Galatea 2.2, page 11
“How about getting paroled for good behavior?”
“Come on, Engineer. Come clean for once. Tell me all that doesn’t depress the hell out of you.”
“No, it doesn’t. It just means we have as good a shot at this as any waffling poseur. We can get our supernet to sound exactly like a fashionable twenty-two-year-old North American whiz-kid imitating a French theorist in translation by, say, this time next month.”
“Engineer—”
“I’m serious, Marcel. I’ve seen the stuff you’re talking about. Gnomic is in. We just have to push ‘privilege’ and ‘reify’ up to the middle of the verb frequency lists and retrain. The freer the associations on the front end, the more profound they’re going to seem upon output.”
“Fine. Do as you please. You obviously don’t need me for any of it. And I don’t need to spend a year working on a pointless and cynical scam. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in tech writing.”
“Marcel, sit down. Marcel! Don’t be an infant,” Lentz ordered. His voice broke. It shocked me. I didn’t think he’d care. Certainly not about something as trivial as my packing it in.
“All right,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I was joking. A little self-deflation. It’s been so long since I’ve been satisfied with anything I’ve done that I get critical. And I forget that not everybody is as detached as I am. I thought you understood. I’m sorry.”
I just watched the man. All footwork. All of it, the contrition as well as the cynicism. He himself had long ago lost the ability to tell what he was after or when he was being genuine. But the astonishing thing—the thing that made no sense—was that he wanted me around. The game was no fun, it was worthless to him otherwise. I couldn’t figure it, and I didn’t want to leave without knowing.
I sat back down, as deliberately as possible. I drew out my answer, curious to see what I would say.
“Imp B?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what I meant by the question.
Lentz answered without pause. “A noble cause, in any case. And not without theoretical interest. Let’s do it for ourselves. I mean, of course we’ll show them what we come up with and all. But let’s just work, and forget about the bet.”
I looked at the man. The bank safety-glass lenses protected him from eye contact.
“To hell with that.” I laughed. “My kid is going to ace that exam!”
“Okay, okay.” Lentz cackled alongside me. “Anything you say.” His eyes seemed to be watering. He actually put his hand on my shoulder, but just as quickly removed it.
We worked hard on sentence parsing, on relationships and comparisons, on simple semantic decoding. B did not get any more likable in the training process. But it grew undeniably clever at pattern matching and manipulation. The fact that it curve-fit countless serial streams of input vectors and could generalize the shape of a simple sentence at all punched my lights out.
May will be fine next year, I assured it. Father hopes to plant roses in the front yard. Mother goes to fetch the doctor.
We were in Lentz’s office one weekend afternoon when he said, “It’s time to give the kid something a little more obscure.”
He rooted through the chaos of his bookshelves. From behind a stack of papers that had begun to recycle themselves, he pulled a fifties-era thermos bottle, a stained coffee mug inscribed Opa, and a ring of what for all the world looked like assorted roller-skate keys. Clearing this hole allowed him to shove around the rest of the junk in his packed office as if it were all some giant 15-puzzle.
This shoving at last released a book that seemed to have been stuck in deepest hiding. Squirreled away, like a boy’s soft-core magazine. The pale pink fata morgana photograph on the jacket had been torn and taped clumsily back together. I knew the book even before he dredged it up into view.
“Oh no. Engineer. Lentz. Give me a break. Not that one. I’ve seen full professors make a total debacle of that book.”
“Well, now, Marcel. We’re not going to do the book. Heaven forfend. Just this bit.”
He dropped the text open in front of me, a horny thumbnail overscoring the harmless epigraph to Chapter One.
“Just that?”
“Just that.”
“You’re insane, you know.”
“Oh yes. I’m quite aware of that. Wait,” Lentz delayed me. “I want Plover to see this. Let’s hope our prize pupil doesn’t choose this moment to act up.”
