Let air travel and wireless communication be the two legs humanity stands on. And let’s see what the consequences will be.

VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV

Took—The Futurists’ Drum, 1915

Two

IT’S SUCH A PERFECT September morning, the city’s most glorious month, no clouds, no doldrums, that she’ll walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. She walks across whenever she has time, almost every morning this bright blue month, then catches the subway to the library on the other side. Today she has time because Jack left so hastily to go home and change into his suit. The river and the skyline both lull and energize her; the rhythm of the serene parade, the labor force snatching a bit of beauty before the day’s rigors, sets a good pace for her thoughts. Walking meditation, her friend Linda calls it. Linda is an aspiring Buddhist originally from Houston. “For people like us, who sit a lot at work, it’s better than ordinary meditation,” she says.

But what Renata does can hardly be called meditation. It’s more like musing, drifting, enjoying the bustle of the Brooklyn streets. She walks slowly, so slowly one might almost think she’s trying to delay something, to ward off the future. A child of the suburbs, she’s always found the city streets pleasing, calming. And soon she’ll be sheltered by the enormous stone weight of the library; nothing could be more solid or reliable. It waits for her across the river. The uniformed guards greeting her by name at the entrance are reassuring, guardians of her peace. The long, high-ceilinged, marble halls, where her clunky sandals sound an echoing click, are homey; her small office is a haven. She’ll greet her boss, Denise, a monumental black woman whose long African braids form a bead curtain covering the telephone always at her ear. And across the hall is Linda, renowned in their third-floor coterie as the world’s greatest research librarian. A large sign on Linda’s door reads, “False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil.” Socrates. Renata has passed it every day for six years and still finds it cheering. In her own office everything will be where she left it yesterday, the notepads, the books, the dictionaries, the computer waiting obediently to be animated. She can make the screen any color she likes, and she chooses different colors for different languages. Isn’t that enough of a life? Any word one could want is right there in the building. Does she really need Jack? Is the feel of him pushing into her really so important, as important as she’s let it become?

Lunch with Linda will be entertaining. Linda remembers, effortlessly, everything she reads, and she knows where to find anything else. Two days a week, Denise sends her out to play the Answer Lady. She sits at the information desk and people ask her questions. The rest of the time Linda reads and “fools around” with the computer, hunting down new troves of data, especially about love and sex. She is intrigued by the amorous customs of ancient and modern cultures. A bouncy chatterer, she offers obscure tidbits about these and about her own sex life, specifically, the odd venues in which it occurs. Linda was sympathetic to Bill Clinton’s conducting his affair in the Oval Office and the adjacent corridors; she understood the lure of risky or physically challenging sites. Her own preference is for moving vehicles: cars, buses, trains, and once, a rowboat.

Linda keeps Renata posted about her long and sporadic relationship with Roger, who works for a securities firm based in London and travels a great deal. They have had sex in the woods of the Adirondacks, on the beaches of New England, in the New Mexico desert, at the shores of Lake Michigan, and places in England that Renata can’t recall. At last weeks lunch, Linda reported that they did it on a plane returning from London.

“On the plane?” Renata asked in disbelief.

“In the bathroom.”

“You’re kidding. How?”

“It was a red-eye, because I had to be back at work Monday morning. It wasn’t too full. We were in first class. They upgraded me.”

“But—?”

Linda looked around. The café near the library was crowded, the tables close together. The waitress was approaching, and already a man at the next table was giving them curious glances. “I’d better tell you another time. It’s almost worth buying a ticket for, though, believe me.”

“Not for me. I hate flying.”

“Exactly. This makes it bearable. Anyway, let’s talk about something where we don’t have to whisper.” She reported on her unsuccessful search for information about a forgotten eighteenth-century composer, Giovanni Battista Pandolfi, whom Renata had asked about after she heard his violin sonata on the radio—or maybe it was a concerto, she can’t remember anymore. The announcer had noted that very little information about Pandolfi was available; if not for the one sonata (or concerto) and a single reference to him as an employee in an orchestra, he might not have existed. He might even be an invention. Given her reclusive tendencies, this passage through life with no traces except one enduring piece of music would appeal to Renata, although many people have passed through life leaving even less.

“Nothing so far,” Linda said. “It would help if you could remember whether it was a sonata or a concerto. How could you forget what you heard?”

