On his way to the subway （another first-in-a-decade）， he paused at a lamppost feathered with paper flyers advertising lost pets and used furniture. A printed poster caught his eye: an on-campus lecture to be given by Miranda Kline, the anthropologist. Bix was deeply familiar with Miranda Kline, and she with him. He’d encountered her book, Patterns of Affinity, a year after forming Mandala, and its ideas had exploded in his mind like ink from a squid, and made him very rich. The fact that MK （as Kline was affectionately known in his world） deplored the uses Bix and his ilk had made of her theory only sharpened his fascination with her.
A handwritten flyer was stapled alongside the poster: “Let’s Talk! Asking Big Questions Across Disciplines in Plain Language.” An introductory meeting was scheduled to follow Kline’s lecture three weeks later. Bix felt a quickening at the coincidence. He took a picture of the poster and then, just for fun, tore off one of the paper tabs from the bottom of “Let’s Talk” and slipped it into his pocket, marveling at the fact that, even in the new world he’d helped to make, people still taped pages to lampposts.
2
Three weeks later, he found himself on the eighth floor of one of those stately, faded apartment buildings around Columbia University—possibly the very one he’d admired from below. The apartment bore a pleasing resemblance to what Bix had imagined: worn parquet floors, smudged white moldings, framed engravings and small sculptures （the hosts were art history professors） hanging on the walls and over doorways, tucked among rows of books.
Apart from the hosts and one other couple, all eight “Let’s Talk” attendees were strangers to one another. Bix had decided to forgo Miranda Kline’s lecture （presuming he could have finagled entry）; her antipathy toward him made it seem wrong to attend, even in disguise. His disguise was “Walter Wade,” graduate student in electrical engineering—in other words, Bix himself, seventeen years ago. What gave him the chutzpah to pose as a graduate student all these years later was the confidence that he looked much younger at forty-one than most white people did. But he’d erred in assuming that the other discussion group members would be white: Portia, one of their art historian hosts, was Asian, and there was a Latina animal studies professor from Brazil. Rebecca Amari, the youngest, a PhD candidate in sociology （the only other student besides “Walter Wade”）， was ethnically ambiguous and, he suspected, Black—there’d been a twinge of recognition between them. Rebecca was also disarmingly pretty, a fact heightened, not muted, by her Dick Tracy eyeglasses.
Luckily, Bix had marshaled other tools of identity concealment. Online, he’d purchased a headscarf with dreadlocks emerging from the back. The price was exorbitant but the dreads looked and felt real, and their weight between his shoulder blades was like the touch of a ghost. He’d known that weight for many years, and liked having it back.
When everyone had settled onto couches and chairs and introduced themselves, Bix, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “So. What was she like, Miranda Kline?”
“Surprisingly funny,” said Ted Hollander, Portia’s art historian husband. He looked to be in his late fifties, a generation older than Portia. Their toddler daughter had already charged into the living room pursued by an undergraduate babysitter. “I thought she’d be dour, but she was almost playful.”
“What makes her dour is people stealing her ideas,” said Fern, dean of the women’s studies department and rather dour herself, Bix thought.
“People have used her ideas in ways she didn’t intend,” Ted said. “But I don’t think even Kline calls it theft.”
“She calls it ‘perversion,’ doesn’t she?” Rebecca asked tentatively.
“I was surprised by her beauty,” said Tessa, a young professor of dance whose husband, Cyril （mathematics）， was also in attendance. “Even at sixty.”
“Ahem,” Ted said good-naturedly. “Sixty isn’t so very ancient.”