He limped down the corridor, making good time for a sixty-year-old whose body had been nothing but a nuisance to him for half those years. He returned with a dubious Harold in tow.
When he saw me, Harold’s face lit up. “Ave, Scriptor! Are you keeping this charlatan honest?” Had I taken the least step toward him, he would have wrapped me in a bear hug.
Harold’s spontaneous affection depressed me. I’d done nothing to get this fellow to like me, and the fact that he did made me feel dishonest. My sense of unearned credit was interrupted by the appearance in the doorway of a sullen teenage girl.
“Trish,” Plover commanded. “Trish. Take the headphones off. Take—the—headphones …” He pantomimed in affable, immense semaphore. Trish complied, rolling her eyes toward a spiritual mezzanine.
“This is the novelist whose books I showed you.” Harold turned back toward me, to make sure I was the person he meant. “Richard, this is Trish. The second of the Plover Amazons.”
She shook my hand, then looked around the lab for sterilization equipment.
“How many in the tribe?” I asked.
Harold started ticking off his fingers. “I don’t know. I’ve lost count.”
“Oh, Daddy!” Trish moaned. A mentally deficient father: the only thing that could have driven her to address me. “Don’t listen to him. He’s been insufferable ever since Mom let Sue go to Italy.”
“Hear that? ‘Insufferable.’ Trish is the literary one. She writes poetry.”
“I do not. They’re song lyrics.”
“She’d like you to look at them sometime.”
“No way!” Trish shouted.
Lentz snorted at the collocation. “Is Hartrick going to come have a look at this?” he asked.
I felt the tension before the sentence was even half out of him. Harold looked ready to strangle the little man.
“No. Just do your stuff. Let’s see what you got.”
“What you have,” Trish corrected. This time, Dad rolled his eyes.
I spoke to B. I launched into the singsong nursery rhyme that, for reasons that I’ve long since forgotten, I’d used to open my first novel.
“As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives …”
I stumbled and hung up on the lines. Harold reminded me how they went, and I got all the way through.
Everyone held their breath. “Well?” Lentz said. “Go ahead, then. Get on with it. Pop the question.”
I posed the query with which my firstborn book began.
“Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?”
Somewhere on the curve of unfathomable syntaxes lay the desired answer. Our network of nets took less than half a minute to triangulate it. “One.”
“Way cool!” Trish exclaimed. She moved toward the terminal, excited. I noticed something wrong with the way she walked. Then the shoe dropped: she was on roller blades.
Plover broke out in a belly laugh. “This is for real?”
Trish took the microphone. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL!” Vectors danced across the screen, but Imp B kept its counsel. Trish pouted.
“It may be less impressive than it looks,” I demurred. “I assume it just ignored everything in the riddle that it couldn’t fit into the main predication.”
“It’s impressive enough,” Lentz said, laconically. “Unfailing literal-mindedness may be the most impressive thing going.”
THE EPIGRAPH I read to Imp B, like the book it opened, came from a distributed nowhere. I don’t know why I used it. If I had to gloss it, I would say the line was about walking head-on into the parade of not-you, somewhere along time’s dirt track. No matter how long and elaborate history’s procession, the eye meeting it along the muddy road is always first person singular.
That book came to me during our first year in B., the richest year in my life. I thought we were happy then, but who can say? Our happiness may never have been more than bravery. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That was my favorite line, that pilgrim winter. I liked the idea that we grew to become our attitudes. And attitude, during our stay in B., felt like happiness, deep and artesian.
We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winter starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.
Through those first mythic days, we met our neighbors. We sashayed around them in the laundry room and halls. We shook hands and took their business cards, with none to give in return. We folded origami mnemonics from the syllables of their names. Then we forgot the mnemonics.
No matter. People in our building did not want to be called anything anyway. That was why they chose the place. That was why we ourselves lived there. Every soul in that horseshoe courtyard wanted to be left to its private invulnerability.
