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attraction between us, despite the fact that we could have been locked in a closet for seven hours and nothing would have happened, maybe, for some reason, Jacob is trying to seduce me. Out of nostalgia for Ilan. Or as consolation for the turn in his career. Was I really up for dealing with a desperate man?
    Or was I, in my dusty way, passing up the opportunity to be part of an idea that would, as Jacob had said, “bestride the world like a colossus”?
    *   *   *
    Early Saturday morning I found myself knocking on Jacob’s half-open door; this was when my world began to grow strange to me—strange and yet also familiar, as if my destiny had once been known to me and I had forgotten it incompletely. Jacob’s voice invited me in.
    I’d never been to his apartment before. It was tiny, and smelled of orange rinds, and had, incongruously, behind a futon, a chalkboard; also so many piles of papers and books that the apartment seemed more like the movie set for an intellectual’s rooms than like the real McCoy. I had once visited a ninety-one-year-old great-uncle who was still conducting research on fruit flies, and his apartment was cluttered with countless hand-stoppered jars of cloned fruit flies and also hot plates for preparing some sort of agar; that apartment was what Jacob’s brought to mind. I found myself doubting that Jacob truly had a wife and child, as he had so often claimed.
    “Thank God you’ve come,” Jacob said, emerging from what appeared to be a galley kitchen but may have been simply a closet. “I knew you’d be reliable, that at least.” And then, as if reading my mind: “Natasha sleeps in the loft we built. My wife and I sleep on the futon. Although yes, it’s not much for entertaining. But can I get you something? I have this tea that one of my students gave me, exceptional stuff from Japan, harvested at high altitude—”
    “Tea, great, yes,” I said. To my surprise, I was relieved that Jacob’s ego seemed to weather his miserable surroundings just fine. Also to my surprise I felt tenderly toward him. And toward the scent of old citrus.
    On the main table I noticed what looked like the ragtag remains of some Physics 101 lab experiments: rusted silver balls on different inclines, distressed balloons, a stained funnel, a markered flask, a calcium-speckled Bunsen burner, iron filings and sandpaper, large magnets, and yellow batteries likely bought from a Chinese immigrant on the subway. Did I have the vague feeling that “a strange traveler” might show up and tell “extravagant stories” over a meal of fresh rabbit? I did. I also considered that Jacob’s asking me to murder him had just been an old-fashioned suicidal plea for help.
    “Here, here.” Jacob brought me tea in a cracked porcelain cup.
    I thought, somewhat fondly, of Ilan’s old inscrutable poisoning jokes. “Thanks so much,” I said. I moved away from that table of hodgepodge and sat on Jacob’s futon.
    “Well,” Jacob said gently, also sitting down.
    “Yes, well.”
    “Well, well.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I’m not going to hit on you,” Jacob said.
    “Of course not. You’re not going to kiss my hand.”
    “No.”
    The tea tasted like damp cotton.
    Jacob rose and walked over to the table, spoke to me from across the compressed distance. “I presume that you learned what you could. From those scribblings of Ilan. Yes?”
    I conceded. Both that I had learned something and that I had not learned everything. That much was still a mystery to me.
    “But you understand, at least, that in situations approaching grandfather paradoxes very strange things can become the norm. Just as if someone running begins to approach the speed of light, he grows unfathomably heavy.” He paused. “Didn’t you find it odd that you found yourself lounging so much with me and Ilan? Didn’t it seem to beg explanation, how happy the three of us—”
    “It wasn’t strange,” I insisted. I was right almost by definition. It