The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

1.

In the predawn one morning last April, I woke up from a violent and disturbing dream. In it, I was somewhere that I realized was the Southwest with three other guys whom I knew in the dream but didn’t quite recognize when I thought about them later.

All of us were engaged in smuggling something — drugs as it turned out. We were tough. Or they were anyway, big guys with long hair and mustaches. There was, I knew, another bunch of guys much tougher than us with whom we didn’t get along and there were cops.

The end of the dream was that I heard police sirens and was scared but relieved because they weren’t as bad as the other guys. The last image in the dream, however, was the cops smashing two of the big guys’ faces right into the adobe wall of the building we stayed in. And I knew, in the way one does in dreams, that the other guy and I were in for something as bad or worse. Then I woke up before dawn in my apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

From the time I was a small boy I’ve been afraid of the long marches of the night, the time in the dark when the lights inside me went out. The fear that would hit me as my head was on the pillow was that I, the one falling asleep, would not be the one who woke up.

Imagining the fragility of my identity chilled me. I did fall asleep again though and dreamed once more.

This time, I saw the main cop with his short white hair and gray suit sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette, staring blue eyed and expressionless at me. I was much younger than I am now, maybe in my mid-twenties instead of my sixties.

In my dream, I realized that I had been looking at a computer and had viewed all this on some kind of a website.

When I awoke this time, the sun was up. Except for my having seen it as a website, the dream seemed like a fragment of the past, a time when I might, in fact, have found myself in places almost as bad as the dream.

I felt sick, my stomach was upset, every bone and muscle ached, and each move I made took an effort.

Nothing seemed to have led up to this illness. I’d been to the theater the night before with my friend Ellen. We’d seen a show with music about eighteenth century boy sopranos (played by women) and abducted orphans.

A few hours before that, an affair I’d been having for some time with a guy named Andre was broken off very suddenly. The man with whom Andre lived had called me up and said that Andre had told him everything. They both wanted me to stay away from him from now on. It was a once-a-week thing that had become routine and boring, as I told the man, and I asked him to say good-bye to Andre for me.

I’m a veteran of more than forty years in Manhattan and normally neither big, melodramatic Broadway shows nor sudden disruptions in love cause the kind of distress I felt that morning.

Even as I wondered if I should call my doctor, I was aware of a kind of web stream that ran constantly in a corner of my brain. The fever dream took the form of a constant Google search complete with web pages and blogs I couldn’t remember looking for.

Pictures and stories with elusive contexts appeared. At one point, I found myself looking at the profiles of the members of a tough cop unit somewhere in the Southwest. It had short bios, photos of them with mustaches and holsters and masklike sunglasses.

As I wondered why and how I had looked this up, I saw a familiar face with a white crewcut and expressionless cop eyes.

I remembered I wanted to call my doctor. As I dialed the number, I thought of the tune and lyrics of a song I’d been listening to recently. It was by John Dowland, a poet and composer who was kind of the Kurt Cobain of Elizabethan England. Something in the melancholy grace of the tune, the resignation of the song’s lyrics had caught me.

Maybe this attachment had been a kind of harbinger, some part of my consciousness telling me I had started dying. I wondered how Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears,” had affected Philip K. Dick when he’d used it in a title.

Somehow the call to the doctor never got made. I couldn’t remember what day it was. People who phoned me — friends, the godchildren who in sentimental moments I thought of as my kids, the woman who had been my work-wife before I retired from the university — seemed concerned.

Many things ran on the screen inside my head. The Macabres when I found myself looking at their site seemed like many a New York late seventies punk group. The photos showed the musicians — emaciated, decked in bondage accessories, with their hair hacked off at odd angles. A bit of one of their songs played. Then police sirens wailed just like they had when my friends and I had gotten caught.

I realized that the sirens were my phone ringing. A friend who had once been a nurse wanted the telephone number of my medical group and the number of someone who could take me there next morning.

2.

That night was especially awful: a long confusion of dreams. Chris, my speculative fiction godchild who lives in Ohio, seemed almost frantic. He kept calling me but I was too sick to talk to him for more than a minute or two.

When I looked at my inner computer screen it showed me palm trees and bright sun and elephants. The Macabres now worked nearly naked in a prison chain gang. A woman with the face of a peacock seemed very familiar. I thought I spotted the policeman with the blue eyes that gave away nothing. He looked right at me and was about to speak

Then my doorbell sounded and it was my friend Bruce who was there to take me to the doctor’s. With his help I walked the few blocks to my medical group office on Washington Square. A very concerned doctor ordered me into Saint Vincent’s hospital. Shortly afterward Bruce escorted me to the emergency room admittance desk. Then he hugged me and was off to another job and I was in the power of the hospital.

There was no waiting. I identified myself, was given a form to fill out, and was shown right into the middle of the beds and gurneys, patients, and orderlies. Numbers flashed on computer screens, and machines beeped.

Nurses and doctors clustered around an enormously fat, comatose woman then dispersed. A social worker took the life history of an elderly black man who very patiently explained to her how he had lost everything he had ever had and lived now in a shelter. A moaning patient rolled by on a gurney hung with IV bags. Two cops wheeled in a shooting victim.

Then an orderly threw back the curtains around a bed and told me to come inside. My clothes were taken away. I was dressed in two gowns, one worn forward, the other backward, and socks with skid-proof soles. I was bled and examined and hauled through cold corridors and x-rayed.

Tubes got attached to me. A catheter was stuck up my urinary tract; at one point a very new intern tried to stick a tube down my throat and I choked and gagged. A horrible brown goop came up my guts and into my mouth and nose. My hospital gowns got soaked and there was commotion. People talked about me as if I was dead or not there.

It reminded me of an accident scene. I heard police radios, saw flares illuminating a nighttime car crash. I saw a familiar picture on a computer screen. It was in black and white, a 1950s newspaper shot.

A kid in his late teens had been thrown onto the branch of a tree by the force of a collision. He hung there bent at the waist over the branch of the tree, his loafers gone, his legs still in jeans, his upper body bare. The cool striped shirt he wore now hung down over his head. That was probably for the best: the face and eyes under those circumstances are not something you’d want to see.

That image haunted me at fourteen. I had imagined myself dramatically dead in just that manner, if only I could drive and had a car.

“That photograph was his own private version of the old primitive painting, ‘Death On A Pale Horse,’ ” I read on a screen in front of me and realized I was looking at a website about me.

Then the screen was gone and I was back in the tumult of the emergency room. “Intestinal blockage — massive fluid build-up,” said a female resident. “It’s critical.”

“Rejected the drain,” said the intern who had failed to get it in.

A male nurse spoke quietly to me like I was a frightened animal, put his hand on my chest to calm me, and stuck the tube into my nose and down my throat in a single gesture. A tall, wheeled IV pole with hooks that held my drains, feeding bag, urine bag, and various meters was attached to me.

Doctors examined me further. I felt like my insides were grinding themselves apart. A bag hanging next to my head rapidly filled with brown goop that had been inside me.

It was very late at night when I was wheeled onto elevators and off them, then down silent corridors. I was still dirty and wearing the damp hospital gowns when I was brought into a ward on the twelfth floor.

A young Asian nurse named Margaret Yang took over. Before I was placed on a bed, she called and four orderlies appeared. Women talking in the accents of Puerto Rico, Ukraine, and Jamaica, brought me into a bathroom, sponged me off, put me under shower water, and turned me around under it saying, as I tried to cover myself, “It’s okay. You are as God made you.”

3.

Only when I was clean, in clean clothes and on a bed looking out at the night did I remember that I had been in this hospital forty-two years before.

When I was a kid first coming into the city from Long Island, I woke one night with no idea who I was or where I was. The place I was in seemed vast, chilly, and sterile. The lighted windows in the brownstones across the street revealed stylish apartments and I knew it looked like a magazine cover without knowing what that was or how I knew this.

A nurse told me I’d been found facedown in a hallway, bleeding from a cut on my forehead and without any wallet or ID. I had lots of alcohol and a couple of drugs in my bloodstream.

A very old nun, thin and stiff, her face almost unlined, came around late in that night. She inspected the bandage on my forehead and talked about Dylan Thomas. I was still enough of a Catholic kid to feel embarrassed talking to a nun while sitting on a bed in just a hospital gown.

“He was brought here not ten or twelve years ago after a hard night’s drinking. He died from that and pneumonia on the floor just below this one.

“I thought of him when I saw you,” she said, looking at me calmly. “I wonder if you, too, are a young man who has an uneasy relationship with death.”

I said I didn’t know if I was or even who I was.

“Time will reveal those things,” she said. “You’re still very young.”

Then I found myself looking at that long-ago night on a computer screen. It was all conveyed in images: a New Yorker cover of figures silhouetted against the lighted windows of their brownstones, a figure of a nun that seemed almost translucent.

What appeared at first to be the famous drawing of the young Rimbaud unconscious in a bed after being shot by his lover Verlaine turned out to be a photo of Dylan Thomas dead in Saint Vincent’s Hospital — and became me at twenty-one with my poet’s hair and empty, blue amnesiac eyes.

I pulled back from the screen and saw all around me a vast dark space with green globes rotating through it. Then I squinted and saw that the globes were the glowing screens that monitored each patient in this hospital. Beyond us, further out in the endless dark, were other screens in other hospitals, stretching on into infinity.

4.

Apparently I called out, because then Nurse Yang was speaking to me, asking if I was okay. The universe and the globes disappeared. Saint Vincent’s, as I saw it all these years later, seemed a small, slightly shabby, and intensely human place.

“I’m so glad,” I told her. “You people have saved my life.”

She was amused and said that this was what they tried to do for everyone brought in here but that it was always nice to be appreciated. When she started to leave, I got upset and she showed me how to ring for help if I needed it.

After she was gone I lay in the cool quiet with the distant sound of hospital bells and the voices of the women at the nurses’ station. But I didn’t sleep.

My fear that all trace of me would be lost while I slept was out and active that night. Lying there, it seemed likely that this person with a search engine installed in his head was not the me who had existed a few days ago.

Drugs and the tubes siphoning the liquid out of my guts and into plastic bags had eased my pain and I did drift off every once in a while. But nurses and orderlies came and woke me quite regularly to take my signs and measure my temperature.

At one moment I would be awake in the chill quiet of that hospital with a view out the window of the Con Edison building and the Zeckendorf Towers at Union Square visible over the low buildings of Greenwich Village.

In the next, I’d be looking at a computer screen that showed a map of the old Village — a vivid 1950s touristy affair with cartoon painters in berets and naked models, beatnik kids playing guitars in Washington Square and Dylan Thomas with drinks in both hands at the bar of the White Horse Inn.

Awake again in the dark, I waited, listened, half expecting the old nun to reappear. Instead what I got was a moment’s glimpse of the white-haired cop who had watched me get beaten. He looked at me now with the same deadpan.

5.

I came out of a doze, awakened by a gaggle of bright-eyed young residents. “Mr. Bowes,” one of them, a woman with an Indian accent, said, “we were all amazed by the x-rays of your intestines. It was the talk of the morning rounds.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the blockage they were extremely distended. You came very close to having a rupture which would have been very bad. You could easily have died.” All of them, a small Asian woman, a tall rather dizzy-looking blond American boy, and a laid-back black man nodded their agreement and stared at me fascinated.

“How did this happen?” I wanted to know.

“We believe it was from twenty-three years ago when you had cancer and they removed part of your colon,” she said. “After all this time, the stitching began to unravel and adhered to the other side of your intestines.”

Other doctors appeared: the gastroenterological resident spoke to me, my own internist popped in. They told me that I was out of immediate danger. Sometimes the blockage eased all by itself. Sometimes it required surgery. The surgeon would see me the next day.

My bedside phone had now been connected. I made some calls. People came by, friends and family, old flames and godchildren. They brought flowers and disposable razors, my CD player, a notebook, they gave me backrubs and went out and asked questions at the nurse’s station. They established my presence, showed the world that I was someone who was loved and cared for.

Margaret Yang came and sat for a while, talked to my sister Lee who was visiting, about this unique old hospital and how they were all devoted to it. I wanted to hang on to everyone, nurses, friends, family who was there in the bright daylight.

They had brought me the Dowland CD. The countertenor sang:

Gradually on that lovely spring day with the sun pouring down on the old bricks of the Village, twilight gave way tonight. Lights in the hospital dimmed, the halls got quiet.

When I was operated on for cancer it was uptown at Mt. Sinai. The ward I was in overlooked Central Park and at night in the intensity of my illness and fear and the drugs inside me, I saw lights passing amid the leafless winter trees.

And I imagined an alternate world called Capricorn where people dying of cancer in this world appeared to the population as glowing apparitions.

The night before that operation, I awoke with the feeling I was falling through the furniture, through the floor, and into Capricorn.

Remembering that, I saw a picture of myself, ethereal and floating amid a stand of winter trees in a hospital bed. The white-haired cop was showing it to me on a screen.

“When we spotted that we knew you were in no way run-of-the-mill,” he said. “Our seeing you like this confirmed an initial report from when you were in this place as a kid with a busted head and no memory. Someone spoke to you and said you had an uneasy relationship with death and the potential to see more than the world around you.”

6.

Some people have the gift of being perfect hospital visitors. The flowers my friend Mark brought the next morning looked like a Flemish still life, his conversation was amusing and aimless.

He sat beside my bed that morning and I told him about a book I’d once written.

“The first things I wrote after I had cancer was a fantasy novel called Feral Cell. In it, people dying of cancer in this world are worshipped in an adjacent world named Capricorn. They call our world ‘Cancer’ and call themselves the ‘Capri.’

“The faithful among them find ways of bringing a few people who are doomed on our world over to theirs. To prevent us from drifting back here, we are dressed in the skins of deceased Capri, drink their blood, which is called the Blood of the Goat, and are objects of awe.

“But there are others on that world — decadent aristocrats, of course — who hunt us. They throw silver nets over us and drag us down. They skin us and drain our blood and use those things to cross into this world.”

“That must almost have made getting sick worthwhile,” he said.

“The future New York City I depicted in the book — turn of the third millennium Manhattan — was all open-air drug markets and rival gangs of roller skaters and skateboarders clashing in the streets. What we got, of course, was gentrification and Disneyland.

“A lot of being sick is like one long nightmare. In my Capricorn everything was terror and magic. At night, patients in a children’s cancer ward could be seen floating amid the trees of a sacred grove.”

Mark walked with me as I pushed my IV stand around the floor. One of the hall windows overlooked Seventh Avenue. Outside on a glorious day in spring, traffic flowed south past the Village Vanguard jazz club.

“The low buildings make it look like the 1950s,” Mark said.

“Time travel,” I said.

It was a quiet Sunday. Later that afternoon, my godchild Antonia was giving me a backrub. Suddenly a dark-haired woman, not tall but with great presence and wearing a red dress suit, appeared. She introduced herself as the one who would be my surgeon if the intestinal blockage didn’t ease. And I knew that it hadn’t and wouldn’t and that she would operate on me.

As night came and friends and family had departed, I thought of Jimmy when he was a patient at this hospital. Jimmy had been a friend of mine in the years of AIDS terror. He designed and constructed department store window displays.

Since I’d first known him he talked about the little people inside his head, the ones he relied on for his ideas.

“Last night they put on this show with fireflies and ice floes. Perfect for Christmas in July,” he’d say. “Sadly, what I’m looking for is ideas for Father’s Day which is, as always, a wilderness of sports shirts and fishing tackle.”

Just before Jimmy died in this very hospital, I came into his room and found him in tears.

“They’re all sprawled on the stage dead,” he told me.

7.

Without being aware of a transition to sleep, somewhere in the night I became part of a Milky Way of bodies lying hooked up to lighted screens. I saw all of us, patients here and across the world, floating in a vast majestic orbit.

Then the cop, tough, his blue eyes giving away nothing, watched as I looked at the photo he’d handed me.

It showed me in my dream of the Southwest along with my companions who would later get arrested and beaten into pulp.

“How did you know these guys?” he asked.

“I was a friend of one of them. Louis.”

“Friend, you mean like a boyfriend?” He displayed no attitude but past experience with cops made me wary. I shook my head.

Then he told me, “It must be tough for someone like you. Kind of comfortable, retired, having something like this from his past brought up after all these years.”

“Nothing like that happened to me. It’s just a dream.”

“A dream, maybe, but made up of bits of your past.”

Then I heard voices and he was gone. Lights went on in my room and curtains got drawn around the other bed. Since my arrival I had been the only patient in the room. That ended.

“In here.”

“Easy.”

The new patient cried out as they moved him. Through an opening in the curtain, I saw nurses and orderlies transfer him to the bed. Then they stood back and two young surgeons from the emergency room approached. From their talk, I learned that the patient had been in some kind of an incident that had damaged his scrotum.

The doctors spoke to him. “We saved one testicle and your penis,” they said. “But we couldn’t save the other.”

The patient asked a question too mumbled for me to hear and a doctor said, “Yes, you’ll have full function.”

Then they were gone and almost immediately the kid slept and snored. His name, I found out later, was Jamine Wilson and he was nineteen.

8.

Dawn was just about to break. I opened the notebook and wrote out a will, divided my possessions among my siblings and friends. Making out a will was a way of trying to hold onto myself, to indicate that I still knew who I was and what was mine.

That afternoon my sister Lee visited me. I had named her my executor. I dreaded the thought of living in a coma and said I didn’t want extreme measures to be taken to keep me alive if I couldn’t be revived. She went out to the desk and informed them of this.

Then we talked and listened to Jamine Wilson in the next bed on his phone. He talked about buying hot iPods. He called a woman and told her to bring him burgers and fries from McDonald’s.

