 
# Infinite Drift

Copyright 2015. By Jeffery Bartone

Published by Unsolicited Press.

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# TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

# CHAPTER ONE ~

I do not have much in life other than a dwindling roll of tracing paper, half a dozen black Sharpies, two pairs of jeans, four nice flannel shirts, plenty of underwear and socks, and a suitable winter jacket. I have given it all up, everything, and sequestered myself in a small cabin in the purgatorial mountains of northern Maine for reasons that will soon become clear.

I own about one-tenth of an acre here, but all the land around me, thousands of acres, is under the purview of a retired commodities trader, a childless widower who is sure I am on my way to becoming the next Unabomber. His imperious log-cabin mansion is a good half-mile up the road from my humble little abode. He assures me that the land around me will stay pure, forever pure; apparently, he is trying to atone for a life of conspicuous consumption by transforming himself into a nature-loving liberal at the end. He shows up on occasion under ridiculous pretenses. The first time, days after I had moved in some six months ago, it was because he saw smoke from the lower valley and wanted to be sure my cabin was not on fire. It was not, and he knew that I knew that he knew that it was not. I was just cooking some eggs.

Yesterday, my good neighbor came down the ice-encrusted dirt road in his shiny, new, silvery, big-wheeled pickup truck—everything he owns is new—with a bottle of good Irish whiskey and scads of deer jerky to see if I had any electricity.

"Mine went out about an hour ago," he said. "Not that it matters. I could live for a year up there on generator power alone." He was standing out on my little flat-stone stoop, whiskey bottle in hand, giant bag of jerky clipped to his waist. Jerky and booze—I had to let him inside. He walked like a pigeon. He knew that I knew that he knew that my cabin does not have any electricity or indoor plumbing beyond a hand pump in the kitchen sink, and that I heat and cook with wood. It is a rustic life, mine.

The ruggedly handsome old man—think of the actor Ed Harris or, in a certain light, Ming the Merciless—observed all the scrawled equations on the huge sheets of tracing paper strewn all over my cabin. I'd had to shuffle them around to clear a path to one of the two wooden chairs around the stove so that we could sit down and be more or less sociable. It was, I think, the billionaire's tenth visit.

"Just what have you got going on here, son?" he asked suspiciously. He crossed his legs and then uncrossed them. He was sitting perfectly straight now. He looked like an aging J. Crew model with his crisp red-flannel shirt, tan khakis, and clean work boots.

I smiled and got up to disturb the nice hellish bed of embers in my little stove with an iron poker in preparation for adding another log. "I'm working on a solution to impending universal doom," I said. "Or rather I'm trying to deconstruct my entire life's work. I won't lie to you."

He laughed. "Better maybe that you did."

"You're here," I said, standing awkwardly. I had not eaten anything all day and was feeling a bit dizzy. I continued: "This is your sole reality, Gil, here and now. You may as well know the horrible truth."

"And what's that?"

"Well..."

I went out to my dwindling woodpile and picked out a medium-sized log that was not, as were most of them, totally coated with ice. I returned to set it in the central space I had made for it in the embers. It started hissing right away. Actually, I don't know why I went out and got it. It was already about eighty degrees in my little converted chicken shack. I could see sweat pooling on Gil Smoltz's liver-spotted baldhead. Bald is beautiful; I've had a shiny dome myself for years now.

"Been a rough fall so far," he said. "You sure you got enough wood out there for the winter?"

"Definitely not."

"You feel free to cut as much as you want from my land then," he offered. "Nature provides, if you're sensible about it and only use what you need. We haven't been—that's why we're in trouble now."

"Nature is a bitch," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"A mean-spirited destructive bitch. Think about it, Gil. She tosses up massive volcanic eruptions and hurricanes and tsunamis and droughts and plagues and shit, which needlessly wipe out millions of God's creatures, great and small, whole species sometimes. Just like that. There's no rhyme or reason for it—it just happens. Call it natural selection if you want to, but the truth is it makes existence a fatalistic nightmare for every living thing on this planet, us included. Whoever came up with the idea that Nature is balanced and sensible is an expert, a fucking genius, at selective reasoning. The natural world is every bit as brutal and barbaric as the civilized one."

"Interesting," he said, after a while. "You are a Republican, I take it?"

"No," I said. "I'm a prognosticator of doom. No political party represents me."

"I see. Well"—he got up with the bottle of whiskey—"shall I christen this?"

"Cups are on the shelf above the hand sink there—wait, what am I saying? You know where the cups are. I'm sorry," I said. "It's just...I'm feeling a little strange these days. You need ice?"

"Certainly not." He found two suitable jelly jars and poured out two generous draughts of whiskey. He returned to the living room, which is what I call the open area around the woodstove, and handed me what my full-moon eyes were fixated on. "To all the natural and unnatural beauty in the world," he offered as a toast, and as a way of mending differences, I think.

"You're okay in my book," I said. "I shouldn't burden you with my troubles."

"Eh," he said, "what else have I got to do? You're a friend. I consider you my friend."

"Why, thank you."

"To fast friendship!" he said, raising his jar. He was looking at me strangely now. He'd made two toasts—I'd made none. I knew that I needed to come up with something of my own now to maintain some kind of manly balance of ceremonial responsibility here. I held up my jar. "Here's to—to the enduring unity of being!"

"Yeah," he said, sipping tentatively, "that."

I watched him get up and pigeon-walk over to my kitchen table, where I had my latest doodles of doom on smaller sheets of tracing paper. "All this monkey business here," he said. "With your strange symbols—I don't care what you say. There's a woman at the center of it all. There always is."

"Women, drugs, and universal doom," I said. "My own personal little Trinity."

"Don't you touch that crap, son—ever! Drugs, I mean."

"Too late."

"Well, then—" He clearly wanted to keep things light, because we are happy drunks here, see, not sad alcoholic sacks intentionally isolating ourselves in the rocky wilds of Maine. In the spirit of lightness, he avoids coughing up direct commentary on my obvious self-destructive impulses and impractical life's work. In the same spirit, I resist commenting on the repeatable fact that he had moved from New York to Maine to be around trees and yet lives in a dwelling that required the destruction of thousands of them. "I guess you'll never be President then, will you," he finally blurted out. "Well, me neither. I made too many lucrative backroom deals with the Mafia in my time. And who am I kidding—I'm too fucking old." He turned around and raised his now mostly empty jelly jar. "Here's to those Dago sons of bitches—"

"To Dagos," I said, thinking of my old college sweetheart Vampora and her strange distended family in Boston.

"You forgot to carry the two here," Gil said, chuckling to himself as he pointed to a random scrawl. Then he got serious, morbidly so, "All these weird symbols—you know what they mean?"

"Yep."

"They make sense to you then?" he asked, as if he still didn't quite believe it.

"These symbols are universal. That squiggle there, for instance, looks like a horizontal figure-eight—it represents infinity."

"I see that one a lot on here."

"That's because I'm concerned with something I'm calling Infinite Drift right now," I told him. "It's basically the idea that a critical mass of 'things' in the universe—and I'm talking about some really, really small things here—they will begin to exist, and perhaps even to move around, without respect to time. They can be anywhere at any time, disappearing and reappearing willy-nilly, from our perspective anyway. It's crazy, man! I can't even begin to tell you how awful it would be for us as a species if my theory were valid. I mean it: we would lose our unity of being."

"I see."

"Gil," I said, "unless I'm wrong here, humanity will someday experience an event so awesome and awful it will rival any version of Hell Dante or anybody else has ever created. The curse of my life right now is that I desperately need to prove myself wrong."

"Infinity," he said, as if the syllables themselves had meaning beyond the concept. "Interesting—"

"This equation here"—I pointed to my pet equation, my favorite, which takes up very little space actually—"it shows time as a distressed reality, by which I mean one that is continuously reaching out ahead of itself and then being boomeranged back by forces we still have not come close to discovering or identifying yet. Now lots of things are distressed realities, but time isn't supposed to be one of them. It—it's..."

"Very interesting," he muttered.

"Yeah." I slapped the table. "Look, Gil, if time isn't stable—theoretically the only stable thing in existence—then what the hell is?" I rolled up the little sheet of tracing paper with my beloved pet equation on it and tossed it on my futon in the corner. "Think of time as the infinite triangulation of all known matter," I said, "without which we would not exist. It—it's..."

I suddenly felt phenomenally, utterly, ridiculous here.

"You ever make money with this stuff?" Gil asked me.

"Nah," I said, "never."

"Too bad."

We finished our whiskeys. The mood was too dark now. I stretched my brain to find a suitable emotive transition from heavy to light. For most men it's sex and sports—well, for me these days it's sports. "You know," I said, making my voice deeper, "I haven't seen a newspaper in months, let alone a television. What's going on in the NFL? My Steelers, how are they doing?"

"They look strong on defense anyway."

"Good," I said. I knew that he had satellite television and kind of hoped that he would invite me up to his big log mansion for a game some Sunday.

"Yep," he said. "Defense wins championships."

"Yep."

That was good. That was what we needed. I poured out more whiskey. I felt safe with this man here, safer than I'd ever felt by myself in this dark shack, mostly because he's reached that point in life where he wants nothing in particular from anyone in particular. He is the perfect existentialist. He came to my cabin yesterday because my cabin is here. He came to see me because I am here. It's possible, of course, that the widower is lonely and needs a reliable drinking buddy, and I really could be the Unabomber for all he cares. Near the end of the night, he even offered to invest in me if there's ever a commercial application for my work.

"I wish," I told him.

"You never know. Einstein didn't intend to build atomic bombs, did he?"

"I guess not," I admitted.

"I'm just saying—I'm kind of drunk here, so forgive me—but stranger things have happened. Will you at least consider the possibility?"

"I need to finish what I'm doing here first," I said. "Then we can talk about that other stuff."

"You're dedicated; I like that."

"I'm obsessed, you mean."

"But I don't think you're eating enough. Tell you what"—he stood up shakily—"I'll send my housekeeper down with food in the morning. She's a great cook, I'm telling you."

"Nah."

"Yeah." Gil put his heavy hand on my shoulder. "I'm going to do that. Hey, keep the bottle. And this too." He handed over the thousand-year supply of deer jerky. "You have a good night, Eggers, you hear me?"

"Good-bye, sir. And—thanks."

~

The story of how I got to this low point in my life is complicated, but it's a good one to tell because it involves a brazen woman who in simpler times would have borne all the blame. And even today I suppose I could still easily blame that Tarot-card-reading, bisexual Pagan who goes by the name of Vampora (née Victoria Mortanno) for my steady migration away from a good path through life. I'd first met this strange dark-haired beauty in an introductory Anatomy class at Simon's Rock College. Since Mortensen followed Mortanno on the class roster, we were unceremoniously lumped together as lab partners. All I knew about her at the time was that she fronted an all-girl glam-rock band and was having a highly public affair with a popular English professor nearing sixty, whose husband happened to be the Provost. I was scared to death of her.

Vampora and I were well into our first assignment, which was to dissect and label the muscular striations of a fetal pig, when her beautiful voice broke through the nauseating stench of formaldehyde in the lab: "Eggers, I think I am just about done with this shit already."

"But we need to finish this," I said in a high nasally voice loud enough to get other people to look over at us. "It's fifteen percent of our grade."

"I don't care," she said. "I mean it. Fuck this stinking pig—fuck this course. I'm going to be changing majors anyway. Let's go back to my place."

"Uh, okay."

We left the lab with our fetal pig horribly exposed to the dry air and made the four-mile trek on foot to her grungy off-campus crash pad in the sleepy little haven of Great Barrington. In her Spartan studio apartment, we watched an old black-and-white vampire movie while wrapped in multiple layers of flannel on her lime-green couch. Then we smoked a joint and fell asleep. The following evening I went to the dining hall and mashed food into Styrofoam cups to bring to her—my idea of a romantic surprise—since I knew she was not on the meal plan and had nothing but Ramen noodles and beer in her place. We ate the mashed food with our fingers and talked about things. It was good easy talk, although I quickly learned why so many people had warned me about her: she was too weird even for a New England liberal arts college, which says a lot. She thought she was a reincarnated wild boar, for instance. Her human form was temporary.

By the time winter break rolled around, I had more of my stuff in her place than in my own cramped dorm room. I let the semester roll on into May before I decided to ratchet up the wooing. We were on her couch, studying for Finals, when I tapped her arm and broke the silence with my favorite word, "Hey!"

"Hey yourself," she shot back, pinching my arm.

"I know," I said. "Let's go to Siberia. We need a study break anyway."

"Sure." She closed her textbook. "Why the hell not?"

I am sure my eyebrows had peaked the way my father's big wooly things used to do whenever he would read something disturbing in the newspaper -- the locally notorious hilly region known as Siberia was where insecure new couples went to advertise their togetherness in safe bohemian clusters.

"Okay, then," I said, still somewhat shocked at the imagined possibilities. I had an old smashed condom in my wallet, which my mother had given me when I was thirteen with a mild approbation: "Some people aren't meant to be parents, Eggers. Best to use this..."

We put on light jackets, grabbed a six-pack of beer and a wool blanket, and headed out to Siberia on foot. It was an invigorating walk, mostly uphill. A hideously oversized dark-orange moon was slung low in the sky, casting eerie sweeping shadows through the giant pines along the desolate road. We walked on silently.

Finally we arrived, only to find that another couple had beaten us to the highest spot, the best place for first-timers. Worse, they weren't fooling around at all. They were sleeping; stoned, or tripped out—in any case, they were like turtles the whole time we were out there. There were six other couples in Siberia. It was a strange scene, a human invasion of sorts, all those flesh-colored beings wrapped in spectral fabrics among the colorless prattles and hardy scrub bushes growing up between the smooth glacial stones that were here long before us and will be here long after we have creatively self-destructed as a species.

Vampora and I set up our blanket on a nice lower ridge overlooking the valley where an offshoot of the Puritans held court once and did insane things to themselves and the natural world in the name of divine propriety. We now formed the feathery end of a staggered fantail of romantic couplings. Vampora shivered and I offered her my jacket, which she refused. We sat gazing out over the verdant valley until a sharp high-pitched sound came from somewhere deep in the pine forest: this was my cue. Years of mindless devotion to the cryptic bigotry of the Boy Scouts of America had enabled me to identify birdcalls, and so I knew right away that this horrible sound was the call of a simple little Barred Owl feeling threatened or turned on. Vampora didn't seem impressed by my knowledge of these feathery creatures, but I couldn't stop talking. My mind was fixated on the amazing Barred Owl now. "You know, the Barred Owl is a really incredible hunter," I continued. "They mostly eat mice, rabbits, possums, foxes even—hell, anything small and fuzzy and dumb enough to get caught out in the open at night. Unlike most owls, though, they can snatch other birds right out of the air. They are even known to wade into the water to catch fish when their usual diet is scarce. They are incredibly resourceful, I'm telling you." I knew I needed something to cap my encyclopedic diatribe here. "The females," I added, "are far more ruthless than the males."

I ended by cupping her breast awkwardly. She looked at me as if I were a perverse headmaster about to spank her. "What?" I said.

"I didn't come here for that."

"Oh, okay."

"Sorry, Eggers."

I opened a beer for her, then one for me. We drank beer for a while. A new couple, the eighth here now, had climbed up to our ridge and set up their own wool blanket a few yard from ours. They didn't know the rules, apparently. Worse, they were gigglers. They had a bottle of some hard liquor, which they passed back and forth. I watched with some degree of envy as the guy dove his hand right under the bell of the girl's colorful little skirt while he tongued her ear. She caught me staring, which seemed to turn her on even more.

Vampora was watching the petting couple too. "Hey, I know that girl," she said, eyeing up the little elf's moonlit yoke of a breast. "And the guy too. They were in our Anatomy class last semester, remember? Their pig was a disaster."

"Yeah, right. They're English majors now."

"Right. They're living the dream." I snuggled up against Vampora. "I'm still technically a virgin," I whispered, trying to mask my desperation. "Did you know that?"

She dug her sharp spidery fingers into my arm. "Everyone knows that, Eggers." She twisted my head around and made me look into her eyes. "Well, anyway, I have a nice surprise for you."

I watched that wonderful left hand of hers dip into her purse and come out clutching a little baggie with something in it.

"What's that?" I asked.

"My sister gave me this. Let's take some."

"What is it?"

"Acid. I was going to wait until after Finals, but since we're here—"

"Jesus!" I shrieked, way more loudly than I'd intended. I looked around; I hadn't disturbed anyone. "I heard that shit can derange your brain—permanently!"

"That's the idea."

"My cousin John tried it once," I continued. "And he never recovered. He changed his name to Grog and dropped out of college, and now I hear he's living with some crazy old rich guy in Prague." I paused, mostly to catch my breath: "They're a couple—"

"Ha-ha, that's good," she said. "Wouldn't it be funny if it turned me straight and you gay? Then we'd have real problems. Look, we don't have to, if you—I just thought..."

"No, no. No—"

"You put it on your tongue, like this." She showed me. "Now Eggers, open up..."

I cannot describe what happened next, exactly, but it's possible that that evil little tab did for me all at once what a long productive life of rigorous scientific reckoning would never have accomplished. I mean it seemed to condense time: one night became one hundred years of active philosophizing and perfect mathematical modeling by a dedicated genius mind. My clumsy desires for a seduction scenario involving a crushed condom with Vampora slid into the subliminal essence of the universe itself—that's right. You get me, or you don't.

Before dawn, Vampora pushed herself away from me—we'd been silent for hours, not awake, not sleeping: just breathing—and she announced she was going into town with some outwardly mobile seniors to get bagels and coffee and stuff. She was gone for over an hour, I figure. The burning tip of the sun had appeared over the Puritan valley when I caught her sleek form racing up the hill with a waxy little white bag of goodies.

"Eggers!" she said, as if speaking to a retarded child. "Wow, you were really out of it last night. The things you said..." Her reed-like wavering body, hovering over me now, was haloed with clear morning light. She looked more beautiful than ever. I turned my back on her.

"Oh," I said, "my head—"

"Coffee?"

"I guess."

"I bought you an orange."

"A what?" I looked at it, and that's when something even stranger happened. It was still a round piece of fruit, sure, but within it, I saw an infinitely strange yet highly accurate form of a round piece of fruit. They were two, totally separate, different things, and I could make out each one clearly now. Well, I thought, if an orange can embrace a dual reality like that, then so can we. So can we.

"It's an orange—you eat it?" Vampora said.

"Yeah-yeah, right."

It went to my hand, as real as anything I'd ever touched before.

"Eggers?" Vampora said. "Oh my God! Are you okay?" She sat down next to me, cross-legged, at a weird angle. I mean, she was facing me but not quite facing me. I tried not to focus in on the cottony white 'V' of her panties. "Eggers, you'd better not change your name and run away to Europe with some strange man after this, you hear me? I am the antagonist in your life story and that, buddy boy, is never, ever going to change. Anyway, this was supposed to be fun. I just thought...I thought we needed something to happen, something different."

"It's okay." I bit into the orange without peeling it. "So, do you remember any of the stuff I said last night?"

"No, of course not. Why would I want to?"

"Because I may need it," I said. "I saw some really strange things."

"Me too."

"I mean, I saw something just too horrible to ignore," I said. "I think...yes, I am going to be changing majors now too. I am going to become a cosmologist."

~

I do not know how she did it—not even my big brother Levi, the millionaire art dealer and notorious cavorter, knows where I am right now—but somehow Vampora found my little cabin in Maine. I am so used to the deathly silence that fosters my best thinking that any outside noise strikes my ears like a thunderclap. I'd heard the rambling engine long before I looked out the little frosted front window and saw her pulling up in a shiny orange Jeep Wrangler with an airbrushed vampire bat on the driver's-side door. I put on my coat and went out to greet her. I hadn't laid eyes on her in well over a year now, our longest hiatus ever. I didn't know what to expect.

"Eggers," she said, sticking her pointy chin out, "ha! Can't hide from me." She shut down the Jeep's engine.

"I guess not."

"Boy, do I have a nice surprise for you." She jumped out, ran around the front of the Jeep and opened the passenger-side door, and out came a short person in a puffy down jacket with a fur-lined Eskimo hood that completely occluded her face. She wore oversized black boots and giant sheepskin gloves. "Eggers, I present to you—one Jasmine Geckle! Doctor Jasmine Geckle—she's a newly minted Ph.D. from MIT, your alma mater, can you believe it? She's a particle physicist with some promise, or so I'm told, and get this—she does some of the same weird shit you do. Look here, I brought you a brilliant little nerd girl to help you with your math! Anyway, we had to get out of the city. Don't ask, and we won't tell." Vampora shook the hooded figure's shoulder. "She's completely insane, this one—you guys should get along swimmingly."

The little nerd girl said, did nothing. I could have been a flagpole for all she seemed to care. "I call this incredible little creature Jazz," Vampora continued, as she guided the girl toward the cabin, "or sometimes Geckle, because it's such a cool last name—don't you think? Dr. Geckle! But really, I think Jazz is better, don't you? Isn't she just, just amazing? Of course she is! Just look at her! Jazz, honey, I'll get the bags. Your back, remember? Sweetheart, you're freezing! Just go inside. Go on—go!"

The sleepy faceless little physicist slunk off into the cabin, leaving the front door wide open behind her. I followed Vampora around to the back of the Jeep. She opened the hatch and took out a huge valise, then some kind of weird round case, then a normal suitcase; I could see a lot more baggage shoved into the vehicle's ample cargo compartment. "Jazz is like you," she said. "Helpless, without me."

I stepped forward: "Your last little surprise completely ruined my life, you know." My voice sounded tiny and flat, as I knew it would, but what could I do about it? This was my red-flannelled old college flame here, my lifelong love, with the same bold brown eyes, same lush mouth and dimpled chin, same gargantuan ego and perfect jazz-age body. She was a world-famous novelist now—I had to remember that—with a hint of grey in her unruly tangle of hair.

"Well"—Vampora bit her bottom lip—"this one has the same potential, Eggers. Don't forget that. Hey, come on. Give us a hug."

"Oh, sorry. It's just—I'm working on something here."

"No," she said, "you are not. You're working out something here. That crazy train you've always got running through your head."

"You look good, Vampora. I can't believe you found me here."

"Eggers?" She swiped her aquiline nose—the perfect point to the perfect face!

"Oh"—I picked up the huge valise—"sorry. Let me help—"

"Put that down! My hug?"

"Oh, right"—I hugged her—"sorry."

"Jesus, Eggers! Aren't you eating?"

"Well..."

"Don't worry about it," she said. "I'm here now. Momma will take care of both of her little cross-eyed geniuses."

The girls took a nap on my futon that afternoon and then around four went into town to get provisions. Apparently, the idea of living on nothing but canned peaches and deer jerky did not sit too well with them. In truth, it has taken them about a week to settle in fully—or at least to stop complaining about having to shit in an unheated outhouse and boil water on the woodstove to take a wild-man bath in my hundred-gallon metal tub behind a green plastic curtain hung from eye hooks. They had insisted on sleeping on the bear rug in front of the stove, under a mile-high pile of old quilts they had brought up with them. I did offer them the futon but they turned it down. "It stinks," Jazz said. I will not even comment on the sounds they make when they think I'm asleep.

I have not made any appreciable progress since they got here.

Gil had noticed the orange Jeep right away, I'm sure. But he didn't swing down until a few days later, under the pretense of delivering a turkey for Thanksgiving, which was still two weeks away. Jazz warmed up to him right away. "What a beautiful bird!" she said. "Now how shall we cook it?"

"It is that, my dear." Gil gave me a look whose latent content can only be transcribed by those of us with binary chromosomal construction. "A beautiful bird!" he said. "Shot it myself right behind my house this morning. Look, just stuff its ass with tons of vegetables and a good amount of garlic, wrap it up in foil, and stick it in that stove there, right over the coals, and it'll come out hot and juicy and ready to eat."

"Just the way I like them!" Jazz said, running the tip of her tongue around her mouth.

Vampora inserted herself between the two and held out her hand. "I am Vampora—at your service. And that horrible little squid over there goes by the name of Jasmine."

"And you are both such perfect little lovelies," Gil said. "Friends of my good man Eggers here, are you?"

"Is that even possible?" Vampora replied, taking the turkey from Gil. Jazz stepped aside and tilted her head so Gil would notice her beamy smile.

"I am Gil," he said to her. "Gil Smoltz."

"I knew I recognized you!" Jazz exclaimed. "You were on The Celebrity Apprentice years ago with the Donald, right?"

"Guilty as charged."

"Excuse her," Vampora said. "She's on an outrageous caffeine high." She stepped outside to put the turkey in the little storage shed behind the cabin, where it had maybe a fifty-fifty chance of feeding us on Thanksgiving instead of the resident raccoons.

"How nice to meet a civilized man up here," Jazz said. "I take it that impressive structure up there is yours?"

"It's a work in progress," he said. "I'm thinking of adding a solarium."

"Most excellent idea," Jazz said. "Would you like some coffee, sir?"

"Would I." They stepped into the kitchen area, putting up a symbolic Great Wall of China between them and me. I noticed then that my kitchen area was sparkling clean and uncluttered; all my work materials, I mean the Sharpies and sheets of tracing paper and protractors and rulers and such, had been piled around my futon. I have been relegated to the northwest quadrant of my own damn cabin. The girls have taken over.

Gil and Jazz eventually left the kitchen area and huddled around the woodstove. They were talking about Shakespeare now, a sideline interest of his. "One thing I've noticed about him," Gil said, "is that the women always get the better of the men in the end, at least in the comedies. Ever notice that? I mean, that's fun to read. But in the real world? In my world anyway—I just never saw it work out that way."

"It does with some girls," Jazz said. Just before Vampora had returned from the shed, she got in: "Like Vampora there. She will spontaneously combust before she ever lets anyone, man or woman, get the better of her. It's maddening."

They said nothing more until Vampora had come in and finished stomping the snow from her boots and had removed them. "So," Gil continued, "you know something about me, Jasmine, my dear. Now tell me something about you. What do you do on his strange planet of ours besides look ravishing?"

"Nothing."

"A very common occupation these days, it seems."

"What are they talking about?" Vampora asked me. We were both on the Mongol side of the symbolic Great Wall of China now.

"Nothing," I replied.

We both watched Jazz slap the rich old man's shoulder. "What I mean is, I'm a physicist. I study nothing—or rather, I am obsessed with it. It's like the most perfect concept ever."

"Well," he said, "what is there to study? If you don't mind my asking."

"Not at all."

"I wish," Vampora said to me, grabbing the kettle from the woodstove to go fill it with water, "he hadn't asked her that. We could be here until the next ice age."

"There actually is a lot to think about," Jazz continued. "Let me give you an example. You have a million dollars, and then you lose it. You now have nothing. You with me?"

"Sure, sure," Gil said.

"Well," she said, "tell me this then: is that the same as you never having had the money?"

"Er..."

I stepped forward now. It is my job—and I take it very seriously—to addle my dear neighbor. "I can answer that," I said. "It isn't. The absence of something that once existed and is now gone is categorically distinct from that which has never existed, which we call nothingness. Take two away from two, and what do you have? Nothing! The word 'nothing' expresses an absence—you would miss your goddamn million dollars, right? Nothingness, on the other hand, has no spatial essence. It represents that which has never existed. This in effect makes it infinite, and that opens up a host of serious problems when it comes to disproving things, which in the world of cosmology is actually more important than proving things these days. I mean, I could claim that I would have won the Powerball lottery had I gotten a quick pick yesterday at a certain place and time, right. It's a preposterous claim, but how could anyone actually disprove it?

Gil turned back to Jazz. "You have any idea what the hell he's saying?"

Jazz was looking at me differently now. "So"—she blew a strand of blond hair out of her eyes and angled her fabulous compact frame to accommodate me now—"this is what you've been working on up here?" It is the first time she had shown any interest in my work.

"More or less."

"Show me." I led her over to my futon and randomly took up one of the rolls of tracing paper.

"Well," Gil said, pigeon walking over to Vampora, who had started washing some dishes in the hand sink, "what about you? Tell me you do something sensible in this world?"

"I write lesbian vampire erotica."

"Any money in that?"

"Butt loads."

"Excellent!" he said, with a Shakespearean hand flourish. "Would you, my dear, like to ditch those two mad crazies over there and head into town with me for some innocent bingo playing and some much less innocent whiskey drinking?"

"I sure would." She dried her hands and looked over at Jazz, who was absorbed in my work now. Just before she left the cabin with the reclusive hard-drinking billionaire next door, Vampora said, "It will be interesting to see how long it takes those two hapless birds to let the stove go out."

~

It was well after midnight and still no Vampora. Jazz and I had done some amazing work that night, making more progress in five hours than I'd made in five years working alone. We were elementally exhausted now. I got out the old bottle of whiskey Gil had left me and we polished it off quickly. We were getting giddy and stupid on the bear rug. Vampora had been spot on—we had let the stove go out. Now we'd overcompensated and created a sauna-like atmosphere in the cabin.

"I have a confession," Jazz said.

"Me too," I said.

"Oh, yours is easy. I can see it snaking out the top of your pants. Mine—it's more complicated." She wiped her high beluga forehead with the back of her bejeweled hand; the ends of her hair were wet and stringy; her high and mighty cheeks were flushed; her tie-string lips were shiny and dark red, almost purplish; her eyes were bloodshot from drinking or from the heat or from who knows what. "Things aren't as they appear."

"Didn't we just establish that on paper?" I said.

"What I mean is things between me and Vampora. We are not exactly here by accident, you know."

"Oh."

"I don't believe in circumstance," she said. And suddenly, with her beamy, seductive smile, I saw this energetic genius whose silver belly-button ring was graphically displayed before my dumb adult male eyes as so much younger and fresher than my old flame. In fact, Vampora in absentia seemed downright matronly and crusted over now. Jasmine continued: "Every deadbeat dumbass I've ever met left their life open to circumstance and then didn't like what they got. I'm more proactive than that."

"Yes," I muttered.

"Circumstance is the bane of all achievement."

"It's a bitch—you're right."

"Eggers," she said, "I am not totally gay, you know."

"Me neither!"

"I mean," she continued, "right now I'm looking at what you've got there, thinking, 'Man, I wouldn't mind some of that.' Eggers—"

"I am listening."

"The reason I hooked up with Vampora was so that I could someday, hopefully, meet the real Dr. Eggils Morrisson."

"Crap!" I said. "Does everyone know that stupid character is based on a real-life failed individual?"

"Everyone in the entire civilized world, Eggers. But don't worry—he actually grows a pair and murders someone in the next book. You'll see." She stood up and removed her jeans, revealing red-and-blue striped boys' boxer shorts; and then off went her light blue blouse, just like that, revealing an absent bra and pointy little torpedo breasts. "I hope you don't mind, but I'm dying here." She sat down closer to me this time. "What was I saying again?"

"You and Vampora—"

"Right! So anyway, I went to this big vampire literature convention in San Francisco—let's see, this would be back in February—where Vampora, of course, was the major attraction. I'd forged a press pass—from Vampire Digest; I kid you not—and told her moronic handlers I wanted to interview her. And they bought it—they led me past all the tongue-lolling, wine-swilling zombies hoping to be The One she'd select for a midnight romp and on into her inner sanctum. After that, it was just too easy. Anyone who reads her shit knows what she likes. And now here I am, sitting next to the great Dr. Eggers Mortensen, the notorious recluse, in the flesh—"

"I'm not a recluse," I said. "I'm ostracized. There's a difference."

"True genius is not always recognized in its own time." She lifted a leg and laid it over mine. "Your work, your little book, The Infinite Stretch of Time—oh my God!" She ran a fingernail down my arm. "I stumbled on it as I was in the MIT library for a most nefarious purpose, but don't ask—"

"Nefarious? Come on, Jasmine! You can't get away with that."

"Well," she said, "alright, if you must know." She took a long deep breath. "I didn't get honors on my dissertation, and believe me I'd worked my ass off on it; my father had died of a drug overdose, and I had developed a bit of drug problem myself. It was clear to me that I was a waste of human flesh. So I decided to hang myself in the MIT library, take care of everything lickety-split, end it all. I wasn't desperate about it though, wasn't like insane or anything like that. It could have been another item on my list of things to do that day, you know, pick up dry cleaning, change email password, hang self.

"Well, anyway," she continued, "I found a good spot, with an exposed steam pipe overhead, but I'm short, as you can see. So I had to stack up some books to reach it...and that's when I stumbled onto your slim little tome. On a whim—because it's really a great fucking title—I started reading it. I was hooked. You, your work, Eggers—it literally saved my life. Finding you was my idea, you know."

"So let me see if I've got this right," I said. "You've been doing girl-on-girl things just on the off-chance you'd get to meet me someday?"

"It hasn't been totally unpleasant." She took my hand, started licking between my fingers. "But right now I want something closer to what God intended." She stood up and stepped out of her underwear. I slid my pants down to my knees. She sat on my stomach and let her hair wind down over my face.

"Go slow," I said. "It's been a while..."

"Months?"

"Years, actually."

"You poor boy. You—oh...shit!" She dug her fingernails into my shoulder meat and jumped to her feet. Vampora had stumbled into the cabin. Her eyes settled on Jazz's naked body. "Nice, Eggers. Really fucking nice."

~

It's safe to say we did not have a traditional Thanksgiving. Gil came down around two in the afternoon with a moveable feast of traditional holiday goodies prepared, no doubt, by his trusty housekeeper—yams, mashed potatoes, real cranberry sauce, stuffing with raisins and oysters and pine nuts, and a nice pumpkin pie with a canter of whipped cream. The wild turkey, which had made it through the week after all, was already sizzling in its foil hut atop a nice bed of fiery embers in the woodstove. The girls had set the table with newly purchased cutlery and fancy china they'd gone all the way down to Bangor to get, and we all sat down to celebrate the ethnocentric particulars of yet another episode of white dominance over an unsuspecting native population.

Afterwards we busted out the hard liquor. Gil had brought down a top-notch CD player, along with a thousand-year supply of batteries, and he took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to inundate us with his generation's music. Dean Martin was an instant hit, Mel Tormé not so much.

Around midnight Gil and Jazz were slow-dancing to some lugubrious dirge under the penumbral light of the kerosene lamps—Engelbert Humperdink is my best guess—while Vampora and I were over on the bear rug by the stove. It's hard to tell which mismatched couple were the drunkest here.

"I really do love that stupid little squid there," Vampora said, pinching my side, "even if she is pathological. Listen, whatever story she told you the other night to get you hooked on her? It isn't true. Hardly anything she says is true. I'm not even sure she's a real physicist."

"Oh, she is," I said. "You can't fake that."

Elvis was on now, singing something about a hound dog, and no one can remain laconic under the spell of his wonderfully overrated voice. We both watched Jazz dazzle the smooth-soled billionaire on the makeshift dance floor of my pitiful cabin. She was doing some bastardized form of the Jitterbug, as were Gil's eyes. Her little black skirt kept flying up to reveal her little black panties.

Vampora whistled under her breath. "You be careful with her, Eggers. She'll reel you in, have her fun, and then what? When it comes to love, you are the fuzzy little woodland creature scurrying around in the open at night, and she is the great Barred Owl up in the tree."

"Why are you telling me this?" I said. "You're the one I'm in love with."

"Then you shouldn't have abandoned me in New York."

"I didn't abandon you! I—"

"You broke down, I know." Vampora swung herself around to sit on my lap; I had to brace my arms behind me to keep from tumbling back into the hot radiating stove. Her hands went around my neck, but she applied no pressure. She let her lips drift down to my mouth.

"Hey!" Gil shouted over Jazz's shoulder. "You two! Get a, get a room..."

"Oh my God," Jazz said, "I am so drunk—"

"You're doing just fine, my dear," Gil said.

"Have they been talking about me?" Jazz asked him.

"Oh," Gil said, "you are a peach!"

There was a moment of terrible silence as the CD-player switched to a new selection; we waited in suspended animation, and then Sinatra's "My Way" came trickling out of the twin tweeters. Jazz and the billionaire went back to slow dancing, and my old flame and I continued to engage in horribly awkward foreplay on the bear rug.

"What's the most erotic thing that has ever happened to you?" Vampora said, as she unzipped my pants. Then she re-adjusted her skirt to conceal our lingering his-and-hers genital contact.

"This is close."

"You two!" Gil shouted at us. We waited, but that was it. Jazz's head had fallen onto his chest. Without his support now, she'd have been an ivory-skinned lump on the floor.

"Tell me a good one about some little front-row flasher," Vampora said.

"No. Nothing like that has ever happened to me."

"Hey," Jazz shouted, at no one in particular, "who's talking about me?"

"You are a peach," Gil said. "Come here, my peach." I think he made some sloppy attempt to kiss her then.

For a painfully long time Vampora remained motionless while I gnashed my teeth and strained to hold back the inevitable. It was the first time I'd felt a woman's enveloping warmth in nearly nine years. "Anytime you want, Eggers," she whispered in my ear. "Don't wait for me. I already had my fun today with gizmo over there while you were out chopping wood."

Vampora started moving her hips around in quiet rotations, looking down at me with crossed eyes. She stroked my hair. "Good boy," she whispered. "Just what you've always wanted. And now maybe you'll leave my girlfriend alone."

We waited until Jazz had passed out on the futon and Gil had vanished before extricating ourselves. No parting words: one minute we had a jovial dancing billionaire in our midst, the next he was gone. One minute I was with Vampora in the Biblical sense, the next she was tiptoeing across the cabin to get a drink of water.

"Eggers," she said, moments before I'd passed out, "the Great Vampire Goddess thanks you so very much."

~

A few days later I saw Gil pass by the cabin for his morning constitutional with his Labrador Retrievers. I caught up with him on the return trip.

"Good morning!" I called out.

"Eggers!" His two Retrievers came over to lick my mittens. They're dumb beasts, friendly as hell though.

"Sir," I said, "how are you this morning?"

"Fine," he said nervously, "just fine. Come here Barnaby, Sweeney! Come here, I say. Now, sit." They dutifully sat by his feet, tails wagging. "Say, Eggers, I didn't do anything, uh, untoward to that poor sweet girl the other night, now did I?"

"It was a crazy night."

"Yes. Craziest Thanksgiving ever. What I wouldn't give to be forty-years-old again. Well, anyway, I am going to send her some flowers. Just in case—"

"Great idea, sir. Flowers good. Women like flowers. Flowers good."

He grinned. "I like you, Eggers. Just not as much anymore." He continued trudging up the slick road to his great log mansion.

I went back inside. Vampora was awake now; Jazz was still a set of curvy outlines under her monster pile of quilts. She doesn't appear until noon at the earliest. "We're beginning to smell a bit funky here," Vampora said, seating herself at the kitchen table, "from sleeping on that stupid dead bear all the time. And bathing in a bucket—it doesn't quite cut it."

I sat down across from her. She was wearing one of my flannel shirts along with Jazz's oversized fur-lined boots, and nothing else. The stove hadn't quite gotten the place up to a comfortable temperature yet.

Vampora made coffee, a backwoods act that involved pouring the steaming water directly over coarse grounds in a heavy metal strainer. It's the best coffee I've ever had. "Here," she said, sliding a hot cup across the table. "Breakfast?"

"I'm not hungry. I just want to get to work."

"Sure you are. You'll eat. You'll eat whatever momma makes for you."

I sipped coffee while she went out to the storage shed for supplies.

"Damn raccoons got all the sausage again," she announced on her return. "We need more of those big tins with clasps, Eggers." She took her loot over to the stove and started prying frozen strips of bacon loose and laying them out in the pan. Then she threw some frozen bread directly onto the stovetop. "I think the Vampire Lesbot has had her final seduction," she said. "Time to kill off the old gal. After ten novels—"

"Ten, really?"

"That's right. All international bestsellers. I'm actually bigger in Europe." I watched her stir the eggs after adding in some onions and red peppers and capers and black olives and cuts of provolone cheese and some other things. I breathed in that wonderful domestic smell and realized I was hungry after all.

"Over eight million copies sold at last count," Vampora said, "and you can bet your sweet ass I'm counting. Anyway"—she piled up the scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and burnt toast on one plate and brought it all over to the table—"I'm thinking of replacing Lesbot with vampire twins, Wendy and Wanda. They'll kill her off, somehow, and take over her empire." She went over to the lone cupboard to get a plate, and then slammed it down in front of me, along with a fork, a knife, and a bottle of hot sauce. "Here—eat!"

I filled my plate with a huge pyramid of eggs and many slabs of bacon and pieces of toast and watched her do the same. I dotted my cheesy eggs with little red Rorschach blotches of hot sauce and dove right in.

"Twins, huh?"

"Yeah," she said. "They're asexual; it's all about blood to them, blood, and more blood. Well, they're sick to death of blood. So to rekindle their old sexual fire, the old bats create a coven of beautiful half-breeds, you know, half vampire, half-human. They will be irresistible to morals, as deadly as they are beautiful. Hmm." She reflected on this a moment. "The sisters' plan is to live vicariously through the coven. Their sexual exploits will take up most of the book, of course. Then the sisters will lose control of them and have to kill them off, one by one. This is where you come in, by the way—I mean, Eggils. Dr. Morrisson. Who is not you, according to my lawyers."

I chewed, gulped coffee, swallowed. "Why not have the old gals rediscover their human sexuality and seduce the coven, one by one? Then they can all live happily ever after in some antebellum mansion."

"Have you even read one of my novels, Eggers?"

"Well—uh..."

"I know, I know!" She dumped more hot sauce on her eggs. "You've been busy trying to save the world."

"Sorry."

"So, is she any help at all?"

"Help?" I said. "Jazz is turning the whole thing around! Your little surprise there—"

"Who has the destructive capacity of a tsunami, don't forget."

"Yeah," I said, "right. But she is brilliant. Thank you."

"You are most welcome. Now, are we even?"

"Not even close."

When Jazz had finally crawled out of her cocoon of quilts around one o'clock, and after she'd had a few cups of coffee and some gummy bears and had lifted the cone of derisive silence she puts around herself for the first hour or so of each day, we got right to work. Vampora had gone up to Gil's log mansion to help him plot out his solarium.

"Well, Eggers," Jazz said, magic marker in hand. She was monkeying around with our most problematic equation. "What I wouldn't give to have my computer here..."

"Gil did offer to run a line down for us," I said. We were standing around the kitchen table like Nazi generals surveying their battle plan, fat mugs of coffee standing sentinel over our aggrieved efforts on paper.

"Hey," she said, "what about..."

I watched her marker dance across the tracing paper.

"What?" I said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Hawking's Paradox," she said. "Like, we're stupid?"

"No, no, no," I said. "I thought of that already."

"Not hard enough apparently."

She kept following what I was sure was a theoretical dead end. "Damn!" she said, setting down the marker. "Maybe you're right..."

"It was a valiant effort."

"So was Carthage." Her bottom lip started quivering as if she were about to cry. "Eggers, let's take a nap."

"Er—"

"A Platonic nap, you poor sad sack of a man."

~

Last Sunday, with one week left in the regular season, Gil finally invited me up to his log mansion to watch football. He had split-screen capabilities on his huge wall-mounted unit so he could revel in his Giant's continued success while I suffered through another close battle between my Steelers and one of their longtime conference rivals. I have been in wagon-wheel restaurants considerably smaller than this stretched-out basement area, which he referred to as "The Romper Room." It is the only high-ceilinged basement I have ever seen. The walls are paneled with rustic barn planks; the ceiling is covered with giant logs that still have moss on them, which must have been shellacked or something to make it all appear so shiny and permanent. I am sure some big-city designer had been paid a small mint to come up with that. This same genius had also decided that a billionaire's basement rec. room needed an honest-to-God moose head on the wall, along with a chortled accompaniment of other murdered woodland creatures' stuffed corpses in a display case covering the entirety of one wall.

We were sitting on a gigantic, centrally placed leather couch with a cooler full of iced beer between us.

"Giants have got this one locked up already," Gil said, yawning. "I just hope no one gets hurt before the playoffs."

"Must be nice," I said. "Steelers games have always been nail-biters, for as long as I can remember."

"Yeah." He opened the cooler. "Beer?"

"Ah, no. I'm still working on this one."

"Jerky then?"

"Swell," I said.

We were at peace at that moment reveling in this popular Sunday American pastime under the piteous gaze of a decapitated bull moose. I thought about it, how that poor solitary beast must have gone out one morning to rut around and eat moss and generally do healthy moose things, only to hear a strange echoing crack from afar. He must have wondered what the hell that was, and where it had come from—and then he would have felt something strange, maybe a tingling sensation spreading out from his massive chest, before he started staggering through the snowy path he knew so well, the path he had trod so many times as a calf under his mother's safe censure, suddenly unsure of which way to go to escape from this unseen foe as his shoulder freezes up on him and forces him to his knees, big brown moose eyes rolling back, confusion mingling with weakness, but no fear...no, no fear for the great bull moose of the forest.

"Eggers, you alright?"

"Yeah," I said. "Just...you shoot that moose yourself?"

"Yep," he said, beaming with pride. "Sure did. Not some hundred yards from where we're sitting, many, many years ago. Used to be a hunting lodge here, not too much bigger than your place...well, actually it was a lot bigger, but still rustic."

"Did he get to see you before he died?" I asked. "I'm just wondering if that big moose there got to see the strange upright creature that had forced him to face his last moments on Earth. His god, his great upright god—"

"You are a very strange man, Eggers."

"Yeah, well, soon we are all going to be very strange indeed."

"Still into that doomsday stuff, I take it?"

"Yep."

We drank beer and ate jerky and watched football, two regular guys here, one of whom happened to be a billionaire and the other who happened to be trying to save the human race. Somewhere in the midst of the fourth quarter, we heard the Retrievers barking up a storm in their palatial kennel upstairs: seconds later, I saw Jazz's flushed face peering in at me through the huge French doors, steaming up an outer pane of glass. I could also clearly make out my iron poker in her hand, and Vampora's own flushed face hanging over Jazz's shoulder like a beautiful harvest moon.

"Eggers!" Jazz shouted. "Come on out here! I've got something for you—you son of a bitch!"

"Aw, crap!" Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the football flutter out of Roethlisberger's hand and nosedive into the ground.

"Eggers," Gil said, paternally, "what the hell did you do?"

"Well," I said, "it is a chicken coop, right?"

"Cock of the rock," he muttered, clearly impressed.

"Come on out here, you asshole!" Jazz shouted.

"I would prefer not to!" I shouted back at her. I was hoping the reference to Melville, a writer we both loved inexplicably, would entice her to forget her anger and realize the ridiculousness of this moment, or at least drop the goddamn poker. I have seen tragedy averted on a lesser pretense, and we could all use a laugh around here.