“I don’t know,” Renata said. “But there’s no rush. Take your time.” Maybe Linda will know more about Pandolfi today. Meanwhile, as Renata heads toward the bridge, she reviews her files in her head and lights on “The Long Unhappy Life of Miss Greff,” one of the clippings in the Transformed Lives folder. By rights Miss Greff’s is not a transformed life at all and doesn’t belong in a folder of that name. After decades of extreme frugality, Rosalind Greff, a child of the Depression, died at ninety, leaving $105,000 in savings accounts to be distributed among the fire department, the rescue squad, and the youth recreation program in her Pennsylvania town. According to the newspaper account, she worked in a shop as a jewelry polisher from the age of thirteen and remained there, “taking overtime whenever possible,” until she retired in her sixties. “Miss Greff lived her first 45 years with her mother, who dominated her. After the mother’s death, she lived the next 25 years with her brother, who also dominated her.” When he died, she was alone. Her only human contact, after her retirement from the jewelry store, was with a neighbor who kept an eye on her and did occasional shopping and errands. Among Miss Greff’s fears were bugs, thunder, and men. In the manner of such eccentrics, “she made aprons from old dresses, and after her brother died, she made blouses from his shirts. She caught water that dripped from the kitchen faucet and used it to wash dishes....She dusted with a mop she fashioned from old underclothes and a hanger,” and, no surprise, she sat in the dark to save electricity, finding her way around by the light of a street lamp. Her existence was noted only when the heirs to her largesse realized they had no idea who she was, nor did anyone else in town, except for the one neighbor. She was a woman whom no one knew.

Why should this story mean anything to Renata, other than to evoke the expected pity and dismay? It certainly hasn’t the zing of Letitia Coles happy metamorphosis into a belly dancer. Renata’s life in no way resembles Miss Greff’s, nor is she especially frugal. She wasn’t a Depression child but grew up in the relative plenty of the ’70s and ’80s. Her mop comes from the hardware store on Court Street and her clothes from good shops—she favors a blend of arty and expensive classic; her parents were not domineering but rather permissive, in the manner of baby-boomers. She doesn’t fear bugs or thunder and has not avoided men. During the two years after her father died and her mother was institutionalized, she slept with a great many men, until circumstances required that she stop. Later, when she was free to resume, she was more selective, being a bit older. Then she stopped again—it became unrewarding—until eight months ago and the advent of Jack.

She studies Miss Greff’s life because she used to imagine her own life might be one in which nothing would happen. Early on, in a short span, a great deal happened. Enough to fill a much longer span. Then nothing, or nothing worth thinking of. Then Jack happened, and that happening confuses her.

After the events of her early youth, there was comfort in the prospect of no powerful emotions ever again. She liked, or had persuaded herself that she liked, contemplating a peaceful stretch of blank years, broken only by obscure new languages with evocative new words, often words so subtly shaded that they have no adequate equivalent in English, words for feelings and sensations we have not named, and as everyone knows, what we haven’t named we cannot see or take into account. Like iranima, for instance, from Etinoi, the South Seas island language she’ll be learning this week. Iranima means the faint melancholy we feel at the attainment of a longed-for wish. The closest way to say it in English is “nostalgia for longing,” the bittersweet parting with a familiar craving, and the resulting emptiness of the soul grown used to crave. Bakiranima, its derivative, was what she had noticed in Jack their first time together—a clinging to past misery or an unwillingness to embrace good fortune when at last it comes round in the Etinoian cycle.

Still, the desire to live—to live for two, her dead sister as well as herself—would keep asserting itself. And when Jack turned up, that desire gained the upper hand, as apparently it never did in Miss Greff. Does she want to risk it or fight it? But fight for what? Emptiness?

A week after the disaster on the farm, twenty dollars was missing from their club dues. Renata was the treasurer.

The seven girls sat on the basement floor, and Renata opened the dues envelope as she did every Friday night, always a titillating moment. Children on the cusp of adolescence are fascinated by cash; they don’t know quite where it comes from, yet they have an inkling of its powers. But that wasn’t what made the blood rush to Renata’s face. There should have been seventy dollars in the envelope—two dollars a week from each girl, five meetings so far. Last week she’d brought the mound of crumpled singles, some of them soft as rags, to her father and asked if he could give her bigger bills. Monday night he handed her three new twenties and a ten, which she stroked over and over for their crispness and put carefully away in the envelope in her bottom drawer.

“What’s wrong?” asked Abigail, the president, a haughty girl with ivory skin and a long blonde ponytail she liked to toss about. “What are you waiting for?”

“There’s money missing. A twenty.” Renata rubbed the stiff bills between her fingers in case they were stuck together. She even slid her thumbnail along their edges, making a nasty squeak, as if she could force their minuscule third dimension to split.

The club was saving up for a trip to the city. One day soon, when they’d accumulated enough, they would take the bus in and have adventures. Any kind of adventures; the mere words “the city” set off fantasies all the more alluring for their vagueness. None of their parents would allow them to travel into the city alone, so they would lie. They relished planning their lies as much as they relished the coming adventures.

