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  And then Makeda was standing by the bed, completely unclothed but for a rolled up cloth between her legs. My eyes widened and my washela rose like a kudu’s ear, but my belly was as tight as a kebero drum. She had something in her hand. She stuck it inside her mouth and then came over and handed me some. I didn’t know what to do with it. Though green, it smelled of bananas. I learned later that khat is often packed in banana leaves. “Unclean,” she said wonderingly, sitting on the bed and then sliding next to me again under the covers as if I were not even there. “She cut with me a knife so rusty I was picking little bits of rust out of my wound for weeks.”

  I myself dissociated right then. I registered her words, but could not find the feelings that should have accompanied them. She was speaking much more quickly now, the khat doing its work. “It was only once the orphanage was raided and I was brought back here to this village, to the church, only after Father Wendimu got hold of some antibiotics—lord knows what he sold of his own possessions to obtain them—that my body had a chance to heal. I’d become a wild animal by then. Even when my body began to hurt less, I was useless.” She made a fierce face, and I saw chewed bits of leaf covering her teeth. “Until the other children began to arrive. In the beginning, they were war orphans like me, but then the AIDS babies came, younger and younger, dropped off outside our gates in the middle of the night, brought by nurses from one of the makeshift hospitals. More than a few had just been set down by the sides of their dead mothers, howling to the point that they were hoarse for days afterward.”

  Now Makeda sat up suddenly, and I shrank back a little from her heedlessly displayed breasts. A shaft of moonlight entering through an ill-fitting window illuminated her face, and I had the fantasy she was actually a ghost. She smiled then. Actually smiled. “It was the children who saved me. Father Wendimu knew exactly what he was doing. He made sure I was assigned the worst cases, the ones closest to death. I had to mobilize. And he—he begged, borrowed, and stole whatever he could to get me supplies. As soon as books became available again, he found me books for beginning nurses—I don’t know how. Over time I became something resembling a human again. I began to think of them as my children. Even when I knew they would leave me. Hoped that they would leave me. Igzee’abihier, the Lord of the Universe had made them mine, and I knew that some essential part of them would be mine forever.”

  I, too, had stayed hers forever. Witch! What force was it that this woman possessed? And now the moon had found a way to insert as much of its glow as possible into this little room, as if the two of us were spot lit on a stage. Makeda looked me full in the face. “That raging infection would prevent me from having a child, and my disfigurement and my shame took care of any desire I might have had to make one.” She looked at me with something akin to pity. “Pain, Assefa. All I know here”—she touched a hand between her thighs, as if for emphasis—“is pain.” And now she touched her naked breast. “But here, what I know is love.”

  I knew this was not dissociation. This was truth. This was an uncanny form of grace. For the face of my old friend Makeda was now identical with Ethiopia’s own dark virgin, Maryam of Sion. And she was asking me, “So, tell me, what is the name of the girl you have left behind?”

  Chapter Nine

  Fleur

  I SUPPOSE IT MADE its own kind of cockamamie sense that it was Serena McKenna I turned to after we all bade a miserably useless set of goodnights to Fidel Marquetti and the Kangs. I went to bed with the small comfort that the police hadn’t taken in either Fidel or the Kangs, leaving the Kangs to retreat into their home in stoic silence as the paramedics swept a still ranting Fidel off to Huntington Hospital. Only then did Animal Control load Chin-Hwa’s bullet-ridden body into a van to be tested for rabies. Did I mention I felt useless?

  Serena was one of the wisest people I knew, even if she shared with her employer Jane Goodall the inability to recognize human faces. Their malady, by the way, is called Prosagnosia, and they shared it with one of my favorite actors, the endearingly loopy Stephen Fry, as well as the renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, who could escape the London blitz, teach at multiple major universities, write ten ground-breaking books, but couldn’t tell his brothers apart. In the six years I’d known her, Serena had mistaken me for her old Cambridge classmate Stanley H. Fiske and my physics team member Gunther Anderten, whose own affliction of vision, strabismus, made you wonder if he was looking at you at all. I’d never gotten around to asking Serena if she and Jane recognized chimp faces, but I suppose it didn’t really matter, since they had the primates’ naked bodies, idiosyncratic sounds, and distinctive odors to give them clues.

