Galatea 2.2, page 29
A. fumed in analog rage. She thrashed at the command and control keys, using the mouse cruelly. She snorted like a bull. She threw one hand up in the air. To no one at all, she called out, “What’s the waiting period on handguns in this state?”
I’d heard her so often in my sleep that the sound of her voice shocked me. No one stopped typing even long enough to chuckle.
She couldn’t kill me more than once. I leaned forward, matching her tone. “Shorter than the wait on network response.” I looked down and saw myself from a distance, quaking like a sixteen-year-old.
She swung around to register me, distracted. “I thought as much.” She turned back to her screen. I lived out that life where those were the only words we would ever exchange.
Another aggravated minute and she looked around again. “You’re not, like, digitally literate by any chance, are you?”
I mumbled something so doped it belied any claim to competence. But I stood, walked over, and despite the attack of palsy, helped her retrieve her afternoon’s work from the ether.
“Magic,” she declared. She gathered her printout and disk. She stuffed them, along with the pile of James, in a black rucksack. “Thanks! I gotta run.” And she abandoned me to the endless process of revision.
I saw her some days later at the department mailboxes. It took two beats to convince myself I could greet her legitimately.
She took three to respond. “Oh, hi.” She reached out a hand, not to touch, but to affix me in space. Her wrist went down and her fingers up, pointing at me. A confiding gesture, a cross between a fifties hand soap commercial and a brass-extended Thai classical dancer. “From the computer lab, right?”
I introduced myself.
Her mouth made a cipher of uninterested surprise. “Oh. You’re the Parasite-in-Residence, aren’t you?”
“Yep. That’s me.” Yep? I heard Lentz whisper to me. Yep?
“I heard you were arrogant.” I thought it might be worth telling Helen: the various names for isolation.
“I—I have an image problem.”
She gave her name. I tried to look as if I were committing it to at least short-term memory.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I was just heading for a coffee,” I answered. My first since the age of fourteen. “Care to join me?”
She looked up. The hand again, calculating. Worth it, not worth it? She would have bolted in an instant if she knew I wanted her company.
“I guess I could use a cup. I’ve this deadly seminar at two, and I need all the help I can get.”
I maintained myself on the way to the café. If not Garrick or Gillette, I at least avoided utter nitwittery. I felt disembodied. Detached. Steeped in emergency-room calm. War coverage with the sound turned off.
We talked shop, the one shop we had in common. Grad school was her life. I’d lived through it recently enough to pretend I remembered it. I told her the story of my existence, or at least the radio mix. Everything but the essentials. I told her how I’d always thought I’d be a physicist, until I heard Taylor interpret texts.
“Where was that?”
“Ai! I’m sorry. Here. All here.”
“Professor Taylor? I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”
“He died. A couple of years before you arrived.” Traceless in her generation.
“And you never finished?”
“Not in so many words, no. I guess I wrote my first novel instead.”
She laughed. “Probably more worthwhile than the diss.” The way a person might say that stamp collecting might be worth more to the race in the long run than, say, investment banking. “What made you leave?”
I told her how specialization left me parochial. I told her that theory and criticism had shaken my belief in what writing might do. I told her about my father’s death and the seminar where we counted the feet of that Robinson sonnet on mercy killing.
I was talking too much. “How about you? How far along are you?”
She grew restive and subdued all at once. “Not as far as I thought.”
“You’ve taken the master’s exam?”
“Yeah.” Miles away.
“When?”
She laughed. “Who wants to know?” She took a slow sip. “It seemed like such a landmark while I was doing the run-up to it. I worked so hard to prepare. Then two days, a few questions. They say okay, you know this stuff. It’s over. You don’t even get a chance to flex.”
“But now it gets fun, right?”
“You think? I’ll be middle-aged by the time I get the doctorate. No offense.”
I hiked up a grin. “None taken.”
“And no matter how good I am, I might be waiting on tables afterward, like all the other Ph.D.s in literature. They lied to us, you know. By accepting us into the program. They implied we’d have jobs when we were done.”
“Nobody gets work?”
She snorted. “One in four, in a good year. And some of those who get jobs are repeats, out for their third or fourth time. The whole profession is a total pyramiding scheme.”
“And by the time you guys get the chain letter …”
“It’ll take more new bodies to finance the payoffs than there are undergraduates in the galaxy.”
A. stopped to greet a passerby and to wave at someone seated two tables away. She knew half the people in the café. I, too, now fit somewhere in her star system’s outer orbits.
“I wouldn’t feel like such a sucker if the whole process weren’t such a bilking. This is the most class-conscious society I’ve ever been part of. The department superstars lord it over their minor tenured colleagues, who saddle all the junior faculty with shit work, who take it out on the senior grads, who have no time for the master’s candidates, who hold the undergraduates in contempt. That’s not even mentioning the nonacademic staff.”
“Is it that bad? I’m out of the loop.” So far out that I could not even pick up her rhythm.
“Worse. We carry the same teaching load as faculty, and get paid maybe a seventh what you do. Socially, we’re pariahs. I doubt the turf wars in business are half as bitter.”
