The Place of Quarantine

Chapter 18

“Let’s go to your bedroom,” Elsa says. “We need to choose your clothes.”

I halfheartedly try to protest, but she is adamant – she gets up off the couch and drags me along behind her.

Today is an important day: I’m about to have a serious talk with Nestor, summarizing what we have achieved so far. This is a joint decision by Elsa and me – however, we are not totally clear what our objectives are. It’s just a vague sense of urgency that both of us have felt simultaneously.

In addition to this inkling, there is a formal reason: I have recalled a considerable part of the theory. It’s almost logically complete now – I have remembered everything right up to my fainting fit, Bern’s hospital and an airliner flying over the clouds. My memories cascaded in like a raging torrent; I barely managed to transfer them to paper. There were formulas, facts, notes and sketches – at times, all mixed up in a heap, not easy to sort out. I worked during the day, in the living room, and sometimes in my bedroom instead of sleeping – in contravention of the schedule, with permission from Nestor. Surprisingly, I didn’t get tired – that’s one of the advantages of a fictitious body. Some of the math hasn’t come back to me yet, but I know it won’t be long; I’ll soon be getting the hang of it.

Elsa spent nearly all her time on her embroidery. Our tablecloth is now covered in inscriptions: in addition to “Good girls go to heaven…,” we have “Virginity is curable,” “Dream to dare,” “Love your enemies” in large letters and a few more random words. While I was hard at work at my desk, she would sit at her regular place on the couch and look over at me with some envy, maybe even jealousy. I understood her – fully occupied by my theory, I couldn’t give her enough attention. We still kept to our usual routine, however: joint breakfasts, walks along the embankment, attempts to somehow link our memories – which, to be honest, Elsa put a lot more effort into than I did. She basically became the mistress of the house – mistress of our everyday lives, of our surreal world and, in a sense, mistress over me. At least, that’s how it seemed – as for me, I was incapable of thinking seriously about anything except quantum fields and fractal structures.

And then, a few days ago, I suddenly had a dream about Tina. It was bright, short and completely incoherent. There were flashes of pink taxis and sheets on an unmade bed, fragile nudity and shameless groans, a view from a window onto a jungle of skyscrapers, myself sitting in front of a pile of paper covered in formulas. I remembered a word from the dream: “Bangkok.” I repeat it to myself in my head, soundlessly. I repeat the word and a smell emerges – a mixture of musty cellars and smoldering coals, hissing oil and roast meat on skewers, fish sauce, coriander and tamarind. I feel, I recall – the unbearable sun, the moist, humid air, the taste of sweet coconut milk fresh from the nut, the taste of Tina – also sweet, somewhat reminiscent of coconut, but incomparable to anything in the world…

None of these details led anywhere; no veils were revealed, no covers were pulled back. I still couldn’t work out what took place, what happened in that hot, noisy city between me and a girl with the looks of a teenager. After that I tried with all my strength – to make a breakthrough, recollect, grasp – but to no avail: the theory would not advance and Tina no longer appeared to me. I only dreamed of the familiar: the clouds below the airliner and the equations with the mysterious field on the right, which I did not know how to approach. And last night I saw Brevich – not the way I knew him before, in my first dreams here, which Nestor had chosen. Now he seemed different – almost insane, driven by fate into a corner. And ready to do anything to pay fate back.

In the morning, I told Elsa about this, and a certain shadow flashed across her face. A hint of recognition or a glimpse of doubt – and she suddenly admitted she was anxious for no reason. This was all the more strange – because the dream had alarmed me as well. It was then we decided: it was time to have a frank talk with my Nestor. To lay all our cards on the table – so he would also reveal whatever he had hidden up his sleeve. If, of course, he had anything up there.

“All the Nestors are liars!” Elsa declared. “But we must do something anyway. Somehow, neither of us are feeling ourselves – isn’t that right?”

Now we are standing in front of the wardrobe, and Elsa is rifling through it purposefully. For some reason, it seems to her my appearance is going to be important for the upcoming conversation. “None of these are right…” she mutters. I wait patiently. Finally, an austere dark suit and white shirt are presented to me. “Here, try this on,” she says, looking at my figure skeptically.

“Would you mind turning your back?” I ask. “I don’t know why but I feel a bit awkward.”

Elsa snorts but obediently turns away. I put on the things she has chosen. “Oho!” she exclaims, turning toward me again. “It fits really well. I had no idea you were so handsome. I don’t think Nestor will be able to resist you. It’s a pity, of course, he’s not gay – although you can never be certain… We’ve got an hour left – is there anything you need to prepare or write down? Or maybe you’d like to eat?”

An hour later, I am sitting in front of the screen. At exactly five o’clock my counselor appears and looks me up and down with unconcealed surprise.

“Just trying to guess,” he says at last, “whether you’re going to a wedding or a funeral.”

This pronouncement is followed by his peculiar laugh. I wait patiently until it recedes and say, “Nestor, I want to provide you with a summary of what I’ve recalled so far. I am ready to share everything I’ve remembered – there is a lot of important stuff – and in return… I’d like… No, no, let me recount it first – without concealing a thing.”

“How open of you,” Nestor sniffs. “Practically a coming-out, one might say. Well, go on then, do tell – now I understand why you’ve been so secretive these last few days.”

He’s right – up until now we’ve been playing some sort of game of cat and mouse. I’ve been talking about my progress in hints, not getting into details. My counselor, in turn, has hardly been asking any questions, only making his usual witticisms, both to the point and off it.

“Yes,” I agree, “I am being extremely open. And that’s official, I repeat, official. I’m going to reveal to you and your experts everything I have, without reservations…”

Then, over the next forty minutes, I describe the quantum model of the brain up to the moment when my memories were interrupted. I describe it all but in a coherently concise way, accessible to a layman, with just the minimum of formulas. Having finished, I lay a few sheets out on the table, covered with equations. They contain all the accompanying math – again, in very condensed form.

Nestor listens to me with an impenetrable expression on his face. Then he looks over my papers and asks, “Is that all?”

I shake my head. “No, not all!” – and tell him, significantly less coherently, about my latest dreams, about Brevich, Tina and, most importantly, about my and Elsa’s uneasy gut feeling. I make a point of particularly stressing this, even adding a little intrigue, but it has no effect on him whatsoever.

This, of course, makes me angry. “My calculations,” I exclaim, “I know, they are somehow connected with all this!” And I add, “Elsa – why did that shadow pass across her face?”

Nestor remains silent. I repeat with annoyance, “Why? I need your help – again. We need your help – Elsa is with me on this – and we are asking you to look hard, do some digging about, fish around, cross-reference… After all, you are my counselor, and don’t forget: we’re talking about the theory of the mind here, nothing less. Remember, you yourself did mention the importance of my role!”

Nestor looks at me, his eyebrow raised, as if waiting to see whether I want to continue or not. Then he nods, “Yes, nothing less” – and tries to make another sarcastic comment about my suit. It isn’t funny; I just grimace. He puts on his serious face and sighs, “I’m disappointed!”

“Please explain,” I propose.

“Willingly,” Nestor agrees. “What you have told me is not of much value to us – it certainly wasn’t worth getting dressed up for. I had already guessed you were getting somewhere – judging by your equivocal hints and despite your childish game of hide and seek… But as far as the mind is concerned, I cannot agree with you, not at all. As I see it, you haven’t yet gotten close to the nature of the human mind. And most importantly, what is the B Object?”

I become agitated; my cheek begins to twitch. I even seem to have broken into a sweat underneath my fine suit. Nestor continues unperturbed, “Besides, you are surprisingly persistent in your delusions. You don’t listen to anybody – yet I’ve already said this more than once: your file doesn’t contain a single word about a girl called Tina. So I have nothing to dig up, fish out or cross-reference against.”

His imperiousness is solid, like thick armor. “In my opinion,” I say irritably, even cantankerously, “in my opinion, you simply don’t want to make even the slightest effort. It’s not clear to me what you’re doing here at all, except cracking lame jokes…” And I add, “By the way, what do you think your superiors will make of all this? Are they going to be pleased with you, or maybe as disappointed in you as you are in me?”

Nestor frowns, “Your threats are pathetic. Do you want to complain? Okay, by all means, go ahead. For example, you can write a message on the promenade sidewalk with white chalk. Oh, what a pity – you have no chalk… Well, then, why not just go down to the seashore and scream – maybe someone will hear you!”

“Ha, ha. Very funny!” I say.

Nestor continues, “But you’re right about something. You’re correct as far as my superiors are concerned. They are likely to be as unhappy as I am myself. Because it is indeed strange that your file doesn’t contain a thing about this Tina whom you keep coming back to relentlessly, again and again. There’s nothing either about Tina or the B Object – it’s as if your memory is hiding them away somewhere, protecting them against strangers. In the backwoods, where there’s no getting to them – even if… Even if we assume they do exist!”

“You mean to say…” I begin to raise my voice, but he interrupts me, exclaiming even louder, “Just you wait a minute! Just cool it with the resentment; otherwise I may also get offended, and I have good reason. Really, why do you only see me as some callous, self-obsessive career type? Why do you fail to notice the sincerity of my words, my genuine and unfeigned bewilderment?… You are a callous egotist yourself, Theo; you don’t have the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to feel, oh, their pain… An egotistical, self-centered character, but there’s nothing to be done; I am duty bound to live with it. Because I have obligations,” he assumes a dignified air, “yes, obligations, and now, as it happens, I need to move on to the next of them. Its time has come – I need to tell you how your theory and the place it occupies are seen here, in our society. By all means, let’s ‘cross-reference,’ as you put it – allow me to provide a summary as well, even though I haven’t dressed myself up as an undertaker. So…”

I wave my hand, trying in turn to interrupt him. I want to make an objection – I also have something to say about sincerity, genuineness and callousness. But Nestor does not react; he isn’t even looking at me but down – probably at some of his papers.

“So,” he repeats. “Of course, we have our own theories of everything. Theories of the mind and theories of the universe – recognized officially, so to speak. The only problem is that they are incomplete; they have blank spaces in the most prominent places – and when you showed up, there was a flash of hope that with your help we might succeed in filling some of them in. Well, that hope is still glimmering, but I have to admit: so far you have filled in almost nothing. You are wandering along the same border that we are – it’s a bit strange, isn’t it? This is something worth thinking about, not shaking your fists at and getting confrontational about!”

I snort indignantly but keep quiet. “Some of our knowledge,” Nestor continues, “came from your world, from those who remember your article and subsequent works by others. The remainder is the result of our own studies and efforts. Both parts, it should be noted, agree with each other perfectly – and much of ‘Theo’s theory’ has been stringently reconstructed. First, it’s about quantum mechanism – including heat exchange with the environment, which provides memory capacity. And second, the concept of attractors as navigators of memories and thoughts. And we’ll begin with them – with the pleasant. With the amazing and extremely important. Get yourself ready.” Nestor purses his lips and speaks with great emphasis, “You are about to hear. Something. Quite amusing!”

I shrug, demonstrating my readiness, and he pronounces insinuatingly, “Attractors… In Theo’s theory they are given a great deal of attention. As much as they have been in our works – and that is deserved, undoubtedly deserved. Unfortunately, here, we do not have the opportunity to experiment with what you had available to you – the brain of a Homo Sapiens from the terrestrial world. We cannot reconstruct the attractors you got on the basis of real data. But, even in books, in long, boring novels, a crucial role is sometimes played by pictures, and this is so here too: some of the newcomers who lived after your death perfectly remembered the illustration from your article, the very same ‘face of thought’ you hung over your desk. We clung to it like a straw, and the straw turned out to be strong. We restored it carefully, like a wanted man’s photofit. We blew the specks of dust off it, discarded everything superfluous and made a comparison – it is clear with what: our ‘human brain’ here can be investigated thoroughly! And so: the kind of attractors navigating in our ‘consciousness’ undoubtedly resemble your ‘face,’ Theo – the ‘face of thought,’ I mean, not your sullen physiognomy. Apparently, our minds here and your earthly ones function similarly. The realities are different, but the principle is unalterable – how do you like that fact, it is amusing, isn’t it? Well, I did promise… And now, with your calculations, we can probably verify this – here I must give due respect to the revelations you’ve made today. They do provide something – admittedly, I didn’t show it, but believe me, my soul rejoiced!”

Nestor pauses, cocks his head to one side and looks at me for a few seconds. I, too, remain silent, mulling over what I’ve heard. For some reason, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Not seeing any reaction from me, he sighs briefly and says, “Let me clarify. I also rejoiced because the whole concept, the universality of the principle, goes further. Much further – it is by no means confined to the mind alone. This is an unexpected development, astonishing to any mind – if you’ll forgive the pun – capable of comprehending it. But we’ll save it for later – really, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We must focus on the most urgent issues, and therefore: now to the main one of these. Or rather, to a fairly sad one…”

All his animation seems to have dissipated. He frowns, sighs again and then talks, tediously and at length, of the attempts to formalize the interaction of their “brain” with something external. Their problem is the same as mine: there is no doubt that an interaction exists, but they are unable to put it into a consistent theory.

“Yes, we also see an excess – an excess of energy consumed during intense thought,” Nestor says with a clearly displeased expression. “Yes, we have also come to the idea of fractal ordering, which is fairly obvious. In our equations – and they, I’m sure, resemble yours – divergences of a certain type appear, quasiparticles that violate physical principles – all that is familiar to you, isn’t it? We are trying, like you, to introduce some compensating field – which, thanks to your good graces, is called the field of the conscions… Overall, we have to admit: we and you, probably, have similar things in mind, pursuing the same goal – and so far, suffering the same setbacks. Our calculations do not give us what we all long to see, touch and feel, even if only on paper. We cannot get solutions in the form of stable localized vortices: those very B Objects, in which, as you put it in your article, our memory is ‘recorded.’ For some reason, it is precisely this part of your theory that has been impossible to reproduce.”

I again make a gesture of protest. “I know, I know,” dismisses Nestor. “Yes, no one is arguing: the indisputable fact that consciousness doesn’t die with the brain clearly speaks in your favor – in favor of you personally, Theo, and these Objects of yours. It’s just a pity there is nothing more to say about them for the moment – and yet so much rests precisely on them. The most important consequences, the most thrilling, incredible mysteries… And where are they, the B Objects? Alas, they are nowhere in sight – do you now understand my impatience, my disappointment? Of course, I can see some specifics in the numbers on these papers of yours – they may prove useful. But something tells me that there won’t be a decisive breakthrough.”

He pauses, and for a few minutes we just look at each other. Then I clear my throat and say, “Could you provide me with a description of your theory of the field of conscions? Even if it is incomplete, even if you and I have been stuck in the same places.”

“Impossible!” Nestor declares. “It’s not even up for discussion. All the experts have unanimously agreed that our theory will only throw you off the scent. It will send you on the wrong course – can we risk that? Of course not – but I will take the liberty of saying one thing related to it. Purely to encourage you, give you a gentle nudge…”

He looks away and continues after a short pause, “We, after all, have had successes too. Our equations have allowed us to obtain some specific types of solutions, different from yours – and they are extremely important. But the B Object still remains the main prize. We must understand what it is – in a strict mathematical sense. If you only knew what prospects this opens up… It’s a pity we cannot talk about them now. Later – it can only be discussed later!”

“Well…” I say and spread my hands. I have nothing to add, and there’s no point in making objections. I just know that very hard work awaits me and cannot be avoided. Already now, in advance, I feel weary at the thought of it.

“Yes, and by the way, I cannot help but note,” Nestor suddenly comes to life again. “There is one more consequence of your ‘official’ summary. It’s now clear: from today onward, you can only count on your own memory – neither I nor your file can help you now. This is a new turn of events; admit it. I will cease to be your adviser, let alone your mentor. I will remain only as your friend – yes, sometimes in life you can’t choose your friends. Well, and I’ll still be your therapist – like, you know, almost every friend is in their own special way.”

Thus, our session comes to an end. That night I have another incoherent dream. It contains an elusive hint at an elusive smell. At an elusive, somewhat stringent taste.

I wake up refreshed, rerun everything I have heard from Nestor in my head and go to the living room, without deciding what I’m going to say to Elsa. Still wearing my shirt from yesterday, only with the sleeves rolled up, I try my best to radiate confidence and optimism.

Elsa, as usual, is standing by the stove preparing breakfast. Hearing me, she turns around and raises her eyebrows inquiringly.

“There is some interesting news,” I say with exaggerated enthusiasm. Her face immediately takes on a somewhat bored air. Nevertheless, I continue, “We now know: in this world, the brain works in the same way as it does in ours – in what used to be ours…” And I exclaim, “It’s a pretty amazing fact!” – thinking that I sound remarkably like Nestor.

Elsa nods silently and turns back to the stove. “Yes, probably,” she says, stirring something in the pan. “So, overall, if I understood correctly, nothing worthwhile happened, right? But I’m sure you did everything exactly as was needed!”

I tell her briefly about yesterday’s conversation, adding that I do not have a counselor as such anymore. That he is now just a “friend” – and I can’t expect any help from him.

“An interesting development,” Elsa mutters thoughtfully. She walks up to the cupboard, takes a plate from the shelf and abruptly turns toward me.

“Just don’t forget…” she says. “Don’t forget: you have me! Even if my body is fake and I don’t understand much about your abstruse scribbles. By the way, I was just thinking… Could you show them to me again? I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I really want to take a look.”

“No problem,” I shrug, go to my bedroom and bring her several sheets of paper.

Elsa puts my breakfast on the table, pours the coffee and, while I’m eating, examines the mathematical symbols, moving her lips as she does so, as if repeating something to herself. She even runs her finger along the lines like a blind person reading braille, and then she begins to ask me questions, “What’s this? And this? And this one in brackets?”

I explain, at first briefly, but soon get carried away. Forgetting my food, I talk eagerly about neurons and synapses, about protein filaments connecting the micro and the macro, about symmetry breaking and water dipoles lining up in a row. Elsa, of course, understands little but sits and listens patiently. After I’ve finished she is thoughtful and quiet as she picks over her embroidery on the couch. I try to work, but to no avail – my thoughts are scattered, and I am unable to concentrate.

The midday session with Nestor is over quickly – we don’t have much to say to each other. I return to the living room, wait for Elsa, and we go for a walk.

The weather is splendid and the seafront is full of people. There are no empty places in any of the cafés. “I’d really like a fresh grapefruit juice,” says Elsa, and we stop at the kiosk. We get in line and suddenly find ourselves at the center of a conflict.

Standing in front of us is a couple whom we’ve met two or three times before – a young man and an older woman, both tall and aloof, with unhealthily puffy faces. They are having an argument – a rare event in Quarantine – hissing at each other and exchanging unpleasant looks. I hate to see this and really want to leave, but Elsa looks at the fruits with longing, and I decide to wait.

Soon the woman declares to her companion, “I’ve had enough of this, basta!” – evidently intending to abandon him. I’m standing in her way. “Excuse me,” she says irritably, and, not waiting until I step aside, passes right through me, as if there’s nobody there.

I don’t feel anything, but it makes me angry. “Hey, lady,” I say after her. “Didn’t they teach you better manners at charm school?”

The woman turns around and bursts into a malicious tirade. “Who are you to pass judgment on me?” she shouts. “You’re nothing but an uneducated redneck, a savage – how dare you talk to me like that?…”

Of course, I am at a loss for words, but Elsa is quick to enter the fray. Without hesitating for a moment, she grabs someone’s glass and hurls its contents right into the woman’s face. My assailant falls silent, leaving only Elsa’s voice audible: “You bitch, keep your mouth shut! He is more educated than any of us and all the Nestors put together! There is a million times more on a single scrap of what he writes than in your entire imbecile brain. You are at the bottom of the parabola – just sit there and don’t stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong…”

I’m amazed – I would never have imagined Elsa capable of such vehemence. Flushed and furious, standing tall, like an Amazon protecting her tribe. Everyone around is stunned too. All eyes are on us…

However, the fracas doesn’t last long. The man leads away his companion, who is still so shocked she hasn’t fully come to her senses. Elsa and I leave as well and soon we are sitting on a bench not far from the street singer. She sips her grapefruit juice and squints into the sun. It seems to me that today she is especially, defiantly beautiful.

