14

“Here we are. Frankie’s Diner. Diners,” said George, “are the best places to have arguments.”

“No argument,” said Irene. “I’ve been waiting to go to Frankie’s since I crossed the border into Ohio.”

Frankie’s was attached to a nightclub, and George and Irene had waded through a band unloading instruments and amplifiers into the club side on the sidewalk. George took Irene’s elbow, guided her through, but he was nervous to touch her, as if she would evaporate like a smoke golem, disappear into the ether again. When they got into the restaurant they were almost alone. The vinyl seats in the tight booths had been patched with duct tape, but a small brave pink carnation mounted a defense against dinginess in a miniature crystal vase on each table.

“Astronomers don’t normally go here,” said George.

“Good, then we won’t see any of your ex-girlfriends,” said Irene.

“Touché,” George said. He picked up a menu and perused it, but Irene didn’t touch hers.

“I’m eating fish tacos,” said Irene. “Be warned.”

“First date, and you’re having fish tacos. That is bravery. You are an innovator.”

“This isn’t a first date,” Irene corrected him. “I have a boyfriend. You have … some kind of girlfriend, right?”

“Some kind of. Yes. And you have some kind of boyfriend. Wizard is he? Hill troll? Batman?”

“He’s into role-playing games. You know, online ones. He’s made quite a lot of money designing scripts and things for them, thanks.”

“Dungeons and Dragons, that sort of thing?”

Irene said, “Look, I’m here to discuss work. My work and your work.”

“Our work,” said George.

“We don’t have ‘our’ work,” said Irene. “I’m pretty sure we might even cancel each other out.”

George said, “Let’s discuss my work then. Speaking of poems, once upon a time, when I was a little boy, my mother read to me a poem about how the faeries would sometimes come and take little boys away to play with them forever on their island.”

“I know the poem,” said Irene.

“Do you?” said George, incredulous.

“Yeah, it’s Yeats. It’s just … a regular poem. Lots of people know it.”

George felt the Yeats was a cosmic signal, more than a happy accident. “Well, my mother was an astrologer, and she taught me that there were gods in the stars.”

“Lots of people do that, too, and it’s called church.” Irene rearranged the sugar packets in the ceramic container, ordering them pink, yellow, blue. She took the white ones out and made a separate pile.

“Well, I believed it,” said George. “So do you want to put rulers and calculators through all my internal organs?”

“Alright.”

“You have killed me with calculus.”

Irene smiled, looking at him through her eyelashes. He moved his feet carefully under the table, not wanting his long legs to kick her.

“That’s so weird that our mothers were both astrologers,” Irene said, turning the labels of the hot sauce and ketchup bottles forward. “Your mother didn’t really look like an astrologer to me.”

“Yes, well my mother doesn’t do it anymore. She changed.”

“Neither does mine. Maybe we have the same mother.”

“Probably. Because the only thing worse than meeting you when you obviously have already found the love of your life”—George gestured with his arms to indicate Belion’s largeness—“is meeting you and finding out you’re actually my sister.”

An old woman approached the table. She didn’t wear a uniform or carry an order pad, but she asked, “What you guys like to eat?”

“Fish tacos, please. And chili. And Fortuna? Rip the roof off on the peppers, OK? I want to leave here without a lining in my stomach.”

George raised his eyebrows. “Same,” he said.

“Careful,” said Irene. “We used to come here all the time in high school. I know what I’m dealing with. You’ve been sheltered. You’ve been protected from fish tacos and the fire they represent.”

“Well,” said George, “I know they’re messy and spicy and come with beans. You’re breaking all the rules of date food. You care nothing for me. This is proof.”

“When I’m choking, flatulating, and dripping fish from my seared-off lips, you’ll be able to see the beauty of my calculations instead of the asymmetry of my eyes.”

“Probably not,” said George. “I will never forget the asymmetry of your eyes. It is transformative symmetry. It is the best symmetry. It is the symmetry that is beauty.”

*   *   *

Outside, it was late. She got into her car and started it. “Come on,” she yelled to him. He got into the car, and as soon as he opened the door, he could hear music. A soaring violin part and a man’s deep voice singing a song from the seventies. This freaked him out. No one else should have known this folk song—the band was so obscure and weird: Compton and Batteau. He had never met anyone before in his life that knew this music.

“How do you know this band?” he asked her.

“My mother again,” said Irene.

“Was she a violinist?” he asked. He wanted to know all about her. Every year, every hour. What she liked for breakfast, whether she liked her pillows hard or soft. “And what do you like for breakfast?”

“Just get in,” said Irene. “Before we get to breakfast, I want to hear all about your ‘plane of symmetry’ thing.”

“Are you sure?” George asked.

