Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

recorded them going about the business of it.
    â€¢ • •
    Whatever it was, it was beginning to happen. The sun itself seemed to be rotating. Each oyster sat deep in its own mystery, waiting for the shock. The shock was moments away, already sending waves back in time at them, though the waves were impossible to interpret. The air around the oysters was like music. Ordered currents began to flow. The new earth beneath them began to turn. And then the light cracked into them, and the question mark that was the world snapped itself out straight, dividing them from mystery forever.
    â€¢ • •
    â€œBack in Gainesville,” Pat told the reporter, “I’d have to orient each oyster individually. Here we have the advantage of dosing whole bushels at a time. We can study both shelf-life and microbiology in one experiment.”
    The reporter peered at him through grass-green contact lenses, her breath smelling strongly of buttered toast. “How will you be able to tell if the oysters are dead?” she asked.
    â€œWe know they won’t be dead,” he said impatiently.
    â€œBut just hypothetically,” she said, grinning.
    He didn’t see the joke, but he explained to her that any looseness in the shell was an indicator. There could be no slippage between the halves, none.
    â€œWow,” she said.
    He glanced over her shoulder at a carpeted vestibule in which was set up a courtesy telephone for guests of the plant. The phone had drawn his eyes throughout the interview, like abomb or an unlocked safe. It shone blackly on a small table on which also sat a plate of crullers.
    â€œWhat’s next?” the reporter said.
    â€œI beg your pardon?” Pat said.
    â€œWhat other foods will you be working on?”
    â€œOh, dead chickens,” Pat said, sighing.
    â€œI can see I’m wearing you out,” the reporter said, finally. She went away looking a little annoyed, her eyes somewhat dimmed.
    When she was gone, Pat went and sat by the phone. He removed the pocket dosimeter from his beltloop and set it on the table beside the crullers. It was a small instrument that resembled a Sharpie pen, only with a lens at one end. Zero, it had read when he commenced the tour of the plant, and zero it read now. He had absorbed no radiation. He had penetrated wall after wall within the warehouse-sized building, moving ever closer to the source. At every new level, Dr. Roland had pointed out more buttons, more controls, more men. There were earthquake buttons and flood buttons, hurricane buttons and buttons to press if someone fell asleep. There were men whose job it was to watch buttons, and men who watched only other men. The whole thing reminded Pat of some giant child’s ant-farm. He had gone as close as one could go to the great source, and his dosimeter still registered zero.
    He looked again at the little instrument and thought, That’s me. A big zero, coming and going. Nothing will ever change—I
am
invisible. He grabbed at the phone’s receiver and punched the buttons hard, hurting his finger.
I’ve had it with this secret life
, he would tell her.
Keep your deceptions, your illusions, your stupid, hopeful Trinidadian. Without you my life will open up like a wonderful picture book, what people know of me will be the truth
. The phone was ringing blankly in his ear. It went on, ringing and stopping, ringing and stopping. He let his head fall for a moment and felt the blood rushing to his face like a child’s hot tears. He felt like a child planning to run away from home. His courage was already dissolving, he could not sustain it.
Fine, I’ll callher later
, he told himself.
From the hotel, let the University pay for it
. But even as he thought this, it was already passing out of him, going out of reach like a helium balloon. It was passing out of him and it was gone. He lifted up his head and landed back in the sweet hopelessness of his life. The