Orson rises from the black leather Eames chair in his office to refill his mug from the department’s communal Mr. Coffee and rubs his eyes.

He has been reading articles in physics journals that were written by the chairman of the tenure committee as a means of preparing himself for his interview, just one week away.

The man's work is clumsily written, the proofs are scattershot and the…

1.

Orson walks beneath cool, granite arches along a prescribed route to a campus classroom with unsatisfactory  fluorescent lights. He stows his briefcase and watches the students file in, their faces closed to him. He will never understand their expressions, never read the nuances in their gestures, never catch the subtle tones of hope, desire or admiration in their inflections.

Like the stone arches, he lives life above…

Orson and his sister Alana had enjoyed a running joke, one time, about Hawaiians hoarding all the vowels and the Serbs hoarding all the consonants. He'd make up names of Yugoslavian war criminals, like Brdyzstan Krmudgnlik, and she would reply with…

A first cousin to Alana and Orson sends them feel-good emails telling them to live, love, laugh and "dance like no one's looking."

Orson just deletes everything the cousin sends, but Alana reads them and puzzles over the alien words and sentiments, trying to find some link between the greeting card emotions and her own. It is as if they use two distinct languages and need a third to translate them, a Rosetta stone or maybe an oracle.

She knows that she is missing a vital…

When Orson and his sister were school children, they had puzzled their teachers with white flashes of brilliance and what then was termed 'antisocial behavior.'

Had they been born 30 years later, they might have been diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome, based on a shared lack of interest in popularity, their photographic memories and emotionless faces.

And even though they displayed no affection for each other, Orson and Alana were attuned as if a wire…