Galatea 2.2, page 23
Helen had to spell things out for me. People were idiots. No, no, no. From the top. “How do you sing?”
I had gone on one of those glorious demented sidetracks, the hallmark of intelligence. The ability to use everything in the lexicon to answer except the answer.
I’d given her “The bird is singing,” “The poet’s heart is singing,” even “Grief is singing,” when all the poor girl needed was “Uttering pure-toned pitches in time sequence is singing.” Writing struck me as so impossible, my years as a novelist so arrogant, that I could have lived that life only through blatant fabrication.
How do you sing? All I could think to do was demonstrate. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. Failing to say what a thing was, I could at least put an instance in her ears.
WHEN I RETURNED to the lab two days later, I thought I’d dialed a wrong number. Even before I reached the door, it hit me. Sound rolled out into the hall, shock waves in bonsai packages. I’d heard music emanate from Lentz’s suite once before. But this was the air of a new planet. I rounded the corner, ready already to be dead.
Inside, Helen was singing. Through her terminal mouthpiece, she sang the song she’d heard me sing. What else could she? She sang Bounce me high, bounce me low, bounce me up to Jericho. A song I’d sung once as a child, when hired by an opera company to portray a small boy. My sung, staged simulation of childhood. Helen sang in an extraterrestrial warble, the way deaf people sing. But I recognized that tune in one note.
Lentz sat behind his desk, hands pressed to his neck. He had not moved since arriving, however long ago that had been. Even through the bank glass of his specs, I saw vinegary damp.
“You did this to her, Powers!” I knew where I’d heard that mock indignation before. I recognized it, after one training. My father, the summer before his death, laughing as he scolded my older sister: How can you do this to me? How can you make me a grandfather?
I’d done nothing. A kludge of morphologies—implementations within implementations, maps that had learned to map each other—passed a milestone we hadn’t even hoped to set her. Lentz and I stood by, winded, pulses racing. All we could do was listen.
She auditioned the tune. Bounce me high. Bounce me low. Only by hearing it out loud, in her own voice, could Helen probe the thing, test it against itself.
She was stuck on the first phrase, that unfinished half-stich, because that’s all I’d sung her. Because that’s where I had stuck. After twenty-five years, I could not remember how the rest of the tune went. Over and back Helen hummed, not knowing she possessed but half the melodic story. Bounce me up to Jericho. Lack of tonal resolution did not faze her. No one told her that tunes were supposed to come home to tonic. This was the only one anybody had ever sung her.
And in that moment, I understood that I, too, would never have a handle on metaphor. For here was the universe in a grain of literal sand. Singing—enabled, simulated on a silicon substrate. I felt how a father must feel, seeing his unconscious gestures—pushing back a forelock or nudging the sink cabinet shut with a toe—picked up and mimicked by a tiny son.
“Lentz,” I whispered, so as not to distract the miracle, “is this what it’s like to be a parent?”
Very like, his eyes leaked back. And I saw what it meant to want that awful next step, tasting oneself from the outside, in a flash of constructed recognition. To say the thing I made I did not make and is not mine. To know in Polaroid advance that hour when all life’s careful associations will come undone.
LESS THAN A year after we moved to E., we got a letter from the Taylors. I wrote them often, for after we bolted, I needed word from U. more than I ever did while living there. They wrote back jocular stuff: “Don’t you two realize the age of Europe is over and that of North America is following in its wake? Get back over here before it’s too late.”
Taylor had so little time to reply that any word was an event. I kept the envelope sealed, thinking it would be fun to read to C. when she got home from her latest temp job. We’d marvel at Tayloresque sentences together, over the dinner I prepared for her.
I watched C. step off the bus, waving from the balcony as I did each evening. She shot me back one of those terrified, fatigued, smiling, full-body waves that never failed to cut right through me. The letter is dated September 17, but it must have been a cold fall. C. was already swallowed by that giant navy coat that ran all the way down to her ankles.
In the kitchen, she danced a little jig at the sight of the letter. Anything that made me happy might increase the chances for our transplantation. “Come on, Beauie. Read it, you loony-tick. What in the world are you waiting for?”
I slit the packet open and read:
“Dear Rick and C.,
“Belatedly, I take up pen, first to thank you for your welcome tape of good music and loved voices. Similarly welcome have been the letters, which I have meant to answer every day. Recent weeks have both dragged and hurried, creeping by the minute but vanishing into an unreal limbo so that even less than usual am I able to believe that months have passed since we have seen you …
“For nearly a full month I have had a succession of terrible waits after tests, each of which finished a three- or four-day vigil with more bad news. CAT scan, bronchoscopy, bone scan, and finally a week in the hospital for removal of a piece of rib for bone biopsy determined that in addition to a main tumor in the right lung I have cancerous bone in the left rib cage, ruling out an operation and leaving radiation and chemotherapy as treatment. The only test with encouraging results showed no evidence of metastasis to brain …
“Since then, my silence has been caused by effects of treatment. The dreaded nausea did not last long, but loss of appetite and weight did, and a fatigue so profound that I can’t adequately describe it. My muscles have atrophied and I spend most of my time lying down. I am good for little more than harvesting the odd tomato, gathering windfall apples, picking some late-planted lettuce …
“Our long silence is terribly misleading. Your departure left a large emptiness that has been italicized by this illness and our being more solitary than usual. If we possessed ESP, you would have been deluged by messages from here. Still, it is a pleasure to imagine the two of you together in the wide variety of settings you manage to inhabit. My life would seem pretty bounded-in-a-nutshell by any measure, but your joint enthusiasm in getting out and seeing the world is overwhelming.
