Galatea 2.2, page 33
A. fell silent, proportionate to the remembered cacophony. No one knew this woman. Sociability was a brilliant camouflage. Beneath it hid the most private person I’d ever met.
“I could have started one of my own by now. A family. But no. I had to do things the hard way.”
I don’t know why, but she let me see her. Dropped her guard. I’d made myself fall in love with A. With the idea of A. With her interrogating body. With hands that held in midair all the questions Helen would never touch. I had loved C. wrongly, for C.’s helplessness. I loved A. helplessly, for the one right reason. For my frailty in the face of her. For her poise in knowing how soon all poise would end.
I realized I was going to propose to that body. I needed to see what her person, what the character I steered around in my head would say to total, reckless invitation.
I was going to do what I’d never had the courage to do in my decade with C. I was going to ask this unknown to take me to her and make an unrationed life together. To marry. Make a family. Amend and extend our lives.
“All right,” I said, affecting a virtue. “You’re sufficiently fallible to be just what we’re looking for. Are you in?”
A.’s grimace upended itself. Such a test was no less entertaining than pinball. And what could she possibly lose?
“Okay, girl,” she addressed Helen. “I’ll race you. No mercy!”
Helen said nothing.
“She’s being reticent again. Give her a digital gold star, or something.”
I opened at random the next book on the list. An epigraph at page top: Bernard of Clairvaux. C. and I had once spent a timeless afternoon in that town. The words read, What we love, we shall grow to resemble.
I read the words to Helen. She kept her counsel.
“Helen? What do you say to that?”
Still she gave no response.
“Helen?”
A. poked me. “Shh. Leave her be. She’s rolling with it.” She’s moved by it, A. wanted to say. But that was the grip of an archaic theory, long discredited.
It hit me well after it should have. The mind is still an evolutionary infant. Most trouble with the obvious. I reached down and turned the mike back on. Then I read the words again.
“HOW MANY BOOKS are there?” Helen asked one day, not long before the showdown. She sounded suspicious. Fatigued.
“A lot,” I broke it to her. I had numbered every hair on her head, but in one of those counting systems that jumps from “three” to “many.”
“Tell me.”
I told her that the Library of Congress contained 20 million volumes. I told her that the number of new books published increased each year, and would soon reach a million, worldwide. That a person, through industry, leisure, and longevity, might manage to read, in one life, half as many books as are published in a day.
Helen thought. “They never go away? Books?”
“That’s what print means. The archive is permanent.” And does for the species what associative memory fails to do for the individual.
“Reading population gets bigger?” Helen asked.
“Not as rapidly as the backlist. People die.”
Helen knew all about it. Death was epidemic, in literature.
“Do people get any longer, year in, year out?”
“Is the life span increasing? Only on average. And very slowly. Much less than we pretend.”
She did the rate equations in two unknowns. “The more days, the less likely that any book will be read.”
“That’s true. Or that you will have read the same things as anyone you talk to.”
“And there are more days every day. Will anything change?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Always more books, each one read less.” She thought. “The world will fill with unread print. Unless print dies.”
“Well, we’re kind of looking into that, I guess. It’s called magazines.”
Helen knew all about magazines. “Books will become magazines,” she predicted.
And of course, she was right. They would have to. Where nothing is lost, little can be found. With written continuity comes collective age. And aging of the collective spirit implied a kind of death. Helen alone was capable of thinking the unthinkable: the disappearance of books from all but the peripheries of life. History would collapse under its own accumulation. Scope would widen until words refused to stray from the ephemeral present.
“When will it be enough?” she asked.
I could not even count for her the whole genres devoted to that question alone.
“Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?”
I read her one of the great moments in contemporary American fiction. “Only it’s not by an American, it’s no longer contemporary, and it doesn’t even take place inside the fictional frame.” This was Nabokov’s postlude to Lolita, where he relates the book’s genesis. He describes hearing of an ape who produced the first known work of animal art, a rough sketch of the bars of the beast’s cage.
I told Helen that, inside such a cage as ours, a book bursts like someone else’s cell specifications. And the difference between two cages completes an inductive proof of thought’s infinitude.
I read her the take of a woman who once claimed to have written for no one. A lifelong letter to the world that neither read hers nor wrote back:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul!
SHE WANTED TO know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael’s real name. Who this “Reader” was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree’s Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be “only a novel.” What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be a mistake not to live all you can.
I SAID GOODBYE to C.’s parents. They didn’t understand. They had come such a long way, and didn’t see why the next generation couldn’t tough it out as far, or further.
“She’s crazy, huh?” her mother said.
Her pap, in his Chicago-Limburgs patois, asked, “Just one thing I want to know, Rick. Who’s gonna set my digital clocks?”
I said goodbye to C. “I promised I’d see you through school. And graduation’s still six weeks away.”
