For Brendan, who knows why.

String
Theory

JACQUELINE ASHKENAZI KNEW THERE were holes in the universe. She simply had never expected one of them to swallow her.

When she was fourteen years old, she saw a picture of an atom in her science textbook and noticed that it resembled a solar system. It was a primitive thought, she later understood, the kind of thought that poets had when they imagined they were being profound. She had dismissed it then as mere metaphor, describing nothing real. But the following year she saw a picture in a textbook of a nebula so immense that even calculating the numbers involved made her acutely aware of her own insignificance. It reminded her of a drawing of a cell she had seen in the newspaper’s science section, a neuron in the brain. It occurred to her that she existed at a midpoint between the unfathomably small and the unfathomably huge. Then it occurred to her that she wasn’t even that, that there was of course no midpoint to infinity. There were entire worlds in her body, tiny beings living private unexamined lives within her cells, billions of galaxies in every mitochondrion, worlds within worlds like a set of Russian dolls shrinking down infinitely and then expanding until they encased her body, her planet, her galaxy, her universe, her eternity. She was of no significance at all. The realization thrilled her. It was a rush of exhilarating freedom from the need to matter.

When she entered the doctoral program in particle physics—the only woman in the entire department, in that cold autumn of 1980—Jacqueline knew what to expect: the intensity of the work, the deep plunge into the frigid depths of the mind, the inability to even entertain the possibility of a personal life. All of these were things she craved and welcomed, things that defined the marvelously free adulthood she had just entered, her wondrous refuge from a childhood spent bearing other people’s burdens. What she hadn’t anticipated was the loneliness.

In college she had often been the only girl in her physics courses, but in the residence halls it was different. Her long years of comforting her mother and sisters had served her well. With the other girls she quickly became the local authority on how to dismiss pretentious boyfriends, the emergency technician for science and math requirements, the fixer of jammed typewriters, the high priestess hearing confessions and absolving others of their sins, the oracular voice of reason whom everyone trusted. But now she was in graduate school, inhabiting a cell-like dorm room on a hall full of women getting degrees in various literatures—women who seemed to know one another from the moment they first met, women who studied together, worked library jobs together, compared hairstyles together, and dated a rotating phalanx of law students in tandem. All Jacqueline had to do was answer their first question about her—what she was studying—to feel the chill seep between them.

In her department it was worse. She didn’t know how to talk to the openly arrogant young men who were apparently her peers; she was terrified that the slightest smile or joke from her would be punished with the permanent label of unserious, unworthy, “ditzy.” As a result—though she took comfort in the possibility that it might not have mattered what she had done—she was isolated, ostracized. Like many ostracized people, she began to unconsciously revel in her weirdness, cultivating her isolation as though it were her own proud and happy choice. She began dining alone in public, took up the introvert’s sport of swimming, wore unseasonal clothes, and occupied her mind with her work to the exclusion of all else, until her closest friends were the symbols that bordered her dreams: ∆/t, change over time. Her presence clearly unnerved every man she met. She was impressed by how quickly she could empty a room. It sometimes seemed that no one had spoken to her in months. Until Roger.

Roger was a mistake: that much was clear. But that had been what was so attractive about him. For a math graduate student, he was handsome, well within the thin-and-jumpy rather than the fat-and-sloppy mold of mathematicians. He wore no glasses, had a thick head of blond hair, was a gangly and strangely vulnerable-looking six feet tall, and spoke in a deep voice that surprised everyone as it emerged from his thin and unassuming body, as though there had been some minor error in the compilation of his body and his soul.

She first met him at a Friday night service, at a synagogue frequented by humanities professors. She was surprised to see him there; for most of the men in the math and physics departments, atheism was a contact sport. But Jacqueline liked to go to the services. It was an opportunity to argue with God, to present him with her research results and ask him what the hell he was thinking. The synagogue was a liberal one, with women and men sitting and singing together, so different from anything she had experienced as a child that she might as well have converted to Hinduism. Yet occasionally one of the melodies would jar her back, if she closed her eyes, to the closet of a room behind a room where she had learned to pray as a child, leaning against the cage-like bars that separated her and her mother and sisters from the front of the repurposed basement classroom where her father prayed loudly among the men, like an opera star performing an elaborate part for which he received the congregation’s acclaim. And he did receive it. Everyone knew Isaac Luria, respected Isaac Luria, loved Isaac Luria. His wife and daughters were blessed, blessed to have such a man. Only Jacqueline and her mother and sisters saw who he was when he wasn’t performing, when he retreated backstage to where she and her mother and sisters lived their lives. Long sleeves and long skirts were required, even in summer; no one saw the bruises. But now Jacqueline would open her eyes and find that even the same wailing melody could not conquer the loud short-skirted women around her who were singing it, their uncorrupted joy as they sang the ancient words: Renew our days as of old!

She had seen Roger there, remembering him vaguely from the hallways between the math and physics departments, and had briefly marveled at a math student appearing in this decidedly flaky and feminine crowd. It turned out that they had both been invited to the same dinner after the service, at the apartment of a married couple of eternal history graduates who saw themselves as old souls, responsible for nurturing the newer students. Jacqueline sat across from Roger at the table, picking at her food and dimly following the conversation, which had taken an inane turn involving aliens, inspired by some recent movie that Jacqueline naturally hadn’t seen. But the tall, blond, remarkably skinny man opposite her soon distracted her with his eating. He was devouring his food, with a kind of enjoyment she rarely witnessed in the ascetic world she lived in. She watched as he gnawed his way through a piece of chicken—not sloppily, but neatly, carefully, with a passion akin to love—and then savored second and third helpings of peas, chopped liver, potato pudding, with a giddiness that alarmed her. There was something almost supernatural about watching him eat. It seemed to violate the laws of conservation of matter, as though matter were disappearing into his body. But then, very abruptly, he stopped eating, resting his fork on his plate, and all the matter he had consumed seemed to alter itself instantaneously into energy—bound and bundled energy, knotted between his tense blond eyebrows as he raised one at her, as if they were sharing a secret. Then he tipped his head toward the host, who had just asked another alien-related question:

“If there is anything intelligent out there, why hasn’t it already visited us?”

“Who’s to say it hasn’t?” Roger answered.

It was strange to hear his voice: a deep voice, much deeper than Jacqueline would have expected, as if he were a biblical prophet channeling the divine presence. Jacqueline almost laughed.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been personally abducted,” said a joker two seats down. “I really don’t need to hear about the anal probes.”

Roger rested a hand on the table as everyone laughed, a thin hand with hairy blond knuckles, and glanced at Jacqueline again. The glance unnerved her. When he spoke, he seemed oblivious to the attention of everyone at the table, as though he were addressing the point, the question, rather than the person who asked it. “I just mean,” he said, “that the odds that we’ve been visited by life from another galaxy during the period of recorded history are infinitely close to zero.”

“Exactly my point,” said the host. “The odds of aliens landing on earth are more or less nil.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Roger said. “The opposite, in fact. I mean that there’s only been human life on this planet for a hundred thousand years, and human civilization that kept meaningful, readable records has only been around for less than ten thousand years, probably closer to five. It’s almost insanely short.”

