Trader wasn’t sleeping. And he wasn’t twitching and gulping and scratching his hair. Trader was working. He had a thick typescript out on the table beside the tin ashtray and he was writing in corrections with a ballpoint, his head bent, his eyeglasses milky under the bare forty-watt. An hour of this, then two hours, then more.
I go in and lock the door behind me. This trips the tape recorder housed beneath the table where Trader sits. I feel a third party in the room: It’s like Colonel Tom is already listening in. Trader’s looking up at me with patient neutrality. From under my arm I take the
case folder and toss it down in front of him. Clipped to its cover is a five-by-eight of Jennifer dead. Beside it I place a sheet headed Explanation of Rights. I begin.
Okay. Trader. I want you to answer some background questions. That’s fine by you, right?
I guess so.
You and Jennifer were together for how long?
Now he keeps me waiting. He takes off his glasses and measures up his gaze to mine. Then he turns away. His upper teeth are slowly bared. When he answers my question he seems to have to move past an impediment. But not an impediment of speech.
Almost ten years.
You two met how?
At CSU.
She’s what? Seven years younger?
She was a sophomore. I was a postdoc.
You were teaching her? She was your student?
No. She was math and physics, I was philosophy.
Explain it to me. You do philosophy of science, right?
I do now. I switched. Back then I was doing linguistics.
Language? Philosophy of language?
That’s right. Conditionals, actually. I spent all my time thinking about the difference between “if it was” and “if it were.”
And what do you spend all your time thinking about now, friend?
… Many worlds.
Excuse me? You mean other planets?
Many worlds, many minds. The interpretation of relative states. Popularly known as “parallel universes,” Detective.
Sometimes I have the look of a grave child trying not to cry. I have it now, I know. As with the child, staying dry-eyed while enduring sympathy, it’s more like defiance than self-pity. When I don’t understand something, it makes me feel defiant. I feel: I will not be excluded from this. But of course you are excluded, all the time. You just have to let it go.
So it wasn’t an academic connection. You met how?
… Socially.
And you moved in together when?
When she graduated. About eighteen months later.
How would you characterize your relationship?
Trader pauses. I light a cigarette with the butt of its predecessor. As usual, and of set purpose, I am turning the interrogation room into a gas chamber. For-hire executioners, bludgeoners of prostitutes_ they seldom object to this (though you’d be surprised). A professor of philosophy, I reckoned, might have lower tolerance. That’s sometimes all you’re left with in here: The full ashtray. Buts and butts, we call it. You’re left with the full ashtray, and the rising levels in your lungs.
Could I take one of those?
Go ahead.
Thanks. I quit. When I moved in with Jennifer, actually. We both quit. But I seem to have started again. How would I characterize our relationship? Happy. Happy.
But it was winding down.
No.
There were problems.
No.
Okay. So everything was great. Well leave it like that for a minute.
Excuse me?
You guys were building for the future.
Such was my understanding.
Get married. Kids.
Such was my understanding.
You two talked about it… I asked if you talked about it…Okay. Kids. You wanted kids? You yourself?
… Sure. I’m thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face.
She want them?
She was a woman. Women want children.
He looks at me, my town flesh, my eyes. And he’s thinking: Yeah. All women except this woman.
You’re saying women want children in a different way? Jennifer wanted children in a different way?
Women want children physically. They want them with their bodies.
They do, huh? But you don’t.
No, I just think that if you’re going to live life…
To the full…
No, if you’re going to live it at all. Then the whole deal, please. Could I… ?