Meanwhile, the song we hear is quite strange. “Katie has left us, her boat floats up an invisible river. Along an apparently nonexistent river, lying in dimensions inaccessible to the eye. No one can tell if I’ll see Katie again, but there’s hope – it’s in the complexity of a Lagrangian. It’s in the diagonals of the tensors of my world…” I hear and wonder whether this is really happening or if I’m only dreaming.

“What beautiful words!” says Elsa. She snuggles up next to me; I sense her warmth. I sense her in all her entirety, even her soul. The way she belongs to me, her lack of indifference.

Then we leave. “The Southeast awaits you – with slender girls whose yonis taste of coconut…” the singer trills in our wake, but I’m not listening anymore. The new word drills into my brain. Against the background of the silvery sea I see a silhouette. I see brushstrokes carelessly made by black raven hair and bright-red lipstick…

That very evening I recall how I met Tina.

Chapter 19

I had intended to spend just a few days in Bangkok and then head on to Phuket and flop for a couple of weeks on the beach. My plan was simple: to do the obligatory rounds of the temples, follow the guidebook routes and in general “get to know” Bangkok as well as any other moderately curious tourist. Almost immediately I regretted coming to the city at all. The hotel was dirty and too expensive, with very small rooms and nonexistent service. The surrounding streets were almost impassable – because of the countless food stalls and motorcycles weaving along the sidewalk. Thousands of cars poisoned the air, their drivers ignoring pedestrian crossings. Everything was alien, difficult and irritating. I decided the place was not for me; it sucked out my energy, dissipated my thoughts and sapped my strength. But on the third day, I met Tina and everything magically changed.

I saw her on a skywalk, on the way from the overground station to one of the shopping malls. The journey was a short but tough one: the humid heat enveloped me like a cloud, and my clothes were sticking to my body. To avoid going too fast, I fell into step with a girl about ten meters ahead of me walking more slowly than the other pedestrians. We moved like a single entity, without getting closer to each other; the crowd flowed around us. I observed her from the back – fragile shoulders, slender legs, a bright streak in her hair. She had an exquisite languidness, a natural grace about her and – something else. We entered the mall together, an oasis of coveted coolness. She settled at a table in a café near the entrance, and, on a whim, I sat down there as well, not far away. She did not seem to notice me or anything else around her. Her demeanor betrayed not just a reverie but a certain intense concentration. A focus, not typical of Thais, and – something else besides.

The girl spent about half an hour in the café – and in all that time I didn’t take my eyes off her. At first, she wrote something in a small notebook; then she fiddled with her phone. I could not approach her and strike up a conversation; there was an aura of inaccessibility around her, an elastic shell, lines of a force that enclosed her in a dense cocoon. Then she asked for her bill, and I realized she would now disappear from my life forever. To get up and pursue her would have been stupid, so I sat and just watched her pay and leave, walking away with her graceful gait. I followed her with my eyes for as long as I could, then looked at her empty table and discovered that, yes, she had disappeared but not quite. On top of the enclosure next to her chair lay her forgotten glasses case. I took it, intending to give it to the waiter, and, after a moment of hesitation, looked inside. There was a note in Thai and English: “I often forget my things. Please contact me, if you find this.” Underneath this message was her phone number.

In a quarter of an hour, we were sitting at my table together. I had called her; she had come back and agreed to have coffee with me. It was just a gesture of politeness – but I was as nervous as a schoolboy nonetheless.

She introduced herself, “My name is Tina.” And she asked, “Are you here for a long time? Did you come specially to save me from losing my glasses?”

I noted her good English and responded in the same tone, “Something like that. Consider me your knight in shining armor, your Lancelot. A Lancelot whose actual name is Theo.”

She, of course, had no idea who Lancelot was. Annoyed with myself, I began to spout even more nonsense. “I’d very much like to say that, yes, I’m only here because of your glasses, but I don’t make a habit of deceiving beautiful girls,” I spluttered, feeling more and more of an idiot. “Actually, I came here to nurse my ego. I’m not a knight but a gloomy tourist, aimlessly wandering around, surrounded by smiling Thais…”

In this verbose and not altogether amusing manner I joked for several minutes. Tina remained absolutely serious.

“But I’m not smiling,” she said when I had finally stopped talking. “And you should not always believe other people’s smiles. Even if you are a naive farang and see everything upside down… I shouldn’t say this, of course – I’m Thai myself, albeit only half Thai. And I really love Thailand!”

I asked her what the other half was. Tina curtly replied that her father was a Korean businessman from Seoul. I asked how she could possibly have gone any distance without her glasses, and she, just as curtly, told me they were made of plain glass and did not have any lenses.

“Why do you have them, then?” I persevered. “Are you in disguise? Are you hiding from someone?”

She suddenly became uneasy and said quietly, “Well, maybe I am” – and turned away. Then she finished her coffee and asked, “How old are you?”

I told her my age. “Aha,” she said thoughtfully and pondered something. Then she took out a mirror and made up her lips with bright, blood-red lipstick. I thought with an inexplicable sadness she was getting ready to say goodbye and leave, but Tina suddenly said, “There is one thing I’m curious about.

“It’s of no consequence, but I am still interested,” she continued, carefully enunciating her words. “Maybe you know: The world, the universe – what is its shape; does it have edges? Earth is clearly a sphere – but what about beyond it? Are their six flat layers, like in a cake? And above them Brahma’s twenty heavens? As one monk explained it to me, ha-ha… And another thing I’d like to know: Where does time come from?”

“Wow,” I grinned, not hiding my surprise. Tina’s gaze bored into me. I asked, “Are you really looking for an answer?” She nodded.

“Well,” I shrugged. “If we are talking about shape…”

I pontificated for quite a while – not expecting, of course, that she would understand anything. It was just nice to feel at ease, on solid ground. I told her about relic radiation and its remarkable uniformity. I explained why this allows for the idea that the curvature of the universe is constant, and, moreover, the scientific world is inclined to think it is close to zero – if, of course, we are considering an “empty” space undisturbed by gravity. Curvature imposes strict restrictions on possible shapes, and, perhaps, the most probable of them is a three-dimensional torus with a smooth surface, rather like a donut…

“Can you imagine a donut?” I asked Tina. She looked at me, all eyes. “Now, as far as time is concerned,” I continued, “then out of a multitude of interpretations the thermodynamic arrow is the one most worthy of attention. There is a law: in an isolated system, entropy increases; it can’t be otherwise. The increase in disorder is what distinguishes the past from the future, determining the direction of all processes. This is considered the direction of time – at least in the macrocosm we are used to. In the microworld things get complicated: for example, quantum field theory allows time to be reversed…”

At that moment, Tina made an imploring face, and I interrupted myself, “I’m sorry, all this probably sounds boring. I got carried away; it happens to me often. Would you care for more coffee?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t understand much, but it was so fascinating to listen… Perhaps later you could tell me in more detail – this and maybe something else.”

“Do you always ask how the universe works when you first meet people?” I inquired jokingly.

“In general, yes,” she said. “I use it as a defense.”

“Against whom?” I asked.

She shrugged, “I don’t know, everyone.” And added, “Who’d have guessed you knew so many clever words!”

We laughed, and I realized the ice between us had melted. “Are you hungry?” I asked her. Tina thought for a moment and said honestly, “Yes. Let’s go to the third floor – there’s a good Thai restaurant there…”

Soon we were eating – seafood salad, rice with crab meat, and chicken in something sweet and pungent. Tina ordered for both of us and then confessed, “We won’t be able to eat it all, but I wanted it like this for some reason. It’s not wise to come here hungry – and I did not have any breakfast and forgot about lunch.”

I liked watching her eat – with a concentrated, meticulous grace. At the same time, she managed to speak volubly about herself – in response to my cautious questions. I learned that Tina was born in Korea; after her parents broke up, her mother brought her back to Thailand, to a small town in Isaan province. They spent almost three years there while the divorce dragged on. For Tina, it was a happy time – in Isaan, unlike Seoul, which she hated with all her heart, no one made fun of her looks and slightly darker skin. Then the divorce finally came through; they were given a generous settlement and moved to the suburbs of Bangkok, with good schools attended by children of middle-class folks rather than farmers. There was enough to send her to the university – where Tina graduated with a diploma in IT, after which she began to live independently, renting a tiny apartment. She had a penchant for anything related to computers, as well as a knack for cracking firewalls and passcodes. Most of her work came from small shops selling second-hand mobile phones. She didn’t make much, but it was enough, and working in an office with bosses and a strict timetable would have been impossible for her anyway…

Later, we went outside onto the noisy Ploenchit Road. “It’s time for me to go,” Tina said and looked away.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” I asked, in a deliberately nonchalant manner, sensing my trembling voice betraying me.

Tina paused and suddenly gave me a dazzling Thai smile – the first one in the three hours we had spent together. “It’s hard to imagine what might induce me to agree,” she said thoughtfully. “Unless you were to promise to tell me why we can’t go back in time – along this arrow of yours… Let’s get in touch by text tomorrow; you have my phone number.”

She left with a quick assured step – never again did I see her walking as slowly as she had that morning. She moved around the city swiftly and decisively, despite the heat. She hurtled through space, weaving past cars, buildings and pedestrians in a flourish of thick black hair and, sometimes, a flash of red lipstick.

The next day we met in the same mall, at the same café, at almost the same time. Tina, however, seemed quite different. She was withdrawn and quiet and sometimes looked around as if searching for the cause of her discomfort. I ordered her a cake with coconut; she ate it slowly, in small pieces, throwing me attentive, serious glances. Then I went to the bathroom and, returning, I saw her sitting motionless, with her eyes fixed on something utterly remote.

I joked, “You seem like you’re here, but not here today.” And added, “It’s like you’re talking with someone from some other world,” and almost recoiled from her intense upturned gaze.

“I’m sorry,” I shrugged, “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“No, no,” she said. “I just… Do you think I’m a bit of a freak?”

Her look became alert, almost frightened. I hastened to reassure her, “Not at all. I’ve known a lot of freaks and, no, you’re not one of them.”

“Good,” Tina nodded. I saw she was feeling even more uncomfortable now. Then I asked, “Is there something wrong? Tell me – I’ll understand; maybe I might be able to help.”

She looked at me in silence; I sensed she was trying to decide something. Almost physically, I could feel her desperate shyness and – her desire to share, to relieve herself of some sort of burden.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said at last. “You see, this is not about the universe – I’m not used to discussing this with everyone I meet.” Then, after a pause, she responded to herself, “On the other hand, you’re not just anyone; you’re the only person I’ve met who can really talk about the universe.” She thought a bit more and contradicted herself angrily, “However, you are a farang, much older than me. It’s clear you can’t be trusted.” And then she sighed, “But how can you not be trusted? After all, you didn’t let me lose my glasses…”

She reached for her cake. Her fingers were trembling slightly. I no longer doubted that her desire to confide would prevail over her bashfulness.

“I could tell you,” she said, raising her eyes again. “But you’re unlikely to believe me; it sounds so stupid. Stupid and strange – stranger than all your ‘donuts’ and ‘arrows.’ And most importantly, you’re unlikely to understand – even though you know so many smart things.”

“It can’t hurt to try,” I encouraged her.

“Well, okay…” Tina drawled, folding her arms over her chest. “Just remember: I warned you.” And she began to recount – incoherently at first, somewhat reluctantly choosing her words. Then she started to speak more fluently; I noticed that when she spoke, her whole body curved slightly to one side, and her hands danced in the air in a special, peculiar way. And as soon as she paused, even for a brief moment, she immediately folded her arms again, as if protecting herself – from me and everything around her.

This state of detachment and not seemingly being present was not unusual for her, Tina said. It happened to her quite often – which means she probably is a freak after all, and I’d been too presumptuous with my optimistic judgment. However, freak or no freak, she was no ordinary one because… Here, Tina was silent for a while and then blurted it out, “I really do speak to someone – constantly and involuntarily. And the most important thing is that this ‘someone’ comes – yes, from another world; there’s no other way of putting it!”

She looked at me intently. I nodded, seriously, without the slightest hint of a smile. “There’s no other way of putting it,” she repeated, “and there’s no need to. It doesn’t have a precise name anyway, even if I were to go through every dictionary and phrasebook. I cannot even explain it clearly to myself – although, of course, I’ve become used to it and stopped considering it a disease, a sickness. Now I just call it a symptom – it’s a step forward; a difficult one. It’s a positive step – because a symptom is not necessarily related to an illness…”

Tina’s “symptom” manifested itself way back in her distant childhood, soon after moving to Thailand. She began to experience odd sensations: it seemed someone invisible had stationed himself next to her and remained there, never leaving her for a single moment. He could not be touched, he was incorporeal, but his presence was undeniable. He held endless conversations with her – no, she wasn’t hearing voices, but her mind itself was in a constant dialogue with him, in contact with him, and that’s how all her thoughts were conceived. All that she could say, think, remember, arose from the presence of that “someone” nearby – or maybe “something” if one were to look from a wider perspective. Although, of course, “someone” was preferable because he already was her best friend, an intimate confidant, and she has no desire to think of him as something without a soul.

In her childhood, when it all began, she got scared and asked the Buddha to save her from this obtrusive stranger. In addition to the Buddha, she mentioned this to her mother, who became seriously alarmed and took her to a well-known local shaman. He said that Tina was being hunted by an evil spirit living in an old tree near her house and performed a tiring and distressing ritual that frightened her more than the symptom itself. After that, she decided she’d be better off not asking the Buddha for anything – and, in general, not discussing this secret “someone” with anyone.

From that moment, Tina only posed questions to and sought answers from herself. For a while, due to a lack of any other ideas, she continued to believe her “friend” was a spirit on a hunt for her, although she doubted his malignancy. Wandering around the house, she peered into the branches of the trees, looking for her “collocutor,” mentally begging him to reveal himself. Then, all at once, she became disillusioned with this notion, outgrew it and immediately started to feel almost like an adult. She began to be visited by very unchildlike thoughts, and with them came various fears, some of which had remained with her ever since. Tina still did not like sleeping in the dark, always leaving the night-light on. She was afraid of heights and dogs and avoided the touch of strangers. And her main phobia was and remained the fear of death.

Over the years, she became increasingly reserved. Her peers felt her detachment, her aloofness – and were on their guard with her. She did not try to dispel their suspicions, to become one of “the gang.” At school, she was teased and given nasty nicknames – because of her habit of moving her lips, as if carrying on a silent conversation. She only withdrew further into herself, and at times she would suddenly become aggressive, attacking her tormentors like an enraged cat. Once, she pushed one of her classmates who had been persistently calling her a “loony” into the school pond from a footbridge – he couldn’t swim and nearly drowned. This incident made a big impression on Tina: she learned to stay away from people who might make fun of her – at any cost. Since such people made up the overwhelming majority, the price she paid was solitude. She embraced it willingly and wasn’t afraid of it in the least.

She never made a single close friend. And there were no boyfriends either – despite her attractive appearance, she was not a big hit with the boys. All this bothered her very little – Tina’s main preoccupation was her “symptom” and not the people around her. She had no doubt this was no accident; it was an echo of something vitally important – and she was very afraid her life would not be long enough to uncover the essence of it. For the time being, this essence remained a mystery; she did not know how to approach it. Neither religion nor the Thai myths offered anything useful. Common concepts of the mysterious and otherworldly seemed naive, simplistically primitive. As a result, she stopped going to the temples and almost forgot about the Buddha. And she treated Thai films and TV series, full of phantoms of all stripe, with condescending contempt…

“Look around,” Tina lowered her voice, glancing at the tables nearby. “Everyone sitting here is convinced they share this world with a whole legion of ghosts, but to me this sounds like nonsense. I do not share the space; it’s just that some part of me does not fit into this space – do you understand? Have you ever noticed how cramped together we are here? As if you’re sitting in a small room with a large crowd of idiots. And in that room, there is a window, and there, beyond the window is a boundless, infinite breadth!”

It was these words that caused something to shift in my mind. I suddenly interrupted her, “Wait, wait” – and turned away, trying to apprehend this microscopic change. Tina looked at me with some alarm; I grinned to calm her, then nodded and said, “I understand you perfectly, better than you think – and, by the way… Please think hard, don’t rush, this is serious: How would you describe the place where this ‘someone’ of yours is located? How would you label this place – or perhaps you might be able to just show it to me?”

“What is there to think hard about?” Tina shrugged. “It’s here, around me – and around again, everywhere.”

“Wait a moment; here’s our world” – I drew an imaginary circle on the table. “And here you are” – I mark a point at its center – “show me where your interlocutor is? To the right, to the left, all around?”

“No,” Tina shook her head, “he’s here” – she made a gesture as if poking through the plane of the table with her finger. “Under the table, above the table and here, a little to one side, if you look in that direction, but the table doesn’t matter; that place always remains with me. Only out there, as I said, there is none of the crowdedness we have here.”

“Amazing…” I muttered, looking at her hand and rubbing my temple. “Amazing and strange, and very precise. You know, I’m working on something; I’m trying to explain how thoughts are born. Both yours and mine – but I’m still unable to tell you in a comprehensible way. It seems I don’t yet understand the most important thing myself.”

The sense of a shift in my mind was still with me; I caught it. I was ready to start formulating it – in solitude, in silence.

Soon we said goodbye. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I told her. “Maybe we’ll see each other again, who knows.”

“Yes,” she responded to my tone, “as I was saying, the world is such a crowded place…”

For some reason, I couldn’t hold her gaze. “In any case,” I said, looking down at the table, “I believe this ‘symptom’ of yours is not a fantasy or drivel. It is something very real, and you are wonderful – with or without it.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Tina laughed, and it was a strange laugh. Then I looked at her at last and saw in her eyes, deep inside, a very adult confusion and longing. So out of harmony with her lipstick and the bright streak in her hair.

Going to the skytrain station, I muttered in different ways, “Dimensions, dimensions, there are many of them, far more than three…” I wanted to laugh, feeling an incredible burst of energy. In the car, I pressed my forehead against the glass door and looked out at the city, stretching in all directions, the skyscrapers piercing plane after plane. The train made a semicircle, turning toward the Chao Praya River; the monorail bend changed the perspective, altered the geometry – the geometry of the city, the geometry of the world. Bringing together points that had seemed dispersed, like on my fractal curves… I looked through the glass, like an emperor over my domain from the top of a hill. Gradually it became clearer what I needed to do next with the equations and the mysterious field. With the flows that establish balance – the balance of energy, the balance of consciousness…

And suddenly, I was struck by something else, like an electric spark or the overly adult gaze of a teenager. I sensed with every fiber of my body that I didn’t want to, I couldn’t fly away from here – from Bangkok, from Tina. I finally had real allies – maybe for the first time in my life. I could sense their lack of indifference – it was so valuable, so rare! A city full of alien realities; a girl whose life was infinitely distant from mine had suddenly become incredibly close – much closer than snooty Bern and my colleagues, not willing to open their eyes a bit wider.

Ten minutes later, on the platform of my station, I took out my phone and wrote to Tina, “I’m not going anywhere!” Immediately I received a text back with a surprised “Oh!” and after it, seven emojis in a row expressing jubilation and joy.

“Shall we meet tomorrow?” I texted and received in reply, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Chapter 20

Before Bangkok, all the components of my theory – neurons, the water dipole matrix and a new compensating field – had existed in the same space in our habitual three-dimensional one – without going beyond it. Of course, I had often thought of making the new field an “external” phenomenon, entering the three-dimensional world from somewhere outside, but each time I rejected this idea, hastily driving it away. I remembered too well the embarrassment caused by the ill-fated article where I’d mentioned the hyperspaces and external forces my colleagues had found so funny. To put it simply, I was just afraid – but now, having met Tina and seen how she had unhesitatingly pushed through the plane of the table with her gesture, I realized I had no right to fear. I made an effort and stopped being a coward. This was the essence of the shift in my mind – and it played a crucial role.

