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+It was a cool spring evening, he had switched off the air before she arrived and opened the windows on either side of the bed. Faint strains of car horns downtown, children playing in the neighbor's yard, cicades like violins, the murmer of pigeons cooing in the raingutters outside above the window. The thin white curtains lufted lightly out in a puff of breeze and he watched, craning his head on the pillow as small gray-brown clumps of coalguated dust pushed off the ends of the fabric, out into the air like trapeze artists swinging from the rafters of a circus tent. He imagined them crawling out of the unused air vents poking out from the stained-pine baseboards, hiding around the bedposts, clinging in the wind.
+
+Is what we're doing worthwhile? She took a drag off the cigarette and let the smoke evaporate slowly out of her mouth. He watched it drift up toward the ceiling, a soul leaving a body.
+
+Waiben shifted his leg so that his foot rested on the bunched up comforter at the foot of the bed, elevating his knee, but causing his already withering penis to slide off his leg, looking pathetic and leaving a trail of come through the hair on his thigh. He wiped it up onto his hand and stared at the gleaming wetness. Worthwhile?
+
+Yes. He looked at his now prominently featured leg, riddled with thick gnarled scars and now quite obviously shorter than the other. He compared it to her leg extending out of the white sheet and curling over, not touching his. He thought about how she never seemed to touch him afterward and wondered if that revealed some revolsion or just a lack of intimacy, which then sent off wondering which would be worse. She was watching his face, he could feel her eyes surveying the terrain, gauging, hoping for some elaboration, but he refused to turn his head. Her eyes were like hurricanes on the weather report, swirls of white and dark spots where the storm bore down on someone, when it was the weather you could get by feeling sorry for others, but now they were bearing down on him, a wind was gathering on that side of bed and no divider or trundle would spare him, especially after he told her and the real cleaving began.
+
+Worthwhile. He repeated it as if the sound would somehow give it greater clarity. It slid off the tongue, it was a slippery word, compound, complex. He steeled himeself momentarily and then rolled over glancing at her eyes as he snatched the cigarette from between her lips and brought it, lipstick smear and all to his. The smoke tasted like stale air trapped in a basement with rotting rats and cochroach carcasses, it made his lungs recoil. Secretly he hated cigarettes, he hated that she smoked in his house, in his bed even, but in the year and a half that they had been enjoying these afternoon trysts he had never once set foot in her house. It wasn't the first time he had thought about it, nor was it the first time that the thought of it had made his own house seem older, his bookshelves more disheveled, the pictures hanging in the afternoon sunlight even more faded, the walls even more yellowed than they were. He imagined her house, bright and airy, the sort of place with a cool, clean tiled counters in the kitchen, yellow walls with framed black and white photos she had no dount taken when she was younger, a bedroom where everything was white and contrasted with the deep mahogany bedframe, the sort of place where catalog photographers spent their days off. Or perhaps she lived in a cheap apartment, some roach infested nightmare, he had no way of knowing. He was too embarrassed to ask. They had simple gone back to his house one afternoon, he poured her a drink and they did very little talking. In fact he had tried to talk and she simple grabbed him by the back of the neck and silence him with her mouth. It was sexy at the time, but thinking of it now he couldn't help realizing that it was precendant setting, it was a distancing action, it was a classic psycological defense mechanism and he of all people had failed to see through it. He realized, not for the first time, that was what irritated him that she was always in control. Despite being almost two decades older he was never in control when she was around. Not here, not at the lab, not during the experiments. 
+
+He took another drag off the cigarette and handed it back to her blankly, turning his attention to the tuba propped up in the corner. It had been in the corner for nine of the ten years he had lived in this house and yet he had never once played the thing, never once even picked it up since he laid it there in the corner, propped against the chaotic bookshelving his ex-wife had built in a moment of inspiration. The saw she used was likewise gathering dust in the shed out back, along with paint that colored the bathroom, several old aplliances so rusted and collapsing in on themselves that it was difficult to assess exactly what their function had been. That's where everything goes, off to its respective shed to die and rot above gound or below. Waiben avoided the shed. When he went in the yard at all it was usually late at night, stumbling drunk looking for somewhere it pee.
+
+What are you thinking about?
+
+Nothing. The word worthwhile. 
+
+The tuba for instance, was it worthwhile? He had given it to his wife for her forty-fifth birthday, she had played in a high school marching band, he always found it hard to imagine, her dimunitive five foot four frame with a tuba strapped to it, towering over her head like a balloon ready to tear itself out of a child's hand. This particular tuba had probably once belonged to a musican who knew how to use it, someone who had likewise marched in parades, high school football halftimes. But now it sat, tarnished brass religated to the status of prop, some distraction in the corner of the room for others to comment on, oh you play the tuba? No. It was a gift for my, nevermind. In the end it meant almost nothing to him, was it worthwhile? Is anything worthwhile, really? Was it worthwhile when it was a gift? In that moment of presentation did it fulfill its final act and collapse willingly even into the corner until such time as it would no longer exist at all. And when it ceased to exist would it then cease to be worthwhile? If it ever had been?
+
+So what do you think?
+
+I guess it depends on who you are, what you're talking about.
+
+I'm me, you are you. I'm talking about what we're doing?
+
+You mean now, here in this bed?
+
+No. I mean the work.
+
+Yes. It is worthwhile. It will help people. He said it slowly, listening to his voice harden around the words, waiting to see if he still believed them.
+
+You honestly believe that?
+
+He knew she just wanted to pick a fight. It was how she always left. It was how he knew at the end of day she felt nothing at all for him. It was simply easier for her to be with people she didn't like, detested perhaps, because then it was easier to leave. She was forever leaving.
