“Is it envy or jealousy I feel toward bees?” Marwa continued writing. “Mr. Haddam suffered over the misuse of those words. Also fortuitous, which does not mean fortunate. It means accidental. ‘Poor Grendel’s had an accident, so may you all,’ is the last line of GRENDEL which we read after BEOWULF. Is accident possible, or is everything determined? Could we determine what determined anything, and if there are too many variables for us to determine, would that define accident?

Grendel’s experience prior to Beowulf’s arrival taught him that things were fixed. But Beowulf is the agent of Romantic possibility; his existence can change reality. He is Accident Incarnate. Beowulf frees Grendel from his boring, ironic life of terror and murder, of causing them. So Grendel’s death at Beowulf’s strong hands is a relief. ‘Poor Grendel’s had an accident, so may you all.’

Bees can go to any flower they want and just walk all over and into its most private parts. Bees are not shy or embarrassed even if they’re clumsy. Bees never think they’re stupid or ugly. Or guilty. Or ridiculous. Bees don’t know they’re pollinating other species. They just feel compelled to get pollen and make food for the hive. Their intestines turn pollen into honey. Straw into gold. Rumplestiltskin. Their intestines. Bees shit honey. Marcus’s shit beetles live on other creatures’ excrement. Bees eliminate — literally — the middle man!

I would like to be a bee. Not the Queen or a drone, but a worker bee. Up in the morning, observe the dance, fly to a likely source. Rub around and scrub around and collect pollen till I’m too heavy to fly, but I can and then do fly away home to make my deposits in the honey bank.

Envy is for things. Jealousy is for feelings. Ings. Do I want Prix or do I want Prix’s feelings?

He doesn’t want me. I don’t think he wants my feelings either. I don’t know what Prix wants. He wants things to go slow. It’s not about me, it’s about Time.

I don’t even feel tired. What is hopeless?

Desiree. She left a package on the floor at my door. It’s heavy and I haven’t opened it. Someone could’ve stolen it, but no one did.

Oh Great Goddess Sulis of Bath, I worshipped at your hot springs today. ‘Healing springs help to encourage the growth of cities,’ Uncle Pliny said. Sulis aka Minerva aka Athena, Aquae Sulis, her thermae maximae, was the best of baths! Dr. Jonathan Swift was disgusted by people going to Bath, England, to sit in and eventually drink their own detritus in the name of good health. The thermae of old were as normal as restaurants are to us. In the 4th century, Rome had 856 baths. 600 years later, Cordoba had even more.

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. We read this in art. These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in the space. (Interior information presents as external formation. I’m thinking genes. I’m thinking brain neural gyrating. I am consciously thinking, and I’m asking my invisible Brain Rumplestiltskin to produce the right word for that celebrity bathroom. Spin, angular gyrus, spin straw into gold. Give me the Word.)”

There was a noise down the hall in the bathroom, a sign that morning was coming. Marwa twisted her head back and forth, then bent back to her writing:

“‘The specific patterns out of which a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose and set us free. But when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict. The more living patterns there are in a place, the more it has the self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name. And when the place has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass.

In nature, a thing is always born, and developed, as a whole. Amountain is shaped as a whole. The crust of the earth heaves and the mountain takes it form. And while it is growing, each rock and particle of sand is also whole. There is nothing unfinished in it during the thousands of years that bring it to the state we know today.

Cleaning up is only a small part of bathing. Bathing as a whole is a far more basic activity with therapeutic and pleasurable aspects. It puts us into sensual contact with water. We become less warlike when we tend to ourselves this way. There is a correlation between the degree to which a society places restrictions on bodily pleasure, particularly in childhood, and the degree to which the society engages in the glorifications of warfare and sadistic practices.’

I don’t know. The top of the pyramid on the $1 bill levitated separately from the rest of the pyramid. I looked that up when I found out Grover Cleveland is on the $1000 bill. The pyramid’s apex, surrounded by a halo (a glory) is identified as unfinished.The point is that it isn’t whole. But the more living patterns youput in this place, America, the more it has the self-maintaining fire that makes it part of nature.