Jacqueline had thought of this, too. In those years she often marveled at people who took an interest in history, even in ancient history. The word “ancient” seemed to her almost meaningless, a failure of imagination. She heard the words of the prayer again: Renew our days as of old. How old?

“If aliens coincidentally happened to arrive in our neighborhood during a period when the earth even existed, which is already unlikely, the odds are highest that it would have been during the period in the planet’s history prior to any life on earth,” Roger continued. “They would have gone home thinking that Earth was just another ice-covered or lava-covered dirtball, the way we think of Mars. And if they had shown up at some other point in geologic time, there wouldn’t have been anyone around capable of telling us about it. It’s like the Viking capsule’s visit to Mars. Maybe it’s not true that Mars has no capacity to sustain life. Maybe it’s just that we arrived too late, or too early.” His voice was still deep, strangely rich, but his tone was unassuming, utterly devoid of the arrogance that Jacqueline had almost come to think of as part of the male body. “I’m just saying that there’s a lot we can’t know,” he concluded, and looked at her again. “Actually what we can’t know is infinite.”

The host seemed to follow Roger’s eyes. He pointed at Jacqueline. “Jacqueline is doing some kind of fancy physics,” he announced. “Origins of the universe, that kind of thing.”

Several faces along the table turned toward Jacqueline. She felt the back of her neck growing hot.

“Physics? Really?” a man toward the end of the table asked. “I didn’t know they had girls in the physics department.”

Everyone was looking at her now, with a hushed awe usually reserved for the diagnosis of a fatal disease.

“They only have me,” she said. It occurred to her, for the first time, that men her age were never referred to as boys. She looked down at her plate of uneaten food, humiliated. She had expected to be humiliated, she realized. So why had she come? She glanced up again and saw the other women at the table smiling at her, pitying smiles. An old familiar feeling swelled within her, a feeling she remembered from many nights of avoiding her father in her childhood home: an urge to compact herself into a black hole, to shrink down until she disappeared.

The host tried his best to be gracious. “So Jacqueline, based on what you’ve been doing,” he said, “what are the odds of our being visited by aliens?”

Jacqueline was quiet for a moment, slightly amazed to find everyone still looking at her. She wondered what she could say that they could possibly understand.

“The one thing that’s very clear is how short human life is,” she finally said.

Someone laughed. “Is that supposed to be news?”

Jacqueline frowned. But Roger was watching her, she noticed, listening. “I don’t mean individual life spans. I mean the existence of people on earth. Like—like Roger said. A hundred thousand years just doesn’t seem like enough time to accomplish anything, really. Even if we have a good million-year run ahead of us, it just feels very meaningless.”

She looked around and saw that people were shifting uncomfortably in their seats, glancing at each other, and she sensed that she had said something terribly wrong. But why? It was true, wasn’t it? She thought of an article she had read recently in one of the scientific journals, an essay inside the back cover: Is there some kind of spiritual loss in the acknowledgment that the universe is a physical and chemical process, rather than a mythically grand, emotionally motivated enterprise? If that is the case, so be it. To say otherwise is to deny the reality of the universe in which we live. When she read this, she had wondered why anyone would feel diminished by knowing that all was matter, that nothing mattered. To her it was like an open window, a gust of cold fresh air in an overheated room—refreshing, liberating. She still believed, then, that she had been set free.

She winced and tried to recover. “The most interesting thing that’s come up in our department lately is a new attempt at a unified field theory,” she said. She could tell, as she glanced at the faces around the table, that most of them couldn’t understand her, that they were humoring her, that she was speaking a different language. But at least she was no longer insulting their purpose in life. They appeared somewhat relieved. “It doesn’t have anything to do with aliens, of course. Actually it makes the whole question irrelevant. The idea is that the entire universe is made up of invisible vibrating strings.”

Everyone laughed, except for Roger.

“What do you mean by strings?” he asked, when the laughter had subsided. “That must be an analogy for something else.”

In Jacqueline’s mind, everyone else at the table dissolved at that moment until the room disappeared—until nothing was left but her and Roger, seated across a table, suspended on a void. And Roger was listening.

“All the things that we usually think of as particles, subatomic particles, aren’t really points in space, the way we tend to think of them,” she said. “Instead they’re actually one-dimensional loops, and they behave like infinitely small rubber bands—but one-dimensional, if you can imagine that, which most people can’t. And they vibrate at varying frequencies, and they produce a kind of—a kind of harmonics, within themselves and with each other, and the symphony is the atom, or—or the universe.” It was alarming to be listened to so closely. Every limb of her body was alive, vibrating with silent music. “It’s all very new, it’s only been in a few articles published this year. I mean, the idea’s been around for a good ten years, but it’s only recently that the math has started to make sense.”

Roger stared at her. “How does the math make sense?”

For a moment she hesitated. But then she began, with a wondrous freedom, to tell him: the Euler beta-function from two hundred years ago, the Planck masses and lengths, the one-dimensional wave function, the Lorentz transformation properties, the boundary conditions, the tension parameters, the ghosts. She had never known that it was possible for a man to listen like that. It stunned her, shook her, shook both of them, oscillating between them like music. They remained there, suspended in space, until someone at the end of the table passed out the little books containing the blessings for the conclusion of the meal, pulling them back down to earth to thank God for their food.

When Roger walked her home, she asked him what he was studying.

“Fractals,” Roger said. “You know about them?”

“Of course,” Jacqueline said. She had taken a class in college where the professor had occasionally alluded to fractals, a class in which she had been the only female student, like in most of her classes. In the class, the professor pointed out what had always seemed obvious to Jacqueline—that normal geometry, with its perfectly irreducible points and elegantly infinite lines and gorgeously impossible spheres and slopes, didn’t in any way describe the real world people lived in. But fractals—patterns that reproduced themselves potentially infinitely, like the self-replicating patterns of a fern, or the infinite length of the English coastline if one measured down to the infinitely microscopic particles making up each grain of sand, or the reproduction of genes within a family over generations—actually did.

“People were only able to really start studying them a couple of years ago, because of computers,” Roger was saying. “Everyone who speculated about them before was dismissed as a crank. But now there’s the Mandelbrot Set, which is this extraordinary pattern that can be used to explain just about everything that we see in nature. It’s basically how really simple rules can generate tremendously complicated systems. It’s very exciting. But very hard to explain to anyone who’s not used to thinking in that mode,” he said. “My family thinks I’m insane, of course. If I’m smart enough to do this, I’m smart enough to do something that would earn me real money. Can’t argue that one. I just plead insanity. Does your family think you’re insane?”

Jacqueline hesitated. Her father had refused to grant her mother a religious divorce, which left her mother unable to remarry and, in practice, even to continue living in their neighborhood. Their departure to a dilapidated apartment in a town where they knew no one had been beyond devastating for her mother, who had since become addicted to sedatives. But it had been Jacqueline’s greatest blessing. It had landed her in public high school—where she had discovered, like a Renaissance scholar emerging from the Middle Ages into the blinding glow of enlightenment, laws of the universe that could always be believed.

