This_Shared_Dream

Brian

THE PLANS

May 18

BRIAN LUGGED HIS FATHER’S boxes into their cramped apartment.

Every room was stacked with boxes. Most were still taped shut, but some were open, the contents rummaged through. He sighed as he set Sam’s boxes next to the coffee table.

“Problem?” asked Cindy, from the kitchen area, ten feet away.

“These are Dad’s papers, but I have no idea when I’ll get a chance to read them.”

“Is two hours from now soon enough?”

Brian gave her an enthusiastic hug and kiss. “Easy to please,” she said. “I like that in a guy.”

She put Bitsy to bed right after dinner, claiming that she was exhausted, ergo, Bitsy must be too. Zoe lingered, opening the saxophone case. “Grandpa’s?” she asked. Brian nodded.

She fell asleep on the couch, holding the saxophone on her lap, smiling. Brian gently removed it and carried Zoe to bed. He was alone.

It was a miracle.

Brian began to unload the dusty contents of the boxes onto the cleared-off coffee table.

He found a sizable collection of notebooks. Twenty? They were all neatly labeled by date in his father’s hand. The first one was in December 1941. The last was dated 1967. He glanced inside each of them, briefly, as he stacked them on the table. Each was full of his father’s fine engineering print.

Beneath these, Brian found a brown cardboard folder. He untied it and went through memorabilia. Tickets to a show in London. A folded poster that, when unfolded, fell apart at the creases. The Perham Downs, his father’s band, would be appearing in the village of Ludgershall on the night of April 12, 1944; a photo of the band was at the top of the poster. He set it aside, to be framed, and put the folder aside too. He’d explore it in detail later. Next: a bundle of papers held between two sheets of corrugated cardboard by rubber bands, which disintegrated when he pulled on them.

He lifted off the top piece of cardboard, and fell into the world of someone very different from his father—a typed treatise. By someone named Dr. Eliani Hadntz. Footnotes referenced scientific papers published in the 1930s, 1920s, and earlier.

He plunged into it.

The process was disorienting. A lot of the speculation in the paper, which proposed a huge project to change humanity from warlike to peace-loving, was based on information he had always assumed was discovered later in the century. But then, he didn’t know a whole lot about the history of science; not much more than any reasonably well-educated person.

The paper referenced Schrödinger. Perhaps, he speculated as he read, the author even knew Schrödinger. He realized, as he turned the pages, she definitely knew Lise Meitner, the physicist who had resolved the issue of the possibility of nuclear fission.

And yet, the ideas the author had were more … organic than Brian thought of physics as being, even though he was familiar with Schrödinger’s thin volume What Is Life?, which was in the Halcyon library.

Schrödinger had been a physicist. Physics, for Brian, was abstract, a model of forces and their interaction on one another, not alive, as biological processes were. However, it made sense that one’s bodily interior, one’s brain, one’s genes, were also subject to the laws of physics.

How had Hadntz found so much information about neurology? He looked back to the title page. Yes, this Doktor Doktor Hadntz was a medical doctor, and also had a doctorate in physics. That might explain her focus, and her linking of such disparate subjects.

He became lost in the strange, inspiring manuscript, which was interrupted, from time to time, with diagrams and equations.

The night waxed. Existence narrowed to this tiny opening into another universe of thought and perception. Yet, when he stepped through the passageway of the paper, the view widened in a dizzying fashion, encompassing time and space and consciousness, entwining them in a way he’d never thought possible. Exhilaration burned in him, paired with a mysterious, nagging undertone of fear.

He came to a set of folded mechanical drawings. He unfolded them, one by one, carefully, on the floor. As he handled them, pieces of paper flaked away. Several had been folded and unfolded so many times that he had to piece together sections that had separated. He opened one of four small canisters and shook out a roll of microfilm, a hallmark of the spy thrillers he’d loved when he was a kid. A thrill ran through him. This was his father’s. Or maybe … his mother’s? That was Megan’s theory.

Of Jill’s theories, if she had any, he knew absolutely nothing. She had remarkable powers of withdrawal and stonewalling.

He examined the drawings, which were numbered. They were views of a “Device,” powered by a top-secret invention, the cavity magnetron. He had to smile. A cavity magnetron powered his microwave. It was interesting that yesterday’s top-secret war-winning development, which made possible shortwave radar, was now used in such a ubiquitous and mundane fashion.

Later papers were more speculative. A theory of postulated neural plasticity, accompanied by equations. He worked through a theory of the kinds of forces, and pharmacological interactions—separate, as if they were two different avenues to the same end—that might create a situation of relatively extreme neuroplasticity.

The documents explicated ideas about the nature of time heavily linked to theories of quantum reality and to a theory of consciousness.

The night wore on. His eyes burned. He wished for a quaff of this postulated neuroplasticity so that he could continue. He rummaged through high-up bottles in a cabinet over the top of the refrigerator and poured himself some quite marvelous Scotch. Neuroplasticity, straight up.

At about five in the morning, it struck him: He was looking at the plans for the … Infinite Game Board. He remembered it now; it hove into memory like those vaunted memories of childhood abuse he’d heard about: something buried, inaccessible until it sprang into mind with all its ferocious original energy.

The Infinite Game Board was metal, or metal-seeming, cool and hard, with upturned edges, like a cafeteria tray. Beneath it was a platform about two inches high, which held small drawers, like storage drawers beneath a bed, and short metal legs unfolded from each side so an invalid could use it in bed. The drawers held gamelike tools: dice, round, colored chips, decks of cards with faces that varied from numbers to shapes to colors to questions. He and his sisters called it “Infinite” because it seemed that the number of games one could play were never-ending.

Whenever they got it out, it manifested a different game—unless they called for an old favorite, or a particularly compelling game. Avid game players, they eagerly began each game the board suggested, never wondering at its odd capabilities. It was the golden age of board games, and this game was many in one, not advertised on TV because it was another mysterious thing from the attic, so old that no one else knew about it anymore. It might show them a race, a game of chance, a game of getting the most chips, or a game of strategy. The rules seemed evident from the face of the board, or the pieces they found in the drawers, but if they fell to arguing about the rules, a pleasant teacher’s voice emanated from the board, or a printed rulebook might be found in one of the drawers. It was a child’s delight. They didn’t question it and naturally they didn’t reveal it to their parents, perhaps sensing that it might be dangerous and would be taken away. As they grew older, the games grew more serious, and less fun. The board had a mind of its own. The Nuclear Winter game scared the pants off them, for instance, because it was imminent. Brian began to fear playing with it.

Now, he marked that as a true tipping point, the first time he became aware that the game corresponded to realities in the grown-ups’ newspapers or the magazines his parents read.

And yet, he had forgotten all that, as if it had been a dream. The possibility of a nuclear winter was, after all, extremely remote. In 1964, Khrushchev and Kennedy had disarmed their entire nuclear arsenals, and all information about the development of nuclear arms had been sealed. Off the table, completely. Too terrible to contemplate.

What if, these papers asked, the idea of any war became obsolete? How? Through neuroplasticity combined with education, cultural and historical literacy, even shots of live horror from victims of war, making the consequences direct, impressing upon people the necessity for change.

“Game Board,” was just one whimsical form that the … Device … took, according to this paper. Its essence could be embedded in any physical form. It predicted and passed the development of weak and strong nanotech.

But what did it do?

He recalled that was what Jill had told him, so long ago, when she’d hidden it, pretending that it had gotten lost. “Stories come from it.”

And yes, it did seem to link with consciousness, and could instill ideas or feelings, just like books could, except it had the power to bypass literacy and go deeply into the mind, and somehow even control action or engender thought or reflection, the way a timely interjection from an adult might optimally work.

He often wished he had his father’s effectiveness in picking these moments. On the shore of Lake Huron, when he was five, he and his father had taken an evening stroll. Seeing an intricate sand castle on the shining wet shore, he rushed to demolish it. After his first kick, his father quietly said, “How did you feel yesterday when somebody did that to your racetrack?” He stopped mid-kick, torn between his joy in destruction and the memory of his own feelings just a day earlier—his racetracks and pit stops and painstakingly constructed driftwood seats and stacked stone spectators so disappointingly smashed.

Someone just like him had built this. Someone just like him would feel angry and sad.

He still badly wanted to destroy the castle. Yet he felt ashamed, and did not. He still recalled that strong, direct conflict of emotions: Should I do the wrong thing, hurt someone else, and have fun, or do the right thing, and be disappointed?

It was good to have experienced that. It changed his behavior immediately, and the lesson had lasted the rest of his life. But not every child was as fortunate as he had been. If more children could experience the gist of that, at just the right teaching moment; if they could put themselves in the place of others, and imagine their feelings …

How could one give the essence of this realization, the neurobiological event, translated to neural connections both specific and open, to parents and children everywhere, as practical a bit of information as “This is the wheel,” or “This letter represents this thought, or this sound.” Could it be like a new form of reading, or might it prove to be something more invasive, harder to shake, something that could be used by many people for many purposes?

They came across the strange stuff in the attic less than a year after moving into Halcyon House. It was in an empty space in the attic floor, beneath a board, with a trunk over the top of it. It took all three of them, pushing hard, to move the trunk. They had only moved the trunk to reconfigure an imaginary space, a pirate ship or a castle tower, and then the board was loose, so naturally they pulled it up. Inside was the squishy substance, colorful and seductive, with the firmness of Silly Putty, malleable and fun.

Megan had carelessly pitched a squeezed pinch of it into the attic jumble.

And then he had found a bit of that same stuff, and put it in his pocket. Just today.

He stood, turned his pockets inside out, then remembered emptying them in the truck to search for some change for a parking meter. Great chance of finding it there, with all that trash—unless this bit, small as a kernel of corn, was it …

At that, he flipped into his other life, the one he’d tried to hide from for so long, almost as if being in the old house, being in the attic, just the act of handling these papers, had activated something that had become blessedly dormant, the edges of which he had vanquished by drinking. The life in which he enlisted in the Navy, learned to fly fighter jets, trained in Libya at Tripoli Air Force Base, screaming out over the desert. The one in which he’d dropped napalm over Cambodia.

The one in which his own plane had erupted in flames.

Cindy was shaking him. “Brian! Wake up!”

“You were screaming,” she told him as she led him to bed. “Might it have something to do with that Scotch you were drinking?”

“Don’t let the kids touch those papers.”

When he woke up around noon, she’d folded the plans and put everything back in the box. “Did you read that paper?” she asked him. “Dr. Hadntz writes a lot about Montessori education.”

“I didn’t get that far.”

“I skipped over the physics parts, I confess.” She poured what Brian figured was her fourth or fifth cup of coffee of the day; she was a caffeine hound. She handed Brian a cup, along with a little glass bowl of pills, his vitamins. Megan, Cindy, and Jill were huge believers in the power of vitamins, and bought them mail-order from the same company. They always came with samples of protein powders or supplements the company was pushing.

“Take them. You’ll need extra today.”

“I’m fine, Cindy.”

“Take them.”

He did. “What’s this new white one?”

Cindy looked at it. “Came in the new box yesterday. The latest super-duper freebie, you know, like they throw in sometimes. H-something, probably stands for health, some new synergizing additive. Oh, I remember. This is good for your memory.”

“Right.” Brian choked them all down, as he did every morning; Cindy seemed to think they “balanced” him and lessened his need for alcohol. He didn’t believe that, but he did think they helped him feel better in general. “Bleah.” He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and grabbed his coffee cup.

They stepped out onto the cramped balcony, at treetop height, with a view of the neighborhood playground, where the kids were. Zoe pushed Bitsy on a swing, playing Nice Big Sister, at least for the moment. They settled into the aluminum lawn chairs that took up most of the balcony. “So what do you think?” Cindy asked.

“Jill is hiding something. We knew that, I guess, but I just didn’t realize how weird it all was, or how important it might be. It’s probably why she cracked up. All the more reason, I guess, for us to tread carefully. I think she knows what Mom and Dad did during the war, and what they did after the war. In fact, I believe they were custodians of the Device that the paper talks about.”

Cindy looked startled. “This thing was actually made?”

“After last night, I’m sure of it. It explains … everything. Mom’s disappearance, for instance. I have a feeling that Mom and Hadntz knew each other. Megan’s been saying that Mom was CIA for years. Before last night, I thought Megan was being kind of grandiose.”

“What does Jill think?”

“Jill won’t say what Jill thinks. It’s her trademark. She was extremely nervous about me taking these papers. She knows a lot more than she’s saying. She might even know where Mom and Dad went.”

“You need to press her on it.”

“I’m going to. But I want to have everything in order first.”

“Brian. I mean, before next year.”

“I don’t want to give her any way to slither out of telling us everything she knows. If I ask her anything now, she’ll just clam up. Guaranteed. What can I do—threaten to break her kneecaps? I don’t understand all of this yet. And I don’t understand what it has to do with us, not really. I’m just starting to get a distant theory. I need to be like a lawyer. Present the hard evidence. Anticipate her evasions. And with all the work we have piled up, that might take a while.”

Cindy sighed. “You Dances are all alike. ‘Oh, let’s not talk about anything important. Maybe next year. After all, we have a lot of urgent work to do and that takes up all of our time.’ Have you ever heard the word ‘introspection’? How about ‘family dynamics’? No wonder you’re all so messed up—” She looked away.

“Great place to stop talking, Cindy. I admire your tact, your extraordinary reserve.”

“I’m sorry. You’re doing fine, now, honey, and I know it’s hard. Anyway, there are a lot of strange connections in the paper. Physics and Montessori in the same sentence?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“That’s the reason I read it. Or tried to. It’s up front, in the intro. She postulates that physics combined with Montessori education could change the human brain. She indicates that she actually met the Montessori. When? How? Anyway, her ideas are full of optimism and the hope of peace. Peace was Montessori’s dream too—peace through education. It’s a zeitgeist thing, I guess. I’d sure like to get my hands on this gizmo. Make all that optimism real. See where it leads.”

“You and a lot of other people, probably.”

“Fat chance. No one ever made this. Otherwise, we’d know, don’t you think?”

Brian stared out at the ineffable there-ness of everything around him. He felt the smooth porcelain of the coffee cup between his hands, the hard web of the lawn chair beneath him, heard the susurration of leaves in the breeze.

Cindy said, “You think it was built.”

“Yes. The Device was built. By my dad and the guy he talks about in his journal—‘W.’ For Wink. Winklemeyer. I never met him. And—”

Cindy looked at him sidelong, eyebrows raised. “There’s more?”

