Crossroads to Eden: A Novel

By Fred M. Frohock

Paul Lorca, an American professor of cultural anthropology, is living in London during a sabbatical. One evening, while walking through crowded Leicester Square, he and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Sandra, lose each other. After a frantic search, he finds her. But during the course of the next several weeks, he comes to believe that it is not his daughter he has found, but someone or something else.

What if it were possible to clone a beloved deceased family member and an historical figure from 2000 years ago? A privately-funded underground medical research team in New York City works to clone a messiah with DNA extracted from the Shroud of Turin. Stacey Manning, a brilliant young biochemist, is invited to join the team. She accepts because she wants to clone her sister, recently killed in a tragic auto accident.

In Miami, terrorists are targeting Cuban-Americans. A group forms to oppose this threat, but what are the consequences for the lawyer who volunteers to undertake the role of avenger?

Crossroads to Eden is a fast-paced ensemble novel of extraordinary characters and their journeys into the unexplored regions of alien possession, reproductive cloning guided by the miracles of contemporary science, and efforts to cope with domestic terrorism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480849594

Fred M. Frohock

Fred M. Frohock holds a PhD in political science with a minor in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of eleven other books with academic presses including Chicago, Cornell, and the University of Kansas. Dr. Frohock is also the author of numerous articles and papers in academic journals. He is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. Crossroads to Eden is his first novel.

Book preview

Part 1

Beginnings

1

W hat have you learned with age?

That I need one more life. Maybe more. Nietzsche’s eternal return. Only for any next life, I want the memory of this life intact. I want to live with what I have learned here and now.

"Einmal ist keinmal."

Paul Lorca looks at his young companion with amazement. A biochemist who knows German as a conversational language. And Nietzsche? ‘One time is no time.’

How literal. And drawn out. Try this. ‘Once is never.’ Also consider that even with many lives, there would still be so many options. You’d still have choices, and regrets. And insignificance.

No. I wouldn’t. Listen to me. We don’t learn how to make better decisions. We learn how to use experience. How to live with more gravitas.

I don’t think I understand that cryptic observation.

Stacey, no, you don’t. And you won’t understand these thoughts until you accumulate some years.

And how narcissistic is that comment.

Lorca knows that, brilliant as she clearly is, she doesn’t understand even his last caveat. She is on what she has called a research and recreation trip to the Lower Florida Keys. Lorca is on a purely recreational break, away from real life and hoping to avoid all thought in favor of the entirely physical. With Stacey he has found both the physical and the intellectual. At this moment she is lying on her stomach on the beach towel, thighs apart and one leg bent up at the knee so that a sandal flaps against her heel when she shakes the upraised foot. The thong bathing suit exposes a body that gives Lorca much pleasure.

Look at Joanne and Manolo. She points toward the surf, where their companions are dancing in the waves. The sun is low in the sky and seems to Lorca to be directed across the ocean as luminous backlighting for dancers in the surf. The whole setting has a mysterious brightness that is unusually sharp for the time of day. The faint sounds of reggae can be heard from somewhere near the shore. Lorca recognizes the rhythms of the music but not the song. Nature as theatre, Lorca thinks.

My eyes are too old for this light. Where are my glasses? Stacey?

Stacey rolls over on her back and hands him his sunglasses.

Lorca puts them on and looks over at the dancing couple. Beautiful. Summer heat ignored in the dance. He gets up slowly and walks over to what is said to have been a seawall sometime in antiquity but is now a broken wooden dock on the right edge of the beach. He adjusts his dark glasses and looks for crawfish. Yesterday a lobster, so large and sluggish that it appeared drugged, pushed away from a plank of the dock near the bottom and drifted toward the open ocean. Now the water is murky, and Lorca can see only small mullets and a few large snappers.