He lived in a halfway house to which he didn’t want to return. A social worker came by and informed him that he would have to be out of the hospital the next morning. He ignored her.

“Where are you now,” he asked the woman on the phone. “Can’t you get on the subway?”

My sister left when they came to take me downstairs for x-rays. They gave me barium and recorded its progress through my digestive tract. I was there for hours, lying flat on a cold metal slab while they took each series of shots, resting, sleeping sometimes on the metal slab, until it was time for the next pictures.

It reminded me of the esoteric forms of modeling. Hand models, foot models; unprepossessing people with one exquisite feature. “Intestine model, that’s me,” I told the technician who smiled and didn’t understand.

I dozed and saw a screen that read, “An example of his early modeling work.” And there I was, very young, in Frye boots and jeans and leather jacket, a kerchief tied around my neck but with my hands cuffed behind me. It looked like some S&M scenario I might once have posed for. But the setting was the Southwest of that dream.

Then they woke me up and took some more x-rays.

When I got back to the room, Jamine’s hospital lunch was untouched beside his bed. I had taken nothing by mouth for days. He looked up at me dark and angry. Our eyes met and for a moment I saw a bit of myself: the kid in the nightmare, the one who’d ended up in this hospital with his memory gone. And I think, maybe, he saw something similar.

“Where are you now?” he asked someone on the phone then said, “You were there five minutes ago.”

Some time later, his caller finally arrived whizzing down the hall on a motorized wheelchair, the McDonald’s bag on her lap. She was Hispanic with eyes that looked hurt or afraid.

She maneuvered her chair next to the bed. The two of them ate. He chewed noisily, talked while he did. “I was so scared,” he said, “when I saw all the blood. And it took so long for them to call for help.”

The cell phone rang and he talked to someone. Shortly afterward a girl and a guy in their late teens came down the hall on their chairs. These were his friends from the halfway house. They seemed oddly impressed by whatever had happened to him.

Before the evening was over there were five wheelchairs in the room and I realized that Jamine, too, must have one. I was surprised by how quiet and lost everyone but Jamine seemed. At some point they were told they had to leave. My roommate turned off his phone and went back to sleep.

9.

The room, the ward, the floor, the hospital grew silent.

“The place ran with ghosts,” Randall, an old queen I knew from when I was first in the city had said about the very classy hospital uptown where he had been for major heart surgery.

“They came and talked to me at night, taunted me. An awful man I lived with when I was young and stupid and new to New York, was cruising the halls like it was still 1925. He was a cruel bastard, physically abusive, and I’d walked out on him. He told me he was waiting for me, that sooner or later he’d have me again.”

Randall liked to have me stay at his place once or twice a week. It was an easy gig. He really got off on having a young guy around. Give him a chance encounter in his own apartment with a twenty-two-year-old in jockey shorts and he was happy.

“I know when I pop off that awful sadist will be waiting for me, and I’m afraid,” he said.

I smiled like he had made a joke and he shook his head and looked sad. He died at that hospital a year later and I felt bad. He’d been good to me, generous, kind. I liked him well enough then but I really understood him now.

Deep in the night the cop and I stood at the window and looked at the very late traffic flowing south on Seventh Avenue. I could tell by the car models that it was the late 1960s. The constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time.

“We can do it, you know,” he said. “Bring you back forty years to face trial.”

“For what?” I asked. “What crimes did I ever commit that were worth that kind of attention?”

“Look at yourself.” Again the screen came up and it was the three guys whose faces I could almost remember and myself all in boots and jeans and leather vests and kerchiefs around our necks. Like musicians on an album cover imitating desperados.

The one farthest away from me handed a cloth bag to the next guy who handed a smaller brown paper package to the guy next to me who handed me a white packet and I turned and handed a glassine envelope to someone not in the picture: like a high school textbook illustration of a drug distribution system.

“A kid died from something you sold,” the cop said. The screen showed a girl, maybe eighteen, sprawled on the floor of a suburban bedroom with a needle in her arm and a Jim Morrison poster on the wall.

“None of that ever happened,” I said. “I never did anything like that.”

“We don’t plant this stuff. It was inside you. Back in 1969 a family wants vengeance,” he replied.

I saw myself from behind kneeling with my hands tied at my back. All around on the sand, my clothes lay in strips where they’d been cut off me. My belt and my boots were tossed aside; the kerchief I’d worn around my neck was now tied over my eyes. Behind me the three other guys all hung by their necks from the branches of a tree.

The cop said, “You’ll wish they’d hanged you, too. What the family wants to do will make what happened to that black kid in your room a joke.”

Then I saw myself frontally. Mutilated and bleeding to death into the sand, my mouth open in a silent scream.

That woke me and I lay in my hospital bed in the first dawn light. But I had trouble shaking the dream.

10.

Greenwich Village was partly an Irish neighborhood in the days gone by and Saint Vincent’s still reflected that. My nurse that morning was Mary Collins, an old woman originally from Kerry with a round unlined face, the last of the breed. I’d established my credentials, told her about my grandparents from Aran.

After the policeman had mentioned that initial report, I’d asked Mary Collins about the nun I’d talked to. She looked at me and said, “You saw Sister Immaculata. I haven’t thought about her in years. They said she roamed the halls and talked to the patients. Some of them she comforted, others she frightened.”

“But she was real.”

She shrugged. “Well, when I first worked here, they told stories about catching glimpses of her. But I never did.”

Behind the curtains around the other bed, Nurse Yang spoke quietly to Jamine. “No matter what our health issues, we need to eat healthy food. Try this orange juice.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Try it for me.” And we heard him slurp some orange juice.

“She has the patience of Job,” murmured Mary Collins and turned to leave.

I said, “There’s this guy I keep seeing in my dreams. He looks like a cop, shows me all kinds of things, threatens to drag me back to face punishment for crimes I never committed.”

Nurse Collins paused. In the silence, I heard Margaret Yang say, “Would you try this cereal?”

“His name wouldn’t be McGittrick would it?” Mary Collins asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Immaculata and McGittrick both — ah, you are a rare one! If that’s how it is, tell him to back away. While you’re a patient in this hospital, you’re ours not his.” She winked and nodded at me and I guessed she was doing for me what Nurse Yang was doing for my roommate.

Word came that my surgery was scheduled for that night. The exact time was not set. Jamine was on his cell phone. He was due to be released from the hospital that afternoon and sent back to his halfway house. I wondered about the pain he didn’t seem to be feeling and the desperate moment that had left him partially castrated.

Lying there, I thought of people I knew who had come out of surgery with hallucinations attached to their brain like parasites.

A few years before, an old professor of mine was not doing well after heart surgery. He was incoherent. Things hung in the balance and then with his eyes shut and seemingly unconscious, he said quite clearly, “Surgeon Major Herzog of the Israeli Air Medical Brigade orders you to get off your asses and get me cured.”

“Herzog straightened things out,” my professor told me a few days later when he had rallied and begun recovery. “The first time I saw him was shortly after the operation. I came to and he was standing in full uniform at the end of my bed reading the computer screen. He told me I was someone they needed to have alive and he was going to save me. Then he changed some of the instructions on the screen.”

No one on the staff had ever heard of Surgeon Major Marvin Herzog. The doctors attributed the now rapid recovery not to a series of crisp orders and clandestine changes in the patient’s treatment but to the body’s wonderful will to live.

A week or two later when I visited him at home, my professor told me, “Doctor Herzog said last night that usually they don’t let people like me see him. But he thinks I can handle it. He explained how his unit oversees everybody who’s under anesthesia…”

As he went on, I had realized he was still talking to his imaginary Doctor and maybe always would.

Finally I was wheeled out for more x-rays. When I came back hours later, doctors, nurses, and Jamine’s social worker were in attendance. His motorized chair, a shabby, beat-up item, had been brought into the room. When he was helped into it, he screamed with pain. A hurried conference took place out in the hall. The patient was helped back into bed.

Late that night, he was still there, talking quietly into his cell phone. It had been arranged that he was to be sent, not to his halfway house, but to a rehab facility. He seemed pleased. Was it for this that he or someone else had used the knife?

McGittrick had noticed him. Was that a first sighting, like Immaculata observing me all those years ago?

11.

That night I waited at the window feeling very small and lonely and watched the taillights of the cars as they rushed into the past.

A woman I know underwent a long and intense operation for cancer. During the hospitalization that followed she was well taken care of by the hospital nurses and orderlies and seemed to love them.

She walked with help immediately after the operation as you’re supposed to. Everyone was amazed at how quickly she moved, looking around impatiently, fascinated by the other rooms on the floor — the vacant ones with their empty beds, the locked doors that led to conference rooms and doctors’ hideaways.

Later, when reminded of this, she remembered nothing of her treatment. All she could recall was a movie being made night after night in which her body was used to portray a corpse. The ones making the film were criminals, threatening and intimidating her. The hospital workers were helping them. This went on all during her time in recovery.

She wanted to walk as quickly as possible, she said, so she could escape. Her fascination with the rest of the floor was because those were places that figured in the dreams. She pretended to love the staff because she was terrified of them.

By daylight she found them drab and ordinary, devoid of the desperate drama they held during her nights.

Then someone calling my name interrupted me. Word had come that the surgical team was ready and the gurney was on its way.

I went back to my room and the gurney was there. As I was loaded aboard and my IV pole was strapped to its side like a flag, I saw my godchild Antonia, twenty years old, but tiny as a child, come down the hall. Somehow she had gotten into the hospital at that late hour.

In that wonderful place, it was quite alright with everyone that she accompany me down to surgery. “You’ll have to leave before they begin the procedure,” one of the nurses told her.

Off we went and the attendant sang as we rolled along and told me that I was going to be fine. Then deep in the hospital, far into the night, we were in the surgical anteroom. One of the young doctors who had operated on Jamine was part of the team.

He and the others seemed like college students as they joked with Antonia and me while we awaited the surgeon who was late. Then she was there in her red jacket and dress and greeted us all.

I thanked Antonia for being with me as they hooked me up. I held onto the image of her, as everyone smiled at me and I was gone while wondering if I was ever coming back.

12.

When I awoke a young man with a shaved head said, “Good morning, Richard, you’re in surgical recovery. My name is Scott Horton and I’m a nurse. How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve just been hit by a truck but haven’t felt the pain yet,” I said and he grinned, nodded with approval, pleased I was coherent enough to attempt a joke.

Just before I had awakened, in the moment between darkness and light, I had been in the vast space with only the light of the hospital patients’ computer screens revolving around me like suns in galaxies.

In the way it happens in dreams, I knew these were all the unconscious patients in all the hospitals in the world. Together we formed an anima, an intelligence. Most of us were part of this for a few hours, for a day sometimes. For a few it was for months and even years.

The policeman looked up from the computer with his white crewcut, his battered nose, his cigarette.

“Someone told me your name is McGittrick,” I said.

“If that name pleases you…” he shrugged.

“In other words I’m making you up as I go along.”

“Somewhere inside you knew someone oversaw the intersection of one world and the next. First you put a face on that one. Now you’ve found a name for me. Mostly I don’t deal personally with people in your situation. I don’t have to because they aren’t aware of me.

“We could keep you in a coma for as long as you live. Instead we are sending you back a changed man,” he told me. “You’ll never be able to forget what you’ve seen and you’ll never again accept the waking world as the real one.”

I had been going to ask him what he wanted. Instead, I had awakened to find Nurse Horton.

In the bright early morning in the hospital, he showed me a new button on my IV stand. “You press that when you feel any discomfort and the painkiller is injected directly into your bloodstream,” he told me. You can do that at five-minute intervals whenever you feel you need to. I’ll be back to see you very shortly.”

I held his arm and said, “Please don’t go away. I saw this guy just before I came to. The nurse upstairs called him McGittrick. He said they were using my mind while I was unconscious, that he could keep me in a coma for as long as I lived.”

He smiled. “Well you tell McGittrick to back off. You’re my patient. We have you now and we’re not letting go. We’re going to get you cleaned up and I’d like you to walk a little some time today.”

An orderly came in and took my temperature. One of the young doctors who had assisted in the surgery came by. “Things went very well. We’re confident we removed the obstruction. We opened you up along the old cancer surgery scar. We didn’t find any cancer this time.”

Another orderly took blood. Scott returned and the two of them helped me sit up and put my feet over the edge of the bed. “You’re doing great,” he said and the orderly agreed. I slid off the bed and my feet found the floor.

The orderly pushed the IV stand. Scott held me. I walked around the room. The sun was shining outside.

“I think I can do this by myself,” I said. They made me take hold of the handle bar. I pushed it out the door and into the hallway and back again.

“Very good,” they told me, and I lay down on the bed. I was sitting propped up when my sister and brother-in-law came in. My surgeon dropped by in her red suit and talked with us. Everyone seemed very pleased.

When I was alone, Scott brought me some paper and a pen that I asked for. He sat with me for a little while, told me that he was thirty-three years old, that he came from a town outside Boston and lived now in Chelsea within walking distance of the hospital. I wondered who he lived with but didn’t ask.

I wrote Scott a rambling thank you note/love letter and added at the end of it, “People who have hallucinations after operations sometimes don’t seem to come all the way back. Part of them gets lost. The hallucination can be at least as good, as powerful and compelling and meaningful, as real life. Especially since real life is as a patient, the victim of a disease. The hallucination is so engrossing that they don’t want to leave it behind. I’m afraid that will happen with me.”

Scott had gone off duty by the time I finished writing. I spent a very bad night in the recovery ward. People were waxing the floor, cleaning the walls. The nurses were slow to respond. Being awake was a nightmare.

Then McGittrick was with me. “You’re not supposed to talk about what I’ve told you, asshole,” he said. “That other time, you wrote that book about the world where people dying of cancer could become gods. But you made it science fiction and anyway nobody read it so that was okay.

“That young nurse who thinks he’s so tough? ‘We have you now and we’re not letting go,’ he says. When his time comes he will be ours and he won’t even know it’s happened.”

“What’s the point of all this?” I asked.

“You know how people when dying feel themselves drawn toward some kind of glowing light? They find it comforting. Well those globes floating in the flickering brain, the warm light of death and the promise of peace is you and all the other assholes hooked up to machines, each contributing his or her little bit. Last night you were part of the light dying souls were drawn toward. That’s one of the things we do.”

“Why an old cop, why not an angel with a fiery sword?”

“You don’t believe in angels. You have a thing for the law. Your kind usually shows that by being bad and getting caught. The cuffs go on and you swoon. You were too bright to get a criminal record. Our reports say you have promise.”

“Before the operation you were threatening me with mutilation. Now…”

“I’m going to offer you my job.”

“Right,” I said. “But you don’t exist. You told me so.”

He seemed a bit amused. “That’s not as big a deal as you make it seem.”

“And the phony charges?”

“Could also not be a big deal. That depends on you.”

13.

Then he was gone and it was morning. The door of my room was open, the cleaning crew had departed, and the hospital was waking up. Pain had begun to gnaw at my guts. I hit the button, waited a few minutes, and then hit it again.

Scott walked by and I called him. He had just come on duty. He had other patients but he stopped for me. “How are you?”

“Bad night.” I wanted to tell him about the men endlessly cleaning the floor and the smell of ammonia but I didn’t.

“Did McGittrick talk to you again?”

“Sorry I bothered you about that. I feel stupid.” What I was sorry about was having brought him to McGittrick’s attention.

“It’s why I’m here. We’re going to get you ready to return to your ward. I want you to walk before then.”

Later when he was watching me push my IV stand around Recovery, I asked him, “Does everybody in this hospital know about McGittrick?”

He grinned. “If they worked with Mary Collins they do. I started out with her.”

When they came to take me back upstairs Scott said good-bye and I knew it was unlikely I’d ever see him again. Unless, of course, I took McGittrick up on his offer.

When I returned to the twelfth floor, I was in a new room all by myself. Jamine was gone. Even Nurse Yang, busy with her current patients, barely remembered him. That’s how it would be with me.

I hit the painkiller button, got up, and walked. I needed the pole to lean on a little. Nurses and orderlies nodded their approval. I was a model patient, a teacher’s pet.

When my phone rang it was my godchild Chris planning to come in from Ohio and stay with me after I got out of the hospital. Friends came by. Flowers got delivered. I fell asleep, exhausted.

It was getting dark when I awoke and there was commotion and a gigantic man was wheeled in. “Purple,” he said. “Don’t go far from me, girl.” My new roommate had a private healthcare worker. He called her Purple which wasn’t her name and which made her quite angry.

He sang Prince songs. He called people by names he’d given them. He told me he was an architect who had stepped through a door in a half-finished building he’d designed and fallen two floors because there was no floor on the other side. All the bones in his feet had been shattered. It took the healthcare worker and all the orderlies on the floor to help him change his position in the bed.

At one point I dozed off but awoke to hear a Jamaican orderly whom he called Tangerine, saying, “I do not have to take this. I will be treated with respect. My name to you is Mrs. Jackson.”

“Oh Tangerine!” he cried in a despairing voice.

I hit the pain button, got up, and walked to the window overlooking Seventh Avenue. In the night, the streetlights turned from red to green.

McGittrick’s face danced on the window in front of me. A computer screen on a nearby station counter faced the window and was reflected on the dark glass.

When I turned to look the computer screen was blank. I turned back and the face was there. It might have been the drugs or I may have been asleep on my feet. But as hard as I looked McGittrick remained.

Then Jamine’s face appeared on the screen. McGittrick said, “He stands out kind of the way you did, flirting with death but afraid of it. Bear in mind that if you don’t work for us someone else will — maybe him.”

“What exactly would I do?”

“Be around; make sure all is running as it should. Be a cop,” he said. “Think it over.”

“Okay. But when I sleep from now on, you have to stay out of my dreams.”

