Bellwether

The source of the Colorado River doesn’t look like one either. It’s in a glacier field up in the Green River Mountains, and what it looks like is tundra and snow and rock.

But even in deepest winter there’s some melting, a drop here, a trickle there, a little film of water forming at the grubby edges of the glacier and spilling over onto the frozen ground. Falling and freezing, collecting, converging, so slowly you can’t see it.

Scientific research is like that, too. “Eureka!”s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals’ density are few and far between, and mostly it’s just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Take Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Their goal was to measure the absolute intensity of radio signals from space, but first they had to get rid of the background noise in their detector.

They moved their detector to the country to get rid of city noise, radar stations, and atmospheric noise, which helped, but there was still background noise.

They tried to think what might be causing it. Birds? They went up on the roof and looked at the horn-shaped antenna. Sure enough, pigeons were nesting inside it, leaving droppings that might be causing the problem.

They evicted the pigeons, cleaned the antenna, and sealed every possible joint and crack (probably with duct tape). There was still background noise.

All right. So what else could it be? Streams of electrons from nuclear testing? If it was, the noise should be diminishing, since atomic tests had been banned in 1963. They ran dozens of tests on the intensity to see if it was. It wasn’t.

And it seemed to be the same no matter which part of the heavens were overhead, which made no sense at all.

They tested and retested, taped and retaped, scraped off pigeon droppings, and despaired of ever getting to the point where they could perform their experiment on radio signal intensity for nearly five years before they realized what they had wasn’t background noise at all. It was microwaves, the resounding echo of the Big Bang.

Friday Flip brought the new funding application. It was sixty-eight pages long and poorly stapled. Three pages fell out of it as Flip slouched in the door and two more as she handed it to me. “Thank you, Flip,” I said, and smiled at her.

The night before I had read the last two thirds of Pippa Passes, during which Pippa had talked two murderously adulterous lovers into killing themselves, convinced a deceived young student to choose love over revenge, and reformed assorted ne’er-do-wells. And all just by chirping, “The year’s at the spring,/And day’s at the morn.” Think what she could have accomplished if she’d had a library card.

“You can change the world,” Browning was clearly saying. “By being perky and signaling before turning left, one person can have a positive effect on society,” and it was obvious from “The Pied Piper” that he understood how trends worked.

I hadn’t noticed any of these effects, but then neither had Pippa, who had presumably gone back to work at the silk factory the next day without any notion of all the good she’d done. I could see her at the staff meeting Management had called to introduce their new management system, PESTO. Right after the sensitivity exercise her coworker would lean over and whisper, “So, Pippa, what did you do on your day off?” and Pippa would shrug and say, “Nothing much. You know, hung out.”

So I might be having more of an effect on literacy and left-turn signaling than I’d realized, and, by being pleasant and polite, could stop the downward trend to rudeness.

Of course, Browning had never met Flip. But it was worth a try, and I had the comfort of knowing I couldn’t possibly make things worse.

So, even though Flip had made no effort to pick up the spilled pages and was, in fact, standing on one of them, I smiled at her and said, “How are you this morning?”

“Oh, just great,” she said sarcastically. “Perfectly fine.” She flopped down onto the hair-bobbing clippings on my lab table. “You will not believe what they expect me to do now!”

A little work? I thought uncharitably, and then remembered I was supposed to be following in Pippa’s footsteps. “Who’s they?” I said, bending to pick up the spilled pages.

“Management,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was wearing a pair of neon-yellow tights, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a very peculiar down vest. It was short and bunched oddly around the neck and armpits. “You know how I’m supposed to get a new job title and an assistant?”

“Yes,” I said, continuing to smile. “Did you? Get a new job title?”

“Ye-es,” she said. “I’m the interdepartmental communications liaison. But for my assistant, they expect me to be on a search committee. After work.”

Along the bottom of the vest there was a row of snaps, a style I had never seen before. She’s wearing it upside down, I thought.

“The whole point was I was overworked. That’s why I have to have an assistant, isn’t it? Hello?”

Wearing clothing some other way than was intended is an ever-popular variety of fad—untied shoelaces, backward baseball caps, ties for belts, slips for dresses—and one that can’t be put down to merchandising because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not new, either. High school girls in 1955 took to wearing their cardigan sweaters backward, and their mothers had worn unbuckled galoshes with short skirts and raccoon coats in the 1920s. The metal buckles had jangled and flapped, which is how the name flapper came about. Or, since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on the source of anything where fads are concerned, they were named for the chickenlike flapping of their arms when they did the Charleston. But the Charleston didn’t hit till 1923, and the word flapper had been used as early as 1920.

“Well,” Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”

“But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”

“Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”

“ ‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’ ” I said.

“What?”

So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”

She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.

“I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”

Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.

I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out and turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.

Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?

I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application. “Were there instructions included with the form?” I asked Flip.

“How would I know?” she said, getting up. “What’s this?” She stuck one of the clippings under my nose, an ad of a bobbed blonde standing next to a Hupmobile.

“The car?”

“No-o-o,” she said, letting her breath out in a big sigh. “Her hair.”

“A bob,” I said, and leaned closer to see if the hair was cut in an Eton bob or a shingle. It was crimped in even rows down the sides of her head. “A marcel wave,” I said. “It was a permanent wave done with a special electrical metal-and-wires apparatus that was about as much fun as going to the dentist,” but Flip had already lost interest.

“I think if they’re going to make you stay after work or make you do extra jobs they should pay you overtime. Like stapling all these funding forms and delivering them to everybody. Some of them were supposed to go all the way down to Bio.”

“Did you deliver one to Dr. O’Reilly?” I said, remembering her habit of dumping packages on closer offices.

“Of course. He didn’t even thank me. What a swarb!”

“Swarb?” I said. Fads in language are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t even try from a research standpoint, but I know most of the slang because that’s how fads are described. But I’d never heard this one.

“You don’t know what swarb means?” she said, in a tone that made me wish Pippa had gone around Italy slapping people. “No hots. No cutes. Cyber-ugg. Swarb.” She flailed her duct-taped arms, trying to think of the word. “Completely fashion-impaired,” she said, and flounced out in her duct tape and upside-down down. Without the clippings.

Saturday morning the library called and told me my name had come up on the reserve list for Led On by Fate, so I went to Boulder to pick it up and buy a birthday present for Brittany.

“You can have Angels, Angels Everywhere, too, if you want,” Lorraine told me at the library. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a dalmatian on it and red fireplug earrings. “We finally got two more copies now that nobody wants them.”