“How can the fight be so ugly over so small a piece of pie?”
A. grunted. “It’s ugly because there’s nothing to fight over.”
We could buy a house. She’d never have to worry about making a living again. I could call New York, tell them I had another book in me after all. She could spend all day living, recovering the pleasure of the text.
“Maybe the whole discipline is breaking up,” I suggested. “As a relative outsider, I’d say no one seems to know quite what they want the thing to become anymore.”
“Total chaos. Who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down. All that hot new stuff, the pomo and the cultural studies and the linguistic-based solipsism. I’m fed up with it. It’s all such verbal wanking off. Frankly, I no longer give a fuck what happens to Isabel Archer. Neither politically, economically, psychologically, structurally, nor posthumanistically. So she’s got to choose which of these three loser boys she has to marry. This takes how many hundred pages?”
Her eyes caught mine and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oops. Sorry. It’s that Catholic pottymouth of mine. You are faculty, aren’t you?”
“Technically. So what do you think you’ll do with yourself?” Name the city. Your terms. Unconditional.
“I figure I might get a job in business somewhere. Editing or marketing or something. If I’m going to be abused, I can at least get paid to take it.”
She gave me not one syllable of encouragement. No shy curiosity or even dry interest. But I had already done so much on no encouragement at all. All on my own.
It occurred to me: who A. was. Why I had come back to U. to meet her. A. was Helen’s pace rabbit. Her heat competition. She had beaten the master’s exam, the one we’d pitch our machine against. She was the woman who pulled love from the buried grave. The designated hitter for frailty, feeling, and whim. The champion of the humans.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said. “I have to make animal tracks. See ya!”
She disappeared faster than she had the first time.
But I had spoken to A. I’d sat three feet from her, for half an hour. Amid a corsage of coffee spoons, I replayed the conversation. I lived on that “See ya,” trying to wrest it back from metaphor, to move around in it, through the latticework of lived time.
C. MUST HAVE cared for my third book. She said as much in every available way, and she had no particular reason to lie just yet.
The story had mutated into a hopeful monster. Here and there, I tried to code into its paragraph cells the moves we made, the friends we loved, the events that shaped us and were worth saving. I hoped my molecular genetics might transcribe, if not an encyclopedia of successful solutions to experience, at least some fossil record of the questions. I wanted my extended metaphors to mirror speculation in the widest lens, the way the genome carries along in time’s wake all the residue of bygone experiments and hypotheses, from bacteria on.
But novels, like genomes, consist mostly of intron baggage. And as with evolution, you can’t always get there efficiently from here.
At thirteen hundred pages, my typescript had only the longest odds against being bought. Whatever my publishers expected, it wasn’t this. At best, they’d issue a desperate request that I change trajectories, free the skinny book hiding inside this sumo. At worst, they’d kiss me off and wish me well. Great fun, but. Maybe one of those avant-garde presses?
C. and I went to the post office together. We were both more nervous than we’d been the first time, years before. We didn’t know what to hope for. The manuscript took up a small crate.
“Send it by boat,” C. said.
“It’s expensive either way,” I countered. “And the difference isn’t that big. We can swing it, sweet!” I giggled.
“Boat,” C. insisted. “Surface rate.” Her eyes clouded. In a moment, she might have shouted or turned and walked away without a word.
I cradled the box, with its long customs form marked Drukwerk. Printed matter. Several kilos of story, an attempt to feel, in music, life’s first principles and to hear, in those genetic principles, living tune. I’d tried to ground creation’s stepladder in its molecular building blocks. I’d written a book that aspired to understanding, when I could not even understand the woman on whom my actions depended.
We sent my book Stateward by slow boat. Outside the post office, C. kissed me long and hard. She gamboled a few steps, exhilarated by the dusk. “Come on. Let’s go out to eat.” We never went out. “Let’s go have Chin-Ind.”
We celebrated by heading into the city and dining on rijsttafel. “The wages of colonialism,” C. babbled. “Calories and imperial exploitation,” she said, holding up a satay. “Now, there’s guilty pleasure for you.”
At meal’s end, we realized that we’d forgotten to toast. C. held up what was left of her water glass. “To us, Beauie. To the pair bond. To the double helix.”
“What could be simpler?” I added.
Nothing could harm us anymore. I had lived to finish my work. The rest of life would all be bonus round. Afterward, we went home and read to each other, the first time in a long time. I spooned my body against hers. Before we fell asleep, I joked, “If they don’t want this one, I can always go back to programming.”
“… TO WHICH THE woman says, ‘If you want infidelity, you’ll have to find someone else.’”
“That’s a joke,” Helen announced. Part theory, part improv, part defensive accusation. She had learned to recognize humor: those utterances even more inexplicable than the rest of the unsolvable smear.
Or she told it in my voice alone. I felt unaccountably happy. I had for a week. Blessed by everything. And everything I looked upon felt blessed.
Her response fed my upswell. “Helen,” I rambled, “thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore.”
