Galatea 2.2, page 17
“He’s bigger than life for you, isn’t he?”
“No,” I answered her. “No. He’s exactly life-sized.”
“I’m not going.”
She went, and had a good time. “He’s just like you said. The suit. The complete paragraphs. Only you forgot the war bond songs.”
“I had no idea about those.” The evening had, in fact, been a continuous astonishment.
“Tell me again the connection between that long Matthew Arnold quote …”
“… from a poem no one has read in half a century …”
“… and the glimpse of Norma Shearer’s cleavage that he got in a Colorado valley movie theater at the age of ten?”
“I can’t remember. I think the connection was that second bottle of Slovakian wine.”
We went with increasing frequency. C. grew as devoted as I. Every visit revealed new amplitude to Taylor. Taylor the inconsolable fan of hopelessly bad sports teams. The shuffler to bluegrass tunes. The consummate organic gardener who’d planted half the fruit trees in U. The collector of questionable jokes no one else would dare tell even in private. The wartime aircraft spotter. The fisherman and naturalist. The mimic of a thousand voices, from Blanche DuBois to a Mexican bush league baseball announcer. The boy who taught himself to read on Tarzan and John Carter, who went on to devour every volume in the rural library long before he made his escape.
This abundance held together on the slightest of sutures. Taylor’s deepness was bleak. He had read all the books. He was fluent in the mind’s native idiom. He knew that the psychopathology of daily life was a redundancy. He might have been the supreme misanthrope, were it not for his humor and humility. And the source of those two saving graces, the thing stitching that heartbreaking capaciousness into a whole, was memory.
Taylor’s wit made me feel like the most sparkling conversationalist. We’d return from their place well past midnight, kept up by adults thirty years older than us who outlasted us easily. We’d proceed to lie in bed hours longer, eyes pasted open, thoughts racing, replaying the evening’s exchanges. Thought seemed to me that thing that could relive, in island isolation, its own esprit d’escalier. Memory was the attempt to capitalize on missed cleverness, or recover an overlooked word that, for a moment, might have made someone else feel more alive.
C. agreed. “When we’re over there, I remember stories from my own childhood that I haven’t thought about for lifetimes.” We cracked jokes we’d never thought to try on each other. We sang for the Taylors the songs we’d written to keep ourselves going in B., neglected since our return to U. Whatever the quality of our performance, the Taylors liked us enough to keep asking us back.
We went for the Fourth of July. The Taylors played The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings John Philip Sousa and made hand-cranked ice cream. We went to a Christmas party, the living refutation of Joyce’s “Dead.” Good cheer from on high, and in a shape even humans could understand. Late that wonderful night, Taylor came and sat down next to C. in a corner, put his arm around her. Of course, even that spontaneous affection had to be framed in an incomparable Taylorism: “I trust you realize that this arm is sufficiently anesthetized by alcohol that I’m not getting any illicit pleasure out of this.”
The attention made C. glow until New Year’s.
But in the long run, attention made her worse. All that winter C. declined. Only love could have done her any good. And of available loves, only the unearned kind would have worked. But C. could not free herself from her certainty that unearned meant undeserved.
Each letter in the box, every call from family or friend hit C. like an accusation. She began to shape her adult story: every life decision she had ever taken was a small disappointment to someone. And each disappointment was a savings stamp pasted in the final book.
We trudged through to spring. The thought that her unhappiness must be weighing me down made C. even more unhappy than she thought she was. Worse, the thought fulfilled its own prediction. Her fright alone began to weigh me down. Or, not her fright, but the anchor of helpless love it lodged in my heart.
Two years in a U. we no longer belonged to left us partners in fear. I can see it in the one photograph I still own of her from that time. That look of crumpled panic passing for a smile in front of the lens will forever make me want to cry out and rush to her in her pain. And how much worse, that pain, when she declared its source in my need to comfort her.
“Buddy. Buddy. What do you want? Tell me. Just talk to me. How can I make you happier?”
“You could leave me,” she announced one night.
She might as well have accused me of murder. I stared into a face from which all impression of the woman I knew had fled.
“You should, you know. It’s no more than I deserve.”
We skipped the Balzac installment for that night. What we needed to read each other then was our own manuscript in progress. No line or paragraph or whole chapter that couldn’t be blotted. Nothing in our style that we couldn’t render blessedly direct by a joint edit. But C. harbored a deep hostility toward words. They only increased the odds of her missing the mark. Extended her sense of betrayal.
We tried to talk. The more I raced, the more C. seized up. She froze, the rabbit in that Larkin poem I’d read for Taylor ten years before. The creature that thought it might slip the notice of a fatal epidemic by keeping stock-still and waiting.
When words didn’t work, we tried our bodies. I kissed her boxer’s shoulders, her ribs and flinching thighs. I thought to take resentment’s nodes out of her muscles into my mouth, digest them. I tried. C. talked then. But her words were voiceless phonemes of distress that carried no message but their desperate pitch.
Time has unlimited patience. It replays its summer stock forever, until we at last get the point. Its paths get laid down until we can walk nowhere else, even if there were an elsewhere in the undergrowth to walk.
