3. Camille #3
She’d let me sit on the battered leather sofa and read whatever I wanted.
Mostly, I remember titles I didn’t understand, but sometimes there’d be a line or image that stuck.
One winter, she read to me from a book about shrews.
They are the only small mammal known to survive on a diet of venom, she told me.
The only creature built to metabolize what would kill everything else.
I remembered that, long after she was gone. I learned from her the discipline of patience, the value of waiting out an adversary rather than confronting them head-on.
She could sit with a problem for hours, refusing to be drawn into the quicksand of anger or urgency. She taught me to look for the slowest solution, the one that required the least movement but guaranteed the outcome. It is, I suppose, my only inheritance.
I lean back against the bench, rolling my shoulders to work out the tension that always collects there after a long session with the snakes.
My body is built for this work—long arms, steady hands, and a tolerance for discomfort that verges on self-annihilating—but even so, I am not immune to exhaustion.
I flex my left hand, the one with the faint outline of the viper bite from my first year in doctoral training. The scar tissue is nearly invisible now, but I still feel it tingle in wet weather, a ghostly reminder that even ritual and science bend, sometimes, to accident.
I check the time again. 21:21. If I were a different sort of man, I would use these hours for sleep or television, or maybe the company of another person. But solitude suits me; the presence of others, even on the fringe of my attention, acts more like a toxin than a balm.
I have never understood the compulsion to fill empty rooms with empty speech. My mother was the same. She and my father could go days without talking, except to exchange formulaic greetings, like the signals between two animals sharing a territory.
It wasn’t until after she disappeared that my father tried to fill the silence, and by then, it was too late.
I finish my notes, tidy the lab’s glassware, and run a final inspection around the enclosures. Mireille and the others have already retreated into their preferred hides, a signal that the night has gone on long enough.
I switch off the overheads, lock the climate control panel, and let myself out the side door into the cool darkness. My estate is silent except for the faint tremor of insects waking in the grass and, from somewhere beyond the wall, the thin cry of a nightjar.
I take a few deep lungfuls of the nighttime air before going back in.
In the hallway outside the lab, I toe off my shoes and shed the lab coat, careful to keep the inside out so as not to track any residue upstairs.
The stone steps are cool beneath my bare feet, and for a moment the sensation returns me to my childhood, to the tiled floors of my father’s apartment, always chilly in the mornings, always in need of my mother’s presence to warm them.
Now the cold is only a reminder that I am alone, and this house is mine to order as I like.
I trek through the upstairs hallway to my bedroom, then to the attached bath.
I strip down, catch my reflection in the mirror, and pause.
The face that returns my gaze is not unfamiliar, but I study it anyway.
My features are my father’s—the aquiline nose, the gray eyes whose expression never quite matches what I think I am feeling, and even the way my mouth moves when I speak.
My body, on the other hand, is all Nadia.
The lean, tall frame, the narrow shoulders, the dark skin that no French winter could ever bleach out.
I step into the shower and turn the tap. The water is slow to run hot—the house’s one persistent flaw—but when it does, it scalds. I let it do so, feeling the heat work through my scalp and across my shoulders, until I am certain every trace of venom has been erased.
There is a comfort in cleaning. In scrubbing away the markers of the day, of resetting the body to zero, if only for a few hours. As I work the shampoo into my hair, I replay the day in sequence. Ryan Smith. The boy in the lane. My new neighbor.
I have already decided I will befriend him.
It will be easy. Americans are always grateful to be noticed, to be folded into the illusion of community, even if the community wants nothing to do with them.
I have watched enough of them during my years at university to know the script.
You anticipate their needs, you offer small kindnesses, and in return, they offer you everything.
Stories, secrets, confessions. All you have to do is listen, and eventually, they will place their entire life into your hands.
It occurs to me, as I sit in the dark, that I am rehearsing a script for myself as much as for him. I will introduce myself tomorrow, perhaps with a basket from the garden or a bottle of wine. I will ask polite questions and offer polite answers. He will want to talk. They always do.
If I am lucky, he will know something useful. If I am very lucky, he will know nothing at all, and I can make of him whatever I need.
If I am honest, I am not sure which outcome I’m hoping for.