I just shrugged my shoulders.

      Steve told us that Helen had conveyed to him the entire story of her experience of meeting me in the pub that night when my association with Erica had ended in a deadlock. He told us that he hadn't realized at the time that Helen had been talking about me, which he hadn't found out until some years later. She had told him merely how the professor, whom I had met in the pub that night, had actually made my problem worse that he had tried to solve, so that she decided to repair the damage. This required that she engage me in an experiment, not knowing who I was. Steve said that the experiment was to prove to her that the Platonic method actually works. She told Steve, she reasoned that if the experiment worked, I would be helped and enriched thereby, and so would she be, since she had a difficult problem of her own to work out. Her goal had been to see if it was possible for both of us to behave like human beings in the highest possible sense.

      "That's what she said to me, Peter," said Steve. "Helen told me that she remembered how the slave boy in Plato's Meno dialog had been able to solve a complex puzzle in geometry without any prior education and without any need for him to be taught anything whatsoever. The boy had accomplished the complex feat out of his own resources as a human being. She determined that she could utilize the same process in regard to the even more difficult task that she had chosen to tackle, which she also needed help with. That is why she engaged you in conversation outside the pub after you were leaving," said Steve.

      Steve related that Helen had observed me in the pub looking at my wedding ring, turning it on my finger at times, possibly without even being aware of it. She sensed that my reason for being in that pub was rooted in that ring. She also sensed that my patient listening to the old professor's rambling on about all the political problems in the world, which he understood technically quite well, was also related to that ring. She sensed that neither the professor, nor I were in any way aware of that deep-seated linkage. So, she decided to challenge me to become sensitive to what I couldn't see with my eyes. Steve said that in order to reach that goal, she decided to lay before me the awesome task of comprehending her breakthrough discovery of the lateral lattice of human hearts, which was still a new concept to her. It had just begun to unfold then.

      Steve related to our entire little group on the beach, how that breakthrough discovery came about. He talked about how it unfolded in the shadow of a need for the healing of one of Helen's friends. Steve pointed out that Helen's friend had always had a weak heart. She knew that. She also knew that her friend was facing a complicated and extensive surgery that day, which was scheduled to require four hours to be completed. Steve related that Helen had become sensitive to her friend's need for support twenty minutes after the procedure began, according to schedule. "As if someone had spoken, Helen suddenly sensed an urgency that felt like a cry in the dark, projecting a need for more strength." Steve told us that what she felt was so powerful and urgent that it had almost frightened her.

      Steve told us that in response to the unfolding crisis Helen had pulled together all that she knew about all the principles that define our humanity. He explained that in the intensity of such a crisis one has not enough time for contemplating all the principles verbally, as one normally does in the process of scientific explorations. "All the principles that she was aware of fashioned together in her mind in a single moment," said Steve. "It became drawn together into the form of a huge visual representation of all the truths that she had previously discovered and contemplated. She saw before her a construct of a reality unfolding that came to light in the form of an infinite lattice of human hearts, all linked to each other laterally by strings of love, all contributing a bit of their strength, flowing as light, in support of her friend. She saw a universal process fulfilling a need that apparently had become acute."

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche