Galatea 2.2, page 19
Something hid about the edges of this book-in-progress. I could not name it outright. Behind Pop’s fictional malady, my real father lay ill. The grip of addiction dismissed him too early from the world Dad tried to name. Writing this book meant telling him I finally understood. Even when I didn’t. Even when I wouldn’t, until long after the last page was done.
I WORKED MY salvage, on my private schedule, with the drapes pulled closed. Rescue and recovery filled me with cold pleasure. Every evasive joke the Hobsons pulled on one another released another piece of secret family language from long-term storage.
I transcribed. I recovered whole forgotten strongboxes, hoping the heirlooms might find their way, in time, into the hands of people who would write me back to say, “Now, how did you know about that?”
All families, I decided, walked in single file. At least, the one I lived did. Either experience was somehow as exchangeable as scrip, or we were each so alone that I might as well record the view from my closed cell.
But that view turned out stranger than I ever imagined. I felt myself taking dictation, plans for a hypothetical Powers World that meant to explain in miniature where history had left me. My prisoner’s dilemma came down to declaring love for a time and country, a way of life I’d never even liked, let alone felt at home in.
For an accurate take on the place, I had to leave. The nested narratives were swallowing me wholesale. I needed distance. I knew only one place in the world where I could finish my North American theme park: the imaginary village tucked away in the quaint fairytale country that a woman I once loved invented for me.
FROM THE DAY I saw Lentz’s picture, my heart took itself off the project. The moment I made him study that snapshot calendar, while I studied him.
“Lentz, you’ve been jerking me around.”
He snorted, if he gave even that much satisfaction. Some crack about my intriguing verb choice. That shifty fluorescent reflection of Coke-bottle glasses. He’d taken down the calendar, hidden it. Maybe even destroyed it. Get the boy’s mind back on the chase. His move had the opposite of its intended effect.
“Why are we doing this?”
I stared him down, made explicit, by silence, the threat of a general strike. I was still the only one G listened to. If I didn’t talk, the box wasn’t going to get any more literate. And I vowed not to talk to G until Lentz talked to me.
“Why are we …? Because, Marcel. Because, if you haven’t noticed, I have the unfortunate habit of chewing, in public, more than I am able to bite off.”
The closest he’d come to admitting the whole project’s haplessness. But also a buyout. A bait-and-switch. A gambit to throw me off, now that I demanded names.
“What’s in this for you, Lentz? Why waste a year? What’s your motive?”
“Poet. Don’t you know by now that science is without—”
“God damn you. Can’t you level with me? Once?”
My outburst raised no more than one weary eyebrow.
“What am I to you, that you need to bother yourself over? Use me, if the project interests you. Symbiosis. Otherwise …” He left the menace hanging, the way a fatigued marathoner leaves spittle dangling from his lips. “Black-box me. That’s the answer. Black-box the whole sordid process. It works for me.”
I flipped on G’s microphone. I breathed into it in disgust. I sneered a couplet at it, from memory. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” LEDs on the coupler recorded G’s struggle to paraphrase.
Lentz worked his dry lips. “Powers.” Back down the audit trail of his own voice, into someone else’s. “Our boy is not ready for irony.” He shook his jelly bismarck of a body erect. He went over to the Bartlett’s I’d planted on the shelf above the UNIX terminal. “Marmion?” he asked, a good imitation of perplexity. “Walter bloody Scott is on this list? I quit.”
I refused to so much as acknowledge him.
For a terrifying moment, he threatened to lay a hand on my shoulder. God knows what fundamental particles such a collision would have spit out.
“Marcel. Marcel.” Begging me. I could no longer tell which would be more cowardly—honesty or compassion. “You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?”
WE WENT TO the home. I’d biked past the compound, but had never seen it. Invisible, on the south edge of town. A sprawling plantation bearing some herbaceous sobriquet. The lot attendant did not even bother to wave him on. The grounds were manicured, but bare.
Autumn had accomplished its steeped regrouping. Leave-taking, a done deed. We walked along an ice-choked pond to the main building. Here and there, a bundled shuffler swayed in the company of paid help. Winter had set in in earnest. The first one since adolescence that I’d go through alone.
