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When we learned to read and write, for example, it was I who actually did the reading and writing. Eliza remained illiterate until the day she died.

But it was Eliza who did the great intuitive leaping for us both. It was Eliza who guessed that it would be in our best interests to remain speechless, but to become toilet-trained. It was Eliza who guessed what books were, and what the little marks on the pages might mean.

It was Eliza who sensed that there was something cockeyed about the dimensions of some of the mansion’s rooms and corridors. And it was I who did the methodical work of taking actual measurements, and then probing the paneling and parquetry with screwdrivers and kitchen knives, seeking doors to an alternate universe, which we found.

Hi ho.

• • •

Yes, I did all the reading. And it seems to me now that there is not a single book published in an Indo-European language before the First World War that I have not read aloud.

But it was Eliza who did the memorizing, and who told me what we had to learn next. And it was Eliza who could put seemingly unrelated ideas together in order to get a new one. It was Eliza who juxtaposed.

• • •

Much of our information was hopelessly out of date, of course, since few new books had been brought into the mansion since 1912. Much of it, too, was timeless. And much of it was downright silly, such as the dances we learned to do.

If I wished, I could do a very presentable and historically accurate version of the Tarantella, here in the ruins of New York.

• • •

Were Eliza and I really a genius, when we thought as one?

I have to say yes, especially in view of the fact that we had no instructors. And I am not boasting when I say so, for I am only half of that fine mind.

We criticized Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, I remember, on the grounds the creatures would become terribly vulnerable while attempting to improve themselves, while developing wings or armorplate, say. They would be eaten up by more practical animals, before their wonderful new features could be refined.

We made at least one prediction that was so deadly accurate that thinking about it even now leaves me thunderstruck.

Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern power sources and tools.

We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddledy winks with huge chunks of stone.

We supposed that it might even be abnormal on earth for gravity to be stable for long periods of time. We predicted that at any moment gravity might become as capricious as winds and heat and cold, as blizzards and rainstorms again.

• • •

Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves—and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.

We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.

We thought it was more likely, though, that the framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves as composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.

Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives—which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and