I leafed through it while she swiped Led On by Fate with the light pen.

“Your guardian angel goes with you everywhere,” it said. “It’s always there, right beside you, wherever you go.” There was a line drawing of an angel with large wings looming over a woman in a grocery checkout line. “You can ignore them, you can even pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t make them go away.”

Until the fad’s over, I thought.

I checked out Led On by Fate and a book on chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams so I’d have a pretext for going down to Bio to see what Dr. O’Reilly was wearing, and went over to the Pearl Street Mall.

Lorraine was right. The bookstore had Angel in My Condo and The Cherubim Cookbook on a sale rack, and The Angel Calendar was marked fifty percent off. There was a big display up front for Faerie Encounters of the Fourth Kind.

I went upstairs to the kids’ section and more fairies: The Flower Fairies (which had been a fad once before, back in the 1910s); Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; More Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; and The Land of Faerie Fun. Also Batman books, Lion King books, Power Rangers books, and Barbie books.

I finally managed to find a hardback copy of Toads and Diamonds, which I’d loved as a kid. It had a fairy in it, but not like those in Fairies, Fairies, Etc., with lavender wings and bluebells for hats. It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances. My kind of moral.

I bought it and went out into the mall. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, balmy and blue-skied. The Pearl Street Mall on a Saturday’s a great place to analyze trends, since, one, there are hordes of people, and two, Boulder’s almost terminally hip. The rest of the state calls it the People’s Republic of Boulder, and it’s got every possible kind of New Ager and falafel stand and street musician.

There are even fads in street music. Guitars were out and bongos were in again. (The first time was in 1958, at the height of the Beat movement. Very low ability threshold.) Flip’s buzzcut-and-swag was very in, and so was the buzzcut-and-message. And duct tape. I saw two people with strips around their sleeves and one with dreadlocks and a bowler had a wide band of duct tape wrapped around his neck like the ones the French had worn during the à la victime fad after the Revolution.

Which was incidentally the last time women had cut their hair short until the 1920s, and it was a snap to trace that fad to its source. Aristocrats had had their hair chopped off to make it easier on the guillotine, and after the Empire was reinstated, relatives and friends had worn their hair short in sympathetic tribute. They’d also tied narrow red ribbons around their necks, but I doubted if that was what the dreadlocks person had had in mind. Or maybe it was.

Backpacks were out, and tiny, dangling wallets-on-a-string were in. Also Ugg boots, and kneeless jeans, and plaid flannel shirts. There wasn’t an inch of corduroy anywhere. In-line skating with no regard for human life was very much in, as was walking slowly and obliviously four abreast. Sunflowers were out and violets were in. Ditto the Sinéad O’Connor look, and hair wraps. The long, thin strands of hair wrapped in brightly colored thread were everywhere.

Crystals and aromatherapy were out, replaced apparently by recreational ethnicity. The New Age shops were advertising Iroquois sweat lodges, Russian banya therapy, and Peruvian vision quests, $249 double occupancy, meals included. There were two Ethiopian restaurants, a Filipino deli, and a cart selling Navajo fry bread.

And half a dozen coffeehouses, which had apparently sprung up like mushrooms overnight: the Jumpstart, the Espresso Espress, the Caffe Lottie, the Cup o’ Joe, and the Caffe Java.

After a while I got tired of dodging mimes and in-line skaters and went into the Mother Earth, which was now calling itself the Caffe Krakatoa (east of Java). It was as crowded inside as it had been out on the mall. A waitress with a swag haircut was taking names. “Do you want to sit at the communal table?” she was asking the guy in front of me, pointing to a long table with two people at it, one at each end.

That’s a trend that’s moved over here from England, where strangers have to share tables in order to keep up with the gossip on Prince Charles and Camilla. It hasn’t caught on particularly over here, where strangers are more apt to want to talk about Rush Limbaugh or their hair implants.

I had sat at communal tables a few times when they were first introduced, thinking it was a good way to get exposure to trends in language and thought, but a taste was more than enough. Just because people are experiencing things doesn’t mean they have any insight into them, a fact the talk shows (a trend that has reached the cancerous uncontrolled growth stage and should shortly exhaust its food supply) should have figured out by now.

The guy was asking, “If I don’t sit at the communal table, how long a wait?”

The waitress sighed. “I don’t know. Forty minutes?” and I certainly hoped that wasn’t going to be a trend.

“How many?” she said to me.

“Two,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to sit at the communal table. “Foster.”

“It has to be your first name.”

“Why?” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “So I can call you.”

“Sandra,” I said.

“How do you spell that?”

No, I thought, please tell me Flip isn’t becoming a trend. Please.

I spelled Sandra for her, grabbed up the alternative newspapers, and settled into a corner for the duration. There was no point in trying to do the personals till I was at a table, but the articles were almost as good. There was a new laser technology for removing tattoos, Berkeley had outlawed smoking outdoors, the must-have color for spring was postmodern pink, and marriage was coming back in style. “Living together is passé,” assorted Hollywood actresses were quoted as saying. “The cool thing now is diamond rings, weddings, commitment, the whole bit.”

“Susie,” the waitress called.

No one answered.

“Susie, party of two,” she said, flipping her rattail. “Susie.”

I decided it was either me or somebody who’d given up and left. “Here,” I said, and let a waiter with a Three Stooges haircut lead me to a knee-mashing table by the window. “I’m ready to order,” I said before he could leave.

“I thought there were two in your party,” he said.

“The other person will be here soon. I’ll have a double tall caffè latte with skim milk and semisweet chocolate on top,” I said brightly.

The waiter sighed and looked expectant.

“With brown sugar on the side,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Sumatra, Yergacheffe, or Sulawesi?” he said.

I looked to the menu for help, but there was nothing there but a quote from Kahlil Gibran. “Sumatra,” I said, since I knew where it was.

He sighed. “Seattle-or California-style?”

“Seattle,” I said.

“With?”

“A spoon?” I said hopefully.

He rolled his eyes.

“What flavor syrup?”

Maple? I thought, even though that seemed unlikely. “Raspberry?” I said.

That was apparently one of the choices. He slouched off, and I attacked the personals. There was no point in circling the NSs. They were in virtually every ad. Two had it in their headline, and one, placed by a very intelligent, strikingly handsome athlete, had it listed twice.

Friends was out, and soul work was in. There were two references to fairies, and yet another abbreviation: GC. “JSDM seeks WSNSF. Must be GC. South of Baseline. West of Twenty-eighth.” I circled it and turned back to the code book. Geographically compatible.

