The roadside assignation with the radiologist

The roadside assignation with the radiologist is the second clandestine meeting between The Narrator and her lover, set in November fog at the edge of town, where their planned conversation about the future collapses into wordless, erotic encounter and leaves her physically and psychically undone. It is a scene of failed language and bodily intensity, in which the couple's attempt to decide how to move forward dissolves into silence, and the narrator returns home hollowed out, unable to dress herself or recognize the mother she is supposed to be. The episode crystallizes the affair's central paradox: a relationship that cannot speak itself into being, yet overwhelms every other register of her life.

The Setting and the Failed Plan

The meeting takes place in November, as wildflowers push through the earth along the side of the road, broken up and forced out — an image the narrator explicitly compares to herself and her lover. They had planned to meet just beyond the parked cars, at the edge of the village where the houses end, to talk about how to move forwards and how to stop coming up against a brick wall. The radiologist emerges from the fog walking behind a man pulling a cart that screeches, a sound she feels in her teeth; he appears to be selling fruit and fish. But the conversation never happens. He does not say a word, and the narrator reflects that he might as well have been mute or have damaged his vocal cords. The fake silence of the road was enough.

The Encounter Itself

What follows is described as reaching the summit — an erotic obsession in which the texture of words becomes texture itself, the colour copper, and weeds cover their eyes, get in their eyes, sit behind their pupils. They walk along with the babies hanging upside-down, heads full of blood, swinging to and fro; the babies drool and shriek, and the adults drool and shriek too. Blinded, they fall into a ditch and roll around like two idiots while the babies wave at them from above, reaching out their hands to help them climb back up. The scene is saturated with animality and inversion: the lovers are reduced to writhing bodies while the infants look on from a position of strange authority. When the night has run its course like a convulsing dog, they say goodbye.

The Aftermath and Physical Collapse

After the parting, a feeling of suffocation rides up the narrator's throat, a tick scales her neck, something winds itself around her and lodges inside her, its pincers poking around behind her mouth. She follows the white lines on the road home like a tightrope walker, one foot in front of the other, her bones a step behind like a slave, her arms outstretched. As the sun rises she pushes the baby along; he sings softly, la la la, and she wonders how he can feel like saying anything, calling him her baby wolf with his cold little snout, howling at some planet or other. Back at the smoky house she finds a note with the dinner menu and a few kisses at the bottom, stuck up with Scotch tape. She takes off the little wolf's clothing, tugging at his skin. The homeopathic painkiller she swallows under the covers has no effect, and when she wakes a few hours later her skin is violet.

The Morning of Disintegration

That morning she takes much longer than usual to do everything. She puts on one sock and drops the other, does up one button and the other comes undone, brushes her hair and inspects her teeth and nails. Nothing is as it should be; her body will not allow itself to be dressed or tidied. Four hands knock on the door — her husband and son, the two stooges, who lie on the floor and slip dirty messages under the door reading 'We love you, Mummy', painting their lips pink, thinking they are hilarious. The little boy climbs onto the grown-up's head; together they are a monster. Her husband calls out in a high-pitched voice, Come out already. Come on, Mummy, come out. We're hungry. But they will not persuade her. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees a different person to yesterday: she is not a mother. The assignation has not only failed to resolve anything — it has stripped her of the capacity to perform her role at all, leaving her a stranger in her own skin, dressed as best she can with her sudden, poisonous transformation.