And what did that mean?

Michael remembered the flower. It was moving and unmoving at the same time, like a bridge half built while its CADCAM model was whole and alive. That was him, that beautiful powerful thing. That was us all. Where was it?

It would be where there was no time. And where would that be?

Mathematics said there were eleven dimensions in all. Four of them existed only in time. The three dimensions of space were created by the big bang. They were expanding outwards. That expansion was simply time, flowing in one direction only: towards the future.

But.

That would mean there were seven dimensions outside time. They would be just as small as they were before the big bang. They would be a point. No height, width or depth. They would be like the smallest dot made by the sharpest pencil. But that dot would be everywhere. It would be at the core of everything around you. It would be in the core of you. You live there, but don't know it. Everything in your life flows in one direction only, into it.

A word came to him: neurophysics. The extension of the self into the universe.

He knew something was there. He had once stood in its presence or rather, had not stood. He had thought there, like someone hovering on the outside of a black hole, just escaping before being sucked into its powerful maw.

How would you research something like that? Was anyone else doing any work in it? Michael began to get restive. His hands, still in gloves, moved to assuage a sudden urge for movement in his gut. He wanted to get up and find out. He wanted a library, a bibliography, and a database to search.

How would anyone research something like that? Well, how do they do black holes? They do thought experiments, they work through the logic of the mathematical descriptions, and they model the maths on something else. It's mathematical metaphor, really. Like Einstein, proving atoms exist in a paper on molecules in tea. He just used the same maths that would describe ping-pong balls.

I said it was like standing on the edge of a black hole.

Heaven collapses into a point, where gravity can no longer work, because there is no space, and time cannot work because there is no expansion. Our eternal lives happen in something like a black hole. Mind you, only like a black hole.

Why not use the same mathematics to describe it and see what happens?

Michael went even more physically restive. He did a little jump in place. Does neurophysics exist? Did I just make that up, or did I read it somewhere? And if I did make it up, I could really be on to something, I mean I could, I could do that, I could take all that mathematical work, and just see what happens. And I wouldn't have to cut up any chickens to do it. I could just go ahead and do it, and if I was wrong, then that's great too, a negative result is still a result, we've still learned something.

Suddenly the train was too small and too slow. All he had to read was a John Grisham novel, and he wanted to throw it out of the train, or chuck it into the steam furnace like the boat in Around the World in Eighty Days. They burned everything on it for fuel. Get me home, get me to my computer, now!

And don't tell me it's not empirical. I've been there, buddy, I died to get there, and I saw it, and I'll know it when I see it again, described in numbers.

Michael settled back in his chair and slapped his own thigh. Outside, light rain was falling, like stars on grey farm outbuildings with tin roofs, pulled down by gravity, gravity which he had read in one paper could be described mathematically in the fifth dimension as electricity. The rain fell and dried and was exhaled as vapour. As a child he thought that was how the earth breathed. He loved the idea, the vapour going up like his own breath on a cold day, and turning into mountains of steam in the sky. The perfection of the system. It was perfect, the world was perfect, life was perfect, this rain and those farm buildings, ancient but with new roofs, were perfect.

Gravity twists reality out of nothingness, what physics calls quantum vacuum.

Is that what made his Angels?

If so, his mind, reaching into eternity, can twist his dead father back into being. What does it mean that he can twist those different selves so far that he can slip into another life? It means there are parallel universes. Universes you can stub your toe on and have a black toenail the next day. And parallel selves, with parallel flesh you can touch?

So gravity is thought? How can a black hole make anything?

And Michael jumped up yet again.

Well, because we know that matter going into black holes is ultimately ejected again as new creation, white holes.

So, I can take those equations too, for white holes, and see if they tell me how my real self can make Angels.

I can account for this, I know I can. I can account for the rain. I can account for the yearning between stars. Somewhere there in all that process is yearning between people as well.

Michael took a taxi from the station, an extravagance to slice through the rain, to get home. He ran up his stairs unwinding his scarf, and threw it and his coat onto the sofa, and took down his Stephen Hawking and his Daniel Dennett. He did a search on Amazon and ordered books. He began to think about how he could organize his days, teaching, marking papers, researching at night, like Einstein in the Patent Office. He would be invisible, unknown, effective. He felt fulfilled, abundant, forgiving. He had an answer to the question: What do I do next?

Michael made himself a cup of soup. Sipping it, he looked at his Picassos, which seemed to rise up in colours like a flock of parrots. The rain had stopped, and sunlight pierced the layers of skyscrapers to glow on his wall. And Michael felt a sudden sense of joy.

It could be of course that the miracle had been sent to teach him about the universe. It could be that it had come to help him understand God, or duplicate God's experience of creation. But it seemed to him now that the miracle had simply come so he could finally learn to enjoy himself. That was what fun was: liking your destiny.

Over the next three days, Michael called back Mustapha the Afghani engineer and they made the love they should have made the first time. He remembered Rabindrath, who permed his hair and who worked in college administration. At one time Michael had been so drawn to him that he would deliberately walk into Rabindrath to feel the warmth of his body and the wiriness of his arms through his cotton shirt.

Michael remembered Stavros the Greek who delivered the post and lifted weights. In mid-winter he wore black T-shirts to show off his musculature. But it was his sweet, slightly dreamy smile that Michael had liked so much.

In fact Michael, who had once found difficulty thinking of someone he fancied, was suddenly shocked by how many beautiful people there were in the world. There were his students, whom university protocols said he must not touch. They rained down onto his bed, sweet and young and at their best, no longer calculating grades or hoping to avoid paying fees until they were sure of an A. In the magic space of the miracle, he and students became what they were in fact: equals. His beautiful body did its work and Michael did not even allow himself the thought: I'm cured. Everything had become light and easy and floating, as if they all had the bones of birds.

There was the boy behind the till at Tesco, whom Michael had once found almost unbearably beautiful. His beauty was not unbearable now because of that equality. Michael was up to it. The boy from Tesco liked being tickled and roared with delighted laughter on Michael's bed. He recombed Michael's hair with gel into a kind of cross between James Dean and Christian Bale. Michael combed it again to save it after the boy had gone, and realized he would comb it that way from now on.