Neil beamed his best panty-remover smile, held up a brown paper bag. He was dressed at his nondescript best: khaki shorts, hindu sandals, and a black nano-T-shirt with a panel playing and replaying some clip of Marilyn Monroe swimming naked in a black-and-white pool. Thanks to his lean build and the jaunty, jockish way he carried himself, he looked more like an undergraduate hoping to score some weed than a respected neurosurgeon. Only his face advertised otherwise. No matter how expressive, it always seemed to flex about something inveterate and imperturbable, as though he had been a boxer or a Tibetan lama in his most recent previous life.

His minivan loomed in the driveway behind him.

'Found myself in need of some liquid therapy,' he said.

'Dad!' Ripley cried out in her snottiest voice. 'It's, like, starting already!'

'Austin Powers,' Thomas said in explanation.

'Smashing, baby,' Neil said, clapping him on the shoulder.

An hour later, Thomas realized he had become quite drunk. Ripley was curled around cushions, fast asleep between him and Neil. Frankie was sitting avidly on the floor in front of the screen, laughing as Austin dodged booby-bullets.

'Aren't you tired?' he asked his son.

'Nooooooo.'

Thomas looked apologetically at Neil. 'I promised I would watch it with them.' Ever since the divorce, the kids had become particularly exacting when it came to promises. He sometimes wondered how many penny-ante pledges it would take to dig him out of the hole he and Nora had shoveled together.

Neil laughed, nodded at Frankie who rocked like a heroin junkie beneath a close-up of Austin. 'Just think,' Neil said. 'Right now your son's brain is being rewired by signals from outer space.'

Thomas snorted, though he wasn't so sure he found the comment funny. It was an old college game of theirs, describing everyday events in pseudo-scientific terms. Since science looked at everything in terms of quantity and function instead of quality and intention, the world it described could sound frighteningly alien. Neil was entirely right, of course: Frankie's brain was being rewired by signals from outer space. But he was also just a kid enjoying something silly on TV.

'And,' Thomas replied, 'any minute now molecules from my large intestine will trigger nerve impulses inside of your nose.'

Neil frowned at him, his eyes luminous with reflected screens. Then he gagged and laughed all at once, pulling his nano-T over his nose. Black-and-white Marilyn kicked across the sides of an oblong pyramid.

The room thundered with machine-gun fire. Frankie turned with what he called his 'squishy face' and cried, 'You stink, Daddy!'

'Shhh,' Thomas admonished. 'You know how mad Ripley gets.'

'I have mallcools in my nose too!' Frankie chortled to Neil. 'Stinky ones.'

Instead of humor, there was a flash of anger in Neil's gaze, so quick that Thomas was certain he had imagined it.