THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH, HORATIO, THAN ARE DREAMT OF IN YOUR PHILOSOPHY.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The human genome contains all the genetic information you need to make a person. The information is encoded as DNA sequences within twenty-three chromosome pairs in cell nuclei as well as a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. Its total length is over three billion base pairs, yet the differences among individual humans only vary within a range of 0.1 percent. Further differences could be accounted for by the extensive use of alternative pre-mRNA splicing, but here’s the take-home message: regardless of race, color, creed, or credit rating, people are, by and large, 99.9 percent identical.
All humans are alike, and some are more alike than others. Some humans share combinations of gene sequences that remain uncannily intact through generation upon generation of reproduction. Indeed, this was the case with Alice, Alec, and Constance.
Had the dividing trellises between the penthouse rooms of the Hotel Montini magically blown away, Alice might have turned right and spotted her mother’s brother, Alec, with her boisterous Australian aunt, Meg. She had not seen them since one Thanksgiving in her early teens when her mother had made a sotto voce comment about Uncle Alec giving up on architecture to become a “shopkeeper.” Relations had cooled since then, and communications were limited to an annual exchange of Christmas cards.
Had Alice turned left, she might also have recognized her grandfather’s sister, Constance. She had only met her great-aunt a couple of times as a child, but her mother never failed to drop their aristocratic English connections into conversation whenever the opportunity arose. Constance loomed large in family folklore.
My purpose in gathering the three of them on the roof of the Hotel Montini was merely to facilitate the efficient execution of procedure. When you are a specialist, as I am, in matters of the human heart, much of your work occurs in microcosmic realms. Harnessing the right wavelength will carry you far. Forging allegiances with certain colonies of bacteria is essential, as well as enlisting the assistance of sometimes unhelpful viruses. Inside the twisting canyons of human DNA sequences, wonders can be accomplished. For my part, it is simply more effective to work on people who share the same DNA sequences, rather like working on the same make of car. I have found over the years, however, that under these circumstances—when like is gathered with like—serendipities occur. When Constance picked up the blue missile sitting at the base of her lemon tree, for example, it was one outcome among millions that might have occurred as a consequence of August throwing the tile. But it just happened to be the right one.
* * *
Holding the small blue square, Constance could have sworn it was vibrating, very softly, in her hand. She wondered whether it was an omen. Had it returned to her for some kind of purpose? Was she supposed to put it in her bag and take it back to London? She had taken it originally for luck, and the tile had brought her luck, certainly, but the luck had been bad as well as good. She counted the years that it had been in her possession as the most tumultuous of her life. No, she decided, I have done quite enough living in interesting times.
With the tile in hand she padded back through her room into the hall and knocked on the door of the blue-tiled suite. There was no answer. Without thinking she put her hand on the door handle and turned it. The door opened. Constance peered inside. Observing the stripped and disheveled bed, she called a timid, “Hello?” Again, there was no answer, but she could see that the rug next to the bed was peeled back, revealing the space where the tile belonged. She walked into the room and, taking care not to strain her back, bent and fitted the tile into the hole.
Experiencing the deep satisfaction of someone placing the final piece in an enormous jigsaw, Constance straightened. Hearing someone approach from the terrace, she wondered for a moment whether to stay and explain herself, but in the millisecond she had to run this scenario through her head, she realized that the truth would simply sound barking mad. She scurried to the door and had almost escaped when a man’s voice said, “Can I help you?” Constance popped her head back into the room to see a young man draped in a sheet like an ancient Roman senator in need of a tailor. “Sorry. Wrong room,” she said and closed the door quickly behind her.
By the time August opened his door to look up and down the empty hall, Constance had slipped back into her own suite. Alice appeared and asked what August was doing. He was in the middle of explaining about the mysterious old lady when it suddenly struck him that he may have been victim of some kind of scam. He suggested Alice check her backpack, which she did, but nothing appeared to be missing. She turned, poised to tease him about his paranoia when her eye caught the space on the floor where the tile was supposed to be missing. She rushed over to the newly replaced tile and popped it out of place with her toe.
“It came back,” she said, naturally astonished.
“What?” he said.
She picked up the tile in wonder. “This,” she said. “This is the tile you threw over the roof.”
His lips curled, but his eyes did most of the smiling.
“I know it can’t be,” she said, “but it is.”
And so began a long and frustrating debate in which Alice attempted to assert that the impossible was not only possible but had actually come to pass.
* * *
On the red-tiled terrace next door, Alec and Meg stood in silence watching the young musicians below sawing their way through more Haydn. Meg was accustomed to filling the space between Alec and herself with patter, banter, drivel, whatever she could come up with. In the division of labor that had developed between them over the years, this had been her job. But now she was quiet. She was not trying to force her husband’s hand or make him take the lead; she had simply run out of fuel. She had nothing to offer, except an awful premonition that there may not be a future for them, that the reserves of genuine forgiveness required to move forward were not available to either of them.
They heard movement on the terrace next to them. A young woman spoke. Her voice reminded Alec of someone, but he couldn’t place whom.
“I don’t care what you think,” said the voice. “I’m keeping it.”
The low rumble of a man’s voice replied, although they could not make out what he was saying. Then the young woman said, “For luck. I’m keeping it for…”
She suddenly stopped speaking. Meg and Alec both guessed, correctly, that this was because the source of the low rumble was now kissing her.
Alec looked down at the balustrade and saw his wife’s hand next to his.
“I don’t know that we could be happy again,” she said.
“I don’t want happiness,” he said and thought, but did not add, something that shocked him to the core with its fierce, utter, and unexpected certainty: I want you.
He knew, then, that he would always want her, that he would find a way back to her somehow. He let his little finger slide across the cold stone and touch hers. He was aware that she could feel it and was grateful that she did not retract.
Constance stood at the edge of her terrace. Music drifted up, melodious enough to be soothing. She closed her eyes and imagined Henry next to her. After a while she could feel him, the heat and press of his body next to hers. He had said to her once that people left but love remained. She felt, now, how right he was. Constance rested her head on Henry’s shoulder, certain she could feel him bearing her weight.
Not far from Constance and Henry, Alice and August stood in almost exactly the same position, and not far from them, Meg and Alec. Three couples, surrendering to stillness, listening to the notes and the silence between the notes, oblivious to each other yet connected—standing at the beginning, middle, and end of their loves.
Some of it was my work. Some of it was not. As Nikola Tesla, engineer, futurist, and mad scientist, often asserted, it’s all about energy, frequency, and vibration. The parameters around what can and cannot be achieved in the quantum realms are vast, the variables infinite. Sometimes there are consequences that I neither foresee nor plan with outcomes that surprise even me. They may crop up immediately. They may occur years later.…