“You’re not dreaming. It’s just easier to reach you when you’re asleep. But we’ll give you a little time to consider.”

When I came back to my own ward, the nurses at the desk, as if they sensed something about me, looked up as I passed by. When I went into my room the architect was crooning a song to his caregiver who was telling him to shut up.

They stopped when they saw me and I wondered if I was marked somehow.

“Look,” I said, “I’m recovering from major surgery. I need to sleep.” They stared at me, nodded and were quiet. I hit the painkiller button and hit it again every few minutes until I drifted away.

14.

I awoke and it was morning. The architect, quite deferentially, asked if I had slept well. “I made sure all these ladies kept very quiet so you could rest and get better.”

This guy was a harmless lunatic with none of Jamine’s vibes. I thanked him.

Then Mrs. Jackson helped me wash up and I was taken for x-rays. When I returned the architect was gone, brought to another ward for physical therapy, Nurse Collins said.

She was on duty and had come in to check on me. “You’re doing well,” she said. “They didn’t get you this time.”

“Who was Immaculata? Who is McGittrick?”

“I don’t think she was any kind of angel and I don’t think he’s a banshee because I don’t believe in them. Ones like that lurk in the cracks of every hospital there ever was. Most places they don’t even know about it anymore. But they still have them. Give them the back of your hand.”

I’d begun feeling that if I performed certain tasks — walked rapidly three times around the floor, say, then I was practically recovered.

That night I paused on my rounds and looked out the window. The Greenwich Village crowds on a Friday night in spring reminded me of the rush of being twenty and in the city. I thought of Andre and how I’d lost him just before I got sick.

McGittrick was reflected in the window “You know,” he said. “That guy that got away might still be with you if you’d been well when his friend called. We can let you replay that scene.” Cops offer candy when they believe you’re beginning to soften and cooperate. But they still can’t be trusted.

“I enjoy the sweet melancholy of affairs gone by,” I said. “I’d like to be with Andre as if nothing ever happened. But I’d know that wasn’t true and wouldn’t be able to stand it.” As I headed back to my room, I said, “Thanks, though.”

As I hit the pain button, a young guy who’d had an emergency appendectomy was brought into the room. He lay quietly, breathing deep unconscious breaths. I passed into sleep remembering moments when someone with whom I’d made love fell into slumber like this just before I did.

15.

The next morning was a Saturday. A resident and a nurse came in and drew a curtain around my bed. They detached me from the catheter, pulled the feeding tube out of my throat and out through my nose.

That morning I ate liquids for the first time since I’d been there. Everything tasted awful. I forced myself to eat a little JELL-O, drink clear soup and apple juice because that was the way to get better.

Dale, my roommate, cast no aura, had no vibes that I could feel. He was twenty-seven, a film editor who had collapsed in horrible pain on Friday night. He was getting out later that day. His insurance paid for no more than that.

After ten days in the hospital, I was a veteran and showed him how to push his IV rack, how to ring for a nurse.

Mark came by. I told him, “When I wrote Feral Cell, I had the narrator drink blood. Blood of the Goat binds him to the alternate world, Capricorn. Blood of the Crab binds him here. As one world fades the other gets clearer. What I was writing about was being sick. It’s like this other country. You get pulled in there without wanting to and have to haul your ass out.”

He said, “Remember first coming to the city and how hard it was to stick here? Like at any moment the job, the apartment you were sharing, the best friend, the lover would all come loose and you’d be sucked back to Metuchen or Doylestown or Portsmouth. Kind of the same thing.”

The roommate was on the phone. “It felt like a bad movie, waking up and finding all these people staring down at me. The guy in here with me is this amazing Village character.”

He was still on the phone when his lovely Korean girlfriend came in with his clothes. She took his gown off him as he stood talking and dressed him from his skin out. It bothered me that he was getting out and I was still inside. As they left, he turned, waved good-bye, and grinned because he was young and this was all an adventure. I had more in common with Jamine than with this kid.

That evening, I was served a horrible dish of pasta and chicken but it was a test of my recovery and I ate a bit of it.

That night McGittrick said, “If it’s not love that interests you, how about revenge? Ones who screwed you around when you were a kid? You wrote a story about that. We can go deep into the past. You could go back and make sure they never did that to anyone else.”

I shook my head. “The one I most wanted to kill was myself. It took a long time to untangle that. This is who I am,” I told him. “I’m turning down your offer.”

He smiled and shook his head like my stupidity amused him. On the screen, I knelt blindfolded in the desert. “Did you forget about that?” he asked as I walked away.

16.

Sunday morning, as I tried to choke down tasteless jelly on dry toast, a guy named John was brought in to have kidney stones removed. He was tall, thin, and long-haired, almost my age. “I was born on Bank Street, lived in the Village my whole life,” he told me.

There was something in the face with its five o’clock shadow and hawk nose that looked familiar. He was an archetype: the guy who held the dope, the guy who hid the gun, the guy who knew how to get in the back way. He was like Jamine. Like me.

It was confirmed that I was going home the next day. At one point that afternoon my niece walked with me around the floor. When we came to the window on Seventh Avenue, I looked around and realized there’s no way that a computer screen could be reflected from the desk onto the glass.

“Thank you,” I told Margaret Yang later. “You people gave me a life transfusion.”

“We just did our job. You are an interesting patient,” she said. That night when I stopped and looked out, the traffic was a Sunday night dribble without any magic at all.

17.

The next morning, I awoke with the memory of a visitor. The night before I had opened my eyes and seen Sister Immaculata. “I’m disappointed,” she told me. “That you aren’t willing to give others the same chance that was given to you.”

“What chance was that?” I asked.

“You were a stumbling wayfarer,” she said. “We helped you survive in the hope you would eventually help us.”

“What is it that you do?”

“Hope and Easeful Death,” she said with a radiant smile and I realized that I trusted cops more than nuns.

That morning they disconnected me from the last of my attachments. The IV pole was wheeled away.

John was about to go down to the operating room. He would spend this day in the hospital and then be released the next.

“You ever go to Washington Square Park?” he asked. “Look for me around the chess tables in the southwest corner.”

Then my friend Bruce was there, pulling my stuff together, helping me get my pants on, tying my shoes for me. I was in my own clothes and feeling kind of lost.

Nurse Collins was on duty. “Good luck,” she said as I passed the desk for the last time. She looked at me for a long moment. “And let’s hope we see no more of you in here.”

The taxi ride home took only a few minutes. The flight of stairs to my apartment was the first I had climbed in almost two weeks and I had to stop and rest halfway up.

I’d thought that when I got out of the hospital I would magically be well, and had a hundred errands to do. Bruce insisted I get undressed again and helped me into bed.

“When what they gave you in there wears off,” he said. “You will feel like you’ve been hit by a fist the size of a horse.”

He filled my prescriptions for Oxycontin and antibiotics, bought me food we thought I could eat, lay on my couch and looked at a book of Paul Cadmus’s art he’d found on my shelves. I dozed and awoke and dozed some more. People called and asked how I was. A friend brought by a huge basket of fruit.

Bruce taped the phone extension cord to the floor so that I wouldn’t trip on it: more than any other single thing that spelled old age and sickness to me. It struck me as I fell asleep that Bruce was HIV positive and taking a cocktail of drugs to stay alive, yet I was so feeble he was taking care of me.

The second day Bruce came by in the morning, watched to make sure I didn’t fall down in the shower, helped me get dressed, and went with me for a little walk. The third day I got myself dressed.

Late that night, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was a stranger’s face, thin with huge eyes. This was a taste of what very old age would be like. I missed the large ever-present organization devoted to making me better. My life felt flat without the spice of hallucination and paranoia.

The next day my godson Chris came to stay with me. That year we both had works in nomination for a major speculative fiction award. The ceremonies were to be held in New York City.

We were in different categories, fortunately. It was on my mind that if I could attend the ceremonies and all the related events, it would mean I had passed a critical test and was well.

Chris was shocked at first seeing me, though he tried to hide it. When one person is in his sixties and sick and the other less than half his age and well their pace of life differs.

He adapted to mine, walked slowly around the neighborhood with me, sat in the park on the long sunny afternoons, ate in my favorite restaurants where to me the food all tasted like chalk now, read me stories.

The awards that weekend were in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. All the magic of speculative fiction is on the pages and in the cover art. The physical reality is dowdy. Internet photos of the book signing and reception show Chris happy and mugging and me fading out of the picture. Like those sketches Renaissance artists did of youth and old age.

As the awards ceremony dragged on I realized I’d be unable to walk to the dais if I won. I needn’t have worried. A luminary of the field, quite remarkably drunk, after complaining bitterly that he for once hadn’t been nominated, mangled all names and titles beyond recognition, then presented the award to the excellent writer who won. When it was over I rode home in a cab and went to bed.

Chris was nice enough to stay on and keep me company. One day as we walked into the park I saw John, my last roommate at the hospital. Looking as gray and thin as I did, he sat at a chess table in the southwest corner of Washington Square. The chess players share that space with drug dealers and hustlers.

I said hello. He nodded very slightly and I realized he was at work and that he was a spotter.

The spotters are paid to warn dealers if the heat is on the prowl or tip them off that a customer is at hand. I glanced back and saw John watching me.

One evening I took Chris to see a play that was running at a theater around the corner from my place. As we walked down narrow, old Minetta Lane, kids on motorized wheelchairs rolled past the Sixth Avenue end of the lane.

For a moment I saw Jamine. Then I wasn’t sure and then they were gone.

One day on the street we found a guy selling candid black and white photos that his father had taken fifty, forty, thirty years ago on the streets of Greenwich Village. One shot taken from an upstairs window on West Tenth Street and dated 1968 showed the Ninth Circle Bar with young guys in tight jeans and leather jackets standing on the front stairs. I felt a rush of déjà vu.

That night on a website I saw that scene again, the street, the stairs, the figures. But this time there was a close-up. The kid in the center of the group was me. The other guys were my partners in crime from the dream.

I clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was a figure in a motorized wheelchair rolling up Minetta Lane toward the camera. My face was a twisted mask. My hands were claws. I was ancient and partially paralyzed: the ultimate nightmare.

“You see how long we’ve been keeping an eye on you. And how long we’ll keep it up,” McGittrick said and I awoke in the dawn light.

That evening when Chris and I kissed good-bye at Penn Station and he went off on the airport train, I felt the most incredible loneliness and loss. He’d been sharing his energy and youth with me and now I was on my own again.

Back downtown, I sat on a bench in Washington Square in the May twilight. Dogs yapped in the runs. As the light went away a jazz quintet played “These Foolish Things.”

McGittrick stood studying me. “Why,” I asked, “was it necessary to screw my head around as you’ve been doing?”

“Think of it as boot camp. Break you down, rebuild you. Would the you who went to sleep the night before you got sick have sat in a public park having this conversation?”

“How did you get into this racket?”

He smiled, “Immaculata recruited me. Said I was a restless soul that wouldn’t be happy unless I got to see a little more of life and death than others did.”

“And now?”

“I’m ready to move on. You’ll understand when you’re in my place.”

My guts, where they had been cut open and stapled back together, still hurt a little. I’d pretty much tapered off the medication but I needed to go home and take half an oxycontin tablet.

I arose and he asked, “Would you rather talk to Sister Immaculata?”

“That’s okay. You’re less scary than a nun.”

“You’ve got a while to decide,” he said. “But not, you know, for ever.”

I nodded and continued on my way. But we both knew how I’d decided.

Dowland wrote:

I had seen death and didn’t want to die. Maybe I was a restless soul or maybe I was too big a coward to face death all at once and forever.

From a little reading I’d done, some research on the Internet, I knew that injury or illness actually can change a personality. What I’d always feared had happened. The one who had gone to sleep that night a few weeks before had awakened as someone else.

And I now was different enough from the one I had been that I didn’t much care about that person who now was lost and gone.

I CROUCHED IN THE rain with a gun.

A wave climbed the pebbly beach, washing over my foot, filling my pants with grit and sand. Around me, the rocks loomed black and big as houses.

I shivered as I came back to myself and for the first time realized my suit jacket was missing. Also my left shoe, brown leather, size twelve. I looked for the shoe, scanning the rocky shoreline, but saw only stone and frothy, sliding water.

I took another pull from the bottle and tried to loosen my tie. Since I had a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other — and since I was unwilling to surrender either — loosening my tie was difficult. I used the gun hand, working the knot with a finger looped through the trigger guard, cold steel brushing my throat. I felt the muzzle under my chin — fingers numb and awkward, curling past the trigger.

It would be so easy.

I wondered if people have died this way — drunk, armed, loosening their ties. I imagined it was common among certain occupations.

Then the tie opened, and I hadn’t shot myself. I took a drink from the bottle as reward.

The waves rumbled in. This place was nothing like the dunes of Indiana, where Lake Michigan makes love to the shoreline. Here in Gloucester, the water hates the land.

As a child, I’d come to this beach and wondered where all the boulders came from. Did the tides carry them in? Now I knew better. The boulders, of course, were here all along — buried in soft soils. They are left-behind things. They are what remains when the ocean subtracts everything else.

Behind me, near the road, there is a monument — a list of names. Fishermen. Gloucestermen. The ones who did not come back.

This is Gloucester, a place with a history of losing itself to the ocean.

I told myself I’d brought the gun for protection, but sitting here in the dark sand, I no longer believed it. I was beyond fooling myself. It was my father’s gun, a .357. It had not been fired for sixteen years, seven months, four days. Even drunk, the math came quickly.

My sister Mary had called it a good thing, this new place that was also an old place. A new start, she’d said. You can do your work again. You can continue your research.

Yeah, I’d said. A lie she believed.

You won’t call me, will you?

Of course I’ll call. A lie she didn’t.

I turned my face away from the wind and took another burning swig. I drank until I couldn’t remember which hand held the gun and which the bottle. I drank until they were the same.

During the second week, we unpacked the microscopes. Satish used a crowbar while I used a claw hammer. The crates were heavy, wooden, hermetically sealed — shipped in from some now-defunct research laboratory in Pennsylvania.

The sun beat down on the lab’s loading dock, and it was nearly as hot today as it was cold the week before.

I swung my arm, and the claw hammer bit into the pale wood. I swung again. It was satisfying work. Satish saw me wipe the perspiration from my forehead, and he smiled, straight white teeth in a straight dark face.

“In India,” he said, “this is sweater weather.”

Satish slid the crowbar into the gash I made, and pressed. I’d known him for three days, and already I was his friend. Together we committed violence on the crates until they yielded.

The industry was consolidating, the Pennsylvania lab the latest victim. Their equipment came cheap. Here at Hansen, it was like Christmas for scientists. We opened our boxes. We ogled our new toys. We wondered, vaguely, how we had come to deserve this. For some, like Satish, the answer was complicated and rooted in achievement. Hansen was more than just another Massachusetts think tank after all, and Satish had beaten out a dozen other scientists to work here. He’d given presentations and written up projects that important people liked. For me it was simpler.

For me this was a second chance given by a friend. A last chance.

We cracked open the final wooden crate, and Satish peered inside. He peeled out layer after layer of foam packing material. It was a big crate, but inside we found only a small assortment of Nalgene volumetric flasks, maybe three pounds weight. It was somebody’s idea of a joke — somebody at the now-defunct lab making a statement of opinion about their now-defunct job.

“The frog is in the well,” Satish said, one of his many opaque expressions.

“It certainly is,” I said.

There were reasons for moving here. There were reasons not to. They were the same reasons. Both had everything, and nothing, to do with the gun.

The lab gates are the first thing a person sees when driving up on the property. From the gates, you can’t see the building at all, which in the real estate sector surrounding Boston, speaks not just of money, but money. Everything out here is expensive, elbow room most of all.

The lab is tucked into a stony hillside about an hour upcoast of the city. It is a private, quiet place, shaded by trees. The building itself is beautiful — two stories of reflective glass spread over the approximate dimensions of a football field. What isn’t glass is matte black steel. It looks like art. A small, brick-paved turnaround curves up to the main entrance, but the front parking lot there is merely a decorative ornament — a small asphalt pad for visitors and the uninitiated. The driveway continues around the building where the real parking, the parking for the researchers, is in the back.

That first morning, I parked in front and walked inside.

A pretty blonde receptionist smiled at me. “Take a seat.”

Two minutes later, James rounded the corner and shook my hand. He walked me back to his office. And then came the offer, like this was just business — like we were just two men in suits. But I could see it in his eyes, that sad way he looked at me, my old friend.

He slid a folded sheet of paper across the desk. I unfolded it. Forced myself to make sense of the numbers.

“It’s too generous,” I said.

“We’re getting you cheap at that price.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not.”

“Considering your patents and your past work—”

I cut him off. “I can’t do that anymore.”

“I’d heard that. I’d hoped it wasn’t true.”

“If you feel I came here under false pretenses—” I began climbing to my feet.

“No, no.” He held his hand up to stop me. “The offer stands. We can carry you for four months.” He leaned back in his leather chair. “Probationary researchers get four months to produce. We pride ourselves on our independence; so you can choose whatever research you like, but after four months, it’s not up to me anymore. I have bosses, too; so you have to have something to show for it. Something publishable, or on its way to it. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“This can be a new start for you,” he said, and I knew then that he’d already talked to Mary. “You did some great work at QSR. I followed your publications; hell, we all did. But considering the circumstances under which you left…”

I nodded again. The inevitable moment.

He was silent, looking at me. “I’m going out on a limb for you,” he said. “But you’ve got to promise me.”

That was the closest he’d come to mentioning it.

I looked away. His office suited him, I decided. Not too large, but bright and comfortable. A Notre Dame engineering diploma graced one wall. Only his desk was pretentious — a teak monstrosity large enough to land aircraft on — but I knew it was inherited. His father’s old desk. I’d seen it once when we were still in college a dozen years ago. A lifetime ago.

