Galatea 2.2, page 15
“But that’s where associative learning comes in, isn’t it? We don’t have to enumerate all those qualities. If the machine keeps coming across them, and sometimes people are gazing into crystals, and sometimes they’re pitching a curve, and sometimes they are having—”
“That’s just the problem. Any baby can hold a ball in its hands. Your machine can’t. How many words is it going to take to say what that globe feels like? The heft of the thing. The possibility.”
“Red rubber sphere that you can chuck …”
“Richie. Richie.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that no one called me that. Besides, it sounded good in her mouth.
“Are you going to do ‘red’ as fitting between x and y angstroms?”
“Not at all. That’s the classical AI people. Chen and Keluga. We’re going to do red sky, red-faced, red flag, in the red, red dress …”
“Sexist. Okay. Go on to ‘sphere.’ How is the poor thing supposed to get ‘all the points equidistant from a center’ when it has never seen distance? When it can’t possibly measure?”
“Good point. You mean we have a problem. No symbolic grounding.”
“Symbolic grounding.” Diana grinned, and wiped the tartar sauce from her lower lip. “That’s the phrase I was looking for.”
“You’re saying a reading machine is hopeless. We should give it up.”
“I’m saying, if you’re going to make such a thing, you have to give it eyes, hands, ears. A real interface onto the outside.”
“The literary theorists think a human’s real-world interface is problematic at best. And greatly overrated. They say even sense data must be put into symbols.”
“The literary theorists have to get tenure. And they have no hard facts to get tenure with. They have to fight for a slice of a pie that’s getting smaller every day.”
“Getting smaller because of people like you.”
I was teasing. She took me at face value. “Yes, maybe. But tell me, then. Why do your people need to either emulate mine, attack us as nature molesters, or dismiss us as irrelevant self-deluders?”
“My people are scared shitless of your people, that’s why. They’re terrified that Dad and Mom really do love you best.”
Diana smiled like a teenager. “Are you kidding? We’re the problem child. Don’t you remember? You heard the parents tell us never to play with matches.”
We walked outside into a day remade. The trees had stripped bare, but for a moment, I couldn’t tell if they were coming or had just gone. We two were the only ones on the whole street wearing coats. A pack of earphoned roller bladers with wraparound shades so silvered they couldn’t see almost mowed us down.
My disorientation was total. “Wasn’t it almost winter when we went inside?”
“It’s getting so that these once-in-a-century freak weather spells occur every other week.”
“That’s the fault of you scientists.”
“Doubtless.”
“It’s still nippy. Have I lost my mind, or are those women wearing shorts?”
“Youth is never cold,” Diana lamented.
Ten years ago, fifteen, I’d pitied those who’d let their skin go papery and their blood thin. Back then, this had been my haunt. Now I’d lost the lease, could not even name the street.
“I want it to freeze. Freeze hard.”
“It’s going to freeze,” Diana guaranteed. “You’ve forgotten. It’s rough out in these parts. Four months of interstellar blackness. Deep space. Zero. The air loads up with sleet BBs, with nothing between here and Pennsylvania to slow the wind.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Five years. You know the funny thing? I never thought of myself as a Californian when I lived there.”
We walked toward campus. “Does the brain have a ‘decaying leaf recognition’ subsystem? A ‘sheepskin coat just back from the cleaners’ subsystem?”
“I know what you mean,” Diana said. “Smell is everything, isn’t it? When I smell the air right now, I think, I know what’s coming. Time to batten down.”
“I think, how can I leave all this?”
She said nothing for the longest time. Then Diana said, “Thrill.”
“Yes. Thrill.”
It took me until the Quad, until we walked over the spot, to make the connection. To realize what day it was. You see, it didn’t feel like November. Same day, different year: I no longer knew what people meant by that. Four days later, it snowed.
“SYMBOLIC GROUNDING,” I told Lentz.
D, our first implementation to run on the sprawling community of connection machine, was my slowest charge so far. But parallel architecture and several software twists made it the one with the most astonishing reach. D came into this world recursive. It took forever to grasp that two was the integer just past one. But the instant it got that, it had infinity in the same breath. It could watch itself learn. When it got “Dogs bark,” it also got “Baby says, ‘Dogs bark.’” The breakout, when it came, was going to be unbelievable.
