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last step in this new data-collection phase. Next he would have to conduct field studies, which meant triggering the condition in people whose brains showed latent possibilities for it and then waiting to see if the drug he had developed to control the condition was effective.
    Two years earlier they had moved into human trials prematurely, with disastrous results. Sunil tried not to think about that time. But he was worried about this new phase of testing.
    To be really sure the serum worked, the more advanced stage of testing would have to be conducted outside laboratory conditions—in the real world, so to speak. There was no exit strategy, and neither were there real controls in place to limit the damage. As Brewster said, To see if the product works, we have to see it work.
    I’m going away in a few days, Sheila said, changing the subject. This will be my first holiday in five years.
    Good for you, Sunil said.
    You should get away too, she said.
    I do need a break.
    Come with me?
    You’re going to Cape Town, aren’t you? I have no interest in going back there. There I’m just a black man.
    I thought it was here that you were just a black man, Sheila said.
    As black as I am, I am also Indian. Not half, not part, but in equal whole measures. In the new South Africa, there is no room for complications like me. I know there’s no real room in the U.S. for the kind of complication I present either, but at least it’s big enough to give the illusion that there is. And you, Sunil asked.
    And me what?
    How much of you has been tainted and fucked up by the racism here? Is that why you dress like a white soft-rock singer from the eighties, he asked.
    I’m not sure. I think I’m just a nerd who thinks she looked her best back in the eighties. I think that it’s more about being a woman that preoccupies me, she said. You know, the cost of the extensive education I’ve had, the demands of the work I do, the expectations I have for myself and also for a partner, all these concern me more than race.
    You think these things isolate you, as a woman? Lead to a lonelier life?
    Of course they do. There are just fewer men in the world who want or can deal with a black woman like me; even fewer that I want.
    Funny, I didn’t even think about that, Sunil said.
    Never thought about me as a woman?
    I mean, Sunil began, but stopped.
    Yeah, well, it’s different for women, Sheila said. Time and all that.
    Yes, time and all that, Sunil echoed.
    Trying to clear the air, she asked: So—seeing anyone?
    It’s complicated, Sunil said.
    It always is, Sheila said.
    Sunil smiled. He crossed the room and refilled his cup, pausing to inhale the fragrant, woody smell. He loved this blend—all wet forest leaves and warm hearth fires. Sheila watched him.
    I’m sorry, he said, catching her look. Would you like some coffee?
    She shook her head. No, I don’t want to be up all night.
    Right, he said, of course.
    When you were a child, did you imagine your life would ever turn out the way it did? I didn’t. I don’t really know what I expected, what I thought it would be like. It’s elusive, like the fragment of a song, or a smell or even a taste, all of which come upon me in the least expected places at the least expected times, she said.
    I know what you mean, he said. The smell of pipe tobacco and rain will always remind me of my father, of long drives in a car, none of which are mine or true. Yet sometimes the memory is so visceral it makes me want to cry. And it feels like I know what’s missing but then it’s gone.
    In my case, I know exactly what’s missing, she said.
    You do?
    And then he caught that look in her eye. The one he’d seen so many times. The one she had when she thought he wasn’t looking. And he loved it, the look, the feeling it gave him, like he could fall into it and be in love. But he was already in love, with Asia. And though it made no