“Can you promise me?” he asked.

I knew what he was asking. I met his eyes. Silence. And he was quiet for a long time after that, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. Weighing our friendship against the odds this would come back to bite him.

“All right,” he said finally. “You start tomorrow.”

There are days I don’t drink at all. Here is how those days start: I pull the gun from its holster and set it on the desk in my hotel room. The gun is heavy and black. It says Ruger along the side in small, raised letters. It tastes like pennies and ashes. I look into the mirror across from the bed and tell myself, If you drink today, you’re going to kill yourself. I look into my own gray eyes and see that I mean it.

Those are the days I don’t drink.

There is a rhythm to working in a research laboratory. Through the glass doors by 7:30, nodding to the other early arrivals, then sit in your office until 8:00, pondering this fundamental truth: even shit coffee — even mud-thick, brackish, walkin’-out-the-pot shit coffee is better than no coffee at all.

I like to be the one who makes the first pot in the morning. Swing open the cabinet doors in the coffee room, pop the tin cylinder and take a deep breath, letting the smell of grounds fill my lungs. It is better than drinking the coffee, that smell.

There are days when I feel everything is an imposition — eating, speaking, walking out of the hotel room in the morning. Everything is effort. I exist mostly in my head. It comes and goes, this crushing depression, and I work hard not to let it show, because the truth is that it’s not how you feel that matters. It’s how you act. It’s your behavior. As long as your intelligence is intact, you can make cognitive evaluations of what is appropriate. You can force the day to day.

And I want to keep this job; so I do force it. I want to get along. I want to be productive again. I want to make Mary proud of me.

Working at a research lab isn’t like a normal job. There are peculiar rhythms, strange hours — special allowances are made for the creatives.

Two Chinese guys are the ringleaders of lunchtime basketball. They pulled me into a game my first week. “You look like you can play,” was what they said.

One is tall, one is short. The tall one was raised in Ohio and has no accent. He is called Point Machine. The short one has no real idea of the rules of basketball, and for this reason, is the best defensive player. His fouls leave marks, and that becomes another game — a game within a game — to see how much abuse you can take without calling it. This is the real reason I play. I drive to the hoop and get hacked down. I drive again.

One player, a Norwegian named Umlauf, is six feet eight inches. I marvel at the sheer size of him. He can’t run or jump or move at all, really, but his big body clogs up the lane, huge arms swatting down any jump shot made within reach of his personal zone of asphalt real estate. We play four-on-four, or five-on-five, depending on who is free for lunch. At thirty-one, I’m a few years younger than most of them, a few inches taller — except for Umlauf, who is a head taller than everyone. Trash is talked in an assortment of accents.

Some researchers go to restaurants on lunch hour. Others play computer games in their offices. Still others work through lunch — forget to eat for days. Satish is one of those. I play basketball because it feels like punishment.

The atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system — you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you’ve got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent.

Satish works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he said.

A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it’s like looking at another world. What had been flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex. Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography — you’re up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you’ve been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you’re falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you’re going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never do hit the ground — like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, and never reaches the other side, not ever. That’s an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.

I zoomed in to 14,000X once. Like God’s eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.

Satish and I both had offices on the second floor.

Satish was short and thin. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His features were balanced in such a way that he could have been the fine, prodigal son of any number of nations: Mexico, or Libya, or Greece, or Sicily — until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick; and you could not imagine him being anything else.

The first time I met Satish, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then clapped me on the shoulder and said, “How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.

It was Satish who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “Make a point of it,” Satish said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”

I watched him work. He filled the SEM’s reservoir — icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down to the tile floor.

Liquid nitrogen doesn’t have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand and they’ll tend to bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you — like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you’re wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir, the nitrogen could spill down inside and be trapped against your skin. “And if that happens,” Satish said while he poured. “It will hurt you bad.”

Satish was the first to ask my area of research.

“I’m not sure,” I told him.

“How can you not be sure?”

I shrugged. “I’m just not.”

“You are here. It must be something.”

“I’m still working on it.”

He stared at me, taking this in, and I saw his eyes change — his understanding of me shifting, like the first time I heard him speak. And just like that, I’d become something different to him.

“Ah,” he said. “I know who you are now. You are the one from Stanford.”

“That was eight years ago.”

“You wrote that famous paper on de-coherence. You are the one who had the breakdown.”

Satish was blunt, apparently.

“I wouldn’t call it a breakdown.”

He nodded, perhaps accepting this; perhaps not. “So you still are working in quantum theory?”

“No, I stopped.”

“Why stop?”

“Quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview after a while.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The more research I did, the less I believed.”

“In quantum mechanics?”

“No. In the world.”

There are days when I don’t drink at all. On those days, I pick up my father’s .357 and look in the mirror. I convince myself what it will cost me, today, if I take the first sip. It will cost me what it cost him.

But there are also days I do drink. Those are the days I wake up sick. I walk into the bathroom and puke into the toilet, needing a drink so bad my hands are shaking. I look in the bathroom mirror and splash water in my face. I say nothing to myself. There is nothing I would believe.

It is Vodka in the morning. Vodka because vodka has no smell. A sip to calm the shakes. A sip to get me moving. If Satish knows, he says nothing.

Satish studied circuits. He bred them, in little ones and zeroes, in a Thomlin’s Field Programmable Gate Array. The array’s internal logic was malleable, and he allowed selective pressure to direct chip design. Genetic algorithms manipulated the best codes for the task. “Nothing is ideal,” he said. “There’s lots of modeling.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked.

Satish was a genius who had been a farmer in India until he came to America at the age of twenty-eight. He earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT. After that, Harvard, and patents, and job offers. “I am just a simple farmer,” he liked to say. “I like to challenge the dirt.”

Satish had endless expressions. When relaxed, he let himself lapse into broken English. Sometimes, after spending the morning with him, I’d fall into the pattern of his speech, talking his broken English back at him, an efficient pidgin that I came to respect for its streamlined efficiency and ability to convey nuance.

“I went to dentist yesterday,” Satish told me. “He says I have good teeth. I tell him ‘Forty-two years old, and it is my first time at dentist.’ And he could not believe.”

“You’ve never been to the dentist?” I said.

“No, never. Until I am in twelfth grade in my village back home, I did not know there was special doctor for teeth. I never went because I had no need. The dentist says I have good teeth, no cavities, but I have stain on my back molars on the left side where I chew tobacco.”

“I didn’t know you chewed.”

“I am ashamed. None of my brothers chew tobacco. Out of my family, I am the only one. I try to stop.” Satish spread his hands in exasperation. “But I cannot. I told my wife I stopped two months ago, but I started again, and I have not told her.” His eyes grew sad. “I am a bad person.”

Satish stared at me. “You are laughing,” he said. “Why are you laughing?”

Hansen was a gravity well in the tech industry — a constantly expanding force of nature, always buying out other labs, buying equipment, absorbing the competition.

Hansen labs only hired the best, without regard to national origin. It was the kind of place where you’d walk into the coffee room and find a Nigerian speaking German to an Iranian. Speaking German because they both spoke it better than English, the other language they had in common. Most of the engineers were Asian, though. It wasn’t because the best engineers were Asian — well, it wasn’t only because the best engineers were Asian. There were also simply more of them. America graduated four thousand engineers in 2008. China graduated more than three hundred thousand. And Hansen was always hungry for talent.

The Boston lab was just one of Hansen’s locations, but we had the largest storage facility, which meant that much of the surplus lab equipment ended up shipped to us. We opened boxes. We sorted through supplies. If we needed anything for our research, we signed for it, and it was ours. It was the opposite of academia, where every piece of equipment had to be expensed and justified and begged for.

Most mornings I spent with Satish. I helped him with his gate arrays. He talked of his children while he worked. Lunch I spent on basketball. Sometimes after basketball, I’d drop by Point Machine’s lab to see what he was up to. He worked with organics, searching for chemical alternatives that wouldn’t cause birth defects in amphibians. He tested water samples for cadmium, mercury, arsenic. Point Machine was a kind of shaman. He studied the gene expression patterns of amphioxus; he read the future in deformities.

“Unless something is done,” he said. “A generation from now, most amphibians will be extinct.” He had aquariums filled with frogs — frogs with too many legs, with tails, with no arms. Monsters.

Next to his lab was the office of a woman named Joy. Sometimes Joy would hear us talking and stop by, hand sliding along the wall — tall, and beautiful, and blind. Did acoustical research of some kind. She had long hair and high cheekbones — eyes so clear and blue and perfect that I didn’t even realize at first.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I get that a lot.” She never wore dark glasses, never used a white cane. “Detached retinas,” she explained. “I was three.”

In the afternoons, I tried to work.

Alone in my office, I stared at the marker board. The great white expanse of it. I picked up the marker, closed my eyes, wrote from memory.

When I looked at what I’d written, I threw the marker across the room.

James came by later that night. He stood in the doorway, cup of coffee in his hand. He saw the papers scattered across the floor. “It’s good to see you working on something,” he said.

“It’s not work.”

“It’ll come,” he said.

“No, I don’t think it will.”

“It just takes time.”

“Time is what I’m wasting here. Your time. This lab’s time.” Honesty welled up. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s fine, Eric,” he said. “We have researchers on staff who don’t have a third of your citings. You belong here.”

“It’s not like before. I’m not like before.”

James looked at me. That sad look back again. His voice was soft when he spoke. “R&D is a tax writeoff. At least finish out your contract. That gives you another two months. After that, we can write you up a letter of recommendation.”

That night in my hotel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. I imagined calling Mary, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. I imagined her voice on the other end.

Hello? Hello?

This numbness inside of me, strange gravity, the slow accretion of things I could have said, not to worry, things are fine; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself at the railing outside, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. Thunder advances from the east, from across the water, and I stand in the dark, waiting for life to be good again.

There is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I see myself outside myself, an angular shape cast in sodium lights — eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal. Because once you’ve learned something, you can’t unlearn it. Darwin once said that the serious study of math endows you with an extra sense, but what do you do when that sense contradicts your other senses?

My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness — the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else.

The lab.

Satish said, “Yesterday in my car I was talking to my daughter, five years old, and she says, ‘Daddy, please don’t talk.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I am praying. I need you to be quiet.’ So I asked her what she is praying about, and she said, ‘My friend borrowed my glitter ChapStick and I am praying she remembers to bring it back.’ ”

Satish was trying not to smile. We were in his office, eating lunch across his desk.

He continued. “I told her, well, maybe she is like me and she forgets. But my daughter says, ‘No, it has been more than one week now.’ ”

This amused Satish greatly — the talk of ChapStick, and the prayers of children. We finished our lunches.

“You eat the same thing every day,” I observed.

“I like rice,” he said.

“But every day?”

“You insult me. I am a simple man trying to save for my daughter’s college.” Satish spread his hands in mock outrage. “Do you think I am born with golden spoon?”

In the fourth week, I told him I wasn’t going to be hired after my probationary period.

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

His face grew serious. “You are certain?”

“Yeah.”

“In that case, do not worry.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Sometimes the boat just gets sink, my friend.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Did you just tell me that you win some and you lose some?”

Satish considered this. “Yes,” he said. “That is correct, except I did not mention the win part.”

During my fifth week at the lab, I found the box from Docent. It started as an e-mail from Bob, the shipping guy, saying there were some crates I might be interested in. Crates labeled “Physics,” sitting in the loading dock.

I went down to receiving and looked at the boxes. Got out the crowbar and opened them.

Three of the boxes were of no interest; they held only weights, scales, and glassware. But the fourth box was different. I stared into the fourth box for a long time.

I closed the box again and hammered the lid down with the edge of the crowbar. I went to Bob’s office and tracked down the shipping information. A company called Ingram had been bought by Docent a few years ago — and now Docent had been bought by Hansen. The box had been in storage the whole time.

I had the box taken to my office. Later that day, I signed for lab space, Room 271.

I was drawing on my marker board when Satish walked into my office.

“What is that?” he said, gesturing to what I’d written.

“It is my project.”

“You have a project now?”

“Yes.”

“That is good.” He smiled and shook my hand. “Congratulations, my friend. How did this wonderful thing happen?”

“It’s not going to change anything. Just busywork to give me something to do.”

“What is it?”

“You ever hear of the Feynman double-slit?” I asked.

“Physics? That is not my area, but I have heard of Young’s double-slit.”

“It’s the same thing, almost; only instead of light, they used a stream of electrons.” I patted the box on the table. “And a detector. The detector is key. The detector makes all the difference.”

Satish looked at the box. “The detector is in there?”

“Yeah, I found it in a crate today, along with a thermionic gun.”

“A gun?”

“A thermionic gun. An electron gun. Obviously part of a replication trial.”

“You are going to use this gun?”

I nodded. “Feynman once said, ‘Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can be explained by saying, You remember the case of the experiment with two holes? It’s the same thing.’ ”

“Why are you going to do this project?”

“I want to see what Feynman saw.”

Autumn comes quick to the East Coast. It is a different animal out here, where the trees take on every color of the spectrum, and the wind has teeth. As a boy, before the moves and the special schools, I’d spent an autumn evening camped out in the woods behind my grandparents’ house. Lying on my back, staring up at the leaves as they drifted past my field of vision.

It was the smell that brought it back so strong — the smell of fall, as I walked to the parking lot. Joy stood near the roadway, waiting for her cab.

The wind gusted, making the trees dance. She turned her collar against the wind, oblivious to the autumn beauty around her. For a moment, I felt pity for that. To live in New England and not see the leaves.

I climbed into my rental. I idled. No cab passed through the gates. No cab followed the winding drive. I was about to pull away, but at the last second spun the wheel and pulled up to the turnaround.

“Is there a problem with your ride?” I asked her.

“I’m not sure. I think there might be.”

“Do you need a lift home?”

“I’ll be okay.” She paused. Then, “You don’t mind?”

“It’s fine, seriously.”

She climbed in and shut the door. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drive.”

“I wasn’t doing much anyway.”

“Left at the gate,” she said.

She guided me by stops. She didn’t know the street names, but she counted the intersections, guiding me to the highway, blind leading the blind. The miles rolled by.

Boston. A city that hasn’t forgotten itself. A city outside of time. Crumbling cobblestones and modern concrete. Road names that existed before the Redcoats invaded. It is easy to lose yourself, to imagine yourself lost, while winding through the hilly streets.

Outside the city proper, there is stone everywhere, and trees — soft pine and colorful deciduous. I saw a map in my head, Cape Cod jutting into the Atlantic. The cape is a curl of land positioned so perfectly to protect Boston that it seems a thing designed. If not by man, then by God. God wanted a city where Boston sits.

The houses, I know, are expensive beyond all reason. It is a place that defies farming. Scratch the earth, and a rock will leap out and hit you. People build stone walls around their properties so they’ll have someplace to put the stones.

At her apartment, I pulled to a stop, walked her to her door, like this was a date. Standing next to her, she was almost as tall as me — maybe 5’11”, too thin, and we were at the door, her empty blue eyes focused on something far away until she looked at me, looked, and I could swear for a moment that she saw me.

Then her eyes glided past my shoulder, focused again on some dim horizon.

“I’m renting now,” she said. “Once my probationary period is over, I’ll probably buy a condo closer to work.”

“I didn’t realize you were new to Hansen, too.”

“I actually hired in the week after you. I’m hoping to stay on.”

“Then I’m sure you will.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “At least my research is cheap. It is only me and my ears. Can I entice you in for coffee?”

“I should be going, but another time perhaps.”

“I understand.” She extended her hand. “Another time then. Thank you for the ride.”

I turned to go, but her voice stopped me. “James said you were brilliant.”

I turned. “He told you that?”

“Not me. I talk with his secretary, and James has spoken about you a lot, apparently — your days in college. But I have a question before you go. Something I was wondering.”

“Okay.”

She brought her hand up to my cheek. “Why are the brilliant ones always so screwed-up?”

I said nothing, looking into those eyes.

“You need to be careful,” she said. “The alcohol. I can smell it on you some mornings. If I can smell it, so can others.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No. Somehow I don’t think you will.”

The lab.

Satish stood in front of the diagram I’d drawn on my white board.

I watched him studying it. “What is this?” he asked.

“The wave-particle duality of light.”

“And these lines?”

“This is the wave part,” I said, pointing at the diagram. “Fire a photon stream through two adjacent slits, and the waves create an image on the phosphorescent screen behind the slits. The frequencies of the waves zero-sum each other at certain intervals, and a characteristic interference pattern is captured on the screen. Do you see?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But if you put a detector at the two slits…” I began drawing another picture under the first. “Then it changes everything. When the detectors are in place, light stops behaving like a wave and starts acting like a particle series.”

I continued. “So instead of an interference pattern, you get two distinct clusters of phosphorescence where the particles pass through the slits and contact the screen.”

“Yes, I remember now,” Satish said. “This is familiar. I believe there was a chapter on this in grad school.”

“In grad school, I taught this. And I watched the students’ faces. The ones who understood what it meant — who truly understood — always looked troubled by it. I could see it in their expressions, the pain of believing something which can’t be true.”

“This is a famous experiment. You are planning to replicate?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? It has already been replicated many times; no journal will publish.”

“I know. I’ve read papers on the phenomena; I’ve given class lectures on the details; I understand it mathematically. Hell, most of my earlier research is based on the assumptions that came out of this experiment. But I’ve never actually seen it with my eyes. That’s why.”

“It is science.” Satish shrugged. “You don’t need to see it.”

“I think I do,” I said. “Need to. Just once.”

