Galatea 2.2, page 34
“Exactly,” Ram encouraged. “You might have missed one or two, but the correlation is strong. Who says that measurement is subjective?” He tapped my first pile. “Friends.” He looked at me to see if I was following. He tapped it again, then went on to pile two. “Abstract acquaintances. Yes?” He pointed to the third pile and said, “Total strangers.” He scrutinized my bewildered face and shrugged. “He does not understand me, this Powers fellow.”
I didn’t understand him. But I liked him. I liked him a great deal.
“Come. I’ll show you. Would you mind if I subject you to this Western postindustrial instrument of torture?”
He indicated a chair fitted with a head vise. It looked like a prop from bad seventies science fiction.
“Why not. It’s in the interests of science, right?”
Ram chuckled. He fitted my head into the restraint. My skull suitably immobilized, he projected three slides on a screen in front of me. Three portraits. Someone out of a Vladivostok high-school year-book. Marilyn Monroe. And Ram himself.
The laser-guided instrument tracked the center of my pupil as I scanned each photograph. It took several sequential readings and spread the data points over a plastic overlay map of the image field. In the end, the paths my eyes traced over the different faces conformed to the categories he’d previously defined. Total stranger. Abstract acquaintance. Friend.
“Here is something you will also find very interesting.” Ram pulled out another envelope with a small sample group.
“Why are these interesting? They’re just like all the others, more or less.”
“Aha!” He held up an index finger. “That’s what makes them interesting. All of the people in this group suffer from prosopagnosia. Brain damage has rendered them incapable of recognizing people anymore. They deny having seen any face, even their own, even the face of their spouse or child. Or at least they think they can no longer recognize faces. Yet clearly, the eyes …” His hand serpentined, tracing the route of the curve’s knowledge.
“Astonishing.”
“You know, I think the astonishing may be the ordinary by another name. But these results do lead us to many tempting guesses. That perception is carried out in several subsystems, we can say, most certainly. That these subsystems talk to each other: indeed. That perhaps they go on talking, these subsystems, even when the others stop listening. That breaks in communication might occur anywhere, at any point in the chain. That each part of a compound task may manifest its very own deficit. That everything you are capable of doing could be taken away from you, in discrete detail.”
I added to Ram’s list the obvious, the missing speculation. The look of the magic lantern. That what you loved could go foreign, without your ever knowing. That the eye could continue tracing familiarity, well into thought’s unknown region.
“WHAT DO I look like?”
I could find no face in the world. No color or structure. The days when I might have tried to pass her off as a Vermeer look-alike were over for good. Race, age, shape excluded too much. I needed some generic Head of a Girl that had no clan or continent and belonged nowhere in identifiable time.
“What do I look like, Richard? Please. Show me.”
I’d pictured her so many different ways over the course of the training. I thought: Perhaps some blank template Buddha, or a Cycladic figure. A trompe l’oeil landscape that became a figure on second glance. An Easter Island head. A Feininger or Pollock. A Sung bamboo. I didn’t know how I thought of her now. I didn’t know what she looked like.
She insisted. I turned up a suitable likeness.
“It’s a photo? It’s someone you knew once? A woman friend?”
She would have pretended ignorance for me. Would have let me off the hook again, except that she had to know.
THE LIST OF Excellent Undergraduate Teachers came out. Student evaluations of their evaluators. A. topped the graduate instructors in the English Department. I was thrilled, and confirmed by thrill in my intuition.
I forced the moment to its crisis. Helen and I had been hitting the books the Sunday evening after our world tour. The day’s work had left me in a Spenserian stupor, where what I needed was Larkin. On pure reflex—that satellite brain housed south of the shoulders—I flicked off the mike, picked up the phone, and dialed her. One smooth motion. I’d never dialed her number before. But I had it memorized.
“Hello you,” I said when she picked up. I sounded almost young. “It’s me.” And in the awkward microsecond, I clarified with my name.