The shape of its brain was generative. It matched the arc of an uncoiling sentence. But deep syntax wasn’t enough. Words weren’t enough. “The policeman gave the motorist his badge,” I told it. “Who does ‘his’ stand for? The policeman gave the motorist his license.” Now who?
How much would D have to know before it could get that one? Tracing my own inference process dizzied me. The linked list of properties hanging off the world’s every object required a combinatorial explosion of sense. But to see even part of what the host symbols stood for required that D first see.
“We have to give it eyes,” I decided. “Why train it with all the properties of a ball when we can show it what a ball is?”
“Nice leap, Marcel,” Lentz said. “I’ve been waiting for you to make it.”
“And here I was afraid you were going to kill me for bringing it up.”
“On the contrary. In fact, I still have a passive retinal matrix lying around intact from work I did last year. We can paste it in.”
“Now, where the hell did I put that eyeball? It was around here somewhere.”
Lentz laughed. “All right. So the work habits could be more systematic.”
Sight was not the sudden beamburst I hoped for. Revision E could convert objects into retinoptic neurode maps. Training got it to associate words with each visual clump. But navigating by this crayon cartography resembled sewing silk with a Lincoln log needle.
I gave it several common objects, in stiff cross section. E made only static traces: photos, not footage. I sorely doubted that the speckles of light and dark did anything to round out the ball in E’s associative memory. We boosted the resolution. Added bits for color, sixteen million shades. Whether E traveled those surfaces or twirled them in its mental space I couldn’t say.
The creature in Frankenstein learned to speak by eavesdropping on an exiled family, the most astonishing act of language acquisition until Taylor’s beloved Tarzan, the books on which the best reader I ever met grew up. Frankenstein’s creature had his chattering family and a knapsack of classics: Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s Werther. E, like Tarzan, learned to talk more or less on print alone.
“I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects,” Shelley’s creature says somewhere. “I learned and applied the words, ‘fire,’ ‘milk,’ ‘bread,’ and ‘wood’ …”
One day I would teach this speech to a machine that had learned to read. Maybe not E, or F, but G, or son of G. And my machine would understand.
“I distinguished several other words without being able as yet to understand or apply them,” the girl child’s monster would tell mine. Words “such as ‘good,’ ‘dearest,’ ‘unhappy.’”
“YOU DON’T EAT,” Diana accused me.
“I eat. I eat a lot. You saw how much I put away at lunch.”
“I bet that was your only meal that day.”
“I lose track sometimes. Lentz and I … We get to training at such weird hours.”
“You don’t eat unless someone feeds you. Is that it?”
I knew what was coming. But I had nowhere to run. I wanted to tell her then. Before any court of confusion. My evacuated life left no air for anyone. Least of all someone as kind as Diana.
But Diana hadn’t offered anything rejectable yet. Nothing but the most generic friendship.
“Most experimental neurologists can’t cook,” she said. “They’re fine until they get to the part of the recipe that says ‘Season to taste.’ This throws them for a loop. They like the ‘Measure carefully into bowl.’ They tend to hang out up there.”
“Connectionists,” I mimicked, “cook brilliantly. They start out at random, and a few thousand iterations later …” Two funny deflections, then I’d flee before she could extend the invitation.
“I bet novelists know how to shape a recipe.”
“Maybe back when. The age of plot and closure. Times have changed. It’s all microwave these days.”
“I know what,” she said. “You can cook a meal for me.” So simple. A sudden, happy inspiration.
She’d had mercy. Given me one she couldn’t expect me to accept.
“Well, Diana, that sounds great in theory. But unless it’s Jiffy Pop, and you bring the matches to light my stove’s pilot …”
“At my place. I have all the utensils. And I won’t get in your way at all.”
“Just stand by and laugh?”
“Something like that.”
“All right, then. All right. I rise to the challenge. Moules Provisoires.”
“Oh. My. The man’s done this before.”
I had, in fact. But I didn’t care to give her the details.
I got to her place Saturday evening. I managed to carry all the provisions on my bike rack. Even the tapers. I rang the bell, ready with a funny opener about ruined anything tasting better by candlelight.
The door was opened by a little boy. I started to mumble something about getting the address wrong.
“Mom,” the boy called back into the house. “The writer’s here!”
“The writer?” Diana answered from within. “Tell him to use the tradesman’s entrance.”
The kid looked up at me, wrestling with the command. His face searched mine for clues. I watched the solution—irony—ripple through him until he let me in with a wry smile.
