What is love? A contract for keeping us together, making things legal, perpetuating the species, a droopy butterfly wing of invented sap for the masses, a drug for idiots. That’s what love is. I want to say that what I feel is desire, just sex, an animal firing itself up over another animal, but I know I have felt that before. Love makes me want to spread my legs. Love makes me want to put his hand down my pants. That’s my version of romance.

The box of my mother’s ashes is heavy in my dream, superheavy, like it’s going to kill me to carry this box through the house and out the door. How much did my mother weigh? How much did she weigh after her bones had been put through the pulverizer? This box is not my mother. It has her ashes in it, but it’s heavier than that, it’s heavy like heavy, dude. Meaning weighty.

I lug my mother’s box of ashes into Dark House: the parlor, the library, the theater, the back room, the props room, and I know I’m coming to the center.

There’s nothing inherently scary about a ruined room, a broken floor, and a hole that leads down. Or maybe there is. I don’t know, because what this particular broken floor has always done is push my face away, so that it is perpetually in the periphery of my vision, and just looking at it sideways fills me up with paralyzing fear. I am the girl that has a solid plan for suicide in every city I am likely to visit, involving bridges of a particular height, water of a particular depth, and gravity. I face the side of a bridge with my toes curled, my breath let all the way out, my hands open like catch me. But that broken floor, that whistling dark, those beams sticking up through the floor, down through the ceiling, that causes me a fear that goes deep, all the way back to the little child’s brain I had when I was six, and this whole thing started.

I’m afraid of the hole in the center of Dark House, but I walk straight over to it now, and I open up the box. Inside the box is a plastic bag. I open up the bag. Inside the bag is a thick powder, interspersed with bits of her. In the dream, it is the purest white. There is a wind coming at me from the back, a firm strong breeze behind me sucking straight down into the hole in the floor. The hole is big and draws everything to itself: the air, the people ground up into powder, the ideas in my head. I know that when I turn the box upside down the dregs of my mother will spiral into the hole and make a beautiful shape, like the curve of a snail shell, like the inside of a nautilus. It will spread out from my hand in a sparkling arc and make something so perfect as she floats away from me.

So I don’t do that. I throw the whole damn box down the hole in one whoosh. And it is gone.

I feel dizzy, like I do when I stand too close. Then I’m running like a child up the basement stairs having banged the lid of the clothes dryer closed, and I burst through the door and out onto the porch, and George’s country house is straight ahead of me and I run, run, run across to it and up onto the porch of it, and there’s George again, and he’s sleeping still. I lie down next to him in the bed, put my cheek on his arm, and curve my spine into him, and it’s warm.

I’m looking at the place where my mother’s box of ashes used to be before I threw it into the center of Dark House, and I know that now I can’t wake up, because if I do, I will open my eyes, and it will be back there, that black terrible box. So I’ll lie here, and sleep forever.

19

George woke up. His first instinct was to not open his eyes; the headache was that bad. He gently extracted his arm from under Irene’s face, replaced it with a pillow, and left her sleeping there on the white cotton. He pulled the sheet up around her body and padded across the faded carpet and out of the room. In the bathroom, he closed the door so that it would be dark. He opened the medicine cabinet and by feel identified and took out a spray bottle, which he squirted into each nostril, sharply inhaling. He shut the medicine cabinet and looked at where he knew the mirror was, except that he was in the dark.

“This is a love story,” he said. “Act one, boy meets girl. Act two, boy loses girl. This is act two.”

He could feel the painkiller entering his headache and wrapping it up in cool plastic, pushing it back into its container, closing the lid. He stood there in the bathroom in the dark until he could roll his head around on his neck and not feel like he was going to pass out. Then he opened the door and went out. He pulled some jeans on from his dresser, thought about making a sandwich, and leaned over Irene and kissed her on the temple.

“Sweetheart,” he said. She opened her eyes and stared straight across the room as if she’d seen a ghost.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” But when she turned to face him, she was pale.

“Come and let me make you lunch,” he said. “I have a way with meat and bread. We need to get going, because I have something at the institute I’m dying to show you before my lecture.”

She nodded. She reached for the sheet and pulled it up around her chin.

“Come on, don’t you want to see your supercollider?”

* * *

Irene and George stood in the elevator, going down. There were only two buttons on the wall: M and S. They’d started out in main and they were going to sub.

“This is the world’s biggest scientific instrument you’re about to see,” said George.

“I managed alright with one the size of a large bathtub,” said Irene.

“This one is bigger than the one you had,” said George. “Therefore better.”

“Hmm,” said Irene. “That remains to be seen.”

Once they stepped foot on campus, Irene had gotten tough again, as if her combative exterior went on like a uniform when she was near science. George looked at her now, her jaw set and her eyes seeming to try to pierce through the elevator doors. She was a little dynamo. He felt a pang of love for her, watching her cross her arms and tap the toe of her ugly boot. This is a love story about astronomy, he thought. Twin souls collide and love each other forever. And no one ever goes crazy. And no one ever dies. And the universe folds back on itself and clicks into place, and the pylons holding up the electrical wires are really trees. And the trees are really gods.

