Galatea 2.2, page 7
Counting the gaps was also counting the words. Machines performed the task effortlessly, born to it. Could they count ideas as well? Could they be made to sort thoughts, assemble them into a supple, southbound express?
I read the homework Lentz assigned me. An article on hippocampal association that Diana Hartrick co-authored grabbed my imagination. Every sentence, every word I’d ever stored had changed the physical structure of my brain. Even reading this article deformed the cell map of the mind the piece described, the map that took the piece in.
At bottom, at synapse level, I was far more fluid than I’d ever suspected. As fluid as the sum of things that had happened to me, all things retained or apparently lost. Every input to my associative sieve changed the way I sieved the next input.
To mimic the life we were after, Lentz and I would have to build a machine that changed with every datum about life that we fed it. Could a device—a mere vehicle—survive the changes we’d have to inflict upon it?
It struck me. To train our circus animal in Faulkner or Thomas Gray, we would first have to exhilarate it with the terror of words. The circuits we laid down would have to include the image of the circuit itself before memory overhauled it. The net would have to remember what it would be again, one day, when forgetting set in for good.
Before I’d even scratched the homework pile, I was a changed person. The writer who had signed on to the reckless bet was dead. Lentz, Hartrick, Plover, Gupta, Chen—each clinging to the local trap of temperament—C., Taylor, all my lost family and friends, all the books on the List, all the works I would now never write stood waving goodbye from beneath my departing compartment window.
It seemed forever since I had set out on an open ticket. Forever since I had traced, in mental route, the trip that would not be mine to retrace much longer.
AFTER A WHILE, the calendar becomes a minefield. I had to skirt so many anniversaries that autumn that I found it hard to take a step without detonating one. Taylor’s seminar met in an attic room of the English Building, that fall when, at eighteen, I found my first map of the world. I taught my first course, the one C. took, three falls later. Fall at twenty-two, I passed my Master’s Comps, and moved as far away from U. as I could get.
I could not see how I’d gotten from one fall to another, or from any of those falls to this one. Age lurches in fits and starts, like a failing refrigerator compressor. Like a gawky, grand maladroit adolescent on ancient roller skates, navigating a stretch of worn sidewalk in a subduction zone. It holes up awhile, stock-still, then slams out one afternoon to play catch-up ball.
Time is not a wave. It is discrete, particulate. I came to class one day, that class where I pretended I was Taylor, unlocking the self’s intricacies to a horrified and enthralled audience. I arrived that morning at eight to announce that I wasn’t up to teaching that day, or the session after. I gave an assignment for the following week and watched my fold file out, subdued.
All but C. She stayed on, by tacit pact knowing it was time to come forward. We stood alone in the emptied room. She asked, “Want to sit somewhere for a minute?”
I did. We wandered out of the English Building onto the Quad. What quads were for: for generations of student sadness to lie down on, in the crisp blue of the first week of year’s end. Everything we saw as we staked our spot said, last November ever. The first of an almost endless list of lasts.
C. sat Indian style. I lay on my side, head propped on an elbowed arm. On all sides of us ran the ring of collegiate buildings—Chemistry, Math, English. Each had been the setting for a thousand and one urgencies and embarrassments. I would be glad to be gone.
But gone where? The rub. I hadn’t a clue, and felt good about even that. Very few job openings for the thing I wanted to do. I’d be lucky to be busing tables for a portion of the tips, this time next fall.
My father had foreseen that, of course. The man had known everything, except how to go on living. He never said word one when his son told him he planned to transfer out of physics, trash the stellar career. He didn’t need to say anything. I could read the verdict in his face: Do what you need to. But what a colossal waste of talent and investment.
“Poetry, Rick? What does that mean, exactly?” It means you haven’t the faintest idea what you want to do. Burned out on problem sets. Isn’t that right?
I never got the chance to defend myself. The man took off to Alaska to his sister’s. Dad timed his disappearance so no one had to watch him go. And as a result, I’ve had to watch the immortally wasted body pace through a decade and a half of accusing dreams.