Brian shifted in his chair; listened to the shouts of his children as they played. He took a sip of cold coffee.

“It was built in a different world.”

Cindy smiled, rolled her eyes, and patted Brian on the shoulder.

Jill

REINHABITING THE PAST

May 22

JILL GOT OFF the Metro at the Georgetown Park stop. An escalator lifted her toward a light-filled arch, and she stepped out onto Wisconsin Avenue. Whens was with his father and the Lavender Lady. Grumpy, but he had his phone and could complain to her if he felt like it, which seemed to help a lot.

To her left was a sign for the Metro. She had a moment’s flash: In the world she now called the original timestream, there had not been a Metro stop in Georgetown. It certainly came in handy. Before, she would have had to wait for a mile-long bus ride from the Foggy Bottom/GWU stop.

To her right was the C & O Canal, an overhead freeway, the Potomac River, and across the river, Virginia.

It was twilight. Cars nosed down the steep hill toward the river and streamed into the mall’s underground parking garage. When the light changed, Jill headed uphill half a block to M Street, and turned left.

This block had once been a druggie hangout, heavy with the scent of marijuana smoke, where psychedelic music blared from narrow black-light illuminated clubs. The windows of upstairs apartments were always open in the summer heat, wafting exotic incenses into the street. Jill had often visited friends in those ragtag apartments full of furniture from Goodwill, huge houseplants, twining cats, and out-of-town crashers. The Cellar Door, on the next block, hosted many a fine performer. Jill missed all that with a feeling that verged on the visceral.

In this world, the psychedelic scene had been much more muted. Without a war to protest against, the former Air Force parachutist Jimi Hendrix, who had been a Screaming Eagle, had not composed his chilling “Star Spangled Banner” interrupted by machine gun fire and the explosions of death missiles. He was, however, alive, and a respected jazz musician.

No, in this world, this particular block of M Street rapidly went upscale after 1970. These mannered town houses, beautifully restored, were sealed against street sounds and smells. Open drapes revealed opulent rooms Jill had visited on Elmore’s arm—the homes of tenured professors, lawyers, and lobbyists with spouses in high government positions. The women, and probably some of the men, spent hundreds of dollars—or even thousands, monthly—on upkeep for their bodies, faces, and hair.

Her bookstore was at the end of the block, opposite the end of Key Bridge. Everyone crossing the bridge into Georgetown saw it. She stocked fine literature, the latest political science books, philosophy, poetry.

And science fiction. She longed for a comic section to exude the wonderful smell she recalled from childhood, but Elmore had pitched a fit about that.

She was instantly soothed as she walked through the door, which stood open. The golden oak floor shone softly. Classical music, which she would switch to some quiet Coltrane or the Strayhorn piano solos she’d just gotten her hands on. She counted seven browsers downstairs and three in the loft. Zane, one of the college kids who worked for them, was ringing up a sale. When he saw her, his mouth opened in pleased astonishment.

She smiled at him, said, “Be back in a minute,” and went to the office. She locked her backpack in a desk drawer, sorted through the mail while standing at the desk, and poured herself some coffee. Evidently Elmore had taken care of everything in his efficient way. Left to her, it would all be in a tangle. And, she supposed, with a wry sigh, it soon would be.

On her way to the counter, she asked a young woman if she could help her and showed her the biography section.

“How’s everything?” she asked Zane.

“Just fine. School’s out; sales are so-so. How are you?”

She gave him a quick hug. “Oh, I’m fine.”

“Good. We were worried about you.”

She wondered what they’d been told, but just said, “Did Elmore pay you?”

“Of course. Right on the dot.”

“Good. Okay.”

After Zane left, Jill settled onto her stool and surveyed her store. Everything looked exceedingly clean and clear, the books with their bright covers square and neat on the shelves. An hour earlier the usual evening thunderstorm had ended, and cool, still-damp air eddied through the front door. She realized that she hadn’t been here since the day before she’d … gone nuts.

Well, that was a good thing to not think about. God just had to give her grace to know what she couldn’t change.

The main problem was that it might be that she could change just about anything.

But, no. That couldn’t be possible. The therapist was right. She was a roiling inferno of insanity.

She could change some things. For instance … she slid off the stool and walked across the store to a shelf she’d focused on. There was a book in the history section that needed to be moved to the poli-sci section. There. It was all right to change little things. But how to know what was little and what was world-changingly big?

She smelled cigarette smoke. Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped.

“Sorry,” said Koslov. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She saw that he wasn’t smoking, but, as usual, his tie had flecks of ash on it. He was too close to her. She stepped back. “That’s okay.”

“We’ve all been concerned about you. You left the minute the committee congratulated you as a new doctor.”

She certainly had. That day, so soon after getting out of St. E’s, she was in no shape for anything beyond the scope of her presentation, and especially did not want to tangle with Koslov.

“I’m glad to see that you’re back at work. The store has been … haphazard, without you.” He usually came by once or twice a month, as did many professors. “So, everything is all right now?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Fine.”

“You left very quickly that other day too, after your last class. I’m afraid that I upset you.”

“Oh, no, not a bit. I was just doing too much. Not eating right. That kind of thing.”

“That’s a relief to hear. We were talking about your alternate history, if you recall.”

“Like I said, I was pretty tired.”

“Sorry you missed graduation.”

“Oh, those ceremonies are so boring.” She bent down and straightened some books.

“Indeed.” He reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed to her.

She brightened, despite her interest in sweeping Dr. Nosy out of the store. “A list. Good.” All the professors had their lists, and she often stocked their suggestions. Koslov’s lists were always of foreign, translated books, many of which she had never heard of. They generally turned out to be interesting.

“Your husband refused to order these.”

“He was afraid they wouldn’t sell.”

“I explained to him that I suggest them to my students, and that they aren’t carried by the university bookstore.”

She smoothed the list on the countertop. “Yes, I’ve seen some reviews of this … Oh, good, I’d like to read this one myself. We should have them in ten days or so. The Fleiger will take longer.”

Koslov pointed at one title. “This is a book of poetry. I translated it. The translation has won an award, by the way.”

“Congratulations. The original was Russian?”

“Yes. The author’s name is Rosa Hadntz. Have you ever heard of her?”

He was watching her face very closely. She was puzzled. “No. Ought I have?”

“Oh, no. She died long ago, in a German concentration camp, and her poems were only found lately, in Stalingrad. She had been sending them to her relatives there.”

Jill sighed. “That’s a sad story. I will certainly order a copy.”

“Maybe two?” he suggested.

She smiled. “By the way, I’m having a party at my home for the Fourth of July. I sent the invitations yesterday, so you and a few other people in the department will be getting them soon.”

He tilted his big, shaggy head. “I hear you’ve moved. You’re getting a divorce?”

Nosy old fart. Well, they probably all knew. “Yes. It’s the house I grew up in.”

“Very good,” he said, and nodded thoughtfully.

Five or six people walked in. The after-dinner rush was starting.

“I’m getting busy,” she said.

“Let me just pay for this, then.” He did so, and walked out onto M Street. Good riddance. She’d only invited him to the party because she’d asked everyone else in the department, practically. He made her nervous, and he’d never done so before. Before, it had been invigorating to spar with him. Something had changed, but she wasn’t sure what. Her, probably.

She turned her attention back to her domain.

It was good to be back in the store. Orienting. Like breathing. Nothing new, and that was comforting. Elmore was right; he hadn’t ordered a damn thing, and not a single sales lunch was on the calendar. He complained that she was too old-fashioned and that she ought to do everything by computer. He was probably right.

She started yet another list, and tried to keep an eye on the man wearing an old, shapeless fedora, pulled low, and a long raincoat, browsing in the mystery section. Students, and street people, had a way of walking out with those little paperbacks. But she was soon too busy to pay close attention, and when the rush was over, and she got back to her stool behind the counter and her cold cup of coffee, he was gone.

When she locked up, though, she felt marvelously successful. A whole evening back at the store.

She was Jill again.

Wilhelm Anderson

THE WEREWOLVES

May 22

WILHELM—BILL—ANDERSON sat in the Bank cafeteria sipping coffee and eating meatloaf and boiled potatoes, alone, while around him congenial chatter filled the air. Most colleagues expressed incredulity at his affection for this meal (with boiled green beans on the side) but it reminded him of home. He ate it whenever it was offered, and kept away from their teasing. After all, they didn’t know the meal meant something important to him.

His mother would cook such a dinner on cold Ohio evenings, as snow lay heavy on the flat streets of the small town and on the flat land surrounding it, and the 5:00 P.M. gloom outside the kitchen held a just-lit streetlight. By the time they lived in Ohio, his mother’s blond hair no longer fell in graceful, 1940s-style waves around her face, but was pulled back in a severe, colorless bun, and her steps, as she endlessly cleaned their plain frame house and dark furniture, were much heavier than those of the lithe Alpine hiker he had doggedly followed on Sunday afternoon family outings when he was small, and visiting her parents in Bavaria. He was sometimes embarrassed by the black, plain shoes she wore, by her German accent (his father, also from Germany, had none, which did not seem odd until Wilhelm got a little older) and by the way she did not fit in with the other mothers—even though, she often said, their neighbor’s own parents were from Germany and they had German names, so why could they not treat her with more respect? Still, Wilhelm, who was now, always and only, Bill, understood that his father had preferred that she keep to herself. She attended Mass several times a week, and seemed to return refreshed.

Wilhelm was completely forbidden to ever mention that his older brother had died bravely in the Battle of Berlin. And he had not even told his parents that he, Wilhelm, had taken over firing Hans’s machine gun, propped behind sandbags, after his brother died.

It would have been impossible to speak of.

Hans’s death was his fault.

On that day in 1945, Wilhelm had slipped from the apartment cellar where he, his mother, and countless neighbors were hiding as Russian missiles shook plaster and debris onto their heads.

When he emerged from the celler, he stared at the empty crater where the corner butcher shop had stood for his entire life. His breath steamed the cold, smoky air, and then he bent over, coughing and wiping tears from his burning eyes.

He scrambled over a mountain of bricks to see, down the street, fleeing German soldiers raked by machine gun fire fall in their tracks. The apartment where his best friend lived exploded.

Wilhelm crouched, turned, and fled.

He never knew how long it took him to find Hans’s company. It seemed a miracle to spot his brother, from an alley, in the ever-shifting nightmare of broken streets where the dead lay still and injured soldiers cried out. He ran toward Hans, yelling.

Hans turned, shook his head at him, and opened his mouth. That clear, timeless image was Wilhelm’s permanent nightmare. His brother’s head exploded, showering Wilhelm with blood and driving him sideways into the hard sandbags.

His next memory was of his body shaking as he crouched where Hans had been, hugging the machine gun as he had been taught in his brief lesson. Wilhelm fired at men on horses on the cross-street ahead, tanks, and Russians dashing from building to building as they advanced. Burst! Burst! Burst! When the soldiers neared him he escaped through roofless buildings, the disintegrating world curiously soundless save for a ringing in his ears, lit by fireworks overhead and blazing buildings before and behind him. After running for a long time, he realized that he held Hans’s heavy knife in his hand and thrust it into his pocket. Thinking to hide in a church, he paused at the doorway after seeing pews full of injured men, but a skinny fräulein, her face streaked with blood and greasy hair straggling from the scarf tied around her head, grabbed him and put him to work changing bandages. At three in the morning, as missiles streaked the sky, he flattened himself into crevices as Soviet tanks passed and made his way back to his mother’s apartment with half a loaf of bread and some cheese. She wept at the news of Hans’s death, and instead of praising him like a good German mother, screamed as his hearing returned.

He had another memory, of his mother being raped by Russian soldiers the next day as he hid beneath the bed, as she had told him to. As he lay still beneath the creaking bed, he almost grabbed the butt of the American gun that one Russian soldier had dropped to the floor with his pants, so that he could kill the soldier. He was still ashamed, so very ashamed, that he had not. Afterward, his mother asked him to never tell his father what had happened, though she did not explain exactly what that was.

And so, there were many things he had grown up not talking about.

He watched Jill Dance across the room, also sitting alone, her back to him, reading as she ate a salad. There were a lot of similarities between them, connections, so many that he sometimes yearned to tell her everything. He knew she would understand. Their parents, for instance—his father, and her mother—had both been spies. And they were both dead. He was not sure if she was like him in other ways. Did she remember a past in which Berlin had been taken by the Russians, rather than the Allies? But that was just one of the many things he longed to discuss with her.

As a child, Wilhelm was only allowed to play alone, in his yard, but once a week the family would drive to another town where a family with a farm held a German club meeting, and while the adults talked in the living room, in their native tongue, their collective children roamed outside. They swung from the barn’s hayloft on a heavy, knotted rope, rode around cornfields on an old knack, or swam in the creek. In the winter, after they tired of playing in the snow, they were sent to the basement, where they could watch Sky King and Fury and Rin Tin Tin. There was one boy he really liked, because he could play chess. Christmases were wonderful, with the enchanting scents of butter cookies, pork roasts, and stollen filling the house. Sinister Krampus—really (he knew by that time) a man dressed up like a demon—came and handed out sticks and coal to bad children; they chased him, screaming in glee, from the doorway into the cold, snowy night. Krampus was always followed by Weihnachtsman—they were supposed to call him Santa Claus—who brought games like Mr. Potato Head and metal cars and, one fine year, a train set.

Having no friends was hard, but he knew he was different. So did the other boys in school, but they had no idea how different he really was. His father always called him Bill, and mildly remonstrated his mother for continuing to call him Wilhelm, but Wilhelm was already fixed in his mind as his true name, anyway.

His father was often gone on long trips, and during those trips Wilhelm slipped into his father’s study. This was strictly forbidden, so it was always when his mother had taken the bus to the butcher shop or the market. The room was full of locked file cabinets, and despite intense and creative searches, he never could find the keys to the cabinets. Sometimes he just sat in his father’s big wooden tilting chair and swirled around, or paged through books that were too hard for him to read, or just stared out the window into his lonely backyard with its single elm. There was an odd, melted artifact his father kept on his desk as a paperweight. He’d always thought of it as a war scrap, something picked up in the street after a bombing raid.

Its weirdness had always fascinated Wilhelm, and by this particular day, November 22, 1963, he had grown into a singularly handsome blond young man, much sought after by girls, though his mother refused to let him date. He sat in the office wondering what to do.

