Page 34 of Spread Me
Jacques pauses in his scrubbing. “There’s no such thing as ‘desert madness.’”
Mads clicks their tongue. “That’s one of the hallmark symptoms of desert madness. Denial.”
Kinsey turns around on the lab stool. She twitches her pencil between her fingers, drumming it against her thigh. “Jacques, this isn’t fair to you, but I need to ask you to please tell Mads why you scrub the lab every morning. Otherwise, they are going to keep being annoying until I succumb to desert madness and stab them through the eyeball with this pencil.”
“Aw, Boss. You could never have desert madness.” Mads’s face is alight with mischief. “I’ve neveronceseen you scrub a lab table.”
Jacques wipes down the surface of the table with the sponge, letting the dead suds splatter against the linoleum floor. He’ll come back through with a mop once he’s finished with the surfaces, just like he does every morning. “I like a clean lab,” he says, shrugging his freckle-blottedshoulders and moving to the next lab table. “A clean lab produces clean results.”
“Last night,” Mads says, “I watched you drink gin and canned pineapple syrup off the small of Nkrumah’s back. Since when are you dedicated to cleanliness? Of any kind?”
Kinsey stops drumming her pencil, looking between the two of them. “Wait, you two are—”
“No,” Jacques says, “but Nkrumah left the door open and someone poked their head in to ask about tetanus shots.”
“Gin and canned pineapple syrup sounds good,” Kinsey mutters.
“It was. And Mads—I clean the lab every morning because it’s the right thing to do. Okay?” Jacques’s voice is easy, but there’s a warning on the horizon of it. “I’m not a complete disaster, no matter what people think.”
Kinsey’s and Mads’s eyes meet briefly. Mads raises their eyebrows. “Got it. Sorry for interrupting. Kinsey, you got a minute to talk about gloves? We need a non-latex brand, Saskia’s developing a sensitivity.”
Kinsey rises. “Tell me about it in the exam room. I need to get away from these samples for a minute anyway.”
As they leave, Jacques starts humming to himself. It’s a song Domino has been whistling lately, and it’s in all their heads. They can hear the tune all the way down the hall.
Kinsey manages to keep it together for four hours, as the sand falls and the wind picks back up. Soon, it’s howling again, harder than ever, scouring the outside of the little wedge they all live in. She listens to the world screaming over the vast expanse of desert that surrounds the base, and she tries her damnedest to think of a solution to the problem of the lichen.
It’s the most important thing she’ll ever do, she knows. Solving this matters more than anything. It matters more than the thought of Jacques, trapped outside in all that Hell. It matters more than the fact that Domino and Saskia are just a few walls away, locked in the exam room and the lab, waiting for her.
Wanting her.
But her body doesn’t seem to share her priorities. Herskin is too sensitive, her legs restless. She can’t get comfortable in her bed. She leans against the warm wall, feeling it cool as the temperature plummets outside. She catches herself trailing fingers across her limbs, following the path Saskia forged. She strokes the tender skin of her own underarm, then the crease where her hip blends into her thigh.
They feel the same. Maybe, she thinks, they are the same. Maybe it’s not so complicated to transform one into the other, to open oneself up and become a sweet slick of invitation.
She’s going to go to the exam room, she decides. She’s going to pull the cardboard off the window and press her nose to the glass and tell Domino that she’s sorry. That they were right, and she overreacted. That she shouldn’t have told everyone to look at their mistake. It was a small mistake, she thinks, and it didn’t deserve that kind of attention. A few extra eyes, a few extra mouths—so what? What does it matter? In the face of such perfect, total becoming, who cares if a few pieces get mixed up?
At the same moment that she opens her door, Mads opens theirs, too. Kinsey freezes, thwarted. They stare at each other across the hall. Then Mads, glancing at Nkrumah’s door, steps out of their bedroom and into the hallway.
“What are you doing?” they whisper.
“Going to the bathroom,” Kinsey lies. “What are you doing?”
“Same. Do you want to go first?”
Kinsey nods, biting back a swear. She pads down the hall to the bathroom. Avoids making eye contact with the double shower. As she sits on the toilet, she considers what she’d been about to do. The second she was snapped out of her own libidinous reverie, she could see how unhingedher plan had been. If she’d gone to the exam room as she’d intended, would she be able to resist going inside? If she’d gone inside, would she have been able to keep Domino contained? If she hadn’t—where might they have gone? What might they have done?
Kinsey decides that she can’t be trusted. She’s not strong enough in the face of this kind of temptation. When she comes back from the bathroom, she catches Mads by the arm. “I haven’t been drinking nearly enough water,” she whispers. “When I tried to piss, my urethra coughed. Hydrate with me when you get back?”
“Sure.” Mads looks at her with eyes that are too understanding. They think she’s afraid to be alone. She doesn’t correct them.
She waits in their room. They’ve got both twin beds pushed together against one wall, a thick stack of blankets piled into a nest to try to make up for the crack between the small mattresses. There are photos taped to the walls. Kinsey looks them over in the dim light of the single scarf-draped lamp.
There’s an older couple, one of whom has Mads’s hawklike nose. A woman, mid-laugh, holding up what looks like a plate of shrimp. A house with a jasmine-choked trellis in front. She’s still looking the photos over when the door opens behind her and Mads slips inside, carrying two enormous bottles of water.
“Is this your girlfriend?” Kinsey asks, gesturing to the woman with the shrimp.
“Sister,” Mads says, handing her a bottle of water.
