Galatea 2.2

It was like so, but wasn't.

I lost my thirty-fifth year. We got separated in the confusion of a foreign city where the language was strange and the authorities hostile. It was my own fault. I'd told it, "Wait here. I'm just going to change some money. Check on our papers. Don't move from this spot, no matter what." And chaos chose that moment to hit home.

My other years persist, like those strangers I still embrace in sleep, intimate in five minutes. Some years slip their chrysalis, leaving only a casing to hold their place in my sequence. Each year is a difficult love with whom I've played house, declaring, at each clock tick, what it will and won't put up with.

My thirty-fifth trusted no one. As soon as I said I'd only be a moment, it knew what would happen to us.

Thirty-five shamed me into seeing that I'd gotten everything until then hopelessly wrong. That I could not read even my own years.

At thirty-five, I slipped back into the States. I did not choose either move or destination. I was in no condition to choose anything. For lack of a plan, I took an offer in my old college haunt of U. The job was a plum, my premature reward for a portfolio that now seemed the work of someone else.

I thought the year a paid leave of absence. A visiting position, where I might start again with the recommended nothing. House, meals, office, expenses, and no responsibilities except to live. I clung to the offer without too much reflection.

In fact, I had nowhere else to go. I couldn't even improvise a fallback.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. I'd long ago developed all the needed antibodies. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Nothing else remotely resembled home. Time had turned my birthplace into an exotic theme park. I could not have gotten a visa to live where I'd grown up. And I'd just spent the last seven years in a country that seemed exile already, even while I'd lived there.

But U. I could slink back to, and it would always take me. We were like an old married pair, at exhausted peace with each other. I did school's home stretch here, learned to decline and differentiate, program and compose. U. was where I took Professor Taylor's life-changing freshman seminar. Twelve years later, a stranger to the town, I passed through to watch Taylor die with horrific dignity.

U. was the place where I first saw how paint might encode politics, first heard how a sonata layered itself like a living hierarchy, first felt sentences cadence into engagement. I first put myself up inside the damp chamois of another person's body in U. First love smelted, sublimated, and vaporized here in four slight years.

I betrayed my beloved physics in this town, shacked up with literature. My little brother called me here to tell me Dad was dead. I tied my life to C.'s in U. We took off from U. together, blew the peanut stand to go browse the world and be each other's whole adulthood, an adventure that ended at thirty-five. The odds were against this backwater having anything left to throw at me.

Since my last trip back, I'd achieved minor celebrity status. Local Boy Makes Good. I'd never get my name on the city-limits sign. That honor was reserved for the native Olympic legend. But I now had the credentials to win a year's appointment to the enormous new Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. My official title was Visitor. Unofficially, I was the token humanist. My third novel earned me the post. The book was a long, vicarious re-creation of the scientific career I never had. The Center saw me as a liaison with the outside community. It had resources to spare, the office cost them little, and I was good PR. And who knew? A professional eavesdropper with a track record might find no end of things to write about in an operation that size.

I had no desire to write about science. My third novel exhausted me for the topic. I was just then finishing a fourth book, a reaction against cool reason. This new book was fast becoming a bleak, baroque fairy tale about wandering and disappearing children.

Even I could not fail to see the irony. Here I was, crawling back to the setting I had fictionalized in my sprawling science travelogue. The University put me up in a house, the seventies equivalent of the barracks where the hero of my book had lived on his arrival in town. Beyond a lone bed and desk, I left my rooms unfurnished, in my character's honor.

I bought a secondhand bike, perfect for the stretch from my house to the Center. The research complex had sprung up since my last visit. A block-long building in a town the size of U. cannot help but make a statement. The Center's architecture laid irony upon irony. It was a postmodern rehash of Flemish Renaissance. In the Low Countries, I'd lived in postwar poured concrete.

The Center had been built by an ancient donor couple, two people archaic enough to get through life still married to each other. They reached the end of that shared existence with nothing better to do with the odd fifty million than to advance advanced science. I don't know if they had children, or what the kids were slated to get when the folks passed away.

U. got a warren of offices, computer facilities, conference areas, wet and dry labs, and an auditorium and cafeteria, all under that jumble of Flemish gables. The small city housed several hundred scientists from assorted disciplines. Thankless Ph.D. candidates did the bulk of the experimental drudge work, supervised to various degrees by senior researchers from all over the world.

Work at the Center divided into areas so esoteric I could not tell their nature from their names. Half the fields were hyphenated. Creative play spilled over borders, cross-pollinating like hybrid corn in heat. Talk in its public spaces sounded like a UN picnic: excited, wild, and mutually unintelligible. I loved how you could never be sure what a person did, even after they explained it to you.

Most attention converged on complex systems. At the vertex of several intersecting rays — artificial intelligence, cognitive science, visualization and signal processing, neurochemistry — sat the culminating prize of consciousness's long adventure: an owner's manual for the brain. With its countless discrete and massively parallel subsystems, the Center seemed to me a block-wide analog of that neuronal mass it investigated.

The Center and two dozen similar places here and abroad would decide whether the species would earn its last-minute reprieve or blow the trust fund the way it intended. The footrace would photofinish here, as life came down to the wire. Bio-chips, seeded to grow across the complexity threshold. Transparent man-machine interfaces. Control of protein folding. High-def, digital contrition.