The girls didn’t accuse or sulk. They were girls raised to be civilized, the brightest and prettiest girls in the class, girls who moved and spoke and dressed with ease, who knew already how to negotiate in the world. The club’s unspoken purpose was to declare their distinction, to include and exclude. From the first weeks of junior high they’d sorted themselves out: girls like that can spot one another at a glance, just as they can spot their opposites—the clumsy, the ill-defined, the inarticulate, the hesitant. And so on that first evening, they honored a tacit allegiance. If they were suspicious, they remained polite. “It’ll turn up. It’s got to be somewhere.” Besides, Claudia and Renata possessed a mystique. It was a point of honor to be able to tell them apart; mistakes were embarrassing and could reduce one’s standing in the group. The other girls studied them, trying to find subtle differences. They interrogated them about twinhood. Did each one know what the other was thinking? When did they stop dressing alike? Who was smarter? Who could run faster? Would they get their periods at the same moment, or at least on the same day? (Everyone awaited this milestone with a mix of eagerness and apprehension; the two girls who’d already reached it were envied.) Did they like the same foods? Did they always agree? Did they ever fight?

Foolish questions. To Renata and Claudia, being twins meant something of quite another order. It meant relief, immunity, from what they imagined as a painful isolation: living as the only one bearing this particular face, this body. They each knew what it felt like to live behind the same face, and they marveled that others could bear their singularity. Everyone could look in a mirror, but mirrors abandon you the moment you turn your back. Mirrors couldn’t be companions. They two were faithful mirrors, companionable mirrors. Other people, Renata learned later, are uncomfortable meeting someone who resembles them: they feel eerily exposed, found out. As she grew up she noticed that women can be vexed to find someone wearing the same dress: the sign of identical taste is obscurely mortifying. Also, the same dress on different bodies points out the oddities and flaws of each. But she and Claudia had nothing to hide. Their identical bodies relieved them of the shame of carnal secrets.

Above all, there was the secret language, at least there had been until the fire in the barn a week ago. None of the girls in the club knew the language existed. And because in this language they confided everything thoroughly, their memories merged and became common property. They couldn’t say anymore which one had seen the dead cat floating near the edge of the river, its matted fur giving off a foul smell, or seen the English teacher, Miss Pryor, and the biology teacher, Mr. Jimemez, kissing in the front seat of his red Volvo. And so they had double memories, a richness of scenes witnessed that was like an extra layer of consciousness, each one possessing what the other had seen or heard.

It was that way for Renata, and she had never thought it could be otherwise for Claudia. But she was wrong. Claudia was changing. For her the common face and common memory had become oppressive. She needed to escape from twinhood. From her twin.

Their mother helped them look for the money. The next day, after they’d searched every closet and drawer, every pocket and backpack, she spread newspapers on the kitchen floor, shooed Fox away, and dumped out the vacuum cleaner’s bagful of clotted dust. Down on their knees, the three of them rummaged through the week’s worth of filth, raveling it with their fingers. Renata blushed with shame as the dirt formed black lines under their fingernails, as if she really were a thief putting her loved ones through this ordeal.

Grace sat back on her heels. “Think, both of you. Think back to everything you did since the last meeting. Maybe one of you borrowed it for something and forgot to put it back?”

“I never use that money. I just put it in the envelope,” Renata said.

“How should I know?” Claudia said. “She’s the treasurer, not me.”

Then Renata knew for sure, from her voice, her sullen withdrawal. It had occurred to her the night before, when Claudia went to bed without a word, but she’d stifled it; she wouldn’t think the unthinkable. Now she couldn’t even tell their mother: she and Claudia never told on each other—that, too, was unthinkable.

All the latest studies of twins illustrate the uncanny affinities that persist even when the twins are raised apart. They turn out to have similar tastes and aversions; they eat the same foods, play the same games, choose the same sorts of lovers. When they’re brought together they fly into each other’s arms. In the face of such research, the old examples from enduring myth tend to be overlooked, the betrayals and the murders—Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus.

Renata saw the club members at school every day. Their civility eroded. A few hardly bothered to hide their suspicions. She felt marked. There was no way to explain. Her father gave her a new twenty to replace the one that was lost, and stroked her hair and said the girls would forget about it soon. In the locker room she handed the dues envelope to Abigail, the president. She didn’t look Renata in the eye, just accepted the envelope silently and turned away with a faint toss of her head.