  Before composing my email, I checked the time in Tanzania, where the Jane Goodall Institute is based. We were ten hours behind, which I should have known since we were also ten hours behind Ethiopia. Which made me stop in my tracks with an alarmingly accelerated heartbeat. I recited a couple of Ra-Ma-Da-Sas and stroked a soothingly motoring Jillily before commencing my message.

  “Dear Serena,” I wrote, “I hope you and the chimps are fine. Please send my regards to Lord Hanuman and tell him that my team talks about him all the time.” Which was true, particularly whenever we needed a little comic relief from our enforced hiatus from dematerialization research. What better reprieve from our frustration than recalling how a rescued lab chimp helped move our mathematical computations forward by flinging poop bullets at a blackboard, one of them just happening to attach a much-needed numeral seven?

  I chewed at a tiny flap of cuticle before continuing, “Serena, I hate to bother you, but something terrible has happened. An animal has been murdered right next door, and I don’t know if I can go outside again without ...” Mumps-like balls forming just below my ears, I flung myself out of my desk chair onto the carpet, where I rolled into a fetal ball, rocking and quietly moaning and sneaking in a little upper arm pinch now and again to prevent myself from alerting Stanley and Gwennie that a pity party was taking place down the hall. How ironic to have reached my supposed age of maturity just in time to throw a tantrum like a toddler over the death of dog I didn’t even particularly like. As for Fidel, he’d evaded sharks and the Coast Guard to come to this country from Cuba; why hadn’t he been able to take a little doggy doo in stride? The stupid signs he stuck up everywhere spoiled the symmetry of his garden more than a few turds, which, after all, pretty much blended in with the soil. As for the Kangs, why hadn’t they kept the dog they supposedly loved safely inside their house and just walked him like other people did their pets? And what was wrong with Chin-Hwa that he failed to pick up that a dangerous human lived next door?

  If there were situations where nobody and nothing is right, which god should be blamed for such inefficiency? Cydoimus, the Greek god of din, battle, confusion, and uproar? The Egyptian god of chaos Seth? Or, better yet, the Hindu Akhilandeshvari, otherwise known as She-Who-Is-Never-Not-Broken?

  I laughed harshly enough for Jillily’s ears to prick up like hypervigilant antennae. I scooted her toward me and pressed my nose against her belly, feeling her heartbeat decelerate as she purred.

  “The Never Not Broken Goddess,” I murmured into her motoring ribs. “She’s the one, isn’t she, girl? Silly me. I should have been worshipping her all along.”

  Chapter Ten

  Fleur

  IT WAS MY half-Jewish friend Sammie who’d first called my attention to the Buddhist notion of mindfulness, but it took a pale-skinned, blue-eyed Sikh to offer me practical guidance on making the body-mind connection. Which is why I was driving like a maniac to Siri Sajan’s home studio, skidding precariously close to the butterfly-tattooed ankle of a preoccupied cellphone gabbing teenager as I swerved into a hasty right turn. I’d already detoured back home to grab my purple yoga mat, for once unbothered by its embarrassing Etch-A-Sketch of Jillily fur. I vaguely recognized the irony of driving too fast to a yoga class, but took a dark pleasure in blaming my carelessness on a series of bewildering conversations with Assefa.

&
nbsp; Siri Sajan, as good as her name—which translates from Punjabi as friend—had offered me a private session as soon as I’d babbled into her phone, “It was either call nine-one-one or you, but I think I’m too young for this to be a heart attack.” Who better than a master of Kundalini to realize I was at risk of falling into the everlasting pit of eternal emptiness?

  Did I say bewildering? Make that unsettling. Better yet, let’s call the spade what it was. Actually, that’s not the most accurate image, since the actual Greek expression, mistranslated by Erasmus, was to “call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.” I personally didn’t give a fig what to call what I was feeling. I only knew I couldn’t bear it alone.

