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we’re the viruses inside something else inside something else inside something else, like Russian nesting dolls, and God walks around with us inside and doesn’t notice.
    Rather than the other way around, he said, and he unbuttoned her blouse to the breastbone and ran a finger down a blue vein to her left nipple. She watched the nipple rise, felt the ping of blood in the tip. It’s like they think, she said, these microscopic things, they think. Not thought, he said, but will. The universe runs on sex and will, he said. One feeds the other. I’m older than you. You’ll live to see that this is true.
    They walked through a laboratory filled with glass tubes and faded Formica tables. There were different colored liquids in the tubes, and the tables were covered with white dust. Beyond the lab, the box of an elevator without a door, these belts and weights that you could see.
    She was afraid of closed-in places and heights, and she leaned into the warmth of his body. It was strange being out in the daylight with him. He seemed more vague to her, like something bleached by the sun. She wondered if she looked the same to him. She felt like one of those couples you’d see in beat-up cars, his hand jammed inside her blouse or underneath the waistband of her jeans, and the look on her face too old, a kind of mask, both hard and scared because she could not concentrate or focus on a single thing outside of him.
    He said he had worked at this mill one summer when he was a boy. You’re still a boy, she said. No I’m not, he said, I’m not a boy.
    One of his jobs was to walk on the crust that hardened on the grain and spoiled the suction when it was time to drain the silos. He broke the crust, with a rope around his waist, and then grabbed on to the ladder as the grain began to flow and threatened to pull him under. Grain is tricky, he said, both liquid and solid. Tons of red wheat could stand solid as a mountain and then give way and flow in waves.
    In five seconds, he said, you can drown in it. Be so far under that twenty men couldn’t pull you out.
    She remembers walking in the woods one spring, kicking aside old leaves and looking for crocuses and the red spindly starts of peonies. She had reached down and picked up some rotting leaves, she had crushed the webbing and run her fingers along the spine. She was eighteen and all of a sudden that day the ground had started to feel like a thin crust on top of endless water. Like the ground was fragile, like it would give way at any step and she’d just fall and fall and fall and never stop falling.
    Once that occurred to her the feeling had never entirely gone away. She’d just gotten used to it, like learning to walk on a ship. She had sea legs. Once in a while the boat would pitch her forward and she could feel herself starting to drown. She thought she understood what it would be like to drown in the silo. She wanted him forever always. Whatever it is that wants to pitch her forward was always out there, around the edge of her vision, circling.
    Hold me, she said, and she leaned into him, his breathing in her ear. Just the thought of being up that high terrified her. Whenever she was up that high she was absolutely certain she would jump. Do you love me? she asked him. He would never say the words, and she knew it was a dangerous thing to ask him, but she asked it anyway. Do you love me? She led his hand up underneath her skirt. Do you love me? Am I important to you? Will you live in a house with me, and read our children stories, and go to church all dressed in a suit and tie on Easter? Could we build a family like a boat for the times when the ground turns to water? Could you do that with me as you could never do it with her?
    She was too young for his wife to matter to her, but his children were all too real. She was waiting for them to grow up and then he would be with her all the time, and they would eat in restaurants, holding