Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital

all, to be practically a genius, it seemed: first Harvard, then MIT, no one could understand what she did. There was never anyshortage of enlisted men from Promised Land—marines, navy, air force, grunts (black and white, but more often black)—and he would bump into them and have a drink and pick up news of back home. And now that Cobb himself, like so many, had graduated to a private security force—the financial perks being considerable, especially from those corporations rebuilding key industries in war-torn zones and from those which felt equally nervous and insufficiently safe from sabotage at home—now that he was corporate and private, getting news was simpler than getting good Southern grits. So, though he had not seen her since high school, Cobb had kept track.
    They had both moved out of state: Cobb to Virginia Military Institute on ROTC money; Leela on a math scholarship to Boston. Cobb always had her current address. He had her number. From time to time, late at night, he would call. Usually he got her answering machine. Her voice smelled of browning gardenias and school cupboards and chalk and locker rooms. If she herself answered, he did not speak but he did not hang up. He waited. Cat got your tongue? she would say. Or she might ask, lightly: Are you a deep breather? When you call back, leave a message on my answering machine and I’ll pass it on to Ma Bell.
    He did not call very often, never more than three or four times a year, and always from different public telephone booths.
    Now, however, was different. Now he had access to her emails, to incoming and outgoing calls, to transcripts of same, to her credit card transactions, her library borrowings. He had photographs. He was looking forward to the moment when he would say casually: You could have been a porn star. And then, when her eyes widened, he would say: I could getyou started. I could post these on the net and you’d be flooded with calls. Bound to pay a lot better than teaching college kids math which is the only thing in store when your post-doc runs out.
    She believed she was safely walled up in her ivory tower on a remote peak of higher mathematics. He wanted to tell her: Your grasp of reality has always been slight. You’ve always had your head in the clouds. You’ve never fully grasped the situation for people who live on the ground.
    She had moved on from Pure Mathematics to the Math of Music. He had photocopies of articles that she had published: “Waves and Harmonics”; “Mathematical Frequencies and the Cultural Construction of the Twelve-tone Scale”; “Mathematical Signatures of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms”; “Trigonometric Identity in the Compositions of John Cage”; “Development of the Sound Holes in Violins: a historical and mathematical perspective”. He’d read some of the pieces twice, hunting for intimate revelation, but the reasoning and the equations were opaque. Whatever she was talking about, it was not his kind of math.
    What he did know was that numbers to her, as to him, were secret codes. She read messages in them. She used them to encrypt the notes she sent.
    Cobb read, and listened to, thousands of messages every day. He collected codes. He deciphered them.
    He believed that Leela—possibly without her own knowledge—was being used to encode information of a dangerous kind.
    Watching her through the one-way glass, he focused on her lips and on her closed eyes. How could she manage such stillness? Was she counting? What could possibly be going through her head?
    Cobb fingered the tobacco tin in the inside pocket of his vest. He studied Leela’s lips as he had covertly studied them in junior high from two rows away. He had still wanted to please her in junior high. Then he had simply wanted to make her take notice. And then he had wanted to punish her for the casual way she flouted rules: meeting boys behind the derelict Hamilton house, making out with them on the weed-choked veranda, swimming in the