There weren’t any other GCs, but there was a “Boulder mall area preferred,” and one that specified, “Valmont or Pearl, 2500 block only.”

Yes, in an eight-and-a-half narrow, and I’d like that delivered Federal Express to my door. It made me think fondly of Billy Ray, who was willing to drive all the way down from Laramie to take me out.

“This place is so ridiculous,” Flip said, sitting down across from me. She was wearing a babydoll dress, thigh-high pink stockings, and a pair of clunky Mary Janes, all of which she had on more or less right side up. “There’s a forty-minute line.”

Yes, I thought, and you should be in it. “There’s a communal table,” I said.

“Nobody sits together except swarbs and boofs,” she said. “Brine made us sit at the communal table once.” She bent over to pull up her thigh-highs.

There was no duct tape in evidence. Flip motioned the waiter over and ordered. “LattemarchianoskimtallJazula and not too much foam.” She turned to look at me. “Brine ordered a latte with Sumatra.” She picked up my sack from the bookstore. “What’s this?”

“A birthday present for Dr. Damati’s little girl.”

She had already pulled it out and was examining it curiously.

“It’s a book,” I said.

“Didn’t they have the video?” She stuck it back in the sack. “I would’ve bought her a Barbie.” She tossed her swath of hair, and I could see that she had a strip of duct tape across her forehead. There was a cut-out circle in the middle with what looked like a lowercase i tattooed right between her eyes.

“What’s your tattoo?”

“It’s not a tattoo,” she said, brushing her hair back so I could see it better. It was a lowercase i. “Nobody wears tattoos anymore.”

I started to draw her attention to her snowy owl and noticed that she was wearing duct tape there, too, a small circular patch right where the snowy owl had been.

“Tattoos are artificial. Sticking all those chemicals and cancerinogens under your skin,” she said. “It’s a brand.”

“A brand,” I said, wishing, as usual, that I hadn’t started this.

“Brands are organic. You’re not injecting something into your body. You’re bringing out something that’s already there in your natural body. Fire’s one of the four elements, you know.”

Sarah, over in Chem, would love to hear that.

“I’ve never seen one before,” I said. “What does the i stand for?”

She looked confused. “Stand for? It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s I. You know, me. Who I am. It’s a personal statement.”

I decided not to ask her why her brand was lowercase, or if it had occurred to her that anyone seeing her with it would immediately assume it stood for incompetent.

“It’s ‘I,’ ” she said. “A person who doesn’t need anybody else, especially not a swarb who would sit at the communal table and order Sumatra.” She sighed deeply.

The waiter brought our lattes in Alice-in-Wonderland-sized cups, which might be a trend but was probably just a practical adjustment. Pouring steaming liquids into clear glass can have disastrous results.

Flip sighed again, a huge sigh, and licked the foam despondently off the back of her long-handled spoon.

“Do you ever feel completely itch?”

Since I had no idea what itch was, I licked the back of my own spoon and hoped the question was rhetorical.

It was. “I mean, like take today. Here it is, the weekend, and I’m stuck sitting here with you.” Here she rolled her eyes and sighed again. “Guys suck, you know.”

By which I took it she meant Brine, of the bower boots and assorted studs.

“Life sucks. You say to yourself, What am I doing in my job?”

Not much, I thought.

“So, everything sucks. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not accomplishing anything. I’m twenty-two!” She ate a spoonful of foam. “Like, why can’t I ever meet a guy who isn’t a swarb?”

It might be the forehead tattoo, I thought, and then remembered I wasn’t any better off than Flip.

“It’s just like Groupthink says.” She looked at me expectantly, and then expelled so much air I thought she was going to deflate. “How can you not know about Groupthink? They’re the most in band in Seattle. It’s like their song says, ‘Spinning my wheels on the launchpad, spitting I dunno and itch.’ This is too bumming,” she said, glaring at me like it was my fault. “I gotta get out of here.”

She snatched up her check and slouched off through the crowd toward our waiter.

After a minute he came over and handed the check to me. “Your friend said you’d pay this,” he said. “She said to tip me twenty percent.”

After Flip left I went back to the personals, but they seemed sad and a little desperate: “Lonely SWF seeks someone who really understands.”

I wandered down the mall, looking at fairy T-shirts, fairy pillows, fairy soaps, and a cologne in a flower-shaped bottle called Elfmaiden. The Paper Doll had fairy greeting cards, fairy calendars, and fairy wrapping paper. The Peppercorn had a fairy teapot. The Quilted Unicorn, combining several trends, featured a caffè latte cup painted with a fairy dressed as a violet.

The sun had disappeared, and the day had turned gray and chilly. It looked as if it might even start to snow. I walked down past the Latte Lenya to the Fashion Front and went in to get warm and to see what color postmodern pink was.

Color fads are usually the result of a technological breakthrough. Mauve and turquoise, the colors of the 1870s, were brought about by a scientific breakthrough in the manufacture of dyes. So were the Day-Glo colors of the 1960s. And the new jewel-tone maroon and emerald car colors.

The fact that new colors are few and far between has never stopped fashion designers, though. They just give a new name to an old color. Like Schiaparelli’s “shocking” pink in the 1920s, and Chanel’s “beige” for what had previously been a nondescript tan. Or name a color after somebody, whether they wore it or not, like Victoria blue, Victoria green, Victoria red, and the ever-popular, and a lot more logical, Victoria black.

The clerk in the Fashion Front was talking on the phone to her boyfriend and examining her split ends. “Do you have postmodern pink?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said belligerently, and turned back to the phone. “I have to go wait on this woman,” she said, slammed the phone down, and slouched over to the racks.

It is a fad, I thought, following her. Flip is a fad.

She shoved past a counter full of angel sweatshirts marked seventy-five percent off, and gestured at the rack. “And it’s po-mo pink,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not postmodern.”

“It’s supposed to be the hot color for fall,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said, and slouched back to the phone while I examined “the hottest new color to hit since the sixties.”

It wasn’t new. It had been called ashes-of-roses the first time around in 1928 and dove pink the second in 1954.

Both times it had been a grim, grayish pink that washed out skin and hair, which hadn’t stopped it from being hugely popular. It no doubt would be again in its present incarnation as po-mo pink.

It wasn’t as good a name as ashes-of-roses, but names don’t have to be enticing to be faddish. Witness flea, the winning color of 1776. And the hit of Louis XVI’s court had been, I’m not kidding, puce. And not just plain puce. It had been so popular it’d come in a whole variety of appetizing shades: young puce, old puce, puce-belly, puce-thigh, and puce-with-milk-fever.