The next few weeks passed in a blur. Satish helped me with my project, and I helped him with his. We worked mornings in his lab. Evenings we spent in Room 271, setting up. The phosphorescent plate was a problem — then the alignment of the thermionic gun. In a way, it felt like we were partners, almost, Satish and I. And it was a good feeling. After working so long by myself, it was good to be able to talk to someone.

We traded stories to pass the time. Satish talked of his problems. They were the problems good men sometimes have when they’ve lived good lives. He talked about helping his daughter with her homework, and worrying about paying for her college. He talked of his family backhome — saying it fast that way, backhome, so you heard the proper noun; and he talked of the fields, and the bugs, and the monsoon, and the ruined crops. “It is going to be a bad year for sugar cane,” he told me, as if we were farmers instead of researchers. He talked about his mother’s advancing years. He talked of his brothers, and his sisters, and his nieces and nephews; and I came to understand the weight of responsibility he felt.

Bending over the gate arrays, soldering tool in hand, he told me, “I talk too much, you must be sick of my voice.”

“Not at all.”

“You have been a big help me with my work. How can I ever repay you, my friend?”

“Money is fine,” I told him. “I prefer large bills.”

I wanted to tell him of my life. I wanted to tell him of my work at QSR, and that some things you learn, you wish you could unlearn. I wanted to tell him that memory has gravity, and madness a color; that all guns have names, and it is the same name. I wanted to tell him I understood about his tobacco; that I’d been married once, and it hadn’t worked out; that I used to talk softly to my father’s grave; that it was a long time since I’d really been okay.

Instead of telling him these things, I talked about the experiment. That I could do. Always could do.

“It started a half-century ago as a thought experiment,” I told him. “To prove the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Physicists felt quantum mechanics couldn’t be the whole story, because the math takes too many liberties with reality. There was still that impossible contradiction: the photoelectric effect required light be particulate; Young’s results showed it to be a wave. Only later, of course, when the technology finally caught up to the theory, it turned out the experimental results followed the math. The math says you can either know the position of an electron, or the momentum, but never both. The math, it turned out, wasn’t metaphor at all. The math was dead serious. The math wasn’t screwing around.”

Satish nodded like he understood.

Later, working on his gate arrays, he traded his story for mine.

“There once was a guru who brought four princes into the forest,” he told me. “They were hunting birds.”

“Birds,” I said.

“Yes, and up in the trees, they see one, a beautiful bird with bright feathers. The first prince said, ‘I will shoot the bird,’ and he pulled back on his arrow and shot into the trees. But the arrow missed. Then the second prince tried to shoot, and he, too, missed. Then the third prince. Finally the fourth prince shot high into the trees, and this time the arrow struck and the beautiful bird fell dead. The guru looked at the first three princes and said, ‘Where were you aiming?’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘The guru looked at the fourth prince, ‘And you?’

“‘At the bird’s eye.’”

Once the equipment was set up, the alignment was the last hurdle to be cleared. The electron gun had to be aimed so the electron was just as likely to go through either slit. The equipment filled most of the room — an assortment of electronics and screens and wires.

In the mornings, in the hotel room, I talked to the mirror, made promises to gunmetal eyes. And by some miracle did not drink.

One day became two. Two became three. Three became five. Then I hadn’t had a drink in a week.

At the lab, the work continued. When the last piece of equipment was positioned, I stood back and surveyed the whole setup, heart beating in my chest, standing at the edge of some great universal truth. I was about to be witness to something few people in the history of the world had ever seen.

When the first satellite was launched toward the deep space in 1977, it carried a special golden record of coded messages. The record held diagrams and mathematical formulas. It carried the image of a fetus, the calibration of a circle, and a single page from Newton’s System of the World. It carried the units of our mathematical system, because mathematics, we’re told, is the universal language. I’ve always felt that golden record should have carried a diagram of this experiment, the Feynman double-slit.

Because this experiment is more fundamental than math. It is what lives under the math. It tells of reality itself.

Richard Feynman said this about the slit experiment: “It has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In truth, it contains only mystery.”

Room 271 held two chairs, a marker board, a long lab bench, and several large tables. I’d hung dark canvas over the windows to block out the light. The setup sprawled across the length of the room.

Slits had been cut into sheets of steel that served to divide the areas of the setup. The phosphorescent screen was loaded into a small rectangular box behind the second set of slits.

James came by a little after 5:00, just before going home for the evening.

“They told me you signed up for lab space,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He stepped inside the room. “What is this?” he said, gesturing to the equipment.

“Just old equipment from Docent. No one was using it, so I thought I’d see if I could get it to work.”

“What are you planning exactly?”

“Replicating results, nothing new. The Feynman double-slit.”

He was quiet for a moment. “It’s good to see you working on something, but isn’t that a little dated?”

“Good science is never dated.”

“But what are you expecting to prove?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

The day we ran the experiment, the weather was freezing. The wind gusted in from the ocean, and the East Coast huddled under a cold front. I got to work early and left a note on Satish’s desk.

I did not explain it to Satish. I did not explain further.

Satish walked through the door of room 271 a little before 9:00, and I gestured toward the button. “Would you like to do the honors?”

We stood motionless in the near-darkness of the lab. Satish studied the apparatus spread out before him. “Never trust engineer who doesn’t walk his own bridge.”

I smiled. “Okay then.” I hit the button. The machine hummed.

I let it run for a few minutes before walking over to check the screen. I opened the top and looked inside. And then I saw it, what I’d been hoping to see. The experiment had produced a distinctive banded pattern, an interference pattern on the screen. Just like Young, just like the Copenhagen interpretation said it would.

Satish looked over my shoulder. The machine continued to hum, deepening the pattern as we watched.

“Would you like to see a magic trick?” I asked.

He nodded solemnly.

“Light is a wave,” I told him.

I reached for the detector and hit the “on” switch — and just like that, the interference pattern disappeared.

“Unless someone is watching.”

The Copenhagen interpretation posits this: Observation is a principle requisite of reality. Nothing exists until it is first observed. Until then there are only probability waves. Only possibility.

For purposes of the experiment, these waves describe the probability of a particle being found at any given location between the electron gun and the screen. Until a particle is detected by some consciousness at a specific point along the wave, its location remains theoretical. Therefore, until a particle is observed passing through one slit, it could be equally anticipated to pass through either — and thus will actually propagate through both in the form of probability waves. These wave systems interfere with each other at regular intervals and thereby assemble a visible interference pattern on the capture screen behind the slits. But if a particle is detected by an observer at one slit, then that excludes the possibility of it passing through the other; and if it can’t propagate through both, it can’t compile an interference pattern.

This would seem self-contradictory, except for one thing. Except that the interference pattern disappears if someone is watching.

We ran the experiment again and again. Satish checked the detector results, being careful to note which slit the electrons passed through. With the detectors turned on, roughly half the electrons were recorded passing through each slit, and no interference pattern accrued. We turned the detectors off again — and again, instantly, the interference pattern emerged on the screen.

“How does the system know?” Satish asked.

“How does it know what?”

“That the detectors are on. How does it know the electron’s position has been recorded?”

“Ah, the big question.”

“Are the detectors putting out some kind of electromagnetic interference?”

I shook my head. “You haven’t seen the really weird stuff yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“The electrons aren’t really responding to the detectors at all. They’re responding to the fact that you’ll eventually read the detectors’ results.”

Satish looked at me, blank-faced.

“Turn the detectors back on,” I said.

Satish hit the button. The detectors hummed softly. We let the experiment run.

“It is just like before,” I told him. “The detectors are on, so the electrons should be acting as particles, not waves; and without waves, there’s no interference pattern, right?”

Satish nodded.

“Okay, turn it off.”

The machine cycled down to silence.

“And now the magic test,” I said. “This is the one. This is the one I wanted to see.”

I hit the “clear” button on the detector, erasing the results.

“The experiment was the same as before.” I said. “With the same detectors turned on both times. The only difference was that I erased the results without looking at them. Now check the screen.”

Satish opened the box and pulled out the screen.

And then I saw it. On his face. The pain of believing something which can’t be true.

“An interference pattern,” he said. “How could that be?”

“It’s called retrocausality. By erasing the results after the experiment was run, I caused the particle pattern to never have occurred in the first place.”

Satish was silent for five full seconds. “Is such a thing possible?”

“Of course not, but there it is. Unless a conscious observer makes an ascertainment of the detector results, the detector itself will remain part of the larger indeterminate system. The detectors don’t induce wave function collapse; consciousness observation does. Consciousness is like this giant roving spotlight, collapsing reality wherever it shines — and what isn’t observed remains probability. And it’s not just photons or electrons. It is everything. All matter. It is a flaw in reality. A testable, repeatable, flaw in reality.”

Satish said, “So this is what you wanted to see?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it different for you now that you’ve actually seen it?”

I considered this for a moment, exploring my own mind. “Yes, it is different,” I said. “It is much worse.”

We ran the slit experiment again and again. The results never changed. They matched perfectly the results that Feynman had documented decades earlier. Over the next two days, Satish hooked the detectors up to a printer. We ran the tests, and I hit print. We listened as the printer buzzed and chirped, printing out the results.

Satish pored over the data sheets as if to make sense of them by sheer force of will. I stared over his shoulder, a voice in his ear. “It’s like an unexplored law of nature,” I said. “Quantum physics as a form of statistical approximation — a solution to the storage problem of reality. Matter behaves like a frequency domain. Why resolve the data fields nobody is looking at?”

Satish put the sheets down and rubbed his eyes.

“There are schools of mathematical thought which assert that a deeper order lies enfolded just below the surface of our lives. Bohm called it the implicate.”

“We have a name for this, too,” Satish said. He smiled. “We call it Brahman. We’ve known about it for five thousand years.”

“I want to try something,” I said.

We ran the test again. I printed up the results, being careful not to look at them. We turned off the equipment.

I folded both pages in half and slid them into manila envelopes. I gave Satish the envelope with the screen results. I kept the detector results. “I haven’t looked at the detector results yet,” I told him. “So right now the wave function is still a superposition of states. Even though the results are printed, they’re still un-observed and so still part of the indeterminate system. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Go in the next room. I’m going to open my envelope in exactly twenty seconds. In exactly thirty seconds, I want you to open yours.”

Satish walked out. And here it was: the gap where logic bleeds. I fought an irrational burst of fear. I lit the nearby Bunsen burner and held my envelope over the open flame. The smell of burning paper. Black ash. A minute later Satish was back, his envelope open.

“You didn’t look,” he said. He held out his sheet of paper. “As soon as I opened it, I knew you didn’t look.”

“I lied,” I said, taking the paper from him. “And you caught me. We made the world’s first quantum lie detector — a divination tool made of light.” I looked at the paper. The interference pattern lay in dark bands across the white surface. “Some mathematicians say there is either no such thing as free will, or the world is a simulation. Which do you think is true?”

“Those are our choices?”

I crushed the paper into a ball. Something slid away inside of me; a subtle change, and I opened my mouth to speak but what came out was different from what I intended.

I told Satish about the breakdown, and the drinking, and the hospital. I told him about the eyes in the mirror, and what I said to myself in the morning.

I told him about the smooth, steel “erase” button I put against my head — a single curl of an index finger to pay for everything.

Satish nodded while he listened, the smile wiped clean from his face. When I finished speaking, Satish put his hand on my shoulder. “So then you are crazy after all, my friend.”

“It’s been thirteen days now,” I told him. “Thirteen days sober.”

“Is that good?”

“No, but it’s longer than I’ve gone in two years.”

We ran the experiment. We printed the results.

If we looked at the detector results, the screen showed the particle pattern. If we didn’t, it showed an interference pattern.

We worked through most of the night. Near morning, sitting in the semidarkness of the lab, Satish spoke. “There once was a frog who lived in a well,” he said.

I watched his face as he told the story.

Satish continued. “One day a farmer lowered a bucket into the well, and the frog was pulled up to the surface. The frog blinked in the bright sun, seeing it for the first time. ‘Who are you?’ the frog asked the farmer.

“The farmer was amazed. He said, ‘I am the owner of this farm.’

“‘You call your world farm?’ the frog asked.

“‘No, this is not a different world,’ the farmer said. ‘This is the same world.’

“The frog laughed at the farmer. He said, ‘I have swum to every corner of my world. North, south, east, west. I am telling you, this is a different world.’ ”

I looked at Satish and said nothing.

“You and I,” Satish said. “We are still in the well.” He closed his eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You do not want to drink?”

“No.”

“I am curious, what you said with the gun, that you’d shoot yourself if you drank…”

“Yeah.”

“You did not drink on those days you said that?”

“No.”

Satish paused as if considering his words carefully. “Then why did you not just say that everyday?”

“That is simple,” I said. “Because then I’d be dead now.”

Later, after Satish had gone home, I ran the experiment one final time. Hit “print.” I put the results in two envelopes without looking at them. On the first envelope, I wrote the words “detector results.” On the second, I wrote “screen results.”

I drove to the hotel. I took off my clothes. Stood naked in front of the mirror.

I put the enveloped marked “detector results” up to my forehead. “I will never look at this,” I said. “Not ever, unless I start drinking again.” I stared in the mirror. I stared at my own gray eyes and saw that I meant it.

I glanced down at the other envelope. The one with the screen results. My hands shook.

I laid the envelope on the desk, stared at it. Keats said, Beauty is truth, truth beauty. What was the truth? Will I drink again? The envelopes knew.

One day, I would either open the detector results, or I wouldn’t.

Inside the other envelope there was either an interference pattern, or there wasn’t. A “yes” or a “no.” The answer was in there. It was already in there.

I waited in Satish’s office until he arrived in the morning. He put his briefcase on his desk. He looked at me, at the clock, then back at me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since 4:30.”

He glanced around the room. I leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind my head.

Satish just watched me. Satish was bright. He waited.

“Can you rig the detector to an indicator light?” I asked him.

“How do you mean?”

“Can you set it up so that the light goes off when the detector picks up an electron at the slit?”

“It shouldn’t be hard. Why?”

“Let’s define, exactly, the indeterminate system.”

Point Machine watched the test. He studied the interference pattern. “You’re looking at one-half the wave particle duality of light,” I said.

“What’s the other half look like?”

I turned the detectors on. The banded pattern diverged into two distinct clumps on the screen.

“This.”

“Oh,” Point Machine said.

Standing in Point Machine’s lab. Frogs swimming.

“They’re aware of light, right?” I asked.

“They do have eyes.”

“But, I mean, they’re aware of it?”

“Yeah, they respond to visual stimuli. They’re hunters. They have to see to hunt.”

“But I mean, aware?”

“What did you do before here?”

“Quantum research.”

“I know that,” Point Machine said. “But what did you do?”

I tried to shrug him off. “There were a range of projects. Solid state photonic devices, Fourier transforms, liquid NMR.”

“Fourier transforms?”

“They’re complex equations that can be used to translate visual imagery into the language of wave forms.”

Point Machine looked at me, dark eyes tightening. He said again, very slowly, enunciating each word, “What did you do, exactly?”

“Computers,” I said. “We were trying to build a computer. Quantum encryption processing extending up to twelve qubits. We used the Fourier transforms to remodel information into waves and back again.”

“Did it work?”

“Kind of. We reached a twelve-coherence state then used nuclear magnetic resonance to decode.”

“Why only ‘kind of? So then it didn’t work?”

“No, it worked, it definitely worked. Even when it was turned off.” I looked at him. “Kind of.”

It took Satish two days to rig up the light.

Point Machine brought the frogs in on a Saturday. We separated the healthy from the sick, the healthy from the monsters. “What is wrong with them?” I asked.

“The more complex a system, the more ways it can go wrong.”

Joy was next door, working in her lab. She heard our voices and stepped into the hall.

“You work weekends?” Satish asked her.

“It’s quieter,” Joy said. “I do my more sensitive tests when there’s nobody here. What about you? So you’re all partners now?”

“Eric has the big hands on this project,” Satish said. “My hands are small.”

“What are you working on?” she asked. She followed Satish into the lab.

He shot me a look, and I nodded.

So Satish explained it the way only Satish could.

“Oh,” she said. She blinked. She stayed.

We used Point Machine as a control. “We’re going to do this in real-time,” I told him. “No record at the detectors, just the indicator light. When I tell you, stand there and watch for the light. If the light comes on, it means the detectors picked up the electron. Understand?”

“Yeah, I get it,” Point Machine said.

Satish hit the button. I watched the screen, an interference pattern materializing before my eyes — a now-familiar pattern of light and dark.

“Okay,” I told Point Machine. “Now look in the box. Tell me if you see the light.”

Point Machine looked in the box. Before he even spoke, the interference pattern disappeared. “Yeah,” he said. “I see the light.”

I smiled. Felt that edge between known and unknown. Caressed it.

I nodded at Satish, and he hit the switch to kill the gun. I turned to Point Machine. “You collapsed the probability wave by observing the light, so we’ve established proof of principle.” I looked at the three of them. “Now let’s find out if all observers were created equal.”

Point Machine put a frog in the box.

And here it was, the stepping-off point — a view into the implicate, where objective and subjective might be experimentally defined.

I nodded to Satish. “Fire the gun.”

He hit the switch and the machine hummed. I watched the screen. I closed my eyes, felt my heart beating in my chest. Inside the box, I knew a light had come on for one of the two detectors; I knew the frog had seen it. But when I opened my eyes, the interference pattern still showed on the screen. The frog hadn’t changed it at all.

“Again,” I told Satish.

Satish fired the gun again. Again. Again.

Point Machine looked at me. “Well?”

“There’s still an interference pattern. The probability wave didn’t collapse.”

“What does that mean?” Joy asked.

“It means we try a different frog.”

We tried six. None changed the result.

“They’re part of the indeterminate system,” Satish said.