The building teemed with job descriptions: theorists, experimentalists, technicians, magicians. Someone here had a probe attached to every conceivable flicker. One wing swarmed with scientists who proclaimed their transcendence over engineering. Another housed engineers who didn't even acknowledge the distinction. What one floor banished bred like mold in a nearby quarter.

The Center was big. So big I lost my office twice in the first month, the way you lose a rental in an airport parking garage. Sheer size was the Center's chief virtue. Even the embarrassment of talking to the same colleague twice faded in a place so huge. In such an expanse, I hoped, one year would be too brief for me to be of any but passing interest to anyone.

What's more, the complex opened onto virtual space, through a spreading network backbone. I had an office with my name on the door, and a computer cabled into the world web. No one suspected that I had no research group, that I could not tell a field-responsive polymer from a spin glass. I came and went in awful freedom, a complete impostor.

I found the dress-up weirdly pleasant, knowing I could go home nightly to a house both empty and rented. For a long time, I must have been aspiring to just this. Immaculate and cold-booted, a resident alien. Just passing through the old alma mater.

The Center had much to recommend it. Its doors knew me from a distance. They clicked open at the command of an infrared pass card that I didn't even need to take out of my wallet. I flipped backside to sensors, mandrill style. Anyone reading this by accident or nostalgia a hundred years from now will have to take my word for the novelty.

The parabolic front foyer concentrated sound. I liked to stand at the focus and hear the rush of my own breath, the throb of blood coursing through my veins. I listened to my body's roar, sounding for all the world like a message left on an answering machine by someone who died later that day.

I tinkered at my new novel, ticking at the machine keys with my door closed and the fluorescent lights doused. My office reveled in state-of-the-art, clean-room efficiency. The perfect place to tuck my millennial bedtime story in for the night. I'd click a radio button on my screen and eighteen months of work waited for me by the time I hiked upstairs to the network laser.

I browsed the world web. I fished it from my node on a building host that served up more megabits a second than I could request. By keying in short electronic addresses, I connected to machines all over the face of the earth. The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it.

The snap of a finger, a satellite uplink, and I sat conversing with a mainframe in my old coal-mining ex-hometown seven time zones away. I could read the evensong schedule from off a digital valet in Cambridge, download Maurya painting, or make a Cook's tour of New Zealand. In seconds, I could scroll through dinner menus in languages I could not even identify. From my chair in the virgin Center, I revisited every city I'd ever spent time in and hundreds I would never get around to visiting in this life.

The town had been knitted into a loose-weave, global network in my absence. The web seemed to be self-assembling. Endless local investigations linked up with each other like germs of ice crystal merging to fill a glass pane.

The web overwhelmed me. I found it easier to believe that the box in Pakistan I chatted with was being dummied up in the other end of the building. I didn't know how my round-the-world jaunts were being billed, or if they were billed at all.

For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jet-setting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.

The web had been a long while in linking up. It, too, was just a stopgap stage in a master plan drawn up on the back of the brain's envelope. A bit of improvised whittling, forever a step shy. A provisional pontoon in that rough pencil sketch for final triumph over space and time.

I explored the world's first network in embryo. After days of disappearing children, I spent my nights playing in the greatest virtual sandbox yet built. I'd stumbled upon a stack of free travel vouchers. I put up in U., but I resided elsewhere. I thought: a person might be able to make a life in all that etherspace.

Each day produced new improbabilities. I searched card catalogs in Kyoto or book reports from Bombay. German soccer scores and Alaskan aurora sightings filled my office E-mail pouch.

I eavesdropped on international discussion groups, ongoing, interactive Scheherazades that covered every imaginable theme from arms control to electronic erotica. Notefile threads split and proliferated in meiosis. Debates flowed without beginning or end, through tributaries and meanderings, responses to responses to responses. Inexhaustible protagonists from every time zone posted to the continuous forum a dozen or more times a day.

Alone in my office, blanketed by the hum of the Center, I felt like a boy happening onto a copy of the Odyssey in a backwater valley library. I wanted to rush out into the hall and announce my each discovery. But who could I tell? Those lonely souls who stood most to gain would only shake their heads, dazed, locked out on every level. Those who had the wherewithal to see what the fuss was about had already habituated to the inconceivable.

Advanced science, of course, profited enormously from the web. The groups at the Center could now read journal articles months before they hit print. The data Autobahns had no speed limit. They plunked one in front of any results on earth before you could read the "Connect." Researchers peered into colleagues' labs on other continents, in real time. They shared data in 3D, as they gathered it.

On all sides of my cubicle, experimenters scoured the nodes. The net reduced duplication of effort and helped pinpoint crucial results they otherwise might have missed altogether. Instant telemessaging produced an efficiency that fed back into steeper invention. And invention accelerated the universal linkup.

But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

Yet I could not log off. My network sessions, all that fall, grew longer and more frequent. I began to think of myself in the virtual third person, as that disembodied world-web address: rsp@center.visitor.edu.

How long could I show up at the Center and produce nothing of use to anyone? The productivity problem. The pure-research problem. The inspiration, the blind-trust problem. I could drift without limit and still not be reprimanded. I had the year gratis. I might do nothing but prime the pump, rest and recharge, and still I would not ruffle so much as a mite's mood where it camped out on the eyelash of the emergent digital oversoul.

I meant to milk the new book for as many weeks of touch-up as I could get away with. Past that point I tried not to speculate. Three times before, the end of a long project had kicked off the start of another. I'd mastered the art of surviving narrative whiplash. No reason, in theory, why I couldn't regroup again. Go on and work forever.