The nearer the next man’s dossier, the more easily we avoided it. A hole breached our bathroom ceiling into 307 above. It tore open in the shower steam, peppering our tub with drywall. We tacked a linen sheet printed with lime-green woods across the gaping wound. As good as healed.
We were each other’s entire populace. Even job hunting was a shared delight.
“Here’s one for you, C. ‘Good communications skills.’”
“Um, Beau? I think they mean modems and stuff.”
We listened to each other’s stories. We improvised. We pulled repertoire out of deep storage. The books we didn’t read out loud to each other we paraphrased at great length. And we read, reread everything that time had prevented us from reading properly until then.
I might linger over a printed paperback opening for an afternoon, wondering if I wanted to commit. For, once past page 10, I was obligated to stay the campaign, however sordid. I read essays, history, biography—things that would never in a million years be on the List because they weren’t English or weren’t literature. I commenced that million-and-a-half-word associative memoir that Lentz would harass me with by name, a dozen years later.
I began to keep a reading diary. Not very dramatic as turning points go, but there it is. A lifetime later, rereading these notebooks, I saw that the lines I copied out, the words I deemed worth fixing forever in the standing now of my own handwriting, clumped up with unlikely frequency toward the start of any new book. The magic quotes thinned out over any book’s length. The curve was linear and invariable. Perhaps writers everywhere crowded their immortal bits up toward the front of their books, like passengers clamoring to get off a bus. More likely, reading, for me, meant the cashing out of verbal eternity in favor of story’s forward motion. Trapping me in the plot, each passing line left me less able to reach for my notebook and fix the sentence in time.
C. read Buddenbrooks and Anna Karenina. She reread Little Women. Everything made her weep. Everything. Well before the last page, she would drag her heels. Her bookmark tracked across the spine of a paperback like Zeno’s arrow, frozen in infinite halfway points on its way to the mark. The first four hundred pages zoomed by in two or three nights. The last forty could tie her up for a month.
When she did finish anything, it convulsed her. I remember her reading Ethan Frome.
“I thought every American high schooler had to pass a test on that book. Right before they quizzed you on the Constitution,” I teased her.
C. shrugged. “Maybe I’m not an American, Beau?”
The day she finished, it turned cold. I was in the front room, on the overstuffed chair we’d saved from street-side collection. C. was in the bedroom, on the mattress on the floor. Out of dead silence, I heard her distress call. “Beau. Ricky.” Soft and desperate, already lost, pinned under a mountainside of rock.
I closed the distance at reflex speed. She was propped up against the wall, her eyes rimmed red with salt, her fist shaking, pressed against her mouth. “Oh, Beauie. Give me another chance. I’ve been so selfish and awful. I can be better. I know I can.”
This was from Ethan Frome, of all places. Ethan Frome.
Each workday, C. put on her navy blue uniform and walked across the land-filled fen between our apartment and the Fine Arts. There she stood for eight hours at a go, saving the masterpieces of world painting from a poking and prodding public.
Museum guard may be the most tedious occupation in the nation’s job register. But someone neglected to tell C. She came home glowing with minute enthusiasms, discoveries that could be made only by staring at a painted surface for days at a time. In particular, she loved being assigned to the Fine Arts’ chestnut Colonial collection. Too late, I heard in her love the deportee’s thrill, the fascination with a country hers only by the thinnest accident of birth.
For the two of us, America went antique. In that city, at that time of year, people moved purposefully through the streets, hinged to their shadows. Their black coats seemed coal seams against gray snow. In silhouette, they passed for protagonists in modernist Czech novels. They packed down subway stairwells and through turnstiles. I packed along with them, on the way to the trade press office where I worked.
I imitated them for C. at night, when I came home. I mimicked the exchange of pleasantries. “We must dine some evening.” “The Net National Income has experienced another sudden surge.” C. insisted I had a future, either on stage or in a brokerage.
