a service. The department maintained a state of mourning

You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself,

It was in the midnight hours, when the mind fractured and things stopped making sense and the boundaries of the possible became fluid, that they did their best work.

If you went into the field for gold stars you were in for disappointment.

No, the point was the high of discovery. No one else understood—certainly not the ex, who went on to do something involving mortgages and making poor people poorer. How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts? That the

She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea.

…in the last year dreaming had become a threat to coherent subjectivity. Dreams were flying-carpet rides through loosely associated memories and Alice simply had too many of them; the routes multiplied infinite, all wish and no repression; in a split second her mind could go from innocent childhood memories to three-headed serpents writhing over

gathered around a creature—a deity, Alice saw, a giant with an elephantine

For this happened sometimes, all the time in fact; when she let her gaze go slack, then all sorts of things started creeping in at the edges, fantastic things: serpents with many heads; wolves devouring the sun. A friend studying neuroscience had told her once that eyesight was largely memory, that your brain saw a pattern and filled in the rest.

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn't afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life's work down the toilet. You shoved it to the