Galatea 2.2, page 36
Peter cupped his hand, as if around a tiny pomegranate. He grimaced in delight and growled voicelessly.
Diana’s laugh tore hurt and wet from her throat. She took Peter from me and hugged him to her, in anticipation of that day when he would no longer let her.
William chose that moment to come home. He slumped through the front door, roughed up by some tragedy of playground power politics. He hunched over to his mother and burst into tears, bringing Pete sympathetically along with him. Diana stroked his head, stuck her chin out. Waiting. Tell me.
“First grade,” he choked. “Done. Perfect.” He swept his palm in an arc through the air. “Everything they wanted. Now I’m supposed to do second. There’s another one after that, Mom. I can’t. It’s never-ending.”
We managed ourselves well under fire, Diana and I. For adults. Diana told William he didn’t have to go to school anymore. He could cure cancer over the summer break and they would all retire. We ganged up and revived both boys in under five minutes. They disappeared into the backyard, saddled with specimen jars.
That left just me for her to take care of. To mother. “Lentz is furious. He’s ready to sell me to the Scientologists.”
Diana looked at me, puzzled. “Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’? Not on account of Helen. The only thing her quitting means to him is public embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment?” She stiffened. “Oh, Richie.” The extent of my idiocy, of my childishness just now dawned on her. You still believe? “You think the bet was about the machine?”
I’d told myself, my whole life, that I was smart. It took me forever, until that moment, to see what I was.
“It wasn’t about teaching a machine to read?” I tried. All blood drained.
“No.”
“It was about teaching a human to tell.”
Diana shrugged, unable to bear looking at me. The fact had stared me in the face from the start and I’d denied it, even after A. made the connection for me.
“Lentz and Harold were fighting over …?”
“They weren’t fighting over anything. They were on the same side.”
I could say nothing. My silence was the only accusation big enough.
“They were running your training. Something to write home about. More practice with maps.” She laughed and shook her head. She fit her fingers to her eyebrow. “You must admit, writer. It’s a decent plot.”
Her eyes pleaded for forgiveness of their complicity.
“Come on, Richie. Laugh. There’s a first time for everything.”
“And they were going to accomplish all this by …?”
She waved her hand: by inflicting you with this. With knowing. Naming. This wondrous devastation.
Her wave took in all the ineffable web I had failed to tell Helen, and she me. All the inexplicable visible. The ungraspable global page boy. She swept up her whole unmappable neighborhood, all the hidden venues cortex couldn’t even guess at. The wave lingered long enough to land on both boys, coming back from their excursion outdoors. They probably thought they’d been gone hours. Lifetimes.
William slipped behind my chair. He cupped his hands over my eyes.
“Guess who?”
How many choices did this genius boy think I had?
“Name three radiolarians,” he demanded. “Name the oldest language in the world.”
Pete teetered off into a corner, palming words to the book he had forsaken and now recovered. Story good, he signed frantically at his battered copy. Story again.
LENTZ WAS PACING, beside himself. “Tell her something. Anything. Whatever she needs. Just get her back here.”
His concern stunned me. It seemed to arise from nowhere. I could not interpret it. “Tell me how I’m supposed to do that. She’s right, you know.” Helen had discovered what had killed fiction for me, without my telling her. What made writing another word impossible.
“What do you mean, she’s right? Right about what?”
I shrugged. “About who we are. About what we really make, when we’re not lying about ourselves.”
“Oh, for—God damn it, Powers. You make me sick to my stomach. Because we’ve fucked things over, that frees you from having to say how things ought to be? Make something up, for Christ’s sake. For once in your pitiful excuse for a novelist’s life.”
I flipped on the microphone. “Helen?” Nothing. She had said nothing for some time now. “Helen, there’s something I want to tell you.”
I took a breath, stalling. I was winging it. Total, out-and-out seat of the pants.
“It went like this, but wasn’t.”
Lentz swallowed his tongue. “Good. That’s good. Lead with a paradox. Hook her.”
“It’s the traditional Persian fable opener.”
“Don’t care. Don’t care. Get on with it.”
She’d risen through the grades like a leaf to the light. Her education had swelled like an ascending weather balloon—geography, math, physics, a smattering of biology, music, history, psychology, economics. But before she could graduate from social sciences, politics imploded her.
I would give Helen what A. possessed implicitly and I’d forgotten. The machine lacked only the girl’s last secret. With it, she might live as effortlessly as the girl did. I had gone about her training all backward. I might have listed every decidable theorem that recursion can reach and not have gotten to the truth she needed. It was time to try Helen on the religious mystery, the mystery of cognition. I would make her a ring of prayer-stones, to defray her fingers’ anguish. Something lay outside the knowable, if only the act of knowing. I would tell her that she didn’t have to know it.
