“Maybe I would,” she said softly, “if I could figure men out.”

Nolan assumed that was a veiled reference to his own behavior and decided to change the subject. “Any other news? How’s Cerisa?”

“Like you care.”

“Just curious.”

“She’s been gone a lot. Speculation is that Ariana Bayless is considering reconfiguring the Biolab and Cerisa’s been there a lot advising her. That, or they’re involved in some torrid affair, because they are together all the time.”

“I could see that. Cerisa Daylen and Ariana Bayless.”

“Anyway, she hasn’t been around much, which of course has made the rest of us just as happy as bugs in the springtime. Hiram thinks maybe she’s considering resigning, but Pakt says that won’t happen till the world ends. But we talk about it a lot.”

“That would make her happy.”

“So what about you?” she asked. “You okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t want to talk about it, I guess.”

“Not really.”

“Would you want to have lunch, though? You cannot talk about it while we eat.”

“That sounds good. I’m hungry already.”

Over the meal, she filled him in on other small events that had transpired in his absence. As she spoke, the world began to resume some of its normal shades and contours; it was as if, with her words and details, she applied color and depth onto his flat, gray perspective. Now and then she would mention the name of someone whose existence he had literally forgotten, and he would reinsert that person into his interior landscape, until gradually it became populated and lively again. Sometimes he became so engrossed in remembering these newfound friends that he missed a few of her next sentences.

“I’m supposed to go to my mother’s this summer, in fact, for at least a month,” she was saying once when he fugued back in to the conversation. “Coleta Templeton—you remember the Templetons?—is introducing her youngest daughter at a birthday ball, and my mother is just adamant that I return for it. And of course the summer is the high social season at my mother’s house, because that’s when we celebrate her birthday, and my grandmother’s birthday, and my birthday, and so I know if I once set foot in-country, I won’t get away for weeks.”

“Will Julitta go with you?” Nolan asked.

Melina sipped her drink and looked quizzical. They had been gone from the lab for nearly ninety minutes, and she showed no signs of wanting to return. Nolan assumed she had cleared this all with Pakt (“I’ll take him out to lunch and see how he’s doing”), so he had not bothered to glance at his watch since they sat down.