I went back to the hotel, to my cramped, uncomfortable room. It was a very unsuitable place, totally unlike my office or apartment in Bern, where everything had been so lovingly chosen and arranged. But I didn’t have any choice, so I sat down at the narrow desk on the awkward, rib-backed chair, took a sheet of paper with the hotel logo, picked up the cheap, poor-quality hotel pen, and in these totally inconvenient conditions recorded the most important thoughts. The first of them stated: the number of dimensions of our world and the space in which my new field “lives” do not have to match. This external space could be a multi – more than three – dimensional one. The mysterious field permeates our world, as, for example, a magnetic field permeates a figure drawn on a sheet of paper placed between the poles of a magnet… Thus, discarding my past fears, I divided the two worlds. And crossed the line.

That day I sat at my equations until late at night. I twice ran out of paper and ran down to reception to ask for more. The next morning, I canceled my trip to Phuket and started to look for accommodation for the remaining days of my vacation. The thought of sand and sea only aroused bewilderment. I no longer needed rest; I was fed up with it.

Of all the areas of Bangkok I had managed to visit, I liked only the central one where Tina and I had met. I promptly took the subway to the center and, without bargaining, rented a two-room apartment on Langsuan Road. Then I brought all my things there and immediately fell in love with the place – both the street and my new home. The features of the city that surrounded me – the humid air and the strange smells, the bustling crowds on the potholed sidewalks – acquired a new status, became friendly. The short walk from my new apartment to the skytrain station convinced me every time: the city was my ally. It was ready to share with me its energy, its perpetual thirst for life.

I perceived this thirst, imbibed it, absorbed the energy into myself. And worked tirelessly, for days on end. The division of the worlds into an internal and external one complicated the theory, demanded different approaches. It seemed I was moving even further away from a result, but the complication also had its pluses: now I could toughen the criteria by excising those constructs that had no real meaning with a ruthless scalpel. The set of available options widened, but, at the same time, there were more restrictions, like levers in my hands; I just had to use them wisely. I varied the quantum variables, the degrees of freedom of my “fractal” quasiparticles – and, on the other hand, changed the dimensionality of the space from which the hypothetical field originated, its configuration, metric and curvature. The divergences in the equations disappeared and emerged again. I was wandering in a jungle of transformations, playing one anomaly off against another, trying to make them mutually destroy, nullify each other… It was a long, difficult process, and its success to a large extent depended on luck. This state of uncertainty, a random trawl in an ocean of possibilities, lasted about three weeks. And all this time Tina provided a vital foundation for my determination, an inexhaustible source of strength.

The same day, shortly after my move to Langsuan Road, we met in an outdoor restaurant nearby. It was stuffy; I was drinking ice-cold beer and telling her everything – about my work, about the mysteries of the human memory and mind, about her, Tina, and her gesture, piercing through the surface… I said to her, “I can’t promise anything, but perhaps you’re experiencing exactly what I’m looking for in my math. Why not concede there are people with abnormal sensitivity – who feel the interaction of their brain with something external. If so, then my theory could provide an explanation of your quirkiness – it would be the clue you are looking for!”

Tina didn’t ask any questions; she just listened without taking her eyes off me. Only when I mentioned her “symptom” did she raise her eyebrows and mutter, grinning, “Ah, so you didn’t fly here to save me from losing my glasses. You came to explain why I’m such a freak. At last – I was so afraid no one would ever come to my rescue…”

Afterward, she asked, “Can I help you in some way?”

“Yes,” I said, “you can. Just be with me sometimes. I don’t know why, but I need your presence.”

Not surprised, she just nodded her head. “If you want, I’ll come to your place in the mornings. I can bring you lunch, make you coffee. Or just pay you a visit – we are friends, after all. And friends do visit each other – sometimes quite often…”

And she began to come frequently – that is, every morning – to keep me company during the most productive hours. She would bring some street food – I’d try a little, out of courtesy, and Tina would eagerly devour the rest herself. Despite her idiosyncrasies, she, like all Thais, had a good appetite and was a strong sleeper – she talked of this with pride, as if to emphasize her relative normality. Sometimes she tried to tidy up the apartment, although it was already clean – the rent included maid service. More often, she would just sit on the sofa in a Buddha-like pose and busy herself with her phones or watch movies on her tablet with her headphones on.

Her presence helped me immensely. To know she was there, to look at her at times – it was so important and seemed so valuable! The power of her dark, almond-eyed gaze in response increased my strength tenfold. I was aware she was here with me every passing second, and it wasn’t distracting – on the contrary, it deepened my concentration, sharpened my focus. I sunk my teeth into stubborn formulas, using every ounce of my courage and my resources. She believed in me – and I couldn’t allow myself to linger over doubts, to assume for even a moment that my work might end up being futile.

Thus, the first two weeks passed – in the most intense, albeit unfruitful research, and in getting used to Tina’s presence. She would spend most of the day with me. After that, we’d go out for a meal, and then she would leave to attend to her own affairs. In the evening, as night was closing in, we would usually chat on “Line.” At first, we just exchanged jokes or trifles, but soon the tone of her messages began to change. And so did mine – I recognized it but could not help it. The platonic period of our relationship had exhausted itself. We had become tired of the pretense of hiding just how attracted we were to each other.

Suddenly, from one evening to the next, Tina began to ask one and the same thing: “Do you want to see me tomorrow?” – as if there were any doubt. And, every time in response to my surprised, laconic “Yes, of course,” she would write something like: “Oh, yes, you need me for your work…”

I would remain silent. There was a tension crackling between our chat apps – as if the data-transfer protocol had special tags for it. She continued, “Well, so be it; it’s good at least, you’re not rejecting me outright – whatever the reason might be…” I laughed in reply, showing I was taking this as a joke. Pretending I did not understand, although I understood everything perfectly.

I knew how to be bold with women, but I felt an inexplicable timidity toward Tina. Her apparent vulnerability bothered me – and at the same time I knew she was amply protected and it’d be tough to break through her defenses. The very same lines of force that had surrounded her in the café during our first meeting were still in place, here, around her – like the invisible “someone” with whom she was engaged in an endless dialogue. Subconsciously, I was afraid of failure, rejection. And a hint of rejection had already happened – one evening, soon after my move to Langsuan.

We were sitting somewhere, and before leaving I suddenly wanted to make physical contact – albeit without any serious intentions. I reached across the table and took her fingers in mine. Tina reacted very sharply. Wrenching her hand away, she recoiled in her chair and, as was her habit, folded her arms over her chest. I shrugged, raising an eyebrow inquiringly, and she said with feeling, with all her heart, “I can’t stand lovey-dovey stuff!” There was an awkward pause; I paid the bill and we left, but within the hour we were exchanging messages again, and the next morning she came to see me as usual. This episode had not changed anything at the time, but now it was really holding me back.

Meanwhile, I sensed our mutual attraction. It tormented me, getting more and more difficult to deal with. In the evenings, after parting with Tina, I would go to the massage parlor next door, where for a surcharge the girls would be happy to offer various extras. I got up to all sorts of things with them, but it didn’t help. As soon as I got home, I would start wanting Tina again. It got to the point where my desire began to interfere with my work – I could no longer concentrate on mathematics when she was sitting on the sofa behind me. It was clear: something needed to change. We had to come to definite terms – if not regarding the configuration of external spaces, then at least with the nature of our relationship.

Finally, an idea came into my head. I decided to cook dinner for Tina – knowing that the next day, on Saturday, she would be busy and would only come to see me in the evening. I found a book of Thai recipes on the web, studied it until the small hours, went to the Central Market in the morning, and then, forgetting about my formulas, immersed myself in cooking – on the whole, successfully enough. The only thing that didn’t work out was the traditional Thai soup; the rest – the green curry, the rice with pineapple and especially the pad thai noodles – were rather edible. Then I called the maid in to do the cleaning, went to get some wine and waited for Tina.

She never cooked herself and was stunned. At first, she could barely cope with her shyness and sat in silence, unable to raise her eyes. I began telling her about Europe – about Gunter and his wife, about Tony with his sad vagabond eyes and macho “he who lives in the bloodstream” Albert. My account was lighthearted and funny, and Tina soon cheered up. Her stiffness dissipated; she laughed a lot and even asked for a wine – although she never usually touched alcohol. I poured her some chardonnay. She quickly drank it, got up, took a few steps around the room, came up to me and said with a smile, “You’re such a big man and I’m so small, and yet you’re making me dinner…” Then she added, “Perhaps there’s something you want from me?” – and looked at me with her dark eyes, openly, at point-blank range, as only she knew how.

I also got up and grinned, as if responding to a joke, “If you already know what I’m thinking, then I have nothing to add.” Tina took a step back, not taking her eyes off me. I could sense her expectation, even an element of impatience – and a complete unwillingness to turn back.

I advanced toward her, took her by the hand and gave her fingers a light squeeze. “Well, yes,” she said, “look how the time’s flown. It’s probably too late to go home now” – and retreated a little farther. I followed her.

“I’ll just have to spend the night at yours,” she said. “Evidently, I’m going to have to repay you somehow for putting me up?” Then she took another step away and feigned a deep sigh, “What a fall from grace – to spend the night at a man’s place…”

I moved toward her again, without letting go of her hand. Our eyes were locked together like the steel links of a chain.

Tina stepped back and leaned against the wall. She shrugged, “I’ve already told you much more intimate secrets. What’s the point of concealing my body?” Then suddenly she released her hand, pulled off her T-shirt and immediately covered herself with it, muttering, “Of course, I must give you this; otherwise you might go looking for other women. And anyway, it’s such a small thing…”

Her voice was trembling with tension. She turned away and confessed, “I’m afraid, but it’s not what you think. I’m just terribly unsure of myself. I’m a virgin; I’ve never had a proper boyfriend before. You know about most of my complexes, but there’s one more – I have a fear I’m not any good in bed!”

I just embraced her, ignoring her words. I had a thing or two to say about complexes myself – the entire previous year after I had broken up with my Turkish girlfriend, my love affairs hadn’t amounted to much. Evidently, my theory had taken over; I couldn’t free myself from it, take my mind off it. No, I wasn’t thinking about my formulas during sex, but I would often lose interest – at the most inopportune moments. I’d become helpless, I’d hate myself – so now I also had reasons to feel uneasy. Yet, I tried to forget about them – surprisingly, it worked out. And we made love.

I took Tina to the bedroom, sat her on the bed, pulled off the rest of her clothes. She gave a deep sigh, leaned back and spread her legs. I buried my tongue deep inside her – she came quickly, signing to me she wanted to rest, to savor the moment. Then she pulled my head back toward her. She came again and made a gesture with her hand. It didn’t express anything specific, but I understood: she wanted me to penetrate her…

Probably, it was one of the clumsiest episodes in my life – Tina’s inexperience and lack of confidence were evident, and I was unable to help her much. And yet, it was one of the happiest occasions: I felt indefatigable and capable of any feat. At first, I tried to be gentle, overly cautious, but Tina suddenly screamed, “Don’t mollycoddle me, be rough with me, give it to me hard!” I obeyed and took her roughly – she did not make a sound all the way through. I looked into her face but could not perceive what lay behind the new expression on it. Her eyes were closed, her lips tightly compressed. It seemed I was coupled together, not with a fragile Thai girl but with a boundless cosmos that refused to provide me with a response – perhaps because I wasn’t yet worthy of it. Only at the last moment did she open her eyes, and I saw how brightly her pupils were burning.

Afterward, she sat for a long time with her legs crossed and her back straight, looking in front of her and not saying a word. I sat next to her, gazing at her in silence, not even trying to guess her thoughts. Waves seemed to be emanating from her entire body; I sensed a perplexity in her caused by something bigger than the loss of virginity. The boundless cosmos was finally sending me a signal. It was a pity I didn’t know how to decipher it.

Then she recovered, stretched out her hand toward me and touched my hair as if seeing me for the first time. She asked for more wine, went to the bathroom; on her return, she lay down next to me, cuddled up close – and so we lay, it seemed, for ages. After she fell asleep, I cautiously freed myself from her embrace, poured myself a gin and sat down in an armchair nearby.

Tina’s dreams were restless, unsettled; she shuddered and muttered indistinct words in Thai. I could almost physically sense that her talking with her “someone” was continuing even now – with images being created in her head, thoughts conceived, their connections formed. I remembered her in the recent moments of intimacy – her compressed lips, the amazement in her burning eyes, her demand for roughness. I wondered what it was she was looking for in this world, overcoming her fears, pushing tenderness away like a half measure. It was somehow connected with her vulnerability, with her subtlety of feeling, but I could not grasp its logic and essence. I made a huge effort, trying to comprehend at least a little bit, but I understood almost nothing. Yet a presentiment of understanding, a foretaste of a deep truth, came to me that night. For the first time, I thought about the role of consciousness and the role of the body; I separated them, imagining how we are enriched by our new experiences, and why. Are they transferred somewhere – and if so, where? Maybe experiences do not vanish in vain, do not simply die? Maybe those among us who have heightened feelings subconsciously know this and are striving to live their lives more fully, more vividly – even at the expense of damaging themselves in the process?…

I have to stress: back then I was not able to formulate all this, tie the loose fragments together. But a sense of these fragments remained within me. As well as confidence – of a fulfillment, which was waiting for me somewhere nearby. I could no longer doubt that, could not show any weakness. It had gotten closer to me, become more discernible. Because: a crucial step on the path toward it had been taken – the fulfillment of love. Even if not a word about love had been said.

Chapter 21

Of course, our intimacy changed everything. Things became easier but at the same time more tangled. We each tried to cope with these complications in our own way.

Tina’s next step was momentous: within a day she had moved in with me. She rang from the street-level intercom, asking for help – I ran down the stairs perplexed and saw her standing at the entrance with two large bags. For some reason, I wasn’t at all surprised. To her, it also seemed natural, although at first she was somewhat embarrassed by her act. She talked as she wandered around the apartment unpacking her things, “Who would have thought it. For example, only yesterday I had no plans of living with a man whatsoever. Especially a farang. And a middle-aged farang at that. It’s a good thing I don’t have any girlfriends; they’d be shocked. They’d probably be saying I’m a kept sweetie!”

I also did something decisive: I extended the rent on my apartment for another four months. I did not tell Tina about it – she already considered it a matter of course that I was going to be in Bangkok for a long time. We never raised the topic; only once did she ask when I was going back to Europe. I answered honestly – that for now I didn’t know – and my answer satisfied her. At least that was what I thought, and I worried myself while figuring out what to do with my vacation, which was rapidly coming to an end. After our night together, the decision came of itself – I simply realized there was no way I could leave. Having understood this, I wrote a desperate letter to Bern begging them to let me stay on as a consultant so that I could work remotely, albeit for only half my salary. They were accommodating – maybe my message managed to convey a sensation that possessed me utterly. The feeling that fate was forcing me to remain here with a powerful gesture that could not be contradicted.

Our daily routine was established right away. Tina would get up first, silently slipping out of bed; she would do some stretching and yoga exercises. Then, just as quietly, she would potter around the apartment, tidying things up, shifting them from place to place, brewing the coffee. When I woke up, she would return to the bedroom, sit by the mirror and busy herself with her appearance, applying the slightest cosmetic touches. I reclined in bed and looked at her – it was a mandatory part of our daily ritual. Often this would excite her; she would come over to me with an innocent half smile. I would drag her to me, rip off her clothes and throw myself on her fragile nudity…

Then we would have breakfast, and I’d work while Tina sat on the sofa behind me, doing her own thing. Sometimes she would do it semidressed; without turning around I could easily imagine her sharp shoulders, thin neck, brittle teenage grace. Just looking at her gave me strength and inspiration, which, I’m sure, I’d never have gotten from anyone else. Even sex with her, contrary to the laws of physiology, did not leave me drained but charged with energy.

At the same time, not everything about our intimacy went smoothly. For a while, Tina could not get used to her new state and our bedroom games. As before, she would occasionally mutter, “Lovey-dovey stuff…” – although her own tenderness could have melted anyone. And, simultaneously, she would melt herself, soaking me with her juices, which disconcerted and bewildered her…

It was impossible to predict what exactly on a particular day would bring her pleasure and what would leave her feeling indifferent or even uncomfortable. Besides, she always tried to hide her discomposure – so as not to upset me and spoil the mood. But, of course, I sensed everything – and became upset, nervous and at times would lose my erection. Then, Tina, desperate with herself, would run to the bathroom – only to come back in a few minutes and console, calm me like a wise, mature woman.

More often, however, she preferred it for me to be the mature adult. She liked being led – and this wasn’t just feminine weakness, a search for a strong shoulder to lean on. By handing over the initiative, she was, for a little while, casting off a huge load – a burden of responsibility of an ambiguous kind.

Sometimes she wanted to behave like a child – fooling around, having fun, whimpering. At others, she became easily hurt, with or without a reason, and then she threw up her hands in a funny way, always repeating the same phrase: “Can you really treat me like this?” But then the full weight of her responsibility would fall back on her shoulders. Occasionally, during my difficult moments, she unerringly perceived my fear of failure. And she would lead me to my desk, almost by the hand, saying, “Come with me. Don’t be afraid; sit down and do this. Do this well.”

And I would do it – at least I’d try. Sometimes, while working, I’d suddenly feel I was desperately missing contact with her. I would make up some excuse to turn toward her, ask how she was feeling, whether the AC was too cold for her or not. Tina almost never answered, only nodded, shrugged and looked at me with a playful, understanding glance. Then she would suddenly get up, approach me, press my head to her breast and stay like that for several minutes, exchanging her energy with me. She would just stand there, not saying a word, looking into the distance, into worlds that didn’t exist for others…

In my work, everything has changed as well. Our new life has strangely altered my view, my perspective. It was no better or worse; it just became different. This may have been the reason, or simply the quantity of effort had evolved into quality, but by the end of the fifth week, I stumbled across the right combination of the parameters and degrees of freedom.

This again happened in an ordinary way – everything just suddenly came together. Three multipliers turned to zero, neutralizing the most malicious divergences – and the remaining ones were eliminated by renormalization. The external space in this case could have any number of dimensions from a certain range: ten, sixteen, twenty-eight, forty-two… Each of these values assumed its own set of degrees of freedom in fractal quasiparticles “on a flat sheet of paper” – in our three-dimensional world inside a multidimensional external one. I settled on the simplest, the sixteen-dimensional case. It required only one additional quantum variable, and the equations acquired a laconic, elegant appearance. I knew: the more harmonious and compact the theory, the greater the chance it would be correct.

Thus, the mysterious field interacting with the dipole matrix was fixed, described by mathematics. As I already knew, the interaction took place when the water dipoles of the brain were arranged in a special way. Their arrangement was “packed” into a nontrivial fractal-like figure – I named this state “fractal coherence”; it emerged and was sustained thanks to the intense work of certain neural groups. They created the initial conditions, triggering the quantum effect – fractal symmetry breaking, fractal ordering – this was exactly what the “superfluous” energy was spent on when the brain was working hard, remembering and thinking. The energy was then released in a stream of quasiparticles, quasi-Goldstone bosons – they transferred it to the external field, gaining mass and slowing down. Thus, the quasiparticles, the quanta of dipole waves supporting fractal coherence, acted as agents of a previously unknown interaction – as mediators between our brain and a new field, our world and an external multidimensional space.

Now I saw this field – in the modified right-hand side of the Lagrangian I had obtained. Assuming it was the primary cause of our intelligence, I named its quanta, the particles that permeate our world and interact with the quasiparticles of the brain, “conscions” – from the word consciousness. And that was where my achievements ended. The formulas demonstrated mathematical consistency, affirmed the possibility of the new interaction, but, alas, I did not understand exactly how it was taking place. The equations describing the connection of the worlds lay in front of me, but I could not solve them.

