I was dating two nurses at once. They were both older than me by a good margin. All they had in common with each other was nursehood and microbiology. But really there was very little difference between us. All autopoietic beings, after all, chemically maintain their identities despite constant environmental perturbation. Joan and Marci taught me that trees and people have common eukaryotic roots—we share mitochondria, Golgi bodies, and sperm tails—and that the ultimate ancestor is a DNA-containing microbial cell. The genome trapped within the plasma membrane of eukaryotes is an entity capable of indeterminate growth. It is immortal. Which is not to say it is flawless. Indeed, to err is more than human, it is biological.
Joan was wiry and charmingly goofy. She lived in a trailer park. Her hair was long and red, frayed like antique textile, sexy because it looked old. She almost never wore underwear, only tattered bras or briefs when she did, and she played bass guitar in a band of failed minstrels. She once plucked out a song for me in her nightie, bobbing her hairy head and biting her lip as she strummed. She was forty.
Marci was the ex-wife of a university law professor, and lived on a hill in a Victorian with a dozen rooms and a semicircular driveway. She was pretty and petite, cropped hair dyed a sleek black, but for all the time I knew her she had a blemish on her cheek, a wart that said all she herself would not about what it was like to have your husband leave you for a student. Marci kept busy in community cleanup groups, had three darling sons, and was proud of her kitchen. She was forty-two.
Joan was a home health aid. She darted through town in a clunker, a bag of syringes on the seat next her, and gave injections to people who needed them but couldn’t do it themselves. She made more as an LPN, she said, than she had as a secretary. The injections, which were generally painful, were gratifying to her because she didn’t like most of her patients.
Marci was a full RN, but only volunteered at the local hospice, caring for terminally ill children who arrived one month and invariably died by the next. At first, she said, you cry for them. You cry for every damn one. But before long, there’s one you don’t cry for, either because he’s not there that long, or because you know he’s better off dead. That clears the way. Pretty soon you’re not crying for any of them.
Back then I told people I was a writer, but in secret I was working at a hardware store. I made enough to pay the rent and the heat, and occasionally had time to scribble out stories I never liked when they were finished. Sometimes, after our shift, my friend and coworker suggested we stop at a nearby beer garden. It was here that I met Joan, at an old warped picnic table littered with plastic beer pitchers. In retrospect, it makes sense, as the brewing of beer is fundamentally the autopoiesis of brewer’s yeast under warm, wet conditions.
Joan sat alone with a book. My friend and coworker knew her, or had known her, but he had a girlfriend his own age by then. He introduced us.
“This is Joan,” he said. “She has no life, and you have no life. Maybe together you can make life.”
He wandered off into the garden’s oblivion, and Joan and I stared at each other. I looked at her book. It was called The Conjugal Cyst. Microbiology, I gathered, and eventually I learned that it was the text for a course Joan was taking as part of a continuing-education program.
A water treatment plant loomed over the garden. Its odor surfed the breeze toward us across a fetid alley, and provided the context for my only relevant factoid. I nodded at the book.
“The purification of sewage is the autopoietic activity of methane-producing bacteria,” I said.
“How sexy that you know that,” Joan said.
The next moment might have been awkward, but she continued with a lecture.
“The cell is the minimal unit of both autopoiesis and reproduction,” she said. “Lederberg proved definitively that bacteria have a sex life: A donor passes DNA to a recipient. It’s like nursing. Genetic recombination began as an enormous health delivery system.” She went on to explain that even the simplest bacterial sex was not at all simple, and that from a cellular vantage point human sex was identical to that of protistan microbes. She pushed together two beer puddles on the surface of our table to form a sample colony of microbial orgy, then explained that sex had come about as a response to threats in the environment, primarily ultraviolet light. “Dinomastigotes form non-fertilizing conjugal cysts to help one another survive cold spells. Isn’t it romantic?”
I agreed that it was.
The sound of a band drifted down on us from a window, a rocking angry sentiment. As one pissed-off song ended we heard laughter, tingly laughter, and at the end of it a woman called happily, “Oh fuck!”
Joan passed a finger slowly through the moisture of her beer puddle. “Mitosis and meiotic sex arose as organizing phenomena from the mire and confusion of microbial community life. Bacteria often engage in sex without reproduction. Sometimes it’s lethal, producing no offspring and destroying both partners. They do it anyway.”
She put the wet finger in her mouth. I had nothing to say.