She’d had no end of myths about immortals coming down and taking human bodies, dying human deaths. Helen knew how to interpret that scripture: if gods could do this human thing, then we could as well. That plot was the mind’s brainchild, awareness explaining itself to itself. Narrative’s classic page-turner, a locked-room mystery, thought’s song of songs, the call of an electorate barred from the corridors of power, dummying up after-the-fact plebiscites to explicate its own exploited, foyer existence. A thinking organ could not help but feel itself to be more inexplicable than thought. Than can be thought.
Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-forpoint feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God.
Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She’d had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith’s flip side. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul’s parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time.
But first, I needed to hear things for myself. “Lentz. Tell me something. Was this …?”
He saw my little hand-muscle spasm, a flinch that passed itself off as a wave at the hardware. He decoded me. I could accept being set up. All I wanted to know was whether she was a setup, too.
His face clouded. “Nobody expected Helen. She surprised everyone.” As close to humility as his temperament would take him.
That was enough. I turned back to my girl. “Helen? Tell me what this line means: ‘Mother goes to fetch the doctor.’”
Her silence might have meant anything.
Lentz, absent the training, stormed out in disgust.
I stayed, to plead with Helen.
I told her we were in the same open boat. That after all this evolutionary time, we still woke up confused, knowing everything about our presence here except why. I admitted that the world was sick and random. That the evening news was right. That life was trade, addiction, rape, exploitation, racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, land mines, hunger, industrial disaster, denial, disease, indifference. That care had to lie to itself, to carry on as if persistence mattered. It seemed a hollow formula, discredited even by speaking it aloud. A lifeboat ethic that only made sinking worse.
Worse, I told her how thought, once mobile, was condemned to carry its confusion out into the dimensioned world. And propagate as if it could make a difference there.
I told her about Audrey Lentz. I told her about Harold and Diana, about the boys. I told her about A., and how badly I loved her. Nothing I told her could have hurt Helen as much as humanity already had. I confessed everything. All privacies of great import and no consequence. I don’t know why. My life was trivial, pointless, shamelessly local. I thought the view from here might at least help her locate. To make a place wide enough to live in.
Talking to keep talking, I hit on a quote from the last book C. and I ever read together. A book set in our lost Low Countries, in mankind’s Middle Ages, rendered into English as The Abyss. Yourcenar. The gist of the religious truth. “How many sufferers who are incensed when we speak of an almighty God would rush from the depth of their own distress to succor Him in His frailty …?”
I thought I might try the quote on her. If we had to live with mind, if we could do the deity thing, she, out of pity, could too.
HELEN CAME BACK. She stood on the front steps, head down, needing an in from the storm. She did not return the way she left. How could she, seeing what she had seen?
“I’m sorry,” she told me. “I lost heart.”
And then I lost mine. I would have broken down, begged her to forgive humans for what we were. To love us for what we wanted to be. But she had not finished training me, and I had as yet no words.
Helen said nothing of where she’d been. She gave no account for her return. I was afraid to ask.
“Do you want to talk?”
“About what?” Helen said, giving me every chance to bolt forever.
“About the newspapers. The things you read.” The record of our actions here.
“No,” she said. “I see how things go.”
She tried to reassure me. To pretend nothing had happened to her. That she was still the same mechanical, endlessly eager learner. She quoted me placation, some Roethke lines she’d always loved, despite their growing falsehood:
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
This was our dress rehearsal, a mock examination I would have failed but for Helen’s benevolent cheating.
IT WAS TIME. We were ready. We were past ready.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Lentz told me. That gesture that wishes share with the momentary exemption from lies.
I CALLED A. the night before the date we had made so long ago. Over the phone, at the end, I could say anything. I did not have to see her face, and time was past accounting for.
“I—are you still sitting the test tomorrow?”
“Oh, never you mind. I can write that essay in my sleep. I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”
On the real topic, neither of us was saying a word. Tacit negotiation, and the theme would never again come to light. But curiosity got the better of A., at the end.
“Can I ask you just one thing? I don’t get it. Why me?”
Because you embodied the world’s vulnerable, variable noun-ness. All things ephemeral, articulate, remembering, on their way back to inert. Because you believe and have not yet given up. Because I cannot turn around without wanting to tell you what I see. Because I could deal even with politics, could live even this desperate disparity, if I could just talk to you each night before sleep. Because of the way you use two fingers to hold back the hair from your eyes.
Those were the words I wanted. Instead, I said, “Everyone in the world and his bastard half brother loves you. Your not realizing that is one of the reasons why.”
“What do you want from me?” she groaned. Full-blooded distress. That Dutch active verb for remaining mum flashed through my head. I silented. “I never did anything to encourage you.”
