what, if anything, Regina had found of me.
But it wasn’t just the words. I felt disturbed by the frenetic scratching that seemingly made Regina finish. I was troubled by her voice. I’d never heard it before. I hardly knew what she looked like, much less how she sounded. I’d avoided all images of them, preferring she existed as a blank, weighted disk I shuffled around my mind. I felt something strange towards her, a sense of parallel susceptibility, like differently-behaved plants grown in the same bed. An act of excessive symmetry had occurred. What I felt was sympathy, I supposed, just not in its colloquial sense. The sympathy of a mirror—which was not compassion, was not solace.
I never told Clem about the letter. I wanted to forget it immediately. Their relationship, after all, only meant what I let it.
◆
I sat in front of the vivarium for hours, watching Clem reposition the fogger and slats. It was my fourth day in Scotland, one that I spent observing the surface-level mist of the vivarium change in density and striation. Never once did the mist convocate nor rise. Clem was initiating micro-modulations in temperature, humidity. He was fixating, really; eventually, when I got tired of him ignoring me, I told him it was time for a break. A few beers, on the banks of the drizzly River Clyde. We discussed other ecosystems: our impending trip, for instance, and our families and friend groups. Eventually, the deluge became so steady we returned to Clem’s.
“Doesn’t Glasgow have enough clouds?” I asked him inside the vestibule. “Would you mind manufacturing me some sunlight?”
Once back in the flat, on the kitchen counter, Clem showed me a science fair demonstration: how to make a bottled cloud. In a jam jar, he clattered two inches of sink water into a whirlpool with a metal spoon. Then, he instructed me to drop a lit match into the jar, after which he quickly moved a frozen ice tray over its mouth. The jar filled with a gauzy, opalescent fog.
“The water vapor condenses onto the smoke particles,” he explained, lifting the tray. The cloud dissipated like a plume pulled from a chimney cap. “I can create a similar effect with the fogger and fans in the vivarium. It’s like wind.” But he couldn’t figure out how to make the mist rise and form that elusive nimbostratus: the kind of uniform gray that overhung Glasgow, issuing its continuous course of rain.
This amongst all projects? Sure the cloud was charming, but something about the pursuit bothered me. I couldn’t decide if I thought it was frivolous, to effort at this level towards something so transient, or ostentatious, to presume he could control the weather. I watched Clem toy around with the tank’s leftmost duct, a look of pure concentration furrowing his brow. I asked, “What could the cloud possibly represent to you?”
Clem met my eyes. “Nothing,” he responded automatically with a shake of his sandy head.
“Surely it must mean something to you,” I asserted. “Look at you!”
Clem looked in a circle. Laughed once. “My love,” he said. “It means nothing to me. Nothing at all.”
I crossed my arms and walked over to the window, finishing the conversation in my head. Well what would you know about meaning, I thought, You’re a scientist.
◆
Clem and I traveled to a blue-and-white seaside town three hours south of Lisbon, where the restaurants had no menus and all the street dogs were small. Our first day, we left our phones at the hotel and let the world keep time for us. I allowed myself to ease into its natural and perspicacious system: how the ocean spent the morning narrowing the beach and the evening widening it, and the sun bowed across the sky, and the church bells clanged to mark the hour, and Clem’s appetite, with its predictable shaping, would shrink and flare.
The town nosed out over a wave-carved cliff. The beach could be accessed via a coil of driftwood steps. It was a wild beach, covered in tufts of seaside tansies, the available ocean rendered unswimmable by a frothy rip current. We spent the day reading, wading trepidatiously to navel-depth in the hostile sea, and floating peacefully in rock pools formed on the intertidal shore. Locals, too, relaxed in these brief, shallow basins, smoking cigarettes and drinking beers from perspiring glass bottles. Some scaled the scarp to blade off barnacles with knives. I had never vacationed as a couple.
But soon the vacation would end. After we left, I would spend only a few more days in Glasgow before returning to New York. I felt a sense of unease, one that the fact of vacation only exacerbated. Here, the question of what to do was announcing itself. On the second night, we giggled through the line of a turf-carpeted restaurant on the promenade. We ordered green wine, olives, octopus, and monkfish stew. Sucking a tentacle, Clem asked me if I would ever move to Glasgow.
“But why wouldn’t you come back to New York?”
“Because I’m in school.”
“That’s not why. You could transfer.”
“I like Scotland,” Clem said. “Anyway, do you even want that?”
“For you to come back?” I slipped an olive into my mouth and spit out the pit. “Yes!”
A precious look of consternation clouded his face. “I’m worried it doesn’t make sense,” he said with a sudden gravity that surprised us both.
“What doesn’t?” I asked, though I suppose I already knew.