The city posed like one of those portraits C. guarded, a Whistler or a Copley. The subway trains—state-of-the-art, burnished, Asian—were at heart archaic trolleys. They hauled their human freight back and forth to garden suburbs with odd monikers. Cars darted through the maze of surface streets, tomorrow’s Studebakers.
My computer magazine outfit sat inside a rustic steel-and-glass exoskeleton that made the surrounding buildings look even more antiquated. The cityscape was something an American postprimitive might do, a nostalgic century from now.
C. and I lived it in advance retrospective. We took long walks along the prow of winter, reconnoitering, registering everything. We ingested the ochers and burnt umbers, the tints that tipped us to the fact that the present was far stranger than it let on.
Only the urban poor refused to go aesthetic. They spoke in tongues, human or otherwise, debating themselves or whoever else would listen. They handed the two of us soiled pamphlets covered in Carolingian minuscule. Or they slouched asleep, grease- and blood-caked, in the back of sleek light rails, riding out to the docklands district of progress’s trade fair.
On nights when the windchill permitted, when the bitterness of interplanetary dark toyed with its food by easing a degree, I walked home. I cut across the public plots, the ancient Victory Gardens, all their victories lost, forgotten, or squandered. There, bent women tilled the rows in windup planetarium ellipses. The city’s native foreigners, waiting for spring to plant a new crop for next year’s war effort.
I made my way through the garden, the days getting dark early, just after four. Over the fusty expressway bridge, I headed into the home stretch, closing in on the place C. and I had made for each other, from out of total accident.
We lived from sense to sense. I can picture the neighborhood as if it were last evening. The street with the nineteenth-century name. The narrow, storefront scrap-metal emporia. The corner convenience grocer, hanging on by milk-quart markups and lottery tickets. The empty lots that did thousand-dollar days as instant baseball parking garages when summer still was. The abandoned warehouse that flourished briefly as a bar where youth in search of the chemically enhanced Authentic congregated and methodically slammed into itself, studying the dance floor as if meaning were there, in designer-drugged Arthur Murray footprint.
The neighborhood, the street, our apartment are still real. But the city where we spent those years gets more stylized, harder to see, the further I get from what the two of us used to call home.
And we did feel at home there, for a season. We could have pitched camp there forever. I belonged there more than in any of those toytown props that loom like back-projection houses behind me and my brothers and sisters, in my album of faded black-and-whites.
And C.: C. lived there, too, for a while. For the first time since she’d learned how to plan, outcome didn’t matter. It was all dress-up, in B. An oldies party. For two years—a long vacation—she found a fantasy that fit her.
BUT C. GOT homesick. It was inevitable. How could any town compete with a ghost? We’d lived in B. several months when we learned that C.’s parents were returning to Limburg. Both her folks had retired. The workday was over. A quarter century camping out on the South Side of Chicago was enough. It was time to give up and head home.
C. blamed herself. Had she stayed close, the folks might never have left. Twenty-some years had produced no permanent attachments; no tie kept them here. Only the children, and the three of them were already scattered all over the map. C.’s parents chose to see whether the little town of E. still existed, if it ever had.
The news devastated C. “I’m a miserable excuse for a daughter, aren’t I?”
I was supposed to agree with her. I was supposed to tell her no.
Guilt was her move in the loop C. and her mother put each other through. The struggle was not over whether they loved each other, but over whether love was enough. They kept at one another, testing, accusing, defending. This endless attempt to determine who had betrayed the other put them both through hell. The kind of hell that would hurt far more, someday, when all scores were reconciled.
C.’s father, on the other hand: any flare-up, and Pap started whistling to himself, heading off to the nearest back room to fix things. I wondered how this old Dutch railroad man with his accented Chicago idioms—“Let’s get the show on the road,” “Now you’re talkin’,” “If it works, it works”—would ever fit back into a province whose chief industry since the shutting of the coal mines was geriatric care. He’d been away once before, in a German forced-labor camp. I always thought that first deportation was the reason he lit off for the States.
