Galatea 2.2, page 22
I imagined I knew what she was saying.
All the while, I was busy finishing the most American book I would ever write. Disney, Mickey, the Japanese internment, the World’s Fair, Trinity Site. The Hobsons, holed up in their white wood midwestern A-frame, now a fairy tale to me.
AFTER A DAY of writing, I liked to walk. Village fell away to countryside, and I might have been anywhere. I lay in a cow pasture, looking up at the sky, repeating “Hemel, hemel, hemel,” trying to get the tag to stick to this unnamable Ruysdael. I felt my back against the chill ground and thought, “Aarde,” until I no longer had to think to think it.
My mood in those days ranged from sad fury to rolling, social confusion. I was worse than adrift. I stood just outside the windows of the lost domain, peeking at the blazing costume party within.
Reading out loud kept us together. Kept me in the country, when I wanted to disappear. We read Flemish comic books and Frisian poetry. We went on Poe’s expedition to tropic Antarctica. We started in on the million-and-a-half-word chamber-continent of Proust. We got out. We pored over the Michelins, the Fodors, the Baedekers. We waded into the guides, either in translation or, fitfully, in our newfound original.
HELEN WAS STRANGE. Stranger than I was capable of imagining. She sped laugh-free through Green Eggs and Ham, stayed dry-eyed at Make Way for Ducklings, feared not throughout Where the Wild Things Are. Not surprising. The symbols these shameless simulations played on had no heft or weight for her, no real-world referent.
“Skip childhood,” Lentz told me. “We’re running out of time.”
“How is she going to know anything if we skip childhood?”
“She doesn’t need to know anything.” Lentz smirked. “She just has to learn criticism. Derrida knows things? Your deconstructionists are rife with wisdom? Jeez. When did you go to school? Don’t you know that knowledge is passé? And you can kiss meaning bye-bye as well.”
I hated him when he got arch. His archness left me so helpless with rage that I could never answer him. I knew how much Lentz believed in meaning. Helen was Lentz’s meaning-paradox: our Net of nets, like some high Gothic choir, asserted significance while denying any algorithm’s power to reach it. Meaning was a contour. All those wrong turns we had to bring back from the dead.
“Get cracking on the List, Marcel. Time’s awasting. You want childhood? Give her Beowulf.”
“She’ll never make sense of it.”
“Oh. As if you can.” He punched me playfully in the shoulder. This was not the beak conducting the misanthropic midnight session of Mozart a few months earlier. Lentz was rearranging his own firmware in a way we weren’t supposed to be able to do.
“Sense is pattern, Ricky-boy. Give her some patterns and see how she arranges them.”
I sometimes talked with Helen from the English Building, through a terminal ethernetted to the campus-wide backbone. That way, Lentz could use his office for real science while I continued the training. Archaic wood and incandescence gave numbing rote the feel of a grand, nineteenth-century anatomy lecture. I had my library there as well, the books Helen soon had to study.
Perhaps I also meant to scope out the competition. Bring the fight home, into the enemy’s HQ. The English Building crawled with twenty-two-year-olds, frantic with the impending Exam. Each one had made the same error in judgment, giving their lives over to books. Each had disappointed some father, whom they’d hoped only to delight forever with their ability to read and write. Not one believed they would ever get a real job.
I watched them up close, our opponents, the curators of the written language. I moved about among them, a double agent. I listened around the mailboxes, in the coffee room. Criticism had gotten more involuted while I was away. The author was dead, the text-function a plot to preserve illicit privilege, and meaning an ambiguous social construction of no more than sardonic interest. Theory had grown too difficult for me, too subtle. It out-Heroded Herod. The idea seemed to be that if mind were no more than shrill solipcism, then best make a good performance of it.
But the apprentice wordkeepers: here were my old lost friends in photocopy, only younger than I had ever been. Most were peach-fuzzed posthumanists, pimply with neo-Marxist poststructuralism. They wielded an ironic sophistication Helen would never be able to interpret, let alone reproduce. I didn’t even want her to hear the tropes.
The halls rippled with an intellectual energy steeped in aggression. It took me a long time to see what that energy was. It was fear. Fear that everything theory professed might be true. Pure panic that the world didn’t need them anymore.
It took just as long, mingling on the outskirts, to learn what had happened to me. I’d been gone no longer than a semester. I’d come back to the standing, eternal crew. Almost the same roster, down to their names. The only difference was that nobody hung out anymore. Folks were busy, needing two books and ten articles by age twenty-five to keep one’s head above professional floodwaters.
Or perhaps the press was less industry than embarrassment. Conversation dropped to hushed flusters when I tried to join in. My offers to stand this year’s successful master’s candidates a round of beers were met by a chorus of “Sounds good” that dissolved in polite postponements.