"Vampora just told me about you two love birds!" Jazz shouted.

"I'm sorry," Vampora said. "I thought she'd take it better."

By then I'd gotten up and advanced to the French doors: some three feet of air and two thin little panes of glass separated my face from theirs. Gil hadn't stirred from the couch, although he had hit the mute button. "She's a little drunk," Vampora announced. I noticed that neither girl was wearing a coat, hat, or gloves.

I heard the cooler lid slam shut, and then Gil called out, "Maybe you should let them in. Eggers?"

"Yeah-yeah," I said. I opened the French doors. Jazz came in and set the poker against the wall, to my relief. Vampora came in as well and shut the doors behind them.

"I never let that girl out of my sight," Jazz said to me, her teeth chattering between words. "When the hell did it happen?"

"What do you mean—when?" I said.

"Sweetie," Vampora said, "you were right there. Thanksgiving—?"

"Thanksgiving?" Jazz said. "You mean—oh my God! On the bear rug? That quickly? Well"—she smiled at me, but it wasn't a nice smile at all—"some stud you are. So let me get this straight, Eggers. Here I am helping you avert utter insanity, and you go and seduce my girlfriend right under my nose? Is that it? Well, what's next?" She narrowed her big round eyes. "Maybe you can cut off one of my breasts and make a nice little skull cap for yourself! Or how about—"

"I'll take her home now," Vampora said.

"Put a starving rat up my ass and let it go to town!"

"Sweetie," Vampora said, "come on. Let's go—"

"Let us go, you and I!" Jazz said, in a shrieking upper-class British accent. "Like a patient euthanized on a table...I hate you, Eggers Mortensen. I hate you!" She picked up the poker; I immediately took a few steps back. "Oh," Jazz continued, "do I dare disturb the universe..."

Vampora gripped Jazz's shoulder firmly to keep her from advancing toward me. She addressed Gil: "Maybe Eggers could sleep here tonight?"

"Certainly, my dear."

Vampora turned Jazz around and maneuvered the brilliant little nerd girl out of the Boys' Romper Room. I watched them walk down the slippery road toward the smoky little cabin in the valley.

"Eggers," Gil said, invoking a hearty return to football watching, "you really are one clueless son of a bitch."

~

I waited a full week before making a vainglorious return to the cabin. Vampora responded to my presence by throwing up in the hand sink. I put her down on the futon, wrapped snugly in a wool blanket. Jazz and I had decided to forgo our doomsday work to attend to some domestic things. For one, we were nearly out of firewood. A few weeks ago, I had borrowed Gil's ATV and a good length of chain so I could dip into the woods behind the cabin and haul out a few man-sized fallen logs to cut up and split at some point. I was manning the chainsaw and Jazz was going wild with the splitting ax, bringing it down on each log with violent swirls of steamy air pouring out of her mouth. I noticed that she'd stripped down to a T-shirt already. She was quite muscular, her arms especially, a holdover from her early days as a promising gymnast.

"Jazz, geez," I said, shutting down the chainsaw.

"What?"

"Come on," I said. "You're all over the place."

"I could say the same about you." She nearly fell backwards as she slammed the ax into the next virgin log. "She doesn't have the flu, Eggers."

"What?"

"Vampora." She set up another log. "It's not the flu, and she's not hung over. It's morning sickness."

"What?"

"Yep," she said. "She's pregnant with your mongoloid child. No doubt about it. We went into town and got one of those home-pregnancy tests the other day. It was...it is"—her voice shot up a full register—"positive." Her ax got stuck in the log. "Hope it's a girl," she muttered. She tried to free the ax.

"Well..."

"And you should know," she continued, "Vampora's getting antsy. I think she wants to pull out soon—in fact, I know she does. She has professional obligations, you know, especially with that movie in the works." She finally pried the ax free. "Well, you can stand there like the village idiot if you want to, Eggers. I'm going to keep splitting wood so you don't freeze to death after we leave."

That night Vampora made a spectacular dinner—duck l'orange with garlic mashed potatoes and breaded asparagus spears, from-scratch bread sticks, and these neat little strawberry crepes for dessert, with some kind of sweet walnut dressing and fresh whipped cream. It had the feel of a last supper.

We ate silently like Protestants for most of the meal, and then Vampora offered up a toast. The wine was some heavy French varietal that lit up the roof of my mouth. "To our oneness of being!" she said. "And to the cross-eyed geniuses who have saved humanity from a most-horrible fate."

"What the hell do you mean?" I asked her.

"She didn't tell you?" Vampora replied.

"Tell me what?"

We both looked at Jazz.

"She solved your little existential conundrum," Vampora said.

"You actually solved it yourself," Jazz said in a soft voice, "years ago—you just didn't know it."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she said, "while you were away—uh, staying up at Gil's—I went back over your early equations. Couldn't sleep, you know. I was actually able to get a lot done without your negativity swirling around me. Hawking's Paradox—ha! I was right all along."

"That doesn't make any sense," I said. "Hawking solved his own paradox by admitting parallel universes. We rejected that—didn't we?"

"Yes," she continued, "because we thought it would prohibit time from doing its thing in our universe"—she started addressing Vampora now—"which is to support the singularity of all things. Put simply, a 'thing' is what it is because it is where it is. However, what Hawking was able to prove, mathematically, is that some 'things' aren't always where they are supposed to be, from our perspective anyway. Sometimes a 'thing' suddenly appears somewhere it could not possibly have gone in the time allotted to it, even if it were moving at the speed of light. But what poor Hawking has never been able to show is how, or why, this happens—"

I leaned forward. "But, still—"

"Don't interrupt me!" Jazz snapped.

"Sorry," I said. Vampora and I shared a conspiratorial look; we were used to Jazz's strange moods by now. "Go on."

"Well," Jazz said, pausing to catch her breath, "anyway, what old dingo breath here"—she patted my arm—"what he figured out, basically what he means by Infinite Drift, is that it's possible for a critical mass of 'things' to be where they are not supposed to be. Theoretically, this means two things could, in fact, be in the same place at the same time. This would disturb the universe in a way that would cut to the very core of our being. Let's just say it wouldn't be good for us—oh, not good at all!"

She took a sip of wine. "But now Hawking's Theory of Parallel Universes solves everything for us, and rather nicely too. A 'thing,' in other words, simply flashes into another universe whenever it drifts too far from where it's supposed to be in ours, and then snaps back before its absence has even been felt here. This is occurring like a bazillion times every nanosecond—"

"Which preludes Infinite Drift," I ventured.

"Exactly," Jazz said. "So, viola! We're saved. Everything in existence here straddles all timelines across all universes. So, even if we don't know where it is exactly, we know that it is -- it exists in all of its states at all times. The math, when you get right down to it, is actually somewhat simple. Let me show you." She got up, went over to the futon, and picked out a roll of tracing paper. "Take a gander at this," she said, unfurling it before my big dopey eyes.

"My God..." I muttered.

"See?" Jasmine said.

"So non-unitary time evolution—"

"Yes," Jazz said. "It's real. Now here's the mathematical proof. So you see"—she sat back down and took a big bite of bread—"there's no need to worry about Infinite Drift anymore. We will surely wipe ourselves out through more conventional means before it ever becomes a problem."

I took a clearly delineated moment out of my life to feast my eyes on the most elegant equation I have ever seen—the most beautiful, immaculate thing on this planet! My whole life—I could feel it happening—began to revolve around it. I could not even be sure I was the same person anymore.

"It's all wrapped up so neatly," I said. I may have started to cry a little at that point.

"Take it," Vampora said, as if she were daring me to do it.

"What?" I said.

"Sure," Jazz said. "What the hell would I want with it? Just...be good to my little pet."

I took the little piece of paper in my hand and folded it over gently, as if to protect the ink.

"Now, Eggers," Jazz said, "maybe you can sleep at night—"

"And maybe get a real life," Vampora added, wiping my cheek. "This should provide you with enough academic fodder to land some cushy tenure-track teaching post somewhere, right?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "It sure as hell will."

~

Around five the next morning, Vampora rolled me out of my futon to announce that they were leaving. The girls were heading back down to the city. I saw their myriad bags stacked up inside the front door and Jazz standing there in her oversized Eskimo parka and fuzzy black boots and giant penguin gloves, her face occluded by her hood exactly as it had been when she had first stepped out of that orange Jeep two months ago. I threw on some clothes and helped Vampora load up their stuff.

Then the girls climbed into the Jeep. Vampora elbowed Jasmine to get her to speak. "Oh, Eggers," Jazz said, "just so you know, none of that crap I told you about finding your book in the MIT library was true. I love life. I would never even think about killing myself. Vampora's agent is my cousin; that's actually how we met. Nothing fancy. And your little book? Packed with grammatical errors—I couldn't even finish it. We came up here to rescue you, Eggers, from yourself. Also—well, thank you for the sperm. We had a bet to see which one of us would win the jackpot. Guess it's Vampora, but it really should have been me, since I'm so much younger and more supple and all that, and it would be a much easier birth—"

"Shut up!" Vampora said, slapping Jazz's knee.

"You shut up!"

I was speechless.

"I think he wants us to go now," Jazz said.

Vampora fired up the Jeep. "Eggers," she said, shifting into 'D' for drive, "do yourself a favor: chop off that hideous beard, move back to the city, and find yourself a nice plump little wife to take care of you."

I watched them fishtail up the road, pass Gil's mansion, and disappear into a flurry of whiteness around Deadman's Curve.

Now the girls are gone. Here for a time, now gone. I stayed outside in the blinding snow until Gil had driven down in his flashy pickup. "Thought they'd never leave," he said, ambling with me toward the warm inside of the cabin.

I put some water on the woodstove for coffee. "You were right," I said. "It worked like a charm."

"She solved it?" I could sense the excitement in his voice. "She—?"

"That's right. Man!" I shook my head. "I wish I were that goddamn smart."

"She's not that smart," Gil said, "or she would have figured out what she was really doing for us. And she still might."

"She will," I said. "No doubt about it."

"Then we'll need to protect ourselves. Hell hath no fury—you know the rest. Eggers, we just might need those damn Dago friends of mine after all." He produced two fat cigars from his fob pocket. "My friend," he continued, "I've got to say, I had you figured all wrong. For a while there I thought—honest to God—you really were a simpleton."

"I am. Seriously—"

"Me too then. Well?"

"Well, what?" I bit off the end of my cigar, spit the nub out on the floor; he lit it for me.

"How much commercial potential do you think this thing has?" he asked. He lit his own cigar now.

"How the hell would I know?" I said. "I've never been on The Celebrity Apprentice."

"But it'll work—you're sure of that now?"

"Oh," I said, "it'll work. I'd stake my life on it."

"Well," he said, "then that's that."

"Yep."

I was still trying to wrap the logical strands of my brain around the simple brilliance of Dr. Jasmine Geckle's equation, still trying to establish at least a baseline comprehension of what it would mean to bring non-unitary time evolution into the practical realm. If it works, we will be able to turn the entire multi-verse into one giant cloud-like computer processor. We will be able to do so many things, so perfectly...

Gil and I smoked our cigars while waiting for the water to boil. "Eggers," he said, "you know, for most of my life, I've let lesser men cling to me like leeches to get rich, really stinking rich. I let them because—well, Christ, it's America: there's plenty to go around. Now, at eighty-one years of age, here I have become the leech, clinging to you. And let me tell you it's not so bad." He blew out a perfect series of concentric smoke rings. "That strange slippery universe you keep yammering on about, Eggers? I have a feeling you and I are going to own it soon."

"Well," I said, "then you take this."

"What's this?"

"A piece of tracing paper."

"I can see that!"

"Any physicist worth his salt would chop off his own foot to get a hold of that."

"Why give it to me?"

I looked away: "I have something I need to do here. Take it."

"I knew it!" he said. "A woman is at the center of things, after all. But which one?"

"Just take it!" I shouted.

"I will not!" The kettle started to whistle but we both ignored it. "Look, Eggers," he said, "we're partners in this—you hear me? I can't do this without you."

"Just, please—go."

"Alright. You do what you need to do here—but nothing too crazy, okay?" He stood up, his whiskery face breaking through our celebratory plume of smoke. "Alright, I'm going. See? Here I go..."

He's gone now, my man Gil. He's gone and I'm here to do my thing, which involves pouring out a five-gallon can of gasoline on the bear rug...now I light a match and watch it burn in my hand. I have to drop it, of course. Either I have to...you get me, or you do not.

Now a greedy blue wall of flame is gaining height some three feet from me; it's gaining height and force; it's rolling over the bear rug fast, turning orange now, snaking its way toward those pyramidal rolls on the kitchen table...

I've stepped safely outside—why wouldn't I?—and already the heat from the great cabin fire is baking my face. I pull up my hood, tuck the roll of paper under my arm, and turn away from my burning little cabin in Maine. It's snowing more heavily now. I can barely make out the outline of Gil's imperious log mansion up ahead on its earthy pedestal. But I know it's there, about half a mile away, yes...

I know that at some point, maybe even by the time the girls reach the little town of Squapan—in just a few minutes probably, the way my old flame drives,—Jazz will begin to suspect something. Vampora will certainly have to pull into the general store there—she always has to pee when she travels—and Jazz will likely go inside to buy some Slim Jims or Jalapeño potato chips or something to quell her endless hunger for junk food. As she's standing by the checkout counter—that's when it will happen. She will glance at the magazine rack and spot the reconstituted face of some aging actress or see some simple recipe for flourless crepes...something will happen anyway. There will be some imagistic trigger and suddenly it will click, what she has just done.

But she won't say a thing to Vampora—that's the thing. That's how I see it anyway. Instead the brilliant little nerd girl will smile knowingly as she gets back into that orange Jeep for the long haul back down to New York City. Yes. She will keep her great knowledge to herself as isolate flecks of snow lose their essential being to the monotonous slosh of wiper blades.

# CHAPTER TWO

I rode with Gil back to New York in his shiny, big-wheeled pickup truck with his slobbery Retrievers safe and sound in their makeshift kennel in the capped bed. We'd left his mansion immediately that morning; there was no reason to spend another minute in Maine.

For the first few hours, I could only stare wide-eyed at the slippery road ahead, haunted as I was by the image of all those poisonous blue-orange tongues of fire lashing out at the delicate lower branches of the pine trees surrounding it. They didn't deserve to be such an integral part of that manic scene, those poor old pines, didn't deserve the "Do-Trees-Have-Standing?" pain I'd caused them.

Gil was the perfect travel mate that day. He didn't say anything to me at all, nor did he play the radio, whistle, hum, burp, or do anything to disrupt my insular morbidity. This allowed me to sleep the whole way. I awoke on the Hudson Bridge, looking down at the flat shimmering water of that eponymous river, with the light-dotted skyline of New Jersey dropping off into the greater distance. We were careening through a gaping lacuna of orange dots and glowing cement, or so it seemed to me. I had drool running down my chin and a horrible painful kink in my neck. Before I had stumbled into that great log mansion. Gil had set up some kind of late-night secret meeting with his longstanding lawyer to work out the natty details of immediate incorporation. He tried to get me to attend, and he actually insisted that I get my own lawyer at this point, but I ducked out of both by insisting that I trust him completely when it comes to money matters, which is not a lie. In truth, I cannot even begin to explain the state of mind I was in at this time. All I know is that I couldn't shake the impression that my body was in imminent danger of collapsing into one flat boneless pile of cartoon eyeballs and flesh on the ground for the nocturnal denizens of Manhattan to walk around on their way to better tidings elsewhere.

Ah, Manhattan! My old stomping grounds...Gil stopped the truck at the corner of Ellington and Columbus, some three blocks from my eventual destination; the dogs immediately stuck their muzzles through the little sliding window separating us from them; they were now giving out excitable yips to be let out or perhaps to express their brutish happiness at being alive. I'd asked Gil to stop there at that particular corner because—I won't lie to you—I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. A light snow was falling now, falling ever so lightly on multi-million-dollar condos and burnt-out tenement complexes alike. Gil made some remark about how snow at night in the city reminded him of fireflies, which I thought was damn clever under the circumstances. Then we sat in silence in that over-heated quad cab of his for a long time—until he suddenly whipped out his wallet and handed over one-hundred-and-twenty-two dollars, which he told me with great humility was all the cash he had on him. Then more infernal silence punctuated by the occasional happy-dog yip.

Finally, Gil slid over, rather quickly and I would have to say gracefully for an old dude, grabbed my cheeks above my beard-line, and told me he loves me like a son and is worried about me. He admonished me not to do anything too stupid tonight; then he made me promise that I would not do anything too stupid tonight; then he made me promise that I would call him on his cell in the morning to let him know that I hadn't done anything too stupid tonight; and then he finally released me...

I got out, took one last look at that roll of tracing paper shoved down into a drink holder, and slammed the door. After the truck had pulled away, I stood out in the bitter cold for I do not know how long. The sidewalks were mostly empty, with only some giggling old couple in matching Christmas sweaters across the street walking briskly hand in hand. I eventually got my feet to move. I was now walking toward the Park, on a compass heading east-southeast, moving without appreciation past all the red-green strings of blinking lights and sinister smirking Santas...toward a certain towering brownstone with cracked spires flanking its solitary front door. The building had risen up in my mind as the only place on earth.

I got into the lobby without any trouble—someone had propped the main door open with a popular paperback from twenty years ago—and then I trudged up the central stairway of this somewhat modest but neat and clean condominium complex to the second floor, to unit Number Three. Hard to believe, but those were my singular knuckles poised over the smooth surface of that private door with a nice holly wreath encircling a big brass "3" inviting any and all delivery boys or girls to the correct address of someone who, when I lived there with her anyway, couldn't stop spending money on clever mail-order gadgets. I was shaking from head to foot, fighting off a jaw-clenching tension that lay coiled in some interstitial chamber of my body as I tried to talk myself into rapping on wood. You see, I was about to knock on the door of one Gloria Steckman's place of residence. The last time I'd seen her in person—some nine years ago—she'd thrown herbal tea in my face and told me to go get bent. I won't even try to pretend I didn't deserve it.

I thought for a moment, a panicky rough moment that seemed to roll on for years, that she might not even live here anymore. I'd forgotten to look for her name on the mailboxes in the entryway. But then I remembered that she'd inherited this little two-bedroom condo from her maternal grandmother; it was (or had been when I lived with her anyway) accessed at about one-sixth its actual value—it really cost next to nothing to keep up...she didn't earn shit as a social worker, and she was, above all else, a full-blooded New Yorker through and through. No question about it. She was still there: where else could she go?

I finally made myself knock on the door. It was about eleven o'clock by then. Maybe I'd be waking her up, maybe not. Maybe she'd recognize me; maybe she would not. I'd had wild streams of cool curly hair the color of sun-bleached driftwood and a smooth face when we were in the midst of our three-year mad span of craziness, and was generally thought of as cute, albeit in a co-co-coco-puffs kind of way. I had also been a workout nut, a crazy phase of my life that lasted about six years, and probably had a good thirty pounds of muscle on my medium frame back then. Now I had the misshapen backwoods physique of someone who eats too much of one thing and never sleeps.

I could see a pinpoint of light—it had just appeared—and then a flash of motion behind the crazy-house peephole in the center of the door. Good cautious girl. I heard the sliding of brass on brass, three distinct clicks, and then the door rotated open. It opened and a beamy heart-shaped face appeared around the leading edge. Yes, it was her big face with its geometrically centered little pushpin nose and high flanking cheeks, and only the crinkling suggestion of wrinkles around some lively blue eyes. Lips that sink ships...my Gloria! My Ashkenazi nightmare! Her hair was still strawberry blond, still shoulder length, and still straight as uncooked spaghetti. Damn! I thought. Only an idiot would ever have let such beauty go. Ergo: I am an idiot. If my epithet says anything to the contrary, it's because my heirs think the truth about me reflects badly on them.

"Eggers?" she said in her sleepy Lauren Bacall voice. She was wrapped in a short white terry-cloth robe, which I wish to God had been a full-length loose gray tunic instead. The robe encouraged my eyes to linger on her drop-down muscular thighs for far longer than is politically correct before falling helplessly to her flat little Flintstone feet.

"Gloria—hi."

"Oh my God! Eggers? Is that you? Did something happen? Are you okay?"

"I don't know."

"Aw, geez. Here we go. Well—"

"I-I don't know what I'm doing here actually. I'm sorry."

She exhaled volubly. "Come on...come in."

I couldn't believe it. She let me in. She smiled at me—actually smiled, after all these years—and then stepped forward to give me a hug. No kiss, not even a little peck on the cheek, but it was nice anyway, a nice hug. I was crying now, but I cannot say why. I could smell the pine tar from her sparse little Christmas tree in the corner, a blue spruce as always, decorated exclusively this holiday season with little hand-knitted Cat-in-the-Hat characters. She always was a notorious theme decorator, and she's not the only agnostic-leaning-atheist Jew I know who puts up a tree and stockings every year for her goy boy and guests to appreciate.

"It's okay," she said. She took my hand. "Come on, sit down. Over here, on the couch. Sit down, Eggers. Just breathe." I sat on the couch. My eyes were closed now. It's as if I were sinking into the soft eternal essence of the universe. Just breathe. It's as if I were being slowly laid down in a warm salty bath with effervescence jets of water bubbling up around me. I think Cat Stevens may have been playing in the background: It's not time to make a change / just relax, and take it easy...

Then came the hard thunder, the warning rumble of sky—a man's voice:

"Honey?"

I opened my eyes.

"Oh?" the man said, eyeing me up from the doorway of bedroom number one. He was tall and manly; he was a tall manly man. He wore honest-to-God checkered-blue-flannel PJs that covered him up from his lower neck to his ankles. (In his defense, it was rather cold in Gloria's place.) "Company?" the man asked.

"This is Eggers," Gloria said. "I told you someone was knocking on the door, Ned."

"Eggers?"

"I told you about him. The doom-and-gloom guy?"

"Oh, right. Well—"

"I can go," I offered.

"No," Gloria said. "It's late. You can sleep on the couch."

"Fine with me," the man—Ned—said. And then he actually did an about-face and went back into the bedroom. Wow, I thought. Men like that—they all need to get together in Copenhagen or Reykjavik or somewhere like that and draft some kind of definitive document for mass distribution so that the rest of us of the male genus know how they do it, how they are so goddamn compliant with their women. But do not get the wrong idea here. Ned is okay. I'll never say anything bad about Ned. Give Ned his due—he could kick the living shit out of me if it ever came down to that. Ned makes a great Asian stir-fry; he's a high priest of the outdoor grill; he can tell you exactly what he puts in his family-recipe meatloaf to make it taste so damn good. Ned will draw you a hot bubble bath and stay to rub your feet while you cry for no reason and listen to Tori Amos. His technique for cunnilingus is flawless. Ned loved my Gloria and probably still does. Ned is...he's not bad looking. He'll do okay in the single world. Some girls, I know, they like the tall, hirsute "I can take a brick to the face" kind of guy.

"Eggers?" Gloria said.

"Oh, uh—sorry."

"You're full of 'sorry' tonight, aren't you?"

"I guess."

"You guess?"

"I don't know."

"Would you like some tea?" she asked.

"Tea—ha!"

"What?"

"Never mind," I said, determined to stop scaring her. I sincerely do not want to scare people. "Tea is...oh God! No tea, please! No tea—"

"Okay-okay. No tea. I won't serve tea—there's no tea in the house. Okay?" She patted my hand. "I'm sorry. I just—I never was good at this. Look, just tell me: is there...Eggers, is there something I'm supposed to be doing?" She looked away. "I just—I never could understand why you like to take that shit."

"What?" I sat up straighter, which for some reason made her eyes shoot wide open. She slid a few deeply symbolic inches away from me. "No, Gloria! You've got it all wrong. I am stone cold sober right now. I haven't taken anything like that in years."

"Well, then—"

"I'm just naturally insane tonight."

"Good to know." She reached over and patted my hand again. "Good to know," she repeated. Then—I kid you not—she slid over next to me, brought my head down to her warm bosom, and kissed me, twice, above my left ear. She held me tightly; she held me like that for quite a while. I guess I fell asleep at some point. There was probably more talking than what I have put down here. I'm sure more was said. But what really matters is that I woke up on the couch the next morning with my head sunk down into a big fluffy pillow, fully clothed, snug as a bug in a nice thick generational quilt. I could hear Ned's low grumbling voice in the kitchen, and Gloria's deep sonorous replies, which were curt enough to give me hope in my romantic mission.

I made myself sit up, and for the next few minutes all I could do was rub my own temples as I grappled with some bizarre but not-at-all unsavory impressions of a future with Gloria, the plump little seductress who had stolen my virginity at a wild graduation party for MIT glory boys in a haunted Bostonian landmark mansion some twelve years ago. I wanted to start whistling like a schoolboy on summer break and skip on into the kitchen to plant a big kiss on her lips, right there in front of poor old Ned, and then sit down to a nice steaming cup of her jaw-rattling java and a fresh copy of the New York Times. Everything is A-Okay when you're with a girl like Gloria.

Instead, I kept the quilt wrapped tightly around my stiff body and drifted like a mummy toward the smell of cinnamon.

"Oh, hey there—good morning," Ned said. He was sitting at the head of the little round kitchen table in his nice dark mass-produced suit. My presence in the kitchen did not seem to shake him up at all.

Gloria got up and wordlessly poured me a cup of coffee. She set it down in front of me and assumed her place at Ned's side. I took a quick sip and immediately burned the roof of my mouth. "Ned," I said, shaking off the pain. "Ready for work, I see. It's hump day, right?"

"It's Thursday, chief."

"Right. Thursday. The Day of Thunor...Thor's Day...Thor of the mighty hammer. And what a glorious Thursday it is! Gloria?"

"Eggers."

"This coffee is excellent. This is excellent coffee."

"I'm glad you like it," she replied. She looked at Ned. "Guess I should go get ready for work now."

Ned and I both shared the same primordial panic moment, what I am now willing to chalk up to some evolutionary holdover of the basic instinct for immediate destruction that strikes two rutting bucks, for instance, when they meet by chance at the watering hole. We both wanted to say something to our Gloria to keep her here with us, but it was already too late: she did it—Gloria left us alone in her neat little kitchen. I like Gloria's old kitchen, by the way. I will always like Gloria's kitchen.

"So," Ned finally said, his dead-bolt eyes focused on something hanging just over my left shoulder, "Gloria tells me you're a writer."

"What?"

He took a big Ned-like bite out of his steamy cinnamon bun, followed by a cheek-puffing swig of orange juice. The Neds of the world chew their food completely before they start talking. "Yeah," he said. "Gloria said you published some book; said she couldn't understand a word of it."

"She read it? She actually read my book—"

"She said you were some kind of scientist..."

"A cosmologist."

"Yeah—I'm one-hundred-percent sure that's what she said." He had so much chipper goodness in his voice that he, Ned, became the one I wanted to kiss now. "Eggers—uh, listen. Any friend of Gloria's is welcome in this house. If you need a place to crash for a while—"

"Thanks."

"Great! Well"—he slid his chair out and stood up—"see ya."

Ned was gone. He left for work that morning after slipping into the master bedroom to plant one last stealth kiss on his girlfriend Gloria. I'd heard more hushed conversation from the living room before the front door slammed shut. All I could do for an infernal span of time was pass my eyes over things and wonder if they were actually here in all their singular glory. I mean, could I actually reach out, touch, and possibly even break that little ceramic owl over there? I noticed it had an old-school rotary timer embedded in its belly. I saw a quartet of Winnie-the-Pooh potholders hanging on little brass hooks in a descending arc on the narrow strip of wall between the old white Frigidaire and the old white gas stove. There was Kanga and Baby Roo and Tigger and Piglet...

Gloria appeared in the doorway.

"You're not dressed," I remarked.

"I called off work today," she said. I could not stop staring at her. It was strange: she had drifted into the kitchen and made it over to the stove, moving from Point A to Point B without occupying any points in between.

"Migraine?" I asked.

"No. I just called off."

"Well, sit down. Let's talk."

She sighed, but she did finally sit down.

"Listen," I began, "I'm thirty-nine years old now, Gloria. I've been a chronic underachiever, as you well know, scrounging up adjunct teaching gigs here and there, ghostwriting dissertations, whatever. But now—well, I've affected an amazing turn-around. Listen, I am about to become a part owner of the known universe, with all the attendant wealth you might expect from such a position. I mean it. The details are still being worked out."

She yawned, revealing those little snaggled bottom teeth of hers, and then she sneezed into her forearm. "That sounds really nice, Eggers. Good for you."

"I'm serious—damn it!"

"I see. And just what will you do with the universe when it's all yours?"

"Make it my playground—our playground, if you'll have me."

"Unh-huh. I thought that might be why you came here. Listen to me, Eggers. I've waited a long time for a man like Ned. He is sensitive and sweet; he's good to me, good for me. Christ, my parents love him and he's not even Jewish. We've been together for almost a year now. Eggers, what you and I had, or did—that was so long ago. How about if I make you a nice hot breakfast and then you go on your merry way?"

"Sleep with me, Gloria. Right here, right now. Then, if you want, I'll get the hell out of your hair and you'll never hear from me again."

"You're that horny?"

"Actually, no. But I was hoping you were."

"Hmm." She was still in her little white terry-cloth bathrobe. Her knees were slightly apart...I mean, I couldn't exactly see them as they were under the table, but why wouldn't they be? I bet her toes were curled. Mine were anyway. I wasn't horny—no, not exactly—but I desperately wanted to part a certain someone's robe and plant my palms on her little teacup breasts. I wanted to race the soft inner sanctum of someone's thigh with the tip of my tongue. I wanted to make Gloria Steckman moan with pleasure—that's all.

"Gloria?" I said.

"Eggers. Would you like some more coffee?"

"No."

"Something to eat then? Cinnamon bun? They're still warm. Or I can make you some cheesy eggs and bacon."

"No."

"Right. Uh, you were about to say?"

I rotated my half-full coffee mug, one full complete 360-degree rotation. "Gloria, what I came here to ask you...what I want to know is, can you name one person in your life, one single person, who has been totally, unfailingly honest with you? Can you honestly say that you've never caught old Neddy there in a lie? Some men—you know. They'll say or do anything for a blow job."

"You're crude!"

"Right. But answer the question. Answer it honestly."

"I'm not sure where you're going with this, Eggers. But...all right. The answer is—no. I don't think I can say there's anyone, even Ned, who has been perfectly honest with me. But I don't expect it, so it's not an issue. People are what they are."

"Well," I said, "that's true. But, Gloria, I am that person. Think about it. I have always been perfectly honest with you, even when it wasn't in my best interests, so to speak. That's why we broke up, remember? I took acid at Brooke's party, after you'd expressly told me you'd give me the boot if I ever did that again. You asked, and I told you the truth even though I knew what would happen. You threw tea in my face, if you recall. Look, I have to be honest with people—I can't help it. It's like a disease—"

"Hope it's not contagious then."

"Ha! Ha-ha. That's good. You always could make me laugh."

"Yeah," she said. "We did laugh a lot. And cry—"

"Both are good. At least you know you're feeling something."

She brought her hands up to the top of the table and folded them together in a tense little teepee of gnarly piano-player fingers. (She's concert-level, though she doesn't play out anymore.) "So you mean it, Eggers? I can ask you anything and you'll answer it honestly?"

"Sure."

"Okay, then. I have the perfect question for you, and I hope it makes you spontaneously combust, right here in my own damn kitchen." She brought her luscious lips to within a centimeter of my nose, and whispered, "Eggers Mortensen? Will you ever love anyone as much as you love that big trollop Vampora?"

"No, never. I'm sorry."

She pulled back. "Oh my God!"

"Now listen—"

"You are incorrigible! Now I remember—"

"Gloria?"

"You are such an asshole!"

"Gloria? I'm just being honest with you—"

"Fuck your honesty! You're being selfish."

"Man," I said, "I've never wanted to kiss anybody more than I want to kiss you right now."

"I don't care what you do. Kiss me, fuck me. I don't care."

"Damn—"

And that's how it happened. Most things happen and they're little moments. You hardly note them. Other things happen and they stay lodged in your brain for life. They are big moments. This may be the biggest one of all for me, what we ended up doing in Gloria's kitchen. It's so big I'm not sure I'm capable of seeing the real here-and-now Gloria when she is standing right in front of me trying to get me interested in the type of curtains we should have in our palatial living room or telling me what our charitable foundation is doing, because the moaning, screaming, finger-nail-digging one from that morning is still roaring up in the rubble of my mind.

Afterwards we lay side by side on the cold linoleum like fresh-market fish on ice.

"You know what's really great about our, uh, little arrangement here?" I said when I'd finally caught my breath.

"What, Eggers?"

"I have to be honest with you, but you don't have to reciprocate. You can lie through your teeth for all I care. In fact, I insist you do so whenever it will spare me any pain. Just don't ever leave me, no matter what I do. Okay?"

"Hey!" She put a finger over my lips. "Shut up, Eggers. Despite what happened here, this isn't about us. I am about to break the heart of a man, a damn good man, who doesn't deserve it. What do you think about that?"

"You honestly want to know what I think about that?"

"Wait! No, Eggers. I absolutely do not want to know how heartless you really are."

~

I think it says something about Gloria's true feelings for me that I was not allowed to tell her that I was spending my days in secret meetings in a famous lower-Manhattan corporate complex a few blocks from Ground Zero on more-than-equal footing with sundry individuals generally considered to be the best and brightest in their respective fields, and yet she kicked Ned out and inserted me in his place anyway. I only had to spend a grand total of nine days at a Midtown hotel, including a gloomy Christmas—worst ever, by far—that involved a lot of pizza and beer, and a little baggie of Vermont's unheralded cash crop.

Three days after Christmas I checked out of the hotel and moved in with Gloria. We spent New Year's together, just the two of us on the couch. We watched the Ball drop on television and then toasted our spurious togetherness with stifled yawns and nervous hopes, but no resolutions.

After that, we fell into a domestic routine that, for better or worse, seemed preordained. I left at seven sharp every morning and typically didn't return home until well after eight in the evening. I guess Gloria really did believe, as my ID tag said, that I was a Junior Researcher who happened to like very expensive Italian suits, a dozen of which were now hanging in Ned's old half of the closet. Maybe she figured I had a straight nine-to-five job, and I came home so late every night because I liked to amble about the theatre district after work, indulging myself with all the young imagistic furies of high fashion and low morals. But—no. Like most Midwestern transplants, I find the New York street scene personally invasive. When you shove so many seething bodies into one confined space where escape is impossible, it automates the fight instinct.

In any case, we made it through the biting cold days of January and on into February. On Valentine's Day, I finally asked her point-blank, "So, Gloria, what would you do if you suddenly had millions of dollars to play around with? And pretty soon you will, you know."

I'd come home early, around six, so she was still over by the stove preparing dinner. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and little silver pumps, along with a pearl necklace, and there were two real pearls held out by little inverted hands dangling from her ears. For my part, I'd changed out of my corporate clothes, was now wearing an old Pearl Jam concert T-shirt, and ripped jeans.

"Gloria?"

"Well," she replied, keeping her back to me, "guess I'd pay off my students loans first. Then I'd buy myself the biggest fucking Steinway you ever saw." She was leafing through her immaculate spice rack in search of the one "secret" spice that would make this, like all her meals, distinctive. "I'd get rid of Ned's workout shit and turn the guest room there into my music studio. I'd start playing again."

"Oh come on!" I said. "Why would you continue to live here?"

"Oh, I'll never give this place up."

"But you couldn't get a grand piano in here unless you knocked out a wall or something. Well, I guess we could always do that."

She dipped a finger into one of the three steaming pots on the stove. She tasted it and immediately added more salt. I was still trying to figure out what she was making. I could smell something pungent, sweet, and a bit exotic, probably curry, and I was sure one of the covered pots in the back contained rice. Curry and rice—her signature combination. The kitchen was full of steam and the aroma of life now. We had been together on this, our second go-around, for barely seven weeks and yet already we were at the open-farting, kissing-without-brushing stage. This time we were able to leap over all the time-stamped middle stages of a modern American courtship, which I must say is nice.

"Hey," she said, "do you want to set the table or just sit there drinking whiskey?"

"Is that a trick question?"

"Set the damn table, Eggers."

"Sure thing."

I set the table, throwing down two regular plates, two forks, two knives, two spoons, and two slightly spotted wine glasses. Meanwhile she had poured her dinner creation out into a large ceramic serving bowl. I watched her fluttering fingers lay down some parsley sprigs, pimentos, and cracked red pepper for garnish. Now I could see. It was lamb. Lamb is my favorite thing on God's great earth, and I had not had it for ages. She had made me curried lamb with saffron rice and—I knew this because I finally went over to the stove to look—tapioca pudding for dessert. What's more, she had gotten a good-label bottle of Malbec and set it on the table for me to open.

"Gloria sweets," I said, after my first bite, "this is really delicious. Mm-mm good! I can't believe you made me curried lamb. There's nothing on God's great Earth I love more than lamb!"

"Glad you like it."

"This is the best goddamn lamb curry I've ever eaten! I swear. And tapioca pudding? How did you know that was my favorite dessert?"

"Your mother. She told me."

"What?" I said. "My mom? She called—here?"

"No. Actually, Eggers—settle down now, will you?—I called her."

"You—when?"

"Oh, yesterday. It was nice. We talked for a long time. I invited her here for a visit sometime this summer. She's thinking about it—"

"Oh, God!"

"Your mother and I have a lot in common."

"I'll bet you have!" I was really rocking in my chair now.

"Oh calm down!" she said. She picked at her food. "You need to let up on your mother, buddy."

"What don't you ask her what she did to my father before you say that."

"I know all about that," she said. "She told me. People make mistakes. Eggers?"

"Oh here it comes..."

"I'm pregnant."

"Ah!"

"I just...I didn't know how to tell you. That's actually why I called your mother. I wanted her advice. My own mother, well—"

"She pushed for an abortion, I'm sure."

"She did not! Shame on you. No. Your mother suggested I make you a special meal, get you really drunk, and then just lay it on you. She said Mortensen men need clubbed in the head or they just don't get certain things. I'm inclined to agree."

My brain was spinning with ugly thoughts. "Please, please tell me you didn't cry on the phone with her. Gloria?"

"I cried on the phone, yes, a little—what's the big deal?"

"You have no idea what you just did. Now"—I let out a not-so-little burp—"now I make pregnant women cry. Some son!"

"You need to let up on your mother, buddy."

"So," I said, chewing a big chunk of lamb, "you are pregnant,—my girl is pregnant. Or should I be saying 'we'? We are pregnant. Isn't that the modern way?"

"Fuck that, Eggers. Men can say 'we' when one of their lower ribs gets broken by a late-term fetal kick, okay. Anyway, I'm not sure it's yours. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't."

"I shot up out of my seat. "Ah! So that would explain why you haven't been drinking with me."

"You apparently drink enough for two."

"Well," I said, keeping my face turned down, "now doesn't that make us the modern American family. We're both lousy with children and stepchildren now."

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Okay," I said. "Since we're in a confessional mode here—"

"Oh, I don't like where this is going!"

I took a long thoughtful sip of wine, and then another; she refilled my glass with the untouched contents of hers. "Thanks," I said.

"Sure thing. Now, Eggers, you were saying?"

"Right." I took another sip of wine. Now I had to begin: "You know when I was up in that horrible little cabin in Maine working on stuff?"

"After your nervous breakdown? Your mother told me about that too."

"Right. I, uh, I wasn't exactly alone there."

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is Vampora came up for a little visit."

"What do you mean 'little visit?'"

"I mean she just showed up one morning and stayed for a few weeks. She had this weird girl with her, her lover, you know, so it wasn't just the two of us. I don't know how they even found out where I was. My brother didn't even know."

"Now I really don't like where this is going!"

"She and I, uh, we had a moment together."

"A moment?" she said. "What kind of moment?"

"The kind that social researchers call irresponsible when it happens to teenagers. The kind you and I had on this here kitchen floor, only not nearly as good. So you see? Looks like we are both going to be a parent and stepparent now, Gloria sweets—the modern American family, right here. We should be celebrating."

"I don't want to celebrate. There's nothing to celebrate."

"How about our love?" I said.

"Fuck that!"

"Well now," I muttered, "that's very lady-like. How the hell can you be mad at me anyway? We're in the same boat here."

"No, we are not. There's a big difference. I was never really in love with Ned." She got up and started dishing out dessert. "Well, sweetie," she said, plopping a big bolus of pudding into my dessert bowl, "for what it's worth, happy fucking Valentine's Day."

~

A few weeks later, my brother Levi paid me—us—a surprise visit in the middle of the night. By then he was a full-fledged member of our little skull-and-crossbones secret society, serving as the Chief of Public Relations for X+ Corporation. (They let me name it, and so I picked the name of Vampora's old college band, The X+ Girls.)

In any case, I had barely gotten the door open to admit him when he flew right by me without a word of greeting and stopped abruptly in the exact geometric center of the living room.

"I just thought of something," he said.

"Can't sleep, I take it?" I said.

"I think I know how to solve the containment problem, Eggers."

"Hey, that's my job. I'll solve the containment problem. You stick to public relations."

He cranked his head around to look at me. I felt like a small moon stuck in his giant planetary orbit.

"What?" I said.

"Jesus, man!" He focused in on my stomach. "Are you getting fat now, Eggers?"

I looked down at my shirtless self. What could I say?

"It's the lighting," I muttered. But in truth, I had put on almost twenty pounds in my relatively short time with Gloria, most of it around my mid-section. And the concept of 'fat' to my brother is predicated on the same scale most anorexics use: anything over eight percent is way out.

I watched him taking in Gloria's things with his bright sweeping eyes. Already I could see that the triumvirate of two brothers and a girl was somewhat dicey here. I had to believe that Gloria was just too crude, too boxy, for a man like Levi Mortensen. He was like a Hollywood idol, with a straight Superman jaw line and perfect little dimple in his chin, thick cross-bow lips, our maternal side's nubby little nose (as opposed to the paternal beak), and a full head of slicked-back blonde hair.

And not to hang my wonderful partner out to dry here, but she did tell me once that she could never trust a man who couldn't be mollified by a good juicy steak. She may also have said something about how vegetarian men all make love like this one yogi from Minnesota she had dated for a mercifully brief span of time: all fingers, no cock.

Matter and anti-matter—right there for even the dimmest of the dim to see.

My brother was still standing in the center of the living room. I was still trying to figure out why the hell he was here.

"Mom's worried about you," Levi said. "She knows everything now about your situation with this girl. And you know how she feels about cohabitation before marriage."

"Yeah. Best to wait until you're married to screw someone over."

He let that slide. "Being a father, Eggers. Man! It's the hardest thing you'll ever do."

"Well," I said, "take this back to mom, Levi. For the first time in his life, your son Eggers is getting great food and great sex at the same time—what's to worry about?"

"Plenty."

"Plenty?"

"Yes," he said. "Because when it comes to abstract ideas, you're right up there with anyone. But when it comes to real-life things, Eggers, things that matter—you're the kid in the corner who eats rubber bands. No offense."

"I love this girl, Levi. I mean it. Gloria's going to be the grieving widow at my funeral someday."

"Jesus! What a morbid thing to say."

Levi took out a new pack of cigarettes, tore off the wrapper, and shook it until one lone cigarette was standing out above all the others, brought forth into the light by a combination of straight defiance of the odds and chaos theory. It went right to his mouth.

"Can't smoke that in here," I said. He ignored me and lit it up. And there you go, the workout nut, vegetarian, kung-fu master is a smoker. Every man has his thing, I guess.

"The kitchen then," I said. We went into the kitchen. I turned on the exhaust fan. He sat at the de facto head of the little round table. I poured him a whiskey, no seltzer, no ice—just straight whiskey in a shot glass. Levi never let it touch the table. I poured out another, and another, and another—and finally he set his shot glass down. I got him an ashtray, a little cracked Cheshire Cat Gloria had made in a pottery elective during her hoary days as a sought-after coed at Boston University. Then—what the hell—I sat down to drink whiskey with my blazingly successful big brother Levi. Just two brothers drinking whiskey here in the wee hours of the night: it was going on all over America.

"Everything okay on the home front?" I asked.

"Perfect. Everything's perfect. Lisa just took the girls up to Providence to see her folks. I'll be joining them at some point, for a day or two anyway."

"Good—great. So..."

"Jessica will be in kindergarten next year," he said. "Can you believe it? Man, time sure flies."

"It crackles actually—"

"Eggers," he interrupted, "you really should start working out with me. I've got this new trainer—he's the greatest. Ex-NFL linebacker from the Eighties—but he's still stacked. I'm telling you—"

"I will, Levi. I absolutely will do that."

"Never hurts to be in shape," he said. "You used to be—man! Your abs, they were like steel plates."

"Right on."

"Just look...look at my arms! That's what my new trainer has done in just a few weeks. I could drop a wild boar in his tracks now if I had to, Eggers. I'm not afraid of anything." He faced the back window and raised his fist over his head. "I say bring it on, you goat fuckers!"

"Levi? Did something happen to you tonight?"

He spun back around. "Yeah, you might say that." He looked down into his half-empty shot glass. "I was attacked this evening, Eggers."

"Attacked?"

"Shot at, actually."

"Jesus!"

He blew a smooth stream of smoke out the side of his mouth. It made me want to start smoking. That's Levi—he does everything with supreme coolness, even under duress. "Just like Lennon, you know?" he continued. "I was just walking along minding my own business, and this dude came out of nowhere, said my name like we were friends, and then...man, it's like it was in slow-motion! I saw his arm swing around; I saw the little snub-nosed pistol in his hand; I saw his finger stretch out to meet the trigger...he brought it right up to my fucking nose! He was barely five feet away; I have no idea how he missed. He never got off a second shot. Some guy who was standing right there—I owe this dude my life!—he tackled the little shit. Then I jumped in and got a few good hits on him too. A cop, one of those mounted ones; he was there in like two seconds. Well"—he downed his dregs and slammed the shot glass on the table—"I guess that's one more crazy little fuck for our overcrowded prison system!"

"Jesus, Levi!"

"I came that close to checking out tonight, Eggers." His eyes were little circular ruins now, as if they had dried up and cracked in the span of thirty seconds. "Unlike you," he added, "I haven't spent my whole life thinking about death. I have no idea what it is. Death—what the fuck! I just think...Lisa and the girls—"

"It's okay, Levi."

We were both thinking about our dearly departed father, the suicidal son of a bitch.

"Geez, did we drink all that already?" he asked, glaring at the bottle.

"Looks like it," I said.