A week passed, another began. I was treading water, on the verge of the most important secret, and could not move a single step forward. It was extremely frustrating to be standing on the threshold and not being permitted to look inside. Coming to a standstill was nothing special; it had happened before. It had happened often, and, like any other scientist, I was used to that. But never had I been so tormented by my incapability – too much converged together; I was sure that the result, when it finally came to me, would put everything in its place. That my theory would be completed, logically whole. That the essence of the mind and the nature of true consciousness would become clear to me. And that I would reveal to Tina the basic nature of her mysterious “symptom,” unmask her interlocutor-confidant, drag him into the light. I felt desperately impatient; all these motivations urged me on. But I wasn’t getting anywhere.

As if in tune with my mental state, thunderstorms began to break over Bangkok. Every day, heavy clouds would gather by lunchtime, clinging to the tops of the skyscrapers. Soon there would be a short but furious deluge, followed by muddy streams of water cascading down the sidewalks and throngs of cars frozen in traffic jams. Then we started to have problems with the electricity: it would get cut off at the most inconvenient times. Often, we would wake up in the middle of the night to a stuffy humid room and wander around the apartment like sleepwalkers in the sparse gloom of the streetlights. Then the storms went away, and the electricity was fixed, but a serious conflict had arisen between Tina and me.

It had been coming to a head for quite some time; we’d been approaching it from different sides and had simultaneously reached the critical moment, just as we had often attained orgasm together. It all started when I told her about my success – the equations for the sixteen-dimensional case – although for the time being, this “success” was still illusory and eluding my grasp. I think I did it just to cheer myself up – running ahead and saying things I so much wanted to believe. Everything, however, turned out differently. After listening to me, Tina shook her head, “I don’t understand. I know I’m stupid, but can you draw me a picture of it, please…” – and I became confused, evasive and inarticulate. I was unable to draw something I could not see myself; it would have been the most appalling deception!

As a result, I only got angry – both at myself and Tina. The words I had let loose on the world too soon had not pulled me along with them – conversely, they had made everything worse. Seeing no way out, I began to make attempts at changing things around me – but the only thing around was Tina; the rest was not important. It started to seem to me that her presence was no longer helping but, on the contrary, hindering, leading me astray. One time and then another, I tried to work away from home, in a café next door. But only ended up achieving one thing – exacerbating her jealousy, which by that time was already making itself felt.

After that first night, Tina’s mind quickly passed through several stages – clarifying our “romance” and its future. While I was occupied with global concepts – which, I thought, united her and me just as globally – Tina was thinking simply, like any woman. For several days, despite moving in with me, she was tormented with doubts – I could sense them but did not contemplate their nature. Then the doubts receded; the internal reasoning had been completed. Tina understood, formulated for herself precisely what she wanted. She decided she wanted to be with me for the rest of our lives.

Right after that, unconsciously and then quite consciously, she began to assert her rights over me. Her ownership rights – despite her youth and the disparity of our worldviews. Her position evolved rapidly, changing day by day.

It began from an inverse point of view, in a sort of emancipated way. “I’m not jealous,” she told me, “and I’m not trying to tie you down. Every man should have adventures, I know. You can sleep with other women and then tell me about it…”

I was turning this into a joke; Tina was laughing. Then, in the same exalted-joking manner, she began to make fun of me. “Actually,” she sighed, “you are a bit over the hill, don’t you think? Just a little bit older and you’ll be an ancient ruin, ha-ha-ha. What other women could there be – it’s amazing you don’t have a heart attack when we make love!”

At the same time, she – cautiously, as if by chance – interrogated me about every minute of the day I had spent without her. On several occasions – pretending to be playing around – she even tried to check my smartphone. I wasn’t bothered – I had nothing to hide. My mind was busy with my theory and the equations that wouldn’t yield. And then we had a conversation.

It happened at dinner, in a quiet Japanese restaurant. Tina started it suddenly – she had been chatting about trifles, then stopped, took a piece of sashimi from her plate but did not eat it, her chopsticks frozen in midair. She looked at me and said in a tense voice, “On the whole, I wouldn’t mind if we were to be together for a long time. Maybe a very long time. Perhaps forever.”

Caught unawares, I could not find an answer. The waitress came up and poured us some green tea. Tina’s chopsticks trembled in the air. She laid them on the table, turned away and added, “I would like to have a child with you, but this is not obligatory. If you are afraid I’ll be stressing you about children, then don’t worry; it’s not a big deal for me.”

I caught a glimpse of something in her expression beyond her years, as I had weeks ago, during our second meeting. I now noticed it again but did the wrong thing: I did not take her seriously. Instead, I winked at Tina slyly, “I know, you’re only pulling my leg. You’re much younger than me, and it’s too early to discuss our future, isn’t it?…” Tina smiled and changed the subject. She did not raise the topic again that evening or for the next two days. Only later did I realize: it was precisely then that she had become possessed by the idea that I had a wife left behind in Europe to whom I was going to return sooner or later. She’d heard that romances with Western boyfriends often ended this way. And on the third day, there was an explosion.

I came home from the café in the evening at about seven. Tina met me without a smile or a kiss, her face in a frozen mask.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

I just shrugged, “You know perfectly well.”

“Well, yes,” Tina nodded, “it’s all too easy – to hide behind your work, when in fact you could be doing anything you wanted. And no one would know where you were, exactly…” Then she asked, “Well, have you done much today? Have you made a lot of progress? Completed a great feat of labor? Of course, you can do much better without me!”

It was a sore spot; I flared up and was rude to her. She was rude to me back, burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom with her phone. And from there she began sending me short messages – flashes of despair, insecurity and hurt.

“I do not want this anymore,” I read. “You are old. You don’t speak Thai.”

“It’s all unreliable. With you. Unpredictable!” I read in confusion. “I will not live in Europe. Go back on your own.”

“Go back to your wife. How old is she? Fifty or sixty? Just what you need!” And after this came: “I don’t want a farang!!” – like a scream at the top of her voice.

These condensed fragments of hastily formulated thoughts for some reason hit me straight in the heart, dispelled the illusions and destroyed the magic. I suddenly felt that behind them was a life infinitely alien to me, one unconquerable abyss after another. Everything I had closed my eyes to now reared up before me. Self-deception – there was no other way of defining our closeness. Naivety – that was the reason for my faith in the affinity of our goals, in that indistinct something binding us together with a strong thread…

After a two-minute silence, the final message came through: “Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I wrote back. “I understand.”

“Okay,” I wrote next. “Go away then.”

And added a few hurtful, unfair words.

I was filled with disappointment and bitterness. Tina remained in the bathroom; not a sound escaped from it. I wandered aimlessly around the apartment, then changed my clothes and went out into the city, not wanting to see her or talk to her. Carrying inside my dissatisfaction with the both of us, my anguish. Nursing it like a tamed beast.

Chapter 22

Night descended on Bangkok. I was walking toward Sukhumvit, to the sweaty crowds and neon glare, to the countless bars and every imaginable vice ever invented by man. I stopped somewhere, ate a bowl of spicy soup, drank something and moved on. Then I had a drink somewhere else, stepped away from the central boulevard and walked and walked, veering randomly from street to street…

I traipsed around like this for hours – not knowing what I was doing or where I was going. Feverish thoughts whirled around my head – about Tina, about my theory and my fate. Everything was slipping away; I couldn’t grasp hold of any encouraging feeling. Faces floated into view – old and ugly, or inviting, heavily made up – they rushed up to me and staggered away. Hands grabbed me by the sleeve, trying to sell me something, capture me, lure me, drag me away – I pulled my arm free, pushed peddlers aside, ignoring their indignant cries, and walked on, stopping only for yet another drink. Then the streets became empty; I had wandered into some desolate hole. I found myself in a very poor and dirty neighborhood next to a bridge across a rotting canal. Nearby, there were piles of garbage, a few miserable shacks and people – a fairly large group. They called me over to them; I approached, and they began to point something out to me – “Here, here!”

A man lay next to a racing bike. Quite young, white, with European features. His head was bleeding – evidently, he had tried to ride around a puddle in the middle of the road along a concrete elevation but had fallen off and hit a stone.

I instantly absorbed the whole scene with my inflamed, alcohol-addled brain. I grasped it and realized: this was a reminder, maybe even a sign. My stepfather immediately came to mind – yes, fate continued to lead me around the same themes. I remembered my childhood and myself covered with night sweat, the awakening of my fear, the fear of death – it came as suddenly as death itself comes. I remembered Tina and her fears – and, for some reason, how she had sat in the Buddha pose after our first sex, listening to something new emerging within her. I was remembering, and the same thing appeared from nowhere, kept spinning in my head: “Phase transition!”

The people around me were babbling something in Thai. I did not hear them and paid no attention. Everything seemed to have frozen; I was beyond reality, beyond events – having turned into a medium and receiving a signal. The world opened up before me, revealed itself to me – in its entirety, all at once. I perceived its interconnections, unable and not even wanting to formulate them into words, symbols, numbers. It was a sensation of extreme clarity – as if my mind had suddenly been overlaid on tracing paper with the structure of the universe and was living with it in unison. I don’t know which term was more relevant here – resonance, similitude, concordance? They were all quite powerless. Words were powerless, but the feeling itself made me more than powerful, omnipotent. Everything that had happened and was happening to myself and others was becoming arranged in a series, breaking down into the most basic images, and I was capable of instantaneously grasping any or all of them.

I saw that life was a spider’s web, a labyrinth full of dead ends. I could see Tina, the guiding thread, one of the many or few available to me. And my theory – it was a component, an element of the series, one of its details. I sensed that it only required a little effort on my part to find a track in its own intricate labyrinth. I made this effort; in my mind – with difficulty, with a creak – a corner was turned, and a change of the guard, a transfer onto new rails occurred. Suddenly, flicker after flicker, fragments of a new comprehension were lit up: one formula, another and yet another… An integral, which seemed to be unsolvable, broke into several independent parts… I finally saw the real meaning of some of the constructions that I had dropped for the sake of simplicity, to shorten the path. But no, the path could not be shortened. Was this what fate had been repeatedly hinting, offering clues to which I had been apparently deaf?…

Then I came to; something brought me sharply back to reality. A sound… I shook my head and heard a groan – obviously, the cyclist was alive. “An ambulance!” I shouted and looked around, but no one moved. I screamed and waved my arms, but they only looked at me silently. Then I pulled out a mobile, shoved it in someone’s hand nearby and yelled in his face, “Ambulance, ambulance!” The man immediately disappeared – I realized I would never see my phone again. And at that very moment the ambulance appeared – obviously, it had already been summoned before me.

The medical team busied themselves with the cyclist, and I felt unneeded, superfluous. I desperately wanted to go home, to Langsuan, and began to ask about how to get out of there. People turned away from me, not understanding a word; I thought sadly I would have to randomly find the road back, but then an elderly woman with a flabby, drunken face and kind eyes emerged from the crowd. “Let’s go,” she said; “I’ll show you the way.”

Barely believing my ears, I asked her, “Do you speak English?”

“I worked for thirty years in the massage parlors in Patpong,” the woman smiled. The smile almost made her beautiful. She seemed like a saint to me.

“My name is Som,” she added. “And you’re handsome…”

I followed her under the bridge, winding through the garbage heaps.

“Look, this is where I live,” Som said, pointing to a hovel made out of cardboard boxes.

“Why are you here?” I asked in confusion. “You have such a wonderful soul…”

“Where else should I be?” she said in surprise. “This is my home.”

Behind the bridge was a path through the bushes, and beyond the bushes – a wide highway. “You need to go there,” Som pointed to the left. Suddenly we heard a shout. The man whom I had given my phone had caught up with us and shoved it back in my hand.

I wanted to give them money but discovered I didn’t have a single baht. My wallet with my cards had been left at home; I had to make my way on foot; the journey took an hour and a half. I stumbled into the apartment, still not completely sober, in my sweaty clothing – and immediately saw Tina.

“Hi,” she said, “I didn’t leave, I just couldn’t” – and she came up to me, embracing me around the neck.

I gently pushed her away and muttered, “I need a shower.”

“Did you cheat on me?” Tina asked.

“No,” I shook my head. “No, quite the opposite.”

I went to the bathroom, but Tina followed me. She glanced sideways, standing on the threshold, and said, “So, you want to shut yourself away from me with a door? Are you disappointed? Are you going to leave me?”

I tried to smile, “It seems I couldn’t part with you – even if I was disappointed a thousand times.”

“Aha,” Tina nodded and frowned, “but you are of course angry with me?”

“I don’t know. Without you, I’m trapped in a spider’s web,” I confessed, revealing what I was really thinking.

“Aha,” Tina repeated, growing pensive and taking a step back. I finally closed the door and began to undress. She did not go away, though, and spoke from the hall, “While you were gone, I went outside and brought back some food – sweet pork; you like it. I saw a dog without a tail. I drank tea and dropped the mug in the sink, but it did not break; only the edge chipped a bit…”

“Yes, yes,” I muttered and turned on the tap. I stood under the stream and disconnected myself from everything in the blessed white noise. Then, about twenty minutes later, I left the bathroom and asked Tina to make me some coffee.

“In a minute,” Tina nodded but did not go into the kitchen. She followed me around the apartment and continued to talk. “I was afraid and did not sleep,” she complained. “I’m not used to sleeping on my own any more. I had to turn on the lights everywhere and leave the TV on. But even so I fell asleep just for an hour or two – and I had a bad dream…”

She spoke quickly, her words tumbling one after the other as if she were afraid that if she stopped, it would be forever. I embraced her, holding her tight. She took a deep breath and calmed down. Then she slipped out of my embrace, “Coffee… I’ll be quick.”

I swiftly downed the first cup and then another. My head cleared; I sat down at the table, yearning for my work as if I’d been away from it for a whole week. I leafed back through my notebook and immediately saw what I was looking for – the part of the equation I had earlier decided to omit. At the bottom of the sheet, two coupled operators, changing the behavior of the field, were frozen as if readying themselves for a great leap. For a complex transformation strangely leading to simplicity. This was a leap indeed – over the void, above the conventional, the familiar. A jump – from the interaction of fields to the compatibility of geometries. The entire system was reformulated in another way: my quasiparticles, local perturbations, produced space deformations carrying a topological charge. What had previously seemed mind-bogglingly complex, now came out naturally and simply. And I saw: these deformations twisted the field of the conscions into a vortex!

In three hours, I had derived the principal solution of the modified equations – a stable wave of soliton type. I only noticed the conscion vortex for a brief moment – but that was enough to believe in it. It was a stable wave motion localized in space around the source of disturbance – the human brain. In multidimensional reality, the brain was surrounded by conscions dancing their dance around it. A highly complex dance full of meaning – encapsulating everything we think about, everything we remember…

I named the vortex the “B Object.” It was unclear where it came from – I just liked the word; it reflected the instantaneous associations flashing through my head. The associations were forgotten, but the word remained.

After that, I went to bed and slept until noon. Waking up, I saw Tina sitting nearby and looking at me. “Tina…” I muttered. “Now I know what you sense around you. You were right – it’s here, here and here. It is a stable, solitary wave, a whirlpool of new particles, their dance.”

She replied in all seriousness, “You are my genius!”

The next few days passed in a frenzy. I refined the theory to its final form, checked and double-checked it, scrutinized its properties. Then, convinced that everything was correct and error-free, I set about the main test – the connection with reality, the calculation of energy flows. Everything dovetailed in the best way possible; the “dark energy” of the brain – indirectly, through the oscillations of the dipole matrix – transformed into the new “steps” of the dance of the conscions. It enriched the conscion vortex of the B Object with new content – and the energy balance was strikingly rigorous. It was the most harmonious mechanism, and my formulas now described every stage of its workings!

Finally, I could say without reservation that I could see the whole picture. I could trace the entire path step by step – from the brain’s response to an external stimulus up to abstract thought and self-awareness. It all started with a “seed,” a trigger, some kind of image, sound, word or smell, or some other reason for exciting a particular group of neurons in the neocortex. Neurons resonated with the water matrix, activating the required dipole code, quantum oscillations of a certain frequency that had been “sleeping” until then at the lowest energy level. An interplay commenced between the micro- and macrocosm; a synchronicity in the neuron firing emerged and could be observed on the encephalograms. The brain passed through a multitude of states, perhaps previously familiar to it, circling near their attractors or jumping to others – that is, forming memories, thoughts, moving to associations linked with them, returning back, then moving away again…

The initial stimulus no longer played a role; the brain itself built chains of images, thoughts, memories – and, from time to time, became concentrated, “stuck” on certain ones. On those that were especially important at this given moment – and, as a result, the brain states forming this something became advantageous; it would pass through them again and again. Some areas of neural correlation seemed to start glowing red: a new hidden order, a special, “fractal” coherence was established within them. This coherence was caused by the ordering – again, fractal ordering – of the water dipoles, which, in turn, was supported by special types of quantum oscillations: bosons that, at first glance, could not exist according to the laws of physics. But they did exist – an external field had come to the rescue. This was my field of the conscions – interacting with it, quasiparticles-bosons decelerated, and the fractal ordering became stable!

Thus, the external field influenced the brain, but the brain influenced it in turn. A vortex arose in the flow of the conscions – it emerged and then existed, “lived” in the immediate vicinity of its source. Its dynamics were constantly changing, enriching – with the memories and thoughts on which the brain was concentrating. And then the enriched vortex, the B Object, in turn interacted with the brain slightly differently – as if providing a feedback. Consciousness focused in on itself or, if you like, “looked” in upon itself from the outside. This evidently was how insights, sudden comprehension, the formation of new concepts – all those things reflecting the real strength of the human mind – happened, as if being “prompted” externally. I no longer doubted that I had unraveled and mathematically described the mystery of the mind. And at the same time the nature of Tina’s enigmatic “symptom”…

These were amazing, crazy days, the likes of which I had never known in my life. The hard work of the previous years was now crowned with success – of the greatest possible scale. To this was added the confidence that I had mastered the most important secret in the universe. And what’s more, I was overwhelmed with my extraordinary intimacy with Tina.

Every evening I would describe to her in detail everything I had done during the day. She, of course, understood little, but I was sure she sensed all the most important things, transmitted them through herself. She somehow immediately believed me, believed in me, believed the truth of my discovery. And we became increasingly aware of exactly what we meant to each other.

Our link was stronger, deeper than the usual – coincidence of tastes, sexual attraction or commonly held opinions. We were connected by the greatest knowledge and we were both making a contribution toward it. We each played our own role in it – I could explain the phenomenon, and Tina could unequivocally experience, physically feel it, thereby confirming its truth, even if only for the two of us. This, as far as I could tell, made us and our partnership something inimitable, most unique. This gave huge meaning to our lives, and each of us was a source of meaning to the other. Many might not have believed it; they might have considered us charlatans and liars, losers who could not find their place in the world. But we knew what the world, and our place in it, really were.

Sensing our closeness, we did not talk about it – and never spoke about love. I diligently avoided tender words – and she even more so; it wouldn’t have been her style. We just lived in our intimacy, reveled in it, not even trying to find a name for it.

The accounts I would produce in the evenings would turn us both on and always ended in sex. And our sex had also become different: within a week Tina had been transformed from an uptight virgin into an unbridled courtesan. Her shame dissipated, she now allowed anything to be done to her body. We did it in all sorts of places – on the bed and on the sofa, on the floor and in the armchair, in the kitchen next to the sink, in the bathtub under the shower… Wiry and flexible by nature, she could twist herself into the most incredible positions trying to find one that would bring a new or greater pleasure. Her subtle, barely perceptible aroma – the scent of arousal, desire, passion – seemed to permeate throughout the entire apartment. Sometimes she would say to me with a grin, “You bring out the animal side in me. When I’m with you I feel like a girl from Nana Plaza who has slept with a thousand men!”