“Oh, hi.” A., nervous in relief. “What’s up?”
“Checking to see if you’re booking for the test.”
“Ha! I’m going to whup your girl with half my synapses tied behind my back.”
“What are you doing next Wednesday?” Midway in, my voice gave out. I began to tremor as if I’d just robbed a bank or fallen into an ice crevasse. “It’s Shrimp Night at my favorite seafood place. The crustaceans are fair, but the conversation is good,” If she was into shortness of breath, I was home free.
“Uh, sure. Why not? Wait. Hang on.”
I heard her put the mouthpiece against her body. I heard her roll her eyes and shrug. I heard her ask the mate whose existence I’d been denying if they had any plans.
“It’s kind of a problem,” she explained on returning. “Maybe another time?”
“Another time would be great,” I replied, mechanical with calm.
“SHE’S AMAZING,” LENTZ said.
I had to think who he meant. “Now do you believe me? She’s conscious. I know it.”
“We don’t know anything of the kind, Marcel. But we could find out.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I told him. “Set your sandwich down between gulps. It’s a societal norm.” I tried to slow him. To keep him from saying what I knew he was going to say.
“I must admit, Marcel. I’m surprised by what you’ve been able to accomplish.”
“It’s not me.” It was her. The subsystems talking to subsystems. Lentz’s neural handiwork.
“She sure as hell seems to mimic with shocking accuracy some features of high-level cognition. It’s uncanny. And a heuristic tool such as comes along once in a lifetime.”
“Heuristic?”
“Stimulus to investigative discovery.”
“I know what the word means, Philip.” But I could not add what I meant: Is that all she means to you?
“Her architecture is such that severance could be effected with a great deal of local selectivity.”
“I don’t believe you said that. You want to cut into her? You want to lobotomize?”
“Easy, Marcel. We’re talking about a painless operation, as far as I imagine. We could get what is unattainable in any other arena. Isolate the high-level processes by which she maps complex input and reassembles responses. Analyze them. Correlate various regional destruction with changes in—”
“You don’t know it would be painless, Lentz.”
He fell back against the cafeteria chair and studied me. Was I serious? Had I lost it, gone off cognition’s deep end? I saw him find, in my face, the even more indicting idea that I didn’t voice: that hurting Helen in any way would be wrong.
Lentz, in an instant, anticipated everything either of us might say to each other on the morality of machine vivisection. The whole topic was a wash, as insoluble as intelligence itself. He waved his hand, dismissing me as a madman. No part of her lived. To take her apart might, finally, extend some indirect service to the living. Anything else was softheaded nostalgia.
I had no leg to stand on. Lentz owned Helen, her shaped evolution, the lay of her synapses. He owned all the reasoning about her as well. I had some connection to her, by virtue of our long association. But that connection was, at most, emotional. And if Helen lived far enough to be able to feel, it just went to prove that emotions were no more than the sum of their weight vectors. And cuttable, in the name of knowing.
My strongest argument belonged more to him than it did to me. We know the world by awling it into our shape-changing cells. Knowing those cells required just as merciless tooling. To counter any part of Lentz’s plan would be to contradict myself. To lose. I had just one bargain to make. And I damned myself with it willingly.
“At least give us until after the test.”
“That’s fine. I’m pretty much backlogged until then anyway.”
I hadn’t suspected how easily I could sell my weighted soul.
“Diana was right,” I spit, venomous. “You are a monster.”
He stared at me again. You’re going to fault me for the deal you proposed? He stood up to leave, grasping his tray. “Oh, don’t go getting your ass all out of joint, Marcel. I said we won’t cut anything until after you run your little competition.“
I TRACKED DIANA down to her dry lab. She sat in front of a monitor, watching a subtractive visualization of the activity of cerebral columns. A color contour recording: the flashing maps of thought in real time.
“Lentz wants to brain-damage Helen. Selectively kill off neurodes. See what makes her tick.”