Diana appeared, doubling my shock. She carried a younger boy in her arms. I must have looked like a blithering undergrad.
“Here’s Richard,” she said, addressing the child. “Can you say ‘Hi, Richard’?”
“Rick would be fine,” I said.
This child wasn’t about to say anything. I saw it in his features. The slightly spatulate face. The fold to the nose and ears. Speech would be long and hard in coming.
“This is Peter.” The cheerful matter-of-fact. My worst-case fears came home to roost. I knew her. I could never pretend ignorance again.
“Hello, Peter.” I didn’t know how to carry on. “I once wrote a book about someone named Peter.”
Peter hunched up into a little ball. He peeked out sideways.
“He’s a little shy with strange people,” the older brother said. “But for a Down’s baby, he’s a genius.”
“And this is William.”
“Do you know what it says on the Brazilian flag?” William asked me.
“I used to know.”
“You probably did,” Diana cracked.
“It says, ‘Ordem e Progresso.’”
“No kidding! What does that mean?”
William thought. “It means—order me some soup?”
Diana choked with shame in mid-laugh. “Oh, sweetheart! No. That was just a little joke of mine.”
“I know,” William pouted.
“What’s the Netherlands?” I asked.
“Easy one. Red stripe, white stripe, blue stripe.” He drew them in the air, visualizing as he described. Then he pointed at me. He waved his index finger in a pedagogical sweep. “Also Luxembourg,” he warned.
“Yeah. There’s a reason for that.”
“I know, I know. Here’s one. Red circle on white background?”
“Easy one. Japan.”
“No fair!” Adults weren’t supposed to know anything.
“Don’t get him started,” Diana said on our way to the kitchen. “He can do all hundred and eighty of them.”
“Hundred and eighty-six,” William corrected.
“What if you take Netherlands and double it? Hold a mirror up to the bottom?”
That one took a couple of steps. “Thailand?”
“You’re good, man. You’re good.”
“Formerly known as Siam.”
“Population?”
“Approximately fifty-one million.”
“Approximately,” Diana sighed.
“Name seven countries where Spanish is the principal language.”
“Easy one,” William said, the index finger now a fencing foil. The most extraordinary boy I will ever meet.
“Come on, you guys,” Diana said. “Peter and I need food. Don’t we, Peter?”
Peter curled up in his hedgehog defense. But he kept his eye on me at all times.
I put William to work washing the mussels. “Is it just the four of us?” I asked Diana.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I assumed you knew.”
“What, from Lentz? Nobody is real but him. Hadn’t you heard?”
“It’s such a small world over at the Center. I guess I’m used to everyone knowing everything about everybody.”
“And nothing much about anyone.”
“Well, we all have our work, first.”
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
I held my hands out, one toward the kitchen counter, the other toward some remote lab. “Two lives. Alone.”
“Huh!”
“I mow the lawn,” William said.
“How much does she pay you?”
“Two-fifty.”
“Holy moly. There are laws against that, you know.”
Diana made to fillet me with the lemon knife. “Don’t make waves, writer. Or I’ll give you something to write about.”
The meal came together. And William and I managed it without assistance from the feminine half of the world. We made a bucket brigade of the dishes. Peter sat nearby, chattering with his hands.
“Look,” William called. “Pete’s helping!”
I heard the sound of dismayed discovery behind me. “What do we do with these?” Diana stood by the counter, holding the tapers and floral sprig that I’d tried to leave hidden in the bottom of my bag. She looked at me dead on. Her eyes started to water.
“Light them, of course.” But recovery came two beats too late. I shrugged, and even that hurt. This is why I asked you not to ask me here.
Diana put the tapers in elaborate candlesticks that she first had to unwrap from newspapers. We lit them and doused the lights. But the darkness scared Peter. He coiled forward against himself. Diana turned the lights back on. We let the candles burn.
William had more fun with the shells than with the insides. He did, however, enjoy dipping his mussels in the wine sauce and dribbling all over the table. Peter worked away at his compote. He insisted on trying one mussel. He got half of it down, with a look of utter stupefaction.
“They’re both going to have the runs for days,” Diana said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. They get the runs from jelly toast.”
William bit his cheek. I didn’t know how badly, at first. All at once, he stopped talking. I thought it was a clown act. Pantomime. I started to laugh, until William’s silent, red-faced distress made Peter break out in tears and lower his face into his plate.