The past evening Lorca played a game of touch football with some college students vacationing in Key West. The game was played on Smathers Beach, both in the surf and on the hard, wet sand near the water. Across the road on a balcony overlooking the beach, a few members of a local shrimp boat crew, finished with their day’s work, were drinking rum. Whenever one side ran a sweep with blockers, the shrimpers would start some drum rolls. The only thing was that most of the runs were cut short by the defensive ends on both teams so that the drum beats never got a chance to reach any crescendo. The lack of scoring must have been frustrating to the players, the onlookers, and especially the drummers.

Lorca’s memories of the game are dominated by singular events. Trying without success to hit one of the wideouts with a flair pass he somehow threw too low for the receiver to reach. Then the isolation he felt while lining up on the sand, slightly in the water, and looking out over the bay at a sailboat turning gracefully under a sudden breeze. Running out into the water and turning around to find the ball there at his waist for the one easy catch he made all game. Heading upfield once to try a block on a tall student from Florida Atlantic University, who spun away from him easily, sliding past Lorca with a lovely shove to his shoulders and touching the runner to halt the play, helping Lorca up with a solicitous hand and genuine concern. Trace odors of seaweed in the ocean air. Hearing broken parts of conversations from the inland areas of the beach and from the megaphones the guides used on sightseeing boats, which passed slowly in the water. Sitting in the water, laughing at a dropped pass while a vendor came by selling conch hats for souvenirs.

Later both teams drove over to a bar on Duval Street, just down from the ocean side of Captain Tony’s. The beer was warm, flat, feeding the sense of being underwater, a feeling the night’s heat and humidity intensified. The moist heat dominated the slow ceiling fan circulating air over the tables. Lorca consumed five large draft beers during the three hours he was in the bar. When he left, he felt heavy, bloated—not unexpected sensations given the drinking. But they created for him the passing impression that he was some earth creature, a sloth or mole, as he negotiated his way back to his car over the wet sidewalks and rain puddles from the brief shower that had filled part of the time they were in the bar.

Now, without benefit yet of a shower, Lorca feels the distillations of beer sliding down his skin in streams of perspiration. He glances at his chest. It is completely wet, the skin glistening in the sunlight as if greased for some unspeakable physical action. He takes a towel and wipes his skin almost dry.

Lorca walks out on the dock, carrying their two beach chairs. He sits down and eases his feet onto the ladder extending down into the water. Stacey has come over to join him. More than warm, he tells her. Hot. He runs his hands over his chest and stomach, and flips some of the remaining sweat into the ocean water.

Ugh. You are so repulsive sometimes. Do you know that? She sits down in one of the chairs.

I am repulsive only in the summer heat of the subtropics. Lorca places the towel on the empty chair and carefully slides into the water from the ladder, staying away from the wood on the side of the dock.

Under the water, near the bottom, thin ribbons of seaweed anchored to some coral move as if in a breeze. Lorca has the sensation, familiar to him by now, of floating in some version of Michelson and Morley’s pseudo aether made real, with both sound and light stretched out over some thick and nonlinear space. The refracted images of three fish pass across his vision. He shoots to the surface and inhales air in a loud gasp.

Don’t drown, whatever you do.

Lorca waves a hand weakly at his companion and jackknifes back down under the water.

A white blotch of sand, unexpected lightness on the dark ocean floor of mud and rock, catches Lorca’s eye. He pushes his body down with quick and tight contractions until he can reach the grainy particles. They give way to his touch, granular heaps with no resistance. He swirls the sand around in a clockwise motion, and it shifts up slightly and then settles back to the bottom. He arches his back and surfaces again.

What do you see?

Beauty.

Lorca pushes his hands up in a sharp motion from under the water and descends feet first this time, upright as the surface of the water passes from his neck to his nose, then quickly past his eyes and hair. He keeps his eyes open as the sharp outline of a boat tied to the near side of the dock becomes a blurred submerged hull underneath the surface of the water. The propeller on the motor is a static gray, the blades motionless as if caught in a high-speed photograph. A large manta ray glides past, wings moving in graceful slow motion. The vague outline of a lobster trap by the side of the dock holds Lorca’s attention until he determines that it’s empty.