“It’s with protoctists that meiotic-fertilization cycles evolved. Fungi hold the record for biotic potential, but some bacteria reproduce three times per hour. That’s me flirting, just so you know.”
“I know,” I said.
Joan wet her finger again, but this time used the moisture to spell out a message on the table. She wrote it upside down so it read from my side.
I want you bad.
I used my own finger to continue the message. It still read from my side.
I want you badly.
She rested her chin on her fist, smiling. “Grammar is such a turn-on,” she said.
We said good-bye to my friend and coworker and went to the little house I rented, my dark den with some land and shade trees. We took turns reading passages from The Conjugal Cyst as though it was a manual of love. Outcrossing, Joan narrated, was the mating of two organisms that were no more closely related to one another than to other members of the general population. We laughed and hugged, and then we used our bodies to form a tight cyst that protected us against the dark. Joan left late that night, and I stood by the door until the taillights of her clunker wavered around the bend. She was back the next day at high noon.
“My DNA needs mending,” she said.
She climbed into my house and then into my arms. She had forgotten her book the night before, and I had spent most of the morning reading it.
“I should have told you this before,” I said. “I have herpes. Type I. Genital.”
“Oh, I’ve had that for years. Anyway, the transfer of a virus from host to recipient is just another form of chromosomal sexuality.” She took a step back and pulled off her shirt. “I’ve been driving around all morning sticking people with needles. Now, it’s my turn.”
Later, when we lay on my bed, exhausted, Joan took a deep breath and then spoke: “Sex has its analogies. If a village grows to double its original size, that’s mitosis. If the village then splits into two villages through colonization, that’s meiosis. The donor’s DNA must align with the recipient’s DNA accurately enough so that the recombination event does not create inversions, disjunctions. There’s danger for both. Sex is the joining of genetic material from two sources in a single individual, but does not require an increase in the total number of individuals. In fact, the number may decrease.”
She ran a hand over my chest, her fingers playing my little hairs as though they were the strings of her guitar.
“Lord, I hope I don’t have to kill myself over you,” she said.
Marci I met at a bookstore poetry reading. I went to poetry readings, I admit, to make sure the poets weren’t up to anything interesting. Before the poet, whoever he was, took the stage, I flipped through a coffee table book on cooking. I was considering taking up cooking. I had the idea it would improve things.
“Oh, do you cook?” Marci said. She was beside me, pert and ready.
I looked at her, and thought to impress her with a tidbit from The Conjugal Cyst. “Sexual dimorphism is the visible differences between potential gamont partners.”
Marci’s education was more complete than Joan’s, and she didn’t hesitate. “There are at least as many mechanisms of mate recognition as there are species of organism,” she said. “Probably many more.”
We gaped at one another, but the poet began before we could continue. I looked at Marci’s wart through the first few poems. It was red and ugly, a virus in and of itself, but she was still quite pretty.
I asked her to coffee when the poet was done and the applause had faded, at the moment when, had I not said anything, we would have floated away from each other into the street’s vast soup of amoebae and diatoms. We discussed the reading. Marci liked it, I found things to say. I told her I was a writer, and I was careful to speak in complete sentences. As a kind of punctuation to the conversation, I traced my finger along the rim of my coffee cup. Marci told me stories of the hospice children she cared for, but watched my finger as she spoke, and I knew it was this that made the difference for her, that tipped the scale in my favor.
“The exact extent of bacterial conjugation is unknown,” she said, once we had gotten to know one another, roughly. “Some species mate with enough consistency, however, that they can be studied in a lab.”
“Maybe they like to be watched.”
“But the mating is always polarized. The donor always grabs ‘his’ mate and forces his genes into ‘her.’ It’s never reciprocal.”
“Never?” I said.
She smiled, and we split the bill. She gave me a business card with just her name and address on it. Marci Reed, 132 E. Windswift Lane. Reed was her married name, retained because it was the name of her children and that made a difference. Her divorce was not yet final.
“I want you to put my clitoris in your mouth,” she said, our first time together. “I know you’re young, but how can you not have done this before?”
“Teach me,” I said.
She thought a moment. “The eukaryotic cell wraps and moves discrete parts of itself—it has a predilection for engulfing things. Originally, protists cannibalized one another without digestion, doubling their chromosomes without fertilization.”
I gave it a shot.
