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She looked up. The hand again, calculating. Worth it, not worth it? She would have bolted in an instant if she knew I wanted her company.

"I guess I could use a cup. I've this deadly seminar at two, and I need all the help I can get."

I maintained myself on the way to the café. If not Garrick or Gillette, I at least avoided utter nitwittery. I felt disembodied. Detached. Steeped in emergency-room calm. War coverage with the sound turned off.

We talked shop, the one shop we had in common. Grad school was her life. I'd lived through it recently enough to pretend I remembered it. I told her the story of my existence, or at least the radio mix. Everything but the essentials. I told her how I'd always thought I'd be a physicist, until I heard Taylor interpret texts.

"Where was that?"

"Ai! I'm sorry. Here. All here."

"Professor Taylor? I don't think I've heard of him."

"He died. A couple of years before you arrived." Traceless in her generation.

"And you never finished?"

"Not in so many words, no. I guess I wrote my first novel instead."

She laughed. "Probably more worthwhile than the diss." The way a person might say that stamp collecting might be worth more to the race in the long run than, say, investment banking. "What made you leave?"

I told her how specialization left me parochial. I told her that theory and criticism had shaken my belief in what writing might do. I told her about my father's death and the seminar where we counted the feet of that Robinson sonnet on mercy killing.

I was talking too much. "How about you? How far along are you?"

She grew restive and subdued all at once. "Not as far as I thought."

"You've taken the master's exam?"

"Yeah." Miles away.

"When?"

She laughed. "Who wants to know?" She took a slow sip. "It seemed like such a landmark while I was doing the run-up to it. I worked so hard to prepare. Then two days, a few questions. They say okay, you know this stuff. It's over. You don't even get a chance to flex."

"But now it gets fun, right?"

"You think? I'll be middle-aged by the time I get the doctorate. No offense."

I hiked up a grin. "None taken."

"And no matter how good I am, I might be waiting on tables afterward, like all the other Ph.D.s in literature. They lied to us, you know. By accepting us into the program. They implied we'd have jobs when we were done."

"Nobody gets work?"

She snorted. "One in four, in a good year. And some of those who get jobs are repeats, out for their third or fourth time. The whole profession is a total pyramiding scheme."

"And by the time you guys get the chain letter. ."

"It'll take more new bodies to finance the payoffs than there are undergraduates in the galaxy."

A. stopped to greet a passerby and to wave at someone seated two tables away. She knew half the people in the café. I, too, now fit somewhere in her star system's outer orbits.

"I wouldn't feel like such a sucker if the whole process weren't such a bilking. This is the most class-conscious society I've ever been part of. The department superstars lord it over their minor tenured colleagues, who saddle all the junior faculty with shit work, who take it out on the senior grads, who have no time for the master's candidates, who hold the undergraduates in contempt. That's not even mentioning the nonacademic staff."

"Is it that bad? I'm out of the loop." So far out that I could not even pick up her rhythm.

"Worse. We carry the same teaching load as faculty, and get paid maybe a seventh what you do. Socially, we're pariahs. I doubt the turf wars in business are half as bitter."

"How can the fight be so ugly over so small a piece of pie?"

A. grunted. "It's ugly because there's nothing to fight over."

We could buy a house. She'd never have to worry about making a living again. I could call New York, tell them I had another book in me after all. She could spend all day living, recovering the pleasure of the text.

"Maybe the whole discipline is breaking up," I suggested. "As a relative outsider, I'd say no one seems to know quite what they want the thing to become anymore."

"Total chaos. Who's in, who's out, who's up, who's down. All that hot new stuff, the pomo and the cultural studies and the linguistic-based solipsism. I'm fed up with it. It's all such verbal wanking off. Frankly, I no longer give a fuck what happens to Isabel Archer. Neither politically, economically, psychologically, structurally, nor posthumanistically. So she's got to choose which of these three loser boys she has to marry. This takes how many hundred pages?"

Her eyes caught mine and her hand flew to her mouth. "Oops. Sorry. It's that Catholic pottymouth of mine. You are faculty, aren't you?"

"Technically. So what do you think you'll do with yourself?" Name the city. Your terms. Unconditional.

"I figure I might get a job in business somewhere. Editing or marketing or something. If I'm going to be abused, I can at least get paid to take it."

She gave me not one syllable of encouragement. No shy curiosity or even dry interest. But I had already done so much on no encouragement at all. All on my own.

It occurred to me: who A. was. Why I had come back to U. to meet her. A. was Helen's pace rabbit. Her heat competition. She had beaten the master's exam, the one we'd pitch our machine against. She was the woman who pulled love from the buried grave. The designated hitter for frailty, feeling, and whim. The champion of the humans.

"Thanks for the coffee," she said. "I have to make animal tracks. See ya!"

She disappeared faster than she had the first time.

But I had spoken to A. I'd sat three feet from her, for half an hour. Amid a corsage of coffee spoons, I replayed the conversation. I lived on that "See ya," trying to wrest it back from metaphor, to move around in it, through the latticework of lived time.

C. must have cared for my third book. She said as much in every available way, and she had no particular reason to lie just yet.

The story had mutated into a hopeful monster. Here and there, I tried to code into its paragraph cells the moves we made, the friends we loved, the events that shaped us and were worth saving. I hoped my molecular genetics might transcribe, if not an encyclopedia of successful solutions to experience, at least some fossil record of the questions. I wanted my extended metaphors to mirror speculation in the widest lens, the way the genome carries along in time's wake all the residue of bygone experiments and hypotheses, from bacteria on. But novels, like genomes, consist mostly of intron baggage. And as with evolution, you can't always get there efficiently from here.

At thirteen hundred pages, my typescript had only the longest odds against being bought. Whatever my publishers expected, it wasn't this. At best, they'd issue a desperate request that I change trajectories, free the skinny book hiding inside this sumo. At worst, they'd kiss me off and wish me well. Great fun, but. Maybe one of those avant-garde presses?

C. and I went to the post office together. We were both more nervous than we'd been the first time, years before. We didn't know what to hope for. The manuscript took up a small crate.

"Send it by boat," C. said.

"It's expensive either way," I countered. "And the difference isn't that big. We can swing it, sweet!" I giggled.

"Boat," C. insisted. "Surface rate." Her eyes clouded. In a moment, she might have shouted or turned and walked away without a word.

I cradled the box, with its long customs form marked Drukwerk. Printed matter. Several kilos of story, an attempt to feel, in music, life's first principles and to hear, in those genetic principles, living tune. I'd tried to ground creation's stepladder in its molecular building blocks. I'd written a book that aspired to understanding, when I could not even understand the woman on whom my actions depended.