That was a cloudy day in late November. After school Renata went down by the river, alone. “Down by the river,” for the girls in their group, meant a special spot. High above the Palisades walling the river was a park with a playground and picnic tables where the local kids congregated. Surrounding the park was a wooded area, and a little ways in past the trees was a path that led to a bare ledge of the Palisades. From there a steep path wound down the rock face to the shore. Not many kids knew the path, no one knew who made it, and no one ever told any parents about it. Below, the space between the rock face and the water’s edge was no more than eight feet wide, and had always struck her as too humble a gateway to such a broad river. It should have an enormous, regal frontage all the way along. All it had here was a dilapidated, narrow wooden pier, its approach overgrown with weeds; it stretched far out into the water, much of the railing gone, the planks rotted and broken in places. Birds would perch on the rail and leave their droppings.

The ground down by the river was mucky, with faded tufts of grass and sickly reeds. Nearby were three abandoned rowboats, leaky, their paint peeled off to leave a dingy, mottled gray; beer cans and empty cigarette packets and condoms littered the bottom. The appeal down there was privacy. They could watch the cargo ships pass, and the barges, and on summer weekends occasional sailboats; they could even glimpse, far in the distance, the Circle Line from the city below, at the highest tip of its orbit. They could walk out onto the pier—not too far out, because there was a point at which the rotting planks couldn’t bear their weight—and gaze out at the town on the opposite shore, at the bridges, the great one to the south and the low sleek one to the north, and on a clear day they could spy the beginnings of the city they’d been saving their money for.

A few times, Claudia and one of the wilder girls had gone far out on the pier and threatened to jump in. “Come on, I dare you,” Claudia called one hot day in September, while Renata and the others hung back. “What are you afraid of. It’s just water. We’ll swim.” “It’s filthy,” Abigail said. “It’s disgusting. And you don’t know what’s underneath. The whole thing is falling apart.” “I dare you,” Claudia repeated, but when no one took up her dare, she and the other girl slunk back. It was filthy. Every kind of debris drifted past: a boot, a wire hanger, a blender, a man’s briefs, an alarm clock, a soap dish, fruit peelings, a dog collar. They were suburban girls, envious of the city, and they liked to blame it for the defilement of the river, though it was really the upstate factories oozing their waste that did the more serious damage.

It was a secret place, uncontaminated by adults. There might be other kids from school there now and then, sometimes a couple fooling around in one of the old rowboats. But mostly it was empty. Mostly it was their own.

That November day, Renata walked through the park among the deserted picnic tables under the arching elms and climbed a special tree she and Claudia loved. She entered the woods, took the path, and scrambled down the rocks to the edge of the river. No one was there. She walked out onto the pier and skipped some stones on the water and acknowledged that something had ended. Claudia wouldn’t play with the farm anymore or speak the language. She never mentioned the missing money, though she must have known Renata knew the truth. She didn’t care. Renata didn’t know why she was being abandoned, not yet. A large ship went by, then two barges. Across the wide span of water, the houses of the town opposite were as tiny as houses on a Monopoly board; the boats docked at a small landing were toy boats. She peered south and glimpsed the northern edge of the city under the gray sky. She must learn to be alone, she thought. Like everyone else.

She couldn’t face the club meetings anymore, and after a few weeks Claudia dropped out too. “Boring.” But Claudia remained part of the group of girls. She and Renata had been seen as virtually interchangeable, yet somehow Claudia was not tainted by suspicion.

Renata became a loner. Things might have changed two years later when she went to high school, a large school with new people who didn’t know or care anything about the childish club. But by then she didn’t care about being one of the popular girls. She had lost her sister and no other company could make up for that.

At the same time, a pair of British twins, just a few years older than Renata and Claudia, were adolescents locked in a struggle of such potent mutual love and loathing, need and revulsion, that they ended in a mental institution. Neither one was complete without the other. They were each other’s lifeline and torment. “Like twin stars,” their biographer described June and Jennifer Gibbons, “they are caught in the gravitational field between them, doomed to spin around each other forever. If they come too close or drift apart, both are destroyed.”

Not so, Renata protested when she read it—for of course she would read it. Look: she was not destroyed. She might even be considered fortunate, since Claudia didn’t turn the full force of her resentment on her, no more, that is, than by betraying her and estranging her. Claudia might well have destroyed Renata, but instead she destroyed herself.

She was so sunk in memories, moving like a sleepwalker toward the bridge, that at first she didn’t recognize the short old man with the leathery face who approached her on Court Street. He didn’t recognize her either. “The subway?” he asked in a Spanish accent. His appearance should have been enough: he always wore loose brown pants with a belt and black suspenders, a plaid shirt, a battered brown fedora, and thick square glasses. Renata started answering in Spanish, and as soon as the words came off her tongue she knew who he was. The bookman. She’d never seen him away from his table of used books on the corner of Montague Street with his cronies keeping him company, lounging on the ledge of the apartment building.