C. dodged the blow, but caught a corner of it across her face. “Don’t do this to me, Rick. I’ll graduate. I promise.”
“Do you need anything? Should we get you a car before I go? Do you have enough money?” Late-minute plans for a final day trip, solo, lasting from now on.
My reflex solicitude hurt her worse than anger. “Beauie,” she pleaded. “We can’t do this. We can’t split up. We still have twelve hundred pages of Proust to get through.”
I searched her, sounding this reprieve, hoping for an impossible instant it might be real. But she did not want it. She did not want to do those remaining pages, to throw bad reading after good. She just wanted to save nostalgia, not the thing it stood for. She only wanted my blessing, to get on and make a life free from suicidal remorse.
“Who’s going to finish the book?” She meant the commonplace one, with the ticket stubs and lists of films and meals and outings, a shared narrative, senseless except to us.
Then the senselessness of all stories—their total, arbitrary construction—must have struck C. She started to scream. I had to pin her arms to her side to keep her from harming herself. I held her for a long time. Not as a medic. Not as a parent. Not as a lover. I held her as you might hold a fellow stranger in a shelter.
When she grew calm, she was not yet calm. “I must be sick. Something must be wrong with me. I’m a sadist. I’ve spoiled everything that was worth having.”
“We still have it. It just has to go on hold.”
“I wanted to make you proud. I thought, in twenty years, that I might become the perfect person for you.”
“You’re perfect now.”
“I’ve ruined your life.”
“You haven’t, C. You’ve done what you needed to. You’re a good person.”
She looked at me, remembering. Yes, that’s right. I have been. I have been good. “And now I have to go outside.”
I tried to match her. To rise to her. “This is all the fault of that damn Polish kid, you know.”
I felt: at least I’ll never have to do any of this again.
HELEN WANTED TO read one of my books. I gave her my first try. I had written it at A.’s age, just after passing the comps. I knew nothing about literature then, and so still thought it possible to write.
“Go easy on me,” I begged, surrendering the digitized image. “I was just a kid.”
The night she read it, I got fifteen minutes of sleep. I could not remember being that nervous, even when reading the longhand draft to C. I came in the morning after, wired over whether this machine thought my book was any good.
We chattered for several minutes about nothing. I grew anxious, assuming the worst. Then I realized: she wouldn’t volunteer anything until prompted. She had no way of knowing that I needed to know.
So I asked. Outright. “What did you think of my book, Helen?”
“I think it was about an old photograph. It grows to be about interpretation and collaboration. History. Three ways of looking come together, or fail to. Like a stereoscope. What’s a stereoscope?”
“Helen! Did you like it?”
“I liked it.”
“What did you like?”
“I liked ‘I never saw a Moor. I never saw the Sea.’”
I’d forgotten. “That isn’t mine. I was quoting.”
“Yes. I know,” Helen brushed me off. “That was more Dickinson. Emily.”
Helen’s brain had proved wide enough for my sky, and me beside. She was one step away from grasping this audience-free poet’s analogy, the last scholastic aptitude test: brain differs from the weight of God as syllable from sound. Yet comparison filled her with need to see the real moor, the navigable sea, however much deeper the brain that could absorb it.
“Show me Paris.”
“Well?” Lentz shrugged, when I relayed the request. “Do you have any travel plans for the immediate future?”
I had, in fact, no immediate future. My visiting appointment at the Center ended in a few weeks. Beyond that, my life came down to throwing a dart at the world map. I had no reason, no desire to be anywhere except where A. was.
“You can’t be serious. You want me to fly to—”
“I didn’t say I wanted anything, Marcel. I asked you what you were doing.”
I pictured myself strolling the Seine bookstalls, looking for that forgotten book I always thought I would someday write. Paris was the one city where C. had ever felt at home. We’d gone as often as we could. Now I could not see myself wandering there except with A.
“It’s absurd,” I decided. “What could she gain from it?”
“The hidden layers are hungry, Marcel. Ask not for what.”
Lentz brought in slides. We hooked them up to the digitizer. An unrecognizably young Lentz in front of Notre Dame. Lentz in the Tuileries. By the Panthéon. The Médicis fountain. “Helen,” he lectured. “The one on the left is me. The one on the right is by Rodin.”
She never could see much of anything. She was a one-eyed myopic with astigmatism, two days after an operation for glaucoma. Everything looked to her like blurry Braque, except for Braque. Yet she loved light and dark, and these would have meant to her as much as words, had we wired her up right.
“Motion,” she insisted. We tried some ancient public television video. She felt hurt. Locked out. “Depth. Sound. I want Richard to explain me.”
“Interactive,” Lentz figured.
“What’s our range on the camera hookup?”
“Oh, a couple of hundred meters, maximum, from the nearest drop box.”
Lentz and I agreed to defraud Helen. Between us, at least, we pretended that it was less swindle than simulation. We would do for this machine the inverse of what virtual reality promised to do for humans.