The structure grew more institutional with each step we took toward it. Inside the door, a checkpoint masqueraded as a visitors’ center.
“Afternoon, Dr. Lentz,” a callow youth with blazer insignia greeted us. “You’re early today.”
We blew past the emblazoned kid. I made apologetic motions with my shoulders, excusing us all.
Lentz slipped into his Sir Kenneth Clark. “Notice how the ablebodied get the first floor. Doesn’t make sense, does it? They’re still functional. Give them a room up on four or five.” He shook his head as we made our way to the elevators. Pretended amusement. “No. It’s for us, Marcel. The visitors. Brave face. Best foot forward, and all. Appease the people who cut the checks.”
I wanted to tell him to stop talking. But I couldn’t say even that.
“Going up?” he asked. And punched the top button.
We stepped out of the elevator into an altercation. A large man and his half-sized nurse barreled down the hall. The crisis was apparently urinary. The man, even in pain, radiated that cheerful benevolence bordering on misjudgment. So far as his beaming face was concerned, he was startled kindness incarnate.
His attendant hastened him along. “Come on, Vernie. Come on.” As Lentz and I passed, emergency struck and the aide steered Vernie toward the toilet of the nearest private room. Before they could even knock at the open door, the vigilant occupant shouted, “Keep that filthy nigger off my property.” Vernie and the nurse hurried away down the hall to catastrophe.
Lentz stopped to make me look into the room. A pale wax pip of a man lay strapped to his bed, still muttering racial profanities under his breath.
“Two days from death,” Lentz said. The man looked up, uncomprehending. “Organic brain disease. One hemisphere already in the grave. And as hateful as any freshly conditioned twenty-year-old. You think I’m a pinched misanthrope, don’t you, Marcel? I’m not brave enough to be a misanthrope. I don’t even have the guts to be a realist.”
We walked on, deeper into the clinical fortress. I no longer wanted an account of the picture. I no longer wanted to know what happened to the prematurely old couple on that winter beach. But it was too late for rain checks. I would get my answer, far worse than the confusion it explained.
“Look here, Marcel. You’ll find this interesting.”
An Asian woman, perhaps eighty, stood staring out the window onto the evacuated lawn. She held herself close, rocking slightly. She chanted repeatedly.
“What do you think she’s chanting, Marcel? Come on. You lived in the mysterious East, didn’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“What do you think? Koans? Confucian appetizers? Tibetan prayer-wheel captions?”
“I think it’s Chinese.”
“Mandarin. She was a mathematician on faculty, back in some hypothetical past. Half a century ago, she liked to tell her colleagues that if she ever felt herself losing her mind, she’d arrest the process by practicing her times tables.”
“You speak—?”
“What do you take me for, Marcel? I wouldn’t know it from Pali pork recipes. But I do have it on good authority that”—he sobered — “that all her numbers are wrong.”
We turned down a passage at hall’s end. The rooms here no longer fronted onto the public corridor. A genteel nurse’s station signaled tighter guard. The staffer on duty, seeing Lentz, made a quick, ambiguous hand gesture. She disappeared into the catacombs.
She returned, smiling briskly. “Lunch room or her room, Professor?”
Lentz checked his watch. “It might as well be lunch, Constance. Can we beat the rush?”
“It’s all yours. Private party.” Constance eyed me, committing to nothing.
We went into a common room, bright with skylight. All the furniture felt soft. Even the large round table somehow squished when bumped. Everything edge-free, in screaming pastel. Lentz passed through a windowed door into a kitchenette. I heard a refrigerator open and Lentz issue a capitulatory, “Shit.”
A woman entered the room, Constance leading her through the armpit. Someone had stage-makeupped her to look two decades younger than she was. Dressed by committee. But in no apparent need of the human leash.
In fact, she shrugged free, smiling. She came toward me, hand extended. “I am so pleased to meet you,” she said.
I shook her hand, unable to say anything.
