Ben Goertzel's Strange Fiction & Art

Vladimir smiled. Things were beautiful. The country house was small, but perfect. It would be the ideal vacation. He looked on admiringly as his young wife Avdotya ran around in the field, with his little son Vaclav. Avdotya was gorgeous, in a wispy sort of way. She always looked like she had one foot in another world. She had this smile that was so close to angelic, it could almost be frightening at times. And Vaclav was so very clever. Only four and a half years old, and he could read already, and do simple sums. He was nimble too. He ran around his mother's legs, doing cartwheels and somersaults.

Avdotya ran back towards him. "What do you think?" he said. "Nice, isn't it? We've got it for two whole months."

"It's more than nice, it's incredible," said Avdotya, embracing him and kissing him. "I wish we never had to go back to Moscow. It's so crowded and dirty. I wish we could stay here forever."

"But it's home," he said. "There's nowhere to work out here. Let's just enjoy it while we have it."

"You're so practical, Vladimir. Can't a girl have her dreams?"

"Dream, dream, by all means dream," he smiled. "Come on, Vaclav. Let's go down by the river. Maybe we can catch some fish for dinner."

The three of them walked happily down toward the river, along a narrow winding path through the woods. "Did I tell you I sold an article to Discover?" he said to Avdotya. "Two thousand five hundred U.S. dollars, they paid me. That's more than I made the last three years put together, at the university."

"That's amazing," she said. "You're brilliant. So you can quit your job, and move out to the country."

"It's just one article. I wouldn't do that, yet. But it's a possibility...."

"Dad, what's a possibility?" asked Vaclav.

"Something that might happen."

"But anything might happen. So everything's a possibility."

He rubbed his son on the head. "I guess so."

"So it's a stupid word."

"No, Vaclav. Some things are more likely to happen than others. Like, it's possible you might fly up into the air like a bird. But it's probably not going to happen. A better possibility is that you're going to keep walking along the path, get to the river, and catch some fish for dinner."

"If we went in an airplane we could fly up in the air like a bird, Dad. Did you ever fly in an airplane?"

"Yes, I did. I flew to America, for a conference, once."

"What was it like there?"

"Not as beautiful as this."

"Oh."

"But rich. Everyone has cars, new cars. The houses are big. Even the kids get their own rooms. You never have two or three families living in the same apartment. Big color televisions, and dozens of different channels on TV. And all the houses have central heat and air conditioning -- you're never hot or cold inside."

"Could we go and live there, Dad?"

"Maybe. If I keep selling articles to American magazines. I guess it's a possibility."

They walked along, taking in the clean, warm air.

"What's that sound, Dad?"

"It's a bird, I guess."

"Not the bird. I mean the other sound."

"I don't hear anything son."

His mother smiled. "It's the angels singing. The angels singing up in Heaven. Only the little boys can hear them."

"Little girls can here them too, Mom," corrected Vaclav. "It should be, only the little boys and little girls can hear them."

"Right."

At the river, Vladimir caught a couple fish, while Vaclav splashed in the water and Avdotya stared up at the sun. After a while, though, Avdotya started to feel sick. "I've got that headache again," she said. "I think we'd better go back."

"I'd hoped the country air would get rid of these headaches."

"Well, maybe we haven't been here long enough. Anyway, it's back again. I need to lie down, Vladimir."

"Can't you lie down on the grass here? It's lovely. I don't want to go back."

"Vladimir...."

"All right, all right...."

They walked back up the path slowly, Avdotya leaning on her husband's arm.

She lay down on the couch in the cottage. "I'm feeling really dizzy again. And I'm starting not to see things right. Can you turn the light off. It's awfully bright in here."

"The light isn't on, Avdotya. It's just the sunlight through the windows."

"Well, shut the curtains, then."

"All right."

She lay there, moaning quietly and shifting herself, trying to get a comfortable position. "Go out and play, Vaclav," said Vladimir.

He ran to his mother's side. "I want to stay with Mommy."

"Go play, Vaclav," said his mother. "I think I saw a little girl out in the field behind the cottage. Go see if she wants to play with you."

"All right."

Vladimir sat down in the kitchen and looked at his wife piercingly. She was beautiful, as always; her large eyes, her slender limbs, her white skin. "The doctors say there's nothing wrong with you," he said. "It's just nervous tension."

"It's not nervous tension," she said. "I know nervous tension, and this isn't it."

"Maybe we should move to the U.S. They probably have better doctors."

"Do you think you could really get a visa?"

"I don't know. If I could get a job at an American university. But those are too hard to find. Maybe I could get a job as a staff writer at some American magazine. But I'll have to sell more articles first."

"You think the doctors there are better than in Moscow?"

"They're more modern."

"Hmmmm.... Could you shut the curtains, please?"

"Avdotya, I've already shut the curtains."

"There's so much light in here."

"It's dark."

"I'm seeing these white things, moving around...."

"Why don't you have some vodka. It'll put you to sleep." He brought her a bottle and she guzzled it down obediently.

Meanhwhile Vaclav ran outside, chasing butterflies through the field with the little girl from the cottage behind. The butterflies were fast, dipping and swooping around, soaring up toward the sun. The little girl never got near them. But Vaclav got closer and closer; one time his finger brushed a butterfly's wing. Finally he caught one in his hand and showed the little girl. He let it go, laughing.

This was his first vivid memory.

A crowd of boys rushed around in a field in Swarthmore, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. They were playing soccer -- a variety of soccer in which strategy and finesse took second place to tackling, elbowing and general mayhem. A handful of girls were playing too, and some girls and smaller boys stood on watching.

There was plenty of laughing and socializing, and no one seemed to be taking the game very seriously -- with one exception, a Russian immigrant boy named Vaclav Bulgakov. His ball-handling skills were superb. He was fast, an accurate shot, and a master of feinting. He was a short twelve year old, playing with boys up to eighteen, but it was always he who managed to leap up in the air, in the midst of a huddle of grasping heads, and nudge the ball down to his feet.

Everyone in Russia played soccer that way, he told them, when they questioned his intensity and ability. But they didn't quite believe him.

Susie Peters and Jacqueline Honore' were standing there watching the game. Susie was the prettiest girl in Vaclav's class; she had just moved in from Idaho. She never joined in the games; she was much too mature for that. She was only twelve years old, but she was starting to look like a woman. She had firm oval breasts, and the beginnings of an hourglass figure. Jacqueline was thirteen, almost fourteen, and a bit of a tomboy. She was a year ahead in school, but she looked younger than Susie. She often played soccer and baseball with the boys, but today she wasn't, because Susie wasn't.

"That kid plays soccer like a maniac," said Susie.

"Who? Vaclav?"

"Yeah. Look at the way he runs around George and Johnny. He makes 'em look like idiots."

"He's good," agreed Jacqueline. "He comes from Russia, or somewhere."

"He's kind of cute, doncha think?"

"Yeah ... I guess so. He's kinda weird, though...."

"How do you mean?"

"They say his mom is, like, totally nuts. Like, she wakes up screaming at night. She hasn't left the house in ten years. Megan heard her one time -- she lives down the street from him. She said it sounded like a dying cat." The two girls looked at each other and giggled.

Jacqueline continued. "And his dad is like a total drunk. One time he smashed his car into the telephone pole in front of my house. It was, like, totalled. It was late at night, we were sleeping, and we heard this horrible crash. We went out to look, and this car was crumpled up in front of the pole. And this guy got out, Vaclav's dad, and he didn't say anything, he just kind of staggered home. He didn't even say anything to us. It was ... eesh! really scary."

"Wow."

"And his sister's retarded. I mean, really retarded."

Susie paused to take the information in. "Well, he's still really cute," she said, after a while. "I like his big brown eyes."

Jacqueline giggled. "Michael's way cuter."

"Michael Baker? No way!"

Jacqueline's big sister Anna rode up on her bike. "Come on, Jackie. We've gotta get home. Mom'll kill you if you're late again."

"I told you, don't call me Jackie."

Anna smirked at her. "All right, Jackie. I won't."

The soccer game was over. Vaclav and Michael came over to talk to Susie.

"Good game," said Susie to Vaclav.

"Thanks."

"You gonna be on the soccer team, when you get to high school?"

He shrugged. "I guess so."

One of Anna's friends walked up with a handful of books. "Can I come over tonight, Anna? I need you to help me with trig."

Anna laughed. "Get real, Sally. Help you with algebra? I've been lost since the first week." She giggled. "I spend the whole class passing notes to Tom."

Vaclav looked at them curiously. He said, "Trigonometry's easy. My dad taught me trigonometry last year."

Sally scowled at him. "You're just a little kid."

"Let me see what you're doing." Sally handed him the book. There was a bookmark; Vaclav opened it to the marked page. "See, that's just a double angle formula. You just have to let y equal 2x. Then divide both sides by cosine. But you don't have to do it this way, it's easier if you use complex numbers. My dad showed me."

"Your dad sounds pretty smart," said Sally, suitably impressed. She laughed. "My dad can't add two and two."

"I could help you with your homework," offered Vaclav.

Sally smiled. "You're sweet."

Vaclav saw she didn't want his help, although he couldn't see why. He looked at his watch, an digital alarm watch with a built-in scientific calculator, and said, "Got to get home to dinner. See ya, Sally."

"Bye, Vaclav."

"Bye."

As soon as Vaclav left the other kids, he grabbed a book out of his pocket. It was a sci-fi novel, Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. He walked along while reading, looking up only when he had to cross a street. He got home at five past six, a few minutes late. His father was in the kitchen fixing dinner.

Vaclav sniffed the air. "Sausage and potatoes again?"

"Whaddayou want, stuffed camel in hot sauce?"

"Hi, Jame. How ya doin'?"

"Good."

"What'd ya do today?"

"Nothing."

"Great...."

Jamie picked up her milk and slowly, methodically, poured it out on the table. She was absorbed by the patterns it made on the table, circles expanding and intersecting, running down off the table and splashing on the floor.

"Where's mom."

Vlad's jovial expression suddenly disappeared. "She's upstairs. In bed."

Vaclav looked at him meaningfully. They both knew what 'in bed' meant. "How's she doing?"

"Not good."

"How bad?"

"I don't know." He shook his head, annoyed at the inquisition. "I've been writing all day. I've got a piece due for Science News in two days; I've barely even started it yet. On chaos theory. I've got to interview these people in England; I've been chasing them on the telephone. It's crazy. You know how it is."

Vaclav knew how it was. His father worked at home, but he set aside the hours from nine to four for his workday. He worked very hard, and very efficiently. It wasn't easy to make a living as a freelance science writer. He ate lunch at his writing desk. One or two days a week he went out, to talk to his university friends at U. Penn, Temple or Drexel. That was what set him apart from other science writers. He had been a top-flight physicist at Moscow University; he understood science from the inside. He raced through research papers as if they were newspaper articles.

