God and Jetfire Read Online Free Page B

up the next morning, and we drove less than a mile to the other side of the university. We pulled into a gravel parking lot behind a Mexican restaurant I had been to once and a stately segment of row houses. A small brick building sat in the far corner of the lot, and signs pointed to the surgery entrance at the basement level in back. We parked beside the Dumpsters and entered a tiny vestibule. An armed security guard scanned us with a handheld metal detector, and we edged around the door into reception, where two girls sat low behind a counter. The Price Is Right on the television in the waiting room; a man seated, inexplicably laughing. One of the girls filed my credit card in a long drawer that looked like it was drawn from a library’s card catalog. In its place she handed me a device that, she explained, would vibrate when the doctor was ready for me.
    I asked whether there wasn’t something between now and surgery, some kind of counseling or preparation? She said that the clinic offered counseling over the phone and that I had already had it. They were young and in the middle of a conversation.
    The windows in the waiting room looked out to the bumpers of cars parked at the level above us. Cars pulled in and out, flashing light fast around the perimeter of the room, and we could see feet clicking toward the upper entrance of the women’s center. We took seats against the wall; the weight of the earth pressed against it on the other side. Bob Barker stood, microphone in hand, as a contestant pulled down hard on the big wheel, and the little device in my lap started to shake. I told Jevn that I didn’t know what we should do, but I thought I’d probably never smile again. The sun was low and the seats of the Saab were warm on our very fast car ride home, during which I understood what he meant when he said he couldn’t be responsible for that.
    *   *   *
    For the next few days, we clung to what we knew with certainty: we had to finish the school term. But I was exhausted and anxious, and so I asked Jevn to build my model. We were broken up but bound. I gave him my drawings, and he sat at the little table beside my drafting board in my apartment and began to lay out measurements on a piece of chipboard.
    I picked up the pencil I had left there days ago. I traced the lines, trying to find the feeling that had originally shaped them, a threshold to that time when their contours were my biggest concern. Now it appeared they’d been drawn by someone else.
    â€œIs this roofline supposed to meet this one?” he asked, but I didn’t know. I hadn’t decided. I designed with my eyes closed, like a mole digging where the ground was softest, asking myself if the space should open out left, open right. Should there be light, should there be shelter. Jevn thought about the quickest, simplest way to build things. The best material, the most efficient construction sequence. He cut similar pieces at the same time, using a jig for speed and precision. He would lay out all the parts before he assembled them. What resulted was always beautiful.
    He worked furiously at the table. I hated how he glanced at me as I handed him my long metal ruler. Sitting there, he required me to make my many unmade decisions, and in very little time the questions that had consumed me during the school term were given certain, unremarkable dimension, and the thing I’d allowed to remain a rich mystery for ten weeks began to look like a building. I ran into the bathroom to throw up. He continued to measure and cut, measure, cut, and he finished my model in half the time it would have taken me.
    I stepped into my shower and let the water pummel me. The north light of the frosted windows glowed; their rusted, wet cranks made muddy dust on the yellow tiles of the sill. I pressed my stomach with the palm of my hand. Nothing was visible there, but a small certainty began to develop inside me. A pebble