Was the universe cut from whole cloth, or was it a thing of shreds and patches? Everything in the universe was spinning, from inside an electron to the widest galaxy. When a black hole was spinning, it dragged space-time around with it. Know how an object moved, and you know about its size, its structure, even its life history. People originally believed that the moon was the only object in the sky that could spin. The one thing that didn’t seem to move was the universe. ‘Yoni-verse’ Biren called it, to Marwa’s endless annoyance, which was why, she knew, he always said it. Biren’s team’s Intel Fair project — Judy was on his team — worked on measuring cosmic rotation by looking for distortions in the faint glow of microwaves left over from the Big Bang. By the end of the 20th century, the best research showed no sign of cosmic motion. It looked like the ‘yoni-verse’ had completed no more than one-millionth of a revolution since it was born some 13.7 billion years ago. But wasn’t one-millionth’s worth of the rotation of the universe still sizable movement? Biren wished she hadn’t asked. He returned to the point he’d been trying to impress her with, that the ‘yoni-verse’ had been expanding at a rate that suddenly, five billion years ago, accelerated. Biren called it a ‘cosmic jerk’ and put up his palms in surrender before Marwa could tell him who the cosmic jerk really was. “I will ‘yoni’ you no more,” Biren said. “My mother calls that a snow vow,” Marwa said, “it melts inthe spring.” “Your mother is very wise,” Biren said, bowing. Marwa seriously wished that Biren would stop flirting with her, that Marcus would stop circling around her like a long-legged moth (a hideous image she hoped she would not see in a dream soon), and that this crazy spring weather, sunny one minute, hail the next, would calm down during the Intel Fair weekend in Brooklyn where the crocus were all abloom and daffodils at least six inches of green out of the ground. The Ides of March were just over; the Latin Club, of which Marwa was Vice President, had observed the annual ritual by marching around Stuyvesant High School, dressed in white sheet togas, carrying the closed coffin of Julius Caesar, and intoning Latin funeral dirges. As a freshman, when they had read Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR in English, it had been the Latin Club’s performance that had attracted her. Her mother had noted that it was a shame Stuyvesant didn’t offer Arabic along with or instead of one of eight languages (Judy took Japanese), but now, by the time Marwa was a junior, Arabic was in the works for the next year or the one after. Marwa was one third of the Intel team that included Marcus and Vivian Cheng. Marwa didn’t like Vivian, but she respected her. Marwa hated to admit to herself that they had a lot in common, including not being crazy about each other. But Vivian was her Taiwanese parents’ first American child, and she had an older and a younger brother. They also lived in Battery Park City, and Vivian’s father worked in investing although not at a bank like Marwa’s father. Vivian was shorter than Marwa, but not as short as Judy. Vivian understandably looked more Asian than Judy, but her skin was as dark as Marwa’s. She was also left-handed, as was Marcus. He was a tall, skinny, blue-eyed and curly dark-haired boy who lived on the Upper East Side. From kindergarten, he’d attended an uptown private school for boys. He had taken the entry exam for Stuyvesant secretly, impressing his father and appalling his mother. Marcus had argued with his father that he was following in his great grandfather’s Eastern European footsteps by seeking freedom: economic, political, and philosophical. According to the fiction his mother told her associates, she had chosen a Roman imprimatur for her only child, but in truth, she’d given him her maiden name and a bris. Marcus had also been bar mitzvahed in the year before he began at Stuyvesant, but both his parents had emphasized it was an ethnic, not religious, endeavor. They were both corporate lawyers in different firms. Marcus took Spanish, not Hebrew. Vivian Cheng was the smartest person her own age Marwa had ever known, which was one of the things she did not like about her. Vivian made no effort to compete, and she always came in first. Marwa always expected Vivian to correct her, which she did quite gracefully, and she was always right. Vivian had gotten a perfect SAT Verbal in eighth grade. She was taking Latin as well as Chinese (thankfully, she had no will to power and was not the Latin Club’s President). It rankled Marwa that Marcus thoroughly