When he surfaces this time, he sees that Stacey has brought the small ice chest over from their blanket to place it on the dock. Lorca leans his head back and shuts his eyes against the sunlight. Then he turns completely over in a slow somersault back under the water.

There is no sound at all. Lorca thinks he could as well be entering an abandoned cathedral. The white sand on the bottom has drifted down into the form of a triangle. He expels half the air in his lungs in bubbles that rapidly rise to the surface. Then he kicks down to the bottom. The seaweed is thick in the center of the artificial bay formed by the curvature of the dock. Large concentrations of green and purple foliage conceal the bottom. Lorca touches the growths. Small berries are underneath some of the leaves. He turns upright and tries to stand on the seaweed. He feels he is levitating, lifting above the weeds in some modest defiance of gravity. A shaft of sunlight cuts through the water, a single column of light from surface to sea bottom. Lorca relaxes and feels his body ascend to the surface.

Stacey is using the towel to rub sand off her back. What’s happening?

Epiphanies.

What the hell is that in this context?

Lorca kicks slowly over to the makeshift ladder on the dock and climbs up. His thoughts are physical, images of Stacey over the last week. Her body dominates his feelings. He thinks of the way she sat in a chair last evening, legs spread and long skirt tucked down between them, not quite reaching her boots.

Come over here, Lorca tells her.

Oh no. No public sex, remember? She dances away. Especially on rough docks.

Lorca blows the salt water from his nostrils. He sits down in the empty beach chair. The water on his body feels like a wet suit, pressed tight by the heat and sunlight.

Why do I feel like something is going to happen? he asks her.

Stacey looks at him without replying.

And why do I feel that the passage of time is speeding up?

Because it is, Stacey replies. It definitely is.

Lorca shrugs.

Do you still want me to join you in London this fall? she asks him as she sits down in the other chair.

Of course. But early fall. I will probably leave for London the first part of September. When the summer tourist crowds thin out. I’m on sabbatical for the entire academic year, remember.

And is Sandra coming over?

Yes. Yes.

How did you get your wife to let her daughter, your daughter, fly across the ocean by herself without a companion? And Sandra would probably have to miss school for the weeks blocked out for the trip.

Lorca smiles. Magic. I found a way to cast a spell on Janet. And Sandra is smart enough to miss the entire school year and still earn honors. He opens the ice chest and takes out an ice-cold bottle of Peroni beer. He notes that Stacey is very still, looking at him with the unblinking and appraising gaze that reminds Lorca he has been running with a first-rate intelligence. And a young but distinguished research scientist, with whom he may be falling in love.

He gestures with the bottle to offer Stacey a beer. She shakes her head. Lorca finds a metal opener and pulls off the bottle cap. The cold beer sprays on his chest, shifting his concentration back to the indolent rhythms of the day. The taste of the beer is perfect, rich and pungent, and all he needs now on this hot afternoon.

2

P aul, are you at all interested in watching the game?

Yes. Of course. But look, Brad. Lorca points to the part of the sky that has caught his attention. Is that a skydiver up there?

Don’t know, don’t care. I’m interested in what’s happening down on the playing field.

It is a sunny and warm Saturday afternoon in early September. When Paul Lorca turns his attention back to the football game and away from the mystery entity drifting against the prevailing winds below the line of cumulus clouds toward the eastern horizon, he discovers again that breathing, life itself, is only a secondary concern at intense moments during the football game. The moving sound in the stadium is immense, seamless, a muffled roar that undulates from its bottom and then takes off on gravel highways to a level that seems to suck the air out of the stadium. No oxygen at the top. We’re in a vacuum. Then back once more to the field as the crowd watches the next play in seconds of attentive silence. No one moving, not even the players. The sound again, the single Ohhhh, rolling from the throats of seventy-eight thousand people sitting, now standing, as the quarterback fakes a handoff to a running back into the line to hold the linebackers and bring the free safety in two crucial steps. Then he drops back three steps for the quick scan of the field in front of him before throwing in one unbroken motion—deep, deep to the wideout running a fly pattern down the right sideline.

