Pytho was the ancient name of Delphi, home of the Python, who wrestled Apollo; and, more famously, of the Delphic Oracle, the Pythia being the prophesying priestess there, a creature of frenzies and ecstasies. Solanka could not imagine that this was the meaning of “Pythian’ the builders intended: dedicated to convulsions and epilepsies. Nor could so epic a house be intended for the humble—the grandly, mightily humble—practice of poetry. (Pythian verse is poetry written in the dactylic hexameter.) Some general Apollonian reference was probably intended, Apollo in both his musical and athletic incarnations. From the sixth century Before the Common Era, the Pythian games, one of the great quartet of Panhellenic festivals, had been held in the third year of the Olympic cycle. There were musical contests as well as sporting ones, and the great battle of the god and the snake was also re-created. Maybe some scrap of this would have been known to those who had built this shrine to half-knowledge, this temple dedicated to the belief that ignorance, if backed up by sufficient dollars, became wisdom. The temple of Boobus Apollo.

To the devil with this classical mishmash, Professor Solanka silently exclaimed. For a greater deity was all around him: America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power. America, to which he had come to erase himself. To be free of attachment and so also of anger, fear, and pain. Eat me, Professor Solanka silently prayed. Eat me, America, and give me peace.

Across the street from Pythia’s phony Assyrian palace, the city’s best simulacrum of a Viennese Kaffeehaus was just opening its doors. Here the Times and Herald Tribune could be found inserted into wooden rails. Solanka went inside, drank strong coffee, and allowed himself to join in this most transient of cities’ eternal imitation game. In his now disheveled linen suit and straw Panama, he could pass for one of the more down-and-out habitues of the Cafe Hawelka on Dorotheergasse. In New York nobody looked too carefully, and few people’s eyes were trained to the old European subtleties. The unstarched collar of the sweat-stained white shirt from Banana Republic, the dusty brown sandals, the straggly badgerish beard (neither carefully clipped nor delicately pomaded) struck no false notes here. Even his name, had he ever been obliged to give it, sounded vaguely Mitteleuropkische. What a place, he thought. A city of half-truths and echoes that somehow dominates the earth. And its eyes, emerald green, staring into your heart.

Approaching the counter with its refrigerated display of the great cakes of Austria, he passed over the excellent-looking Sacher gateau and asked, instead, for a piece of Linzertorte, receiving in response a look of perfect Hispanic incomprehension, which obliged him exasperatedly to point. Then finally he was able to sip and read.

The morning papers were full of the publication of the report on the human genome. They were calling it the best version yet of the “bright book of life,” a phrase variously used to describe the Bible and the Novel; even though this new brightness was not a book at all but an electronic message posted on the Internet, a code written in four amino acids, and Professor Solanka wasn’t good with codes, had never even managed to learn elementary pig Latin, let alone semaphore or the now defunct Morse, apart from what everybody knew. Dit dit dit dab dah dab dit dit dit. Help. Or, in Iglatinpay, elp-hay. Everyone was speculating about the miracles that would follow the genome triumph, for example the extra limbs we could decide to grow for ourselves to solve the problem of how at a buffet dinner to hold a plate and a wineglass and eat at the same time; but to Malik the only two certainties were, first, that whatever discoveries were made would come too late to be of any use to him and, second, that this book—which changed everything, which transformed the philosophical nature of our being, which contained a quantitative change in our self-knowledge so immense as to be a qualitative change as well—was one he would never be able to read.

While human beings had been excluded from this degree of understanding, they could console themselves that they were all in the same bog of ignorance together. Now that Solanka knew that someone some where knew what he would never know, and was additionally quite aware that what was known was vitally important to know, he felt the dull irritation, the slow anger, of the fool. He felt like a drone, or a worker ant. He felt like one of the shuffling thousands in the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang, the faceless ones doomed to break their bodies on society’s wheel while knowledge exercised power over them from on high. The new age had new emperors and he would be their slave.

“Sir. Sir” A young woman was standing over him, uncomfortably close, wearing a pencil-thin knee-length navy blue skirt and a smart white blouse. Her fair hair was pulled back severely. “I’m going to ask you to leave, sir.” The Hispanic counter staff were tensed, ready to intervene. Professor Solanka was truly perplexed: “What appears to be the trouble, Miss?”

“What is the trouble, sir, not what ‘appears,’ is that you have been using bad language, obscene terms, and so loudly. Speaking the unspeakable, I should say. You have been shouting it out. And now amazingly you ask what is the trouble. Sir, you are the trouble. You will go now, please.” At last, he thought even as he was receiving this verbal bum’s rush, a moment of genuineness. One Austrian is here, at least. He rose, pulled his lumpy coat around him, and left, tipping his hat, though not her. There was no explanation for the woman’s extraordinary speech. When he was still sleeping with Eleanor, she would accuse him of snoring. He would be halfway between wakefulness and sleep and she would push at him and say, Turn on your side. But he was conscious, he wanted to say, he could hear her speak, and therefore, had he been making any sort of noise himself, he would have heard that, too. After a while she gave up persecuting him and he slept soundly. Until the time when once again he didn’t. No, not that again, not right now. Right now when, once again, he was conscious, and all manner of noise was in his ears.

As he approached his apartment he saw a workman hanging in a cradle outside his window, doing repairs to the exterior of the building and, in loud, rolling Punjabi, shouting instructions and dirty jokes to his partner smoking a beedi on the sidewalk below. Malik Solanka at once telephoned his landlords the Jays, wealthy organic farmers who spent summers upstate with their fruits and vegetables, and made emphatic complaints. This brutish din was intolerable. The lease stated clearly that the work would be not only external but quiet. Furthermore, the toilet didn’t work properly; small pieces of fecal matter bobbed back up after he flushed. In the mood he was in, this caused him a degree of distress disproportionate to the problem, and he spoke vehemently of his feelings to Mr. Simon Jay, the gentle, bemused owner of the apartment, who had lived there happily for thirty years with his wife, Ada, had raised his children in these rooms, toilet-trained them on these very water closets, and had found every day of his occupancy a simple and unqualified delight. Solanka wasn’t interested. A second flushing invariably dealt with the trouble, he conceded, but that was not acceptable. A plumber must come, and soon.

But the plumber, like the Punjabi construction workers, was a talker, an octogenarian named Joseph Schlink. Erect, wiry, with Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth, Joseph came through the door impelled by a form of defensive pridefulness to get his retaliation in first. “Don’t tell me, eh?, I’m too old you’re maybe thinking, or maybe not, mind reading I make no claim on, but a better plumber in the tristate area you von’t find, also fit like a fiddle or I’m no Schlink.” The thick, unimproved accent of the transplanted German Jew. “My name amuses you? So laugh. The chentleman, Mr. Simon, calls me Kitchen Schlink, to his Mrs. Ada I’m also Bathroom Schlink, let zem call me Schlink the Bismarck, it von’t bother me, it’s a free country, but in my business I haff no use for humor. In Latin, humor is a dampness from the eye. This is to quote Heinrich Boll, Nobel Prize nineteen hundred seventy-two. In his line of vork he alleges it’s helpful, but in my job it leads to mistakes. No damp eyes on me, eh?, and no chokes in my tool bag. Chust I like to do the vork prompt, receive payment also prompt, you follow me here. Like the sbvartzer says in the movie, show me the money. After a war spent plugging leaks on a Nazi U-boat, you think I can’t fix up your little doofus here?”