couéism (1923)—–Psychology fad inspired by Dr. Emile Coué, a French psychologist and the author of Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion. Coué’s method of self-improvement consisted of knotting a piece of string and reciting over and over, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Died out when it became apparent no one was.

Scientific breakthroughs have been triggered by the most minor of events: the sight of bathwater rising, the movement of a breeze, the pressure of a foot on a step. I had never heard of one being triggered by a kiss, though.

But it was a kiss that had the full weight of five weeks of chaotic turbulence behind it, shifting patterns of thought out of their accustomed positions, stirring up the variables, separating and mixing them again into new conjunctions, new possibilities. And when Ben had put his arms around me, it had been like the discovery of penicillin and the benzene ring and the Big Bang all rolled into one. Eureka to the tenth power. Like coming to the source of the Nile.

“This FLIP thing, where you met him,” the waitress was saying, “is it like a recovery group?”

“Discovery,” I said, staring transfixed after Ben, wondering how I could have been so blind. It was all so clear: what triggered fads and how scientific breakthroughs happen and why we had won the Niebnitz Grant.

“Can anybody join this FLIP?” the waitress said. “I’m already in a latte recovery group, but there aren’t any cute guys in it.”

“I need my check,” I said, fishing a twenty out of my purse and handing it to her so I could go back to HiTek and get all this on the computer.

“He already paid,” she said, trying to hand me back the twenty.

“Keep it,” I said, and grinned at her as something else hit me. “We’re rich. We won the Niebnitz Grant!”

I hurried back to HiTek and up to the stats lab, and called up my hair-bobbing model.

Suppose fads were a form of self-organized criticality arising out of the chaotic system of the popular culture. And suppose that, like other chaotic systems, they were influenced by a bellwether. The independence of women, Irene Castle, outdoor sports, rebellion against the war, all of those would simply be variables in the system. They would require a catalyst, a butterfly to set them in motion.

I focused in on the bump in Marydale, Ohio. Suppose that wasn’t a statistical anomaly. Suppose there’d been a girl in Marydale, Ohio, a girl just like everybody else, with flapping galoshes and rouged knees, indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little hungrier. A little ahead of the flock. A girl who had had a crush on a dentist on the other side of town and had walked into the barbershop and, with no idea she was starting a fad, that she was crystallizing chaos into criticality, told the barber to cut off her hair.

I called up the rest of the twenties data and asked for geographical breakdowns, and there was the anomaly again, for rolled-down stockings and the crossword puzzle, right over Marydale. And for the shimmy, even though the dance had originated in New York. But it hadn’t become a fad until a bobbed-haired girl in Marydale, Ohio, had picked it up. A girl like Flip. A butterfly. A bellwether. The source of the Nile.

I called up the paintbox and traced the course of events at HiTek again, from Flip’s misdelivering Dr. Turnbull’s package to her fiddling with the latch on the gate, but this time I also fed in Led On by Fate and the bread pudding, Management’s sensitivity exercises, the duct tape, Elaine’s exercises, Shirl’s smoking, Sarah’s boyfriend, Romantic Bride Barbie, and the various skill levels of caffe latte.

All the variables I could think of and every one of Flip’s actions, irrelevant or not, all of them feeding back into the system, adding turbulence, and leading not, as I’d thought after the sensitivity exercise, to disaster, but to the Niebnitz Grant, to love and to geographic compatibility and the source of hair-bobbing. To a new, higher state of equilibrium.

Flip had felt itch, and as a result I had told Billy Ray I’d go out with him, and he’d said he felt itch, too, and told me about the sheep, which I’d thought of when Flip lost Ben’s funding form.

Flip. Her footprints, like Barbie’s sharp little high heels, like the echoes of Pippa’s voice, were all over the crime scene. She had told Ben I was engaged to Billy Ray, she had failed to copy pages 29 through 41, she had taught the bellwether to open the gate, she had told Management about Shirl’s smoking, upping the level of chaos each time, mixing and separating the variables.

The screen filled with lines. I connected them, feeding in the iteration equations, and the lines became a tangle, the tangle a knot. The lost stapler, Browning’s “Pied Piper,” Billy Ray’s cellular phone, po-mo pink. Flip had circulated a nonsmoking petition and Shirl had ended up out in the parking lot in a blizzard and I took her down to Ben’s lab and she watched Ben and me struggle with the sheep and said, “You need a bellwether.”