enjoyed Vivian’s remarkable vocabulary and rapid fire etymological histories of words. She was always the only one who knew a strange word in class, like ‘lucubrations’(late night studying or writing, as by candlelight), ‘ukases’ (from the Russian, an edict or order by the Czar, having the force of law), and the most recent, ‘jejune’ (unsatisfying to the mind), which had launched Vivian on a comic riff on Juno, “Since jejune derives from Latin jejunus, fasting, empty, dry, poor, maybe it originally arises out of lacking Juno, mother’s milk, meaning.” Vivian laughed (no one else did), so then she got serious and had to share more superior knowledge that in ancient Rome juno was the feminine equivalent for genius, both meaning the soul, “feminine and masculine, respectively. So I’d suggest,” Vivian again attempted humor to Marcus’s approval as the three team members arranged their Intel display in the university hall, “that geno means a homosexual soul, junius the lesbian soul, and,” Vivian sounded triumphant, “gee-June” really means the all-purpose soul of the transsexual!” Marcus laughed in that way boys did when a girl said anything even vaguely sexual. Marwa didn’t even smile. Vivian also had synesthesia to the same extent Marwa did, both of them more than Marcus who only had it a little. That was how they had become a team, interested in studying the neurological and genetic phenomenon. Through Judy’s dad, Dr. Why, who sat on his Chair in Neuroscience and worked on mathematical modeling of the scale-free network of the human brain especially focusing on the visual cortex (in short, eyesight), Marwa had gotten in touch with a former colleague of his uptown at Rockefeller University, a neurogeneticist working on the genetics of synesthesia. Marwa had liked the Greek woman scientist when she smiled as Marwa said, “Genes are like a library,” but had resented the greater approval Vivian received when she had said she was making genes her senior year Intel project, for which this junior year team was merely practice. Marwa had no idea what she’d do for her senior Intel. Marcus reassured her she’d be inspired by whatever summer program she got into. Another sore point, but Marcus tried to kid her out of her sour mood by singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Genome,” the Herskowitz song. It wasn’t working, and Marwa began listing causes for her irritability: the pressure of the Fair, Vivian, Marcus and Biren — well, of course, not sleeping well because of bad dreams, and admit it, preying on her was her startling cowardice the one time since Valentine’s Day when she’d seen Prix (pre-what, after all?). Marcus could see he was getting nowhere singing so he snapped, “Lighten freaking up, will you?” Marwa snapped back, reminding him of a real, shy admission he’d made to her a few days before when they’d been IMing, about being a guy meant that every morning was only a question of “when the gun would go off.” “How can you stand that?” Marwa typed and sent. “You bleed every month. How can you stand that?” At which point she had closed the IM. So now, Marwa scowled and made her hand into a gun-shaped curse, gesturing Marcus’s disgusting daily urges, and a coward again, she stalked away, reliving her humiliation: she had hidden from Prix and how golden he had looked, how blinding in her eyes like a migraine and her heart had started thudding so suddenly at the sight of him across the street coming toward the building lobby that she had run and hidden in the stairway hall behind the elevators to avoid his seeing her. Her heart seemed to have an extra beat in it as it pulsed to ‘OutVIRgin, OutVIRgin.’ It sounded sharp and metallic, like a saber, and her chest hurt. Vivian also starred in Fencing Club, on the saber. She ranked nationally. In the huge university hall, Marwa passed other schools’ displays. As she stormed by, she sarcastically acknowledged the main competitors from Bronx Science (“Sigh!” done with defeated, sagging shoulders) and Brooklyn Tech (A disgusted “Eck!”) as they recognized her Stuyvesant superiority with equal disdain (“Sty!”). The comradely ill will calmed and slowed her down. Her heart stopped thudding. What a thing of shreds and patches she was! As she crossed the high and wide space of the Polytechnic hall, Marwa passed the display of some sophomores from a Staten Island high school: Pangaea Earth, Past and Future their colorful banner unfurled over their booth. Before the continents had names, in giant red printout, – 250 Ma, (250 millions years ago) they’d huddled together, as if for warmth or to stay dry out of the