He was home “sick,” his usual stomachache. If his father had been home, he never would have been allowed to stay out of school, but his mother was much more indulgent. She had gone to Schmidt’s for bratwurst, tying on her black headscarf and shrugging on her black overcoat, telling him that if he felt up to it he ought to practice his piano. Before leaving, she said, “Do you want me to turn off the television set?” She kept it on as she ironed to help improve her English.

“It’s okay,” he said.

It was not as much fun in his father’s office as it had been when he was younger. There were no pictures of Hans in the house, as if he had never existed, and he longed for his brother often. He had only one scrap of paper to remember him by, and this he had kept in his shoe when they got on the U.S. military plane in Berlin. It had fallen apart on the creases long ago because of his ceaseless folding and unfolding, and even the tape was old and cracking now. But he remembered it well.

Hans was only seventeen when he died. For weeks, they had prepared for the Russians after a dreary, snow-filled winter of hardship. Wilhelm and his mother waited with fear and nervousness in their once-fine Berlin apartment, now depleted of furniture, which had been burned for firewood, but Wilhelm practiced and drilled with other boys his age in a nearby square every day, led by an elderly farmer who had fought in the Great War, though they had few weapons. They were told to use their wits and to seize weapons. The farmer had managed to find weapons with which to train them from time to time—an old hunting rifle, a hand pistol, and once, to Wilhelm’s pride and delight, his own big brother Hans appeared and let each of them use his machine gun. It was empty of ammunition; for that was too valuable to waste, but Wilhelm learned how to manipulate the gun, theoretically at least.

When the cannons began to boom, low and far off, and they knew that the Russians were almost upon them, Hans was still able to stop in every few days for perhaps an hour, dropping off canned food and usually falling asleep in a chair.

The last time he came home, he handed an envelope to Wilhelm. He said, “You may soon be the man in the family, since we do not know where Father is or whether he will survive the war. These are my thoughts, some things to remember.” When he left, Wilhelm opened it immediately. It was written in his brother’s beautiful hand with its flourishes and one or two scratch-outs, and was about his Lebensfeier, his life ceremony, which all Hitler Youth celebrated the year they turned fifteen. Some celebrated it in lieu of a religious confirmation, but not Hans—he had had to attend catechism classes his entire life. Their mother was incensed at the very thought that this war ceremony might stand in for the eternal verities, for her own son or for any German youth, so she had attended in a very bad mood.

Wilhelm, sitting between his parents, was entranced by its beauty and glory: the drum flourishes and horn fanfares, the special Hitler Youth flag, and the perfect, spotless uniforms worn by all the young men.

But far beyond that was the excitement of Hitler actually attending, which was a great honor. Wilhelm had memorized, along with Hans, who was an indulgent big brother, the oath they swore.

Wilhelm read the missive left by Hans on the evening of May 6, as the cannons grew ever louder and the great city began to crumble. Crowds filled the streets in a great westward exodus, for it was rumored that the Allies would treat them better than the Russians, their ancestral enemy. Wilhelm’s mother made no move to leave. “I have lived my entire married life here, and I will not go. If your father lives, and if I live, he will find me here waiting.”

Wilhelm went to the front parlor window, settled himself on the floor, and read:

Never forget this wonderful day, my dear brother. I am only sorry you have not been able to have your own Lebensfeier. But perhaps, in the future, no matter how dark it looks now, you or a son of yours might experience the same joy. We must, in these times, hold fast to that thought. The Thousand-Year Reich has just begun. Hitler will never die.

Hitler! Hitler himself came down the row of Hitler Youth and shook all our hands. He shook my hand.

As he did so, he placed his own over mine, so that mine was held between his, like a father holding the hand of his child. His kindly eyes smiled into mine, looked deeply into me, and I vowed in my heart to Lebensfeier, my life job. My Führer said, in his speech that day, “We want a hard generation that is strong, reliable, loyal, obedient and decent, so that we do not need to be ashamed.” This is what I have striven to be, my dear brother, during the long and hard years since.

The vows I spoke that day, and which I saw you, with pride, in the front row, reciting, were these:

We affirm:

The German people have been created by the will of God.

All those who fight for the life of our people, and those who died,

Carried out the will of God.

Their deeds are to us holy obligation. This we believe.

We affirm that God gave us all our strength,

In order to maintain the life of our people

And defend it. It is therefore our holiest

Duty to fight to our last breath

Anything that threatens or endangers the life

Of our people. God will decide

Whether we live or die. This we pledge.

We want to be free from all selfishness.

We want to be fighters for this Reich

Named Germany, our home.

We will never forget that we are German.

And I have not. Wilhelm, I give you this charge: You must continue to fight for the Fatherland.

Remember the Fatherland as I will, if I live: as free, high mountains, as a Nation, working together, as the Hitler Youth book tells us, to rid the world of poisonous blood unworthy of mingling with our pure German blood, our pure German bodies. We are an old, strong people, and our land was glorious. It will be so again. Read your Hitler Youth book daily. It is filled with wisdom.

Work hard, my dear brother, to further the Work given us by our Führer, to use that which I bequeath to you—an idea, a commitment—to move the entire world forward into the bright, glorious sunshine of the timeless ideals of our beloved Führer.

On his brother’s special day, Wilhelm had recited the affirmation along with the young men on the stage in a loud, clear voice, while on one side of him his father held his shoulder and squeezed it, and, on the other side, his mother looked down at him in grim disapproval, and dashed away tears. On the first day of the Battle of Berlin, those affirmations had propelled him from the cellar, to which his mother and himself had been dragged by neighbors, into battle.

In America, he and his classmates marched down Main Street on Decoration Day, the day in May when the graves of American soldiers who had killed his kin were decorated. He daily pledged allegiance to the American flag, though at first it took a beating on the part of his father to make him do so, to convince him that this was necessary, and that he had to forget his last name had ever been Konrad, or even Wilhelm; it now was William—except, rebelliously, stubbornly, in his own mind. He had studied government, he had read their history of the war thinking Lies, all lies, propaganda, and made As on all his tests. There were Jewish children in his school—not many, but they were popular and never shunned; in fact, most classmates looked surprised when he asked them whether they knew their friends were Jews, and some didn’t even know what Jews were. There were no Negro children, and of this he was glad. Sometimes he wondered, Is it possible that my country might have been wrong, might have done wrong?, but in the end, that letter, that day in Berlin, the memory of his brother proud in his uniform, were all much stronger than years in an American school, mingled as they were with his brother’s sacrifice.

Wilhelm stood, intending to leave the study and turn off the television chatter in the other room. He should not be sitting here in the past; it only made him sad. He heard, “We interrupt this program to announce that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. He is being rushed…”

In that instant, the odd, burnt artifact on his father’s desk glowed and became briefly clear, emitting powerful rainbowed light. He stared, transfixed.

For a moment, his childhood memories became even stronger, and more brilliant, but were infused with something new and unpleasant—the ideas that his mother had often expressed, that Germany had done horrible things during the war and that they were all guilty, all damned, which his father would counter with a mention of Hiroshima. Despite her isolation, she seemed to like the ideals of America, took pains to go through all the preparation for the citizenship tests at home, although Wilhelm’s father told her to never do anything so foolish as to actually go out and take the test because Hear! Hear! (he would point toward his closed office door) were her birth certificate, which had taken place at home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wilhelm’s birth certificate, in Canton, Ohio, and his own, in Pennsylvania as well, and that they were all supposed to forget about Germany entirely, as if their lives before coming here had never happened. Then he would sit stonily quiet in the dark parlor for an hour, drinking schnapps, and finally come out, apologize, hug them both, and tell them he knew it was hard.

As the paperweight surged with light, Wilhelm saw the world as his brother had described it in that sacred letter, but instead of its populace being of pure German blood and genes, the colors of their faces ranged from pale to dark. Many voices poured from them, a Babel of languages that refuted everything his brother had stood for. All were equal in rights and in education. The human brain grew and changed, shed its ancestral darkness, became a species not of male brother-warriors and aggressors, but a species of women and men who instead used other means to solve conflicts. Ideas flowed through him in waves, as if to wash from him the blood-memories, the ancient feuds, the ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, even the wars fought in the name of his mother’s religion, the religion of others …

The light dimmed. Shaken, Wilhelm continued to watch it, breathing hard, clenching his hands in tight fists.

Nothing more happened. Finally, he ventured to touch the thing. Its coolness surprised him.

He had taken chemistry courses in high school and since then had wondered how it had been formed, what it was made of. Perhaps it was a meteor? He thought several times about breaking off a piece and trying to melt it in a crucible and see if it gave off an identifying gas, or color, but he did not even dare think about tampering with anything belonging to his father.

Now, he wondered whether or not there might be other reasons not to play with it.

Wilhelm left the office. He closed the door behind him and went into the living room, with its drawn drapes, the ironing board set up in front of the television set, and the heavy dark furniture. It was lit by a single lamp, the base of which was a lovely young blond woman in a meadow of porcelain flowers, sitting beneath crystals that dangled from the silk shade, spangling her face with light.

He turned up the television set. What had he heard? The President had been shot?

But no. The usual soap opera was playing. He watched a commercial for Ipana toothpaste. He turned to the other two channels, adjusted the rabbit ears. Nothing, nothing, about an assassination attempt. Had he been dreaming? Had the glow in the artifact anything to do with what he had heard?

Two days later, he returned from school to find his mother in her immaculate kitchen, leaning on both arms against the table, her head bowed. When she raised it, her face was streaked with tears. “Your father is dead,” she said.

He was stunned. “Why? What happened?”

“Two men came today, from his company. He—caught pneumonia and died of it.” She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, folding her hands on the table.

He put his hand on her back. He was the man now. He had to be strong. He shouldn’t cry. “Where did this happen? Why didn’t he call and tell us he was sick?”

“He probably—he didn’t think he was so sick. He just collapsed at a meeting.”

His father’s funeral was held in the little German farming town they had gone to so often when Wilhelm was a child. His father’s casket was closed. Wilhelm beat against it with his fists. “I want to see him!” Two strong men, friends of his family, took him from the church. A few other men came out with him, tried to comfort him. One offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. He was dull and dazed at the funeral, with its incense and Latin, and watched the casket lowered into the ground with a sense of unreality. Something was not right.

A few weeks later, there occurred an afternoon when he felt as though his mother was going to tell him important things. He had felt some tension for several days after the man in a black suit came and talked to her behind the closed, curtained French doors to the living room. When she invited him into the little-used parlor, always darkened, the furniture always covered with sheets, and they both sat in the dim light on facing chairs, he had hoped. Her lips had been tight when she had begun talking, on that long-ago afternoon, as the other neighborhood children played outside. “Wilhelm, I feel as if I must tell you…” But then, suddenly, she stopped talking, got up, and left the room.

Their years in the American town were probably more lonely than they ought to have been, and as he was going away to Ohio State—the United States government paid for his college, which he took for granted then but soon realized was unusual—and his mother lay in the hospital dying of cancer, in what he later realized was a rare private room, also paid for by the U.S. government, she finally talked.

His father, she said (“And I know I can trust you to tell no one, ever, but you deserve to know; I am so very tired of lying”) was a spy during the war. He worked for Germany, but also for the Americans. He had been a brave man to do so. She, herself, had not known this until she questioned him severely about why they were able to move to America when everyone else in Germany—her mother, her sisters, her one surviving brother, and his old father—had to stay behind and starve. He said that in exchange for scientific secrets from Germany as well as from Russia, he had bought them all a better life—college for Wilhelm, a lifetime pension for her should he die. He had warned her his being killed was not unlikely, because of his past. Many people were after him—in particular, former Nazis who were angered at his defection. The United States government could only protect him so much. He had things to do, dangerous missions to carry out.

Furthermore, Wilhelm’s mother said, his father had told her that he realized American ideals were much better than those of the Nazis. Wilhelm’s mother fixed him with a strong, steady gaze. “Remember that that is what your father thought. I am sorry he never told you, because you probably will never believe me. He was never a Nazi himself, not in his heart or mind. It made him sick to pretend, sick to seem to support his oldest son in joining the Nazi Youth. You cannot imagine those times, Wilhelm, how hard and dangerous they were. Your brother’s death broke him. I see how you worship the past, how you hoard those swastika magazines under your bed, when you should instead, if anything, God forbid, be hiding pictures of women! It is our fault, your father’s and mine, for not talking frankly to you, but you were so young. We hoped you would forget, and we didn’t want to burden you with more than you could understand, with more responsibility than you could handle. And we were afraid … you might let something slip.”

She fixed her eyes on him, still the young blue of cornflowers, still the eyes that could see right into him, see what he was thinking. “Your brother died for the wrong reasons. It is a tragedy. But we were all caught up in … all kinds of wrong ideas, wrong actions, and by the time some of us wanted to stop, there was too much momentum. Hitler made it all sound so glorious, and once he had power, he murdered all who opposed him.”

Wilhelm started to protest, and she held up a hand. “I am tired. Do not argue. Your father left you a locked metal box containing something so secret that I was never to open it. It was to be yours after you finished university.”

After his father died, she continued, her voice hoarse from medicines and faint from weakness, she opened it anyway. If they were no longer German, why did she have to be an obedient German wife? And that went for Wilhelm too. His wonderful brother had died for no reason, had been made to fight when just a boy, and since she had come here she had taught herself to read English, and she watched American shows, and she learned of how the Jews had been slaughtered in the camps, and none of it was what she believed Germany was, and certainly not one that anyone with an ounce of religion in them should have stood for. She even revealed, as she lay there, withered, her hair white, with two pink spots from anger on her cheeks, that her sister had hidden a Jew in the attic, and no one ever found out, and now she was ashamed that she had not had the courage to do the same.

Wilhelm became angry at his mother then, and said that she was lying, that their father would have been ashamed of her, and that his brother had died for the Führer, and that he had promised to live for the Fatherland and knew of others who wanted to bring it back.

She threw her glass of water at him and said, “Get out!”

He had. He never saw her alive again. Now he regretted that, since he had so much to ask her, but she died a few days later. He didn’t even know, for instance, if she knew that she now lived in a world that believed that the past, beginning in April 1945, was different, and that the change had occurred the day his father supposedly had died. But he never could have asked her directly if she had been raped by an American soldier rather than a Russian.

