She watched him stagger to a nearby bench and fall into it. She lowered herself to his side and took his hand in both of hers. She waited until he could find the words, until he was ready to speak. She would wait forever if she had to.
When he finally spoke, it wasn’t what she expected. “They cleared me of the plagiarism,” he breathed. He sounded neither despondent nor triumphant. He didn’t even sound relieved. He sounded spent, beyond the point of exhaustion.
She exhaled without even being aware that she had been holding her breath. But although the news was good, the best that either of them could hope for, she knew better than to celebrate and resisted the urge to embrace him. She just kept his hand clasped and waited to hear the reason he looked so lost.
“But Victor is department chair,” Jonas finally said.
“What does that mean?” she asked, dreading the answer.
“That the board couldn’t stop him from firing me.” He delivered the news with as much dispassion as he would a weather report, but Amanda’s world instantly constricted to that little bench. She felt the same despondency and fear and anger that Jonas must have been feeling in that moment but evidently couldn’t express. She wanted to shoot to her feet and storm off into that building, to find Victor and rage at him. She wanted to thunder at the administrators, the bureaucrats, the petty little people who had been either so stupid as to believe Victor or too spineless to defy his wishes. She wanted to burn the entire building to embers and felt like she could do so merely with the force of the fury she felt.
Jonas leaned forward and rested his arms on his legs. He stared out into nothingness. He spoke, but Amanda couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“What, honey?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“What if he’s right?” Jonas repeated. “If not for him, I never would have started work on parallel universes. I never would have tried to formulate a proof for their existence.”
“And I never would have taken up painting,” she replied, “if my parents hadn’t taken me to see a David Hockney exhibit when I was six.” She turned Jonas’s face toward hers. “Inspiration isn’t imitation, Jonas. Artists and scientists both build on the work of those who came before them.” He looked away, seeming unconvinced. “If you had really stolen from Victor, stolen anything,” she said, “the board would have said so.”
“I wish it were that simple,” he answered.
“Tell me how it’s not.”
“He showed me his work,” Jonas confessed. “Over the years, as he was wrestling with the project, Victor would occasionally ask me to look over his equations.”
“So?”
“So . . . how do I know some of his ideas didn’t influence my own? Even on a subliminal level.”
“You don’t,” she responded simply. “But you told me you tried to get him to look at your work, didn’t you?”
“That’s right,” Jonas answered, with no idea of what point Amanda was trying to make.
“And why’d you do that?”
“Because I’d hoped he’d want to work on it with me. Together.”
Amanda’s hand swept the air. “Exactly.”
“What’s your point?” Jonas’s fatigue was almost all-consuming.
“My point is . . . these aren’t the actions of a thief. If your intention really was to plagiarize”—she leaned hard on the word—“you wouldn’t have invited Victor to join in.”
Jonas acknowledged the truth of that with a halfhearted shrug.
“Trust me,” she implored him. “No one understands plagiarism as well as an artist. I might not be able to appreciate the nuances of parallel worlds or quantum theory, but I’m pretty confident in my ability to recognize theft.” Jonas flashed her a skeptical look. “And I know the man I fell in love with. I know his soul.” She reached out and touched the center of his chest.
Jonas took her hand in his. “In any case, I’m out of a job.”
“Any university would be lucky to have you,” Amanda said. New thoughts ignited her. “We’ll move. There’s no law that says I can only paint Manhattan. We can go anywhere—” She was already imagining new places, new opportunities, new homes, but she found herself stopping short. Jonas had a look she’d never seen before, and it frightened her. Sickened her. She could feel the blood drain from her face. “What?”
“No one is going to hire me,” he answered. As before, there was no emotion behind his words. He might as well have been back in the lab, reading off the measurements taken by some instrument or coldly reporting the result of a calculation.
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she heard herself stammer. Her fear was transforming into dread.
“He’s already salted the earth,” Jonas said with an impotent shrug. “His word against mine. Paper covers rock.”
“I still don’t understand, Jonas.”
“He can keep people from hiring me. It’s like he said back at our apartment, he can keep me from ever getting another job.” He shook his head, emotion finally seeping into his voice. It wasn’t anger or sadness but disbelief. “He was in there . . . bragging about it.” Jonas’s face contorted. “It’s all over for me.”
Amanda shook her head in defiance. “No.” She bit at the air, the word manifesting as a puff of white. “Your research . . .”
“I haven’t even finished it.” He let out half a laugh, a mixture of incredulity and bitterness. “The TA who told Victor what I’m working on . . . she made it sound like I was close to finishing. But I’m not. Not really. Not even close.”
“So get close.”
“What?”
“Finish. Now you’ve got the time.”
“But not the reason,” he answered, his voice laced with despair. “I don’t really see the point of going forward.”
“Why not? Something compelled you to start down this path. I think you were inspired. It’s really no different than when I begin a painting.”
Jonas grimaced and wagged his fingers. “Not exactly. You have a dealer. You have a gallery. There’s an outlet for your paintings.”
“That hasn’t always been true.”