I bought a three-foot-long piece of po-mo pink ribbon to take back to the lab, which meant the clerk had to get off the phone again. “This is for hair wraps,” she said, looking disapprovingly at my short hair, and gave me the wrong change.

“Do you like po-mo pink?” I asked her.

She sighed. “It’s the boss color for fall.”

Of course. And therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.

I put my incorrect change and my ribbon in my shoulder bag (very passé) and went back out onto the mall. It had started to spit snow and the street musicians were shivering in their Birkenstocks and Ecuador shirts. I put on my mittens (completely swarb) and walked back down toward the library, looking at yuppie shops and bagel stands and getting more and more depressed. I had no idea where any of these fads came from, even po-mo pink, which some fashion designer had come up with. But the fashion designer couldn’t make people buy po-mo pink, couldn’t make them wear it and make jokes about it and write editorials on the subject of “What is fashion coming to?”

The fashion designers could make it popular this season, especially since nobody would be able to find anything else in the stores, but they couldn’t make it a fad. In 1971, they’d tried to introduce the long midi-skirt and failed utterly, and they’d been predicting the “comeback of the hat” for years to no avail. It took more than merchandising to make a fad, and I didn’t have any idea what that something more was.

And the more I fed in my data, the more convinced I was the answer wasn’t in it, that increased independence and lice and bicycling were nothing more than excuses, reasons thought up afterward to explain what no one understood. Especially me.

I wondered if I was even in the right field. I was feeling so dissatisfied, as if everything I was doing was pointless, so… itch.

Flip, I thought. She did this to me with her talk about Brine and Groupthink. She’s some kind of anti-guardian angel, following me everywhere, hindering rather than helping and putting me in a bad mood. And I’m not going to let her ruin my weekend. It’s bad enough she ruins the rest of the week.

I bought a piece of chocolate cheesecake and went back to the library and checked out The Red Badge of Courage, How Green Was My Valley, and The Color Purple, but the mood persisted throughout the steely afternoon, and all the icy way home, making it impossible for me to work.

I tried reading the chaos theory book I’d checked out, but it just made me more depressed. Chaotic systems had so many variables it would have been nearly impossible to predict the systems’ behavior if they acted in logical, straightforward ways. But they didn’t.

Every variable interacted with every other, colliding and connecting in unexpected ways, setting up iteration loops that fed into the system again and again, crisscrossing and connecting the variables so many ways it wasn’t surprising a butterfly could have a devastating effect. Or none at all.

I could see why Dr. O’Reilly had wanted to study a system with limited variables, but what was limited? According to the book, anything and everything was a variable: entropy, gravity, the quantum effects of an electron, or a star on the other side of the universe.

So even if Dr. O’Reilly was right and there weren’t any outside X factors operating on the system, there was no way to compute all the variables or even decide what they were.

It all bore an uncomfortable resemblance to fads and made me wonder which variables I wasn’t taking into account, so that when Billy Ray called, I clutched at him like a drowning man. “I’m so glad you called,” I said. “My research went faster than I thought it would, so I’m free after all. Where are you?”

“On my way to Bozeman,” he said. “When you said you were busy, I decided to skip the seminar and go pick up those Targhees I was looking at.” He paused, and I could hear the warning hum of his cell phone. “I’ll be back on Monday. How about dinner sometime next week?”

I wanted dinner tonight, I thought crabbily. “Great,” I said. “Call me when you get back.”

The hum crescendoed. “Sorry we missed each oth—” he said and went out of range.

I went and looked out the window at the sleet and then got into bed and read Led On by Fate cover to cover, which wasn’t much of a feat. It was only ninety-four pages long, and so obviously wretchedly written it was destined to become a huge fad.

Its premise was that everything was ordained and organized by guardian angels, and the heroine was given to saying things like “Everything happens for a reason, Derek! You broke off our engagement and slept with Edwina and were implicated in her death, and I turned to Paolo for comfort and went to Nepal with him so that we’d learn the meaning of suffering and despair, without which true love is meaningless. All of it—the train wreck, Lilith’s suicide, Halvard’s drug addiction, the stock market crash—it was all so we could be together. Oh, Derek, there’s a reason behind everything!”

Except, apparently, hair-bobbing. I woke up at three with Irene Castle and golf clubs dancing in my head. That happened to Henri Poincaré. He’d been working on mathematical functions for days and days, and one night he drank too much coffee (which probably had had the same effect as bad literature) and couldn’t sleep, and mathematical ideas “rose in crowds.”

And Friedrich Kekulé. He’d fallen into a reverie on top of a bus and seen chains of carbon atoms dancing wildly around. One of the chains had suddenly taken its tail in its mouth and formed a ring, and Kekulé had ended up discovering the benzene ring and revolutionizing organic chemistry.

All Irene Castle did with the golf clubs was the hesitation waltz, and after a while I turned on the light and opened Browning.

It turned out he had known Flip after all. He’d written a poem, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” about her. “G-r-r, you swine,” he’d written, obviously after she crumpled up all his poems, and “There go, my heart’s abhorrence.” I decided to say it to Flip the next time she stuck me with the check.

I spent the rest of the weekend ironing clippings and trying to decipher the simplified funding allocation form. What were Thrust Overlay Parameters? And my Efficiency Prioritization Ranking? And what did they mean by “List proprietary site bracket restrictions”? It made looking for the cause of hair-bobbing (or the source of the Nile) seem like a breeze in comparison.

Nobody else knew what EDI endorsements were either. When I went to work Monday, everybody I knew came up to the stats lab to ask about it.

“Do you have any idea how to fill this stupid funding form out?” Sarah asked, sticking her head in the door at mid-morning.

“Nope,” I said.

“What do you suppose an expense gradation index is?” She leaned against the door. “Do you ever feel like you should just give up and start over?”

Yes, I thought, looking at my computer screen. I had spent most of the morning reading clippings, extracting what I hoped was the relevant information from them, typing it onto a disk, and designing statistical programs to interpret it. Or what Billy Ray had referred to as “sticking it on the computer and pushing a button.”

I’d pushed the button, and surprise, surprise, there were no surprises. There was a correlation between the number of women in the workforce and the number of outraged references to hair-bobbing in the newspapers, an even stronger one between bobs and cigarette sales, and no correlation between the length of hair and the length of skirts, which I could have predicted. Skirts had dipped back to midcalf in 1926, while hair had gone steadily shorter all the way to the crash of ’29, with the boyish shingle in 1925 and the even shorter Eton crop in 1926.