When Jamie came home at four, the workday was over. Then he would check on Avdotya, read to her, talk with her. Unless he was busy for some reason, such as these telephone interviews with England.

Vaclav rushed upstairs, Ubik still in hand. His mom was lying there, on the bed, her face caked in sweat. She looked as though she'd been crying for hours. He resented his father for ignoring her, but on reflection, it was difficult to blame him. There wasn't much you could do for her, really. And after you saw her, it could take hours to recover.

She just got worse and worse; and the worse she got, the more she withdrew from the world. And the more she withdrew from the world, the more Vladimir withdrew from her. It was, Vaclav precociously saw, as though his father was insulating himself emotionally from her death, which he saw was forthcoming. But Vaclav refused to follow suit. He would not insulate himself. He opened himself to Avdotya entirely. No matter how mad, how ill-groomed, how disconnected she was -- still, she was his mother.

He sat down by the bed and took her hand. "Hi, mom."

"Vaclav. Hi."

"How ya doin'?"

"You have to ask me?"

"No, mom, it's all...."

"Okay, son. Okay. I mean, you know...."

"It's all right, mom. Don't worry."

She took a deep breath, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "It's the angels. They're evil. They're not angels at all."

"It's okay, mom. You're feverish. You're hallucinating." That's what the doctors had said. Hallucinating. She was prone to hallucinations. Common in cases of advanced schizophrenia.

"That's what they tell me." She smiled and ruffled his hair. "But they don't know.... They don't know. The angels are real enough. Only ... they're not any good."

He leaned over and kissed her.

"You understand, son. You're the only one."

He smiled. He didn't understand at all, he only felt for her. But he was glad to give her pleasure.

"It's just another place I go."

"Well, then, I wish you'd come back to this one...." He smiled, and had a new thought. "Or bring me there with you, mom. Maybe I can help you there."

She shook her head. "No. No. Don't say that."

He stroked her hand gently.

" You'd better leave me, son. I need to be alone for a while. I've got a long battle ahead of me.... Tell Dad to bring my medicine."

He got up and left obediently. About thirty seconds later, the screams began on cue. He wished she could be quieter, so all the neighbors wouldn't hear her.

"She wants her medicine," he told his father.

"I don't know why. It never does any good."

"She's talking about angels again."

"Evil angels. God, I don't know what it is about them. Vaclav, if you could have seen her.... When you were little. In Russia. And before, back before you were born. She was beautiful, she looked nothing like she does now. And she was clever, smart, bright as a button. Smartest girl I ever met. She was the one helped me get started as a science writer. Every time I had an idea for an article, I'd try it out on her. She didn't know the science, but she knew what would appeal to people. She understood human beings. Everyone looked up to her.... And her English, it was wonderful. She knew all the poets, Shakespeare, Byron, Coleridge.... She used to take you out to look at the stars -- show you all the constellations...."

"I know. You told me before."

"Right. Okay. Why don't you bring her up her medicine. It's upstairs, on the bathroom shelf. You know where it is."

"I don't want to."

"All right." Vladimir trotted upstairs to deliver the medicine himself. As always, he took the stairs three at a time. Vaclav admired his father's endless energy -- a trait which he, himself, possessed also. Vladimir turned out two or three magazine articles a month, took care of an autistic daughter and a debilitated, schizophrenic wife, and still managed to teach Vaclav algebra. It was no wonder he liked to drink sometimes. Anyone would, in his position -- you needed some way to relieve the tension. Nevertheless, Vaclav had promised himself that he would never touch alcohol. He didn't like the way his father smelled when he came back from the bar -- the way he walked, or talked. He always tried to ignore it, but in the end it was disgusting. And then there was the time he'd crashed the car. The insurance had paid for a new one. But the neighborhood had been talking for months. Two years afterwards, and they still hadn't forgotten it.

Eventually they sat down to eat. Vaclav held his book in his lap, reading under the table.

"What're you reading?" asked Vladimir.

"Ubik. It's science fiction."

"Ubik? I know Ubik. That's a great book. It's a classic. That's the one where these people are put in half-sleep, right? And they hallucinate they're back in the 1930's...."

"I don't know," said Vaclav harshly. "I haven't finished the book yet."

"Oh. Sorry."

They ate in silence for a while. Jamie was playing with her sausage, arranging it at different angles on the plate. She wasn't eating anything. Eventually Vladimir spoke again. "Dick was into hallucinations. Alternate realities. Is that why you're reading him? Because of...?" He gestured upstairs toward his wife.

"It's just something I picked up at school, out of the library. You remember the movie, Blade Runner? That was made from one of his books."

"I didn't know that."

"The book wasn't called Blade Runner, it was called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep."

Vladimir laughed. "I haven't read that one. Do they indeed. I'd imagine they don't dream at all. Why do we need to dream anyway? It's just an imperfection in our brains. My friend Victor says dreams are just random nerve firings from the brain stem. The mind places an interpretation on these random stimuli; that's why dreams never make any sense."

Vaclav looked puzzled. "But that's not right, Dad, is it? Don't your dreams mean something? I mean ... you dream about things that are important to you. It's not just anything. Even if the stuff from the, from the brain stem is random, that doesn't mean the dreams don't mean anything, does it?"

Vladimir shrugged. He was willing to concede a point to his eleven-year-old son. "I guess you're right; we don't really know. That's just Victor's theory. We should ask your mom -- she's in dreamland right now. Maybe she could tell us."

Vaclav smiled weakly.

"I'm writing a piece on dreams for Psychology Today. I'll be able to tell you more about it next month."

"Mmmmm."

After dinner, Vaclav ran up to his room and flopped down on his beanbag chair, his nose still buried in the book. It was indeed, as his father had said, about people who hallucinated. Put into a kind of half-sleep, a mechanical life after death, they imagined all sorts of worlds. One of them, a character named Jory, managed to gain extra power and control the others' imagined realities. As his father had anticipated, it made him think about his mother's "other world."

Around nine, Vladimir called up. "I'm going out tonight, Vaclav. Jamie's in bed all ready. Look after her if she gets up."

"All right, dad."

He went to see his mom again. She recited disconnected fragments of poetry. More old, twisted, obscure-sounding stuff. Vaclav hated it.

"Yester-night I prayed aloud

In anguish and in agony

Up-starting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me

A lurid light, a trampling throng

Sense of intolerable wrong"

"Mom...." The words annoyed and frightened him. He wished she would stop.

She raised her hand. "Hold on, Vaclav. I remember more." She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and went on.

"So two nights passed: the nights dismay

Saddened and stunned the coming day

Sleep, the wide blessing seemed to me

Distemper's worst calamity

The third night, when my own loud scream

Had waked me from the fiendish dream

O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild

I wept as I had been a child..."

She broke out into uncontrollable tears.

"Mom.... Come on, mom, you're upsetting yourself."

"Come here, let me hold you, son...."

He leaned forward for a hug. Her tears made his face and neck all wet. The last verse was barely comprehensible.

"To be beloved is all I need

And whom I love, I love indeed."

He smiled. "I love you, mom."

"That's Coleridge, son. There's a lot of other words in there.... I can't remember things right anymore."

"It's okay, mom. It doesn't matter."

She straightened herself up. "Where's your father?"

Vaclav paused, disliking the question, but he saw no way to get out of answering. "He went out."

"Out drinking again."

"I guess so."

She shook and the tears came again. "It's all my fault. I should kill myself, that's all. I'm just a burden, a burden to everyone. He never used to drink before ... before I started having problems."

"Stop, mom. Don't talk like that. Go to sleep." He stroked his mother quietly.

"Sleep? Go to sleep? But then I'll dream, Vaclav. You have no idea...."

He looked at her compassionately. Then there was a bracing scream from Jamie's bedroom downstairs.

"The baby's calling," said his mom.

"I know," he said. "I'll go to her."

He ran downstairs. Jamie was crouched in the corner of her room, urinating. The whole room smelled like piss. It was revolting. He took her by the hand and guided her to the toilet, but she had nothing left. She didn't want to go back to bed; she loved the attention. He brought her upstairs and lay her beside Avdotya. "All right if I leave Jamie here, Mom? She can't sleep."

"Sure."

The two of them lay there, Avdotya and Jamie, holding each other and drifting to sleep. Vaclav went back to his room and picked up his book of mathematical puzzles. It was time to go to sleep, but he wasn't sleepy. He was developing an aversion to sleep. If he slept all night, after all, then when would he have time to read?

Most of the math puzzles were too difficult for him, but he enjoyed fiddling with them anyway. He especially liked the geometry problems. After a while he turned to another book, one about the fourth dimension. This one he liked to read often too. One time he had begun designing a four-dimensional Rubik's Cube, but he had given up halfway through.

Mathematics was wonderful. It was a universe that made perfect sense. Or, rather, he sometimes reflected, it made perfect sense to him -- just as his mother's universe made perfect sense to her. Tonight he couldn't focus on the math problems; he just kept thinking about what his mother had said. The angels are evil. Another world. She thought he understood, but he didn't understand at all, not any better than anyone else. The only difference between him and everyone else was that he wanted to understand.

He fell asleep, as usual, with the lights on and a book on his lap.

The next day at school, there was an English test he hadn't prepared for at all. He never paid attention to his homework. He managed to get through it though. After school, inspired by the discussion with his father, he went by the town library and checked out a book on sleep and dreams. He browsed through it in the library. Then, as he was leaving, he ran into Susie Peters. She was leaving the children's section, with a handful of pre-teen novels. "What're you reading?" she asked brightly.

"About sleep and dreams," he said. They left the library together. "Do you know there are four phases of sleep. There's only one of them that we dream in. Dream sleep is closer to being awake than to the other kinds of sleep."

"Really? That's cool."

"Do you ever remember your dreams?"

"Yeah. All the time."

"You know you have hundreds of dreams every night? You can never remember all of them. Just the ones that come right before you wake up."

"Mmmmm. Last night I had this dream ... it was the strangest thing. I dreamed I could see into other people's minds. I could see exactly what they were thinking, Vaclav. It was the weirdest thing."

Vaclav smiled. "So what were they thinking?"

"What were they thinking? I don't know ... all kinds of things. I don't remember."

"Too bad."

They walked past a park and she said, "Let's sit down on a while." They sat down on a bench surrounded by trees. Things were quiet for a few moments. "Vaclav," said Susie finally, "did you ever kiss a girl?"

Vaclav blushed. He tried to stop himself from trembling. "Only my sister," he said. "And that doesn't count."

"Do you want to kiss me?"

"Sure."

He leaned over in front of her and stared into her eyes for a moment, taking her face in his hands. She was surprised by the intensity of his gaze. She closed her eyes, leaned forwards and kissed him. When it was over, they leaned forward and tried again. She turned around sideways so the angle would be better.