Then, having completely exhausted each other, before falling asleep we would chat and joke: about ourselves, our lives and also – about the world’s incredulity. I told her what I knew full well – about the resentment my theory would evoke, how they would look for reasons to ridicule it, to find even the smallest fault. “Then,” I said with a chuckle, “we will present you as living proof; it might help. Keeping your animal side well concealed, of course…”

“Ha-ha,” Tina answered me in the same tone. “I know you: you’d be dying of jealousy right away. But don’t worry, we won’t be showing me to anyone – because they wouldn’t believe me either. You can at least do the math – and what can I do? They’ll just say I’m a lunatic – we’ve already been over that. Or maybe they’ll invent some sort of pill to cure me, so I stop sensing this Object of yours. Well, thanks but no thanks!”

And then the day came when the theory was finally completed – it was no longer a joking matter. We suddenly realized the depth of its consequences – especially the main one, the depth of which shook us to the core. And we continued to be shaken for a while, trying to cope with our bewilderment.

The essence of this realization was revealed to me on a hot, sunny morning. I saw it on paper and sat for a long time, not taking my eyes off the formulas, as if trying to find the courage to fully believe them. The crux of the matter was simple, easily comprehensible: the math demonstrated that the B Object, once created, could then exist without the brain. Having for any reason lost and become separated from its creator, it did not dissolve, did not scatter into nothingness. It was kind of fixated on itself, maintaining in full its vortex dynamics!

Later on, as usual, I checked everything again and again. Then I carefully copied on a separate sheet of paper the sequence of the transformations revealing how the B Object undergoes phase transitions – the first, the second one, the third one… And that night I told Tina about it – agitated and carefully selecting my terms.

She, I think, understood my emotions rather than the content of my words. Yet she caught the main thing: the B Object could not be enriched without a brain but is able to live without it, keeping what it had acquired. It can survive for a long time, maybe forever – with its conscions tirelessly dancing their dance. One that reflects everything that has been received in its time from the host-brain – the entire memory, or at least the most important fragments…

What I was saying hung in the air; it seemed strange even to me. I became nervous; trying to make it clearer, I exclaimed: “After the death of the brain, the B Object loses its connection with our world!” And I gesticulated, explaining, “Only the special quasiparticles, quanta of specific dipole waves, are able to interact with it!” And for the hundredth time I stressed the main notion, as if trying to find a fault in it: “Without fractal ordering – that is, without the active work of the brain – there are no such quasiparticles, and therefore there is no interaction. The B Object loses its energy supply and its compensating part. All its momentum becomes directed inside, toward itself, but it does not destroy it. It soon jumps into a different phase state and, not being attached to anything, moves away into space, carrying what it has accumulated. Just as a stone flies off after it’s released from a sling, our memory ‘recorded’ onto the B Object races into the distance. In anticipation of – who knows what? Perhaps, some new fateful encounter?”

Tina lay by my side, not moving, frozen. “Your secret ‘interlocutor,’ plus your body, your brain – all this in its entirety is you,” I told her. “Your body will disappear, but the interlocutor – that is, the B Object – will remain alive; it will then become you, storing within itself the experiences you have lived through.

“Your B Object, containing you within itself, will be carried away to other worlds,” I went on, surprised at how stupid and pitiful my words sounded. “It will be carried away, as if on a quest – a long and endless quest.

“And maybe it will find what or who it is looking for,” I fantasized, stroking her on the back. “Maybe it – that is, you – will become someone else’s secret interlocutor. What would I give to know for sure…”

“If we were to know this for sure,” said Tina, “then we would no longer fear death.”

And after that we were silent; we just lay there, huddled together – probably thinking the same thoughts.

Chapter 23

Tina’s voice and her words resonate in my ears. As if I’m living through that night again, sound after sound, touch after touch, and it is with some reluctance that I open my eyes – here on Quarantine, in the soft armchair of my bedroom. I open them and stare into space for a long time – remembering how in Bangkok, once the theory was finished, and the last equal sign was down in my long-suffering notebook, I went out into the city and wandered around it for hours in unrestrained euphoria. Formulas floated before my eyes, and beyond them, beyond the integrals, logarithms and matrices, I could see the whole universe and farther beyond it. I imagined stunning pictures – multidimensional worlds with exotic metrics, patterns and shapes that could not be believed in, and yet I knew they existed, me myself being an inseparable part of them. Their scale did not overwhelm me – I could see alongside them a myriad of shooting neurons, the trembling of the dipoles, the waves of an invisible field piercing the brain. I could visualize the most complex dance, the dance of the conscions, and it was no less majestic than any cosmic structure. I felt a proportionality with the entire cosmos – for myself and for every other human being.

The music thundered inside me. I walked along a crowded street and peered at the faces – of petty traders and taxi drivers and tourists crazy with the heat. I told myself not to judge them strictly; they, too, would leave their mark. Many of them had thought, felt and perhaps loved at some time or other. There are those still capable of it to this day – and everything their mind has been accumulating will be preserved and not lost. The B Objects, having left their “owners,” will bring parts of their lives to other worlds. Do the other worlds need that? Maybe so; who knows – and perhaps, I thought, among these people there are those who believe they have a global role to play, even if they can’t explain it in words. Everyone, probably, has moments when they feel themselves to be on familiar terms with the stars and galaxies. On the same wavelength with outer space – and then they are no longer intimidated by the immeasurable scale of time and distance. This is reflected in their faces, in their eyes – look closely at anyone doing what they know best. Perhaps, at that moment, they feel the universe itself is tirelessly caring for the integrity of their unique “I”! Is this not a reason to be proud of your superiority over mindless nature?… I felt the most acute pride in humanity. Although, of course, “pride” is not the right word. No one has yet come up with the right words for this.

I wandered around, insensible to the heat, talking to myself, grinning at my own thoughts. My delight, my emotional outburst resembled a powerful narcotic dream. Even now I am utterly unashamed when I recall it – and I remember, savor the memory, reclining in my armchair, stretching out the pleasure. Then I finally get up and go out into the living room – in the same elevated state of mind. I have several sheets of paper in my hand: a concise extract, the quintessence of my work. The sequence of the transformations deforming space, the path leading to the conscion vortices, to the stable soliton waves. To the B Objects connecting worlds – my former, terrestrial one and this strange place that I have yet to really get to know.

Elsa stands at the stove, wearing a short dress with a bow and a lace apron. She looks like a French maid from an upmarket porno. I say hello and am immediately struck by her gaze. I freeze under it, feeling pinned to the wall. Like we are midddle of a love affair and I have just been caught cheating.

“You’re glowing all over,” Elsa says. Her voice is calm, even, but there is an electric charge about it heralding the proximity of a storm.

“You were the same yesterday and generally every morning over the last few days,” she continues. “What would be the reason for this? Let’s assume: you’re recalling that Asian girl of yours! Maybe you’re even having erotic dreams?”

I know: a certain tension has been rising between us – I sensed it but there was nothing I could do. Thinking about Tina and reliving, as if afresh, the story of our romance and the completion of my work, the decisive steps leading to the dance of the conscions, I distanced myself from my roommate. I wasn’t telling her much, keeping all the details to myself, and she wasn’t pressing me with questions, although her silence obviously concealed a grievance.

“Answer me!” Elsa insists.

“You guessed right,” I confess. “Something like that – plus some math. I’ve made progress; I didn’t tell you earlier, as I was afraid of jinxing it, but now, it seems, these anxieties are already behind me…”

The echoes of the morning’s euphoria linger within me; I can’t believe Elsa’s resentment can be serious. I’m still waiting for her to share my happiness – yet I sense how the global images in my mind are fading, and my entire accomplishment is diminishing in size.

“Yes, I remembered Tina, I resurrected my theory, the theory of the conscions,” I continue, not wanting to give in. “I saw their vortices – by the way, it’s thanks to them that we are here. If you want, I can tell you everything in greater depth…”

Elsa waves her hand impatiently, “Forget it. Your depths are too much for me; I won’t understand them. I’m just a down-to-earth girl; I only know: your muse has finally returned to you. And I’m not fit to take her place, of course – although to be frank, muses come in all shapes and sizes… What is that in your hands – are you drawing portraits of her? Or are they your love letters?”

She doesn’t attempt to hide her irritation. Not knowing how to react, I make a circle around the room, moving a chair away and putting it back again. Then I try to take a step closer to her, but Elsa pulls away and sits down at the table.

“Well,” she says in an indifferent tone, “tell me if you want. We have to move forward with that spreadsheet of ours somehow” – and she purses her lips, almost like Nestor would.

I plant myself opposite and – somewhat bashfully, fitfully – I tell her the whole story. Elsa stares seriously straight at my face. When I finish – in an incoherent and confused manner, despite the triumphant conclusion – she sighs and says, “Well, on top of everything else, you were her first lover… She must have behaved stupidly and felt awkwardly shy. There’s nothing more boring than virgins, is there? In any case, this Tina of yours is in no way connected with me and my past. We’re treading water – as ever!”

She gets up, walks to the window and nods toward the cityscape beyond it, “It’s such an annoying image! I wanted to put something better on but didn’t manage to for some reason. Really, the day has started badly… By the way, don’t you think it’s odd that even here, with only you and me present, you need someone else to help you remember these vortices of yours? The only thing I’m good for is frying your eggs in the morning!”

For some reason my heart contracts. Elsa carries on, trying to smile, “Although fried eggs are no small matter; at least I have no rivals on that score. And you know, it seems I’m getting better and better at them – don’t you think?”

I cling to her words, like a lifeline, nodding with a short strained laugh, “I have to admit, in my former life, no one ever cooked such great breakfasts for me.” And I add, “As for Tina, it’s complicated; there’s no point in being jealous. You see, she was able to physically feel everything I described with my equations on paper. To feel and perceive the sensation – glancing at her, it was as if I myself could sense that our B Objects were next to us, nearby.”

“I think,” says Elsa, “the whole point is that you could physically sense her. It’s so upsetting – having a body that can only tease!”

“I think,” I reply, matching her tone, “the thing is that Tina’s presence dispelled my doubts. This is the main role of a muse – not to let you have doubts!”

Elsa continues – stubbornly, as if not hearing, “It’s good I restrained myself from trying to make you mine. I did it from the very first day – feeling for some reason that it wouldn’t work out. And now I also understand: even if everything here were for real, even if we slept together and your head was spinning, I would still lose out to her – the one who is not just far away but is basically in some sort of other life. I would lose in every sense – I simply didn’t have a chance!”

After that, we remain silent. I eat my eggs – they really are delicious – and Elsa drinks her coffee in small sips. After breakfast, I get up, put the dishes in the sink and take a blank sheet of paper.

“Look,” I say and draw a human head and something vague around it.

“Oh,” Elsa snorts. “It’s a saint with a halo. Just don’t tell me this is a drawing of yourself!”

I continue, “This is not a halo; imagine – our three-dimensional world and some wider outer space. Imagine that space above and under this sheet of paper…”

“Some men,“ Elsa sighs, “just don’t get it the first time. You’re wasting your breath; it’s just not my thing. The extent of my perception is very limited.”

I’m genuinely surprised, “Do you really not want to hear about it? Do you have no interest in how and where your memory is kept? It’s what saves your former experience for your future lives – by the way, there could be a lot of them. They could be long – and you’re not interested in their meaning?”

Elsa frowns, “What’s the big deal? I’ve always suspected something of the sort existed – what happened once is bound to repeat itself. Things rarely end at the first attempt – which, by the way, often happens to be awkward… And as far as meaning is concerned, the why and how, I really don’t care. What’s important is the result – and I believe most people think the same.”

“Yes,” I agree, feeling nettled. “Yes, that’s why it’s so easy to sell the simplistic concept of God. It’s much easier to understand than multidimensional spaces and quantum fields. And the result, in general, is the same. No wonder in my first life, theoretical physicists had such small salaries…”

Elsa doesn’t smile at my joke. “If this is a reproach in disguise,” she says, “then you’re off the point – remember, I had my own way of getting to heaven. It may be quite simplistic, too, but at least I chose it myself. And I didn’t like church, by the way; it was utterly boring there.”

“Yes,” I nod and look at our tablecloth. Good girls go to heaven… curls around under my plate.

“Yes!” she repeats after me and continues, “I just thought: Maybe you’d like me to embroider some of your equations on here? That would be another contribution – besides my fried eggs, I mean. Or, if not an entire equation, then at least a very clever word; I remember one: ‘Lagrangian.’ And next to it I could add your name – has anyone ever embroidered your name?”

There is a deliberate coldness in her voice, a concentration of her resentment. I merely shrug.

Then, to top it all, she refuses to go out for a walk. She just sits with her needlework on the couch, without even glancing up. I look out the window, changing the views – a first, a second, a third… Nothing good comes of it. Disappointed, I sit down at the table and fiddle about with nothing to do, drawing some random symbols instead of formulas. And then, unexpectedly even for myself, I go up to the sink and rewash the dishes on the rack that are already sparkling clean. This calms me down, and by the evening session, a part of my former euphoria has returned. After all, I say to myself, the main event of the day is my upcoming conversation with Nestor, not my quarrels with Elsa.

My former adviser and now only a “friend” appears on the screen at exactly five. “Get ready,” I say to him, “it’s your turn to hear ‘something quite amusing.’ For example, what a B Object is – in the strictest mathematical sense.”

Nestor tenses visibly. “If so, then you seem to be a bit underdressed,” he tries to joke. “I’d expect no less than a tuxedo…” Then he brushes his temple and mutters something else in the same vein, but his snide little jokes bounce right off me. I am full of confidence and calm – and I recount everything to him in perfect order, from A to Z: about the idea of the separation of worlds and how I came to it with the help of Tina, about the sixteen dimensions and the new quantum variable, about the field of the conscions that pervades the universe and its vortices at the source of the disturbance. I talk about waves of soliton type – the B Objects forming around the brain once it has reached a certain maturity. And then – without any dramatic pauses – I reveal the most intriguing thing: why my theory is so difficult to reproduce. I stress the need to leap to the side and take a look from another angle – in order to uncover the topological charge and deformations of the space-field. And I briefly describe the meaning of the transformation that came to me in my drunken stupor after my quarrel with Tina and another reminder of death.

“Here’s the math,” I say and spread out my sheets with formulas on the table. “Here they are, in front of you, the B Objects,” I add, unable to resist a little pathos. “They ‘record’ the contents of memory during the life of the brain. Probably, not everything is recorded – I presume the memories, ideas, thoughts that our brains repeatedly return to are more likely to be preserved than others. It can also be assumed that a special chance is given to those products of thought that have been subject to a certain amount of work – when, for example, they have been reformulated several times to be verbalized in the best way. The work of a thought or on a thought is a guarantee of a kind that the thought will not be forgotten, will not be lost – either in the current life or future ones. By the way, I guess that for life itself, for the physical body, the very process of exchange with the vortex of the conscions could be unpleasant or even, in some cases, unsafe. I can imagine heart palpitations, headaches and jumps in blood pressure – sometimes of extreme magnitudes…”

Nestor snorts, “Well, this last part is just lyricism…” And he asks, “So, you’re done, are you?”

“Not quite,” I say, “there’s something else,” and I put the last three sheets of paper on the table. On them in a formal, strict format is the apotheosis of my theory, possibly its most important essence. Step by step, equation by equation – the path to this essence, to the phase transitions that the B Object is capable of undergoing without destroying itself, preserving its internal dynamics.

I say, “This is also nothing more than lyricism, perhaps, but there’s no escaping it; it demands to be articulated…” And I confide in Nestor the same things I told Tina that night: how a conscion vortex, having separated from the brain that created it, continues to carry within itself the sophisticated “dance moves,” keeping unchanged their most complex pattern. How it rushes with its contents somewhere far away – for a long, long time, possibly forever…

Nestor remains silent. Then I express my gratitude to him personally, underlining the assistance he has provided. I note the connection between the main provisions of my theory with the facts he has been revealing to me – albeit sparingly – from my first days in Quarantine. I mention his words about the metabrane and his hints regarding the field of the conscions, his frequent, though not completely coherent, references to the B Objects. All this, too, probably pushed me in the right direction, set the right tone. Even if it seems to me that Nestor could have been more open, we achieved the end result nonetheless; and as for his secrecy, maybe he had his own reasons for it.

Having said all this, I look at my “friend.” He nods – as if to say “received and duly noted” – but still doesn’t mutter a word. Well, that’s his right; I put the papers in a neat pile and declare, “Allow me to sum up!” And I briefly go once again through the main milestones, the most important aspects.

“Quantum fields!” I exclaim. “They play the principal role. Quasiparticles capable of interacting with the conscions ‘appear’ only at the level of atoms and the smallest molecules. At the level of quanta – due to specific effects that have no place in classical physics.

“The uniqueness of the structure of the brain and its incredible complexity!” I continue. “The dense packing of a huge number of interconnected neurons. This structure is essentially nontrivial; it’s based on a fractal principle, self-similarity on various scales. And the scales are converging; the boundaries between them are blurred – thus the micro and macro come into contact with each other. Our brain is a macroscopic-quantum system, if you’ll forgive me for such a wordplay.

“And finally,” I say, raising my voice even higher, “finally the main thing: the dynamic nature of memory! The fact, amazing to many, that memories are not static records but sequences of rapidly changing brain states, some specific dynamic regimes. Statics mean unavoidable death; only dynamics have a chance – of rebirth and resurrection. If the memory were stored in the form of neuron ‘imprints,’ it would inevitably die with the brain forever!”

At this, Nestor interrupts me, “Yeah, yeah, I understand. Why are you spelling it out to me, as if I’m a first-year student…”

He is frustrated – for no apparent reason. I shrug and fall quiet. Nestor turns away and says, not looking at me, “Well, congratulations. This is, undoubtedly, an achievement, a great accomplishment in its own way.”

His behavior seems strange to me – I was expecting something different. We remain silent for a minute or so, then Nestor jerks his chin and adds, “If, of course, all this proves to be true. As we all remember, you have a history of giving in to wishful thinking!”

The expression on my face has evidently changed. “Okay, okay,” he mutters, raising his hand in a conciliatory manner. “That was all in the past; turned to dust so long ago it’s almost forgotten. Still, it’s most likely been recorded in your personal B Object… Kidding, kidding. For some reason, I believe in this instance everything is going to be faultless. It’s now up to the experts – I’ll pass your calculations on to the higher authorities. And, well, I’m glad that you’ve been able to live through such vivid moments here. That you’ve experienced all this all over again – the delight of a discovery, the courageousness of an idea, the triumph of a thought…”

“Why are you being so caustic, Nestor?” I ask, surprised.

“Triumph…” he repeats, thinks for a while, then suddenly clicks his fingers in front of his nose, as if trying to drive away an apparition, and declares, “And now for something else. For the essential nitty-gritty – from your triumph to the everyday. To your search for the point at which your memories intersect with those of your charming roommate. No one can put this off, even a VIP like you. When it comes to Quarantine obligations, everyone is equal…” – and for a while, he proceeds to reprimand me like a schoolboy. At the same time, it seems to me his thoughts are wandering somewhere far away.

Just the same, I am dumbfounded by the timeliness of his scolding, its tone. My confidence evaporates along with my calmness. I let him see with my entire demeanor that I am not happy and thoroughly put out. Nestor looks at me intently as if expecting some response, but I have nothing to say, and he just nods, “Well, that’s all. Or do you want me to return to the beginning and share with you all the delight of your achievement? To participate in the feast of your ideas and thoughts?”

I don’t even dignify him with an answer. Nestor clears his throat and says, “Well, here’s something else about delight and feasting. Have you never thought the very fact of you being here implies that not everything in your story back there went smoothly? Quarantine is no place for euphoria. And stories from the past, as a rule, don’t tend to have happy endings.”