The strongest correlation of all was to the cloche hat, thus giving support to the cart-before-the-horse theory and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that statistics isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

“Lately I’ve been feeling depressed about the whole thing,” Sarah was saying. “I’ve always believed it was just a question of his having a higher relationship threshold than I do, but I’ve been thinking maybe this is just part of the denial structure that goes with codependent relationships.”

Ted, I thought. We’re talking about Ted, who doesn’t want to get married.

“And this weekend, I got to thinking, What’s the point? I’m following an intimacy path and he’s into off-road detachment.”

“Itch,” I said.

“What?”

“What you’re feeling,” I said. “Like you’re spinning your wheels on the launchpad. You didn’t run into Flip this weekend, did you?”

“I saw her this morning,” she said. “She brought me Dr. Applegate’s mail.”

An antiangel, wandering through the world spreading gloom and destruction.

“Well, anyway,” Sarah said, “I’d better go see if I can find somebody in Management who can tell me what an expense gradation index is,” and left.

I went back to my hair-bobbing data. I ran a geographical distribution for 1923 and then for 1922. They showed clusters in New York City and Hollywood, which were no surprise, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Marydale, Ohio, which were. On a hunch, I asked for a breakdown of Montgomery, Alabama. It showed a cluster too small to be statistically significant but enough to explain the St. Paul one. Montgomery was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had met Zelda, and St. Paul was his hometown. The locals obviously were trying to live up to “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” It didn’t explain Marydale, Ohio. I ran a geographical distribution for 1921. It was still there.

“Here,” Flip said, sticking my mail under my nose. Apparently nobody had told her po-mo pink was the in color for fall. She was wearing a brilliant bilious blue tunic and leggings and an assortment of duct tape.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, grabbing a stack of clippings. “You owe me two-fifty for your caffè latte and I need you to copy these for me. Oh, and wait.” I went and got the personals I’d gone through Saturday, and two articles about angels. I handed them to Flip. “One copy of each.”

“I don’t believe in angels,” she said.

Right on the cutting edge, as usual.

“I used to believe in them,” she said, “but I don’t anymore, not since Brine. I mean, if you really had a guardian angel, she’d cheer you up when you were bummed and get you out of committee meetings and stuff.”

“What about fairies?” I asked.

“You mean like fairy godmothers?” she said. “Of course. Duh.”

Of course.

I went back to my hair-bobbing. Marydale, Ohio. What could it have had to make it a hot spot of hair-bobbing? Hot, I thought. How about unusually hot weather in Ohio during the summer of 1921? So hot long hair would have clung sweatily to the back of the neck, and women would have said, “I can’t take this anymore”?

I called up weather data for the state of Ohio for June through September and began looking for Marydale.

“Do you have a minute?” said a voice from the door. It was Elaine from Personnel. She was wearing a sweatband and a sour expression. “Do you have any idea what hiral implementation format rations are?” she asked.

“Not a clue. Did you try Management?”

“I’ve been up there twice and couldn’t get in. There’s a huge crowd.” She took a deep breath. “I’m getting totally stressed. Do you want to go work out?”

“Stair-climbing?” I said dubiously.

She shook her head firmly. “Stair-climbing doesn’t give a large-muscle workout. Wall-walking. Gym over on Twenty-eighth. They’ve got pitons and everything.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got walls here.”

She looked disapprovingly at them and went out, and I went back to my hair-bobbing. 1921 temps for Marydale had been slightly lower than normal, and it wasn’t the hometown of either Irene Castle or Isadora Duncan.

I abandoned it for the moment and did a Pareto chart and then ran some more regressions. There was a weak correlation between church attendance and bobs, a strong correlation between bobs and Hupmobile sales, but not Packards or Model T Fords, and a very strong correlation between bobs and women in nursing careers. I called up a list of American hospitals in 1921. There wasn’t one within a hundred miles of Marydale.

Gina came in, looking harassed.

“No, I don’t know how to fill out the funding form,” I said before she could ask, “and neither does anybody else.”

“Really?” she said vaguely. “I haven’t even looked at it yet. I’ve been spending all my time on the stupid search committee for Flip’s assistant. What do you consider the most important quality in an assistant?”

“Being the opposite of Flip,” I said, and then, when she didn’t laugh, “Competence, cheerfulness, willingness to work?”

“Exactly,” she said. “And if a person had those qualities, you’d hire them immediately, wouldn’t you? And if they were as overqualified for the job as she is, you’d snap them right up. You wouldn’t turn her down because of one little drawback and expect them to interview dozens of other people, especially when you’ve got other things to do. Fill out this ridiculous funding form, for one, and plan a birthday party. Do you know what Brittany picked, when I said she couldn’t have the Power Rangers? Barney. And it isn’t as if she isn’t competent and cheerful and willing to work. Right?”

I was unclear as to whether she was talking about Brittany or the assistant applicant. “Barney is pretty awful,” I said.

“Exactly,” Gina said, as if I’d proved her point, whatever it was. “I’m hiring her,” and she flounced out.

I went back and sat down in front of the computer. Cloche hats, Hupmobiles, and Marydale, Ohio. None of them seemed likely to be the trigger. What was? What had suddenly set the fad in motion?

Flip came in, carrying the stack of clippings and personals I’d just given her. “What did you want me to do with these again?”

Tuesday Management called another meeting. “To explain the simplified funding forms,” I said to Gina, walking down to the cafeteria. “I hope so,” she said, looking even more harassed than she had yesterday. “It would be nice to see somebody else on the defensive for a change.”

I was going to ask her what she meant by that, but just then I spotted Dr. O’Reilly on the far side of the room talking to Dr. Turnbull. She was wearing a po-mo pink suit (sans shoulder pads), and he had on one of those print polyester shirts from the seventies. By the time I’d taken all that in, Gina was at our table with Sarah, Elaine, and a bunch of other people.

I walked over, bracing myself for a discussion of intimacy issues and Power-walking, but they were apparently discussing Flip’s new assistant.

“I didn’t think it was possible to hire somebody worse than Flip,” Elaine was saying. “How could you, Gina?”

“But she’s very competent,” Gina said defensively. “She’s had experience with Windows and SPSS, and she knows how to repair a copy machine.”

“All that’s entirely irrelevant,” a woman from Physics said, though it didn’t sound irrelevant to me.

“Well, I’m not working with her,” a man from Product Development said. “And don’t tell me you didn’t know she was one. You can tell just by looking at her.”

