Once the tour had moved on to view said gorillas and the rest of the exhibit, Jaime and his father stayed to watch the man fold. This artist was not Japanese, but a white man with a tidy beard. To Jaime, he looked like a schoolteacher or maybe a librarian. His fingers looked too big to make such delicate things as the paper cranes that people could buy in the gift shop.

“Did you always do this?” Jaime asked him.

“I worked as a scientist a long time ago,” said the man.

“Oh! What kind of scientist?” Jaime’s father asked.

“A physicist,” said the man.

“My mom was a physicist,” Jaime said proudly. “She did lots of important things. She loved it. Why did you give it up?”

The man laughed. “I didn’t. Not exactly.”

“Huh?” said Jaime.

“What I mean is, folding paper is a lot like math, a lot like science.”

Jaime was doubtful. “Really?”

“Sure. NASA scientists are interested in the art of folding because they have to find ways to fit large things in small spaces. There’s another scientist whose art is displayed here, a man named John Montroll, who has made models of Platonic solids and Archimedean solids.”

“I don’t know what those are,” said Jaime.

“Beautiful,” said the man, in that dreamy way Jaime’s father might talk about his mother. “Origami is a lot like magic, too. No matter how many folds you make or if you end up with a cat or a crane or a mantis or a fish, you still have only one sheet of paper. The paper stays the same. It never loses its essence.”

“What’s essence?”

“Its spirit. Its soul.”

“Paper doesn’t have a soul.”

“No?” The man held out a tiny paper figure. Jaime took it. It was a bronze woman in a long elaborate bronze dress.

“Who is she?” Jaime said.

“I’m not sure. She might be many things. But I think she’s a scientist.”

“And also an artist?”

“Why not?” said the man. “But maybe you can ask her.”

Jaime still had the tiny woman. Every once in a while, he would ask her what she was. Sometimes he imagined she said she was a scientist, sometimes he imagined she said she was an artist—a particle artist, a star artist. Sometimes when he asked her who she was, he imagined she said she was his mother and she was all of the other things, too. Everything at once.

She was also a piece of paper. The paper remained the same.