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George Dermont, third-year postdoctoral research fellow and favorite instructor of most female undergraduates at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, stopped in a stairwell of Stickney Center, looking for a vending machine that would take his dollar. George had a headache. A bad one. It felt as though the fibers of his brain were full of ice, and every thump of his heart was a hammer, shattering them over and over. It felt bad.

From the vending machine, he could get some headache pills. He could get some caffeine gels. At the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the vending machines were stocked with sundries geared specifically to the young scientist. One could find lens cleaner, superglue, clamps, Altoids, and rubbing alcohol. One could certainly find migraine medication: vasoconstrictors, sumatriptan, even opium nasal spray. But George’s dollar was so wrinkled and old that it seemed he might try all the vending machines on campus and have no luck. The dollar kept coming back out.

George left the stairwell and turned down the corridor toward the lecture hall. He had five minutes to get to class and look over his notes from last semester, to try to remember what he was going to say to the new students. He pushed through the double doors and the class hushed their chatter. He pulled his notes out of his briefcase and pretended to look at them while he casually closed his eyes. It was the beginning of September. There was no need to panic.

He opened his eyes, turned his head to the left and right, and smiled down on the class. This is what they had come for. To learn the history of astronomy. And he would teach it to them, by the book this time: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest.

At times he tried to show his students extra stuff about the universe and give them a peek at what the Toledo Institute of Astronomy really had to offer. Then they would squint, shuffle their feet, cock their heads to the side. As if that lecture was not something they wanted to hear. As if it would slide off their brains at an angle, leaving a scuff mark. He knew that if he went off book too much, it would get harder and harder to get back to the textbook’s comforting pages. He would end up standing in a corner, facing the wall, ranting and raving at nothing. George Dermont was the bright young star of the cosmology department, the “it boy” for concerns of the whole universe and beyond. But if he ever really told them what was in his mind? If he ever fully expressed the depth of his beliefs? Would they keep on smiling, winking, waving? Or would they say to him, “Now what the fuck is that all about?” and denounce him as a fraud?

George began his lecture, and the students learned. They nodded their heads. Twenty minutes in, George eyed a girl in the third row in a tank top and khaki shorts, looking like a young Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, minus the pistols and with double the braids. There was one ropey braid on each side of her head, each draping down to decorate one bulbous breast. George almost thought he had seen her before. There was something about the braids that looked familiar. The way her eyes met his. The way she held his gaze. And just like that, George found he had departed from his lecture script. He had limbered up. He had remembered exactly what he had to say, and from an introduction to the first six constellations, George took a sharp turn.

“Remember the Assyrians?” he said. “They were the ones that came down like a wolf on the fold. They had gods. So did the Babylonians. The Greeks also had gods: commonly seen wearing white and having really smooth brows. Romans had gods. Hell, yes, everyone had them.”

The students nodded and chuckled. They remembered. This was something in the history of astronomy that they could comprehend: humans having gods. “Nowadays we assume there are pretty much three gods. Ours and the ones in other people’s religions.”

George smiled through the pounding in his skull. Lara Croft the freshman was tickling the tops of her breasts with one braid. The other hand was resting on her laptop, but she wasn’t typing. George looked at her, but found himself unmoved. Years ago, he might have let a girl like this come chasing after him with her braids knocking into her tits, might have thrown her down on a cascade of throw pillows, might have thought, “We’re in Toledo; what could go wrong?”

“Three gods. The world population is pretty much agreed on this fact, with the exception of Hindus, who remain belligerently polytheistic and Buddhists, who don’t even really have gods.”

George waited. The students still watched him, waiting for him to get back to chapter 1, “The Ancients,” and the book. Lara Croft nodded too slowly, like she was saying yes to a different question. Then, strangely, she began to glow. Her face blurred for a moment as George’s head contracted into stabbing pain, and then it reformed with redder lips and darker eyes. George blinked and squinted. Her hair grew down until her braids were coiled around her feet, and her limbs stretched and curved into pinup proportions. Now George saw she was wearing not a tank top and shorts but a bustier and a type of undergarment that George had once referred to as “spanking panties.”

“No one worships, for example, Zeus anymore,” he went on bravely, closing his eyes against the sight of her. “Or Ra. So where did all those other gods go?”

One of the young men in the class raised his hand.

“Yes,” said George. “Your name?”

“It’s David,” said the boy. “What page are we on?”

“Where did they go?” George pressed on. “Are they sitting somewhere in a retirement home for aging deities? Sipping tea and asking for their sons, who they know are coming to visit them today? Asking every day until the nurses must dress someone up as a son and make the fake son visit all the rooms? And the gods don’t even notice the difference? Because they are in their dotage?”

The braided vixen before him was rising into the air now, shaking her head as if to say, no, no, no!

George got louder, “Does the fact that they did not survive mean that they were not real? Greta, do you think the gods were never real?”

“Well—” began a girl in the front row. She shook her head. Seemed about to say her name was not Greta.

“It’s too horrible to imagine.” He interrupted her. “Gods don’t die—they don’t just disappear. They can’t do that.”

