"You undervalue yourself, Susan. The public worships you."

"Adam?"

"He approached each of the cast members of the old Facts ofLife show before you, and none of them wanted to do it. So hechose you instead."

"Oh. So I'm now retro?"

"If being retro and hotis a crime, you're in jail, Susan. In jailwith John Travolta, Patty Hearst, Chet Baker and Rick Schroeder."

Susan made the movie, and enjoyed herself well enough, butafterward was again unoccupied, which was worse than before, because she'd tasted work again. Chris was off-tour, and in the house much of the time. He and Susan fought all day, both reel-ing with disbelief that they were bonded to each other.

Susaneventually moved into Dreama's place, where incense burnedincessantly, and where Dreama's numerology clients barged intothe bathroom to ask Susan if a 5 9 should date a 443. Betweenher pitifully small savings and her monthly income, she had justenough to rent a tiny Cape Cod house on Prestwick.

As Dynamite Bay's 1996 release neared, Susan began doingpress. She was in New York doing an interview with Regis andKathy Lee. It was familiar, and this time she loved it. Chris finallygot his green card and the two agreed to divorce after the moviehad run its cycle. The movie fared reasonably well, but led to nonew offers. At the hotel in New York, before leaving for JFK, Su-san spoke with Dreama, who reminded her about an upcomingdinner at the house of a mutual friend named Chin. Dreama was going to bring Susan a new set of numbers to help her make fu-ture decisions.

Susan felt rudderless. The harmless nonsense of Dreama's numbers made as little sense to her as anything else. On the wayto the airport, Susan asked the car driver to pull over at a delijust before the Midtown Tunnel, where she popped out andbought some trail mix, bottled water and a Newsweek. She hadmentally entered the world of air travel, and put her brain intoneutral, not expecting to have to use it again until Los Angeles.

Chapter Twenty-nine.

Vanessa dissected her first brain one hour before she learned thecorrect technique for making a moist, fluffy omelet. It was inthe tenth grade at Calvin Coolidge High School, Franklin Lakes, Bergen County, New Jersey. She was in biology cla.s.s, where stu-dents were divided into groups of four, each a.s.signed a pig.They were told to stockpile their observations, and then after-ward the cla.s.s would discuss brains.

Vanessa had been given her own brain. In the Bergen County School system, Vanessa was al-ways being given a brain to herself. It wasn't so much that shewas a round peg in a square hole-it was more that she was aticking brown-wrapped parcel in an airport waiting lounge.Treat Vanessa Humboldt differently.

Vanessa dissected her pig's brain quickly, with a forensicspeed and grace that chilled her teacher, Mr.

Lanark. Next camehome ec, in which Mrs. Juliard demonstrated for the cla.s.s theproper way to whip eggs, pour them into a b.u.t.tered nonstickpan (medium-low heat) and use a Teflon spatula to gently lift up the edges of the nascent omelet to allow the runny egg on top to trickle underneath and cook. Once done, the eggy diskwas folded over onto itself and presto, "a neat-to-eat breakfast-time treat."

The students followed Mrs. Juliard's technique. Near the end of Vanessa's omelet creation cycle, as she folded the egg overonto itself, her life was cut in two.

Vanessa stood in home ec,undoing the fold, and then folding it again over onto itself indifferent ways. The other students finished their omelets, atethem or disposed of them, according to their level of eating disorder, and prepared to leave, but Vanessa stood rapt. Her cla.s.smates were students who'd known Vanessa since day care, who'd seen her reject Barbies, hair scrunchies, Duran Duran andsundry girlhood manias of the era, opting instead for Com-modore 64's, Game Boys and the construction of geodesic domes from bamboo satay skewers. They giggled at her.

"Vanessa, honey-you're not angry or anything, are you?"asked Mrs. Juliard, who, like most of Vanessa's teachers sincekindergarten, trod on eggsh.e.l.ls around her. They feared an un-determined future torture that would subtly but irrevocably bedealt them should they in any way displease this brilliant Mar- tian girl.

As for Vanessa, she looked upon high school as a numbing,slow-motion prison, to be endured only because her depress-ingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make any ef-fort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permither to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of funand sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the CoolidgeGators football team. They viewed Vanessa'a intelligence as anact of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only forits students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.

But all of this was different now, because of her omelet.

"Vanessa? Are you okay, honey?"

Vanessa looked at Mrs. Juliard. "Yes. Thank you. Yes." Shelooked at her dirty utensils. "I'll wash up now."