They sat there listening to the birds sing, feeling very alive and adult. "Vaclav," she asked him finally, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"I want to be a scientist," he said. "Or maybe a science writer, like my dad."

"What kind of scientist?"

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe a medical researcher. I want to learn how to fix people's brains. So no one has to be ... crazy. You know. Like my sister, and my mom."

She nodded. "You're smart. You could be anything you want. I want to be a model, or a teacher."

"You'd be a good teacher," he said.

"Do you think you can fix people's brains? Really?"

"I don't know. You can fix people's bodies, right? My dad had a gallstone taken out once. They even put a pig's heart valve in a person. My dad wrote a story about it. They tried to put a baboon's heart in a person, but the person died."

"Weird."

"Yeah."

"Vaclav? Wanna touch my breasts?"

"Sure."

Her breasts were small, but with surprisingly large nipples. She closed her eyes and smiled as he caressed them.

"Will you be my boyfriend?"

"Sure."

For the next six months, he and Sally went everywhere together. Now that he was going out with the prettiest girl in the class, no one thought he was strange anymore. Not only was he at the top of the class academically, he was an excellent athlete, and he had a good sense of humor. One time he drew caricatures of all the teachers and put them up on the bulletin board. Mrs. Reynolds, the English teacher, was angry. She'd been drawn with a huge nose, rotten teeth, black eyes and huge, distorted breasts. But the art teacher thought the caricatures were wonderful, and asked Vaclav to sign up for art next year.

Puberty came over him all of a sudden, just on cue for his thirteenth birthday. He grew much more enthused about Susie's kissing and touching games. They spent a lot of time talking, too. She even came by the house sometimes. She met Vladimir, who struck her as friendly and entertaining, not at all the drunk Jacqueline had made him out to be. And Jamie was cute enough in spite of her autism. She never asked to meet his mother, and he never offered.

One time she asked him, "How did it happen, your mom?"

"I don't know," he said. "Dad says it wasn't anything that happened. Just something in her brain. Maybe a tumor or something. It started when I was four. Dad thought maybe coming here would improve things. Better doctors here than in Russia. But it didn't work."

"It's not, um...."

"Hereditary? I don't think so. But no one really knows what's the matter with her anyway." He paused. "Look at how Jamie is."

"She's sweet."

"Yeah. The doctors say it has nothing to do with how Mom is. How Jamie is, I mean. But still, you can't help but wonder."

"Your dad's got a tough job. Taking care of your mom and Jamie both."

"He does all right," said Vaclav, wondering why he felt obliged to minimize his father's achievement. "Jamie goes to school every day. And mom doesn't need much taking care of, really. She just lies there, getting worse and worse. She goes around the house during the day. She gets herself food and stuff. She hasn't left the house in seven years, you know."

"I know.... But still, things could be worse, you know. At least she's not mean to you. My mom always yells at me over nothing."

"Yeah. My mom never does that. She just yells at things that aren't there."

"She loves you a lot."

"Yeah.... Hey, you want to see a movie this weekend?"

"Sure. What's playing?"

"I think Batman Forever starts on Friday."

"Cool...."

Things went along smoothly for a while. Then, one time, Vaclav didn't show up in school for a couple days. Susie went by his house to see what was happening. If he was out with a cold, he would have called her on the phone and told her. She suspected it was something unusual.

She knocked on the door and no one answered, but the car was in the driveway, so she shouted out "Vaclav?"

Vladimir came to the door. "Vaclav's upstairs," he said. "His mother's been ill. Very ill, I mean."

Susie nodded. She wished she hadn't come.

"You can go up if you want."

She made her way up the stairs hesitantly. Vaclav knelt by the bed, his mother's hand clenched in his. She lay there in a nightie, a stick-thing figure with her head leaned back and her mouth open. She made a move as if to scream, but only moaned.

"Vaclav...."

"I think she's dying, Susie."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah. I should have called you."

"No. It's all right...."

Susie put her hand on his arm.

"She was all right when I was a kid," he said, weakly.

"I know. You told me.

"She used to recite poetry. Take me outside to look at the stars, and show me the constellations.... When I was a baby." If Susie hadn't been there, he would have cried. But he forced the tears back in his eyes. "Hey, let's go for a walk. I've been sitting here long enough."

They walked for two hours, not saying much of anything. When they got back to his house, there was an ambulance in front. Paramedics crowded around his mother's bed. "She's dead, isn't she?" he said.

"I'm afraid so."

Vaclav didn't speak for two weeks afterwards. He sat in his room staring out the window. Susie came by and tried to talk to him but he just touched her arm and looked away. His father pleaded with him over and over again, but it was useless. "It's sweet of you to keep coming by," he said to Susie. "He'll come out of it soon enough. He was always very close to his mother."

"He talked about her sometimes," said Susie.

"He listened to her too closely," said Vladimir. "All her talk about angels and demons. He tried to understand her madness. Some things you just can't understand."

The only one he seemed to be pleased with was Jamie. She would come and sit by him in silence. They would look out the window together. She would tap her fingers on his arm, in her obsessive autistic way, and he would smile at her, softly and faintly, perhaps seeing something of his mother in her. At night she would lean her head on his lap and go to sleep. She had never taken to him quite so well before. Now, for the first time ever, he was in the same place as her. His mind wasn't off in worlds of mathematics, science, girlfriends, books, sports. It was in the present moment, in his body and physical surroundings. Other people were an assault on his senses. He was becoming autistic.

When he started talking, it was grudging, as if he felt it would be too rude not to. He didn't seem to much enjoy communicating with others. His father understood this and mostly left him alone. Susie would come by every day fater school, and he would sit there in silence, making one-word replies.

"You've got to go back to school, Vaclav."

"Yeah."

"You've got to pull yourself out of this."

"Mmmm."

"Vaclav, why don't you listen to me?"

"I'm listening."

"What are you thinking about all the time that's so damn interesting!"

"I don't know."

He would just sit there staring at Susie, at her small breasts, her lipstick-covered lips, her pleading eyes. How shallow she was; how little she understood. But how sweet of her to keep coming by.

After a few weeks Susie stopped coming.

It was eight weeks before he went back to school. The break hadn't hurt him academically -- he was well ahead of the class anyway. But when he got back, he saw that Susie was walking around holding hands with David Randell. She had finally given up on him.

She walked up to him after school and said "I'm sorry." He saw she wanted him make a romantic gesture, to try and win her back. She didn't care about David Randell, not as she'd cared about him. But he was unwilling to make that effort. He just stared at her and walked away.

A superficial observer might have said that the life went out of Vaclav, after his mother died. He didn't play soccer with the neighborhood kids anymore, didn't say much of anything to anyone. When he moved up from junior high to high school, he didn't join the soccer team, as everyone had expected him to. He dropped off the few casual friendships he'd had, and didn't bother to make new ones.

But the truth was that Vaclav hadn't lost his enthusiasm -- he had just redirected it, from outside to within. He had always been fairly introverted, but with a slight streak of showmanship. It was this extraverted streak that had caused him to race around on the soccer field, to constantly raise his hand in class, to revel in his relationship with the prettiest girl in the eighth grade. Now the showmanship was gone, replaced with a kind of quiet conceit. It was as if he didn't even consider other people worth impressing. He was involved in his own private world, which no one else got the opportunity to understand, except for possibly his father.

Most of the school day he just sat in class reading; not so much science fiction anymore, more factual information. Math, physics, biology, chemistry, linguistics, history. He mastered the art of listening to easy lectures while reading difficult books. He grasped calculus and linear algebra easily, and moved on to differential equations, which he found surprisingly hard. He read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution three times. He memorized the atlas of the human brain, and most of Gray's Anatomy. At the dinner table he would show off his new knowledge to Vladimir, who was thrilled and impressed. "You'll be a great scientist someday," he told his son. "You'll be my greatest achievement."

He graduated fourth in his class without trying.

When he left Swarthmore High School, he didn't have a single friend. He hadn't had a girlfriend since Susie, in the eighth grade. But he had a better fund of knowledge than most college graduates. He aced his SAT's and Achievement Tests, applied to MIT and was easily accepted. On the application form, where it asked for his intended area of study, he wrote "Theoretical physics, electrical engineering and neurobiology, as relating to brain scan technology."

Susie came up to him at the graduation ceremony. They hadn't spoken in four and a half years.

"Hi, Vaclav."

"Hi, Susie."

"It's Sue now."

He looked at her strangely. "Hi, Sue...."

She paused, momentarily unsettled. "So ... I hear you're going off to MIT."

"Right."

She took a deep breath. "I just wanted to say ... I've wanted to talk to you for years. I still feel really bad for what happened, I mean when your mother died. I should have stuck by you...."

He smiled warmly. "Don't be silly, Susie. We were just kids."

She sighed a sigh of relief. So he had long ago forgiven her, or ceased to care anyway. "Can I walk you home?"

"Aren't your friends waiting for you?"

"They'll do all right without me."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Fine."

They walked along uncomfortably. "Are you still planning to be a medical researcher?"

"I'm not going to get an M.D, I don't think. But I might, I guess. I want to study electrical engineering and neurobiology. I want to work on PET scans, or fMRI scans, or something like that."

"I don't know what that is."

"They're tools for seeing into people's brains."

"So you can tell what's wrong with them?"

He smiled. "Or what's right with them. Yeah."

"I'm thinking of going to Boston, too. To Boston University."

"Yeah? How come Boston?"

"I've got an aunt who lives there. I can stay with her."

"Oh. Well, maybe I'll see you there."

"I hope so. Let me give you my aunt's number. I guess you'll be staying in the dorm?"

"Right."

"I would have liked to stay in the dorms too, but it costs too much. At least I'll be away from my parents though.... I guess you're on full scholarship?"

"Yeah."

He was bemused at her renewed interest in him. All through high school, she had ignored him, just as he had ignored her and everybody else. But now she was all warm and friendly, just as if the four and a half years had never passed. He looked into her eyes and decided to satisfy his curiousity. "Susie. Why are you doing this?"

"What do you mean? Doing what?"

"Coming up to me, talking to me like this. Why are you doing this now? It's been four years, Susie. I mean...."

She shrugged. "Why not?"

"It's just a little weird, thats all. At any time during the last four and a half years you could have come up and talked to me, but you didn't."

"You could have come up and talked to me too," she pointed out. "But you didn't."

"And I didn't now either. At least I was consistent."

"'Consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds'," she said, grinning. "Emerson."

"Touche'." She couldn't, could she, have known how Avdotya had liked to quote Emerson? "Well.... I'll guess I'll give you a call in Boston. I'll be going up in August."

He turned to leave, but she said, "Wait, Vaclav."

"What?"

"You asked an honest question, you deserve an honest answer. I always wanted to come up to you and talk to you, maybe to become friends again. But I couldn't find the words. I felt ... I felt too bad about breaking up with you the way I did."

