Book excerpt: A wry narrative of love, loss, deceit, and exile told by a woman who in mid-life discovers some previously unrecorded events in the history of the nuclear era. ...It was and it wasn't mine...Who the hell is K.K. Havlamaz'...Obelisk and elephant, granite and graying rock, beamed white in the sunshine...get on morning flight and by evening you're back at the Moon Palace...Guns, gangsters, and gamma rays...the trajectory is determined by resolving the velocity into vertical and horizontal components after the launch...time to revise and enlarge the relationship, move from sodality to sex...to know the parameters of our danger...that we might be a noisome glitch on someone's screen... What is the connection between a brooch shaped like a lily, the obelisks of Rome, and rare transuranium isotopes? What strange alliances were there between Cold War enemies? And what happens to the people who find out?