The venue was overbright, my mouth raw from hot coffee drunk too quickly sometime that afternoon. A strange atmosphere—something like tension in the walls, in the way people spoke to each other. I felt stripped of too many of my senses, concerned about my rhythm, about the exact small sequence of movements required to put my hand on Leah’s arm. Earlier in the evening we had fought, I forget about what exactly. Certainly not about her going away or any reservations I might have had about the trip. If it were possible now to look back and feel at least secure in the fact that I had predicted something, noted some foul planetary alignment and spoken my fears aloud, that might be of some comfort. As it was, I suspected nothing. Leah had gone and returned many times before and I had no reason to presume this trip would be any different. What we’d argued about had been something banal, impossible to recall and easy enough to guess at: Leah never wiping the surfaces down unless prompted, Leah never giving me two seconds just to stare into space without asking me what I was thinking. Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud. It would, perhaps, be easy enough to claim that Leah’s impending departure was what prompted me to pick fights unnecessarily and often, but to be perfectly honest I’m not certain that’s what it was. Often enough it’s occurred to me that fighting is simply something I’m given to, like picking at my cuticles. Whatever it was we fought about, the climax was loud, fraught, and quickly forgotten. We had never been very committed fighters—bit and scratched and then grew bored, too quick to appease and to declare ourselves the ones at fault. The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.
That night, the fight sat between us like something sore and satisfying—tender pulp of a fresh-pulled tooth. The sense of something better off removed. I felt good to have scrapped and apologized. Moving around the party, I registered the ache between us and felt grateful, irritable, loved her easily. She brought me a glass of something, pulled my hair from where it had slipped down the neck of my dress, kissed my temple, and snorted when a woman from the Centre introduced herself, despite having already spoken to me several times that night. I’m sorry, the woman said when Leah pointed this out to her, one of those nights. It’s all blah blah blah, hi hi hi, bullshit bullshit bullshit. Leah explained that the two of them would be crewmates on the forthcoming expedition, that they had actually worked together before. I nodded and smiled and asked if she was looking forward to the trip. As much as anyone looks forward to a long commute, the woman replied, and Leah huffed a laugh, kept an arm around my shoulders. Jelka thinks she’s such a scream, she said to me and Jelka shrugged and asked me what I did for work. I remember the way it felt to stand with the two of them, the way people turned to look at them, occasionally interrupting our conversation to shake their hands. It’s like you’re famous, I teased at one point and Jelka made a face. That’s just what these people are like, she said, raising an eyebrow at Leah. Weird. Weird people. Haven’t I said this since we came to work here? Leah laughed, leaned more heavily into my side. You just like being mean about people, she said, there’s nothing wrong with them at all.
At the end of the night, there were toasts; well-wishes for the expedition, joking exhortations not to stay away too long. A woman waxed lyrical on advances in technology, on the research opportunities opened up by the Centre’s commitment to modernity. The atmosphere, though convivial, seemed shot through with something unidentifiable—strange sensation, almost a flavor in the air. During the toasts, I saw several people from the Centre standing with hands clasped in front of them or under their chins, the way you might expect to witness at a church event. I stood with Leah and registered a sense of unzipping, turned my head into her neck and whispered that I was sorry about the fight.
* * *
I am reading a book I found in a charity shop, flipping through in the hopes of encountering notes made by previous owners, which is one of my favorite things to do. Leah used to buy me books chosen purely on the strength of this, presenting me with copies of Das Kapital and Middlemarch with inscriptions scrawled across their title pages by people I will never meet. For Doreen, without apprehension. For Jack, on his birthday and despite his behavior. The book I am reading is a textbook on human anatomy, coffee stained and sticky to the touch, long chunks of text irregularly underlined at points referring to nerve endings and dormant human tissue, as though the previous owner had been using it to build a monster in a shed. Structurally, I read aloud to myself, for no other reason than because it is underlined, there are three classes of sensory receptors: free nerve endings, encapsulated nerve endings, and specialized cells. Free nerve endings are simply free dendrites at the end of a neuron that extend into a tissue. Pain, heat, and cold are all sensed through free nerve endings.