With that, he disappears. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes but lie awake for a long time. For some reason, I remember my first day after my “awakening” and feel the same: a desperate loneliness, superfluousness and strangeness; Nestor, Elsa – they don’t care. Their supposed indifference is nothing but an illusion that dissipates in a moment. No affinity is possible without a common goal – that has a meaning for both. A long-known truth, but it hurts nevertheless…

And I think about Tina – with bitterness, with an intense sadness. I try to imagine what happened to us after those thrilling days, how our lives developed. My night dreams are still revealing nothing about this – did we stay together for long, or were we soon parted? Did we have any children? Did Tina leave me, or, perhaps, did I leave her, disenchanted by something? What was the conclusion of our story – which, according to Nestor, had little chance of ending happily? I just hope a lot of good things took place before it came to a bad end. And that everything came to a closure of its own accord, without a disaster or tragedy, with no one to blame…

I lie and think about all this and suddenly I realize with the utmost clarity: here it is, the separation of worlds. The place of Quarantine finally presents itself as it really is – a small, congested locality, bounded from all sides. And, as if opposing it – everything that exists beyond… It was the same in my former life: the space I shared with Tina had no boundaries. And the world without each other – it was incredibly cramped. That’s why she used to say: “It’s so crowded here!”

I toss and turn for an hour and then another, sighing gloomily. I want to drive all thoughts out of my head – forever. There is nothing to think about anymore – it seems I have reached an understanding of everything that exists. I have learned all that is possible to learn – despair, defeat, joy at my accomplishments, true closeness…

“The dance of the consions,” I say aloud, grinning ruefully at my own whisper. Then I finally sink under somewhere, into incoherent dreams. It’s as if half the frames have been washed away from the film. Images and faces scurry from one void to another – and so it goes on all night.

Chapter 24

The next day, Nestor cancels the midday session and is late for the evening one by almost ten minutes. Having finally appeared, he nods dryly and just as dryly announces, “Congratulations. Apparently, your calculations are correct. The transformation that introduces a topological charge does change everything. It opens the doors, removes the veils… At least, that’s what our experts are saying. They are a bit overexcited now and inclined to exaggeration.”

He is serious and gloomy. I would even say he appears unshaven and has the look of a man who has spent a hard, perhaps drunken, night. There is a shadow of regret on his face over something that has failed to come to fruition. As if he’s lost hope, is tired of struggling and has resigned himself.

Of course, this is only my fancy, but I can allow myself to fantasize a bit. I have completed a great feat, and now I can afford myself some slack. For example, some sort of joke – and I’m just about to make a quip about his appearance when he suddenly adds, “By the way: I will probably be transferred away from you soon. You, and the whole situation with you, have exceeded my level of competence. Although the question of my replacement has not yet been resolved. Some decisions are difficult indeed…”

This is unexpected news. I don’t know how to deal with it, only I realize I no longer want to make any jokes. Nestor continues, “We will return to this later, though. And for now – now I am still working with you, and my list of tasks has not been canceled, not yet. It has even been expanded: I have to…” He looks down and quotes verbatim with a wry grin, “I have to ‘bring you up to date on the same subject matter but with much broader horizons.’ To put it plainly, I’ve been given permission to share things with you that are still within my remit and about which my competence is unquestioned. This concerns cosmology – and I should note right away: your hypothesis about the sixteen dimensions coincides with our ‘picture of the world,’ although its validations are significantly indirect. What’s more, the other – possible – numbers of dimensions you have obtained from your equations also correspond to our most widely accepted cosmological model…”

It suddenly dawns on me, and I, not very politely, interrupt him, “Of course! I’ve just realized – you, Nestor… Go on, admit it – you’re a cosmologist, aren’t you?”

Nestor immediately takes offence, as if he’s been waiting for an excuse to do so. “I don’t understand what difference it makes,” he mutters, puffing his lips. “Yes, I am a former cosmologist, and, yes, I wasn’t a success, but let’s just see what will happen with you in that regard. You have always been lucky, Theo – even hitting away at random, you soon ran into fruitful ideas, always getting out of dead ends. I wonder how many lives your luck will last – I mean, how much success has been apportioned to you in general.”

“Are you wishing me adversity and disaster?” I ask, surprised.

“No, no, of course not,” Nestor waves his hand and pulls an innocent face. “How could you think such a thing? We’re almost colleagues; I would never… I just wonder how you will deal with all this. I mean your pride in yourself, your tendency to feel like you’re on a pedestal…”

He looks at me point-blank, then smirks and says sarcastically, “I reckon you always dreamed you’d have a monument put up in your name in your lifetime?”

“Yes,” I answer him in the same tone. “And by the way, Elsa wants to embroider my name onto our tablecloth.”

“Really?” Nestor shakes his head and suddenly exclaims with genuine, sincere bitterness, “Well, there you go!”

Then he looks through something under the screen; I wait patiently. A minute passes, then another. “Well,” Nestor finally sighs, “may I continue? About cosmology – if you’ve satisfied your sudden interest in my career. Let’s start by summarizing – reviewing the main theses of ‘Theo’s theory,’ as they are seen in our world. I would like to ask you to confirm – if everything is right? To check I haven’t gotten confused or distorted anything, inadvertently underestimating… I would advise you to make notes – you can even put down ticks; I won’t be offended. I won’t think you’re copying me – like, you know, trying to make fun of me.”

Yes, today he is being difficult. I silently take a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

“First,” says Nestor. “We believe, like you, that consciousness is nothing else but the result of an interaction with an external field. Thanks to you and out of respect for you, we are using the term you coined and are calling it the field of the conscions. Give that a tick – we have nothing to argue there. The conscions are apparently emitted by the metabrane and spread throughout the entire cosmos – you don’t possess much knowledge on this yet, so here ticks are irrelevant. And finally: we are aware of just two examples of the conscions interacting with something. In both cases, it’s a highly complex structure – a ‘macroscopic,’ as you put it, quantum system. Let’s call it the ‘brain,’ having in mind both the one from your former world and ours here.

“Next,” he continues, “the agents of interaction are a special type of particle-waves that emerge in the brain when some strict conditions are met. Be careful with your ticks now; things are going to get tricky. According to your theory, the human brain does not immediately become ‘fit’ for the interaction. It has to develop, reach a certain maturity; only then can a specific ordering take place in it – as a result of what you have called ‘fractal symmetry breaking.’ This is a quantum effect, and the quantum field theory requires the appearance of quasiparticle-bosons that support the fractal order – it is they that interact with the conscions, resulting in the formation of a vortex around the brain. You have named it the ‘B Object’ – yes, put a big fat tick there: we believe in it, and we call it the same. We admire it a lot – of course: in a certain sense, it is copying our personality. Its dynamic reflects the aggregate of quantum vibrations that encode our memory – and, thus, all recollections, associations, thoughts, both specific and abstract, are gradually being ‘rerecorded’ on it. And yet, next to this tick, you should put an equally fat question mark – there are important nuances here. You were right only to an extent, but don’t get frustrated: there is a huge benefit in your error! And anyway, no one can be right about everything, without exception, all the time…”

There is a hidden arrogance in his voice. The arrogance of the cosmologist, I say to myself. And I obediently draw a question mark – so that he sees – and next to it another and a third, just out of mischief, to spite him.

Nestor snorts, “Don’t overdo it. And focus: you asserted that when the conditions for the interaction disappear – for instance, if the brain dies – this is not the end for the B Object. It doesn’t get destroyed, it does not turn into nothingness; on the contrary, in a certain sense it matures and grows stronger. It transfers into another phase and lives its own independent life, traveling in space until it finds, you fantasized, something suitable, a different structure, that it can ‘catch onto’… Give yourself a tick – your fantasies in this instance have coincided with reality. An example of such a structure does exist – our ‘brain’ here. You can also add an exclamation mark – hurray! Human consciousness is reborn into a different nature. The experiences lived through are preserved in the conscion vortex; the personality does not die but regains a body and lives in this body, developing and enriching itself. Moreover, there is reason to believe that after death here, the whole story reiterates. The B Object undergoes another phase transition, once again finding something suitable for interaction – and so on. You have done some preliminary calculations showing that the Object can have many phase states – so award yourself a whole load of ticks and exclamation marks. But next to them – yes, you’ll need to put another question mark, perhaps more than one. Because here, too, some of your assumptions are totally wrong!”

He nods with a patronizing grimace and adds, “By the way, I was somewhat sloppy in my wording. I was being a bit careless when I said that the B Object ‘lives’: the Object itself is incapable of living, although it can exist without disintegrating for an infinitely long time. Life is about development, an exchange with the external environment; life requires a body. It is the body that ‘extracts’ information from the outside, and the brain, as an intermediary, transmits it to the B Object. Give yourself a tick – you did mention this. And let’s sum up: all this together forms a coherent concept, which, of course, is an outstanding scientific discovery confirmed in practice. I repeat: the resurrection of earthly consciousnesses in our world is not a theory but a fact. Therefore, let me congratulate you once again…” – and he claps his hands several times, apparently imitating applause. Then he says, “And now let’s move from rapturous praise to a criticism – constructive criticism. To the question marks that are dotted all over your sheet of paper – it’s not a coincidence you’ve put down so many. You’ve been feeling, I guess, that your view of things was hopelessly narrow – and, most probably, remains so!”

“Interesting…” I mutter, agitatedly tapping the table with my pencil. For some reason, Nestor’s words nettle me. I recall how very recently I’d had a sense that I had mastered all the mysteries, that I knew everything of importance, and this irritates me even more. “Narrow, huh?” I repeat after him, and Nestor nods affirmatively.

“Yes, it is narrow, and don’t squint at me with such anger,” he threatens me with his finger. “You – and your Tina as well – have been considering the whole concept of the conscions from a very limited perspective. ‘Ah, my consciousness… Ah, my memory… Ah, my fear of death…’ This is the view of a pair of loners, accustomed to rescuing themselves on their own. The view of desperate, hardened misanthropes!”

I smile with some effort, trying to show I appreciate his eloquence, but Nestor is being serious. He continues, “Or you were obsessing over the fact that a human being leaves a mark in the universe, like a footprint on fresh concrete. As if your earth’s humanity is something special, the pinnacle of evolution. A very parochial view, and, alas, you’ve not been able to overcome it. That’s why it’s surprised you that I wasn’t overly excited when you presented me with your little secret, this transformation opening the way. You didn’t even want to think that the B Object itself is only a part of the big picture. That there are people who see this picture better than you… Yes, there are those who are trying to get their minds around something more than individual destinies. Those who are not just thinking about leaving their trace on the universe but about the universe itself. No one appreciates that, of course; no one gives them due praise – well, so what? They still have the will not to turn into sociopaths and latent misanthropes – although they could… Well, okay, never mind, let’s not dwell on the negative. Let’s get back to the point: the point is that your Objects can have a much more global role and meaning. Don’t get upset: by saying so, I’m not trying to belittle what you’ve done. Moreover, we can now penetrate this very meaning much deeper. But first, we need to define it properly.”

Nestor assumes a dignified air, and I feel this is not a pose. His confidence is obviously growing. Something is changing imperceptibly in his face, in the position of his hands – and even his voice, it seems, sounds different.

“So, back to the question marks,” he says. “Let’s start with this: you assumed that the interaction of the type ‘epsilon’ – as we call it here – leading to the emergence of conscion vortices, is the only way of exchanging anything between the brain and the field of the conscions. Consequently, you reasoned, the brain must mature, ripen, before the field of the conscions will ‘notice’ it. Remember: the complexity of the neocortex, the special configuration of neurons, the initial conditions for fractal coherence… If these are not present, then there is no reaction from the external field, you believed – and that turned out not to be so. Our mathematicians were unable to get to these Objects of yours, but they did obtain solutions of a different type – more traditional ones, by the way. You can look at the details later, but I’ll give you a rough outline: the brain – at least our ‘brain,’ which we have studied thoroughly – goes through several stages, several jumps of complexity while growing. For a long time, it does not produce a stable fractal ordering, but, so to speak, hints at it – yes, surely. Fleeting, unstable sketches of fractal order – the brain seems to be measuring itself compared to its future role. And each of these sketches generates its own quasiparticles – a brief impulse that creates perturbations in the flow of the conscions! Imagine a stone thrown into a pond – in the same way, conscion waves disperse out from the brain, and this occurs long before the brain is able to support a full-fledged Object. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the brains of our ancestors who lived millions of years ago were also quite capable of ‘disturbing’ the external field. And probably, in your terrestrial case, everything was approximately the same!”

I lean forward, fixing my gaze onto him. Nestor falls silent and makes a sympathetic face. He looks at me for a minute or two and says, “I understand this makes you unhappy. It even likely upsets you, but we have to admit: your theory only describes a particular case, one of many. Your Object is only a part, albeit the most important one from the point of view of our destinies, our egos, our personal aspirations. Well, now we have to work on a generalization, an integration of all the solutions – both for the conscion waves and their stable vortices – in one mathematical formalism. A tough job, probably a long one, but one thing is already clear. We can acknowledge that both your and our regions of space ‘disturbed’ the field of the conscions long before intelligent beings appeared in them. They seemed to signal to the metabrane that structures would soon be created which would be able to interact with this field, allowing conscion vortices to form or develop further. Thus, global space learned in advance about its special locations!”

“It learned in advance…” I repeat, rubbing my hands together and putting them to my cheeks. I ask, “Does this mean?…” – and interrupt myself, “No, it doesn’t. But nevertheless, the whole picture is changing dramatically… You’re wrong; I’m not upset in the least. It’s just all so very new!”

“Yes, yes,” Nestor gestures impatiently. “A lot is still new for you. And for me as well – one just never gets tired of being surprised by these things. Here, for example, take your second mistake: you stressed – probably to avoid any mysticism – that the meetings of B Objects with the new host brain occur randomly – if, of course, they occur at all. That each Object hurtles by itself into the pitch-dark cosmic night – as if cherishing the hope that someone needs it… It’s very romantic – a poem could be written on the subject. It is a pity that its ending would be immensely sad – exactly like your reasoning about random chance. Well, you should be forgiven; you are not a cosmologist, you are not even a poet, and in general, this part of your theory was developed poorly. I’d say not developed at all, but here, in our science, we have taken it seriously. And soon it became clear: your assumptions, fortunately, are incorrect – otherwise new lives would only theoretically be possible at a probability so small it’s not even worth mentioning. The conscion vortices would not have found structures suitable for interaction randomly – even at a brief glance, such a hypothesis seems strange, and if you do the calculations… So, we had to forget about the randomness and concentrate on searching for a rule – because a fact is a fact. B Objects migrate from your world to ours, and something helps them do this. What could that something be? The answer is almost obvious – nothing other than space itself. The idea is bold, even a little bit mad, but it is quite evident. We have mathematical results demonstrating its viability. And this means: the metabrane not only learns about its special locations. It also, apparently, reacts to this information!”

And again I look dumbfounded. Then I mumble, “Does something affect the curvature in some manner? Pseudo-gravitational inhomogeneities, energy clusters? But the effective mass must be huge for them to be at least a tiny bit noticeable…”

“Of course, you are thinking along the right lines,” Nestor nods to me, condescendingly, as if I were a student. “With effective mass, however, not everything is so unambiguous, and, moreover, Einstein’s equations are also a special case, valid only for your local world. Obviously, on the metabrane, the physics is different; space-time depends on various factors, and the field of the conscions is one of them. Perhaps, from the point of view of the metabrane, the creation and maturation of the conscion vortices represent some sort of advantage in terms of energy distribution. Maybe something is minimized in this way, some kind of global functional… We can only guess. I repeat: there are only hints; we are still a long way from a complete cosmological theory that would take into account the field of the conscions. But this assumption is quite plausible, isn’t it?”

“Wait, wait,” I ask and look perplexedly at the piece of paper in front of me. Then I take a pencil and draw something over the ticks and question marks, frantically trying to comprehend what I’ve just heard. Nestor calmly, patiently waits. Thus about a quarter of an hour goes by.

“Well,” I wave my hand. “Let it be so… I admit, I can’t grasp all this right away. I’ll think about it later – and, please, can you finally give me some scientific articles, some books. And I must say: the prospect is incredibly shocking!”

Nestor spreads his hands, “I agree with you fully. It’s difficult even to acknowledge the globality of it all, the unusualness of its scale… Our intelligence, our ability to think – or even the rudiments of such ability – elicit a reaction in the immeasurable cosmos. They force space, the mysterious metabrane, to change its geometry – admittedly, it’s more customary to talk about these matters in the context of cosmic cataclysms, the merging of stars, the formation of black holes. And here all we have is just the birth of an intelligent mind on some insignificant specks of dust… Behold the significance of a single small human being, behold – his or her role. It does not compare with your timid mention of some sort of indistinct trace. And besides, it’s such a pleasure to be aware that something is not indifferent to us. And not just something but the universe itself!”

It’s difficult to tell whether he is joking or not. I’m silent, but my lips stretch into some stupid half smile.

“But let’s not be too grandiloquent,” Nestor continues. “We should not expend all our emotions just yet. Save your wonder; I will tell you something else soon – about the prospect, so to speak. And in the meantime…”

He touches something under the screen; then I see in his hands an oblong black object resembling a mobile phone. He looks into it, brings it to his ear, listens in silence and nods in satisfaction.

“In the meantime, we must pause briefly, and it’s good – I think you need a rest too. You need something like, as they say in your world, a ‘bathroom break.’ Even if the bathroom here is just for show, you can still visit it out of habit. To go back to basics, ha-ha…” – and Nestor laughs his strange laugh. This time, it definitely is a joke – and he is pleased with it.

Chapter 25

Having laughed his fill, Nestor disappears from the screen, and I really do go to the bathroom – to refresh myself. I stand there for a while over the basin, looking at my reflection in the mirror, splashing cold water on my face. I listen to my thoughts, I watch their shadows – broken formulas, exotic symbols. Half-erased images of equations, the ruins of mathematical identities. They clarify nothing – though it would be naive to expect otherwise.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I say out loud. “Everything lies ahead.” Then I return to the bedroom – Nestor is not there yet, but the screen is alive. An image has appeared – at first glance, it seems to be a pure abstraction, a jumble of shapes and colors. Little by little, however, I distinguish something meaningful – a myriad of multicolored threads tangled together like a ball of yarn. This is familiar – to me and even to Elsa – but this time the picture is not static; it has started moving. Looking closely, I recognize a concurrency about it, a sophisticated order. Different sections of different threads approach each other and then scatter away. From time to time, bright points of light appear on a few of them, and pale-yellow halos emerge around some of the points, like flashes of light in the fog. The points do not burn for long; they disappear, but the halos that surround them remain. They are stretched out a little, like the tails of comets, and seem to float away somewhere to other points of light on other threads, which in turn rush to meet the halos…

It is difficult to tear my gaze from the screen. I look at it spellbound and then hear Nestor’s voice, measured, a little solemn, “Imagine a metabrane, and inside it a wreath of filaments, a variety of local universes. All of them are constantly changing shape – for many reasons, including the fluctuations of the metabrane’s curvature. The points that light up and go out are flashes of intelligent life – that which is capable of interacting with the field of the conscions. And the halos are the collections of the vortices of this field, the B Objects… I’m sure you’ve already guessed from my hint: yes, the Objects do not travel in space independently of each other. They don’t scurry around madly on their own or fly away in random directions. They are organized in a union, a system – this is precisely what allows our lives to ‘migrate’ en masse from one world to another. And, most important, as we’ve mentioned already: the halos and points are constantly searching for each other; they endeavor to draw closer, to intersect. In accordance with the authoritative dictates of the metabrane!”

Then Nestor himself appears on the screen. The picture moves to the upper-right corner. “Well, how do you like the visuals?” he asks. And he adds with feigned modesty, “This, I must confess, is my own work.”

I see he is seeking praise and I say quite sincerely, “It’s brilliant. I am impressed!”

“Oh, come on…” Nestor waves his hand dismissively and continues, “Of course, as far as the halos are concerned, we are only certain about the existence of just one of them. But, in my opinion, it’s natural to assume there are many – perhaps a lot. And, possibly, from the metabrane’s point of view, there is an energy advantage for them to converge toward each other. Maybe even to merge together, forming a superhalo – if you like, an abstract image of a supermind, a superbrain!…”

He’s now changed again – his eyes are glowing, and his shoulders seem to have opened out, spreading beyond the edges of the screen. A totally different person sits in front of me, not at all like the petulant, thin-skinned man at the beginning of the session. This, of course, is only an illusion, but I have seen similar transformations before. Take Kirill, for instance – but, of course, he and Nestor have nothing in common. And anyway, that was another life.