otherwise Earthly blue, entirely ocean, a planet better named Oceania than Earth. The one huge landmass was named Pangaea, and the one gigantic, surrounding ocean Panthalassa. Marwa paused to look at their geological posters’ multimillenia, their nice graphwork, map legend explaining “Subduction Zone”, triangles pointing up and down in two dimensions like that unsettling three-dimensional, intersecting tetrahedron in Judy’s apartment, and even old globes on their table demonstrating admirable mathematical mapping adapted and seamlessly glued on. They were only sophs, they didn’t have a chance of winning, but maybe next year. And what about now, this year? Was it actually possible that she lived in the middle of Time’s favors? Was it actually possible that humanity was midway in size between quark and galaxy? Pangaea we had been before, and “Pangaea Ultima” we would form again 250 million years in the future (their bannered FUTURE WORLD + 250 Ma), heaving up different Himalayas, lowering different Death Valleys. To any sentient beings in the sci fi writer’s Upwhen (the future), how thoroughly unimportant to restore to any continent this tiny island of time, 2001? There were no words for her stupidity. Outvirgin, what a stupid word! Marwa was unfamiliar with feeling stupid. Being smart was like being born into an invisible aristocracy. One couldn’t take any credit for the genetic hand one had been dealt, but there was a noblesse oblige about it that demanded finesse in playing. When she was little, Marwa had become aware that grown ups would defer to her, listen to what she said or look at what she did without the patronizing accommodations she observed they used with other children. She knew that Sharif was jealous of her because he was both a boy and older, and until Joey had been born and everyone saw the same thing in him, Marwa had been Sharif’s usurper, the child that hopes were invested in. Even as she got older and being female was a recognized handicap, living in a culture where brawn really believed it outweighed birth and brains, Marwa had only experienced the suspicion and animosity, and the nasty insult names ‘geek’ and nerd’ as the equivalent of ‘majesty’ and ‘highness.’ Marwa knew the same Anglo Saxon root was expressed in ‘king’, ‘cunning’, and ‘cunt’. Poor Sharif, Marwa thought, when she finally breathed outdoors. It was warm enough to stand outside in the March sunshine in the Commons area although a sudden gust that sent litter into miniature tornadoes bit through Marwa’s light sweater. So this was where Sharif, he always said, “Took classes,” never “went to school.” Marwa had been in the Gifted Program in second grade; Sharif had never even qualified. He also never complained, Marwa realized, looking around at her older brother’s world. He was stolid and reliable and kind; Marwa thought he lacked energy but not feelings. In Far Rockaway, he had played basketball, and he was as tall as his black teammates, but he’d never seemed to care much about the game. Marwa didn’t think he’d ever bothered to play on the new courts in Battery Park City, and she didn’t even know if Brooklyn Polytechnic had a basketball team or if Sharif had considered going out for it. For the first time, Marwa realized that her brother hardly ever talked about what he did and where, and that was at least half because no one ever asked him. Why shouldn’t he prefer Alexandria where he was treated like a returning king to what Marwa called home where Sharif not only didn’t have his own room, he had to share a bunk bed with his seven year old brother? This was the second time in as many weeks that Marwa had run away and hidden and felt stupid. Why had she run away from Prix and now from Marcus? She was merely irritated about feeling stupid, but underneath that was the real fear she’d felt in the stairwell, even shutting her eyes tight and huddling on the bottom stair as if a murderer were after her. Emerson was right, it wasn’t Hamlet dissing Claudius, “the king’s a thing of shreds and patches,” “Man was a thing of shreds and patches and a misfit from the start.” So was Woman. So was Marwa. Pigeons and seagulls were pecking around the chained garbage baskets. There were fewer seagulls, but they were much bigger than the pigeons and more aggressive. The Stuyvesant Intel advisor, Mr. Spinelli, walked up behind her. He held her parka. “Coming or going?” he said. Marwa laughed. “I wish I knew.” “Don’t we all.” “Does it make any sense that all the planet’s above-ocean landmass would clump together like that, move apart 1 to 3 centimeters,” then, as if impatient with her