Recursion(3)

The phone rings while she’s brushing her teeth. She spits, rinses, and catches the call on the fourth ring in her bedroom.

“How’s my girl?”

Her father’s voice always makes her smile.

“Hey, Dad.”

“I thought I’d missed you. I didn’t want to bother you at the lab.”

“No, it’s fine, what’s up?”

“Just thinking about you. Any word on your proposal?”

“Nothing yet.”

“I have a really good feeling it’s going to happen.”

“I don’t know. This is a tough town. Lots of competition. Lots of really smart people looking for money.”

“But not as smart as my girl.”

She can’t take any more of her father’s belief in her. Not on a morning like this, with the specter of failure looming large, sitting in a small, filthy bedroom of a blank-walled, undecorated house where she has not brought a single person in over a year.

“How’s the weather?” she asks to change the subject.

“Snowed last night. First of the season.”

“A lot?”

“Just an inch or two. But the mountains are white.”

She can picture them—the Front Range of the Rockies, the mountains of her childhood.

“How’s Mom?”

There’s the briefest pause.

“Your mother’s doing well.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

“How’s Mom?”

She hears him exhale slowly. “We’ve had better days.”

“Is she OK?”

“Yes. She’s upstairs sleeping right now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Last night, we played gin rummy after dinner, like we always do. And she just…she didn’t know the rules anymore. Sat at the kitchen table, staring at her cards, tears running down her face. We’ve been playing together for thirty years.”

She hears his hand cover the receiver.

He’s crying, a thousand miles away.

“Dad, I’m coming home.”

“No, Helena.”

“You need my help.”

“We have good support here. We’re going to the doctor this afternoon. If you want to help your mother, get your funding and build your chair.”

She doesn’t want to tell him, but the chair is still years away. Light-years away. It’s a dream, a mirage.

Her eyes fill with tears. “You know I’m doing this for her.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

For a moment, they’re both quiet, trying to cry without the other knowing, and failing miserably. She wants nothing more than to tell him it’s going to happen, but that would be a lie.

“I’m going to call when I get home tonight,” she says.

“OK.”

“Please tell Mom I love her.”

“I will. But she already knows.”



* * *





Four hours later, deep in the neuroscience building in Palo Alto, Helena is examining the image of a mouse’s memory of being afraid—fluorescently illuminated neurons interconnected by a spiderweb of synapses—when the stranger appears in her office doorway. She looks over the top of her monitor at a man dressed in chinos and a white T-shirt, with a smile several shades too bright.

“Helena Smith?” he asks.

“Yes?”

“I’m Jee-woon Chercover. Do you have a minute to speak with me?”

“This is a secure lab. You’re not supposed to be down here.”

“I apologize for the intrusion, but I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

She could ask him to leave, or call security. But he doesn’t look threatening.

“OK,” she says, and it suddenly dawns on her that this man is bearing witness to the hoarder’s dream that is her office—windowless, cramped, painted-over cinder-block walls, everything only made more claustrophobic by the bankers’ boxes stacked three feet high and two deep around her desk, filled with thousands of abstracts and articles. “Sorry about the mess. Let me get you a chair.”

“I got it.”

Jee-woon drags a folding chair over and takes a seat across from her, his eyes passing over the walls, which are nearly covered in high-resolution images of mouse memories and the neuronal firings of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.

“What can I do for you?” she asks.

“My employer is very taken with the memory portraiture article you published in Neuron.”

“Does your employer have a name?”

“Well, that depends.”

“On…?”

“How this conversation goes.”

“Why would I even have a conversation with someone when I don’t know who they’re speaking for?”

“Because your Stanford money runs out in six weeks.”

She raises an eyebrow.

He says, “My boss pays me very well to know everything about the people he finds interesting.”

“You do realize what you just said is totally creepy, right?”