Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Twelve: Diviner of the Electrons

83 Today I’m riding on a city bus with Vivica (she parks where she pleases, and her van has been booted). She’s taking me out of Kingdom Come and into the city, to the laboratory where she examines renegade cells under a million-dollar electron microscope that can magnify a dust particle—no, the dust a dust particle collects when it neglects its housekeeping —to the size of a Buick, and where she makes informed pronouncements about what their distorted shapes might mean. I think the news is rarely good, the cells of the hale and hardy never slapped on a slide for the scrutiny of expert oglers of the minute. The bus is crowded in front and we stand hunched over in the aisle, stooped straphangers. There are seats in the rear, but Vivica refuses to sit in the back or on the margins of anything , buses, theatres, lecture halls, churches. The bus driver twelve Diviner of the Electrons 84 seems not to have accustomed himself to the brakes of this bus, so we lurch along and I feel wobbly (I’m a stalwart lubber , sure, but I can topple easy as any ninepin). I can see passengers wondering if we are creatures once thought to be extinct, now displaced in an unlikely habitat, pterodactyls balancing on a birch branch in a stiff breeze. The boy in front of me looks nervous and inches as close to the woman in front of him as he can, clearly fearful I might swoop in for the kill, mollusk-sized morsel that he is, might capsize and crush him if we take a curve. Vivica is wearing an A-line coat that bells out from her calves, with buttons big as a child’s face, and she tightens her eyes to accusatory slits, glares at a thin man sitting in front of us, reading the newspaper. In the seat next to him sits a bag of groceries, but the space it occupies is only a fraction of Vivica’s width. I can almost smell paper catching fire as Vivica’s laser stare burns a hole in the back of the sports section. The man shifts in his seat and then gingerly periscopes his eyes over the top of the paper . “Oh, here,” he says to Vivica and stands up, moves the groceries to the floor. “Take a load off, little, er, uh, lady.” He chuckles nervously and licks his lips. Vivica gives him a dismissive quarter-smile and gracefully lunges into the seat as the bus driver taps the brakes. She jars the kid pecking at an electronic game next to her and he grumbles, gives her a glance, another, stands up, stares, grabs a pole, looks at me, looks back at Vivica, gape-mouthed, dangling the stillchirping game at his side. “When are you due?” asks the man, pointing the now rolled-up newspaper in the direction of Vivica’s belly. Before stepping onto the bus, Vivica had said to me, “Want to see me mump a seat without a word?” and she pushed her 85 stomach forward and put her hands in the pockets of the tent-like coat. “August,” says Vivica, no mathematician: it is now September . The man’s forehead buckles in puzzlement and then he smiles and asks, “Your first?” “That I know of,” says Vivica, and the man nods then looks at me, rubs his chin. Vivica slips me an unsubtle smirk. Suddenly, the man leans forward and places his hand on Vivica’s stomach, right over one of the dessert-plate-sized buttons. “Quite a hot cross bun you got baking in there,” he says, and his grin reveals badly capped teeth with a faint verdigris shimmer. Vivica peels the man’s hand from her stomach, leans forward , and looks into his hepatic eyes yellowing with disease or age or discolored from having borne unbearable witness. “Ivo?” she says. The man straightens and takes a step back. “Ivo Novak?” He twists the newspaper in his hands with such nimble haste he seems a professional throttler of long throats, a strangler of geese perhaps. And he has this look in his eye, the glint of a sharpened blade catching the sun. I imagine him the official bare-handed hatchet man at a pâté de foie gras factory, picture geese weighted down with force-fattened livers thrashing him with the last-ditch...