He’s clear. He’s got a step. The ball in a long, elegant parabola descends to the outstretched hands of the receiver running in full stride. He’s got it, got it, the hands reaching out and folding the football so thoughtfully into the safe, sweet folds of the jersey, now falling over the goal line with the defensive back on his shoulders, swatting too late at the ball tucked in and out of reach, both of them sprawling and sliding on the end zone turf. Referee with arms in the air. Touchdown!

Knew they could do it. Excellent play-action call. Great, great catch.

Is it enough? Are they safe now? The whole thing feels anomalous to me.

Are you kidding? Up ten in the third quarter. Never enough for this team. Give me a forty-four-point lead, and I’ll relax. A little.

I know. Porous defense.

Cold beer. Get your cold beer.

Lorca looks back at the area of the sky where he saw the puzzling flight of something that seemed to defy gravity.

Cold beer, cold on the lips, mouth, sliding down the throat with hard swallows.

Wow. What vivid testimony. Yeah, I’ll take one. Over here.

I’d like to breathe here if you don’t mind.

Just hold it a second. Sorry. Just let me reach those beautiful beers.

Sit down. Down in front.

All right, all right. Take it easy. Patience is a virtue. A higher virtue to some.

Football rising end over end, descending in the end zone to the waiting back. With an acceleration that stops the heart, he moves diagonally and directly upfield through a crease in the coverage. Watch it, get him, he’s gone. The deafening sound again of the crowd, the pitch flattening to an unceasing groan. On your feet shouting, "Get him." A saving ankle tackle at the home side forty-yard line, collective relief with two thoughts uttered across the stadium: Should have squibbed the kick. Don’t they know anything about his speed? Should’ve kicked it in the stands, even better.

Can’t take much more of this.

Defense. Do they even know the word? Get a dictionary.

Laughter from another part of their seating area. Bunch of academics up there.

So what. Show some respect.

We will if you just have a little faith.

Faith. Yes, this team needs faith, and hope and charity also. And religion.

And a defensive coach.

We need Buddy Ryan out there. Booooooo.

I’ll take Rob, thank you.

Look at that. Number Forty-One, a true freshman out on the field. To block on the kickoff, for God’s sake. Do they know what they’re doing? Eligibility used up for special teams play.

Football kicked off low, knuckleball batted by the downfield back. Players converge swiftly on the loose ball. Referee signals possession for receiving team.

Dodged a bullet there for sure.

Running play. Injury timeout, player on his back staying there while team moves back to huddle. A stretcher is taken out on the field, and the player is carried off, waving his hand weakly to light applause from the crowd.

Air is stale in this stadium. Thick with humidity. Even without a dome cover, global warming is here and now. We’re being cooked in an open-air skillet.

What do you expect in a stadium with almost eighty thousand people?

I expect oxygen.

Dream on.

I’ve got to piss.

Be more explicit, will you?

Do you want something from the food stand? Get it for you right after I piss.

No, no, just go.

Excuse me please. Have to get through here.

Shuffling, hopping, holding on to the shoulders of strangers, on the aisle for the quick run up the stairs to the exit, to the men’s room, where men stand urinating into a long metal trough that stretches around the entire room. Strong smell of piss everywhere in the room. Relief as bladder empties. Wash tips of fingers with cold water, dry with paper towels, crush and throw into wastebasket. The aisle outside is dense with people walking, standing in line for food and drinks, watching an overhead color TV that shows the game in progress on the field. Clear throat, swallow, buy beer from a vendor hawking his product along the wall. Too warm but wet and reasonably sharp on the taste buds.

Let me by here please. Lorca sits down. Did I miss anything?

Seven touchdowns, three fumbles, twelve field goals.

Fuck off.

One score, a touchdown, by the opponents. Then nothing, up and down the field. We’re now in the fourth quarter.

Up by three.

Yes, that reasonably follows.

You noticed.

Shouting. Pursue a scorched earth policy.

I don’t think they resonate with that.

And I care?

Wait, look. This is going to be a pass. Watch and see.