  I’d been climbing out of the tub when my phone rang the first time, and it had taken me a few minutes to register that it wasn’t Jillily I was hearing, but the new meowing cat ringtone programmed into my phone as a Christmas present by Amir. Amir himself had his own new ringtone comprised of escalating Lord Hanuman grunts recorded especially for him by Serena, and he was only too happy to install a feline counterpart for me.

  I’d grabbed my cellphone with one hand and swiped my plush, orange bath towel from the closed toilet seat with the other. I managed to set the cell on speaker and began to hurriedly swab my breasts and belly until I heard the faint “Fleur? Fleur? Are you there?” At the sound of Assefa’s voice, fire streaked upwards from my tweeter. I envisioned the soft tuft of hair below his lower lip, his dark and liquid eyes. The whole time he’d been away, I’d been aching for the breathless unity of lying with him after our mini-explosions, our hearts beating in unison.

  I hastily clapped the phone to my ear. “It’s me, Assefa. I’m having a hard time hearing you. God, I’ve missed you. Can you speak up?”

  Assefa’s voice got louder for a few seconds then faded again. “Fleur, I need to talk to you. I want to explain ....” The line crackled. “It’s not easy ... so sorry .... Oh, hell, this connection’s terrible. Let me call you on another ...” And then he was gone. I tried to star sixty-nine him until I realized it would hardly work with a call from Africa.

  I stared balefully at my image in the heavily misted bathroom mirror. With most of my face obscured by steam, I looked like a headless ghost. Was it my imagination, or was it more than the lousy connection that made Assefa sound so far away?

  As I replayed the few words in my mind that I’d managed to hear, Jillily pushed open the bathroom door. Scratching her under her chin, I muttered, “It’s all right, Jillily, isn’t it?” But instead of rubbing her head against me for more, she turned her back, arched, and commenced the lurching strains of “I’m going to toss my breakfast all over the floor.” Which she did. And it was bad. It looked like she’d gotten hold of some of last night’s cauliflower curry. As soon as she relieved herself, she seemed perfectly fine, exiting the room with her question mark tail insouciantly aloft.

  Usually, I mop up Jillily’s messes without a thought. It’s simply a part of having a cat. But this time I swabbed up the saffron-colored gook haunted by a gloomy felidomancy, which, in case you’re curious, is a method of divination that interprets cats’ movements as omens of future events.

  I knew I was being ridiculous. Surely I was reading more into this than the occasion warranted, but I set off for Caltech with a vague unease that mounted into full-fledged alarm as soon as I took another abortive call from Assefa on my car’s Bluetooth. This time, he sounded less troubled than irritated when the static set in. I heard him mutter, “Damn it, Fleur! Maybe it’s you,” before the connection fizzled out again.

  That was when panic—and acid reflux—set in. Which I tried to explain to Siri Sajan when she opened her door. But my yoga teacher wasn’t having any of it. She put a finger to her lips, guided me into her Persian-carpet-strewn living room, and gestured for me to unroll my mat. I couldn’t help but reflect that my purple yoga mat looked garish against her faded burgundy and green rugs, but I tried to let the thought go as I sat cross-legged opposite her. We sang together, “Ong Namo, Guru Dev Namo.” I bow to the Creative Wisdom, I bow to the Divine Teacher.

  Siri Sajan was definitely divine herself. The session she offered me was more restorative than taxing. By the time we got to the sweet final refrain of Kundalini meditation—borrowed from The Incredible String Band’s “May the Long Time Sun Shine Upon You”—and exchanged Sat Nams, I was feeling fit for human company. I drove to Caltech with the assurance I’d been making a tempest in a teapot. (And if you’re wondering—as I did when I first heard it from Father’s thinly repulsed lips—about the derivation of that phrase, you might be interested to know that it has counterparts in Arabic, Bulgarian, Tamil, and Portuguese, with my favorite being the Greek variant that translates as drowning in a spoon of water.)

  Anyway, by the time I finally poked a head into Stanley’s classroom, the crew was already breaking up for the afternoon. Stanley had a dental appointment, and the rest of the team had errands to do. All but Bob, that is. Which was how I ended up joining him for a meal at the Broad Café. It would have been just plain rude to turn him down.