But this time felt different. This time, after I paid my Pied Piper account, nothing waited for me on the far side of story's gaping mountain. Nothing but irremediable Things As They Are.

What little diversionary work remained I dragged out for all it was worth. Two Kbytes of new text or four of reasonable revision honorably discharged me of the day. Beyond that, I could indulge my remaining hours in good faith. A page and a half freed me to go and do as I liked.

Mostly, I liked to haunt the Center after hours. At night, the building thinned almost to empty. The community of night research emitted a sober thrill. The handful of sallow, animated faces at that hour could not help but be there. Their inquiries had them hooked, as levered to the intermittent payoffs as their lab animals. They piloted the halls, feverish, close to breakthrough, indifferent to clock time. They weaved from lab to lab in directed distraction, eyes combing every visual field but the corridors down which they moved.

Except for these addicts of the verifiable, I had the place to myself. That alone was worth coming in for: fifty million dollars of real estate filled with several hundred million in instruments, boxes that glowed with subdued purpose, abandoned like an electronic Rapture. No one could have a more profound sense of history than a night custodian of such a building.

Night brought open-endedness to the place. Through the machine on my desk, I could disappear down the coaxial rabbit hole to any port of call. I had a phone I could dial out on but which never rang. I had a white board and bright pastel markers that wiped off without a trace. I amused myself by writing out, in different colors, as many first lines of books as I could remember. Now and then I cheated, verifying them on the web.

These nights were dead with exhilaration. Like battening down in the face of a major maritime storm. All I could do was stock the mental candles and wait.

On such a night, I met Lentz. From my first glimpse, he seemed the person I'd come back to U. to meet. While I stood by, this man prototyped the thing humanity has been after from out of the starting block. In the year I knew him, Philip Lentz would bring a life back from the dead.

The night in question, I'd diverted myself so successfully with bursts of null activity that I found myself still in the building well past midnight. I was prowling the corridors on the floor above my office. I stood outside a conference center, reading a posterboard entitled "Compliance of Neuronal Growth over Semiconductor Substrate." Someone had encouraged nerve cells to connect themselves in clean, geometric, living chips. And had electron microscopy shots to prove it.

I felt my perfect solitude. A few fluorescent highlights here and there kept alive the odd captive plant. As I do when I'm alone, I hummed to myself. Only now, in the distance, I began to hear the music I'd been humming. Mozart, the Clarinet Concerto, middle movement. The one that C. had thought the most pained palliative in creation.

Here, in the deserted, empirical dark, years too late, I heard that she was right. In the Center, where no birds sang, this sound, slowed to a near stop, resigned all hope of ever saying just what its resignation carried. At this impossible hour, when even the most inexorable researchers had gone home to whatever family they could muster for themselves, only music stayed behind to prove the ravishing irrelevance of research.

The clarinet and orchestra exchanged phrases, elaborating on the ongoing expansion, unfolding, inhaling beyond capacity like the lungs of a patriarch wedging open the air after being told of the death of his last great-grandchild. The endless phrase spoke of how you reach an age when anything you might answer would not be worth asking.

Who in all this restless measurement had time for so infinite an aside? The late-night auditor, whoever he was, must have thought he listened alone. Even the cleaning crew had gone. The earliest hardcore hackers would not stumble in to their predawn keyboarding for another two hours.

Ordinarily, any sound would have driven me to an emergency exit. Now I gravitated to the source, audiotropic, to secure the forsaken signal.

The tune grew more real. It approached the asymptote of live performance. The next turn of the corridor maze would flush out a covey of tuxedoed instrumentalists. The thread of sound led me to an office down a spur hallway I did not know existed. The cell door stood wide open. The phrase issued from it as if from the wellspring of all improvisation.

The music's hopeless peace emboldened me. I came alongside the door and looked in. Except for the sound, the room was deserted. I bathed in the emptiness. Heaps of equipment, much of it bare boards and components, shimmered in the dark. Some of these devices produced this ethereal interpretation, while others only absorbed and contemplated it.

From a cave of instruments in the corner, light glinted off two small surfaces. What I had taken to be two flat LCD panels flickered into a pair of near-opaque glasses. The creature behind them now gazed at me without registering anything. Archimedes looking up languidly at the Roman soldier about to run him through: Don't disturb my circles.

The head attached to these glasses peaked in a balding dome. From freakish frontal lobes it tapered away to nothing at the temples only to erupt again in a monstrous beak. Even after I oriented the image, the face shocked me.

The man stretched out on a reclining office chair. His head flung itself back against a flatbed scanner. His feet kicked up on a mountain of offprints. Even horizontal like this, he could not have been longer than five and a half feet. Yet his doe-colored jacket and white oxford button-down crept up his arms as if the knit were unraveling.

I'd never seen this man before, either in these halls or anywhere else. Not even I could forget such a figure. He must have been at least sixty, in earth years. To judge by his pallor, the fellow avoided all contact with natural light. His puzzled blink suggested that he avoided human contact, too, to the extent of his abilities.

Without taking his eyes from me, he continued his series of infinitesimal hand adjustments in the space in front of him. He pushed a suite of frictionless hockey pucks about the wired surface of his desk. The rink looked like a cross between an acupuncture map and a player piano roll. Between the music and these arcane hand motions, I couldn't decide who led and who followed.

The conductor gestured across his electronic score, locking stares with me until the slow movement played itself out. Discord and resolve, the devastating rasp of reed, the musical sequence pushing against the limits of my cranial sounding post, a grace too huge and slow for understanding.