On the field a spiral bullet hits the hands of the left flanker with two linebackers closing, ball tumbling out to the turf. Incomplete pass. Catch the goddamn ball. The net behind the goal post is raised like a perforated flag.

Let me guess. They’re thinking field goal.

A soft thunk from the field as the kicker’s foot sends the football flat between the goal posts, the interior lights in the stadium catching the shine on the ball for one luminescent instant as it hits the net. Two referees raise their arms simultaneously.

Ugly but three, now up by the breathless gap of six points. Hold them, defense.

Just run out the clock, please.

Time out on the field. The university band begins playing a ritual song, melody driven forward by drums and cymbals in a rising beat, rhythm all linear in one direction, no interruptions. A line of cheerleaders dances to the music, hips moving in and out, side to side, hair shaking over shoulders. A balloon bursts two rows down.

How symbolic.

Too cute. Let it go. Do not try for the insightful comment.

Time in on the field. The fullback for the visiting team breaks two tackles and lumbers for seventeen yards with a cornerback hanging on his shoulders.

Are we outgunned or what?

I think we’ve become diminutive in the fourth quarter.

The visiting team is halted and punts the ball to the home team’s thirty-yard line.

Gridlock, we want gridlock.

You sound like a pansy Republican, you know, and anyway we have the ball.

Just run out the clock, please.

Successive running plays take the ball up to the forty-third-yard line. Then the signature play, quarterback option with the tailback trailing, a fake into the line by the quarterback who turns and starts to toss the ball to the trailing back. But a blitzing linebacker gets a hand on his arm, and the ball is flipped loose behind the tailback. It is on the ground with players diving on it, on each other. Then a player breaks free with the ball, running toward the home team’s goal line. It is the free safety from the visiting team, and the quarterback finally catches him from behind, the tackle deep and very near the goal line. The referee, running with the play, calls the ball dead. Possession to the visiting team on the home team’s six-yard line with eighteen seconds left in the game.

Holy shit. Is this possible?

The quarterback comes slowly up to the line of scrimmage, with the crowd in a deafening frenzy. He scans the defensive alignment and then shouts coded instructions to his right and then to his left.

He’s calling an audible. It’s going to be a reverse. Lorca stands up and shouts at the field. A reverse! Watch the flanker!

The quarterback takes the hike and turns around to hand off the ball to the right flanker, who has come back on a reverse. The flanker gets the ball from the quarterback in a seamless handoff and dives into the line. Fumble. Home team recovers.

Ahhh. I just love the critical fumble by the opposing team.

"Hasta la vista, baby."

Are you ever old fashioned with that phrase.

The clichés work so well in sports. So ugly but still a win, and a win is a win.

And finally the team listened to you, right?

The team leaves the field, jubilant. The coaches embrace one another, offer condolences, handshakes to the opposing coaches. The crowd slowly files out of the stadium. On the street the cool late afternoon breeze signals an early fall.

Go for a coffee, Paul, or what?

No, thanks. I have to go home for dinner.

Next week then.

Yes. No. I’m leaving for London on that weekend. Let me know if you can use the tickets.

I’ll call you on Monday. Maybe lunch.

Sounds good.

Lorca walks on the crowded sidewalks and then more desolate side streets toward his car. The walk conjures memories of those magical evenings when he walked home from Oktoberfests, Halloween in particular, with one of his daughters on his shoulders, the leaves blowing across the hard, black tar of the streets. He also can’t stop thinking about the strange figure in the sky, descending and ascending on a windless day without motorized assistance. What was this creature? And how many times do we see something anomalous in the sky and blow it off, assimilating it to the conventional forms of strange occurrences, mysteries to be marked but never explained? An absorption that I’m doing now, Lorca thinks.

He zips up his windbreaker as he turns the corner of the first block and sees the yellow lights of the parking garage midway up the street. Behind a window in a house on his right, a toddler grimaces and smiles, smiles too broadly and vacantly for the comfort of the viewer. Lorca unlocks his car and enters the line of traffic edging away from the stadium. The lights around the top of the stadium gleam amber against the sky as he negotiates the car down the hill and under the overpass, slowly making his way toward the ramp to the bypass that will take him to the turnpike leading directly to his street.

