rubik’s cube (1980—81)—–Game fad involving a cube made up of smaller cubes of different colors that could be rotated to form different combinations. The object of the game (which more than a hundred million people tried to solve) was to twist the sides of the cube until each side was a solid color. The fad’s skill threshold was somewhat too high—as witness the dozens of puzzle-help books published—and the fad died out with many people never having solved it even once.

Lorraine was back. “Do you want Your Guardian Angel Can Change Your Life?” she asked me. She was wearing a fairy godmother sweatshirt and sparkly magic wand earrings. “It came in, and so did your book on hair-bobbing.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “I don’t know what caused it, and I don’t care.”

“We found that book on Browning. You had checked it in after all. Our media organization assistant shelved it with the cookbooks.”

See, I told myself—walking over to Kepler’s Quark and giving my first name to a waitress with chopped-off hair and a waitress uniform that probably wasn’t a uniform—things are looking up already. They found Browning, you never have to read the personals again, and Flip can’t slouch in here to ruin your day and stick you with the check.

The waitress seated me at a table by the window. See, I told myself again, she didn’t seat you at the communal table. She isn’t wearing duct tape. Definitely looking up.

But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like I was out of a job. It felt like I was in love with somebody who didn’t love me back.

He’s totally fashion-impaired, I told myself. Look on the bright side. You no longer have to worry about what caused hair-bobbing. Which was a good thing, because I was pretty much out of ideas.

“Hi,” Ben said, sitting down across from me.

“What are you doing here?” I said as soon as I was able to. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I quit,” he said.

“You quit? Why? I thought you were going to work on Dr. Turnbull’s project.”

“You mean Alicia’s statistically-thought-out, science-on-demand, sure-to-win-the-Niebnitz-Grant project? It’s too late. The Niebnitz Grant has already been awarded.”

He didn’t look upset about it. He didn’t look like somebody who’d just quit his job. He looked containedly excited, his eyes jubilant behind the Coke bottles. He’s going to tell me he’s engaged to Alicia, I thought.

“Who won it?” I said, to stop him. “The Niebnitz Grant. A thirty-eight-year-old designed experimenter from west of the Mississippi?”

Ben motioned the waitress over and said, “What have you got to drink that’s not coffee?”

The waitress rolled her eyes. “There’s our new drink. The Chinatasse. It’s the latest thing.”

“Two Chinatasses,” he said, and I waited for the waitress to quiz him on whole vs. skim, white vs. brown, Beijing vs. Guangzhou, but Chinatasses apparently had a lower skill threshold than caffe latte. The waitress slouched off, and Ben said, “This came for you,” and handed me a letter.

“How did you know where to find me?” I said, looking at the envelope. It was blank except for my name.

“Flip told me,” he said.

“I thought she was gone.”

“She told me a while back. She said you hung out here a lot. I came here three or four times, hoping I’d run into you, but I never did. She said you came here looking for guys in the personals.”

“Flip,” I said, shaking my head. “I was reading them for trends research. I wasn’t trying … you did?”

He nodded, no longer jubilant. His gray eyes were serious behind the Coke-bottle glasses. “I stopped coming a couple of weeks ago because Flip told me you were engaged to the sheep guy.”

“Ostrich,” I said. “Flip told me you were crazy about Alicia, that that’s why you wanted to work with her.”

“Well, at least now we know what the i on her forehead stands for. Interfering. I don’t want to work with Alicia. I want to work with you.”

“I’m not engaged to the sheep guy,” I said. I thought of something. “Why did you buy that Cerenkhov blue tie?”

“To impress you. Flip told me you’d never go out with me unless I got some new clothes, and this awful blue was the only thing I could find in the stores.” He looked sheepish. “I also took out an ad in the personals.”

“You did? What did it say?”

“Insecure, ill-dressed chaos theorist desires intelligent, insightful, incandescent trends researcher. Must be SC.” “SC?”

“Scientifically compatible.” He grinned. “People do crazy things when they’re in love.”