Bigotry is one of the oldest and ugliest of trends, so persistent it only counts as a fad because the target keeps changing: Huguenots, Koreans, homosexuals, Muslims, Tutsis, Jews, Quakers, wolves, Serbs, Salem housewives. Nearly every group, so long as it’s small and different, has had a turn, and the pattern never changes—disapproval, isolation, demonization, persecution. Which was one of the reasons it’d be nice to find the switch that turned fads on. I’d like to turn that one off for good.

“People like that shouldn’t be allowed to work in a big company like HiTek,” Sarah, who was actually a nice person in spite of her psychobabble about Ted, was saying.

And Dr. Applegate, who definitely should know better, added disgustedly, “I suppose if you fired her, she’d sue for discrimination. That’s what’s wrong with all this affirmative action stuff.”

I wondered what small and different group Flip’s new assistant had the misfortune to belong to: Hispanic, lesbian, NRA member?

“She’s not setting foot in my lab,” a woman wearing a turban said. “I’m not exposing myself to unnecessary health risks.”

“But she won’t be smoking on the job,” Gina said. “She can keyboard a hundred words a minute.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Elaine said. “Haven’t you read the FDA report on the dangers of secondhand smoke?”

On the other hand, there are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.

I was about to say as much to Elaine when Dr. O’Reilly grabbed my arm. “Come sit with me,” he said, and led me away. “I need you to be my partner in case Management springs another sensitivity thing.” He looked at me uncertainly. “Unless you’d rather sit with your friends.”

“No,” I said, watching them surround Gina. “Not at the moment.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “The last sensitivity exercise, I got stuck with Flip.” We sat down. “So how’s your fads research coming?”

“It’s not,” I said. “I picked hair-bobbing because I wanted a fad that didn’t have an obvious cause. Most fads are caused by a breakthrough in technology—nylons, waterbeds, light-up sneakers.”

“Fallout shelters.”

I nodded. “Or they’re a marketing phenomena, like Trivial Pursuit and teddy bears.”

“And fallout shelters.”

“Right. Hair-bobbing didn’t cost anything except the barber’s fee, and if you didn’t have that, all you needed to whack your hair off was a pair of scissors, which is a technology that’s been around forever.” I started to sigh and then realized I’d sound like Flip.

“So what’s the problem?” Bennett asked.

“The problem is hair-bobbing doesn’t have an obvious cause. Irene Castle looked like a possibility for a while, but it turned out she was following a Dutch bob fad that had been popular in Paris the year before. And none of the other sources has a direct correlation to the critical period. Have you ever heard of a place called Marydale, Ohio?”

“Good morning,” Management said from the podium. He was wearing a polo shirt, Dockers, and a pleased smile. “We’re really excited to see you all here.”

“What’s Management up to?” I whispered to Bennett.

“My guess is a new acronym,” he whispered. “Departmental Unification Management Business.” He wrote down the letters on his legal pad. “D.U.M.B.”

“We have several items of business today,” Management said happily. “First, some of you have been having minor difficulties filling out the simplified funding allocation forms. You’ll be receiving a memo that answers all your questions. The interdepartmental communications liaison is in the process of making copies for each of you right now.”

Bennett put his head down on the table.

“Secondly, I’d like to announce that HiTek is instituting a ‘dress down’ policy beginning this week. This is an innovative idea that all the best corporations are implementing. Casual dress induces a more relaxed workplace and stronger interemployee interfaces. So starting tomorrow I’ll expect to see all of you in casual clothes.”

I tuned him out and studied Bennett. He looked terrible. His polyester print shirt had little daisies on it in an assortment of browns, none of which came close to matching his brown cords. Over it he was wearing a pilled gray cardigan.

But it wasn’t just the clothes. The Brady Bunch Movie had made seventies styles fashionable again. Flip had worn satin disco pants the other day, and platform shoes and gold chains were all over the Boulder mall. But Bennett didn’t look “retro.” He looked “swarb.” I had the feeling that if he were wearing a bomber jacket and Nikes he’d still look that way. As if he were an antifaddist.

No, that wasn’t right either. Any number of fads were started as a rejection of existing fads. The long hair of the sixties was a rejection of the crew cuts of the fifties, the short, flat, figureless flapper dresses a reaction to the exaggeratedly bustled and corseted Victorians.

Bennett wasn’t rebelling. It was more like he was oblivious to the whole concept. No, that wasn’t the right word either. Immune.

And if he could be immune to fads, did that mean they were caused by some kind of virus? I looked over at Gina’s table, where Elaine and Dr. Applegate were earnestly whispering to her about emphysema and the surgeon general’s warning. Was Bennett really immune to fads or just fashion-impaired, as Flip had said?

I opened my notebook and wrote, “They hired Flip’s new assistant,” and pushed it over in front of him.

He wrote back, “I know. I met her this morning. Her name’s Shirl.”

“Did you know she smokes?” I wrote and watched his expression when he read it. He looked neither surprised nor repelled.

“Flip told me,” he wrote. “She said Shirl was going to pollute the workplace. The pot calling the kettle black.”

I grinned.

“What does that i tattoo on Flip’s forehead stand for?” he wrote.

“It’s not a tattoo, it’s a brand,” I wrote back.

“Incompetent or impossible?”

“Initiative,” Management said, and we both looked up guiltily. “Which brings me to our third item of business. How many of you know what the Niebnitz Grant is?”

I did, and even though nobody else raised their hand, I was willing to bet everybody else did, too. It’s the largest research grant there is, even bigger than the MacArthur Grant, and with virtually no strings attached. The scientist gets the money and can apply it to any kind of research at all. Or retire to the Bahamas.

It’s also the most mysterious research grant there is. Nobody knows who gives it, what they give it for, or even when it’s given. There was one awarded last year, to Lawrence Chin, an artificial intelligence researcher, four the year before that, and none before that for over three years. The Niebnitz people (whoever they are) sweep down periodically like one of those Angels from Above on some unsuspecting scientist and make it so he never has to fill out another simplified funding allocation form.

There are no requirements, no application form, no particular field of study the grant favors. Of the four the year before last, one was a Nobel prize winner, one a graduate assistant, one a chemist at a French research institute, and one a part-time inventor. The only thing that’s known for sure is the amount, which Management had just written on his flipchart: $1,000,000.

