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The Fowler Cooper Publication Federation

January 2043

Primary Topic: Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin

This is what winning the Nobel Prize got you.

Amy looked around her empty new lab and sighed. She was not used to being alone anymore. First it was her choice, to have undergraduate assistants a day or two a week and then she needed more help with her landmark study and then everyone clamored to work with her. For she was a Nobel Prize winner.

But, for now, the lab was empty, as she has sent everyone out to complete tasks elsewhere and then suggested they take a long lunch. She was struck, now that she was alone, the same way she was struck the first time she saw it. Yes, it was shiny and new and state-of-the-art, but it lacked something. She would have said soul, but she made the mistake of saying that two months ago to Sheldon, after seeing it for the first time, and he scoffed at her. But then he'd squeezed her hand, so he understood her after all. As he always did in the end.

Not only had the world changed in twenty years, but her little world of the lab had changed, too. There were robotic and computerized assistive devices to perform the most menial of tasks, and station after station of complex computers to perform everything else. Even something as essential to her job as slicing the brain for slides wasn't done anymore, the tomographic programs analyzing and virtually slicing a whole brain on the screen, almost instantaneously giving output after output of data, more data than Amy even needed, and all it took was a simple turn of the mouse or voice command to rotate the three dimensional image of something a few microns thick still attached to its whole. It boggled her mind sometimes. No pun intended.

She'd learned not to say aloud that it boggled her mind. She knew she was considered old-fashioned and quaint for the way she insisted on teaching each of her assistants how to properly slice a brain the old way. The way she'd learned, the way she'd done it for years. It wasn't even taught anymore. But still they came, these young people, younger than Ada now, so very young, to learn in her lab, even if they giggled and said it seemed so barbaric. Because she was a Nobel Prize winner, and, even before that, well respected in her field if not famous in the traditional sense, if not famous like her daughter.

But this is what she wanted to teach them: science is barbaric. It's a physical struggle, not a voice command. Now you could inject a patient with dye and watch the scan on your computer screen as their Fowler-Bonnet micro-neurotransmitters lit up like fireworks. But there was a time, twenty years ago, when Charles Bonnet was just a quaint footnote in ophthalmic history and Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler was slicing a brain when she had an idea.

"Why the frown?"

Amy jumped, not having heard Sheldon's soft approach. She turned and smiled at him. At least this thrill was still the same: looking up to see her tall handsome husband visiting her lab, even if his temples were gray now.

"I was thinking about science."

"How could you possibly frown about that? I brought sandwiches," he added as he lifted the bag up in his hand.

"There's something about this lab, especially when it's empty. I don't think it suits me." She waved her arm toward her smaller corner office, and Sheldon followed her. There was a tiny pedestal table in the corner, for tiny meetings that she never really had, and they sat there to eat.

"But you helped with the design. Your name is on the door," Sheldon protested, unpacking the bag.

"My name is on the building."

Sheldon tilted his head as he passed her a napkin. That was the extent of his reply. Perhaps she shouldn't have said it.

The Fowler Center for Neuroscience had not been her idea. It would have never been her idea. The lab was already under construction when the Nobel announcement came, but Caltech had capitalized on the publicity they received for the purely coincidental timing of the ribbon-cutting ceremony one month later. Amy had suggested, as casually as she thought she could, that Sheldon didn't need to come. Left unsaid was the unavoidable fact that she was the second person he loved to get what he so desperately desired. But he'd come anyway and proudly stood next to her and smiled when she cut the ribbon amidst the flashes of the hovering camera drones.

"Sheldon, I -" "Book Club?"

They looked up at each other and smiled. Amy tried again. "Maybe I shouldn't have -"

"You deserve every building in the world, Amy. Now, it's Book Club Day and, as we have plans this evening that you insist we keep, this lab will have to do."

"We have to keep them!" Amy said, taking a bit of her sandwich.

"So you tell me."

"We have gone to every single one of Penny's movie and television show premieres, it is only fitting we go to Fawn's first one."

After swallowing, Sheldon said, "But I assumed her generation would be the ones to go."

"I'm sure they all want to, but many of them are in college now or live elsewhere. Fenny and Frances are coming. Ada told me she and Jacob wanted to come, but they're saving all their time off for their parental leaves this summer," Amy pointed out. It still seemed strange to say the words, to imagine her baby having a baby.

"In that case, we need to have Book Club, otherwise I'm afraid I won't understand this movie at all," Sheldon replied.

"I doubt that." Amy chuckled and pulled her iKindle out and put in on the table, in case she needed to locate a quote for their discussion. "As you no doubt surmised, I picked this book because Fawn's movie is about it. Or this play here is a play within a play within a movie or something like that."

"Do you think Steve Martin is rolling over in his grave?" Sheldon asked, eating more of his sandwich.

