Galatea 2.2, page 5
Even more depressing, I wasn’t the only old guy in the place. At a table in the back, the smokers’ section, a group of Center fellows took a rare break from experimentation to engage in what seemed, from my distance, heavy theoretical talk.
In their midst, looking even more sickly and implausible out of his idiom, my man Lentz gesticulated. His hands built and dismantled various violent tetrahedra in the air. He made some point that the half-dozen others at the table refuted with exasperation bordering on disgust. Science looked a lot like literary criticism, from across the room.
Lentz glanced my way, looking through me. We shared an awkwardness, each pretending not to have noticed the other. Each pretending the other hadn’t spotted us pretending. I felt relieved that he didn’t wave, but slighted.
After a while, the group’s lone woman detached from the debate. She walked toward me. She was tall, amiable, dismayed, her freckles like constellations in a home planetarium. I had seen her in the corridors. I couldn’t begin to guess how old she was. I’d lost all ability to gauge age.
In the time it took her to cross the room, I sketched a story about a professional guesser who learned to tell, within impossible limits of tolerance, the age, weight, height, and accumulated sorrow of anyone he met.
“I’ve come to recruit you,” she announced, drawing up. “The good guys need help.”
She dressed impeccably, forgoing the scientist’s customary indifference to grooming. She wore tweed, with her ample hair rolled in one of those forties ingénue prows. The effect was uncannily archaic, as if she were about to announce that severing the corpus callosum cured epilepsy.
“Who are the good guys?”
She laughed. “Good question. I’m Diana Hartrick. I do associative representation formation in the hippocampus.”
“Is that near here?”
I grinned as widely as possible, trying to pass off the idiocy as voluntary. I stuck out my hand, stupidly. In Limburg, one shakes hands early and often, with anything that holds still long enough.
“Little Marcel,” I said. “Not doing much of anything, at present.”
She took my hand, but her face clouded. She sucked in her mouth, a teacher unwilling to credit a bad report about a good pupil. “Now, why would you lie to me before you’ve even met me?”
At first I thought she meant the bit about my not working. Then the penny dropped. Dr. Hartrick, I figured, was a kind soul, but as literal as a lawyer giving the keynote at a libel convention.
“I’m sorry. That’s Lentz’s pet nickname for me.” I gestured with my chin back toward her table.
“Oh. Him. He’s why I came to get you. The man is on another rampage.”
She leaned against the bar, resting a tote bag on her hip. From the side pocket, amid a sheaf of papers, issued an ancient softbound Viking Portable. Its spine was scored to pulp. I read the blurb at the top, despite the cover’s being badly scuffed. “Not less than three times in his or her life should everyone read Don Quixote … in youth, middle age, and old age.”
“May I?” I indicated the book.
She passed the book to me with a bemused patience long used to eccentric requests.
I flipped the book over. I opened to the copyright page. Nine-hundred-page books cost $1.85 when I was twelve. It didn’t seem possible. I turned to the First Sally. In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall …
These few words spread like truth serum through me. I was fifteen again, and working up the courage to tell the Egyptian empress who sat in front of me in sophomore humanities that the hair on the back of her neck stopped my breath to look at.
I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.
Those sixteen words from Chapter One bogged me down in old amber. Before the end of the clause, I felt mired as a Cambrian bug in molasses memory. The First Sally, a second time: it sicked a pack of ghosts on me as brutal as the ones hounding the overread Don.
I shut the volume before the rest could get out. “Thanks. That’s all I needed to check.”
Hartrick took the book and slipped it back into her bag without comment. “Are you going to suit up and help us do battle?”
Her words came out softly, without any of that self-effacing edge of junior faculty under the gun. In one phrase, she grew older, drier. I’d misjudged her earnestness. I was the lawyer, the literal fool who’d missed the joke.
I imagined that her line of work lent her this presence. When you see up close the countless subsystems it takes to place an image into the permanent buffer, when you measure the loop that image makes on its way to being retained, you temper yourself against the definitive. You go humble, understated, wry.
