Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle Page B

call him back and tell him to come over, willing to take him any way I can get him. He arrives already bristling with defenses, a cape of snow on his shoulders. As we stand there in the living room, hashing it all out, I try to keep it together by fixing my eyes on the snow, watching the flakes turn to drops of water and then disappear into the fabric of his coat. A brand-new coat, I notice, and I am side-swiped by an image of his new apartment, where I’ve never been, all the furniture I know he has treated himself to—top of the line, paid on credit, same-day delivery, as if he can buy his way back to a beginning. Exhausted, I collapse into him,and he pilots me towards the bed, but when we make love I feel as if I am struggling for a grip on a slippery raft, trying in vain to pull myself up. Afterwards, we are lying side by side, not touching, when he turns to me and flexes the mattress with his fingers. I know why you can’t sleep, he says. It’s obvious. What you need are individually wrapped coils. When he falls asleep I turn on the light and watch his eyes flutter in a dream. I imagine all his women, in there with him. I close my eyes and picture them, one by one, lingering on the torturous details: their optimism, their young skin, their white teeth flashing as they smile at him across his expensive new bed. But in between, I find I keep seeing the herpetologist’s office. Familiar, like an ill-used back room of my mind: the glow of the lamps, the dust-cloaked bookshelves, the anoles—a many-colored bouquet.
    Adaptation
    On the coldest day of December, the heat goes out at work. I sit hunched at my desk, freezing, my hands pulled up into my sleeves, dreaming about the tropical warmth of the lamps in the herpetologist’s office. I get up, switch off the computer, and go. Outside, a thick sleet is falling, turning the city the color of asphalt. The cold air slices through my clothes. When I arrive I try to think up a reason for why I’ve returned, but the herpetologist takes my coat without question and in fact seems overjoyed to see me. Let me show you the lab, he says, clasping my arm. Is it as warm as your office? Iask sheepishly. Warmer! he says. Come on. Our shoes squeak on the linoleum as we walk down the long hall. No one else seems to be around. He opens the door of the lab with a key on his crowded ring. At first, the room seems full of empty aquariums. Then, slowly, as the herpetologist leads me from one to the next, the animals reveal themselves. There is a sidewinder and a hellbender. There is a chuckwalla from Texas that, when it sees us, rushes between two rocks in its habitat and puffs itself up until it is wedged tightly in. There is a nightmarish creature from Australia called a thorny devil, with spines that have spines. Its Latin name, typed on a card taped to its aquarium, is Moloch horridus. In the next cage, a giant Gila monster sleeps under a heat lamp, its sides pooled out around it, POISONOUS ! written in red on its card. A brilliant green gecko uses its tongue to wipe its eyes. The herpetologist’s face is shining. All these diverse adaptations, with one common goal, he says. To live to see tomorrow. He turns abruptly towards the back of the room, tripping over a cardboard box full of crickets. Come here, he says, motioning, and I go to him and watch a barking tree frog, an impossible, unnatural yellow, delicately eat a fly out of his hand.
    Natural History
    My husband and I sit side by side on the couch in the light of one lamp. We say the same things we always do, slicing back through the scar tissue in one another’s heart. I’ve always felt, he says, that you never had any hope for us. I stare atthe puddle of melted snow around his boots by the front door, no idea where to begin. My hopelessness extends to include the entire human race. We’ve mortgaged our lives, ruined the planet, and with modern technology rendered ourselves nearly obsolete.