“I’ve exhausted my pitiable energy, though not my love. The best way you can please me is to promise that my illness will not lead you to even the slightest tendency to avoid pleasure out of affectionate empathy. Try to adopt the opposite attitude; let me hope that thoughts of me will enhance pleasures I’d enjoy, too, if we were together.”
After the first paragraph, I looked up at C. But we’d read too far to pretend the message away. I got through the whole history. Finishing, I looked up across the widening kitchen table at the college girl who had sat with me on the Quad, when still young enough to believe in consolation. This was the same woman, the same panicked doe, in the same glare that life keeps training on us until we can no longer even dread it.
An awful half-second stutter step, and C. said, “You’ll have to go back to the States.”
“Just to see him, at least,” I pleaded, the exact reaction her reflex generosity meant to stave off. But I was not pleading with C.
I flew back to U., numb to the new feel of the place. Taylor could still get out. We went to a nearby woods. We talked. He knew he was done. The only thing for it was presence of mind. Taylor brought along his camera, took a snap of me. I wanted to take one of him, fix him forever. But Taylor had already begun to waste away and refused to be captured like that.
I showed him the excerpt from my new book that had just appeared in a glossy literary weekly. Taylor, for whose approval I’d developed my labyrinthine style, delighted in the piece’s uncharacteristic breeziness. He delighted even more when I told him how much I’d been paid. “A dollar a word! That has a solid ring to it.”
I had done what everyone in Taylor’s line, what he himself had once dreamed of doing. I could wake up every morning and devote myself to making worlds. People read my inventions and wrote about them in turn. My words had grown careers of their own. My overnight success gave Taylor such pleasure that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I meant to quit fiction.
“I didn’t want to burden you with such a prediction when you were an eighteen-year-old kid memorizing ‘The Windhover.’” He beamed. “But however much luck always plays into such things, it was possible, even then, to imagine your getting away with something like this.”
We turned to the real issue. He protected me from what his disease was doing to him. He seemed, for half an hour, the equal of any formulation he had made before the tumor came alive inside him. I asked him whether, at that stage of the illness, literature helped much. Did it make things any clearer, any easier?
Taylor stayed as brutally forthright with me as ever. He thought for a moment, to get the prosody right. “I would say that literature is not entirely irrelevant, in this circumstance. But it’s not quite central, either.”
Before we headed home, I asked if he had any regrets. Anything he still needed to do. Taylor told me then that, to his mind, the only two careers worth striving for were doctor and musician. I could not tell how figurative he was being.
Taylor sickened. I found a house-sit in the neighborhood, and came by every day. I sat with him as he napped, or I read to him, or we watched sports on television. Sometimes we talked, but never again like that day in the woods.
He lost his appetite, shrank to insubstantial nothing. His gut stopped working. His skin gained purple-green highlights and his joints grew smooth as polished metal. When muscles gave out, he cupped his question-mark head in both hands. He sat in the sunroom until he could no longer sit up. Then we moved him upstairs, into his long bed.
He asked me to check out some books from the library, so he could prepare to teach his class in January.
M., his wife, remained rocklike. She exuded competence beyond belief. She lifted the skeletal Taylor out of bed and carried him—Mary holding a puppet Christ—deflated and naked, to the toilet, in her arms.
Only his mind remained luminous. Near the end, the medications did change him. But even then, his topographies fought to keep themselves intact. One afternoon before Christmas, I found Taylor in a state that was not quite sleep, but could pass for sleep in low light.
“Oh, it’s you!” he greeted me. “All day long, the sounds outside this window have been turning into events from my past.”
He went on to tell me, in devastating detail, about the valley of his childhood, out West. The names of all his classmates and the ways each had distinguished or humiliated himself in coming of age. The frozen rabbits hanging on the barn wall that kept the family alive all winter. Every single title in the valley library, outread and exhausted by fourteen.
Before I left town, I put another book in Taylor’s hands. One for the permanent record. One he would never read. I gave him the first bound galley of my second book, Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Number two was my memorial to a sick father. In it, I described every impasse of history but his. Only the passage of years, only knowing I’d never show Richard Powers, Sr., what fiction had done to him, made that fiction possible.
I told Taylor about my father. How I’d broken his heart. His lover’s quarrel with the world. His disappearance at the end, his one last frontier adventure. I told Taylor about the cryptic absolution Dad sent me from the Yukon. The cremation of Sam McGee.