mother, Marwa translated, “a half to four inches per year, arrange themselves thusly,” Marwa’s wave of her arm took in the concrete Polytechnic Commons and the entire planet,” and reclump, but in a different pattern, in another 250 million years? Does it?” “To clump or not to clump isn’t my department,” Mr. Spin paused. “What about Gondwanaland?” “Godwannaland?” Marwa said. “Gon-dwana-land,” Mr. Spin corrected. “I’m pretty sure that was before Pangaea clumped.” With his hands, he orchestrated the movement of continents, “They comes together, they comes apart, they comes together again, it’s like daisies, loves me, loves me not, loves me.” “You think it lands on ‘loves me?’” “The house doesn’t bet against itself.” Another Mr. Spin pause, then, “As they say in zero gravity, what’s up?” “Do they say that in zero gravity?” “How would I know? But I know it’s a lot of five days a week all of us getting up, working in my classroom an hour and a half before school starts, looking up the dark anus of Nature for light at the end of the tunnel, the westward route to the Orient, whatever the hell you’re all looking for –” Mr. Spin was one of the few teachers who could talk like this and never upset anyone. There was Neitzche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Mr. Sullivan’s Beyond PC, and then there was Mr. Spin, who’d been at Stuy “still before time immemorial.” But Marwa had seen photos of him in ancient yearbooks when John Spinelli’s head of now white wiry hair had been thicker and black. Most famous for his Bio class “Dance of the Sperm,” a rite of passage at Stuy, Mr. Spin demonstrated motility by spiraling around the classroom like a dervish, bouncing and bounding against lab tables, walls, any unfortunate student returning from the bathroom, and in a final crescendo, against the classroom door, as he yelled out, “Curses, foiled again!” and sank to the floor. Marwa looked at Mr. Spin’s tired face. He could be older than her grandfather in Alexandria. His young assistant Intel advisor, a black woman, like Marwa also taller than Mr. Spin, joined them. “How we doin’ out here?” she asked. “I just needed some air,” Marwa said. “We got air inside,” Mr. Spin said. “Come and breathe.” A whirling dervish. King David dancing ecstatically. Marwa sat in the thick carpet in Joey’s room and noticed his discarded baby’s toy, the clear plastic top, filled with big, colorful beads that popped about, making baby Joey scream with pleasure — now it was carefully displayed in one of the cubbies that framed his windows up to the ceiling soffit. Judy had already buzzed downstairs, and Joey had run into the living room to open the door for her. The Intel Fair had gone very well for Stuy; AP exams were weeks away. It was Saturday night, a lull. Joey didn’t let Marwa sing him lullabies anymore when she babysat for him, as tonight. Up until he was nearly four, he hadn’t realized she couldn’t carry a tune. Judy stood in Joey’s doorway, pulling off her hooded jacket and presenting from a capacious pocket the tape she’d brought for them to watch. She dropped LILI into Marwa’s lap and turned to examine a poster Joey ran to explain. “Whatcha got here?” Judy asked. “It’s rocks. It’s geology. Did you know there are three kinds of rocks?” “I may have at one time,” Judy went along. “Ig-nee-us, metta-MORE-fo-sis–” Marwa said, “–metamorphic–” Joey, impatient at being corrected, was nonetheless delighted to be encouraged to say something that sounded dirty, “Metta-more-FICK, and sedentary.” “Sedentary?” Judy said. Joey looked to Marwa. His head was covered with dark curls bigger than his big eyes. “Sedimentary,” Marwa said. “Sedimentary. Oh, yeah, sediment. What drops down from the water. Fish bones, et-cet-er-RAH.” Marwa stood up and took Judy’s coat from her. “Joey’s new word, ‘etcetera’.” “What’s your favorite kind of rock, then, Joseph?” Judy asked. At which point, Marwa dropped Judy’s jacket over Joey, covering him. He went right along with the spirit of the moment and collapsed to the floor under the imagined crushing weight. “MetamorFICK!” he yelled from underneath, “because it crushes limestone into marble!” The teenagers, however, had left his room before hearing Joey’s reason, and he was just as quickly lost under Judy’s jacket which had morphed into an underground cave dangerous with sta-lag-mites (“g for ground”) poking up from the ground and sta-lac-tites pointing down at him from the dark ceiling (“c for ceiling”), like teeth in a giant’s jaw about to bite down and gnash and gash him. After the battle of Joey and the Beanstalk in Judy’s jacket cave, Joey emerged sweaty and