Charades Read Online Free

Trick.
    And then, out of the murky room, out of nowhere, out of the saxophone and the puddle of lasers, steps the Blue Lady who brushes by them with an ectoplasmic spin.
    It is the girl. Charade. Whom Koenig has not seen since she vanished from his bedroom several nights ago.
    She twirls like a top, her skirt flaring and rising. From certain angles you can see her thighs, and then as she spins more slowly, languidly, the blue skirt sinks, drifts, floats about her calves and ankles. From everywhere you can see her eyes, which are very very blue, or maybe teal, or maybe blue-green (depending on the lift and dip of the skirt).
    Koenig, feeling dizzy, has to lean against a bookcase.
    â€œAll done with mirrors,” his colleague jokes. “Plus beam splitters and cathode ray tubes and video photography.”
    In the hallway later, Koenig asks casually, indifferently, “That girl. The hologram girl. She a graduate student?”
    His colleague says sourly: “Not your type, Koenig. She’d break your balls.”
    * *
    Tuesdays and Thursdays, the mornings of the large introductory course, Koenig scans the tiers of seats but she does not come. Others come. They knock on his door, they saunter in the lot where he parks, no effort seems to be required; Radcliffe women, MIT women, Wellesley women, faculty and students, murmuring brilliant, murmuring famous, murmuring Nobel Prize, it seems to be an aphrodisiac, he does not remember their names. They come and go and nothing helps.
    Nothing helps because he dreams of the girl Charade. Nothing helps because in any case the mournful eyes of Rachel, his former wife, are always watching. Nothing helps; but still the women come and go.
    â€œYou should be put in a museum, Koenig,” his colleague mutters one day in passing. “The compulsive consumer, a macho antique.”
    Koenig is startled. “Listen to who’s talking,” he says curtly.
    â€œNot everyone chatted up by the Nobel committee gets to Sweden,” his colleague says.
    Koenig works late. He is pushing back, mathematically, to that busy stretch of time between the Big Bang and a specific point occurring 10 - 35 of a second later. With present data, he measures the red-shifting of the light from distant galaxies. He works at the borders, at the junction of astrophysics, particle physics, cosmology. What he is obsessed with is cross-fertilisation, the braiding of disciplines. What absorbs him is the way the girl seemed to hold words in her hands and the way she appeared one night (did she not?) in his apartment, and the way she spoke of his wife Rachel, and the way …
    More and more he works in the basement of Building 6, rather than in his office or his Cambridge apartment, in case she reappears. He is waiting for her to tap on his door.
    Sometimes, on Tuesdays or Thursdays, he thinks he sees her from the edge of his eye as he writes on the blackboard. But when he turns, it is always someone else altogether, someone bearing no similarity to her at all, except for a braid tossed to one side perhaps, or a few curls across the forehead, or blue-green eyes.
    In the murky basement light, beneath coiled ducts, he dallies with the text of a speech that is to be presented at the Science Museum. Matter, he writes, a sense of the solidity of matter, is one of our most persistent illusions. The presence of matter represents nothing more than a disturbance in the field at a given point, the figure in the carpet as it were.
    â€œWhat a sentence,” she says. And is still there when he turns.

4
    The Second Night
    When he blinks they are in his apartment again and she is asking, surprised, “Just Koenig? Really? That’s your first name too?” And before he has time to answer: “Well, ah, Koenig — yes, it’s nice, it suits you.”
    She hooks her legs over the arm of his chair and watches as he pulls on his pants. “You know,” she says, “I haven’t