“The winner of the Niebnitz Grant receives one million dollars, to be spent on research of the recipient’s choice.” Management turned over a page of the flipchart. “The Niebnitz Grant is awarded for scientific sensibility.” He wrote science on the flipchart. “Divergent thinking.” He wrote thought. “And circumstantial predisposition to significant scientific breakthrough.” He added breakthrough and then tapped all three words with his pointer. “Science. Thought. Breakthrough.”

“What does this have to do with us?” Bennett whispered.

“Two years ago the Institut de Paris won a Niebnitz Grant,” Management said.

“No, it didn’t,” I whispered. “A scientist working at the Institut won it.”

“And they were using old-fashioned management techniques,” Management said.

“Oh, no,” I murmured. “Management expects us to win a Niebnitz Grant.”

“How can they?” Bennett whispered. “Nobody even knows how they’re awarded.”

Management cast a cold eye in our direction. “The Niebnitz Grant Committee is looking for outstanding creative projects with the potential for significant scientific breakthroughs, which is what GRIM is all about. Now I’d like you to get in groups and write down five things you can do to win the Niebnitz Grant.”

“Pray,” Bennett said.

I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down:

“What is that?” Bennett said, looking at the list. “Those make no sense.”

“Neither does expecting us to win the Niebnitz Grant.” I handed it in.

“Now let’s get busy. You’ve got divergent thinking to do. Let’s see some significant scientific breakthroughs.”

Management marched out, his baton under his arm, but everyone just sat there, stunned, except Alicia Turnbull, who started taking rapid notes in her daybook, and Flip, who strolled in and started passing out pieces of paper.

“Projected Results: Significant Scientific Breakthrough,” I said, shaking my head. “Well, bobbed hair certainly isn’t it.”

“Don’t they know science doesn’t work like that? You can’t just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you look at something you’ve been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you’re looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don’t they know you can’t get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?”

“These are the people who gave Flip a promotion, remember?” I frowned. “What is ‘circumstantial predisposition to significant scientific breakthrough’?”

“For Fleming it was looking at a contaminated culture and noticing the mold had killed the bacteria,” Ben said.

“And how does Management know the Niebnitz Grant Committee gives the grant for creative projects with potential? How do they know there’s a committee? For all we know, Niebnitz may be some old rich guy who gives money to projects that don’t show any potential at all.”

“In which case we’re a shoo-in,” Bennett said.

“For all we know, Niebnitz may give the grant to people whose names begin with C, or draw the names out of a hat.”

Flip slouched over and handed one of her papers to Bennett. “Is this the memo explaining the simplified funding form?” he asked.

“No-o-o-o,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It’s a petition. To make the cafeteria a one hundred percent smoke-free environment.” She sauntered away.

“I know what the i stands for,” I said. “Irritating.”

He shook his head. “Insufferable.”

It occurred to me the next day while ransacking my lab for the clippings I’d given Flip to copy that Bennett’s remark about having already met her new assistant must mean she’d been assigned to Bio. But in the afternoon Gina, looking hunted, came in to say, “I don’t care what they say. I did the right thing hiring her. Shirl just printed out and collated twenty copies of an article I wrote. Correctly. I don’t care if I am breathing in second-secondhand smoke.”

“Second-secondhand smoke?”

“That’s what Flip calls the air smokers breathe out. But I don’t care. It’s worth it.”

“Shirl’s been assigned to you?” I said.

She nodded. “This morning she delivered my mail. My mail. You should get her assigned to you.”

“I will,” I said, but that was easier said than done. Now that Flip had an assistant, she (and my clippings) had disappeared off the face of the earth. I searched the entire building twice, including the cafeteria, where large NO SMOKING signs had been put on all the tables, and Supply, where Desiderata was trying to figure out what printer cartridges were, and found Flip finally in my lab, sitting at my computer and typing something in.

She deleted it before I could see what it was and leaped up. If she’d been capable of it, I would have said she looked guilty.

“You weren’t using it,” she said. “You weren’t even here.”

“Did you make copies of those clippings I gave you Monday?” I said.

She looked blank.

“There was a copy of the personal ads on top of them.”

She tossed her swag of hair. “Would you use the word elegant to describe me?”

She had added a hair wrap to her hank, a long thin strand of hair bound in bilious blue embroidery thread, and a band of duct tape across her forehead cut out to frame the i.

“No,” I said.

“Well, nobody expects you to be all of them,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’re so hooked on the personals. You’ve got that cowboy guy.”

“What?”

“Billy Boy Somebody,” she said, waving her hand at the phone. “He called and said he’s in town for some seminar and you’re supposed to meet him for dinner someplace. Tonight, I think. At the Nebraska Daisy or something. At seven o’clock.”

I went over to my phone message pad. It was blank. “Didn’t you write the message down?”

She sighed. “I can’t do everything. That’s why I was supposed to get an assistant, remember? So I wouldn’t have to work so hard, only since she’s a smoker, half the people I assigned her to don’t want her in their labs, so I still have to copy all this stuff and go all the way down to Bio and stuff. I think smokers should be forced to give up cigarettes.”

“Who all did you assign to her?”

“Bio and Product Development and Chem and Physics and Personnel and Payroll, and all the people who yell at me and make me do a lot of stuff. Or put in a camp or something where they couldn’t expose the rest of us to all that smoke.”

“Why don’t you assign her to me? I don’t mind that she smokes.”

She put her hands on the hips of her blue leather skirt. “It causes cancer, you know,” she said disapprovingly. “Besides, I’d never assign her to you. You’re the only one who’s halfway nice to me around here.”

It was the Kansas Rose at five-thirty. “You got my message okay,” Billy Ray said, coming out to meet me in the parking lot. He was wearing black jeans, a black-and-white cowboy shirt, and a white Stetson. His hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him. Long hair must be coming back in.

“Sort of,” I said. “I’m here.”

“Sorry it had to be so early,” he said. “There’s an evening workshop on ‘Irrigation on the Internet’ I don’t want to miss.” He took my arm. “This is supposed to be the trendiest place in town.”

He was right. There was a half-hour wait, even with reservations, and every woman in line was wearing po-mo pink.

“Did you get your Targhees?” I asked him, leaning back against an ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING sign.

“Yep, and they’re great. Low maintenance, high tolerance for cold, and fifteen pounds of wool in a season.”

“Wool?” I said. “I thought Targhees were cows.”

“Nobody’s raising cows anymore,” he said, frowning as if I should know that. “The whole cholesterol thing. Lamb’s got a lower cholesterol count, and shearling’s supposed to be the hot new fashion fabric for winter.”

