“What happened on the night you mention?” she asks.
“I got up and took the book out of his lap, turned out the light,” I reply.
“What was he reading?”
Her question catches me by surprise. I have to think. I don’t remember clearly, but I seem to recall Benton was reading about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America that is less than an hour’s drive east of Richmond. He was very interested in history and had double-majored in it and psychology in college, and then his curiosity about Jamestown was ignited when archaeologists began excavating out there and discovered the original fort. It slowly comes back to me: The book Benton was reading in bed was a collection of narratives, many of them written by John Smith. I don’t recall the title, I tell Anna. I suppose the book is still in my house somewhere, and the idea of happening upon it one of these days pains me. I go on with my story.
“I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office,” I say. “As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it’s made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It’s funny, but my normal activities seem mundane and beyond question until they are inspected by others. That’s when I realize I don’t live like other people.”
“Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?” Anna asks.
“Because they wanted to know about everything.” I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo’s fire before lightning strikes.
Can’t sleep! he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn’t sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn ‘t need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.
At this point, Anna interrupts me. “Nothing else might have preceded this? No forewarning whatsoever?” She knew Benton, too. This wasn’t Benton. This was an alien who had invaded Benton’s body.
“Nothing,” I answer her. “No warning.” I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. “The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI’s star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn’t was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, Anna, we had respect. We always treated each other with respect.”
“And did he tell you what was wrong?” She presses me on this.
I smile bitterly. “When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me.” Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it Is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an aban- doned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.