“Of course he does,” Diana said. She neither missed a beat nor took her eyes from her screen. “It wasn’t that long ago that he stopped frying ants with the magnifying glass.”
“Diana. Please. This is really happening.”
She stopped, then. She looked up. She would have taken my hand, had she not been a single parent in a secret affair, and I a single, middle-aged man.
“I can’t help you, Ricky.” Her eyes glistened, slick with her impotence. “I fractionate monkey hippocampi.”
Confusion warmed me like an opiate. I rolled with it, to the point of panic. “Monkeys can’t talk.”
“No. But if they could, you know what they would ask the lab tech.”
She implored me, with a look of bewilderment. Don’t press this. Helen hurt her. I destroyed her. But nothing approached the pain of her own living compromise.
I GAVE HELEN a stack of independent readings. I did not trust my voice in conversation with her. And she needed no more lessons in cheerful deceit.
In all our dealings, Harold Plover had never been the spokesman for anything but decency. I decided to go enlist his humanity. I’d never seen him away from the Center. But I had his address, and showed up at his place late that Saturday afternoon, unannounced.
Harold met me jovially at the door. He was seconded by an even more jovial Doberman. The dog was at least half again bigger than A.
The dog leaped up and knocked me over, while Harold fought to restrain it. I righted myself and the game started all over again.
“Ivan,” Harold shouted at the creature, further exciting it. “Ivan! Knock it off. Time out. Haven’t we talked about socially unacceptable behavior?”
“Try ‘Down, boy.’ Quick.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of this pooch. He won the ‘Most Likely to Lick a Serial Killer’s Face’ award from doggie obedience school.”
“Doesn’t this brand have one of the highest recidivism rates?”
“Breed, Maestro. Dog breeds. Dog food brands. Words are his life,” he explained to Ivan.
At last Harold succeeded in hauling the disconsolate dog off me. Without asking why I’d dropped by, he hauled me into the inner sanctum. The place crawled with daughters. Daughters had been left about carelessly, everywhere. Harold introduced me to his wife, Tess. I expected something small, fast, and acid. I got an isle of amiable adulthood amid the teenage torrent.
One who must have been Mina flirted out a greeting. “Look who’s here. If it isn’t Orph himself.”
“Orff?”
“Yeah. Orphic Rewards.”
“She’s gone anagram-mad,” Harold whined. “It’s driving us all up the bloody wall.”
Another daughter came downstairs, modeling her prom dress. This might have been Trish. I wasn’t betting.
Harold exploded. “Absolutely not. You’re not wearing that thing in public! You look like a French whore in heat.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Listen to the expert in French whores.” Tess tousled Harold’s hair. “I figured you had to be spending yourself somewhere.”
“Do you believe this woman? You’d never guess to hear her, would you, that she spent six years in a convent?”
“We’ll talk about it,” Tess consoled the devastated kid.
“We won’t talk about it,” Harold shouted.
“Talking never hurts,” Tess said.
The Doberman came and pinned me to the sofa. A preadolescent in blue jeans, probably the caboose, said, “Watch this.” She produced a dog biscuit. “Ivan. Ivan! Listen to me. Can you—can you sneeze?”
Ivan rolled over.
“I didn’t say roll over. I said sneeze.”
Ivan barked.
“Not speak. Sneeze. Sneeze, you animal!”
Ivan sat up and begged, played dead, and offered to shake hands. In the end, Harold’s youngest threw the dog the sop in disgust.
Harold reveled in the show. “He’s learned that you just have to be persistent with humans. They get the idea eventually, if you keep at them.”
Before I knew it, dinner enveloped us. No one sat at the table. Only about half of us bothered with plates and silverware. But definitely dinner. The tributary of bodies in and out, being fed.
“That’s not fifteen minutes,” Tess said to the one in the revealing prom dress. “Remember? Fifteen minutes with your family, every day. You promised.”