“Well, okay,” Nestor raises his hand as if slowing himself down. “The superbrain is only an assumption: one of a number of hypotheses that we are unlikely to test soon. Yes, one of them – and I confess: I was laughed at. Moreover, I was laughed at by my own family. You know how it is; you were mocked, too, when you hinted for the first time at the fields and forces that came from other spaces. Do you remember – during the period of your desperate struggle with the Higgs boson? Thus, it’s still unclear who will have the last laugh, but let’s skip this for now; let’s talk about more immediate prospects. The ones I promised you – they are closely connected with the sole ‘halo’ we know about. We, by the way, call it the ‘Cloud’ – the Cloud of B Objects.”

Nestor pauses and throws me an attentive, stern look. Then, as usual, he tilts his head to one side and says, even somewhat sympathetically, “Get ready. Take some more paper – you’ll probably want to note down your thoughts. But don’t strain yourself too much: your thoughts will be in confusion. Yes, in confusion and complete disorder – for sure.”

I obediently pick up a pencil and pull a blank sheet of paper toward me. “The Cloud!” Nestor exclaims and again pauses, rubbing his face. Then he confidentially informs me, “The Cloud is mysterious; its riddles are significantly nontrivial,” and looks down at his papers.

I want to hurry him up, give him a nudge; I’m almost squirming in my chair.

“And one of the riddles is entirely extraordinary,” Nestor continues. “The point is: the ‘union’ of the Objects is not uniform. It is structured in a complex way – and, what’s more, we have reason to believe… There is some certainty, supported by scientific…” He looks up at me and declares, “We are certain the Objects in the Cloud interact!”

We stare at each other, silent. Then I make a gesture, “Wait, wait, I’ve already considered this. I tried to check it out, at least in theory… Yes, this idea came to me, but according to my calculations, even if two brains are in close proximity, their B Objects do not interfere with each other – are you telling me I was wrong here too?”

“You were!” Nestor says firmly. “You were, and you were not. No one is claiming that by bringing your head closer to someone else’s, you’re going to accidentally enter that person’s Object. Your brain always ‘communicates’ with only one single conscion vortex – but these vortices themselves, independently of the host…”

“What… Are you kidding me?” I say, knowing full well he is not.

Nestor merely shrugs. Then he continues, “I’ll start from the very beginning: at some time, one of the Clouds moved close to our ‘special point,’ with the very world where you and I are now located. Obviously, this Cloud had been created by your intelligent life – or, at least, it had interacted with it – because here, individuals began to be born among us with a terrestrial past. Initially, they had a hard time – imagine the very first people waking up with extremely realistic memories. What were they meant to think; how and with whom could they share this experience? All sorts of things happened, but gradually, we stopped turning our backs on the facts and began to understand the essence of what was going on. The concept of rebirth – with the memory preserved and subjective features of the consciousness intact – was formulated and officially adopted. Now newcomers are given the care they need: Quarantine is, without exaggeration, the ideal way to prepare for the new reality. It’s the most important step – without it, those who have been reborn would for a long time remain in a state of blindness and confusion, very similar to the one in which they’d lived their first life. We, of course, also went through many misperceptions and mistaken judgments. Our own history of comprehension was a rather peculiar one; yet everything developed much more dynamically than in your world – past collective experience did its thing. And of course, the main efforts of this comprehension were devoted to the most important factors – to the actual rebirth and the mechanisms that, despite the scale of distances and times, make it possible.”

Nestor touches the bridge of his nose, as if he is straightening an imaginary pince-nez, and grins, “By the way. We already know that our local ‘brain’ can play a dual role in relation to conscion vortices. It is able to ‘attach’ to itself ones that already exist as well as create new ones in which nothing about the former life is ‘recorded.’ Many of those born into our reality never remember anything from the earthly one. Obviously, Objects of different degrees of maturity can coexist in the Cloud – and perhaps some people born on your earth were too ‘connected’ to B Objects that already existed and had been carrying a certain previous experience. Perhaps they were tormented by memories of an inconceivable, inexplicable past, and they were not quarantined as they are here – I believe they were mercilessly mistreated. Your society tended to apply labels quite easily – the label of insanity, for example…”

He pauses as if waiting for me to intercede on behalf of my former world. Then he adds pointedly, “But the past is the past. We’re talking about our rules and culture – here, earthly memories are thoroughly studied. They are like a keyhole: through it, we can look into the hidden life – the life of our consciousnesses, no matter how strange that may sound. I, of course, mean the Cloud, which is extremely difficult to approach. We cannot get inside, cannot pinpoint, examine or measure anything. Only its external features are available to us – the statistics of rebirths and memories of the previous lives, if any. And there are two main aspects to these features: chronology and grouping.”

Alerted by the familiar words, I try to interrupt him – a question has occurred to me. A very important question, it seems, but Nestor only frowns at my impatient gestures. “No, not now!” He shakes his head. “Right now, you’d be better off listening. Sitting still, not intruding, not even fidgeting. Although the first part is quite boring…”

I obediently remain still. “What’s not so interesting is the chronology,” Nestor explains. “There’s not much about it. Everything is quite logical: the new arrivals come here in approximately the same order in which they left their first life. That is why the Cloud in my image is somewhat reminiscent of a comet’s tail – it probably has an elongated shape, and the earlier Objects are located closer to its head. There are exceptions: sometimes even those who have died more than a century earlier may be reborn later, but such discrepancies are rare and relatively minor – they never exceed one hundred and fifty years. Those who have left your world within an interval of fifteen or twenty years of each other arrive here in any order – either earlier, later or at the same time. The statistics we have don’t show anything significant – and that’s where the boring bit ends. Because there is something else that is significant indeed…” He makes a solemn face and carefully enunciates his words, “Newcomers are born in groups. Groups! How does that strike you?”

“Groups? I don’t quite understand…” I mumble.

“What’s there not to understand?” Nestor waves his hand impatiently. “A group is a group. To use your earthly terms, for example, in the same ‘hospital’ of a single ‘city,’ you can see the following: one day there are no newcomers; on the second there are also none; and then on the third – say, fourteen; and the day after that, none again. And so on; these sorts of patterns are the rule rather than the exception. The same is true on the scale of cities: you get hundreds of reborns in a city during one or two days, separated by almost-empty weeks. The specific numbers may vary, but the phenomenon itself is undeniable. For a while, we couldn’t grasp what was behind it – those who had been born in the same group had died on earth at different times, in different places, and did not even know each other. There were no correlations – just a continuous statistical noise – but one day someone discovered a fascinating fact with absolutely incredible consequences!”

I interrupt impatiently, “In other words, some sort of correlation has been observed?”

Nestor pretends not to notice my question. He frowns slightly and continues, in a deliberately casual manner, “The fact is this. The first lives of the newcomers from the same group do intersect in some way – although at times implicitly and very briefly. The vivid episodes, experiences, sudden shocks of one always correlate with incidents from the life of another or others…”

He pauses and raises his index finger, “Think about it! Before and after the intersection, their destinies are independent: these people live and die in different countries and in different years. But their consciousnesses – encoded in the B Objects – are reborn in our world together. This rule has been thoroughly tested, and we are certain there are almost no exceptions to it. What does this mean?” Nestor stares directly into my eyes and slowly pronounces, “This means that the B Objects inside the Cloud ‘recognize’ each other. They ‘see’ each other, they ‘know’ a lot about each other. And they are redistributed, clustered together, depending on their internal content, on the experiences accumulated within them!”

I put my pencil on the table – carefully, soundlessly. Silence hangs in the room for several long minutes.

“It’s funny,” Nestor says at last, without the slightest hint of a smile. “I see you’ve believed me right away, without even questioning what I’ve said. Yet many do question it – even those whose minds are far less critical than yours. Many think it’s all been made up, like in a children’s fairy tale. Maybe it’s just me you believe? Am I such an authority figure for you? All right, only joking… I understand you, scientist to scientist: it’s impossible to argue with statistical confirmation. Well, admit it, are you stunned? Do you want another bathroom break? It won’t help: I am stunned too – to this day. Despite all the time we’ve had to think about it here!”

“Depending on their internal content…” I repeat after him. “In what terms can one define it, that content? How can it even be categorized? And, even at a cursory glance, this should entail a multitude of consequences…”

“Of course,” Nestor nods. “The consequences are immense and staggering. The experiences of the first life affect the beginning of the second – and not just the beginning. Data from the maternity hospitals are just one example; there are others, much more sophisticated. Much less obvious – and, in general, it’s not clear when and how the interaction between the B Objects occurs. Maybe it takes place not only when the Objects are released from their bodies? Maybe their attraction-repulsion manifests itself during life – the first, the second, the others? What if this is the hidden reason for the unexpected twists and turns of our destinies?”

He smiles weakly, “Now you may fantasize as much as you like, and no one could reproach you for lazy thinking. Any ‘wisdom’ bordering on dense prejudice now plays with new shades. How about this one: the adversities we face in our life are commensurate with our abilities? Or – if you wish for something with all your might, will it come true? What would an emissary of serious science say to this now? Here’s what he’d say: Why not? Maybe what you desire hard enough really does come true, whether in this or in the next life – through the tendency of your B Object to the corresponding reclustering provoked by your thoughts? Or is it quite the opposite: What is a desire, really – maybe the Cloud desires on your behalf? Maybe the metabrane desires on your behalf – after all, the relocation of Objects in the Cloud could also be interpreted as a change in its geometry. An infinitely small change, you might say, but who knows in what ratio the multidimensional twists are reflected in the space-time of a local universe?… So yes: maybe your desires, aspirations and so forth are only consequences of what’s happening somewhere outside – outside your body, outside your world. Moreover, maybe they are not aspirations per se but insights, some unconscious interpretations of the dynamics of the cluster to which your Object belongs? And the same can be said about our anxieties, fears…

“Or here: what about the question – the eternal question over which humanity has been constantly struggling? Is there free will, are humans masters of their lives – of all the lives that await them? The human mind – do they really control it themselves? Well, maybe they do – but not quite in ways they imagine: by themselves and not by themselves, together with others, thanks to others or in spite of… It’s natural to assume that your thoughts, even if indirectly, affect your destiny. But, it turns out, it’s not just yours – have you ever felt, Theo, that you are bound hand and foot by everyone else’s expectations, illusions, wishes?

“How simple it is to contrive a religion on the basis of this,” Nestor shakes his head. “And how difficult it is to get to the core of it – to the real, mathematical core! Stepping from the consequences to the depths, to the causes – what kinds of physics work here? How does the connection of fates function; what formulas can describe it?… Funny, almost no one can understand the ‘why.’ Why are the causes and depths needed if the consequences are believed anyway? Just ask a stranger: Does he think that things happen for a reason? What answer will he give you – well, if, of course, he dares to tell the truth?”

And again we look at each other in silence. I remember Elsa and her categorical “What’s important is the result!” Then I cough and say, getting my unruly tongue around the words with difficulty, “But, Nestor… Does it not seem to you that explaining everything, absolutely everything, with the Objects and the Cloud is a bit speculative somehow? That it’s somehow too convenient: to think up some abstract concepts and reduce the phenomena to their interaction in some ultimate outer space beyond the reach of any detector…”

“Well, yes,” Nestor immediately responds. “It is, of course, speculative and simplistic, but I’d like to note one thing. The B Object has not been thought up: it exists, and someone has proved it. Who, who? Oh yes, you, Theo!”

Now it’s my turn to shake my head. I’m completely at a loss for words.

“Actually,” Nestor continues, “switching the question of fate to a different level of abstraction, considering it in terms of the B Objects interacting with each other, is a complete game changer. Incredible horizons are opening up; new opportunities are knocking on the door. You can try to lay a foundation under a great many things – say, under the concept of predestination, a perception of mission. Possibly somewhere inside the Object there is a concealed source of energy, a spring whose tension never lets up – now, thanks to you, we can examine it more closely. Or we can sort out in details the influence of one life on another – that includes how our previous lives affect the next… It’s like taking a step toward a mathematical model of karma – in our world, no one laughs at the word ‘karma’ anymore…”

I blink, then blink again; I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. Something strange and alarming is ringing in my head – a string? Is it just a melody, a collection of sounds? Or the shadow of a recollection, an insight, a recollection of an insight – of the deepest, most inarticulate one – the beginning of an understanding of those things that cannot be fully understood. But you can take a step toward them, to reach out with a thought. It seems I have already been doing this, already been reaching out. Someone has even prompted me – I almost remember the name, the face – a gloomy, flabby face opposite…

Nestor continues to hold forth, “No one even laughs at the word ‘magic’ – it’s not so easy now to dismiss the inexplicable. The same applies to predictions of the future: you can look contemptuously at all the tarot cards, all the rune stones and crystal balls, you can make fun of charlatans, but who would dare to poke a specific charlatan with a finger and say – this is nonsense? It turns out that life itself is magic in some sense, or so it appears if you dig deeper. It is governed by phenomena that are incredible, unbelievable – but there is no dismissing them; they exist. Their existence is confirmed by statistics – it is impossible to dismiss statistics. Did you ever imagine that statistics and magic would be mentioned in the same context? Would be working, so to speak, as a team?”

I am listening but no longer hear him; my attention has wandered. The words “things, things… reason, reason…” throb in a staccato in my head. I can almost physically feel how my perception of the world is changing – the perception of a grandiose world. As Nestor and I are changing – it seems he looks at me almost with tenderness. Indeed, our entire conversation sort of hints at a certain intimacy. Matter is too subtle, imagination too brave…

Then the staccato subsides. I ask, “Nestor, why didn’t you tell me about all this before? It might have saved so much time… It seems I have only now started to believe that this world – this Quarantine – is for real. Although it’s difficult to explain why.”

Nestor waves his hand, “Don’t be too self-confident. You can hardly make judgments about time – as well as about the evolution of your beliefs. The time had to come, and it wasn’t tracked by me. What to say, and when, has never depended on a whim of mine – it’s not even been my calculated choice. I’m just following instructions – yes, there are others watching your personality. A whole group of experts – you understand why. And maybe soon you’ll find out there are even more reasons for so much attention!”

“How soon is ‘soon’?” I mumble.

“Obviously, when the time is right,” Nestor smirks. “It’s simply impossible to avoid a tautology here. I’ll give you just one clue: my ticks in the task manager play an important role. Remember – the obligation, the duty of a roommate…”

“I suppose,” I say thoughtfully, “the role of a roommate is somehow related to the Cloud.”

“Undoubtedly,” Nestor nods, “and I am even authorized to explain to you exactly how. Not in any great detail; only in the most general terms. But – this is not for today; our conversation has already dragged on enough. You’ll just have to be patient until tomorrow morning…” And he disappears, not seeming to notice my gesture of protest.

Chapter 26

All night I dream the same thing – a string of characters and numbers running in an endless line. Something like a stock market tape or subtitles for the hearing impaired. Probably, my subconscious mind is trying to convey the truths to which I am still deaf. Then everything merges into a single-colored bar; soon it’s swallowed by darkness, and I wake up in fright. My heart is pounding; I feel stuffy and even seem to be shivering. A black ocean almost swallowed me – it was familiar; I had floundered in it before, unable to escape. It somehow matches the feeling I experienced when Nestor mentioned karma – and then magic and something else. Later, I fall back into a slumber again. I plunge deeper and see, see… No, I can’t see yet. Something interferes, envelops, blinds.

I have breakfast alone, without Elsa – she is not leaving her bedroom. I make myself a tasteless sandwich and chase it with tasteless tea. Reluctantly, I try to jot something down on paper, write out a couple of equations. Then I cross them out and go outside – alone, at an ungodly hour of the morning. I walk at a quick pace along the empty seafront and think, think, think…

The shifts in my consciousness have somehow happened too fast. My math, my Tina… Hot, humid Bangkok, my intimacy with her – and right there: the field of the conscions, the theory of the B Objects. Like swinging from an extreme to an extreme, from one layer of memories to another – but as soon as I reached the most hidden, the most important one, Nestor effortlessly tore things apart, completely changing the perspective. Now my theory is merely a special case. What I considered to be a universal achievement has been transformed into just a small step, one of many…

The next session doesn’t go well. Nestor is pointedly dry and matter-of-fact, his face an impenetrable mask. We seem to be slightly sheepish with each other after the delight we experienced last time. Like the morning after a wild bacchanalian night.

He mutters monotonously, “I must remind you that you and your neighbor Elsa have been placed in the same residential block because your ‘awakening’ happened at the same time and place. This, apparently, means that the B Objects, the vortices of the field of the conscions, in which your minds were ‘imprinted,’ converged in space and time, ending up, as we say, in one group. Statistical studies show that the grouping of Objects is directly related to their contents. Not to the usual dynamical parameters but to the experiences and events of your earthly lives…”

I can’t see his hands, but he seems to be clinging to the armrests of his chair as if he were in a dentist’s office. His speech is formal and completely devoid of emotion. There isn’t a trace of yesterday’s animation.

“The grouping of the conscion vortices is itself extraordinarily important,” Nestor mumbles. “This means that their ‘community’– what we call the Cloud – is not static, and its evolution is not accidental. It is a dynamic system that operates according to certain laws; our goal is to understand these laws. The vortices interact, and the parameters of this interaction are the aspects of human destinies – one can say the destinies themselves demonstrate some kind of interconnection. Obviously, first of all, one needs to identify these parameter-aspects, to recognize which ‘features’ of earthly lives make the corresponding Objects converge, congregate together – or move away from each other, or influence each other in some other way. To do this, we must describe the destinies in some formal, logically complete language – which, of course, is a very challenging task. Choosing the right approach is difficult, but we have still made progress, and I won’t conceal the fact that Quarantine is one of our most important sources of data. There are different techniques; I will not dwell on them in detail. Let me just say that one of them – which may appear oversimplistic at first glance – is exactly this: breaking the new arrivals into pairs and searching for the intersections in their memories.”

“Factor clustering, concordance analysis…” I say quietly. “I read something about it – psychometrics?”

There is nothing unexpected in what he is expounding – I have already assumed all this while reflecting on yesterday’s conversation. I even have my own ideas; I’d love to share them, but I restrain myself – most probably they are way too hasty.

Nestor frowns, “Psychometrics is from your past life. Our science has made considerable steps forward. Factor analysis, as you understand it, is not much help in this instance – but it is encouraging, of course, that you grasp the essence so quickly!” He grins and adds, “By the way, your neighbor was unlucky: she spent three days on her own. This doesn’t usually happen, but they were busy with you for a while to ensure your file was as complete as possible. Still, some things evidently remained hidden. This Tina of yours, for example…”

I want to object but, suddenly, agree instead, “Yes, it is strange. Tina, then my theory – and what happened afterward… I’m stuck on the ellipsis, like on a puzzle. I’m mired in it, like in a quagmire!”

Nestor just nods with an expression of accentuated detachment on his face. Soon the session ends, and the screen switches off. For a quarter of an hour I sit in my armchair, thinking incoherently, then abruptly I jump up, pacing back and forth, and exclaim, “Yes, but still!…” No, Nestor’s dryness does not diminish the importance of what I’d heard yesterday. Of the most unexpected, most incredible things that I’d heard… It lives on in me as if waiting for when I will take it up properly. The clustering of B Objects, the interlinking of destinies… This is a trick much bolder than those I used to deal with! Once again, I become bemused at the grandeur of the whole concept, and with this feeling I go out into the living room – hoping my roommate will be there.

And so she is. Elsa sits on the couch, in her usual place, but instead of her embroidery, she is holding a book. In recent days, she has lost interest in her sewing. I, of course, understand that neither my equations nor my name will ever appear on our tablecloth. It was just her little joke.