At a traffic light, Lorca sees his wife, Janet, drive by in a Mercedes. He stares at the car as it moves away from him down the street in the opposite direction. He knows they do not own a Mercedes and the woman he has seen in the car cannot be his wife. When the light turns green, he drives toward his home.

*   *   *

The front lights of his home are on when he turns into the drive, even though light from the setting sun still illuminates most of the houses. As he opens the front door, his wife comes over and kisses him.

Paul. They’ve lost Jeff from across the street. The Farringtons.

Where is Sandra?

She’s back. She was out with the family, searching for him all afternoon.

Lorca puts his newspaper on the dining room table and sits down on the sofa in the living room. He takes off his shoes.

And Rachel?

She called. She’s still with her friends from last night’s concert. She’s fine, going to spend tonight with them also, though she sounds a little tired.

Have the Farringtons called the police?

Just now, finally. They were hoping all afternoon that he would turn up.

Dumb.

Lorca sees a flashing red light as a police vehicle stops across the street. He slips his feet back into his shoes and goes outside. A small group of adults and children has gathered around the police cruiser.

We haven’t seen him since late morning. It is the mother of the missing child speaking to one of the officers. Her eyes are wide and drawn.

All right. Let’s just go inside so I can ask you some questions. The officer takes her by the arm and leads her into her house. Lorca hears the assuring words before they move inside. He’ll show up. Bet on it.

The other officer is addressing the group that has gathered. Do any of you know whether Jeff has done this before? Does he sometimes play a game like this?

The children in the group volunteer information.

Yeah, sometimes he does this.

But we all looked everywhere for him.

Lorca walks down the street. Lights are on in most of the houses. Through one of the windows, Lorca sees a television set with the evening news on the screen. The reporter’s mouth moves silently. In a house farther down the street, a woman folds pillowcases at an upstairs window. Lorca takes a deep breath of the evening air. It is cool, dry. He misses his windbreaker. At the last house on the street, the one owned by a corporate lawyer, several couples are standing on a deck at the side and rear of the house. A man with a golf club demonstrates a swing to another man, who is holding a drink.

Lorca crosses over to the line of houses perpendicular to his own street and slips quietly between two of them over to the community park directly behind the residences. He stands at the tree line, listening to the slight wind high through the leaves. The darkness of the wooded areas offers a pattern of undefined shapes.

A man calls from one of the houses. Is anybody there?

Lorca glances around quickly and sees that a tree is between him and the house, shielding him from the calling party. He stands still, his entire body motionless.

A woman’s voice. I know I heard something, Ben.

It’s nothing. Come on.

Sound of a door closing.

Lorca drops to a kneeling position. There is no sound but tree leaves moving in the evening breeze and the steady whine of crickets. He reaches down and touches the grass. A medium-size stone is under his hand. He feels his lips start to form a smile in the darkness. He picks up the stone and moves slowly toward the house from which the voices came. When he has a clear shot, he throws the stone in a high arc, turning to run just as he hears it crash against the metal grill on the rear deck. He follows the bicycle path through the woods, running as fast as he dares in the darkness. Once he slips and slides across some mud on his left side.

Madness, he thinks. Associate professor of cultural anthropology arrested for vandalism, destroying private property, terrorizing the middle class.

He gets up, laughing. In the distance, he can see the houses on the other side of the park. He limps toward them, emerging from the woods in what he hopes looks like a jogger’s stride.

Hi, Mr. Lorca. The girl is one of Sandra’s friends. She is straddling a bicycle.

Oh, hi. How are you?

Have they found Jeff yet?

No, I don’t think so.

Lorca walks away. He finds the street that can take him around the park and walks the several blocks back to his house.

His wife greets him inside the door. Where the hell have you been? We had to start dinner.

Hello, Dad. Sandra is at the table, eating the dinner his wife prepared.

