Out of Time

Chapter Four

51 Chapter Four He lived with his wife once in a sprawling three-story house on Caplewood Drive. They rented the ground floor. They slept in a room at the back of the house that jutted out of the house precariously, and overlooked the steep slope of a ravine choked with kudzu, the huge trees strewn with green. The room sagged and swayed. The air conditioner hummed and clattered. This was in Alabama, and the air conditioner was always on. Above them various couples they knew had moved in and out. They themselves had lived upstairs, until the ground floor had become vacant. A man with cats had lived in the basement apartment until it flooded. In this rocking room they made love and slept late. In this rocking room surrounded by green they lay clutching each other in the dark. When his wife miscarried the first time, he had wept in that bed, the high wind rocking them, their hands on each other. He mourned what wasn’t. In that bed they ate and slept and made love, rocking, reading.They read poetry and physics . He took comfort in physics, where all things are possible, an infinite number of parallel universes, ten billion universes where their first child carried to term, an endless stream of cribs rocking in the dark, in the wind of the worlds. ...