He had opened the box as soon as she died, and found strange papers he did not understand, but he had known they were related to the melted-looking electronic object, because a photograph of it was paper-clipped to the notes. He still kept the object with him in his Washington condominium as one of his most cherished treasures. He thought that this was why he could see two pasts, and he was pretty sure that Jill Dance could too, because her mother’s name before she was married—Bette Elegante—was in a list he found in the box, along with many other names. He had tracked down some of those people. They were spies, every last one of them, he was sure. Not one of them revealed anything to him.

He knew now that the notes were about a Device that could change time, if only because, for a moment, he had seen another epoch taking place, one in which, after Kennedy’s death, the Russians and Americans might have annihilated each other and Germany would have been able to rise again. And yet, he remembered the other Germany, divided, as if it were a piece of fabric to be torn in half by housewives arguing at the market. Here, it had never been divided. No one but himself seemed to know that. Even the books had changed, overnight, it seemed. Everything had changed but him, and he was certain it was because of that glowing thing.

There was something else too, in those notes—nonsense about it being able to change the human mind, to end war, but he discarded that. His own short war in Berlin had been glorious, a mad chaos of resistance, a brave last stand, and he had avenged his brother’s death. That felt good, not bad. It was the one good thing he had ever done.

Over the years, under the tutelage of a friend, he migrated to D.C., joined the Foreign Service, and found that any information about his father was sealed for all time. He learned a little science, wondered more and more about the strange sounds and the light in the piece of junk, the coincidence of his father dying the same day he heard the television say—he was still sure of it—that President Kennedy had been shot. He also stubbornly changed his first name, legally, back to Wilhelm. Why should he be ashamed of it? He didn’t go so far, though, as to change Anderson back to Konrad.

At various times in his twenties, he had belonged to several clandestine organizations. One was a simple, straightforward, Hitler-worship club. Wilhelm had seen the man; his brother had touched him, so Wilhelm was a minor star. What magnificent power Hitler had, and that same deep, sacrificial love for Germany. He kept a small replica of the 1940 German flag on his desk, next to his Q station, hanging from a cheap plastic stand, and he had a real Arbeiterjugend pennant, which the Hitler Youth had used in the 1930s, given him as a gift, framed. He never allowed anyone in his study, and always kept it locked.

He had also, long ago, belonged to groups that believed that a Nazi future was still possible. He had resigned from those groups years ago and had completely expunged his name and records from any of their accounts—not because he no longer believed in National Socialism, or in white supremacy. He did so because, otherwise, he could not have the job he had now. His present job was an avenue to power.

He watched the back of Jill’s neck as she read—long, with tendrils of her carelessly swept-up hair curling down against the tan skin he sometimes wished to caress.

He was not that much older than she was—twelve years. They had so much in common. He had contrived to take courses with her, attended the same workshops, yet she seemed to hardly notice him. Which was proper; she was married. But beyond that was a strange reserve he imagined was feigned. She must feel the same as him, that they were fated to be together, eventually. Now, she was getting a divorce—more evidence that his dream of marrying her was true. She knew more than she said. She had some connection with that light-thing.

And he knew more about it than she could possibly imagine. He wanted to share that knowledge with her. Together, they could change the world. Her strange liberal ideas had to be a cover. She had to be more intelligent than that.

The fuller plans for it, possibly, were in the house she lived in now. Together, they could pool what they knew, bring about a new future.

No, it was not coincidence that he worked with her. It was fate. He probably would not have made that connection unless fate had led him here, to the Bank, to this very section of the Bank.

It was true that her ideas were tragically skewed. He could see that. Yet, he knew that he could fix her. Repair what had gone wrong. She was working on plans that directly opposed everything he believed. Those wonder-schools that supposedly would teach everyone to read. Nonsense, desecration. Some people—some races, and this was a scientific fact—were dumb as dirt. The Chinese, African, Japanese, Jewish, and Indian people he met at the Bank were anomalies.

He couldn’t blame everyone else for agreeing with her—they had been indoctrinated since birth to believe that all races were equal, that everyone deserved equal rights. He even caught himself thinking this, sometimes, because he had undergone the same indoctrination—but, happily, too late. He knew how he was supposed to think, and he had to seem to think these things right down to his core. He couldn’t let himself get so stirred up like this. It was just that Jill was so—so innocent, so goody-goody, so seemingly unaware that one day you could get up in the morning in an intact, ancient capital city and by night your city could be a pile of rubble filled with bloody, stinking corpses, one of them your brother. He had a “friend” who was Russian, part of another plan he was working on. He knew how useful people could be, how to cultivate them. He’d managed to stay out of the clutches of mental health people; he knew how to lie on an application, on the batteries of personality tests he’d undergone. He had a mission given to him when he was five, by Hitler himself, and by his brother, the day before he died.

Women were drawn to him. He was quite good-looking, and debonair. At first, this made him happy, but inevitably, relationships deepened. One fiancée had recommended therapy, evaluation, drugs, and the next one did too, after a year, and in much stronger terms, wondering aloud if he might be schizophrenic, or worse. It was better, he had decided, and easier, to live alone than to have a relationship with someone to whom he might reveal his most intimate thoughts, and who might then turn on him, even before they knew the whole truth, only distant fragments. He dated sporadically, picked up women in bars, satisfied his needs without ever getting involved.

Which made Jill’s aloof behavior somewhat puzzling, almost insulting. He kept in shape; his hair was still a nice shade of blond, though paling a bit—maybe he should think about some color. He had a doctorate. He was a smart man. He made good money. He had a nice condo, played the piano quite well, had a subscription to the Kennedy Center, and went to all the operas.

Jill finished eating. She dropped her book into the heavy bag she always carted around, hoisted the bag to her shoulder, and picked up her tray. He stood, leaving his own tray on the table, and hurried around a dozen tables to intercept her. “Let me help you with that.”

She held on to the tray with both hands—rather tightly, so there was a short battle before he let go—and laughed. “Bill, thank you, but I’m completely capable of disposing of my own trash.” She did so.

He stayed close, hoping to ride the elevator up with her, but she said, “See you later,” and ducked into a bathroom.

Jill

THE NEW SCHOOLS

May 29

JILL ENTERED THE CONFERENCE ROOM on her floor. She pulled out a chair at the end of the long, gleaming hardwood table and linked her Q presentation to the projector.

Soon the participants began to show up.

Clarissa, skeleton thin, wore her trademark arm bangles, dangling earrings, and a tight, plain black business dress and jacket. She nodded to Jill and took a seat next to the Nepalese woman they had brought to Washington. Clarissa had been most vocal, within the Bank, about trying to stop Jill’s project. Jill had discovered that while she had been in the hospital, Clarissa had worked hard to weaken the project. She was still trying, mostly in covert ways, like slowing down the loan process. But Jill now had the power to add more loan processors.

At the last meeting, before Jill had gone into the hospital, she had said, “Local populations will regard these schools as propaganda tools.” This was only one of her many objections, most of which Jill found useful in strengthening her own position.

“Some people will,” Jill had responded. “Even though communities have to request the schools, not every community is a democracy. Let’s discuss possible strategies to deal with that and enable children to attend.” Those strategies were now incorporated into the vast documentation that all such projects amassed.

There was no question, now. This would be an almost celebratory meeting. The Children’s Houses were green-lighted, with the Bank’s full support. The United Nations, in their most recent Convention on the Rights of the Child, had included an International Right of Every Child to Literacy. Classbooks and libraries accessible via Q, after one learned to read, contained a world of information—science, literature, anything ever in print. Although licensing fees and payments to content providers were expensive, those fees, and all fees, no matter what was accessed, were presently funded via huge philanthropic institutions. In this world—this world, Jill thought, so slightly, yet so potently different from that world, her old world, keeping a child illiterate was almost universally regarded as child abuse. Increasingly, technology was available and in development that would cheaply and easily diagnose reading disabilities, and these technologies were embedded in classbooks. If a child was having difficulty, Q diagnosed it and brought forth a new strategy.

The main thing that classbooks could not do was provide the concrete materials that young children needed to manipulate in order to move information about the physical world into their developing minds. Hence, the Children’s Houses, with their full array of materials.

Clarissa had lately sent a paper to everyone on the committee implicating the questionable content of many of their supporters’ movies and games in promoting violent behavior because of mirror neurons, recently discovered.

Jill had been pleased. It may have offended or cooled some of their supporters, but it probably made some of them reexamine what they were doing. And it certainly hadn’t quelled any of their support. All the research in the mirror neuron paper was solid; it was true, and simply strengthened the scientific underpinnings of the venture. Part of the outstanding success of Montessori was attributable to the activation of mirror neurons; their function in learning was a vital component in the school’s pedagogy. Holographic children manifesting local race, language, and culture activated whenever a child touched a particular material, showing each child, nonverbally, how the exercise was done. They could not always count on having a trained teacher in the environment, but the directress had always been only a small, but cohering, part of a successful classroom. A new child in a mature classroom always saw the wide variety of what the other children were doing, independently, and imitated them. The holographic children provided this link in a school that might be full, in a single day, of children ranging in age from two-and-a-half to five, with no teacher. The school might have a few module-trained aides who were also learning about the materials, child development, and conflict resolution strategies. The most important thing the first children to encounter the environment had to learn was respect for the materials, and for each other. Clarissa’s objection made a very good teaching point.

The room was filling up. Hank, a middle-aged man with a jolly laugh that belied his critical eye and attention to the bottom line, hurried into the room. Jill greeted her international team—two Montessori experts she’d flown in, one from Holland and one from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The engineer-architect team from China, the computer engineers specializing in virtual environments from Los Angeles, and an Indian physician from the World Health Organization also arrived. Her boss, Farid Lahaoud, who was Lebanese, schmoozed and smiled.

The ubiquitous Bill Anderson—though on what departmental pretense he’d invited himself, she couldn’t imagine—stepped into the room and took a seat. He smiled at Jill and she responded with a brief nod, turning to greet representatives from several large philanthropic foundations.

With everyone seated, she thanked them for coming. “This project has required extraordinary cooperation among all of you, as well as years of hard work. You have united unique contributions from many disciplines. The learning environments you have created will bring cheap, effective, science-based education to many underserved children of the world.

“We have already processed loans for five thousand schools, worldwide. Many more are in the queue, and Ms. Danvers”—she nodded toward Clarissa—“is supervising that process. Her department is streamlining the process, due to the huge demand. Once more schools are up and running, we anticipate many more requests. I wish to thank Pacifico Akbay, from Manila, for his work in developing an excellent network to get this information out. We’ve had articles on Q and in all the major newspapers, worldwide, for over six months, as well as a very well-translated pod special.”

“What about the private sector?” asked Hoshi Katsu. “If you’ve seen my memo from last week, you’ll see that we are dealing with several different developments. We’ve had requests from Sydney, Kyoto, Beijing, London, and so on, for these schools. Generally, they don’t fit the parameters for determination of need.”

Jill said, “Dr. Lahaoud?”

Dr. Lahaoud stood and said, “The CEO of the nonprofit handling detailed coordination of development and distribution was delayed by weather in France, but should be here just as soon as the meeting is over.” Laughter. “However, we’re developing a sliding scale, so that those who can pay will, for the prefab school, or the plans, if they wish to give work to local manufacturers. The bookkeeping is rather complicated, but I can safely say that it looks as if we may not have to make as many loans as originally projected. Peripheral problems are arising in more urban environments regarding teachers’ unions—although there aren’t many unions serving preschool teachers—and schools already in business, which aren’t pleased about this competition. These are not our problems, but I just wanted to bring them to your attention.”

“I have a question about pedagogy,” said a slim young woman at one end of the table. “If this holographic technology is so powerful, how can we keep totalitarian, religious fundamentalists, or any party with a political agenda from using these schools for indoctrination?”

Jill responded, “I don’t believe we can. This is not a new idea, and no one can regulate the uses of technology. However, the holographic children are simply there to give children nonverbal cues about how the materials are to be used. The materials themselves are the compelling aspect of the environment, and they, by themselves, keep small children occupied and concentrating for hours on end. I’m not sure that most youngsters would sit around and listen to a holographic child talking about religion. But it’s an open question, a possibility. Yes?”

A woman from Tasmania said, “Lately there have been studies linking video games containing violence to increased actual violent actions by children and teens, and some of that income is being used to support the schools. Isn’t this a possible public relations problem?”

Jill said, “The Bank has not underwritten nor developed this visual technology. We’re merely licensed to use it, and we will use it only as it is laid out in the plans. I’ll let our Hollywood representative have a word.”

Jan, the holographic developer, wore a simple jacket over a black T-shirt. “We appreciate this latest research.” He nodded, and sat down.

The woman said, “Could anyone reprogram this?”

The young man said, “Not just anyone, but there are hackers everywhere. But what’s the worst they could do—make the holographic children throw things? Show them hitting other children? Kids see that every day.”

The woman frowned.

The man said, “I think what you’re worried about is the potency of these visual technologies. It’s very true that they carry a lot of import in the developing brain, from what I’ve learned while working on this project. But this technology is simply not limited to schools. It’s in arcades. Possibly, even, training camps for soldiers. This is just an innovative and positive use of it. We appreciate the opportunity to give back to the community in a positive way.”

After all the questions were answered, at least for the time being, Jill continued, “Your Q packet includes all the visualizations I will show, evaluation forms concerning performance of your own developmental modules and how well they are, in your opinion, interfacing with the other modules, a mechanism to provide critiques and feedback and discuss incorporation of the feedback into the 1.3 module currently in use, and, just as important, feedback from the thirty communities that have, in the past month, completed setup and have children in the schools. Tomorrow we will have workshops to go over the results and decide where to go from there.”

Dr. Lahaoud took the floor. “I want to congratulate all of you on a job well done. We have had an enthusiastic response to the schools, and very few problems with assembly in any of the communities. In your packet is a list of the questions and problems presented to the remote consultants. I’d like all of you to review your area in detail as to why the problems might have occurred, and propose solutions.”

Jill moved on to her favorite part: the visuals of the geodesic schools.

“Our first school was set up in Kathmandu. Already, the country is asking for more. In Nepal, the population is scattered and sparse; a village might consist of only a few families. If we can get our costs down, it would be nice to be able to have smaller versions in these communities.

“You see how easily the foundation is assembled by this crew of ten, in just one day. The rest of the building took another two weeks to finish, but that included all electrical and plumbing connections as well as installation of the holographic projection panels.

