Then, as she watched, he put his feet inside the tube and slipped inside, like a kid into a water slide, and was gone. The last things she saw were his smiling face, the hair across his forehead, his fingers gripping the side of the tube, and then he went on in, feetfirst.

She climbed the ladder, put her hands on the lip of the opening, and peered inside. She could see him in there, looking out. His elbows, spread wide, reached across the tunnel. He was grinning.

“Come in,” he said. He motioned with his hands for her to enter.

The air was cool in the tube and smelled slightly of oxygen. There was a light breeze coming up the tube from behind George. She put her arms into the tube, put her head in.

“Not headfirst, the other way,” he said. He reached out his hands toward her. And that’s how she landed on her back, with her head at the opening, her feet hooked over his shoulders and behind his arms, still in their white socks.

“No,” she said. “I don’t—”

“Yeah,” he said. “You do. This is something you will like.”

WARNING: Biohazard. Authorized personnel only.

While he was kissing her so softly, on her belly and the insides of her thighs, Irene could see the lights in the hard plastic shapes of all colors spread around the other opening in the tube, now dim but glowing. She could see the desk by the elevator with the computer on it, shining on the tile floor. She could follow the ropes of wires with her eyes, all their colors collected in bunches by huge zip ties, tied up to the ceiling and along the walls. She could see an emergency warning sign, mounted on the wall. A number of signs. Her eyes scanned them while his cheek pressed against her thigh.

“George,” she said. “We’re having sex in a supercollider.”

“Shhh,” he urged her. He brushed his hand over her body and she closed her eyes. He separated her slowly with his fingers and put his mouth against her, let his tongue come through.

Sometimes her life felt like one long inhale. This was like one long exhale, her air draining out, her whole self pushing down on him. Her knees were cold against the side of the tunnel, a cold dense metal stopped her legs from falling flat, and she could feel the bumps of her spine pressing down into the foam, making a row of indentations on it, as her body curled up. She put her fingers in his hair and felt the shape of his head, the surge of a deep, insatiable love for him, not because of what he was doing, or maybe entirely because of it. Because no one else could have done this. Because he had not tried to do it, but had simply accomplished it.

She thought, This is a hot brush, pressed against me. She felt she had never known what she had waiting in her own body until now. She didn’t even know what it looked like down there, or what any girl looked like. It was as mysterious to her as another planet. In school they had been instructed to examine this piece of themselves in the bathroom, with a mirror, but she hadn’t. Nor had she explored this strange nebula with her fingers. Not in the bathtub, not in the dead of night, not after reading a steamy passage in a romance novel. She didn’t read fiction. She didn’t abide stupidity. It wasn’t her that made the noises like the ones she was making now.

WARNING: Keep all cylinders chained.

With her eyes closed she imagined the tunnel around her, the pipe she was in, when it was fully operational. The beam pipes would thread through this space, separate from each other, parallel and small. When the experiments were running, the temperature inside the pipe would be so cold that she would be instantly frozen, all parts of her body frozen except the part that was touching him. There would be particles whizzing by, and the two-ton magnets would be engaged all around her, dragging the particles from one insertion point to the next, past the detectors, so fast, so fast they could not be observed. The particles inside their pipes in the tunnel, never touching, never grinding into each other, only accelerating, and they would get faster and faster in their endless loop. Then, at the flip of a switch, remotely, from upstairs, a physicist—maybe even Irene herself—would change the path of the particles as directed by magnets, and they would intersect. They would begin to intersect here, in the detector. Here where she lay. Scattering gluons and quarks. Showers of decaying particles, shooting out in jets.

Inside the tunnel, there would be nothing obvious going on. But secretly, everything would be going on. Black holes formed by colliding particles, spitting out energy until they were spent, dissolving back into space. A rush of particles like a rush of wind or a beam of light, charging around the circuit of the Euphrates collider like mad fish around a circular river, accelerating and accelerating, forever.

WARNING: X-rays. This equipment produces X-rays when energized. Film badge required in this area.

George’s hands moved against her thighs, and he pulled her gently apart a bit further. She felt her head swing backward out into space, knock against the side of the pipe. She felt a little bit of pain where her skull hit the metal, but she didn’t really mind. She said, “George,” and it came out strangled, came out tight, and George said “Mmm hmm,” in a very calm way like it was all fine. She shifted her hips, pressed herself into him, felt urgently like there was an intersection coming, an arrival of one particle and another particle in the same nanomolecular space, where they would touch, there would be a brief exchange of gravity, and then a sucking sound, a singularity, and all of herself would be drawn down into it. It was dangerous, and frightening, but it was all she could do not to yell out, “Do it.”

Who cares if it’s dangerous? Who wants to be the person who doesn’t touch two bells together to make a sound, who doesn’t hit a baseball with a bat, doesn’t grind an orange against a knife. In life, there is only collision to keep us from dissolution, and there is only love to keep us from death. In this bumping into that, there is salvation and sacrament, an end to the endless falling, a wall between us and oblivion. Where she could have slid, helpless, through the tunnel, her face engaged in terror, her hair flying wildly behind her, body freezing, fingers broken, she was now stopped and jutted up against him, and the collision of their bodies was the best thing she had ever felt in her life. In the quiet place there in the tunnel, in the pipe, with no room for anyone else or anything else between them, she pushed her hands against the edges of the pipe, and her hips began to shake. She felt prevented from the fall. She felt a hand come out and stop her as she dove away from the bridge into the water. She felt herself traveling through space at a million kilometers per hour, and then a halt, a warm embrace, a pair of strong arms.