"You didn't break up with me, Susie. First of all, I drove you away by not talking to you. And then you took up with David, but it was clear that you would have gone back with me, if I had asked you to."

She smiled. "It was clear, was it?"

"I thought so. I just couldn't ... I couldn't be friends with anyone then. Not for a couple years after. It had nothing to do with you personally."

"I know...."

"Good."

"Anyway, I always wanted to talk to you, but now it was like I might never see you again, and I realized I ... I didn't want that to happen. I realized ... you know, I've been out with a lot of different guys."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Well ... you've always got your nose in a book.... I've even been out with some college guys. Jay, who took me to the prom. But I never really liked any of them, not even Jay ... I mean, I liked them, but not the way I liked you." She blushed. "They're so ordinary. You're really something special. I guess I've still got a monster crush on you...."

He laughed. "You're playing tricks on me, Susie."

"No one's called me Susie for years."

"Oops. Sue. I forgot."

"No, keep calling me Susie, please. I like it."

He looked at her carefully. She was awfully attractive. She certainly had developed a lot. He realized he hadn't actually looked at her closely since the death of his mother. Her breasts were large and firm; her complexion was smooth and pale; her lips were full, round and red. She was beautiful, actually -- even in a graduation gown, which was not the most flattering of outfits. Still the prettiest girl in the class. Up to this point he had been annoyed by her attentions, but now he had a change of heart. "You know," he said, "I've done nothing but read for the last four years. Maybe it's time I let loose a bit. You want to go out somewhere tonight? There must be loads of graduation parties."

"Yeah. Jacqueline's having one, actually.... But we don't have to go there if you don't want to. We can go anywhere."

"Jacqueline's party's all right by me."

"Great."

And so Vaclav lost his virginity, in Jacqueline Honore's rec room, to his first girlfriend Susie, on the night of his high school graduation.

A couple months later, in the beginning of August, he and Susie drove up to Boston together. Exploring a city full of strangers, they felt like an old married couple, as though they had never been apart.

Vaclav took some exams and tested out of the first-year lectures in math, physics, chemistry and bio. But he still had to do all the labs. So he was loaded down with first-year physics, chem and bio labs, plus second year math, physics, bio, chemistry and electronics. He bought all the books for his classes early, and tried to read them before the semester started. But there was too much information; he couldn't get through them.

As soon as classes started, he wondered if he'd taken too much on. Math and bio were easy for him, but the other classes were tough. It was several orders of magnitude more challenging than high school. But he found he could do it, if he focused his attention. He didn't have much time for Susie; he even took classes straight through the summer. But that was all right with her. B.U. was a party school, and she made a lot of new, interesting friends. Her load as an architecture major was pretty light. There was a fair bit of work, but it was easy; you could do it while hung over or stoned, or while talking with friends. After a day hanging out in Boston with crazy artists, it was a relief to take the train across to Cambridge and see Vaclav. With everyone else it was a bit of a put-on; she was always showing off how much fun she was. With Vaclav she could be totally natural. She knew he was crazy about her.

As Vaclav correctly suspected, she fooled around with other guys now and then, when the opportunity was irresistable. But it was never all that satisfying, and she always felt bad afterwards, so she gradually gave it up. Unbeknownst to her, he also experimented with other women -- after all, she'd been his first. But after their freshman year was over, they decided to move in together. He left his dorm room, she left her aunt's house, and they got a small apartment in Cambridge. She had to take the subway to school every day, but it was much closer than it had been from her aunt's house.

Vaclav could have finished college in two and a half years, what with his advanced placement credit and his summer courses. But instead he stayed on for four, and left with degrees in electrical engineering, physics and biology. He did exactly what he had said he would do on his admissions form, the one he'd filled out in high school. He did a senior research project on weak magnetic fields in the brain, trying to replicate some Russian research. Meanwhile Susie had changed her major from architecture to graphic arts, and was scheduled to finish after one more year.

As graduation approached, he was offered a job in the MIT Media Lab, working on computer interfaces that would take commands directly from the brain of the user. But he was unsatisfied with the project. It was based on brain waves -- EEG's and ERP's, electroencephalograms and evoked response potentials.

"It seems like a good job, though," said Susie, sitting next to him on the couch in their tiny two-room apartment.

"It is a good job. And it's right up my alley, too. I mean, it's neurobiology and electrical engineering. That's why they want me for the job."

"It's good money too."

"Yeah. But I hate EEG work. Brain waves don't mean anything. They want to read computer commands from ERP's, but you'll never get anywhere that way. The repertoire of commands will be awfully limited."

"What's the difference between EEG and ERP? You've told before, but I always forget."

"EEG is just an electric potential you get from placing electrodes on the scalp. It's a regular wave. There are different waves for different activities. Theta waves, alpha waves, and so forth. I've told you about that before."

"Yeah."

"ERP is like a glitch in the brain waves caused by some specific stimulus. Like if you hear a sound, that shows up in your brain waves, but only for a half a second or something after you hear it. What these guys at the Media Lab have done is to train people to make ERP's at all. So, if you think a certain thing, it makes a certain ERP pattern come up. If you could do it well enough, it could be like a whole new language. We could communicate by brain waves."

"If we all had electrodes hooked up to our skulls."

"Right. But the thing is, it'll never work that well. You'll never get more than a few dozen different patters under conscious control. The problem is, I mean, what are you getting with EEG? You're just getting a wave that comes from a whole bunch of different generators -- a whole bunch of places all over the brain, all mixed up. There's no way to tell what comes from where. There's so much complexity in the brain, and you're boiling it down to a one-dimensional signal. You remember that project I did with chaos in EEG?"

"Your final project for that neurobiology class?"

"Right. We found some indications that brain waves are chaotic. They're unpredictable, but not in the sense of being random; in the sense of having some simple underlying structure that generates a lot of complexity, in a deterministic way."

"Sure...."

"But now, where does this chaos come from? Does it come from some individual brain system, that carries out some function? Or does it come from the interaction of a vast number of brain systems? You can never tell, with EEG. It's hopeless. You need some other kind of brain scan, if you want to tell anything."

"But they must know this. At the Media Lab."

"Of course they know this. They jsut want to work with ERP anyway, because that's the only thing we have that gives the temporal resolution."

"Temporal what?"

"EEG lets you follow what's going on through time. You can tell the electrical potential in the brain right now, and then tell it again a few dozen milliseconds later. You get a picture of the brain's path through time, on a very fine scale. That's why scientists like EEG. You can study the way things change over time, just the way you do in physics.

"The other methods of scanning the brain -- PET, fMRI, and SPECT -- they give you decent spatial resolution. You can tell what's going on in different parts of the brain. But you can't get the temporal resolution. With fMRI you can get down to maybe half a second -- but that's not good enough. So you have a picture of what parts of the brain are active, and then you have another picture of what parts of the brain are active, a couple seconds later. You have no idea what goes on inbetween...."

"How do these things work? You're not sticking anything on the head, like in EEG, right? Are you shooting some kind of laser through the head or something?"

"Not a laser." He smiled. "That would be dangerous. In PET scans, you inject someone with water made from radioactive oxygen, O-15. Then...."

"And that's not dangerous?"

"Not particularly, no. It has a half-life of two minutes. You're not getting much radiation. Anyway, O-15 has a deficiency of neutrons, so it's constantly emitting positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons."

"Antimatter? You're putting me on."

"No. Come on...."

"This stuff is really weird."

He shrugged. "Maybe it is, it works though. So the radioactive water builds up in the brain over a period of a minute or so. The greater the blood flow in a certain area of the brain, the more radioactive water accumulates in that region. The person wears a radiation detector around their head that tells you where the O-15 is. See, after the O-15 spits out a positron, the positron hits an electron, and they annihilate. Matter and antimatter destroy each other. But when they annihilate, they produce two photons, annihilation photons, shooting out in opposite directions. The photons shoot out of the head at light speed -- the skull doesn't stop 'em because they've go tlike 500 kiloelectron volts of energy."

"Enough, enough.... So you shoot people up with radioactivity and watch where it comes out."

"Sure. Sort of. MRI is different though. It's based on nuclear magnetic resonance. You know how atoms in the presence of a magnetic field act just like little compass needles. So if you're smart enough you can line up a bunch of atoms in the same direction -- just like compasses all line up to the earth's magnetic field. When they're all lined up together, they emit radio waves. The radio waves tell you what kind of atoms are there and what kind of chemical environment they're in. So, you don't have to get injected with radioactive substances or anything, you just have to lie in this tube, which makes terrible banging noises."

"Sounds lovely."

"The machine reads the radio waves coming out of different parts of your brain, and tells you how much oxygen is present in different places."

"Wow. This stuff is amazing."

"This is what I've been thinking about for five or six years now."

"I know. But you never really explained it to me."

"You never asked me to."

"I know. It's so damn complicated...."

"Right. Okay, so these methods are cool, but they're limited, because they can't tell you what's happening at successive instants in time. You can tell, like, what parts of the brain are used for processing verbs, and what parts for processing nouns. You can tell what parts have to do with conscious attention. But that's about all you can tell.... Everything interesting in the mind goes on in the interval between a few dozen milliseconds and a second. It takes you less than a hundred milliseconds to recognize your mother's face -- but maybe a second or two to formulate a logical idea about what your mother is doing. It's the gap between these two where everything's happening. But you need spatial and temporal resolution to figure anything out. If we could measure the brain in time and in space, with decent accuracy, then we could make a map of the mind at work. And we could see what's going on. We could see ... we could see where things like hallucinations were coming from. We could see why one person is smarter than another, why one is bigoted and the other one isn't.... We could figure out everything!"

"You said you can tell what parts of the brain do what things, with the brain scans we have today. Is it the same for everyone? We all use the same parts for the same things?"

"Only for some things. Other things are different for everyone. Like, we all have the same basic attention network, for regulating the focus of consciousness. But if you tried to find the part of the brain for thinking about ... love, or something, it would be different for everyone. What they do is to average out over a lot of people, and just find the regions that are active in everyone when using their brain in a certain way."

"That sounds more promising than EEG. But the problem is, you can't tell what's happening. Just where it's happening, right?"

"Yeah. What you need is to see how the activity flows from one place to the other. How thought activity diffuses through the brain. You should be able to write an equation for it, just like Newton's Laws in physics. But we don't have the data yet."

They sat there looking at each other for a while. Vaclav was pleased that Susie was showing such an interest in his ideas. Most of the time she seemed relatively indifferent.

Susie got a thoughtful look on her face. "Newton's Laws for the mind, huh? I don't know ... I see what you mean, but ... maybe you don't need so much the data, though, Vaclav."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you know, I took a class in philosophy of mind last year, right? Some people think you can tell everything you want to know about the mind just by introspection. So, you could figure out your equation for how thoughts flow through the brain, just by looking at your own mind. Looking how your own thoughts work."