They were outside her building now. The air was cold, shivering with icy clarity. Jacqueline glanced up, past a burned-out streetlamp, and saw that they were being watched by hundreds of stars, cold burning lamps in a bright black velvet sky.

“I think all scientists are orphans,” Jacqueline said as she stood at the door. “You join a family of ideas instead of the one you were born into, and your own ideas are your children.”

Roger laughed as he wished her good night. Many, many years passed before Jacqueline understood his laughter.

SHE SAW HIM AGAIN a week later, at the newly opened microcomputer lab. Or rather, she didn’t see him until she was on her way out—when he appeared, as if emerging from the void, to open the door for her. It was a frigid evening with powerful winds, enormous uncontrolled forces battering her face and sweeping her out of the building. And there was Roger, guiding her out.

“Jacqueline Luria,” he said brightly. “Good to see you again.”

It was strange, hearing this gangly man speaking to her, and even stranger to hear him saying her name. Hearing anyone speak to her still felt strange. She was surprised he even remembered her.

“Hello, Roger,” she said, swallowing words in the wind. His name felt like a concession somehow, a toll to pay to get through the door. They were walking down the sidewalk now, the two of them together, obviously heading in the same direction.

“Going home?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. The burden of trying to think of something more to say felt unduly large. She reminded herself that other people probably had conversations with each other all the time, that having someone else acknowledge one’s existence was in fact perfectly normal. Roger loped alongside her as though they had known each other for years. She would have expected to feel uncomfortable. But instead she felt warmed, physically, by his presence. The wind was strong, and he was tall, and his body blocked the snow from blowing into her eyes.

“I remember you live in the graduate women’s dorm,” he said. “That’s pretty far from here.”

“It’s just across the river,” she answered. But he was right. The women’s dorm was far, a half-mile’s walk from anywhere on campus that she needed to be. If she had enrolled twelve years earlier, she wouldn’t have even been allowed to leave the building after curfew.

“My place is right here,” Roger was saying. He pointed to a narrow brick building with rusted fire escapes, just two doors down from the door he had opened for her. Envy rushed through Jacqueline’s body. How marvelous, she thought, to live so close to the labs. She was still envying him, wishing she lived there, when he spoke again.

“Would you like to come up? Just until the wind dies down, I mean. You’ll freeze to death crossing that bridge.”

Jacqueline laughed out loud.

Roger looked pained, though he might only have been wincing against the wind. “Seriously,” he said, in his comically deep voice. “My roommate should be home; you could meet him. Or if you want I could call you a taxi. I’m not a creep. I just don’t want you to freeze to death.”

Jacqueline paused. It was kindness, or at least it sounded like kindness. But she thought of the other students in her department, of how they smirked at one another whenever she passed them by, and knew it probably wasn’t.

“That’s generous of you,” she answered, with as much sarcasm as she could muster. “But I’ve been doing this walk all semester, and so far I haven’t died.”

It really was freezing, though. She had lost a glove at some point and kept one hand crammed into her pocket; that morning she had also left her hat in a lecture hall and hadn’t had time to retrieve it. Her long black hair whipped around her face, lashing at her mouth.

“Are you sure?” he asked. They were at his door now. His eyes were brown, she saw, the sort of light brown eyes—blond eyes, she had thought of them as a child—that often accompany blond hair among Ashkenazi Jews. Which was his last name, she suddenly remembered from their introductions that Friday night: Ashkenazi. “I’m offering you warmth and shelter,” he said, in a voice that tried to joke. “Even food, if you’re hungry.”

She looked up at the long street ahead of her and thought of the frigid and deserted walk to the women’s dorm, of the patches of ice, of the punishing wind, of the painfully long bridge, of the frozen river beneath it, of her monastic cell at the end of that walk, of everything she had deprived herself of these past few months, of everything that might exist beyond the limits of her imagination. Then she looked at Roger and saw something she had never before seen in a man’s face: humility, and hope.

“All right,” she said. “But I’m paying for the taxi myself.”

He smiled at her, the first kind smile that she had seen in months, and opened the door.

ROGER’S APARTMENT WAS WONDROUS, a warm lighted box suspended in a void of snow and darkness. It was an old apartment, with peeling paint, a battered leather sofa half drowned in magazines, a wooden table made out of a door on sawhorse props that was pushed against a wall and covered with stacks of papers torn from spiral notebooks, and a brick fireplace that someone was using to store an extravagant new boom box and enormous piles of tapes. Roger had disappeared into the kitchen to call the taxi company, leaving Jacqueline alone in the warm living room. His roommate, it seemed, wasn’t home after all. Jacqueline was surprised to find herself relieved. As she sat down on the couch, she sensed a presence in the room, like an electrical charge circulating in the air. Static, she thought. She took off her scarf and felt the shock.

“I called three times, but their line is busy,” Roger said as he came back into the room. “Figures. Do you want something to eat?”

The question felt intimate, as if he were her brother, or her father. She shuddered. But she had worked straight through the dinner hour and hadn’t eaten since lunch. Lunch had been ten hours ago.

“Depends what you have,” she said.

“Apples, bananas. Other fruits.”

“That’s all you have? Fruit?” This seemed improbable. Jacqueline knew little about how men lived, having rarely seen a man at home since childhood. But she knew they were rumored to eat only things that came in boxes, or things that women cooked for them. She glanced around the room, noticing a new layer to the room’s warmth that she hadn’t sensed before. “Something smells delicious.”

“Oh, I almost forgot. I also have a pie. It’s been sitting in the oven. I better go turn it off.”

“What?” Jacqueline asked. She followed him to the kitchen. The kitchen was as decrepit as the living room, with lime-green appliances—too old to be modern, too new to be quaint—that spoke of a hopeful landlord ten years earlier and reminded Jacqueline unpleasantly of her childhood home. The floors were crooked. But the smell was wondrous. How could he have left the oven on while he was out, she wondered. She counted this as a sign of honesty: perhaps his roommate was here after all, had just stepped out, would be returning soon. “What kind of pie?”

“A fruit pie, of course. Like there’s any other kind. Why doesn’t anyone ever make vegetable pies?”

“A lot of people make vegetable pies,” Jacqueline replied. “Pot pies, quiche—”

Roger smirked. “Are you one of those girls who cook all the time?”

Jacqueline sensed that her own worth was at stake in this question—whether she was a real woman, or whether she was his equal. Which answer was he hoping for? The truth was that she had spent many years of her life cooking with her mother, and later for her mother. Since then she had become allergic to cooking, living mainly on pizza and fruit.

“No, I can’t cook,” she answered. Which was both completely true and completely false at the same time.

“Good,” he said. Jacqueline shivered with delicious relief, surprised by how happy his approval made her. “That means you won’t be in any position to judge my pie.”