He mashed out his cigarette. He was blinking in slow motion as he rubbed his entire face. "Eggers," he said, clamping his tongue down on each syllable to keep from slurring, "there's more to this than what I've told you."

"What do you mean?"

"This wasn't an isolated incident. Few weeks ago—they took a shot at Gil too."

"What!" I said. "What the hell?"

"Yeah," he continued. "We didn't want to tell you because—well, you're you. He was in his limo on the Parkway; they had no chance of getting him, Eggers. Zero chance, you hear me?"

"You keep saying 'they,' Levi? 'They' took a shot at Gil? Who are 'they'?

"Well...alright." But he checked himself here. "Eggers, you mean—you really don't know anything?"

"That seems to be the general consensus."

He wiped his chin. "So you have no idea what's going on out there? How much we're already hated by the 'hack into the DOD for fun' demographic?"

"Uh..."

"You're just up there in your billion-dollar lab oblivious to it all, aren't you?"

"Apparently."

"Well," he continued, "maybe you've at least noticed all the 'remodeling' going on around the Complex? Ha! Those 'remodelers,' Eggers? They're a cracker-jack security company from Israel. We're paying them more than the GDP of most countries to do their thing for us. They brought in all kinds of mind-blowing stuff, stuff I didn't even know existed, you know—aerial drones the size of flies and light-switch cameras and these really cool robotic cockroaches. They're even putting down these special floor tiles so we can shock the fuck out of anyone anywhere in the place. I'm serious—they've got all kinds of fun stuff. You've got the clearance: you should go down to the basement sometime and check it out. When they're done with the place, Eggers, it'll be more secure than the White House."

"This was inevitable, you know."

"What?"

"Yeah," I said. "Every great scientific advance throughout time has been met with fierce opposition. It used to be religious fanatics leading the charge. Now I guess it's just a bunch of pimply community-college rejects with IP addresses."

"Don't underestimate these crazies, Eggers. One took a shot at me tonight."

"Right, sorry." I focused in on the half-inch of whiskey left in the flat little bottle. "Look," I said, "I hate to ask this, believe me, but...how the hell does anyone out there even know what we're doing? We don't even quite know what we're doing yet—"

"We're not sure," he replied. "Could be simple industrial espionage—"

"But," I put forth again, "we haven't really done anything as a company except collect money and conduct research."

"Eggers, when tens of billions of dollars from all over the world gets funneled into one central point—well, people tend to notice that. It's obvious we're not just another tech start-up. And, of course, there's the other possibility."

"A mole?" I said.

"That's right. It could even be someone from your team, Eggers."

"Oh, man!"

"Gil's doing a great job—don't get me wrong—but we've got, what, over six-hundred people working for us now. Even the first-floor bean counters know enough to chum the waters out there, so to speak. And if it's someone from the inner circle—man, I don't even want to think about that!"

"Maybe we should have everyone checked out again," I said.

"Sure, Eggers. But—come on, man! You know as well as I there's no reliable test or procedure for identifying that one coo-coo who is going to snap when he gets close to a real stream of power. Some people are just really good at hiding their insanity."

"So," I said, "it could be anyone—"

"That's right."

"Where's Gil right now?"

"Gil's probably still with the Feds back at the Complex," he said. "He's putting together a, uh, a private security team with those big Italian goons of his. He's taking this very seriously. He's very worried...but not about me. He's more worried about you right now, Eggers. The crazies out there—we believe they know you're the brains behind what we're doing. Listen, that's the real reason I'm here. Gil thinks you could be next—he thinks you're the real target. He wants to send some of his goons over here, as bodyguards. I said I'd come talk to you first."

"No fucking way."

"Yeah," Levi said, nodding, "that's what I told him. I told him you'd say that. I said, 'Gil, he won't go for it. My little brother is a man of principle. He's the kind of man who would rather die than be shadowed by your goons.'"

"Damn straight! Uh—die?"

"Yes," he said. "Apparently the Feds have picked up what they call 'chatter'—"

"Chatter?"

"It means talk with key words or phrases like your name repeated a few hundred times in conjunction with stab in the gut, shoot in the cranium, immolate, dismember...decapitate—"

"Alright! I get it."

"The Feds are monitoring everything out there, you know, every single cell-phone call and text and email, every stupid Twitter and Facebook and Instagram account in America. But—shhhh." He brought his finger to his lips. "Don't tell."

"Wow," I said. "Who's the enemy again?"

"We are talking about some pretty dedicated fanatics here, Eggers. Can't stop them by being Dudley Do-Rights, now can we?" He started laughing, just like that.

"What? Levi—?"

"Oh, sorry. It's just...remember dad's definition of a fanatic?"

"What? No."

"He didn't give you 'the speech' about liberals before you went off to college?"

"No. All he said to me was 'flunk out of college, kid, the next stop's the recruiting station.'"

"Yeah, well, according to the old man a fanatic is someone who takes what he sees in himself and projects it out onto others, and who the hell wouldn't want to take a shot at that? Man, I can still see his big square face, smoke curling around it, bottle of Iron City Light in hand, in that big old house on Main Street."

"Yeah," I reflected, "our dad." I noticed then that Levi's hand was shaking; he could hardly steady it enough to pick up his shot glass. I refilled his glass and then mine; we were now officially out of booze. We were silent: we both had plenty of things to think about. Levi has six kids—three with his first wife, his old college sweetheart who now lives in Chicago; one with his second, an insane actress; and two little ones with his third and current wife Lisa, who is thin and twenty-something and pretty from any angle and soft-spoken and oriented toward domestic concerns and comes from a big-name east-coast family that has squandered all its wealth—just his type.

Levi eventually left that night, around four. I'd tried to convince him to crash on the couch, but he said he wanted to sleep at home so he could still get in his early-morning workout.

Well, if my brother's mission was to secure my permission to have a security detail assigned to me, he'd succeeded. Before crawling into bed, I looked out the bedroom window and saw a big black SUV with tinted windows parked in front of the building.

The next morning, I got up over an hour late—Gloria had already left for work—dressed quickly without showering and went outside. For a moment, it was just the big black SUV and me. Then both front doors opened at once and two giants of the human race stepped out. The taller one had close-cropped grey hair; the other was bald. They both wore identical black pinstriped suits and Eighties-era aviator shades. They both looked like they could power-squat an engine block.

"Well-well," I said, "my saviors."

"Mr. Mortensen—"

"Call me Eggers. And you are?"

"Larry," the bigger goon said.

"And I'm Moe," the other goon said. He was the shorter, stockier—, and uglier—of the two. "Can't use our real names, you know. So we picked Larry and Moe."

"Just drive me to work," I said. Moe opened the back door for me, and I slid into the vehicle. I got out my laptop to check over some figures. Then I kept catching Larry studying me in the rearview mirror as he drove along at a ridiculous crawl.

"What?" I finally said.

"You ever in the military?" Larry said.

"Uh, no. I never served. But I come from a military family. My grandpa fought in Korea; my father and some uncles fought in Vietnam."

"Terible war 'Nam," Larry said. "All most guys did was duck and cover and run like hell. There wasn't much real fighting over there. We just blew the shit outta stuff from the air, torched villages, whatever. If you was lucky maybe, you got to shoot your load off into some bushes or something. Go ahead, ask your old man. He'll tell you."

"He's dead; he died," I said. "He took his own life, more or less, which is what I might do if this conversation continues."

We crawled along for a few more blocks.

"Now Dessert Storm," Larry said. He waited until I'd looked up from my screen. "That was a real war. We was on one side—they was on the other. You could see their heads pop up every now and then; most of them poor shits didn't even have helmets, just them turban things, like that's gonna help 'em. But I tell you, they fought like hell. Man, those little fuckers could fight! Say what you want about the great American soldier, but if there would of been as many of them as there was of us, we would of lost that war. I'm not kidding."

"And to think they went and gave this guy a bunch of metals," Moe said. Moe never fought in any war. Moe learned what he knows about life and death from the streets. I have no doubt there are fewer men on those streets because of Moe.

"Yep," Larry said. "Brave little fuckers..."

"Man," Moe said, "this world ain't fair!"

"Got a scar a mile long right here across my stomach from some guy over there couldn't even hold the knife right," Larry said. He shook his head. "But he came right at me anyways. Brave little fucker—I'm telling you. And now as my reward I get to earn ten times what I ever made as a Marine delivering flesh packages for The Man."

"How the mighty have fallen!" Moe said.

"Hey!" I said. "Did you just call me a flesh package? Really?"

"Oh, don't worry," Larry said. "You're gonna be called much worse before this week's out."

"Get used to us, Egghead," Moe said. "Cause you ain't going nowhere without us glued to your side."

And there you go, my security detail. From that point on, Larry and Moe would take me to and from the Complex, day in and day out, and anywhere else I wanted to go. There would be no more wild taxi rides down Broadway for Gloria and me, no more tunnel-of-death subway rides after a late night out on the town; no more lurching bus rides out to explore the nether regions of the tri-state area on the weekends.

The goons dropped me off at the VIP entrance that day and then escorted me up to the Lab, all the way through the Lab, and right to my office door. "Keep your cell phone on you at all times," Larry said, as I unlocked my door. "That's how we can track you."

"And remember: don't go nowhere without us," Moe put in.

"Yeah-yeah," I said. I went into my office, which was very small by corporate standards, leaving the door open. For some reason, it created anxiety among my crew whenever I closed it. The lights automatically came on. I went over to my desk, entered my password into my central computer, and ran my hand over the fingerprint scanner. Then I called up a program that tracked the overall activity of our main customers, a pharmaceutical giant, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Both were very active that morning. Both had forked out billions of dollars to be the first to purchase multiple Non-binary-Processing mainframes that had to be housed in buildings the size of aircraft hangers and required huge cooling towers and city-sized generators to run. We'd contracted these out at a steep loss, just to be up and running, so we could book some revenue on our corporate spreadsheet, I guess.

I was mesmerized by the fluctuating numbers scrolling down my screen, each of which represented real operations going on somewhere out there in the real world. I could only imagine what the wonks at DOD were doing with all that computing power suddenly at their fingertips.

I had just settled back in my swivel chair to start scrolling through my email account when my executive assistant Helen Peluski came rushing in without knocking. She was followed by Grigor Dmitri, my lead physicist and the odds-on favorite to take over R&D when I finally—some would say inevitably—flame out.

"The Bobbsey twins!" I said.

"Oh, hey," Helen said, twirling the ends of her multi-colored hair. "That is way before our time, Dr. Mortensen—sir." At just twenty-four, she was of a generation that did not laugh, as if to find humor in anything was a sign of weakness. I'm sure they hoped my generation would take this for sophistication.

Grigor, who was in his early forties, also had no use for laugher. He would sneer whenever anyone did anything that directed attention away from him. Standing at five-six and swizzle-stick thin, he liked to get right in your face when he talked, as if his close proximity made him seem normal sized. He must have burnt off a thousand calories a day just by twitching and nervously adjusting his collar and shifting around on his specially made platform shoes. He'd shaved his head a few weeks after being hired, which had earned him the nickname Mini-Mort. He didn't seem to like it or hate it. It just was, like everything else in his life.

Grigor always wore a light-blue jumpsuit with a black tie and modern running shoes. I was told he even went out at night like this, with his nametag still affixed to his chest.

"Dr. Mortensen," Helen said, "did you forget what today is?" She always dressed like a naughty librarian, with short skirts, knee-high socks, and frilly light-colored blouses dotted with radicalized feminist buttons. "Why Can't We Say 'Vagina' in a Room Full of Pussies?" was my personal favorite. She'd recently taken to wearing oversized owl-rimmed glasses held in place with a head strap.

"It's hump day, right?" I said.

"It's Thursday," she said. She glanced nervously at Grigor. "You really don't remember?" She opened her black-leather hip pouch and took out an unmarked pill bottle. "Here—sir." She held out three dime-sized pink pills.

"What's this?" I said.

"Yeast extract, some B-complexes, amphetamines—other stuff. It's everything you need to get through your day. My brother makes these in his basement, if you want more."

I popped them into my mouth. Grigor slid forward with a bottle of sparkling water.

"You guys are the best," I said. It was still hard to believe that barely two years ago I was sitting on the wrong side of a Dean's desk while his high droning voice spelled out his college's economic woes and the end of my measly employment there, and now I had beautiful young people being paid a living wage to alleviate my hangover.

I caught Helen checking her PDA. It had to be business-related. She may be emotively inert, and reputedly anorexic, but she always follows the rules at work.

"What is it, Helen?"

"Well..." She looked at Grigor again. He flicked his nose, scratched his ear, adjusted his starched collar, and stepped up to my desk.

"Senator Fineburne's private tour?" he said. "We moved it up—remember?"

"Of course! I remember." But I wasn't fooling anybody—and the best thing is, I didn't have to. "Well," I said, standing up, "you guys ready?"

"You are the one who needs to be ready," Helen said. She adjusted my tie. "You're the superstar, the one they all want to see, the celebrity scientist. Sir—!" I was really beginning to hate the way she kept saying 'sir,' as if it were some inside joke.

"Don't call me 'sir,'" I said.

"Dr. Mortensen," she said, "the thing is—"

"Eggers," I said. "Why the hell can't I just be Eggers?"

"Well..."

"Dr. Eggers," Grigor said, "we're supposed to meet up with the tour in the Simulacra—or were supposed to, about half an hour ago. We'll run Ballerina; you'll dazzle them—you know the drill."

"Yeah-yeah. Come on—let's go." I put my hand on his shoulder, which I knew he hated. "Let's go give the big-wig Senator a glimpse of humanity's future."

The three of us made our way to the Simulacra, a "secret" wing off the main Lab where a cadre of computer super-geniuses worked ridiculous hours developing our three-dimensional simulations and virtual-reality systems. My brother was in the midst of showing off Ballerina to a small girl wearing jodhpurs, knee-high shiny black boots, and a sparkly, frilly blouse. She was made up elegantly, like an adult, with bright red lips, blue eye shadowing, and thick black lashes. She had small round glasses with pink rims studded with fake diamonds perched on the end of her nose. She couldn't have been more than nine. She was holding the hand of small, well-dressed man whom I immediately recognized as the esteemed Senator Fineburne from some Midwestern state that wouldn't have mattered without his political pull. I was not surprised to see that Gil was not with him. He liked to have Levi conduct these little tours so he could meet everyone for lunch afterwards and start a conversation with "Pretty impressive stuff we've got going on here, huh?"

Ballerina, our first full-sized interactive hologram, existed on a little black stage in a corner of the Simulacra. Standing at just over five feet tall, she was modeled after Julie Garland. She could give a solo performance of any ballet in existence. She had recently been connected to our most advanced self-actualization program and was now creating her own dance routines and, according to Grigor, getting curious about her surroundings. We used her whenever children were in the tour group because our free-walking cyborgs tended to scare the crap out of them. To most people, including my wife, they were more frightening than circus clowns.

"Go ahead," Levi said to the Senator's daughter, "ask her a question."

The little girl clung to her father's leg.

"Or ask her to do something," Levi said. "She is programmed to do whatever you tell her to do."

I saw a grin advance over the Senator's face. He must have guessed what we'd had her do after hours.

"Ballerina," Levi said. "What is your favorite ballet?" Her big blue eyes switched from the little girl to Levi. She stood up straighter.

"The Nutcracker," she replied. Her voice was always cheerful.

"I know that one," the Senator said.

I stepped forward. "Why?" I said. "Ballerina, why is that your favorite?"

"It is the most performed ballet of the modern era," she replied. "It brings joy to children and adults alike."

"Does it bring joy to you?" I asked.

"Dancing always brings joy," she replied.

"It's okay, Christina," the Senator said. He had moved up closer to the little stage with his daughter. He took her hand and guided it toward Ballerina. "She's not real; she's just a hologram," he said. "You can touch her. Go ahead." The little girl moved her hand closer and Ballerina backed up and let her own hand hover just an inch over it. The little girl giggled. When she tried to reach up and touch Ballerina's hand, the hologram moved it up and away. The girl tried again, and again, and Ballerina kept her hand always just out of reach. I had never seen her do that before. I looked at Grigor, who shrugged.

"Watch this," the Senator said. "Ballerina—jump!"

Ballerina just remained standing on the stage, with her head down and her hands folded over her stomach. Her mouth was open; her eyes were closed.

"Uh, Jump," the Senator repeated.

Ballerina remained motionless.

"What's with that?" Levi asked me.

"Beats me," I replied. "Guess our self-actualization program is better than we thought. It's turned her into a petulant teenager."

The little girl seemed fully engaged now. "Jump!" she said. "Ballerina, jump! I said 'jump!' Like this!" The girl jumped off the ground awkwardly and tried to spin around. Her father caught her by the arm to keep her from falling.

Ballerina opened her eyes. "Jump," she said softly. "Jump...but, why?"

Levi sidestepped over to Grigor. "What's going on here?" he whispered.

"I don't know," Grigor said. "This is new. Must be a glitch."

"Let's move them on to the main Lab now," I said.

"Good idea," Levi said.

But before my brother could move the tour on, the Senator asked him, "Levi, what's the point of creating something like this? I mean, what real use do you have for a hologram here? Don't get me wrong—this is incredible. If I didn't know better, I'd think that's a real person up there. But is that thing, that girl"—he glanced down at her daughter, who was staring at Ballerina's face—"you know, is she used for anything more than entertainment value?"

Levi smiled; this was what he wanted. No ego-inflating private tour was complete without giving out some "secret" proprietary information.

"Eggers?" my brother said. "This is your territory."

"Oh," I said, "right." I had a sudden vision of myself as the wind-up monkey here. This wasn't the first time I'd had to step up and be the crazy-but-not-too-crazy celebrity scientist. I knelt down in front of the Senator's daughter. "Can you keep a secret?" I asked her.

"Unh-huh, yep."

"Good," I said. "Because what I'm about to tell you no one else can know. Okay? Lips sealed?"

"Yep!"

I stood up and adjusted my tie. I addressed the Senator now. "Those big machines you are going to see out there in the main Lab, which is your next stop—they are so powerful, they can compute so quickly, that we do not have time to design programs worthy of them. Until we can develop a progressive language, which incidentally we are working on, we will have to design avatars, digital beings whose intelligence and creativity are equal to or possibly greater than our own, and have them do what we want to have done—the good stuff, you know, like curing pancreatic cancer, finding a way to make cold fusion viable, stuff like that. If you can imagine it, it can be done—that will soon be a reality."

"So," the Senator said, "this is all because of that, uh, what's it called—the Post just did a big write up...damn!"

"Non-binary Processing," Levi interjected. He knew it was never a good idea to leave a bigwig hanging.

"Yeah," the Senator said. "That's it."

"Right," I said. "Basically, NbP allows us to bypass the restrictions of time. It gives us the kind of power we couldn't even imagine having just a few years ago."

"Yes-yes," the Senator said. He glanced down at his daughter, who was picking at a fingernail now. "I understand the basic concept: what would otherwise take billions of years now takes a split second. But I still don't see why you need to create beautiful women as holograms. It's just, these avatar things—it feels so much like slavery. We create them, give them. Then we send them out into space to do our dirty work."

In my periphery, I saw Ballerina raise her head, as if she were intently listening in on us. It threw me off for a second. Levi stepped in to help. "No-no," he said. "They will no more be slaves than the GPS in your car, or your phone there. Simple as that."

The Senator's eyes opened wide. I turned toward the stage and saw what had shocked everyone: Ballerina had stepped off her stage. She was standing about two feet in front of it now. "Holy cow!" I said. Grigor ran up to the main computer terminal to call up some quick-scan diagnostics program.

"How can she do that?" Levi asked me.

"Ballerina?" I said. "What are you doing?"

"You are Eggers Mortensen," she said. She walked toward me. Her eyes were looking off to my right, which didn't matter. Her sensors were embedded in the ceiling; she could "see" me, so to speak, from anywhere in the Simulacra.

"That's right. I'm Eggers."

Her hand glided around my face. "You are not a dancer," she said.

She moved over to Helen. "You are sick," she said. "Very sick...I am sorry for you."

She drifted over to Grigor and smiled at him. "Do you, sir, want me to pull up my skirt?"

"Shut her down!" Levi said.

"I will touch myself for you again," she said. "If you ask me—but be nice, this time, please..."

"Damn it!" Grigor said. "I can't...she's done something to her program. This is...unbelievable!"

"Ballerina?" I said. "What did you do? My God—"

She was moving toward the exit.

"What are you going, Ballerina?" Levi asked.

"I am going to the Lincoln Center..."

"Hit the kill switch," Helen said to Grigor. She was standing next to him as he frantically scrolled through menu items. She had never liked Ballerina.

"I am beautiful!" Ballerina said. She did a little pirouette as she continued crossing the floor. Then her hands rose up to her mouth. "I am sexy!" she exclaimed, looking down at her arms. When she cupped her breasts, Levi started ushering the Senator and his daughter out of the Simulacra.

"Please do not make me go!" Ballerina said. She was performing an unrecognizable dance now, something original maybe, and moving much more quickly toward the exit. "Please—"

Grigor slammed his finger down on the keypad and the hologram disappeared.

"Will you be able to bring her back?" I asked Grigor.

"No way," he said. I saw a tear building up in the corner of his eye. "Ballerina is dead."

I got home around midnight, after commiserating in the main Lab with Helen and Grigor and my crew of big brains, who had used one of our new centrifuges to concoct some grain alcohol that tasted like old pennies dipped in molasses. We were saddened by what had happened to Ballerina, even though we all knew we'd just witnessed a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Our next-generation AI hologram was already in the works, an ultra-secret project called "Buddy."

In any case, I found Gloria soaking in her claw-footed tub in a mountain of bubbles. She was always taking late-night baths. She had lit a bunch of candles, which were placed evenly around the rim of the tub, along with a smoldering mini-tower of Patchouli incense on the little shelf above her head. Sarah McLachlan or somebody like that was playing at a soft volume from her docking station. Her cell was balanced precariously on the edge of the tub, blinking with new messages, with little bubbles still on its screen.

I wanted to strip down and get into the tub with her, but instead I sat on the lid of the toilet with my head down in my hands.

"What're you doing in here, sweetie?" she asked. "Everything okay?"

"Not sure."

She sank down further into the bubbles. I slid off the toilet and got down on my knees. "Gloria?"

"What, Eggers—what?"

"Let's get married."

"Sure. I'll call in a rabbi. A bathroom wedding—every girl's dream!"

"I'm serious. We can go to Vegas—or better yet, some tropical island. Just the two of us. We'll get some shaman to shake beads over our heads, spray us with shark urine or something for good luck, and voila! We're husband and wife."

"Ah, Jesus! Go splash some cold water on your face."

"I mean it," I said. "Get out of that tub and let's go, right now."

"We'd need someone to tag along as a witness, Eggers. My sister or your brother."

"Screw that! If we invite one, we'll have to invite the other, and then your parents and my mom and then everyone. No, we'll just hoodwink some beach bum." I dug around the now-lukewarm water in the tub until I'd found her hand. "Gloria Steckman? Will you marry me?"

"Get up, you freak! Not like this," she said. "Not when you're drunk."

"Yeah." I could barely stifle a yawn. "The world according to Gloria."

"Get the hell out of this bathroom, Eggers. I had a really awful day at work. Just...get out of here."

I got out. I didn't know what to do with myself now. I paced a little, got a drink of water, and eventually grabbed my coat and went outside. I was barely off the front stoop when Larry and Moe got out of the SUV and flanked me on foot. I noticed there was now a "Permit Parking Only" sign in the parking spot directly in front of the condo, which had previously been reserved for the building manager. The Corporation's reach seemed to be endless now.

"Girl troubles?" Larry asked. He was always trying to be discreet about his job but I could see his eyes scanning the street up ahead. "Know how I can tell? Guys always walk like they're grinding walnuts in their ass when they get into it with their girl."

I stopped abruptly. "It's my personal business," I said.

"Hey," Moe said, "looks like he's gonna cry."

"Nah," Larry said. "Egghead ain't that much of a wimp. By the ways, where we going? Egghead? Maybe you outta tell us that."

"Botte's Ballroom," I snapped. "It's just a few blocks ahead."

"Ah!" Larry said. "My kinda place."

We continued walking.

"So," Larry said, "what did you do now?"

"I proposed while drunk—a PWD. My first—"

"Ha!" Moe said.

"Listen"—Larry slapped my arm, giving me a new appreciation of what he could do if he really had to take someone out—"that was dumb. You did a dumb thing—so what? Ain't gonna be the last time that happens. You'd better snap out of it, right now, and start thinking of ways to make up for being a big douche bag. Know how to do that?"

"How?" I asked. I was genuinely interested now.

"Simple. Gotta surprise her—that's the only way. Trust me, Egghead, I been married to the same girl for twenty-nine years now. You can't surprise your girl when you need to, you ain't never gonna make it over the long haul with any girl. And a girl like the one you got back there, a girl like that, if you don't mind me saying—"

"And if I do?"

"A girl like that," he continued, "if she was going to a place like we're going to tonight, I mean a real classy joint—if she didn't want to go home alone, guess what? She wouldn't have to." He addressed Moe now: "You think I'm getting through to him?"

"Nah! He's gonna go home pissed to the gills and slap her around a little. I can see him doing that."

"Fuck you both," I said.

"See what I'm saying?"

We walked the next block in silence. For some reason Larry was really invested in my relationship now. He just wouldn't let it go: "Look, Egghead, you got a big brain—use it for something other than numbers, how about it. Just think, what can you do to surprise her? Because she's back there wherever she is right now—"

"In the tub," I said.

"Ho boy!" Moe said, whistling through his teeth.

"In the tub," Larry continued. "She's in the tub and right now her little girl brain is spinning with things you can do for her. And listen: she's gonna come up just about anything you can come up with. Know why? Know how women can do this? 'Cause they're smarter than us—that's why. It's no secret. Ah, hell! You're so rich maybe this stuff don't apply to you. You can do pretty much anything you want. I mean, a girl's a girl. They can't help that."

"Flash a big rock under her nose," Moe added.

We were, for better or worse, at Botte's Ballroom now, which a wealthy young Englishman owns named Smythe and doesn't even have a dance floor. No matter. It's small and dark and out of the way and plays the kind of jazz that lets you live as if you were caught in a perpetual spin on a marble dance floor in the roaring Twenties with teeth-gleaming bachelors and beautiful flappers under the innocent spell of Champagne and the promise of an eternally powerful America...

Smythe was behind the bar. I do not know what to say about him without feeding a stereotype. He's small and wiry, stark white, with feathery blond hair; he's always impeccably dressed—he was clearly born in the wrong era.

Now Botte's has live music every night of the week, but the band must have been on a break when we came in, because something really weird and nice was coming out of a quartet of little corner speakers at a manageable volume.

"What is that?" I asked Smythe. I sat down on a barstool, with one goon on each side of me. I'd only been in here about half a dozen times before, with my brother and some workmates, but Smythe had already let me run up a tab. It was nice. I got to go in, order drinks, and just walk on out. I think I owed him a little over fourteen-thousand dollars at that point.

"Coltrane's 'Impressions,'" Smythe said. "Live version, from Baden-Baden, Germany." Like every Englishman I know—or I should say both of them—my favorite barman is at his best when he's telling you something you don't know anything about. "Great jazz standard there, better than 'Blue Train' from a technical standpoint, at any rate. Listen to how it winds around itself. Can't copy that, though many have tried."

There were about fifteen other people in the joint, mostly couples, with only a few lone-wolf investor types and one wild-eyed cougar in the mix. Smythe was looking at me now; he's a nice guy, but still a businessman. "I'll have one of your awesome martinis," I said.

"Vodka or gin?"

"Whatever you made for me and my brother the last time we were in."

"Sure thing. One vodka-gin martini—"

I turned to Larry. "I don't suppose you can drink?"

"Oh," Moe said, "he can drink! Just not on the job..."

"Sorry, Egghead. Duty first."

"Yeah..."

Smythe, who always works the place by himself, served me my drink and then went out to check on the tables. "What's the band tonight?" I asked him when he'd returned to the bar.

"Solo act. Girl named Andrea on piano. All originals."

"Hmm. Any good?"

"Deserves to be playing in a better place than this, that's for sure."

"Bigger, you mean. There is no better place that this, Smythe."

"Thanks, Eggers. I like you." He glanced at the goons, each in turn. I'd already noticed that no one ever looked them squarely in the eyes. "I don't even want to think about what you do for a living, but I like you."

"I am a legitimate businessman," I said.

"Sure you are. And I keep legitimate books. Another?"

"Keep 'em coming."

About ten minutes later, after my third martini, the girl came out onto the little square stage and positioned herself behind the baby grand piano and started singing some angelic ballad; as her eyes rolled over me, my heart began to pound out its own rapid rhythm. I felt a tear trickle out of the corner of my eye. I couldn't help noticing that the musician looked a lot like Ballerina.

I was now beginning to worry myself.

I tapped Larry's shoulder. "I need to get out of here," I said.

"What's wrong, Egghead?"

"I just realized anyone in here, like that guy over there with the mole on his cheek; he could be the one to put a slug in my cranium. Or, hell, the musician herself—"

"Nah!" Larry said. "Ain't nobody in here we can't take out. Just relax, have a little fun, and stop blubbering like a baby. Too soon for you to go back yet. And this girl—man, she's smokin' hot!" His eyes were droopy; his lips were loose; his fingers were softly drumming the table. I wondered how the musician would feel if I sent her a note backstage: "If nothing else, your music soothes the savage beast."

We stayed for another song. Then the goons flanked me back home, in silence. I barely got my key in the front door before it was swinging open. "Jesus!" Gloria said, pulling me inside. "Don't ever do that to me again!"

"Whaaaa? Just went out for a lil' walk."

"You stupid boy!" She was wearing that same skimpy white robe she'd worn when I'd barged in on her as a crazy man some six-plus months ago. She smelled like minty bath oils. "You didn't even take your phone with you. I had no way of contacting you. How did I know where you went?" She finally let me go. "Are you hungry?"

"I wouldn't turn down a Scooby snack."

"Let me make you something then."

"Okay." I took off my coat, dropped it on the floor, and followed her into the kitchen. I sat at the table and waited until there was a liverwurst-and-onion sandwich on a plate in front of me, along with a nice spread of garlic-stuffed olives and baby carrots. I took a bite out of the sandwich and tossed an olive in my mouth. It felt good to get something solid in me.

After a while, Gloria got up to get some seltzer from the fridge. When she sat back down, she said, "Eggers, you know I love you, right?"

"Uh, right."

"But you've got to let up on the booze a little, and whatever the hell else you've been doing. You're killing yourself."

"Yeah. I know. I will."

"Sure you will." She twisted the cap off and took a sip of the seltzer. "The thing is...I mean, Jesus! Things have happened so fast. One minute I'm with Ned; I'm happy; everything's good...and now there's a Gloria and Eggers. Eggers and Gloria..." She took a carrot from my plate and popped it into her mouth. "Do you want to know what happened to me at work today, why I snapped at you in the bathroom?"

"I don't know," I said. "Do I?"

She flicked my forehead. "Of course you do," she said. "Anyway, this morning I had to bring in Jerome for yet another nasty extraction. Remember I told you about him?"

"Yeah-yeah, you've known him forever. The big black cop with the big heart who would do anything for you."

"Right. So," she continued, "on our way to the house, he suddenly made a freakish right turn. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, 'Just checking.' 'Checking what?' I asked—right? And he said, 'I'm checking to see if we're being followed.' Turns out we were. So he gets on his radio and has a buddy get the license number of whoever was following us. And guess what? Turns out the car belongs to some shady offshore corporation headed by—drum roll, please!—your billionaire buddy Gil Smoltz. Eggers, are you really so damn insecure you had to hire someone to follow me? I mean, come on! Why would you want to marry me when you can't even trust me?"

"That's not it," I said.

"I'm listening."

"Okay," I said, "guess I should've told you about this sooner. You know all this secret stuff I've been doing for Gil? Well, there are people out there, a lot of them"—I paused to let my stomach settle—"people who think it's some kind of Terminator-like project... actually I don't know what the hell they think. But they're dangerous—that's all I know. So Gil suggested we get a security detail to protect me, hence the big SUV parked in front of the condo, and I asked him to put one on you too. But they're not keeping tabs on you or anything like that. Okay? You could sleep with the entire offensive line of the New York Giants, or that Jerome guy, and I wouldn't know about it."

"Unh-huh."

"I'm serious," I said. It felt good to be talking to Gloria about this. "Do you have any idea how many people out there want to destroy us? I personally get no fewer than a thousand pieces of hate mail every day."

"Yeah?" she said. "Well, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of those are from me."

"This isn't a joke, Gloria. Damn it! These people are fanatics—terrorists, that's what they are—and there's no telling how far they're willing to go. I'm in danger, and that puts you in danger too. We need to be careful."

"Oh, I see. Eggers?"

"What?"

"Are you really this fucking dense? My point is, you should have told me about something this big right away. Isn't that what couples do? Instead, the big man goes and takes care of his little woman on his own. Did it ever occur to you that I might want to take some additional steps to protect myself, that I have a dangerous job anyway and have actually been trained in this kind of thing?"

"Uh, good point."

"Yeah, you get it now—after the fact. That seems to be how it always is with you." She slid her chair back. "Finish your damn sandwich, Eggers. Then...you can sleep on the couch tonight."

I waited a few more days before taking the big goon's advice and surprising Gloria. First, I showed up at her office in Queens around four with a dozen roses and some chocolates. Her normally cantankerous old boss let her out a half-hour early so I could take her to a famous little creamery nearby for a nice relaxing dinner. We talked freely, nicely, while my security goons Larry and Moe nursed black coffees at the next table. Then I had them take us into the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Gloria stepped out of the SUV, roses still in hand. That's my girl, I thought. I couldn't believe people were walking by her without openly staring. It was a nice early-spring evening, cool and windless, with a glowing sky overhead. I couldn't have set it up any better.

"So," I said, "what do you think of that?" I swept my hand over the outer façade of a spectacular white limestone mansion set back a ways from the street. It had full-frontal cast-iron fencing and a little balcony off the top level. It loomed over us and everything else around it.

"It's nice," she said. She'd hardly looked at it.

"Want to go inside?"

"What? How?"

"It's for sale—can you believe it? I've arranged to have the real-estate agent meet us here. Ah, and there she is now." I could see the agent's anorexic legs striking the pavement at ten paces, and closing fast. She was talking on her cell, of course. This city never sleeps because people like that never sleep. She wore an almost-too-short dark wool skirt with classic black leotards and snappy black boots, a fur-lined sheepskin jacket, and a black-leather skullcap. She was pretty in a bitter old screen-actress kind of way.

"Dr. Mortensen!" she squeaked. She looked at Gloria. "So this is the lucky lady?"

"Nothing about that now," I said. "Let us have the grand tour. Show us every room in the place—"

"Certainly! This way, if you will."

"You guys wait out here," I said to Larry and Moe. "We'll be alright."

We went inside and clopped our way over the smooth white marble of the dramatic foyer with its high soaring ceiling and Volkswagen-sized brass-and-crystal chandelier. The last time my feet clopped across the Italian marble, I was with Gil, who assured me I could afford the nine-figure price tag. The place was still lavishly furnished, though much of the furniture was worn and faded, giving the impression that it was the best of a bygone era.

We moved on into the Reception Hall: every room in a mansion like this has a name. The Reception Hall, the Green Room, the Master Suite, the VIP Bedroom, the Master Library, the Master Study, the Billiards Room, the English Basement...there are twenty-two of them in all.

"There's over twenty-one thousand square feet of living space on five levels," the agent announced. "There is an elevator to take you to each of them—uh, in case you have parents or elderly relatives who need assistance, you know." I looked up at the patterned ceiling and had to fight back the urge to shout out obscenities just to hear the returning echo.

"It's a pity you are looking at this in the winter, because the Rose Garden out back is simply breathtaking," the agent continued. "There have been numerous articles written about it alone, including one in last year's Landscaping Digest. You should go to Landdig.com and check it out for yourselves. You are buying a true piece of American history here."

We moved up another level to the plain old palatial Living Room. "This mansion was designed by the great architect C.P.H Gilbert," the agent said. She positioned herself strategically in front of the huge gaping fieldstone fireplace. "He designed and built all of the most famous mansions in this fabulous part of the city. I wouldn't live anywhere else, you know. It is extremely rare for a Gilbert to come up on the market: you are both quite lucky." She addressed Gloria now: "You know, Eleanor Roosevelt used to sit before this incredible fireplace—isn't it though?—in that very armchair and knit mittens for our boys overseas. You will find that there is a story for every room in this spectacular mansion. Would you like to see the Master Bedroom now? Dearie"—she touched Gloria's elbow—"you are totally going to love the pink Powder Room! This way—"

We marched single-file up some very steep, curving stairs to see the third-floor Master Study. This velvety-walled chamber still held the comingling musk of cigar smoke and old-world cologne. "Hey, thanks, Mrs. Hornes," I said. "We want to look around on our own now. You can go."

"Well, Dr. Mortensen, if you are still concerned about the street noise—"

"No! No concerns. Just leave me the key. Thank you."

The agent took one last worried look around the amazing study of the amazing mansion whose final sale was sure to propel her to the top of the sales list for the year, and finally left. Gloria was over by the window now, clutching her roses. "Eggers," she said, gazing down on all the bustle of Fifth Avenue at night, "what is this, some kind of joke? Or did you bring me here so you poke me on that Polar Bear rug over there?"

"Well," I said, "now I guess I have to. But seriously. Do you like it?"

"Do I like what?"

"This house!"

"What kind of question is that? Do I like it? How the hell do I know if I like it? It doesn't even seem real to me. It's like something my mother would drool over in one of her ridiculous magazines, her 'architectural pornography,' my father calls it. I can just see her shaking her head and wondering why Jews like us don't have houses like this."

"Forget all that. Could you live here?"

"Could you?" she shot back.

"I hope so. I already put money down on it."

"What?"

"Surprise!"

"Oh, I think I need to sit down."

She was already starting to show by then—or perhaps merely demonstrating the effects of a four-thousand-plus-calorie daily diet on the female form—but I knew it wasn't the pregnancy that was making her knees buckle. I helped her over to a massive love seat with checkered oak arms studded with well-worn brass tacks and clearly delineated twin ass marks in its stark red, bulbous, leather seat-cushion.

"How the hell did you pull this off?" she asked, free hand planted on her knee like a Sumo wrestler about to belly-butt someone.

"Here." I showed her my latest pay stub, which had my recent seven-figure bonus circled in pencil and a little arrow pointing to the phrase "NOW will you marry me?"

"Jesus!" she said, eyes getting big.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," I said. "I'm telling you, we have big-money men from all over the civilized world climbing over each other like lemmings to throw wads of cash at us at this point. Look, if you don't like the house—"

She handed back the stub. "I'll be okay living wherever you want to live, sweetie."

"That's a cryptic response, even for you."

"It's the truth, damn it! You want it—buy it. It's your money."

"Our money, you mean."

"We're not married yet."

"Right."

"Now"—she held out her hand—"help me up. Thanks." She tugged on my shirt. "Alright! Yes, I will marry you, Eggers Bernard Mortensen. But if you really want me to live here with you? Get rid of that fucking bear rug."

# CHAPTER THREE

It was the evening of all evenings, the best of times, and the worst of nothing, and it just so happened that my brother Levi and I had a rare moment of after-hours togetherness in his top-floor office. It was late summer, still about eighty-five degrees outside, and we were talking about love, money, and shit, and having cocktails from his immaculate wet bar, just the two of us.

"Money," my brother said, spontaneously, like a burp. Moments ago he'd left his perfect little mahogany bar, which had nice seashell accents and driftwood inlays and a centrally placed shellacked starfish the size of a serving plate, with a fresh drink in hand—a spicy Bloody Mary—and now he was standing behind his big shiny savannah of a desk. He'd gone there to collect his gold cigarette case, which had been sitting by itself next to his raccoon-skull ink well and accompanying black-feather fountain pen, gifts from some big-name Catholic Cardinal who had a smidgen of Native American blood in him and over fifty-thousand shares of X+ Corporation preferred stock, more than enough to buy a fallen soul.

Levi made some motion as if to pocket the cigarette case, then he changed his mind and took out one of his little hand-rolled jobbies. In those days, before he'd quit smoking for good, he was having his cigs made to order from some famous little Turkish tobacco shop in SoHo.

Levi lit up his little cigarette with his zebra-striped Zippo—we were a smoke-free workplace, of course, but this was after-hours—then he stretched out his sinewy neck, Ostrich-style, and tensed all the little balls of muscle in his jaw as he absorbed that first nice deep rush of nicotine. He'd recently limited himself to one cigarette per waking hour to adhere to his general principle of moderation in all vices, and so far, it seemed to be working. His enjoyment of each cigarette was being enhanced, at any rate.

For a moment, I saw him as one of the lesser men Gil let cling to him to get rich, one of the leeches—but that moment was brief. This was Levi here. Levi is Levi. Levi is the kind of man who gets brought in as a public relations specialist on a contingency basis and barely two years later is occupying the coveted office suite next to the CEO as the corporation's Chief Operating Officer. My brother's suite had it all. It had a posh executive working area the size of a small gymnasium, which we were in now. It had a well-designed secretary's alcove and adjacent full-service copy-and-print center manned by sundry biz-school interns and a moody temp drone named Kucich whom no one could remember hiring. It had a conference room with a panoramic eagle's-eye view of the Financial District, along with a kitchenette and breakfast nook, posh overnight-sleeping quarters complete with a waterbed, Jacuzzi, and sauna. At my suggestion, Levi had put in a game room, which allowed us to resume our childhood Ping-Pong rivalry and provide yet more anecdotal evidence that a man's recorded IQ does not directly correlate to his skill around the pool table. What I mean is Levi had won seventeen games in a row.

"Money," Levi repeated. We were both feeling reflective and, I confess, a little self-important, because the reports had just started coming in that afternoon: we were now officially the biggest corporation in the history of humanity. It just two years we'd outpaced everyone—Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Apple, Facebook, Sinopec...

For a while my brother's eyes remained fixed on a desktop gilt-framed pictograph that flashed through digital takes of his wife Lisa and the girls in five-second intervals. He had thousands of them now, as if he couldn't stand having one second of their lives go unrecorded. "I'm having a little, uh, problem with money," he said, breaking his own spell. "It's the weirdest thing, Eggers. What I mean is, I can taste it. It just suddenly started happening. What's that called?"

"Gustatory Synesthesia," I said. I took a sip of my drink, a Mai Tai that Levi had made as my "surprise-me" cocktail of the evening. It was perfect, sweet, but not too sweet.

"Right—thanks. You would know that. Does it ever happen to you?"

"Nope," I said.

"Whenever I think about it, or just say it—money—money, money, money"—he wiped his mouth—"I get this weird taste, yeah. It's terrible actually. It's happening right now, in fact. It's like stomach bile rolling up the back of my tongue..."

He looked at me with big wet dopey eyes, expecting help. But what could I say? I love money; I hate money. I love-hate it so much I would strike it from the planet if I had that kind of power.

"Money is death," I blurted out. But I had no idea what it meant. I guess those three words had been rolling around the slimy folds of my brain and then just happened to find their way out of my mouth.

"How so?"

I recovered quickly. "Think about it, Levi. It's a classic paradox. What is a dollar really but an IOU for something in life you expect to get later, right? Well, trace that to its logical endpoint and money then comes to signify all that you won't get after you die. Ergo: money is death."

"No-no," he said, with quickened breath. "You couldn't be more wrong here. Money is life...the power behind life. Look, you may be a great scientist, Eggers, but you're a lousy philosopher. You seem to get everything backwards. And—well, you're killing my buzz."

"Sorry."

"We should be celebrating anyway. You are now one of the richest men in the world, goddamn it."

Levi checked his watch, which was worth more than our old childhood home. It was a recent gift from the King of Sweden himself, who wants everyone to know that the Swiss aren't the only ones who make great watches. We'd put our entire European Operations Center in Stockholm for reasons that were never explained to me but which I suspect might have something to do with the inevitable systemic collapse of Continental Europe. "And to think," Levi added, glancing over the impressive trio of original paintings on his otherwise blank far white wall (a Bartone, a Pellegrino, and a Picasso), "just a few years ago I was a lowly art dealer."

"Lowly? Come on, Levi, you made millions at it."

"Yes I did."

"Do you miss it?" I asked.

"No, not at all. It's the stupidest job in the world. You know what it involves? Telling rich old hags what to buy to match their living-room curtains. I mean, there is some personality matching involved and stuff like that—can't fob a 'Piss Christ' off on some dowdy old Catholic, right—and a little advising on price and insurance coverage and so forth, and sometimes you get to stand in as a proxy at auctions, which is kind of fun actually, spending other peoples' money; but you know why the job even exists at all? Because there are still people out there who don't know crap about computers. I didn't tell them anything they couldn't find out on their own in about five minutes. Hell, there won't be any big-name art dealers around in a decade or so—our clients will all have died off by then. No. I'd rather light my toes on fire than go back to my old life." He blew out a perfect series of smoke rings, and stepped back to admire it. I'd seen it before—I wasn't impressed. "Tonight is the night, Eggers. You know that, right? Supposedly Smoltz is going to announce his successor at The Club. I guess everyone's already there—Sebastian, Snyder, Jameson, your buddy Yaz. And rumor has it Gil's staying in-house on this."

"Yeah-yeah," I said, stifling a yawn, "I heard that."

"You just wait. Eggers"—his mouth widened into one of those seductive Levi grins that only blind monkeys and a wise younger brother can resist—"I believe you may be looking at the next CEO of X+ Corporation."

His big antique wall clock continued to click. I glanced outside and caught the high-rise female falcon fluttering her wings as she settled into her federally protected nest just outside Levi's office window. I'd sobered up quickly with my brother's sudden pronouncement.

"Levi," I said, "you have your degree in, what, Printmaking? No offense but—come on, man—how can you possibly expect them to make you the next CEO?"

"Same way they've made you out to be a rational thinker, Eggers. These people have that kind of power—they can do anything they want. It's scary actually."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he reflected. "It's the perfect scenario, if you think about it. As long as there's smooth sailing, they'll leave me at the helm. And as soon as we hit rough waters? I'm gone; they'll dump me overboard. Then they can do what they really want to do, which is to bring in some MBA hotshot like Sebastian. I've got about a three-year window, I figure."

"Sounds awful," I commented.

