* * *

One morning when Cora waded out of the water, she heard hammering. She walked around the building to find Eh working on the big bathtub that sat outside on the lawn. He was nailing wood panels into place.

She paused there, watching the hammer work. On this side of the building, each hit of the hammer echoed off the hillside, Wha-WHACK Wha-WHACK. She wondered how hard Blum had to hammer to get a nail through a dolphin’s skull.

Tibbet had mentioned Eh had been a tennis champion at Harvard. Eh moved the way one would expect: head up, eyes bright, ready to return any serve. He stood tall, cognizant of his strength and station in life, wearing a crisp polo shirt and Madras shorts. In a crowd, he would be the one noticed, the one to whom the teacher would direct the difficult question. The person hired, the employee rewarded.

She, on the other hand, posed there in her bathing suit like some hopeful beauty queen, with her deviant haircut and her glasses for the handicapped, uncertain if she’d heard the words correctly. Few teachers would look her in the eye, much less ask her a question. Concepts would be explained to her using short sentences.

She asked—What’s the bathtub for?

He looked up.—It’s a tank for Blum.

—What’s he going to do with it?

His eyes had drifted down to her hips, examining them. At times, men surveyed parts of her body with an almost strategic attention, like it was a cliff they’d been dared to climb.

He said—Blum wants to float in it. With the lid shut, you can’t hear or see. The water is body temperature so you can’t feel anything either. He wants to meditate in it, learn what a total lack of sensation does to the mind over time.

—So it’s not for the dolphins.

—No.

She exhaled. Less worried now, she considered the bathtub for another moment, imagining floating in it, in the dark.—He’s experimenting on himself?

—Yep. It used to be the way things were done. Before you performed research on another, you tried it out on yourself.

—Really? Like what?

—Well, Newton put a bodkin in his eye.

—A what?

—Bodkin. It’s like a . . . I guess like a hatpin. He slipped it in between the eyeball and the eye socket and moved it around. Went deep. He wanted to learn if it would distort his vision.

She grimaced.

—That’s nothing. Blum always talks about a teacher he had who wanted to understand the structure of skin, so he cut off his own foreskin . . .

She interrupted—His what?

He repeated—Foreskin. And examined it under a microscope, keeping notes as the cells died.

She wasn’t sure what her expression showed, but her eyes were wide.

Eh reacted by rocking his head back in exasperation and throwing his hands out. She’d learned long ago that people tended to gesture with more energy when they felt some self-doubt.