The lemur-like man appraised me, unselfconscious. We made interstellar contact, paralyzed by the mutual knowledge that any attempt to communicate would be culture-bound. Worse than meaningless.

Silence, after such sound, grew unbearable. I broke first. "Mozart," I said. Having begun to make a fool of myself, I pressed on and completed the job. "K. # 622. What happened to the finale?"

The man's hands stopped and laced themselves behind his head. He snorted out the side of his mouth, as if flossing the idea from between his teeth. "No finale. We deal exclusively with middles here."

He picked up the hockey pucks and started to shuffle them again. Music rose from the aural grave. The clarinet recommenced its paralyzing simplicity. That perfect phrase breathed in and out just as before, steeped in stabbing acceptance. But something different unfolded this time. A slower, more forlorn rumor. Where the difference lay, there was no saying.

The owl-man made his mechanical adjustments, as if he dreamed this music himself, out of a computational hurdy-gurdy. He flicked switches and fiddled with sliders. My shadow must have snagged the edge of his retina, because he looked up, surprised to see me still standing in the doorway. "Thank you for the little chat," he said. "Good night."

I bobbed my head in ridiculous acquiescence and backed down the hall, dismissed to safety.

I don't know what I expected, really. Civility, perhaps. Acknowledgment. An exchange of names. All the social niceties that I'd avoided so studiously since my Dunkirk back here. I obsessed for a day and a half, inventing ironic, dry comebacks. In my head, I let the man know in no uncertain terms that I was neither a pest nor ludicrous.

Under cover of daylight, I returned to pinch his name off the office door. Philip Lentz: a name as Palladian as the man was misshapen. The Center's promotional brochure said he explored cognitive economies through the use of neural networks. The pamphlet withheld even the foggiest idea of what this might mean.

For years, back before I saw the photograph that led to my retirement from software, I'd made a living by writing code. But a neural net, I learned in browsing the web, resembled nothing I'd ever programmed in my coding days. Neural networkers no longer wrote out procedures or specified machine behaviors. They dispensed with comprehensive flowcharts and instructions. Rather, they used a mass of separate processors to simulate connected brain cells. They taught communities of these independent, decision-making units how to modify their own connections. Then they stepped back and watched their synthetic neurons sort and associate external stimuli.

Each of these neurodes connected to several others, perhaps even to all other neurodes in the net. When one fired, it sent a signal down along its variously weighted links. A receiving neurode added this signal's weight to its other continuous inputs. It tested the composite signal, sometimes with fuzzy logic, against a shifting threshold. Fire or not? Surprises emerged with scaling up the switchboard.

Nowhere did the programmer determine the outcome. She wrote no algorithm. The decisions of these simulated cells arose from their own internal and continuously changing states.

Each decision to fire sent a new signal rippling through the electronic net. More: firings looped back into the net, resetting the signal weights and firing thresholds. The tide of firings bound the whole chaotically together. By strengthening or weakening its own synapses, the tangle of junctions could remember. At grosser levels, the net mimicked and — who knew? — perhaps reenacted associative learning.

Neural networkers grouped their squads of faked-up cells together in layers. An input layer fronted on the boundless outdoors. Across the connective brambles, an opposite squad formed the door where the ghost in the machine got out. Between these, the tool kit of simulated thought. In the so-called hidden layers lay all the knotted space where the net, and networkers like Lentz, associated.

The field went by the nickname of connectionism. Piqued, I subscribed to the web's discussion group on the subject. Reading made good counterpoint to my final rewrite. It was also a great day-waster and delaying tactic. Studying postponed the time when I'd no longer have any rewrite to counterpoint.

Now, whenever I logged on to the system, a new round of notes on the topic greeted me from all quarters. Several of my fellow visitors at the Center took part, firing messages back and forth to intercontinental colleagues. But unless this Lentz signed on with a pseudonym, he seemed to cut a wide side step around the citizens band. "

I followed the exchange. The regulars took on personalities. The Danish renegade. The Berkeley genius provocateur. Slow and Steady, respected co-authors, in constant battle with their archrival, Flash-in-the-Pan. Some speculated. Others graciously deflated. I saw myself as a character in this endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was there. But even lurking left a signature.

I learned that networks were not even programmed, in so many words. They were trained. Repeated inputs and parental feedback created an association and burned it in. Reading that fact tripped an association in me. The man had been sitting in his office after midnight, playing the same five minutes of Mozart again and again to an otherwise empty building. To a bank of machines.

This Lentz, I reasoned, had a neural network buried in that mountain of equipment. One that he was training to recognize beauty. One that would tell him, after repeated listenings, how that simple reed breathing made and unmade the shifting signal weights that triggered souls.

Some days later, the beak thrust itself into my office without knocking. Dr. Lentz stood upright even more precariously than he reclined. Even standing still, he listed like a marionette on a catamaran, my office door handle his rudder. Again the summer suit, the last scientist not giving congressional evidence to wear one. His skin had the pallor of a sixties educational TV host. He looked as if he'd taken self-tanning cream orally.

"Reclusive novelist living in the Netherlands?" His voice held more accusation than question. An allusion to a photo caption that had run in a major news weekly. I'd been captured in front of a stand of palms imported into the Sonora. The text beneath gave my life in thumbnail, now wrong on all three counts.

