Reggie had this idea for a bomb. But like, the bomb didn’t explode like other bombs did. It didn’t split an atom or push apart molecules with eruptive, volcanic heat. It did the opposite. It brought things together. When this bomb detonated near two people, they fell into a smoldering, tethered love. When it blew up a block of apartments, the brick columns were rearranged into a lowrise compound of neighbors. When it leveled a city, the city reformed beyond the dreams of even the most fanatical commune’s manifesto, joined by a sense of togetherness so strong that each resident would die for the stranger, who could never really be a stranger anymore, across the street. 

Reggie had the idea for the bomb while living in a cramped apartment with his wife, Leslie. Leslie was a famous author. She had a regular column in a magazine and put out critically acclaimed, best-selling novels every few years. Her novels were lauded as complex, eerie character studies that voiced feelings her readers had their whole lives, but could never give shape to (that was the review from the magazine where she worked). She was a writer. Reggie was an out of work actor. He mainly stayed at home with their two year old daughter, Lettie, and their sixteen year old dog, Shiva. Shiva could barely walk at this point, so Reggie spent a lot of time cleaning up her shit around the apartment. He spent a lot of time cleaning up his daughter’s shit too. He sometimes felt that his vision was colored under a thin brown film of shit. He worried the empty dots swimming around his eyeballs were shit parasites. 

Leslie was away on a book tour when Reggie started thinking seriously about the bomb. At first, he thought he could make one. He followed the steps to download a web browser that would hide his internet activity (the same one he used to get pot delivered to his parent’s house when he was a teen), and looked up everything he could about bombs and how they worked. This proved an ineffective outlet. He barely remembered anything from the one high school physics class he had taken, and no amount of online videos could really help him understand enough of the minutiae to begin working on his own bomb – which worked in the exact opposite way existing bombs worked anyway. 

So he decided to pick up his guitar and write a song. He had been in an indie-rock band in his early twenties, while he was simultaneously auditioning for roles. The band played lovely angular guitar songs with chanted choruses that sounded like a lot of the other lovely angular guitar songs with chanted choruses being released. They were not bad though, and had gotten big enough to tour a few nearby states. He had met Leslie at one of those shows. 

Reggie dusted off the acoustic guitar in the closet and sat on the couch. He started with a finger-picked melody, something soft and earnest like a lost pigeon, and then began humming over it. Eventually, he found a few words that fit the bones of a verse. He got out his phone to record it while Lettie and Shiva were both taking naps. 

***

The song sucked. He deleted all traces of it from his phone and started from scratch. But the bomb had to exist somehow, somewhere. 

While Leslie was still on tour, he decided to go out with his one friend who still went out, his old band’s singer. A babysitter, the teenage daughter of the Egyptian family who lived downstairs, took care of Lettie and Shiva. 

Reggie’s friend was going on and on about the girl he was seeing, someone simultaneously too young and too mature for him. They were sitting in uncomfortable stools in the corner of a club. Behind them, there was a noxiously sweaty dance floor, bodies rubbing against each other like wet pasta and music so loud that the air around the speakers was bending. They were the only two people sitting. 

The friend worked at a plant store and had brought Reggie a gift, a thin dying orchid that sat there a few inches taller than their beer glasses. Reggie spaced out at the orchid while his friend monologued about the girl. 

The longer Reggie stared at the plant, the more his view telescoped into it. The club began to sink underwater, blurry and far away. He saw further into the flower, down the steeple of its paper white petals, and into the alien finger bulbs sticking out of its center, down even further into the black shadows where somewhere the stem took over. The orchid was a vacuum, sucking the matter, the light and sound out of the world and into its insides. He was ready to jump in too. 

The next morning, Reggie woke up certain that he could write a story about the bomb. He watered the orchid, and did some research on the best conditions for it to thrive. 

Leslie came home from her book tour a few hours later. 

***

Reggie wrote in secret, in the stolen, rare hours when Lettie and Shiva slept at the same time. In the breaks away from cooking dinner or cleaning the apartment or managing bills. 

He avoided telling Leslie about it – the thought of it made him feel stupid, like showing off your pickleball serve to Roger Federer. He closed his word processor every time she passed by behind his laptop and put up the ESPN frontpage. He tried to keep his typing as quiet as possible. 

Reggie got a cheap thrill from this unnecessary secret, a little jolt of electricity like a roller coaster rising to its first precipice. Reading his story gave him the opposite feeling. He didn’t know what to do with it. 

The story primarily concerned the scientist obsessed with making the bomb. At first, he was an old man, widowed, burdened by the subtext that making this bomb will make him whole again after the untimely passing of his wife. The next day he was a young PhD candidate with ideas that no one would listen to, seeking mentorship in the physics department of a sun drenched California university, driven by the social awkwardness that separated him from his peers. After about a week, he settled into a she – a research scientist at the fragrance department of a large consumer goods conglomerate. A scientist who had gotten used to a cushy corporate lifestyle – company car, high salary, the choice of conference destinations. 