One day, a grad I had several times exchanged nods with stopped me in the hall and began, “Mr. Powers, could I get you to sign this paperback?” At last it struck me. I’d betrayed my old mates. I’d done the unforgivable. Let myself get old.
After that, I read increasingly to Helen from my English office. Books were about a place we could not get back to. Something in my voice when there might give her that little interpretive leg up.
The building’s vague ache of background radiation emanated from one room, up on the third floor. I managed never to walk past it, but it swelled in my avoidance. I hadn’t stepped into that room since I turned adult. I sat two flights below, in my office with its Magritte fireplace, forgetting. As if forgetting were something that could be actively engineered.
I gave Helen Blake’s “Poison Tree.” Way premature. I wondered what I could have been thinking. I was thinking, not of the lines, but of the day I got them:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
“What does that mean, Helen?” I never let up on her, with this whole meaning thing.
She struggled to form the generalization. She made things up now, when she didn’t know. I took that as a great step forward.
“It means, things that you say …” I prompted her. She could usually complete a sentence form with some paraphrase of the words just fed her.
“Things that you say disappear.”
“And things you don’t say …?”
“Things you don’t say get bigger.”
Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.
I needed at least to see if the room still existed. Enough time had passed. Standing in the doorway and looking would not kill me.
I climbed the patched stairs, light-headed and short of breath. I did the two floors in a deliberate, directed haze. Automatic. On muscle memory alone. I pushed my body forward, the way a sixteen-year-old dials the phone to ask for his first-ever date. The way a doctor sentences an 11:15 clinic appointment to fatal path reports.
I mounted without thinking. Thought would have inhibited action. I’d reach that room only if I got to it before I knew where I was going. I pulled up in the middle of an ordinary classroom, deserted, on the small side. A blackboard bore the message “Thurs. 3:30-5:00,” ringed by a smeared white corral of eons-old microorganism skeletons. The linoleum floors had darkened into a color somewhere between the Forest of Arden and the wine-dark sea. A circle of warped wooden chair-desks had been hastily abandoned. Waneth the watch, I would someday try to tell Helen. But the world holdeth.
Nothing had happened here in this room’s hundred years. Nothing that bore remembering. I started to shake. Each breath set off a body-length shudder. I could not imagine how things had gotten so cold. The two dormer windows we always had to open, even in winter, because the radiator could not be shut off, demurred above me, closed.
I don’t know what I wanted. Some spectral second glance at the teacher in action. The chance to ask why the world refused to answer to the poems he’d made us memorize. I needed to revise the place—first love, discovery, vocation, eighteen. To do take two. The update. Correct the shape, improve the story I’d made of where I’d been.
I should have tried something out loud. Something from one of those beaten-up anthologies, the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition. Taylor could recite all the way back to the foundations. We would not be civilized until we could remember. He died knowing stuff he had committed to permanence at an age when the rest of us were learning Engine, engine, Number 9. Whole cantos, half-chapters from books even the titles of which I had forgotten.
A bell rang, one of those forlorn indicators of ten to the hour and class change. I left on command. The scrimshawed wood corridor complained at my weight, for some reason still insistent after all these dry-aired winters.
I hit the head of the stairwell, Middlemarch under my breath. I rounded the landing, unlooking. Maybe I never looked. Maybe I always navigated by toe-tap and hope. Halfway into the second flight, I heard a creak that wasn’t me. I sighted down, along my path. It was A., the pageboy mirage I’d seen late at night, while proofing copy.
This time I knew her name. I’d tracked her down to an official departmental photograph, which led in turn to her CV. I’d learned that she was a second-year master’s candidate. She had graduated from college the year my third book came out. The fact appalled me.
Seeing her again, I realized how often I had seen her since, from the end of endless halls. Only now A. was real, bounding upstairs, a meter in front of my descent. She exuded blue, robin’s egg, adventure, the cerulean tidal pool. She breathed like a sleeping child, like the held breath of friends gathered in a too-small house on the eve of holidays.
I snagged on her face as she glanced up, scanning mine. Instant, reflex presumption; it made me ill. Yet I knew her.
I had to keep from greeting her. My pulse doubled, cutting my intelligence in half. My skin went conductive. In the time it took me to drop another step, a bouillabaisse of chemical semaphores seeped up through my pores and spilled out to wet the air.
She must have known. She looked away, giving no indication. Her face stayed in absolute neutral, a gear beyond adopting. Two quick strides and she skipped past a near brush with literature.
I bottomed out at the base of the stairwell. I stood, winded, like a hawk-reprieved mouse. Like an agoraphobe giving a plenary speech. I would have laughed at myself, had I been able to catch my breath.
Not only could I no longer write fiction. I could no longer live fact. I’d lost fundamental real-word skills while away. The same skills I was trying to instill in Helen.