And I feel unfinished. I suppose my physical implications were there from the first egg-and-sperm rendezvous, but I was not there, and I’m not entirely here yet. I’m like my own Cheshire Cat, watching parts of me materialize in front of my very eyes.

The Eye of Horus, whose right eye was the sun and his left the moon, was staring right at me when I woke up on the couch with Prix. And Prix was staring right at me, too. The Eye of Horus (Wedjat, Whole One) is his left eye that was restored by Thoth, the god of wisdom and the moon after Horus avenged his father Osiris’s death at the hands of O’s brother, Set, the jackal-headed god of night (who rules as I write this with my tiring left hand). So Set blinded Horus in his left eye in the battle, but Horus killed Set, and then Osiris was reborn in the underworld. If you can call that living.

Left eye, right eye, do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around. And Horus got his left eye back and stared at me from a blown-up dollar bill on a (movie) star’s wall. Odin also lost an eye. But how Norse is that? Doesn’t ‘Norse’ sound like mucus? Like ‘snort’ and a little bit ‘snot’? Norcus = neologism formucus. ‘Norse’ is definitely Crayola Timber Wolf gray.

I had an Egyptian children’s book when I was little that showed the EYE OF HORUS representing fractions inside a whole. Each part of the eye is a part of the whole. All the parts of eye, however, don’t add up to the whole. This, some Egyptologists think, is the sign that the knowledge can never be total, and that one part of the knowledge is not possible to describe or measure. There are 6 parts of the Eye of Horus corresponding to 6 senses, not 5. 320 ro = 1 heqat. The ro is the smallest unit of input energy needed to register as sense data. The symbol for ro is the mouth. It represented one mouthful, but Mommy always made it one kiss.

Each of the sacred unit fractions which the ancient Egyptians attributed to the six parts of the eye of the god Horus are: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64.These fractions, all with powers of two in their denominators, were used to represent the fractions ofhekat, the unit measure of capacity for grains. According to a legend, the pieces were lost in a battle, and restored by the god Thoth.

1) Touch = 1/64 heqat = 5 ro.

2) Taste = 1/32 heqat = 10 ro.

3) Hearing = 1/16 heqat = 20 ro.

4) Thought = 1/8 heqat = 40 ro.

5) Sight = 1/4 heqat = 80 ro.

6) Smell = 1/2 heqat = 160 ro

We never got as far as Thought with the kisses because the 20 from Hearing resulted in too much laughing, and then I had to calm down. When I read this book with Joey, we never got past Touch’s 5.

With Prix, I didn’t even get to Touch.”

Marwa’s left hand hurt when she closed her journal at dawn. Her eyes burned as she climbed up to her bed. Her cell phone awakened her five hours later. It was Joey calling from Niagara Falls, and when he stood facing the wrong direction, Marwa couldn’t hear him over the background roar.

“We’re going to brunch,” Joey yelled into his cellphone. “That’s br-ek-fist and luh -unch. We went on a guided tour yesterday. Did I wake you up? You sound funny.”

“I am funny. How are Mommy and Daddy?”

“Fine. You know what Niagara Falls is? It’s the run-off from the Great Lakes! They spill down where the ground is lower. Like you said stars make bowling ball curves in outer space. But the guide didn’t know about graffity. Is that like graffeety? Daddy bought me a pop-up book. I had cheese curly fries for supper. Mommy said I’d be sick, but I wasn’t.You know E- rosion?”

“Personally.”

“Niagara Falls was born 12,500 years ago and 15,000 years from now it’ll be flat. Then you can walk off the falls and not fall or drown because they won’t even be there. They can tell by carbon-dating. What’s carbon-dating?”

Marwa saw herself in the spa tub with Prix-as-a-carbon-atom, but said, “They can find out how old something is by how much a kind of carbon’s still in it.”