◆
Because the sunset could be viewed panoramically from the cliff’s peak, Clem and I found ourselves its sole beach viewers. We returned after dinner. The tide had receded and the beach was littered with what the ocean surrendered: carapaces, abalones, snails, the brittle skeletons of little fish. We walked through the bands of debris in silence, the sandbar glittering with rills of unrecalled ocean. A sulphuric mist rose. Clem sat on a rock, reading my book in the bluing light. A ways off, I playfully carved the names of my friends into the wet sand. I wrote longer things, too, prayers and wishes that spiraled around shells and wheeled through the streams of seawater.
But what started as a lovely ritual quickly assumed compulsive fervor. Because I began to feel as if anything unrecorded into the intertidal zone might be taken from me; so I wrote furtively, then desperately. I wrote a series of important dates, including that of my betrayal and Clem’s apology. I squared them, adjacently transcribed my address, Clem’s address, the address of my childhood home. Further down, in wetter sand, I wrote words from the found letter. These I did want the ocean to wash away—independent woman and Angel, possible, not beautiful. I wrote Regina’s name once, then twice, and then repeatedly into a radiant spiral that I couldn’t figure out how to end until it hit a perfect scallop and was through with me. What would it all be for, if it didn’t work out? All this suffering! I felt Clem was taking something from me. Or that he’d taken something from me a while ago, and all this time I’d just been trying desperately to wrangle it back.
Eventually, I felt his cool, impartial presence over me. At first I felt embarrassed to have been caught scribbling, but Clem said nothing, laying a flat palm against my back.
Back at the hotel I straddled Clem, holding his wrists down against the bed.
“Say something mean to me,” he demanded. “Just so I know you can.” He went on that the ability to say something mean, to him, felt integral to love.
“Do you think I’ve never said anything mean about you?” I asked. Because I’d said countless mean things about Clem. In the year we didn’t speak, all I’d said were mean things, none of which I wanted to repeat now.
“Just one.”
“No! Let it go.” I told him I used to want meanness too, but it wasn’t integral to love, for me, at least not anymore.
“Please. Just one.”
“Fine,” I said. “You don’t deserve me.”
Clem smiled, “That’s not mean. That’s just a fact.”
“I think you’re too easily influenced.” His face lit up with something hungry and overeager that impelled me to continue, “I think you’re wishy-washy, in a moral way, and it makes you a coward.”
Clem considered it. “Is that all?”
“Fine!” I let go of his hands and slapped his thighs. “Your relationship failed,” I moved my face an inch from his, our lips touching as I spoke. “And failing at that kind of relationship isn’t just a romantic failure, it’s a moral one. She left you. She saw something real about you, a stain you’ve spent your entire life trying to hide, and she left. You embarrassed yourself. You’re alone now. You’re all alone. Trying to recover some undergraduate interest in the hope that it will make you a life. It won’t. You have no friends. You have no career. No system of belief to fall back on, you have nothing. And I was right. I was right about everything! I—”
Clem grabbed my chin and yanked me towards him, his thumb digging abruptly into my jaw and halting my speech. He held me firmly, so I couldn’t move even if I wanted to, and rocked me, repeating, “You don’t mean it, you don’t mean it.”
◆
It could have been a needlelike crack in the copper pipes beyond the wall, or the weather. It could have been the weather, of course: while we’d been on vacation the endless deluge was briefly interrupted by what would be the only summer days that year, hot and cloudless, which sapped the water out from that soggy city. It could have been any elemental interrelation, really, held in brief, tenuous correspondence: the window’s draft, the forecast, the ecosystem of the tenement building, with its ventilation and cooling systems and unbroken cycle of appliance usage. There were other indications around the flat. For instance an immediate airlessness upon entry, a must which prickled our noses, a sage-colored tessellation along creases of walls and ceilings.
Of course I’m also inclined to say—knowing that Clem would disagree—that we had turned some fated corner too quickly, thereby catching the presence of Another. Because we’re all gifted a certain amount of concurrence in a life, each of us is parceled our own measure of apertures in the explainable. Though I would go further to say that all my life was itself a lattice of these concurrences. So I imagined myself, briefly, as a bug, calling out for Clem in a column of resin. The first known animal to conceive of proximity, that’s how I imagined myself, calling out for Clem in a resounding chamber, because in finding him, I too would be found.
As it happened: when we arrived back in Glasgow, after the plane ride with its fundamentally uninteresting comedy of errors, after lugging the luggage upstairs, after the series of perfunctory comments as to the bizarre affectation that the flat seemed to have assumed in our absence, after inspecting these, after finding the mold begemming corners and pleats, I opened the door to the compartment beneath the bed, and that’s when I saw it. Just for an instant, I saw it: that glorious aggregation of droplet and ice crystal, those opaline whiskers of vapor, how they had, in our absence, groped towards each other. I called Clem over in shock. How long had they hung there like that, in unity, before I interrupted them? Look, how the world catches up on itself! But as I heard Clem approach I was overtaken by an impulse. I unlatched the hook to the vivarium’s glass door and cracked it open, an inflow of new air rushing in. Clem arrived to investigate.
“What is it?” he asked.
But by then it was gone.