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“Antarctic Models of Induced Nephokinesis,” he read. This was the branch of meteorological engineering he was concerned with in his own researches—in fact, it was the very title he had chosen for his dissertation. Beneath this, Dr. Frank J. Kemp’s name was printed, and then the name Satis House—an academic vanity press in Ann Arbor; Levine had seen its discreet advertisement in the back pages of the Journal of Applied Meteorology . The date of publication was given, to his astonishment, as 1970, almost twenty years before Levine had had even the dimmest notion of the potential power of Antarctic models—a notion that, despite all his ascetic labor over the past year and a half, remained only partly elucidated. It was a radical conception of nephokinesis even today, and in 1970 sufficiently heterodox, no doubt, to have prevented Kemp from publishing his theory by any other means than paying for it himself.
    Levine turned the page and saw that Dr. Kemp had, with a precision that struck Levine as tragic and fine, dedicated his work to the beloved memory of his wife, Jean, 21 May 1900–21 May 1969. Levine imagined the sorrowing, hairless scientist, slumped in a chair beside his wife’s hospital bed on a spring day in 1969, his head filled with polar wind. Levine was literally horrified—the hairs on the back of his neck stood erect—at the ignoble fate that had befallen the widower’s theory. It was like the horror he had felt, a few weeks earlier, when he had come across the row of bookshelves in the graduate library where the bound dissertations were kept—a thousand white surnames inscribed on a thousand uncracked blue spines, like the grim face of a monument. It was a horror of death, of the doom that awaited all his efforts, and it was this horror, more than anything else—he really was only a few months from finishing—that determined him to commit the mortal sin of Academe.
    I had been browsing among the Drama shelves, looking for a copy of anything by Mehmet Monsour, the fashionable Franco-Egyptian theater guru, who was currently serving as guru-in-residence at the university’s School of Drama. I was at the beginning of an affair with a guru-prone would-be actress named Jewel, and I had come with Levine to Long Beach only in the hope of finding something that would please her; Levine had been irritable, paranoiac, and unwashed for the past several months, and in general, I confess, I tried to avoid him. When I found nothing at all Franco-Egyptian in the Drama section I went to find Levine, who had said something about going for lunch to a local taqueria that served goat. It was the sort of thing one did with Levine, and I was halfway looking forward to it.
    “Levine,” I said, “let’s go get those tacos.” He was slouching against a fire extinguisher at the back of the store, completely absorbed in his reading, eyeglasses slipped down his nose, his mouth open. He suffered from a deviated septum and was a chronic mouth breather. His lank red hair covered one eye. He seemed unpleasantly surprised by what he was reading, as if it were a friend’s diary.
    “What’s that?” I said.
    Levine looked up, his face first blank, then irritated; he had forgotten where he was, and with whom, and why.
    “That book,” I said, with a nod. “You look fascinated. You look scared.”
    With a sigh Levine stared down at the black book, and bit his lip. “It’s going to be my dissertation,” he said. “Once I retype it.”
    “You’re going to plagiarize it?”
    “I’m going to rescue it,” he said. “It and myself.”
    “Is it on the same subject? There are other books on Antarctic models of induced nephokinesis?”
    Embarrassed, afraid that I must disapprove of him, he nodded his head. Then, with the childish look of apology he wore when at his most abject—he always looked this way around Betty—he opened the book to its fly and held it out to me.
    “It’s only seventy-five cents,” he