He thought it over carefully. It was rare that she made a concrete suggestion for his research. She was unusually intellectually confident today. "But ... I'm not aware of the three-dimensional structure of my thoughts, am I? It's just a one-dimensional stream of consciousness. So what I see by introspection is a projection onto one dimension, just like EEG."

"Yeah, it's a ... projection, true. But it's not one-dimensional. That's just a metaphor, really. The stream of consciousness. Consciousness doesn't really just go in one direction -- it spreads out all over the place. Mine does, anyway!" She grinned.

"You're right. It's more non-dimensional than one-dimensional. A sort of combination of the two.... Maybe you're right, Suse. Maybe you could get somewhere by introspection. Use the system to study itself. But I wouldn't know how to do it. That's not where my talent is."

She shrugged her shoulders. "So ... what you want to work on is making a better brain scan technology."

"Right. And that's the problem. I don't know what I need to study. Do I need to study the brain more? Is it an engineering problem? Or is it fundamental physics?"

"You're asking me? I told you what I think you should do. You have to look inside yourself. Maybe you'll find something that way that will tell you what area to look in."

He smiled. "Look inside myself.... What are you, my guru?"

"Hey.... You asked, I answered."

"Yeah. Fair enough. Still, I have to decide what to do once I graduate.... I've applied for graduate study in every discipline under the sun. I'm sure I'll be accepted everywhere, but...."

"Egotist."

"No, I just mean...."

"I know, I know. I'm only kidding."

"I just need to decide which to do."

She laughed and put her hand on his leg. He was just as handsome as he had been at twelve years old. And just as intense, just as peculiar. "I don't know, Vaclav. I don't know. But you know what ... I don't think you can know. I don't think anyone can know."

"You're so profound today."

"No, I'm really serious."

"I'm serious too," he grinned.

"Okay.... What I mean is, I don't think it's possible to predict where a discovery will come from. If you're going to make a really big discovery, it's gonna come from some unexpected direction. Not anything anyone would really predict. So," she shrugged her shoulders, "I guess you should toss a coin. Use the I Ching or something." She laughed. "Karen, you know Karen."

"Yeah."

"She's making an art exhibit based on the I Ching. A painting to illustrate each hexagram."

"Neat. Phil Dick wrote a novel based on the I Ching. The Man in the High Castle."

All of a sudden Susie got up from the couch. She put a CD on, Jean-Luc Ponty, took off her shirt and sat back down. She wasn't wearing a bra. She got a look on her face that he couldn't quite fathom. "Hey, Vaclav ... do you want to feel my breasts?"

He laughed, and fondled her gently. He remembered the moment she was referring to. "You were mighty forward, weren't you? A mighty forward twelve year old. I couldn't resist...."

She smiled. "I'm going to be forward again." She turned around and sat on his lap, pressing tight up against him. "Vaclav Klonoswki ... will you marry me?"

He didn't hesitate for a moment, not in his mind or in his words. He said, "Of course I will, Susie. If that's

what you want. I mean, I always thought we'd get married eventually." They hugged, and he kissed her on the mouth. But then he pulled back a bit. "But ... just one thing. Don't expect a big house and a garden just yet. I'm going to be in school for quite some time. I have to ... you understand."

"I understand. Do you think I'm marrying you for money? You can stay in school forever. I'll get a job and support you if that's what you want me to do."

"I love you, Susie." It was the first time he'd said that.

"I love you, too."

He looked at her quizzically. "I've decided, you know. Right this moment. I'm going to go to med school. I'm going to become a brain surgeon. And get a degree in physics."

"In your spare time?"

"Right."

She got up off his lap and sat down next to him again. "You're crazy, Vaclav. You're stark raving mad."

"Just like my mother."

"Heh...." That comment had surprised her -- he never joked about his mother.

He shook his head. "I can do it."

"I'm not doubting you," she said. "But you don't make things easy on yourself. Med school is a lot of pressure, even if you're a genius."

"I know. But if you're going to run experiments on people, you've got to be an M.D. That's what made me decide. Your marriage proposal...."

"I don't get it. What does the one have to do with the other?"

He looked at her seriously. "Our marriage is an experiment."

She tilted her head. This was an odd turn to an odd conversation. "How?"

He took a deep breath. This was something he had to get out. "An experiment to see if someone as obsessed with his work as me can hold together a marriage."

"Vaclav! That's hardly the attitude to start out with."

He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm a scientist.... I'm a lousy romantic. Sorry."

She pouted. "Apology not accepted."

He pressed on, just like always. "Remember, you said to me once -- you quoted Emerson, just like my mother -- you said, 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds.'"

"I remember."

"I was being simple-minded then. You were right about that. I was focussing on ideas and nothing else. I spent my whole life in high school reading, without thinking about other people at all. Except for Jamie...."

"Yeah?"

"Well, now I'm not simple anymore. I'm complicated. I'm obsessed with my work; I want to do nothing but work. I want to chart out the brain, to understand the way people's minds work. It's not just that ... I want to make people's minds better. I want to fix the problems we have, so no one has to be like my mother got, or like Jamie ... ever again. So no one has to be like us ever again either...."

"Come on, we're not so bad."

"No. But we could be better. Everyone could be better. But that's not the point I was coming to. The point is, I feel this incredible passion for my work, but now I also have this passion for you. I want to be with you, spend time with you, make you happy. And these two passions contradict each other. I'm not simple-minded any more; I contradict myself."

"'I contradict myself. Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.'"

"Walt Whitman?"

"Yeah. Don't tell me your mother quoted Whitman too."

"Never. Not once. He wasn't her style at all."

"Good." She got up from the couch, went to the fridge, and got out a bottle of champagne, which she'd been saving for the occasion. She popped out the cork with a grin. "Let's drink to our experiment, then. To the unity of opposites! To the meeting of the most complex mind in the world, with Susie's one-track mind...."

He laughed, and touched her. "You're drunk already."

"So what if I am?"

Vaclav very rarely drank -- he was still nervous about alcoholism, even though his father's drinking problem had died with Avdotya. But now, he put his worries aside, and drank like a true Russian. They drank together until they could barely stand up, and made love on the couch till they were too tired to move anymore. She was ecstatic; and he was deeply happy too. The alcohol washed away his confusion, his reservations. Everything was simple and fine.

Vaclav called his father early that evening to tell him the happy news.

"It's too bad your mother never knew Susie," Vladimir said. "I think they would have liked each other. Susie is much like Avdotya was when I met her. So clever, so lighthearted, so devoted to you...." Only after he made this observation did he realize its double-edged nature. "But Susie's not frail like Avdotya was," he added, hurriedly. "She's hearty and strong.... Anyway, my congratulations, Vaclav. I don't know what's taken you so long to propose to her."

"I've decided to go to med school, Dad," he said. "I'm going to be a brain surgeon."

"Great," said Vaclav.

"I decided I need to be an M.D. if I want to experiment on people." He was aware that his father hadn't asked him for an explanation. But he felt the need to justify himself. Because he knew his father would see through him anyway. His father would see, as Susie had not, that he wanted to become a doctor to make up for the incompetence of the doctors who had treated his mother.

Avdotya, Avdotya, Avdotya ... he would never, he sensed in a flash of insight, be able to shake her off. The insight chilled him, led him somewhere he didn't understand -- but then he chased it off.

The pause was rather long. Finally Vladimir spoke. "You're waiting for me to say you're still trying to save your mother."

"No...."

"But it doesn't really matter, does it? Who really knows what it is they're trying to do anyway? You do what you do, in the end. You never understand the reasons."

"But if I get a really effective brain scanner," Vaclav pointed out, "then we will understand the reasons. And that's exactly the point."

Vladimir laughed. There he was, being precocious again. Only, it wasn't precocity anymore; he was an adult now. "I never could win an argument with you, Vaclav. I don't expect to start now. I'm sure you'll be one hell of a medical researcher. In a few years I'll be writing articles about your work."

"I hope so."

Vladimir tried to keep his mouth shut, and leave it at that. But he couldn't. The dynamic of friendly argument between the two of them was just too strong. "I just hope you're not disappointed."

"What do you mean?!"

"I mean, I don't doubt that you'll understand a lot about the mind and brain. You'll invent brilliant new machinery. You'll help people too. You'll make brilliant contributions. But ... you're not going to fix the basic problem. You know that, right? You're not going to cure the human race. Madness, craziness and perversity are part of being human. As a Russian you should know that better than anyone.... So if that's what you're out to do ... I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. That's all I'm saying."

"And what's so bad about being disappointed?" replied Vaclav ironically. "Is it better not to try at all?"

"I didn't say that," said Vladimir. He realized that Vaclav, at age 22, wasn't ready to understand what he was trying to say. Maybe in another ten years, or twenty. "Anyway, you didn't call to talk philosophy. Contratulations, really. You should call Jamie and tell her the good news too." Jamie was living in a group home now, with other retarded teenagers. Vladimir visited her several times a week, but lived peacefully alone.

"You think she would understand?"

"I don't know. Probably. She would understand you were happy, anyway.... You haven't visited her in quite a while, you know. Nor me, in fact."

"I know. I've been busy. It was a tough semester."

"It's always a tough semester. Even in the summer. That's because you take too many classes. You've got to learn to enjoy yourself! That's one thing that Susie knows better than you."

"Point well taken, Dad. Maybe we'll come down next weekend.... Classes are over anyway. And for a change I'm not taking classes this summer. Though I do have a job in the engineering lab.... How are you doing, anyway?"

"Pretty damn good, actually. I've started dating a lady named Margo, a chem prof down at Rutgers in Camden. She's a really bright girl, and quite a looker too. Actually, I've got a date with her shortly; I'm going to have to let you go soon."

"All right, Dad. I'll talk to you later."

"Do call Jamie. And try to come down when you can."

"I will, I will."

Susie watched him hang up the phone with an oddly sad look on her face. "I love hearing you talk to him," she said.

"Oh yeah? Why?"

"You're still so close. Just like friends."

"He was getting on my nerves tonight, actually. Giving me his lecture about how I'm trying to save Mom."

She smiled. "Well, you are, aren't you?"

He looked at her, annoyed. "I want to help people, that's all. To help people with science. Is there something so strange about that?"

"No. Don't get defensive with me. I haven't said anything about it, have I? Everyone has some reason for doing what they do."

"So you believe it too. I'm trying to save Mom."

"That's just a Freudianism, Vaclav. It's silly. You know that. Stop being so sensitive. What I meant to say was, everyone has all kinds of reasons for doing what they do, and they're always all mixed up with each other. Just like the multiple, what do you call them, generators -- the different parts of the brain that come together to make a single EEG wave. There's no way to split them apart. Until you come up with your brain scanner, I guess.... Then we'll be able to tell them apart. Maybe."

"We're repeating the exact conversation I had with my father."

"Oh. That's interesting."

"Mmmm."

