pick his brains and then for at least another six months to do the comparison. If he beat the program, he'd be able to stay on, and if it was a near thing, maybe ISAS would at least change the policy so that there was always a test period after an AI analysis, which should make Peggy happy because it bought a little time for people, some of whom might beat their AI counterparts in a fair test. And if the program beat him, then maybe he really would go back to school…
Masao Yanoguchi gazed at the open, innocent face and suddenly laughed. 'Mr. Quinn,' he murmured, not unkindly, 'your subtlety is showing.' Jimmy flushed, caught in the act. 'Nevertheless, this is an interesting proposition,' Yanoguchi said, standing up and walking Jimmy to the door. 'Please put it in writing.'
5
CLEVELAND, OHIO:
AUGUST 2014-MAY 2015
If his return from the Sudanese refugee station to the United States hadn't been so disorienting, Emilio Sandoz might have handled the impact of his first meeting with Sofia Mendes a good deal better. As it was, he took the brunt of it while jet-lagged and culture-shocked, and it was several weeks before he could establish custody of his reactions to the woman.
In the space of twenty hours, he had moved from a war zone in the Horn of Africa to the suburban campus of John Carroll University, set in the placid peace of a pretty neighborhood of old and well-kept houses, where the children screamed and ran but in play, laughing and robust, not stunned or desperate or starving or terrified. He was amazed at how shocking the children were to him. The gardens also startled him, on many levels—the soil, black as coffee grounds, the luxurious jumble of summer blossom and ornamental plants, the profligate use of rain and fertility…
He might have wished for a few days off but arrangements had already been made. He was to meet Sofia Mendes on his second day back, at a campus restaurant that served Turkish coffee—a fuel that, he would later learn, she required at regular intervals. Emilio got to the coffee shop early the next morning and sat in the back, where he could watch the door, silently taking in the ripples of laughter and witty, empty conversation all around him, getting used to English again. Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students—the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp- waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet. He was fascinated by the beautiful grooming and attention to detail: the arrangement of hair, the delicacy of shoes, the perfection of cosmetics. And thought of shallow graves in the Sudan, and mastered the anger, knowing it was partly exhaustion.
Through this garden of artificial delights and into his inclement mood, Sofia Mendes strode purposefully. Catching sight of her, knowing somehow that this was the woman he was waiting for, he recalled the words of a Madrid dance mistress describing what she looked for in an ideal Spanish dancer. 'Head up, a princely posture. The waist held high above the hips, the arms
Brows up, she held out her hand to shake his briefly and then looked back toward the crowd she had just walked through. 'As pretty as a vaseful of cut flowers,' she remarked, accurate and cool.
At a stroke, the vigor of the boys, the loveliness of the girls looked temporary. He could see which ones would age badly and which would soon be shapeless and how many would give up their extravagance and dreams of glory. And he was startled by the precision with which the image matched his mood, chilled by his own harshness, and hers.
It was her last bit of small talk for many months. They met three mornings a week for what felt to Sandoz like a relentless interrogation. He found that he could stand only ninety minutes at a time; afterward, he was nearly ruined for the day and it was difficult to concentrate on the elementary Latin course and the graduate seminars in linguistics he was assigned to teach during his stay at John Carroll. She never wished him a good morning or engaged in any chitchat. She simply slid into the booth, opened her notebook and began questioning him about his steps in learning a language, about tricks he used, habits he'd formed, methods he'd developed almost instinctively, as well as the more formal and academic techniques he used to analyze and understand a language, on the fly, in the field. When he tried to leaven the sessions with jokes or asides or funny stories, she stared at him, unamused, until he gave up and answered her question.
Courtesies provoked outright hostility. Once, at the very beginning, he rose as she sat down and replied to her first demand for information with an elaborate and ironic bow worthy of Cesar Romero. 'Good morning, Senorita Mendes. How are you today? Are you enjoying the weather? Would you care for some pastry with your coffee?'
She looked up at him, eyes opaque and narrowed, as he stood waiting for a slight unbending from her, a simple civil greeting. 'The gentlemanly Spanish hidalgo act is tasteless,' she told him quietly. She let the silence go on for a moment and then her eyes dropped to her notebook. 'Let's get on with it, shall we?'
It didn't take much of that to exorcize the Jungian vision of her as the ideal Spanish woman from his mind. By the end of the month, he was able to see her as an actual person and began trying to figure her out. English was not her first language, he was sure. Her grammar was too precise and her dentals were a bit damped, the sibilants a little drawn out. Despite her name and appearance, her accent was not Hispanic. Or Greek. Or French or Italian, or anything else he could identify. He put her single-mindedness down to the fact that she was paid on a fee-for- project basis: the faster she worked, the more she made. It was an assumption that appeared to be confirmed when she berated him once for being late.
'Dr. Sandoz,' she said. She never called him Father. 'Your superiors are paying a great deal of money to have this analysis done. Do you find it amusing to waste their resources and my time?'
The only occasion she said anything about herself was toward the end of a session that embarrassed him so thoroughly he even dreamed about it once, and awoke cringing at the memory. 'Sometimes,' he told her, leaning forward over the table, speaking without realizing how it would sound, 'I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present.'
He blushed when he heard what he'd said, making it worse, but she took no offense; indeed, she seemed to miss any connection that might have been taken wrongly. Instead, she seemed struck by a coincidence and looked out the cafe window, her mouth open slightly. 'Isn't that interesting,' she said, as though nothing else he'd told her so far had been, and continued thoughtfully, 'I do the same thing. Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?'
And the moment passed, for which Emilio Sandoz thanked God.
If the sessions with Mendes were draining and faintly depressing, he found balance in an extraordinary Latin 101 student. In her late fifties, fine white hair drawn into a neat French braid, Anne Edwards was compact, quick and intellectually fearless, with a lovely pealing laugh she made frequent use of in class.
Two weeks into the course, Anne waited until the rest of the students cleared out of the room. Emilio, gathering his notes from the desktop, looked up at her expectantly.
'Are you allowed out of your room at night?' she asked. 'Or do the cute ones like you have a curfew until they're senile?'
He flicked the ash off an air cigar and waggled his eyebrows. 'What do you have in mind?'
'Well, I considered suggesting that we shatter our vows and run away to Mexico for a weekend of lust, but I've got