She skipped her next cla.s.s and waited until noon, sitting on aradiator near the cafeteria. She knew n.o.body would ask VanessaHumboldt if anything was wrong for fear that the responsecould only complicate their lives.

The noon bell rang. She waited five minutes, then walkedthrough the staff area into the faculty room, where teacherswere lighting up cigarettes and removing lunch from Tupper-ware containers and the microwave oven. The vice princ.i.p.al, Mr.Scagliari said, "Vanessa-this room is off limits to-" but hewas cut short.

"Can it, Mr. Scagliari."

Voices simmered down and then stopped. A student in thefaculty room was still, in late 1980s New Jersey, a rarity.

Vanessa was straightforward with them, as though she were informing them about a transmission that needed fluid chang-ing, or the proper method for planting peas. She said that shewas leaving school that afternoon, and that she was probably ashappy to be gone as they would be to have her out of there. She stated what the staff had known all along, that she could ace any graduation test they could throw her way, including SATs andLSATs. She also said she would be contacting the American CivilLiberties Union, the local TV and print media, and that shewould locate a hungry, glory-starved lawyer to do her dealings. She had $35,000 in savings stashed away from waitressing andplaying the horses and could easily support such a gesture.

The staff masked their surprise with pleasant faces. Shesounded so reasonable.

Vanessa went on to say that contacting her parents wouldn'tgain them much ground, as they were more concerned abouther prom dress than her future ambitions. In her own head shewas already at Princeton and Calvin Coolidge High School wasonly a bad dream after a strong curry.

She walked out the front doors and over to the parking lot, where she got into the battered Honda Civic she'd paid for her-self and put her plan into operation.

Within a month she wasout of the Bergen County school system, and accepted at Prince-ton for the next fall in a joint mathematics-computer scienceprogram. But as she drove home that afternoon, Vanessa thoughtof eggs and she thought of brains. She wondered how it wasthat maybe twenty thousand years ago human beings didn'texist-and yet suddenly, around the globe, there appeared ana-tomically modern people capable of speech, language, agricul-ture, bureaucracy, armies, animal husbandry and increasingly arcane technologies dependent on refined metals, precise tools of measurement and elaborate theoretical principles.

It all had to do with the brain-which upon dissection struckVanessa as a large flat gooey sheet of omelet elaborately foldedover onto itself into the gray clumpen hemisphere. Vanessa haddecided that twenty thousand years ago the human brain de-cided to fold itself over one more time, and it was that singleextra fold that empowered brains to create the modern world.So simple. So elegant. And it also helped to explain why Vanessawas such a freakazoid, so cosmically beyond the others in her school.

Vanessa realized that her brain had made the next fold-that she, in some definite and origamilike way, represented thenext evolutionary step of h.o.m.o sapiens-h.o.m.o transcendens-andthat her goal in life was to seek out fellow h.o.m.o transcendens andwith them form colonies that would bring Earth into a new golden age.

At Princeton she encountered fellow advanced humanoidsand she no longer felt so alone. But she was disappointed to dis-cover that such petty failings as jealousy, political infighting,fragile egos and social inept.i.tude were just as prominent amongher new colleagues as they were among the old. Phil fromthe Superstrings Theory group was a pig. Jerome the structurallinguist was a pedantic bore who lied about meeting NoamChomsky. Teddy the quark king was a misogynist. Vanessa cor-rectly surmised that her life needed balance, and one polarafternoon, when ducking into an arts building for a dash ofheat, she attended a surprisingly enlightening lecture on the Ab-stract Expressionist paint dribblers. From this lecture she de-cided that balance in her life would come from the arts, and thatfellowh.o.m.o transcendens must surely await her in that arena.

She sought out any artistic gesture that proposed human evo-lution beyond h.o.m.o suburbia. She attended The Rocky Horror PictureShow at midnight screenings for two years running, dressed as Susan Sarandon, which left her with a lifelong yen for midwest-ern twin-set outfits. She read sci-fi. She tried joining Mensa butwas turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted todiscuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms.

Half a year before graduation, a dozen companies battled to employ Vanessa, but she chose the Rand Corporation becausethey were in Santa Monica, California, close to Hollywood andwhat could only be a surplus of advanced geniuses. She was notabove movies-they were the one genuinely novel art form of the twentieth century.