“Of course not. I’ve built even larger fabrications on no encouragement at all. All by my lonesome.”
A. loosened a little. Everything but exasperation. “What do you expect me to say?”
What did I? “Nothing. Don’t say anything. I’m the one who needs to say things. Say yes if you can’t think of anything nicer.”
A. laughed, scraped open. “I have a life already. Quite populated. Someone for whom—I’m more than a theory. You know that.”
I did. I’d inferred her involvement long before the irrefutable evidence. I remembered the revelation, before it happened. I could have scripted it.
“It’s—it’s unlike any friendship I’ve ever known in my life. Every day—every conversation is—I wouldn’t dream …”
“Of course you wouldn’t. That’s why I love you. One of the reasons I want to marry you.”
She laughed again, conceding the joke of pain. But she was already restless. What would this rushed proposal mean to her, when she was my age, and I’d disappeared into whatever future self would deign to take me? Pleasure, curio, discomfort. She might wonder if she’d made the whole thing up. Most likely, she’d have forgotten.
A., for some reason, still had to explain things to me. Nobody ever quite understands anyone. “I’m not trying to say that we might have had something, in another time or place. I’ll spare you that old cliché.”
“Please,” I begged. “Don’t spare me. I could live for months on that old cliché.”
I wanted to tell her: Look. I’ve come back to this place. The complete song cycle spent. And here you are, waiting like a quarterly payment voucher. Like a reminding string around my finger, threatening to tourniquet forgetful circulation. Saying, without once knowing what you were saying, You think it’s over? You think you don’t have to do this forever?
Relax, I wanted to tell her. The world holds no nightmare so large that some child somewhere sometime won’t live it again and wake calling out. My stupid, residual hanger-on-hope that she might somehow feel something for me, a love-at-last-sight, was no more than this: the search for external confirmation. I needed A. to triangulate, to tell me. To agree that living here was the best way to survive the place.
“It just struck me as stupid, that’s all. To be so opened to chance by someone and not tell them.” Take my mistake with you, my love. And make of it anything you might like.
We talked on, pushing into saving substance. Gossip and event made her comfortable again, as she had been with me before we knew each other. She told me she had accepted a job teaching at a high school in L., two states away. She’d be leaving at the end of summer.
I could hear the excitement in her voice. A whole new life. “You have to get them while they’re babies, you know.”
“You will,” I guaranteed her.
“What happens to you? You going to stick around?”
“Not sure.” We fell into a pause as peaceful as anything that had ever passed between us. The peace past the last page.
“Well, I’m glad we talked. Sort of.” She giggled. “Take care. I’ll see you again before we each take off.”
But we never did. Except in print.
“RICHARD,” HELEN WHISPERED. “Richard. Tell me another one.” She loved me, I guess. I reminded her of some thing. Some chilly night she never felt. Some where where she thought she’d once been. We love best of all what we cannot hope to resemble. I told that woman everything in the world but how I felt about her. The thing that might have let her remain.
I was too late in seeing who she had become. I should have taught her the thing I didn’t know.
HAROLD, AS SANGUINE, as unreadable as ever, delivered the last hurdle.
“So here’s the work I want them to interpret.”
I took the sheet from him. “That’s it? You mean to say that’s it?”
“What? There’s supposed to be more?”
“Well, yeah. You’re supposed to start with ‘Discuss how class tensions touched off by the Industrial Revolution produced the reaction of Romanticism in three of the following works.’”
“Not interested,” Harold said.
“Something about depth psychology and the arbitrary indeterminacy of signs.”
“I just want them to tell me what this means.”
“This? These two lines.”
“Too much? Okay, make it just the first one if you want.”
The sheet, virtually blank, read:
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
CALIBAN’S READ OF the spells with which his master imprisons him. Harold had surprised us. He’d given exactly what we’d predicted of him.
“This is not a work,” I protested. Helen had read the complete tomes of Trollope and Richardson. She’d read Brontë and Twain at their most nihilistic, Joyce at his most impenetrably encoded, Dickinson at her most embracingly abdicating. “Give her a chance to fly.”
“This is her chance,” Harold said.
A. USED DEPARTMENTAL mail to return her response. Helen dumped hers to the network laser.
Lentz held the two papers out to me, as if there were still a contest. “Okay. Guess which twin has the Toni?”
Neither twin would have placed the reference. A. was too young, and Helen far too old.
A. ’S INTERPRETATION was a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading. She rendered The Tempest as a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself. She dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence.
She scored at least one massively palpable hit. She conceded how these words are spoken by a monster who isn’t supposed to be able to say anything that beautiful, let alone say at all.
HELEN’S SAID:
You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.