Something in his tone excited her, a playfulness she hadn’t expected. The nape of her neck prickled. The oven temperature was set very low, she noticed—which at least made some sense, if he had known he’d be out. She thought of the sabbath in her childhood home, of the oven perpetually set to two hundred degrees. But still: a pie?

“I find it highly improbable that you baked me a pie,” she announced.

Roger’s eyebrows rose. “Baked you a pie? How would I have even known you were coming?” He grinned. “If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.”

It now occurred to her, as she sensed once more his roommate’s absence, their solitude in this bright warm box suspended in a frigid void, and the absurdity of the oven with its enveloping smells, that she actually had not noticed Roger in the computer lab before she left—and that she had never seen him in the lab any other evening either, and that the sidewalk leading to the lab was visible from his living room window. She thought of him replacing the phone receiver a few minutes earlier, of the click of the phone falling into place, and wondered if he had even called the cab company at all. Her immediate instinct was to flee. But everything that was possible or even probable just moments earlier—saying no, walking home through the wind, going back to her empty cell to continue spending her days and nights in a bare room working through problem sets, calculating, again and again, the speed of change over time—was gone, gone the way the past was gone, irretrievable, as though it had never been. A door had closed behind her and here she was, like a child born into the world and unable to return to the blind womb of the world before. The room was warm, the smell was delicious, and now this beautiful man was smiling at her.

“I’m not saying it’s improbable that the pie is for me,” Jacqueline said.

“Oh, really?” he asked. “That’s presumptuous of you. I actually would find that highly improbable.” The teeth were beautiful, but the lips, warm and full in a way rare among men, were what captivated her. She was normally suspicious of men. But Roger seemed gentle, harmless—like an overgrown child, despite his deep voice. Most wondrous of all was that he looked absolutely nothing like her father.

“What I find improbable is that you baked a pie, period,” Jacqueline said. She was aware, as she had been made constantly aware in every math or physics course she had ever taken, of the urgency of not being perceived as silly, of how potentially fatal it could be, even in the most casual conversation, for her to say anything that could even remotely be construed as illogical. Playfulness was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She made her voice stiff, cavalier, proud. The tone her mother hated. “You do not strike me as the type of person who bakes pies.”

Roger was unruffled. “Do you mean statistically, because I’m not a woman?” he asked. “I concede. But statistically, a woman who studies particle physics is far more anomalous than a man who bakes pies.”

It wasn’t a compliment, she later realized. But it felt like one to her then. She was surprised to find herself blushing. “I don’t mean statistically,” she said. “I mean based on who you are.”

“What could you possibly know about my baking proclivities?”

Jacqueline allowed herself to smile. “I know that you’ve never heard of vegetable pies.”

Roger grunted, a surprisingly pleasant sound. “That seems rather irrelevant to me,” he said, in a mock-imperious tone. “I’ve heard of fruit pies, and fruit pies are the only pies in question here. In fact, to be technical, only one fruit pie is in question here. It doesn’t need to be probable that I regularly bake fruit pies. It only needs to be possible that I baked this single example of a fruit pie.”

Some deep groove within her, worn in by her mother and thousands of mothers before her, made her sense that this was not merely a joke. “For someone who bakes pies, or even someone who baked this one particular pie, you have a remarkably neat kitchen,” she said.

“I’m a remarkably neat person. It’s common among mathematicians.”

Jacqueline laughed out loud, and was surprised to see Roger scowl, insulted. “No, really,” he insisted. “I’m being serious.”

Jacqueline had observed exactly the opposite—that the graduate students and professors in the hard science departments were tremendous slobs, with unreadable handwriting, shirts covered with food stains, and offices that were so disgustingly clogged with papers that one could hardly open the doors. She was privately convinced that this was very closely related to the fact that all of them were men, that these men were kind of an extreme of mental masculinity, incapable of distracting themselves with necessities they considered unworthy of their brilliant minds, and assured daily from a very young age that some woman would always be there to clean their clothes for them. But generalities wouldn’t succeed with Roger, she saw.

“Your living room suggests otherwise.”

“That’s my roommate’s stuff. He’s in chemistry, and they’re all slobs.” He was opening the oven now, releasing a wave of overwhelming sweetness into the air.

“Well, then, how about the fact that you’re taking the pie out of the oven with a washcloth on your hand instead of an actual potholder.”

“Circumstantial,” Roger declared. “Why buy potholders when washcloths do the trick?”

“Because potholders can actually prevent your hands from getting burned.”

He smarted as he dropped the pie onto the counter. Its surface was glazed to a shine. “Do you see any burns on my hands?”

Jacqueline couldn’t stop smiling now. As she became more sure of herself, it was becoming possible to enjoy it, to enjoy him. She was already making the mistake, confusing confidence with comfort. “I also note the conspicuous lack of cutting boards or rolling pins on your dishrack.”

“I already put them away. Like I said, I’m a neat person.”

He got out a knife and fork and began cutting the pie on the kitchen counter. The smell was impossibly wonderful. He struggled to stab a large piece with a fork, withdrawing a dripping, steaming chunk of fruit from beneath the pie’s shell like a surgeon extracting an organ.

“Apple pie, right?”

“Of course. The kind I’m statistically most likely to produce.”

“So of course your garbage can is full of apple peels and apple cores,” Jacqueline said.

“Not at all. I’m so meticulously neat that I—”

But Jacqueline had already lifted the lid of the garbage can in the corner. Inside it was a large cardboard box from a supermarket bakery.

“I see it was on sale,” she said.

She expected him to smile back at her, for them to share a loud laugh. She almost started laughing herself. But when she looked up at Roger, he had stepped backward toward the doorway, where he was now standing with his head bowed low before her, his hands pressed high against the doorposts, just above his blond hair. The living room window hovered less than ten feet behind him, pressed with the night’s thick black ink and lit by otherworldly flashes of ice that glowed in the light of a streetlamp. His hands seemed bound, tied to the doorposts by their thick blue veins. One hand, she saw, was still holding the forkful of pie.

“I really thought it would work,” he said. “I didn’t want to be just another jerk who takes you up to his place. I—”

“You aren’t,” she told him, a politeness she would have extended just as readily to a stranger in the street. “It’s nice that you tried.”

Roger shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you for months.”

Another woman might have been flattered, or disgusted, or even frightened. But Jacqueline restricted her thinking to pure logic. And what Roger said made no sense.

“I only met you two weeks ago,” she objected. It wasn’t an argument; it was a simple statement of fact.

“That’s right, you only met me two weeks ago,” he sang, in a strange high voice. Later, when she knew him better, she would come to know that voice as a signal that he was letting go of reality, detaching himself mentally from the little kitchen, from the present moment, from time, from her. “You only met me two weeks ago. But I met you two months ago. You wouldn’t remember it, of course. To you it was like it never happened. I went to you for help.”

Roger hung his head again, and she could see the thinness of the hair on the crown of his head. It moved her, this vulnerability to time and change. She had been raised in a world where men always covered their heads. But what he said baffled her.

“Help? What kind of help?”

