“My interview isn’t until eleven,” said Irene. “Can I bring you anything? Tea? Pills?”

“Tea and pills,” said her mother.

In the kitchen, Irene pulled three tea bags out of the canister and flooded the cup with boiling water. She wrapped the strings around the handle, tore the foil off two sinus pills, and trudged back up the stairs.

“Just leave it on the nightstand,” said her mother, who had not moved.

“Mom, what’s that smell?” Irene smelled something sharp.

“I had a problem,” said her mother from under her elbow. Her lips were terse, wired together.

Irene set the tea and pills down on the nightstand as directed. She walked into the bathroom and began to fill the clawfoot tub. It was wide and deep, dramatic. Irene squirted lavender bath gel into the water under the running tap, and it began to foam up. When it was steaming and full, Irene went back into the bedroom. Her mother was sitting up and had taken the pills with the boiling tea.

“Go get in the tub,” said Irene. “Throw your clothes outside the door when they’re off.”

The stain in the bed was orange, a deep vibrant orange. It was large. Irene swept the fluffy quilt back, stripped off the white sheet and the mattress pad. Irene felt a mad, animal urge to run away from that stain in the bed, from a mother who puts stains in her bed. But she picked up her mother’s clothes off the floor in the hallway, bundled them into the sheet, and hauled the armful down to the laundry room. Standing in the kitchen, listening to the washing machine fill, she felt a drip of water on her head. She looked up and saw a water stain darkening on the kitchen’s drop ceiling, and raced for the stairs. Her mother had let the water of the tub overflow. Had she drowned? Was she dead? How was she able to sustain life in this state?

It’s not good when your mother pisses herself in her bed. It’s like you’re the one doing it, and you feel sorry. But you’re also the one seeing it, so you feel rage. There was too much of her mother in Irene for her to feel completely safe from pissing her own bed, and no matter what tourniquet she tied around her neck, she could not guarantee that her body would effectively die, that her belly button would effectively disappear, that she would separate, be just a head, her own head apart from her mother’s.

She found her mother dozing with the faucet still spraying, the water in the tub spilling over gently onto the floor. Irene switched off the water and began to cry. Later that day she drove to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, parked in the visitors’ lot, barfed in a bush, blew up her interview, and accepted an offer in Pittsburgh instead. Pittsburgh had a bridge 240 feet above the Allegheny River. It would do.

But before she left for Pittsburgh, she had one more conversation with Bernice. When she got home from the ruined interview, her mother sat in a rocking chair in her bedroom, her mouth flattened into a line. The graying hands in her lap clasped each other urgently, as soon as Irene said, “Mother, I’m leaving. So we need to talk.”

When the words were out of her mouth, Irene almost wanted to call them back.

“I know about your drinking. I know you drink. It’s not sinus, or an ulcer, or anything like that. You’re drinking too much. And you have been forever.” She sat next to her mother on the ground, in a supplicating pose, took her hand, held it. She wanted to go back to not having said those words out loud in the world, when she could just dream about it and then get through the waking hours as if they were a dream.

“I’m not going to visit you anymore, once I get to Pittsburgh,” said Irene. “Unless you stop drinking. Then I will.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother had said. She was sitting in a rocking chair, and her face was drawn and tight, her mouth suddenly small and pinched. “The doctor recommended I drink a glass of wine a day,” said her mother. “For my health. But I’ll stop. I’ll stop. If you say I have to.”

“That doctor doesn’t know how much you drink.”

“It was a different doctor a long time ago,” said her mother. “I have a heart condition.”

Irene paused. She wished she had never brought it up.

“Mother, I know you pissed your bed this morning, because your liver is failing, because you drink so much gin. You think you are fooling everyone you know, but you’re not.”

“No one knows. It’s none of their business what I do.”

“They know, mother. They can smell it.”

But did they know? No one seemed to know. How did they not know, when she sometimes answered the phone by saying nothing at all?

“It’s odorless,” her mother said. “It doesn’t smell like anything.”

Irene remembered a time when she and her mother had been arguing. Her mother had sunk her fingernails into Irene’s arm, face close enough for spit flecks to fall from her mouth to Irene’s cheek, and had said, “You’re a hateful child. A child of the devil. You’re an ungrateful, hateful devil child.” The cold stones in her mother’s eyes had flashed completely sober, and Irene had found herself, in that moment, impatient for her mother to get that drink inside her, to become tolerable, to fall asleep, to go away.

But now Bernice’s face didn’t move. It stayed taut and she kept staring away from Irene, over Irene’s head.

“You’ll see me in your dreams,” said Bernice. “Like we always have done.”

“No,” Irene said. “I won’t be joining you there either. You must stop drinking, mother. You’re going to die.”

“I don’t even drink that much,” said Bernice. “You’re exaggerating.”

“Mom, I know you’re trying to kill yourself,” Irene had choked out. “I understand that you are.”

“No, I’m not,” Bernice snapped.

“The only sad thing,” said Irene, “is watching it take so long. It’s taking too long, Mom. Killing yourself this way is taking too damn long.”

Irene had gone to Pittsburgh. And her mother lived and lived, and tried to write and call, but there wasn’t enough guilt to bring Irene back: not to the Hinterland and not to Toledo. Then she died, and Irene came. And went back to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, this time in triumph. It was hard not to connect the dots, and make a constellation: it would be a flame, a twisted, tangled flame. And above the flame would be not a phoenix, not a bird at all, but a girl all alone.