“Our team has, in the past six months, trained thirty ‘ambassadors,’ one of whom flew to Kathmandu and introduced the school, the theory, and how it functions to community leaders, adults who wished to work in the school, and the parents and children. She was there for a week. She evaluated the learning style of each perspective teacher or aide and gave them appropriate orientation and learning modules, which included written material, theory, videos, interactive material, and holographic training situations. Most applicants competently completed self-administered tests and were then able to improve their performance. She spent four days in the classroom with the children and the adults. She introduced them to the concept of the holographic children. The developmental feedback included in every piece of equipment, coded to each individual child in the environment, seemed to work particularly well.”

The Montessori consultant from Tanzania asked, “Can the children now turn off the holographic child when they no longer need it?”

Jan said, “Yes, we added a small red square on the shelf in front of each piece of equipment, so the child can do that herself.”

The Tanzanian professor said, “We will continue to monitor, through videos, how well the materials record, how long they are used, which children are using them, and how well the materials are doing in helping children refine a particular motor or sensory skill. This will also help pinpoint learning styles and learning problems, such as dyslexia or more subtle problems, including mental health issues and areas of giftedness.” She smiled. “Several grad students are doing very well in devising evaluative protocol as they monitor and compare.”

The WHO doctor said, “How did the parents and children respond to the vaccinations and the blood and urine tests?”

Jill skipped to the physical exam portion of the video. “There were plenty of technicians and nurses in Kathmandu who volunteered to help, and we gave parents the option of going through the steps themselves with their child. The children didn’t seem to mind the blood prick on their finger or the vaccinations; I guess the technology has done away with any pain. Most of the children found the vision and hearing tests quite attractive. The toilets in the schools, of course, collect information constantly and Q remarkable or anomalous results to your centers.”

Her molecular engineering expert from India, who had worked on using the latest developments in nanotechnology, impatiently tapped her pen on the table. Jill smiled and invited her to give her Q-School presentation. She hoped it might put a bug in people’s minds; it was actually, in her own mind, the next phase of her project, but the most controversial one, because nanotechnology, strictly and exhaustively defined in legal jargon, was a hot-button issue, along with genetic engineering, in most of the world.

“Hello. I am Dr. Singh.” Her long black hair reflected the glow of the visual projections.

“Please understand, first, that what may seem a radical vision to you is simply my contribution to a peace think tank I’m currently involved in. While it is respectful of children, who now have an internationally agreed-upon right to education, it is not respectful of the propensity of governments, municipalities, religions, or individuals to control, as they still can and do, the intellectual and emotional growth of their citizens, whether by design, ignorance, unwillingness to fund education, or fear. I think of this as being one component, and perhaps the most powerful, of a campaign against war itself, which feeds on ignorance, poverty, slavery, and individual powerlessness.

“Imagine a seed, about the size of a soybean, stuffed with artificial DNA”— in quick succession she showed slides of the composition of the “seeds,” with sidebars about how each stage of growth worked, adding that they were all in the Q—“shipped to any place of need in the world. Where necessary, all applicable property rights will have been procured.”

Jill thought that there would be a lot of questions about how the activists who now dropped classbooks all over the world might well get hold of these seeds, but everyone was absorbed by the presentation.

Dr. Singh showed a time-lapse video of the seed actually growing, which, she said with a smile, had been filmed in an undisclosed location. “Once exposed to sun, or rain, or cold, or heat—for it will be equipped to respond and thrive in all kinds of conditions, depending on what it encounters, much like we are—it will begin to grow. It will put down supporting roots, which draw building nutrients from the soil, adhere to solid rock or concrete and grow using solar energy, or elevate the ground floor above an area prone to seasonal flooding.

“Through the conversion of solar energy into sugars, it produces the carbon nanotubes that will, in a matter of weeks, turn into a classroom in Afghanistan, in Darfur, or in any American inner city, small town, or rural community. They are merely an extension of the present international Montessori network, but they will reach into hard-to-serve areas.

“Parents will like them, because they’ll keep children occupied. I would like to think that governments will welcome them, for there are no politics involved in learning the correct scientific names of the plants, insects, and animals in your environment, or learning the signs for the phonemes, which make up one’s language and using hand-eye coordination exercises to activate the neuronal pathways of memory.

“Certainly, I can imagine armies hacking at such disturbing manifestations. But my schools will be very difficult to destroy. They will grow back quickly. They will know how close other classrooms are, and how many are needed for the local population, so there will not be too many, or too few. They are, actually bulletproof, and their irising doors shut when stimulated by the pheromones of rage or fear, keeping out those who might seek to kidnap or rape the children inside, at which time Q alerts the necessary authorities. At the same time, the community will have access to information about the schools, and the panels are transparent so that no one need fear that anything untoward is happening to their child inside. Each of you has a copy of this presentation in your packet to peruse at your convenience; an open-source forum is also up and running so that we can incorporate innovations. For instance, we’ve had a lot of questions about toileting, and you can see the present provisions for help and supervision.

“We can also set up inexpensive self-teaching modules that afford literacy, mathematics, and Internet access to vast portions of the world, and help them understand that the possibilities and opportunities that we take for granted are available. If temporary brain plasticity for adults is eventually developed, so much the better. Mindful evolution seems a far better alternative than mindless conflict.”

She sat down to applause, although Jill noticed that some attendees looked pensive.

Jan, the virtual designer, said, “I can think of places in this country that need these schools. For instance, Los Angeles.”

Jill said, “Thank you, Dr. Singh. There is an open forum on our website for discussion of issues raised by this concept. There are many hurdles to its creation, if that ever occurs, and many refinements after that, I’m sure.”

The meeting ended on a high note, Dr. Lahaoud congratulated her on a job well done, and Bill Anderson slipped from the room like a ghost.

With Several Characters

June 1

IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING, early.

Like a loosed arrow, Whens ran up the stairs, lodging his bare feet into hollows worn in the wood stairs. “Mama,” he shouted, when he reached the landing, and shoved open her door, which stuck, with both hands and all his might.

She was a small lump on a huge bed, a distant, flower-covered mountain ridge, and she did not move.

He took off like a rocket—he was a rocket—and landed on top of her, clinging, now a small crab, arms and legs clasped tight. “MOM!”

She pushed her arms from beneath the sheet, grabbed him around the waist. “Get in here! Where are your clothes?”

“Downstairs. I took them off,” he said proudly. “Are you crying?”

Jill sniffed and wiped her face with her palms. “Yes.”

“Are you sad?”

“I was. But I’m better now.”

“What were you sad about?”

“My mother and my father.”

“They’re gone.”

“Yes. I miss them.”

“I miss them too.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I miss Grandma Dance especially.” She was surprised at that, but she had been showing him some old family pictures.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“I tried.”

“But what happened?”

“I spilled the milk when I opened it.”

“It’s a whole gallon. It was pretty heavy.”

“Yes.”

“And then your pajamas were covered with milk and you took them off.”

“They were all wet. When is Abbie coming?”

“Pretty soon, I think. Let’s get dressed and clean up the milk.”

The kitchen, indeed, was a mess. “Tell you what,” said Jill. “Let’s pick out the Spacies first.” She and Whens, down on all fours, began fishing them out of milk and mushy cereal.

Jill had about five in one hand, and she sat back, crossed her legs, and considered them.

“Mommy, you’re not helping,” said Whens.

“I’m thinking.”

She’d never had much to do with Spacies. She had entered this timestream when she was seventeen, a little too old for cereal toys. Brian and Megan, she knew, had loved them in their version of the sixties, which was different than Jill’s. The entire moon colony collection—complete!—was arranged on the kitchen windowsill, interspersed with other dusty knickknacks. There was even a tiny multinational flag, which featured the paradigm-changing photo of the Earth taken from the moon. Brian had told Jill that the flag had been included in just a few cereal boxes; it was rare and valuable.

Whens stuck his hand in every new cereal box and grabbed the cellophane pouch as soon as it came from the store. She used to tell him not to do it, but now she picked her battles more carefully, thus saving herself from complete exhaustion and the embarrassment of issuing ineffectual edicts.

The wet Spacies had an imperative feel to them. She had certain needs when they touched her skin. She had to be imagining these sensations—yet, they were quite powerful. For instance, she had to learn to read. She had to become proficient in spatial and mathematical concepts. And, no problem, she could. She was human.

She had a sudden, dizzying vision of a world filled with geniuses of all kinds, a world in which change and progress in improving health, extending life, empowering marginalized people, and in expanding the artistic abilities and possibilities and individuality of everyone moved rapidly. Instead of just fight or flight, there was a new option: define and discuss.

And there were no wars.

Ah, utopia. Her particular silliness.

She stared at the tiny figures in her hand, descendants of those that Brian had kept since he was a kid, grouped around a pot of salmon-colored geraniums on the kitchen windowsill. She went to the sink, pushed aside a china collie, and saw several astronauts, of varying heights, wearing big helmets and puffy suits. A dark woman wearing a white coat—a physician, perhaps, or a scientist, stood next to a short, blond man playing a flute. But there were many more, along with space vehicles and a few things from the Mars Colony set. She leaned over the kitchen sink and studied them. They were quite detailed.

She felt more urges, more necessities.

She had to contribute to the community. If she was not a part of a community, she had to create one. An altruistic one.

She stepped back from the sink. Altruism. What was that, anyway? She remembered endless marijuana-fueled college discussions about it. Did it exist, was it possible? Given that humans were naturally, when pressed, fairly vicious animals with the advantage of forethought and the ability to raise vast sums of money and armies and to invent fearsome weapons? Beat swords into plowshares, indeed. Generally, plows were melted down for bullets.

Not in the world of Spacies.

Spacies, of course, were not just about space, about The Future, anymore. There were teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists. They all came with stories and scenarios. They were, Jill realized, a propaganda tool.

They rather reminded her, she thought with a chill, of the Infinite Game Board.

She remembered throwing a fit when she’d realized that the Game Board had been left in Dallas.

Coupled with the harassing a few weeks ago …

She’d thought about calling the police, and then wondered what the hell she would say. She had, of course, put it out of her mind. She was so very good at that.

How would anyone else even know about the Device?

Her parents, she thought, with a brief, happy thrill. But no, it certainly hadn’t been them. She recalled the two other men in the hospital—if they really had been there.

She continued to stare at the Spacies in her hand, trying to grab and follow that slippery thread. All those memories were so damned vague, so dreamlike …

“Mom!”

She rinsed the milky Spacies and put them on the counter. “Okay, now. You tell me. What’s the best way to clean this up, do you think?”

* * *

Whens finished sopping up milk and cereal with a rag, which he’d rinsed in the bucket of water he’d asked his mother to fix for him. The floor was still a little wet. He looked at it while he dried his hands on his T-shirt. Well, a lot wet. Puddles. But it was clean.

“Mom,” he yelled. But of course, she didn’t answer. You had to go find her. She never answered yells unless you made them sound like you might die if she didn’t come.

He took the Spacies from the counter and stuffed them into his pockets. Then he grabbed the handle of the bucket and dragged it to the back door, opened it, and dragged the bucket out on the porch. It spilled when it got caught on the threshold, but at least everything went out onto the wood and drained between the boards. There was some cereal left behind, and he squished it through the cracks.

There. That was done.

He left the bucket out there, tipped over, and looked into the yard. It would be fun to play on the new swing set. He started down the steps, but then remembered.

The attic. She had told him to come back.

He had gone back once or twice, but she hadn’t been there.

Maybe she would be there this morning.

He came back inside, and carefully shut the screen door so that it wouldn’t slam. He crept over to the door to the attic, which was on the other side of the kitchen.

“Whens? What are you doing?” Her voice came from the library.

“Playing.”

“Is the floor clean?”

“Yes.”

She fell silent.

He managed to get the attic door open, just a little bit, without it creaking. Then he slipped through into the long, dark, narrow staircase with its haunted stacks of old magazines.

He continued on, his bare feet making no sound.

The second floor landing was sunny; someone had left the door to the hall open. He stretched past the opening like a cartoon character in case Mom was upstairs now, and passed the other landmarks—the fascinating metal gas station with a car lift you cranked that his mother said might cut him, and a deflated basketball. Mom said Aunt Megan kept it because she used to be on the basketball team.

Finally, he reached the top landing. It was so hot.

He turned the funny oval doorknob and entered the attic, where the heat was even more intense. He had to be careful, now, not to step on something sharp, or anything that might break.

He liked the gloomy light and the dancing dust. He went over to the trunk, which was where he had been when he’d first seen Grandma, and climbed up on it. Then he climbed down and found the old book he kept there, My Father’s Dragon, got back up, crossed his legs, and opened it. He loved the story, and the pictures. He knew it by heart.

He turned a few pages, then heard, “Hi.”

She was sitting on the floor, cross-legged. He thought she was beautiful. She wore shorts and a T-shirt. “Want to play checkers again?”

“Yeah.” He jumped off the trunk and got the old checkerboard and checkers, in its ragged, taped box, from the place next to the trunk where he kept his favorite attic stuff so far. He already had a butterfly kite, a rusty gear wheel, and his dragon book.

“I get black,” she said.

“I get to go first.”

* * *

Jim drove, Megan sat next to him, and Abbie was in the backseat. The car was stopped at a light on Fourteenth Street.

“I’m just not comfortable leaving Abbie there,” Jim said, as the light turned green.

“Shhh.”

“She’s got her headphones on.”

“I don’t care. What’s that thing she’s playing with?”

“Some classbook thing from school. Which reminds me, we’re supposed to have a conference with her teacher about it like last month. Something about its new capabilities.”

Megan sighed.

Jim started up again. “Your sister’s a nutcase.”

“I can’t believe that you just said that. It’s not like you.”

“I’m sorry, but Abbie is my baby. I feel uncomfortable about it. Why can’t she stay with Brian and Cindy?”

“I told you. They’re coming over to the house too. For the weekend.”

“Then it’s the house! It’s just so kooky there.”

“Jim! Stop it. You don’t get out enough.”

He smiled. “All right. But what’s all this about calling Stevie ‘Whens’?”

“He named himself.”

“Maybe Abbie will be ‘Little Wheres’ when we get back.”

“Hon, I have to go to this meeting. But if you’d like to stay here with Abbie, you can.”

“Travel magazine will really pay me well for the Cuba piece. We could use the money. But … that weird old house.”

“It’s a lovely house,” Megan declared.

“Sacred.”

“You bet.”

“Haunted.”

“By us. By Mom and Dad.”

“I’m just nervous. You know, I’m not sure if I’ve been away from Abbie this long before. I’ll probably cry the day she goes off to kindergarten.”