And he’d never seen her anywhere but walking past his table. When he heard her voice they smiled in recognition and gave the usual greetings: how are you today, how are you, beautiful day. Indeed, the Technicolor blue of the sky kept deepening, and a light breeze wafted from the north, rippling her flowered skirt against her bare legs, reminding her of how Jack had left her unattended to an hour ago.

“I have to go to a court building on Centre Street in Manhattan. I’m a witness in a case,” he explained in his genteel way. “But, you know, I hardly ever leave the neighborhood. I don’t know the subways very well.” Like most people who are forced to speak an adopted tongue and speak it poorly, in his native Spanish the bookman sounded smarter and more competent.

At his corner table, the bookman would welcome everyone like a long-lost friend, even first-time visitors. Renata never used to stop there because she was surrounded by enough books at the library, until one day last year, as she neared his post, he headed straight toward her holding a banana in each hand, smiling as if he’d been expecting her. He thrust the right-hand banana at her and the left-hand banana at another woman passing by. She tried to say she didn’t want a banana but there was no refusing him, so she took it with thanks. The other woman did, too. He flashed his toothy smile—cheap, gaudy dentures—and said “God bless you,” the words with which he ended every encounter.

He wasn’t pleased about testifying in court—who is?—and Renata commiserated. “Is it a serious case? Criminal?”

“No. My brother slipped on the ice in front of a building and broke his hip. I was with him, so I have to tell what I saw.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I hope he’ll be all right.”

“He’s fine.” The bookman smiled benignly. “It was two years ago.”

“Ah, the wheels of justice....Well, it’s only a few stops. Go to the corner.” She pointed. “Cross the street, turn left, walk one block, and it’s right there.” She was glad to help him out: the bookman was a local saint who inspired saintliness in others. He was at peace with the world and emanated a sense of the benign; everyone in the neighborhood felt it, at least those who wanted to make the world a better place. Or thought they did, but regretted having so little opportunity. Even a sense of the divine, one might say, were one inclined in that direction.

Helping him out was a small recompense for the banana and the many books he’d sold her at absurd prices from his jumbled inventory of cheap romances, how to find your inner child, The Iliad, John Le Carré, how to play golf like Tiger Woods, how to make a great toast at a wedding, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Louis L’Amour. People gave him the overflow of their shelves, and the bookman accepted all contributions indiscriminately. Happily. A happy man. Her best find on his table was the book about uchronies.

Uchronies are stories that imagine history taking a different course through some small but not inconceivable turn of events. The “what if” theory of history. Or, in the fancier language from the library’s recent exhibit on Utopias, a uchrony is an “apocryphal historical sketch of the development of European civilization such as it never was, such as it could have been.” Let’s say Hitler accidentally drowned on a camping trip as a boy, what would German history have been? Gandhi ducks the fatal shot. Truman slips getting out of the tub and can’t give the order to drop the bomb. And so forth. Closer to home, what if Claudia had been careless and left the twenty dollars she took from the club’s treasury at age eleven—the theft for which Renata was blamed—in the pocket of her jeans, and she, Renata, had discovered it? Or, four years later, when her Uncle Peter ran one finger gently down the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades while she was bending over her bike in the garage, adjusting the kickstand, what if she had understood right away that he was mistaking her for Claudia, was in the habit of caressing Claudia (which would account for Claudia’s recent moodiness), and what if, despite the lacerating shame, she’d gone like a good girl to tell her mother...? Would they have believed her? Would they have banished Peter? Would everything have turned out differently, Renata herself, altogether different?

She’d wanted an obscure book about uchronies, a book she couldn’t find in the library, and there it was on the bookman’s table. It’s true all kinds of things turned up there. Everyone who knew him suspected the bookman was in touch with a higher power. Not that Renata flattered herself that any higher power would care whether she found a particular book, not with so many more weighty matters on the agenda. Still, it was uncanny.

She pounced on the book. Just what she was looking for, she told the bookman, who grinned. “God bless you.” He charged a dollar. She wanted to give him more, he’d never make any money charging such low prices, she told him, but he wouldn’t take more. He said he’d rather have friends than money: “Mas valen amigos en plaza que dineros en casa.”

He wishes the world well. He would rather give than receive. How has he gotten so far along—in his seventies, it seems—without growing embittered or wary? It’s unnatural. Renata is much younger and very wary, especially of people who aren’t wary. Maybe the bookman is slightly soft in the head—all those God bless you’s. Who is he, anyway, when he’s not at his stand? Some days she imagines him in a shabby room with one grimy window and a hot plate, staring at an ancient black-and-white TV and other days, blue sunny days like today, she thinks that for all she knows, besides the brother, he has a wife, children, a nice apartment with pictures of the Crucifixion and the Virgin all over the place, a retirement pension, the book table his twilight-years hobby. As it happens, as he will shortly tell her when they have occasion to speak more intimately, that latter, better fantasy is very much the way it is for the bookman.