  The Broad is Caltech’s answer to New York delis, a California hybrid offering ridiculously caloric processed meat sandwiches coupled with organic produce. We were still debating what to order when Bob reached into his briefcase and said shyly, “Maybe when we find a table, you’d like to take a gander at this.”

  I looked down and laughed. “What, more? Bob, I swear you must be the messenger of the God of Physics, doling out the secrets of the universe, article by article.”

  If Bob was blushing before, he’d now attained the bright crimson of one of mother’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles roses. He looked even more embarrassed when I slid a thumb under my jeans waistband with exaggerated difficulty and confessed, “My heart longs for the Reuben, but the scale says I’d better stay with the Caesar.” I turned to the nose-ringed girl at the counter and asked, “Can you put a little chicken in it?” before muttering a quick aside to Bob, “Gwennie would kill me, but I’ve got to have a little animal protein once in awhile.”

  Seeing that Bob was still a rather spectacular shade of red, I tried taking the focus away from myself, asking, “What’s looking good to you?” before I realized what I’d done. I added a hasty, “What do you have an appetite for?” Oh dear. I really did suffer from foot-in-mouth disease.

  Bob made a visible effort to gather himself. “I’m going back and forth between the Lumber Jack and the Herder.” I snorted, and he darted a paranoid look at me before Nose Ring Girl turned her attention back to us and asked him, “Have you decided yet?” She actually sneezed into her hands as he replied, “Okay. Make it a Lumber Jack. But just the roast beef and turkey. No ham.”

  “Is that all?” she asked, her dark eyes wandering between the two of us.

  Bob looked tense. He turned to me. “Do you want anything to drink?” I shook my head. “No, that’ll be all, but”—he paused—“would you mind washing your hands?”

  The girl shot him an incredulous look, gave a curt nod, and then pivoted toward the back. She wasn’t the only one who was shocked.

  I beamed at Bob. “Bob, you’re not just a messenger of God, but my personal hero. I would never have had the guts to say that, but it needed to be said.”

  Grinning, Bob led the way to a pine-topped table, and as soon as our food was ready we chowed down like there was no tomorrow.

  Finishing my salad first, I turned to the article Bob had handed me. It was a contribution to the journal Physics Letters B written by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. My heart skipped a few beats as it dawned on me where Poplawski was going. I didn’t even mind Bob pulling his chair around so that our thighs were nearly touching. He read the final page along with me, though he obviously knew what it said.

  I smiled up at him gratefully. “All kidding aside, you sure do come up with the good stuff, Bob. First Jaime Gomez, now this.” And I meant it. Bob seemed to have an unerring eye for work that would be helpf
ul once we got our green light on P.D. The fact that Poplawski had developed mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into black holes opened all sorts of possibilities. He was proposing that a black hole wasn’t made up of matter collapsed into a single point, but was instead a kind of wormhole or tunnel into which matter was sucked before it gushed out of a white hole at the other end to form an alternate universe.

  Which, as Bob excitedly pointed out, suggested that the cellular black holes I’d postulated in the human body were just as I’d predicted, bridges to alternate realities into which we might disappear and reappear according to the Principle of Dematerialization. And while Congress had virtually decreed that we couldn’t yet go forward on testing P.D., we could certainly follow up Poplawski’s ideas when the time came.

  Nodding encouragingly, I said, “I think you’re onto something, Bob.” His face lit up like neon, and the foot of his crossed leg jiggled like Jillily beset by fleas. I was right there with him. “This opens up no end of —”

  My cellphone erupted with a series of meows. As much I wanted to continue our conversation, my heart leapt at the thought that it might be Assefa. With a quick nod at Bob, I rose from my seat and moved to a quiet corner of the café.

  There was static on the line again, but it didn’t get in the way of Assefa’s “Fleur, can you hear me?”

  “I can! I can hear you!” I could barely contain myself.

  “Listen,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

  I pressed the phone more tightly to my ear. “Is it your father?”

  “No. No. Abat is fine. He’s actually on his way back. The government expelled him. It’s absurd. They say he and Zalelew wanted to steal the Ark of the Covenant. As if they could even if they wanted to.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “As if it was there in the first place, and not just a fiction of my people’s inferiority complex.”