The screen went dark, layer on layer of events feeding back into each other, and then sprang suddenly into a new design. A beautiful, elaborate structure, vivid with radical red and cerulean blue.

Self-organized criticality. Scientific breakthrough.

I sat and looked at it for a while, marveling at its simplicity and thinking about Flip. I had been wrong. The i on her forehead didn’t stand for incompetence or itch. Or even influence. It stood for inspiration. And she was Pippa after all, only instead of singing she was stirring up the variables, upping the level of chaos with every petition and misdelivered package until the system went critical.

I also thought about penicillin and Alexander Fleming, with his crowded, too-small lab, heaped with piles of moldy petri dishes. The institute he worked in had been right in the middle of chaos—half a block from Paddington Station on a noisy street. Add in the vacation and the August heat and the new research assistant he had had to make room for, and all those tributary details like his father and the rifle team. And water polo. At school he’d been on a team that played a water polo match against St. Mary’s Hospital. Three years later, when he was getting ready to go to medical school, he picked St. Mary’s because he remembered the name.

Add in that, and the soot and the open window of the lab above, and you had a real mess. Or did you?

David Wilson had called the discovery of penicillin “Quite one of the luckiest accidents that ever occurred in nature.” But was it? Or was it a scientific discovery waiting to happen, a system so chaotic that all it would take to push it over the edge into self-organized criticality was a spore, drifting in through an open window like Pippa’s song?

Poincaré had believed creative thought was a process of inducing inner chaos to achieve a higher level of equilibrium. But did it have to be inner?

I saved everything to disk, stuck it in my pocket, and went down to Bio.

“I need to know something,” I asked Ben. “Your bellwether chaos theory. Did you figure it out little by little or did it hit you all at once?”

He frowned. “Both. I’d been thinking about Verhoest and his X factor, and that maybe he was right, and I started trying to think what form another factor might take.”

“And that’s when the apple hit you on the head?”

He shook his head. “Alicia came in to tell me her research showed the next Niebnitz Grant recipient would be a radio astronomer and that Management had called another meeting, and then we had the sensitivity hug and for a couple of days after that all I could think about was you and how you were engaged to that cowboy.”

“Ostrich rancher,” I corrected. “For a couple of weeks, at least. So the ideas were in there percolating, but do you remember what it was that put it all together?”

“You did,” he said. “The sheep were milling around in the hall outside of Management, and you said, ‘Flip did this. I know it,’ and Shirl said she wasn’t there, and you said, ‘I don’t care. Somehow she’s behind this.’ And I thought, No, she isn’t. The bellwether is. And I remembered Flip leaning on the paddock gate, flipping the lock up and down, and I thought, The bellwether must have learned how to open it from her, and led the rest of the sheep into this chaos.

“And it hit me, just like that. Bellwethers cause chaos. They’re the unseen factor.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I have to go find something. Just what I thought. You’re wonderful. Be right back.” I kissed him for inspiration, and went to find Flip.

I had forgotten she’d quit. “Three days ago,” Elaine in Personnel said. She was wearing a pair of Cerenkhov blue Rollerblades. “In-in-line skating,” she said, raising her leg to demonstrate. “It gives a much better full-body workout than wall-walking, and it helps you get around the office faster. Did you hear about Sarah and her boyfriend?”

“They broke up?” I said.

“No. They got married!”

I pondered the implications of that, “Did Flip leave a forwarding address?” I asked. “Or say where she was going?”

She shook her head. “She said to give her check to Desiderata down in Supply and she’d send it on to her.”

“Can I see her file?”

“Personnel records are confidential,” she said, suddenly businesslike.

“Call Management and ask them,” I said. “Tell them it’s me.”

She did. “Management said to give you anything you want,” she said bemusedly, hanging up. “Do you want the whole file?”

“Just her previous work record.”

She skated over to the file cabinet, got it, and skated over to me, executing a neat toe stop.

It was what I’d expected. Flip had worked at a coffeehouse in Seattle, and before that at a Burger King in L.A. “Thanks,” I said, handing it back to her, and then thought of something else. “Let me see her file a minute.” I opened it and glanced at the top line, where it said “full name, last, first, middle initial.”

“Orliotti,” it said. “Phihppa J.”