“Bobby Jay,” the hostess, who was wearing a red gingham pinafore and hair wraps, called out.

“That’s us,” I said.

“We don’t want to sit anywhere close to where the smoking section used to be,” Billy Ray said, and we followed her to the table.

The sunflower fad had apparently come here to die. They were entwined in the white picket fence around our table, framed on the wall, painted on the bathroom doors, embroidered on the napkins. A large artificial bunch was stuck in a Mason jar in the middle of our sun-flowered tablecloth.

“Cool, huh?” Billy Ray said, opening his sunflower-shaped menu. “Everybody says prairie’s going to be the next big fad.”

“I thought shearling was,” I muttered, picking up the menu. Prairie cuisine wasn’t so much hot as substantial—chicken-fried steak, cream gravy, corn on the cob, all served family-style.

“Something to drink?” a waiter in buckskin and a knotted sunflower bandanna asked.

I looked at the menu. They had espresso, cappuccino, and caffè latte, also very big in prairie days. No iced tea.

“Iced tea’s the Kansas state beverage,” I told the waiter. “How can you not have it?”

He’d apparently been taking lessons from Flip. He rolled his eyes, sighed expertly, and said, “Iced tea is outré.”

A word never uttered on the prairie, I thought, but Billy Ray was already ordering meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and cappuccino for both of us.

“So, tell me about this thing you’re researching that’s got you working weekends.”

I did. “The problem is I’ve got causes coming out my ears,” I said, after I’d explained what I’d been doing. “Female equality, bicycling, a French fashion designer named Poiret, World War One, and Coco Chanel, who singed her hair off when a heater exploded. Unfortunately, none of them seems to be the main source.”

Our dinner arrived, on brown earthenware platters decorated with sunflowers. The coleslaw was garnished with fresh basil, which I didn’t remember as being big on the prairie either, and the meat loaf was garnished with lemon slices.

Billy Ray told me about the merits of sheep-raising while we ate. Sheep were healthy, profitable, no trouble to herd, and you could graze them anywhere, all of which I would have been more inclined to believe if he hadn’t told me the same thing about raising longhorns six months ago.

“Dessert?” the waiter said, and brought over the pastry cart.

I figured a prairie dessert would probably be gooseberry pie or maybe canned peaches, but it was the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, “and our newest dessert, bread pudding.”

Well, that sounded like a Kansas dessert, all right, the sort of thing you were reduced to eating after the cow died and the grasshoppers ate up the crops.

“I’ll have the tiramisu,” I said.

“Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve always hated bread pudding. It’s like eating leftovers.”

“Everybody raves about our bread pudding,” the waiter said reproachfully. “It’s our most popular dessert.”

The bad thing about studying trends is that you can’t ever turn it off. You sit there across from your date eating tiramisu, and instead of thinking what a nice guy he is, you find yourself thinking about trends in desserts and how they always seem to be gooey and calorie-laden in direct proportion to the obsession with dieting.

Take tiramisu, which has chocolate and whipped cream and two kinds of cheese. And burnt-sugar cake, which was big in the forties, in spite of wartime rationing.

Pineapple upside-down cake was a fad in the twenties, a dessert I hope doesn’t make a comeback anytime soon; chiffon cake in the fifties; chocolate fondue in the sixties.

I wondered if Bennett was immune to food trends, too, and what his ideas on bread pudding and chocolate cheesecake were.

“You thinking about hair-bobbing again?” Billy Ray said. “Maybe you’re looking at too many things. This conference I’m at says you’ve got to niff.”

“Niff?”

“NYF. Narrow Your Focus. Eliminate all the peripherals and focus in on the core variables. This hair-bobbing thing can only have one cause, right? You’ve got to narrow your focus to the likeliest possibilities and concentrate on those. It works, too. I tried it on a case of sheep mange. You’re sure you won’t come to my workshop with me?”

“I have to go to the library,” I said.

“You should get the book. Five Steps to Focusing on Success.”

After dinner Billy Ray went off to niff, and I went over to the library to see about Browning. Lorraine wasn’t there. A girl wearing duct tape, hair wraps, and a sullen expression was. “It’s three weeks overdue,” she said.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “I only checked it out last week. And I checked it in. On Monday.” After I’d tried Pippa on Flip and decided Browning didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d checked in Browning and checked out Othello, that other story about undue influences.

She sighed. “Our computer shows it as still checked out. Have you looked around at home?”

“Is Lorraine here?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “No-o-o-o.”

I decided it was the better part of valor to wait until she was and went over to the stacks to look for Browning myself.

The Complete Works wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember the name of the book Billy Ray had suggested. I pulled out two books by Willa Cather, who knew what prairie cooking had actually been like, and Far from the Madding Crowd, which I remembered as having sheep in it, and then wandered around, trying to remember the name of Billy Ray’s book and hoping for inspiration.

Libraries have been responsible for a lot of significant scientific breakthroughs. Darwin was reading Malthus for recreation (which should tell you something about Darwin), and Alfred Wegener was wandering around the Marburg University library, idly spinning the globe and browsing through scientific papers, when he got the idea of continental drift. But nothing came to me, not even the name of Billy Ray’s book. I went over to the business section to see if I would remember the name of the book when I saw it.

Something about narrowing the focus, eliminating all the peripherals. “It can only have one cause, right?” Billy Ray had said.

Wrong. In a linear system it might, but hair-bobbing wasn’t like sheep mange. It was like one of Bennett’s chaotic systems. There were dozens of variables, and all of them were important. They fed into each other, iterating and reiterating, crossing and colliding, affecting each other in ways no one would expect. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I had too many causes, but that I didn’t have enough. I went over to the nine hundreds and checked out Those Crazy Twenties; Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters; and The 1920’s: A Sociological Study, and as many other books on the twenties as I could carry, and took them up to the desk.

“I show an overdue book for you,” the girl said. “It’s four weeks overdue.”

I went home, excited for the first time that I was on the right track, and started work on the new variables.

The twenties had been awash in fads: jazz, hip flasks, rolled-down stockings, dance crazes, raccoon coats, mah-jongg, running marathons, dance marathons, kissing marathons, Stutz Bearcats, flagpole-sitting, tree-sitting, crossword puzzles. And somewhere in all those rouged knees and rain slickers and rocking-chair derbies was the trigger that had set off the hair-bobbing craze.

I worked until very late and then went to bed with Far from the Madding Crowd. I was right. It was about sheep. And fads. In Chapter Five one of the sheep fell over a cliff, and the others followed, plummeting one after the other onto the rocks below.