“Ah, there ya go,” Marci said. After a time, she climbed on top of me and began to move. The Conjugal Cyst said that non-mitotic cells, no matter how elegant their motility, tended to die. It made me sad. Marci called my penis the “little undulipodia” after the long waving organelles that allowed for movement in eukaryotes. Undulipodia were once free-living bacterial entities. Marci detailed the theory of their development as she twisted and plunged on top of me.
“They were pounded down from symbionts to structures inside the cell,” she said, gasping. “The extent of the merger was unprecedented in intimacy.”
I had to exit early, as we didn’t have a condom between us. But Marci grabbed on to the little undulipodia, and it was nice, pulsing into her hand. She rolled beside me and examined the goop.
“Sperm contains 3,300 micrograms of DNA. It’s very efficient, but Gymnodinium nelsoni contains 143,000 micrograms.”
“I’m only human,” I said.
“Now what do I do with this?”
“Wipe it on my back. I’m taking a shower anyway.”
“I never did this before,” she said, and smeared the stuff across my shoulders, the back of my neck, and my buttocks.
I met Joan and Marci in the summer, but by autumn things were very different.
Joan became convinced that I did not wish to be seen in public with her. It was only partly true. Several times we had eaten together at a supermarket restaurant counter, I reminded her, and we had taken a number of long walks together in a park that was a public place, I argued, even if no one else was there. By mid-September, she had begun dating another man who agreed to go to bars with her, but only on weekends. I left phone messages for her—to return her book—but she never answered them.
Marci I pushed away on my own. She had tried that forceful bacterial-style love on me, bringing her boys over for unexpected visits, sending me notes in the mail full of painstaking script, and arriving unannounced late one night for sex, which was exciting at first, then frightening, and finally exciting again. At the equinox, I told her I was not ready for the life she lived, nor did I deserve it. We embraced, she told me she loved me, and I thanked her for the sentiment. A week later she flew to Seattle to visit a man she had met at a hospice staff reunion a month earlier. She came home engaged.
Autopoiesis, The Conjugal Cyst explained, came from the Greek for “self-making,” but in modern scientific usage it was more closely aligned with “self-maintenance.” Only in certain phyletic lineages had sex come to be required in both autopoiesis and reproduction. The fact that human beings evolved from one of these lineages has created an unrealistic view of biological sexuality. In fact, it isn’t at all clear why autopoietic entities are divided into individuals that reproduce; it simply seems to be the case. Men and women are not different from one another because sexual species are better equipped to confront a dynamic environment, but because of a set of historical accidents that permitted the survival of ancestral protists.
Even today, bacterial cells exposed to intense ultraviolet light undergo lysis—they explode. In early October of that year there came a day when I felt bloated and infected and desirous. A phage burst was imminent. Meiotic-fertilization cycles are closely related to environmental cycles, and as fall colors swept across our town my alchemy was stirred as though in response to a threat. The word male means an organism that produces small gametes that swarm, but the term may also be applied to one of the gametes. Male sex cells are so designated because of their propensity to move, and a large motile gamete is called an ookinete. That October day, I became an ookinete. I called my friend and coworker, but his protective cyst was already complete. I was alone and exposed. Before I knew it I found myself wandering through the year’s first chill, driving the town already drunk, missing gears and slurring the words I spoke aloud to myself. My quest was for a conspirator of similar need. She would long to be new in the sexual sense. Why she would want this I didn’t know. I was simpler. I was a vulnerable exhabitant. I longed to borrow undamaged DNA, and donate my own. I felt totipotent. I needed to outcross.
It was still early when I found myself exhausted from the search, shrouding a beer mug at one moment full and crisply cold, the next warm and empty as my soul. Before me was football on a TV screen, men in tight pants contorting and swarming, ookinetes staring hard at one another while yet more ookinetes stared hard at them. For a time, I felt I understood the game well enough to play.
The female anchor of the halftime news update, rattling statistics of the day’s homicides in the nearby metropolis, proved to be the vision that slapped me from my ugly stupor. She recalled Marci’s chirpy tone and clipped hair with a macabre sentence or two. I ran through Marci’s mole pattern in my mind—I had it memorized, and connected the dots over her back and belly to mythical shapes. Her joint structure, I remembered, had excited me beyond the usual call of joints, and her neck, I had once thought, was the secret destination of all ookinetes. I reconsidered having set Marci aside, regardless of how wise and mature a decision it had seemed at the time. In the span of a minute or two, I played out a life with her, moving through it at super-warp, granting benefit to all doubt and slowing only for scenes of our fused mixis. I found it all nutrient-rich and agreeable. One life was surely as viable an option as another, I thought, and to refuse them all, as I had until then, was a kind of doom. A man who is infertile is autopoietic but unable to reproduce, The Conjugal Cyst had warned. He has forfeited genetic continuity. In an evolutionary sense, he is already dead.