I pictured what it felt like to see the organ at work, its cartoon flickers pasted up on a PET scan. You flash a world in front of your subject’s eyes and watch the watercolor washes splash around the temporal lobe, fixing that world in a holdable shorthand. This woman traced the process in real time, the mental palette exploding in desperate semaphores, trying to convince itself that the fleet whose capture it signals hasn’t slipped off in night fog.
Every postmodern postsolipsist, I thought, should do a postfrontal neurology stint. The most agile of them would, like this careful woman, take to weighing the violence in their every predicate. Once they saw the bewilderingly complex fiber in its impossible live weave, theorists would forever opt for the humblest, least-obtrusive sentence allowed them.
“I’m afraid my doublet’s in the wash.”
She smiled, generosity itself. “Come on,” she insisted. “We need somebody who can out-talk him.”
I followed her back to the Center’s table. Lentz was well into introducing me by the time we two drew up.
“Here’s our Nonresident-in-Residence. Marcel, meet Gupta, Chen, Keluga, and Plover. You appear to be chummy with Hartrick already. Everyone knows Marcel, the Dutchman. By reputation, anyway. Does anyone actually read those things of yours?”
I smiled. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
“Your mother’s read them?”
“She says she has.”
“Marcel writes Books,” Lentz glossed, for nobody. “Watch what you say. We’re all going to end up immortalized.”
The pitcher of watery pilsner on the table had done nothing for his aggression. Tonight, though, his fight was with his colleagues. I was just a convenient sparring dummy, tangent to the main event.
I sat down. The table crackled. Talk had died away to wary philosophical sparks, now that the hard data had been expended all around. My presence threw a damper on the charged colloquium. Everyone reverted to good behavior.
Of the group, I’d met only Ram Gupta, a perception researcher of international reputation. His recent passage through Immigration could not have been choppier. The airport officer assumed this brown-skin meant to go feral the minute anyone let him in the country. The epic humiliation seemed not to have perturbed Dr. Gupta in the least.
“You are making interesting points and you too are making interesting points,” Ram sang, nodding by turns at Lentz and Harold Plover. “Could we not just leave it at that? Come, gentlemen. If we all stood up and got hit by a car as we walked out this door tonight, God forbid, would any of us want this conversation to be the …?”
“I thought you people believed in eternal repetition,” Lentz baited him.
Plover, a big, cotton-frayed Kodiak of a man, threw up his hands. “Terrific. Just what I need. I’ve already suffered an eternity of this nonsense in the last half hour alone.”
“Harold, if you’d just come up with some fresh objections …”
“We can’t level any fresh objections, ‘cause we got no data.” Keluga, a scrubbed blond boy of about twelve, searched the circle of faces for approval. Eager grad student’s night out with the grown-ups.
“Data?” Lentz minced. “Oh, by all means. Hartrick will be happy to shave up several hundred simian forebrains for us to run some trials. That ought to resolve the question, once and for all.”
“You cut up monkeys?” I whispered to Diana. “Rhesus pieces?” I sided with Ram. Even absurdity beat public ugliness.
Lentz snorted. “Marcel, we’re going to give you a seven out of a thousand for that. One more such outburst and you have to go back and sit with the poets.”
“Oh, leave him be,” Plover mumbled into his cups. “It was funny.”
“Don’t blame me,” I said. “I got it from a friend at Cal Tech.”
Hartrick poured herself two fingers of foam in the bottom of a fluted glass. “You’re straying into metaphysics, Philip. All the data in the world couldn’t prove or disprove those kinds of claims.”
“What on earth are you drinking?” Plover asked me. I’d brought along my kriek, unwilling to part with even the dregs of a liquid that came to about half a dollar a swallow.
“It’s a Dark Lite,” I said.
“It smells like vinegar cough syrup.”
