Night-Gaunts by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146281
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the conclusion of the recording there is an embarrassed silence. N____ cannot lift his eyes to the faces of his colleagues. His face is a mask of humiliation. Scarcely can he breathe. A wispy female voice hovers in the room distracting as a moth fluttering about—will come to love me.

Shuffling papers the Professor says in a voice of disdain, “Well. No scientific content there. Recommend delete.”

6.

… will come to love me.

In his cubbyhole of an office on the eighth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences not far from the Professor’s large office N____ sits at his desk computer, fingers poised.

So large is the computer, it blocks N____’s view of an obscure corner of the University campus. Rarely in his many years at this desk and facing this window (a narrow column of green-tinted glass from floor to ceiling, soundproof) amid a constant churning of cooled air against his face and hair has N____ troubled to lean around the computer to gaze out the window.

Nor does N____ now. Sitting numbed, vacantly staring at the computer screen. What does it hold? Is the screen a way into the future, a way into N____’s own, elusive soul? Or is the screen but a thin plastic scrim over nothingness?—N____’s soul?

Fingers poised at the keyboard. Waiting.

While in the apartment on Edgar Street the experimental subject is waiting.

Is she lying hugely pregnant, part-naked slovenly-sumptuous as an odalisque on the familiar sofa sagging beneath her weight, eating cereal in handfuls, chewing on broken cinnamon doughnuts, her favorites; is she frowning over a pamphlet given to her by Nurse Betty, My Baby & Me: Our First Month, like a methodical schoolgirl underlining crucial phrases in yellow Magic Marker? N____ squints but N____ cannot see: is the frizzed rust-colored hair brushed back from the low, earnest brow? Are the bare swollen legs spread, that have not been shaved in weeks, and sprout distinctive dark hairs? Inside the belly swollen tight as a drum the baby-to-be gives a kick. “Hey!—That hurt!”—Mary Frances laughs in delight. So happy, God has blessed her.

Or is she, as N____ has more than once discovered her, busily engaged in cleaning the kitchen? Wiping down she calls it, paper towels and Windex.

And the linoleum floor, with a sponge mop. Other rooms, tidying up. Who would have guessed, the experimental subject enjoys housekeeping, even hugely pregnant? To N____’s astonishment one day seeing that Mary Frances had started alphabetizing haphazardly arranged books in several bookcases as if these were actual books in an actual library carefully selected by “Nathaniel Li.”

Yet more unexpectedly N____ one day discovered that Mary Frances was reading, or trying to read, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; another day, a neuroscience textbook titled Brain, Body, and Behavior which she’d shut quickly with an embarrassed laugh when N____ came in. “Oh gosh! Hope nobody’s gonna quiz me.”

As a graduate student N____ had annotated virtually every page in this classic textbook. Out of curiosity when Mary Frances was out of the room

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