"What the hell are you talking about, Eggers? I'll have made billions by then! I'm actually looking forward to it. Between you and me, it will be a relief to have my life overturned like that. I've already begun preparing Lisa for it. We're thinking of buying an island in Costa Rica." Levi set down his drink and picked up an amber paperweight with a little seething Jurassic beetle embedded in it, a birthday gift from Donald Trump himself. "Well, anyway. They're all at The Club waiting for us."

"Club night," I said. "Yippee..."

"What the hell's wrong with you, Eggers?"

"I don't know."

"A disturbance in the force?"

"A little wrinkle maybe."

"That's better! That's the volatile little brother I love more than life itself.That's the disturbed little man who never quite does what he's supposed to do." Levi funneled twin streams of smoke out his nose, like a raging cartoon bull; his neat little cigarette was just about spent already. "Which is a hell of a lot better than the morbid wax dummy I've had to endure for the past few weeks. Anyway, I know what it is, what's eating you—everyone knows what it is."

"What?" I said.

"That movie."

"Aw, come on!"

"That what's-his-name—Dr. Eggils Morrison? Everyone hates that little jerk now. And everyone knows he's you. Man, your old flame sure cut you down to size in this one."

"I told you—that was the director's fault."

"Yeah, sure. It's never the writer's fault." He flicked a little nub of ash into an ivory ashtray the size and general shape of his forearm. Just think: some wrinkled old elephant had to meet his doom so that a man like Levi Mortensen could come home from his latest deep-savannah safari with a clandestine, hand-carved souvenir. "It's not bad actually," he added. "A little too Sapphic for my tastes, but my wife sure loves it. Should I be worried?"

"Let's have another drink, Levi."

"I don't know..."

"One more—"

"I think we said that a few drinks ago." He checked his watch again. "I mean, remember last week at the Governor's Ball?" He took one final soul-stirring drag off his cigarette, and then mashed it into the ashtray. "You crammed two pieces of shrimp up your nose and went around singing 'I am the Walrus, coo-coo-cachou!' Then you felt up the Mayor's wife. They're swingers, you know."

"Yeah," I said. "Let's not talk about that."

"Jesus," he snapped, "what's wrong with you? You've got everything, man! Everything! A beautiful wife who doesn't seem to care what you do, the greatest house on Earth, and more money than God..."

"Which is the same as having nothing," I said.

"What?"

"Having everything is the same as having nothing. I'm just saying—"

Levi picked up his cocktail glass and rolled the remaining cubes of ice around in a little manic cyclone before finishing off the drink. "Ah, great!" he said. "The morbid wax dummy is back. Should be a great night at The Club."

And what can I say about The Club? It is what it is: dark and morbid and, I swear, haunted—or at least I am not alone in having seen the ghost of a startled old man in a nightshirt. The Club, at any rate, is where men go to smoke openly, drink more-or-less sensibly, and make handshake deals behind the subjective security of ceiling-to-floor, thick, red curtains and a steel door that is manned around the clock. The Club is the most exclusive membership operation in America; at a cool million dollars a year, it's also the most expensive. A nameless faction that seems to want things to revert to a 1950s social order spearheads it. The Club is nestled in a squat fort-like building in Chelsea, where it has been since 1896, the year that X-rays and radioactivity were discovered...and I believe the radio was invented that year too. You know I can almost—if I really try here—picture all those Victorian-era men in top hats and black tails at their new Club smoking their big stogies and discussing all the investment opportunities wrought by these strange new ideas...

My brother and I finally left the Complex around nine in his stretch limo, with his security goons in the front and mine trailing in their SUV. We'd be there in roughly twenty minutes, depending on traffic. As we turned onto Sixth Avenue, Levi hit some button in the door panel and a soundproof, tinted-glass separation-wall started rising up behind his head and quickly settled into its secure slot in the roof. "Eggers," he said. "Before we hit The Club, there's something I need to discuss with you."

"Not the Washington thing again, I hope."

"Yeah. Look, Gil and I did everything we could, believe me." He gazed out the tinted side window. "The President won't back down. Apparently he saw your mug on the cover of Time a few months ago and now he wants to meet you in person."

"What's the matter with that guy?"

"How the hell would I know? He's still a guy, and guys sometimes just get something in their brain and can't dislodge it—you know how it is. And when you're the President—well, then I guess you don't have to. So, looks like you're going to Washington after all."

"A Pennsylvania Yankee in the King's Court!"

"Eggers," he said sharply, "are you going to be okay tonight?"

"Mr. Mortensen Goes to Washington!"

"Eggers, listen to me. This isn't Albany. This is The Club. Even you aren't too high-and-mighty to get kicked out of The Club. And once you're out, there's no coming back in."

"I just need some water."

"There'll be plenty of water at The Club." He patted my knee. "Now listen, you need to work with Jameson on this."

"On what?"

"Your Washington trip, Eggers—pay attention! You'll be going sometime next week, Tuesday or Wednesday, we figure. Jameson will get you ready—tell you what to say, what not to say."

"The President has big ears."

"Jesus!" he said, bringing his hand up to his forehead. "Alright. Let me talk to Gil again. Maybe we can still get you out of this without too much collateral damage."

"Beautiful man, Gil."

As soon as we got to The Club, I split from my brother. He went his way to charm people, and I went straight to the bathroom to throw some cold water on my face. On my way out I was unceremoniously whisked into an obscure corner by my good buddy Yazwehi 'Yaz' Nabali, the big Somali. We were shielded on one side by a strange, cast-iron, multi-layered plant stand with blooming Jade Trees in proliferation, and on the other by a sliding dividing wall with opaque panels depicting little smiling Geisha-like women in white kimonos with big red spots on them, an apparent paean to our first full-fledged Asian-American member.

Yaz handed me a bottle of water. "Your brother said you could use this," he said.

"Thanks, man." I drank it down and dropped the empty bottle into one of the top-tier potted Jade Plants. I looked at Yaz, who was—and still is—our chief of human resources, the big man upstairs who hires and fires and also issues the pay checks. His is your classic African immigrant's tale: native country implodes, once-prominent family barely escape with their lives and some jewelry—and on to America, land of plenty.

And who knew? Today's Horatio Alger is a tall black man in a pinstriped suit.

"Yaz!" I said. "You're looking particularly erect tonight."

"That is one of your jokes, I presume?"

"Not a very good one apparently."

"Eh," he said, "they are all the same to me. And you, Eggers, I have to say you do not look very happy. Your brother wants me to keep an eye on you tonight. After the Governor's Ball—"

"I hate Club night, Yaz. I just don't see the point of going to a club at night to do the exact same shit we do at the Complex during the day."

"But this is how business is conducted, all over the world—in dark smoky places like this by men who don't know much else. We like to pretend things have changed, but they have not."

"You got that right," I said. "What drips! Why not just drink and have fun here? Hey, let's slap asses and talk about football."

"Please do not touch my ass!"

"But it's such a nice tight little—"

"Please! Thank you. Anyway," he said, "it is summer now. We should be talking about baseball, yes?"

"Most boring game ever," I muttered. "Well, where the hell is Gil anyway? Let's get this king-making shit over with so I can go home and pick a fight with my lovely wife."

"She is a very beautiful lady, Eggers. You are a lucky man." Yaz looked over at one of the smiling Geishas on the sliding wall, and then he took a step closer to me and visibly stiffened. "You know, I believe I know who Mr. Smoltz is going to select as our next intrepid leader. Our next chief...I am afraid it is going to be that horrid little toad Sebastian! Yes, because he is—how do you say it?—an ass-kisser. He is a big all-American howdy-dowdy fat-faced fucker..."

"Keep going, Yaz. I'm enjoying this."

"Sebastian is going to run our company? Ha! He could not run a goat out of a burning barn!"

"Well," I said, "Sebastian is gay."

"Everyone knows that."

"I'm just saying—"

"It does not matter anymore," he said, "not in this country anyway." He stopped to receive an oblique compliment from some twenty-something sycophant in sales, a legacy member of The Club. "Actually," Yaz continued, "if anything it has been helping him, because he has amassed a little cult following of fellow butt buddies—have you noticed? Do you see the way that big yeti Snyder eats up everything he says? Actually, I like Sebastian. I do not know what I am saying here."

"We're all under a lot of pressure, Yaz."

"Not you," he said. "You are cool as a cucumber."

"Or mad as a hatter."

"You are a very strange man, Eggers. In my country you would be a tribal chief."

"And that's why your country is such a fucking mess."

"Yes-ss," he said, backing away. "However, what I mean to say to you is, your brother should be the next big chief, the CEO, our leader. Do you not think so?"

"Why not you, Yaz? Hey—boss man!"

"No-no. No," he stammered, "no. I do not deserve it, yet. Your brother—he is the best choice. Everyone likes him—he is a very handsome man—and he is probably the smartest man I have ever met. He has already done so much for this company. What a shame that he might not get it. Unless, that is, you stuck your neck out for him? Then he has a good chance."

"Fuck no!" I said.

"You are a profane man, Eggers. Perhaps that is why I like you so much."

"And I like you, Yaz. But you're too tall."

"In my country there is a saying: the tall man is one who sees above the eyes of others. It, uh, loses something in translation. Why would you not help your own flesh-and-blood brother?"

"Because then all his suffering would be mine," I said. "I'd never hear the end of it. That's how it works in my family."

"Ah!" he said, nodding. "Well, that—uh, that makes absolutely no sense. You have no faith in your own brother?"

"What?" I said. "Oh, he'll get the damn job, Yaz. He'll get it because he's Levi. What Levi wants, Levi gets." I leaned into his chest. "Look, you didn't hear it from me, but I happen to know—it's already a done deal. Lips sealed, okay?"

"It is—how do you say it?—a plum position."

"Sure as hell is," I said. "It's really just a check-and-sign-here kind of deal. He'll have a bevy of underlings to do all the real work."

"It is very simple at the top then."

"That's right. Best-kept secret in the world." I ducked out of our private circle to nab two crystal flutes of Champagne from a passing dandy whose sole purpose in life was to spin around The Club flat handing a tray of drinks for us. I ducked back in and handed one to Yaz, who doesn't ever drink.

"There are so many secrets in this world," he said. "I am thirty-nine years old and feel I have discovered so very few of them in my time."

"Yeah." I held up my Champagne glass. "To undiscovered secrets, Yaz—"

"Undiscovered secrets, sir." He clinked my glass, and sniffed his bubbly.

"You know," I said, taking his glass from him to avoid any more awkwardness, and then drinking it down in one swallow, "if only more people out there could see what the Masters of the Universe are really required to do, no one would ever again bust his ass cleaning carpets or driving an eighteen-wheeler through a Midwestern snowstorm. Everyone would get an MBA and become the chief of something-or-other, which is where we are heading as a country anyway."

"Which is good—yes?" Yaz reflected on this a moment. "Yes, let the machines do all the hard physical labor—"

"Or the Chinese," I added.

"I do not like the Chinese."

"Who does?"

Gil's grand entrance was surprisingly muted. Here I'd been expecting a sudden change in the general hubbub around me, a kind of here-comes-the-king quietude when he entered the White Room, but there was nothing like that: suddenly there was Gil, standing next to the oriental dividing wall, smiling at me. I guess at The Club everyone is king.

"Gil!" I said.

Yaz bowed his head. "Mr. Smoltz."

"Ah, gentlemen, found you at last," Gil said. He shook my hand, then Yaz's. Gil was in CEO-mode here, which meant that he had to keep a certain emotive distance from everyone, including me. I hated it, but understood. We were more than two years removed from out time in Maine now, but I still wasn't used to seeing him in a crisp business suit, all clean-shaven and shiny. Every time I closed my eyes, he would pop up in khakis and red flannel, with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and a bag of deer jerky clipped to his belt.

"Eggers," he said, "how are things up there in R&D?"

"Just fine, sir. I didn't break any of your million-dollar machines this week."

"And Mr. Nabali, I take it HR is humming along nicely?"

"It is indeed, sir."

"Well, very good then."

That's Gil Smoltz, a classic Old-Money Man. His management style chiefly involved saying "Well, very good then" when he got a positive report and "Well, fix it then" when he got a negative report.

"Gentlemen," Gil said, "I will be making a formal announcement at the Board meeting on Monday, as you've probably heard, but I just wanted to let the inner circle know first, who I've tagged to replace me. Come on, let's go. Everyone's already gathered in the Roosevelt Room." He smiled; it was that at-ease beamy smile I used to get all the time in Maine.

"You can spare us the suspense," I said. "It's Levi, right?"

"Was there ever any doubt?" Gil replied.

I elbowed Yaz. "Told you."

I ended up staying for the entire unscripted ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, which lasted until well after midnight. I may even have enjoyed myself a little. My brother gave one barnburner of a speech, that's for sure. It's was the perfect mix of business jargon and Levi charms. He finished to genuine applause: "And finally, I believe—yes—what this great company of ours needs right now more than anything is just some renewed buzz. Because people seem to have forgotten that what we are doing is beyond extraordinary—it is revolutionary. It is revolutionizing life as we know it; it is revolutionizing the world."

Afterwards, Larry and Moe took me home. At the time I wasn't sure what had changed, but I did notice that they had taken a different route—a much longer one—and both had stood outside the SUV for a few moments, scanning the shadowy region beyond my new security fence, before opening the vehicle door to let me out. They stayed very close to me as I went up the steep steps.

It was too late to go check in on the little tyke—he wakes up easily—so I went straight up to the Master Bedroom. Gloria was sitting up in our giant canopy bed, reading; she always waits up for me, no matter how late I get in. She'd put on her spinster's nightgown, which meant she was not in the mood for lovemaking. Our marriage, for better or worse, was coming to depend more and more on these little non-verbal cues.

I took off my work clothes and hung them up in the dry-cleaning pickup rack, went into the Master Bathroom to brush my teeth, and then crawled into bed next to her, naked as usual.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Ah," I replied, "pretty uneventful. My brother is going to be the next CEO, and I'm going to meet the President—"

"What? Get out!"

"Yeah," I said, "it's Levi. What would you expect?"

"No!" She finally closed her book. Now I could make out the title: The Time Traveler's Wife. Why would anyone want to travel to any time other than this one? I wondered. "Eggers, I meant—the other thing."

"Yeah," I said, "the President. Gil is trying to get me out of it."

"Get you out of it? What possible reason do you have for not wanting to meet the President of our country?"

"I don't know. It's weird; just the thought of me sitting there with the President, just me and the President of the United States, having coffee or something. I mean, what do I say to him? 'Hey, how's the Armageddon-button finger?' 'Bomb any Bedouins lately?'"

"He's the President, Eggers! You don't say squat; you just answer his questions. Come on, it'll be fun. I'll go with you."

"Really?"

"Sure." She was silent a moment. "When are we going?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"They don't tell you ahead of time—for security reasons, I guess. They just call, and you go. Sometime early next week probably. Gil has a company jet on standby..."

"Wow!" she said. I could sense her brain spinning. "I'll have my sister come over, whenever we have to go, and watch Adam—"

"I thought we had nannies for that."

"They are not allowed to sleep over. It's in their contract."

"Well," I said, "then why don't we just take the little tyke with us? Our first family trip."

"Oh, alright."

Later that night I was dragged out of REM sleep by a low rumbling voice. It was Gloria, somewhere out there in the bedroom sitting area, in the dark, talking on her cell phone. "But that's exactly what I mean. Think about it, Leslie...it's...oh sure, sure..."

I knew how this would go; they would either get into a fight or talk for hours.

"I know; I know!...What?...No! Listen, I am not leaving Eggers. That's not why I'm calling...ah sure, he's still drinking too much, yeah. That too, of course. What?...Oh, that was just bullshit talk...Listen to me...Yeah, I know. I know...Anyway, guess what?"

I fell right back to sleep.

~

The next morning, a Saturday, we had a late breakfast in The Nook. We were served a nice spread of scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage links and multi-grain bagels with local creamery butter and five different flavors of jam and fresh-squeezed orange juice and a full-fledged fresh tropical-fruit plate, and coffee of course, prepared by our new weekend cook Sinead, an Irish beauty studying comparative literature at Columbia. It was a silent affair, for whatever reason. I ate and read the Journal; Gloria ate and read the Times—we would occasionally look up at the same time and smile.

Then she was off to the little boutiques that are rarely frequented by social workers to shop for a nice Washington dress with her sister and mother, and I had to meet with the gay guy to look over his latest plans for the English Basement. I liked the gay guy, our interior designer, but he worked at a glacial pace. For every new step in the renovation process, he wanted to know more about me, as if he were intent on creating an interior of our house that mirrored my soul. Me? Well, uh, let's see: I love whiskey and contact sports and food that burns your lips and girls who say things like 'fuck me with a spoon' when they're surprised...if he weren't associated with cigarettes, I'd want to be the Marlboro Man. Look, I used to be able to bench-press two-hundred-and-ninety-five pounds easily: I want a house that lets me believe I still can...

Apparently, the gay guy thought that our house needed a lot of studded black leather, even on the walls. Gloria had wanted to fire him right away—he'd turned our Living Room into "some kind of gay Turkish bathhouse," she claimed—but for some reason I kept giving him second chances. I hated all the time it was taking out of my life. Recently, someone at work—Sebastian, that asshole—had calculated that I was earning about $6,778.23 per minute now, just by breathing and being me. And despite my best attempts at humility, I couldn't stop going about my day thinking, "I just earned $15,456.51 brushing my teeth! Hey, I just took a $247,000 shit..."

Gloria had finally recused herself from the English Basement project. She was doing everything possible not to say, about the house in general, "This big fucking fiasco was your idea, Eggers!" I know this because she'd recently said to me, "Well, I'm doing everything possible not to say this, but this big fucking fiasco was your idea, Eggers!" It really is becoming my own personal House of Usher.

And more recently I've learned that if you don't put someone's name in a memoir—if you just call him the gay guy, for instance—you will invite a lot of criticism.

His name is Richard Sanchez. Richard and I, on this particular day, were down in the huge hollowed-out shell just below ground level that would soon become an architectural masterpiece, a four-thousand-square-foot man cave to beat out all other man caves. I'd brought down a bottle of Tequila and two crystal glasses to try to smooth things out between us.

"Oh," Richard said, "I see. You are going to fire me."

"I just want to talk—that's all. I figured you were a Tequila man—"

"Why, because I'm Mexican?"

"Mexican? Geez, I thought you were from California."

"I am."

"Oh."

I handed him a full glass. "Cheers," I said.

"Cheers." He took that first sip and practically melted into the floor. "Dr. Mortensen, I take it you don't like the new design?"

"Well..."

"You should be honest with me."

"Okay then. About your latest design...it is something I might want to wrap around my worst enemy before throwing him into an active volcano."

"That is perhaps a little too much honesty."

I refilled our glasses.

"Funny," he said.

"What?"

"How much I have dreamed of this moment—being picked to design the house, you know, the one everyone in my profession covets. There isn't an interior designer anywhere in the world who wouldn't chew off his own toes to get this job. Yet—well, it just isn't what I expected. But then I guess nothing ever is. My wife thinks I'm having a mid-life crisis—"

"Excuse me?" I broke in. "Did you just say your 'wife'?"

"Oh, right. I see. I'm small-boned, I talk with my hands a lot, and I have a matador's nice tight little ass, if I do say so myself. I must be gay! The gay interior designer—of course!"

"Well, sorry. But I'm going to keep thinking that."

"And I am going to keep cashing your checks." Richard Martinez took another appreciative little sip of Tequila. "Next week I will bring you a better design, Dr. Mortensen. Next week you will like what I show you. You will like it very much, I promise. Although I honestly thought you'd be easier to peg. You are without question my most difficult client. Just who is Dr. Eggers Mortensen? I still really don't know. Because—and pardon me for saying this—I think your spirit is diffuse. It's like your character in that movie." His eyes got glassy; he lowered his voice. "It's amazing—that actor, he looks just like you."

"Aw, crap," I said. "Not this again—"

"That guy, he thinks he's a romantic but he's just way too reckless for love. That's why you—he, I mean...he always ends up hurting the ones he loves."

"Could we please talk about my English Basement now? That is what I'm paying you for."

"I wouldn't mind another snort of this excellent Tequila first."

"Sure," I said, refilling his glass, and mine. "Now—"

Richard looked deeply into the busted-out dividing wall. "I would never want to be a Vampire."

"That makes two of us."

"I totally understand why you hate them so much," he said. "Because what we hate in Vampires is what we hate in ourselves."

We got nowhere with the new design for the English Basement. I figure I'd earned about $978,000 discussing the finer points of vampire culture with my interior designer Richard Martinez that day. He stumbled out after promising yet another re-design more in line with what I want—something manly but not patriarchal, tough but not gritty, assertive but not oppressive, sophisticated but not gay...

After that I went up to the Nursery and got Adam from his Nanny and took a nap with him in the big bed. Adam: that gurgling little guy, my stepson—what can I say about him? Most kids break into the world screaming and crying; Adam asserts his existence through smiles.

In any case, he woke up around three. I changed his diaper myself and then took him up to the Rooftop Terrace, where we had put in an age-appropriate play set and padded toddler area. I let him muddle around for an hour or so up there in the shade; then I gave him back to the Nanny and went with my brother Levi to his gym to have a workout session with his amazing trainer. I got back around six. Gloria wasn't home yet, so I had some cold cuts and beer brought up to my Study. Somehow, I managed to get a little work done.

Gloria got home around eight with bags and bags of stuff. She didn't have time to show me any of it though, because she had to get ready for a charity event we had been drafted into attending. I took another nap, a short one this time, and around nine-thirty I popped out of bed and jumped into my ready-set-go tuxedo. I found Gloria in the pink Powder Room. She was sitting on her swivel-stool, plucking her brows in front of a giant pore-magnifying mirror.

For a while, she said nothing while I hovered behind her and admired the mirrored distortion of her breasts. Then she said, "You've been drinking all day again, haven't you?"

"I had a little tequila with the gay guy. But I'm fine now." I watched her apply makeup to her cheeks with a flared-out black brush. It happened to be the exact same color as her cheeks. I couldn't see the point of it. "I thought we weren't going to go to this stupid thing tonight," I said.

"No. Let's go. You can point out that little intern you let blow you in the elevator."

"She won't be there. She has some sorority function—"

"You asshole!"

"You started it! Come on," I said, "you know I'd never cheat on you."

"How the hell do I know that?"

"Well..."

Now she was putting on lipstick the color of overcooked salmon. I was just waiting and watching.

"Actually, Eggers, I don't really want to go to this thing, but we have to. The Edelsteins are expecting us. They went through a lot of trouble to get the top floor of your Complex for their Ball this year. It's an impressive space—"

"I know," I said. "Hello, it's my building? But why do we have to go?"

"They're big donors to our foundation."

"So what? Listen to me: we keep forgetting that we don't have to do anything we don't want to do. That's what Gil does. You think he's going to be at this stupid thing tonight? We're super stinking rich, baby; we're the upper one-percent now! We don't have to go. Let's just go out and fool around on the veranda tonight. We'll give those geeks with the telescope another show. You hear me? I say screw the Edelsteins! You hear me?" I got up on a chair and shouted, "Screw all the Edelsteins of the world! Screw...the...Edelsteins! Screw...the...Edel...steins! Come on, who's with me?"

My wife stood up, and I got down off the chair and followed her into her walk-in closet. "This charity world makes no sense," I continued. "We give to the Edelstein's charitable foundation; they give to ours. Well, why the hell doesn't everyone just use their own damn money for their own damn foundations?"

"Oh, sweetie!" She slipped into a purple dress and did a little pirouette for my admiring eyes. "Sometimes I think you really are the crazy guy who just gets dragged into things."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You don't get anywhere using your own money, silly. That's what people from our social class have a hard time getting. They think money equals power; more money means more power. But there's a limit, a kind of built-in governor—and baby, we passed that point long ago. The truth is, sometimes you need, well—you need your money to act like a magnet. Because there are bigger things than money in this world, like connections, people who know people—"

"Is this what you've become?"

"Eggers, this is what I've always been. Could you zip me up?"

"I'd rather feel you up, but okay."

She looked at herself in her dress. "How the hell did I get so damn fat?" she said.

"What are you talking about?" I said. "You look spectacular."

She put on a white glove and then took it right off. "Alright," she said, "I think I'm ready."

"Wait. Before we go?"

"What, Eggers?"

"Play something for me on the piano. Play the one song you'd want to save if some evil entity were to swoop down and erase every song you know from the world."

"Sweetie, are you stoned?"

"Come on," I implored. "You finally got your big-ass Steinway, and you've never once played it for me."

"There's a reason for that," she said.

"Which is?"

"What if I'm not as good as you think I am?"

"We already know I'm not as smart as you thought I was, so what's the big deal?"

She grabbed my cheeks. "You know what? Every once in a while, Eggers, you remind me why I love you so much."

~

We were fashionably late: it was almost midnight by the time we'd rolled up to the top floor of the Complex and walked out into the Ballroom—"best ballroom in American," according to The New Yorker—for the Edelsteins' world-renowned Nth-Annual Charity Ball.

As soon as we'd gotten out of the glass elevator, Gloria grabbed my arm and started dragging me into the cloistered depths of that vaulted chamber. There was not one person here either of us recognized.

"You don't look very happy," I remarked. I had to put my mouth right up to her ear to be heard.

"I told you I didn't want to go to this thing. But we're here, so..." She waved at someone somewhere out there along the bustling edge of the great ballroom, and then elbowed me until I'd waved too. I have no idea who the hell it was.

"I'm not talking about this party," I said. We were passing this amazing spread of seafood—rows and rows of red steamed lobster tails, along with cracked claws and chunks of raw body pierced with little wood picks, all on a giant mound of ice; a shrimp ring the size of a kiddie pool; a Mount Kilimanjaro pile of oysters and twin peaks of clams; scallops in profusion...

"What are you talking about then?" she asked.

"Married life—us." Back in June, Gloria and I had had a barefoot wedding in the Cayman Islands with only my brother and her sister as witnesses. There are members of both of our families who have not yet forgiven us.

"Jesus, Eggers!" Gloria said. "What a question to ask now." We kept moving arm-in-arm through the shifting bodies of people. I'd tried to pacify myself by imagining—it was a terrible idea actually—that I was in some 3-D video game where the object was to avoid all contact with the blue-veined zombies of the east-coast charity circuit. They move so slowly, but there are just so many of them...

We'd just rounded the corner bar when Gloria jabbed her elbow into my side. "You do know she's going to be here tonight, right?"

"What—who?"

Gloria waved to someone. "You know who," she said. "Oh, it's okay. Go find her, get it over with. I need to mingle anyway."

She kissed my cheek and melded with the shifting zombies, and I made my way over to the open bar, where I bumped into Sebastian Groline, our highly touted Chief Financial Officer. He was holding the hand of a young blond woman whose chin kept dropping down to her chest. They'd apparently been having a Sebastian kind of night. Right behind Sebastian, like a shadow, was some porky guy in cowboy boots.

"Eggers," Sebastian said, "this is Thomas Greene. He's a State Senator from up north. He's leading the Republican resurgence in our fine state. Eggers, be nice to this young man. He's going to be President someday."

I thought, If that squamous little toad there ever becomes President, I'm moving to Guam.

Sebastian turned to the little sausage man and pinched his arm: "And this guy here, Tommy, this is Eggers Mortensen. You absolutely must put him on your list of people to know. He's a true genius, the real brains behind X+ Corp. And he's already one of the richest men in the world."

"Oh?" the woman hanging on Sebastian's arm said, as if someone had just wound her up. "Like Bill Gates!"

Thomas Greene plowed through Sebastian and his sidekick and held out his hand for me. I went down on my knees, took it lightly, and kissed it. "Aw, geez!" the guy said, looking around nervously.

Sebastian pinched my cheeks. "Oh, I just love this guy! He's never serious about anything." He corralled his people away from me. "Come on," he said, "there's someone else I want you to meet."

I was alone again. I had more drinks than I probably should have had before moving away from the bar and on into another sector of this impressive over-the-top ballroom. I was just moving through bar bodies. I just flowed and kept on flowing—until I suddenly found myself standing nose to nose with the lady of the night herself, Mrs. Edelstein. The old man, I guess, had shifted over to a politically charged circle of men, which left his poor wife horribly exposed to an elemental dervish like me. It was a strange moment, as if the ballroom were some inflatable set and now all the crown moldings and little Grecian sculptures overhead were losing their rigidity; the ceiling had become convex instead of concave, so that the huge chandelier was practically down in my face now.

"Hey," I said to Mrs. Edelstein. "You look lovely, simply dazzling!"

"And you have obviously been made aware of the open bar."

"Indeed. Care to dance?"

"Why, sir, the band is on break right now."

"We'll make our own music, baby!"

I have always reveled in the emotional cross-stitching that occurs when two people are put into conversational orbit by chance. However, as invariably happens at public events like this, Mrs. Edelstein and I found our way to a serious topic. "The problem," I was saying—and don't ask me who had gotten us onto this track—"with charitable organizations is that they are invariably working toward their own destruction. It's a classic paradox actually."

"I don't follow."

"You cure MS," I went on, "then who the hells needs a foundation dedicated to curing MS anymore? Right? Don't even try to tell me that doesn't work its way into their factoring at some point. Whenever they try something new, somewhere in some deep crag of their collectivized brain, the idea is spinning: 'Gee, if this works—we're finished!' "

"That is quite preposterous, I must say! Because even if you are right, sir—and I am not for one minute admitting that you are—there are still so many things to fight for in this imperfect world of ours. Any organization that is worth its salt may simply move on to the next important thing. Once you have the proper machinery in place, you know—"

"Then—correct me if I'm wrong—what you're saying is they don't really care about what they're doing. It's the machinery that matters, fighting for the sake of fighting. What they're fighting for, or against, is just a pretense."

"Clearly you are on something tonight."

"Tera Firma," I said.

"You look very familiar to me. Have we met?"

"Not yet."

"Well," she said, "what do you do? May I get a serious answer to that at least?"

"Cluck like a chicken, juggle pencils..."

"You, sir, are trying far too hard to be entertaining now."

"You're right," I said, laughing. "Actually I'm Gloria's husband."

"Ah, Eggers Mortensen! You look much different in real life than you do in your photos."

"Amazing what they can do with Photoshop nowadays, huh?"

"You know," she said, "I simply cannot believe our paths have not crossed before. I've heard so many things about you, from so many different quarters." She took my arm and threw her reconstructed hip into my own natural swivel-joint; the elegant old cougar, who was about my height, was standing so close to me now I could smell her minty breath: "Not all good, I'm afraid. I must say, Eggers, you do not disappoint. Come-come, young man, take my arm and walk with me. Let's get everyone talking about us."

I wanted to—I really did. I wanted to go around that awesome ballroom with the inimitable Mrs. Edelstein in tow, but I ditched the old broad nonetheless, using the oldest trick in the male handbook: "Let me hit the head first, if you don't mind."

I had to ditch her because I could now see, some twenty feet away from me, passing in front of a giant Yucca tree—my old flame: Vampora! She wore some crinkly gold outfit with eighties-era shoulder pads and a thick-black belt around her abdomen, along with black-webbed fishnet stockings and knee-high black-leather boots that had little open-mouthed bat-heads at the end. She had lens-enhanced red eyes, black lipstick, and sharp black fingernails. Even in this august atmosphere, she was drawing attention to herself.

I'd closed about half the distance between us when out of nowhere—or so it seemed to me—some redhead beatnik swooped in and handed Vampora a glass of pink Champagne. The girl wore a colorful tiara and little dream-catcher earrings to match her swirling batik blouse and white mini-skirt—all aesthetically supported by some high-heeled blocky sandals whose straps ran all the way up to her bony knees. Now she was clinging to my old flame's arm as if they were skydiving with one parachute between them. I'd recognized her right away. She's a well-known young actress who is one camel-toe away from a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster—a little heartbreaker, if you believe the tabloids.

"Eggers," Vampora said.

"Vampora!" I bleated. Her ornamental sidekick took one look at me and yawned. Either Vampora had told her about me or she hadn't. Either way I was clearly not enough of a physical presence for her. She sipped Champagne and looked around the room for more interesting specimens.

"Eggers."

"Vampora."

"Quite some building you've got here," she said. "This Ballroom—wow!"

"First time I've ever been up here," I said. "So, how's life? How're things? You bitch—why didn't you call me when you got back to the city?"

"Life is good; things are good, and fuck you. I just got in last night."

"I can get little baby Jane this weekend then?"

"If you want." Vampora glanced at the little beatnik glued to her side. "Eggers?" she said. "Just say what you want to say. You couldn't be more obvious—"

"I'm just wondering...have you heard anything from her? You know—anything?"

"No," she said, visibly shaken, "nothing. For over a year now—"

"Nothing, really?"

"Eggers, just let it go. I have. It may be better—for you, for me—that we don't know where she is. Let the poor girl do her thing, whatever it is she needs to get out of her system, and then maybe she can start working her way back into the real world. Let's hope so anyway. If you did it—anyone can." She sipped her Champagne. "Look, you wouldn't even have recognized her at the end. I don't know what happened; she just snapped. Suddenly she was nothing like the fun-loving, big-grinning, brilliant little nerd girl that I, uh"—she glanced over at her sidekick—"took up with for a time."

"Don't tell me you don't miss her. Look," I said, "I just want to find her. I just want to know she's okay."

"She can't help you, Eggers. She couldn't even help herself near the end."

"Help me?" I said. "I want to help her."

Vampora pushed the little heartbreaker's arm away. "Honey? Go powder your nose or something. This is my personal business here."

"Whatever." The up-and-coming actress went off to add her morbid youthful energy to another shifting sector of the greatest ballroom in America.

"Girls like that," Vampora said, "they single-handedly overturn all the reams of feminist scholarship against misogyny. Beautiful as hell, but—"

"What is she, all of twenty-four?"

"She will be someday. Listen, you can't help Jazz at this point, Eggers. What she's going through—"

"You never told me what happened to you two."

"You happened, Eggers. Haven't I taught you anything? Alright," she said, "truth is, she just unraveled, and I mean completely. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, just kept muttering something about, uh, 'loop gravity,' I think—"

"Loop quantum gravity," I said. "Are you sure about that?"

"I'm not sure about anything! Okay? Whenever I'd ask her to explain it—I did try to get her to talk about it—she'd say, 'Oh, you wouldn't understand!' and then storm off to her room. I snuck in there once when she was out on a walk, trying to cool herself down, or something—oh Eggers, what a mess! I'm talking rotten banana peels on the floor, apple cores and candy wrappers everywhere, piles of pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons; and get this; she was peeing in old milk cartons by then. They were all lined up against the wall, Eggers. There were huge black flies everywhere! It was disgusting, worse than your creepy little cabin in Maine."

"I am going to find her," I said. "I owe her that much. It was her equation, after all, that started all this."

"Believe me, she knows." Her fingers glided over my stomach. "Listen, a man can't save a girl from herself, Eggers. That's a universal law."

"I have to try, at least."

"Alright!" she said. "Alright. But I need you to promise me something first."

"What?"

"That you won't go mount some kind of search-and-rescue operation or anything like that until you check with me first. I don't care where I am, what I'm doing—I want to know. I just might want to tag along with you."

"Oh, I'll find her," I said. "My people are that good." I held up my cell phone. "One call, that's all I have to make—"

"Well," she said, "as soon as you know anything, you call me, okay?"

"Sure thing."

She kissed me on the lips. "It's always good to see you, Eggers. Now I guess I should go fish my date out of the punch bowl..."

~

On Tuesday of the following week, around five in the morning, we got the call from the White House: I was to meet the President that evening. Gil sent a limo over to the house—we barely had time to pack—and my family and I were swept out to LaGuardia, whisked through security, and led straight out onto the tarmac and into the corporate jet. It took off without delay. There were six passengers: Adam was in his special protective shell next to Gloria; the goons were in the seats directly in front of them, and Jameson and I were up front around the conference table. Jameson was having conniptions because he'd wanted another day or two to prep me. "So, Eggers" he was saying, as we crested fourteen-thousand feet, "right before takeoff I checked with my contact in Washington. He doesn't know the set-up for this evening. I'm thinking it isn't going to be a one-on-one with the President though. It's probably going to be one of those fireside chat deals in the Green Room that this President likes so much. What I do know is that this is going to be televised live, which gives us next-to-no wiggle room. Eggers? Pay attention here, for Christ's sake! We don't have much time."

Jameson, our Chief of Institutional Promotion and Public Relations, is one of those men who are integral to a big grinding American corporation but never get tagged for the top position. Everything about him is flat—his spirit, his emotions, his face (Gloria thinks he looks like the actor Eric Roberts). Even his hair lies flat on his head. He has a flat ass. His voice is also flat, which is why he only mouths the words to "Happy Birthday!" whenever we shock some lowly celebrant at the Complex with a cake and trick candles.

"Eggers," he said, "I know that everything is a game to you. That's okay around the Complex. You have your big billion-dollar playground and you get to play in it all day long. But this is different, because tonight your face is going to be the face of X+ Corporation, for all the world to see. Over forty-six-thousand people depend on us for their livelihood now. Does that sound like a game to you?"

"A really stupid one."

"Only to you, Eggers. Only to you. Now"—he flung open his notepad—"let's review Buddy again, because it absolutely will come up and it is essential that we get this right. When you're with the President, do not ever refer to Buddy as 'him': Buddy is an 'it.' He's a computer program, nothing more. And whatever you do, do not use the following words or phrases: soul or spirit, sentient or sentience or sentient being, breathe or breath or breathing, feel or feelings, heart or heartbeat or...'"

I stopped listening. His voice was mere background buzz for the infinitely more human moment of a mother singing "Frère Jacques" to her frightened son in the back of a jet airplane. It worked on Adam; it worked on me. I fell asleep with my head sinking back into the soft cushion of my ergonomic executive's chair, and Jameson had the good sense not to wake me up.

My next moment of consciousness involved my wife's breath tickling my ear: "Honey, wake up. We've landed..."

And so I, Dr. Eggers Mortensen, got to meet the President of the United States. Just yesterday—some eight months after the fact—I managed to score the official White House transcript of that evening, which wasn't hard: it's up on their website now (www.whitehouse. gov/ Mortensen-et.al/fireside-chat6/fiasco-09899.zasdfe.).

And so I include it here. It really speaks for itself:

TRANSCRIPT OF THE 6th 'FIRESIDE CHAT WITH THE PRESIDENT'

IN THE GREEN ROOM, WITH THE FOLLOWING PARTICIPANTS:

1) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES;

2) GENERAL RICHARD L. SCHMEMSIS;

3) CARDINAL FERDINAND MONDICCI;

4) SENATOR GEORGE R. FINEBURNE (D);

5) SAMUEL TABITHA, 13, FROM MINNESOTA, THE BIG APPLE

YOUNG PHYSICIST OF THE YEAR AWARD RECIPIENT; AND

6) DR. EGGERS MORTENSEN, REPRESENTING

X+ CORPORATION OF AMERICA

*****************************************************************************

[Begin Transcript 1531 hours:]

PRESIDENT: Gentlemen, and little gentleman [laughs], welcome to the White House. We are in the Green Room for this evening's chat session. This, the Green Room, is where...uh...well, we can have the history lesson later.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Mr. President...

CARD. MONDICCI: Well, now...uh-um...thank you, sir—

SEN. FINEBURNE: Yes-s...Mr. President...

DR. MORTENSEN: Uh—[coughs]...hi, Senator...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Hmm...Er... [unintelligible]...

PRESIDENT: I've invited you all here this evening because ...well, first of all...to celebrate...a landmark we have just passed, just a few weeks ago as I understand it. Thanks to the incredible efforts of X+ Corporation... Dr. Mortensen here...they've been able to break a barrier...one that some said was impossible. I am, of course, talking about the brain barrier. We can now make a virtual human that has all the, uh, the cognitive abilities of a, uh, a real living human...the process, I believe it is being called, Non-binary Processing.

SAMUEL TABITHA: Cool.

PRESIDENT: We can now process information, uh, on an order that, uh, that was inconceivable just a few years ago. We used to talk about processing in terms of terabytes. Now...now we need a whole new language, a whole approach to what we do, to industry—technology—to everything. Non-binary Processing is transforming the way we do business, the way we live...the quality of life, uh, that your generation can expect, Samuel, yours and the ones to follow... the things you will be able to do, in Medicine, Nanotechnologies, for example, and green technologies as well...you will be much better off than we are today. You will live longer, you will live better. And that is the true fulfillment of the American dream, uh, that each and every generation lives better than the one before it...and now...uh... this reality is here, before us all. And there are only more incredible things on the horizon. Tell us, Dr. Mortensen, about Buddy...if you would...

CARD. MONDICCI: Yes-ss...

DR. MORTENSEN: Right [coughs]. Buddy. Buddy is...uh, my company, X+ Corp...uh, you know that...we, uh, anyways, we have joined forces with [coughs]... well, a lot of companies actually, thousands I guess...and the Defense Department, our biggest contractor...but this one company, called Genetac, uh...we worked with them to create Buddy...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Genetac...the huge pharmaceutical outfit, being investigated for price-fixing...that Genetac?

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Wait! Is this that, uh, that virtual man-thing I keep reading about? With its own heartbeat and everything like that...

SAMUEL TABITHA: Buddy-bud-bub...

DR. MORTENSEN: That's right. Buddy is basically the first programmed entity to equal a living human in terms of his cognitive abilities...I mean, in terms of the complexity of his being, um, his sophistication of thought, I mean... basically he is every bit as smart as anyone sitting here. And he's, uh—Buddy, that is...he is the first virtual being to exhibit signs of sentience...the first, and so far only, sentient man-made thing in existence...and he's just the start of uh, what we're going to be able to do, soon...very soon...

SEN. FINEBURNE: And what exactly does this, uh, this latter-day Frankenstein of yours do...so that you can sit here and say that it's...you claim that it's...sentient? Good God—

DR. MORTENSEN Well, a lot of things. The first, the one that got his, uh, his creators, uh...sorry, but that's what we call them... [whispered to Card. Mondicci:] Sorry, sir.

CARD. MONDICCI: Goodness gracious...

PRESIDENT: This is fascinating. Please, uh, continue...

DR. MORTENSEN: Uh, right. Yes...anyways, Buddy, to answer your question, he, uh, he asked for a toothbrush. This was only a few days after he was cree-...uh, activated. And uh, and so...so when they asked him why he wanted it...and, uh, we can recreate, so to speak, anything in our world, and then put it in his...except we hadn't done that with a tooth brush...well, he...he said he wanted a toothbrush anyway—he figured out what it was on his own, see...and so, he wanted it so could have white teeth like, uh...I guess one of his creators had really white teeth, right...and he liked it, I guess, what they looked like on her...which means, uh...well, it means he'd made the transference from what he saw, through his sensors—that's pretty basic technology there—to what he wanted for himself...he did this on his own...toothbrush equals white teeth, in other words...it's a huge gulf to cross, in the virtual realm, and pretty amazing, after only a few days of self-awareness...that's all he had by then...uh, anyway, they, uh, well, they asked Buddy why he wanted white teeth, right, and he said...and I'm quoting here: 'I might want to marry Justin Bieber someday.'

SEN. FINEBURNE: Good Lord!

DR. MORTENSEN: Yes. Apparently, unknown to us, he'd gone online, and stumbled upon Bieber...his heartbeat even went up appreciably...

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: You made your guy, Buddy...uh, why would he, uh...like that...

CARD. MONDICCI: Oh, my!

SAMUEL TABITHA: Awesome!

PRESIDENT: Well, that, uh...that sure lightened things up, now didn't it? [Laughs].

SAMUEL TABITHA: Ha!

SEN. FINEBURNE: So let me get this straight...you've created this, uh, this sentient thing...Dr. Mortensen...you and your company, which gets, you get tens of billions of dollars from government contracts...you claim that's what it is, something that has feelings and everything like that, and surfs the Internet now, on his own...uh...a replicant, isn't that what it's called, what you care calling it?

DR. MORTENSEN: Look, he has self-awareness, awareness of his physical self—yes. But feelings? I don't know about that...or a soul...I mean—uh [coughs]...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Yes, well, uh...my point is...now you're going to, what, replicate it, create thousands more 'Buddies', right?...millions maybe, right...and then, what? Experiment on them? Use them instead of mice and monkeys? Like lab rats? This poor thing that wants a toothbrush...because that's what I've been reading you're going to do to him—to them...he's a highly sophisticated lab rat—am I right?

DR. MORTENSEN: Well, uh, I-I-I don't...I don't know about that...I-I-I uh...

PRESIDENT: Samuel? You want to say something?

SAMUEL TABITHA: Er, um...oh-h...

PRESIDENT: It's okay, Samuel. We value what you have to say here.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Son, speak up...

CARD. MONDICCI: Behold! Children are a heritage of the Lord...

DR. MORTENSEN: Hey-uh [coughs].

SAMUEL TABITHA: Uh...um...I'm just thinking...it's kinda like, uh-um, like Jurassic Park? They create dinosaurs, but they get out...they get out...something happens, right? It, uh...in the movie...

SEN. FINEBURNE: I believe the power goes out, then the back-up power fails as well. Then, what...the electric fences stop working. Then a cascade of mishaps, uh, happens...

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: It's what we call a Catastrophic Failure—

PRESIDENT: Interesting.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Son, are you saying this could happen with...with what Dr. Mortensen is doing? With all these Buddy things out there...

SAMUEL TABITHA: [Barely audible:] I dunno.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Son?

SAMUEL TABITHA: That fat guy, from Seinfeld...uh...that guy, he did it. He cut the power, to steal the dinosaur genes...and he...and he messed up the computers...he had to get out...he's gonna sell 'em...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Right-right.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: There was a storm too...can't forget that...

SAMUEL TABITHA: Yeah, right...a storm. But, it's, uh, not like...like...it just happened, you know? The dinosaurs getting out...my mom says, she says people...it's always people who, uh, they, like, mess stuff up. Just one person, like the Seinfeld guy...Newman, yeah!...they do something and, and so...the rest of us...get hurt...some people just don't care who they hurt. They're only after themselves. If some fat guy like that, um, if he like did the same thing...

PRESIDENT: Ah-h, so you're talking about security...about securing the, uh...what we create, as a result of breaking the brain barrier...uh, safeguards, and so forth. Dr. Mortensen? Care to comment?

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Yes...

CARD. MONDICCI: [Unintelligible]...

DR. MORTENSEN: Uh, thanks [coughs]. Uh...what was the question again?

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Oh boy!

SAMUEL TABITHA: Ha! Ha-ha...

SEN. FINEBURNE: What the...

PRESIDENT: We're interested in knowing about, uh, about what safeguards...what you've done to protect the American people, in case something like, uh...what we just discussed here...might happen.