Diana was up in a fraction of a second, before I knew what was happening. “It’s okay. Petey, it’s okay.” Diana lifted her boy and hugged him to her. She repeated the litany various ways, glossing with a flurry of hand motions.
“You sign to him?”
“A little. It’s easier for him to reply. Words will come slowly. Fine motor is tricky for him.”
“What is he saying?”
“‘William is going away’? No, sweetheart.” Diana signed her assurance. “William just has a little owie. It’s so strange,” she confided, aside. “He has this incredible bodily empathy. If any creature for blocks around is distressed, Peter starts weeping. Tell Peter you’re all right, William.”
William stood holding his cheek, still bawling silently. He walked over to his brother and put his hand on his back. “It’s okay, Peter,” he said. Stoicism cost him. He burst at last into audible sobs. His brother followed along, unquestioning companion.
The mildest household drama, but it wiped me out. How could I survive the first real crisis? William’s fallen pyramid of shells, Pete’s spilled, untippable cup, Diana’s gap-toothed, hand-signing serenity, the candles blazing away in the brightly lit room: all too much. I thought, I’d never live. I’d hemorrhage halfway through week one.
The storm ended faster than it blew up. Suddenly William was laughing and clearing away dishes at the promise of cake. His mother teased him. Peter still had his head down in his plate, like a sunflower under the weight of autumn’s end. But even he seemed to be accustoming himself to trust the return of happiness.
After dinner, we did the dishes. William asked to play Battleship.
“You don’t have to,” Diana said.
“Yes you do,” said William. “That or Yahtzee.”
He stuck all his ships in the corners, a clever evasion until I caught on.
“Boys.” Diana shook her head. “A total mystery.”
Peter threw both hands up in the air and let loose a chortle of euphoria at nothing. At domestic peace. It seemed a sign of imminent bedtime.
“Come on, guys. Upstairs. Roll out.”
William balked, but a feeble rearguard. Diana carried Peter as far as the stairs, then set him down. “Watch this.” Pete leaned into the steps. He took them like a half-track. His feet went up over his shoulders, lifting him from level to level. “He’d be walking by now, but he’s so loose-limbed.”
I stood downstairs during the bathroom rituals. I snooped Diana’s bookshelves, learning nothing but that she was a cognitive neurologist who hoped to do some birding and furniture finishing in some alternate life.
“That’s just the problem. Any baby can hold a ball in its hands. Your machine can’t. How many words is it going to take to say what that globe feels like? The heft of the thing. The possibility.”
“Red rubber sphere that you can chuck …”
“Richie. Richie.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that no one called me that. Besides, it sounded good in her mouth.
“Are you going to do ‘red’ as fitting between x and y angstroms?”
“Not at all. That’s the classical AI people. Chen and Keluga. We’re going to do red sky, red-faced, red flag, in the red, red dress …”
“Sexist. Okay. Go on to ‘sphere.’ How is the poor thing supposed to get ‘all the points equidistant from a center’ when it has never seen distance? When it can’t possibly measure?”
“Good point. You mean we have a problem. No symbolic grounding.”
“Symbolic grounding.” Diana grinned, and wiped the tartar sauce from her lower lip. “That’s the phrase I was looking for.”
“You’re saying a reading machine is hopeless. We should give it up.”
“I’m saying, if you’re going to make such a thing, you have to give it eyes, hands, ears. A real interface onto the outside.”
“The literary theorists think a human’s real-world interface is problematic at best. And greatly overrated. They say even sense data must be put into symbols.”
“The literary theorists have to get tenure. And they have no hard facts to get tenure with. They have to fight for a slice of a pie that’s getting smaller every day.”
“Getting smaller because of people like you.”
I was teasing. She took me at face value. “Yes, maybe. But tell me, then. Why do your people need to either emulate mine, attack us as nature molesters, or dismiss us as irrelevant self-deluders?”
“My people are scared shitless of your people, that’s why. They’re terrified that Dad and Mom really do love you best.”
Diana smiled like a teenager. “Are you kidding? We’re the problem child. Don’t you remember? You heard the parents tell us never to play with matches.”
We walked outside into a day remade. The trees had stripped bare, but for a moment, I couldn’t tell if they were coming or had just gone. We two were the only ones on the whole street wearing coats. A pack of earphoned roller bladers with wraparound shades so silvered they couldn’t see almost mowed us down.