I launched my screen saver, to blot the incriminating text on my tube. He might have read it, even from his angle. Those eyes seemed set out on stalks.

"Yep. That's me."

"Yep? This is 'dazzlingly brilliant'? So tell me. What is it about the Dutch, anyway?"

"Excuse me?"

"They hang around your writing like dung beetles around a cholera ward. At least a cameo appearance in every book you've written. I mean: fifteen million tulip-sucking, clog-carving water wizards. So what? That's less than the population of greater New York."

He'd done his homework. And wanted me to know.

"Search me," I countered. "Accident. Pure coincidence."

"Nonsense. Fiction doesn't permit accident. And what little coincidence it does put up with is far from pure. Why don't you write about real countries? The whole global community is out there, chain-dragging on its own economic exhaust pipe. It's North against South, you know. Haves versus have-nots. How about a swing through the tropics? The lands of the 6 percent population growths and the two-hundred-dollar-a-year incomes?"

I gestured toward the hard disk on my desk where my latest sat, all but finished. "There's a bit in the new one. ."

He waved me off. "Doubtless the Dutch are in attendance as well."

Two words, right at the end. The little Frank girl's Dear Kitty. He gloated. I looked away.

"You and your precious bourgeois queendoms. Why should I care? Why should I pay twenty-five dollars—"

"Only thirteen in paperback." The joke fell flat. At that point I would have given him the complete works at cost, to get him out of my office.

"Twenty-five dollars to read about a negligible nation whose unit of currency sounds like something you'd use to pay the tinker or cobbler."

"Well, they did rule the world once."

"For what — twenty years? The Golden Age." He paced in place. The eye-darting edginess started to get on my nerves. I shoved the spare chair at him. He sat, smirking.

"The great middlemen, your Dutchmen. Bought and sold all races, colors, and creeds. Tell me. How does it feel to live in a country that peaked three centuries ago?"

"I haven't a clue." I hadn't yet decided how it felt to grow up in a country that peaked three years before I tried to bail out.

I didn't relish the idea of an insult match with a stranger. Besides, I'd already reached the same conclusion he had, this cognitive economist who had no more than browsed my novels, standing in front of the fiction "P" s at the University bookstore. He was right. It was time to give the Dutch a rest. After my latest, I planned to put them down for the count. But then, my plan for the next time out was to pack in everything. Not just the exotic bits, the color travelogue. I meant to retire my whole mother tongue.

In the meantime, I figured I might at least bait this scientist. I wasn't doing anything else that afternoon anyway. Nothing but writing.

"They've had more than their share of world-class painters and composers, for a negligible country."

"Oh, please, Mr. Powers. European-class. The world, it may stun you to learn, is predominantly black-haired. A plurality of those live without adequate shelter and would use The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp as a canvas roof patch if they could."

"And your Mozart?" I don't usually like cheap counterattacks, but the man asked for it.

He shrugged. "The piece happened to be handy. A small fraction of the available repertoire. Replaceable, I assure you." He stood and strode to my whiteboard. Without asking, he erased the text I'd written there and began to draw a matrix of hollow boxes. "All right. I'll grant you the pretty pictures and a few good tunes. But they've never amounted to much in the novel-writing department, have they?"

"That's the fault of translation."

"Not the limits of that expectorant Low German dialect? An orthography to write home about. And crikey! How do you deal with that syntax? An even by native speakers not until the ultimate grammatical arrival capable of being unraveled word order that one's brain in ever more excruciatingly elaborate cortical knots trivially can tie."

His burlesque was note-perfect. He tore it off, at tempo. It chilled me. How much homework had the man done? Could a cognitive linguist parody a language he didn't speak? I didn't want to know. I wouldn't have answered him in kind then, even if he switched over.

I still dreamed in that language. It ruined me for English. Cone for over half a year, I still saw the spire of the Utrecht Dom each time I walked under the Center's tower. I could not shake free from a place I never felt at home in. And all because of some dead Polish kid who attended the next grade school down from my father's. A kid who didn't know the Netherlands from the East Indies.

I'd formed an impression of the place in a dank Chicago suburban basement late in winter at age eight. A child's account of the flood that ravaged Zeeland shortly before I was born turned real in my head. That's what it means to be eight. Words haven't yet separated from their fatal content. For a week and a half, I saw people camped everywhere on top of step-gabled houses, island traumas in ever-rising water.

This was my unshakable image of a place I thought would never be more than an image to me. The word "Holland" filled me with autumnal, diluvian disaster. And this sense persisted, even after living for years as far inland as reachable, high up in the Dutch mountains.

On the day I read that book, sixty-seven blocks north of the Loop, C. was sixty-seven blocks south, lashing fast another imaginary Netherlands altogether. Everyone has a secret low country of the heart where they should have been born. C. missed hers by a year and an accumulation of ripples.

C. was more Dutch when I met her in U. than she became later, after she expatriated. At twenty-five, she learned that she could claim citizenship anytime before the age of thirty. It was as if Belonging lay in some ivory-inlaid credenza in the Hague, waiting to be opened before expiration date. Hers for free, by virtue of being born of Dutch parents. Even parents who had halfheartedly jumped the schooner of state. Once she claimed her birthright, displacement became total.

I could trace the chain of dislocation back to a nineteen-year-old Polish boy I didn't know from Adam. A South Side kid who should never have left home. His name clustered with lots of recalcitrant Slavic consonants. To me, it was unique. For all I know, the same surname takes up a column and a half of the Cicero phone book. The boy's own dislocation must have begun at least a generation before. But I did not know his particulars.

