Read Online Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller - Free Book Online Page B

the white sheets. She was curvy and petite, and liked to stretch her body by pointing her toes and arching her back and extending her fingers as far as she could until everything tingled. She’d hold the position until she cramped and then released …
    They lay there awake in the dark.
    Donny was also lying naked on the white sheet. It was scorching that summer. They had no air conditioning. An old antique ceiling fan, which looked as though it had been imported from colonial Kenya, was spinning slowly. It forced the hot air down.
    Mabel switched on the bedside light.
    They had not had the conversation yet. Donny had not asked the question that upset him. He had been, at least until tonight, prepared to go on like this. To wake in the morning, go to the watch-repair shop, put on an eyepiece, and replace a hairspring, oil a wheel train, change a broken balance staff, or just affix a new crown. Eat a sandwich. Come home. Make small talk. Read a paper. Smoke a pipe. Have a drink. Go to sleep. Day after day, quietly allowing time to pass while fixing the instruments that measured it.
    But that summer night in 1975 was different. There was no way of knowing what made it different. Maybe it was the temperature — the way the heat in his imaginary Vietnam followed him to the lower-east side of New York, and the sweat from the jungle soaked into his bed sheets.
    Maybe there was just no more room left inside him to contain his inner world any longer, and, regardless of the possible consequences, it needed to be released.
    When she took his hand in hers and sighed, Donny asked the question.
    â€˜Why are you still with me? Why haven’t you left me?’
    His voice, as he remembers it, was calm. Quiet. Sincere. Drawing from a subterranean reservoir of humanity, still and quiet in our collective souls.
    There was a long pause before Mabel answered. He looked at her painted toes as they flexed. She had beautiful arches.
    â€˜You know what I’ve been thinking about?’ she said.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I’m been thinking about those two spaceships that just found each other in all that emptiness.’
    â€˜I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    She turned her head and frowned. ‘You don’t watch the news?’
    â€˜I’ve been keeping my head down.’
    â€˜The Apollo and a Russian spaceship. The Soyuz . They linked up two days ago. Out there in the blackness. In all that silence, they connected. I wonder what it was like to hear that sound. To be floating. Weightless. And then suddenly you hear the clang of metal against the hull of your spaceship. Your enemy extends his hand. You grip it with your glove. Above it all, finally. It gave me a feeling I used to have. I don’t remember what you call it. It was like … sort of like a smell that you walk past one day, and this world rushes back in and time vanishes, and you’re there again. What would you call that?’
    â€˜Hope.’
    â€˜You should have watched the news.’
    â€˜I can’t tell if this is an answer or not.’
    â€˜I’m still here, Sheldon. Does it matter why?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I need to know how fragile it is.’
    â€˜It isn’t science, Donny.’
    â€˜I’m working on a tough watch back at the shop. It’s an Omega Speedmaster. There’s a broken screw that sits just below the surface of the hammer spring. I have to strip the whole thing down to the bones to get a grip on it, and I’m not even sure I know how to put it all back together again once I do. All these in-house calibres are a little special. Anyway, it’s the same watch your astronauts wear out in space.’
    â€˜Is this a coincidence?’
    â€˜It’s a popular watch. I had one myself, but Saul took it. I don’t know where it went.’
    â€˜That’s too bad. I like coincidences.’
    â€˜Do you blame me?’
    â€˜Do you