Free Losing It by Alan Cumyn

one turn of the dial past the 10,000-kilometre warranty. There was no middle-aged spread, no decay, no brain cells falling out overnight.
    And no touch. It was pure that way. They walked and they talked of Heidegger, Proust, of Orwell in Spain and Hemingway in Africa, of Jane Austen calculating the winds of courtship, of Melville and Hawthorne and Poe. Such talk. Pure and full of energy and life, of history and literature. There was no touch, no ignoble sweating in back rooms, no furtive kisses instantly regretted, no dresses stained with executive semen.
    “Bob?” Sienna said.
    “Ah,” Bob said. “You asked about my wife. She is a very … capable woman. Quite a good … mother and, in her day, an … able scholar.”
    “You have children?”
    “One. Yes. A boy.”
    She asked his name and he told her, felt quite uncomfortable. Home was home, a different sphere, distinct, important in its way, vital. But it would be wrong to have the two intersect. They were like the positive and negative worlds of somescience-fiction novel, simultaneous and opposite, not meant to know of one another. Explosions would result and it was dangerous to talk of these things, to risk disaster; the real world was tiresome and inflexible and unable to cope with ambiguities the way one could safely within one’s personal privacy.
    Bob had no problem keeping the two worlds separate in his own mind. But he
was
having trouble keeping Sienna in her small space. She was overwhelming that way; by far the most beautiful, original, and approachable of the undergraduates he’d taught in the last several years.
    Since Julia, in fact.
    “My wife and I,” Bob said, “have been married seven years now. It’s a very – well, it’s a conventional union,” he said.
    “Conventional?”
    “We’re doing the things we
ought
to be doing,” he said, with something of a sigh. “And for now, that’s how it feels.”
    “Conventional.”
    “Yes.”
    Poe betrayed Virginia too, Bob thought. As soon as she was dead he downplayed any love he’d felt for her. It was so easy. Bob wanted Sienna too badly. He wanted to stay in the bubble of her universe. He didn’t want it to hold him but he wanted to stay and so the words had come out in a tone of voice that gave the impression all was not well with his marriage, not as it could or should have been. He hated himself for doing it but didn’t stop himself either, then didn’t correct the impression afterwards.
    I’m a slumper, he thought, and slumped in his seat, in self-acceptance and resignation.
    But then at the Central Heights Hotel, a tall, bright, impressive building with an atrium in the lobby and glass stretching to the heavens, Bob felt much less of a slumper. Of course, theyhad booked separate rooms, on separate floors even. His was quite small, a generic North American hotel room but on a corner, with windows looking out on traffic in two directions. There was a miniature plastic bottle of Scotch in the courtesy bar that he drank down immediately to help stop the slumping. Then he carefully took his special package – his ludicrous Internet purchase – wrapped it in a plastic bag and stuffed it in the wastebasket along with the female clothing he’d brought with him.
    Enough slumping, he thought.
    The courtesy bar contained vodka as well as the now-empty Scotch. It would be stupid to mix the two, Bob knew. Especially in the middle of the day.
    Still, the Scotch had gone down very smoothly. They were such small bottles. And it was going to be a heavy afternoon.

    “So, briefly, it would be useful to recapitulate, to rough out the broad outlines of Poe’s situation in that doleful, contradictory January of 1849,” Bob said. He cleared his throat, shifted his weight, took a careful gulp of water from the glass provided and leaned close to the microphone. His notes lay open on the lectern in front of him, typed up several years before by the departmental secretary, Helen. He had delivered