“All the guys in your lab eat lunch together every day at the snack bar at the department,” he said. This seemed to Jacqueline like a non sequitur. But she listened. “I’ve seen them there every day since the semester started. They always sit together at the same table, and you always sit by yourself, at a table on the other side of the room,” he said. “Just you and your books and ridiculous amounts of coffee. Never another person. Not even any food. I’ve never seen you eat anything. Even at that dinner, you barely touched it. It was like you were—like you didn’t need food, like you weren’t subject to physical laws.”

“You’ve been watching me?”

He raised his head and rolled his eyes, a gesture that would have been obnoxious if his whole demeanor hadn’t been so abject, so welcoming of utter failure. “Everyone has been watching you,” he said.

“Everyone? Who’s everyone?”

He breathed out, a labored sound, as if he were expelling his soul. “The whole physics department, the whole math department, everyone in computer science, chemistry, statistics, everyone. Every grad student, every postdoc, undergrads even. Everyone is watching you.”

This was impossible, Jacqueline knew. In the three months since she had arrived, almost no one had acknowledged her presence. In classes, in the lab, in mandatory meetings, no one even made eye contact with her. She was utterly invisible. Wasn’t she?

“No one can believe there’s a girl in the physics department, that they actually let a girl into the physics department. They never did that before, except some girl two years ago who dropped out after a semester, and everyone’s still laughing about her. There’s even a pool going on, guys betting on when you’ll drop out. But you’re apparently acing everything, without even anyone to study with. Everyone’s talking about you, but no one has actually talked to you.”

“No one ever talks to me,” she said. She was still stunned. Was the universe not indifferent? How could that be? Was everything she thought she knew about the world around her wrong?

“No one dares. The guys in your group won’t go near you. I asked them about you, but—I mean, the idea of even talking to you was laughable. That’s why I went to get help from you.”

He was waving his hands now, framed in the doorway. An odd sensation pricked her, a kind of detached curiosity and mild surprise, as if she had just opened the door and found him there waiting for her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Of course you don’t. It’s like fighting gravity. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He paused. “It was at your tutoring job, with the college kids. You know, where you sit in the library lobby on Wednesday nights helping walk-ins with math homework and the office pays you minimum wage. I went to that.”

The darkness of the window behind him seemed to hum, dark matter resonating around him as though he were a body floating in space. “You did?”

“I didn’t think you’d recognize me. I was right, of course. I pretended I didn’t understand something basic—integrals, derivatives, I forget, but something really obvious. You were very patient with me. You even complimented me when I pretended to suddenly understand it. I almost asked you out for coffee then, but I could see you weren’t interested. You waved me off like I was a little kid. It was hopeless. Like it still is. God.”

This was astounding to her. What amazed her most was that she had no memory of him, none at all. She remembered the many students who had come by for help—the lip-glossed girls, who were afraid of her; the long-haired boys, who were ashamed in front of her; the unsalvageable ones whose minds were simply closed to the concepts; the talented ones who just wanted to be sure they were right. All of them had seemed small to her, childlike, unintimidating, fragile. If anyone had asked her, she would have said that she recalled every last one of them. Until that moment, she had believed that all past experiences accumulate in the mind, buried perhaps, faded perhaps, but nonetheless preserved and waiting, prepared to be summoned. It was a lie, she now understood, like the story she had once been taught of the creation of the world—an infinitely powerful, essential, functionally necessary lie. She had absolutely no memory of Roger.

“After that I gave up hope,” he said. “But then David, who I can’t stand, mentioned that at Friday night services there had been a historic sighting of the infamous Jacqueline Luria—or as he put it, ‘The Girl.’ As if I didn’t know your name. As if everyone didn’t know your name. He asked me if I wanted to come along to the service with him. I considered it a divine message, even though I don’t actually believe in divine messages. Then I found out you were going to their place for dinner. I couldn’t believe they knew you.”

“They don’t,” she said softly. “They were just being nice.”

“When I walked you home that night I tried to ask you out, but I—I lost my nerve. Later I called you a few times. More than a few times. Dozens of times. But you’re never home, of course. Then this past week I saw you going to the computer lab every night at eight,” he said. “I can see the road from the living room. It was like peering into a hole in the fabric of the universe. Suddenly you were right there, outside my window. You always leave at ten. I knew you’d be there tonight.”

He sucked in his breath, letting it out in a long, low sigh. “I’ve never used that computer lab,” he said. “I’m not an undergrad who can’t do his math homework. I’m not a person who bakes pies. I never even turned on the oven before tonight. I’m lucky I didn’t burn down the building.”

He was still holding the forkful of pie. Jacqueline had never in her life seen a man so frank and self-effacing before, so openly imperfect, so painfully, hopelessly human. It seemed almost impossible to believe. She couldn’t shake the notion that she was in an audience, watching a riveting monologue in a very entertaining play, with an actor she wished she could meet in real life.

“I can’t believe I just told you this,” he said, holding his hands in the air, clutching the fork. “The only thing worse than the fact that I did all these things is that I’m telling you about them now. Now you think I’m a stalker. And an impostor. And deranged. And you are entirely correct, because I am all of the above, to a power of twelve.” He pressed his hands against the doorposts, then pressed his head against the hand that was still holding the fork. “God, I’m an idiot,” he muttered. “God.”

It had taken Jacqueline several years in public school, in the secular world, to appreciate that when people used the English word “God,” they were not usually referring to the creator of heaven and earth. Sometimes she still heard it that way and had to shake her head to brush it off. But to her surprise Roger actually meant it. “God,” he said, staring at the chunk of apple on his fork, “why did you make me such an idiot? What kind of evolutionary sense would it make for you to make me an idiot? Am I just here as a warning to others? What purpose could my idiocy possibly serve for the future of the universe?”

If she had grown up in a different home, she might have heard this as self-pity. But she hadn’t, and the question intrigued her.

“The Talmud says there are four things human beings are never allowed to ask about,” Jacqueline finally said. “That’s one of them.”

Roger closed his eyes. “What, why I’m an idiot?”

“No, what God’s plan is for the future of the universe.”

She watched as Roger considered this, blinking as he absently rubbed his chin with his free hand. “What are the other three?” he finally asked. His voice was miserable.

“What’s above the world, what’s below the world, and what happened before the world was created.”

“How do you know that?” he asked. He still didn’t look at her.

She knew what he meant, but to her it felt irrelevant. “I don’t know any of it,” she teased. “I’ve only just started asking.”

But Roger wasn’t listening anymore. He was shaking his head. “God, this is pathetic,” he said. “I didn’t know it was possible to be this pathetic. I don’t even know how to end this.” He looked up at her without looking at her face, his eyes focused somewhere around her shoulders. “Maybe you could leave, kind of gracefully? And then you could gracefully never speak to me again, and gracefully forget that this ever happened, while I gracefully crawl into a pit and die. God.”

He was leaning against the two doorposts with his shoulders heaving, shuddering as though he were trying to shrug off the world. The look on his face was almost too tragic to bear. He glanced to one side, gazing absently at the forkful of apple pie he still held in his hand.

“Aren’t you going to let me taste it?” she asked.