My disorientation was total. “Wasn’t it almost winter when we went inside?”
“It’s getting so that these once-in-a-century freak weather spells occur every other week.”
“That’s the fault of you scientists.”
“Doubtless.”
“It’s still nippy. Have I lost my mind, or are those women wearing shorts?”
“Youth is never cold,” Diana lamented.
Ten years ago, fifteen, I’d pitied those who’d let their skin go papery and their blood thin. Back then, this had been my haunt. Now I’d lost the lease, could not even name the street.
“I want it to freeze. Freeze hard.”
“It’s going to freeze,” Diana guaranteed. “You’ve forgotten. It’s rough out in these parts. Four months of interstellar blackness. Deep space. Zero. The air loads up with sleet BBs, with nothing between here and Pennsylvania to slow the wind.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Five years. You know the funny thing? I never thought of myself as a Californian when I lived there.”
We walked toward campus. “Does the brain have a ‘decaying leaf recognition’ subsystem? A ‘sheepskin coat just back from the cleaners’ subsystem?”
“I know what you mean,” Diana said. “Smell is everything, isn’t it? When I smell the air right now, I think, I know what’s coming. Time to batten down.”
“I think, how can I leave all this?”
She said nothing for the longest time. Then Diana said, “Thrill.”
“Yes. Thrill.”
It took me until the Quad, until we walked over the spot, to make the connection. To realize what day it was. You see, it didn’t feel like November. Same day, different year: I no longer knew what people meant by that. Four days later, it snowed.
“SYMBOLIC GROUNDING,” I told Lentz.
D, our first implementation to run on the sprawling community of connection machine, was my slowest charge so far. But parallel architecture and several software twists made it the one with the most astonishing reach. D came into this world recursive. It took forever to grasp that two was the integer just past one. But the instant it got that, it had infinity in the same breath. It could watch itself learn. When it got “Dogs bark,” it also got “Baby says, ‘Dogs bark.’” The breakout, when it came, was going to be unbelievable.
The shape of its brain was generative. It matched the arc of an uncoiling sentence. But deep syntax wasn’t enough. Words weren’t enough. “The policeman gave the motorist his badge,” I told it. “Who does ‘his’ stand for? The policeman gave the motorist his license.” Now who?
How much would D have to know before it could get that one? Tracing my own inference process dizzied me. The linked list of properties hanging off the world’s every object required a combinatorial explosion of sense. But to see even part of what the host symbols stood for required that D first see.
“We have to give it eyes,” I decided. “Why train it with all the properties of a ball when we can show it what a ball is?”
“Nice leap, Marcel,” Lentz said. “I’ve been waiting for you to make it.”
“And here I was afraid you were going to kill me for bringing it up.”
“On the contrary. In fact, I still have a passive retinal matrix lying around intact from work I did last year. We can paste it in.”
“Now, where the hell did I put that eyeball? It was around here somewhere.”
Lentz laughed. “All right. So the work habits could be more systematic.”
Sight was not the sudden beamburst I hoped for. Revision E could convert objects into retinoptic neurode maps. Training got it to associate words with each visual clump. But navigating by this crayon cartography resembled sewing silk with a Lincoln log needle.
I gave it several common objects, in stiff cross section. E made only static traces: photos, not footage. I sorely doubted that the speckles of light and dark did anything to round out the ball in E’s associative memory. We boosted the resolution. Added bits for color, sixteen million shades. Whether E traveled those surfaces or twirled them in its mental space I couldn’t say.
The creature in Frankenstein learned to speak by eavesdropping on an exiled family, the most astonishing act of language acquisition until Taylor’s beloved Tarzan, the books on which the best reader I ever met grew up. Frankenstein’s creature had his chattering family and a knapsack of classics: Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s Werther. E, like Tarzan, learned to talk more or less on print alone.
“I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects,” Shelley’s creature says somewhere. “I learned and applied the words, ‘fire,’ ‘milk,’ ‘bread,’ and ‘wood’ …”
One day I would teach this speech to a machine that had learned to read. Maybe not E, or F, but G, or son of G. And my machine would understand.
“I distinguished several other words without being able as yet to understand or apply them,” the girl child’s monster would tell mine. Words “such as ‘good,’ ‘dearest,’ ‘unhappy.’”
“YOU DON’T EAT,” Diana accused me.
“I eat. I eat a lot. You saw how much I put away at lunch.”