I dialed Marci’s number into the first phone I could find. Again, I was careful with my sentences.
“Is this a mating call?” Marci said.
“Sort of.”
“You know, you don’t really see stylized mating behavior until the higher vertebrates.”
“I’m a mammal,” I said.
She agreed to see me, but asked for twenty minutes of lag. I stopped at a convenience store for coffee, and chewed an entire pack of gum.
When I arrived we hugged liked dear friends brought together for a sad occasion. She had tea ready in a porcelain pot. We sat together, reflections of casual friendliness, on a fat flowered sofa, organelles draped here and there to suggest what was possible between us. I asked after her new fiancé. She pressed her lips and said he was a good egg, and after all I had learned, I wondered what she meant by it.
After an interval that seemed to me fair, I told her what I had come to tell her, that I had reconsidered our break, that her life, which had first struck me as overwhelmingly contained, now seemed like the essence of hope in a world gone mad with hate and death. I told her I missed her children and reminded her that she had described their taking to me as miraculous. (In fact, I thought the boys had been merely deferential.) Love was the important thing now, I said, the love of coworkers, of partners, of perfect pairs bound to one another by the powerful twine of a collective heart. Marci stared at a spot before her as I spoke, thinking of our possible life, a life she had already imagined a season before and surely much more slowly. I was convincing, as I believed all that I said, believed, in fact, in every sentimental vision I had ever known, the sappy equations of oneness metaphoric and endosymbiotic. At last, I fell silent and leaned forward to await her decision.
“I have to know!” she said, sliding across the cushions. “I’m just—I’m sorry, but I have to know!”
We embraced and kissed and lived a moment that would be unblanched by subsequent imaginings. I felt the tip of my nose brush her wart—still prominent, but healing nicely.
We moved to her bedroom and undressed, kissing and touching, stroking and grabbing each other with tender strength. We ducked beneath the sheets of her massive bed, thrashing off the coolness. Marci climbed on top of me, pinned my shoulders, and forced a moment of stillness.
“I’m married to one man, engaged to another, and here I am with you,” she said.
“It’s exponential cheating,” I said, and she laughed at a vision of herself thought impossible until now.
We brought our tongues together, cilia threaded in the airtight cyst of our mingled mouths. It seemed to me that the proximity of brains made this the most intimate of couplings. We were locked together for some time when there came a minute knocking on the bedroom door, softer than the scratch of a cat.
“Oh! Get up, get up!” Marci whispered. “Go over—get over there!”
She pushed me, naked, into a low-ceilinged nook of the room, an angular recess that in daylight was a charming imperfection to the impressive old home. Marci answered the door, and of course it was her youngest, Colin, awakened by thirst or a dream. The boy had turned on a lamp in the hall, but the light failed to reach my little cave. I stood hunched like a troll.
Marci kneeled and spoke quietly to the boy, shaping breathy promises of love. She looked over her shoulder at me once, and moved to block her son’s line of sight. As they spoke I took stock of my cranny, noticing, for the first time in a number of visits to the room, a framed picture hung low on the wall. It was a pencil portrait, and I was stunned when I studied it and recognized the face: Marci as a much younger woman, a wholesome-looking ingenue just two or three years younger than my age of the moment. Her hair was long, her face tight and flattered by the artist, her expression a joy that I had never yet seen her deploy. The wart on her cheek was gone. Or, rather, yet to emerge.
Marci sent Colin off with a hug and a kiss, a pat on his head and one for his stuffed bear. She shut the door again. The room went black, and after a moment the night flushed in through the panes. We stood opposed in the blue light, and Marci looked at me strangely.
“Seeing you there,” she said. “Seeing you there crouched and hiding.”
“You pushed me there,” I said.
“I know.” She touched her index finger to the divot of her upper lip. “Many organisms have given up mixis while retaining meiosis. Many, especially gram-positive bacteria, do not engage in sex at all.”
“It’s because their cell walls are too thick,” I said.
“Correct. But the trend in dense, educated regions of the world is toward a decrease in the frequency of mixis.”
“Not all sexual events require fusion,” I tried.
“You’re not ready for this.” She tipped her head, and made a self-congratulatory gesture to the room and its furnishings. “A bacterial donor that offers too many of its genes dies.”
