Page 14 of Where the Snakes Sleep

I coax her forward, mindful of her quickness; she is less forgiving than Mireille and has left me with a crescent-shaped scar along my index finger as a testament. Tonight, she is calm, docile even, and the extraction goes without incident. Her venom is less dramatic in appearance—clear, almost watery—but the sample is valuable in its own way, especially for the photometric assays I run on weekends.

As I finish, I glance at the wall clock. The hands point to 21:17.

This time of night, especially if it’s spent in the confines of my lab, almost always brings up the memory of my mother.

I often picture her bent over a desk, her knuckles ink-stained, and her hair clipped back in a way that left her old acne scars exposed. She was not beautiful in the way women are supposed to be, not even in her own recollections of youth. But she was singular, always. When I was very small, I used to sneak into her office at the university after hours, marveling at the ordered chaos of her bookshelves and the way the world shrank to a precise, navigable grid once the rest of the campus went dark.

She’d let me sit on the battered leather sofa and read whatever I wanted. Mostly, I remember titles I didn’t understand, but sometimes there’d be a line or image that stuck. One winter, she read to me from a book about shrews. They are the only small mammal known to survive on a diet of venom, she told me. The only creature built to metabolize what would kill everything else.

I remembered that, long after she was gone. I learned from her the discipline of patience, the value of waiting out an adversary rather than confronting them head-on.

She could sit with a problem for hours, refusing to be drawn into the quicksand of anger or urgency. She taught me to look for the slowest solution, the one that required the least movement but guaranteed the outcome. It is, I suppose, my only inheritance.

I lean back against the bench, rolling my shoulders to work out the tension that always collects there after a long session with the snakes. My body is built for this work—long arms, steady hands, and a tolerance for discomfort that verges on self-annihilating—but even so, I am not immune to exhaustion.

I flex my left hand, the one with the faint outline of the viper bite from my first year in doctoral training. The scar tissue is nearly invisible now, but I still feel it tingle in wet weather, a ghostly reminder that even ritual and science bend, sometimes, to accident.

I check the time again. 21:21. If I were a different sort of man, I would use these hours for sleep or television, or maybe the company of another person. But solitude suits me; the presence of others, even on the fringe of my attention, acts more like a toxin than a balm.

I have never understood the compulsion to fill empty rooms with empty speech. My mother was the same. She and my father could go days without talking, except to exchange formulaic greetings, like the signals between two animals sharing a territory.

It wasn’t until after she disappeared that my father tried to fill the silence, and by then, it was too late.

I finish my notes, tidy the lab’s glassware, and run a final inspection around the enclosures. Mireille and the others have already retreated into their preferred hides, a signal that the night has gone on long enough.

I switch off the overheads, lock the climate control panel, and let myself out the side door into the cool darkness. My estate is silent except for the faint tremor of insects waking in the grass and, from somewhere beyond the wall, the thin cry of a nightjar.

I take a few deep lungfuls of the nighttime air before going back in. In the hallway outside the lab, I toe off my shoes and shed the lab coat, careful to keep the inside out so as not to track any residue upstairs. The stone steps are cool beneath my bare feet, and for a moment the sensation returns me to my childhood, to the tiled floors of my father’s apartment, always chilly in the mornings, always in need of my mother’s presence to warm them.

Now the cold is only a reminder that I am alone, and this house is mine to order as I like. I trek through the upstairs hallway to my bedroom, then to the attached bath. I strip down, catch my reflection in the mirror, and pause. The face that returns my gaze is not unfamiliar, but I study it anyway.

My features are my father’s—the aquiline nose, the gray eyes whose expression never quite matches what I think I am feeling, and even the way my mouth moves when I speak. My body, on the other hand, is all Nadia. The lean, tall frame, the narrow shoulders, the dark skin that no French winter could ever bleach out.

I step into the shower and turn the tap. The water is slow to run hot—the house’s one persistent flaw—but when it does, it scalds. I let it do so, feeling the heat work through my scalp and across my shoulders, until I am certain every trace of venom has been erased.

There is a comfort in cleaning. In scrubbing away the markers of the day, of resetting the body to zero, if only for a few hours. As I work the shampoo into my hair, I replay the day in sequence. Ryan Smith. The boy in the lane. My new neighbor.

I have already decided I will befriend him. It will be easy. Americans are always grateful to be noticed, to be folded into the illusion of community, even if the community wants nothing to do with them. I have watched enough of them during my years at university to know the script. You anticipate their needs, you offer small kindnesses, and in return, they offer you everything. Stories, secrets, confessions. All you have to do is listen, and eventually, they will place their entire life into your hands.

It occurs to me, as I sit in the dark, that I am rehearsing a script for myself as much as for him. I will introduce myself tomorrow, perhaps with a basket from the garden or a bottle of wine. I will ask polite questions and offer polite answers. He will want to talk. They always do.

If I am lucky, he will know something useful. If I am very lucky, he will know nothing at all, and I can make of him whatever I need.

If I am honest, I am not sure which outcome I’m hoping for.

4

Ryan

I wake to the smell of dust and old plaster. The mattress beneath me has no sheets, just a bare, scratchy surface that feels like it’s been used as a scratching post by several generations of cats. My clothes—yesterday’s jeans and a t-shirt that smells like airplane and exhaustion—are twisted around my body like I’ve been wrestling in my sleep.

Light cuts through the shutter slats in thin lines. I squint at them, then at the ceiling above me. A water stain spreads across the plaster like a dark continent, its borders soft and blurry. The map of some unknown country. Below it, the door frame has warped, pulling away from the wall at the top so that the door, when closed, leaves a crescent of darkness along the edge. The skirting board along the far wall has detached itself entirely from the plaster, hanging by a single nail like a loose tooth.

I slip off the mattress, and my knees crack. The floor is cold under my bare feet, and I can feel every uneven joint between the boards. The bedroom is small—smaller than it looked in the fading afternoon light yesterday, when I first dragged my suitcase up the narrow stairs.

The stairwell is a tight, twisting thing, the banister wobbling under my grip. Each step groans a different note, a discordant scale descending into the ground floor. The kitchen waits at the bottom, its tile floor cracked along the grout lines in a web of fine, hairline fractures. I run my toe along one of them, and the grout crumbles.

The sitting room is somehow even worse. Paint peels from the walls in long, curling strips, revealing layers of older colors beneath—a pale green, then yellow, then something that might have been blue at some point. The layers of someone else’s life, decisions made decades ago about what color the room should be. I stand in the center of the floor and turn in a slow circle, and my shoulders begin to ache. Not from physical labor—I haven’t done any yet—but from the sheer weight of it all, the fucking arithmetic of decay. Each cracked tile is a repair. Each peeling strip of paint is sanding, priming, and painting. Each warped door frame is measuring, cutting, and planing. The water stain means a leak somewhere in the roof, which means climbing up there, finding it, patching it, and hoping the whole structure doesn’t collapse under my weight while I’m up there.