I was watching the screen closely, and the interference pattern vanished. I was about to shout, but when I looked up, I saw Point Machine peeking into the box.

“You looked,” I said.

“I was just making sure the light worked.”

“I could tell.”

We tried every frog in his lab. Then we tried the salamanders.

“Maybe it’s just amphibians,” he said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“How is it that we affect the system, but frogs and salamanders can’t?”

“Maybe it’s our eyes,” Point Machine said. “It has to be the eyes — coherence effects in the retinal rod-rhopsin molecules themselves.”

“Why would that matter?”

“Our optic nerve cells can only conduct measured information to the visual cortex; eyes are just another detector.”

“Can I try?” Joy interrupted.

I nodded. We ran the experiment again, this time with Joy’s empty eyes pointed at the box. Again, nothing.

The next morning, Point Machine met Satish and me in the parking lot before work. We climbed into my car and drove to the mall.

We went to a pet store.

I bought three mice, a canary, a turtle, and a squish-faced Boston terrier puppy. The sales clerk stared at us.

“You pet lovers, huh?” He looked suspiciously at Satish and Point Machine.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Pets.”

The drive back was quiet, punctuated only by the occasional whining of the puppy.

Point Machine broke the silence. “Perhaps it takes a more complex nervous system.”

“That shouldn’t matter,” Satish said. “Life is life. Real is real.”

I gripped the steering wheel. “What’s the difference between mind and brain?”

“Semantics,” said Point Machine. “Different names for the same idea.”

Satish regarded us. “Brain is hardware,” he said. “Mind is software.”

The Massachusetts landscape whipped past the car’s windows, a wall of ruined hillside on our right — huge, dark stone like the bones of the earth. A compound fracture of the land. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

Back at the lab, we started with the turtle. Then the mice, then the canary, which escaped, and flew to sit atop a filing cabinet. None of them collapsed the wave.

The Boston terrier looked at us, google-eyed.

“Are its eyes supposed to look like that?” Satish said. “In different directions?”

I put the puppy in the box. “It’s the breed, I think. But all it has to do is sense the light. Either eye will do.” I looked down at man’s best friend, our companion through the millennia, and harbored secret hope. This one, I told myself. This species, certainly, of all of them. Because who hasn’t looked into the eyes of a dog and not sensed something looking back.

The puppy whined in the box. Satish ran the experiment. I watched the screen.

Nothing. There was no change at all.

That night I drove to Joy’s. She answered the door. Waited for me to speak.

“You mentioned coffee?”

She smiled, and there was another moment when I felt sure she saw me.

Hours later, in the darkness, I spoke. “It’s time for me to go.”

She ran a hand along my bare spine.

“Time,” she whispered. “There is no such beast. Only now. And now.” She put her lips again on my skin. “And now.”

The next day, I had James come by the lab.

“You’ve made a finding?” he asked.

“We have.”

James watched us run the experiment. He looked in the box. He collapsed the wave function himself.

Then we put the puppy in the box and ran the experiment again. We showed him the interference pattern.

“Why didn’t it work?” he asked.

“We don’t know.”

“But what’s different?”

“Only one thing. The observer.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“So far, none of the animals we’ve tested have been able to alter the quantum system.”

He brought his hand to his chin. His brow furrowed. He was silent for a long time, looking at the setup. “Holy shit,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Point Machine said.

I stepped forward. “We want to do more tests. Work our way up through every phylum, class, and order. Primates being of particular interest, because of their evolutionary connection to us.”

“As much as you want,” he said. “As much funding as you want.”

It took ten days to arrange. We worked in conjunction with the Boston Zoo.

Transporting large numbers of animals can be a logistical nightmare, so it was decided that it would be easier to bring the lab to the zoo than to bring the zoo to the lab. Vans were hired. Technicians were assigned. Point Machine put his own research on hold and assigned a technician to feed his amphibians in his absence. Satish’s research also went on hiatus. “It seems suddenly less interesting,” he said.

James attended the experiment on the first day. We set up in one of the new exhibits under construction — a green, high-ceilinged room that would one day house muntjac. For now, though, it would house scientists. Satish worked the electronics. Point Machine liaisoned with the zoo staff. I built a bigger wooden box.

The zoo staff didn’t seem particularly inclined to cooperate until the size of Hansen’s charitable donation was explained to them by the zoo superintendent. After that, they were very helpful.

The following Monday we started the experiment. We worked our way through representatives of several mammal lineages: Marsupialia, Afrotheria, and the last two evolutionary holdouts of Monotremata — the platypus and the echidna. The next day we tested species from Xenarthra, and Laurasiatheria. The fourth day, we tackled Euarchontoglires. None of them collapsed the wave function; none carried the spotlight. On the fifth day, we started on the primates.

We began with the primates most distantly related to humans.

We tested lemuriforms and New World monkeys. Then Old World monkeys. Finally, we moved to the anthropoid apes. On the sixth day, we did the chimps.

“There are actually two species,” Point Machine told us. “Pan paniscus, commonly called the bonobo, and Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee. They’re congruent species, so similar in appearance that by the time scientists caught on in the 1930s, they’d already been hopelessly mixed in captivity.” Zoo staff maneuvered two juveniles into the room, holding them by their hands. “But during World War Two, we found a way to separate them again,” Point Machine continued. “It happened at a zoo outside Hellabrunn, Germany. A bombing leveled most of the town but, by some fluke, left the zoo intact. Or most of it, anyway. When the zookeepers returned, they expected to find their chimps alive and well. Instead, they found dozens of them dead, lying in undamaged cages. Only the common chimps had survived. The Bonobos had all died of fright.”

We tested both species. The machine hummed. We double-checked the results, then triple-checked, and the interference pattern did not budge. Even chimps didn’t cause wave function collapse.

“We’re alone,” I said. “Totally alone.”

Later that night, Point Machine paced the lab. “It’s like tracing any characteristic,” he said. “You look for homology in sister taxa. You organize clades, catalogue synapomorphies, identify the outgroup.”

“And who is the outgroup?”

“Who do you think?” Point Machine stopped pacing. “The ability to cause wave function collapse is apparently a derived characteristic that arose uniquely in our species at some point in the last several million years.”

“And before that?” I said.

“What?”

“Before that Earth just stood there as so much un-collapsed reality? What, waiting for us to show up?”

Writing up the paper took several days. I signed Satish and Point Machine as coauthors.

James read the abstract. He came to my office.

“But what do the results mean?”

“They mean whatever you think they mean.”

Things moved fast after that. The paper was published in The Journal of Quantum Mechanics, and the phone started ringing. There were requests for interviews, peer review, and a dozen labs started replication trials. It was the interpretations that got crazy though. I stayed away from interpretations. I dealt with the facts. I turned down the interviews.

Satish worked on perfecting the test itself. He worked on downsizing it, minimizing it, digitizing it. Turning it into a product. It became the Hansen double-slit, and when he was done, it was the size of a loaf of bread — with an easy indicator light and small, efficient output. Green for “yes,” and red for “no.” I wonder if he knew then. I wonder if he already suspected what they’d use it for.

“It doesn’t matter what is known,” he said. He touched the box. “It’s about what is knowable.”

He abandoned his gate arrays. Above his work station I found a quote taped to the wall, torn from an old book.

In the spring, a medical doctor named Robbins made his interest in the project known through a series of carefully worded letters.

The letters turned into phone calls. The voices on the other end belonged to lawyers, the kind that come from deep pockets. Robbins worked for a consortium with a vested interest in determining, once and for all, exactly when consciousness first arises during human fetal development.

Hansen Labs turned him down flat until the offer grew a seventh figure.

James came to me. “He wants you there.”

“I don’t care.”

“Robbins asked for you specifically.”

“I don’t give a damn. I don’t want any part of it, and you can fire me if you want to.”

James grew a weary smile. “Fire you? If I fired you, my bosses would fire me. And then hire you back. Probably with a raise.” He sighed. “This guy Robbins is a real prick, do you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen him on TV.”

“But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

“Yeah, I know that, too.”

Hansen provided technicians for the testing. The week before the tests were going to occur, I got the call. I’d been expecting it. Robbins himself.

“Are you sure we can’t get you to come?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“If the issue is monetary, I can assure you—”

“It’s not.”

There was a pause on the line. “I understand,” he said. “All the same, I wanted to personally thank you. It’s a great thing you’ve accomplished. Your work is going to save a lot of lives.”

I was silent. “How did you get the mothers?”

“They’re committed volunteers, each one. Special women. We’re a large, national congregation, and we were able to find several volunteers from each trimester of pregnancy — though I don’t expect we’ll need more than the first one to prove the age at which a baby is ensouled. Our earliest mother is only a few weeks along.”

I spoke the next words slowly. “You’re fine with them taking the risk?”

“We have a whole staff of doctors attending, and medical experts have already determined that the procedure carries no more risk than amniocentesis. The diode inserted into the amniotic fluid will be no larger than a needle.”

“One thing I never understood about this… a fetus’s eyes are closed.”

“I prefer the word baby,” he said, voice gone tight. “A baby’s eyelids are very thin, and the diode is very bright. We have no doubt they’ll be able to sense it. Then we have merely to note wave function collapse, and we’ll finally have the proof we need to change the law and put a stop to the plague of abortions that has swept across this land.”

I put the phone down. Looked at it. Plague of abortions.

There were men like him in science, too — ones who had all the answers. Fanaticism, applied to any facet of an issue, has always seemed dangerous to me. I picked up the phone again. “You think it’s as simple as that?”

“I do. When is a human life a human life? That is always what this particular argument has been about, has it not? Now we’ll finally be able to prove that abortion is murder, and who could argue? I sense that you don’t like me very much.”

“I like you fine. But there’s an old saying, ‘Never trust a man with only one book.’”

“One book is all a man needs if it’s the right book.”

“Have you considered what you’ll do if you’re proven wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if wave function collapse doesn’t occur until the ninth month? Or the magical moment of birth? Will you change your mind?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I guess now we find out, don’t we.”

The night before the experiment, I called Point Machine. It was call or drink. And I didn’t want to drink. Because I knew if I drank again, even a single sip, I’d never stop. Not ever.

He picked up on the fifth ring. Faraway voice.

“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Long enough that I wondered if he’d heard me. “Not sure,” he said. The voice on the other end was coarse and weary. It was a voice that hadn’t been sleeping well. “Entogeny reflects phylogeny,” he said. “Look early enough in gestation and we’ve got gills, a tail, the roots of the whole animal kingdom. You climb the phylogenetic tree as the fetus develops, and the newer characteristics, the things that make us human, get tacked on last. What Robbins is testing for is only found in humans, so my gut tells me he’s wrong, and wave collapse comes late. Real late.”

“You think it works that way?”

“I have no idea how it works.”

The day of the experiment came and went.

The first hint that something went wrong came in the form of silence. Silence from the Robbins group. Silence in the media. No press conferences. No TV interviews. Just silence.

The days turned to weeks.

Finally, a terse statement was issued by the group which called their results inconclusive. Robbins came out a few days later, saying bluntly that there had been a failure in the mechanism of the tests.

The truth was something stranger, of course. And of course, that came out later, too.

The truth was that some of the fetuses did pass the test. Just like Robbins hoped. Some did trigger wave function collapse.

But others didn’t.

And gestational age had nothing to do with it.

Two months later, I received the call in the middle of the night. “We found one in New York.” It was Satish.

“What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the words.

“A boy. Nine years old. He didn’t collapse the wave function.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing. He’s normal. Normal vision, normal intelligence. We tested him five times, but the interference pattern didn’t budge.”

“What happened when you told him?”

“We didn’t tell him. He stood there staring at us.”

“Staring?”

“It was like he already knew. Like he knew the whole time it wouldn’t work.”

Summer turned to fall. The testing continued.

Satish traveled the country, searching for that elusive, perfect cross-section and a sample size large enough to prove significance. He collected data points, faxed copies back to the lab for safekeeping.

In the end, it turned out there were others. Others who couldn’t collapse the wave function — a certain consistent percentage of the population who looked like us, and acted like us, but lacked this fundamental quality of humanity. Though Satish was careful not to use the term “soul” in his late night phone calls, we heard it in the gaps between the words. We heard it in the things he didn’t say.

I pictured him on the other end of the line, sitting in some dark hotel room, fighting a growing insomnia, fighting the terrible loneliness of what he was doing.

Point Machine sought comfort in elaborately constructed phylogenies and retreated into his cladograms. But there was no comfort for him there. “There’s no frequency distribution curve,” he told me. “No disequilibrium between ethnographic populations, nothing I can get traction on.”

He pored over Satish’s data, looking for the pattern that would make sense of it all.

“Distribution is random,” he said. “It doesn’t act like a trait.”

“Then maybe it’s not,” I said.

He shook his head. “Then who are they, some kind of empty-set? Nonplayer characters in the indeterminate system? Part of the game?”

Satish had his own ideas, of course.

“Why none of the scientists?” I asked him one night, phone to my ear. “If it’s random, why none of us?”

“If they’re part of the indeterminate system, why would they become scientists?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like a virtual construct,” Satish said. “You write the code, a series of response algorithms. Wind them up and let them go.”

“This is crazy.”

“I didn’t make the rules.”

“Do they even know what you’re testing them for, when they look at your little light? Do they know they’re different?”

“One of them,” he said. He was silent for a moment. “One of them knew.”

And then days later, the final late night call. From Denver. The last time I’d ever speak to him.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to do this,” he said, voice strangely harsh.

I rubbed my eyes, sitting up in bed.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to build this kind of thing,” he said. “The flaw in reality that you talked about… I don’t think we were expected to take advantage of it this way. To make a test.”

“What happened?”

“I saw the boy again.”

“Who?”

“The boy from New York,” he said. “He came here to see me.” And then he hung up.

Ten days later, Satish disappeared, along with his special little box. He got off a plane in Boston, but didn’t make it home. I was at the lab when I got the call from his wife.

“No,” I said. “Not for days.”

She was crying into the phone.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” I lied.

When I hung up, I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. Bought a fifth of vodka and drove home to the hotel.

Stared in the mirror. Eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal.

I spun the cap off the bottle and smelled the burn. Music filtered through the thin walls, a soft melody, a woman’s voice. I imagined my life different. I imagined that I could stop here. Not take the first drink.

My hands trembled.

The first sip brought tears to my eyes. Then I upended the bottle and drank deep. I tried to have a vision. I tried to picture Satish happy and healthy in a bar somewhere, working on a three-day binge, but the image wouldn’t come. That was me, not Satish. Satish didn’t drink. I tried to picture him coming home again. I couldn’t see that either.

Do they know they’re different, I’d asked him.

One of them, he’d said. One of them knew.

When the bottle was half empty, I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope marked “screen results.” Then I looked at the gun. I imagined what a .357 round could do to a skull — lay it open wide and deep. Reveal that place where self resides — expose it to the air where it would evaporate like liquid nitrogen, sizzling, steaming, gone. A gun could be many things, including a vehicle to return you to the implicate. The dream within a dream.

I imagined the world like an Escher drawing, part of either of two different scenes, and our brains decide which to see.

The more complex the system, the more ways it can go wrong. Point Machine had said that.

And things go wrong. That spotlight. Little engines of wave function collapse. Humans are blind to the beauty; the truth is beyond us. We can’t see reality as it is: only observe it into existence.

But what if you could control that spotlight, dilate it like the pupil of an eye? Stare deep into the implicate order. What would you see? What if you could slide between the sheaths of the subjective and objective? Maybe there have always been people like that. Mistakes. People who walk among us, but are not us. Only now there was a test. A test to point them out.

And maybe they didn’t want to be found.

I pulled the sheet of paper out of the envelope.

I unfolded it and spread it out flat on the desk. I looked at the results — and in so doing, finally collapsed the probability wave of the experiment I’d run all those months ago.

I stared at what was on the paper, a series of shaded semicircles — a now familiar pattern of light and dark.

Though, of course, the results had been there all along.

EACH MORNING IS a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

1. Marigold is for Murder

The yellow mask draws me, the one made from the pelt of a mute animal with neither fangs nor claws — better for the workers to collect its skin. It can only glare at its keepers through the wires of its cage, and when the knives cut and the harvesters rip away its skin, no one is troubled by its screams.

I tie the tawny ribbons under my chin. The mask is so light, almost weightless. But when I inhale, a charnel stench redolent of out houses, opened intestines, and dried blood floods my nose.

My wife’s mask is so pretty, pink flower lips and magenta eyelashes that flutter like feathers when she talks. But her body is pasty and soft, the flesh of her thighs mottled with black veins and puckered fat.

Still, I want her.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” I say. “They didn’t have the kind you wanted. I bought what they had. There’s Citrus Nectar, Iolite Bronze, and Creamy Illusion.”

“Might as well bring me pus in a jar,” she snaps. “Did you look on all the shelves?”

“N-no. But the shop girl said they were out.”

“The slut was probably hoarding it for herself. You know they all skim the stuff. Open the pots and scoop out a spoonful here, a dollop there. They use it themselves or stick it in tawdry urns to sell at those independent markets.”

“The shop girl looked honest enough.” Her mask had been carved onyx with a brush of gold at temples and chin. She had been slim, her flesh taut where my wife’s sagged, her skin flawless and golden. And she had moved with a delicate grace, totally unlike the lumbering woman before me.

“Looked honest?” My wife’s eyes roll in the sockets of her mask. “Like you could tell Queen’s Honey from shit.”

“My love, I know you’re disappointed, but won’t you try one of these other ones? For me?” I pull a jar of Iolite Bronze from the sack and unscrew the lid.

Although hostility bristles from her — her scent, her stance, the glare of fury from the eyeholes of her mask — I dip a finger into the solution. It’s true it doesn’t have the same consistency, and the perfume is more musk than honey, but the tingle is the same.