C. came home from her office one evening, laughing. “You’re not going to believe this. They want to promote me to Personnel Officer I.”
I squeezed her in congratulations. She stayed limp. “Of course they do,” I scolded. “It took them long enough, didn’t it?” All I ever wanted was to give her whatever she needed. But what she needed more than all else was not to be given anything.
I saw the frightened-rabbit look stealing in behind her eyes. I’ve been good. A good girl. I never asked anyone for anything. Why are you doing this to me?
“Beauie. Beauie.” She tittered, shaking her head. “I gotta get out of here.”
LENTZ BURST IN once when I was showing Imp E simple shapes. “That bastard Plover is giggling at me in the halls.”
“And it’s my damn fault, isn’t it?”
He drew up short. “Marcel, you are getting smarter and smarter. Every day in every way.”
“He’s right, you know. Harold’s right. Diana’s right. Ram is. Even Chen and Keluga are right.”
“The hell they are.” Lentz’s refusal was clipped. But his agitation was wide enough to knock a precarious mound of fanfold printout to the floor. He leaned to pick up the mess, a gesture that stopped midway in a flourish of disgust at the futility of cleaning up after himself. “Right about what?”
“Right about neural nets not being the answer.”
“What’s the question, Marcel?”
“How is E going to know anything? Knowledge is physical, isn’t it? It’s not what your mother reads you. It’s the weight of her arm around you as she—”
“By all means, Marcel. Put your arm around it as you read. I encourage you. You mean you haven’t been hugging it as you go along?”
“Reading knowledge is the smell of the bookbinding paste. The crinkle of thick stock as the pages turn. Paper the color of aged ivory. Knowledge is temporal. It’s about time. You know how that goes, Engineer. Even you must remember that. ‘We can read these three pages before your sisters and brothers come home for dinner.’”
“You’re still talking about stimulus and response. Multidimensional vectors, shaped by feedback, however complicated. You’re talking about an associative matrix. What else have we been doing but building one of those?”
“But Imp E’s matrix isn’t human. Human knowledge is social. More than stimulus-response. Knowing entails testing knowledge against others. Bumping up against them.”
“Our matrix is bumping up against you. It’s bumping up against the lines you feed it.”
“It could bump up against word lists forever and never have more than a collection of arbitrary, differentiated markers.”
“And what do we humans have?” Lentz removed his glasses to wipe them. As monstrous as he looked with them on, he was even worse without.
“More.” I didn’t know what, at the moment. But there had to be more. “We take in the world continuously. It presses against us. It burns and freezes.”
“Save it for the award committees, Marcel. We ‘take in the world’ via the central nervous system. Chemical symbol-gates. You read my bit on long-term potentiation.”
“Imp E doesn’t take things in the way we do. It will never know—”
“It doesn’t have to.” He shoved more papers on the floor for emphasis. “It doesn’t have to ‘know,’ whatever the hell you mean by that. You’ve been reading Plover’s voodoo neurology, haven’t you? All our box has to do is paraphrase a couple of bloody texts.”
“‘I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.’ How is it ever going to explicate that, let alone paraphrase it?”
“I don’t know. Teach the thing anger. Make it furious. In my impression, you can be pretty good at that.”
“By June, right?”
“Hmm.”
“Literary commentary on any book on the list? As good as your random twenty-two-year-old.”
“As judged by Gunga Din himself.”
“Or public retraction and apology.”
“Come on, Marcel. We’ve been through this. Let’s get on with it. Today’s training.”
“I’d be polishing the retraction if I were you.”
“Don’t remind me. That damn Plover. He’s going to write it for us and make us put our names to it. Well. What better way to meet our fate than facing fearful odds?”
He replaced his glasses and sat down to training. We were working that day on compound subjects. What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands. He had a list of simple sentence forms using words E already had in its fragile, denotative grasp. E’s task was to recast the sentences we fed it. In today’s case, find the conjunction, remove it, and split the compound into two.
When we’d done half a dozen examples and E was responding with a speed indicative of boredom, I reached out casually and shut the office door. No machine without muscle would ever be able to decode such a gesture. Some pretense of noise in the hallway. Ridiculous, after these long weeks of working in the open.
The door swung shut, surrendering the image fastened to its inside. On Diana’s suggestion, I’d already sneaked a look at the hidden shrine. I’d seen the photograph, and it knocked the breath out of me. Now I wanted to see Lentz’s face when the concealed photo looked back at us.
For a considerable fraction of eternity, Lentz said nothing. He looked away from my surveillance, at his notes. At the ignorant terminal.
“Empiricism?” he sneered. He seemed disappointed in me, but not surprised. Prying, snot-nosed kid. What did one expect from a kiss-and-tell, aesthete dilettante? He looked up at the picture, verifying it, although every pixel must have long ago burned permanent silhouettes into his visual cortex. When he sat in here with the door closed, the flood of color would fill his focus, immense at eye level.