9

Irene’s phone barked in her pocket. She fished it out and looked at the number.

“Hello?” she said. “Sparks.”

She crossed a two-lane street decorated with hanging baskets of geraniums, and she was standing at the head of the main quad.

“Hello,” said Belion. “Belion.”

“Oh, hi, babe,” said Irene. She looked down the quad at the glistening arcs and spires of the university’s buildings. “I’m in Toledo.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

“I’m on campus,” said Irene, “Right now.”

“What’s it like?” Belion wanted to know.

“It’s nice,” said Irene. She walked straight down the quad, across the grass and the criss-crossing sidewalk squares. She passed a tall, stately marble building on the left, and on the right a smaller one, capped with a dome and surrounded by a portico. The style of the buildings was Greek revival, because obviously, Pythagoras and everything. Yet the tallest building, the one at the end of the quad, was different. Its roofs more Persian, its spires twisted and eastern, its doorways arched. And at the top, a layered series of rectangles, each one smaller, until on the last was mounted a long dome, the only elliptical observatory in the world.

“I’m coming up there,” said Belion. “I just wanted to let you know.”

“But why are you coming?” Irene asked.

“I’m just coming. I thought I was supposed to come.”

Irene identified Herschel Hall and shoved the map into her laptop bag. She took the phone in her hand.

“You don’t have to, though. What about work?”

“Work?” Belion sounded confused.

“Or the apartment?”

“I’ll sublet it. Craigslist.”

“Well, great. You should come then. Come then.”

“Oh, I am coming.”

“Great, come.”

“And I mean that as a double entendre, where you say one thing and mean not only that thing but an additional thing.”

“I get it.”

“A sexual thing.”

“Right.”

“Let’s just say I’m dying to know what’s behind that door, but I don’t want to have to shrink myself to get through.”

“I’m entering a building, Belion. My reception may become sketchy.”

“What building could be inside that cave, Irene?”

“It’s not a cave, Belion, it’s an internationally renowned school of science and math.”

“I’m coming up there,” said Belion. “And we’re going to straighten out all this funny business.”

“Enjoy,” said Irene. “I left you my mother’s address. That’s where I’m staying.”

“I can find it,” Belion said. “I’ll see you in a while.”

* * *

Irene pushed the END CALL button on her phone. She opened the doorway to Herschel Hall and found the building directory between the gleaming elevators. There was her name, right beside the number 201. So, second floor. Upstairs. There might even be windows.

She stepped into the elevator alone, but once inside she was joined by a tall woman with bare feet and long brown hair. The woman hummed to herself as the elevator rose to the second floor, making no eye contact with Irene. When the car stopped, she drifted out between the opening doors and was gone. Irene got off the elevator and found a steel door marked 201. She swung the door open.

Her new lab was huge. Her heart skipped and jumped. There was a wall of windows but flat slats of metal made up shades that locked out all the light. Irene let the door swing shut behind her, and it clicked tightly. The lab was dim. Granite tables flanked one wall, and her microcollider, brought on a truck from the basement at Carnegie Mellon, sat disassembled in the middle of the room. Once, it was the shiniest thing. Now it almost appeared to have shrunk. On the far wall there was a desk, and on the desk was the only source of light: a laptop. Behind the laptop sat a girl.

“Hello,” said the girl. “So you’re here. Let the party begin.”

The girl’s voice was dry, her inflection sour.

“Who are you?” asked Irene.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl.

Irene reached out to the wall and flicked on a light. Fluorescent bulbs overhead came to life, and the room was bright.

“Ugh, switch to LED, for the love of god,” said the girl without raising her face from the computer screen.

“What?”

“It’s the switch on the left,” she said. “So move your hand a bit to the left, and there it will be. Or, you can read the label. It’s spelled L-E-D.”

Irene switched the LED lights on and the fluorescent ones off. Then she frowned and wished she hadn’t been so obedient. So automatically compliant.

“Who are you?” asked Irene again.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl again. Irene set her laptop bag on a table and walked toward the girl. She was Korean. Her hair was braided up into a bun on the top of her head. She wore a tracksuit—blue with white stripes running up the arms and legs.

“Yes, but who are you, what is your capacity here, what are you doing in my lab?”

“I’m your RA,” said Sam Beth. “Your graduate student.”

“Oh,” said Irene. “I thought I would be able to interview for an assistant.”

“Not assistant. Research assistant.”

“Still, I should be able to interview—”

“Trust me, there’s no one better,” said Sam Beth. She looked up from the laptop finally, and stared down Irene. “That’s why you got me.”

“Oh, I see,” said Irene. She noticed, seeing Sam Beth full on, that the girl had tattoos or face paint under her eyes, three red dots marking each cheekbone.

Sam Beth rolled her eyes and went back to her laptop.

Irene continued her inspection of the room. The tables were clean and bare, but there were holes drilled in a circle in the floor, holes that appeared to have been recently vacated, as if the room had been recently rearranged and something had been taken out.

“What was here?” Irene asked.

“Oh, the universe,” said Sam Beth.

“What universe?”

“This one,” said Sam Beth. “A model. The best model we could make anyway. It rotated. It had axes.”

“Where is it now?” Irene asked.

“It’s getting set up in his new lab. In the basement. It barely fits.”