At my mention of the name, Taylor’s lips crooked. Astonishingly, the man to whom I owed my Shakespeare and Yeats, my Marx and Freud, launched into a full rendition of the hack ballad. He did not miss a stanza. Death had no more dominion over him.
“I don’t know how to say goodbye,” I told Taylor. The book was my goodbye, because symbols are all that become of the real. They change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them. The symbols a life forms along its way work back out of the recorder’s office where they wait, and, in time, they themselves go palpable. Lived.
I left, knowing he had at best days, and at worst a month. Nothing left to do. The old friends were everywhere in attendance. Maybe I should have stayed. Stood and waited. Maybe he could have used having me around.
“Make a noise,” he ordered as I took off. “See the world.”
“I will,” I promised. “And I’ll keep you posted.”
In the short night, eastward above the Atlantic, I thought of the last time I’d made the crossing. My life in U. was dead. I’d gone back to that cow town once too often. I told myself I would never get near it again.
But U. caught up with me, even in my foreign country. And that death was far worse, faced alone in E. C. and I lay on the floor of our apartment, in hypothermia, and listened to the tape of the memorial service, the fiddle tunes, that whole unbroken circle of friends telling Taylor stories, recounting their local eulogies for the man who thought only memory stood between us and randomness.
Each person who knew him surrendered some private lode of remembered event. Or they read from the page one of the poems Taylor himself did from effortless memory. They read Blake and Rossetti and Stevens. No one read “Sam McGee,” because the one who was supposed to read it was lying on the floor in a little ex-coal-mining town on the other side of the world, listening to the belated tape, shivering, wrecked forever by memory.
I could give back nothing to Taylor, I, who couldn’t even find a way to tell him what he had given me. All I could do for Taylor now was to turn him into character.
I held on to C., giving in to my only available response. She probably knew I would backslide long before the idea hit me. One more book, I pleaded with her, wordlessly. I needed to postpone my graduation from lying long enough to tell a double love story. To turn a helical twist that might both eulogize the man and let me live, before it was too late, the life in science from which he’d long ago deflected me.
HELEN DID NOT sing the way real little girls sang. Technically, she almost passed. Her synthesized voice skittered off speech’s earth into tentative, tonal Kitty Hawk. Her tune sounded remarkably limber, given the scope of that mechanical tour de force.
But she did not sing for the right reasons. Little girls sang to keep time for kickball or jump ropes. The little boy soprano I had played onstage at twelve had been doing that. Singing the tune I’d taught Helen, keeping imitative time by bouncing a ball against a pasteup shop door.
Helen didn’t have a clue what keeping time meant, never having twirled a jump rope, let alone seen one. We’d strengthened her visual mapping, but true, real-time image recognition would have required vastly more computer power than the entire Center drew. And we were already living beyond our quota.
If Helen had a temporal sense now, it came from a memory strong enough to remember configurations it was no longer in. And mark the passing of her changing, internal states. God only knows the look and feel of a sense of time without a sense of space. But that was Helen.
“You were not, yesterday,” she would say to me, whether I’d been gone three hours or three days. “Yesterday” stood for any state that Helen had watched get swallowed up by its successor. “You” presumably meant that generic, external irritant that laid data on her input layers. “Were not” was her simplistic idea of negation. Although she had still to learn that absence and presence were not opposites, she was well on her way to a functional understanding of loneliness, that font of all knowledge.
One day she added, “I miss you.”
The thing canonical writers always said in print. I wanted to tell her that she ought not to put the formulation in the present tense while I sat right there at the mike and keyboard. I said nothing, not wanting to undo the example of the rhymers she imitated with anything so trivial as convention.
“I miss Muffet,” she went on. In growing savvy enough for figurative speech, she’d become too softheaded for the literal. Either that, or she was engaging in the neural network equivalent of silliness. If she could sing, I reasoned, I could certainly train her to giggle.
I MAILED THE finished copy of my fourth book to New York on the day Los Angeles set itself on fire. My story predicted that explosion, although such a prediction took no special gift. Mine was less prophecy, anyway, than memory. A child’s recollected nightmare.
The prepublication notices of the book appeared not long after. Soon enough for human recollection, in any event. The most visible of the trade-press reviews dubbed the book “a bedtime tale set in a future apocalypse.” This denial stuck. Everything I’d written about Angel City and its war on childhood had already played out. But so many of the subsequent reviews pushed memory into the not-yet that I began to think I had, in fact, written my first attempt at speculative fiction.
The reviews were not all bad. Chicago glowed, saving my appointment at the Center and preserving face with the home crowd. The best notice, remarkably, came from that national paper sold in street boxes designed to resemble TVs. It spoke of homeopathy, of narrating the worst so the worst did not have to happen.
Most critics, though, felt the reader had to work too hard for too bleak a payoff.
Lentz delighted in the harshest press judgments. It became almost impossible to train Helen while he was around.
He entered the office crowing, “Look who’s here! If it isn’t my favorite manufacturer of literary astonishments. Which is not to say a good novelist,” he added, graciously patronizing, “although you are that, too.”
This was the lead from that same glossy with the twenty-million worldwide circulation that yesterday had predicted such a full future for me.
