Adultery – Steve Gergley

January 1, 2026

In April of 2000, my wife and I had an affair with a married woman we met at a concert for the upstate New York post-hardcore band, Pragmatics. The woman lived in a 127-floor brutalist apartment building marooned on an isthmus of pavement between two seventeen-lane interstate highways. Every floor in the building was an endless corridor of identical steel doors and slate-gray concrete walls. The woman’s husband worked as a security guard on the seventy-second floor of the building. For nineteen hours a day, he clomped on a curved treadmill and stared at a 96-inch, black and white TV screen playing the live feed of the 14.67 security cameras monitoring the thirty-ninth-floor stairwell on the west side of the building.

Each day at 5:34 a.m., my wife and I paid a driverless taxi to merge onto the northbound lane of the interstate highway knifing past our lover’s faceless apartment building. Then, upon arriving at our destination, we triggered the emergency failsafe system by wedging open the right passenger door. Once the vehicle slowed to twenty miles per hour, we jumped onto the cold and spiny pavement and rolled toward the concrete highway dividers lining the perimeter of the road.

We accrued many minor injuries this way, but we didn’t mind. The long, painful clump to our lover’s secret apartment (which squatted next door to her husband’s work office), only deepened our anticipation of the glorious moment when we would snap the lock behind us, slip our bloodied clothes to the floor, and descend the short staircase to our lover’s silk and leather pleasure alcove hidden underneath the floorboards. There we writhed in a wet and quivering heap for weeks on end, only climbing the stairs to eat, drink, defecate, and text daily reminders to our live-in, Belarussian housekeeper to feed delicious chunks of banana meat to our beloved pet manul, Ref, and his fiery yet loyal life partner, Anya.

Down in the humid darkness of the alcove, the three of us twitched like naked mole rats. We explored fifty-seven translucent layers of shimmering human consciousness. We counted the icy-smooth muscular contractions of our involuntarily pumping goni. All the while, the spongy baboon regions of our brains mindlessly solved the greatest mysteries the human race has ever known: The Fermi Paradox, The Reimann Hypothesis, The Largest Prime Number in the Universe, The Hard Problem of Consciousness, the source of all life on the planet. But we abandoned these discoveries on the warm and slick floor of our lover’s secret alcove. Even now, so many years later, these revelations provide no grammatical value to our sticky and clicking insectoid lives.