“It’s probably still too hot,” he said, miserably.

She stepped closer, until she was standing right in front of him. With a boldness she had forgotten she had, she took hold of the hand he had wrapped around the fork and drew it toward her mouth, until the heat from the fruit was warming her lips. As his mouth hung open, she curled her lips and slowly, very slowly, blew.

TWO WEEKS LATER, NEAR dawn, he surprised her by braiding her hair.

“I like the idea that the universe is made out of string,” he said. His fingers flowed into her hair as he lay curved behind her on his narrow bed, stroking her head as though his fingers were gliding downstream. “Do you mind?” he asked. “I don’t have many opportunities to try this.”

“Try what?” she asked.

Before she knew what he was doing, she felt him tugging at her hair, separating it, twisting it. The pull was so familiar, so familial, from her family full of sisters, that the idea that he wasn’t related to her seemed like a silly mistake. Soon his hands had poured down to her neck, but still he was working, tugging, tightening, until she suddenly heard the snap of an elastic band that had been around his wrist, trapping her hair in its grip. The sensation was electrifying.

“I didn’t know men could braid hair,” she said. “Do you have sisters?”

“No,” Roger answered, “just a thorough knowledge of topology.”

She turned around to see him squinting at the window, where darkness had given way to a faint pale gray.

“Daylight,” he muttered, with what sounded like regret. “I guess it’s already tomorrow.”

Jacqueline tugged the end of her new braid. “It isn’t really tomorrow if you haven’t fallen asleep,” she said.

“If only that were true,” Roger sighed. He reached over and switched off the lamp, returning his arms to her shoulders, to her back, to her breasts. Dawn flowed through the window, covering them in a mist made of pure new light. Jacqueline watched the light, contemplated it as it changed and brightened. Is light a particle or a wave? her high school physics textbook had asked. It was a question that had long since become a part of her, like the question of free will and fate. She looked at Roger in the untouched light and saw that it was neither: that it was a blanket, a skin, his lips against her hair.

“When I was a little girl, I used to say a blessing every day when I woke up,” she said. “That’s how I would know it was a new day.”

“A blessing?”

“My parents were very traditional,” she said. It was like an apology.

But Roger was curious. “What kind of blessing? Good luck for the new day or something?”

“No, not luck. Judaism has absolutely nothing to do with luck. It is a very, very rational religion.”

“That sounds like an oxymoron to me. How can a religion be rational?”

Jacqueline breathed, watching the light out the window as it sullied itself on a streetlamp. “When it acknowledges what people can actually know,” she said. “Religions always insist that there are boundaries to what we can know, but this one leaves infinite room for those boundaries to move. Moving the boundaries is even part of the religion, in a way.”

Roger smiled. “Maybe I should look into it.”

“The blessing was, ‘I am grateful before you, living and sustaining king, for returning my soul to me, compassionately, in your great faithfulness.’ But the word for ‘faithfulness’ really means something more like ‘reliability.’ ”

“Returning my soul to me?” Roger repeated. He tugged at her braid. “That doesn’t sound rational at all.”

“Of course it is. When people are asleep, what happens to the part of them that’s only them? The part that isn’t like every other sleeping human body in the world? I think it’s very rational to consider sleep to be a kind of journey of the mind to another world, and to think of it as a journey from which a person might not return. And anyway the word for ‘soul’ really just means ‘breath.’ So you could also think of it in completely rational terms, as a restoration of the waking pace of breathing.”

“Can you teach me how to say the blessing?” Roger asked.

It was an innocent question, or at least she heard it that way then—genuine innocence, a touching unawareness of the deep and strange and beautiful and terrifying world into which it led. She reached for her hair, surprised to find it still in its braid, and thought of her mother’s wigs—of how her mother had thrown out all her wigs once the family moved, and of how unearthly it seemed, those first few months, to always see her mother’s naked hair. She traced the rhythmic bundles of bound hair with her fingertips, the strings bound into patterned waves.

“We never fell asleep last night, so it would be a vain prayer,” she said. “We’d have to fall asleep now and then wake up again.”

“I would love to watch you fall asleep,” Roger said. “Would you let me watch you fall asleep?”

Jacqueline laughed, a nervous laugh. There was an edge of strangeness in him, a precipice beyond which she couldn’t see. But on that ridge between night and day, she thought she simply didn’t know him well enough.

“I don’t think I could fall asleep with someone watching me,” she said.

“Just close your eyes. You’ll forget I’m here. You’ll forget all of this,” he told her, and brushed a hand across her face.

She closed her eyes and tumbled into a dark pit, a dreamless journey toward the center of the earth. The night that had passed remained on the edge above her, she and Roger peering down together and watching her fall. For that night would always be there, Jacqueline knew, hidden in a drawer deep in her mind, ready for her to pull it out, unfold it, and enter that room once more, where a man who would love her forever was eternally braiding her hair.

WHEN JUDITH WAS BORN, Jacqueline was surprised by how little she felt for the baby. Everyone—even her mother, who was still alive then—said that Judith was adorable, and she was. She had crazy curly hair, a dimply smile, and, by five months old, a cackling laugh that made everyone around her laugh, uncomfortable with the knowledge that they were laughing at a baby who didn’t know she was being mocked, and everyone else’s laughter only made the baby laugh louder. But what she felt for her tiny new daughter was painfully unmagical, earthy and unmysterious in the extreme. By the age of twenty-five Jacqueline was accustomed to being transported by thoughts of things beyond her understanding, things too large or too small to contemplate. But if there was a midpoint to infinity, it was this fat pink baby that couldn’t support its own head. It was as if she had acquired a strange new pet. Everything she read and heard about motherhood then—books that had been published in the ’70s, mostly, and one or two newer ones with the same ethos—suggested that it was a nearly poetic calling, that there was some kind of “bond” she was supposed to share with this stranger who had moved into her home. Yet it was her distinct impression that as far as the baby was concerned, she was more or less a vending machine. She checked her daughter into daycare, where the teachers were all women with an intense and incomprehensible love for catatonic infants, and leaked milk at the lab. She watched her male colleagues (by now it was 1982, and every person in the entire department was still a man) sweating into computer keyboards with a phenomenal intensity, pouring power into deconstructing a world, as she left obscenely early to pick up Judith, to go to the supermarket, to make dinner, to bathe the baby—and within five insufficiently rational months, to vomit. Before she had children, Jacqueline had thought of daycare as something that women—new women, modern women, women so distant from the women she had known as a child that they might as well have been an entirely different species, not even slightly related to human beings—had to use in order to work. But it very quickly became clear, toward the end of her second pregnancy, that two daycare tuitions or a full-time babysitter’s salary would far exceed what she could earn as a mere graduate student and that it would eat into Roger’s income too, and that Roger was two years closer to getting an actual professorship and at any rate was more likely to be hired—and that, to her blinding astonishment, it was simply not affordable for her to continue her career.