+
+No. 
+
+Then why say it?
+
+He thought about it. He thought about the lifeless tuba in the corner. He didn't want to tell her the truth, he knew as soon as he told her they would no longer have any connection at all, that the one common point would be severed and all that would be left was shared moments, memories that would fade blur and distort until they were nothing more than fodder for some poorly written memoire. Time cheapens everything, rust and decay always win in the end, in the physical and in memory, time rots the past like termites devouring wood until there's nothing but a spider webbed skeleton that stands for just a moment past its time and then collapses to dust. Worthwhile means that you want to do it again. And he did, he wanted to go straight back to the beginning and do it again. But do it right this time, screen the candidates more carefully, choose different assistants, to undo it all so that it was a shiny brass tuba again, bouncing playfully on the shoulders of his own smart uniform, marching in marshall patterns around the field, deep basenotes rumbling the bleachers and the cheers from everyone filling the night air.
+
+She took the cigarette back and leaned over to ash it on the floor. You don't take me seriously. I'm a lab rat that you happen to like fucking.
+
+Claire. He started and then stopped, allowing the truth of it wash over him, settle in and feel it before he proceeded to deny it. You aren't a lab rat.
+
+I'll also never be your wife.
+
+I know that damnit. What makes you think I want you to be my wife, have you heard me ask you to be my wife?
+
+Don't be cruel.
+
+It was the first time he had ever felt in control. He felt monstrous, cruel and strangly satisified. He heaved himself out bed before she could retort and stumbbled past the tuba toward the bathroom. He crashed unceremoniously down on the toilet, too little energy to even stand. He began to pee, thinking that he had been here for ten years, digging and plowing and sowing for little more than a Starbucks employee's wages, reaping what little the hail and the hot winds of academia were willing to grant. When he was done he stood and washed the come off his hand staring at his gray stubble and nearly bald head in the mirror. Enjoy it old man, that was the last time.
+
+She climbed atop him and sank down. He reached up and held her breasts, but she quickly grabbed his wrists, pinned them back behind his head and began the grind down on him, mashing her clit against his pubic bone. He began a familiar trip through the variety of memories he had carefully designed to sustain himself, a cotten hankerchief wrapped around his bleeding hand, the dream of the woman in the storm, sitting on her stoop, watching the flying snakes dance through the heavy air, the Red Sox in 1982, the rusted chevy he leaned against pouring vodka on his hand, the stinging raw white flesh folding back as his palm extended revealing a deep pale crevease of once-sealed flesh, the 1978 Boston Massacre four-game sweep, the thin blue pin stripes of Yankee uniforms, he could feel she was getting closer, he dismissed the images and wrestled free of her pinning grip, rolling her over and laying into her roughly, sweat pickling on his brow and back, she squirmed and he left a sense of relief, he ducked his head into her neck and slid out, a warm jet of sperm on her clenched thighs and he rolled over wandering if she cared that he had come.
+
+They lay silent, him staring at the ceiling, watching the fan drift lazily around, like a giant like a tape sprocket with tape streched so thin it was invisible, tiny cobweb fibers connecting him back, looping through all the sounds over again, warbled and unintelligible as if the conversation hadn't happened yet. As if the Dean hadn't ever stood from his maghogany desk, open the double doors, paused to eye his secratary's cleavage as he passed and walked down the hall to the elevator and smiled to himself as he pressed the down arrow. As if he hadn't stepped off at the basement floor and marched down the hall, his footsteps clicking smartly on the cold formica tiles until he came to Waiben's open door and tapped lightly. As if he hadn't entered before Waiben could say otherwise and rather proudly, without a word, laid the letter, typos and all, on Wiaben's desk before piroetting on the heals of his Italian leather shoes and marched smartly back down the hall to the elevator. As if his fat fleshly meatstick fingers hadn't pushed the up arrow with such self-satisfaction, his thick dull eyes taking in the secretary again before he disappeared into the stale, dank world where he existed solely to satisfy himself.
+
+Waiben turned off the bathroom light, emerged back into the bedroom and stood naked next to the tuba. If I wanted a lab rat I would use rats. And no, I don't know if it mattered. But it's stopping next week so this whole argument is moot.
+
+Who's arguing? She sat up and leaned over to flicked the cigarette out the window into the dry grass. 
+
+You mean he shut it down? He can do that?
+
+It was a committee decision, I was there. I had my say. He's just an errand boy.
+
+So it was nothing? Just a bit of their game and we're gone?
+
+More or less. Yes.
+
+I want to disembowel him. 
+
+As much as I hate him, it wasn't him. He doesn't even have the intelligence to concieve of decisions like that, let alone make them. 
+
+It doesn't matter. There is always some one higher, some string or wire or something pulling something. In the end the blame is where you assign it. He has to answer to me. Part of me wants to do the same to you.
+
+So what are you going to do?
+
+Nothing most likely. She lay back and craned her arm out the window flicking the cigarette outside. What kind of car does he drive?
+
+He thought for a moment and smiled. A Toyota Celica I believe.
+
+She laughed. 
+
+Then she got out of bed and began to collect her clothes. She pulled up her jeans, buttoned her shirt, walked over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He heard her footsteps pass through the living room, the front door close and then silence. He went to the kitchen and poured a glass of bourbon. He threw back his head and then poured another. He wandered back into the bedroom. He could still smell her. He picked up the tuba ackwardly, the cool brass felt strangely enticing against his skin. He walked out into the backyard toward the shed.
+
+
+