A packet would reach me three days after the news. A small bundle of chapbooks—the poems of Robert Service. The Spell of the Yukon. Rhymes of a Rolling Stone. Dad’s favorite poet, and more beloved because the academics—his son—no longer even bothered to despise the rhymer. “The Cremation of Sam McGee”: Dad’s gloss on his own choice of exit. A slap in the face. A last, belated blessing. A request that if you are going to waste your life studying poetry, at least waste it on the good stuff.
I lay on the Quad, thinking over this goodbye gift, this student of mine sitting across from me. I shifted to my back. I saw myself staring up into the most unlikely azure. How many ghosts did life involve pleasing?
“Are you all right?” C. intervened.
My “Of course” didn’t even convince itself.
“You were … I thought …”
“I’m fine,” I explained.
“Tell me,” she said. Anonymity is best. Who do you ever know, after all? Tell me, while I’m still a blank slate. Before you make me over in the habit of knowledge.
“My father just died.”
I winced then, and annually in remembering. So bleeding what? Fathers and the deaths of fathers. How many children half my age lost parents to any of the world’s ingenious violences in the time it took me to speak those words? I had no right. No one did. My own sorrow sickened me.
I spoke without looking at her, at least. It helped later on, to say that her cow-eyed, trusting complicity played no role in my impulse confession. I came to her sight unseen. I had no idea yet how heart-stoppingly plain she could look. I fell in love with a voice, with two words.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. As if McGee had been cremated through her own carelessness. And yet her each pitch denied its own need to exist as anything at all but compassionate sound. The lone condolence ever allotted. Only the saying mattered. The words meant little, if anything.
“I’m sorry,” she said, serene where she should have been scared off. “Would you like to be by yourself?”
I looked up at her. What do we need to piece her back? Do we need five foot four? Do we need brownish-black, pageboy hair? Aggressively shy, nervously innocent? Could we create her whole, conjure her up again intact on one detail, say, a face denying ever having known anything but astonishment?
I said, “I’d like to sit with you awhile.”
She settled onto the grass, decorously distant. Years later, in a dark bed, I told her. How startled I was—she, a perfect unknown, no sense of me except my classroom act. Why was she here, sitting beside her grieving teaching assistant? Because she’d torn that picture from the family album, and felt obliged to see mine. Because she liked how I looked, poor poet-in-training with the ripped shirts and no mender near. Because my silence sounded so much like need.
She toyed with a blue canvas backpack filled with books. She held it between her legs, a child that might at any minute struggle to its feet and toddle off. Her hair, too short to be pulled back, was pulled back and rubber-banded around a pencil.
I laid it out, on no grounds at all. I told her all about McGee. Everything. Truths I’d never so much as hinted at to my closest friends. Facts never broached even with my brothers and sisters, except in bitter euphemism.
I told her in one clean rush, as only a twenty-one-year-old still can. Of my father’s slow-burn suicide, stretched out over fifteen years. The man’s long, accreting addiction that made every day a sine wave of new hope crushed. How hope, beaten to a stump, never died. How it always dragged back, like an amputated pet, its hindquarters rigged up in a makeshift wagon.
She listened with the simplest urgency. Nothing more ordinary in the world. She was still the age when one could make a go of compassion. At double that age, I’d duck down emergency exits rather than talk to acquaintances, and the thought of making a friend felt like dying.
“Tell me,” she said. And became a part of me always. Daily, somewhere, even if she just as quickly dissolved. You trade your own aloneness. You place yourself in the path of any invitation to come clean. You give up your script completely, on a sudden hunch. Or you never give it at all.
I told her for no reason. Because she sat and asked. Because she, too, seemed so alone in all this collegiate autumn, there on the vacated Quad with her blue backpack and her hair pulled back around a pencil. And because I told her, she would always have something over me. Forever, if she remembered. If she cared to use it.