Her work in California was pleasure, and at night she wentout into the coffee bars of Los Angeles, meeting dozens ofyoung men with goatees and multiple unfinished screenplays. Some were smart and some were cute, and some were quick to charm, but it was Ryan, three years later, whom she deigned to be the first other member of the new species. She found himby accident late one night, at West Side Video after an eveningof hmming and uh-huhing her way through another round of goatees-with-screenplays. She was returning a copy of an ob-scure but technically interesting early eighties doc.u.mentary, Koyaonisqatsi, and muttered, more to herself than to anybodynearby, that the film's repet.i.tive minimalist soundtrack didn't induce the alpha-state high she'd read about.

"Oh, then you'll have to listen to it again, but you have towatch it at a proper theater, and it will work, you know. You'll reach alpha every time."

"You did?"

"Well, yes. That's one of my favorite films."

Vanessa spoke with pleasure. "I liked it, too, but . . ."

"Oh, you know-you have to see it on a big screen. Youreally do. Maybe I'm being too forthright here, but let me askyou this-would you come with me tomorrow night? There's anine-thirty showing of Koyaanisqatsi at the NuArt. If you camehere at eight, we could eat something vegetarian beforehand.

You are vegetarian, aren't you? I mean, your skin. . . ."

There was a weighted pause in which emotion and optionsblossomed before them like time-lapse flowers.

And they were off. They went toKoyaonisqatsi the next night.They went to more movies. Vegetarians, they refused to eat any food that might have tried to resist capture. Ryan was a screen-writer and woodworker, and he was the only Hollywood writerVanessa had yet encountered who didn't feel as if the worldowed him both a Taj Mahal and a large clear rotating lottery b.a.l.l.stuffed with fluttering residual checks. "Tungaska" was genius.Vanessa twinged with the urgency felt throughout the ages byall women who have struggled to put their loved ones throughmed school or its equivalent. Vanessa was determined to be theone who discovered him, who pollinated his talents and sup-ported him during his rise.

Then one night she snuck into the video store and foundRyan entwining his signature into that of her own.

She felt sureit must be love. She had a few doubts about him-his SusanColgate worship, his Caesar hairdo and his underwear, which looked not merely freshly laundered but freshly removed fromthe box.

But no one whom she found tolerable had ever enjoyedher company before.

"Vanny look-it's a Cla.s.s 3 electrical substation with" (gasp)"a WPA bas-relief on the doors. Pull over!"

They were on theway to a Hal Hartley re-release Ryan insisted they not miss.Ryan let Vanessa drive.

Their children would be magnificent.

Chapter Thirty.

The morning after John, Vanessa and Ryan had their numbersread by Dreama, John sat on a towel outside the guesthouse and bombarded Vanessa and Ryan with phone calls. It was an effortto spur progress in the hunt for Susan. On John's fourth call toVanessa's office, her patience was taxed.

"John, I could get fired if the company learned I was usingtheir system to track down two nut cases across south centralWyoming."

"So they're still in Wyoming?"

"Three hundred miles west of Cheyenne, pa.s.sing through . . .at this moment . . . Table Rock, Wyoming."

John then phoned Ryan and grilled him about Susan's historyin Wyoming.

"Susan's mother returned to Wyoming after Susan left TV ButSusan's originally from Oregon."

"So her mother may be in Wyoming, then?"

"She was a few years ago, back when Susan recovered from her amnesia."

"Amnesia-pffft." John sounded disgusted. "Amnesia's bulls.h.i.t,Ryan. It's only a movie device."

"Either way, n.o.body knows where she went for that year. Forthat matter, where did you go when you dropped out of sight,John? You've still never told me."" I went nowhere."

"Brush me, Daddy-O. Jack Kerouac, man!"

" No-Ryan-you know where I went? I really went nowhere. Iate out of dumpsters. I slept under bridges. I traipsed around theSouthwest and got gum disease and my skin turned into pigleather and I didn't learn a G.o.ddam thing."

John hung up. He mulled the morning's information overand became convinced the key to the mystery of Susan's where-abouts lay in finding Marilyn. He phoned Vanessa and ran thisidea past her.

"John, the LAPD tried locating Susan's mother and theycouldn't find her. And besides, Susan and her mother hateeach other. I've had two solid years of Sue Colgate trivia driz-zled onto my brain. I've had to drive Ryan to the twenty-four-hour Pay-Less at two-thirtya.m. to buy two-sided mountingtape for his shrine. I've been forced to watch Meet the Blooms re-runs on tape instead of going to chick flicks since around thedeath of grunge. Sure, I know all that stuff I pulled out of data-bases. But I know the tabloid stuff, too, and Sue Colgate hates hermother."