Megan reached over and squeezed Jim’s shoulder. “She’ll be fine. And Cuba will be fabulous.” She snapped her fingers in a Latin rhythm and nodded her head as if to music. “We will drink mojitos and dance the rumba, long into the night. We will be like crazed mating tropical birds! We will drink strong coffee and it will make us fly!”

“That will be interesting,” said Jim. “I’ve rarely seen you drink anything stronger than a beer. Don’t they have San Pellegrino water in Havana?”

“I thought you were flying in a plane,” said Abbie from the backseat. “I hope I see some ghosts in that kooky house while you’re gone.”

* * *

Cindy arrived at Halcyon House wearing shorts, a tank top, and work boots.

“Hey!” she said, finding Jill in the kitchen. Cindy’s straw-colored hair was hidden beneath a long-billed cap, and she set her work gloves and goggles on one of the stacks of Washington Posts on the kitchen table. She pulled out a chair, sat down, and crossed her long, tan legs at the ankles. “Got any decent coffee?”

“Coming right up.” Jill ground some Kenya AA and poured it into a press pot, then shoved newspapers aside and set the pot, a green mug, sugar, and cream next to Cindy. “What’s Brian doing with the kids?”

“He’s taking them all to the zoo.” Whens had spent the night at Brian and Cindy’s with his cousins.

“Good idea. Did Nate come?” Nate was one of Brian’s employees.

“He’s in the truck. Smoking a cigarette.”

Jill left the room and returned with a notebook. “I made a list.”

“The front step, first,” said Cindy, pressing the coffee and pouring a fragrant cup. She added two large spoonfuls of sugar and a little more; stirred. “If I have to cut a new center stringer, the step might take all day. I’ll have to take the whole thing apart.”

“I really appreciate it, Cindy. You don’t have to do all this.”

“I like construction work. I almost prefer it to my own job, with all the politics and hoops. Plus,” she flashed a wicked grin, “Brian will appreciate what I do a lot more after today.”

“Well, thanks. I can’t believe the place will be ready for a big party in two weeks.”

Cindy finished her coffee and stood up. “That is pushing it. But at least they’ll be able to get in the house without breaking a leg. How many did you invite?”

“About a hundred.”

Cindy stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

“Add up people from Georgetown, the Bank, family, neighbors—comes to about a hundred. I hired a caterer.”

“God, I hope so.”

Jill ran to answer a knock on the front door.

Three women stood on the porch, looking around doubtfully. Their names—Jonquil, Evelyn, and Carol—were embroidered on their shirt pockets. “You must be from Maids-to-Order. I’m Jill. Come on in. I’ve got a list. You’ll mainly be doing the first floor. Don’t worry about the windows today. We’ll do them tomorrow.”

The women looked at each other. Finally, Jonquil said, “This is a pretty big place.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Evelyn added.

Jill folded her arms. “So, what do you want?”

“Time and a half,” said Carol.

“Okay,” said Jill, wishing she’d gotten bids on the job instead of calling a number blind.

Soon the house hummed with activity. Jill switched between a chain saw and an electric trimmer to reveal, after many years of shaded obscurity, the handsome, wraparound front porch. She liberated lush yellow climbing roses from strangling vines. She pulled the rotting remains of a fan-shaped trellis from a thicket of brambles. After thinning heavy flower-bearing hydrangeas and ripping more vines from trees, she cultivated the front flower bed with a hoe and a shovel, digging up and dividing big clumps of canna lily bulbs. She carefully spared a patch of fiery red poppies and freed spears of yellow and violet glads. She discovered a stand of tall, old-fashioned hollyhocks blooming unseen in the jungle. She was deeply glad to find living evidence of her father’s labors still thriving.

As she worked, she thought about her Bank plan to propagate schools as if they were plants, letting her mind run wild. Children in the most politically unstable parts of the world, which was where these schools were most needed, would have to be protected from those who might prey on them. She yanked out huge hanks of weeds as she envisioned how pheromone detectors, or cameras using biometrics, might trigger the emission of a chemical that would put the adults to sleep, instantly, yet leave the children awake and able to escape. Then, the pheromones, or whatever, would go to work on those adults, transforming them into paragons of humanity. She laughed out loud now and then as her vision became more and more audacious, impossible, and illegal. But later, she would recruit people to do hard research on the more possible options.

The saw rang throughout the day, and a myriad of power tools roared, popped, hissed, and buzzed. Constantly mopping sweat from her face, Jill worked mulch, fertilizer, and black dirt into the beds around the porch.

By seven, the front porch steps had been repaired and painted, flowers glowed beneath the mist of sprinklers, a haystack-sized pile of tree branches and weeds stood next to the mulcher, and the grand old house, now actually visible from the sidewalk, drew admiring comments from people on their evening stroll.

“The new steps make the rest of the porch look kind of shabby,” said Cindy, as she, Jill, and Nate rested on lawn chairs out front, drinking cold beers.

“The whole porch needs to be sanded and painted.” Nate lit a cigarette.

“That would be wonderful,” said Jill. “Thanks so much for the offer.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Nate said, holding up both hands in front of him.

“I think we have some down time this week,” said Cindy. “We’ll put you on it. You can at least get going on the porch.”

“All that damned gingerbread.” Nate flicked ashes on the lawn. “I think there’s a law against it now.”

Cindy’s phone rang. She pulled it out and smiled. “Brian. Maybe the next time I’ll answer it.” She stood and stretched. “Feels good to do something besides talk to uncaring bureaucrats all day.”

“Yeah,” said Nate. He lit another cigarette and slouched deeper in the chair. He stared up at the gingerbread. “I feel completely invigorated.”

* * *

Although Jill’s body ached all over from the unaccustomed work of the day, she was mentally alert even at ten o’clock that night. Whens had eagerly chosen to stay all night with his cousins; Elmore and the Lavender Lady had gone on a no-children trip to some kind of fantasy Caribbean place with three-hundred-dollar-an-hour spa treatments that Tracy, thought Jill rather meanly, might benefit from.

Jill was lying on the library couch reading a book about how history can just jump. It examined the genesis of several huge historical conflicts using an unusual lens, that of statistics. The author claimed that many such events were completely unpredictable.

Right, thought Jill. Like my life jumped. In 1970 and 1963 at the same time. Like history was playing a dissonant music in her head, two lines, two instruments. Two sets of memories.

And this house was where they converged.

She threw the book on the floor and got up. Walked around restlessly. Went down the hall past the stairway. Flipped on the light.

Here. This large back sunroom. Her mother’s Montessori classroom during the sixties.

And, not. That is, her mother hadn’t even been here after 1963, a year after they moved here from Germany. She’d opened her school, but soon afterward was gone. Brian and Megan probably didn’t even remember it at all. Although … Jill closed her eyes; tried to remember what their stories were, for theirs differed so starkly from hers—and perhaps, she realized, even from one another’s. She wondered what the results would be if she had Brian and Megan write time lines of their lives. They all shared Hawaii, and part of Germany, but not anything past November 21, 1963. Perhaps the Montessori materials had remained in the sunroom, for a time. Perhaps Sam had quietly closed it and cleared everything away, and this space, which held so many other memories for Jill, had just been Brian and Megan’s playroom, their rainy-day room.

That was all it was, now, and an unused playroom at that, with its storybooks, rocking horse, and blocks. Jill darkened the room and went back to the summer-warm kitchen. She hoisted the windows higher, turned on the overhead fan.

The summer night pulsed with sound. A car drove past, then another; their headlights illuminated the culvert briefly. She remembered watching headlights curve across her bedroom ceiling at night, fascinated. Emerge, grow, retreat, vanish. Pattern repeated with each passing car. Funny what kids noticed.

She didn’t blame her therapist for thinking she was crazy. Maybe she was. She didn’t think so, though. There was another explanation. And the secret was hidden here, in this house. Probably in many forms. She just had to seek them out. Explore.

The thought of exploring made her nauseous. The thought of not exploring made her anxious.

Her restlessness converged in the reality of Whens being away from her. She missed him with every fiber of her being. She took her phone from her pocket; put it back. No. Don’t foist your own weird anxiety on him. Let him learn to feel comfortable in his own newly split world. Right now he was dead asleep, or keeping Cindy and Brian awake along with his cousins.

She smiled. Brian had told her that he’d overheard Whens talking to Abbie about a ghost in the house. Whens was fearless. He’d walk right up to a ghost and try to grab hold of it. Shake the stuffing out of it if he could.

Well, then. There was the old Brian, and the new Brian. The old Megan, and the new Megan. The old life, and the new life. Maybe her job was not to try to blend them together, or even to make sense of it all.

Whatever had happened, however it had happened, there was that world, and this world. The other world, and this world. Like a lens that the optometrist puts in front of your eyes. Is this better, or (flip) this?

Do it again, she always told the optometrist. Again.

Was the other world better? Or this world?

And she found that she too, did not really know. Her memories of the other world were fading. It was no wonder that her brother and sister, who had been younger, seemed not to recall it at all.

Or maybe double, triple, quadruple time would be common in that place known as The Future. Perhaps time would be woven of a harmony of beings and worlds and times, all playing simultaneously.

The house itself was evocative, a living, breathing being. Her parents had bought it for its spaciousness, its price (cheap, because of its condition), its location, and for the multiracial neighborhood. And right now, she could almost feel it changing, around her. Coming to life again, after being abandoned for so many years. Stirring in the night wind. She heard a sound, outside, and jumped, then laughed. Just night sounds. She thought she smelled cigarette smoke, like the damned Chesterfields her mother used to smoke, and suspected the smell was still being exuded from the couch cushions after all these years.

Her dad loved jazz. Not in the past, but, stubbornly now, in the present. He was alive.

And, in fact, his entire jazz collection was right here, from the late 1930s on—here, in the living room, with its comfortable mixture of high modern and chintz. In fact—she squatted down—one record was sticking out of the bottom row, as if it had recently been played. She pulled it out.

A seventy-eight rpm record. Jimmie Lunceford, a big smile on his face, was on the cover, wearing a pencil-thin mustache. She had no idea who he was, but, apparently, he played saxophone.

Jill mused over the stereo setup, which was on an adjoining shelf, for a few minutes, flipped some switches, and moved the turntable control to “78.”

She pulled the record from the cardboard cover; it was further encased in a brown paper sleeve. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and set it on the shelf while she put the needle on the record. While she listened to “White Heat,” she unfolded the paper and began to read:

It may be a quaint concept now, but in the olden days when radio was king and television was something that you could read about in the pages of Popular Mechanics, dance bands occupied the airwaves after prime time (after the ten o’clock news— fifteen minutes), and occasionally before prime time.

Thus it occurred that casting about on the radio dial for something to listen to about 7:30 P.M. on a warm summer evening, I was electrified by a swing band playing breakneck music in perfect pitch, harmony, and tempo, apparently without effort. At the time I was not a popular music fan; being involved only in high school band and orchestra. In fact, near the end of the school year (eighth grade), the girls’ fad was passing around notebooks with numbered pages in which you entered your name on a numbered line on the first page and each subsequent page would ask you to respond with your favorite color, dessert, teacher, girl (blush, blush), boy, hangout, school subject, dance band, flower and so on to the end of the book. The main objective, I suppose, was to put you on record on the favorite girl/boy question. The question that stumped me, though, was favorite dance band. I had never paid much attention, so I would copy someone else’s answer and then forget it the next time.

That was the situation that fateful Sunday evening I happened upon Jimmie Lunceford playing from the Lodgemont Casino. (Much later I realized that the radio announcer, dispatched from his New York studio, was striving to pronounce “Larchmont Casino.”) I discovered that the name of the piece was, appropriately, “White Heat.” I had another shock when I heard his theme song, “Jazznocracy.” Just as fast, just as intricate, just as flawless, just as awesome. I was smitten, never to look back.

I rushed downtown to the Capitol Confectionary (Jimmie the Greek’s soda fountain), the school hangout, to bring my friends up to date, and to make sure that we were together, comfortably ensconced the next Sunday at 7:30 to listen and exchange thoughts on what we heard. There was at that time no affordable equipment to record radio broadcasts or live music. A few rich people bought studio recorders, some of whom had luggable versions built to record dance bands live, but just the record blanks would be beyond our resources. We did have shellac records, seventy-five cents and forty-five cents, seventy-eight rpm; Lunceford, fortunately, was forty-five cents, not a deal breaker. A dud on the second side, however, was a deal breaker for a prospective freshman.

Within our group, however, I think that we managed to buy all of Jimmie’s output for that critical year or two. Our source, at the time, was Lyons Music in downtown Dayton. The store manager (and usually the entire staff) was a lovely young lady named Peggy who was a rabid Ellington fan. She was always pushing Ellington’s latest on us, while we were pushing Lunceford’s latest on her, with no movement in either direction. As an interesting sidelight, the Lyons store was the nearest full-service record store to Dayton’s west side, at the time mostly black population. And which band did the black customers favor? Glenn Miller, that’s who! AND OVERWHELMINGLY!

As our affinity grew, along with our nascent record collections, we met frequently for the purpose of entertaining one another with our latest “finds,” from the likes of Goodman, Shaw, yes, Ellington, Billie Holiday, Claude Thornhill, Raymond Scott Quintet, Wingy Manone, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Jimmy McPartland and the like, culminating in an early winter meeting on a Saturday night in our basement for the purpose of formally organizing the Squounch Club. I had a Wilcox-Gay Recordio player that had no speakers, but it did have an AM transmitter (FM not yet invented), which I could tune to a dead spot on the radio spectrum so I could tune it in on any radio in a city block radius for clear reception. Certainly one of the earliest examples of off-the-shelf open format wireless transmission!1 Refreshments provided by the group assembled consisted of a pony of POC (Known locally as “Pride of Cleveland” or “Piss on Cincinnati”) and a roaster pan of my mother’s baked beans. The meeting got under way with a playing of both “White Heat” and “Jazznocracy,” a brisk invocation by the Lord High Squounch “e saga dah” and equally brisk response “e saga dah” by the assembled multitude (three). The organizing principles were adopted as read:

1. Lord High Squounch for Life: Leonard Gaver

2. Official band: Jimmie Lunceford

3. Official refreshment: POC Beer

4. Guiding principle: No women.

After word got around of our organizing principles, item 4 was changed by acclimation at the next meeting to read, “Closing of official meetings of the Squounch Club shall be conducted by Lord High Squounch Gaver to the strains of Artie Shaw’s ”Gloomy Sunday.” Other than saving a potion of “frumentatious amber nectar of the gods” (POC) for the final “e saga dah,” no further ceremonial changes were permitted. Needless to say, the original Prop 4 was never heard from again.