“I bet that was your only meal that day.”
“I lose track sometimes. Lentz and I … We get to training at such weird hours.”
“You don’t eat unless someone feeds you. Is that it?”
I knew what was coming. But I had nowhere to run. I wanted to tell her then. Before any court of confusion. My evacuated life left no air for anyone. Least of all someone as kind as Diana.
But Diana hadn’t offered anything rejectable yet. Nothing but the most generic friendship.
“Most experimental neurologists can’t cook,” she said. “They’re fine until they get to the part of the recipe that says ‘Season to taste.’ This throws them for a loop. They like the ‘Measure carefully into bowl.’ They tend to hang out up there.”
“Connectionists,” I mimicked, “cook brilliantly. They start out at random, and a few thousand iterations later …” Two funny deflections, then I’d flee before she could extend the invitation.
“I bet novelists know how to shape a recipe.”
“Maybe back when. The age of plot and closure. Times have changed. It’s all microwave these days.”
“I know what,” she said. “You can cook a meal for me.” So simple. A sudden, happy inspiration.
She’d had mercy. Given me one she couldn’t expect me to accept.
“Well, Diana, that sounds great in theory. But unless it’s Jiffy Pop, and you bring the matches to light my stove’s pilot …”
“At my place. I have all the utensils. And I won’t get in your way at all.”
“Just stand by and laugh?”
“Something like that.”
“All right, then. All right. I rise to the challenge. Moules Provisoires.”
“Oh. My. The man’s done this before.”
I had, in fact. But I didn’t care to give her the details.
I got to her place Saturday evening. I managed to carry all the provisions on my bike rack. Even the tapers. I rang the bell, ready with a funny opener about ruined anything tasting better by candlelight.
The door was opened by a little boy. I started to mumble something about getting the address wrong.
“Mom,” the boy called back into the house. “The writer’s here!”
“The writer?” Diana answered from within. “Tell him to use the tradesman’s entrance.”
The kid looked up at me, wrestling with the command. His face searched mine for clues. I watched the solution—irony—ripple through him until he let me in with a wry smile.
Diana appeared, doubling my shock. She carried a younger boy in her arms. I must have looked like a blithering undergrad.
“Here’s Richard,” she said, addressing the child. “Can you say ‘Hi, Richard’?”
“Rick would be fine,” I said.
This child wasn’t about to say anything. I saw it in his features. The slightly spatulate face. The fold to the nose and ears. Speech would be long and hard in coming.
“This is Peter.” The cheerful matter-of-fact. My worst-case fears came home to roost. I knew her. I could never pretend ignorance again.
“Hello, Peter.” I didn’t know how to carry on. “I once wrote a book about someone named Peter.”
Peter hunched up into a little ball. He peeked out sideways.
“He’s a little shy with strange people,” the older brother said. “But for a Down’s baby, he’s a genius.”
“And this is William.”
“Do you know what it says on the Brazilian flag?” William asked me.
“I used to know.”
“You probably did,” Diana cracked.
“It says, ‘Ordem e Progresso.’”
“No kidding! What does that mean?”
William thought. “It means—order me some soup?”
Diana choked with shame in mid-laugh. “Oh, sweetheart! No. That was just a little joke of mine.”
“I know,” William pouted.
“What’s the Netherlands?” I asked.
“Easy one. Red stripe, white stripe, blue stripe.” He drew them in the air, visualizing as he described. Then he pointed at me. He waved his index finger in a pedagogical sweep. “Also Luxembourg,” he warned.
“Yeah. There’s a reason for that.”
“I know, I know. Here’s one. Red circle on white background?”
“Easy one. Japan.”
“No fair!” Adults weren’t supposed to know anything.
“Don’t get him started,” Diana said on our way to the kitchen. “He can do all hundred and eighty of them.”
“Hundred and eighty-six,” William corrected.
“What if you take Netherlands and double it? Hold a mirror up to the bottom?”
That one took a couple of steps. “Thailand?”
“You’re good, man. You’re good.”
“Formerly known as Siam.”
“Population?”
“Approximately fifty-one million.”
“Approximately,” Diana sighed.
“Name seven countries where Spanish is the principal language.”
“Easy one,” William said, the index finger now a fencing foil. The most extraordinary boy I will ever meet.
“Come on, you guys,” Diana said. “Peter and I need food. Don’t we, Peter?”
Peter curled up in his hedgehog defense. But he kept his eye on me at all times.