“My family. So that’s what you call this.”
But if one or another of her sisters had struck up a tune, this one would have joined in on some loving and cacophonous counterpoint. This was the land A. came from, huge, jumbled, and warm. I wanted to excuse myself, to run off to A.’s apartment on G. Street and tell her that it wasn’t too late to make a dissonant choir of her own. I wanted her so badly, I almost forgot why I’d come to this place.
Harold, happily harassing his girls, recalled me. “Lentz wants to do exploratory surgery on Helen,” I said.
“Have another piece of broc,” he urged me. “Lots of essential minerals.”
The word “mineral” struck me as incomprehensible. Foreign. Where had it come from? How could I have used it so cavalierly before now? “He wants to clip out whole subsystems. See what effect that has on her language skills.”
Harold wolfed at the pita pocket he’d constructed. “What’s the problem? That’s good science. Well. Approximately reasonable science, let’s say.”
Mina, drifting past the buffet, called out, “Oh no! Not Helen.”
Trish, in her prom dress, for it was Trish, added her hurt. “Daddy! You can’t do this.”
“Do what? I’m not doing anything.”
Both sisters looked out through puffed portals, bruising silently, over nothing. An idea.
“Diana disagrees,” I stretched. “About its being good science. I think she’d help me, except she feels incriminated herself.”
A skip in the flow, too brief to measure, said I’d overstepped. Broken the unspoken. I should have known. Nobody had to tell me. I just slipped.
“Honey,” her mother told Trish, “take off the dress before you slop all over it.”
“Oh, Mother!” the girl objected, already halfway up the stairs.
Conversation, in its chaos, never flowed back to the issue. Not until Harold and I stood alone on the front porch in the painfully benign evening did I get a second shot.
“Sorry about that.” Harold gestured inside. “Bit of a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“So I have my answer? You’re not going to help?”
“Me? I’m the enemy. What good would I be to you anyway? This is between you and him.”
“And Helen.”
Harold indulged me. “Yes. There is that. But he’s the one calling the shots.”
He breathed in a lungful of air and held it. Behind him, from the house, spilled the sounds of frenetic fullness. Daughters practicing at life.
“Take the fight to him,” Harold confided in me. “Bring it home.”
THAT WAS WHERE I took it, in desperation, the next afternoon. I leaned against my bike in the rain, outside the care facility, the last place in the world I would have chosen to meet him. I lay in wait for him, the last person in the world I would have chosen to waylay. Lentz arrived like clockwork. When he saw my ambush, he affected blasé.
“Back for more? What, are you digging up plot material?” He gestured toward the institution where his wife was interred. “It’s a terrific setting, qua literature. But I doubt it would do much for sales.”
He walked into the building, his back to me. He did not care if I tagged along or not. We rode the elevator up in silence. I had no existence for him.
We went to Audrey’s room. Dressed, in a chair, she seemed to be waiting.
“Philip! Thank God you’ve come.”
I walked into those words as into bedrock. Lentz stopped to steady me. “She has good days and bad days. I’m not sure which are which, anymore.”
We sat. Philip introduced us again. Audrey was too agitated to do more than fake politeness. But she retained my name. That day, she might have retained anything.
In her cruel burst of lucidity, I saw it. Audrey had been formidable. At least as sharp as Lentz. If this demonstration meant anything, even sharper.
“Philip. It’s the strangest thing. You’re never going to believe this. What is this place?”
“It’s a nursing home, Audrey.”
“That’s what I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. What I can’t figure out is why the staff is down in the basement mounting a production of Cymbeline.”
“Audrey.”
“Would I make something like this up, Philip? What could I gain?”
“Audrey. It’s highly unlikely.”
“You think I don’t know that? It’s some kind of modern-dress production. I can hear them rehearsing their lines.”
Constance, the nurse, walked by. Lentz called her.
“Constance, does the name Cymbeline mean anything to you?”
