Leaving a meeting that afternoon Carmen takes the stairwell, pausing on the landing, feeling overwhelmed. So much has changed so quickly, and now within her there is a cacophony of feelings and valences. Every other minute she flips: Atif, the mystery of it all, the investigation, the responsibility, the occasional flit of worry about her own safety—and then on the other side, the new job, the job of a lifetime going well, all the mundane things are good, and, of course, the people here that she’s met, the people who are new to her life promising more change. One of whom she refuses to think too much about. This whirlwind has in turn engendered within her a kind of thawing. Yesterday she’d stood in line at the grocery store face-to-face with a baby looking at Carmen from behind the mother’s shoulder, all blue-eyed and mouth open, absorbing everything and everyone around it as receptively as a Buddhist monk, with a forehead as placid and calm and wise as a sperm whale’s, and Carmen had let out a squeal and a wave in a way that would have made twenty-one-year-old Carmen roll her eyes, because back then she hadn’t really gotten the point of babies, except as something to be observed in neurological interest, thinking of them then as these giant diffuse and basically randomly wired neural networks trying through a response-reward curve to make sense of the world, trying to define the fire hose of undifferentiated input into categories that could be used, bound together, but lately whenever she got close to a baby all she wanted to do was smell it and interact with it and basically just teach it, feed that response-curve with funny faces and giggly waves and winks, which Carmen knew made sense, because every cutesy thing that adults do around babies is not random, no, all those funny faces highlight expressions, and the tone taken is precisely tuned to stimulate a baby’s developing auditory system, and the googly eyes and funny voices and little games are in-built—adults are as genetically programmed to teach babies as babies are to learn, an oscillating cycle, a generational handoff that goes back and back and back. And she finds this beautiful.

“How are you doing that?”

“Doing what? What’s he doing?” The baby’s mother had turned around and asked her, smiling.

“Being conscious,” Carmen had said seriously, bent and gazing into the blue eyes going to-and-fro, rheumy but brilliant in their color. When she had given that blue-eyed baby a wink and wave the response was a happy crinkling gurgle that was literally too cute for Carmen to handle and she actually had to leave the line to calm down.