One way or another, he has an effect. She feels better after she talks to him. He brings news that the world is benevolent, and though she doesn’t trust the message, she trusts the messenger.

“Take the number 2 or 3 and get off at Chambers Street,” she told him. “It’s only a few stops. Once you get there, walk east on Chambers, four or five blocks, and you’ll get to Centre. All the court buildings are there, a block or so north. Just ask when you get there.”

He thanked her and set off. She waited to be sure he got it right. He stopped for the light at the corner, crossed, for a moment was blocked from view. When next she saw him, instead of turning left he turned right. What to do? Call out and run after him? No, no, Señor! Por allí no! Por allá! The other way! Even though she was faster and could catch up, she shrank from making a spectacle of herself, shouting and dashing through traffic in her flowered skirt and sandals. Was he still her responsibility? He must have changed his mind, decided to buy a paper or make a phone call. Or spotted one of his many local friends. But let’s not rationalize, let’s be frank: chances are he made a mistake.

Her directions were perfectly clear. Then again, what’s clear to one person may be complicated to another.

He was getting farther away. She’d have to run pretty fast to catch up now, and the longer she waited, the more foolish she’d seem when she did catch up. He’d know she’d been watching him. Well, so what? He’d chase after her, for sure, if the roles were reversed.

She carries on like this, makes every moment a life-and-death matter, because she knows what a seemingly trivial decision can mean. To go after someone or not, to go after Claudia, for instance, the night she went out so late. As in a uchrony, such decisions can change the course of history. What if, what if?

Oh, never mind, he’d get there sooner or later. He’d ask someone else. His brother’s case had waited two years; it could wait another half hour. He’d probably conclude that her directions were wrong, that she was one of those insufferable people who couldn’t admit ignorance; it’s a matter of pride to have an answer to any question put to them. No, he was so good, he’d understand.

He was long out of sight. She continued on, past the new-agey medical establishment for pregnant women, Birthing Renaissance, a favorite addition to her Twin Titles or Redundancy list. The neighborhood was propitious; only last week she’d spied a delivery truck speeding down Remsen Street appropriately bearing the name Velocity Express.

She climbed the stairs to the bridge. She’d be late getting to the library, but no one would care. Or if they cared, they wouldn’t say, because she’s indispensable.

The library receives books, pamphlets, reports, and every variety of written what-not in hundreds of languages from all over the world, some of them in danger of extinction. Renata’s job is to figure out what these cryptic publications are about so that they can be properly catalogued. She also helps anthropologists translate taped oral histories in unwritten languages and devise systems of transliteration. She has a freakish gift, or that’s what she calls it. (Would Claudia have shown it, too? she wonders. Would identical twins be alike in every anomalous tangle of their brain cells? But Claudia didn’t live long enough to find out, and wasn’t studious while she lived.)

Renata can look at a language and very quickly, within hours for simple languages and days for complex ones, decipher its structure and vocabulary. A dictionary helps, but if need be she can manage without one; a few clues will do. She doesn’t know how it happens, a glitch in the neurons, most likely. It’s like some musicians’ perfect pitch, or their ability to reproduce any melody on an instrument, only it’s rarer. Or like those wizards you hear of who can multiply six-digit figures in their head, or tell you how many marbles are in a jar. Often the latter are autistic or otherwise not quite right, which makes her suspect such idiosyncratic talents may go hand in hand with peculiar deficits. If brain space is limited, that is, perhaps the perfect pitch or the marbles-in-a-jar cells are taking the rightful place of more crucial skills. In any event, she’s made good use of the gift: unless a more efficient freak turns up, the job is hers for life. It would be hard to find a replacement who’d be content to remain in the library forever. Any possible replacements are traveling to exotic places for the United Nations or pursuing more lucrative academic careers. Renata barely finished college.

What she thinks about all day long, as she pores over Cochandi (from deep in the Amazon jungle) or Etinoi or Bliondan, isn’t the mechanical task of finding equivalents in English, but why language functions at all. Why, and this is true of every known language, does a series of words in a certain order make us laugh, and in another order make us cry? The ready, now universally accepted answer that were hard-wired for grammar, syntax, and connotation isn’t enough: she accepts it, then dismisses it. The puzzling question is, Where is the bridge between sounds or marks on a page and our emotional apparatus? What makes us respond to ink strokes with a quickening of the heart or a surge of adrenaline? Why couldn’t her mother understand the jokes in the language she and her sister spoke, and why did those curious syllables make Grace feel angry and excluded, while they made Claudia and Renata laugh?