triumphant and followed the teenagers into the kitchen. “’A song of love is a sad song, Hi Lili, Hi Lili, Hi lo,” Judy sang later as she and Marwa pulled out the trundle bed, “a song of love is a song of woe, don’t ask me how I know…” “Now if that was me,” Marwa said, opening her closet door and undressing behind it, pulling a nightgown over her head before stripping her clothes out from under it, “someone would be banging on the wall to stop me.” “Am I too loud?” Judy apologized. “No, no, I wish I could sing. When I was little I thought I could.” “I thought I could tap dance because my mother had taps put on a pair of my shoes,” Judy said as she undressed and put on bright pj’s from her backpack. “Joey didn’t understand anything but the puppets, you see that?” “I love the music. It was my mother’s favorite movie, at least to watch with me,” Judy said. She waited for Marwa to get into bed, turned out the light, and was quickly into the trundle side, sheet and blanket pulled up over her shoulder, back to Marwa, sleepily wishing her good dreams. Marwa envied Judy her watermelon pajamas, carrying a tune, and falling fearlessly asleep. Marwa never fell asleep easily. She wrestled Sleep as if it were a traitor to the realm of consciousness, the Land of Marwa. In sleep, she was no longer Marwa, not even there, nowhere. Where did Marwa go when her usurping sister took her place? Dream mocked Marwa when she was awake, whispering in red and black, ‘The Country of the Two Lands is our name.’ In daylight, Marwa couldn’t ignore the images of things-in-twos that Dream could send like mailer-daemons. If Dream could come to her unimpeded during the day, why didn’t Marwa have equal power in Dream’s night? Did she? No. Was she then God’s viceregent on earth, was she on earth when she walked in the land of Dream? She certainly wasn’t the lord and owner of her own face, hardly even the steward of her {conscious} excellence. (The Qu’ran edition Marwa’s mother used when she taught linked Sura II.30 to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, which was why Marwa had first read that sonnet when she was eight.) In a dream, Marwa was limited to settings and props, things and familiar places and people, but it was not her will that moved anything or anyone – in a dream, she was like Joey watching the movie, his unconfused acceptance of its unrealities. By the end of the movie, Lili moved from dreamy crush on the married puppeteer to recognition that he was inside all his puppets. The dance at the end of the movie was like Lili’s waking dream in which she moved from adolescent to adult consciousness. “Oh, don’t ruin the movie,” Judy had complained, not even bothering to add, “for Joey” because Marwa’s chatter obviously offended her just as much, and Joey was so into the movie he hadn’t even heard what Marwa said. Marwa knew she would lose all wrestling matches with Dream. She might keep herself awake asking questions, remembering, arguing, one night, maybe two. She knew it wasn’t worth trying because that awful tightness would crowd behind her eyes and in her chest, down into her stomach, and Dream would eventually overpower her and have its way with her. Judy slept beside her. Marwa knew the sound of breathing that meant crossing the boundary between dreamless and Dream’s sleep. It was something she had studied beside her mother trying to comfort her to sleep when Marwa was little, but Ummee always fell asleep, herself, first; beside Joey who tumbled into sleep as easily as he threw himself about everywhere; beside cousins in Alexandria, sleepover friends in Far Rockaway, and now Judy in New York. Marwa felt Dream overwhelming her. With her siren voice, Dream sang to her, the music from THE MIKADO (oh, Judy was here), “‘A wandering minstrel I — a thing of shreds and patches,/ of ballads, songs, and snatches,/ of dreamy lullaby….’” Then there was Marcus, and he was singing to someone else she couldn’t see, “‘I’m a thing of shreds and patches with a darkness at its core/…I’ve know I’ve changed a good deal but I don’t know into who…/And I wish I could have done this without using so much ‘I’…” The giant red ants of her baby dream, moving in a line between her crib and Ummee’s bed, the red ants she knew were her fever…the ants that wouldn’t let Ummee come to her… Ummee! Ummee! Marwa struggled under her covers, grabbed for land, and drowning, grasped a twig of thought: Dream and Body, tyrants allied against her under the Moon, Axis Powers, the Double Axe swinging, the Moon was the blade of an ax, she was dying, Egypt, dying, she was terrified of them. “…of dreamy lullaby…”