“Marcel’s just indulging a little self-pitying nostalgia. The cakes-and-tea thing. Watch out he doesn’t get sick. If he throws up, we’re going to have a million and a half words all over the table.”
“Would you listen to this creep?” Plover railed. “Why do we let him do this to us?” He shook his head at me. “Don’t mind him. He gets like that, even without the two beers.”
I assured Plover with a glance that Lentz and I were acquainted.
Lentz, a general fighting on many fronts, engaged the nearest comer. “You’re the one playing the metaphysician, Dr. Di.”
“‘Dr. Di’! Of all the insulting, sexist—” Plover threw his hands up again. He forgot to release his glass before doing so, and a fair amount of beer ended up on the wall behind him.
Lentz talked through the commotion of cleanup. “You are the ones evoking mystic mumbo jumbo. Is the problem computable in finite time? That’s all I want to know. Is the brain an organ or isn’t it? Don’t throw this ‘irreducible emergent profusion’ malarkey at me. Next thing you know, you’re going to be postulating the existence of a soul.”
Hartrick rolled her eyes. “Not in your case, Philip.” Her eyes came to rest on me. “See what I mean? Care to bail us out?”
“Remember Winner and Gardner?” Ram asked, still hoping to distract everyone from their sought-for conflict. “The piece on comprehension of metaphor, in Brain? Asked to choose the correct picture for ‘give someone a hand,’ many right-hemisphere-damaged patients picked the one showing a palm on a platter.”
Keluga blanched. “Ram, please. I’m still hitting the salsa.”
“Somebody tell me what you people are talking about.” I felt slightly lesioned myself.
“Oh yes.” Lentz did a slow take in my direction. He slapped his thigh. “Of course. Little Marcel. You have an affiliation with—what’s it called these days? The English Department?”
“They’re sponsoring my residency here, yes.”
“Tell us. What passes for knowledge in your so-called discipline? What does a student of English have to do to demonstrate acceptable reading comprehension?”
I shrugged. “Not a whole hell of a lot. Take some classes. Write some papers.”
“That’s all you had to do?”
“Oh. Well. Me. When I was a lad—”
“Shh, shh, everyone. The reclusive writer about whom nothing is known is about to tell us his personal history.”
“Look. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“My. Pardon me. I had no idea we were so touchy.”
“Lentz, your apologies are worse than your attacks.”
“Amen,” Diana cheered. “Don’t let him bully you, Richard.”
Lentz smiled. He folded his fingers in front of his mouth. He looked for a moment like Jacob Bronowski’s evil twin. “Do go on.”
I debated, then did. “When I was twenty-two, I took something called the Master’s Comprehensive Exam. They gave us a list of titles. Up at the top of page 1 was ‘Caedmon’s Hymn.’ Six pages later, it wound up with Richard Wright.”
“Where did you go to school?” Harold Plover asked.
I gestured out the window, the Quad beyond. My face flushed with shame. I’d failed to swim clear of the wreck.
“This list,” Lentz persisted. “What happened then?”
“Then we sat for two days and answered questions. One each in six historical sections.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Oh, anything. We’d do two hours of IDs. You know. ‘Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow …’ Name the author, work, location, and significance.”
“Okay, so maybe I won’t change fields.” Keluga’s crack fell flat.
Plover waved his bear paws again. “Wait a minute. I know this one. The end of Paradise Lost?”
“Harold,” Lentz minced. “You’ve missed your calling.”
“Then we did a few essays. ‘Discuss the idea of the Frontier and its tragic consequences in four of the following six writers.’”
“What questions did you answer?” Lentz quizzed.
I shrugged. Out the side of my mouth, I made a little grad-student raspberry.
“Hold on. This was only a dozen years ago. And you remember …?”
I ringed my thumb and forefinger, held the O up for public view. Lentz looked around the table in triumph.
“I suppose it would come back to me if I tried.”
“Heavens, Marcel. Don’t do that.”