The record ended. The needle bounced back and forth on an ungrooved portion of shellac. Jill turned it over to hear “White Heat,” and continued to read:

In the ensuing years, Lord High Leonard became a high lord many times, and inducted many new members, both male and female, without inflicting any apparent damage upon the body Squounch. I can’t say that I regret any time I spent with the Squounch Club, at home or on the road.

Jill smiled, intrigued. She played both sides again, several times, straining to hear something that would jog her memory. The tune was very familiar. He must have played it hundreds of times. But what about it had been so important to him? Was it just this memory? Or was there more?

She even had a faint thought of getting the sax back from Brian and trying to learn the intricate phrasings; perhaps that was one way to get into the mind of her dad. She put the record back in its paper sleeve with care, folded her father’s words into the cardboard sleeve, and returned it to the shelf, tapping it in firmly to line up with the other records. Sam’s World War II memoirs, which he called “In War Times,” were somewhere in the attic.

But no. Brian had taken them home with him too.

She picked up a hinged photo holder that was on the bookshelf. She had seen the facing pictures a thousand times: her father in his Army uniform; her mother in hers. She stared at the pictures for a long minute, and when she closed her eyes the afterimage remained.

She set the picture back on the shelf. Why hadn’t she read the notebooks, after all these years? Because she was too busy? That had been her excuse. She’d wanted a nice long time in which to sort them out properly.

Right. Such luxuries of time were just a fantasy. She had been afraid to read them.

When her father was still here, it would have seemed like prying. He’d never invited her to delve into his life then. And after he left, the pressure of having been the cause of both parents’ disappearance had made her want to forget. Why relive such devastation, such deep heartbreak?

But—and now she was angry, as she strode here and there in the living room, the screened porch, the library, trying to find a flashlight—if her parents had known about the possibility, why had they not explained it? Cautioned her? Cautioned them all? Thrown the damned thing in the fire? She, Megan, and Brian had found the Infinite Game Board under that loose board in the attic floor. And played with it when they were kids. Kept it all secret from their parents, as their parents had tried to keep it secret from them. No wonder they were all crazy. Megan had her Perfect Life, where everything was under control, all mapped out; Brian was a recovering alcoholic, and Jill had rushed to get married, have a baby, and work her fingers to the bone, all as if it would make some kind of difference, as if she were paying some kind of weird penance, racking up points in the Game Board world. Her parents themselves had lived two lives—maybe more!

“Who knows!” said Jill, throwing up her hand, then heading for the junk drawer in the kitchen. After all, was it possible for one teenage girl to thwart a planned presidential assassination? Nancy, her therapist, had simply filed that one under “Megalomania, extreme.”

And she was right! Jill yanked open a drawer, and it fell to the floor with a crash. There. She reached down and snatched up the old flashlight that rolled across the kitchen floor.

She had been funneled down a path as surely as a marble, in their old Mouse Trap game; was released by a gear after a roll of the dice, rushed through the open bathtub drain, zigzagged down those crazy stairs, and lowered the trap on the opponent’s plastic mouse.

No, she had not arrived in Dallas on her own. But how? What was that mysterious gap; why did her memory not function as it should? Damn it all! She decided to try the attic. There might be something there to help her remember.

The damned flashlight was dead. She jettisoned the spent batteries in the trash can and poked around in other drawers for new batteries, increasingly worried about Dad’s papers. Sure, Brian had taken some boxes, but maybe there were more. She would call him tomorrow first thing and tell him to bring them all back! They belonged in the house.

She paused. That wasn’t what was really bothering her, was it? Mere possession of the past?

The Infinite Game Board, from which all of this trouble, this strangeness, this sense of her life drifting into two separate parts, was safely gone, left in that previous world.

She was worried because those journals might have information about how it had been made.

Why did she think this?

She found a cache of ancient batteries, tried several, and finally found some that worked. She waved the resulting beam across the dining room, yanked open the attic door, and began to climb.

She thought the journals might have classified information because her parents were so very strange. Because Gypsy Myra, in her comic, had created just the sort of history-changing, time-altering Device that had landed Jill, in real life, in the nuthouse, and because the story of Gypsy Myra, the Madwoman of Time, had come from the Game Board.

Mom and Dad had known about the Game Board—the Device: the word popped into her mind, from that phone call. The Device. They had all used it, once, played some kind of game that involved an airplane. She thought. It was all so damned hazy. And what about their friend—what was his name? Winklemeyer? Wink? Hadn’t he been here, that fateful night on the screen porch when they had all played The Game, when they had all flown in that airplane? Even Brian, though he was, at that time, stationed in Vietnam?

The attic stairs, narrow to begin with, were further restricted by objects people had placed on them, no doubt intending to carry them up to the top when time permitted. Jill passed a pile of calendars from 1921, showing the phases of the moon, as she had done countless times; they were a part of her childhood, seemingly immovable. The door to the third floor was open again, but it didn’t matter; she had neither heat nor air-conditioning on. She was short of breath by the time she reached the attic door and pulled it open.

Jill flipped on the light switch and moved her flashlight beam around to augment the resulting dim light. She stepped forward tentatively, ignoring enticing boxes and strange, old toys that had belonged to a previous generation of owners. They’d had a loose rule that the area at the top of the stairs, inside the door, be kept reasonably clear. Despite that, she had to execute a slow, balanced ballet past and over an astonishing variety of objects that she and her siblings had just tossed in.

She stumbled over a dark object, caught herself on the back of a chair, and headed toward a looming landmark—the five-foot-high urn. Once, they had dropped Megan into it. Of course, they’d asked her if she’d like to be inside it first, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to her. They had to move chairs next to it, and then she and Brian helped Megan climb in. Once inside, Megan decided she did not like it and screamed with incredible shrillness and power; it was a wonder the urn hadn’t shattered. They were yelling at her to hold up her arms and they would pull her out when their mother burst into the attic. She and Brian were sentenced to their rooms. Megan got to go to High’s for an ice cream cone.

Jill sat down on a rolled-up carpet and laughed at the memory.

After an hour of poking around, her fears had diminished, as if she had awakened from a bad dream—just what she needed, after all. She was acting like an idiot. It was all just an aftermath of her crack-up. She’d call Brian in the morning about the notebooks.

Running her light around, she noticed something odd: a checkerboard, all set up. She went closer, treading on unknown objects, some of which crunched ominously, and saw that it was dust free.

Who had been up here, playing checkers, especially in this heat? Oh, right. Abbie and Whens.

Then she saw a ragged white envelope on the floor, its contents partially spilled out.

She picked it up, squinted, and trained the flashlight on her find, which she fanned out in her hand: black-and-white photographs.

On the back of the pictures, they were identified, in her father’s handwriting, in pencil. “Germany, 1945. Biergarten, Gladbach. Soldiers in a jeep.”

Motherlode!

There was one photograph of a courtyard—tables set up, empty, waiting chairs, a bar. She heard her father’s voice as if he were sitting next to her:

“It turns out that the castle near Mönchengladbach is the mansion of Joseph Goebbels who unwittingly donated a magnificent couch to our company day-room that I told you about the other day. Reyhdt is the sister-city or suburb to Gladbach, there being no separation between them. I didn’t visit either the Volkspark or Goebbels’s mansion, so I wasn’t aware that the ‘mansion’ is actually an ancient castle. Not surprised, just not aware.

“Neither was I aware that an American general had taken possession and was assigning sleeping accommodations to honored guests; again, not surprised.

“The Volkspark also provided picnic tables, picnic benches and the bar and bar foot rail for our C Company Biergarten in the brick-walled garden behind our apartment building. The summer house served as the back of the bar, with the cooler, an old-fashioned arrangement of a barrel on the bar lined with beer coils wrapped around the inside perimeter of the barrel and the barrel interior filled with cracked ice. Under the bar was the barrel on tap, open coolers holding Coke, Rhine wine, pink Moselle Champagne, Krefeld cognac, and schnapps, on ice. We lit the garden with fairy lights and provided music with a record player and records (LPs) provided by Army Special Services, through speakers provided by our newfound German friend at that radio station at Koln (Cologne) I told you about.

“We sent a truck to Maastrich every week. The brewery there made wonderful beer. The deal was that we got to buy a liter per week for each guy in our organization as long as we had empty barrels to change for their full barrels. We went around Gladbach liberating glasses and mugs, beer cooler and piping and oh-those-precious barrels from bombed-out Biergartens. We kept finding more empties. By the time we left in August we were drawing 2,800 liters per week.

“When we got notice that we were leaving MG, the battalion club got panicky and we picked up their booze rations too. We had about a truckload of beer that we took to the transit camp. We had a guard posted. Each tent got two bottles of wine and cognac a day; pretty good stock. We still ran out a couple of days before V-E Day and were forced to celebrate by standing in a mile-long line to get two cans of beer, then getting back at the end of the line while we drank them.

“That was the beginning and end of our Biergarten. We had $400 in the kitty at closing time and gave it to Dick Behrens to take home and bring to camp where we were supposed to reassemble in Texas after our R & R. We never got there and he used it to get married. He was very apologetic but nobody would have traded the money to go back to camp.”

* * *

Jill remembered now, the stories he’d told about setting up the Biergarten. Finding the speakers, the booze, the bar from the Volkspark.

About how her mother had walked in, one evening, in a red dress, changing his world forever.

She turned off the lights, crept down the stairs to the second floor, and set the pictures down on a table in the hallway. Then she trudged into the bathroom, where she ran a cool bath.

Getting into the claw-footed tub, she submerged her head and ran her fingers through her hair. Cobwebs. Long-dead bugs. Ancient dust. She sorted through the shampoo bottles—where was the stuff she usually used?—and heard a noise.

Electrified, she could hear her heart pound. Where was Manfred? Probably asleep. In fact, the noise probably was Manfred. She relaxed.

“Manfred!” Clicking claws hurried down the hallway.

“You scared me, you silly dog!” Jill got out of the tub, sloshing water onto the floor, and grabbed a towel.

Then she thought she heard another sound.

Shit.

She wrapped herself in the towel and peered around the doorway. “Who is it?”

Manfred looked at her as if she were nuts.

Jill dripped her way down the hallway, intending to get her phone, and noticed that the photos she’d left on the table were now scattered on the floor. She could have sworn that she’d put them all back in the envelope.

But now, on top of the envelope, was a picture of her mother, Bette.

She was wearing a long dark coat, and her hair, pale in the black-and-white photo, was mostly covered with a scarf.

She had her arm around another woman. Jill wiped her hand and picked up the picture, squinted. Was that Gypsy Myra?

They were standing, if Jill was not mistaken, in front of the bombed-out Reichstag in Berlin.

“Damn it! If you’re here, just come out and frigging TALK TO ME!”

Manfred barked her own invitation, then whined a bit.

“Go get them, girl!” She wagged her big fat tail, which could have brushed the pictures from the table. But why would this one be so oddly displayed? What were the chances of that?

Jill, far from being afraid, was just mad. Like Whens, she seemed to have no fear mode. Brian thought she should be afraid. Well, maybe he was right; maybe she was just crazy, like they all thought, or maybe she just took too many vitamins.

She searched the house for an hour, finding nothing and no one, and finally collapsed, deeply chagrined, on the living room couch.

* * *

In her hideaway upstairs, Bette sat on the bed, her legs drawn up to her chin, smoking a cigarette, was also deeply chagrined. She ground out her cigarette with an angry, stubbing movement, and watched the moonlight glaze the treetops below. What had possessed her?

Fish or cut bait, she told herself. The problem was, she had to do both simultaneously, without a crew for the boat, but instead wanted just to dive into the blue, silky depths of her pure love for Jill, and hold her to her heart. I am here, my love, I am present.

I love you so.

Megan

CUBA CONFERENCE

THE INTERNATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS SYMPOSIUM had many tracks. Megan sat on a wrought-iron bench in the courtyard of the old hotel and studied the program.

Scientists were investigating consciousness from many different angles, through many different disciplines. There was a physics track, a neurobiology track, an evolutionary biology track, a religion and philosophy track, and a memory research track. Memory as a distributed field: theory and research. That sounded interesting.

Megan had a list of must-meet theorists—some for her own interests, and some assigned so she could bring back the skinny to NIH. She gathered her papers and got up.

The heat-shimmered tropical beauty of Havana stunned Megan. Plants waved and bobbed in the hot, humid breeze. Their leaves, a phantasmagoria of shape, size, and color, cast moving shadows on one another. Plumeria, hibiscus, and bougainvillea festooned the bricked courtyard Megan passed through on her way to the street, where a large marble fountain cascaded, creating a brief, cool zone. The songs of unseen tropical birds mingled with the distant, constant undertone of the seagulls massed at the harbor. She strolled downhill to the meeting center, through a mixture of business people, tourists, and shoppers. Everything was so open and friendly that it was hard to believe this had been an apex of terror in 1962.

The Dances had been living in Oberammergau, Germany, at the time; her father was teaching at the NATO school there. But her D.C. friends remembered it clearly: They had been hiding under their desks for years every Wednesday at noon when the air raid signal went off. Just a drill, kids, don’t worry.

“It was scary,” her friend Karen recalled, sipping her TGIF martini at an outdoor table on K Street while traffic roared by. Karen had grown up in Tall Oaks. “This time, the siren went off on a pretty fall day in October 1962. It wasn’t Wednesday. We hid under our desks but then we heard an announcement over the PA system. God, the PA was new too. Anyway, the principal said not to worry, we all were getting out of school early. The teachers were scared; they wanted to get home as fast as they could. Even though we lived just a block away from school, my mom was there in front of the school with the car, with about fifty other moms. The line stretched around the block. She honked the horn and rolled down the window and yelled, ‘Come on!’”

Karen swigged the last of her drink and signaled for another. “We didn’t go home. She already had my brother in the car, and we went to the Dillons’ house on Nutting Lane. They had an air raid shelter. I’ll bet it’s still there. We even had to bring one canned food a week to school for their air raid shelter. I think it was under the gym. Anyway, Mr. Dillon never came, and neither did my dad; they were both part of whatever operations or alert was going on. So we all played in the air raid shelter for three days. It was kind of fun once we were down there. There were lots of games—Cootie, Mouse Trap, Monopoly. Our moms were really strict about food and water. They’d taken all the food in our houses and brought it down and made us eat what would spoil easily first. Fruits and vegetables and meats. There was a ventilation system and a generator. Mr. Dillon had a huge antenna in his backyard for his ham radio. Mrs. Dillon talked to him a few times, and she talked to a lot of other people too.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“God! Over a week! We were pretty rowdy by that time. I don’t see how anybody could stand it for much longer.”