I relived for her the Powers family dead drop from middle class to Grapes of Wrath. The silent, unspeakable impact, without the least tug of restraint from any shoulder harness. I made her listen to the man’s keen intelligence, slurred impenetrably. His gross motor skills, stunted like a pithed lab rat’s. I told her all my teenage desperate acts: balancing open fifths upside down on the countertop. X-ing off the calendar, to make him think the lost days had lasted weeks. I showed her his puffy, dazed face.
I narrated all this in harrowing detail. At least, I thought I did. A decade on, C. claimed the sketch had been much more schematic.
I described the late night visit, Christmas the year before. Just after I’d dropped my bombshell, the revised career plans. Dad wobbling into my room like a parasite-bloated puppy. Sitting on the foot of my bed, grasping me with anesthetized claw. Waking me from a lesser nightmare. “Rick. Lss. Listen. Don’t.”
Spooky, ghoulish. Lead-in to liquid panic. I felt my throat clamp again, even relating this thin simile version.
Don’t what?
“Don’t change. Stay.”
“Dad. Go back to bed.” I mimed my own lines for her, in the voice of the child parent. Caretaking commenced early, in the kids of my family. “Sleep it off. It’ll all be over in the morning.” Or soon enough thereafter.
“Rck. Listen. Stay in science. The world needs …”
I told her how I’d disappointed him, embittered my father’s holdout hope. Bricked up the last loophole he saw for his future. I was supposed to redeem the sad disaster Dad had made of life. And now I would never salvage anything, in my father’s or anyone’s eyes.
How could I tell this woman details that made me retch to hear? Maybe I tried to make her run. Test her Good Samaritan threshold of horror. She stayed put. She listened all the way up to McGee’s cancer and instant disintegration. Almost a reprieve, I confessed in shame. The only thing large enough to displace the first sickness. I held back on one detail—Dad’s I-told-you-so grins from inside the debilitating chemo: You always thought your old man would die of drink.
C. sat through it. At one pained silence, she grazed my upper arm. Exemption or encouragement—it didn’t matter. Aside from that, we did not touch.
“Why am I telling you all this?”
“It’s easier when you don’t know someone.”
But I do know you, I wanted to object. The first person I didn’t have to get to know. The first person I’ve ever met more alone than I am.
Sick of myself, I tried to draw her out. She reciprocated out of kindness. She said she was studying comparative literature. “It means”—she smiled, defending herself from the ghost of my father—“that I haven’t accepted reality yet.”
Change of schools had delayed her life by a year. By taking overloads, she would finish almost on time. “I don’t know what my hurry is.” She laughed. “It’s not as if there are a lot of entry-level openings for literature comparers.”
This illusion, born in mutual sadness. Because I’d spilled everything, because she in turn lapsed into long, shameless silences, we could pretend we’d been conversing since childhood. No need to gloss. No fill of awkward gaps. Words seemed almost an afterthought, casual noise. Still here. Fear not. Still here.
After we said everything we felt like, we stopped. We sat together, listening to the sparrows take their everyday, bewildered offense. The last day of innocence, of instant companionship without groundwork or explanation. The last year when one could make a friend.
When she spoke again, I jumped. I’d forgotten about speech, or why one would ever resort to it.
“So will you go home for a while?”
I nodded. The short moratorium of mourning. Knowing’s intermission, before the return of routine.
Some part of this may have come later. Maybe I conflated the different times we met in that spot, that season, by contrived chance. I’ve made a career of rewriting. C. used to say that everything was always outset with me. She came to know me so uncomfortably well. How my mind collapsed everything back to Go. How I would end with a head full of opening lines.
Midmorning grew cold. We sat closer. “‘May will be fine next year,’” C. said, lapsing into beginner’s anonymity.
I heard belatedly. “What was that again?”
“What?” Her throat closed. She bolted for cover. What did I do wrong? A question promoted to refrain, in time. And how rapidly already in C.’s eyes turned into again.
Here, at the first cross-purpose, I was too startled to stop and reassure her. “Whatever made you say that?”