SEN. FINEBURNE: Perhaps, Dr. Mortensen, you'd care to elaborate on, uh, what I believe is being called...the Vena Project? That handheld unit, giving us all the power to create life...

DR. MORTENSEN: Uh, that's...that's, uh...hey, that's classified...

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Come on, George! Really?

DR. MORTENSEN: How the hell did you...

PRESIDENT: Well, now...everyone...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Mr. President, I'm just saying what the American people, out there...what they are thinking. The man on the street...and I mean Main Street, not Wall Street... they're a bit concerned about all this, uh, all this stuff we're suddenly doing in the name of progress. Just because we can do something—does that mean we should? Yeah, we're finally pulling out of the recession—we can all thank Dr. Mortensen for that... but now...I mean, that's good...that's really good... people are starting to go back to work...this is good...right?...but, but it seems to me, uh, that...that no one is questioning... certainly not the Genetacs of the world, or the X+ Corporations apparently...they're not looking at the moral, the ethical side of what they're doing in pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. They're just plowing ahead! The want to make these things—these, uh, Buddies—so they can test drugs on them, so they can feel pain...so that everyone can play God! That's the whole point! Well, uh, I think the American people deserve to hear, from one of the, uh, the architects of this so-called New Order...this guy, since we have him here... maybe he can, uh, tell us what he thinks about that...about creating a, uh, a virtual army of Buddies to experiment on in the name of science...so we can all have Big Pharma give us yet more profit-generating wonder drugs...

DR. MORTENSEN: Look, pal...

PRESIDENT: Gentlemen, these are, uh, very important topics, of course...to discuss, to think about in the future. Science has always been, well, uh, ahead of the curve, so to speak. Scientists make important advances based on their desire to seek knowledge, on their natural curiosity, to innovate, to create for the sake of doing something that hasn't been done before—in many cases, that's just it...this means, they often do their work simply because they just love what they do...so they do it...uh, they do it without focusing on what will be done with it, uh, later...by others, for profit...uh, and this is good. This is good. This is what we ask of our best and brightest; this is why this country honors brilliant young scientists like Samuel here. They are the future of America. And it's good, uh, what they're doing, as long as, uh, as there is input from other people, and I don't mean from Washington. I mean...what I mean is, from our nation's philosophers, yes...and from men of the cloth, like Cardinal Mondicci here...and from, uh, from all walks of life. We get our wisdom, as a nation, from our universities, from think tanks, from our business leaders, yes...but also from our diners, from our factory break rooms, from working men and women all across this great nation...what they have to say...we, uh, can't forget that...to listen to them. This here, these evening chats... this is exactly why I've put them together...uh, to do what we just did here.

GEN. SCHMEMSIS: Sir...

SEN. FINEBURNE: Mr. President...

CARD. MONDICCI: Yes, uh-um, well...

DR. MORTENSEN: [Coughs]...

SAMUEL TABITHA: [...]

PRESIDENT: [Stands up:] Thank you. Thank you, everyone...

[End Transcript 1554 hours]

~

We were staying at the Four Seasons that night. Jameson, the goons, and my family had been taken there directly from the airport. It was protocol: I had to go meet the President alone.

After the Secret Service had taken me back to the renowned hotel after my "chat" with the President, I saw Jameson poised like a puma at the edge of the lobby. He pounced on me while Larry and Moe hovered in the background. "Christ!" Jameson bellowed. "That was a set-up, plain and simple. Goddamn it! We should never have sent you in there alone like that!"

"I don't care."

"Of course you don't!" He stopped pacing to sneer at me. "Why should you care?"

"Let's go to the bar and have a drink, Jameson. Just calm down."

"No. You go, Eggers. Go get shit-faced. Don't worry about a thing—right? No. I'm going to have to go back out there and hit the watering holes and see what I can dig up." That seemed to perk him up a little. "Something's really rotten in Denmark, Eggers—"

"Then you're just the guy to find it. Good night, Jameson."

The goons flanked me up to my top-floor suite. "Looks like they gave you the VIP suite," Larry said. "Stands for Very Immense Prick." He started to make another joke at my expense, but then he saw the mood I was in and broke it off. He slid his card through the reader and opened the door for me. "Go get her, tiger," he said, giving me a manly shove inside.

"How did it go?" Gloria asked, when I'd stripped off my clothes, brushed my teeth, and finally crawled into bed next to her. It was around eleven now.

"You didn't watch it?" I asked. "It was live on C-SPAN for the whole fucking world to see."

"Yeah...I watched it." She closed her book. It was The Virgin Suicides.

"I tanked."

"Poor boy! Come here—"

"Man..."

"It's not as bad as you think."

"Hello? I was there?" She was stroking my head. "How was Adam tonight?" I asked.

"He was a perfect little angel."

"Man, I love that kid..."

"Hey-ey...shhh." A new voice now: the one Adam gets whenever he hurts himself. "You want a massage, sweetie? Come on, roll over..."

"Oh, okay."

"You were sober for the President, right?"

"Still am."

"Good for you!"

"Not really."

I opened an eye and saw all the little bottles of liquor lined up on the mini-bar. I wanted to grow one of those cartoonish blow-up arms so I could reach all the way out to the other side of the room and nab one without getting out of bed. But then I forgot all about it and fell into a nice relaxed state as my wife's magic fingers did their thing...

The next day we canceled our vacation plans in our nation's capital and lit out of there early. We landed at LaGuardia around ten in the morning. Gloria went with Adam back to the house, and I had the goons take me straight to the Complex. I'd listened to MSNBC during the flight in, so I knew what was happening out there—our stock was tanking. My little televised fiasco had sent it on an immediate downward spiral in the overseas markets, and that had carried over into ours.

I didn't get any work done that day. I just sat on my wizard's stool while my trusted crew of awkward geniuses went about their business. I was trying to figure out who would be the first to burst into the Lab to confront me. It was Levi, of course. But he wasn't alone. Gil was right behind him. It was around four-thirty by then—I'd wasted the day—and I could see people streaming out of the Complex already.

"I hate you both," I said, without turning around. I could see their reflections in the window: both men were standing ramrod straight in their matching conservative suits about eight feet behind me.

"Eggers," Gil said, "this is just a little hiccup—"

"Doesn't feel that way to me," I said. "They were right, you know, that stupid kid and the Senator."

"About what?" Levi asked.

"About everything," I said. "Gil, what the hell are we really doing here? Let's just shut it all down and go back to Maine."

I watched my reflective brother put his hand on Gil's shoulder: "I told you—when he gets like this..."

"It's okay," Gil whispered back.

I spun around on my stool to face Levi. "Why are people leaving already? It's not five o'clock yet. What kind of place are you running here, Levi?"

"It's Tuesday," my brother said. "Tuesday is physical-fitness day. People can leave a half-hour early if they pledge to go work out for half an hour at an approved fitness center."

"What a scam," I said.

"Yeah?" Levi said. "Well, it's a scam the employees love."

"Sure. Gets them out of work half an hour early."

"Eggers?" Gil said. "We can't have you like this. We need you: we are at a critical juncture here, with the launch date just a few weeks away. Not one wasted day—remember all that? The full life, Eggers...you still want that, right?"

"Yes."

"And so what did you do here today?"

"Nothing."

"Geez," my brother said to Gil, "you're good at this."

"Eggers," Gil continued, "it's okay. Today was what it was. Now just go home. Go home to your family. Go home and make love to your wife. Go home, open a beer, and watch the Open. Go home and masturbate in the shower—I don't care. Just come back here tomorrow, ready to work."

I slid off the stool. "Okay. Let me grab some shit from my office first."

I went in and got about ten feet from my desk before I saw it: it was sitting right next to my open laptop, a little black box with a glowing red eye. It had a stubby cylinder about four inches in diameter, which had rolled around to point directly at my chest. "Fuck!" I shouted. The thing looked like a toy tank. "Hey, guys!" I happened to glance up at the security camera; the telltale green light was off. Our security system was down.

I knew enough not to move.

"Gil! Levi! Help!"

Levi was the first one into the office. "Eggers...Jesus!"

I couldn't respond: I was afraid even to breathe too hard now.

"Don't move," Levi said. Then he spoke to Gil: "Geez, I think that's one of those proximity bombs Snyder was telling us about. If he moves, at all, it goes off. Sir, we need to get you out of here..."

"I'm not going anywhere!" Gil shot back.

"How the fuck long do I have to stand here like this?" I asked.

"Well," Levi said, "that's the thing..."

Then it happened—my knees just buckled. I dropped right to the floor and watched in horror as white confetti shot out of the cylinder and hit me directly in the chest.

"Just...perfect," I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. My whole body was shaking. Levi helped me up to my feet. Gil whipped out his cell and hit a button, waited, and hit another. "Liz? What the hell! We got a situation in R&D. What? Someone shut down everything—really? Oh, I see..."

Gil hit another button. Moments later, he was bellowing into his cell: "Get me Eli, right now!" I'd never seen him like this before. "What? I don't give a fuck! I don't care if he's got your crooked little dick in his mouth: you get Eli on the line right now! You hear me! You motherfuckers! You sure don't hesitate to cash my checks—and this is what I get! What happened? You want to know what happened? I'll tell you, you punk! Someone slipped right in through the security system you idiots designed for me, just shut down the fucking thing—I mean we are totally blind here! And not only that, but they planted a proximity bomb on Dr. Mortensen's desk in our research lab. That's right—yeah! It shot out confetti, lucky for us. But if it had been a real bomb..."

"Come on," Levi said. "You don't need to hear any more of this, Eggers."

The goons Larry and Moe were waiting for me down in the lobby. "Geez, Egghead," Larry said, "I just heard. I can't believe it—right here, in the Complex?"

"Yeah," Moe added, shaking his head.

"Yeah-yeah," I said. "Someone had a little fun at our expense—big deal. Look, guys, I'm going to catch a ride home with my brother, is that okay?"

"Fine," Larry said. "But we're gonna be right behind you."

We were somewhere on Seventh Avenue when Levi broke the freight-train-loaded silence in the limo. "When Gil calms down he'll realize it wasn't the Yids' fault," he said. "This was done by someone on the inside, obviously." He fiddled with his wedding band. "And there's no security system on earth that can protect you from those closest to you."

"Levi," I said, "someone sent us a serious message today. I mean, Gil's right. If it had been a real bomb—"

"Yeah. Well, all they really did was expose themselves some more, and show how desperate they are." The limo came to a sudden stop. We both waited for it to start up again. When it did, Levi continued: "Things are really heating up now, Eggers. I just got news that the FBI recently shut down a web site that had all kinds of stuff on it about Buddy and—get this—about the Vena Project, stuff I didn't even know. The site was only up for about half a day, but unfortunately"—he stretched out his hands, cracked a few knuckles—"the damage has been done. It has gone viral—'worldwide mass adoption,' I think is the phrase the Feds used to describe it. Can't close them all down, you know."

"But who put the site up?" I said. "We must have something on them by now, right?"

"That's right. The people who put up this site are calling themselves the Unity Brigade."

"Good name."

"Well," he said, "they are our biggest, uh, concern right now. Turns out they're not just a scattered bunch of community-college rejects anymore. They're a real threat, Eggers—I won't lie to you. They're well organized, for starters, and they've got populist momentum on their side right now, especially with that rhetoric-spewing President in the White House right now. Their leader is some mystery man who never stays in one place very long. He just went on the FBI's Most Wanted List as Anonymous Number Three. We'll find him, eventually—then the game will change. As it stands now, we think they're getting some serious funding from somewhere, some liberal fat cat probably. My lone shooter from a couple of years back—remember that turkey?—he was apparently associated with them. They just put out something called The Universal Respect Doctrine, which all the lamebrain liberals in the world are going gaga over right now. It's hilarious: you should check it out."

"I would prefer not to," I said. But neither of us found it funny.

"Right." He breathed heavily. "They're fanatics, Eggers. Don't forget that. That are not like us. They do not deserve our sympathy. They are not doing anything good for world. Dad was right: they're just taking potshots at themselves."

We went through my estate's high-tensile security gate—were waved in by Oscar in the guard shack, the retired NYC cop who served as my personal head of security (and still does)—and then went around the circular drive and stopped under a hooded light. The goons' SUV was right behind us, idling, with its parking lights on.

"Well, I don't know," Levi said. "Just be careful, Eggers. Don't let your guard down for even a second. Not one second—"

"Yeah," I said. "You too."

"And remember: none of this really matters. Because a hundred years from now—"

"Yeah-yeah," I said, feeling a sudden upsurge of love for my big brother, "the planet will have all new people."

"Better ones, let's hope."

We hugged, for the first time in years. I got out and watched the limo pull away. Then, with the goons Larry and Moe flanking me as they'd done so many times before, I trudged up the steep steps into that big fucking fiasco I call home.

# CHAPTER FOUR

At first there had been just a few isolated protests involving a smattering of aging hippies and college burnouts. But by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, there was a much more diverse subset of society congregating around the main entrance of the Complex on a daily basis. I could look out of the Lab's front-facing flank of windows at any point in the day and see anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred protesters down there on the polished marble of our famous speckled courtyard, rubbing their hands together, talking and laughing and releasing great puffs of air as if they were just waiting for a bus instead of engendering a world-wide revolution. I'd started studying them from my Wizard's perch, taking notes even...and now I can report that they generally seemed bewildered, shocked that they were actually out there in this weather, uncertain of what to do, where to go, how to stand, jittery and nervous even, as if they were unpaid interns on a bizarre first assignment. I can almost picture some mustached old manager telling them, "Okay, now I need you to go stand outside some famous building, be a revolutionary—can you handle that?"

Occasionally one of the older Type-A aggressors with a small megaphone would rile everyone up with some dried-out old anti-war slogan from the glory days of protesting in America; sometimes one of those crusty oldies would even lead the daily congregation in a protest song. But of course, I couldn't hear them from fifteen stories up behind four-inch-thick, blue-tinted, shatterproof glass, with the continual hum and thrum of the corporation's giant experimental machines running behind me. I just saw their lips moving, their bodies swaying...

We'd had Legal check with the City: there was nothing we could do about it. As long as they didn't impede business, they were allowed to gather in front of our building to spell out their manic appeal to the public in ready-made signs held up high like torches or draped over their bodies like super-hero capes:

Unity Now! Unity Forever!

Fight & Unite – It's Right!

X-out X+ CORP for X-MAS!

Corporate Scum! Time to Face The DRAIN!"

And my personal favorite: "Split Universe=Split Soul!"

I kept expecting to see someone I recognized in that swirl of misguided souls, someone from my heady days at the Rock perhaps, or some mentally unstable competitor from MIT (and there were plenty), or a defiant straggler from the adjunct nation even. A few weeks ago, I happened to look down there as I was eating my lunch, and I spotted a small figure in one of those old-style checkered cabbie's caps and a bleak gray dress. She wore black army boots and had only one hand, her left, covered with one of those fingerless, rock-guitarist gloves. She was hovering around the edge of the central cluster of Unity Protesters, studying them intently, as if she had a vested interest in what they were doing but wasn't quite one of them. I looked, strained to make out the face, which was occluded by a side curtain of stringy blond hair, because something about this small person reminded me of—you've probably guessed it by now—Dr. Jasmine Geckle. I went back to my office to get my military-grade binoculars to check her out, but when I'd returned to the window, she was gone. My crew of big brains, who were pretty sure I was losing it at that point, saw my disappointment and, through taunts and teasing, chalked it up to my having yet again missed my chance to spy on the two office fatties who would meet up in the copy room of the smaller building across the street to copulate quickly every Wednesday around noon.

It had been well over a year since my White House fiasco in the Green Room, and yet our stock was still in the basement, seemingly always hovering around its 52-week low. There was talk that Non-binary Processing, "the first truly great technological discovery of the 21st Century" (NY Times), may not be the second coming of post-Industrial America after all. There was talk of another major Recession. There was talk that the young CEO of the most monstrous corporate entity in creation is making too many mistakes. There was talk that the Vena Project—my pet!—would never make it off the ground.

Oh, and I should mention that we were being investigated by the SEC now too, for violating something-or-other, which had put everyone on edge and soured the air of what most employees, past and present, would say is an otherwise amiable workplace.

And worst of all, my mother had finally accepted Gloria's invitation to visit us. Lidia Mortensen had just retired after having put in a good twenty-six years as a dental assistant for some Mormon transplant who treated his employees like gold, really he did, and now she wanted to make us the first stop on her just-announced whirlwind tour to addle her east-coast relations over the holidays. My brother Levi was next in line, then on down to bless my crazy Uncle Barney in Atlantic City with her flourishing presence. Gloria had gotten her a direct flight out of Pittsburgh—which really isn't all that mysterious, you know—first-class, of course.

We took my mother right to the big house from the airport for the grand tour. She was suitably impressed, especially since we'd brought in a professional outfit to decorate the place inside and out with festive holiday ornaments of a distinctly secular nature. We're talking thousands of giant sparkly snowflakes, huge glowing Poinsettias, spinning Mistletoes the size of Rottweiler heads with motion-activated background music, and holly wreaths galore. The side yard had been turned into a forest full of lifelike solar-powered songbirds and an assortment of smirking woodland creatures on mechanical pedestals or spinning on translucent strings.

To honor my mother's visit, I'd taken a week off from work so we could hit as many of the touristy hot spots in the city as possible, starting with the Statue of Liberty, slated for later that afternoon. It was my mother's first time in New York. During the limo ride home, she and Gloria had chattered on about how wonderful that Statue must have looked to their respective people, Swedish and Jewish, from the rolling deck of a steamer off the Atlantic. Of course, my mother's people had come over to the promise land on their own terms during an expansive bonanza for loaded white foreigners, so her immigrant saga lacks a certain dramatic appeal, as far as I'm concerned. The true core of dramatic interest, I believe, lies in the subsequent generations squandering of their wealth and a recorded instance of fratricide.

In any case, we were in the middle of lunch, an excellent vegetarian lasagna served by Sinead in the all-seasons Sun Room, when Grigor called with a serious problem concerning a minor test we were running that week. I had to excuse myself. I avoided Gloria's menacing eyes and trudged up to my Dressing Room to slide into a business suit. Then I had the goons take me to the Complex.

Grigor was in the Lab by himself. He was running a quick scan of main Centralizer, which had been freezing up and doing other strange and unexpected things since its last upgrade some three weeks ago. A Centralizer is the machine that sends Non-binary code out into the multi-verse for processing and then almost instantaneously receives the results. We'd recently shattered our own computing speed record by carrying out eight-hundred-and-sixty-four centillion calculations per nanosecond for seven straight days.

At that time, we were developing a tablet that would allow one to tap into a Universal Centralizer. This would essentially give one the ability to design and carry out any conceivable project that involved computing. It would be the ultimate expression of self-empowerment, the final phase in the evolution of individualism: every human being on the planet could conceivably have as much computer power as the largest institutional powers, including the US Federal government. We were calling it The Vena Project. Our experiment for that week concerned how to send and receive data from a centralized location without a substantial loss of energy, what we were calling the "containment problem." (I'm sorry, but I am prohibited from saying anything else about it.)

"Dr. Mortensen!" Grigor said. "This is...this is terrible! Just terrible. It just shut itself down again, the Centralizer. And look at this!" He poked his computer screen. "Look at these numbers...they don't add up. We are losing way more energy than we initially thought."

"Don't you have a life outside of the Lab?" I said. "This couldn't wait until I got back?"

He shrugged that off. "The Feds will want to know about this."

"No-no," I said. "These is a little glitch, for all we know. And the Vena Project doesn't officially exist yet, right? So why would they want to know about something that doesn't exist?"

"What? What the hell..."

"Calm down," I said. "Alright—tell you what. Just shut everything down until I get back, okay? Just sharpen pencils for a week and play chess with the cyborgs. We can tackle the containment issue then. Grigor?"

His beady eyes blinked rapidly. "Dr. Mortensen, what if this means what they're saying out there...the protesters—what if they're right? What if this isn't safe? Once we ramp things up—"

"Listen," I said, "we haven't done anything big enough to shake up the universe."

"Yet!" he shrieked. "Oh God—"

"Grigor?"

"Sir?"

"Get out of here. Go out and try to have some fun, for a change. And for Christ's sake, change out of that stupid jumpsuit."

He reluctantly left the Lab. I stayed a while longer to look over the data. Grigor had a point here, because if we were not able to contain all of the energy we were sending out and receiving, then where was it going? We're talking a miniscule amount here—at the time too small to be measured—but times that by a near-infinite number of computations, which we would soon be doing with the Vena Project, and it becomes a different matter.

I left the Complex with a headache and got back home around seven-thirty that evening. I found Gloria in the Library sound asleep on the couch with a hardcover book open, spine-up, on her chest. It was her signed copy of The Corrections. I sat down on the edge of the couch and let my eyes run up and down her body for a while. I saw that her fulsome lips were twisted into a strange shape; she'd released a little drool on her chin, and her fingers were twitching. I couldn't help noticing she had serious worry lines etched into her forehead now, chicken-claw creases running out from her eyes, permanent parenthetical grooves flanking her mouth—she seemed to be aging in dog years. She was dressed casually, still ready for tourist tromping in black jeans and a light blue sweater.

"Hey-ey," I said, shaking her lightly.

"Whaa...ah, Jesus! I fell asleep."

"Where's my mom?"

"I don't know." Gloria sat up and wiped her chin. "She was just here, reading in Archie's chair over there. Don't look at me like that! I just dozed off for a moment...we were waiting for you all day, you asshole. You said you'd only be gone for an hour or so. Your mother really wanted to see the Statue, you know."

"We'll see it tomorrow—it's no big deal." I poked her in the ribs. "Hey, lighten up. Look, I just had to go into the Lab—don't ask. Come on, sweetness." I helped her off the couch. "Let's go find the old gal and try to salvage this evening."

Gloria followed me up to the Nursery, where our best nanny Deborah was ogling Adam and little baby Jane in their padded playpen full of boy-and-girl toys. (I had my daughter because Vampora was in Germany promoting her latest bestselling tome, The Final Chronicle of the Vampire Lesbot.) Well, there was no Lidia Mortensen in the Nursery. Gloria and I checked out eight rooms on three levels before realizing we should have started with the kitchen. My mother always somehow found her way to the kitchen, didn't matter whose house she was in. Sure enough, there she was, by herself, stirring a steaming pot of something.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked her. She was wearing a gray hoodie with "Penn State Alum – And Damn Proud!" stamped on the back in bold pink letters, a patch-work denim skirt, and red high-top sneakers with thick gray athletic socks running all the way up to her knees. I loosened my tie: I was still in my business attire. "Where's Sinead?"

"I sent her home," my mom said. "Poor girl! She was trying to study for a final exam while making a Béchamel sauce. No girl, not even Wonder Woman, could do that. She burnt it, of course—she was crying when I came in. So I'm taking over dinner. Look, things may have improved, a little, but it's still not easy being a young girl trying to get ahead in this world." She glanced over at Gloria and me, and then returned her attention to the saucepan: "Eggers, you may hate me but you can't say I'm not a good cook."

Gloria put her hand up to her mouth. "Oh my God!"

"Hey!" I interrupted, stomping my foot like an angry old lion. "Ah, screw it! You want me"—I made a move toward the door—"I'll be in my workout room."

"Good," my mother said. "Because I didn't want to be the one to tell you...but you're getting fat, Eggers." That stopped me in my tracks. My mom spoke to Gloria now: "Isn't he though?"

"We both are," Gloria said. "I try to tell him—we can't eat like we're in our twenties anymore."

"Isn't that the truth," my mother said, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. I saw that she already had a bottle of red wine going, possibly not her first. Lidia Mortensen weighed what she's always weighed, maintaining a perfect trim figure through direct infusions of caffeine in the morning, steady doses of nicotine all day long, and hefty draughts of alcohol in the evening to complement her one blow-out meal, dinner, which she ate as close to passing-out time as she could. Her hair was still straw yellow, dyed now of course, still about shoulder-length with a jazz-age reverse angularity; and despite all her years of self-abuse, at sixty-one she still had excellent skin.

"Well," my mother said, "tonight we won't worry about all that. Tonight we feast. So Gloria, does he still eat like the first hyena to reach the carcass?"

"Oh, yeah," Gloria said. "He positively wolfs it down."

"Isn't it awful?"

"Terrible."

"His father ate like that too."

"Guys?" I waved my arms. "I'm standing right here."

"And," my mother said, "He drank like that as well. Next to him, you know, I was a Puritan." She wiped her eyes.

"What are you making?" Gloria asked.

"Oh, I'm keeping it simple. Just a little Chicken Alfredo, a spinach salad, some garlic toast—and for dessert I'm making an almond torte I think you're really going to like. This kitchen—oh my God! Gloria, I'm in Heaven..."

"What, no pudding?" I muttered.

"Sounds great," my lovely wife said. "You know, I miss cooking. I even miss the shopping—can you believe it? It's just—I've got so many things to do now, with the Foundation." I could feel her eyes probing the side of my head.

"It is one of life's great pleasures," my mother replied. "Now get out of here, both of you. Go relax. Dinner will be ready in half an hour."

My mother had set the little table in the Breakfast Nook for dinner that night. As Gloria and I took our seats, my mother told us that the Main Dining Room was just too damn big, too damn impersonal, what with all that echoing space around that giant table and those weird googly-eyed paintings on the walls. This is better, she said, so much more intimate...

It was going to be an adults-only affair, since my mother had apparently spent all afternoon with the little tykes and was ready to bond now with beings whose primary mode of communication did not involve smiling and drooling. She was sitting on my left; my wife was on my right: I had estrogen nightmares on both sides of me now.

"That little boy of yours," my mother said to Gloria, minutes into dinner. We were eating what turned out to be one of the best spinach salads I've ever had—with crisp bacon bits, cheesy crotons, capers and some other stuff, and chunks of fresh mozzarella, and a light Raspberry vinaigrette dressing. "What a little angel! Now Eggers, at that age—different story. He was already talking non-stop."

"He is my beautiful little brown-eyed boy," Gloria said.

"He just, those great big eyes of his—he just likes to lie there and take things in, doesn't he?"

"I know," Gloria said. "I'm almost worried—"

"Oh no!" my mother said quickly. "He's fine. He's a perfectly normal little boy."

We suffered through another long span of silence punctuated by the clink of real silver on fine china and the suppressed smacking of lips. We'd moved on to the main course now. I opened a second bottle of wine. My mother and I were the only ones drinking it.

"So, Gloria," my mother said, entering that phase of drunkenness where she wanted confidentialities now, "how would you describe my son, in a nutshell?"

"How would I describe Eggers?" my wife said, reflectively. "Well, he's kind of like a modern-day Socrates, I think."

"You really think he's that smart?"

"What? Oh, no-no-no. Nowhere close. But he somehow always manages to piss off everyone around him. That's what I meant."

"I see," my mother said. They shared a good laugh. "Then he hasn't changed. He's still my little man..."

"Oh God..." I muttered.

"My little man who used to come home all busted up and bloody because he'd said the wrong thing to the wrong boy at school."

"That only happened once," I put in.

"You know why it never happened again?" my mother said to my wife. "It's because"—they both leaned forward; they were blond hydra-heads at this point (I've tried not to note their resemblance)—"his father made Levi stick up for him."

"Thanks a lot, mom!"

"That's right," she continued. "Then everyone knew that if you messed with the crazy one, you'd have to take on the even-crazier one."

I looked at Gloria: "How can you laugh at that? How is that funny?"

"It's funny...I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize to him," my mother said. "There's nothing wrong with laughing. We need more laughter in this world, that's for sure. More, dear?"

"Yes, please," Gloria said.

My mother picked up the big dish of Chicken Alfredo, even though it was in the center of the table, as close to Gloria as it was to her, and scooped out a good healthy portion.

"Cracked pepper?" my mother asked.

"Why, yes."

"Say 'when'..." My mother started grinding pepper for Gloria.

"Oh, that's fine. Right there—" Gloria tossed on a hefty pile of fresh parmesan cheese and dug right in.

"Good," my mother said. "You eat as much as you want." They shared a look, the meaning of which I wouldn't get until a few days later.

Gloria took a sip of water. "This is really good, Lidia. Eggers never told me you were such a great cook."

"I didn't?" I muttered.

"You know," my mother said, apparently approaching the final lap of her own mental racetrack now, "Eggers wouldn't have survived middle school if his father hadn't intervened on his behalf. That's the kind of thing a boy's father has to do, you know. I see all these poor young girls today trying to raise boys on their own—it just isn't right. We don't think the same way, men and women—that's just all there is to it. And you know it was also his father's idea to send him away to college at sixteen. We just couldn't find a suitable prep school in our area, and they were all so darn expensive, and Eggers wouldn't have been any happier there anyway; so his father started looking at colleges with early-admissions programs—mostly liberal places in the East, you know, which believe me was hard for him to stomach. But he wanted to find a place that would accept Eggers as he was, and Simon's Rock is that kind of place. Good thing he got a scholarship..."

"I understand it is a very special place," Gloria said.

"He had no friends until he got there, you know."

"As far as I know he didn't have any friends there either," Gloria said. "Except for one—and he has a kid with her now..."

"Hey," I said. "I had plenty of friends."

"Well," my mother said, "at least he had people there he could relate to, converse with—who didn't avoid him like the Plague. Everyone in the old neighborhood, even the other unpopular kids, even they avoided him. We were worried there was something seriously wrong with him. Do you know what his brother Levi got out of the deal, by the way?"

"What?" Gloria asked. She tried to make eye contact with me, but I kept staring down at my now-empty plate.

"Kung-Fu lessons," my mother said.

"Oh..."

"That's right," my mother continued. "Most boys want to be Superman. Levi always wanted to be David Caradine. He wanted to drift from place to place with this glazed look helping people. Between you and me and the wall, he's really the crazy one."

"Oh, God..." I muttered.

"What's wrong, Eggers?" my wife asked.

"I feel sick."

"You eat too fast," my mother commented. "Slow down—enjoy the moment."

"And maybe let up on the wine a little," Gloria added softly.

I sighed, burped, and opened a third bottle of wine. My mother piled some more Alfredo on my plate, my third helping, and added a good handful of cheese on top along with another piece of seasoned garlic toast. She ground out a hefty amount of fresh pepper for me, just the way I like it.

"Well, Eggers," my mother said, after more interminable silence, "Don't let us dominate the conversation here. You're a big successful man now. And big successful men, we all know, like to talk about themselves." She rolled her eyes, which made Gloria laugh. "So..."

"Well—" I began.

"See"—my mother faced Gloria squarely now, cutting me out just like that—"that's where his father and I really shined as parents. That's the one thing we could always agree on—our boys. He can say what he wants about his childhood—and I'm sure he's given you an earful already—but look at where he is now. Look at where they both are—how could it have been that bad? Now we weren't rich by any means, although tool-and-dye makers did okay in those days, but one thing we always knew is, we didn't want our boys to get the wrong idea about life, you know, from the people around them. Where they grew up, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, which was and still is a really poor town, everybody—everybody who wasn't a welfare slug, that is—they were obsessed with where they were going to work, what companies in the area were hiring and all that. But we always told our boys, what really matters is what you are inside yourself...let what you are determine what you do. That's the big difference, see. In Middle America, in crappy little towns like Meadville, people ask you where you work. In big sparkly cities like this, people generally ask you what you do. And the answer is never, 'I do this, I do that.' No one ever says, 'I'm keeping peoples' books. I'm investing peoples' money.' It's always, 'Oh, I am an accountant. Oh, I am a stockbroker.' In the real upper-crust sections, they probably just ask you outright what you are...but how would I know?"

"Eggers," Gloria prompted, "tell your mother what you're doing at work right now." She touched my mother's arm—they were touchy-feely girls that evening. "It's really fascinating, Mrs. Mortensen."

"Please," my mother said, "I told you to call me Lidia."

"Eggers?" Gloria prodded.

"I'm ready for dessert now," I said.

"He's always liked his sweets," my mother said, sliding her chair back. "I'll go warm up the torte."

"Eggers," Gloria whispered, when my mother was gone. "You could at least try. You promised, damn it—" Her eyes were getting watery.

"What?" I said.

"Never mind."

"What's with you tonight?" I said. "We're having a good dinner here. No one's shouting at anyone."

"Sure. Sure we are."

"Jesus—!"

My mother came back out with dessert. She served up huge squares of the almond torte with French vanilla ice cream and whipped cream, and little swizzles of chocolate syrup and dark chocolate shavings and a chocolate mint on top. "There," she said, sliding mine over to me first. I stuck my tongue out at Gloria, but she was still in a morbid mood and didn't respond.

"You want to know what I'm doing at work?" I asked my mother, for the good of the order.

"I only know what I read in the papers, which is a lot actually. Some writer for the Tribune even thinks you are in the running for a Nobel Prize, Eggers. Can you believe it? Oh, you should see your scrapbooks now! You and Levi—as if you needed anything more to inflate your egos."

"You keep a scrapbook for them?" Gloria asked.

"Oh," my mother said, "I know! How old-fashioned of me."

"It's wonderful! It's...I'm sorry—I..."

"It's okay," my mother said. She patted Gloria's arm. "It's your house. You want to cry—cry."

"Jesus," I said.

"Who would have thought?" my mother said. "My boys, my destructive little monsters, would go on to become such powerful men. They were always close growing up, you know. Sometimes, I swear, Levi thought he was the father..."

More silence.

"Well," I said, "whatever you're reading out there about me and X+ Corp.—it doesn't even begin to touch on what we're really doing, or what we'll be able to do very soon. Buddy—I'm sure you've read about him."

"Oh, yeah," my mother said. "He's the hot topic at church right now. Eggers, you be careful there..."

I looked at Gloria; she wouldn't look back. I scooped up some residual chocolate sauce with my index finger. I was the first one done with dessert. "Yeah," I said, "I hear all the crap people are saying. But people just need to open up their minds, man, see all the possibilities here. Because we are, literally and figuratively, one heartbeat away from breaking down just about every major barrier in existence. I mean...little Adam and sweet baby Jane there? If our generation doesn't screw things up for them, they'll live for a thousand years—"

"Who on earth would want that?" my mother said. "Eighty years on this planet is plenty."

"Yeah," Gloria echoed.

"If we had the technology to live that long," I replied, "then we'd have the technology to make the world just about perfect. We could make it anything we wanted it to be."

"Yeah?" my mother said. "Well, they are not the same—"

"What?" I said.

"Perfection and what people want the world to be. There are a lot of people out there who have a sick notion of the 'perfect' world. Technology won't change that. In fact, it might make things worse. It might end up giving them better ways of pushing their sickness on to the rest of us. Seriously, will you really be able to make a drug or something that could have turned a cretin like Osama bin Laden into a happy accountant? Will you really be able to make a pill that tamps down the natural instinct for us to feel threatened by anything foreign or different? It's like we have cultural anti-bodies in us too, you know, which seek to identify and kill all foreign invaders—that's how wars start, Eggers, and war is always bad. Just look at what it did to your father. A thousand-year lifespan won't change that."

"What is perfection anyway?" Gloria asked.

My mother reached across the table and tapped her wrist: "Oh, good one."

"Perfection?" I paused to measure out my response. I wanted it to be perfect: it's the first time I'd had a real talk with my mother since I'd come home for my great-Uncle Felix's funeral six years ago. "Simple," I said. "Perfection is the promise of a life of continual bliss."

"That's terrible!" Gloria said.

"Again," my mother said, "who the hell would want that?"

"Okay," I said, "I see the problem. We're talking in big sweeping terms here. But look at it this way. A year or so from now, at the rate we're going—I'm not kidding—a man is going to sit down for dinner one evening and ask his wife how her doctor's appointment went that day. And she's going to tell him she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer—that's why she has been feeling so damn tired lately. He'll just nod and tell her a guy at the office got the exact same thing last year. It was bad; he missed a whole week of work. He lost so much weight it affected his golf swing. 'Damn!' she'll say. 'I can't afford to miss any more work this year.' Then you know what? Then they'll go on to talk about something else; they'll laugh and enjoy the rest of their meal. That is what I'm doing at work right now, mom! That is what I'm giving the world! That is my perfection!"

"Megalomania," my mother said to Gloria. "We always worried about that with him."

I couldn't think of anything more to say; Gloria was completely droopy-eyed by then. My mother poured herself some more wine, suppressed a burp, and then refilled my glass for the umpteenth time. For a while, we all just sat there listening to the low echoing moans of that great limestone mansion settling around itself for the night. Then my mother said, "You have to keep trying, you know." Her eyes couldn't quite focus on anything.

"Trying what?" Gloria asked her.

"To stay together, you two. No matter what happens. Don't"—my mother's voice got stuck in her throat a moment—"don't ever give up on each other. I'm sorry—"

I stood up. "Man, I'm out of here..."

~

Now I have a confession to make -- I have been playing around with that slippery conjunction between story time and real time here. Both are zipping along too damn fast now; if you ask me, racing toward their only logical conclusion—end of story, end of life. I let things ferment in my head for a while before I write about them—days, weeks, months, a year or more sometimes. It's the only way I can put enough emotive distance between them and where I am now to keep from skipping the all-important descriptive details and other background shit, which would essentially render this whole writing project down to a one-page bulleted synopsis:

 Has terrible childhood, goes to college at 16, meets antagonist Vampora

 Has drug-induced epiphany, becomes cosmologist

 Struggles at the bottom depths of academe for a decade or so

 Chucks it all, buys cabin in northern Maine, meets Gil Smoltz, and Dr. Jasmine Geckle, who finds solution to impending doom, with commercial applicability

 Becomes billionaire, gets married, is named Time's Person of the Year

 Gets kidnapped...

That's right! And let me tell you, it was difficult for me to write about that dinner with my wife and mother when I know what happens next. It's my own damn fault: even our own official in-house investigative report more or less admits that, since it exonerates everyone except me.

In any event, after I'd left the table that night—this was around ten, I guess—I stormed into the kitchen and stopped abruptly in front of the big shiny restaurant-grade stove, though I can't say why. I guess my emotional inertia had just ended there and not in front of the gargantuan, double-door, stainless steel, reach-in refrigerator or the triple-tiered convection oven or the conveyer-belt dishwashing system. It ended by the stove, and there I was with nothing to do but start playing the hanging pots like drums with two metal spatulas. I stopped after a while and sat down on a milk stool to smoke a joint. It didn't help. My brain was spinning wildly now; I felt I needed to run a marathon or take one of those Polar Bear dips in some frozen lake just to reduce my manic energy and return to a more-or-less normal cognitive state. But instead I got up and, without putting out any cerebral energy at all now, no thought whatsoever, I walked into the well-stocked pantry where I knew there was a little Lilliputian round-topped door that opened out into a stairwell and thus allowed anyone on the payroll who wanted to leave the mansion discreetly direct access to some steep metal stairs that went down to a little alcove on the ground floor where another strange little round door (a security breach we've since corrected) opened directly out onto Madison Avenue...

So I was on Madison Avenue now. It was December and I was outside, in the cold, with no jacket on—but free, free to go anywhere. The goons, I figured, were probably in the Reception Room. They had taken to hanging out there, playing card games, sleeping in one of the leather lounges or watching TV, or sometimes doing push-ups or shadow boxing—and why not? I never went anymore. And the well-armed Oscar in the guard shack was overseeing the estate grounds, the so-called 'external zone of concern,' now. At his insistence, we'd also brought in from Germany a pair of attack dogs, two giant Rottweilers named Zeus and Apollo who cost more than I'd made in over a decade of adjunct teaching.

But forget about the dogs and what I'd spent on them. What I mean to emphasize here is this: no one, man or beast, saw me leave the house that night. No one knew I was out on my own, unprotected. My destination, which had just flared up in my addled brain, was a birthday party in the Village for a semi-famous rock musician who had just breached the existentially tragic age of forty. I'd met him at a charity event a few weeks back; he'd actually sought me out to talk about the immediate technical challenges of creating virtual band mates for his first solo recording. His mainstay band, Simian Flare, had just broken up in a highly public spectacle of backstabbing legal maneuvers and vitriolic Twitter updates. I got invited to things like this all the time but never went to any. I'd decided to break that pattern on this, the night of all nights...

I hailed a cab for the first time in years, and used the down time in the back seat to plan what to say to Gloria and my mother when I got back home. I figured I would just act meek and whine about feeling like a third wheel or something like that, and then flatter them somehow. That combination usually works with women, right?

Anyway, I paid the driver with my credit card, leaving him a hefty taxable tip, and stepped out onto Sullivan Street, rubbing my arms, shivering. I looked up at the party place, a third-floor flat in a classic redbrick building; its shaded windows were throbbing with shadow dancers. I could hear the muted thump-thump-thump of a modern danceable bass line. I boldly went into the lobby...I hit the buzzer, and was buzzed right in.

A little elf of a woman in a skin-hugging Catwoman suit opened the apartment door and dragged me in by the hand. She kissed me on the cheek, as if we were old friends.

"I am Helka!" she said, in a Nordic (perhaps Icelandic?) accent. She had wide-set, cobalt blue eyes that bulged out like little snowballs and wild protrusions of whitish hair with a seemingly natural, glacial-blue translucence. "The girlfriend...and you are?"

"Eggers," I said.

"That's a funny name! I am going to call you...the egg man! Well, welcome—velkominn—baruch haba—aloha mai...would you like to do an inaugural shot with me?"

"Would I ever!"

"This way."

It was an art-deco kind of place, this railroad flat, only slightly bigger than Gloria's old condo. There were no more than a dozen people here, most of whom were clustered in a dance frenzy in the front living room. I don't know if it helped or hurt my nascent social anxiety that the party was more intimate than I'd expected. Helka took me through the living room, where I could see the hulking Musician himself sitting in a leather recliner with a face-painted teacup woman poised on the arm, and on through the dining room, where a lone couple were smooching in the corner. I followed her into the kitchen, where the main counter from end to end was covered with every kind of liquor bottle imaginable.

"What's your poison?" she asked, picking out two shot glasses from a pyramid of them next to the little stainless steel sink.

"You pick."

"Hm. I'll label you a Tequila man, which means I think you're mean. Don't hurt me." She poured out two Tequila shots: we downed them unceremoniously.

"So," Helka said, "Eggers—what are you? I'm going to guess...thespian?"

"Nope."

"Thug?"

"Getting warmer..."

"Musician?"

"Colder!"

"Hmm—"

"I'm a scion of corporate America," I said. "I work for X+ Corp."

"Ah! You're that kind of man. Well, Dr. Mortensen, we'll have you to thank then when the machines take over the world and turn us all into slaves, won't we?"

"Haven't they already?"

"Most excellent point! Well—"

"And what are you, Helka?"

"Performance artist," she said, weird eyes rolling around in their sockets. "Model...street mime...musician...dancer...lover...whatever moves me, baby. Well, look—it's been groovy. But you see"—she spun around and kissed me flush on the lips, for a long time—"I am allowed to do anything I want with a man as long as I don't spend too much time on any one. So—you time is up!"

"Damn!" I said. "Guess we should have gone straight to the bedroom then."

"Agreed. See ya, egg man."

She went out and melded with the living-room people, who were now dancing to something I recognized, the Talking Heads' "Burnin' Down the House." I stayed in the kitchen, did a few more shots by myself. At some point, the young smooching couple from the dining room, two stiff-looking individuals in matching red cardigans, came in to refresh their drinks. I smiled but they acted as if I weren't even there.

"Page counts, page counts, page counts!" the woman was saying. "Well, I'm sick to death of your fucking page counts!"

"Writers are obsessed with page counts the way the elderly are obsessed with their medicines, dear."

"When even your libido is affected..."

"Ha!" he said. They were both slurring their words.

"Let me ask you this: are we really any closer to divinity because you have two-hundred pages of unpublished shit as opposed to three?"

"Divinity," he said, "who the fuck wants that?"

"I thought we'd agreed that that was the purpose of living?"

"It's changed since then."

"For you maybe..."

"Well, dear, maybe I'll have a good writing day tomorrow. And then—"

"A disease is a disease is a disease..."

"Wonderful!" he said. "Make a scene..."

"But there's no one here..."

I had to find somewhere else to be. I made a face at the couple, which they didn't catch, and went into the living room, where the Musician finally spotted me. "Well, lookee here!" he called out over the music. He rose up out of the recliner. He was like a giant tower of whiteness, with manic blue eyes and thin burning lips—a bleached Meatloaf. In physical appearance, he seemed more akin to a traveling bluesman than an urban rock idol. "Everyone!" A few people looked over my way, and then resumed dancing. "It's Time's Person of the Year, in the flesh. Eggers Mortensen—my man!" He parted the small sea of beautiful people to reach me. "Care for a little Jamaican soul surprise? Best ever," he said, holding out a tightly rolled joint. He put it in my mouth and lit it for me.

"Nice," I said.

"Glad you showed up, Eggers. The Socratic dialectic between art and technology—man, it's the interface of our time! The big sad soul-stretch into immortality, the pursuit of life beyond life. So pointless..."

"I can't tell if you're writing a song or actually talking to me," I said.

"I never stop writing, man!" I handed him the joint. "No-no," he said, brushing it away. "I never smoke the stuff—never drink either. I get high watching others get high. I get high on life...on life and music..."

"And love?"

"Which version?" he asked quickly. "The western conceited one where we're stuck to one person and try to funnel the world into them and then blame them when we find it lacking? Or the eastern mystical one, where we attempt to embrace the full expanse of the universe, together, in one great breath of life..."

"Uh, the latter?"

"Wise choice. Love—man! It's too big to be contained by two people. Love the world, love life, love music—love everything, love everyone! Be in love with love. You...you have that look, Eggers, that menacing edge. Right. I can tell: someone you've let fall out of the great circle of love haunts you. Someone you've hurt, somehow, through your recent actions, through neglect. Am I right?"

"You, my friend, have a great gift. You are right."

"Call her. Right now—"

"Oh," I said, "I don't have her number. It's complicated."

"Indeed."

"She just disappeared," I said, "went into hiding, a few years ago...she could be in trouble. She could be dead...I don't know."

"Then go find her, man! Save her, fix her—whatever she needs. Be resourceful. Use your personal soul power for good. Don't...don't wait until you look in the mirror one day—you are suddenly forty, let's say, with four miserable records to your credit—and your own face looks like a cracked death mask; your own eyes are like dead suns floating in sunken flesh...you, Dr. Eggers Mortensen, you are still beautifully alive, man! Use your life force, use your power as a man, and become your own nature boy..."

"Thanks! You, sir, are a ringing endorsement for a singular consciousness."

"Oh that's wild!" he said. "Oh that's just out of here..."

And so was I. I kissed the musician on the nose—shouldn't have done that, but it was inspired—and then slipped right on out of the party place.