“Powers?” Lentz warned from behind his desk. “Careful.”
“What? You think today’s twenty-two-year-old knows from Nicean barks of yore?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
I looked over at him. Lentz did not glance up from his stack of journal offprints.
“Yours,” Helen corrected me. “Those barks of yours.”
“No, yore. Barks of yore. It means an old boat.”
I did the rest of the poem for her. Oral interp. It was on the List, after all.
“Who weary, wayworn wanders?” she wanted to know.
“Ulysses?” I looked over at Lentz for confirmation. He ignored me. “Yeah. It has to be Ulysses. Do you remember him?”
“The wily Odysseus.” It was impossible to tell if she had developed a facetious streak, or if she was just mimicking. “Why he wanders?”
I corrected her Creole syntax and made my best guess.
“Why is the sea perfumed?”
“Complex,” I clarified. “Basically, I think it means that a sweet thing calls the wanderer home.”
“It means that sweetness is like the way you go back.”
“Me?”
“Beauty calls you back to me.”
“Not me. The speaker of the poem. And not you, I’m afraid. A friend of the speaker’s, also named Helen. If that’s her real name.”
Helen said nothing. Lentz said, “I told you to be careful.”
Only more lessons could cure the effect of lessons. “Remember that ‘Helen’ is also the name—”
“Helen of Troy,” Helen rushed. She had paid particular attention to the story when we’d done it.
“And the wily Odysseus …”
“Went to reget that Helen.”
“‘Reget’ is not a word. Recover, maybe. Retrieve. Rescue.”
Lentz mumbled, “The bitch hardly asked to be rescued.”
“On those Nicean barks of yore.” Helen sounded almost distorted with excitement.
“Explain.”
“The wily Odysseus went to Troy on old boats.”
The presentation was clumsy. I had to lead the witness. But I doubted that many high schoolers could extract as much, these days. A face like the face that launched a thousand ships now called one back to port.
I hid my pleasure, not wanting to scatter Helen’s synapses. I thought to correct her preposition. But I couldn’t come up with a good rule for when we travel on ships and when we travel in them. Rules could be either followed or known. Not both.
“It talks of love, the words?” Helen asked. She copied my inversion, the leading question. The poem is about love, wouldn’t you say?
“Hah!” Lentz cleared his throat with the syllable. “‘Love’ is the envelope wrapped around ‘uhgh,’ to make the groan pronounceable in polite company.”
“You are bad news, Lentz,” I told him.
“Bad news,” Helen agreed.
Her two words knocked me speechless. Somehow during the endless sessions, she’d trained herself to hear a third person in the room.
I whistled low. “That’s my baby.”
Lentz, too, was nonplussed. But tried to hide it. “Bad news? Am I? Tell me: What form would good news take?”
“All about love,” Helen repeated. She had learned the even more impressive and necessary skill of ignoring a nuisance. Then she made the kind of sloppy, hasty generalizing stab we’d built her to make.
“They are all about love, isn’t it?”
“Helen?” My stomach crawled up my windpipe. We were all dead.
“Every poem loves something. Or each wants something in love. Something loves power. Or money. Or honor. Something loves country.” On what catalog could she be drawing? “I hear about something in love with comfort. Or with God. Someone loves beauty. Someone death. Or some poem always is in love with another lover. Or another poem.”
I waited until I had control of my throat again. I don’t know what she made of the extended silence. “What you say, Helen,” I deliberated, “is true. But only in the most general sense. The word doesn’t have the same sense in all your cases. The similarity is too big to mean anything. It’s the differences that interest us. The local. The small picture.”
“Then I need to be small. How can I make me as small as love?”
I lost it. I could find no words.
Lentz, too, failed to get away cleanly. But he was faster into the breach. “You heard her, Powers. She wants to make herself small enough for love.”
“How am I supposed to tell her …?”
“How do you think? Get the letters.”
All I could do was make myself small. I waited for him to tell me I hadn’t heard right. He didn’t. “How do you know there are letters? Not that I’m admitting there are.”
“Now, really. Thirty-five-year-old returns alone from Europe? To the Midwest? And there are no letters?”
I brought in the letters. I’d rescued hers on a brief salvage run a few months after my deportation from E. For two days, while C. hid on the other side of the province, I picked through my possessions and decided what would fit in two suitcases.
For two days, everything I looked on herniated my chest. My self hemorrhaged. Certain things would not fit into my bags. The view of the river valley from the hill outside town. The decent shower stall I had promised C. for a year and never installed. The raw herring and the fruit beers.
The letters, however, fit. The book her parents had learned English from fit. The only sweater C. ever knitted, that never fit me, fit.
C. sent my letters back, special fourth class, the minute I had a forwarding address. I ended up curator of both ends of a dozen years of correspondence. I meant never to read a word of it again. I had no idea why I saved so much as a page. Now I had a reason. Helen.
I started at the beginning. I chose from the stack, opening envelopes without knowing anymore what each contained. I tried to set the context of each passage, as far as I could recall it.
“This one I wrote to her while taking the bus up to my father’s funeral.