She was trying to craft the perfect tropical coconut scent for an apartment bathroom. The molecules under her microscope, which were supposed to bounce off each other, which every physical and chemical law deemed certain would happen, fused together for no rhyme or reason. She tried to keep it a secret from her bosses. From her bosses’ bosses. Something about this new fact seemed important, precious, but she couldn’t explain why. 

Reggie was writing the part where she travelled across the Polynesian islands. She had become convinced that the secret to the bomb lay in the scent she discovered the molecules unexpectedly fusing in. 

So she is on the run in a canoe, escaping from her former employers (he was still figuring that part out), drawn to the part of the world where the scent she was working on came from. She rides in a sturdy boat that cuts through the black waves, guided by ancient navigators. They manage the Pacific by the stars and the currents that construct the deep underbelly of the ocean. They always have. 

The dark cloaks their canoe in an unnatural warmth. The scientist – she can’t tell the difference between sea and sky anymore, it’s all a soft silk weaving through her pores and veins. The terrifying beauty of it all reminds her why she’s so desperate to make the bomb. Reggie puts up some tennis scores on his laptop. 

What are you writing about? 

Uhm, what do you mean? 

Oh, I thought I saw you writing something. 

Nope. 

Okay. Shiva just shit in our bedroom again. I’m sorry I know it’s my turn but I’ve got an appointment. 

It’s okay. 

Also, Lettie is awake. 

Reggie went back to his word processor and saved the document. Then he went to the closet and got some spray cleaner. 

***

The scientist was not working in a pristine clean room to build her bomb. She was in the middle of the jungle. Her lab was a mud hut with a green thatched roof. The leftover sunlight from the jungle canopy sprinkled into her room like golden bullets. Throughout the day, as she worked on the bomb, the thick, musty air held her close in its arms, squeezed its excess sweat onto her in heaping bucketfuls. She slept on the ground at night, in the cool, loud dark. 

Her assistants were the Polynesian tribe members. A few of them had studied at some of the most prestigious oceanographic programs in the world. Some were the expert navigators that had helped her travel this far. Some were eager children, running around the forest for her materials. 

Reggie wanted her to build the bomb. To have it explode just as the scientist’s corporate overlords found her in the forested island. He just didn’t know how to make it happen. 

He was sitting in the apartment living room, sunk into the couch. His whole body was hunched over like a gargoyle. He looked at the orchid, alone in the corner of the apartment. He couldn’t tell if it was actively dying or just experiencing a brief depression. Its stem had the same sad curl as his back. 

Reggie hadn’t made any real progress on the story in days. He called up his friend who had given him the plant. He told Leslie he was going out. 

Leslie didn’t understand what was happening. Reggie had spent the last few weeks lurking on his laptop, staring at the ESPN homepage. Now he was going out. He never went out without her. She thought he hated this guy. He used to complain about him constantly. 

She stayed home with the kid and Shiva. Reggie left all the cleaning supplies out for her. 

Reggie’s friend had just been dumped and was eager to meet someone new on the dancefloor, preferably the same age as his last girlfriend. 

They went down into the basement of the venue. Crumbling stone archways guided them to the main floor. Indigo light bathed the room in a cool waterfall. Flashes of neon green whirred off the DJ’s bracelets like alien lightning-bugs. 

Reggie and his friend bopped their heads and sullenly rotated their shoulders to the beat. Reggie hadn’t really danced in years, not since his wedding. His elbows and knees felt ancient, tectonic plates grinding against each other. He shook it out. The beat got lower and faster. The melody dropped out. His friend wandered off looking for a dance partner. Reggie started moving his whole body. Loosening his limbs. Unwinding his joints. He positioned himself lower, finding the vertical space that matched the beat. His back arched towards the floor, his arms began conducting the song. He closed his eyes. It was like taking a shower. The room faded to black. 

The song’s melody shattered, like a crack in the night sky, and instantly reformed itself. The beat found a lower, pounding register. Reggie started swinging his bones in every direction. His arms, his legs, spasmed in the artificial fog and smoke. He danced like he was seizing for hours. At some point, his friend went home with a college student. 

When Reggie came home, his sweat had dried and the A/C in the apartment blasted him with uncomfortably frigid air. He tiptoed into the apartment. He managed to slip out of his shoes and get past their entranceway into the living room without a sound. Their hallway was dark and he expected the living room to be cast in the same heavy shadows. Instead, he saw Leslie’s head poking out from the top of the couch, blue light illuminating her outline. 

Reggie’s stomach dropped. He had forgotten to shut his laptop before he left. He saw his story naked and exposed on the screen, Leslie reading the last words as he entered the room. He sat down beside her. He could see tears escaping down her face. She didn’t look at him when she talked. 

Why didn’t you show me this? 

I don’t know. 

Leslie shut the laptop and turned towards him. He was expecting a scowl or some other look of admonishment. She hugged him. Up close, her shirt smelled like coconut. Reggie spoke into the space behind her. 

Is it any good? 

It might be. I don’t know yet. 

I’m tired. 

I can tell. I feel it. 

I think I need to finish the story. 

You can do it tomorrow. 

Okay. 

Without the light of the laptop to ward it off, the dark smothered them both to sleep. Lettie’s cries woke them up a few hours later. Shiva died in the morning.