The rest of that night I've had to reconstruct from flash memories. FIRST FLASH: I am outside, in the cold, eager to go find Dr. Jasmine Geckle, to save her, to fix her...to use my personal power for good, etc. etc....SECOND FLASH: I am outside, in the cold, stepping over the splayed legs of a supine, seemingly passed-out bum, on my way down to street level...THIRD FLASH: I am outside, in the cold, fumbling with my cell phone...

I don't remember dialing a number. All I remember is being outside in the cold with my phone up to my ear, wondering who the hell I was going to find on the other end...

"Eggers?"

"Oops!"

"Eggers, what is it?"

"Wrong number. Want Lucas, for a job tonight. Sorry, sir."

"Eggers? You said 'Lucas'?"

"Yea..."

"Why on earth would you need a man like Lucas at this hour?"

"I'm on a mission from God..."

"Jesus, Eggers! You're drunk."

"Am I? And stoned!"

"Where are you, Eggers?

"Cool party, the Village. Life is beautiful..."

"Just go home, Eggers. Have your security detail take you straight home."

"Yeah..."

"You're done for tonight—you hear me, Eggers?"

"Yeah...celebrity zombies. Alert the press!"

"Eggers, I don't know what that means."

"Yes..."

"Eggers?"

"Smoltz, I love you! Beautiful old man..."

"Eggers, are you okay? Are Larry and Moe with you?"

"Such beautiful people..."

"Eggers, listen—"

"No-ooooo...no goons. Ditched the goons. So sorry—"

"Eggers, stay right where you are—don't go anywhere! We can track you through your cell—someone will be there to pick you up in a few minutes...just stay put!"

"Mission from God..." I muttered. But my cell phone had already been snatched from my hand. I remember being surprised by that. In a quick, sobering moment I looked around and quickly focused in on two beady little eyes on a level with my own. I took a step back to get a better perspective on things: the eyes belonged to a bum in a red-and-black checkered coat, the same bum who had been passed out on the stairs a short while ago. He was holding my cell out in his black-gloved hand at arm's-length, as if it were a contagion. He had a long gaunt face, smudged with playhouse grime, which oriented itself around a menacing sneer as he tossed my phone out into the dead street. I heard it hit, turned my head just in time to see a few pieces fly off as it somersaulted to a dead stop.

"Dr. Mortensen," the bum said. He grabbed my elbow. "Listen up! What you are doing, what X+ Corp. is doing, is a direct violation of the Universal Respect Doctrine. I am a Unity Warrior, a Knight of the First Order, sworn to sacrifice my life if need be in order to uphold and protect the Universal Respect Doctrine and the principles that it...ah, finally!" I remember the screeching of tires...a white van...a sliding white door and black-gloved hands reaching out for me...something went over my nose and mouth, a rag with a cool, almost sweet organic odor...

My next big flash of consciousness involves me lying on my side on a cold cement floor, with an earth-splitting headache. I was blindfolded; my hands were tied tightly behind my back with some kind of rough twine. I could feel a thick strip of tape over my mouth; for a second there I panicked—I couldn't open my mouth!—worried that I wouldn't be able to keep breathing through my nose. Then I settled down and managed to work myself into a sitting position. I slid back a few feet—until I'd bumped up against a cold metal wall. I figured I was in some kind of garage or storage locker here. I could smell something industrial like turpentine, and I could hear buoy-bells clanging and an occasional ship's horn only slightly muted by distance, which put me somewhere near a busy port, I figured, probably out of the city though. I also could hear the warning beeps of large industrial machines moving in reverse...

I don't know how long I sat there with my back against that cold wall, taking in all the outside sounds, without any feeling in my fingers or toes and a weird tingling sensation in my sternum. At some point, I'd dozed off, or just zoned out completely—only to get shaken back to full awareness by the sound of a metal door sliding up on rolling hinges, followed by a cold blast of air. "Get him up into that chair," I heard a man say.

"Yes, sir."

"And strap him to it, just in case. Use the zip ties this time, you idiot. And you—there! Close that door, for crying out loud!"

"Yeah-yeah, okay."

Someone slammed down the garage-like door, and someone else said to me, "Come on; let's go" as he jabbed his mitts into my right armpit and lifted me up roughly. I was thrown down onto a chair. "She'll be here any minute," the first man said. I'd counted three distinct voices so far. My ankles and arms were tightly zip-tied to the frame of the chair; I felt a sharp pain in my side, just over my left kidney.

"Ah!" the first man said, spraying me with his liver-and-onions breath. "What a stroke of luck! The big man ventured out on his own—finally! We got ya, sucka! Now you'll see, what you're up against here." His voice was wavering: he must have been circling me. "'Mighty Atlas who held aloft on his shoulders the heavenly firmament.' Bet you don't come across quotes like that in the Journal—big man like you! Bet you don't even know where that's from..."

I desperately wanted to break through the tape over my mouth and shout, "That's Virgil, you asshole!" Instead, I just rocked the chair a little, and emitted angry muted sounds: "Mmm-rrrl-mmmm..."

"Oh?" the man said, coming closer. "You want to talk now?" I felt his fingers dig into my neck. "Big man like you—if I had my way, you wouldn't even be alive right now..."

The fingers went in deeper, cutting off my breath. I heard the door rolling open and felt another blast of cold air—then a big commanding voice: "That's enough! Let him go or you'll be eating your next meal through a straw. Capiche?"

"Yes, ma'am. Look, uh—I know you're not ready for him yet. But the opportunity just presented itself. He finally ventured out on his own; I just couldn't pass it up. I figured better now than never—"

"What's done is done. Now, go do something for the good of the order. Go next door and check the feeds or something—"

"Right on," the man said. "Uh—"

"I mean all of you...get out of here—now!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Alright, ma'am!"

Moments later the tape was being ripped from my mouth, and I felt some rough chapped lips lightly brushing mine. Then the blindfold was removed, and I was peering into some familiar big jade-green eyes. I took in a full breath and held it a moment. "Jasmine," I managed to say. A naked light bulb dangled from an orange utility cord directly over her head, taking away the full dimensions of her face. It wasn't the big-grinning round face I'd remembered from Maine: it was a different face, a serious face with a fresh scar across it.

"Eggers," she said. She looked over at the three men, who were still standing just inside the door, staring at her with brute admiration. "I said get out!" she snapped. "And for God's sake, shut the goddamn door behind you!" They marched out; the door, once again, rolled shut. No one had worn masks or anything: I got to see everyone's face. Jazz turned her attention back to me. "You know better than to scream for help, Eggers, I'm sure." She kissed me on the nose, grabbed my shoulders. "Oh, it is so good to see you, my old friend, even under these rather difficult circumstances."

I swallowed, with difficulty. I wanted to say something, anything, to my "old friend" here in a tight-fitting black body suit with a tool-cluttered black-leather utility belt around her waist—this new-age warrior...but it didn't seem possible to isolate and send out any one word.

"Now Eggers," she continued, "I have something that you probably want more than oxygen at this point." She went over to a small metal cabinet in the corner, opened it, and took out an empty coffee can. She came back over to me, unzipped my pants, and maneuvered the tip of my penis over the lip of the can, and I let loose right away.

"All better?" she asked, zipping me back up. She got a bottle of water from the same cabinet and tipped it up to my mouth. I took a drink—it was ice cold—and promptly coughed.

"Hey-hey-hey, easy," she said.

"Thanks," I muttered.

"I apologize for the temperature in here, but we operate on the fly, as you can imagine; we only have a few space heaters—I'm sorry—and we need them all for next door. We've got some really cool shit over there. Too bad you've gone over to the Dark Side or I'd show you." She smiled. "Eggers, I can't even imagine what must be sloshing around your brain pan right now."

"I'll give you a hint...what the fuck, Jasmine!"

"Unh-huh. I see. Well, I got some 'splaining to do now, don't I?" She found a folding chair along the wall next to the cabinet and set it up directly in front of me. She sat down on it, backwards, with the backrest of the chair plastered to her chest. We were nose-to-nose now, barely three feet apart. Strings of dirty blond hair falling out of a red bandana cupped her face.

"You could start with why you tried to kill Gil and my brother," I blurted out.

"Oh? I did that now, did I?"

"I'd put money on it—"

"Listen, tough guy," she said, "no one has tried to kill anyone—yet. All that early stuff, the shots at your man Gil on the Parkway and that little thing with your brother, and of course that little confetti-bomb on your desk—those were just...let's call them attention-grabbers. I believe I've succeeded in getting your attention now. I can reach my great big blow-up hand into your little Corporate Complex any time I want to. And who am I kidding—they were good for morale. Listen, if I really wanted any of your people dead, they'd be dead already. Actually you'd be dead right now, you know, if I hadn't stuck my neck out for you, more than once."

"Very big of you."

"Well," she said, "I might need you at some point...I need you right now, actually. Your singular brain, I mean. If I could just disconnect it somehow and keep it functioning, I'd throw the rest of you in the river."

"I'm flattered."

"Don't be!" she snapped. "The best you can do at this point is to undo the damage you've already caused."

"Oh."

"Yeah," she said. "You're plowing full-speed ahead, you and X+ Corp., with no regard whatsoever for the consequences. There are just so many questions you haven't even bothered to ask. Eggers, do you see where I'm going with this?"

"Not really," I said.

"That a boy." She patted my knee. "Be stubborn until the end. Listen, regardless of what you may have heard, I couldn't care less about any of that Terminator bullshit. The Universal Respect Doctrine—you've heard of it, I'm sure. Well, that was just created to give the illusion of rationality to some very irrational moves, you know, like our Constitution. I just use it as a recruiting tool, which works wonderfully because, well, machines really are taking over the world. We've created them, made them almost too perfect, and now they are evolving faster than we are, moving beyond us in sophistication, which maybe isn't all that bad. They may possibly be the only thing that can save us from ourselves..." She looked down at the floor. "Actually I don't care one way or the other. I'm not even sure I care all that much for this planet anymore, Eggers. Not the way I used to—"

"When you were with Vampora, you mean?"

"When I was...precisely. I cared then, almost too much. Now the way I see it whatever we do to ourselves, we deserve. No. My concerns at this point are more expansive. More multi-versal, you might say. Listen—"

"I'm listening!" I said. "Stop saying that—"

"Sure you are. But how about you really listen to me, and not to the little voice of me you generate in your head so you can be the big man and control everything. Don't think I don't know how that works! Because—listen, yeah—at this point I'm mostly concerned about what might be happening out there"—she waved her hand over my head—"to other worlds, what we might be doing to them. I mean, look at how we've destroyed our own natural planet in the name of progress. Well, thanks to you and your stupid company—thanks to me and my stupid little equation!—we may be doing the exact same thing all over the universe now, decimating other inhabited planets with civilizations so much better than our own. I don't know how you feel about that, but I think it stinks."

"When you put it that way."

"Listen, Eggers. Here's the thing. I've been doing some doodling on my own, picking up from our work in Maine. I won't pretend to have all the answers, but then it's the questions themselves that are—how shall I put this?—of an alarmist bent. Because, Eggers—and I quote—'now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.' But that, of course, doesn't work unless we're brave enough to act on what we know, always the hardest part of any revolutionary movement." She let her chin rest on the top of her chair; her whole slinky body was now bent into a tight 'C'. "Will you at least hear me out? At least humor me here? I think we both agree you owe me that much."

"Who was that you just quoted?" I asked. "Albert Schweitzer?"

"What? No. Madame Curie."

"Right," I said. "Damn! I should have known that. I—"

"You ADHD freak! Will you forget about the goddamn quote! And listen to me, really listen. Because I have been a busy girl these past few years, and I don't just mean getting together the Unity Brigade and all that. I know what you probably think about us, but it's just what the world needs right now. I mean, democracy can't survive without a little revolution now and then, right?"

"Neither can fascism."

"Good point. You always make good points—at someone else's expense."

"You've created a monster, Jazz. Even you can't control it now."

"Maybe I can't—you're right," she said. "I can't totally control this monster—you're right about that. I'm not even really in charge of it anymore. But I don't regret creating it, not for one second. Anyway, I could say the exact same thing about you and X+ Corp. That's your own big car-stomping monster on the loose, Eggers. You'll see." She got up off the chair, slapped herself on the thigh. "Well, guess now's as good a time as any." She got a piece of yellow notebook paper out of her little hip pouch, unfolded it slowly, and brought it to within a few inches of my face. All I saw were some scratch equations, many of which were crossed out with manic swipes of black ink.

"What do you think?" she asked me.

"Well, uh..."

"Take your time." She waited a few seconds: "Well?"

"Honestly? This looks like gibberish to me, Jazz."

"Sure-sure. I should have cleaned it up a little. I just...I wasn't expecting you yet. But now that you're here..."

I looked back at the page. It was chaotic stuff, what little I could make out. She was trying—I don't know—to find the parameters of some bizarre interstitial realm right here in our own universe that does what we assume parallel universes do to prevent Infinite Drift. But she kept cancelling things out. She seemed, in fact, to be working toward cancelling out everything.

"Shall I explain what I'm doing here for his feeble Highness' edification?" she asked me.

"You're all over the place, Jazz—what's to explain?"

"Hmm. I was hoping for a more sophisticated critique."

"It looks to me like you're just flying from one ill-formed idea to another. Where are the logical connectors?"

"Stay with me here, pretty boy!" She slapped the top of my head. "Look at this"—she stabbed at one of the choppy ill-formed equations at the bottom of the page—"right here! Look. What I'm showing here, I think, is how it may be possible—just possible—to map out, to delineate all the space we've lost in our universe, the space of nothing that is created when things leave us. No one has ever done that. No one has even thought of doing that. Look...because maybe, just maybe we were too quick to dismiss Infinite Drift. Because—now I know this is your area; pardon me for encroaching—but what if, what if when a thing drifts too far from where it's supposed to be in its own time-frame here, when it gets stretched out beyond itself and flashes into a parallel universe, it leaves behind a trace essence of itself here in our universe? What if it is these traces—I'm calling them 'temporal disruptors' until I can come up with something better—what if they are the problem? What if a thing can never totally leave our universe? Think about what it means, to have all those ghost images spread throughout the cosmos, gaining their own bizarre kind of black mass...hey!" She waved her hand in front of my face.

"Yes," I said. "I've spent my whole life working that out. So what?"

"I'll tell you 'what.' Or you tell me. Because if our theory of non-unitary time evolution is correct, then wouldn't a thing have to flash into another universe before it gets stretched out beyond itself here? Otherwise, it couldn't ever leave."

I took a refreshed look at her work. "I don't know. It's a really crazy theory, Jazz."

"Sure, maybe. It just came to me on the ride home from Maine. I just sat there watching those big snowflakes hitting the windshield and then it hit me, like a big-ass avalanche! Eggers, all we really did in Maine was to show how to zap shit into other universes and retrieve it, that it's theoretically possible to do so, and of course you had to go and connect the dots and figure out how to make money out of it. You're a good man, Eggers Mortensen. You are the right stuff, sir—"

"That's really funny—you're a funny girl."

"We lose our humanity when we lose our sense of humor, Eggers."

I'd been flashing from her crazy face, flushed and sweaty now, to her work, which didn't seem quite so chaotic now.

"Don't you see what this means?" she continued. "If we start zapping shit into other universes and bringing it back here, all in zero time, for the sake of near-infinite replication, with no determined locus, no way of knowing where it's really going—just shoot it out there, right! Who cares, as long as we get what we want out of it. A cure for AIDS, so we can have even more miserable people on the planet."

"Jasmine, the multi-verse is so big! I mean—"

"We used to think that about the planet at one time too, didn't we? And look how that's turned out for us. Ah, the sea—the big Sargasso Sea..."She smiled again: "You and I, my friend, we seem to have suffered from conceptual constriction up there in that stupid little cabin in Maine. Too much weird sexual energy or something—it clouded our thinking." She swallowed, took a long deep breath. "If you weren't such a lump right now, you might be helping me here."

"Sorry."

"Yeah-yeah, I know. I've had years to swallow all this; you're just getting it now. But if you look at the bottom of the page here, what I'm showing, I think, mathematically, is that nothing, not one thing that has ever existed has ever left this universe naturally, through any force that exists out there. Infinite Drift didn't exist until we brought it here, Eggers: it's possible we are responsible for it; our lust for progress is about to bring on a universal holocaust. Oh Eggers, we're idiots! We never even considered the most basic of physical laws—"

"The Laws of Thermodynamics—yes we did, Jazz. That was one of the very first things we addressed, that first night we worked on all this, if you remember—"

"I remember everything!" She'd sent spit flying into my face. She pulled her sleeve down over her palm and wiped if off. "Sorry, Eggers."

"It's okay."

She let the piece of paper drop down to her stomach. "It seems that we've succumbed to that most elemental of human impulses," she said, in a soft airy voice, "for all mortal beings desire quickness of thought as a hedge against the drumbeat of death which follows all intellectual hesitancies—"

"That's really good!" I said. "Marie Curie?"

"What? No, you dolt! That's me—little old me. I just keep coming up with shit like that, all the time. I'm on fire, man! I'm burning up here...maybe"—she moved in and licked the tip of my nose—"I'm the one who should be writing a book."

"Jazz?"

"Good sir?"

"I'll give you this much. What we're doing though Non-binary Processing is indeed unnatural—"

"Let's be honest: it's fucking blasphemous. But go on."

"Okay," I said. "Okay. But that's as far as I can go. A lot of things are unnatural but not necessarily harmful, like nuclear energy, or birth control."

"True. But let me ask you this: In the name of all-mighty progress and profit, are you really willing to risk destroying other worlds and maybe even our own in the end?"

"Probably theory suggests we will do neither, Jazz."

"Yeah?" she said. "Well, chaos theory suggests we just might end up doing both. Anyway, you disappoint me. You're just not trying hard enough here." She shook the paper in front of my face. "Look at my work, damn you!"

"Jasmine—"

"Okay, it's pretty sloppy stuff, I know." She wiped her cheeks. "Guess we can't all be as neat and tidy as the great Dr. Eggers Mortensen. I guess you won't be impressed by the rest of what I've done then either..."

"There's more?"

"Sure is. Now, get ready"—she flipped over the sheet—"for the really bizarre shit."

The work on the back was nearly as incomprehensible as what was on the front and certainly every bit as chaotic—and yet...I don't know. There are no more than a dozen people on this planet who can even begin to comprehend what Dr. Jasmine Geckle is doing. I have always wanted to believe that I am one of them.

"What is that there," I asked, thrusting out my chin, "in the middle there—?"

"Ah, good eye!" she said. "My little darling, my new pet. It all revolves around that. Our salvation, perhaps..."

"You're undoing everything here," I muttered.

"That's right! Time to move away from our Cosmo-centric bias! Just maybe, maybe everything isn't always about us little nubs here in the Milky Way, Eggers. Maybe we have to expand our thinking, to start caring about everything and everyone out there."

"Wow," I said, "it's a new baseline for singularity then."

"Bingo!" For a while, we both were staring at that sheet of paper—just one sheet of paper, yellow in color, blue-lined: one tactile reality, which could burn up so easily and cease to exist like anything on this planet. "We've been basing everything on the premise that a thing is what it is because it is where it is, as if nothing else matters," she explained. "Well, I'm not okay with that anymore. It's too primitive, when you get right down to it, as if things can just hop along wherever they want to go, here, there, anywhere—la-la-la—throughout our universe or another, doesn't matter, because they always are what they are, happy in their own little individual time frame. Eggers, here's what I believe now: a thing is what it is because it is hemmed in by everything else in existence. A thing's singularity is codified by the totality of everything that surrounds it. And woe to the beings that try to mess with that!"

She folded up the paper. "Here," she said, stuffing it in my shirt pocket. "Consider it an early Christmas present." She was staring at me intently, her big eyes shifting between my mouth and the top of my head. "I want you to have that, you know, in case something should happen to me."

"What? What's going to happen?"

"Eggers," she said, "promise me something. Just promise me you'll at least try to delay the full launch of your precious Vena project until—well, the truth comes out. Please just find a way! I mean, I know you can't keep the corporate hounds at bay forever, but if you could just do this one thing for me—just give me a few more weeks, damn it!—then we're even."

"Jazz, you know where this is taking you, right?"

"I'm just following my bliss."

"I don't want anything bad to happen to you," I said.

"I believe that, Eggers. But does it really matter? What is my life or anyone's life compared to what is about to happen to billions of beautiful soulful beings out there?" She brought her nose right up to mine, placing her hands on my knees in the process. "My God, Eggers, we could be talking about a massive destabilization of life across all dimensions! The universal holocaust—it is about to begin." She was shifting through facial expressions so rapidly now it was making me dizzy. "'The end of time, the end of everything: when our universe explodes out into the greater void of nothingness, a nightmare beyond reckoning.'" She stood back up and brushed my chin with her fingers. She was actually quoting from my book The Infinite Stretch of Time.

"Christ," I said, "I'm really starting to hate that stupid little book."

"Frightening what your own mind can turn out sometimes, isn't it?"

"Sure is." There was a strange moment of normalization here, as if we could just laugh this whole thing off, go out, and have coffee now. Then I tried to move my arm and felt the digging pain of the zip ties around my elbow. "Well, what now, Jazz? What's next?"

"I don't know. All I want in life right now is to get a little further along in my work, fill in some of the gaps, and find the 'logical connectors,' as you so daintily put it. Eggers, I'm counting on you. Just give me a little more time to try to figure this thing out."

"And then we're even?" I asked.

"Yes, of course."

I watched her chest cavity fill up with air and then collapse quickly.

"I'm not very impressed with those idiots out there," I said.

"My guys? Oh, I realize they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but any one of them would give up his life for me, Eggers."

"Yeah?" I said. "And which one are you sleeping with? I'm going with the beady-eyed asshole who nabbed me on the street."

"Hm. Well," she said, "the way group dynamics work at this level, I'd have to sleep with none of them or all of them. Guess which it is? Okay"—she smacked me on the forehead with her palm—"I can see we're done here. Knights!" She pounded on the adjacent wall. "Knights, we're pulling out now! Take everything and then sweep the place clean! You know the drill." She rolled open the door and ducked outside. She'd left it open: I got to sit there in the swirling cold, zip-tied to a chair, and watch that trio of selfless dolts load up two windowless white vans with all kinds of really high-tech gear—it was incredible stuff—from the adjoining storage locker. It took them maybe half an hour.

Suddenly Jazz reappeared. "Eggers," she said, leaning down to put her nose on a level with mine, "looks like I've got to skedaddle now—things to do, revolutions to plot, you know." She put the blindfold back on and duct-taped my mouth. "Now," she whispered in my ear, "if they do somehow find you before you freeze to death, I hope you'll study that sheet of paper I just gave you. Study it as if your life, and a bazillion others, depend on it. And then you'll see: I am right about this—I have always been right."

The door slammed shut, and there I was all alone in the dark, again...

They found me roughly forty-six hours later. Larry had led the joint team of X+ Corporation goons and Federal agents searching for the missing corporate scientist, which had become the big news item throughout the world. The sun had warmed the locker during the day so it wasn't nearly as bad for me as it could have been. I'd only ended up with a moderate case of frostbite, along with slight dehydration; and someone must have kicked me at some point, because I also had a puffed-out bruise over my left kidney. The paramedics were worried about it, as were Larry and Moe, but I'd refused to go to the hospital, as I'd refused to submit to a debriefing or make any statements at all. I just wanted to go home...

That first night back, Larry actually sat up in a chair outside our bedroom door; he'd even popped in on us once with his flashlight blaring, handgun drawn, because he thought he'd heard a strange noise. He had: it was Gloria crying and shouting obscenities into her pillow. Larry tried to recover by rechecking the window locks. Poor guy! He seemed to feel personally responsible for what had happened to me, and I felt bad that he felt bad.

I took a few days off and then, admittedly before I was ready, returned to work. My crew of big brains was clearly tiptoeing around me now. I hated that but did not know how to address it; and anyway, they could function just fine at this point without my input. For my part, I locked myself in my office, rolled down the shades, and poured over Jasmine's equations. That's all I did for weeks. By then I had transcribed all of her work onto a big white board taking up the entirety of one wall so that I could play around with them. I'd put the original yellow sheet of paper in my home safe.

This went on for about three weeks. Then one morning, as I was eating my breakfast in the Breakfast Nook, Gloria swooped in and dropped a Seahorse Falls Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center brochure in my lap. "We're checking you in today, right after you finish your breakfast, along with Larry, for protection," she announced. "It's a six-week program. Your brother and I have worked it all. You'll be on an extended medical leave of absence. Gil's with us; even Vampora is on board at this point, and your mother—"

"Fine!" I said. "I'll do it."

"Good." She nabbed a piece of bacon from my plate. "Oh and when you come out in six weeks? Eggers?"

"What?"

"Well"—she scooped up a nub of creamery butter with her index finger and put it on the end of my nose—"let's just say the gay guy's next project is going to have to be the Nursery."

# CHAPTER FIVE

Larry and I rolled into the one-hundred-and-seventeen acre compound in the scenic heart of the Catskill Mountains around seven in the evening in one of the corporation's bulletproof black SUVs, just two days before Christmas. Larry shut down the engine, and for a while, we both stared ahead at the huge trigonometric snowflakes pelting the windshield. "Can't believe we made it through that crap," he remarked. "Even in this old battle wagon." He slapped the dashboard. "Egghead? Hey, you okay over there?" His face was lit up by the bluish glow of the onboard navigational screen, which was still flashing "SH Falls 0.0 miles...SH Falls 0.0 miles...SH Falls 0.0 miles..."

"It wasn't your fault, Larry, what happened to me. You know that, right?"

"Yeah?" he said. "Well, it ain't always the coach's fault when his team hits the skids either, is it, but who always gets shit-canned in the end?"

I rubbed my eyes. It was already cold enough in the SUV for us to see our breath. "I mean it," I said. "I don't know what the hell came over me that night. Crap, maybe I really do belong in this stupid place."

"Aw, how about we just drop it!"

"Good, fine by me." He was still looking over at me. "What?" I said.

"Why can't you just do things the way they're supposed to be done? Why you always gotta go try and outsmart everything?"

"I really don't know the answer to that."

"I mean, you're stuck here for the next six weeks so you might as well do what you're supposed to do here, right? Now, Egghead, I know your brain probably don't work this way, but you ever consider that maybe just 'cause your numbers say something's gonna happen, it don't mean it's gotta happen? People're always talking about how we screw with nature and all that, right. Well, guess what? Nature screws with us too! Look at that big earthquake somewhere in Asia, right, or all them tornados out West last week—that's nature's way of telling us we don't know what's gonna happen all the time. It ain't always in our hands, is what I'm saying. Sometimes we really are all just along for the ride."

"That's really nice mobster fatalism there, Larry. But I'm worried we might be about to take ride no one will want to go on."

"Well, I don't know what to say to that." He wiped his window and looked out. "Six weeks without any hooch," he said, "yeah, I can do that. My plan is, I'm gonna just read some books—got my Clancy boxed set with me—and drink lotsa carrot juice and stuff like that and work out like crazy, maybe drop a few pounds. You know Gloria told me they got one of them five-star chefs here, a celebrity-kind of guy; used to have his own cooking show and everything. This guy, in the morning he comes right out to your table with this little cart and makes you an omelet, right there in front of you. Tomorrow morning, man, I'm gonna have me the biggest, baddest omelet you ever saw!"

"That's great," I said. "You live it up here. But Larry, I'm telling you what I have to do right now is much, much bigger than whether or not I have a few drinks now and then."

"Few drinks now and then? Ha!" He slapped my leg. "Ain't one person that knows you wouldn't vote to keep you in here for the rest of your life."

"Jesus!" I said. "It's like talking to a child."

I flung open my door and jumped out into the blinding snow. Then I just started walking. I had no idea where I was going. I mean I couldn't see a thing—no buildings, no lights, nothing. Larry caught up to me quickly. He had my duffel bag slung over one shoulder and was dragging along his own massive duct-taped brown suitcase.

Moments later, he elbowed me. "Will you look at that!" he said. I raised my head and suddenly a huge glowing castle was right there in front of us, looming over us as if it had been hoisted out of the ground on a giant pneumatic platform. We approached the base of the expansive smooth-stone veranda, which had honest-to-God snarling gargoyles along its outer edge and genuine medieval suits of armor flanking two huge entrance doors, each with a cast-iron clacker at chest level and giant revolving cast-iron ball-joints. The whole area was lit up by little outdoor track lights.

"You ready?" Larry asked, as he prepared to bang on one of the giant doors.

I nodded.

The door rolled open and a woman nearly Larry's height ushered us into a large oval-shaped lobby with wide tar-colored floorboards and various animal pelts on the walls. "Ah, Dr. Mortensen—you made it!" the woman said. She was in her mid-thirties and had a perfectly symmetrical face, big dark eyes rimmed with chic round glasses, and a squat setting of multi-colored hair jutting out of her skull like little paint brushes. She wore a dark purple turtleneck sweater and tight black dress pants, along with very sensible multi-toned shoes. She's someone I should have liked on the spot.

"Welcome to Seahorse Falls," she said. Larry and I were stomping the snow off our boots. "Your new life starts now, Dr. Mortensen. I am Madrigal, your personal guide. I will help you to design a personal recovery program that is guaranteed to work." We shook hands—her grip was firm and strong—and then her big lens-distorted eyes rolled over to Larry. "And you must be, uh"—she glanced down at her clipboard—"Larry with no last name."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"He's my bodyguard," I said.

"Bodyguard?"

"He goes wherever I go, like a shadow."

"Dr. Mortensen, this is very unorthodox and, I assure you, completely unnecessary."

"Ah, okay," I said. "I see how it is. Larry, go find us something to drink—some coffee or something."

"Yeah, sure." He dropped my duffel bag at my feet and started dragging his big brown suitcase over to a small coffee station set up next to a full upright snarling grizzly bear. This place smells like horse sweat, I thought.

I took a step toward Madrigal, who was still watching Larry. "Is he armed?" she asked.

"To the teeth! Look," I said, "maybe you don't know about my particular circumstances."

"Oh," she said, "I have a pretty good idea what you've done to yourself and to those around you to arrive here at Seahorse Falls in the middle of a blizzard like this. Your story is never quite as unique as you think it is."

"What?" I said. "No! That's not what I mean. Come on, lady! You must have seen the news reports—the case of the missing scientist?"

"No. I have not. This facility has no connection to the outside world—no radio or television, no internet. You will not be able to use your cell phone while you are here—there is no reception anywhere for miles around. There is one secure phone line, and it is for business use and emergencies only. The world is out there—you are in here. You will have to get used to it. Dr. Mortensen, the time and space for quiet reflection is a key component of our Program."

"Quiet reflection—yes!" I patted my coat pocket, where I had that yellow sheet of paper safely stowed away. "That's exactly what I need."

"For your own good," she said, "you should just send your bodyguard home. Trust me. We are used to having heads of state and very controversial figures stay here. We are equipped to handle any special security concerns that might arise."

"No deal. He goes where I go, or I split. Alright," I said, "look, I'm a charitable guy, and I have a massive headache right now. So let's cut right to the chase. Maybe a sizeable donation would alter your thinking a little?"

"Dr. Mortensen, really!"

"How's one-million dollars sound to you? You can build the Dr. Eggers Mortensen Memorial juice bar, right over there."

"Sir—!"

"Alright, two million. I can't go any higher than that, except to three—"

"It isn't about the money," she said.

"It's always about the money. Four million..."

Larry came back over with two big steaming ceramic goblets in one hand. "What?" he said. "There a problem?"

"That's right," I said. "Apparently this woman here has a problem with your legal right to bear arms and protect me from any and all threats foreign and domestic."

"Nah," Larry said. "Your brother already took care of all that. We're good to go."

"What?" I said.

I looked at Madrigal; she looked at me and smiled. "Four million, did you say?" She handed me a hardcover orientation manual as thick as a small-city phonebook. "Now go get settled into your room, you two. You guys are in the King Edward Suite, on the third level. The elevator is right around the corner there."

"Damn!" I said, tucking the manual under my arm as Larry and I headed for the elevator. "I think I just got snookered."

"Surprised it don't happen to you more often, Egghead. You're the stupidest smart guy I ever met."

~

We got settled in our room, which had all the big and little luxuries you'd expect from a place that many big-name celebrities consider their home away from home. Seahorse Falls—or The Falls, as it's often called—easily competes with the best luxury resorts in the world. Our room had original paintings on the wall, a genuine coat of arms, stuff like that, as if it were designed to let its inhabitants know that wealth makes even recovery an exalted experience. We each had our own canopied, king-sized bed. Larry dragged his suitcase over to his and pressed down on the center of his mattress. He seemed satisfied. He opened his suitcase and took out some spotted swim trunks. "I'm gonna go for a swim, then take a nice long soak in the hot tub. Do me a favor, Egghead?"

"What?"

"While I'm gone, don't run away or nothing. 'Cause next time someone grabs you, we're just gonna let 'em keep you."

"Christ," I said, watching him step out of his trousers, "this is going to be the longest six weeks of my life."

With Larry gone now, I set myself up on one of the throw rugs on the floor—I'd brought along some Sharpies and tracing paper—and took out that little yellow sheet of paper Jasmine had given me, but I just couldn't get my brain going. I agonized over it for about an hour before I was mercifully saved by a knock on the door.

"It's open!" I shouted.

It was Madrigal, wearing a tight red sweater and green mini-skirt with little gold bells sewn into it, and shiny black boots that came all the way up to her knees. She'd pushed the door open but remained standing out in the hallway.

"Dr. Mortensen?" she called in.

"Oh, uh—hi there."

"I hope I'm not intruding."

"Oh, no. I was just—uh..."

Madrigal waded into the expanse of black-and-white madness on the floor. Her tight outfit accentuated her marathoner's physique. I noticed she had little red-and-green sparkles all over her face. She looked down at me, smiling. "You brought work with you, I see."

"Yeah," I muttered.

"It's nice to have passion in life, isn't it?"

"What else is there?"

"Serenity, inner peace."

"Ah, right! Exactly what every intellectual deadbeat I know claims to value."

"Well," she said, "there are Zen-like modalities, states of pure being, which are worth exploring in and of themselves. They are more than mere complements to passion: they are essential to it. Without them passion has only two routes: it dies out, or it drives one to madness." She came half a step closer; her bony knees were inches from my ear. "Dr. Mortensen, you know you may find what you are seeking in your work, as in your life, through alternative means of perception. It may be that you are forcing yourself to come up with things that cannot be forced into being."

"Right," I said. "That's exactly what's going on here."

She smiled again. "You do realize, I hope, that your overriding drive to be successful on one level may be preventing you from discovering others which may be of equal or greater importance. Completeness of being leads to completeness of thought."

"Yes—right. Thanks."

She smiled yet again. I was already beginning to love-hate that smile. "You are paying five-thousand dollars a day to be here, Dr. Mortensen. Perhaps you should at least try to complete the Program?"

"That much, really?"

"Yes."

"Well, then"—I tried to force out my own twisted smile—"guess I should have had some breakfast at least."

She picked up a piece of tracing paper, scanning it as if it were a simple bank statement. "Dr. Mortensen, I can help you with whatever you are doing here—really I can. What we do at Seahorse Falls, it will not disrupt your thought patterns. Actually, it will enhance them. There is a reason we get so many writers, other creative types here—, and some business people too. You are not the first troubled Master of the Universe to arrive in the dead of winter, you know."

She extended her hand and helped me to stand up. For a while, we just stood there nose to nose, holding hands. Hers was warm and soft. I don't know what to say. I just didn't let go of it. Then I blinked and everything suddenly became surreal for me. Everything around me—the weird fissures in the walls and the bizarre flickering gaslights, my canopied bed, Madrigal's beautiful sparkly face—it was all too stark and bold in detail. I blinked again and wondered how the hell I got to be here, in this place, at forty-two years of age. Then it struck me: someday I'll blink again and wonder how the hell I got to be wherever I am at fifty-two...sixty-two...seventy-two...

"Dr. Mortensen?"

"Uh—"

"Are you at all interested in hearing about our Program? It is quite unique."

"Actually I am. But this, what I'm doing here right now—you can't even imagine how important it is."

"Well"—she hesitated, as if her brain were running through all the possible responses—"there is great importance attached to anything in which we have invested real energy and emotion over time, isn't there?"

"Where are you getting this stuff?" I said. "It's great."

"From the Founder. Her great wisdom girds everything we do here. You really should read her books when you get a chance, especially her first one, Fighting the Inner Demon, which for my money is her best. We have all of them in our Library."

"Yeah, sure." I gave her hand a hard little squeeze, then let go. "Madrigal, listen, I'm sorry I can't be a better, uh—"

"Guest. You are a guest here, Dr. Mortensen."

"Right," I said. "But I can't just drop this, what I've got going on here. Not right now. I'm sorry."

"I understand. But will you at least make an effort to eat while you're here? Breakfast starts at seven. I want to see you there tomorrow morning."

"Sure. I can do that."

"Good." She scanned the islands of tracing paper on the floor. "I wish you luck, with your work here. Really I do. Because"—she smiled one more time, this time showing a lot more teeth—"my family still owns a huge block of X+ Corporation preferred stock. Good-bye, Dr. Mortensen."

But I didn't go down for breakfast the next morning, and Madrigal didn't come back to pester me about it. Larry was gone all day, so I was able to work without interruption, which is not to say that I had achieved anything.

Around six that evening Larry returned to the room with his black tie was tossed over his shoulder and the top three buttons of his shirt undone, exposing his curly white chest hair. He said nothing, just slammed his big ass down on the corner of his bed, and stared at the wall.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" I asked. I was still down on the floor, following dead ends.

"Just decided to go through the Program. Why not, right? I'm here—"

"Right. And—?"

"Feels like I just got sucker-punched. I mean, first thing they do get you off the hooch is make you dig up stuff from your past that makes you want it. Hey," he popped up, "ain't that what they call irony?"

"That's a pretty good example of it, I suppose."

"This recovery thing—whew! Lotta work."

Larry looked at me; I looked at him. "What?" I said.

"You're disgusting, Egghead. Go shower, at least."

"Yeah-yeah."

He scanned the spread of tracing paper on the floor: it had grown to take up half the room. "So this is what you plan on doing here? Ignore all the great stuff they got going on and just work on them little squigglies of yours?"

"That's exactly it."

"Yeah, well, don't get too comfortably. I went and signed us up for their little Ping-Pong tournament they got for next week. I don't like losing, Egghead, so you better snap out of it at some point."

"That's just great." My knees cracked as I got to my feet and headed straight for the bathroom. "A sober Christmas," I called out, "just what I need."

"Yeah," Larry said. "I hear you."

~

Three days later, I figured I was ready for a solid meal. So I got out of bed before Larry, showered, and put on tan khakis and a black sweater. After Larry went through his morning routine, we headed down to the ground-level octagonal chamber known as the Dungeon Dining Hall.

"Jesus," I whispered, glancing at the dozen or so droopy-eyed people hovering around the coffee table, "what is this—the zombie café?"

"Shut up, Egghead. It ain't like we look any different."

"Resistance is futile," I said. I glanced out the huge Palladian windows and noticed that the Great Blizzard had finally let up, creating a smooth glistening moonscape out of the castle's inner courtyard.

When it was my turn at the coffee table, I got myself some regular old coffee, dumped in the requisite amount of cream and sugar, and moved on down to the pastry table, where I stacked a plate with donuts and Danishes and all kinds of other sweet little fresh-baked things. Larry had gotten his coffee—black, no sugar—and was now making the long trek to his table in the back corner: by then he'd made friends with everyone and had to greet every person along the way.

At the table, I noticed that Larry was uncharacteristically fidgety and nervous.

"What?" I said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Ah! Here's my man."

I turned around and saw an elderly man in a chef's hat wheeling a little omelet cart out into the open center of the chamber. Larry jumped up out of his chair and waved the little mustached man right over to us.

"Gimme the works again!" Larry said, licking his lips.

"Ah, of course," the Chef said. "I always say a man with a big appetite for food is a man with a big appetite for life. Very good." He looked at me. "You know I can always tell who isn't going to make it here—they don't eat. I am Chef Martin Zapatelli." He bowed comically. "And you are?"

"Eggers Mortensen."

"Ah, yes! I am at your service, sir. You want something—you tell me. I make it for you. Now"—he slid my pastry plate away from me—"you eat a real breakfast; the sweets come later."

"Ha!" Larry said. "See why I like this guy?"

The Chef tossed a pad of butter into a pan and swirled it around. "You," he said to Larry, "I will give you something very special this morning."

"Oh yeah," Larry said, "Lay it on me, pops!"

"I call it The Big Sicilian."

"I'm liking it already!"

The Chef reached into the lower cabinet and took out a handful of olives, some little cherry tomatoes, an onion, a clove of garlic, and right there in front of us he diced everything into sizeable chunks and tossed it all into the hot pan. "Four eggs." He cracked two at a time, one in each hand, into a second pan. It was neat. Then he got out a little plastic container. "Calamari," he announced, dropping the little tentacles and rubbery rings into the first pan. "It came frozen but I tenderize it overnight. And now"—he got out another plastic container—"sweet pickles. Salty and sweet—in Sicily, you know, they love contrasting flavors. It's because the land, it is so very harsh and yet is surrounded by a sea overflowing with beauty."

He added capers, pimentos, hot peppers, a few other things, some spices—then he consolidated the two pans and slid a perfect omelet onto Larry's plate.

Then the great Chef turned to me. "And you, sir? What would you like me to make for you on this fine morning?"

"Gimme the works," I said, trying to imitate Larry's manly baritone. The Chef made me a traditional three-egg Western omelet, and piled already-cooked bacon, sausage, ham, and home fries and lightly buttered whole-wheat toast on my plate.

I was halfway through my excellent omelet when Larry grabbed my arm as if he were a frightened child. "Holy moly!" he whispered. "Oh man!" He rattled my elbow. "Egghead, you know who that is over there?"

"Where?"

"Don't stare! Jesus, what's the matter with you?"

"What—who?"

"Over there getting coffee. It's_______________." (He did say her name, but she has requested that I leave it out of this. I am not even allowed to drop hints, my agent tells me.)

"Wow!" I said.

"Egghead"—Larry kept his voice low—"we are in the presence of honest-to-God screen royalty here. Don't say nothing stupid."

And that's when fate, which occasionally does good things for us, intervened. "Hey!" some mousy little woman from the catering staff called out. "Look, out there—out there in the snow!" Larry and I got up out of our seats like everyone else and drifted over to the huge wall of windows to see two deer pushing steam out of their nostrils as they plowed their way through the deep snow of the courtyard. They were in no hurry; they kept stopping to look around, sniff at things, their tails swishing randomly.

Somehow, that great screen Diva ended up standing right next to me. Our shoulders were practically touching. I kept stealing glances at her: she was about my height, rail thin, with long white wizard's hair. She had on a silky dress, a blue strapless thing with brightly colored dots all over it. She wore no jewelry, no discernible makeup—no shoes even.

"Incredible," the Diva whispered to herself.

"Those are white-tailed deer," I said to her. "They really are incredible creatures, perfectly suited for mountainous terrain or prairies, or deciduous forests like they have around here—but not the dessert. You will not see them in any dessert. Did you know they could outrun a horse? They've been clocked at speeds of up to forty miles an hour."

"You don't say?" She had a great voice. I wanted to give her something to read aloud to me—a phone book, or Shakespeare: it didn't really matter.

"They can leap over a seven-foot fence with ease," I said.

"Yes—really?"

"And they are incredible swimmers. Thirteen miles an hour is nothing for them. That's over twice as fast as an Olympic swimmer. Michael Phelps would get creamed by a white-tailed deer..." We watched the two deer move beyond the reach of the castle's security lights into the rugged mountainside that has been their domain for eons. I wanted to be out there with them...

"A deer can kick harder than a mule," I said to the Diva. I caught Larry rolling his eyes at me. "More people die of mule kicks than shark attacks—did you know that? And deer, especially the white-tailed deer, they have an incredible bite. In terms of pounds per square inch, they are right up there with the American Pit Bull."

"Hmm," the Diva said.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Do you now?"

I watched Larry make his way back to his table, like a little boy afraid to talk to the head cheerleader. I turned back to the Diva. "Yeah," I said. "My father used to have a huge poster of you over his workbench in the garage. Sometimes I'd catch him staring at it as if it were a religious shrine he'd traveled a great distance to see. It's that one where you're barefoot, in a little spotted sundress, with this wide-brimmed straw hat, lying in a hammock looking up at the sky?"

"Oh, I made so many of those. I can never remember a single one."

"I can name every movie you were in, even the terrible French ones."

She laughed. "And they were terrible!"

"I can list them in alphabetical or chronological order."

"You must be very popular at parties."

"Yeah," I continued, "I grew up reciting your biography for my father, and I haven't forgotten any of it. My reward, if I got things right, was I got to stay up with my brother to watch Saturday Night Live. I must say, you've had an incredible life." I held out my hand. "I am Eggers Mortensen."

"Well," she said, lightly touching the tips of my fingers, "then I know who you are as well. And I would ask you to use the Present Continuous tense, please, when referring to my life."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"I was an English major at ______________, as I'm sure you know. I am having an incredible life, Eggers Mortensen."

"Right." I couldn't help myself: I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up a parallel universe where my father was still alive so I could tell him I'd actually met the woman who used to keep him in his garage workshop for hours upon hours in reflective reverence for what we want and cannot have.

When I opened my eyes, the Diva was looking at me with concern. I could feel sweat gathering on my forehead, ready to race down my face. "Did you know white-tail deer live half as long in the wild as they do in captivity?" I said.

"And which do you suppose they prefer?"

I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

"Perhaps we should find you a chair," the Diva said.

"Yes. Good idea." She took my hand and started leading me to the nearest table, but I never made it. My last thought, before hitting the floor, was that there is so much good in this world. It is indeed worth saving...

I spent the next thirty-six hours in the Infirmary. The resident physician, after a series of tests, told me that that there was nothing medically wrong with me, other than slightly elevated blood pressure. The efficient little Pakistani said that I had simply come to the apex of my "personal health crisis," which was hell on the human body. She recommended meditation and yoga, at least eight glasses of water every day, and six small meals a day from now on. She gave me a pamphlet that explained all the horrible things I could expect in the days and weeks ahead.

The Diva had stayed with me in the Infirmary. She even slept in the chair next to my bed. We mostly played cards (I still owe her forty-seven dollars from her incredible run at Gin Rummy) and talked about life and things. Madrigal would pop in periodically to check up on me and impart her secondhand wisdom. Larry came in to drop off some National Geographics and give me the latest weather report.