Roger was encouraging; Roger was loving; Roger was respectful; Roger was good. He said sensitive things about her “going on hiatus,” about her “doing something much more important than anything I do,” about her “going back to the program in a few years,” once the children were in school. But Jacqueline would soon see, from a distance, what would happen in physics in 1984, the year that the world of quantum mechanics and general relativity suddenly became tied up with string; she knew, already, that the field during those “few years” (actually six) would change too dramatically for her ever to return. A universe lay growing within her: conception was the shattering big bang that began a new life and ended hers.

She dropped out of the doctoral program, and no one objected. In fact her male colleagues seemed to exhale with relief. Her advisor, an ancient veteran of the Manhattan Project, looked at her swollen belly and smirked as he wished her luck in “whatever you choose to do next.” She removed Judith from daycare, went home, and tried valiantly to enjoy being alone with her child. Instead she cried for weeks as she watched Judith throw toys at a wall. She had been captured and sold as a slave.

But when Josie was born, Jacqueline discovered something astounding. Judith had been cute, but Josie was beautiful, in an almost adult way—wide-set eyes, a head proportioned to her body instead of the usual baby’s bobble, and an unnerving gaze, even as an infant, that their next-door neighbor described, without irony, as “soulful.” Jacqueline doubted the soulful part, primarily because she doubted the soul. But within months there was no question that this child was what she had hoped for and failed to see in Judith: something extraordinary, something that would truly redeem the wreckage that had become her life.

While Judith had lagged behind in everything the pediatrician said babies should do, this new child was astonishing by every measure. She rolled over at three weeks, crawled at four months, walked at ten months, recognized letters at eleven months, read street signs at a year. The child’s first word was “book.” She only became more extraordinary as she grew older, a genuine radiance of intellect that was almost dazzling to behold. Any toddler who watched enough Sesame Street could learn to read, Jacqueline suspected. But not any child could assemble hundred-piece puzzles at the age of two. Or fill out math workbooks for fun at the age of five. Or have long conversations with the school’s custodian at the age of seven, in Spanish—which Josie claimed to have learned from watching Sesame Street, though Jacqueline knew that was impossible. They had no computer at home yet; it would have been too expensive then, not to mention largely useless. By age ten Josie had won one in a contest. Her first attempt at using it produced a “prophecy program,” inspired by Judith’s bat mitzvah preparation, which generated incoherent poetry in biblical-style verse. Josie would then print up the results and leave them lying around the house, saving the most accidentally sensical ones for Jacqueline’s bathroom mirror:

Lo, take heed, O daughters of Israel!

For in the garden swords shall not prune

The wisdom of thy fathers, lo, it shall not

Comfort, comfort ye, my people,

As righteousness is quenched

Like a mighty stream

Thou shalt yearn for days of old!

That was the year Roger left.

“HAVE YOU EVER READ this book?” Roger had asked her one evening. “Somebody recommended it to me. It’s really interesting.”

He was in the living room, which was stuffed with stacks of problem sets he hadn’t yet graded (she had been right, she had discovered: mathematicians were slobs), sitting on the couch with a thick red book over which he wielded a four-color pen. The front of the book proclaimed its title, in falsely modest lowercase letters: guide for the perplexed. At first she assumed it was some new pop math book, probably about game theory, the latest fad. Then she realized what it was: a translation of a book she last remembered seeing on the couch where her father slept, after he gave up sleeping with her mother. It was a treatise on faith and reason by the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. She remembered its Hebrew title: Moreh Nevukhim.

“What are you perplexed about?” she asked, though like most people who have been married for over ten years, she didn’t need to ask. Roger had been denied tenure, had left the university, and had taken on three different adjunct jobs at three different colleges and a slew of tutoring students to make up for it. She had been looking for work herself, though with a ten-year hole in her résumé she wasn’t expecting to find any. She thought it exceedingly unlikely that there were any solutions to these dilemmas in Guide for the Perplexed.

“At the moment, I’m perplexed about why I’ve spent so many years of my life without so much as acknowledging the creator of the universe.”

Jacqueline smirked. “I think the creator of the universe would be willing to forgive you for that.”

Roger snorted. “That’s easy for you to say. It’s like—well, just imagine that you have an unbelievable gift, something that really only you can do, something so beyond the ability of so many other people on earth, but then instead of using it, you just—you just default into an unremarkable ordinary life, as if you never had that gift. You can’t imagine what that’s like.”

“No, I suppose I can’t,” Jacqueline said, and experienced a time warp: in her living room, she was suddenly standing in her doctoral advisor’s office, listening as he wished her luck in “whatever you choose to do next.” It seemed laughable to her now, the idea of free will.

But Roger wasn’t listening. “He actually anticipates special relativity,” Roger said. “He introduces the idea that time can pass at different rates for different observers. He puts it in religious terms—that humans and God aren’t observing the same things, that time passes differently for God, in a way we can’t appreciate—but he also makes the point that the observer automatically alters the observational results. And at a time when scientists thought the universe was fixed and eternal, he lays out the proof that the universe had a starting point, basically giving logical evidence for what we’d call the big bang. That’s pretty advanced for the year 1191.”

“It’s not exactly original,” Jacqueline said. “It’s sort of mentioned in the first line of the Torah.”

“Yeah, but see, he proves it. In philosophical terms, I mean. It’s kind of incredible. In everything I’ve ever read about God, or anything religious, I always feel like someone expects me to blindly accept ludicrous things and check my brain at the door. But it’s not about belief for this guy at all. It’s about logic. It’s pretty airtight too.”

Jacqueline marveled, as she often did, at her husband’s strange innocence, as though he were forever encountering the world for the first time. She had once loved that. Now it seemed tedious to her, foolish. It occurred to her, as it often had in her physics days, that in the Torah the world was created from something, from an undefined chaos, and that in the most recent understanding she had of string theory, that the big bang also assumed creation from something equally undefined, a universe compressed to a single point. She remembered a time when this revelation had comforted her, promising what she had come to doubt on her long journey from the darkness of her childhood to the light of her adulthood: the singularity of God. She had aged in these past ten years, giving up her body and her mind as spare parts for the use of others. Now Roger was taking the very last piece, borrowing the spark that once illuminated her life, sucking out the breath that had once been her soul.

“It’s like fractals,” Roger said, turning a page. “He has this idea that there are endless possibilities, but that they all lie within a particular pattern, and the only thing that makes it appear that things are random is that we don’t have a wide enough perspective, or that we don’t understand the mechanism generating the pattern. That’s basically the Mandelbrot Set.”

Jacqueline no longer cared about the patterns of the universe. The only pattern she had detected, lately, was that she was living with a man whose interest in God far exceeded his interest in his wife and daughters—which, she reassured herself, was at least an improvement over the active interests of Isaac Luria. She reassured herself often, then.

“But we know the mechanism of the Mandelbrot Set,” she said. “There’s an algorithm for it.”

“There’s an algorithm for everything. That’s the point. But the fact is that we’ll never understand the ultimate algorithm—the one that generates things like the Mandelbrot Set. We can get infinitely close to it, but we’ll always be infinitely close to it, without ever reaching it, like an asymptote. It’s the concept of the limit, five centuries before Newton. Infinite closeness without any connection. It’s amazing. Just very difficult to imagine in reality.”