WARNING: Ultraviolet light. Wear eye protection.

Why not? Why shouldn’t she have this love? Was she really so terrible, so defamed, so ruined in her soul that she did not deserve to be loved by a man, to be stopped from annihilation, to have this mouth pressing, this hand probing, and all the parts of her opening to it and rising up against it. Against, against, what a beautiful thing, Irene thought. To be opposed, to be stood up to, and not to free-fall, uninhibited, and die. As she felt herself begin to come apart and release all the energy churned up by this collision, she thought she might be turning to lavender, and sending out her plume of X-rays into the world, and making her statement against a radioactive plate: Here I am. Here is he. We made this intersection, and it was good. She clamped his head between her thighs, her fingers finding their way to his jaw, his arms, and she was pulling him up to her, where he gratefully came up through the pipe, and sank inside her, his face buried in her neck and his body now arcing over hers. The feeling of being filled, of being whole, of never again having to save herself from death, of never having to wait, alone, through dry years of work, was a more wonderful feeling than she would have thought herself capable of having.

When it was over, George lay next to her on the foam in the tunnel, her head again on his arm, their bodies locked together. No longer lavender, no longer exploding, just drifting, as if a breeze had picked up strong and carried them along through the tunnel, or down the river, in a little boat. Irene’s swelled mind imagined them in a little skiff, on a lazy river, passing primitive irrigation systems, and palm trees, and wild grasses, animals you find in Iraq, and other skiffs, all empty, all safely moored. They would float down this river until they fell asleep, and when they woke up they would look up and it would be all stars, all ancient constellations, and they would laugh.

She knew that this love wasn’t only the sweetest thing that had ever happened to her, but that it was the sweetest thing that had ever happened to anybody.

I didn’t even know how to want this, she thought. And in the end, it didn’t even matter, because he came to her, whether she wanted him or not. It didn’t even depend on her in the end, what she wanted or didn’t want, because what happened happened, and it was so easy and simple that it made her giggle.

“I love you,” said George.

“I love you, too,” said Irene.

“I’m glad you said that,” said George. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Yes, it’s been five whole days since we met. What a holdout I am. You’ve been through such endless torments,” she teased.

“I have,” said George. “I thought I would never find you.”

“What do you mean,” Irene said. Her eyes were closed. “Wait, are you about to say something about destiny? I might need you to shut up. I’m feeling very happy in my body, and if you wake my brain up, it might disapprove.”

“I want to tell you something,” he said. He turned to face her and propped his head up on an elbow. She did the same.

“Are you sure? With the talking? We can’t just lie here?”

He put his hand on her rib cage. “I’m going to say something about destiny.”

“OK,” she said. “Get it over with. Pull the Band-Aid. Then I’m going to climb down and rummage in that desk and see if there are any salty foods.”

“You are destined to be mine,” he said.

“Here it comes.” She smiled at him and rolled her eyes. “Like in the stars?”

“In a crystal ball. I went to a psychic. She saw you.”

“You know when those astrologer types catch TIA faculty outside the safety of academia they like to play all kinds of jokes on you, right?”

“On you. You’re TIA faculty now, too.”

“On us then. Nothing gives them more pleasure than to torment us with oogly stories about fate and prophecies.”

“Yeah,” said George. “I’m sure nothing gives them more pleasure than that.”

He sighed, and then she felt a little bit bad. Not really, but at least she felt a little bit sympathetic.

“OK, go on,” she said. “Tell me about this psychic you went to see, that saw me.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you, because I thought you’d think I was ridiculous.”

“Right, that was wise.”

“And I thought it would bother you.”

“It does bother me. Things that are silly bother me.”

“But now…”

“Now you’ve invaded my girl parts with your face, you can come clean with all your strange and mystical leanings.”

“Right.”

“Fine! I told you to go on.” Irene laughed, and settled in on her back again, desultorily stroking at the side of the pipe. There were no seams. There was no out.

“Well, I went to see this psychic, to find out, you know, if I was ever going to find you.”

“True love, impending death, and whatever happened to Grandma,” said Irene wryly. “The top three reasons to visit a psychic.”

“She looked into her crystal ball.” George went on.

“Where did I put my thingawhatever,” said Irene. “Reason number four.”

“She said you would have brown hair and would be an astronomer,” George began.

“And that I would also have two legs and a ciliated lining in my intestine?” Irene asked.

“And that you would be a dreamer,” he told her.

“Well, there you go,” said Irene. “I’m not a dreamer. Obviously. I’m the opposite of a dreamer. I reject dreaming in all its forms.”

I’m a dreamer, thought Irene. I visit other people in my dreams, and I have a house in my dream that threatens to eat me. Irene suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling, like itchy feet. The psychic’s prediction was stupid but eerily correct. Well, not really. Vague wasn’t correct. Psychic predictions are always vague in the client’s first visit. It was one of her mother’s most important rules. You only need to give the client enough to get them feeling good and coming back. Save the specificity for when they’ve divulged a bit more about themselves.