I put William to work washing the mussels. “Is it just the four of us?” I asked Diana.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I assumed you knew.”
“What, from Lentz? Nobody is real but him. Hadn’t you heard?”
“It’s such a small world over at the Center. I guess I’m used to everyone knowing everything about everybody.”
“And nothing much about anyone.”
“Well, we all have our work, first.”
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
I held my hands out, one toward the kitchen counter, the other toward some remote lab. “Two lives. Alone.”
“Huh!”
“I mow the lawn,” William said.
“How much does she pay you?”
“Two-fifty.”
“Holy moly. There are laws against that, you know.”
Diana made to fillet me with the lemon knife. “Don’t make waves, writer. Or I’ll give you something to write about.”
The meal came together. And William and I managed it without assistance from the feminine half of the world. We made a bucket brigade of the dishes. Peter sat nearby, chattering with his hands.
“Look,” William called. “Pete’s helping!”
I heard the sound of dismayed discovery behind me. “What do we do with these?” Diana stood by the counter, holding the tapers and floral sprig that I’d tried to leave hidden in the bottom of my bag. She looked at me dead on. Her eyes started to water.
“Light them, of course.” But recovery came two beats too late. I shrugged, and even that hurt. This is why I asked you not to ask me here.
Diana put the tapers in elaborate candlesticks that she first had to unwrap from newspapers. We lit them and doused the lights. But the darkness scared Peter. He coiled forward against himself. Diana turned the lights back on. We let the candles burn.
William had more fun with the shells than with the insides. He did, however, enjoy dipping his mussels in the wine sauce and dribbling all over the table. Peter worked away at his compote. He insisted on trying one mussel. He got half of it down, with a look of utter stupefaction.
“They’re both going to have the runs for days,” Diana said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. They get the runs from jelly toast.”
William bit his cheek. I didn’t know how badly, at first. All at once, he stopped talking. I thought it was a clown act. Pantomime. I started to laugh, until William’s silent, red-faced distress made Peter break out in tears and lower his face into his plate.
Diana was up in a fraction of a second, before I knew what was happening. “It’s okay. Petey, it’s okay.” Diana lifted her boy and hugged him to her. She repeated the litany various ways, glossing with a flurry of hand motions.
“You sign to him?”
“A little. It’s easier for him to reply. Words will come slowly. Fine motor is tricky for him.”
“What is he saying?”
“‘William is going away’? No, sweetheart.” Diana signed her assurance. “William just has a little owie. It’s so strange,” she confided, aside. “He has this incredible bodily empathy. If any creature for blocks around is distressed, Peter starts weeping. Tell Peter you’re all right, William.”
William stood holding his cheek, still bawling silently. He walked over to his brother and put his hand on his back. “It’s okay, Peter,” he said. Stoicism cost him. He burst at last into audible sobs. His brother followed along, unquestioning companion.
The mildest household drama, but it wiped me out. How could I survive the first real crisis? William’s fallen pyramid of shells, Pete’s spilled, untippable cup, Diana’s gap-toothed, hand-signing serenity, the candles blazing away in the brightly lit room: all too much. I thought, I’d never live. I’d hemorrhage halfway through week one.
The storm ended faster than it blew up. Suddenly William was laughing and clearing away dishes at the promise of cake. His mother teased him. Peter still had his head down in his plate, like a sunflower under the weight of autumn’s end. But even he seemed to be accustoming himself to trust the return of happiness.
After dinner, we did the dishes. William asked to play Battleship.
“You don’t have to,” Diana said.
“Yes you do,” said William. “That or Yahtzee.”
He stuck all his ships in the corners, a clever evasion until I caught on.
“Boys.” Diana shook her head. “A total mystery.”
Peter threw both hands up in the air and let loose a chortle of euphoria at nothing. At domestic peace. It seemed a sign of imminent bedtime.
“Come on, guys. Upstairs. Roll out.”
William balked, but a feeble rearguard. Diana carried Peter as far as the stairs, then set him down. “Watch this.” Pete leaned into the steps. He took them like a half-track. His feet went up over his shoulders, lifting him from level to level. “He’d be walking by now, but he’s so loose-limbed.”
I stood downstairs during the bathroom rituals. I snooped Diana’s bookshelves, learning nothing but that she was a cognitive neurologist who hoped to do some birding and furniture finishing in some alternate life.
