Ivyland by Miles Klee Page B

his balance. I pedal furiously, not slowing even as I pull needle after tiny needle out of my skin.
    When we reach my house, I coast straight into the backyard. Instead of slowing down, I simply let myself fall sideways onto dry, sun-beaten grass, the bike toppling onto me. The chain grease is cold on my leg. Henri stops, pushes his bike aside and crumples.
    â€œI hurt everywhere.”
    â€œSame.” Could count, but it’s easier to call myself one giant sting.
    My mom’s semi-concerned alto floats out of a window, across a sky silver and veined like a dragonfly wing.
    â€œWhat are you boys doing?”
    â€œNothing,” is the answer, in unison.
    We lay there, reptile-still, replaying action and reaction with awe. Some spoken, some drifting through brains. Through mine, anyway. Leaves overhead ripple at a calm boil. The waves of surreal memory crash without direction. To and fro. In and out. Points of debate are exhausted. Certain blanks fail to be filled. One or two tortured what-ifs haphazardly examined. Apologies come, awkward and quiet. Our stings quietly throb, but the breezes are balms. Blankness creeps up on us.
    At last, Henri, attempting a conclusion, offers:
    â€œWe should’ve played Submarine.”
    â€œShould’ve played Submarine.”

PROFESSOR FLEER /// IVYLAND COLLEGE /// ONE YEAR AGO
    The students give me hope when they do not open their mouths too wide. But this little season has seen slack-jawed awe in the main, and the shrouded inner walls of throats refract things miserably. A quality—let’s say coherence—escapes in muted gasps, slipping serpentine toward sunnier rocks. It’s humbling to remember humility.
    To doubt the primacy of our species, I mean.
    He’s leaning over my desk, asking for my wife, when I notice. (Truth be told, I have no answer, confirming healthy levels of marital trust.) I can barely snatch a word between the oaf’s intimidations. His tie is oddly textured, fish-scaled. Full Windsor knot wrenched as though in pain; it reminds me of a sculptress who worked metal into corkscrewed shapes to strangle and drown her adulterous father in history’s clouded stream. One can’t recall, sculptress, whether your art ever pitied mom instead.
    â€œThere’s a caterpillar on your shoulder,” I interrupt, pointing. The detective sneers and crushes it with thumb and forefinger.
    They are simply everywhere—the word is biblical . Too many warm winters, buttressed by this muggy spring, have yielded a bumper crop of the yellow-speckled creepers. Our campus is their extra-leafy Eden; a formal armistice alone prevents them from wresting control from the deans. Yet I let them feast at Azura’s honeyed insistence, will never maliciously kill one lest she catch me in the boyish act. My vermiculate office spider plant is holey testimony of that appeasement, swarming with the busy plague.
    â€œAre you hearing me right now?” the detective blusters, apparently vexed. “You’re to help me find certain responsible parties.”
    I tell him I’ll draw up a list of moral relativists in the department.
    â€œFunny. I’ll ask again before we go downtown: Professor Azura Carcassone.”
    My wife … crime of passion … exits rising to enable. Sixth floor. She pushes the elevator button with sweet impatience. Inuit cinema to teach. Sylvia, a fiery if cipherlike student of mine, is already descending. Sixty feet below: safety, the ghastly gift shop of Ivyland College Museum. But no. Doors whine open. Four too-similar eyes are locked. Sylvia, my wife shrewdly concludes (and is it any wonder with this quicksilver Sherlock? I blame her sense of noir), has just enjoyed my favorite exhibit, “Gauguin in Tahiti,” which fills the seventh, uppermost floor. Glorious flattening of space, Gothic complex of rilled drapery boiled away to one dimension. Would that I lived within such mazes.
    Azura can’t