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October.
    â€œI’ll bet we’re all having the same thought right now,” said Rupert before we went out to dinner.
    â€œWhat if Dr. Onslo’s quarter had come up heads?” said Melvin, nodding. “What if we’d devised arguments favoring the Phobosians instead? What then?”
    â€œThat branch of the reality tree will remain forever hidden from us,” said Annie.
    â€œI think it’s entirely possible the Deimosians would’ve thrown down their arms,” said Valerie.
    â€œSo do I,” said Melvin. “Assuming our arguments were plausible.”
    â€œKnow what I think?” said Rupert. “I think we all just got very lucky.”
    Did we merely get lucky? Hard to say. But I do know one thing. In two weeks the New York Philharmonic will perform a fully orchestrated version of “Materialist Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor” at Lincoln Center, which miraculously survived the war, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

THE WISDOM OF THE SKIN
    E VEN AS I HAULED his shivering body from the river and dragged it onto the pier, examining his ancient face as a numismatist might scrutinize a rare coin, I did not recognize him. He was supposed to be dead, after all—killed along with his wife when their rental Citroen transmuted into a fireball following its collision with a concrete wall in Florence. Not until he’d stopped wheezing, lifted his head, and placed a kiss of gratitude on my cheek did I understand that the newspaper accounts of his incineration were false. This was surely Bruno Pearl. I’d been privileged to rescue the genius who’d given his audiences Sphinx Recumbent, Flowering Judas, and a dozen other masterpieces of copulation.
    Just as musical comedy eclipsed operetta—just as silent movies killed vaudeville, talkies usurped the silents, and television reduced radio drama to a prolix mockery of itself—so did the coming of the Siemanns plasmajector spell the demise of the sex artists, whose achievements today survive largely in the memories of aging aficionados. I shall always regret that I never saw a live concert. How enthralling it must have been to enter a public park during the last century knowing that you might witness a pair of high-wire sensualists, avant-garde couplers, or Viennese orgasmeisters. It was an age of giants. Sara and Jaspar. Quentin and Alessandra. Roger and Dominic. The anonymous Phantoms of Delight. Teresa and Gaston, also known as the Portions of Eternity. Marge and Annette, who styled themselves Enchanted Equinox. You might even find yourself in the legendary presence of Bruno and Mina Pearl.
    During my student days at the New England School of Art and Design, I was shrewd enough to take Aesthetics 101, “Metaphysics of the Physical,” taught by the benignly fanatical Nikolai Vertankowski. Thanks to Vertankowski’s extensive collection of pirate videos and bootleg DVD’s, his students experienced tantalizing intimations of the medium that Bruno Pearl and his wife took to such dazzling heights. We learned of the couple’s chance meeting at the audition for Trevor Paisley’s defiant presentation of Oedipus Rex (it began with Antigone’s conception), as well as their early struggles on the eros circuit and their eventual celebrity. At the height of the lovers’ fame nobody came close to matching their carnal sorcery, their lubricious magic, that bewitchment for which there is no name. Vertankowski also taught us about Bruno and Mina’s uncanny and unaccountable decline: the inexplicable fact that, when their Citroen exploded, they had not given a memorable performance in over two years.
    Throughout the work week I cross the Hudson twice a day, riding the ferry back and forth between the unfocused city of Hoboken, where I live, and the cavernous reaches of lower Manhattan, where I work. A decade ago my independent film company, Kaleidoscope Productions, received an