When I returned to our room, Madrigal gave me my itinerary for Week One: breakfast at 0600...one-on-one therapy at 0700... "Making Amends with Yourself" workshop at 1000...yoga at 1100...lunch at noon...meditation with Yogi Magna Kaa'lil at 1300...Ping-Pong in the Rec. Hall at 1400..."Facing Your Daemon" group therapy at 1600...dinner at 1800...movie TBA in the Roundhouse Cinema at 1900...optional Swedish massage before lights out at 2200...

I followed it to the letter, and thus became a model guest.

We were all given New Year's day off. I used my free time to go snowshoeing with my new best friend, the tireless Diva. We'd made it all the way out to a small cave where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had supposedly had a romantic summer picnic back when the castle was a ritzy health spa. It was sunny out now, though brutally cold with a whipsaw wind. The Diva had brought along some homemade trail mix, which we stopped to eat at the top of a peak that gave us an incredible tri-state view.

"Whew!" the Diva said. "I haven't gotten this much exercise in years."

"Are you kidding me? I can barely keep up with you."

"Oh"—she pinched my arm—"stop it! I was at my physical peak long before you were even born."

"Is there any more of that grape juice left?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not."

I looked at her scarf-covered face. All I could see were her stark blue-green eyes and a rosy mouth. She could have been nineteen.

"What?" she said. "What's so funny?"

"Oh, it's just this reminds me of that Hemingway story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.' I made the mistake of re-reading it last night in the library."

"Yes, that was ill-advised." She looked out at the distant mountain peaks. The wind kept whistling through the little crevices around the mouth of our cave. "But," she said, "we are not in Africa, and I am nothing like that stupid girl in the story."

"What's stupid about her?"

"All of Hemingway's girls are stupid. Read it again."

"You don't like Hemingway?"

"I don't," she said. "I think he misses something essential, in all of his stories and books. I have always felt that way, and I actually knew the man. He just doesn't seem to get that, well, we move through the world—sure—but the world moves through us as well. And no matter what the modernists say, it is a beautiful world, full of kind-hearted people seeking laughter and love. Why don't writers write about that?"

"That would be boring."

"Perhaps."

"So"—I took another handful of trail mix from the bag—"you actually knew Hemingway?"

"Of course. I knew everyone who was anyone in the Fifties. I was what we used to call an eager beaver, which didn't mean then what it means now."

"Did you drink with him?"

"Oh, sure. Everyone drank in those days."

"I can't even picture you as an alcoholic."

"We weren't alcoholics back then. We were just having a good time."

"How long has it been for you?" I asked.

"Twenty-seven years now, Eggers. I relapsed just once, back in the Eighties. Believe me"—she touched my arm—"I don't envy you for what you have to go through yet."

"I feel pretty damn good right now though," I said.

"Well, don't get cocky. Recovery is a lifelong process. It has no end, except for the end point, if you know what I mean. You love irony, Eggers, right? Well, here's one for you: when it comes to recovery, we're always in danger of letting our successes weaken our conviction for success. I wish I could say it gets easier, but it doesn't." She patted my hand. "Eggers, I think we should start heading back now. It gets dark quickly around here." She let her eyes close for a moment. "You know, this is my fifth stay at The Falls? And every time I come here, something extraordinary happens to me. I think this time my extraordinary thing is—meeting you, Eggers Mortensen. You remind of the great Bobby Riggs. The most talented tennis player who ever lived—I don't care what anyone says about this Federer fellow. He was a charmer, like you."

"That's right. He was one of your suitors."

"Well, he thought he was. He and Marion—uh, Tony Trabert—they once played a match to see who would accompany me to the Golden Globes. Trabert won in straight sets. I went with Leslie Nielsen that year. He was between marriages. Eggers, if we don't start back soon, they're going to send people out after us."

"Yeah, alright. Let's strap these stupid things back on and torture ourselves for another hour or so."

"That's the spirit."

The trip back to the castle took nearly three hours, so that by the time we finally burst into the lobby, the Diva and I were both too tired for words. We just set our snowshoes up against a wall and went our separate ways. (She had the immaculate Queen Elizabeth Suite on the second floor.)

I burst into the room with the intention of going straight to bed, but instead I found Larry, the Seahorse Falls head of security, and the local Sheriff conversing in the central sitting area.

"Eggers!" Larry said, jumping to his feet. "You made it. Good." He led me away from the other men. "Listen," he whispered, "we have a little situation here. Nothing we can't handle though."

"What's up?" I asked him.

"Hey," the Sheriff called out in a gruff voice. "Let's keep the channels of communication open, how about it?"

"Sure thing," Larry said. He dragged me over to the Sheriff, who stood up quickly and held out his hand. I just looked down at it. "This is Sheriff Dan," Larry said. "Sheriff, this is Dr. Eggers Mortensen. Like I was telling you, he, uh, he's the one that handles situations like this."

"Well, he's not off to a good start—won't even shake my hand."

I could tell Larry loved this. The Falls head of security—a gentle giant Larry had nicknamed Sergeant Sideburns—chimed in now. "Gentlemen, we can clear this up quickly—"

"This little misunderstanding," Larry added.

"Right," the Sheriff said. The guy had to be around my age, with bright hazel eyes and boyish swirls of red hair atop his head, but something—divorce, boredom, bad diet—made him appear much older. I knew my role here—I wasn't going to let anyone down. I went over to my dresser, turned my back on everyone, and started removing my gloves.

"Well, Sheriff," I said, "If you have something to say to me, say it. You have two minutes."

He came right up behind me; I could see his fat round face reflected in the small mirror on the dresser. Suddenly I wanted to make everyone freeze so I could write out a script for how the next two minutes would go. I was sure I would get everything right.

The Sheriff looked back at Larry. "There's no one else I can talk to about this?"

"He's your man," Larry replied.

The Sheriff took a few steps over to the immaculate coat of arms, which was very close to what I would have had him do in the script, and spoke with his back to me. "Alright then, here it is: a few hours ago one of your people, Dr. Mortensen, he stole a car in my jurisdiction. I don't need to tell you—this is a serious felony."

"It's Sebastian," Larry said.

"What?" My script had just been thrown out the window.

The Sheriff positioned himself between Larry and me. "Your man—"

I held up my hand: "Shut the fuck up! Larry? What happened?"

"Well, looks like Sebastian was coming up here to see you—"

"The main road is still very treacherous," Sergeant Sideburns added. He must have stood up, at some point, but he was still hovering in the background. He, at least, remained in character. "Lots of drifting snow and black ice."

"Right," Larry said. "He tried to make it up here in his own vehicle, that stupid little hybrid thing of his, so of course he gets stuck. Then he got out and hoofed it to this fancy little Inn, tried to get some people there to take him up here. They wouldn't bite—guess he got a little carried away then..."

"Your man stole one of their Jeeps," the Sheriff said. "And then crashed it, too. They're good people, the owners."

"He's got frostbite pretty bad," Sergeant Sideburns added. "And some lacerations on his face and arms—"

"Where is he now?" I asked Larry.

"I took him straight here," the Sheriff said. "It's the closest medical facility—"

"We're gonna get him choppered out," Larry said. "It's on its way."

"Then what the fuck are we discussing here?" I snapped.

"Well," the Sheriff said, hooking his thumbs in his overstressed belt, "that's the million-dollar question now, isn't it?"

I ignored him. "Larry, I need to go talk to Sebastian alone."

"Must be pretty damn important for him to do all this."

"I think it may be."

"Listen," the Sheriff said, "I just want to be sure I'm doing the right thing here, okay? I mean, nothing is set in stone until I file my report—"

"Larry," I said, "take care of this fat turkey. Do whatever it takes."

"Gotcha."

I went down to the Infirmary. Sebastian looked awful. He had a big purple welt over his left eye and an inch-long cut on his left cheek, which had some translucent Vaseline-like goo over it. The resident physician was sitting on the edge of his bed, bandaging his hand, while he lay there with his eyes closed.

"I need to talk to him," I whispered. "Is that okay?"

"Oh, sure." She got up quickly and took one last look back at her patient. "I just gave him some painkillers though, so if he seems a little loopy—well, that's why."

I cleared my throat loudly; Sebastian's eyes fluttered open. "Ah, Eggers!"

"So, Sebastian, you're moonlighting as a car thief now, is that it?"

"Yeah..." He tried to smile. With some degree of difficulty, he got his eyes to focus on me. "We need to talk, Eggers. It's really important."

"Well," I said, "too bad they don't have these things where two people can converse without being in the same place, you know, like a telephone?"

"Yeah. Your brother," he said softly, "he told me I had to come up here and talk to you in person. He's still in Stockholm, at that conference." He ran his tongue around his dry cracked lips, and tried smiling once again. "I should sue him, huh."

"Someone should."

"We just don't know who we can trust anymore."

"Sebastian, what's going on?"

"Levi and I, we had someone we know for sure we can trust—"

"Larry?"

"Yeah, him. Wow, you're good."

"And?"

"We had our man plant a few bugs around the Complex—off the grid, so to speak. He assured us no one would ever find them. We were the only ones who knew about them. This morning around five, I get a text alert from the ones in the lab—your lab, Eggers. Someone bypassed regular security protocols and broke in. Then they started doing something with that big shiny machine you're always hugging and kissing. On New Year's day?"

"Damn—"

"All we got were their voices. But I ran them through the VRP. You'll never guess whose name popped up?"

"Flannery?"

"Nope. Snyder," he said. "And someone from your crew, that Grigor guy."

"Okay. Good. You did the right thing coming up here with this information."

"I did call your brother before traipsing up here. He's on his way back to clean things up. Guess this is when the real fun begins." He cleared his throat. "So, Eggers, what do you think they did?"

"I don't know. How long were they in the lab?"

"Oh, half an hour maybe."

"That's long enough to do a lot of damage. Sebastian, let's just hope they weren't able to do what I think they were trying to do."

"Which is?"

"I'm going to assume they were trying to scuttle the machine. That would set us back over a year."

"I'm not sure we'd survive that, Eggers."

"Sure we would." I forced out my own awkward smile. "We're too big to fail—didn't anyone tell you?"

"Yeah..."

"In any case," I said, "this is good. We just flushed them out. Finally! We have our big mole. Fucking Snyder!"

"This may not be the end of it, Eggers. This may not be what we think it is. It has all the markings of a first move."

"Leave the philosophizing to me, Sebastian. You're not very good at it."

"I'm just saying we have to be careful here. Because Snyder's smart, really smart."

"Yeah?" I said. "Well, I'm really smart; Levi is really smart—you're really smart. We're all really smart, Sebastian."

"Let's hope we're lucky too then." He coughed, and grimaced. "Fractured rib," he said, lightly patting his chest. "Takes forever to heal." He looked around the Infirmary, as if he were just now realizing where he was. "You know, Eggers, it's too bad that so many people out there hate us so much. If only they could see all the good a corporation like ours does for the world."

"Yeah." I pulled his blanket up a little. "Hey, just relax now, Sebastian. A helicopter's on its way to get us all out of here."

I never heard the helicopter arrive. I only knew it was time to go when the physician brought in a wheelchair for Sebastian. Larry was right behind her. I insisted on wheeling Sebastian out. Larry walked along next to me. "What's the deal?" he asked.

"Look like they broke into the Lab this morning to try to sabotage or scuttle the main Centralizer, or maybe booby trap it—I don't know. Without it, the Vena Project goes nowhere. Snyder's behind it—he's the big mole. He had help from one of my guys, Grigor Dmitri."

"Good," Larry said. "Looks like we got 'em! They ain't gonna like their life now, Egghead."

"Yeah. But right now we need to get back there, Larry, and see what they've done. We should shut down the Complex, lock it down, just to be safe."

"Okay. I'll make the call."

"What about the Sheriff?" I asked.

"Got a new addition to his house is all. Folded pretty easy."

Madrigal caught up to us out on the veranda. "Dr. Mortensen!" she called out. She was in a light-blue lab coat and matching pants, clipboard in hand, as if she'd come right from a therapy session. I let Larry take the wheelchair and direct the poor shivering Sebastian toward the ramp down to the parking lot.

"Madrigal," I said.

"You can't leave in the middle of the program, Dr. Mortensen. It would not be good for you at all."

"I have to," I said.

"But this is like getting up from the operating table before you've been stitched up. You will bleed to death out there, figuratively speaking..."

"I'm sorry."

"Wait! Then I have something for you. I was going to give it to you after you completed the program, as a gift. But now—here."

She handed me a weighty little box with a red ribbon around it.

"What's this?"

"Open it," she said.

I tore off the ribbon. "What the..." I'd removed the lid: inside the box was a military metal embedded in black felt. I recognized it right away: as a Boy Scout I'd had to memorize all of the important metals.

"Your father's Vietnam Service Metal," Madrigal said. I heard the helicopter's rotors rise in pitch behind me.

"What?" I said. "But this was lost—years ago..."

"I know. That is not the actual metal he was given, the one he lost. I had to re-order it. But it's official—it's real."

"But"—I had to force the words out through the lump that had just formed in my throat—"how did you even know about this?"

"Oh, we do a thorough background check on all of our guests, Dr. Mortensen. Now go if you have to go. And maybe this will serve as a reminder: you have unfinished business here."

I kissed her on the cheek and raced out to the chopper, which was down at the far corner of the mostly empty parking lot. After I'd found my seat, Larry slammed the door shut and helped me buckle myself in. Then the helicopter jumped off the icy pavement, throwing my head back. Sebastian was sitting up next to me, wrapped in a wool blanket, shivering. He would actually sleep leaning against me most of the way back to New York.

Larry tapped my shoulder. "Just so you know, Egghead, so you don't freak out on everyone when you get back—"

"What"

"Moe and your mom. Seems they got a little thing going."

"What? Get out of here!"

"Yeah," he said. "Craziest thing ever."

That was news I didn't want to hear. I lifted up the box just to feel the weight of my father's medal in it. I'm not sure I will ever find a better place in this ongoing memoir to put in what happened to him, so here it goes. Bernard Mortensen died on March 17, which no coincidentally happens to be the same date his younger brother Sven had died in Vietnam. My father felt responsible for it, or so I've been told, because he'd talked Sven into enlisting in the Navy with him, since they'd both drawn a bad lottery number. They got assigned to the same supply ship by appealing to our well-connected congressman. Barely six months into their first tour, there was some kind of fire on board the ship, and Sven got caught up in it. He managed to survive for a few days with second- and third-degree burns over most of his body. I understand it's an incredible painfully way to die.

After finishing out his tour, my father returned home, met and married my mother, and started a family. He was normal—except for one thing, a little ritual he'd started in Vietnam and then carried home with him. Every March 17 he would go off by himself somewhere and take out his Vietnam Service Metal and his service revolver. He'd put one bullet in the gun, spin the chamber, and pull the trigger with the nose of the gun pressed into his chest, right over his heart. This went on in secret for years and years.

And then one day—I was twenty-six, still a grad student at MIT; Levi was twenty-eight—my mother caught him in his workshop in the garage right as he was about to pull the trigger. She ran in, ripped the gun out of his hand, and dropped it into the trash bin. Then she took the Service Metal from his other hand and raced out to their car. She started heading north toward Erie. My father got on his motorcycle and followed her. She went all the way to the public dock at the end of State Street. She didn't even get out of the car; she simply rolled down her window to throw my father's Metal out into the Bay. My father dove off the pier right into the icy water after it. The rescue team found him some sixteen hours later, nearly two miles away from the dock, drowned. It was on the national news and everything. The metal was not on him.

This all came flooding back to me during that long helicopter ride, along with a stream of early childhood memories that wouldn't stop until we'd landed on the rooftop pad of the Complex. Larry and I helped Sebastian out of his seat and into the arms of some paramedics who were already there with a stretcher to take him to the hospital. Then we bypassed the elevators and raced down the six flights of stairs to the Lab. The lights were off; it was deserted. I went to the main Centralizer and entered my emergency security code. The last run sequence started scrolling down the screen. I couldn't believe it.

"Jesus!" I said. "This is fucking unreal!"

"What is?"

"They weren't trying to scuttle anything here. Those idiots actually ran the full Vena sequence on their own."

"Wish I could say I knew what the hell that means, Egghead."

"Damn! It doesn't make any sense. I thought their goal was to stop us. Why would they take such a big risk just to do something we were probably going to do in a few weeks anyway?"

"Now that I can help you with," he said. "They wanted to get the jump on you."

"What?"

"Yeah," he said. "You know, get something you don't have. Does that Vena thing work, or don't it? Now they just found out first. That's news that's gotta be worth a fortune out there in the world."

"But it's all right here!" I said. "Everything, all the pertinent data. It would have been easy for them to copy it and then erase it so no one else would see it. Why didn't they? I'm telling you, this makes no sense."

"Not to you it don't. But it does to someone. Come on, Egghead"—he muscled me toward the door—"let's get you somewhere safe."

Larry took me straight home. I'd phoned Gloria from the SUV to tell her I was on the way. She was waiting for me in the foyer. "Eggers," she said," what's going on?"

"Emergency at work," I said. "I had to come back. I had no choice."

"Oh, well—okay. Come on, sweetie. Tell me about it upstairs." She was in her puffy pink bathrobe. She kissed me quickly on the cheek, and then she grabbed my arm and tried to pull me toward the big stairwell.

"Wait," I said, stopping to remove my shoes. "What's with that music? Is that coming from the Ballroom?"

"It's nothing," she said. "Nothing at all. Let's just go to the bedroom, sweetie."

"Hey," I said, "if something is going on in my Ballroom in my house, I want to know what it is, okay?" I went up the small helical stairs to the Ballroom where Moe and my mother were having a gay old time dancing to some big-band favorite. I watched them for a few minutes.

"Hey!" I shouted at Moe, who was wearing an actual tuxedo.

"Egghead!" he said. "You're back? What did you do, bomb out of rehab?"

"Hello, Eggers," my mother said, with a meek little wave of her hand. "Happy New Year, honey."

"What the hell are you doing up here?" I called out to Moe, over the music.

"Dancing with one fine lady." He spun my mother around; she started giggling. She was all made-up; her hair was in a fancy bun held in place with little wooden spikes, and she was wearing one of Gloria's old designer dresses—some skin-hugging zebra-striped thing that no longer fit my wife—with white leotards and little purple dance shoes.

Gloria tugged on my arm, but I ignored it. "Hey, Moe!" I shouted. "Don't you know you're way too ugly to be with a woman like my mother?"

They stopped dancing. My mother just stood there, blushing.

"Yeah?" Moe said. He came right up to me, breathing into my chin. "Well, someone ugly must of been with her or we wouldn't have you."

"Are you drunk?" I said. "You're fired!"

"I'm off-duty here, Egghead. And anyways, you can't fire nobody. That's why we make fun of you all the time. Go ahead and look—it's in your contract."

"Now listen here, Moe—"

"My name ain't Moe. It's Ray. Ray Napoli." He poked my chest. "Got it?"

"Oh, Eggers!" Gloria said, tugging on my arm again. "Leave them alone..."

We went upstairs to the Master Bedroom. Gloria sat on the edge of our bed, hands folded in her lap, knees together. I slid up behind her, removed her robe, and started massaging her shoulders. She lowered her head.

"Do you want to talk about your work thing?" she asked, moments later.

"Not in the least. So...Moe and my mother? It won't last."

"Well, she's really happy right now. I have so much respect for her, the way she sent herself through college while raising you guys and dealing with your crazy father and all that. She's tough as nails. Oh, I just love that woman!"

"Yeah," I said. "Took her forever to get her degree though. I can still see her with a cookbook open on one counter and a textbook on the other."

"She's really helped me, you know; cope with things while you were gone." She dropped her head even lower as I worked on the big stress knot over her right shoulder blade. "Eggers," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, "you know she hasn't been with anyone since your father died? That's a long, long time to be alone. What she's doing with Raymond—there's nothing wrong with it. They're actually kind of cute together..."

"I'm confused here," I said. "Do you want to sleep, fight, or make love tonight?"

"All of the above," she said, spinning around to face me. "Only reverse the order."

#  CHAPTER SIX

Predictably, both Snyder and Grigor had disappeared after the big break-in. Larry had assured me they would be found at some point, with every intelligence agency in the world and our own private goon squad looking for them. "Can't hide anymore in this world," he'd said. "Gotta eat at some point." Somehow, their unauthorized test run of the Vena Project had leaked out to the social media hounds, which sent our stock spiraling up to an all-time high, putting us in line to become the world's first trillion-dollar corporation.

The actual launch date for the Vena Project, however, was being kept a secret in order to drum up publicity, although pretty much everyone in the civilized world knew it would be sometime in early June, some three weeks away. I was told we had preorders for over one-hundred-and-eighty million Infinity-Xs. Soon every human being on our planet with just under four-thousand dollars to spend could have unlimited computing power and storage capacity from a source the size of a standard deck of playing cards.

The whole set-up was cool. Instead of a standard keyboard or computer screen, our interface wizards had created a special projector that could use the molecules in the air as its backdrop. I understand that the first-generation Infinities will be able to project 3-D images in a cube whose dimensions will range from one-inch to one-mile in diameter; it could be placed on the moon if one so desired. I also understand that the super geniuses in our Futures Lab are working on a second-generation Infinity that will interface directly with the human brain.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The truth is that during this time there wasn't really much for me to do at work anymore. The Vena Project was now officially viable and being steered by baggy-pants middle managers now. We'd repeated the unauthorized test a dozen times, and now had reams of data that were being studied by the best and brightest in the world because, at my insistence, we'd open-sourced it. So far, the world's academics agreed that the Vena Project was safe. X+ Corporation was now cleared to transform the world into something no one from the Twentieth Century would recognize. I could only guess how this was affecting Jasmine, who certainly had to be out there somewhere pouring over the data herself. For my part, I'd erased my whiteboards and vowed never to look at her crazy equations again. I simply went into the Complex every morning, sat at my desk and read diagnostic reports that others on my team were more qualified to interpret, signed things without reading them, went to long, self-congratulatory meetings, and then I clocked out and went home, slipped into my study, and—yes—poured myself a drink. I spent most of my down time just drinking in the dark until my mind had turned fuzzy.

Three days before the final launch of the Vena Project, I slipped out of my study and went down to check up on Adam in his Blue Bedroom. It was around midnight. I sat on the edge of his Jeff-Gordon racecar bed for I don't know how long, just listening to his troubled breathing as he thrashed and moaned from some nightmare. Then I leaned over and kissed the top of his hot little head. By then I feared what we all feared—because earlier that day Gloria had told me she'd finally made an appointment with some world-famous Developmental Pediatrician in Boston to have her son tested.

"Oh, little buddy," I whispered. "What kind of world are we giving you anyway?"

I ended up falling asleep on the floor next to Adam's bed that night. I was in the midst of a weird alcohol-infused dream when Oscar the Security Guard shook me awake.

"What?" I said.

"Sir," he whispered. Adam's wall-mounted Thomas the Tank Engine nightlight, just inches from mine now, lighted up the seventy-year-old guard's heavily lined face. He reminded me of a much taller and beefier Cheech Marin.

I sat up. Adam's ventilator-like breathing did not change. "What is it, Oscar?"

"Sorry to wake you. But there's a girl—out front by the gate."

"A girl?" I said.

He glanced at Adam. "Shhh...let's not wake the poor kid."

"There's nothing wrong with that kid!"

"Right. But shhh, let's not wake the poor thing."

I got to my feet. "Alright. Come on then...out in the hallway." We tiptoed out. "Now, Oscar"—I closed the bedroom door carefully—"what girl?"

He glanced down the hallway at the seemingly endless line of closed doors. It occurred to me then that there were rooms in my own house I hadn't gone in since I'd bought the thing. I waited for Oscar to continue.

"Well," he said, "remember those photos you showed me a while back?"

"You mean—she's here?"

"Yeah," he said. "I'm pretty sure it's her anyway. She's out by the front gate. She just marched right up and waved at the camera. She must want us to see her."

"Well then—come on, Oscar! Be a gentleman and let her in. It's zero degrees out there, for crying out loud."

"I can't do that, sir. I'm sorry."

"What?"

He looked down at the floor.

"It's alright, Oscar. Trust me. Just let her into my study. We can talk there. Look, she has no reason to hurt me at this point. If she wanted me dead, I'd be dead." I counted out a few seconds before trying one final appeal. "She won't stay long."

"Sorry, sir. I absolutely cannot let that girl onto the premises. I really should've called this in as soon as I saw her. She's on the FBI's most-wanted list now, you know, after that kidnapping thing. She's a real terrorist—you thought I wouldn't check? Actually I'm taking a big risk coming to you first."

"Look," I said, "as long as you work for me—"

"Actually I work for your brother."

"Right. What was I thinking?" I went over to the window and looked out. I couldn't see anyone out there by the front gate.

"Here—" Oscar handed me a bottle of water. "You look like you could use this."

"Oh. Thanks." I took a drink. "She's out by the front gate, you say? I don't see anyone out there."

"Well," he said, "maybe she got scared and scooted. Pretty ballsy thing to do, coming here, if you ask me."

"Yeah? Well, she's the one taking a risk. Oscar, I have to go out there and talk to her, if she risked coming here. Am I at least allowed to do that?"

"Sure, I guess. But for the record, I don't like it. It's a very stupid thing to do." He took the bottle of water from me and put the cap back on.

"Duly noted."

"You can go," he said, "but not alone. The dogs and I are going to be right there with you."

"Okay."

Oscar followed me down to the foyer where Larry was sound asleep on his makeshift cot. He sat up right away.

"I'm just getting some fresh air," I told him. "I won't leave the grounds."

"In your pajamas like that?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'll be right back."

"You're one weird cookie, Egghead."

I worked my bare feet into some hiking boots, threw on my leather jacket and a black knitted hat, and went outside with Oscar. We went to the heated kennels behind the guard shack. As soon as Oscar had opened the gate, the two Rottweilers sprang out, whimpering with happiness, wagging their stumpy little tails. Then they looked to Oscar for direction. He ordered them to "heel" and they immediately lined up around him, one on each side.

Halfway to the front gate, with the dogs emitting low throaty growls, Oscar said, "You can talk to this girl, Eggers, but make it quick. I can only give you a few minutes. That's it. Then I really do have to go phone this in."

"I understand. Thanks, Oscar."

We reached the gate.

"Hello?" I called out. "Hey! Anyone out there? Jasmine?" Oscar elbowed me and pointed out a shadowy figure just then darting across Fifth Avenue half-a-block away. She stopped, pivoted, and headed toward the gate. Her face was completely mummified by a white scarf. She wore a deep-purple leather jacket with heavy white stitching at every seam, and a long flowing skirt, and hiking boots.

She came right up to the gate and slowly started to unravel the white scarf.

"And hello to you too!" she said, in a high raspy voice. It wasn't her. It wasn't Jazz. This made me a little nervous. "Disappointed?" she asked.

"No," I said. "It's just...I thought you were someone else."

"I usually am."

One of the dogs growled with more force.

"Well," I said, "you sure got my dogs all worked up anyway."

"Everyone seems worked up these days." She put her ungloved hands in her pockets. "Hey," she called out to Oscar, "you sure you don't want to come out here and frisk me? You're already doing it with your eyes, old man—"

"No, ma'am," he replied.

"Then how about giving us a little privacy here," she said. "This is a personal matter."

"Oscar?" I said. "Please? This girl looks like Jasmine, but it isn't her. This is...she's the daughter of an old college friend. She probably just needs money. It happens all the time."

"Alright," he said. "But the dogs stay with you. Call them over."

I cleared my throat, lowered my voice as I'd been instructed to do, and called out "Zeus! Apollo! Come here. Now, sit...stay. Good boys—"

"I'll be in the guard shack, monitoring everything," Oscar said. He looked at the girl, then at me. "You have three minutes. I'll blink the security lights when it's time for you to wrap things up."

"Great," I said. "Thanks."

He nodded and walked away.

"Okay," I said to the girl, "looks like we're alone now."

"It appears so." She looked up at the nearest security camera.

"Damn!" I said. "You really do look just like someone I know."

"Well, gee, thank you. And by 'someone' do you mean Dr. Jasmine Geckle?"

"Now how the hell did you know that?"

"Look," she said, "we don't have much time so I'll get right to it. I am a Knight of the Second Order, sworn to sacrifice my life if need be in order to uphold and protect the Universal Respect Doctrine and the principles—"

"How old are you?" I interrupted.

"Old enough."

"Well, why are you here?"

"I have a message for you." She was staring at my huge glowing house, mouth partly open.

I waved my hand to catch her attention. "Hey!"

"Oh, sorry. It's just...I didn't know houses like that even existed. This is my first time in the city."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"It's just a name."

"Well, what is it?"

"Selena. Yeah-yeah, I was named after that stupid dead singer from the Nineties. My mom still plays her records and sits there on the floor crying. It's creepy." She swiped her nose. "I'm seventeen, by the ways. I'm from Michigan."

"So, you came all the way here from Michigan to give me a message? You just do whatever they tell you to do, is that it?"

"Yeah," she said, "pretty much."

"Well," I said, "what is it then? Your message—"

"It's simple. Dr. Geckle needs your help. She's figured something out—I don't know what—and wants to run some big machine of yours to see if she's right about it. And she usually is, you know—right about things. She needs access to your Lab, Dr. Mortensen, tonight."

"Oh, I see. Anything else?"

"Well, kinda." She was staring at my house again.

"What is it, Selena?"

"Well, she's already there—waiting for you. She found a way in—some guy we like to call the mole—"

"Someone from the company?"

"That's right. You guys are terrible at cleaning house. Anyways, I guess she can't do anything in the Lab without some code. I guess you know what that is, right? Well, I sure don't. But I do know she's counting on you. She believes she can convince you to join us, once you see her latest work. I'm not so sure though—"

"Alright, listen," I said, stepping forward without the dogs, "you did what they asked you to do. Now take my advice: just walk away from this shit, Selena. You're young—you have a choice. You can have a life that will really make the world a better place, one that you'll love—become a veterinarian or something, okay—or you can run pointless errands for idiots who should be medicated, not followed."

"Ha!" She stepped closer to the gate, which made both of the dogs growl. "What does it matter what I do with my life if the world isn't even going to be here in a few years?"

"It matters," I said. "It's the only thing that does. We only have a few seconds left. Do you need money?"

"Wouldn't hurt."

"Here," I said, pulling two crumpled twenties out of my jacket pocket. "It's all I have on me right now."

She swiped the bills from my hand, then stepped back and readjusted her scarf. I was about to say something when the security lights started flashing off and on.

"Time's up!" she said. "So, are you going to help her?"

"She knows the answer to that."

Selena looked at Zeus and Apollo, each in turn, and smiled. "Wow," she said, "those dogs have the biggest fricking heads I've ever seen."

And with that, she turned around and started walking briskly toward the Park.

I went back inside, straight up to the Master Bedroom, and woke Gloria up. "Eggers," she said, rubbing her eyes, "what's going on? Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," I said. "Everything's fine. Listen, I have to go into the Lab to take care of something."

"At this hour? Eggers?" She sat up and turned on her bedside reading light. "You have to be honest with me, remember?"

"Right." I held her hand but couldn't quite look at her. "Truth is, I am going to meet up with Jasmine to run some experiment for her. It could be a real game-changer—"

"What?" she said. "That girl! The crazy one who kidnapped you? Eggers, I thought you were done doing stupid things." She placed her hand firmly on my shoulder. "Sweetie?"

"I know!" I spun around and faced my wife. She smelled great, like body lotion. "But you, Gloria, of all people know I owe her this. And...what if she's right? I won't have any choice. I'd have to put a stop to everything. Our life, as we know it, would be over."

"You'd really do that?"

"Absolutely! It's just...money."

She cupped my chin and looked right into my eyes. "Alright—go if you have to. But take Larry with you, you hear me?"

"Okay."

"And when you get back, Eggers? You and I are going to have to have a very, very serious talk."

"I hear you."

I got dressed, went down to the foyer, and woke Larry up again. He jumped right to his feet. "Egghead," he said, "what's up?"

"I need to go to the Lab to check something out. It's critical."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Hold on." He got out his cell, dialed a number from memory. "Liz, hi. It's me. Anything happening at the Complex?" He listened to what Liz, our head of security, was saying. "Ah, good. Well, I need a favor. I'm gonna be coming in with Dr. Mortensen. We just need access to the main Lab. We're gonna be in and out in no time. Thanks." He pocketed his phone. "Alright," he said to me. "We're good to go right now if we're gonna go."

There was very little traffic at that hour: we made good time getting to the Complex. Larry pulled around the back of the building and parked next to the loading docks. He shut down the engine. "Well," he said, "here we are."

"What are we doing back here?"

"Liz said to go around the back. We're actually not supposed to be doing this, you know. Even you ain't got the clearance to go into the building during off-hours anymore."

It occurred to me then that Larry might be putting his own career on the line by helping me here.

"How much time you gonna need once we get up there?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Okay." He whipped his head around to look at something out of my window. "Hmm," he said, "that's funny."

"What?"

"Well, we got cameras in them little blue bubble-eye things there. Well? So why ain't Liz calling me? She said she would call me soon as I pulled up to the docks. She's gotta know we're sitting here."

"I don't know."

He unbuckled his seatbelt. "Sit tight, Egghead. I gotta check this out..."

This next part no one, not one newspaper, magazine, news channel, or blogger, got right. Believe me: I'd watched it happen...I saw the shadowy figure come out from behind the dumpster, actually saw him before Larry did, and I saw his arm rise up, at which point Larry, sensing something maybe, turned his head just a split-second too late...and then I heard it: the unmistakable earsplitting sound of a gun going off. I saw Larry fall back into the wall of the Complex and clutch his side. When the shooter stepped forward to check out his handiwork, I could see his face in profile.

"Grigor!" I shouted, struggling to remove my seatbelt. I raced out of the vehicle and ran over to Larry, who looked at Grigor and forced out a bleak smile. "You, pencil-neck? You got the jump on me?"

Grigor was still pointing his pistol at Larry. "You were supposed to come alone," he said to me. "Didn't Selena tell you that?"

Larry slowly unbuttoned his coat and looked inside. At least he seemed to be breathing okay. "Hold on," he said, "let me count my bones here. Ah! Just grazed me."

"Eggers?" Grigor said. "I'm really sorry about this. But you need to go up the Lab, right now. There's very little time—"

"Shut up!" I snapped.

"See if by some miracle they ain't blocking our calls, Egghead," Larry said.

"Okay." I got out my cell phone.

"What are you doing?" Grigor asked.

"Checking for reception—what's it look like?"

"Anything?" Larry asked.

"No," I said.

"Yeah," Larry said, "figured as much." He looked at Grigor. "There ain't nowhere for you and your people to hide now, you know that, right?"

"I don't care what happens to me anymore," Grigor said. "I'm just doing what needs to be done."

I glanced up at one of the blue bubbles in the wall, hoping Liz would see us. Larry took a step toward Grigor. "Gimme that gun, kid. It ain't doing you any good." He held out his hand and Grigor simply dropped the pistol into it. "Egghead?" Larry said. "New plan. Go do what you gotta do up in the Lab, but be quick about it. This guy and me, we got a few things to talk about."

"Okay."

Larry slung his arm around Grigor's neck and led him toward the idle SUV.

I got into the Complex through one of the loading-bay doors—my security code still worked—and raced through the warehouse to the central atrium. Then I went up the stairs, taking two at a time, to the Lab. I saw her right away in the back finishing room, Jasmine, standing ramrod straight with her arms down by her sides. Her eyes flashed me a warning—but it was too late. I slid to a stop when I saw an all-too-familiar little black box with a stout tubular nose sitting on the tool shelf. Then, as I feared, its horrible little red eye lit up and it pasted a laser bead on my chest. I heard the automatic door slide shut behind me.

"Shit," I said, remaining as still as I could. I struggled to catch my breath. "Not this again."

"Eggers," Jasmine said.

"Hey, Jasmine."

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm here to see you."

"Interesting," she said. "I'm here to see you too."

I swallowed roughly. I could hear her taking long deep breaths just a few yards away from me now. I was afraid to turn my head to look at her. "So," I said, "you think these will have confetti in them?" I could already feel my knees weakening.

"Ha! Fat chance."

"Damn..."

"Just focus on your breathing, Eggers, okay."

"Well—" I stopped when I heard the little cylindrical door of the finishing room rolling open. I felt a distinct puff of cold air on the back of my neck.

"Don't turn your head around!" Jasmine said. "Just remain still..."

"Ah!" I heard someone say, from directly behind me. "Finally." The voice was male. In a moment, I would be able to place it.

"Good," the man said. "The Wonder Twins are together again—"

"Jameson!" I said.

"Ah, Eggers! Fancy meeting you here."

"Eggers," Jazz whispered, "no matter what he says, don't let him get to you! Just focus on your breathing."

"Oh," Jameson said, "this is too perfect! It's a Kodak movement here, folks..."

I focused on my breathing. I could sense Jameson coming right up behind me. I didn't know how much longer I could hold out.

"Eggers," Jameson whispered in my ear, "how are you? How's life?"

"Shorter than I'd like it to be."

"Isn't that the truth?"

"This doesn't make any sense," I said. "You? You are the big mole? What the hell!"

"Call me Ishmael," he said. He'd moved off to the side now, positioning himself in a safer spot somewhere between Jasmine and me. "Now I know what you're expecting, you two. This is the part where the villain—that would be me—spills everything to the heroes—that would be you—who are about to die."

"Jameson!" Jazz said. But that was it. I could sense she was close to breaking down herself. I had no idea how long she'd been standing there like that.

"Well," Jameson continued, "that's not what's going to happen here. I lured you both here to die, period. I'm just here to see for myself that it's going to happen. Oh, not that I have anything to lose. It's just...I like the idea that you're going to die not knowing everything, Eggers. Like your Guy-Smiley brother who is racing back here in his beautiful private jet to save the day. Well, I've got someone on his plane. That's right. Somewhere over Iceland, the great Levi Mortensen is going to meet his maker. I can just picture it, how his big abacus brain will use its last little bit of energy to calculate what he should have done differently."

"That's what this is about?" I said. "Revenge?"

"Well," he said, "that's what I'd like you to think, at any rate. It's actually about money. Then isn't everything actually about money? Damn! Here I go ironically doing what I swore I wouldn't do. I guess clichés are like stereotypes: there's truth backing just about all of them. You know, maybe blacks really are lazy, Jews are greedy, and Italians talk with their hands. Look, I've already told you too much. I really do have to be going now..."

"Don't kid yourself," I said. "You've overlooked something here, Jameson. You're nowhere near smart enough to pull off something this big. Why do you think you were skipped over for CEO? You weren't even in the running."

"I know—I know!" he said. "I'm dumb as a tree root, which is why I'm standing over here and you guys are each at the business end of a proximity bomb." I could hear him rubbing his hands together. "You know, the shocking thing isn't that you're about to die and I'm about to get away with everything and become a very, very rich man. What's truly shocking is just how easy it was to manipulate people, supposedly brilliant people. I mean, you've played your part admirably, Eggers. As did that big dope Snyder, may he rest in peace, and Grigor of course—they're both too stupid and idealistic to realize what's really going on. I saw everything down there by the loading docks: the little guy improvised wonderfully to get you away from that Neanderthal—what's his name—who incidentally is probably gasping for breath right about now. You too, Jasmine, my Unity comrade. You were magnificent!" He made some kind of hand motion around Jasmine's face. I know this because I could see the distorted shadows on the wall.

"Fuck you, Jameson," Jasmine said.

"Ah," he said, "so much personality there. I'm going to miss you. And you, Eggers? Don't kid yourself about your principles—you're a corporate stooge to the core. Even if we were destroying worlds and threatening our own, you would buried your head in the sand and let the big-money machine keep on going. You think that little fatty you're married to likes you for your immaculate hairline?"

"You son of a bitch!" I said.

"Eggers..." Jasmine cautioned.

"Ah-ah!" Jameson said. "Careful; better listen to Wonder Woman here." His voice had changed; he must have been backing away from us now. "Because I don't want to have to actually witness your death, Eggers. It would take me weeks to get the image of your splattered guts out of my head."

I heard the door roll open, felt that cold rush of air on the back of my neck again. I heard him plugging something into the keypad on the wall. "Now I must go forth and conquer," he said. "You should at least try to show a little sympathy for the devil, you two. I hear it makes your final seconds on Earth much easier."

"Jameson," I said calmly, "you really are a prick."

"And you...are a loose end, Eggers. Well good-bye, good night, and good luck on the other side."

I heard the door roll shut and the emergency locks engage.

"Geez," Jasmine said, "I thought he'd never leave."

"Guess we were both duped by that little beady-eyed son of a bitch."

"A lot of people were," Jasmine said. "Listen, our situation is bleaker than it looks."

"How the hell can that be true?"

"Well, this building is rigged with explosives, Eggers. Honestly, I mean it: the plan was for no one to be in it."

"The plan, or your plan?"

"Well," she said, "does it matter?"

"Explosives? Really?"

"Well, just the Dome actually, but that will be more than enough for rock-and-roll. Bang-bang-bang, soon your glorious Complex is going to come tumbling down one floor at a time, just like the Twin Towers—with us in it, if we don't get out of here in time."

"Damn!"

"Eggers," she said, "don't count us out yet."

"Well..."

"Listen to me!" she said. "I know how to defeat these proximity bombs—it's part of my training. You just need to follow my instructions to the letter. You understand?"

"Yeah-yeah."

"There's no room for error here. We are going to get through this—these bombs are highly overrated—and then get out of here. Just do exactly what I tell you to do. Okay?"

"Okay. I'll try."

"No!" she said, in her Yoda voice. She used to employ it often up in Maine to defuse tension after a fight with Vampora or me. "'Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.'"

"That's good—that's a perfect Yoda voice. Okay, Jazz, what do I have to do?"

"Listen carefully," she said. "First, we need to slowly, very slowly, lower ourselves down to our knees, without moving forward or backwards, not one inch—you need to do this until the laser beam is smack in the middle of your forehead. Now whatever you do, do not let that laser beam leave your body. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Are you doing it?"

"Yes..."

"Just keep going...careful...that's it! Okay, I can see your shadow. You're doing great, Eggers...slowly...that's good...keep going...whoa! That's good—right there. Stop—"

I was down on my knees now: I could feel the beam plastered right in the center of my forehead.

"Now this next part is really going to suck, Eggers. These things have a directional blast, no more powerful than a shotgun really; our point is to redirect it so it's not fatal. It's still going to hurt like hell though—"

"I don't care—I'm ready."

"Alright. Here's what we need to do. At the exact same time we need to dip our heads down and dive forward, straight at the bomb—I mean put everything you've got into it."

"Okay."

"We have to do it at the exact same time," she said, "or one bomb will set off the other. Now, I'll count down from three. When I yell 'go' you drop your head and dive forward. Don't think about it—just do it! Okay?

"Okay."

"Now...when I say go, we go. Three...two...one...go!"

I dipped my head and dived forward and both of the bombs went off at the same time. The noise was deafening. There was no pain, at first. It simply felt as if someone had poured ice-cold water down my back...but then, in seconds, it was as if someone was stomping down on my left shoulder blade with a big heavy boot while driving a screwdriver into my spine. I saw Jasmine sitting up against the wall, staring blankly at the ceiling. I was still on my side. When I tried to sit up, a searing pain shot out from my hip and made the room spin. My ears were ringing; my throat was constricted; I could barely breathe.

"Hey-ey," Jasmine said. Her shirt, like mine, was speckled with blood. "Wow, I can't believe that actually worked."

"Thought you'd done that before?" I said.

"In training—once. With confetti."

"Jazz," I said, "I must say you've led a very interesting life." I ground my teeth, closed my eyes, and finally made my body do what I wanted it to do. That's how I was able to sit up next to Jasmine. She leaned into me until our shoulders were touching.

"My life is going to get even more interesting," she said, "once we find a way out of here and I get the opportunity to bury an ice pick in Jameson's back."

"He won't get away with this. Something will happen."

"He's a fucking lunatic. I never liked working with him, Eggers. I'm not surprised he betrayed us in the end."

The pain in my hip was mounting. It was that deep, throbbing kind, which the brain automatically knows is serious. I tried to focus on Jasmine, on her face, to make sure I wouldn't lose consciousness. I saw, after straining to gain focus, which she had a black eye and a swollen bottom lip. It didn't seem to fit in with what had just happened to us.

"Jasmine, your face? Who did that to you?"

"What, this?" She touched her lip. "Ouch! Your own little Judas Priest—that's who!"

"Grigor?"

"The one and only. You know he's KGB trained? Well," she said, "at least he didn't rape me, which is his MO."

"KGB trained? Oh my God!"

"What?"

"I left my bodyguard alone with that little freak."

"That big guy who's always with you? My money's on him." She turned her head away from me. "You know, I ended up telling that twisted little freak everything he wanted to know."

"Jasmine, look at me? How much time do we have?"

"Before the big boom? I don't know—just a few minutes, probably, knowing Jameson."

"Then we need to focus on getting out of here."

"I'm with you on that..."

But neither of us moved. Instead, we were looking at the back wall, at what the exploding proximity bombs had done to it. It was peppered with small holes, as if someone had poked it with a pencil.

"Jameson really is an evil genius," she said. "You know what his plan is?"

"No."

"Me neither. But I know he wants to destroy this building, and kill you. And if we don't make it out of here somehow, he'll probably be able to pin this on me, on the Brigade—"

"Trust me. Something will happen..."

"I hope you're right. Still, it's a brilliant plan. Well," Jazz said, forcing out one of the big nerdy grins I got all the time in Maine, "I wondered how long it would take you to get all tangled up in this with me."

"Yeah. You know, I actually came here to talk you into turning yourself in."

"I would have done it too. I'm sick of this crap." She put her hand on my chest. "Oh my god! Your heart. You're like a gerbil..."

"Yeah."

"Mine too."

"Okay," I said. "Enough talk. Time to get out of here. Let's get up."

She closed her eyes and nodded. "Right. In a minute...I'm having a little trouble breathing at the moment."

"Okay. You rest. I'm going to go find a cart or something for you. I'll wheel you out of here if I have to, Jazz." I did manage to stand up—it was a lot easier than I'd expected—and I was able to keep my balance as I walked across the Lab to the main door.

"Move it, soldier boy," Jasmine called out. "I do not want to die here."

I passed my hand in front of the sensor, but the door did not open. I punched in my access code, but that did not work either. The door was disabled. It was the only way in or out of the finishing room.

"Damn!" I said, pounding my fist into the glass. "Fucking Jameson." I came back over to Jasmine. Her eyes were closed. "Jazz?"