He looked away again. He worried the mouse pointer, a cat feeling contrition after the kill. Come on, get up and run again. Like when it was fun.
“I suppose you want the caption?”
I didn’t need a caption. I could see well enough. A homemade calendar hung by a tack, still clasping to January. I say “still,” for while we had yet to reach that month, this particular one had been buried twenty Januaries ago.
Just above the paper matrix of days, a pasteup color portal opened onto a couple. They stood, arms around one another, out of focus, on a frozen and deserted beach.
The man was Lentz. He was young, as I had never seen him. He had hair. He seemed impossibly taller, slim. The woman at his side was no older. Yet this couple was ancient beyond saying. Age tented just under youth’s peeling onionskin. The shutter exposed this geriatric core in X-ray. It showed antiquity lying in wait, ready to blossom like an aneurysm.
The craftwork was too clumsy to be a customized mail-order gift. It had the look of a child’s school project—Christmas or birthday present—from before those offerings disappeared in adolescent embarrassment. See what I made you. The earliest bribe of love.
I touched the image with my eyes. I half expected the museum guard’s reprimand. But no one told me to step back. In my mind, I palpated the prematurely old man’s shoulders. Before the camera, they crumpled in a last attempt at bravery. I stroked the woman’s face where the cling of desperation already promised to sag it.
While I indulged myself, Lentz stood and moved to the window. Outside, a gang of grackles combed the landscaped lawn like a homicide squad dragging a field for evidence.
“Lentz. You never told me.”
“What? That I’m married? That I have a family? Everyone, Marcel. Everybody but you.”
That wasn’t what I meant. That he had a private life was no particular shock. And naturally, that life would be peopled. But the way these two held on to each other. Their too-light clothing, their backs to the ice-crusted beach. Nothing but this other waist, this other pair of shoulders between each and their end.
The Lentz I knew could never have posed for such a shot. The Lentz I knew might well have had a wife. He might even have had a child. But my Lentz could never have known them with such hopeless intimacy.
“And you’re still …?” I didn’t know what I was asking.
“There is no ‘still,’ Marcel. ‘Still’ is for unravished brides of quietness.”
The open lens trapped these two in terror at the slightest move. The panic in those eyes was the pose of cognition itself. The look of awareness seeing itself going down, drowning in the depths of its own simulation.
I had, the photo told me, half a dozen months in which to remember, once and for ever, what it felt like to be able to remember at all. My own craft calendars had all been swallowed up by the wraparound virtual future my era was intent on inventing. My days and weeks, the saving particulars of Here were already gone. And I, having forgotten them, was almost past caring.
The young Lentz, in a plaid shirt the likes of which will never again be sold on this earth, even second-hand, in countries that live off our discards, clamped his arm around the shoulder of his mate. She returned the stiff grip from underneath. Perhaps they were shivering. Rigorous. However they touched each other in private, this was not it.
This embrace already succumbed to terminal affection. They propped one another up, as if each had just had a mild stroke. They grasped at each other, two people out on a ledge forty stories up in the night’s icy wind, having second thoughts even as their feet start to flex.
The wind off winter water made them clutch at each other like that. The chill from the child with the camera. They looked on in advance horror at the cut-and-paste project, the child urgently constructing a craftwork life preserver. Stick this on your refrigerator if you dare, to break eternity’s heart and sap the will of time’s worst-case scenario.
One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say, “Yes, to everything,” once. Once only, before your connections have felt what everything entails.
This shoulder was the lone one that could have held that man up. That waist, the only one that could steady the woman. These two chose each other, their charm against the world’s weighted vectors. Anything else but that helpless, familiar grip pinning them in place would be a push into randomness. Would tear the net.
Some scrap of holdover, supervised training told me this is the way one was supposed to end up. The way I should have ended. But even as I felt it, the desire seemed arbitrary, laughable, regressive. Marriage for life belonged to those cultural tyrannies now in the process of being shed. In another hundred years, it would seem as archaic as animism, as “thou.”
If the plaid shirt was really Lentz, then this woman was truly his wife. In this clasp, the couple graduated to inseparable, mutual foreigners. Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. Anti-Hebbian: the firing links get weaker. C., after a decade, grew stranger to me than that college girl who had comforted me on the Quad the day after my dad died. At the end, we shocked each other in the hall of our overlearned apartment, 911 material, intruders. And we’d gotten there without a child to make us wall calendars, to arrest in scissors and glue the secret of who we once were.
I looked at the young Lentz’s blueprint expression, the advance word of crevasses that would range across those facial wastes. I stared at those two shivering bodies, gone half-insubstantial already. I looked up at the real Lentz, studying the grackle dragnet outside. I measured the size of the mistake that had found him out.
Someone had failed someone else. Someone had messed with destiny. A frightened kid with an Instamatic on a frozen beach had watched love capitulate to the very air. Furious cutting and pasting split off the eternal from what always becomes of it, hung an outdated, permanent January to the back of this man’s office door. This was the last couple on earth to whom the inevitable wasn’t supposed to happen. The last who, by fate’s oversight, were to have made it through together into frightened old age.