“Sure, but I might have to tell you why it’s not going to work.”

George buckled his seat belt. “Please do. I’ve been waiting for this all day. Without this information, I may stumble through tomorrow thinking I have a future in science.”

“If such a thing were to exist, it would have been found by now.”

“Not true. The more we work with the Toledo Space Telescope, the more we find all kinds of things we didn’t know existed.”

“But what you’re talking about, this axis of the universe, this gateway, it cannot possibly be known, even if it were to exist. Not for thousands of years, maybe. We just don’t have the instruments. We cannot measure this.”

“Who cares what you can measure? If you can think about it, it could be real.”

“It’s not religion, George. It’s measurements. It’s math, whether you like it or not.”

“You know, religion and astronomy and astrology all used to be the same thing,” George reminded her.

“Well, they’re not anymore,” said Irene. She waved her hand around next to George’s head. “Religion, astrology, hokey schmokey over here.” Then she slammed her hand into the steering wheel. “Astronomy, math, rulers over here.”

“My side of the car is more fun,” said George.

“Your side of the car isn’t even a car! Just saying something doesn’t make it real.”

George sat silently. He was watching her hands gripping the wheel. He couldn’t help smiling.

“How can you be like this when you’re working on the Toledo Space Telescope?” she asked. “Astrometry isn’t about guessing, or writing poetry, or whatever.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But the box I was working on is at JPL right now. Undergoing thermal testing. I don’t have to think about it for a few months. I have the semester off thinking about it.”

“Oh, dear, you’ve finished with the TST, and your little side project isn’t going so well either, is it? Maybe I could talk to someone at the institute for you. You’ve only lost your office, your lab space, your assistant, and most of your funding. I’m sure they can find something for you to do, though. Maybe you can come and work for me.”

She flashed him a wicked little smile and his heart contracted. “OK, can you just point the car and drive?” he said.

“Back across the bridge?” said Irene.

“Yeah, downtown. We need to get up very high so I can show you what I need to show you.”

Irene frowned. “High? Are we going to One Seagate?”

“That’s right,” said George. In all the glass spires of Toledo, one lone “skyscraper” dominated the skyline. One Seagate was a thirty-two-story building with an exterior made all of glass. The tallest building in Toledo.

*   *   *

George and Irene stood next to each other in a glittering elevator booth, going up. His elbow touching her shoulder, carefully touching it, not pushing it. They were absolutely silent. George watched her pulse beating at her throat, and wondered what she thought of him.

When the door opened at the penthouse, a uniformed security guard at a small podium nodded dispassionately at George and waved them inside.

“Come on,” said George. “This is my mother’s office.”

George took Irene by the elbow and pulled her on past the granite reception desk and down the hallway. The office was beautifully appointed and lit for overnight from dim canisters in the ceiling. The carpet was rich and dense, Dean’s paintings on the wall looking strangely bold for such a conservative office.

“My father’s art,” George tossed to Irene as he swept her on toward the back of the suite, flipping on light switches as he went. She stopped in front of a painting, and he frowned. The last thing he needed was for her to dutifully inspect his father’s work and feel she had to say something horrific like, “They’re nice” or “I don’t get it.”

“My god,” said Irene, staring at the canvas. “I think my mother has one of his paintings hanging in her house.”

“Well, he’s kind of famous,” said George. “But whatever. That’s cool. Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

They emerged onto the deck, and the city lay before them in lights. The patio was broad, running the length of One Seagate, and there were plants and trees up here, rooted into pots or huge dirt-filled holes in the floor.

“Trees,” said Irene.

“I do her gardening,” said George. “It’s part of why I get paid my exorbitant salary as son.”

Irene went straight to the edge. For a second, George had the terrible impression that she was going to go straight over, and fall to her death. He almost reached out to touch her, grasp her around the waist, pull her back into him, wrap her up tight. But she stood, instead, gripping the railing. When her face turned back to look at him, it was clouded. Her eyes looked wet, as if she were about to cry, or had just stopped herself from crying.

He went over to her and put his hand in the middle of her back.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he said.

“No,” said Irene. She bit her lip. George imagined her biting his lip. He wanted to kiss her, feel her teeth pressing against his mouth, her wide lips on his.

“Did you know,” he said, “that a fear of heights is actually not a fear that you’ll accidentally fall, but that you’ll be possessed by the desire to fall on purpose?”

Irene was silent, then pulled at a vine from a nearby pot and said briskly, “How do you maintain it? I mean, this vine here, it’s got to be some sort of jungle species. Surely it can’t survive out here in the winter?”

“We’ve got walls. Retractable walls. In the winter it becomes a sort of terrarium.”