Reading all those endangered-species languages, she comes across dozens of fine distinctions absent in English. To take a simple example, Etinoi (pale green on the computer) has three words for brother-in-law, denoting a sister’s husband, a husband’s brother, and a husband’s sister’s husband. It has words for the parents, brothers, and sisters of one’s children’s spouses—our inadequate “in-laws.” It distinguishes between aunts and uncles by blood and by marriage, all embellishments on the root word. Etinoi also has separate words for the varieties of loss: loss of a small object (most likely misplaced); loss of a large object (most likely destroyed or stolen); loss of a person, exactly as we mean it in English, by death; loss of a situation or way of life—one’s job, for example, or social standing or place in the world; loss of a state of mind or being, such as security, contentment, success. And each of those distinct words for loss can be modified by suffixes that indicate whether the thing lost can possibly be regained—tanfos-oude, the misplaced object found, or tanfanori-oude, success somehow regained—or whether, in the case of death or destruction, it is lost for good: tanfendi-noude.

Social life among the speakers of Etinoi is based on an elaborate system of obligations, both within families and in the larger social group, obligations regarding the rearing of children, the distribution of land and food, the allotment of tasks, or relations with neighboring peoples. The most serious obligation of all, which embraces and supersedes all others, is the obligation to live one’s life, that is, not to shrink from it. The word for that is ahmintu. It’s an easy enough principle to understand in the abstract, but not so easy to follow when it comes to action. Miss Greff, for instance, did not fulfill her obligation to live her life. She did not enter the world and take up any of its opportunities and challenges. Letitia Cole, in contrast, the composer turned belly dancer, obeyed the principle of ahmintu.

The task that awaits Renata today is decoding five pages from a taped account of an Etinoi creation myth. She’d love to hear the speaker’s voice, even though that would make the work go slower, but she hasn’t been sent a tape. She has to rely on the anthropologist’s murky transcript. The earth began in fire, the story goes. She can’t tell yet how the fire began. Out of the conflagration from nowhere came an enormous mound of ashes, and out of the ashes plants began to grow, as they do on landscapes scorched by volcanoes. Trees sprouted, and insects and worms crawled out of the ashes. As best as she can tell, everything else came about through some sort of evolution. The story suggests—again she’s not quite sure—that the world will end as it began, in a conflagration. And that this constant cycle, from fire to fire, is unending, with each new universe more precarious than the last, as if the materials are exhausting themselves with each round of flames. A disheartening prospect, but she’s enjoying the work. Looking forward to getting to her office haven.

Those who walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning do it out of love. Love for the bridge and the skyline and the water. So there’s a nice camaraderie among the walkers. Today she was early when she started out, because Jack didn’t have time to make her late. The bookman made her late. Jack had a meeting, he didn’t say where. Something he needed to wear a suit for. She appraised the men striding past and fixed on one, a black man in a tan suit, carrying an attaché case. Just speculating, idling away the walk....Liking him. Liking the way the breeze rippled her skirt against her legs. Wondering if he noticed her too....

So, adrift in her erotic fantasies, she didn’t see it happen, although she’s seen it so many times since that it feels like she saw it. People around her screamed, so she looked where they were looking, at a huge marigold bursting open in the sky, across the river, flinging petals into the blue. Everyone stood frozen on the bridge, as in a game of statues, gasping statues. Then, like an army suddenly given the order to retreat, they wheeled around and ran in the other direction, back to Brooklyn, back across the bridge and down the stairs. To put the river between them and the bloom of fire.

She felt stuck in place while people rushed past her. She didn’t want to go home. There was nothing at home. She headed for the Promenade, in the running crowd. By the time she got there, another grisly flower had burst open in the sky. The people with cell phones and Walkmans told the others what the radio and TV were saying. It was nothing comprehensible. Rumors, conjectures, scraps about planes, flight numbers, nothing compared to what was happening in the sky.

All at once, as she stood gazing across the river, she couldn’t tell for how long, the blooms were extinguished, replaced by a pillar of smoke. An instant later came a sound like nothing she could place, more muffled than thunder and more alive, almost like the roar of a great herd of beasts, but muted, far in the distance. As the sound subsided, the pillar of smoke began surging across the river, walling the skyline, making it seem there was nothing behind the wall.

The bookman!

If he found the subway...If he found the subway right away and got on, he could be underneath the pillar of smoke. Or he might be out by now. If he dawdled or walked farther astray, was that better or worse? Maybe he was so slow or befuddled that the subways stopped before he tried to board. He was a slow walker. So what had she effected by not chasing him? Good or bad? What if?