“Goddamn,” Lentz said, accompanied by culinary crashing.
Constance flew into the kitchenette. “I’ll take care of that, Mr. Lentz.” Just enough scold to be deniable. I noticed bruises across her arms and legs. The old and infirm, it seemed, fought for keeps.
Lentz shot through the door. “Pap. Pabulum. Jelly. Disgusting, all of it. Can’t anyone in this place masticate?”
“Hello,” the woman addressed him, puzzled by his sudden entrance. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” To me, she added, “Do you two know each other?”
“It’s Philip, Audrey,” he said. Emotionless. Leached. “Your husband.” But he took her hand when she offered it. As he must have done every day for a long time.
I saw it then. Her resemblance to the woman in the photo. Less than kin, but more than random. Something had happened to her. Something more than age. Her soul had pulled up stakes from behind her features. She bore no more relation to her former face than a crumpled bag of grounded silk bore to a hot-air balloon.
Audrey seemed not to hear him. She picked at her cardigan. She worried a moth hole until she freed a thread. She pulled, the whole weave unraveling. Lentz reached over and stayed her hand.
“I don’t know,” Audrey fretted, dubious.
“You’re here every day?” I asked Lentz.
He stood up and moved to the heat vent. He fiddled with it, but failed to close it. He cursed its mindless inanimacy.
“Here?” Audrey said. “Not I. Good heavens. I’d sooner die.”
Constance reentered, with a tray stacked high with lunch.
“Nurse,” Audrey shouted. “Oh, Nurse. Thank God you’re here. This man,” pointing to Lentz, off in the corner kicking at the vent, “was trying to rape me.”
“Now, Audrey,” Constance said. “We have minestrone soup, creamed beef, and blueberry yogurt.”
“Why bother with the silverware?” Lentz asked, coming to table. “Why not just give us all straws? Or better yet, newsprint. We’ll just finger-paint with this drool.”
Constance ignored him.
I hadn’t much of an appetite. Audrey fingered the wrong side of the spoon, repeating the litany, “I don’t know.” I knew what she meant.
“Come on, Audrey,” Lentz coaxed her. “It’s lunchtime. You can do this. You did it yesterday, for Christ’s sake.”
But yesterday lay on the far side of a collapsed tunnel. Yesterday, ten years ago, childhood, past-life analysis: all sealed off. Audrey was not just locked out of her own home. She sat on the stoop, not even aware of the shelter behind her, unable to turn around. Unable, even, to come up with the notion of in.
Lentz gestured, patient again. “In the soup. Spoon in the soup.” Encouraging, reinforcing. Showing how.
Audrey, confused, released her spoon into the minestrone from on high. Handle first. Lentz sighed. He scooted his chair around next to hers.
“I’ll do that,” Constance offered.
“No you won’t,” Lentz told her. “Come on, Audrey. Let’s eat some lunch.”
“Nurse. This man is trying to hurt me.”
Lentz addressed her plate. “Here we go, wife. Have a bite.”
But he would not feed her. He picked up the spoon. Dried it off. Put it back in her hand. Pointed out the path from bowl to mouth. Supervised training. No good unless she worked out the specifics herself.
“She’s getting worse,” Lentz observed.
“It’s an off day.” Cheery Constance.
After lunch, Lentz suggested a stroll around the grounds.
“It’s too cold for her,” Constance said.
“Is it too cold for you, Audrey?” Lentz asked.
Audrey stood at attention and studied her shoes. “Oh, call it by some better name,” she said, “for friendship sounds too cold.”
Lentz chuckled and hugged her. She hugged him back, laughing. “The database is still intact,” he pronounced. “As is the retrieval. It’s just meaning that’s gone. Huh, wife?”
“Just meaning,” she echoed him, shy and uncertain again.
Lentz bought Constance off, and he, his wife, and I paced the corridors of the home. Clean, discreet, and genteel. As harrowing as a gothic nightmare. I looked away, to keep the scene from imprinting.