"Hmmm, I don't know." Amy thought as she took a bite herself. "No, I don't think so. After all, it's a bit of absurdist work on its own, and I think he would have appreciated that someone still considers it relevant to do a sort of homage to it in a film."

"But what if this movie is absurdist, too? Not only does it sound like the worst possible way to spend our Friday evening, is that disrespectful to the playwright of the inspirational material?" Sheldon asked.

"In principle, I don't think so, but we'll we see out it plays out," Amy said with a shrug.

"Pun intended?"

She glanced up at his smiling face. "No, happy accident." A pause. "And, back your previous question, you don't think Ada's work is disrespectful to Picasso and all the other cubist artists in history, do you?"

"Of course not! It's superior!"

Amy smiled softly. "It's the same question, though. She took a form of art, cubism in her case, and she turned it around, changed the angle so that you could see all the equations."

"Maybe," Sheldon relented. "So, Picasso. How interesting that's he's both in this play and so influential to Ada. And yet I don't like him one bit."

"Because, whether or not you personally care for his works, he changed art in the twentieth century," Amy explained. "It would hard to deny that, although of course I'm sure there have been detractors that have tried. I'm sure it's why he was chosen as one the principle characters in this play. He represents the forthcoming - at the time of the play - future of art and Einstein represents the forthcoming future of physics."

"It pleased me that Einstein had a bigger role; clearly science is more important than art," Sheldon said quickly.

"Don't let Ada hear you say that."

Sheldon gave the little snort/laugh Amy adored.

"Besides," Amy continued, "I'm not sure Einstein has a bigger part. Yes, he's in the bar first but he leaves and Picasso stays, remember? I wonder if there's some symbolism to that."

"That even a great scientist's work can be disproven with time, but that a piece of art will always retain the same element of truth, because it is a subjective truth?" Sheldon asked.

Amy grinned over the top of her water bottle at him. Dear, wonderful Sheldon.

"What?" he asked, mid-chew.

"I was just thinking how Book Club has changed, too."

"Changed, too?" He raised a single eyebrow, always her undoing.

Shaking her head softly, Amy explained, "Before you came, I was thinking about my lab and my work, how much it's changed since I started. Sometimes progress makes me . . . nostalgic, I guess, for simpler times. Well, not Book Club in the same way," she added in a rush. "I mean, I am nostalgic for our early Book Clubs only because they're such happy memories. But I love the progress Book Club has made. But scientific progress . . . makes me . . . I don't know."

Her husband swiveled his head around her office, looking through the glass windows to the empty lab beyond. "But, as a scientist, surely you appreciate the advances. The good they lead to in the lives of everyone."

"I do." Amy sighed. She thought of Sheldon's office, unchanged over the years. Yes, his computer was smaller, but he still had the same space and he still worked at whiteboards, even if some were electronic now and saved his work on hard drive. The lack of updates was partially fueled by his dislike of change, but it was also because so much of his job remained in his head. A part of Amy envied him, and she couldn't even explain why. So she didn't try; she shook her head into another bite instead. "Never mind. I'm doing a poor job of articulating it. Let's talk about the book instead. What was your favorite part?"

"The math and scientific examples."

Well, at least that never changed. But she asked, "What do you think of the idea that a group of lines can change the world?"

"I'm whole-heartedly with Einstein on this. A scientist's group of lines mean something, they touch the head, they will change the future," Sheldon said succinctly.

"But others have to be open to receiving that change, he says that, too, when Picasso hands him his drawing. No one was ready to hear Galileo champion heliocentrism, for example," Amy pointed out. "Or why does't one man think of something before someone else? What made Picasso and Einstein change the world when others before them maybe could have done it by accident if nothing else?"

"You and I both know great thoughts don't happen by accident," Sheldon said, shifting in his seat. "You worked years on your theory, proving it was a fact. And then, after you, others worked on it more, developing the practical applications for modern medicine. What I worked on this morning could, in time, earn me the Nobel Prize. But I have to refine and distill it first."

"Do you believe in coup des fondres?"

"Bolts of lightning? The atmospheric discharge of electricity? What an odd question."

"No, not that. I meant it in the French sense -"

"The French have lightning, too," he mumbled.

" - as in a sudden inspiration. It did take years to prove my theory, but it honestly came to be all at once, the germ of the idea. I know you've had moments like that before, I've seen them," Amy explained, folding up the paper in which her sandwich had been wrapped. Amy loved those moments, when she saw Sheldon's entire being change and he stood up straighter, the way his eyes sparked, his eyebrows first dipping and then vaulting upwards, just before he lifted his hand to scribble on his white board. For a man who was achingly handsome even when he was sick and cranky, the brilliance of his allure in those moments was almost blinding.