A neighbor's leaf blower turned off and John marveled athow quickly the world became silent. He walked back insidethe house with the cordless phone. "Vanessa, please. Wherever themother is, we'll find Susan. You know it, don't you, Vanessa?"Vanessa didn't answer. "I know you know it, Vanessa.

You're theprofessional finder, not me." He sat down on a couch andwatched sun break through woven slots in the curtain, like acheap hotel in Reno back in the seventies. An unwashed dish inJohn's sink settled with a clank. John took a breath.

"You're smart, Vanessa. You're pretty. You could easily pa.s.s asa human being if you wanted to. It gives you a kick to foolthe others. But I'm worried about Susan Colgate, and I'mworried about her in a way I haven't been worried about anything before. You may not be worried, but I know you care. Iknow you do."

Vanessa was quiet a moment and then said, "Okay."

John sighed and looked at the ridges in his fingernails as hecontinued. "Susan. s.h.i.t-she's been around the G.o.ddam blockso many G.o.ddam times that it makes me cry. And yet there sheis, still this glorious creature."

The sun went behind a eucalyptus tree and John's room be-came cool and gray. He could hear the leaves rustle behind himand through the phone line he could hear occasional officenoises from Vanessa's end.

"I need you to help me, Vanessa. You're my agent of mercy.My oracle. You may be a s.p.a.ce alien, but you're a good s.p.a.cealien. Superman was a s.p.a.ce alien, too. And this afternoon-thisis the chance fate's throwing your way to replace that uraniumheart of yours with blood."

Someone called Vanessa from across the office. She calledback, "In a second, Mel." John could hear her breathe. Vanessasaid, "Her name's Marilyn, right?"

"Yes.

John went outside and lay back and basked in the sun. Thiswas his first real solar exposure since the day he was sick inFlagstaff.

Ryan phoned him. "John, how'd you get Vanessa to agree todo an MSP?"

"A what?"

"I have to call Vanessa. I'll call you right back." Both menspeed-dialed Vanessa, but Ryan got to her first. John's body be-gan to throb with curiosity, with an urge to know that felt likean urge for s.e.x. He walked back inside the guesthouse, picked at a piece of cold pizza in the fridge and tossed some Chinese foodflyers into the trash.The phone rang. Vanessa said, "So I see that Number 11 hasgone and blabbed about the MSP."

"Not really," said John. "But you know what? Here's myguess. You and your egghead palsy-walsies have some scarynew gizmo that can locate a lost hamster from outer s.p.a.ce. Am Icorrect?"

"You're a smart one. Meet me for lunch at the Ivy by the Sea.I don't want to leave Santa Monica. Use your big macho cloutand get a table for three."

John was there early, then Vanessa arrived. They were sur-rounded by chattering dishes, tinkling gla.s.ses, car noises andseagulls screeching outside. Both were slightly twitchy withtheir own worries.

Vanessa was speaking her thoughts aloud. "I'm going to lose my job if I get caught. What am I saying? I will get caught. It's only a matter of how many minutes beforethey catch me."

"Caught doing what, Vanessa?"

"You'll find out soon enough." She made a tetrahedron ofcutlery, using the tines of her forks to join a spoon and a knife.John knew she wanted to ask him something, and he was right."John . . ."

"Yes, Vanessa?"

"Do you think I'm-"she took a big gulp of breath-"cold?"

"What? Oh Jesus, Vanessa, please don't go taking me too seri-ously. It's not a good idea."

"Don't flatter yourself, John. But I mean it. Do you think thatI'm capable of -."

"Of what?"

Vanessa blushed. "This is so embarra.s.sing. Okay, I'll say it: ofbeing loved." Vanessa looked as if she'd suddenly discovered shewas naked in public.

"Yeah, of course you are, Vanessa. But-"

"But what?" Vanessa's voice expressed weakness for the firsttime John had noticed.

"You're lovable, Vanessa." John tried to think of how tophrase what he said next. "But you've gotta rip your chestopen and expose your heart to the open air, let it get sun-burned, and that's b.l.o.o.d.y scary." He bit an ice cube. "Even still,most people seem to do it automatically. But you and I-itmakes us balk."

"And . . . ?"