With my Iolite Bronzed finger, I reach for the cleft between her doughy thighs.

“Don’t touch me with that filth,” she snarls, backing away.

If only she weren’t so stubborn. I grease all the fingers of my hand with Iolite Bronze. The musk scent has roused me faster than Queen’s Honey.

“Get away!”

I grab for her sex, clutching at her with my slick fingers. I am so intent that I do not see the blade, glowing in her fist. As my fingertips slip into her, she plunges the weapon into my chest, and I go down.

Lying in a pool of my own blood, the scent of Iolite Bronze turning rank, I watch the blade rise and fall as she stabs me again and again.

Her mask is so pretty.

2. Blue Is for Maidens

The next morning, I linger over my selection, touching one beautiful face, then another. There is a vacant spot where the yellow mask used to be, but I have many more.

Finally, I choose one the color of sapphires. The brow is sewn from satin smooth as water. I twine the velveteen ribbons in my hair, and the tassels shush around my ears like whispered secrets.

I don’t think I’ll ever marry,” I say. “Why should I?”

The girl beside me giggles, slender fingers over her mouth opening. Her mask is hewn from green wood hardened by three days of fire. Once carved and finished, the wood takes on a glasslike clarity, the tracery of sepia veins like a thick filigree of lace.

“Mark my words,” she says. “All the flirting you do will catch up to you one day. A man will steal your heart, and you’ll come running to me to help with the wedding.”

I laugh. “Not likely. The guys we know only think about Queen’s Honey and getting me alone. I’d just as soon marry a Mask Maker as any of those meatheads.”

“Eww, that’s twisted.” My girlfriend squeals and points. “Look! It’s the new shipment. Didn’t I tell you the delivery trucks come round this street first?”

We stand with our masks pressed against the shop window, ogling the display of vials.

“Exotica, White Wishes Under a Black Moon.” My friend rattles off the names printed in elegant fonts in the space beneath each sampler. “Metallic Mischief, Homage to a Manifesto — what do you suppose that one’s like? — Terracotta Talisman, and Dulcet Poison. I like the sound of that last one.”

“You would.”

“Oh, hush. Let’s go try them.”

“That store’s awfully posh. You think they’ll let us try without buying?”

“Of course they will. We’re customers, aren’t we? They won’t throw us out.”

“They might.”

My concerns fail to dampen her enthusiasm, and I let her tow me through the crystalline doors.

The mingled scents in the shop wash over us. My friend abandons me, rushing to join the jostling horde clustered around the new arrivals. While the mixture of emotive fumes makes my friend giddy and excited, they overwhelm me. I lean against a counter and take shallow breaths.

“You look lost.” The man’s mask is matte pewter, the metal coating so thin I can see the strokes from the artisan’s paintbrush. A flame design swirls across both cheeks in variegated shades of purple.

“I’m just waiting for my friend.” I gesture in the direction of the mob. There’s a glint of translucent green, all I can see of her.

“You’re not interested in trying this new batch?”

“Not really. I prefer the traditional distillations. I guess that makes me old-fashioned.”

The man leans to conspiratorial closeness. “But you purchased those three new ones yesterday. I tried to warn you about the Iolite Bronze. It’s not at all a proper substitute for Queen’s Honey.”

Memories of lust and violence fill me, musk and arousal, pain and blood. But they are wrong. I am someone else today. I shake my head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I search for a hint of green glass or sepia lace. Where is she? “I’d never let someone use Iolite Bronze on me.”

“Didn’t you say it was a gift when I sold it to you?”

“What?”

“I was the shop girl in the onyx mask.”

I am shocked beyond words, beyond reaction. It is the biggest taboo in our society, so profane and obscene that it is not even in our law books. We do not discuss the events and encounters of our other masks. It is not done. What if people started blaming one face for what another did, merely because the same citizen wore both?

The moment of speechless paralysis ends, and I run. I fly through the glittering doors, not caring that I’ve left my best friend behind, and run, run, run until I am back to the dormitory on Center at Corridor. I huddle in the lift, and it whisks me to my quarters. On my bed, I sob, the tears wetting the inside of my mask. A part of me worries that I will stain the satin, but it is a distant part.

When the tears run out, I am done with the day, done with this mask. But the unmasking time is still far off. If I’d only worn the tan mask today, with the bronze veneer and dripping beadwork, I wouldn’t have fled from the pewter-masked deviant. I’d have punched him in the golden flesh of his gut or hauled him to the queen’s gendarmes for a reckoning.

Then I realize what I’m thinking, what I’m wanting — another mask, but not during the morning selection, not during the unmasking — while I’m still wearing today’s.

And I’m afraid.

3. Black Is for Sex

In the morning, as I stand barefaced among my masks, looking anywhere but at the tan one, I receive the queen’s summons. It is delivered, as always, by a gendarme masked in thinly hammered silver. He rings my bell, waiting for me to acknowledge him over the intercom.

The gendarmes are the only citizens about during the early morning when the rest of us are selecting our daily masks, just as they are the only ones who patrol the thoroughfares after the unmasking hour, collecting retired masks and distributing new ones.

“Good morning, gendarme,” I say.

“Good morning, citizen. You are called upon today to carry out your civic duty.”

“I am pleased to oblige.” A square of paper slips through my delivery slot and into my summons tray, bringing with it an elusive sweetness. The queen’s writs are always scented like the honey named after her, both more insistent and more subtle than the stuff which circulates in the marketplaces.

Among my arrayed masks, raised above the others, is the sable mask — hammered steel painted with liquid ebony. It is the consort mask, worn only to honor the queen’s summons. The paint is sheer, and glimmers of silver flicker through the color. The eyes are outlined in opaque kohl, a masked mask.

I lock the delicate chains with their delicate clasps around my head. For a moment, I am disoriented by the lenses over the eyes. It takes longer for me to adjust to the warp in my vision than to the feel and heft of the mask. But not much longer.

The music trills liquid and rich around us, and I concentrate on the steps. In her mask-like-stars, the queen swirls and glides across the ballroom in my arms. Caught in her beauty and my exertions, I have missed her words.

“I beg your pardon, my queen. What did you say?”

Her mask tilts up, and the piquant flavor of her amusement fills my senses. “I asked if you were enjoying the dance, whether you liked the refreshment.”

“I have not sampled the buffet, but it looks lavish. As to the dance, I am worried that my clumsiness might offend you or that I might misstep.”

“I’ve never danced with you before? That would explain your stiffness.”

“I have not had the pleasure. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was only a whimsy. I don’t dance with many. You probably won’t dance with me again.” The queen gestures, and the music stops. She leads me to her couch — crimson sheets and alabaster cushions. I am more familiar with this type of dance, but she isn’t ready for me yet. Her scent, though heady, tells me it is not time to mate, although it will be soon.

It confuses me, this waiting. Why am I here, if not to do my duty?

She reclines on her couch but not in the position of copulation.

“Talk to me,” she says.

“What would you like to speak on, my queen?”

“Do you have a favorite mask?”

It is an odd question, treading the boundary of indecency.

“No, my queen. They are all precious to me.”

“Don’t you wish you could discard some masks, perhaps the ones that you suffer in, and just wear the ones that are pleasurable?”

Was she testing me? “They are all precious to me,” I say again. “Each in its wonderful variety. I would never presume to contravene the law.”

“Not even to bend it a little? There are some citizens who wear just a few masks and don others only as often as they must in order to stay out of the purview of the gendarmes.”

“But that’s criminal.”

“Technically, it’s legal, although it defies the heart of the code. Generally, the number of their select rotation is large enough that no single mask becomes dominant. Do you find the prospect appealing?”

Dominant mask? What would be the purpose in limiting one’s mask selection? Her words make no sense.

“No.”

My answer pleases her. Her scent rises and with it, my arousal, and I cannot think clearly anymore. The queen is the font of desire and satisfaction — the perfume of true Queen’s Honey between her legs, her need, mine — nothing exists but the urgency of mating. It eclipses mere copulation as the sun outshines the stars. I submerge in a tide of desire and completion and the rise of desire again, over and over, until the unmasking hour.

In the morning, barefaced and aching, I report to the Mask Makers galley. I avoid looking at their ugly, soft countenances. It’s partly instinctive discomfort at being seen without a mask, but also, Mask Makers have always made me uneasy. I feel sorry for them, their faces so colorless and insipid. It’s an irony that they wear such bland features and plain colors, yet they make such marvelous faces for us, each one unique in its brilliance. I pity them, and I’m glad I was not born to their caste.

I hand over my summons writ and accept my newest mask, my favor from the queen. It is glossy saffron with pointed wires to fasten it. It has no mouth opening, but it does not seem lacking for that. Like every face they craft, it is a feat of artistry.

4. Orange Is for Agony

I press the saffron mask to my face and wrap the barbed laces around my head. A fleeting touch, my fingertips on the painted metal tell me of thick runnels that dent the surface. Their unevenness makes the fit uncomfortable. For a moment.

Wire mesh presses above and below. If I lie down, I can stretch my neck, a little. But then the mesh cuts into my feet, my forearms, my chest. Standing, sitting, a few back-and-forth steps. But pacing only reminds me how small my cell is. And they do not like for us to pace. Exercise thins the fat between muscle and skin, making the harvest more difficult.

My neighbor wears a ginger mask dotted with cobalt sequins. He urinates, and it splashes through the mesh on me. I hiss my rage, crowded by the scent of his body, and return the favor.

I’m glad when the workers come for him and watch as they trap him in their loops. He tries to fight, but he has nothing sharp or hard to wield. Their wicked tools, edged with blue light, open him from neck to groin. He barely has time to bleed before they carve perpendicular incisions, flaps to better flay him in a single piece.

His eyes bulge as they tear away his skin, all the movement he is capable of. He’s silent, for there is no mouth on his mask; he is as mute as I.

When they’re done, they leave him writhing in the liquids of his body on the wire mesh floor. They take the heavy cloak of his skin with them.

Then it’s my turn. The ginger planes of my neighbor’s mask swivel to me, so he can watch.

There’s no place to run in my tiny cell, and their loops pinion me. When they begin to cut away my skin, it is the most terrible pain I have ever known.

Their masks are lemon, daffodil, and butterscotch. Pretty and yellow, like sunshine.

5. Jasper Is for Jilting

The next morning, the choice is harder than usual. I flinch away from the saffron mask and stare for a long while at the tan one. But it feels inappropriate to select it.

Like a whiff of passing corruption, the notion of going without a mask today, simply staying in my quarters and not choosing a face, flits through my thoughts. It is too scandalous to contemplate; I feel guilty to have even considered it.

Without looking, I reach among the rows of empty faces and snatch the first one my hand falls upon.

It is brackish green, the color of stagnant water in a pool that never sees the sun. The chin and nose are gilded in dark velvet, and the lips shine, liquid silver hand-painted on silk. I tighten the woven cords around my head.

I hover beneath the window of my lover, she of the cerulean mask detailed in voile. She reclines on her balcony, and a song of courtship thrums from her dainty mouth. I inhale the delicate body scents her servant wafts out with a fan: enticement and temptation, innocence and promise.

“Do you love me?” my sweetheart calls.

“With all my soul. You are my everything.”

“I don’t believe you,” she laughs. “How are you different from all the other men, just waiting for a chance to slather me with Queen’s Honey?”

“How can you say that? I’ve asked you to marry me.”

“What does that prove? Any meathead with a tongue can do that. And anyway, I don’t want to marry at all. Marriage is a sorry state that leads to fighting and grief.”

I pantomime exaggerated dismay for her benefit. “What can I do to convince you of my sincerity? Ask me for anything, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Do you have a jar of Queen’s Honey?”

I hesitate. If I answer truthfully, she might accuse me again of being a libertine. But it is also my courting gift. She will feel slighted if I don’t have anything to offer her.

I sigh and choose the better of my options. “A humble present to honor your loveliness.”

“Good.”

When I’m not immediately rebuffed, I dare to hope.

“I’m sending my girl down. Give the Queen’s Honey to her, and we’ll all play a game. She’ll seal the jar so the contents may not be used without breaking it, and puncture its lid, freeing the scent. If you can spend the afternoon with me and my girl in my enclosed boudoir and keep from breaking the jar open, I’ll believe that you love me and not simply the pleasures of copulation. But if you lose control and do break the jar, you can slake yourself on her, but you’ll never get a word or whiff from me again.”

“What, pray, do I get if I can restrain myself?”

Her laughter is like a teasing wind. “If you can check your desires until evening, I’ll send her away and break the jar myself.”

I’m both excited and dismayed by the prospect of her “game.” My lover will ensure that our time is not spent on chaste recreations or thoughtful conversation. She will pose herself and her servant girl in all manner of ways suggestive of copulation. And she is probably already drenched in one of the trendy distillations — Passion Without Doubt or Exotica or Citrus Nectar — to madden me further. Still, the reward will be sweet. And at the very least (my love did not altogether peg me wrongly), I’ll get to do the servant girl.

My prospective consolation prize opens the door. Her mask is a sage green that suggests transparency, the eyes rimmed in toffee lace. She snatches the Queen’s Honey from me, but there the anticipated script ends. She twists off the lid and scoops the unguent out. Without embarrassment or coyness, she rubs it on herself, between her thighs. As I stare dumbfounded, she smears a glistening coating on me. Instantly, I’m aroused and eager.

“Want me?” she whispers.

“Yes.” Flesh on flesh, the Queen’s Honey brooks no denial.

“Then catch me.” She sprints away.

I waver for only a breath. Above, my sweetheart calls down plaintively, wondering at our delay. But desire roars through me, and all I care about is the servant girl.

I chase her through the dormitory block as she weaves around crowds and over obstacles — sculptures, shops, new constructions. Sometimes men turn, catching the fleeting perfume of Queen’s Honey mingled with her sex as she darts by.

I am enthralled. She fills every breath I take. I run until I’m a creature of fire — blazing lungs and burning limbs. But it is spice to my eagerness. I will catch her, and then we will copulate.

She leads me past the market district, past shop windows filled with citizens making purchases, and into the rural outskirts where the machines harvest our food and workers gather esoteric materials for the Mask Makers guild.

In a shaded copse of green wood trees, she drops to her knees. I’m upon her, not even waiting for her to assume the proper position. She opens to me, and I rush to join our bodies.

It is glorious, of course, the release all the more satisfying for the chase. But even as I spend myself, I notice something wrong. The girl is not making the right movements, and her scent, while intoxicating, is strange. Beneath the Queen’s Honey she is impatient when she should be impassioned. As soon as I’m finished, she pulls away, and for the first time after a copulation, I’m not happy and languid, awash in the endorphins of sex. I feel awkward.

Before I can say anything, the girl tears off her mask. The horror of her unmasking paralyzes me; I’m unprepared for her next action. She lunges, ripping off the bindings of my mask, and yanks it free.

I am barefaced.

It’s not the unmasking hour, not the time for emptiness and slumber. Without my mask, I don’t know how to act or feel, or what to say. I don’t even know if I can speak, for I never have without a mask. I’m lost, no one. The nucleus of my personality and intelligence is empty; the girl has stolen it.

6. White Is for Obedience

While I kneel, stupefied, the girl discards my mask, letting it fall among the long grasses where we loved. I don’t even have the presence of will to retrieve it. She examines the inside of her mask. With infinite care, she peels a sheer membrane away. It is like a veil of gauze or chiffon, but this veil has a shape. There are nose, cheekbones, and chin.

It is a mask, but a mask unlike any I’ve seen. The fabric is unornamented and diaphanous white, like thin fog or still water, all but colorless. It doesn’t conceal what it covers, only overlays it.

She takes this ghost of a mask and drapes it over my face. Without cord or chain, it fastens itself, clinging to my head. It is such relief to have my nakedness covered, I’m grateful when I should be outraged.

I wait for the mask to tell me who I am and what to do.

And I wait.

“There’s not much oversoul there,” the girl says. Without a mask, her features are too animated, obscenely so. I avert my gaze, wondering if the ghost mask exposes my expressions in such an indecent fashion.

“It’s only a scaffold to help you get past the schizo-panic,” she continues. “It doesn’t have any personas or relationship scenarios to instill, and absolutely no emotives.”

I don’t like the ghost mask’s vacancy. But at least I can think now, and it occurs to me to scramble for my own mask.

“Stop,” she says.

I cannot move. My fingertips brush the darker green and glint of silver lying in the grass, but I can’t pick it up.

“I’m afraid the scaffold does have an obedience imprint. I am sorry about that, but it’s necessary. You wouldn’t be able to access the oversoul in your mask anyway. The scaffold creates a barrier that mask imprints can’t penetrate, and you won’t be able to take the scaffold off. Go ahead, I know you want to. Try to remove it.”

I grope my face, my head looking for something to undo. There’s nothing to unknot, release, or unbuckle. I find the edge where the ghost mask, the scaffold, gives way to skin, but it’s adhered to me. The memory from yesterday — the saffron mask, being skinned alive — is enough to deter me from anything drastic.

“What did you do to me?” I ask. “And why?”

“Good, you’re questioning. I knew you’d acclimate quickly.” A scent penetrates my distress. She is pleased. Except the tang isn’t right. It’s not feminine but not masculine either. She has no mask to tell me whether she’s male or female. Should I continue thinking of her as a girl? And for that matter, the scaffold hasn’t provided me with a gender. Am I a man or a woman, or am I neuter, or perhaps some sort of androgyne?

I feel lightheaded and ill. “If this is some perverted game,” I say, “I’m not amused. I’ll report this to the gendarmes. They’ll confiscate all your masks for this crime, and—” I trail off. Her naked face is testimony of her indifference to the severest penalty of our society.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I whimper.

