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meant to be sardonic without sounding sardonic. But when he thought back on the poultry sheds he had visited, fear and confusion were indeed fairly accurate descriptions of the state in which the chickens found themselves.
    â€¢ • •
    There were portents: as he was reading a lab journal, Marjolein van Unen, an analyst who he found vaguely attractive, said: ‘Before long, your arms will be too short for that.’ Whenever he came in, she would take off her white lab coat; the T-shirts she wore were low-cut. His father-in-law’s prophecy kept him from seeing an optician — he was forty-five now, so the prediction had proven accurate down to the very year. Ruth thought it was ridiculous, the way he kept bumping up the font on the screens of his phone and laptop, so she bought him a pair of oval reading glasses, the same frames that Schubert and Mörike had worn on the tips of their noses. The letters leapt up at him from the page, and he couldn’t figure out why he had put up for so long with the haziness across the words.
    Sometimes, while introducing a cotton swab with virus material into a ferret’s throat, he remembered what Ruth had asked him: Do you actually know what pain is? How could you know whether your receptors were sensitive or insensitive to that? It was not a category that could be quantified. Pain could not be measured. It was an incomprehensible scientific omission, when he stopped to think about it. At lunchtime, he looked around the canteen and saw himself amid all the epidemiologists, immunologists, and virologists, a realist among the realists, all of them hired to maintain the status quo. Did they know what pain was? Could they bridge the gap between their own pain and the pain of the animals they worked with? He looked at the tray on which he’d assembled his lunch: a glass of milk and a gravy-roll sandwich (two times bovine pain), a banana ( banana pain?), and a fricandeau sandwich. Pork fricandeau, he assumed. At one of the tables, he saw two analysts from his department.
    â€˜Hello, Hester. Hello, Marjolein,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I sit with you while I eat my pig-pain sandwich?’
    â€˜Professor Dr. Landauer,’ Marjolein van Unen said.
    He caught the mockery. It was precisely her lack of blatant beauty that excited him. She had something available about her, like some of the girls in his native village of whom people said that they went along with everyone, back behind the church.
    Twice a week, he went to the gym. For a while he had gone running in the park, but he couldn’t stand the looks of the joggers who crossed his path. He was startled by the men who caught up with and passed him — their malicious snorting, the sweat pouring down their faces. You’d have goddamn thought they were coming to rob you.
    In the gym, he saw the commercial broadcasts on TV screens suspended from the ceiling, and heard the inane pop songs blaring from the speakers. A silent procession of TV cooks and equities analysts marched across the screens, and newsreaders with their wan smiles. Only when a superior body entered his field of vision did he look up: the girl in calf-length leggings and her gorgeous buttocks, the black boy doing his stretching exercises with a studied nonchalance. The sight of a beautiful body shattered any positive thoughts he might have had about his own person; he tugged at the weights, feeling puny and worthless; in fact, all he wanted to do was to go home.
    In the car, Edward comforted himself with the thought that, unlike the narcissistic homos with their gym-buffed bodies who he had seen go to pieces during his years in Amsterdam, he was still alive. But he knew how feeble this internal defence was, how meagre the consolation he derived from the fact that ‘at least everything still works’.
    Gone was his old sense of disassociation upon coming home. Ruth had attached herself to the house and made it theirs.