“I think I am ready.”
“No. You were right before. I have a lot of love, but you’re not ready for it yet.”
I breathed a moment, then sat on the edge of the bed and arranged my clothes. I was humiliated, but it would last only as long as I was in the presence of her victory. Marci sat next to me and corrected my socks, laying them within easy reach as I stuffed my shirt into my pants.
She reached to cup my cheek. “You’re a dear boy. I’ll always think that.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, and I grabbed my socks and found the door in the dark.
Human sexual pleasure has more to do with reproduction than with sex. In the earliest animals, reproduction became trapped within sexuality. There were many attempts to escape, but it never disappeared completely. Sexual systems which appear similar may in fact have evolved independently. I reminded myself of this as I drove to Joan’s. Joan was the same genus as Marci, but she was of a different species. She was the one woman who would understand my need. Fantasies were unnecessary; I had only to appeal to her own vicious requirements. She could ignore my messages, but she had never denied my actual self.
It was a weeknight. The trailer park was dark. The houses themselves, a cluster of dark shanties, squatted out there like a moribund herd of bison, each waiting for the next tornado that would funnel in and snatch them to the sky. The walls of the homes had rusted to a faded orange, and the windows were still plasticked from the last brutal winter. People had put out their plants to catch the morning dew, their cats to do nocturnal battle with an army of shit-eating rats. There were cars on cinder blocks, wandering children who belonged to no one, and from everywhere the soft voice of television as companion and lullaby.
I moved along the dark dirt road, creeping in on my snow tires. Joan’s trailer looked abandoned. However, her clunker sat parked beside the propane tanks, oxidizing. I turned off my lights and drifted in, careful even though I intended to wake her. I sat a moment behind the wheel.
The door, a sandwich of plywood and cardboard, stood open a few inches, attached by her chain lock. I could see a slice of her living room, her couch with crumpled afghans, her shiny guitar upright against an amplifier. I had to pull the door shut to knock on it properly.
She didn’t answer. The door was soggy, and knocking any harder meant risking its integrity. I opened it again and put my lips to the crack.
“Joan! Joan-baby!” I let my voice gradually become louder. “Joan! Joan!”
A light came from the bedroom, and the whole house wobbled slightly under the sleepy footfalls that approached. Joan opened the door without looking to see who it was.
“Are you alone?” I said.
“Just one time,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She looked at me finally. “Oh, hello. Well, come in.”
She wore a veil-thin nightgown. The light from the bedroom pushed through and showed her body as in x-ray. She was barefoot, and stepped lightly on her pads toward the kitchen.
“Want a beer?”
“Desperately.”
“I’m going to smoke weed. You don’t, do you? Why is that?”
“My upbringing.”
“You don’t mind if I?”
“No.”
She brought to the sofa two cans of a cheap domestic, and her pot paraphernalia. Joan didn’t smoke tobacco, and looked unpracticed preparing her little spark plug pipe. When she took her first hit her face dissolved to culinary ecstasy.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
I opened my beer, gargled, and swallowed. I took Joan’s feet into my lap and warmed them with my hands.
“From a philosophical-evolutionary point of view,” she said, “sex, rescue from death, cannibalism, and lack of digestion all started out as pretty much the same thing. Agreed?”
“Okay,” I said, only half listening. I ran my palm up her leg, past her knee to where it became substantial, formidable in its musculature.
“However, if meiosis is to evolve,” she continued, “a stable mitotic division cycle is a must.”
I stopped. “What are you getting at?”
She held up a finger. “The production of a human infant is primarily a form of mitotic expansion. The assumption that hostile environments maintain sexuality is intuitively appealing but ultimately unjustifiable.”
“What did you do?” I said.
She breathed and looked at me. “I had an abortion. Just the other day. It may have been yours.”
I reached to touch her face, run my thumb through the cavity underneath her cheekbone. “It’s okay. Sex in most organisms is still divorced from reproduction.”
“That’s why I haven’t called. My fifth.”
“Fifth?”
“There were four others. One more for the even half dozen.”
“That and the Bermuda trip,” I said.
“Yeah, right. Ha.”
She watched me move toward her, and I kissed her first on her cheek, then on her mouth. I could taste the beer and the pot, and I thought of the way that the taste of a person’s mouth becomes another means of recalling them after it’s all over.
“I love your hair,” I said, scraping my fingers through it. “Have I told you that?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think so. My hair. I don’t know.”