His home, however transient, was not Chicago per se but that emulation of Krakow that interwar Poles ran on the southwest side of former Fort Dearborn. When Armageddon reached as far as the Back of the Yards, the boy volunteered. His family sent him back to liberate a native land he'd seen only in imagination. Before he went, he married. One married young in those days, quick and willfully, to preempt just what happened to him.

The boy was called Eddie. I named my father and a hybrid me after him in my second book.

Eddie and his war bride lived together for two electric bills at the most. Then he vanished. He was killed in that extended tank battle that ran from the forests of eastern Belgium up through Limburg into Nijmegen and Arnhem. He never lived long enough to be anything but a story. This one.

He left behind only one possession. That is, his adopted government left it: one of those pristine stone crosses in one of those endless diffraction-pattern cemeteries that roll across the forgetting countryside. The Low Countries specialize in them.

When war abated again, someone had to care for all the crosses. Cemeteries had proliferated faster than babies, and it came time to adopt them. Village women throughout Limburg enlisted to tend to Margraten. A still-young woman who had stood on a hill and watched Charlemagne's capital burn, who had once run out into the lane with a carving knife at reports of a village horse being strafed, adopted Eddie.

Instructions were simple. Keep the area trim, and perhaps place flowers on history's birthdays. The woman did this and more. She struck up a correspondence with the widow and the bewildered Gold Star mother. God knows in what language. The widow — who knew all along she'd be left with nothing but unreadable letters from foreigners — spoke English and Polish. The mother spoke only Polish. The volunteer grave-tender spoke only Limburgs dialect and that imposed foreign language, Dutch.

The Netherlands was as mythical to the Americans as the States were to the Limburger. But somehow they communicated. Widow and mother visited the grave. They stayed with the grave's adopter, her husband, and their two babies. The Chicago Poles told the young family that if they ever wanted to emigrate to the blessed hemisphere, they had sponsors.

Limburg had never been generous, and war payments, as always, fell on the already destitute. The gravekeeper's husband, a railroad man, declared that he belonged to any country that would feed him. And so a basement room in Little Krakow became the family's country.

After a year, the immigrant wife could stand the New World no longer. She fled back to her beloved Limburg, her two young children in tow. The railroad man stayed, refusing to return home in disgrace. He wrote her letters, in his newly acquired, schoolboek English: "I'm here working. You know where you belong."

After six months, the woman dragged home to her basement nation. C.'s birth was her mother's consolation prize, the one good thing in an unlivable locale. They named C. for the dead boy's widow, who never remarried. After that first death, no room for another.

The family rented a house in a Lithuanian ghetto not far from the stockyards. Lives later, I stranded another, imaginary, Dutch immigrant family in that house. I built my written copy from the descriptions that C. fed me from memory. For two decades, C.'s family lived in that city, speaking to each other in secret phrases. You could say anything, anywhere, in those words. And no one but the displaced would understand you.

They kept themselves alive as exiles do: with rituals and recollections no longer recognizable to those who never left. C.'s mother raised the baby on accounts of a magic village called E. The nether-nether land that C. grew up on was peopled by scores of aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins with archaic names and fairy-tale histories. Never tie your life to a woman with ten dozen first cousins. Never try to expatriate to a country where the currency is called a gulden.

C. tried. She had to. The image her mother wove of E. was more painfully imprinted in C. than any neighborhood she'd actually lived in. C. tried to reclaim that fabulous nation. And I tried to follow her.

"Oh, Beau!" she told me. "It's so beautiful there. It's like a balm on your heart to see it." And so it was, still. Bits and pieces, anyway. Here and there, isolated half-timbered villages poked out between new industrial terrains, like traces of fresco from under annihilating renovations.

C. returned to her E., went back for the first time. On her arrival, a restored citizen, she became an instant curio. She learned that she spoke a dialect frozen in time, steeped in expressions discarded a generation before. And she spoke this dead idiom with a Chicago accent, equated, by the townsfolk of E., with gangsters who had all been shot thirty years before C.'s parents learned their first textbook slang.

I tagged along in C.'s wake. And my first textbook sentence: Nederland is een klein land. A negligible land. A minuscule country that most people in America think lies somewhere in Scandinavia. Ruled the globe once, for two decades.

Adventure ended in further exile. I came back to the States and failed to recognize them. That klein land came back with me, infesting my insides like a medfly slipped past customs. Its national anthem, the most beautiful in the world, with its absurd last line, "I have always been loyal to the king of Spain," hurt me when I caught myself humming it. The thought of those yellow trains, timed to the quarter minute, ruined me for further travel. The sight of an orange soccer jersey still cut into me with a boy's Goliath-killing hope, more cruel because not my boyhood. Syrup waffles in an import store hit me now like a wooden shoe in the chest.

Dutch was a shrapnel wound. Like C., I was a different person with that stranger's vocabulary in my mouth. I hated the sound of those words now. I would have forgotten them if I could. But I still said them to myself, when I needed the safety of secret languages. Each syllable aged me. I could no longer say what the simplest word meant. I'd never be rid of them, whatever my next book succeeded in killing off.

But I wasn't about to give Dr. Lentz the pleasure of this narrative. I didn't much like his type: the empiricist who thought the world outside his three variables worth no more than brilliant condescension. I had met too many of his sort at Center functions. They always ended up by telling me to adopt a pen name. It would do wonders for my sales.