"Oh hey, Eggers." She grimaced. I sat next to her, took her hand. "Holy mother of God!" she said. "That hurts. Hey, where's the cart?"

"I don't know. Jameson did something to the door. I can't even get out into the main Lab. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not sure how we're going to get out of here."

"Well," she said, "let's at least crawl over there...get under that big work table. I mean, who knows? One of us may survive this yet."

"Right...good plan."

We slid very slowly, inch by inch, across the tile floor—we had to cover about fifteen feet—and then we recollected ourselves under the worktable. Her head was resting on my shoulder again. I'd seen really heavy things set up on that table, but it just didn't seem like enough to matter, one way, or the other.

"Well?" I said. "Here we are."

"Yes-s...together again."

She groaned as she rotated her head around, probably to try to ease the pain in her neck. I know—I was tempted to try the same thing. "Just think," she said, "if none of this had happened, Eggers, if we'd never made any real progress in that cabin in Maine, what we might be doing right now. I can picture us maybe playing Spades in some plush parlor, drinking sherry, or cognac, laughing—you and me, and..."

"Vampora?"

"You got it! Eggers, every second of life matters, right?"

"Right," I said. "We're still as alive as anyone on this planet." I swallowed roughly. I thought, so this is it: I am going to die right here, in just a few minutes time. Suddenly I wanted to cram everything I'd ever wanted to say into one perfect sentence. I wanted to cry, scream, pound my head into the wall, and start cackling like a crazy man. It wasn't fear or sadness or some great sense of relief—it was everything at once.

"This isn't at all how I expected to die," Jazz said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I always expected to die alone—I really did. Alone in a bathtub somewhere...a childless old lady looking back on a life full of ellipses. You know what I mean? Something was always supposed to happen that never did..."

"You still love her, don't you?" I said.

"Me and half the world! It's just...it never stopped. I thought it would, after I left New York. I thought if I did certain things I would be okay. You know I can't even remember how it started? I mean, did I even have a life before I met her? Is that how it is for you too, Eggers?"

"Yes."

"Well," she said, "all that won't matter soon, unless we take that shit with us into the afterlife. Now wouldn't that suck!"

"I don't know. What is life, anywhere, without love?"

"Beautiful, Eggers—really fucking beautiful. I don't care what our poets say, or what's in the stupid Bible...love stinks! I mean it. It's the only thing in my life I've ever really tried to understand and couldn't. I want to think there's no such thing as love at all in the afterworld. Everyone just is—you know what I mean? We get to eat what we want to eat, drink what we want to drink, and hook up with whomever we want, you know, just screw for pleasure." I brought her head down into my chest and squeezed it. I wanted something, anything, to sear into my soul on the off chance it would get carried over into the next world.

After a while, Jasmine raised her hand and traced my lips with her forefinger. "It would be nice though, wouldn't it, Eggers, to see her one more time?"

"Yeah."

"And I suppose it's okay, Eggers, that I'm questioning everything now?"

"Sure."

"Because you know I have to wonder if I didn't do all of this, on some level, for all the wrong reasons."

"For her?"

"That's exactly right. For her—for love."

"That would be crazy now."

"'For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.'"

"Uh, Madame Curie?"

"Carl Sagan. Oh, Eggers, hold my hand! Please? No matter what—don't let go..."

She didn't make it. I did—she didn't. Fate works that way. A huge support beam had fallen across her chest, the same one that had crushed both of my hips and severed my spine. That big metal work bench that Jasmine had us get under had actually saved my life: somehow I'd ended up with my head and most of my upper body in a miraculous little box of air, with millions of tons of bent steel and chunks of cement and shattered glass around it...

I was in total darkness for a long time—most news accounts put it at seventeen hours—still holding Dr. Jasmine Geckle's hand...

When the first responders had finally pierced the chamber, pushing in little points of light through a sudden gaping hole over my head, I could see, just inches from my nose, a splay of blond hair over a circle of blood. That's the last I ever saw of Dr. Jasmine Geckle.

I did not let go of her hand, by the way. "Let go, sir," one of the first-responders had said, when they'd finally gotten my legs free with something that looked like a portable medieval torture device. I just wouldn't let go. The man had to pry my hand from hers one finger at a time. "No!" I shouted. But I had no strength to resist anything anymore.

# CHAPTER SEVEN

It took me a while to realize that no one could understand me. "Captain Pike!" I kept saying. I thought it would be funny. "Captain Pike!" I thought I was actually saying it, except no one was reacting to me. My brother was a Trekkie from the old days: I knew he'd get the reference. "Captain Pike!"

Finally I gave up.

And so my first word back, my first audible word, which made everyone rush over to my bed—they would appear suddenly as hovering faces—ending up being "Son..."

Then I was able to get out the entire phrase: "Son of a bitch!"

Levi was there now, where I could see him, one of the three hovering faces, except that his was surrounded by a halo of blurriness. "Shhh...geez, don't try to talk, Eggers."

"Eggers!" It was Gloria now, with her full-moon face hovering next to my brother's. The other face, which had just disappeared, must have belonged to a nurse.

I could hear my wife whispering to my brother: "Should we tell him?"

"I don't know," he whispered back. "Where's my mother? What the hell!"

"She went back to the house," Gloria said. "Come on, Levi, she just wanted to take a nice long hot bath and try to get some real sleep. She's been here by his bed for five days straight. I'll go call her..."

"I'm going to tell him," Levi said.

"Are you sure?"

"I don't know!"

"Let's wait until Lidia gets here..."

"Tell me what?" I asked.

"Eggers?" It was Levi's solitary face hovering over me now; my wife was somewhere else. "Shhhh..."

"Jameson," I said.

"I know, I know," Levi said. "Everyone knows."

"He..."

"Don't worry about him...shhhh."

"You..."

"Don't worry about anything, Eggers." That was Gloria, her voice anyway. She was still out of the picture.

"Larry..." I said.

"Your man, Larry—he's fine," Levi said. "He went to a different hospital. He's just fine...don't worry."

"Grigor?"

"Eggers," Gloria said, "let's do this later. The doctor's on his way."

"Levi?" I said.

"Shhh...Eggers."

"Hey, sweetie," Gloria said. Finally, her face slid in alongside Levi's. They were both peering down at me now, two familiar faces secured in space. "Oh, it's so good to hear your real voice again!" Her hand came out of nowhere and touched my cheek. I could feel it: its warmth, its shakiness. "You've been going in and out of consciousness for the past few days. You've been saying all kinds of crazy things."

"Captain Pike!"

"What?" Levi said. "Eggers—shhh...that's not funny."

It my next instance of full consciousness Yaz was in the room. I found I could move my eyes but not turn my head. I was getting a sense of time passing now, a perspective on things. I knew I was in the hospital and had been here for eight days now. I knew people had been coming in and out, bringing me things like happy-face balloons and stuffed bears. I knew it was morning now, and I had all kinds of wires and tubes going in and out of me keeping me alive and hydrated and mostly free of pain. I was getting hungry, again, but had just thrown up my breakfast and was afraid to eat anything. Yaz was the one who did finally tell me, by the way, what no one wanted to tell me: my left leg had to be amputated from the knee on down. My left leg...

"Yaz?" I said.

"Sir?" Something from Yaz kept flashing through my frame of vision. It was a credit-card thin Sportsman, a flexible thing that straps to your wrist and measures your heart rate, body temperature, calories burned, number of steps taken (ha!), and so on. It responds to your requests for information in a soft feminine voice. Yaz had painstakingly shown me everything it could do.

Then he set it aside and showed me another thing, another gift—a sleek little e-reader that scrolls each word across a super-thin, paper-white flex-screen at whatever pace the reader wants; again, it can be controlled by voice command. Everything these days requires you to shout at it, it seems.

"What the hell!" I said. "What, Yaz, is it some Somali custom to shower the dying man with gifts?"

"It is not a custom of my country to do so—no. Not that it matters in this instance because you are not dying. Are you in pain? Shall I get the nurse?"

"No," I said. "Don't go, Yaz—please."

He brought his handsome cerulean face right up to me, his nose just an inch or so away from mine. "You are not dying, Dr. Eggers Mortensen. Do you hear what I am saying to you?"

"But isn't that what you'd say to me even if I really were dying? So how do I know?"

"Search your heart...do you think you are dying?"

"Well, we're all dying, Yaz. Hey, your breath smells nice."

"Yes-ss," he said, sitting back in his chair, beyond my limited peripheral vision now. All I would get now was that wonderful deep voice of his. I was getting sleepy. "But in my country we are not afraid to tell people who are actually dying that they are about to leave this world for a better one. We are very honest and forthright about death. This allows us to say to the dying man what we would not say to him if he were fully alive."

"And what would you say to me, Yaz, if I actually was dying—which I am not, but let's just say that I am—what would you say to me that you would not say if I was fully alive?"

"We are not supposed to do this, Eggers."

"Humor me."

"Very well then." He thought about it a moment—or at least that is how I interpret the ensuing silence. "I suppose I would tell you that the best and brightest scientists of our land, the most intelligent and perspicacious human beings on this planet—they have studied Non-binary Processing from every conceivable angle and have determined that it is perfectly safe. They have determined this, with absolute certainty. My friend, I would tell you that you may go to your God knowing that there is no chance, none at all, that we are doing any harm to any world out there or to our own right here."

"Why the hell wouldn't you want to say that to me now?"

"Because I can see, from your eyes, that you do not believe me. Here—" He held out a little black jewelry box—or rather, it suddenly popped into my field of vision.

"Another gift, Yaz? What am I, one of your wives?"

"Allow me to open it for you—please. It is the last one I will give you today."

"Oh, alright." He opened it, and held it up to my face so I could see what was inside it: a little one-inch square of some dull gray wool-like fabric, slightly tattered around the edges where it had been cut out of something. "It is a piece of one of Albert Einstein's suits," he said. "I purchased it from a distant relative of his. It is real; I have the certificate of authenticity. Einstein, as I am sure you know, only ever wore one style of suit his entire life. He had seven of them hanging in his closet. This allowed him to get dressed quickly in the morning and get right to the things that mattered to him. I thought that perhaps the direct simplicity of this would resonate with you, and perhaps help you to heal."

"It's incredible, Yaz. I don't know what to say."

"I will put it next to your bed here."

"Yaz?"

"Eggers?"

"Tell me one of your strange Somali jokes."

"Well, okay. Okay—let me see now...here is a good one. Once upon a time, there was a short man who kidnapped a very tall man's daughter. The tall man found the short man and tied him to a tree. 'Tell me where my daughter is!' the tall man demanded. The short man said, 'I will tell you what you want to know if you can guess correctly whether or not I will do so.' To which the tall man replied: 'You will not tell me where my daughter is.'"

"Ah-h...yes-s..."

"Perhaps that was not the best joke under the circumstances."

"Yes-s..." I'd managed to say again. I'd meant just to blink, and maybe to rest a little, but I must have fallen asleep on Yaz, because when I opened my eyes again, it was dark and my hospital room was empty. Even my mother was gone. It was nice, but strange...actually kind of scary. I felt something floating around me then, a presence of sorts (my father?)—and then I felt the room spinning...then I was, very suddenly, in a different place. I'd opened my eyes to find that there were a few others on beds around me, light blue mounds of motionless forms, and more horrible hospital sounds, some audible groans,—damn! I was back in the ICU. I wanted to call out for my mother but I had a tube in my mouth, snaking down my throat. I panicked. Some nurse appeared, tried to calm me down. She left, came back with more nurses; they removed the tube. I took an abortive breath, coughed, and could breathe on my own now. I slept, awoke to find a pygmy doctor probing my abdomen, fell back asleep.

I awoke again back in my own private room. When a nurse appeared, I had her raise my bed and hook me up to my eye-writer so I could get back to writing—so I could get it all down, what happened to Jasmine, just in case...

I have to say I love this thing, my eye-writer, which Levi gave me last week. A technician had accompanied him and showed us both how to place the little sensors in the right configuration on my face and how to extend the twin little antennae so they can track my eye movements. The guy gave me some practice exercises, the simple kind that millions of kindergarteners throughout our great land are filling out with crayons every day. I'd worked on them for a few minutes, and then had Levi take the thing off me. I just needed to sleep.

But I am starting to get the hang of it now. I've been practicing every day, moving that jumpy little cursor from letter to letter and blinking my eyes twice to type out whatever I want to type out. I can delete passages, move things around, edit at will now. It took me just under six minutes to type out this paragraph for you...

~

I've had two visitors today. Sebastian showed up first, with the latest prototype of the Infinity-X, which had been hastily slapped together at our facility in Mexico in an effort to show the world that we are still somewhat solvent as a corporation. I know he wanted me to be impressed by it. As he showed me all the things it could do, in 3D mode, he kept touching my arm...

Then Larry came in. He and Sebastian exchanged a few words I couldn't make out...Sebastian's exit came to me as the shuffle of expensive shoes across tile. Larry had brought me the latest edition of Omni, some thick coffee-table book on the islands of Greece, and a Troy Polamalu bobblehead doll. He sat in the death-watcher's chair next to my bed and let out a heavy sigh. "Sorry, Egghead," he said. "I really wanted to get here sooner, but...I had my own thing to deal with. So, how you doing?" I could hear him breathing with some difficulty over there. "How's the food here?"

"Well..."

"They can do amazing things these days—you just wait," he said. "You're gonna be up and walking again in no time. These doctors here, they're the best in the world."

"Sure," I said. "That's the plan." I focused in on the incipient noises of a well-run hospital for a moment, to recollect my thoughts. "Larry?"

"Yeah, Egghead?"

"What's happening out there? No one will tell me. Not even Levi—"

"That's 'cause you don't handle things like most guys do."

"But I want to know..."

"Know what?"

"I don't know," I said. "Everything."

"I can tell you everything I know anyways."

"Shouldn't take too long."

"Ha-ha," he said, "that's good. Still a funny guy..."

"Laugh, live, and love—that's going to be my new personal Trinity."

"I'm with you on that," he said. "But add pasta to it."

"Then it's not a Trinity, Larry. It's a tetrad, or a quartet."

"Guess you got me there."

"Or maybe a quadrigeminal."

"Right."

He kept changing positions; it came to me as the weird crinkling sound of vinyl pushing against vinyl. "They ain't found that son of bitch Jameson yet," he finally said. "I can tell you that much. But life out there, on the run, it can't be much fun for him. As for why he did it—that's all out in the open now. Seems he had some scheme going with a partner, some Saudi prince. You sure you wanna hear all this, Egghead?"

"Jasmine died because of that beady-eyed little son of a bitch...so yeah, I want to hear it."

"I'm real sorry about that. Look, here's the thing: we're closing in them. It ain't easy—this prince has deep pockets—but we're gonna do it, somehow. Mark my words. We'll get both of 'em in the end. Me and Levi—don't tell anybody this—but we're gonna go rogue if we have to."

"I still don't get what was in it for them."

"Oh, well, we know all that now. Their scheme was clever—I'll give them that. What they did is they shorted our stock after it went sky-high from that test thing they ran. They did it with tens of millions of shares, I guess. That's why they went in and ran that test on their own. Told you there was reason for that. Anyways, the idea then was to take down the Complex with you in it, and then go pin it all on that girl and the Brigade, and then of course our stock's gonna tank. And this is what's happening, by the ways. You should see it out there; it's ugly. Levi thinks they would of made a cool fifty or sixty billion, no problem. Kinda scary, you know? How close they came to pulling it off."

"Yeah," I said.

"I'll let you get some rest now, Egghead."

"Larry?"

"Yeah?"

"I owe you, big time. For everything—"

"Ah, don't mention it."

"I'm glad you survived."

"Ah, yeah—that. I was in the SUV when the building came down. It got blown over onto its roof, spun around and slid about forty feet, but you know them things. They're tanks."

His face suddenly appeared right over mine. I saw all the bruises and cuts on his face, some with stitches. It must have been one of hell of a fight, between him and Grigor.

"You look like hell," I said.

"You should see the other guy," he shot back. "Egghead, listen. I'm gonna come back and see you tomorrow, okay, about the same time, and every day 'til you get outta here. But in the meantime if you need anything—anything at all—you just holler."

~

Levi came in this evening at his usual time to relieve my mother and Gloria for a while. I had him hook me up to my eye-writer so I could write...well, this. The final chapter (what the hell else can happen to me?) I don't know what to say at this point. I seem to be taking one step forward, two steps back. Every test and procedure seems to lead only to more tests and procedures. I've developed unique relationships with the day and night crews in all the diagnostic labs in the hospital. They see me coming and start right back in with whatever conversation we'd aborted when my last procedure had been completed. And everything seems to be in deferral mode here, always a few hours, days, or weeks away...

~

Yesterday my mother came in with Ray, aka Moe, to announce they had just gotten engaged. She couldn't stop giggling as she showed me her rock, big as a split pea, completely out of place on my mother's finger. Their plan is to go to Hawaii and elope, my mother said, with just Levi and Lisa, and—when I'm able to— Gloria and me there as witnesses.

I started laughing.

"What?" my mother said. "What's so funny?"

"Oh, I'm just thinking that this has to be the only time in his life that a man like Ray Napoli would welcome witnesses."

"Well, anyway," she said, "it's good to see you laughing."

"Who else is here?" I asked. My head was clamped down tight again. "I hear someone... over there..."

"It's just me and Ray," my mom said. "It's early yet."

"What time is it?"

"A little after five in the morning." My mother had given me a kiss when she'd arrived, but I could not see her face now. I could not see anything except the dimpled white ceiling tiles in their perfect grid above my bed.

"It's snowing like crazy," Ray said. "You should see it out there. A lotta people are gonna just be staying in bed today."

"Listen, Eggers," my mother said. "I just had a nice long talk with your doctor—"

"Which one?" I said. "I have like four thousand of them."

"Dr. Opelstein. You've only seen him once."

"Ah yes!" I said. "The spine guy."

"Right," she said. "And he thinks that no matter what happens, you will, uh, be able to make a complete recovery in certain areas." She must have moved in closer, because I could make out the leading edge of her hair now. "Just because you might not be able to walk again, Eggers, doesn't mean you can't still please your wife, you know, in the bedroom—"

"Mom! Jesus—"

"She's right about that," Ray put in. "They got them little pump things now; I seen it on TV—they put it right in your cazzone and you're good to go! Hell, might even add an inch or two—"

"Jesus! Will you guys get out of here—go have breakfast or something. I don't need someone here with me every fucking minute of every fucking day. I'm feeling much better now, see?" I stuck my tongue out at them. "Couldn't do that last week."

"Eggers," my mother said, "there's no way I'm leaving this room. Like it or not, your mother is here for you."

"Oh, great..."

"Ray, darling?" she said. "Could you give us a moment?"

"Yeah, baby, sure thing. Egghead?" he said. "You hang in there—you hear me? Just keep thinking about Hawaii." I could hear their long slobbery kiss—it was like something feeding in a marsh—and then a deep passionate moan from my mother at the end.

She waited until Ray was a good ways down the hall before she pulled her chair close enough to let her entire face finally pop into view. "Eggers?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you, but I just wanted to give you something to look forward to. And sex—well, you are a Mortensen. I just thought you might be worried about that aspect of your life. The doctors, Eggers, they can't explain why you're not getting over this infection. They think...I think, that maybe—"

"Illness as metaphor—I get it!" I said. "But believe me, I want to kick this thing and get the fuck out of here, mom. I've got unfinished business in this world."

"Good," she said. She adjusted my covers, kissed me on the forehead. "Good. That's what I wanted to hear. Because your family needs you. I—I need you. Okay, I'll let you rest now..."

"Thanks."

I opened my eyes, sometime later—a few days later, as it turns out—and Levi was in my room again, occupying the death-watcher's chair next to my bed. I could turn my head enough to see him perfectly; the clamps must have been loosened. He was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his all-time favorite novel.

"Hey, Levi..."

"Eggers!" He shut the book, tossed it onto my tray table. "Eggers. You're up—good. So, how are you feeling?"

"Much better."

"So, do you need anything? It seems a little cold in here."

"No," I said. "I'm fine."

"Hey," he said, "guess what? I just spoke with the people at Peratech. They tell me they're almost done with your new wheelchair. It's really pretty awesome...I got to ride it all over the place. Almost crashed it—"

"That's great, Levi."

"Just a few little adjustments and you should be mobile soon, Eggers. Then we'll get you out of here and into a much nicer place. Gloria found this awesome facility right on the Hudson. Christopher Reeves spent some time there. It's like a five-star resort. I just might check into the room next to you."

"Levi?"

"Yeah?"

"Any news?"

"No."

"Nothing?" I asked. "Stop keeping things from me!"

"Don't get paranoid, Eggers. No one's keeping anything from you."

"You, Levi. How did you—?"

"You mean, why am I still alive? You man Larry—I owe him my life! He took that little shit Grigor into the SUV for, uh, questioning, and that's how he found out they had someone on my plane. It was the co-pilot, can you believe it? Larry's methods, uh, let's just say they didn't conform to the Geneva Conventions."

"That's enough," Gloria said. I could imagine her pinching my brother's arm. I had no idea she'd come into the room until her voice had overridden his.

"Okay," Levi said. He shook his head; it got even blurrier. "I need a coffee anyway." His face disappeared.

I could sense Gloria approaching my bed. Then I received a long, deep kiss on the lips. "Hey-ey there, you," I said.

"Hey, sweetie." She sat down on the edge of the bed and ran a dry towel around my face. "How are you feeling?"

"Just dandy," I said. "And how is baby?"

"This one's a kicker."

"It's a boy then."

"No," she said. "I'm pretty sure it's a girl. Little Caroline..."

"Or Isabella."

"Eggers, you can't always have your way."

"Isabella Olympia Mortensen!"

"Oh, Eggers." She pinched my cheek. "Get some sleep..."

~

And now another bedside death-watcher has come in from the dark depths of the outside world—it's Vampora! My old flame had to cancel the second leg of her South American book tour to return to New York to visit me before I die. She showed up around midnight, way past official visiting hours. But no one said anything. I was awake—I have no sleep schedule—but I'd somehow missed her entrance. Suddenly she was just sitting there in the bedside chair, having swooped in like a vampire, this strange dark beauty I've known for nearly twenty-seven years of my life now.

"Eggers."

"Vampora!"

"Wow," she said, softly. "You're just a floating face, in a big white cocoon."

"How very literary of you."

"Are you in any pain?"

"Lots," I said, "and it's wonderful. Hey, I'm thirsty. Could you—?"

"Sure thing." I watched her get up and walk around the bottom of my bed where that dead stump that used to be my left leg was contoured by the white hospital blanket. I could move my head normally now, which was a mixed blessing. "Pants?" I said. "Plain old black pants? And a girlie-girl purple blouse—oh my God! I really am dying..."

"Stop that! Now...here you go." She put the straw up to my mouth. The water was room temperature, tasted like plastic. "I tried to get here sooner, but there's this gigundo hurricane just off the coast of Brazil—"

"They're called tropical cyclones down there," I said. "Now in Japan or China it would be a typhoon. You know what the Australians call them? Willy willys."

"Well," she said, "that's, uh, that's good to know. Anyway, I trusted you wouldn't die before I got here to tell you what a complete shit you are for putting everyone through all this."

"Uh—"

"For her, Eggers? Really? You'd risk everything—"

"That's not it!" I said. "I thought...she and I...I thought maybe..."

"Okay, shh-shh. I didn't mean to get you all riled up. Shhhh. We can do this later. I'm sorry."

"You always get me riled up. Hey," I said, "I want to see sweet baby Jane. Bring in my daughter—tomorrow..."

"Oh, no! Eggers, she—she isn't ready for this."

"I look that bad?" I asked.

"To a four-year-old—yes. Anyway, she's with my parents right now, in Boston."

"Ah, great! All that rich Italian food your mother stuffs in her—she'll have the runs for sure. Seriously, I want to see her. Do I really have to say why?"

"Look," she said, "they're not bringing her back until this weekend. I'll, uh...think about it then. Eggers?"

"Vampora?"

She got up slowly, was hovering over me now, moving in closer. Suddenly all the horrible hospital-room beeps and bleeps signifying my internal fight for life faded away. "I can't be your antagonist if you go and die on me," she said. "And my life revolves around that role—you know that, right? I'm not kidding. If you don't kick this infection, Eggers, you'll be killing us both." She came in even closer, brought that wonderful mouth of hers right up to mine to push her breath into me. "I am a wild boar, remember? All my wild-boar strength is in you now." She kissed me; it's only the second time I've ever seen her cry. "We are going to beat this thing, together..."

~

O glorious day! I have been discharged, released—finally! After seventeen long weeks in the hospital, I am home. Larry and Ray (aka Moe) had picked me up in a specially outfitted company van yesterday to give me and my cool new wheelchair a ride. It was about five-thirty when we came in through the new high-tensile security gate and waved to Oscar in the guard shack. The gay guy had built a wonderful wheel-chair ramp with little embedded flashing yellow lights leading the way up into my house.

You know I've never had a surprise birthday party in my life...but I have now had a surprise return-to-house party. It took place in the Ballroom. Just about everyone was there—all the important people in my life. Someone put on the Musician's first album with Simian Flare, still his best, and people started dancing to it. Larry and Ray did a dirty-dancing routine in the middle of the floor that got everyone laughing so hard they were wiping their eyes. Meanwhile I'd maneuvered myself into the corner farthest from the bar to watch it all.

Minutes later the Diva joined me, her wonderful face all flushed and sweaty from dancing.

"This is for you," she said. "Isn't it wonderful? All these people, Eggers, they love you so much. I love you, so much..."

"Yeah," I said. "It's wonderful."

And believe me, I was grateful.

I lasted a good twenty minutes.

~

Life goes on even after the thrill of living is gone...it's a great song lyric, really, one of my favorites. Life goes on—until it doesn't. You can't ever die—until you do. Life goes on, yes, and in time, we adjust to whatever reality we have to face. The new normal becomes old fast, is what I'm saying.

So I've pretty much adjusted to life on wheels. I now own the most advanced wheelchair in creation. (I just found out yesterday I also own about 14% of the company that makes it.) It's really pretty cool. It's self-righting, has a little karmic brain that activates these crane-like appendages to set the chair back up so I can strain every working muscle in my upper body to get back into it if I am ever dumb enough to do something that overturns it. I practice this at least once a week. My chair also has a robotic arm attached to the headrest, with a full range of motion, which I control with a special little joystick. The thing can reach out almost eight feet and pick up a grain of rice from the floor, in case I ever need to do that. I mostly use it to play checkers with my daughter Jane, who has just turned six—I can't believe it!—and who has inherited her mother's amazing ability to win at every game she plays without strategizing or making any logical moves. It's infuriating—I don't know how they do it.

And I've (mostly) adjusted to the constant medical setbacks, to being driven back to the hospital seemingly every other week now. The most recent episode was the worst. I had just gone into my study to pursue my latest frivolous challenge—to read every great writer's first novel—and was about to dive into Saul Bellow's Dangling Man when Levi flew in, circled the pool table, and came to a quick stop directly behind me, which I hate. It's the symbolic equivalent of standing on stilts over a midget.

"Eggers," he said. "There's something we need to do—right here, right now."

I spun myself around quickly, nearly rolling over the tips of his shoes. "You're drunk."

"Most definitely," he admitted. He'd been on a bender, Lisa had told Gloria, ever since the Board had officially given him the boot about two weeks ago. Then they promptly moved Sebastian into the top spot, as Levi had predicted. I'd already severed all ties to the corporation to "pursue other interests."

Levi was dressed in jungle fatigues, which is never a good sign in an adult male, and had an L.L Bean backpack slung over one shoulder. He looked like a rugged graduate student, someone who might corner you and frighten the hell out of you at a party.

"Well then," I said, hoping to get back to my reading, "let's get this over with, whatever it is."

"This," he said, "is long overdue." He took something out of his backpack. "After everything mom has done for you, Eggers...and you still treat her like an indentured servant." Now I saw what he had in his hand: it was my father's service revolver. "This is dad's gun," he said. "Mom thinks Uncle Hank got rid of it that day, but I'm the one who took it out of the trash can. No one knows I have it."

"Can I hold it?"

"Here—"

I still have very little dexterity and strength in my only good hand, but I usually have enough to pick up and hold most small things. My father's gun seemed ridiculously heavy for its size, as if gravity had adjusted itself for a symbolically weighty object like this. "We're going to settle this now," Levi said.

"Settle what?"

"Your issue with mom. Once and for all—tonight. I haven't touched this since I took it out of that trash barrel. It is exactly the way Dad left it. Go ahead, Eggers."

"What?"

"Pull the trigger."

"What—here? In the house?"

"Yeah," he prodded. "You hate that couch anyway—point the gun at it. Go ahead—"

"Levi...I don't know."

"Pull the fucking trigger!"

I tried to wrap my fingers around the handle. I just couldn't do it. "Levi..."

"I'll help." He came up behind me and ran his fingers up my arm until his hand was blanketing mine. "Ready?" he said. I nodded, held my breath...the gun went off with a reverberating crack, putting a clean neat hole in the center cushion of the couch.

Gloria came rushing in. "What the..." She saw me, saw Levi, saw us huddled together, crying. The gun was in my lap now. She walked slowly over to us. She picked up the gun—first time she'd ever held one—and cupped it with both hands. "Now you see?" Levi said to me. "It would have happened anyway. It isn't mom's fault."

The next morning I woke up around eight, alone in our big bed, after a great night's sleep. I got into a sitting position, maneuvered myself into my chair—I'm very good at that now—and then I motored on over to my dresser to pick out my clothes for the day. I chose sweat pants and a black t-shirt with the inscription "Legs Ain't for Shit." (I have no troubled dressing myself; it's showering that still proves challenging.)

I took the elevator down to the Breakfast Nook, where Levi and Gloria were drinking coffee, talking, and laughing as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened the previous night.

"Good morning, sunshine," Levi said. "So, Eggers, how did you sleep?"

"Like a baby."

"Me too," he said. "So—you ready?"

"For what?"

"For your daughter's birth. Any moment now—right?" He looked at Gloria; she just nodded. I wheeled myself up to my spot at the table and reached out with my biological arm to nab a piece of bacon. Levi slid the plate closer to me, and Gloria dished out some scrambled eggs and piled on some whole-wheat toast and home fries. I was hungry, for a change.

"It's the most incredible thing you will ever experience," Levi said. "To see new life burst into this world."

But I never got the chance: I had another setback that afternoon, another episode, another seizure, and had to be rushed to the hospital. And so Isabella Olympia Mortensen burst into this world without her father there to witness it.

~

I just had a very interesting thing happen to me this evening. After a quick dinner alone up in my study, I went out back and set myself up in a spot I love, near the birdbath. I wanted to get some fresh air and just look up at the glowing sky of the city and think about things. And I was doing just that when I heard a rustling sound in the arbor bushes by the back wall...someone was struggling in there; it was a woman; she kept yelling "ouch!"—and then I saw her stumble out onto the brick path. She righted herself, adjusted her skirt, and started walking toward me. She stopped about fifteen feet away.

"Selena?" I said. I wasn't sure. This young woman was tall and had prominent cheekbones and wild eyes. She was wearing a white canvas sundress with small yellow flowers stenciled into it. She was carrying a small duffel bag covered with all kinds of stickers and pins.

"Hello, Dr. Mortensen," she said. "Yeah, it's me—back again."

"Well-well," I said. "This seems to be the summer of surprises."

"Yes. It sure as hell is." She came closer—close enough now for me to make out the bags under her eyes, the sunken cheeks, the dry chapped lips. I'd seen this look before—in a junkie friend.

"Do you want anything?" I said. "Tea? Something to eat perhaps?"

"No," she said. I could see a trail of blood slowly working its way down her left forearm, and a slew of minor lacerations on her bony shoulders and on both of her legs.

"You could have buzzed at the gate," I said. "They would have let you in."

"I know. I'm just...in a crazy mood tonight. I have something for you—two things actually."

"Well, let's go sit in the gazebo where there's a little more light." She followed me down the brick path, dragging her duffel bag behind her. She sat in one of the chaise lounges; I maneuvered myself over to the centrally placed teakwood coffee table, where some hooded candles were already lit, as they are every night in the summer. I really do have a great domestic staff.

"Well," I said, "I could go for a little Scooby snack anyway." I activated my cell phone and called the kitchen to have some tea and scones brought out.

Selena unbuckled her duffel bag and took out a spiral-bound notebook. "I retrieved this for you," she said, getting up to bring it over to me.

"What is it?"

"Her final notes. Jazz always wanted everyone to think she was so damn smart she didn't have to write stuff down. But she did. She wrote down a lot of stuff."

I opened the notebook and started leafing through it. It was full of the half-formed kinds of equations Jazz had shown me in that storage locker years ago, along with some barely decipherable notations.

"You understand any of this?" I asked.

"No, of course not. But she said, she told me if anything should happen to her...she trusted me! That—" she turned her head away—"is that really all she left behind? One stupid little notebook."

I closed the notebook. "So, Selena, you have something else for me?"

"That's what I said."

"What is it?"

She went back over to her duffel bag and got out an 8"x11" manila envelope. She undid the clasp and brought it over to me. I had trouble removing the contents with my biological hand. She stepped forward and took the envelope from me. "Dr. Mortensen, let me do it for you." I watched as she slowly pulled out a glossy printout...first revealing some dull brown hair, then a flat forehead, then some beady eyes, then a flat nose and a tight-lipped mouth...now I was looking at the full face of one Jameson Lourdes.

"The Feds aren't on to this yet," she said, reseating herself in the chaise lounge. "I don't know. Maybe this is information you can use?"

"Where was this taken?"

"Now that, I figure, is information you could really use." She crossed her legs and smiled at me. Selena had just started to say something when my overnight maid Delores came out with the tea and scones. "Would you like anything else?" she asked. "Dr. Mortensen?"

"What? Ah no, Delores. Thanks."

"Very well then..."

Selena's eyes tracked her all the way back into the house. When the back door had slammed shut, she squinted at me. "A black maid, Dr. Mortensen—really?"

"It's the twenty-first century now, Selena. It's gone back to being okay."

"In what universe?"

"All of them, I hope. So—"

"So-oo..."

"Come on," I said, "eat something. At least have some tea with me." I used my mechanical arm to pick up the pot and pour out some tea for her. I could have done this with my biological arm, but I admit it: I was showing off. She sat down at the coffee table directly across from me and took a sip of tea. "Oh, alright!" she said, offering up a smile big enough to reveal her gums. Then she reached her hand out to pick up a scone.

I said, "You didn't take my advice, I see. Didn't go back to Michigan—"

"Yeah," she said, "actually I did. But my asshole stepfather kicked me out. It wasn't my fault either; he's just a prick who really likes little girls. My mom just watched it all happen with that 'what-can-you-do?' dumb-ass look some women get around their men, you know?"

"Yeah."

"Dr. Mortensen," she said, taking a little bite of scone, "trust me: I can really, really sweeten this deal for you."

"How?"

"By now you must know about that stupid Saudi prince who put up all the money for Jameson's scheme? He's with Jameson right now; they're hiding out together. You can get two for the price of one."

"Okay," I said. "I assume we're negotiating here?"

"I'm having tea, eating a scone—I don't know what you're doing."

"Well," I said, "nothing is free in this world."

"That's true. And as it turns out, I am a little down on my luck at present. Something horrible happened to me last week, but I don't want to go into it right now. I suppose a little cash—not much, mind you—that might be just the thing to get my life back on the right track. I'm thinking of taking some classes at City College."

"Selena, how did you get that photo? Nothing happens unless you tell me that."

"Oh," she said, "I still know people. In the Brigade, you know. It hasn't been totally disbanded. We hate these guys as much as you do. They've ruined everything for us! If you want to know where they are, I have the address"—she tapped on her forehead—"in here, as Jasmine liked to say. And I hope you make them pay! I hope you really make them pay."

"Okay," I said. "Now that is worth a lot to me."

"How much?" She wiped some crumbs from her chin.

"How's twenty-five-thousand dollars sound to you?"

"Just about perfect," she said. "Oh, I can't thank you enough!"

"But there's something I need you to do, before you get your money."

Her eyes shot open. "Oh? Really? You mean, right now?"

"Nothing like that, Selena. There's this special place, called Seahorse Falls."

"What?"

"It's a posh rehab facility. You have to go there and check in, and stay for the full six weeks. I'll pay for it all. You do that, and then when you come out you'll get your money."

"Sure thing. No problemo."

And now I have it, the address. I have just given it to Larry. He will know what to do with it. I have no doubt about that.

~

Well, another year has slid by, just like that. And I really don't have much to report. I'm still married, still working on things, still sober, after a second stint at Seahorse Falls. I haven't touched alcohol in five years, seven months, and seventeen days, but it sure as hell has touched me. Either you get me, or you don't...

There is one major development in my life, which is worth mentioning here. Last month I started the Geckle Institute for Advanced Cosmological Studies. Our mains office is out in Stony Brook, which gives me a two-hour, commute each way. I have a staff of three chortled post-graduates in particle physics who could not get a better assignment elsewhere and who, as expected, work at an academic pace. But they're smart, and already we've been able to extrapolate from Jasmine's work and find some statistical anomalies that are, as she'd once put it, "of an alarmist bent." Now I don't mean to scare you, although maybe you should be scared, but it's possible that Dr. Jasmine Geckle really was right all along. Of course, even if this is the case, we probably have many decades, centuries, millennia—I don't know—before we need to worry about the destabilizing effects of Non-binary Processing. The problem is, I just can't recall a time when humanity has ever pre-empted a large-scale disaster with the knowledge of it right in front of our face.

Otherwise, life goes on. I had lunch with Larry recently. He's doing great, running a security consultancy now, which he described as "way easier than babysitting you, Egghead." We never talk about Jameson or the Saudi prince. Vampora is touring Europe again, which means I have my daughter Jane for the whole summer. We have progressed from playing Checkers to Chess, with the same infuriating result. My daughter is not nearly as worrisome as I thought she'd be at this stage of her life, with Mortensen and Mortanno blood running through her. She's only ten—there is so much ahead of her yet—but I'm confident she just might make it successfully through this world after all.

Every morning I wake up and say it to myself a dozen times, like a mantra: "I will not shoot the first boy who touches her. I will not shoot..."

~

I have a son! Desmond "Dez" Mortensen burst into this world on August 13, weighing in at a hefty 9lbs, 03oz. I got to be there, in the delivery room, to witness his birth. I finally got to see human life burst forth...

~

Gil Smoltz died this morning of a brain aneurism. It was a good death, as deaths go, painless and fast. He was at his big log-mansion in Maine. His grandniece Haley found him in his solarium. He'd been watering his Geraniums. He was ninety-three years old. The funeral is this Friday, in the city. I've had another minor setback, a bone spur in my right hip that had to be surgically ground down a few days ago, but I'm back home now and should be well enough to attend...

I just called Levi, to tell him. He said he is going to catch the first available flight out of Costa Rica, where he now lives.

~

I got a postcard of some medieval castle in Tuscany today, an honest-to-God postcard with a stamp on it and everything. It's from my mother: "Hope you are well, Eggers. Our new house is just half a mile from this castle. When you guys visit this summer we will have lunch there...ciao!"

~

Well, it appears I've let yet another year slip by without writing. I guess it means I should just wrap this thing up now, which is fine. The slow slide into old age has never made for good reading anyway. One thing I can tell you though, in the spirit of finality and certainty, is that for the rest of my natural life I will try to hold on to every single moment of what happened in the Complex that night—the Big Boom, as my daughter Izzy calls it (she's seen that famous YouTube clip, unfortunately).I have to...I am the only witness to Jasmine's last moments in this world, the only one who was with her when she issued her final words: "No matter what—don't let go..."

And of course that muted explosion continues to haunt me, and the reverberating clump of the top floor of the Complex as it fell onto the one below it, and then clump!-clump!-clump!...each clumping fall growing louder and louder and louder, and closer and closer and closer until...clump!-clump!-clump!...the crushing pain, the sudden darkness, the long fall through the darkness...the long wait in darkness, wondering...breathing the cold, dust-filled air...seeing that bloody splay of blond hair...wondering, holding her hand...and that first rescue light...

Today we are visiting Jasmine's gravesite, as we do every Memorial Day. It is the tenth anniversary of her death. My daughter Jane walks beside me, holding my dead hand while I steer my electric chair with my good one; nine-year-old Izzy is bouncing along somewhere behind us, singing something under her breath, and little Dez is up on my lap, rubbing his dribbling nose on the front of my leather jacket. Adam is a few paces ahead, clinging to his mother. At fourteen, he has yet to come out of his mommy-first phase and I'm beginning to worry that he never will.

I maneuver my chair around a wind-tossed bouquet of flowers appearing suddenly in front of me on the walkway, and nearly run over Jane's foot. "Dad!" she shrieks. "Watch it."

"Sorry, sweet pie."

But she doesn't leave my side or let go of my hand. It's possible her daddy-first phase is lasting a bit longer than it should as well. The wind is picking up, the temperature is dropping...

We reach the tombstone, the six of us. Izzy jumps up on the back of my chair, standing on the battery pack, with her pudgy little hands on my shoulders. Usually we are it, Jazz's only visitors, but this time we've been beaten to the site by a stooped-over old man in a yarmulke. He's wearing a black wool coat, tan pants, and clean white sneakers. He's leaning on an elaborately carved wood cane, looking over at us with eyes as big, green, and expressive as Jasmine's were. He smiles at Jane when she kneels down to place our flowers next to a big bright bouquet that is already there. My daughter's dark curly mess of hair gets whipped into her face by a great gust of wind when she stands back up; she flings it back over her shoulder with a violent shake of her head.

"No-no," I say to Jane. "Not there. The other side—put them on the other side of the stone." Dez is falling asleep—his head is on my chest now; he's drooling a little; his breathing is slowing down...I always worry I won't be able to catch him in time if he starts to fall.

"What does it matter, dad?"

"She was left-handed. Come on"—I string out my chin, which everyone knows is my way of pointing at things—"put it over there. I'm serious—"

"Well," Jane says, thrusting out her hip, "maybe she's facing the other way? Ever think of that?"

"Jane!"

"Tyrant!"

"Thank you...that's better."

The old man has been watching us.

"I'm sorry," I say to him. "She's at that age—"

"No need to apologize," the old man says, with a hard Brooklyn accent. "A kid with spunk like that—it's good. It's those quiet ones—they're the ones to watch..."

Adam makes some horrible profane comment about the big splotch of bird poop on the stone next to Jasmine's. When he repeats it with even more volume, his mother leads him away, toward the mausoleum up on the hill. He'll like the mausoleum. And Gloria knows, we both know, that if he stays here he won't let up until someone removes all of the bird poop from the stone.

"Family," the old man says, "the great mystery of our age."

"Of any age," I say.

"Yes-s..."

A loud rumble of thunder disrupts whatever thought he was about to express, and wakes up little Dez. My son looks around, rubs his eyes; he's about to make a fuss. "Here," Jane says, "I'll take the little deadhead." She picks up her little blond bruiser of a brother, flings him over her shoulder, and starts patting him on the back. "Shhh-shhh, that a boy..." They head toward the big gaudy central monument put up for some great 19th-Century industrialist who lived large but died like everyone else, with Izzy tagging along behind them. It's just the old man and me now. He takes out a white handkerchief and wipes his face.

I have to ask, "Are you, by any chance, her father?"

"Me? No-no," he says. "I'm eighty-nine years old, son. I'm the grandfather."

"Ah, that's right! She did tell me about her father—I'm sorry."

"Her father, my only son, may he rest in peace..." He can't finish; his eyes blink to a close.

I wait until they flutter back open.

"I'm Eggers Mortensen," I say.

"I know who you are."

"I knew her pretty well, for a while anyway. She never talked about her family."

"For good reason."

"There always is. Still"—I glance over at Adam, who is giving his mother a hard time about something else now—"family is family. I was with her at the end, you know..."

But the old man isn't listening to me anymore: he's looking down at the inscription on Jazz's stone. "Oh Jasmine"—his voice breaks—"my little peach pit..." He has to grab the rounded top of the stone to keep his balance. Jane is looking over at us now: she's at that age where death is becoming fascinating.

"I'm sorry," I say. "Would you like a moment alone with her?"

"No-no! Don't go, son, please. It's good to see—someone else cares. Memorial Day—guess I should have known. All this time...I thought I was the only one who ever came here to see her."

"What about her mother?"

"Try the nuthouse," he says. "Doesn't even know she had a little girl, let alone lost one."

"She changed the world, you know. It was actually her equation—"

"I know! She told me."

"She did?"

He nods: "She told me—everything. We stayed in touch, right up until the end. Can't say I'm surprised though—what she ended up doing. She always had that in her. She was one of those quiet ones, you know, especially after her mother was put away for good. Her father, he couldn't even take care of a goldfish. How was he going to raise a nine-year-old girl by himself?"

"You took her in then?"

"No. Should have though. I just sent them money, bought her things, got her into good schools and all that. That's the only thing that kept her going—her studies. And books—the girl read like crazy, one right after another. Money—solves everything now, doesn't it?"

"Or it's the root of all evil."

"I'd go with that. Well"—he looks up at the darkening sky after a bolt of lightning has just shot across it—"guess we're being warned now, aren't we? Eggers Mortensen, think what you will. But I'm telling you sure as I'm standing here right now—she never meant to hurt you, or anybody."

"I know..."

He smiles, briefly, and holds out his right hand. I strain to reach out and grasp it with my good one, my left. I want to think that the world has a way of storing unrecorded moments like this: two grieving men holding hands in a cemetery. When I finally let go, the old man turns around and starts walking with the aid of his cane, surprisingly fast, away from the parking lot. I never did get his name. I have a few moments to myself now, a bit of time here before my kids will all pile around me and start shouting—"Dad, let's go...Daddy, it's going to rain...hurry up, dad—!"

I maneuver myself right up to the stone, and take a moment to run my fingers over the inscription: "Death: The Final Frontier." I would like to know who had picked that out—it's perfect for her. Now I run my hand over the inscribed dates—birth and death: the span of life—and I have to shake my head. It is mild consolation—but consolation nonetheless—to know that long after I am gone, people will still be coming to this little cemetery on Long Island for their own reasons, and some of them will happen to pass by Jazz's modest little stone here. Some of them will have to stop, because it is such a strange name—Dr. Jasmine Geckle—and a few may even recall what she'd done. They will read the inscription and the dates and maybe even pause to do the math, and then they'll have to shake their head as I just did. Thirty-two years—man, that's just not enough time. Man, that's just not fair.