“Can I ask you something?” Keluga interjected. “I read somewhere that you studied physics …”
“As an undergrad. You read that? You people are supposed to be reading technical journals. Where the hell is the Two Cultures split when you need it?”
“What happened?”
“To what?”
“To physics.”
“It’s a long story.”
Lentz cackled. “Don’t press the man, Keluga. He’s told every paper in the country that he doesn’t like to talk about himself. About this list, Powers. You think you can find a copy somewhere?”
“Oh, the departmental files have scores of them.”
Lentz looked about the table, his neck flared in challenge. “Anyone object to using this list as a test domain?”
Plover looked pissed. Hartrick hung her head. Ram began fidgeting in distress. Chen, who’d said nothing since I sat down, smiled uncertainly, at sea. Keluga was relishing the squabble, the way a kid might delight in seeing his parents drunk.
“Test of what?” I asked, as politely as possible.
“We’re going to teach a machine how to read your list.”
The words floored me. “You can do that?”
Plover scowled at Hartrick. “I thought you said you were going to bring back reinforcements.”
Hartrick showed her palms, helpless. The token humanist had let them down.
Lentz inspected his nails. “As you see, what we can and cannot do is a matter of some difference of opinion.”
Chen came to life. “It’s to exaggerate,” he said. Or perhaps, “That’s too exaggerated.” His English was impressionistic at best. “We do not have text analysis yet. We are working, but we do not have. Simple sentence group, yes. Metaphor, complex syntax: far from. Decades!”
He attached his attention to the technical edge of Lentz’s bombshell. But I doubted Chen followed the charged subtext that the others were pitched in. I’d just started to pick up on what was at stake myself. And I’d passed the reading exam years ago.
“Chen, Chen. One of the quickest intellects in formal symbol-system heuristics.” Lentz blessed him, fingers bent. “And still a step behind.”
“Philip,” Diana warned. She would pounce, if pushed. Tenure or no tenure. “Hyun? How long have you been in the country?”
“Four years.” He paused to consider the implication. “About a piece in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience I tell you anything. No problem. What you want to know? But the first page of a big-print, supermarket, paperbacked love story? Forget it!”
We all laughed, each for our own reasons. After four years in the Netherlands, I would have been reduced to tears of frustration by such a conversation.
Ram was first to turn laughter into speech. “I am constantly getting complimented on my English by people who don’t realize it is my first language.”
“Would you sit this Master’s Comp thing?” Plover asked him.
“Don’t be kidding me. I mean, who is this Milton fellow to me, anyway?”
A moment of deflation all around suggested that Lentz’s fantasy had been vanquished. He’d been caught in an undergraduate indulgence and forced to own up.
Plover sighed. “Well, Philip, I’m afraid it’s back to real science with you.” He raised his glass in a closing toast, and sipped.
“On the contrary. We’re going to build a device that will be able to comment on any text on Marcel’s six-page list.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Plover spit. “I’ve had it. The man’s just provoking us.”
Diana laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “And doing a fair job.”
“We shouldn’t even humor him.”
“Youngsters.” Lentz’s wave included Keluga and me. Generous with the term. “Children, I give you radical skepticism at its finest.”
“All right, then. Okay.” Plover’s tone rose. He pushed up his sleeves and loosened his collar. “Put your money where your mouth is.”
Chen coughed a sharp monosyllable. It might have been a laugh. “Interesting phrase. Could your machine—?”
“Harold. We will do this thing, and do it with existing hardware, in no longer than—Marcel, how long are we to be graced with your fair presence?”
I looked at my watch. “What time is it now?” Nobody laughed. It must have been my timing.
I said that I had about ten months before I’d need to fabricate a real life. Lentz looked concerned. “It will be a rush job, but never mind. In ten months we’ll have a neural net that can interpret any passage on the Master’s list. Harold’s choice. And its commentary will be at least as smooth as that of a twenty-two-year-old human.”