"The point is, why do you love someone? Because they give you something you had in your childhood, or you lacked in your childhood. Why do you like a certain type of music? Because of some personality flaw, probably. The loud music compensates for your weak personality. Or the quiet music takes the place of some inner calm you don't have. Why do I want to make art? Because I can't remake myself the way I want to, so I do the next best thing, and try to transform the outer world, right? Once you start analyzing everything you do, you wind up deciding everything's worthless. It's all just compensating for something else. If you were healthy, you wouldn't try to do anything, right, you'd just sit on your ass and placidly collect welfare.... And then, you have to ask yourself, why am I analyzing everything so critically? What's the cause of that. Some toilet training problem, I guess. If my mom hadn't made me wipe my own pussy when I was two years old, I wouldn't have any problems today...."

Vaclav laughed harder than he'd done in a long time. "Oh, God.... You're hilarious. My wife-to-be, the stand-up comic...."

"You like the sound of that, don't you. 'Wife-to-be.'"

"I like the sound of 'wife' better...." She smiled at him. "But what were you saying about your parents before, anyway? When I hung up the phone?"

"Oh ... my parents ... I don't know. That's right. I was saying, you can't tell them anything. They've always got some weird idea. When I tell them we're getting married...."

"They're going to ask if I have a job and can support you. Is that right?"

"Yeah. They certainly will."

"Just tell them that brain surgeons make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."

"You're not going to be a brain surgeon. You're going to do research."

"You don't have to tell them that. Who the hell knows what I'm going to do anyway. So I'll only make two hundred grand a year, instead of five hundred grand. Face it, Susie. We're going to be awfully rich. Even your father can appreciate that. We'll be poor for six or seven more years, max. Four years of med school, plus internships. And then we'll be rolling in money."

"Seven years is a long time to wait."

"You said I could stay in school forever, and you'd support me," he said, teasingly. "Have you forgotten already? What a fickle wife-to-be I have...."

"No, I haven't forgotten. You know I don't want to go to grad school anyway. I'm going to work as soon as I finish my degree next year.... You're right, though. Everyone wants their daughter to marry a doctor. They'll be happy for me, for that reason.... But not because I love you, that's the thing.... They'll be glad to tell their friends their daughter married a brain surgeon. But if I fell madly in love with a ... a ditch-digger, and was fabulously happy, then they wouldn't be happy for me at all."

"A ditch-digger? Do they still have ditch-diggers in this day and age? It's all done by machines, right? So it's probably a good union job. They probably make more than college professors."

"You know what I mean...."

"They don't really care if you're happy."

She shook her head. "Right. They never did, really, even when I was a little girl. They wanted me to be obedient, smart, responsible. But happy was never important."

"It's a difficult thing. I mean, why should one person care if another person's happy? How can one person know if another person's happy, in the end? If we could feel each other's minds, it'd be different. We'd pick up on some small fraction of another person's pleasure. We'd all be connected together. But that's not the way it is...."

"No...."

"The strange thing is, though, Susie, you say your parents never cared if you were happy, but yet you're the happiest person I know. That's part of what attracts me to you. You're always giggling and jumping around. Always have been. Maybe there's some connection there. Happiness is this big illicit thing to you, right -- it's forbidden? And that's why it's all the more enjoyable...."

"Vaclav," she said, taking his face in her hands. "You are really weird. I love you so fucking much." She gave him a long, wet kiss.

She led him to the bed, where they made love again, this time quietly and tenderly, and afterwards drifted off to sleep.

Boston, 2020...

Amanda discovered Dr. Bulgakov's papers in her third year of graduate school, when she was already halfway through her thesis work on black hole thermodynamics. She thought it tremendously exciting. None of her professors at Brown were particularly interested, but that only piqued her enthusiasm. Bulgakov and his group at Neurix Corporation were using fundamental physics, which she loved more than anything, not to study far-away galaxies or miniscule particles, but to study something concrete and immediate: human beings, brains. And, unlike most other brain scan researchers, what they were doing wasn't just engineering. It was theoretically deep. The physics was advancing right along with the neurobiology.

When she graduated, she was offered a job in the physics department at Berkeley. It was a plum position, really; physics jobs were tough to come by. But she hesitated before accepting it. She wanted something more than academia offered. Grant proposals, students and exams didn't excite her -- she wanted to throw herself entirely into research. When she saw a position advertised at Neurix, she worked up an application immediately.

And, much to her surprise, it was only a week later that she was called in for an interview. It was an event that she would remember well for years to come.

Dr. Bulgakov was a slender man, medium height, with a full head of bushy brown hair that was prematurely graying. He had a look of intensity about him that frightened some people. He greeted her warmly when she walked in the door, then sat down behind his desk. He leaned forward in his chair when he talked to her, as if he felt the desk in front of him were an impediment to communication.

"So," Dr. Bulgakov said to her, "tell me, Amanda, why are you interested in working at Neurix?"

"I've been interested in brain scan technology since I was an undergraduate," she said. Which was a bit of a stretch. "I always thought it was really amazing that all this advanced, abstract physics could actually tell you something about the human mind."

"It is amazing. But not amazing enough. What we're trying to do here is to make brain scanning really work. We want to get the spatiotemporal resolution to the point where we can actually track the diffusion of thoughts through the brain. We're pursuing a variety of directions: both incremental improvements in current technology, mostly MRI, and fundamentally new directions."

"I know. I heard your address to the American Physical Society, two years ago. That's how I became interested in your work. I organized a seminar series on your magnetic resonance work."

"At Brown?"

"Right."

"I also liked your paper on quark beams."

He smiled. "The Physical Review Letters one?"

"Yeah."

"That was a bit of a digression for me. I don't know what that has to do with anything. We don't have the apparatus for that kind of work here.... I guess Srinivasan and his group at

Berkeley are making the most progress on quark beams now."

"But they're not going the direction you suggested. They're working on high-intensity stuff, whereas your equations were for low-intensity."

"True.... Well, you seem to have a very strong background in physics."

"And mathematics," she said. "I was a double major. My thesis work involved a lot of abstract algebra, and graph theory. Looking at discrete models of spacetime in the vicinity of singularities."

"Fascinating stuff, I'm sure."

"It is. But I don't want to make it my life's work, just studying things light years away. I'd like to do something more concrete, something down here on earth."

"I understand.... Well, before we go any further, let me take you around the lab to meet some of the others."

They went on the requisite tour of the lab, which was a small one. It looked more like a mad scientist's basement than a university research lab. Odd bits of machinery were poked away everywhere, and some of the researchers walked around with strange helmets on their heads. "Those helmets are your new MRI devices?"

"Right. They should go into production next year. Still working out some of the kinks. It's a real breakthrough. We'll be able to monitor brain activity while people are moving around, carrying out ordinary activities."

In a room off to the side of the main lab, there was a room full of rats and pigeons, with strange devices attached to their skulls. An Oriental woman was bent over a pigeon cage, struggling with something. "This is the implant lab," said Amanda.

The woman looked up. "Right. It hasn't been very successful as yet. The effort may be discontinued soon, if something doesn't turn up.... Hi. You must be Amanda."

"Yes. Hi."

"I'm Ma Ling Wainwright."

"Ma Ling's an old-timer," put in Dr. Bulgakov. "She's been here for five years."

After a while they walked back to his office. He sat down behind his desk, and looked at her piercingly. "So what do you think? It's an interesting place, isn't it?"

"Fascinating."

"We're better funded than any academic laboratory. And there are no administrative hassles. I have complete administrative control of the research division.... It's only ten people, but we do the work of twenty. But what buys us this excellent environment is the fact that we keep producing a steady stream of marketable innovations."

She nodded.

"What isn't clear from your C.V., Amanda, is whether you have any practical engineering experience. You see, we're very scientifically sophisticated here, but we're largely engaged in engineering activity. This is a small corporation, so you're never that far from the production and marketing side of things. When I came here, there was no pure research at all; the lab was entirely development oriented. Now we've had a number of theoretical advances, so we've won some respect for pure research. But still, everyone is expected to spend at least a third of their time on development work. In most cases it's more than that."

"Well...."

"Do you have any engineering experience?"

She realized she was fidgeting, and made herself straighten up. "Not exactly."

"What about experimental neurobiology? Have you studied neuroscience at all?"

"I've done some reading. But I don't have lab experience."

He just kept looking at her. What was he expecting? He would have known she lacked practical experience, from reading her C.V.

"But I'm a quick learner, Dr. Bulgakov.... I have done some experimental physics, cyclotron work. And I also have some psychology lab experience. I worked as a rat runner for a semester, when I was an undergraduate. I've read a lot about your implant work, the stuff Ma Ling was doing. I think that's very interesting. I'd love to get involved with that side of the work."

"I'm interested. Why do you say that?"

"You mention incremental improvements versus fundamentally new directions. My feeling is that incremental improvements aren't going to do it. Something radically new is needed, and I think implants may be the way to go. You lose a lot of information through the skull."

"I agree, it's a promising possibility. But Ma Ling hasn't really been able to do anything with it, and she's been on it two years. And the commercial prospects are weak, because you can't go around implanting sensors in someone's brain every time you want to do a brain scan. The marketing people don't like it."

"Well ... if the benefits were enough, I suppose everyone could be implanted from birth. That's just really squeamishness, it's not a fundamental objection. But also, once the technology is developed with implants, we may be able to do the right kind of science to figure out how to do it another way."

He just sat there, ruminating. It was an uncomfortably long silence. He looked as though he were making the decision whether to hire her, making it right then and there.

"You're not the most qualified applicant," he said. "Your physics background is strong, but it's mostly theoretical, whereas what we do here is more oriented toward engineering and biophysics."

Her face fell. "Right."

"But I like your enthusiasm. You seem to have a lot of energy. That's just what we need around here."

She looked up at him.

"I've decided to offer you the job, Amanda. Starting salary $120,000. Standard contract, same as everybody else. Michelle will work up the paperwork. We'll need a decision within two weeks."

She'd accepted the position without hesitation. And ever since that point, the wonders had never ceased. Month after month, there were new discoveries, breakthroughs, surprises. It was nothing like academia, where things were slowed down by teaching, committee work, coffee breaks, vacations, six-hour workdays. Nor was it like working in a big corporation -- like IBM, where she'd interned for a summer -- where there were layers of bureaucrats to deal with, endless presentations to make, internal funds to be applied for. At Neurix it was go, go, go, sixty hours a week, forty-six weeks a year. It was research, research, research.

It was a small lab -- ten when Amanda arrived, gradually expanded to fifteen. But everyone said they did the work of double their number, and it was true. They worked closely with a medical team at Boston University Hospital, where Vaclav was occasionally called in for surgery. And they maintained a workshop of fourteen engineers and technicians, housed in the building next door. This tiny operation, driven by Vaclav's genius and enthusiasm, was the world's leading supplier of brain scan technology. Things could get exhausting sometimes, but the pay was outstanding, and the intellectual stimulation was incomparable. Amanda, like most of her colleagues, felt lucky to be there.