I had learned too much cognitive neuroscience. The more I read about how the mind worked, the flakier mine became. The symptoms had been coming on for a few weeks. Faces touched off self-fulfilling panic: how will you remember this person’s name? Some days before, I’d crossed a street to get to the five side when looking for an address ending in zero. Monitoring my own processes, I felt myself pitching into the ditch alongside the famous test-case centipede after the reductionists asked him how he kept track of which leg moved next.
For months, my bedtime stories had spun a decameron of long-term potentiation, recategorizing, neuronal group selection, transmitter and junctional molecules. Now, for some reason, my low-level structures, blinded by the harsh light that life’s interrogation used to extract its confessions, decided to pull an Aschenbach. A Humbert Humbert. One of those old fools in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, nineteenth-century epistolary vicarage farces. I meant to make an idiot of myself.
By the time I got back to the office, my replay of the woman ascending a staircase had become one of those late-show reruns you wish they’d get a new print of. A.: the face, the name, the stranger I’d been writing to, all my writing life. All those friends whom I, confused, thought dead. The grave where buried love lived.
I DISAPPEARED FROM English. Went back and set up shop at the Center. Paralysis I had already. I didn’t need to compound it with obsession. Three weeks without seeing A. and she’d go ephemeron, would damp down from active memory trace. She’d stop making unsponsored appearances, and I’d stop wanting her to.
Work helped. I sublimated all unquenchable hormonal flare-up desires to read that infinitely suffering creature my favorite stanzas from Piers Plowman by candlelight. Instead I read to the spreading neural net. Several times a week I invented painful contrivances by which I might introduce myself to A. Each time I did nothing but go and talk to Helen.
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed—linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.
She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weight vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You’re so hungry you could eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn’t the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech’s stockhouse except what they mean?
A certain kind of simile fell naturally into her trained neurode clusters. Helen’s own existence hinged on metaphor-making. In fact, associative memory itself was like a kind of simile. Three-quarters of the group of neurodes that fired when faced with, say, a whale might remain intact when depicting a thing that seemed, whatever the phrase meant, very like one. Such a constellation of common firings became, in a way, shadowpaint shorthand for some shared quality.
After all, the world’s items had no real names. All labels were figures of speech. One recognized a novel item as a box by comparing it to a handful of examples so small it fit into a single dimple of an egg carton. In time, one learned without being taught. Rode without the training wheels. Somehow, the brain learned to recognize whole categories, to place even those things seen for the first time.
This much simile Helen could live with. But the higher-order stuff drove her around the simulated bend. Love is like ghosts. Love is like linen. Love is like a red, red rose. The silence of her output layers at such triggers sounded like exasperation. A network should not seem but be.
Yes, yes: we know what the thing is like. But what is it? And then I, too, would be overwhelmed. Any task in the garden seemed easier than pruning her responses, for her responses, however grammatical, were bewilderment incarnate. Her ideas were well shaped, her syntax sound. But her sense: her sense hailed from the far side of the painted veil. I can no more remember its otherness than I can recall the curve of a dream before its red-penciling by the Self.
I revived a little by reminding us both that I didn’t have to tell Helen what things meant. Context spun out its own filament. The study questions themselves laddered the world’s labelless data into a recognizable index. The accumulated weight of sorted sentences had to self-gloss, or Helen would die before she could come to life.
Helen’s nets struggled to assert the metaphors I read her. She ratified them through backtracking, looking for a corner where they might fit into the accreting structure. She gamed the ur-game, puzzling out evolution’s old brainteaser, find the similarity. A is like B. Mind in its purest play is like some bat. Speech is like embroidered tapestries. God’s light is like a lamp in a niche. Greek is like lace. A pretty girl is like a melody. A people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass. How?
“My heart is like a singing bird,” I told Helen. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it. She still had several months to learn about irony and lies.
“What is singing?” she asked. That capacity still floored me. When her associative matrix dead-ended now, she asked for openings. Something inside her web told her her web needed supplementing.
“The bird is singing,” I assured her. “But my heart feels the way a singing bird must feel.”
I failed the test of interpretation I was training her to pass. I missed Helen’s question altogether.
I tried her out on a longer Rossetti exercise. At that point, I didn’t hope for comprehension. Rather, I read to her as one might recite genealogies to a child. No meaning; just a tune she might one day set words to:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree.
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember
And if thou wilt, forget.
I thought she’d stumble over the “thou” or the “wilt,” the “plant no X nor Y.” My fears showed how little I knew what went on in Helen’s hidden layers. Her neurodes connected far more to themselves than to the outside interface.
“What does it mean,” she asked me, “Sing no sad songs?” She could treat clauses as objects. Her speech turned the recursive crank of endlessness.
The question surprised me. Not what I’d expected. “It means, ‘Don’t be sorry.’ People sing songs at funerals. Singing can be a way of missing or memorializing someone. Of saying goodbye. The person saying these words doesn’t want to be remembered that way.”