“Did you ever wonder who you are beneath your masks?” she says. “When you say ‘me,’ who is that?”

Hearing her voice the question that has lately made my mornings so troubling and the hours after unmasking so long is a kind of deliverance. I’m not the only citizen to have these thoughts; I’m not alone in my distress. But the guilt remains, along with an added unease. Is exposing my crime what this is about? Am I to be penalized?

“Don’t be afraid,” she says, “I’m not going to turn you over to the gendarmes or anything like that.”

My breathing quickens. “Are you hearing my thoughts?”

“No, only watching your face.”

“My face?”

“It conveys emotions. It’s like smelling another’s confusion or knowing that someone’s angry by the tightness of their shoulders, only with facial musculature. Before long, you’ll read it as instinctively as you do scents and stances.”

“You say that as though you expect me to be pleased.”

Her mouth curves and parts, revealing the whiteness of her teeth. Being witness to such an intimate view is both repulsive and fascinating.

“I know you don’t think so now,” she says, “but I’ve given you a gift, one very few people receive.” She stands. “Walk with me.”

I don’t want to go anywhere with her, but the scaffold compels me to obey. We stroll deeper into the wilderness, leaving my mask in the grass. It is an uncomfortable sensation, having my will at odds with my body.

“I’ve been watching you for a while to make sure you were right,” she says.

“Watching me?” Fragments of confusion knit into understanding. “You’re the shop girl who sold me the Iolite Bronze and the deviant man with the pewter mask.”

“And the customer at the bakery who bought a dozen egg tarts from you before that.”

“The woman with the pink mask who asked for the recipe?”

“Yes. And before, when you wore your roan and iron mask, I was in the audience when you presented your new poem. And the day before that, I picked indigo with you for the Mask Makers.”

We emerge into a clearing. A broken-down hut lists, obscured by overgrown foliage. Her sage and toffee mask still dangles from her fingertips. She passes its brim over the doorknob, and the door swings open.

“I’m glad to finally meet you,” she says. “You can call me Pena.”

The interior is dim, lit by stray sunbeams poking through holes in the ramshackle walls.

“Pena?” The word is meaningless. “Why?”

“It’s my name, a word that means me, regardless of what mask I’m wearing or not wearing.”

I snort. “Why stop at each citizen having their own name? Why not each tile or brick the builders use or every tree or blade of grass?”

“Every street has a name,” Pena says. “And every shop.”

“So we can tell one from the other. Otherwise, we couldn’t say where a place was, or differentiate between one food market and another.”

“Exactly.” She runs her fingers over a floorboard, and I hear a click. In the far corner by the fireplace, flagstones part to expose steps.

“What’s down there?” I ask.

“Answers. Come.”

We descend, and the flagstones rumble shut overhead. Ambient light washes over us — dim and red, casting bloody shadows.

We’re in a tunnel with rough, stone walls. The light extends ten paces before us; beyond is darkness. Pena strides toward this border, and I am obliged to accompany her. When we are within a pace of light’s end, more red comes on to reveal another span of corridor. When we are within this new radius, the light behind us goes out.

And so we walk.

“Why do citizens need names?” I ask. “We change masks every day, unlike shops and streets which stay the same. What if I discover that my physician is the same citizen as my murderer? Or a citizen in one mask is my lover and in another, my enemy? If I call that citizen by a single word, it’s like treating all their mask identities as the same person.”

“That’s the point,” she says. “It lets us be who we truly are, underneath our masks.”

I shake my head. “Without the masks, we’re not anything.”

“There was a time before the masks.”

“And we were empty, primitive creatures, without will or purpose, until the First Queen created the First Mask to wear and carved faces for the citizens and—”

“And She designated the Guild of Mask Makers and tasked them with their sacred duty so that everyone would be imbued with souls, blah blah blah. I know the lies.”

Her heresy is both disturbing and intriguing. “What do you believe, then?”

“That’s what I’m going to show you.”

“Why me?”

“There’s a group of us named. We seek out others who harbor the same doubts and resentments we do, and we liberate them.”

“I don’t want to be liberated.”

“Don’t you? Haven’t you wanted to be free of the daily selection routine? Or chafed against the mask, wishing the hour of unmasking came sooner? Don’t you hover in indecision some mornings, not because the choosing is so hard, but because none of them appeal? Don’t you wonder who you could be if you were left to decide for yourself?”

I am saved from having to answer by the appearance of something new when the next lights activate: a door.

7. Red Is for Revelation

“Where are we?”

“Beneath the palace at the Mask Makers guild.”

She passes her mask over the door. Like the hut’s, it opens.

I balk. “No. Absolutely not. It’s prohibited.”

She studies me. “I can make you, but I won’t. It’s your decision.”

I open my mouth to repeat myself.

“But first, hear me out.”

I exhale. “If I must. But it won’t change my mind.”

“You know I’ve been keeping by you as you’ve switched masks. I was also with you when you wore the saffron mask at the leather harvesters.”

The memory is still raw. “So?”

“Do you know who I was?”

“One of the skinners, I presume.”

“I was your neighbor in the adjoining cage.”

Despite everything, I’m dismayed. “Didn’t you know what they were going to do to you, to us?”

“I knew.”

“And still you let them, willingly even. Why, in the name of the First Queen?”

“Because, to be with you, I could either hurt you or be hurt, and I chose not to hurt you.”

“Am I someone to you? Have we been lovers or spouses or friends?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why?”

“Because I know who I am, and my actions are a reflection of me. I don’t skin people alive.”

Her last sentence carries a conviction, a certainty that makes me envious.

“What would you do if you had to choose,” she says, “if your decisions extended beyond what mask to wear any given day? Would you willingly inflict such suffering upon another?”

“I would… I-I don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

And I find I do.

The door opens upon a storage room jammed with row upon row of shelves. Bolts of multihued fabric, rolls of ribbon and lace, and jars of washes, dyes, and lacquers are piled together without any semblance of order. More rolls of textiles spill out of cubby holes and closets lining the room.

“This is their overflow storage, where they keep their excess,” Pena says. “We raid it for our mask-making supplies. Named artisans can create near-perfect replicas of guild masks, but without the oversouls, of course.”

“With added features that can unlock doors.”

She displays her teeth again. Some part of me has learned to equate that facial configuration with positive emotion, even before I breathe the perfume of her approval.

“You noticed. Very good.”

“How do they do it?”

She leads me through the jumble. “It’s complicated to explain. All of our mask functions, including the scaffold you’re wearing, are based on the Mask Makers’ constructs. There’s bits and pieces appliquéd, sewn, glued, or imbedded in all masks which stimulate thoughts, trigger emotions, assign personality traits, and so on. Named artisans have taken apart and put back together these pieces, realigning and modifying them until they’ve gained an understanding of their workings. In the process, they’ve discovered that the components can do much more than imprint oversouls, like lock and unlock doors. And there’s still so much we haven’t figured out yet.”

The supply room exits upon a dark corridor that illuminates red at our approach. But unlike the one from the hut, the circle of light shows a cluster of turnings that fork in different directions.

“You make it sound like you named have been at this for a while,” I say.

“We have.” She sets off down one of the twisting tunnels. “Sometimes the gendarmes get wind of our activities, so we work exclusively in pairs — one mentor, one recruit. That way, the most named any of us knows is two, your mentor when you’re recruited, and your recruit once you’re ready to bring someone in. We disseminate information and requests through codes and drop-off points. It’s slow but safer.”

I’ve lost track of the bends and turns we’ve taken. “You must recruit pretty selectively, if each mentor can only take one.”

“Mentors can take another recruit if theirs is apprehended by the gendarmes.” The lighting casts deep shadows over the planes of her face, and for a moment, it seems that she’s wearing a crimson mask. She brushes her fingers over her eyes, and they come away wet.

“What happens when the gendarmes catch you?”

“They kill us.”

I shrug. “That’s all? So you lose the day. In the morning—”

“No. They kill us. It’s not like the petty murders citizens inflict upon each other. There’s no waking up from the death the gendarmes deliver.”

I stumble, shocked. “That’s — that’s monstrous. How is that possible? How can our laws permit it?”

“You said it yourself; without the masks, we’re nothing. When the gendarmes execute one of us, they reassign all of that named’s personas to the population at large. The oversouls continue, and there is no disruption among the citizenry. I think the gendarmes grieve more when they have to destroy a mask that has been ‘murdered’ than when they kill one of us.”

Pena rounds a corner, and there is a wall. It’s creamy smooth, as though stone workers spent hours painstakingly sanding it to perfect flatness.

“Did you make a wrong turn?” I ask.

“Afraid of getting lost?” Her tone is teasing. “Don’t worry. Even if I had made a wrong turn, my mask contains the labyrinth’s secrets. But I didn’t.”

I half expect her to wave the mask at the wall and a door to miraculously appear. She doesn’t. Instead, Pena lifts a hand to her mouth and tears at it with her teeth. Dark blood oozes, and she smears this droplet on the wall.

Soundlessly, the wall glides up and disappears into the ceiling. White, not red, light comes on, blinding after the dimness.

Pena tugs me forward while I’m still blinking. I squint, eyes tearing and blurry, at the small room we have entered. The walls are polished metal, and they encircle us, curving outward so it feels like we’re inside a cylinder. A closed one. While my eyes adjust, the door shuts itself.

In the room’s center is an ornate chair of silver and gold. Resting upon its seat is a mask.

I recognize it, for it is the stuff of legend. Carved from a single diamond with a million-million facets, each representing a mask-to-be, the First Queen’s Mask, the one She created with her own hands to bring enlightenment to us all.

8. Diamonds Are for Death

Pena touches my face, and the scaffold slips away. The anxiety of being barefaced is forgotten in the wonder of the First Mask.

“The truth, your answers, they’re all in the oversoul of that mask,” she says. “All you have to do is put it on.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then we go back, and tomorrow morning you choose a mask to wear, like every other morning, and you never see me again.”

“I might turn you over to the gendarmes.”

Her lips part and flash teeth. “What will you tell them? That a citizen kidnapped you and filled your head with truth? How will you find me? And how do you know the gendarmes won’t kill you simply for knowing this much?”

She’s right, of course. “But I don’t have to put on the First Mask?”

“What you do is up to you. Now and forever.”

I hesitate for a heartbeat before striding to the chair and seizing the First Mask. It’s so light. I’d expected it to be heavier. Holding it aloft, I realize the eyeholes are encased in nearly transparent lenses like my consort mask, except diamond instead of glass.

“You might want to sit before you put it on,” Pena says. “I didn’t and ended flat on my back.”

I perch on the gold and silver chair, and set the mask over my face. There are segmented strands of diamond to wrap around my head that fasten with glittering diamond locks. The lenses warp my vision, disorienting me. But only for a moment.

Crowing exultation.

The war is finished! My last rival and her progeny are dead, and I reign in exclusive sovereignty.

My children, I am so proud of you. This is the dawn of a new age, a glorious and splendid age.

My scientists have conquered our only remaining enemy: time. They have found the key to unlocking the shackles of age and injury, and conquered the last disease. I am no longer chained by the dictates of perpetual reproduction. The years of my empire will be like a magnificent river, rippling past eon after eon, powerful and endless.

I do worry, however, that my soldiers will decline. They are the simplest of my children and only understand rigid procedures and physical contests. Perhaps I should manufacture a new corps of soldiers, an elite one. They can vie with each other in mock battles for the honor of being counted among my gendarmes.

The river of years is murky and deep, and I cannot see where it will take us.

I am stymied at an unanticipated quarter: my consorts. The noblest of my children, nearly my equals — clever and curious, independent and imaginative — I should have known they would feel neglected and adrift when I ceased summoning them to mate. They are creatures of great passion, as I am, and now they squabble, forming factions and carrying out vendettas.

I have started opening my body to them again, but I will ask the scientists to develop a synthetic pheromone so they may copulate amongst themselves.

I am despair.

A citizen killed another today, beyond what my scientists were able to restore. I must accept the truth; we are an aggressive people, not destined for peace, and all I have tried to build is in ruins.

If only there was a way for my consorts to expend their passions harmlessly.

I must confer with my scientists.

At last! I have devised an end to the chaos which blights my citizenry.

My scientists have developed a means of imprinting memories and eliciting emotions that may be interchanged, swapped out, and added upon with seemingly infinite variety. My consorts may oppose each other and mate with promiscuity, all without garnering rivals or blood feuds.

I have set my scientists to generate these oversoul masks in copious quantity and in wondrous variety.

This must work.

All is well. The activities of my children are once more in accord with my desiring, and eternity’s river holds no more uncertainties.

There was a minor dilemma, but I have solved even that. It seems that I am not immune to the effect of the masks. I thought my royal will would safeguard my identity, but it is becoming a strain, sorting reality from fabrication.

I have had an oversoul commissioned. It will be a lasting record of all the tribulations I have confronted and my efforts to remedy them. This mask shall be sealed beneath my palace in a chamber secured by steel, and my blood shall be the only key that unlocks it.

I take off the mask of diamonds. Pena watches me, her lips parted.

I tumble out of the chair and fall to my knees. “I am your servant, First Queen.”

Pena’s eyes widen, and she laughs. “Oh, no, no.” She is at my side and hauls me up. “I’m not the First Queen.”

“But your blood opened the door.”

“Don’t you get it? We’re all of her blood, each of us descended from the First Queen. Some joke on her, huh?”

I stay silent.

“Come,” she says. “We need to get back before the hour of unmasking. If we’re seen on the streets after, the gendarmes will take us.”

I straggle after her, lost in my thoughts. I don’t try to keep track of the red-lit corridors and notice only when we are among the fabrics and dyes of the storage room.

“Hsst.” Pena gestures.

“What is it?”

Without warning, she shoves me, and I tumble into a closeted hole. Bolts of velvet and felt topple upon me. She flings an oversized bottle of jasmine oil after, engulfing me in cloying sweetness.

Then there is confusion. The red light extinguishes, and white beams flash in the darkness. They catch and glint off white metal — glittering eyes, gleaming brows — the silver masks of the gendarmes.

Hidden in my cubby, my scent as obscured as my body, they do not detect me. They converge on a single spot, Pena, huddled between shelves.

“By order of the queen, you are hereby accused and convicted of treason,” one gendarme says.

I cannot smell anything over the sickening jasmine, but I can see the terror on her face. She glances at me, and there is a beseeching in her eyes, and a question, but she looks away before I can understand it.

“The penalty for treason is death, citizen,” a gendarme, perhaps the same one, says. “Do you wish to repent? Identify your co-conspirators, and we will allow you to return to the way of the mask.”

Pena lifts her head. “Never.”

They don’t ask again. They activate their loops, and I’m reminded of the day of the saffron mask. I’m ashamed of the gladness I felt then.

They don’t skin her, but this is as gruesome, if swifter. A gendarme kneels over her as she is pinioned on her back by bands of blue. Bracing himself, he staves in her face with his fist. I want to look away. It is an obscene violation, a perverse defilement to damage a citizen there — to do any violence which might cause harm to a mask. But Pena isn’t wearing a mask, and I don’t look away.

He strikes again and again until there is nothing left of the front of her head but a wreckage of bone and pulped wetness.

9. The Last Mask

The gendarmes are as efficient in disposing of Pena’s body as they were in dispatching her. When they have gone, the red light comes on, and I dare to creep out. As I untangle myself from a length of burgundy velvet, my hand falls upon an unmistakable shape — Pena’s green and toffee mask. The sight of it, so soon after the atrocity of her execution, unhinges me. I start crying and I cannot stop. But it doesn’t matter, because her mask will hide my tears.

Somehow, I make it to Center at Corridor and the familiar confines of my quarters. Safe.

But I am not safe. I cannot forget the First Queen’s memories, which the gendarmes would surely kill me for having, and more, I cannot erase the beseeching question in Pena’s eyes.

I tear off her mask. It’s not the unmasking hour, but I don’t care. I’m weary of masks, even a blameless one without an oversoul. Pena’s death burdens me with shame and guilt — like being flayed again, but with the pain inside.

I am surrounded by masks. Each is a player in some fabricated theater — artist, victim, rake, entrepreneur, lover, spouse, friend. None of them is real, but I can put them on and escape these feelings.

But I won’t.

One after the other, I destroy my masks. The ones that shatter are the easiest. I hurl them at the floor and shards spill across the tile. The ones that burn, I commit to fire. But the metal ones I must work at, smashing one upon another until they are twisted out of all recognition.

I save the sable mask for last out of a sense of propriety. Although it is metal, it is oddly malleable, and it crumbles between my hands. The lenses fall out of the eyeholes and tumble among the broken bits of ceramic and glass on my floor.

I stand amidst the debris that was my life and don the only mask I spared, Pena’s green and toffee one.

My lover glances at me in her cerulean-with-voile mask and lets me in. She thinks I am her servant girl.

“Where did you go?” she demands. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? And where is my suitor?”

Her quarters are much like mine, much like every citizen’s. There is a mask room, a kitchen, and a bedchamber. I brush past her and she follows, continuing to scold as we enter her kitchen. I find what I need in one of the drawers: a tenderizer mallet, heavy and solid. Even when I turn with it upraised, she doesn’t relent.

“Are you ignoring me, you slut?” she shouts. “How dare you!”

Only when I yank off her mask does she become afraid, and by then, it’s too late.

I smash the mallet into her face. She stumbles, and I ride her as she goes down, hammering the metal tool into her face over and over. Bones and flesh mash together into pulp, and still I persist. I must be thorough.

Pena did not have time to teach me the secrets of her league of named. But through her, I have learned enough. I have seen how the gendarmes kill. I do not have their loops or their strength, but I know how to murder so that my victims will not wake.

Pena also taught me to know who I am.

I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen’s eternal river.