“Like flagella. Long and few per cell. Like a witch.”
“A witch. That I haven’t heard. Ha-ha.”
I peeled the afghans off the couch, moving forward as there was room. I found her underneath it all and slipped my hands below her ribcage, holding her like a wicker basket. I kissed her ear, and heard her open her mouth to breathe. I listened for the sweet vocals sure to come, but instead she pushed me back and locked her elbows to hold me there, a forearm away.
“Listen, honey,” she said. “I would. I probably would. But I can’t. It’s too soon.”
“A sexual event,” I said, “requires only one parent to be an autopoietic entity.”
She turned her head. “Do you know what they do? Up there?”
I gently reached between her legs. “If you want, I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
“No.” She shook her head and pushed me out to the full length of her arms. “That’s it. You’re leaving, okay? You’re going.”
I stayed where I was. She was motionless, looking down between us, waiting for me to obey. I stood up.
“Are you okay to drive?” Joan said. “Because I’m not.”
“I’ll get there. It’s fine.”
“Good. Do you understand everything that I said?”
“I think so.”
“Because I had to tell you. Even if it’s after.” She walked me to the door, a palm at my back. “Well, okay then. Take care and drive safe. Call me sometime.”
She locked the chain behind me.
Because it resembles the process of mutation, sex has long been assumed to be a major factor in the generation of evolutionary novelty. But it’s as much a sink as a source; variety produced by sex is simply nullified by further sex. Yet all eukaryotes—compact populations of cells in the form of cats, penguins, rosebushes, slime molds, and people—pine for meiotic-fertilization ridiculously.
I came out from the trailer park and drifted through the barren pond of our town. I was drunk and purposeless again, and as soon as I saw the neon light of a tavern I realized that neon lights are signals for those already drunk and wandering. They are beacons for ookinetes.
The front room of the bar was empty, but the back room was alive with music and smoke and the smack of pool balls. I climbed a stool and dug into my pocket for cash.
A hand caught my wrist, the fingers warm, and a nail grazed my skin.
“Wait, I’ll buy you one.”
She was chubby and pretty and young. She straddled the stool next to me, eyes wandering. The barman brought us beer.
“My name’s Cristina,” she said. “My friends are in the back. They’re playing pool. I don’t play pool.”
“It’s a stupid game,” I said. “It’s dillydallying and physics and symbolism.”
“Exactly. That’s why I don’t play.”
“How long have you been here?”
“All night. I have a test in the morning.”
“You’re a student?”
“Nursing,” she said.
I swiveled on my stool to face her. Our four knees touched. I said, “The zygospore of black bread molds is produced by an orgy of fertilizing nuclei.”
“Wow,” Cristina said.
“That’s me flirting,” I said, “just so you know.”
She gave a drunken laugh, rolling her eyes and running her tongue over her teeth, trying on her sexiness. She reached to touch my thigh, perhaps to see if I was real.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to go home soon. It’s been a long night for me. But why don’t you let me drive you? You have a test.”
“That’s actually a good idea,” Cristina said. She started to rise, wavered slightly, then sat upright in her chair for an announcement. “Outcrossing has never been shown to confer a definite evolution-
ary advantage.”
“True,” I said. “But it reduces the chances of deleterious alleles.”
She squinted at me and laughed.
It took us a moment to find my car in the dark. She told me where she lived. I drove us to the end of the street and hesitated there.
I pointed to the right. “It’s that way to your dorm, but it’s the other way to my house. Which way should I turn?”
Cristina looked off to the right and then to the left, into our various possible futures together. The night was hitting her hard now, and her head lolled a circle on her neck like a top near to falling. She looked out my windshield, splattered with dirt and mud and bug juice, an ugly mural that was a record of my night, my trips here and there, all the hope and bad news. Through the first three billion years of evolutionary time, The Conjugal Cyst said, sex was not required for autopoiesis, growth, or reproduction. Now it is possible to imagine a future in which mixis itself has become superfluous, a time in which evolution will limit the central nervous system feedback needed to produce the pleasure that leads to reproduction. Sex may be a billion-year blip. But this was the furthest thing from Cristina’s mind at the moment, and finally she pointed straight ahead, through the intersection where we were stopped, toward a row of trees and the stones of a graveyard just beyond. Her eyes closed, consciousness wavering as her decision was made.
“Keep going,” she said, and she passed out beside me.
Photo: Henrik Jonsson
