“Excuse me, Carlos?” she said. He turned. There really was something blindingly handsome about him. His hair maybe. Or his demeanor. People are beautiful when they do beautiful things. Perhaps he had spent most of his life doing beautiful things and it had really stuck. He smiled. He had teeth like a military cemetery.

“Jackie, hello. I’m sorry, I was doing science.” He waved over at the flamingo. “This is all very sciency stuff. Just here is an equation,” he said, indicating some numbers on the chalkboard. “It’s important to have equations.”

“I see that. How’s Cecil?”

“Overenthusiastic, consumed with his work, has very little understanding of science. I love him a lot. The usual.”

The scientists nodded and wrote on their clipboards. All information was important information, even if the reasons were not immediately apparent. The reason for anything was rarely immediately or even eventually apparent, but it existed somewhere, like a moon that had escaped orbit and was no longer a moon but just a piece of something that once was, spinning off into the nothing. The scientists were just then writing down that very metaphor. Metaphors are a big part of science.

“I need your help, Carlos.”

“Jackie, there’s little I love more than helping people. Science and Cecil are about it. But I’m in the middle of an important experiment, and I think if we just push through we might figure out why the experiment is important. Finding out why we are doing what we already were doing is an exciting moment, and I believe we may be almost there.”

“All right, dude, but—”

“Besides, Josie asked us to look at this, and I owe her a few. More than a few. I owe her, I don’t know, a high number. I would express it as an equation, but it’s all figurative and figurative math is really tricky.”

“Carlos, look.”

She held up her left hand. The scientists all waited with pencils hovering, unsure of what observations they should be making at that moment. She did all her tricks with the slip of paper. She tossed it on the ground, tore it into pieces, flung it onto a Bunsen burner. Hell, she ate it. Why not?

Each trick ended the same way, with her holding the uncreased paper back in her left hand, where it had never really left.

Carlos dropped his clipboard.

“You too?” he said.

“Me too?”

“Let me see that.”

He took the slip of paper and examined it closely. When he let go it was back in her hand. The scientists were staring, mouths open. Their clipboards were at their sides. One of them appeared to have overloaded and shut down completely.

Carlos rushed around the lab, turning on and off burners, and throwing switches frantically. The other scientists helped the one scientist reboot.

“We start immediately,” Carlos shouted.

“Oh, good,” she shouted back. “Why are we shouting?”

12