“Say what?” The Samaritan would fight, if frightened enough.
“‘May will be fine …’”
“Oh, that!” She smiled, goofy, breathing again. “It’s a line from my parents’ English book. Sitting here—this temperature, this wind?” She tried to defuse me. I nodded: keep talking. “I felt so wide open all of a sudden. So—anything. That’s what made me think of it.”
“English book?”
“As a second language. For adults. A hand-me-down from another South Side family. They came five years before my parents. That’s a whole generation, where I come from.”
“Is there another line, just after that?”
“Yes. Wait. ‘Father hopes to plant roses in the front yard.’ All these short narrative vignettes. Incidents you might live. Let’s see.”
She closed her eyes, to help her visualize. Thought looks up, or off, or in. Away from the distraction of what is. Would a thinking machine, too, turn its simulated eyes away?
“Let’s see. On the next page is one that starts, ‘Mother goes to fetch the doctor.’ Imagine my brother trying to explain to his parents, at age ten, why mothers do to doctors what dogs do to sticks.”
I tried.
“That doctor bit was handy, as it turns out. They lived that one.” She dropped back into her astonished quiet. “So what’s your interest in that May one?” You been holding out on me, Immigrant?
“It’s a line from a nostalgic Housman poem. You see, there’s this comprehensive I’m supposed to be studying for.” The weakening sun cut a peach gash in the side of November the seventh. Summer looked for a last route to the surface, but could not find it.
“Housman?”
“You know. Best years behind you. Poet dying young, kind of thing.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, I don’t know. I suppose a tech writing job at 24K, a mortgage, a finished den full of kids, and early brain death.”
“No!” She laughed. “I mean the poem. ‘May will be fine next year.’ What happens next?”
“Oh. ‘Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.’”
C. laughed. “I’ll only be twenty.”
“I’ll be twenty-two.”
“That gives you two whole years yet.” Her eyes were brown and enormous, daring me. “Whole lifetimes can play out in the space of two years.”
“Whole lifetimes,” I echoed. Maybe that’s all I ever did: echo her. See what she had to say. Get her to commit, then fall back on accommodation.
We caught eyes. We looked for longer than either thought we should. For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not Are you who I think you are? Am I who you think I am?
“Thanks,” I said, taking her fingers when we stood and stretched. “Sorry to unload on you, but I must have needed it.”
“I wish you’d unloaded more.”
“You have a class?” I said, instead of what I should have.
“I’ve just missed two,” C. apologized. An awkward confession to make to one’s teacher. “You?”
I shrugged, pointed toward the meager downtown, toward departure, bus stations, all families waiting at the end of this spreading nexus.
C. started backing down the sidewalk that criss-crossed the green like huge suspender straps. “Have a safe trip home.”
“See you,” I said. My tag line. Still the only way I have to say goodbye. See you. What did it mean? No tense. Elliptical. Almost an imperative. It must have been the last thing I ever said to my father. See you.
C. lifted her hand, palm out. Then she turned the palm inward and placed it on her sternum. She hoisted her pack, swung on one foot, and walked away. I watched her disappear into the milling field of twenty-year-olds on their way to places none could begin to imagine.
MAYBE I KNEW I was already gone. I still had to finish, though, before I could leave. Fall semester came to its Christmas close. My first incarnation as teacher ended. In the composition class, C. got one of a handful of A’s. Our goodbye at semester’s end was terse. I’d grown guarded with her and everyone else. My father had died at fifty-two, and the next thirty years seemed to me an academic exercise.
I taught again that spring. I was better; the class was worse. No one wrote on Aspasia. I booked hard in preparation for the exam at year’s end. One fine May day I found myself sitting in a graduate colloquium on prosody, scanning the inverted feet in a sonnet by Edwin Arlington Robinson called “How Annandale Went Out.” We’d been at the iambs and trochees for a good two hours before it struck me that no one had yet mentioned that the poem was about euthanasia. Whether to let the sufferer die.