“Niagara Falls moves 7 miles a year. It’s the fastest moving waterfall in the world. It erodes shale underneath the top rock. It’s making a backwards road. I asked the guide if he knew shale was sedimentary, and he said, ‘Yes, my dear Watson.’ Everybody laughed. Who’s Watson?”

“Sherlock Holmes’s doctor friend. He always says, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson. Does Mommy want to say hi?”

“You know what else,” Joey said, “when the water crashes and it sprays, you breathe in ions from the broken water, and they make you drunk. What’s ions? Who’s Sherlock?”

“I’m losing you,” Marwa lied. “Call me when you get home. I’ll email you about the ions.”

Marwa lay back on her pillow. Joey was so easy about hanging up. Joey was still a bee. The air was wet and warm again today. September would hold off awhile longer. Even though her mother remained angry with her, Marwa felt better after Joey’s phone call. Graffity. Graffeety. Gravity. Graffitti. What about those ions and with the thought she heaved herself out of bed and down the ladder to her laptop. There was email from Judy she’d open later, but first, to google on waterfalls and ions.

“On the seashore where water is always falling, there are about 2000 negative to 1000 positive ions, which appears to be the ratio that human beings respond to most favorably.

At Yosemite and Niagara Falls, waves of negative ions from the spray of the falls currently are believed to cause lowering of serotonin levels in the blood. Every home had a built in, natural ionizer, the shower. Our daily bath rituals involving falling water create thousands of negative ions by splitting otherwise neutral particles of air, freeing electrons to generate their vitalizing, serotonin-lowering function.

The opposite effect, of increased positive ion ratio, can be observed in demon-winds world wide that ‘blow no good,’ like the Chinook in the Rockies and Santa Ana in southern California, the Sharav of Israel and Africa’s Simoon, Hamsin, and Harmatan…”

A likely story. It sounded more like a New Age health site than a scientific source. Clicking backward, Marwa read,‘Where in the H Is the H in H2O? Water isn’t H20 after all. On the timescale of molecular reactions it is really H1.5O…

Over the brief time it takes molecules to interact t– about 100 quintillionths of a second — quantum effects come into play. The notion of a single pointlike nucleus disappears, and it becomes a wave, like an electron. Then strange things happen.

The wave-like electrons and the wavelike proton (a hydrogen nucleus) interact with each other and with other atoms nearby, in essence getting pulled out of their own molecules…

The number of hydrogen bonds a protein meets along a DNA helix may determine where the protein binds. Quantum blurriness may therefore be embedded into the basic chemistry of life.’

Marwa cut and pasted that article and sent it to her lab mentor, and then opened Judy’s long email about social and lab events.

In reply, Marwa wrote, The neuro-bio basis for my synesthesia suggests that metaphor could be the key to the emergence of human language. The brain seems to have rules for translating visual and aural input into mouth motions. There’s a spillover of signals in motor control areas linking sequential muscle movement in the hand and the mouth. It’s called synkinesia. Like I told you how my mother used to angle her mouth when she cut my bangs.

I’ve got my angular gyrus spinning, trying to describe the bathroom I was in with Prix. Luxurium? Your dad would have a picnic with the network I see generating, like brainstorming ideas all over the chalkboard in elementary-my-dear-Watson school. Maximum Bathnasium? Bath and gymnasium? See you in a week or so, love, M.

(When Judy read the email, all she saw was BATHROOMI WAS IN WITH PRIX.)

Marwa rolled her chair away from the desk and saw the package Danielle had left. A small card lay under the criss-crossed rubber bands around a manila envelope. Danielle had neatly printed, “Don’t freak. Don’t open till you get home. D.L.”

Marwa replaced the card and added the small parcel to the accumulating stuff to take home. Then she headed off for a shower, wishing for many negative water ions. The moment she entered the communal bathroom and saw the red-doored stalls for toilets and the blue ones for the showers, it popped into consciousness: Aquae Excess. Thank you, Angular Gyrus and all your neural elves!