Irene leaned dangerously far out over the rail, the vines and branches of the trees waving alongside her in the high breeze.

“It’s like the hanging gardens of—”

“Wait,” he interrupted her. “Really, to understand this properly, you have to close your eyes, at this height, and imagine this is still Mesopotamia. This is still Babylon. The sand, the oppression. Forget the space shuttle and satellite telescopes. This is like old. Irrigation is brand new here.”

“Babylon, you say?”

He waved his arms. “The Tigris River. The Euphrates.”

George pointed to the west, to show her where the Toledo Institute of Astronomy lay inside its brick wall, inside its gates.

“There’s the ziggurat at the institute, see it?”

Irene nodded.

“But that one’s just a model,” said George. “You are standing on the site of the ziggurat that Hammurabi built. That Nebuchadnezzar used to climb on a Saturday morning, with his hot cup of tea and bagel sandwich. Prototype for the Tower of Babel. Eighty thousand steps up or something ridiculous like that.”

“Right, something ridiculous,” she said drily.

“And you look down, over the side, Nebuchadnezzar,” he went on, “and there’s the world, spread out below you. Babylon. Toledo. All these sparkling lights from the windows of your citizens, and the roads they use to travel by, and the corners of the world. And you look up, and there are the stars, sparkling and marking out the corners of the sky.”

Irene sighed. “It feels like falling,” she said.

“You know you can point the orbiting telescopes out to count the stars and measure space. But you can also point them in, you know? And sometimes at night the earth looks almost just the same. The stars out there, the people and cities down here.”

Irene laughed. “Somebody told me you believe Toledo is built on the ruins of ancient Babylon, and I thought they were shitting me. Is this all to say that I’m standing on some kind of tomb?”

George shook his head. “The ziggurat was not a tomb. It was a temple. So, you’re standing on a kind of altar. A very tall one. This is where it would have been. By the river.”

“Comforting,” she said. “Like blankets and hot tea, but warmer and safer.”

“I’m about to tell you the best part. This is the reason I brought you up here.”

“Oh, good,” said Irene. “I was beginning to think this nutburger you were feeding me about the Tigris and Euphrates was the point.”

“See the Maumee River? That’s the Tigris.”

“Oh, dang, it is the point,” sighed Irene. But she smiled at him, as if it were all OK.

“So where’s the Euphrates?” George pressed on. “Where do you think?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s in Iraq, with the rest of ancient Persia.”

“Nope. It’s here, too. You just can’t see it.”

“Do tell,” said Irene.

“Have you noticed,” George began, feeling like a proud parent on Christmas morning, about to rip the paper off a shiny bicycle, “that lots of people at the institute whisper about what’s ‘downstairs’ and then maybe they point down sort of suggestively like there’s something underground that they’re being very secretive about?”

“No,” said Irene. “I’ve noticed you doing that, but not everyone doing that.”

“Well, there is something underground that we’re being very secretive about, but since I believe you’re about to be asked to be pretty much in charge of it, I think the time has come for you to know it exists.”

“What?” Irene was now interested.

He pointed, and she turned to look west toward where the sun had set, toward the institute. He moved to stand behind her, so that the light breeze blew her ponytail back to brush against his shirt front.

“It starts over there,” he said. “And it comes this way, that way, this way, down to here.” He traced a path with his finger. “And then crosses under the Tigris, and goes back up that way, that way, and up to there.”

“But that’s a circle. You’re telling me this thing is actually following the path of an ancient river?”

“An ellipse actually. But never mind.”

“Rivers aren’t circles.”

“Yes, I know, but this is a supercollider. It’s only called the Euphrates because we already have a Tigris. It’s metaphor. Like poetry is. Like music. Sing it. The Euphrates!” He sang.

She was glaring intently at the place where he’d gestured, and he could see her mentally calculating.

“It’s eighty-seven kilometers,” he said. “The beams intersect in six places, with six different detectors. I’m sorry, five. They’re waiting for one more. I think you have it in your lab. It might be attached to a figure-eight-shaped device at the moment, but I’m sure it can be fitted to the river.”

“The river,” said Irene slowly.

George put his arm more securely around her. He started to say something: “I’m so—” But he stopped. They stood there together silently for several minutes. It was as if his entire life had led up to that point and she had been there the whole time, just quiet. She fit so perfectly into his arm, and there was no bumping of hip bones or awkward dangling of arms. She was exactly the perfect size.

“Since our mothers were astrologers, I have to ask you, what’s your sign?”

“Scorpio,” she murmured without hesitation.

“Really?” he said. “Me too. What day?”

“The eleventh.”

“What?” he said. “That’s my birthday, too!”

He spun her around to face him, holding her now by both arms.