Lentz stood at the whiteboard, connecting the hollow boxes with deft switchboard cables. I cleared my throat. "The Netherlands is one of the two or three places on earth where Western civilization almost works."

"Christ. Give me credit for a little intelligence." He answered without a moment's thought, without even turning around. "If you insist on harping on the Dutch, why don't you do the story of a handful of earnest Moluccan separatists who, lied to and betrayed by their old colonial whore of a mother, hijack a passenger train from Amsterdam to—"

"Don't worry," I told him. "They're history. I'll never mention them in print again."

After that, we left each other alone. When I next saw Lentz by accident in the corridors outside an unavoidable Center obligation, he greeted me in round tones. "Little Marcel! How are the words treating you?"

"Don't call me that. It's not clever."

"Who's being clever?"

"It's self-conscious and patronizing."

Lentz pulled back and pursed his lips. He contemplated finishing me in one swipe. Instead, he did a rapid about-face. "I'm sorry. That wasn't my intention. You see, I'm a bit of a social maladroit. We all are, in this pursuit. Comes with the turf. It's all of a piece, really." He swept his hands around himself the way a magician waves handkerchiefs over the body of a sequined assistant he is about to saw in half. "The myopia, the dwarfhood, the aggression, the affected brusqueness, the scoliosis, the know-it-all mégalo—"

I'd noticed the kinked walk, but scoliosis never crossed my mind. He'd learned to mask it early. I was sorry I'd let him get under my skin. Even someone who has modeled the function of the inferior frontal gyrus might still be plagued by the monsters that gyrus modeled.

"Forget it," I said. "Everybody's a critic."

"I can imagine. Much to resent about your line of work. 'Nobody deserves to get away with life alive'?"

"That, and 'Write me the book I would have written.' " "Universal envy. You folks are king of the cats, aren't you?" "You're joking. Were, maybe. A hundred years ago. It's all movies and lit crit now."

"Well, my defrocked friend. What's it going to be?"

"I'm sorry? What's what going to…? Dr. Lentz, I admit it. I can't always follow you."

"Do come on. The open parenthesis! What would you like me to call you?"

"How should I know? What's wrong with my given name?"

"A bit lacking in imagination for someone in your racket, aren't you?"

I felt twice burned in as many outings. I knew who I was dealing with now, in any event. "I don't care. Call me whatever you please, Engineer."

A low blow, but my own. Philip Lentz smiled, warmly enough for me to see that half his bottom teeth were missing. The remainders had drifted together to cover up the absence. "Little Marcel, I'm not sure I like you." He was quoting again, some dialogue of mine I'd forgotten having written. I said what I had to, what I was already scripted to say. "The pleasure's mutual, Engineer."

Lentz's peace offering came the next week, in my mailbox. He left me a much-thumbed-through short-story collection. He'd affixed a stick-on to a Mishima piece called "Patriotism." In the story, a young husband and wife kill themselves in ravishing detail. The note said: "I hope you get as much pleasure out of this as I did." The signature read, "With sincere apologies, Engineer."

As I skimmed the astonishing transcript, I wondered if he was trashing me yet again. This piece was to be my how-to. A suicide manual for the honor-besmirched author.

Not that I needed any anthology piece to make me want to call it a day. My final revision on the wandering kids was all but done. I was just dragging my heels until New York's deadline. Although they had me under contract for one more book after this one, a well-timed Mishima on my part would have delighted New York and put me, however briefly, on what my editor referred to as the List.

On each of my previous three novelistic tries, some further premise had always presented itself by this point. What the close of the current book did not resolve spilled over into the next. Now, although I spent days doing nothing but listening, the silence at the other end sounded like one of those callers who hadn't the courtesy to tell you they'd dialed a wrong number before slamming down the receiver.

Contract aside, I wanted one more shot. My fourth was too bleak an interval to cadence on. The Blitz wasn't going to have the last word in my fiction, however realistic I wanted to learn how to be. I had one more novel coming to me. But all I could find was the first line.

I knew only that I wanted to write a send-off. My next book would have to start: "Picture a train heading south." The line felt ordained, as liberating as October azure. But I couldn't wrap myself around this opening and begin. I was stalled at departure, for the simple reason that I could do nothing with so perfect a lead sentence but compromise it by carrying it forward.

The words nagged at me, like a nursery refrain. I began to imagine it an unconscious allusion. It felt so unsponsored, I could not have invented it.

I searched the bandwidths, postponing further the hopes of a jump start. I did Boolean searches across incomprehensibly huge textbases. South, train, and picture, ANDed together, within a ten-word range of one another. I substituted every conceivable synonym for each term, verbal almosts piped in from hyperlinked thesauri. But if the world's infant digital nervous system knew anything about my mystery opening, it wasn't saying.

I wondered if my memory might not be going. Like a man who furiously scours the bathroom mirror for signs of recent hairline decampment, I'd test myself from one day to the next. I tried myself on the first lines of books I knew I'd read and those I thought I'd written.

Undeniable: my ability to recall was not what I remembered its having been. Soon I would forget even the lovely heft of forgetting. The command to picture was, like that departing train itself, heading south. The line sounded its last call over the PA, a Transalpine Intercity just pulling out of the station.

My brother Russie called, from Florida. He almost never did. He checked to see how I was surviving bachelorhood. I asked him if he remembered a book. Something our mother might have read to us once.

"Mom? Our mom? We talking about the same person?"

