Something Going Around Read Free Page A

they had thumbs, I mean.”
    â€œYou are not including an insect vector, like the mosquito for malaria.” Even with the scotch she’d taken aboard, Indira was very precise. To go into a line of research like hers, she’d have to be.
    And I said, “No, I didn’t have anything like that in mind. Too easy.”
    â€œToo easy.” Indira made a little clucking noise. “I said before that you found interesting questions, didn’t I? That one … I don’t know the answer to that one yet. I wonder if I ever will. We are harder to influence than rats and mice, thank heaven. Whether we’re impossible, I also don’t know.” She glanced down at her glass, and seemed amazed to see only a few melting rocks in there. “I do know I’d like another drink.”
    I wasn’t sorry to have another one myself. We talked some more. We gave each other cell numbers and e-mail addresses that didn’t belong to the university system. Yes, the modern mating dance. After a while, Indira checked her iPhone and said something about how late it was getting.
    When she stood up, I did too, though I wasn’t planning on leaving quite yet. She wore sparkly shoes. Before long, I found out she did that all the time, even when she exercised. She never met footwear with sequins or sparkles or rhinestones that she didn’t like. It was part of her style, the way gaudy bow ties are with some men.
    â€œI enjoyed talking with you,” I said.
    â€œAnd I did, with you,” she answered.
    â€œI’ll call you,” I said. If she decided she didn’t feel like going out with a random professor of Germanic philology she’d met in a bar, she’d let me know. Even if she didn’t want to, I doubted she’d be mean about it. The way things are, you can’t hope for more than that. Too often, you don’t even get so much.
    Call her I did. She didn’t pretend she had no idea who I was. We went to dinner a few times, and to plays, and to a folk club I like. We went to each other’s places and met each other’s children. All the kids got that their parents had lives of their own. They weren’t always thrilled about it, but they got it.
    We talked more about languages, and about parasites, and about other things, too.
    Yes, we arranged some privacy. That was private, though, so I won’t go on about it. I know—my attitude is old-fashioned these days. Everyone puts everything online as soon as it happens, or sometimes even before. But if someone who specializes in Gothic isn’t entitled to be old-fashioned, who the devil is?
    After I finished the last blue book of finals week and e-mailed grades to the registrar’s office, I headed over to Mandelbaum’s to celebrate my liberation. I heard the sirens while I was walking, but I didn’t pay much attention to them. You do hear sirens every so often in the city. People rob other people, or whack them over the head with fireplace pokers, or shoot them. Cars run lights and smash each other. Sirens are part of life.
    They’re part of death, too. This time, the accident had happened only a few doors up from Mandelbaum’s. It reminded me too much of the other one I’d seen. Another humongous set of wheels with a stove-in front end. Another body on the street with something covering up the worst of things. Another goddamn enormous splash of blood with nasty little critters licking or drinking or nibbling at the edges.
    This time, the driver was a man. He sounded just as appalled, just as stunned, as the blond gal had the last time. “Oh, my God!” he told the cop with the notebook. “She just sailed out in front of me like she didn’t have a care in the whole wide world. I couldn’t stop—no fuckin’ way. Oh, my God!”
    She. Yes, those were a woman’s legs sticking out from under the tarp. The feet were bare. She’d got knocked clean out