“You know what? I have to go,” she said. She sprang away from him and marched back to the patio door, threw it open, and went inside. He chased her.

He caught up to her next to the elevator, mashing on the DOWN button with an angry little finger.

“We can be birthday buddies! Let’s do a joint party. Let’s see, what could the theme be? I know—nebulas! You could dress like the reflection nebula, you know, all shimmery, and I could go as a horse head.”

Irene stared at the crease in the elevator door. After pursing her lips together for a few seconds, waiting for the elevator car to come, she spat out, “I’m leaving.”

George laughed. “I see that. Making the elevator come usually leads to leaving.”

There was a ding, and the doors slid open. Irene turned to look at him. “Well, bye,” she said. She slipped into the elevator and began to mash the CLOSE DOOR button. But George followed her in.

“I’m leaving, too,” he explained.

As the digital numbers descended 10, 9, 8, 7 … she finally spoke: “How old are you?”

George said, “Twenty-nine.”

“You are not,” said Irene.

“Yeah, I am,” said George. “Are you?”

He felt his stomach contract. He actually felt nervous. “Move,” said his stomach. “Move, move, move. Act, act, act.” At the first floor, Irene raced him to her car.

“But if we were born on the same day,” he said, rushing along behind her, “then Irene, we’re not just birthday buddies. Don’t you get it? This is why we know the same poetry. This is why we know the same songs.”

“I don’t know those songs. I don’t like that poetry. Don’t be weird,” said Irene.

She had her car door unlocked when she was ten cars away. It beeped and blinked at her, and George skipped ahead, getting between her and the door before she could reach for the handle.

“Toledo General? Toledo General? Come on, were you born at Toledo General?”

“I’m sure not. No, I don’t—”

“Then where?” said George. “Where? We’re twin souls, Irene! Twin souls.”

His back was against her car and he was braced there, against it; she could not open it. She came toward him, as if she might attack him or climb him or shout at him. But then she pressed her body up against the front of him and put one hand across his mouth.

“I don’t want you to go home,” he said through her hand. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop talking, but—”

“George, shut up,” she said. She put her hand behind his neck and kissed him. He stood up from the car, and she came up with him, his hands under her butt, lifting her, catching her to him, and she clung now, her hands around his shoulders, mouth still touching, now opening, a small soft tongue brushing against his lips. He felt her mouth touch his, causing a long, slow, swell of happiness that started from where the rough denim of her jeans pressed against his khakis, continuing up to where her hips lay against his belt, her breasts pressing against his chest, and all of her warmth and anger spilling out of her like a fountain. Her fingernails were in his hair when she pulled her face back.

He spoke first. “OK, forget whatever I was just saying. I have nothing else to say.”

“Really? Because you had so much to say, thirty seconds ago.”

“I was stupid then. I can’t even remember what I was thinking about.”

He went in for another kiss, but she turned her head to the side.

“You can put me down,” she said quietly. He set her back on the sidewalk. She put her hand on the car door again.

“Let’s get a grip here, George,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Marry me.”

It was all he could do to keep his hands from plunging in between the buttons of her little button-down shirt, shedding it from her, putting his mouth over her collar bone, her breast, her hip bone, yanking off her pants.

“We have obligations,” she was saying. “It’s probably not even legal for us to date. We could get fired.”

“What?” he asked. “Do I have a job? I feel like I’m one-minute old.”

“You need to understand something.” Irene put her hands up to her face, covering her eyes. George remembered that her mother had just died. And here he was, being the asshole. How could he make her cry?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll stop. I’ll go away.”

“No,” she said, and she took her hands down and showed him that she was laughing.

“What is going on?” he said, almost laughing, too. “Are you going nuts on me?”

“I want to have sex with you,” she said, laughing to the point she was crying, and then wiping away the tears. She punched him in the chest. “Sex! I want to have sex!”

“Good!” said George. “That is super good because I want to do that, too!”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, sniffing and pulling herself together, wiping her eyes. “I mean I want to have sex like in my vagina.” She pointed at his zipper. “That going in there,” and she pointed at her crotch. This sent her off into another gale of laughter.

“That’s great, because that’s exactly how sex is done. Exactly that way.” He was confused a little by her behavior, but in his mind the fact that she was talking and pointing at his crotch was enough to distract him from analysis.

“This is going to be OK, Irene,” he said. “This is going to be great.”

“I don’t normally feel like this,” said Irene. “I don’t. This is weird.”

George put his arms around her again, so in love with the feeling of her against him, as if they were two pieces of a two-piece puzzle, and they just wanted to make the picture work.

“We need to go to a place,” said George. “I know the place.”

“What kind of place?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a good kind of place. It’s a nightclub for astronomers. You’ll feel right at home.”