Lorca kisses his daughter on her forehead. Just decided to run a bit.

What happened to your jeans?

Slipped and fell obviously. I’ll change upstairs and be right down.

At the kitchen table, eating with his wife and daughter, Lorca looks at his wife. She smiles briefly at him. What? she asks.

Nothing. You. I love you.

She shakes her head. Amused.

Sandra looks at her parents. Talk about embarrassing.

Lorca feels himself drift mentally. He tries to see the scene in front of him from a detached perspective. In the subdued lighting of their kitchen, his wife, a woman with a lithe, attractive body, strides across the floor to get some fresh drinking glasses. Her movements are athletic, graceful, sexual. When she jerks her head back to shift her hair off her forehead, she seems filled with a kind of physical energy. Her legs shift under her skirt as she takes a cigarette from a newly purchased pack and lights it. She draws deeply and then exhales the smoke with her head tilted ever so slightly back.

You’re not supposed to be smoking, Mom.

Yes, Mom, Lorca adds.

Sorry for my weaknesses.

Lorca conjures another set of images. His wife’s eyes are suddenly deep red. Brown eyelashes flick up and down like the shutter of a camera. Under the light covering of face powder, her skin is tight on the cheekbones, marked by microscopic indentations. Deeper yet, past the covering of the skin, Lorca knows the skull moves in blunt, fluid motions as Janet removes the cigarette from her mouth and stubs it out on an ashtray.

After dinner he reads slowly in his study, unable to concentrate on the philosophical arguments he is studying. Each one is a different interpretation of Newcomb’s problem, a paradox expressing difficulties in joining human reasoning to the domain of an omniscient God. Lorca’s attention wanders. Much of the time he thinks about Jeff and where he is this evening, right now. As if on cue, he hears voices out front. When he goes to one of the front windows, he sees a second police cruiser, this one on the front lawn of his neighbor’s house across the street, the house where Jeff lives. One of the rear doors opens, and Jeff steps out.

Lorca slips quietly down the carpeted stairs and goes out into his front yard. Jeff’s mother is hugging her son, her sobs conveying a deep relief to all the spectators who have gathered at the parents’ home. Lorca hears Jeff, who has both hands buried stiffly in the back pockets of his jeans, tell his father that he lost track of time and that he has been playing carpet golf with friends all afternoon and evening at a place across the street from the Fairland shopping center. As Lorca turns back to his house, he recalls that particular shopping center as a drawing card for thrifty middle-class weekend shoppers. Lorca enters his home and suddenly has an uncontrollable shiver from the damp evening air outside. He returns to his study and puts on a light sweater.

When Sandra comes to kiss him good night, he closes his books and walks with her to her bedroom.

I’m coming to bed with you tonight, Lorca tells his wife as he returns to their bedroom.

Marvelous. Is Sandra asleep?

Well, she told me earlier that she’s exhausted. I just walked her to bed. So maybe in a few minutes? Place your bets on the table. Las Vegas is waiting. Lorca cannot help smiling at this sequence of events, with a found and returned child thrown into the mix of varying night schedules and lovemaking appointments.

Is everything a joke for you tonight? Janet asks him.

Lorca flips his hand in what he hopes is a benign gesture to dismiss his wife’s comment. Then he turns back. Did you hear? Jeff showed up. He was with some friends playing carpet golf and just forgot to call.

All day?

So he says.

In their bedroom Lorca moves over to an open window that overlooks one of their side yards. The white curtains at the edges of the window are moving in the breeze, like a setting in a novel that relies disproportionately on mood and atmosphere. He moves the curtains completely aside and looks out. Light from the house in back, across the backyard, glows in the lower part of the scene directly in front of him. Night shadows obscure the edges of the houses, though still distinct.

Lorca breathes deeply and thinks of his chest as a balloon, one made of a permeable membrane, through which everything in the world can pass—all information, all thought. He turns to the bed. His wife watches him. Her body seems orange in the amber glow of the streetlamp outside. She nods at him. You are a good man.

