“Bernice!” yelled Sally. A dog was barking in the neighbor’s yard. Sally always pronounced her name with an emphasis on the first syllable, like BERN-iss, when she was joking around like she was angry. “Bernice, this is unacceptable. Now put on a blue dress and your whitest apron, and sweep up this mess.”

Bernice was laughing so hard, her stomach was in spasm.

When they settled down, Sally said, “Now I’m all riled up again. You’re going to have to scratch a lot more, and probably sing, too, but no more TV theme songs. I want Compton and Batteau. And hum the violin parts. You owe me. Hey, when we have our kids, we should teach them all about Compton and Batteau. It’s such an obscure act, when they find out they both know the songs, they’ll feel it’s fate for sure.”

When she was finally asleep, Bernice leaned over to look at Sally’s face. The wide mouth was open, a bit of drool descending onto the pillow. The eyelashes were pressed against her cheek like little marks left by a stylus. The eyelids fluttered as if something beneath them was held in captivity. Bernice wanted nothing more than to press her lips to Sally’s temple, feel the vein that pulsed there, blue and deep, and press their warmth together while her friend slept. It would have been a violation, she thought. It would have been a sin. So Bernice left Sally unkissed, and curled back around into the space in the small of Sally’s back, and went to sleep.

* * *

Later that night, Bernice was dreaming. She was in a mall, but an ugly one, and she was passing by a men’s clothing store. Inside the store, Bernice could sense a problem, like you do in dreams. She knew instinctively that something bad was happening. Then she herself was inside the store, moving through the aisles. She saw a woman, standing next to a display of brightly colored shirts, and the woman was naked. The woman was embarrassed, but nobody was really noticing her, so Bernice wanted to tell her it didn’t matter. The woman turned and Bernice knew that it was Sally. Then she saw, like a hammer to the head, that it really was Sally. Not a dream Sally, but Sally having a dream.

“Sally,” she said. “It’s OK, you’re dreaming.”

Sally looked toward Bernice, but it was clear she didn’t really see her. She picked up a shirt from the table and held it against herself, as if she was thinking it could cover her, front to back.

“Sally,” said Bernice. “You’re dreaming. Hey.”

Bernice had to concentrate hard to stay in the room, in the clothing store, with Sally. She knew from reading the books that the hardest part of lucid dreaming was staying in the dream once you’d realized it was, in fact, a dream. Everyone knows what it’s like to figure out you’re dreaming. It’s what you do with the information that matters. Usually you slide away, or just wake up. Bernice forced herself to stay put, and kept calling through the dense underwater audio of the dream, calling to Sally. Sally only pressed her legs together, pressing up against the table, looking back and forth.

Of all the checks you can perform to let your mind know you’re dreaming, being naked should be the easiest. You might not remember to count your fingers, or look at a calendar, or check a watch. But you should be aware that if you’ve let yourself go out in public without pants, what you’re experiencing is not real. However, most everybody in dreams, Sally included, finds themselves in public with no clothes on, and seeks no explanation—only a solution.

Bernice told Sally what the books said. “Take control. It’s your dream. You can put clothes on. Just dream them on.”

Sally turned toward her then, but still appeared confused, as if Bernice was a person she could not clearly see.

So Bernice did the only other thing she could think of to save Sally from the embarrassment of the naked dream, and that was to reach up to her throat and pull her own clothes off. Dreaming, she didn’t bother with zippers and buttons, but just tugged the clothes off like they had already dissolved. Then Bernice was standing there in the clothing store, naked, too. Sally could see her now, though the other patrons still remained gauzily indifferent.

“Bernice,” said Sally.

“It’s OK,” said Bernice. “See? We’re only dreaming.”

12

Irene saw George sitting in the dark. It was the back of his head that she saw first—a man’s head, boxy and large. She came into the room through the back door, and it was him that she saw right away. Something about the way his shoulders lay back against the seat, or the way his chin was tilted to the side, looking up, made her say, “Mine.” Something in this man her heart recognized. Or, not her heart but her throat. Not her throat but something else, something that might live inside you but not be made of blood and flesh. If there was such a thing available for people to have, Irene hadn’t known about it until last night, when hers had jumped and strained, yearning for George. It was disorienting. Like being sick.

She had come to hear a lecture from a visiting professor. The room was dark, and the star machine was on. Irene didn’t like that.

George turned to look back, and saw her. He waved vigorously, and motioned that she should come over. George had left a seat for her right on the aisle. She sat down next to him and leaned over without looking at him to get her laptop out of its bag.

“Hi!” he said. He put one hand on her knee.

“Hello,” she said into her lap, still reaching into her bag.

“It’s great to see you, Dr. Irene Sparks,” said George.

She sat up with the machine, opened it, and said, “It’s great to be seen, Dr. George Dermont.”

“Do you have any gum?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like gum. After all, what’s the point of it?”

“It’s for chewing,” said George.

“I don’t like chewing,” said Irene.

George took his hand back and fiddled around with the notebook on his lap, curling and uncurling one side of the paper. Irene switched her laptop on.

“So how was your day?” he asked. When she turned to face him, she noted his gaze was hovering down around her collarbone.

“Fine,” said Irene. “Assistant is a bit irritable. You know her, I guess.”

“Yeah, Patrice.”

“Sam Beth, she corrected me.”

“Yeah, she’s a … um … Daughter of Babylon. So they’re big on their ancient names. But for paperwork, it’s Patrice.”