When the elevator stopped and they stepped out into the cavern, Irene’s eyes got wide, and she said, out loud, “Whoa.” It had astonished George, too, when he first saw it. A tunnel, several stories high, was lined and laid with brightly colored wires, plastic tubes and disks, and it echoed amazingly, like a never-ending tiled bathroom, or a canyon, or a cave. Halfway to the ceiling was a tube, where the supercollider was being built. All around the opening on each side of the cavern were bright tiles, scaffolding, wires, and lights.

Dr. Bryant rattled down a flight of metal steps he had been climbing and came toward them with his arms open.

“Welcome, Dr. Sparks,” he said. “Welcome to your new domain. I’ve got several appointments for you this afternoon, with engineers and fabricators, electrochemists and a couple of structural guys—I think your designs are going to fit right into our model.”

Irene shook hands with Dr. Bryant and then turned to George. He knew immediately that she wasn’t going to kiss him or give his crotch a good-bye pat or smooth his hair away from his face and look longingly into his eyes or anything. She was going to work, and she had probably said, if he had been paying attention, that at work they wouldn’t be allowed to be together. Not yet. Dr. Bryant was looking at him expectantly, as if he wanted George to leave.

“Have you?” said Dr. Bryant.

“Have I?” asked George.

“Have you seen her?” said Irene.

“No,” said George. “Unless you mean her?” George pointed to Irene.

“No, George, I mean Kate—Dr. Oakenshield. Your friend? Have you seen her? She didn’t show up for her class this morning, and she hasn’t tweeted. I thought maybe she had spent the night with you?”

“What?!” said George. “Of course not! Because fraternizing with other astronomers is both wrong and terrible.”

Irene’s face was inscrutable.

Dr. Bryant winked knowingly at George. “We all know you’ve been trying to get next to Dr. Oakenshield for months,” he said. To Irene he added, “Of course as a policy we don’t encourage our faculty to intermingle, but we work in such close quarters, there are some inevitable relationships that develop. I’m sure it was the same at your old lab.”

“No,” said Irene sagely. “We never fraternized. We also thought it wrong and terrible.”

“Dr. Sparks,” said Dr. Bryant, “this world is merciless. You must take love where you can find it.”

Irene stared at him. He went on, “Anyway, George, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. But I’m afraid there might be trouble at home for her, if you know what I mean. I’ll give you a ring when I’ve gotten to the bottom of it.”

Then George walked away. It felt like there was ripping, like anyone could have heard it, when they separated. He didn’t want to separate from Irene. It felt really wrong.

* * *

George’s class was over. He waited another hour, doing some paperwork. He made some calls, looking for Kate Oakenshield, then dialed the Euphrates Project switchboard and got through to Irene.

“Sparks,” she growled.

“Hey,” he said. “There you are.” The sound of her voice was like a hand on him. He felt it.

“It’s amazing down here, George,” she said.

“Great,” said George. “I’m glad you like it.”

“But I’ve had a lot of meetings this afternoon, now some things have to get done before we can proceed … if you want to…”

“Yes,” said George. “I do want to. I need you, for something that might be a little awkward—”

“Can’t be more awkward than stealing my mother’s ashes from the funeral home.”

“Right,” said George. “Can’t it be? Maybe. I’ll come and get you.”

* * *

George’s car seats were awash with papers and books, and the floor was covered in empty Coke cans and coffee cups. In the back, an incredibly large ivy plant spread its many limbs around the trunk and over the backseat’s headrests, having no trouble breathing.

“Mites?” said Irene, pointing at it before she entered the car. “You don’t get mites?”

“I get oxygen,” said George. He swept the front seat clear for her and then swept the backseat clear as well as she got in.

“Are we picking up a hitchhiker?” Irene wanted to know.

“In a manner of speaking,” said George. “We’re going to need your boyfriend for this errand, see? We’re going to need Enkidu. For backup.”

“What?”

“I need a heavy, to be honest,” said George. “We’re going on a rescue mission. And I’d feel better if I had some muscle on our side.”

Twenty minutes later, Belion was glowering in the back, Irene and George were sitting in front, and the Volvo was on the freeway, headed west. Picking up Belion had been awkward for George for several reasons.

First there was the fact that when Irene directed George to her mother’s house, she had instructed George to drive straight to the house of the drunk psychic who had advised him to wait for a dreaming astronomer with brown hair. Irene’s mother’s house was the psychic’s house, which meant that Irene’s mother was the psychic. George had almost said something. It was at the front of his mouth, waiting to spring out, “Hey, you know what? I’ve been here before!” But he stopped himself. After her freaky reaction to the fact that they shared a birthday, George felt doubtful that Irene would embrace the information that her own mother had counseled George over a crystal ball, had recognized her daughter as George’s future spouse.

It was the kind of information that George could tolerate but Irene could not. He was finding out all about Irene, and this was one of the main things: when confronted with a bizarre coincidence like this, Irene was not one to shake her head and comment on the mysteries of the universe. She was one to smack someone, deny having ever had a mother, and never speak to George again. So he kept his mouth shut.

Then there was the awkward moment while George was inside the car and Irene and Belion were outside the car and Irene was explaining something very firmly to him and used the words “penis sex” and pointed to George, and then clapped her hands together in Belion’s face. George had emerged from his car, looking hopeful and inoffensive, he thought.