Now the gorgeous, glowing creature in the air of the lecture hall was nodding, nodding, her sweet curves dancing a slow dance for him. This was the thing he could not tell anyone, in the lecture hall, in the office, in his weekly report to the chair of the department at their meeting in his office: “Hi, Dr. Sanji. My work on the latest astrometric project proceeds apace, and, oh, also I see gods floating around sometimes. I yield the floor to Dr. Jones.”

Religion is private. It’s a private matter between you and the dozen or so deities who visit you at the most inopportune moments.

George grasped the podium with both hands and squinched his eyes very tight. Then he looked around again at the class. They were sitting up straight, their eyes lit up, on full alert. Something was happening—they had figured out. A real astronomer was now speaking to them, here at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, where they had come to be educated by real astronomers. They leaned forward, eager to hear what he would say next. George looked all around the room, everywhere else except her curves and colors. “If they fall into disrepair, do we have to retroactively call ourselves unbelievers? Are we stupid? Are we duped? If it happened to Ra, it could happen to anyone! Ra was an ass kicker. Ra was the sun god! How could this happen to Ra?”

No one raised a hand. The girl who looked like Lara Croft had now fully changed into the brilliant, irresistible form of a goddess with whom he was quite familiar. She had appeared to him before, but never at work. Now she climbed astride the long fluorescent light fixture near the ceiling, swinging from side to side, using her long braids like fishing lines to dangle in front of unsuspecting students. She laughed silently, but George could hear her, could remember her voice, telling him exactly what to do. The goddess of sex. American pantheon. Contemporary era. His head creaked in pain and he smelled cinnamon, like a very strong exotic tea.

“Maybe—” George paused. He began to move around on the stage, back and forth, trying not to gaze into the space above their heads. The god of sex swung her legs gleefully, biting her lower lip and waving at him. Hi, George, she seemed to be communicating. I’m up here.

“Maybe Ra was sucked into a wormhole,” George said. “Or maybe he just went back willingly into the wormhole from whence he originally came. Something has to happen at the other end of a wormhole, otherwise where the hell is your conservation of matter and energy? Nowhere, that’s where!”

Students were nodding. The girls were smiling. Someone’s book fell onto the floor and it wasn’t retrieved. A boy in the back row chewed a pencil between his teeth. “Could you believe that a wormhole might end in an ancient ziggurat?” George continued. “A cathedral in France? A human uterus? Maybe I’m asking for a looser interpretation of matter conservation than the one you’re willing to give.”

George was pacing faster now, and the sex goddess was swinging faster, his long limbs eating up the stage at the front of the hall, her body flowing over the light fixture and dripping onto the floor below. The students peered at him wide-eyed. Some of them had their mouths open. He would push the idea into the mouth, close the chin, stroke the throat. Even if the idea was blatant lunacy, they would try to swallow. He had that going for him: a certain charisma, a magnetic charm. But if he said, “Observe, above your heads: a modern deity. Observe.” Would they look up? Would they nod and smile, and write down points? He brushed his hair out of his face and turned a winning smile on them. He spread his hands out, long arms wide, a crisp white shirt illuminated in the stage lights over his khakis and loafers.

“George!” called the goddess from the ceiling. He ignored her. He tried to ignore the idea of her. “Tell them!”

“Maybe I’m asking you to believe in the conservation of gods and godliness. Is that too altogether impossible to believe?”

The class waited.

“Think about it. Nothing comes from nothing!” George implored.

The class tilted their heads to the right.

“There has to be a doorway from which they all crawled out, and then into which they all crawl back. There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, kids. What’s it doing over there, just killing time chewing up asteroids? It’s flaring. X-ray flashes: do you know what makes them? NASA doesn’t. I don’t.”

The rows of eyes were all locked on him, each little light devouring his words, none of them drooping down to look at laptops or checking out the other students in the next row. Was it his smile, his apple cheeks, the curve of dark hair on his noble brow? Was it the god above, directing the traffic between their ears? George was the tallest astronomer in Toledo. He was broad-boned and firm as a rock. He returned to the center of the stage. The words came out of his mouth without his intervention. He felt the odd but familiar sensation that he was talking for the goddess, that she was now putting words in his throat for sport, and then pulling them out on a string.

The door at the back of the lecture hall banged open and George could see, standing there, one of the older professors, his boss. Why was he here? To observe the class? To fire George? To find out if George was just a mouthpiece for a god?

“Who sang before the angels sang? In what shape did the stars align themselves, before they took the shape of Greek prophets, Roman warriors, and such? Where did the first flint-reaping knife drop from a weathered hand, so the hand could take a copper idol? Who built the temple of Eridu?”

What the hell is Eridu? thought George. He felt the panic coming on. He felt his brain was not his own. He would lose his job. He would lose his mind. This lecture had gone completely off the rails. The sexy goddess on the light fixture shrugged at him and made a kissy face. George took himself back behind the podium, put his fingertips together lightly and inclined his head, as if to say, Namaste. Good-bye. He gave a weak smile to the professor at the door. But the class breathed in, breathed out, waiting for him to finish. They wanted him to say one more thing. But what would it be? What could it be?