After the pillar of smoke came a hurricane of paper. The sky rained paper, and later some of the papers would be picked up as relics and sorted out—office memos, bills, jottings, computer printouts, resumes, stock reports, the daily menu of corporate life mingling with private scrawled hieroglyphics—while other papers would be left lying in the ash to devolve back to pulp under trampling feet and the wheels of sanitation trucks. Any other day, the papers would have been a treasure trove for Renata, with her collections of linguistic artifacts, of demotic speech, examples of brain and tongue parting company. But not today. Not hurricane day.

People were in motion all around her but she remained, rubbing her smarting eyes, shielding her head from the gale, trying to see past the smoke. They were all coughing, covering their faces with hankies and scarves and tissues. Some people bent to pick up bits of paper as they ran, the way people do peculiar things in a catastrophe. Renata bent down too. Then stood up, for it felt too stupid, as stupid as trying to see through a pillar of smoke. Then bent down again, an impulse she would never fathom, to riffle through the papers gathered at the edge of a grilled sewer lid coated with ash. Among the papers, as if she had been hunting for it, she found the twenty-dollar bill.

Whatever is happening, she thought, whether it’s the end of the world or simply the end of the city, it’s not right to profit from it. What kind of people would want to profit from this? Well, maybe some. Later, indeed, would come the profiteers. Still, the twenty-dollar bill was too powerful to resist. Not out of greed; she’s not greedy. She had the absurd notion that it might be the same twenty dollars that went missing when she was eleven years old, causing the estrangement from her now-dead twin sister and lasting grief. Changing the course of her life.

She is thirty-four. The chances that this is the same bill lost more than twenty years ago, come back to her, are nil. She knows that. But she picks it up and brushes it off against her flowered summer skirt—useless; the skirt, like the bill, is covered with ash—and stuffs it into her purse. Then joins the crowd and goes home, for surely there would be no work at the library today, if ever again. All the while, a thought nags at her, only it’s not even a thought, more of a flicker, a wisp, a feather just past her range of vision. She wants it and doesn’t want it. She heads toward her Spartan apartment, where she’ll throw her clothes in the garbage—her favorite skirt!—and stand under the shower to rinse off the ash that has bleached her black hair white, and only after that, turn on the television like everyone else.

Meanwhile she walks as fast as she can. Instead of the elusive flicker, something she and Linda laughed at during lunch comes to mind, a question Linda was asked during her last stint as the Answer Lady. Earthquake boxes. Renata didn’t know what they were. “In San Francisco and other earthquake areas,” Linda said, “people are advised to keep a box near their bed with anything they might need to take with them in an earthquake. You know, like a toothbrush, medication, address book, extra pair of glasses, whatever, for some types maybe their Palm Pilots and cells. Aren’t you glad you don’t live there?” She’s ashamed to be thinking of it now; it’s wrong to be remembering laughter. The other thing, the flicker, the feather, is more important, but she’s reluctant to grasp it.

Once she reaches her apartment, she gazes out the window at the smoke. Everything else is still there, river, sky, a few boats. She puts the bill under a blue vase on the square oak dining-room table, sturdier than her other things, a table she took from her childhood home after her family broke apart and her mother relinquished memory, which is why Renata wound up with the table, to remember the family dinners of childhood before all those things happened that were not supposed to happen to happy families. The vase sits next to a pile of magazines and the folder of clippings, and the twenty dollars will remain under it for some time. It is not money to be spent.

Only as she stands under the running water does the thought finally cohere and force itself on her. At which point she turns off the water and sits down on the edge of the tub digging her teeth into a towel. A nine-thirty meeting, Jack said. But where? Where? He works near there, under that stretch of ravaged sky. She knew it, she knew it, it’s no good to get close, to love people. Maybe she doesn’t love him if she hasn’t worried about him till now. Too busy feeling guilty about the bookman?

Now the flicker is a bright light, blinding. Jack. Mad Mom. They’re the only ones left. But however many times she tries, the phones aren’t working. They’re experiencing technical difficulties. Already they have words for it.

Even the grief-stricken can’t sit on the edge of the tub all day. She needs to put some clothes on, first of all. It’s wise to be dressed in an emergency, utilitarian clothes, jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, good for running. She dresses in the living room, in front of the TV. Watching the thing happen over and over feels ghoulish. Even so, she tapes it, more ghoulish still. But if Jack is still alive he’ll want to see. He’s the sort who’ll definitely want to see and hear everything. She’s known that since their very first, no, their second night together, when she was finally willing to hear who he really was.