“Yes, I’ve heard a bit about that,” said Irene. “The Daughters of Babylon, huh?”

“Some kind of Internet cult,” said George cautiously. “Astronomer priestesses.”

“But I guess you know her pretty well?”

“She told you?”

“She did.”

Sam Beth had approached Irene at the banquet, just as she was trying to leave. Her face was flushed, and her eyes cut back toward George’s table, George’s parents. “I’ve had sex with Gilgamesh,” she said urgently, clutching a wineglass. Irene had continued piloting Belion toward the door, but Sam Beth caught her by the arm.

“Sorry?” Irene had asked. “What did you need?”

“With George,” said Sam Beth. “He’s looking for his Inanna.”

“I don’t get it,” Irene prompted. But this explained the way Sam Beth had behaved in the office. Something inside Irene felt disappointed, and a little sad.

“He’s slept with almost everyone around here who has brown hair,” Sam Beth explained impatiently. “Fuck and run.”

“How odd,” said Irene. “Well, that has nothing to do with me.”

“That’s right, but your hair is brown,” Sam Beth said. “Not a good boyfriend for you. Look away. Walk away.”

“Well, I appreciate you trying to look out for me,” Irene began.

“No, I mean really, walk away, walk away from me, right now, don’t talk anymore.”

Irene had walked away, but when she got home and to her computer, in the back room of her mother’s little house, she did a little research and found a few strange Web sites with wall-to-wall text and exclamation points that described Babylon as the “mother of harlots.” Girls in graduate school will believe anything.

“Oh,” said George, in the planetarium. “Those other girls—”

“George, I have a boyfriend, and you … well, you know. All the harlots.”

Irene turned back to her laptop. She felt each breath coming quickly into her lungs, as much as she was trying to control it. She opened a new document and typed “September 5th. Guest Lecture. Nathaniel Lebernov.”

“Who’s Nathaniel Lebernov?” George asked.

Irene turned to face him and said, “The Lebernov differential? You don’t know him? Are you serious?”

She typed the equation on her laptop, her wrists snapping and fingers twisting into shape to make the special characters and punctuation.

“That’s the Lebernov equation.” She typed underneath it. “Did you not read ‘The Spectronometric Analysis of the Geomagnetic Particular Radius of Dectrite Gas Molecules’ in last fall’s International Journal of Physics?”

George looked at her.

“Are you only here to pick up chicks?” she asked him sternly, out loud.

“Actually, I’m here because of you. I knew you’d be here, and I wanted to see you.”

Irene blinked very fast, forced her chest to stop convulsing. She felt unhinged and didn’t like it at all. She made her feet touch each other at the heels and imagined those heels on the edge of a building, forty stories up. She had to calm her blood down. She took a sideways glance at George, and he was lying back in his seat, looking straight up, utterly relaxed.

“Good afternoon,” said Dr. Miller, taking the podium. “I will waste no time in presenting our speaker for this morning, whose work you all know has been so important to our field. He is a friend of mine, and as such he has agreed to leave his work at the University of St. Petersburg to come and stay with us for a few days, expound on his work, and enlighten us as to his current research. Please welcome Dr. Nathaniel Lebernov.”

Everyone clapped.

Dr. Lebernov took the podium and waved off Dr. Miller, who sat down in the front and leaned way back, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling. George did the same. Irene sat up straighter, her hands on the keyboard. Then Dr. Lebernov himself raised his eyes upward to the sky, taking in a big breath.

“The universe, my friends, is spinning. Spinning fast, beyond our control,” he said. “We look up at the stars, we see them flare and fade, and we are afraid.”

“He’s talking about you guys, not him,” said Dr. Miller, calling out without a microphone, “He’s not afraid.”

Dr. Lebernov made a shushing gesture with his hands and continued.

“My friends, we are all afraid of what we do not know. We are afraid of what we cannot clearly see. Of uncertainty, and chaos, and unexpected things we had no chance to predict. Chance collisions scare us, and explosions in our backyards, our heads being torn off our bodies by a sudden gust of stellar wind. What might happen to us in the future? What rock might plummet from the sky? How might we change, in an instant, forever, only because of chance? There is nothing we can do about it. No way to protect ourselves. As long as we have only these”—and he pointed to his eyes—“which are all most people have.”

“They have their eyes, and they can stare up into the sky. They know now that the stars are distant. They have a vague idea that the universe is large. They know that giant clouds of gas are burning, that rocks the size of Belgium hurtle around like bullets, and they know that they are tiny, and everything else is big, and that’s scary.

“Sometimes I wish,” he went on, “that people would still believe the earth is flat, the sun is a lightbulb behind some paper board, the stars gods.”

“Some people do,” whispered George to Irene. His breath in her ear.

“Wouldn’t that be easier?” said Dr. Lebernov. “Chaos is the most frightening phenomenon. Order, even malicious order, is at the least predictable. But the cruelty of chaos is murky, malignant in its expanse. Reason may be harsh, and difficult, but it is defensible. So in the absence of agency we create agency, in the absence of information we create myth, and we created gods to rule the heavens so that we know what is there.”

Irene snuck a glance at George and noticed he was listening to the lecture. He still had his head thrown back in a posture of disregard, but his eyes were open. He was still awake.

“But then the astronomers came and put the gods out of business. Set the sun aflame, scattered the stars across the universe, made the earth into a ball. In this crusade, we have one friend. This is mathematics.”