"'If I can think it, I can draw it,'" Sheldon quoted, and Amy sat back to enjoy him reciting something he'd memorized without even trying. It was one of her favorite facets of Book Club. "'I used to have an idea; then a month later, I would draw it. The idea was a month ahead of its execution. Now the idea is ahead of the pencil only by minutes. One day, they will be simultaneous. Do you know what that's like? If you can think it, you can draw it? The feeling of clear, undiluted vision?'" He looked more closely at her. "Like that?"

"Yes, like that."

Sheldon sighed. "I thought I've had moments like that. But I guess not."

Amy bit her lip and looked down, regretting her question. She started to gather their trash. She remembered the morning - the middle of the night, really - when the calls came in. She'd won the Nobel Prize. Ada was the first person she talked to about it, Ada breathless with excitement for her, Amy dazed with interrupted sleep and shock. So much happened so quickly that she barely noticed Sheldon getting out of bed.

She'd found him, standing in the dark of the great room, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows. He turned at the sound of her steps and he smiled at her. He never stopped smiling at her, off stage or on screen at the interviews, beside her at the ribbon cutting for this lab, applauding for her from the audience in Stockholm. It was not that she doubted his joy and pride for her; it was just that she knew it could easily coexist with disappointment. But only once had she ever seen it on his face: in those seconds before he turned in the dark, his face drawn and etched by the lights of the city out the window.

"I think you have," Amy said, trying to force all the sincerity she felt into her words. "But, and this is what I was thinking earlier, science is messy and hard and barbaric. Even Einstein didn't get immediate recognition for his ideas and work. Sometimes I worry that today's young scientists, so used to getting immediate gratification from their computer screens, won't understand that. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not recalling it correctly, maybe it's not a bolt of lightning after all. Maybe it's like they say here, let me find it."

She reached forward and quickly found the bookmark. "Here it is:
'Einstein: Shooting star. They hit the atmosphere and burn white.
Picasso: I'd like to leave a long trail. A long string of fire.
Einstein: From horizon to horizon.
Picasso: So bright that when you look away you can still see it against your eyes.
Einstein: I would like that . . . A retention of vision.'"

"Amy."

She looked up to see Sheldon staring at her. His face was unreadable to her, and that so rarely happened after all these years that it made her heart beat faster in concern.

Her husband, now with graying temples and bifocals in his glasses, wearing a Henley shirt that she'd introduced him too, leaned closer and put one hand over hers, causing her to lower her iKindle to the table. Then he reached up with the other and rested his fingers along her jaw. Amy found her face reaching for his touch, her head angling toward it, without any thought at all. For it's what they did.

"I should have said this months ago," Sheldon said, his voice heavy and serious, "back in October, when the announcement first came. If you are the only shooting star in my life, it will have been my honor to have lived hidden in your trail."

"Oh, Sheldon."

"No more pregnant pauses and biting your lip and watching your words. That is not the Amy I know and love. That is not the Amy I married. If you want to say it, say it. Decorum has never stopped me."

"I think I want to retire," she blurted out.

His eyebrows went up. "Retire?"

"It's this lab. It doesn't feel like me anymore. I'm not sure I'm contributing anymore."

"Pppsshh," Sheldon said softly. "You're the greatest neurobiologist of this era, of course you are. I think you'd get bored without your work, but, if you've thought this through and you've seriously considered all the options, who am I to stop you? Do you want to know what my favorite line in this play is?" Amy nodded. "'Madam Curie didn't say, "I think I've discovered radium; I better check with a man."' And who am I, in the end? Just a man."

"Sheldon!" Amy interjected, lifting her face away from his hand. "You are not just a man! You are a genius and - and - well, you're the man I love -"

"Then that is sufficient for me." He touched her cheek softly with his finger and then he sat back in his chair again. "My point is that you do not need my permission. You never have; not that you've ever asked for it."

"You wouldn't have respected me if I had," Amy said with a smile.

"You're probably correct. When do you plan to retire?"

"To be honest, Sheldon, I haven't thought it through or seriously considered it. I've just had sort of an ennui for a few months now, maybe it's this lab or Ada getting pregnant, I don't know, but it was just now, when I said it, that I realized what I wanted. But I will seriously consider it now."

Sheldon nodded. "Fair enough. But I truly am concerned you'll get bored. I know you could read as much as you want, but at some point you'd probably like some sort of challenge."

"I supposed I could travel to see my grandchild more than I could if I was still working," Amy thought out loud.

"True."

"I could write a text book. I was just thinking, before you came for lunch, about scientists in the early phases of their education, things they learn or don't learn but they should. Maybe something for high schoolers. That would be a challenge."

"To dumb it down to that level? I imagine it would be."

Amy grinned. "Well, it's a thought. I'll think about it all more before I make a decision."

"Would you like my assistance with a pro-and-con chart?"

"Always."

"You know what Steve Martin wrote: 'You take a couple of geniuses, put them in a room together, and . . . wow.'"

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