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her—breast, hand, thigh—but none were what he wanted, or, wanting them, he only wanted more. To be awake at this hour was to be unable to see Maura’s marriage as hypothetical.
    Keep your mind on the oysters
, he told himself. He had two, almost three degrees. He believed the unknown was simply a subset of the known; he expected, logically, the unexpected. The oysters were packed in dry ice in ten bushel cartons, sitting like obedient campers on the long van seats behind him, the first live food items ever to be irradiated. The preservation process was new, not yet commercialized, and on local news programs almost nightly angry college students and young mothers could be seen protesting, mildly scornful doctors and scientists rebutting. Month-old irradiated strawberries that looked and tasted fresh had just arrived on the market; grocery shoppers were videotaped sampling and appraising them. Farmers both excited and skeptical were shown standing in their groves, making thrilling and dire predictions about their industry. The oysters were the biggest story yet; as a representative of his department, Pat would be a part of history. He had twice been interviewed on the evening news, and the
Tampa Tribune
woman was going to meet him at the plant in Mulberry. In twenty-four hours people up and down the Florida coast would begin commenting to one another over their English muffins about his funny name.
    But Maura, Maura slept beside her husband even now: her large tropical husband with his flourishing mustache, not the kind you hid behind but the kind you cultivated with cheerful, automatic faith, the way you would plant a vegetable garden or have children. Pat had met the man at bars and buffet tables many times and found him unbearable. “I’m Trinidadian,” he’d told Pat once, “and we sing when we talk.” The Trinidadian’s smile was so open and precious that it made a small sound, breaking out upon his large, honest face. Pat shook the sound out of his head and drove sneezing and invisible down the dark and empty highway.
    In a recent
Food Science Newsletter
feature story Maura had claimed to have known within twenty minutes of meeting the Trinidadian that he was “the one.” The photo showed her standing glamorously beside the Gammacell 220 as though it were asewing machine she was about to demonstrate. She wore her white coat and held a pint of strawberries she was preparing to feed into the irradiator, the hard fluorescent lab lights making her sleek, tightly bound-up hair appear glossy and beautiful. “Professor Malone operates our own modest machine,” the caption read.
    Pat clenched the vibrating steering wheel with both hands as though it alone could save him.
He
had known within twenty minutes of entering Maura’s classroom that
she
was the one. In a year he had thought this a thousand times, and had even known enough not to say it aloud, known that not saying it was the way to sustain it. But surely the eerie, thrilling consummation of his feelings, her finally humming in the familiar hiss of his shower or standing at his range scrambling eggs as casually as a ghost—surely these things were proof of their love’s inevitability. He had
known
it. Her words in the interview caused him a shocking, embarrassing kind of pain, as though someone had without warning ripped a Band-Aid off his heart. He could not bear to think of the Trinidadian sashaying around so happily unconscious, the way he himself must have looked before he met her. He could not even remember what he’d spent time thinking about before he met her. His own mind, his own heart, before Maura, were lost to him.
    He tried as a game to imagine the oysters as cheerful children in his charge, giddy prodigies eager to take part in such a significant experiment, but this was just fantasy and he couldn’t sustain it. Instead he recalled something he hadn’t thought about in years, a