Lentz, on the other hand, rallied in the face of numbers. “Radical reductionism at its finest,” he narrated, waving down one of the catacombs where the soulless shuffled. “Age, disease, death. Big problems, in need of isolation and solution. Well, we’ve handled it. If not eliminated from theory, at least from practice. Consider the project all but accomplished.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Audrey shook her head in bewildered amusement. “Everybody has something to say!” She crooked a thumb at her husband, shrugged at his ludicrousness, and winked at me. “Isn’t that right?” The gesture still indexed the woman she was, once.
“Increasing control over all the variables. Divide and conquer. Max out the activity or do away with it. Future tech. That’s what science is all about, Marcel. Efficiency. Productivity. Total immunity. Regeneration of lost parts. Eternal, ripple-free life, frozen in our early twenties. Or die trying.”
“And after?” I found it far easier to chatter back at Lentz than to look at her. To see any of the Audreys staring at me on all sides. “After we solve aging? Won’t we still need to convince ourselves of our own sleight of hand?”
“I’m surprised at you, Marcel. That’s never been a problem. I thought you made a living doing that.”
Audrey, bored, had begun to hum “Amazing Grace” to herself. I battened down under Lentz’s rant. I wasn’t about to interrupt the man, ever again.
“We’ve evolved this incredible capacity for lying to ourselves. It’s called intellect. Comes with the frontal lobes. In fact, we’ve gotten so good at the walking-on-water bit that it no longer requires any energetic pretense to keep the act afloat.”
He slipped his arm around Audrey’s waist. Force of habit. Long years, that would not go away. Either intimacy seemed right to her now, or she did not notice. Maybe she was too bewildered to object.
“And the child?” I asked, free-associating.
Lentz stared at the spot of air my question occupied.
“You know. The one who snapped the picture?” The picture. Could we build a mind that would know what you were talking about, when there was no referent? Lentz would get this one. Audrey could have gotten it, when she was still Audrey.
Lentz’s mouth soured, the birth pains of an ironic smile. “Inference, Marcel. Pure speculation.”
“But accurate,” I bluffed.
He slowed, inhaled. Audrey, confused by the change in cadence, sat down on the hallway floor. Lentz thought to lift her. Then he changed his mind and sat down beside her.
“My daughter has eliminated me. As cleanly as only the daughter of an old reductionist can.”
“Why?” I asked, and regretted that single word.
“Apparently”—he held his palms out— “this is all my fault.”
Confusion scattered me as fall scatters warblers. I might have been an occupant of that place, stretched out in front of disorientation’s hearth. “How …? This is organic, isn’t it?” The coded this. Antecedent kept vague, as if we were spelling out words, keeping meaning out of reach of an eavesdropping preschooler. “It’s disease, isn’t it?”
“Even if that were the etiology, I’d still be held responsible. For one, I was supposed to care for her at home. Forever. But I can’t. I—”
His voice broke, taking my equanimity along with it. I didn’t want to know another thing about him. “Of course not,” I agreed, too rapidly. Efficiency. Productivity. Two lives, to pay for one. I looked away.
“There’s more. Jennifer was the one. The one who found Audrey. Just after the event. Cardiovascular accident. You have to love the euphemism. Slumped out on the bathroom tiles. Jennifer went to pieces. You get—what? Three minutes without oxygen before the whole imaginary landscape stops believing in itself? And she called me.”
“What was she supposed—”
“Anything,” he snapped. “Nothing, probably. Who knows how long Audrey had been out already? But anything. Pound on the chest. Cough down the windpipe. My daughter was too terrified to touch her own mother. To call emergency dispatch.”
“Philip. She was only a child.” I don’t know what made me assume that.
“She was a college grad. In English. Back at home because she couldn’t find work. Not the humanistic encounter that close reading prepares you for. Jennifer panicked, and called me.”
“Jenny?” Audrey jerked up. “Someone hurt Jenny?” From her slack mouth arose a wail. The sound flirted playfully for a few seconds before going bloodcurdling.
Lentz put his hands over his eyes. “Maybe it is,” he whispered. “Maybe it is my fault.”
“Lentz,” I managed. Almost a warning.