He turns back to the window. I’ll only be a minute more. In the house across the lawn, someone has turned on a white halogen lamp in a living room partially shielded by translucent curtains on the window. A woman moves slowly across the room. Lorca cannot identify her.

Every house looks mysterious, enchanting, Paul, from a window in one’s own home.

In their bed he puts his arms around his wife and begins rubbing her back. She does the same to him so that it is as if he were an extended self, gratifying different parts of some complex physical whole. She rests one of her hands on his ribs.

Don’t tickle, he says. In response he can feel the hand move almost imperceptibly across his rib cage.

If you tickle me, I’ll have a seizure. Cerebral.

You will not.

Okay, I’ll just splinter into microdots. And celebrate the antierotic.

You’re such a drama queen.

I warn you, I’m leaving.

Where will you go?

The downstairs bedroom where I’ll be safe from assaults.

She gently strokes his face, shifting the mood. You’re safe here.

He moves his hands over the familiar places of his wife’s body. The room is warm. No trace of the cool night air can be felt here on the bed.

Does love give lovers second sight? he muses aloud.

Don’t talk. Go about your business.

As they slowly engage one another, Lorca touches his wife’s face with affection. When he turns his head briefly to the side at what sounds like a shoe dropping on the hardwood floor, he glimpses a shadow in their bedroom closet, unmoving, configured like a person, a private observer quietly absorbing selected experiences.

It’s nothing, Lorca thinks. Just clothes on hangers. Nothing. Yet as he enters deeper into their lovemaking, he feels an attendant thrill from the possibility that there may be someone watching them.

At one point in their movements, Lorca tries to separate who he is from what he is doing, to break away his identity, his sense of self, from the rhythms of his body, of his wife’s body. He recalls Newton’s first law of motion, that a body at rest or in motion will remain that way unless acted upon by an outside force. Memories from physics class in the act of love. He almost laughs aloud. Yes. The force of gravity between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

But the inertia of sensations finally dominates laws of motion, space, time, love. Nothing matters to Lorca now but their sexual movements. He slides his hands under the one joined to him so he can press her closer when he climaxes. The orgasm is preceded by his wife folding her body around him as she murmurs into his ear—coarse, brief, sweet as a moral plea—the one word Paul Lorca is prepared to say is magic.

Come.

Come together, come with me, come again, come and be finished so true sleep can come at last.

3

T he first part in the series of strange days that shift the trajectory of Stacey’s life begins with a phone call. Late one evening, fourteen months into her postdoc fellowship in biochemistry and just minutes after Stacey falls asleep, her cell phone rings.

She has just started to dream about leaving a party somewhere in Greenwich Village. It is late at night, and she is on the street with people she seems to know only in this dream. Two other people join her, a man and a woman, the three of them making a kind of group looking for a way to get back uptown. There are others across the street on the sidewalk. They wear overcoats and brown trousers splattered with mud. They seem to be walking in a kind of cadence, in slow motion. Stacey says, Why don’t we split a cab? and the woman says something friendly, something mildly funny and intimate in an odd accent. Then the phone rings.

At first Stacey thinks it is the apartment phone and gropes, still half asleep, past objects on the night table to find the receiver. When she discovers it, a dial tone greets her.

Hello. She gets out of bed and finds the cell on her dresser. Hello?

A male voice responds, Hello, is this Dr. Stacey Manning?

Who is this? Stacey replies.

Dr. Manning, the man repeats.

Do you like repetition? she asks the caller. Yes, this is Manning, yes (thinking now of the final epiphanies of yeses at the end of Ulysses). Now, who is this? When she thinks of this melodramatic and comic moment later, the start of the conversation that led her to the cloning projects, she realizes she was seconds from hanging up the phone and returning to sleep.

You don’t know me, Dr. Manning. I am a member of a group interested in your work. I wonder if we could meet for lunch tomorrow.

What group? And who are you? Stacey is now fully awake.

It would be easier if we could talk over lunch.

"I’m sorry. With all apologies, but this sounds like the beginnings