For Jacqueline it wasn’t difficult to imagine at all. She had accepted it completely. There would be no more endless possibilities. The only possibility was Josie.

TWO YEARS BEFORE ROGER left, nine-year-old Josie sat at the kitchen table, eating scrambled eggs and predicting the future.

“Mommy, I had a dream last night about you and Daddy and Judith.”

It was a warm fall morning. Judith was elsewhere—in the bathroom, upstairs, in some pocket of space-time that didn’t include Josie. It was a delicious moment, Jacqueline and Josie alone. Jacqueline was only slightly embarrassed by how much this thrilled her. “Really, Josie?”

“Yeah. I dreamed that you and Daddy and Judith turned into computers. Like the ones in school, only a lot smaller. Really small computers you could hold in your hand.”

“Hm,” Jacqueline said. The thrill faded: there was really nowhere positive for such a dream to go. But she loved her daughter’s confidence, Josie’s almost unconscious trust that the universe ought to fit in her pocket. It was something a girl growing up a mere twenty years earlier, a girl like her, never had a chance to feel. “Did the computers do anything special?” Jacqueline asked. She was aware that the question alone might distort the dream—that observing anything would distort it, as both the scientific method and apparently Maimonides suggested—but she didn’t care.

“Yeah, in BASIC,” Josie said.

Jacqueline remembered BASIC, vaguely, from various unpleasant experiences in the graduate school lab just before she dropped out. It was a programming language that other people were just beginning to use then—other people being men. As Josie brought her breakfast dishes to the sink, Jacqueline did not appreciate that this was the last thing her daughter would ever tell her about programming that she would understand: that this dream, recounted at breakfast, was the final ridge of the mass of knowledge that she and Josie shared, that Josie was pushing off into a vast and unmeasured and endless sea, leaving her mother far behind.

“Like ‘INPUT: Mom.’ ‘INPUT: Dad.’ ‘INPUT: Judith,’ ” Josie was saying. “That’s how I knew they were you. Then all three of them read, ‘INPUT: “Josie, lead us.” ’ In quotes, like for text. And then ‘GOTO: Follow.’ Isn’t that creepy? I don’t know if they wanted me to take them somewhere, or if they just wanted me to program them to do something, because then I woke up. Anyway, I thought it was really cool for a computer to be so tiny that I could hold it in my hand.”

Jacqueline considered this as she scrubbed at a frying pan. A cluster of absurdly large soap bubbles had formed near the handle. The lines of contact between the bubbles formed a kind of figure, a star-shaped confluence as the largest bubbles pressed against one another. She remembered the “Harvard Stick-Man,” the stick-figure-shaped pattern of galaxies she had studied in an undergraduate astronomy class, which had baffled cosmologists until they realized that galaxies were forming around unfathomably enormous “bubbles,” or giant voids in space. It was only at the contact points between one void and another that anything existed at all. Jacqueline had been unable to grasp the concept until she had seen enormous bubbles forming in a frying pan in her first married apartment three years later. The memory felt so distant that it almost seemed to have happened to someone else. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind following her daughter, or telling her daughter to lead her—that in effect, she already had. She washed away the suds, worlds disappearing down a drain.

“That’s very interesting,” she said to Josie. “Just don’t tell Judith about it, okay?”

Josie smiled. A few minutes later, Judith emerged from the bathroom and the sisters put on their backpacks and walked out the front door to wait for the bus. The morning was lovely, and Jacqueline had the kitchen windows open. She could still hear the girls on the edge of their tiny lawn when Josie said to Judith, “Do you want to hear about my dream last night? It was really cool.”

“No thanks,” Jacqueline heard Judith reply. She watched her older daughter kick at the curb. Judith had become cold to everyone lately, Jacqueline had noticed, uninterested in playing with her sister, content to sit in silence at the dinner table as Josie regaled everyone with stories of her day. Getting Judith to talk about school, or about nearly anything else, was like interrogating someone in court. But that was just part of being ten, Jacqueline told herself. Any inadequacy in any child, Jacqueline knew by now, could always be blamed on the child’s age. The improbability of this always being true was something that would bother her more if she let it. She did not let it.

“I had a dream that you and Mom and Dad turned into really tiny computers, and you were all telling me to be your leader,” she heard her younger daughter say.

Jacqueline watched Judith at the edge of their lot—pretty Judith, normal Judith, simple Judith, jealous Judith—and prayed, vainly, that the dream would prove too cryptic for her wonderfully average mind.

“What, you think you’re the boss of us or something?” Judith snapped.

“I don’t think anything. I’m just telling you about my dream,” Josie said. There was an obliviousness to Josie, an almost conscious naïveté, that perched on the continental divide between innocence and arrogance. “It was kind of interesting, because I never saw tiny computers like that before, that could fit in my hand. I thought it was a really cool idea. What did you dream about last night?”

Jacqueline watched in horror as Judith smacked her sister’s face.

Jacqueline rushed to the door. But instead of opening it, she paused, and watched her daughters through the window beside the doorpost. Josie did not run back into the house to tell her mother. When the bus arrived an instant later, she simply boarded it behind her sister, with one hand pressed against her cheek. Which only made Jacqueline admire Josie more.

“I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT RATIONALLY,” Roger told her on the day he disappeared. He had grown a beard by then, and wore ritual fringes hanging from beneath his shirt. They hung suspended against the darkness of his black pants, loose strings on which his mind now played music she could no longer hear. “My only explanation for it is that an ancestor must be sitting inside me, summoning me back.”

Jacqueline stared at his car as he drove away, throwing a peach at his taillights in a hopeless effort to alter the rhythms of time and space. To her pure animal horror, despite every deliberate and agonizing choice she had made from the age of fourteen on, her daughters were now condemned to live her life again.

That night Judith curled up in her bed with her forehead pressed against the wall in the bedroom she shared with Josie, consumed by love and fury. But near midnight, Josie left the room. Josie went into Jacqueline’s bedroom in the dark and climbed up into Jacqueline’s bed, lying beside her. In the deep pit of that night, Jacqueline sensed her daughter’s hands against the back of her head, her fingers flowing into her dark and tangled curls—and felt her daughter tying, binding, braiding her hair. And then Jacqueline Ashkenazi took all her lived-out days and stored them in a dark room in her mind, offering them up to eternity.

The story of the daughters Ashkenazi continues in Dara Horn’s acclaimed novel A Guide for the Perplexed, now available in paperback and ebook.

Also by Dara Horn

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

ALL OTHER NIGHTS

THE WORLD TO COME

IN THE IMAGE

About the Author

Dara Horn, the author of the novels A Guide for the Perplexed, All Other Nights, The World to Come, and In the Image, is one of Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists” and the winner of two National Jewish Book Awards. A Guide for the Perplexed was a Booklist Editors’ Choice for 2013 and was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Dara lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children. Visit her website at www.darahorn.com.

Copyright © 2014 by Dara Horn

All rights reserved

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