“Just imagine,” says Elsa, seeing me, “you can order books like in the library here. I immediately asked for almost a dozen – my Nestor thought I was a bit loopy.”

I note she’s wearing mascara and a bright-red lipstick. She rarely uses makeup – today I fancy there’s some kind of challenge in this act of hers. “Good afternoon,” I mumble, chasing foolish thoughts from my head, and ask, “What are you reading?”

“A thriller,” Elsa shows me the cover. “I hope the bad guys get away. Well, what’s on your mind? Asian girls? Formulas? Saints with halos?”

“On my mind?” I reply, pouring some water into the coffeemaker. “There’s a lot on my mind indeed. I had an important, extremely interesting talk with Nestor. And I have to admit: in about two hours he managed to recast a great deal in my head. He swept away all the boundaries; he enlarged – mercilessly enlarged – all the scopes and scales. I am still amazed – and perplexed too!”

“Wow,” Elsa puts down her book. “Look at me – you haven’t gotten sick, have you? So much emotion – it’s something new. Usually, you’re such a cold fish!”

I don’t get offended, knowing she still can’t forgive me for Tina. I even feel guilty of some sort of betrayal. As if I haven’t fulfilled certain expectations – after all, her involvement has been for real. And even now she is not as indifferent as she tries to appear.

Elsa comes up, feels my forehead with exaggerated, comic concern. I try to hug her around the waist, but she pulls away; all I get is the scent of her perfume. We drink our coffee, and she recounts the simple plot of the book she’s reading. Then we clear away the table, each washing our own cup, and go for a walk.

Today it is sunny, but the wind is strong and the sea lumpy. Elsa takes my arm, clutching it tightly; I can feel her strong fingers. And thus we wander, occasionally nodding to the other, tediously familiar couples. Hardly anyone would think that we have had a disagreement.

“It’s good to walk and walk like this,” says Elsa, squinting at the sun. “I’m on your arm – and, even if it’s out of decency alone, you’re not going to try to break free. I can be boring and quarrelsome; I can say the same things over and over – and you will still listen; this is what you have to bear as a man. This is how castles in the air are built, fantasies are created – as if someone undividedly belongs to someone else.”

I breathe in the moist wind; it smells of salt and seaweed. And the subtlest sweetness, it seems to me – but the sweetness is emanating from Elsa, not the sea.

“I admit it, by the way,” she says. “I’m terribly possessive by nature. Same as your little Asian – you won’t contest this, I hope? That was the point of her presence, which you value so highly. A muse, not a muse, an affinity, not an affinity… A woman’s interest is always based on only one thing – on a sense of ownership. At least, very soon it comes down to this – sinking to the bottom of a parabola, ha-ha-ha…”

I chuckle along with her, not even trying to argue. Elsa grips my arm even tighter.

“Your Asian girl just got lucky,” she says. “Like it or not, it’s difficult to compete with a living, warm body – although even this, it seems to me, may be sort of questionable too. I sometimes thought you and I would adapt; we might even like it – after all, there are lots of perverts who find satisfaction in the weirdest things. Maybe we might become an odd couple as well – some sort of perverted, bizarre couple…”

And again I try to laugh, pretending I don’t notice a certain strain in her words. I turn toward her to ask about something different – wanting to change the subject – and I see that Elsa has a very sad face.

“It’s funny,” she says, “for some reason, my…”

There is a gust of wind that shimmers her hair. She pauses, bites her lip, then continues, “For some reason, my boyfriends never hung around. It was amusing; I even used to say to myself: no matter whether I treat a man well or badly, he’s going to disappear quite soon. And now it’s even funnier – despite that you’re not my boyfriend and haven’t vanished yet. Nothing matters: whether my skin is smooth, what I’m like in bed, if this is my first life, my second… The phenomenon takes on the property of universality, don’t you find?”

It’s difficult to turn this into a joke; I mumble something, but the words are awkward. A chill creeps up my back; I don’t exactly know why. Nevertheless, I force myself to smile, “Well, even you’re talking about the universal now.”

“Why not?” Elsa shrugs. “Do you not believe in me at all?” Then she asks, “Well, who else? Talks about something global, I mean.” And she adds immediately, “It’s easy to guess who: it’s your Nestor, of course – and that’s why you were so excited this morning. You two are always pretending to be clever!”

She turns away, mutters something inaudible to one side and then suddenly asks, “Well, what was that about?”

“A lot of things,” I reply. “For example, about fate. And about magic, about karma…”

“Ha!” Elsa exclaims. “What could you two have to say about karma that’s new? What could you personally have to say that’s new – if only about fate?”

“What could I?” I respond absently. “Well, maybe something…”

It’s like a trigger switches on in my head: I can physically sense the ordering of my thoughts. Everything I have heard yesterday is finally beginning to take some shape – little by little, reluctantly, slowly. I feel I should help the process along somehow, verbalize my reflections, say the words out loud – to catch, to seize my emerging comprehension by its coat-tails. Only Elsa is with me – I have to tell her, and she will listen; she, too, has nowhere to escape. No matter how alien or boring it is to her.

“Fate watches over and protects you, at least for a certain time,” I say. “You can’t fight against it; you can’t argue with it. And the basis for all this is the B Object!

“Your own aspirations expressed in familiar terms may be far from what really drives you through life. There is a reason for this – the B Object!

“The trajectory of a life path – your path – is not built by you alone. Everyone is involved – through the interaction of the B Objects!”

Having reached the word “interaction,” I expect Elsa to brush everything aside, as usual, to declare it all nonsense. But she listens attentively, without interrupting. In her silence, there is no rejection – only expectation.

We go down to the sea and sit on a stone about twenty meters from the water. I become even more inspired; I level out the sand under my feet and draw pictures on it. It almost seems to me that Elsa and I are allies again – as we were a few days ago. I’m looking for the appropriate words, searching for the right meanings – and she takes part; she’s with me. She’s truly interested – and an invisible connection between us appears to emerge…

I tell her, “The vortices of the field of the conscions are material entities, not phantoms. They strive to group together – in the wilds of the universe, inaccessible to our gaze. This striving of theirs is governed by what is ‘recorded’ in them – your thoughts, your memory, everything you have ever experienced. Thus, the contents of our lives affect our subsequent destinies – they form intentions and impulses, make us change occupations and countries, connect with people and separate from them suddenly. With an ease that is inexplicable sometimes.”

“With ease…” Elsa repeats after me. “With unfortunate ease – if you think about it for a while, it may be impossible to refrain from tears. But, I suppose, my Object does not contain a single sob. Maybe I should have cried sometimes, but I had no idea. It always seemed to me that the universe didn’t care at all, ha-ha.”

I smile back at her, then shade my eyes with my hand and look at the sea for a few minutes. Something seems to be wrong with it; the waves are small, but, for some reason, their pattern disturbs my eye. It hints at a threatening irregularity – and the white yachts, gliding along the coast, rock and buck too fiercely, as if in a storm.

Then another thought enters my head. I exclaim, forgetting about the yachts, “Yes, and by the way: maybe there is a deeper feedback! The content of the Objects determines their grouping, but the grouping can affect the content as well. The preferable content – meaning not just mutual attraction and repulsion, not just a drive toward continents and countries, but certain peculiarities of destiny, specific vicissitudes of life. What if a group of B Objects must, for example, minimize its internal energy? Does this not mean that some Object or other will strive to be ‘filled’ with a certain life experience? Is it not for this reason that an unconscious desire arises in us to experience something – time and time again? Maybe this is also the case for you – because you are destined to part with your men quickly, no matter how you would have wanted it to be otherwise…”

“The universe is a bitch!” says Elsa and takes my hand. “Well, at least you’re still here.

“I understand,” she adds. “Blaming someone for something is a nonstarter. Many, if not all, are guilty at once!”

“Many…” I mumble. “That’s just how Nestor talked about other people’s desires, which bind us hand and foot. And they at the same time provide the highest degree of freedom. A mission, a true predestination – if you sense it within you, then it’s also because of the whims of the Object clustering. It’s also everyone else’s ‘guilt’ – and we should thank them for it!”

The wind gets up, and it becomes chilly. Elsa turns to me and rests her chin on my shoulder.

“Imagine,” she says, “this grouping of yours; it can separate forever. No matter how hard you try, you can’t turn this back: you break up with someone and understand suddenly – you will not see him again, in any of your lives. This is what’s really called ‘never’ – and it contains more terrible meanings than anyone can think of. Many words could be written about this, and they will be very miserable words!”

“Imagine,” I say in the same vein, “you can fall in love with someone, and you believe this happiness is forever. You believe you have found your other half, but this is just an episode with a purpose that is not immediately clear – for example, in order for you to write a book that might not even be read. Or, sometimes, you are given a chance to learn from the same mistake: for instance, very similar women enter your life, one after another…”

Elsa is silent, as if – I would like to think – she is pondering what I’ve said. Then she bends down and draws a series of little human figures as if hinting at the counting rhyme…

“I like sitting here like this with you,” she admits. “It’s as if we’re having a picnic by the sea. Very romantic – next time we need to be better prepared. If it’s possible to order books, then my Nestor probably won’t refuse us other things as well. I can ask for some crockery – and for a thermos, a basket. We can even bake a cake – it’ll be easy to carry. By the way, I don’t know why I’ve never baked any cookies here…”

I look at her profile, at the line of her cheekbones, her lips. Everything about her is well measured, refined, almost perfect. I want to tell her this. “You…” I begin, but suddenly Elsa’s face becomes taut, her gaze freezes. She gives a short scream, “What is this? What?…”

I turn around and see something unimaginable: the sea is swelling; a giant crest is rising out of it. A thought flashes through my head: this has been coming; we were warned – at least I was. Irregularity is never a vain threat; the intuition that not everything is quite right with your surroundings should always be taken seriously. It’s a bad habit to ignore the signs!

A second later, the trough turns into a wall. In another second, the wall obscures the sky. I can clearly see it is about to crash down on us, hit and smash us – and, without a moment’s hesitation, I whisk Elsa off the stone in one swift movement, trying to cover her with myself. Of course, my body is no defense, but all the same, some instinct pushes me. And, at the back of my mind, a thought pulsates: this is not the first time – we’ve already had a hurricane and a hail of stones…

Frame after frame click through my brain: Elsa’s dark hair, the sand on my cheek. Her body beneath me, supple and elastic – I feel it almost for real. Her shoulder, squeezed by my fingers, her waist, her hips… “Click-click” – I register picture by picture, sensation after sensation. Then, at the very last moment, I look around doomed and see how the gigantic wave looming over the beach freezes on the boundary between the sea and the shore, as if stumbling up against an invisible screen. It freezes – and crawls back into the sea, producing enormous sprays of foam and a multitude of smaller waves running away from us, toward the horizon…

In a minute it’s all over: the sea is still restless, but its agitation contains no threat. Everything is as it was before; only the yachts have disappeared; I don’t want to think about their fate. We get up, brush off our clothes and look around. Excited voices come from somewhere; a woman is screaming. It’s clear the killer wave is not a notion of our fancy: it really did happen.

“You looked pretty comical,” Elsa says, straightening her hair. “On all fours, like a monkey…”

She is not overly scared, but her mood has changed. I can understand her – for some reason, the magic has dissipated along with the wave; the feeling of newly found closeness has disappeared, leaving almost no trace. Trying to return at least a part of it, I run my hand down her back – but don’t feel a thing: neither a hint of a response nor an illusion of warmth.

Elsa does not withdraw but makes no gesture in return to me either. I remove my hand, sit on the stone and regard the semitrampled little figures on the sand. Elsa sits down next to me and says, frowning, “Of course, I might find it surprising that you’re not tired of saving me, although we know that these dangers are most likely not real. But no, I am not surprised; it’s clear: doing this, you are thinking about that Asian girl of yours, having a guilt complex. You suspect you weren’t able to save her from something, and now you don’t want to be ashamed of yourself – but maybe she did not need to be saved? Maybe she didn’t need you at all – I even wonder if you let your dreams go all the way, right to the end? Did you have the courage to see everything as it really was?”

“Bullshit,” I say coldly. “Nothing is clear to you, and neither is it to me, and you know it, and you’re just trying to hurt me!”

I say this and realize: I was searching for the right meanings, but she, not me, has hit the mark. Or somewhere close to the mark. These are her “very miserable words.” For some reason, it is precisely in these words that I can see some kind of clue, a red bull’s-eye in the middle of the target.

Elsa does not respond; she just silently looks into the distance. Soon we get up, climb the chipped stairs and wander along the seafront to our block.

“Actually, there’s nothing romantic about a picnic by the sea,” says Elsa. “You just end up with annoying sand in your shoes.”

Her face is gloomy – nevertheless, she holds my hand and nestles into my shoulder. We keep step, like a small squad of a battered but undefeated army. An army retreating to the demarcation line.

“I will settle with you by the river…” – the words of the song reach me.

It’s our singer – he is sitting in his usual place, but today there is no one around him. Perhaps the wave is to blame. His voice, as if in tune with our mood, sounds especially melancholic and hoarse. “Wait,” I say to Elsa, and we stop a little distance away.

“I will settle with you by the Chao Phraya River. In a dilapidated shack on the canal bank. Among the vines and half-rotten stilts. By the water reflecting the jungle.”

My heart contracts. I remember Tina, our outing in a long-tail boat. A carefree tour through a maze of canals; the jokes of the boatman sitting behind us. I bought him a beer, and he became our best friend for those two hours…

“A white bird with a black beak will roam behind the house. Our modest life will be open to all eyes – to the views of all who float past. Right by the water, we will place a Buddha, a small Buddha surrounded by candles. Everyone will see how much we love him. Everyone will see how much we love each other.”

I stand, frozen, forgetting where I am. The song resonates deep inside me – with something sweetly sharp, incomprehensible, painful. Elsa feels it – she suddenly withdraws her hand and exclaims, “Enough! I’m going home; you can listen here on your own.” Then she turns to the singer and shouts, “How much do I have to put up with this? You are always singing for him to spite me!”

He does not respond, merely plucking the strings in silence.

During the evening session, Nestor is still diffident and dry. “I will read you one paragraph,” he says, flipping through something out of sight below. “It has not been written by me, so don’t get critical.”

And he reads – measuredly and monotonously: “…in the end, she got used to him and simply called him ‘my lord.’ The frequent déjà vus no longer seemed strange – she played his games, resigned to their masculine essence. All her losses were nourished by his hatred; the moans of her passion were devoted to him. She knew the flow of the Tao was tossing her, like a small splinter, together with him from one direction to another. They were hurled side by side in muddy whirlpools, and he, the ‘lord,’ was always slightly ahead. Her happiness lay in following his shadow; this was her special path. She often wondered on which continent, in which time he existed and only regretted that she could not love him with all her heart. For, she believed, you can love only those who are reachable, who are distinctly close.”

Nestor becomes silent and rubs his nose with his finger. Then he smiles thinly with his lips, “It’s an interesting passage, isn’t it? Of course, this is just prose. Fiction, a tale – but still…”

He goes through his papers again, looks for something, then looks up at me. His eyes sparkle; his detachment has gone. “Still,” he repeats. “Imagine, for example, a long thread with knots at different ends. Throw it on the table, make a figure out of it, join the ends together… Who knows how close or distant the points on the local branes are if you look at them from above? Those small knots of your thread on the table might be right next to each other. Who knows whose B Objects are nearby? Is this not a hint at the inexplicable unity of souls? At some special sensation of closeness to someone else, independent of your locations or social circles… Is there not a hint here of the true solidarity of thoughts or – of unrestored justice, of the thirst for revenge?”

“Or simply,” I say, “at the need to be near someone with whom you are, alas, not?”

“Well, yes…” Nestor nods and immediately closes up, drawing inside himself. Now he is wearing a mask again – of impassivity and even boredom.

“The session is over,” he says. “Good night.”

“You’re being sentimental today; you even said goodbye to me,” I try to goad him, but the screen is already dead; no one can hear me.

I’m trying to get to sleep but to no avail. So I wander around the room, then go to the bathroom and stand for a long time under the hot shower, muttering, “Unity, unity…” Nestor’s words do not leave my head – and it seems they’ve stirred something in him as well. Although, of course, with Nestor you never can tell.

Returning to the bedroom, I take one glance at the armchair and resolutely open the door to the living room. A table lamp is on; Elsa is sitting at the table and reflecting on something, her palm propping up her cheek.

I sit down next to her. “I can’t sleep,” she complains. “I have nothing to dream about. And don’t think I’ve forgiven you.”

She has almost the same expression on her face as Nestor – detachment, indifference. But I can still sense our deeply hidden closeness. A closeness that would be pointless and meaningless to cover up with insincerity. We are like spouses who have accumulated a lot of mutual hurt but know there’s no way of getting away from each other.

Elsa seems to feel the same way. She says rather angrily, “In fact, it’s you who’s the possessor in our case, not me. You own me, knowing I am not going to leave Quarantine – and, therefore, your property rights are inviolable. You possess me more securely than anyone ever, more securely than your Asian girl – she could get angry, suddenly lose it, run away from you in her Asian city, in the Asian night, in her Asian world. But I can’t!”

She looks up at me and continues, squinting slightly, “Of course, one could judge things more rationally: you and your Asian are no longer together – death, as they say, has already parted you. She is now who knows where, and I am here with you. Your separation is the price you paid for your possession of me, but it still hurts me that while owning me, you will be thinking about her, maybe even pining for her. For her, for your muse! I still can’t get used to this. But, most probably, I will.”

We keep silent. I, like her, prop my head with the palms of my hands. And I mutter, squinting at the spot of yellow light, “It’s amazing – almost everything you say helps me one way or another. Maybe it’s not about you at all? Maybe things I hear from you, from Nestor, have just one purpose – to lead me somewhere, provoking specific thoughts, stimulating my mind? And – as terrible as it sounds – what if it’s not about Tina either? What if she – and everyone I ever once met – has been granted to me only to make my brain work?”

“The center of the world,” Elsa snorts, but somewhat uncertainly, forcing herself.

I continue, “Yet on the other hand, I am dealing with the most complicated matters, but every moment I feel my dependence on the most primitive, the most simple. On the presence in my life of at least someone, albeit temporarily, momentarily… I feel dependent on a woman, on women – on those near me, whom I sometimes bring to tears, and on the one who is desperately far away. She may be in a different universe, but, I want to think, she is also yearning – or even crying without me.”

“I’ve already told you,” Elsa says coldly, “as for me, I never cry. But it doesn’t mean I’m not hurt.”

“Yes,” I nod. “Yes, I understand.”

I really do understand – knowing already what I felt today while listening to the street singer. The words didn’t help me – the recognition came on its own, highlighted by the yellow spot from the lamp. It came, and I cannot dispel it; I know it will find a way back – with pain. With reminders of my anticipations, of premonitions from the past – foresights of the simplest things, well known to everyone. Like the memory of inevitability, recognition will return inevitably – you cannot escape it, even soaring through the most mind-bending theories. From equations apprehensible by only a few, you deduce what everyone is feeling – and this connects you with the ordinary, with the rest of the world. The connection may be fleeting, but it’s beyond doubt nonetheless; I remember now how I looked at Tina and knew: she belonged to me, but only for a little while. I envisaged “for a little while” in its most frightening sense – and the pain from it had a sweetly terrifying flavor. And this pain was uniting me with another man – who had tasted it and become its slave…

I say goodnight to Elsa and go to my room. I choose a dream for myself – scrupulously specifying the moment from which it should begin. I do not need anyone’s help; I leap off from the ellipsis of the unknown; I free myself from its tenacious hooks.

And the chain of memories unwinds: Tina and I leave our apartment in the evening, holding hands. We are going to celebrate an occasion – I have just pressed the “Enter” button, publishing my theory on the net. The party is coming – but now, falling asleep, I feel no joy. My soul is full of anxiety, and the reason for it lies in one word, in one name: Brevich. With this, I fall through – into the anticipation of pain, into the depths of sleep.