Her thin-skinned face, its flesh a delicate mask for her bones, reddened more than usual in the bodily turmoil of pregnancy. Though these chronic bulges of hers cemented him into the role of provider, he loved the look of her distended body—the belly he rubbed with oil to soften the stretch marks, the way her accustomed air of abstraction was absorbed into a hormonal reverie, and the broadening of her, which included her face and breasts and her buttocks. She let him fuck her in the spoon position, as his body on top became too much a weight on her. They drew closer, the two of them, around this hidden third presence, and Gregory and Iris drew closer as well, patting gingerly with their little square hands the glassy bulge of their mother’s belly, its everted navel and brown center line. This was reality—biology at work, a beating, burbling process the ear could eavesdrop on. The unknown animal inside her kicked against his palm. It was a few thin layers of Phyllis away. What a pity, Owen felt dimly at the time and more keenly later, that young couples, preoccupied and self-absorbed, let themselves be distracted from this miracle of theirs. These years of their own procreating came before shared birthing classes and elaborate prenatal concern for the fetus; Phyllis smoked an evening cigarette with her hand cocked on the jut of the belly, and balanced a glass of wine on the same convenient resting place. Owen was proud that his wife made such natural and easy work of child-bearing; as long as her pregnancies continued, the thought of infidelity was monstrous. Something primitive in him worshipped her in her fertility, though it indentured them both to the next generation. “Ed says,” she told him, “you have a genius for visualization, for spatial relations. You see the programs like drawings in your head.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

She became pensive, sucking in her cheeks to contract her dry lips. “I think for many people math takes them beyond what they can picture. You’re very tied to your senses, Owen.”

He hated to hear this, since having children had reawakened in him his childhood premonitions of dying, and one clear thing about the event was the unlikelihood of taking your senses with you. MIT had shown him the universe swept clean not only of Heavenly furniture but of endless energy—of endlessness in any measurable form. Every form of order, even the proton, ended: he preferred in practical life to forget this fatal thermodynamic pinch. Phyllis’s words, though, were the seeds that, in Middle Falls, while he and Ed labored to sustain their infant data-processing start-up, eventually bore fruit as DigitEyes, a breakthrough in its brief moment.