We showed her the collegiate landmarks of U., all the imitations of imitations of classical architecture, and called the sites she couldn’t see anyway by famous names. Even actual Paris would have been no more than a fuzzy, Fauvist kaleidoscope. Home could match that. All sensation was as strange, as foreign, as the idea of its existing at all.
I took Helen on the Grand Tour. I panned and zoomed on all the structures I passed four times a day without seeing. I sat her in a café where, smack in the middle of a cornfield extending two hundred miles in every direction, she had her pick of a dozen languages to eavesdrop on.
“Thank you,” Helen said. She’d seen through our duplicity early. She chose to exercise, by imitation, the art of the loving lie. For our sakes.
She seemed content to return to reading, until the next novel indulged some new locale. Helen went nuts with wanderlust. “Show me London. Show me Venice. I want to see Byzantium. Delhi.”
She twitched now, like the worst of adolescents. The most precocious.
“Helen, it’s impossible. Travel is rare. Difficult.”
“More flat pictures, then.” She would settle for those static, pathetic portals, our stand-ins for the real.
Lentz had endless slide carousels. His pictures wandered from city to city, tracing a line of changing eras and styles. Photo docs not just of antique towns but of whole lost ways of being. Hair, clothes, cars made their cavalcade. Lentz’s image aged and grew familiar. He’d been everywhere.
“You know that place too?” I called out during the show. “I loved that city. Did you go to the monkey palace? The fortress? The west crypt?” Shameless tourism.
Lentz answered, always affirmative, without enthusiasm. He stayed stony-faced throughout the world tour.
They must have traveled together. I had nothing to lose by asking, except my life. “So where was Audrey while you were out broadening your mind?”
“She always worked the camera,” he said. And advanced to the next slide.
He had no pictures of her. Carousels full of buildings, and no evidence of the tour’s reason. I needed to go with A. to Brugge and Antwerp and Maastricht, if for no other reason than to record the trip. I needed pictures of her, in an album, on a shelf, in a room, in a real house. I needed to own something more than would fit in the emergency suitcase by the side of a rented bed. I pictured myself, at the end of the longer slide show, with four books to my name and not one decent snapshot.
I watched the rest of Lentz’s travels in silence, except for the occasional bit of narration I added for Helen’s sake. Each time I recognized one of Audrey’s images, I stopped breathing. Frame after frame, and how could I tell Helen the first thing about having visited them? I had gotten out, been all over. And never saw anything until we tried to show it to this blind box.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE travelogue, and all I knew of the projector, of the magic lantern, was its images. I lived at explanation’s first minute. My office at the Center was as close to neuroscience’s ground zero as a person could get. If I lived to expectancy, researchers would have produced an infant, ghostly, material theory of mind by the time I died. And I would not be able to follow it. I would be locked out, as consciousness locks us out from our own inner workings, not to mention the clearest word of another. The best I could hope for would be cartoon, layman’s analysis, scraps from the empirical table.
I would take the scraps, then. “What do you do?” I asked Ram, at my next opportunity. I liked the man without qualification. I felt infinitely comfortable with him. And I’d done everything in my power to avoid getting to know him.
“Do? God forbid I do anything!” He held his palms out in front of him. They were the color of aging sugarcane. The kind I ate as a child, when my father, the adventurer, had abandoned Chicago for Thailand.
“What is your field of work?”
“What do you mean by work, heaven help?”
“Aw, come on. What do you mean by heaven?”
Ram’s eyes sparkled, taunting targets for a spitting cobra. He would have preferred talking philosophy over neurology, two out of three days. “Do you know what the world rests on?” he asked.
“Not its laurels, God forbid.”
Ram laughed. “That’s right. Make fun of me. It rests on the backs of elephants. And those elephants?”
“The shell of a turtle.”
“Aha. You’ve heard this one. And that turtle?”
“Another turtle.”
“He’s good. He’s good, this fiction writer. Now, do you or do you not believe that one of those turtles must necessarily go all the way down? That’s it. That is the single question we are granted to ask while in this body. East, West, North, South. Is there a base terrapin or isn’t there? Cosmology. This is the issue dividing us. The one we must each answer.”
“Suppose I just asked you your field?”
“My friend. My fictional friend. The eye moves. We watch it as it does so. That is all.”
“Ram. You’re giving me a splitting headache.”
He nodded with enthusiasm. “Come with me.”
He took me into his labs. He placed several clear plastic overlays on a light table, a doctor dealing out the damning X rays.
“Look here and tell me what you see.”
“Scatter patterns. They look like mineral deposit maps. Like fish radars over the Grand Banks, thirty years ago.”
“I did not ask you what they looked like. I asked you what you see. Arrange these for me, please.”
I studied the spots. The more I looked, the less they seemed a random distribution. After my eyes adjusted, the patterns sorted themselves into three groups.
