Free American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen

scientist will translate that curiosity into intelligently delimited searches in well-chosen databases that then return navigable information.
    Whatever. Number twenty-one on the assignment was to generate one’s own query and query results. I chose not to query my body’s recent developments; even more than mirrors, Internet reflections combine the qualia of unflinching and unfaithful. I had once, via the Internet, tried to learn about the anthropologist Margaret Mead. After an hour I was left only with a strong impression that Mead’s primary intellectual contribution had been the adding of an s to the term “semiotic.” That, and having taken a female lover for much of her later life. I assumed, and continue to assume, that there are more important things to know about Mead, although how would I know?
    At noon I attended a lecture given by Professor Sidwell. The lecture was about the problem of acidification—what to do about the hydrolysis of paper in books, the “slow fires” caused by the low pH levels of the paper commonly used for printing during certain key decades. Professor Sidwell had the same sloping posture my dad had had, and so I felt closer to him than in reality I was. Early on in the term, I’d had a conversation with him in the cafeteria in which he said that American cuisine had gone downhill since the 1940s. His grandmother had been a great cook, but she was the last of the Mohicans. I said, Wasn’t it at least an improvement to know about Chinese food? About soy sauce? No, he said. It wasn’t. Widely available refrigeration? I asked. No, Sidwell answered, refrigeration has been awful. Refrigeration has been absolutely catastrophic.
    In the lecture that day Sidwell was saying, among other things, that the new de-acidification processes—there were several of them, and they were all bad—were leaving the treated paper with an unpleasant texture (the wrong texture), depositing powders, sometimes causing colored inks to run, and leaving clamp marks on books’ bodies. De-acidification was hastening destruction, not delaying it.
    After the lecture I went up to Professor Sidwell, to see if he’d notice my altered self. Also just to say hello. “Ah, the refrigeration advocate,” he said. He barely looked at me. “Are things well in the land of the young and innovative?”
    “I really liked the lecture,” I said. “I guess you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
    “No, no, that’s not quite accurate,” he said. He looked me over. His tone softened notably as he said, “I don’t want you to take this in a negative way, I don’t mean it like that, but you remind me of my grandmother.”
    “Interesting,” I said.
    “I’m going to go ahead and ask you something. Have you become one of those macrobiotic people? Or vegans? I strongly recommend against it.”
    I couldn’t tell if this was an acknowledgment of my alteration or just something else he was saying. No one else I saw that day had yet noticed anything. Though I had a five months pregnant classmate who had recently made a similar report: that no one had noticed.
    And that was the day. I suppose I might have been more detained or disturbed by the change in my romantic prospects—either I had suffered a bad blow or, it was slimly possible, I’d received a tremendous boon—but I kind of knew where I was in my relationship cycle.
    *   *   *
    On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when I had no afternoon classes, I worked at an after-school program for teenage girls, called GRLZ. Fridays were for Bardo exercises, which are “perceptual distortion” exercises. The week before, our Bardo exercise involved going to the grocery store with the goal of walking each aisle without touching anything, without buying anything, without even setting off the sensors for the automatic doors at the entrance, but, instead, following in and out other people who had set off the sensors. We spent an hour and a half like that. It