“Didn’t they let you out to stretch your legs?”

“Oh, once, but little Jack Dillon ran away and hid in the woods. He thought it was pretty funny, and the moms were frantic. I guess that if the Soviets had fired those missiles we would have been toast in five minutes, shelter or no shelter.”

World annihilation. It sounded strange right now; almost impossible to credit, walking down a sunny street in Havana. But Megan’s frequent interfaces with other government agencies made her realize that many people believed, even now, after nuclear weapons had been unilaterally dismantled and outlawed, that a “limited nuclear war” was possible.

How could one make nuclear fission impossible? It was a law of nature. And so some advocated evenly distributed nukes, kind of like the idea that if everyone knew that everyone else was carrying a gun, power situations would be equalized. Yes, I am a hundred-and-ten pound woman, but I can kill you. An odd sort of negative solution.

Megan, on the other hand, wanted to fill people’s minds with good pictures. Pictures of being loved and cared for. Pictures of being happy, and finding life on earth good, full of opportunities. She wanted to fill them with an appreciation of the very fact that they were alive, which to Megan was absolutely astounding.

The ideas she had for doing so were not very practical, nor were they very respectful. Everyone had false memories. So—what if people had good false memories? What if, instead of the terrible memories that disabled a rape victim, she had a memory of empowerment? What good would that be, if it wasn’t true?

It seemed obvious to Megan that the impulses some men had to hurt women and girls simply had to be expunged from their brain chemistry, from their physiology, much like polio and smallpox had been eliminated. She, for one, was tired from the wariness that just walking down the street in Washington—or, for that matter, here in Havana—entailed. Why should she be constantly afraid of being robbed, raped, kidnapped, or mugged? Why would unknown others—maybe that man there, behind that bland face, approaching on the sidewalk—intend to stab her, or stalk her? Why keep that part of “human nature”? There was a lot of other stuff that had to go too. The idea of women being the property of men, for instance. She understood why chastity had been such a big deal in the past—some men didn’t want to spend their lives raising another man’s child. But now DNA testing could easily establish paternity. Still, that made it all the more dangerous for women in many societies. It was easy to conclude that the world would be better without, not necessarily, men, but without men who indulged in these murderous urges, for whatever reason. Perhaps they needed to be sorted out? Preempted, reoriented?

She shivered again. Was Abbie safe at Jill’s? Maybe Jim was right. That man, roaming around the neighborhood—what was he up to? Anything? Nothing at all? What pathology made her think that all menace was aimed at her, or her family? How could she tell the intent of the Walking Man?

Maybe Jill was not the only nutsy person in their family. There was this lost, drafty place in her too; this feeling that something was not quite right. When—look around! think!—it most obviously was right. The perfume of gardenias, the sounds of a healthy, thriving harbor city, the laughter of people drinking café Cubano and eating mango pastries at small tables next to the sidewalk; the blue, blue sky and the saltwater tang of the faint, hot breeze—all was fine; all was very fine.

Megan passed shops filled with goods from around the world. Cuba was an international tourist destination, and her dollars were good here. Castro had relaxed his brand of Socialism after the U.S. recognized Cuba in 1965, after JFK’s reelection.

Megan shivered a bit despite the warm sun, and put down her program. Jill seemed obsessed about those times; she had books piled up to the ceiling about it. She insisted that it would have been a much different world if Kennedy had been killed, one in which dark forces of imperialism and the military industrial complex might have combined to produce a series of endless, useless, depleting wars.

But he hadn’t been. So why did that possibility constantly shadow her?

Megan’s phone rang. Abbie!

“Hi, Mommy. Guess what? There’s a ghost at Auntie Jill’s house! I love her!”

“You love Auntie Jill?”

“No! I mean, I love Auntie Jill but I love the ghost too.”

“Maybe you should go outside and play. Doesn’t Stevie have a new swing set?”

“His name is Whens. We’re playing games in the attic.”

“That’s awful hot, isn’t it?”

“It’s fun. We have a big jug of lemonade.”

“Not Slingers?”

“No. Auntie Jill doesn’t allow them.”

Megan was often baffled about what Jill did and didn’t allow. “Well, okay. Have fun, sweetie. Call me anytime.”

She supposed Jim had been right about Jill’s kooky house. But, after all, it was her house too! And her childhood. And there was nothing too much wrong with that. Except.

Except Mom and Dad weren’t there anymore.

She bought a Cuban coffee at a window on the street, and then, with an impulsiveness in which she rarely indulged, bought one more. The world brightened. Tangibly. The mangoes at a street vendor’s seemed almost to send forth the Kirilian tangles of energy that left-field spiritual nuts claimed to be able to photograph. Wow, she thought. This coffee is really something.

A woman with long, white, curly hair, held behind her neck with a large silver barrette before it cascaded to her waist, fell in next to her. “Hello,” she said. “You are going to the meeting, no?” She laughed. “You are dressed like a scientist who is not really on vacation, like me.”

Megan looked sideways and saw almost-black eyes, a professional suit, high heels, and sweat on the woman’s forehead like her own: This was not a good way to dress in such a hot climate. The woman’s face was slightly lined with age, but her skin seemed to glow, like that of a much younger woman.

“Yes, I am. And you?”

“Yes.” She held out her hand. “Eliani Hadntz.”

“I’m Megan Dance.” They shook hands awkwardly as they walked.

“I’m going to the first memory lecture. Want to join me?” asked Megan.

“Certainly. I’m very interested in memory. In fact, I’ve just published an article.” She laughed. “It was hard to place, because it is cross-disciplinary. It’s called ‘The Physics of Memory.’”

Memory and physics. The words combined for Megan, as powerfully as a neurolinguistic programming anchor: physics, as in atomic bombs; memory, as in, Why do I seem to worry about a memory that doesn’t even exist? And out of her mouth came, “What if Khrushchev hadn’t backed down?” Her mind filled with pictures. Children running naked down the road, screaming. And then she and Brian and Jill, orphaned, tried to take care of one another as everyone around them died from the vomiting sickness. They walked out on a rise above Washington, on Shirley Highway, that their mother had always loved, that view, and saw fires rage in twisted buildings, and nothing was recognizable. There was no food or water.

Megan’s field of vision swirled, and a flat, transparent plane in her head flipped over. She saw that she was falling; watched her program scatter in the breeze. Dr. Hadntz grabbed Megan around the waist as she fell forward, and pulled her to a low wall next to the sidewalk.

“Sit.”

Megan recovered, breathing hard. “Sorry. I got a little dizzy. Maybe I’ve got a flu. Oh, I know! Too much coffee.”

The eyes of Megan’s fellow scientist were sympathetic; even sorrowful. Megan continued to gasp for breath, and looked away.

“Is that what you think?” asked the woman. “Really?”

Megan tried to smile. “I’ve never been to Havana before. It’s a lot hotter than I expected. I’m from the U.S. You’re not?”

“You’re right. I’m Hungarian.”

“Well, you’ve probably heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Hadntz nodded.

“I just … suddenly … had a vision of what might have happened if things had gone the other way.”

“They might have, easily,” said Hadntz. “And then the world would have been completely different, would it have not?” She sighed and said so softly that Megan almost didn’t hear her, “The nightmare sometimes breaks through.”

“Yes.” Megan took a deep breath. “It would have been different. It’s not, though. Everything is fine, here, now. It’s a beautiful day. Isn’t it?” The thoughts she often had—that she was just a temporary vessel for identity, an attractor, a pattern that incorporated the molecules of food to maintain the pattern—suddenly seemed not exhilarating, but frightening, as if she were suspended above a raging, infinite sea by just a thread. Maybe, she thought suddenly, it’s a familial thing. First Jill cracks up, now me. Oh, shit. If she’d known, she’d never have had Abbie—

“Of course it is,” said Hadntz firmly. “It is an absolutely beautiful day.” She looked away for a moment, and seemed to be thinking. Finally she said, “Let’s go in, shall we? The air-conditioning might be exactly what you need.”

* * *

It was so. The cool air inside refreshed Megan, and the familiar reality of being in a lecture hall enveloped her. She loved the frisson of intellectual sharing, of thoughts building on one another. And she loved arguing about these ideas as well.

She took the translation headphones offered her by Hadntz, and they took seats near the front of the auditorium.

The first talk was about mirror neurons. Nothing could restore Megan to full power like new information about the brain. It was her language, her deep reality.

She relaxed, and her relaxation swallowed up her morning’s visions.

* * *

For lunch, Megan and Hadntz found a café a few blocks from the meeting that wasn’t overflowing with people from the conference. Hadntz spoke Spanish, and translated for Megan, who ended up having a salad and another cup of café Cubano. Hadntz ordered a sandwich, which arrived looking strangely flat. Megan eyed it.

Hadntz laughed. “They press them. It makes them much better.”

“Really?”

“What did you think of the talks?”

“This paper was about mirror neurons and violence, of course, but I have wondered if at some point in the future we might be able to distinguish between mirror neurons of empathy for others and mirror neurons that encourage us to imitate violent actions.”

“And then?”

“Oh, then, of course, I’d like to do something entirely unprofessional and invasive. I’d like to zap the violence-causing neurons and enhance the empathic neurons. I’d ratchet those up to intense levels.”

“That’s one approach,” said Hadntz thoughtfully. “There might be a way to do that.”

“How?”

“I will send some information that might be applicable,” she said. “Keep an eye out for it. I think we need to get back to the meeting right now.”

* * *

Later in the afternoon, the group went on a tour to the site where the Soviet missiles had been placed, twenty-two years earlier. A museum stood there now. Megan had wanted to ask Eliani Hadntz to go, but hadn’t seen her anywhere after lunch.

As Megan walked past a black-and-white diorama showing U.S. spy-plane photos, she wondered what the world would have been like if the Germans had developed a bomb. Hitler had driven many German scientists out of the country before the war, but enough remained so that they could have built one, had resources and will been available. Jill said that was what killed Germany in the end—no more oil.

Megan thought about a recent observation in primatology.

Chimps were notoriously violent. In every chimp group, a hierarchy of dominant males raped, bullied, and murdered at a constant low rumble.

In one recent recorded instance, though, the dominant males all went off to exploit the succulent pickings at a garbage dump, excluding the subordinate males and the females so they could have it all to themselves.

The dominant males, subsequently, all got food poisoning and died.

When the subordinate males consequently moved into dominance, the profile of violence changed. Perhaps it changed because the social parameters had changed so suddenly.

Whatever the reason, a new society was born—one more civil, with much less aggression and rape, and had remained so through subsequent generations.

It was easy to suppose that if someone could figure out how to wipe out, disable, or change the top, aggressive males, the ones who insisted that war be omnipresent, the future might be breathtakingly different than the past. She’d just read a book about that very thing, Sex and War, written by physicians—men, in fact—which painstakingly documented that, in their opinion, several defining characteristics of maleness were responsible for human war.

But could war be eliminated as if it were a virus, like smallpox? Humans weren’t just one small isolated tribe, like most chimp groups. They were spread out across the earth, living quite literally atop one another, many-layered and complex. Not only that, they were not chimps; there was that incredibly small, yet powerfully telling, one-percent genetic difference that made humans capable of long-term planning, nuanced language, record-keeping, and complex storytelling. Any characteristic observed in chimps were removed from human characteristics and behavior by millennia and those few crucial genes. The winds of power in humans simply favored those, male or female, who struggled and connived, people convinced of their need to be in control of others. Absolutely the kind of people whose power-managing skills had been sharply honed by competition. Now, if there was some mechanism in place to choose the most peaceful folk to be in power … not that they wanted to be in power. They would run and hide from power. They wanted to read the funnies every morning, and enjoy life. So maybe everyone would be forced to take turns at dealing with governmental issues.

Megan was not, at any rate, a primatologist or an anthropologist. It was amazing, though, how many humans believed that the present systems of behavior were set in stone—and, what was worse, that it was “unnatural” to try to change such behaviors, when evolution was constant and omnipresent in every living system.

She stared into a representative fallout shelter, where a “nuclear family,” life-sized plastic figures, lived in a tiny space with their water distiller, dried food, and emergency flashlights—much like, she supposed, the backyard shelter in which her friend Karen, a thousand miles to the north and a few decades ago, had spent a week.

As she tried to imagine what such a life might be like, Megan hoped that the woman she’d met today might truly have the neurological silver bullet that could lead to human altruism. Perhaps some kind of genetic alteration was possible. Slight, but powerful. Or perhaps just a removal of warfare from the human landscape, like smallpox, polio, and, just lately, many cancers had been removed. A few years earlier a truly terrible virus had emerged, called AIDS, but it had been quickly and effectively eliminated via international cutting-edge research. Sometimes human cooperation truly could bring about results that seemed little short of miraculous. HIV/AIDS was a scourge that they would never have to deal with.

Megan emerged from the shaded displays and walked out into the hot sunshine. The brick pathway wound through rows of royal palms back to the bus. She passed gentle waterfalls and pools full of koi, surrounded by formal gardens. Peace, breathed big-leaved, white-flowered ginger, elegant heliconia with their birdlike beaks, and lush bird’s-nest ferns beneath manicured bougainvillea trees. All manner of lizards zipped and paused; zipped and paused. Beneath the shadow of a tall intercontinental ballistic missile, she read a multilingual sign that explained it lacked its former nuclear warhead.

That woman—what was her name? Megan pulled out her card. Dr. Hadntz. She had been talking about adult brain plasticity. It seemed that if more intense plasticity were available to adults … if they could then take some kind of course devoted to understanding peace, to replicating peace …

Megan felt a brief jolt of intense intellectual hope, the like of which she had not felt for a while: the power of the new, the unexpected, the expansion of possibilities. That which lay just over the horizon. Perhaps, a whole new world.

She smiled at herself. That was precisely what teenagers felt, because a whole new world was just over the horizon, for them.

Maybe Dr. Hadntz had slipped her some certified plasticity, grade A, somehow. A nice fantasy. How wonderful that would be.

She hoped Jim was back at the hotel. She was ready for her mojito. Brian and Jill weren’t here to feign astonishment.

She might even have two.

* * *