This year, her third year at Neurix, Amanda had decided to take a vacation. She had three years of vacation time saved up, and if she didn't use some of it this year, it would be lost for good. Company policy didn't allow you to save up vacation days for more than three years. Somewhat reluctantly, she had reserved a cottage in Barbados for a month. If she was going to take a vacation, she was going to do it right.

And now, back from her month on the beach, she walked into the Neurix research lab with a new enthusiasm, not to mention a new tan. She was eager to get back to work. She didn't officially start again till the next day, but she was back in town already, and she had nothing else to do. It was four o'clock; she decided to check in, and see what was happening at the office.

The first two weeks away had been great, but toward the end she'd begun to realize, with a new and vivid certainty, how much she thrived on the intensity of her job. Sometimes the fast pace seemed frustrating -- everyone was always trying to get too much done in too little time. But in the end it was good, even better than she'd realized. Things were endlessly happening. There was a flow to be caught up in.

Most of all, while sitting on the beach sunbathing, she had realized how much she missed Vaclav. She remembered when he'd just been 'Dr. Bulgakov,' a name on a stack of research papers -- when this animated, brilliant neurosurgeon/physicist/engineer hadn't been part of her life. It was so obvious that she rarely even reflected on it, but it was he who made Neurix exciting. Without him there, it would just be another high-tech company lab.

As she walked into Vaclav's office, he approached her with a devilish grin. "Hello, Amanda," he said. "You're not supposed to be back till tomorrow. Couldn't stay away, huh?"

She smiled ambiguously. "I suppose not."

"You look like a regular Jamaican. I hardly recognize you."

She giggled. "Thanks ... I guess. So what have I missed, boss? Everyone seems awfully upbeat."

"You've missed a lot," he said. "Remember that paper I wrote on low-intensity quark beams. About five years ago."

"Of course I do. Why?"

"Well, I was looking through some old literature, back from the 1990's, and I came across some papers by a guy named Britten Chance, at the University of Pennsylvania. He was trying to scan the brain by shooting beams of light through the skull. The light emerging on the other side is affected by the oxygenation, right? But it never worked very well; the research was abandoned."

"Right...."

"Well, so I tried it with quark beams. And it worked like a motherfucker, Amanda. You wouldn't believe it."

"You're saying...."

"It works. I call it QRI, Quark Resonance Imagery. It really works, Amanda. You can measure the dynamics of the whole brain, right down to the level of clusters of five hundred or a thousand neurons."

"Why didn't you call me and tell me!?"

"You would have come back, right?"

"Of course I would."

"You haven't had a vacation in three years. I didn't want to spoil your vacation."

"When was your last vacation, Vaclav?"

He reached into his pocket, and removed a device that looked much like a ballpoint pen. He pointed it at Amanda. "Your brain state is now being relayed to the computer network. At a resolution of ten microseconds temporal, three microns spatial. The data is piling up as we speak. It's filling up the optical drive right now."

"Come on, you're kidding me. You don't even need a helmet?"

"You don't need a helmet. The quark beams form a field in the air, surrounding the skull. The field stays there a few microseconds, long enough to be registered. That's just relativistic chromodynamics, Amanda. That's the easy part."

"This is too much, Vaclav."

"This is the Holy Grail. It's what we've all been working for."

"And I was just lying on the beach."

"It doesn't matter."

"No...."

"Reinhard will show you the specs. I'm going home to celebrate."

"Do you want to go out to the Rusty Nail?" This was the local pub, where they sometimes went after work.

He shook his head. "Not this time. I want to celebrate with Susie."

"Oh." She often forgot his wife, Susie, existed. "How is Susie, anyway?"

"She's good, I guess. I haven't really been keeping up with her, to tell you the truth. She's got a show at the Kendall Gallery this month. More of those paintings based on Whitman's poetry. The Song of Myself."

Amanda thought about Susie for a moment. She came by the lab rarely -- she seemed to have a distaste for the place. More often she just appeared in the car, to drop off their oldest son Joseph, who liked to hang around in the lab. He would stand around watching the machinery, and asking intelligent questions. Joseph seemed much like his father, but a little less intense, perhaps more capable of relaxation. Amanda had taken a special liking to him, and often asked him to help with her rat experiments -- putting the little scanning helmets on the rats, upgrading the implants, making graphs of the data, and so forth. Once or twice Joseph's younger brother Aaron had been by too, but that had never been successful; he had always started fussing to go home after half an hour or so.

She was surprised that Vaclav wanted to celebrate with Susie, instead of his with colleagues. After all, this was a triumph for all of them, for everyone in the company. Susie never seemed to care a hang about his work. But then, marriage had always mystified Amanda. Like Vaclav, she was married to her research.

"Mmmm...," she said. "I'll see you tomorrow, then."

"Right."

"This is going to be exciting."

"It's already exciting."

"Yeah."

As he rushed out the door, Amanda hurried to find Reinhard. This was hard to believe, but if Vaclav said it was true, she couldn't imagine he was wrong.

Meanwhile, Susie was back at home, on the phone with her agent, David Rao. Who was also her lover, and had been for several years. It was late afternoon; John and Aaron were outside, playing freeze tag with the kids next door.

"I've got to go," she said suddenly, jerking her head. "I think I heard the car pull up."

"What? It can't be. It's only quarter till five. He can't be home early."

"You're right, it must be the neighbors. What was I thinking?" She laughed genially. "I can't remember the last time Vaclav came home early. It must have been when Aaron was a baby. Five years ago at least...."

"So, honey. When can you come by? I've got the morning free tomorrow."

"Tomorrow ... sure. I'll come by after I drop the kids off at school."

"Wear that pink lacy thing, will you? The one you wore last week? It looked ravishing on you."

"It looked ravishing on me? Or I looked ravishing in it?"

"Stop fishing for compliments, you vamp...."

She giggled. "Shit! It is Vaclav. I've got to go. Bye."

He was home fifteen minutes early.

At first she thought there had been some calamity. But then she saw the look on his face. He held a bouquet of roses in one hand, and a bottle of champagne in the other. He was happy about something, and ready to celebrate.

She tried to remember the last time he'd bought her flowers, but she couldn't think back that far. It would have been in the first year of their marriage.

David Rao bought her flowers all the time now. But then, he didn't own her. He had to stay on her good side. As for Vaclav, he gave the phrase "take for granted" a whole new meaning.

Of course, she often reflected, he'd never promised anything different. He'd told her from the outset that he was obsessed with his work, that he didn't have time to be married. But she hadn't counted on the way the obsession would grow and grow and grow.

Somehow she had thought that, once he finished his internship and settled into a research job, things would calm down a little. But this had never happened. True, his hours had become more regular. But his mind had become ever more distracted, ever less focused on everyday life. Ever less focused on her. Every year he published dozens of research papers, filed patents, gave talks at universities around the world. But he considered himself a failure, dismissed all his discoveries as "incremental improvements." He couldn't forgive himself for falling short of his ultimate goal. He was famous in several fields, but entirely unsatisfied. And his reaction to his lack of progress was to work harder and harder -- to push himself more and more.

He always seemed to be moving toward some limit of endurance -- but he never quite reached it. The limit moved further and further, on cue. His inner reserves of strength were marvelous. When his work needed more, he could always find more.

At least when Joseph was young, Susie remembered, Vaclav had always been around on weekends. He'd played soccer, Monopoly, Parcheesi. He'd helped teach Joseph to read and do sums. He'd cultivated Joseph's interest in science, so that now Joseph, at age eleven, was always coming home from school and asking for a ride to the Neurix lab.

It was kind of sad, Susie thought sometimes -- the only way Joseph could see his father was to watch him work. But Joseph genuinely seemed to enjoy it at the lab. Already he knew more about brains and machinery than most educated adults. Certainly far more than his mother did. He was skilled on the computer too. He seemed destined to follow in his father's footsteps.

And Aaron, six years younger, was a different story. By the time he came along, Vaclav was coming home at seven every night. And he was sneaking into the lab most Saturdays "to finish up a few things." It was always "I'll be back in a couple hours" -- and then a phone call four hours later. "Sorry, things got more interesting than I had expected. I'll be along soon." Aaron saw his dad coming and going, and that was about it. His father was an object in motion.

He still took her out sometimes; that had to be admitted. To the odd movie, or symphony, or dance performance. Always the highest of culture. He seemed to enjoy himself well enough. But he was staring into space again, as soon as they got home.

And he enjoyed making love to her. If anything, he was a better lover now than he had been in the early days. But if she didn't want sex for a week or two, if she froze him out, he never seemed to mind. He barely even noticed. He enjoyed her all right, but he made plain he didn't need her.

And now here he was, with flowers and champagne, and a huge, triumphant grin on his face. It was really too surprising. Summoning all the ample powers of her mind, she couldn't imagine what the cause might be.

He opened the door with unusual vigor. "I did it, Suse!" he said. "I finally did it! I can read thoughts! I can scan the brain! After all these years, I finally fucking did it! It's so unbelievable!"

He sounded like an eager undergraduate. He hadn't talked to her this way in years. She wanted to share in his joy, to embrace him, to be an eager undergraduate too. But she couldn't seem to manage it. It was somehow too incongruous. Instead she just stood there and smiled. "Vaclav, are you serious?"

"Of course I'm serious. It really fucking works. It's based on an idea I had years ago, but never saw the implications of. Once I had the idea, it only took a month to build the apparatus. It's quarks, Susie, quark beams! You can measure fields outside the head. And you don't need any tubes. All you need is a little device, about the size of a pencil. I can aim it at you, and it reads the magnetic fields in your brain, and relays them to my computer. Ten millisecond temporal resolution, spatial resolution down to the micron level. It's incredible! This is what I've been looking for all along...."

"Wow."

"I haven't got any results yet, of course. Haven't used it to do anything. We're still running tests, trying to improve the machinery. But the principle is sound. We've had it going all week, but I wasn't sure tilll today. My God, and to think I was losing faith...."

"You, losing faith? I don't believe it."

"Well, I was getting awfully frustrated."

She nodded to show she understood. "It's been a long time."

"But not that long. I'm still young. I'm only thirty-eight. I've got plenty of time to use the QRI machine -- that's what I call it, QRI, Quark Resonance Imagery. Plenty of time to use it. This is it -- this is brilliant! I'll finally understand the mind."

"Do you think so? Really?"

"Of course I think so. That's what it's all about...." Finally he handed her the flowers, and went into the kitchen to uncork the champagne. He poured two glasses. "Drink up, honey! I'm getting drunk tonight, like a true Russian." He raised his hand for a toast. "To the brain!"

"To the brain." She drank obediently. "Hey, you should call Vladimir. Or have you already?"

