Factoring Humanity

But, dammit, it was now after midnight, and she could barely keep her eyes open -

— meaning, of course, that she’d just keep rematerializing the damned construct around her.

It was too late even to get a subway, and also probably too late to be walking the streets alone. She called a cab and then made her way down to the wide concrete steps in front of Sid Smith to wait for it.

22

Heather sat alone eating breakfast the next day. Despite being dog tired, she still hadn’t slept well, and her dreams had been almost as bizarre as what she’d seen inside the construct.

And now as she sat eating, her mind turned to more mundane concerns. The dining-room table had seemed large with all four of them seated around it; now, with just her, it seemed gigantic.

Heather was eating scrambled eggs and toast.

She and Kyle used to talk constantly over breakfast — about the petty politics of their respective departments, about funding cuts, about troublesome students, about their research.

And, of course, about their kids.

But Mary was dead. And Becky wasn’t talking to them.

The silence was deafening.

Maybe she should call Kyle up — invite him to come to dinner tonight.

But no — no, that wouldn’t do. To try to carry on polite conversation would be a sham. Heather knew it, and she didn’t doubt that Kyle did as well. No matter what the topic, he would have to be thinking about the accusation, and he would know that she must be thinking about it, too.

Heather stabbed her fork into her scrambled eggs. She was angry — that much she was sure of. But at whom? Kyle? If he was guilty she was more than angry — she was furious, betrayed, murderous. And if he wasn’t guilty then she was furious with Becky and Becky’s therapist.

Of course, Lydia Gurdjieff had clearly manipulated the situation. But had she actually implanted memories? Certainly the things she’d suggested couldn’t be true in Heather’s case.

And yet -

And yet, so much of it rang true. Not the exact details, of course, but the concept.

Heather was empty inside. A part of her was dead — and had been dead for as long as she could remember.

And besides, just because Gurdjieff’s technique had been leading, it didn’t mean that no abuse had ever happened to Heather’s daughters. She’d been thinking of Ron Goldman’s anger again, and that brought back the Simpson case; just because the cops had tried to frame O.J. didn’t mean he hadn’t actually committed murder.

As she brought some toast to her mouth, she realized with a start that her anger wasn’t conditional.

She was furious with Becky regardless of whether or not Kyle was guilty. Becky had turned their lives upside down.

It was a terrible thing to think — but ignorance had indeed been bliss.

Heather was rapidly losing her appetite. Damn it, why had this happened to them? To her?

She put down her cutlery and picked up her plate. Then she walked into the kitchen and scraped her breakfast into the garbage bag beneath the sink.

Heather got to the university an hour later. When she entered her office, she found the theatrical lights were off — unplugged actually, since they had no switches.

The damned cleaning staff. Who’d have thought they worked after midnight?

The construct sat in ruins, its panels having separated without benefit of the structural-integrity field.

Whether it had fallen apart while the cleaners were still present or had collapsed later in the night, there was no way to tell. Heather’s heart was racing.

She dropped her purse on the carpet and hurried over to the heap of panels. One of the panels had lost a dozen tiles where it had hit the floor. Thank God Paul had had the foresight to number them; she managed to snap them back into place in short order. She then reassembled the construct. It collapsed once more; it was hard to keep the pieces together. But at last she managed it. She walked gingerly across the room, lest her footfalls send it tumbling again. She fumbled the plugs back into the sockets and heard the surge protector on her desktop computer shriek as she did so. And then she watched in relief and wonder as the construct visibly pulled itself together, all of its angles becoming square.

Heather checked her watch. There was a departmental meeting at two — not that much of the faculty was around in the summer, but that would just make her absence all the more obvious.

She was eager to continue exploring. She wrote two notes in Magic Marker telling the cleaning staff not to turn off the lamps. She stuck the first note on one of the lamp stands (low enough that there was no chance of the light igniting it) and the second directly beside the outlet into which both lamps were plugged.