“Like borrow a flock of sheep to keep somebody from losing their grant?”

The waitress plunked down two glasses in front of us, spilling Chinatasse everywhere.

“We need those to go,” Ben said.

The waitress sighed loudly and stomped off with them.

“If we’re going to be working together,” Ben said to me, “we’d better get started.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We both quit, remember?”

“Well, the thing is, HiTek wants us back.”

“They do?”

“All is forgiven.” He nodded. “They say we can have anything we need—lab space, assistants, computers.”

“But what about the sheep and the secondhand smoke?”

“Open the letter.”

I did.

“Read it.”

I did. “I don’t understand,” I said.

I turned the letter over. There wasn’t anything on the back. I looked at the envelope again. It still only had my name on it. I looked at Ben, who looked jubilant again. “I don’t understand,” I said again.

“Me neither,” he said. “Alicia was there when I opened mine. She had to recalculate all her percentages.”

I read the letter again. “We won the Niebnitz Grant?”

“We won the Niebnitz Grant.”

“But … we aren’t … we don’t …”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he said, leaning across the table and, finally, taking my hand. “I had this idea. You know how I told you chaotic systems could be predicted by measuring all the variables and calculating the iteration? Well, I think Verhoest was right after all. There is another factor at work. But it’s not an outside factor. It’s something already in the system. Remember how Shirl said the bellwether was the same as the other sheep, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little ahead? What if—”

“—instead of butterflies, there’s a bellwether in chaotic systems?” I said.

“Exactly.” He was holding both my hands now. “And it doesn’t look any different from the other variables in the system, but it’s the trigger for the iteration, it’s the catalyst, it’s—”

“Pippa,” I said, clutching his hands. “There’s this poem, Pippa Passes, by—”

“Browning,” he said. “She sings at people’s windows—”

“And changes their lives, and they never even see her. If you were making a computer model of the village of Asolo, you wouldn’t even put her in it, but she’s—”

“—the variable that sets the butterfly’s wings in motion, the force behind the iteration, the trigger behind the trigger, the factor that causes—”

“—women to bob their hair in Hong Kong.”

“Exactly. The trigger that causes your fads. The—”

“—source of the Nile.”

The waitress came back with the same two glasses. “We don’t have cups to go. It pollutes the environment.” She set the glasses down and stomped off again.

“Like Flip,” Ben said, thinking about it. “She misdelivered the package, and that’s how I met you.”

“Among other things,” I said, and felt that feeling again of being on the verge of something, of the Rubik’s cube starting to turn.

“Let’s go,” Ben said. “I want to see what happens when I add the bellwether into my chaos theory data.”

“Wait—I want to drink my Chinatasse, in case it’s the next fad. And there’s something else … You didn’t give HiTek our decision yet, did you, about staying?”

He shook his head. “I thought you’d want to be there.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t tell them no yet. There’s something I want to check on.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back at HiTek in a few minutes then,” he said. “Okay?” and went out.

“Umm,” I said, trying to catch the thought I’d had before. Something about trains, or was it buses? And something the waitress had said.

I took a thoughtful sip of the Chinatasse, and if I needed a sign that chaos was reattaining equilibrium at a new and higher level, this was it. It was the Earth Mother’s wonderful spiced iced tea.

Which should inspire me if anything could. But I couldn’t capture the thought The idea that I should have gone back with Ben kept intruding, and that, except for that sensitivity exercise, and some incidental hand-holding, he had never touched me.

And apparently there was some kind of feedback loop operating in our system because he was back and pushing past the waitress, who wanted to write his name down, and through the tables and pulling me to my feet. And kissing me.

“Okay,” he said, when we pulled apart.

“Okay,” I said breathlessly.

“Wow!” the waitress said. “Did you meet him in the personals?”

“No,” I said, wishing she would shut up and that Ben would kiss me again. “Through Flip.”

“We were introduced by a bellwether,” Ben said, putting his arms around me again.

“Wow!” the waitress said.