"Good idea. No."

Vladimir was over seventy now, but he still lived in Swarthmore, and he still wrote for the magazines, though not as prolifically. He was married to a Korean woman, June, a retired crystallographer. They'd been together more than a decade now. They came up to Boston to visit Vaclav and Susie six or eight times a year. Vaclav often asked his father to move up to Boston, or at least to rural Massachusetts, where he'd be closer. He offered to buy his father a nice house, or a condo. June had few connections in the Philadelphia area. But Vladimir, for obscure reasons, preferred to stay put.

Vladimir answer the phone immediately: "Hello?"

"Hi, Dad," Vaclav said, radiantly.

Vladimir made a leap of intuition. "Vaclav. You didn't."

"I did."

"When?"

"Over the last couple months. I just ran the definitive tests today. Ten milliseconds. One hundred neurons across. And we may be able to push it down."

"That's incredible."

"I know it is. And it's remote, too. No obtrusive machinery. It's quarks beams, Dad. The Wan-Li Inequality. Chromodynamic resonance."

"Wan-Li, eh? I wrote a paper on chromodynamics once, you know. Back in the old days, before quarks were isolated."

"You? You were a solid state physicist."

"I know. You're not the only one who's diverse, you know."

Vaclav laughed. "I know, Dad. You're the most diverse person I know."

"I'm a science writer. I specialize in diversity. I was a pretty good scientist, once. But I never could have been like you. I'm awfully proud of you, you know."

"Thanks. I know."

"You'll give me the details, right? Before you issue a press release?"

"Sure."

Over the course of a decade, his father had written half a dozen articles on his work. But this was the big one. It would be a huge scoop for Vladimir. A capstone for his career, as well as a landmark for Vaclav's.

"Well ... I don't know what else to say. I guess I'll let you go celebrate.... Susie must be ecstatic."

"Mmmm...."

"I know things haven't always been great for you two. But this is really something special. This is what you've been working for for damn near twenty years. You've got to do something special."

"Don't worry, Dad. I will."

"All right. I'll let you go celebrate...."

When he hung up the phone, Susie was staring at him oddly. "That's amazing," she said.

"What?"

"He heard the tone in your voice, and he knew immediately what was going on. He knows you better than I do."

"He's my father."

"I'm your wife."

"I know."

She looked down at her feet and shook her head. She poured herself another glass of champagne, and drank it steadily. She sat down on the couch. "I know this is awfully ill-timed, Vaclav, but ... I .... This marriage isn't working."

He looked at her dumbly.

"Think about it Vaclav, for Chrissake.... This is a great thing for you, the greatest moment of your life maybe, and I can't even share it with you right. You've just shut me out too long. Too long."

"Oh, come on, Susie. Don't do this to me now. I know I haven't been a great husband -- I've put everything into my work. But it's paid off now. I'm going to be famous. We're going to be rich, I mean really rich. You know the contract I have with Neurix -- I get thirty percent of the royalties from my patents. And this was my work alone, not even a regular laboratory effort."

"I know. It's wonderful."

"So things are going to be different now."

"You mean you won't stay late at the lab every night? You won't work on Saturdays? You'll try to spend some time with your family?"

"Sue, I don't know. There's more work to be done, it's just a prototype.... This is going to be a busy time."

"There's always more work to be done, Vaclav! That's exactly the point. You're not married to me, Vaclav, you're married to your lab. You're married to your research. I'm sick and tired of coming in second. And I can see that's not about to change."

He looked at her, numbly, empty of words.

"It's not reasonable for me to ask you to change. I understand that. I don't want to stand in the way of the progress of science. You're a great scientist, you're going to win the Nobel Prize for this, right? You just doing what you have to do." The tears finally came. "But I have to do what I have to do too. I'm sorry, Vaclav. I can't live like this...."

He viewed her with growing anger. "There's someone else, right?"

"It doesn't matter if there's someone else."

His face grew tight. "I'm not stupid. That means yes."

"There's no one else who I care about the way I used to care for you." she said. After she said them, she was aware of the viciousness of her words. The way I used to care for you.... But the words were accurate. She didn't feel for him anymore, not the way that she used to. He had made this big discovery, had this tremendous triumph, and she genuinely wasn't happy for him.

"This isn't about anyone else," she continued. "This is about you, Vaclav. You haven't been here for me. Not for a long time. Not for ten years at least. You haven't been here for Aaron either. Joseph, sometimes. Aaron, never. Face it, Vaclav. The marriage is over."

"I can't believe you'd do this! Why would you do this today, of all times? This is supposed to be the best day of my life. And you're dead set on ruining it. But I'm not going to let you. Fine, leave me if you want to! The hell with you then! Fuck you, Susie! You're no damn good. Just fuck you." He stood there and sucked down the rest of the champagne, which was nearly the entire bottle. Then he smashed the bottle on the floor -- a totally uncharacteristic act of violence -- got back in the car and drove toward the lab.

Spooked by his father's accident, during his childhood, Vaclav had never driven drunk before. But now that the situation arose, he wasn't afraid of it, particularly. He was a good driver, very well-coordinated. Even drunk, he reckoned, he was a better driver than average. He made it to the lab in no time.

But when he got there, he didn't feel like going in. He knew the others would be there, working late as usual. He didn't know what he'd say to them. Instead he drove around behind the building to the ravine that sprawled there. On the other side was an abandoned warehouse, and some undeveloped bramble. The sun was close to the horizon, and making strange colors through the clouds. He squinted his eyes and looked at the sun, and he began to feel dizzy.

He leaned back on the car and shut his eyes. He kept thinking about Susie, the way she'd been in junior high school, and when they'd first moved to Boston. The way she'd proposed marriage. Always the prettiest woman around. And she understood everything. Or she had then. She didn't understand anything now.

He recalled how, years ago, he'd referred to their marriage as an experiment. The QRI experiment had worked, he reflected wryly, but the marriage one had failed.

Just like after his mother's death, when Susie had left him for that kid, David Randell, he got the feeling that she was waiting to be wooed back again. That if he threw himself at her feet, gave her everything she wanted, then she'd take him back happily. All she wanted was some extra attention. Take a few days off work now and then. Write her a love poem. Maybe take her to Barbados, where Amanda had gone. It would probably be effective. It would be the best thing for Joseph and Aaron.

But he couldn't bring himself to do it. She had no right to demand being placed above his work. It wasn't that he didn't love her. But he was on the brink of something spectacular. He was about to understand the mind, scientifically, for the first time in human history. If she didn't want that for him, desperately, then she must not love him.

Finally his head slumped down and he drifted into a shallow, dreamy sleep. He had a dream about Amanda, oddly enough, and then a dream about his mother. Back in Russia, before she was ill, carrying him down the sidewalk, talking to some Russian friends.

He felt himself moving toward being awake, coming out of the blackness into light. But then he heard a woman's voice talking to him. He resisted the urge to open his eyes and see where the woman was. He knew there was no woman there, not in reality. She wasn't in dream-land either. She was off in a different direction, perpendicular to dream and reality. A direction he had always known to exist, but had never thought to visit before.

"You're driven Susie away," said the voice. "But don't mind her. You're with the angels now?"

"The angels?" he said. His mouth was dead; his tongue was stuck to his palate. But he realized he didn't have to speak. He only had to think the words.

"You know. You understand. You always knew about the angels."

"What do you mean I always knew?"

"Your mother was here years ago. She told us all about you."

The voice was soft, soothing, with a strange foreign accent. And then he saw the face from which it came. She was beautiful -- exotic, and truly angelic. Lush and round, with full lips and small, sharp eyes. Wispy brown hair, tumbling down in all directions. It was an angel's face, a modern-day angel, but there was a bit of a twist to the expression. This was a lusty, passionate angel, with a little streak of devil inside.

"Who are you? Why are you talking to me?"

"I am the Exterminating Angel."

"What do you exterminate?"

"That you will come to know."

So she was keeping secrets. He was aware for a moment of where he was.

"But why are you talking to me? You didn't answer me."

"I'm talking to you because you're special. Because I love you, Vaclav. Because you understand."

"I understand what?"

"That you will come to know."

"Mmmmm...."

"I need certain things too," the voice said, in a different tone. She was incredibly seductive, this hyperdimensional devil-angel. It was impossible to resist her. "You can help me with my needs. I can help you with yours. It'll be a fair bargain. I guarantee I won't disappoint you."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Don't tell me... I will come to know."

"You will come to know."

"Just get the hell out of here, all right? I'm having enough problems without some phantom spooking me."

"But you came to me, Vaclav. You took that left turn there between dreaming and wakefulness. And you'll come to me again. I can see it now. You will."

Her voice lingered in the air with indescribable beauty. It breathed God, infinity, mind-boggling sex. But then she suddenly disappeared, and her lovely voice faded.

He was alone by the gully, feeling drunk and insane.

It occurred to him, for a moment, that he was finally beginning to understand his mother. Now, twenty-seven years after her death.

He thought of Susie's suggestion, many years ago, that he should look inward instead of building machinery. Now he had looked inward, it occured to him ironically, and look what he had found. Insanity. His mother's visions.

But he didn't like this train of thought. He forced the vision from his mind, got in the car, and drove back to the lab.

It was nearly six but Amanda and Reinhard were still there -- talking vigorously, drawing diagrams on the touch-screen.

"I thought you were going to celebrate with Susie," said Amanda carefully. She could see from his face that something was wrong.

"I was. But she didn't want to. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. She left me."

"She left you? Now? What kind of timing is that?"

"Intentionally bad timing, I think."

"She's just jealous, that's all."

"I suppose so."

"Well..." Amanda found the information hard to process. "So do you want to go to the Rusty Nail? The offer's still open."

"Let's go."

Reinhard went home; he and Amanda headed for the pub. It was a pleasure to sit down with her, with someone who genuinely shared his joy. She understood him, today. He explained the principles of the QRI machine, more clearly than Reinhard had been able to. She grasped it better than anyone else in the lab -- her background was, after all, in physics, rather than medicine or engineering. He scrawled diagram after diagram on paper napkins; she took them in eagerly.

"That's beautiful," she said, when he was finished. "The halo field, around the head. That's the icing on the cake. It's a stroke of genius."

"It's nature's stroke of genius, not mine."

"But you discovered it. No one else could have. You've been building up to this for years."

"I know.... Amanda, I'm going to switch you from the implant project to this one, for the time being. You're the only one who really has the background to help me develop it."

"That'll be wonderful."

That night Vaclav cheated on his wife for the first time ever. But he didn't really consider it cheating, as she had ostensibly left him already. Amanda was a young and vibrant lover, more enthusiastic than Susie had been in years. She was thrilled to be sleeping with her hero, and showed it.

"Now that," he said afterwards, still intoxicated, "that was a proper celebration."

He woke up early in the morning, hoping to sneak out without waking her. Mu