"Come on. She read to us all the time. She taught me how to read."

"Don't know about your mother, but mine used to surface-mount me to the cathode-ray tube."

"She did not. We were strictly rationed." The last children in America who had to ask to turn on the set.

"Maybe that was the case for you guys."

"Well, you were younger than we were," I conceded.

I could hear Russ's askance silence on the other end. Do we need to call the pros? Start the intervention? "Yeah, bro. I was younger than you."

I couldn't imagine where else the line might have come from. Imagine a route, stretching out leisurely to the south. The day is bracing. It should not be this crisp yet, this chilly or sere. The train eases to life. It builds steam. It stokes up, unfolding itself along that first great curve, and leaving becomes real.

No question: it left something chest-tightening behind, tracking out to the taunting horizon. The book I wanted to write, the book I must have heard somewhere in infancy, unrolled farther than I could see from the locomotive, even leaning out dangerously to look. That passage stretched out longer than love, longer than evasion, longer than membership in this life. It lingered like a first lesson. Outlasted even my need to pin down the broken memory and reveal it.

That sentence, the return leg of the northern line, tried to leap the tracks of desire. But it needed me in the tender. I was the free rider, allowed to hitch on to my phrase's urgent run provided I kept the throttle open and the boiler stoked. But the low-grade hammering on rail that haunted my livelong day dampened to a distant click the longer I failed it. I felt myself dropped off at a deserted siding, numb and clueless as to how I had arrived there.

I sent Lentz a return Post-it. The things were pernicious: just enough adhesive for a temporary stick. "Thanks for the present. No apologies necessary. But please: no more literature. What I need is offprints."

I had but to say the word, and offprints poured in. Lentz sent me articles he had written. He sent me pieces compiled by colleagues and competitors. He forwarded stuff almost a decade old, and submissions that had not yet seen the light of publication. He attached no more notes. If I wanted to read his work, he would not object. But he wasn't going to tutor me.

Neural nets, I learned, had a way of casting themselves over people. According to the miraculous drafts Lentz sent me, there was no hotter topic. Researchers across the whole spectrum of disciplines emptied deep pockets into the promising tangles of simulated brain.

In a previous life, I had brushed up against machine intelligence. For a few months, I wrote code that turned consumer goods artificially lucid. I worked for an outfit that wanted to make household devices savvy enough to anticipate needs that potential purchasers didn't even know they had.

I made appliances expert in their own use. I built the rule base and tuned the reasoning. I linked a table of possible machine states to a list of syllogisms that told the device how to respond in each case. I hooked the device to sensors that bathed in a stream of real-world data. These dispatches threaded a given appliance's inference engine like rats in a behaviorist's maze.

If the data found their way to an exit, they became conclusions. All that remained was the gentle art of interface. I got the device to weigh the situation. I instructed it to say, "Hey! You sure you want to do that?" or "Let's try that again on 'Puree,' shall we?" Convincing the user was the delicate part, far harder than getting the device to reach its decision.

My expert systems couldn't be called intelligent. But they did get me thinking about what could be. I thought about the question for a long time, even after I jettisoned the commercial interests. What was memory? Where, if anywhere, did it reside? How did an idea look? Why was comprehension bred, or aesthetic taste, or temperament?

Predicates threaded my neural maze. After great inference, I came to the conclusion that I hadn't the foggiest idea what cognition was. Nobody did, and there seemed little prospect of that changing soon.

No tougher question existed. No other, either. If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse? A brain tangled enough to tackle itself must be too tangled to tackle. Tough, too, to study the workings of a thing that you couldn't get at without breaking. I guess I gave up thinking about thought some time around my thirtieth birthday.

Something about the basic debate upset me. On the one hand, philosophers maintained that the only way into the conceptual prison was introspection. This drove empiricists up the cell wall. Tired of airy nothings, they spent their time amassing chaotic libraries of unrelated data down at neurochemical level.

The top-down thinkers fought back: because thought played a role in experimental design and interpretation, neuroscientists undercut their own efforts. Cognition compromised itself. Recursive by nature, mentation wasn't going to yield to measurement alone.

Cognitive science seemed to me deadlocked. But overnight, while I was away, everything changed. The impasse broke from both ends. Smart appliances kicked out the jambs. The low-level wetware workers came into instruments that allowed them to image the omelet without breaking an egg. At the same time, the top-down people hit upon their own leverage, the neural nets that Lentz's snarl of articles described. Connectionism.

The young connectionist Turks lived on a middle level, somewhere between the artificial-intelligence coders, who pursued mind's formal algorithms, and the snail-conditioners, who sought the structure and function of brain tissue itself. The Center's warrens sheltered all species. But in the halfway world of neural nets, the point man at this place seemed to be Dr. Philip Lentz.

The new field's heat generated its inevitable controversy. I sensed a defensive tone to many of Lentz's publications. Both the neural physiologists and the algorithmic formalists scoffed at connectionism. Granted, neural networks performed slick behaviors. But these were tricks, the opposition said. Novelties. Fancy pattern recognition. Simulacra without any legitimate, neurological analog. Whatever nets produced, it wasn't thought. Not even close, talk not of the cigar.

In his articles, Lentz took these accusations and ran with them. The brain was not a sequential, state-function processor, as the AI people had it. At the same time, it emerged to exceed the chemical sum passing through its neuronal vesicles. The brain was a model-maker, continuously rewritten by the thing it tried to model. Why not model this, and see what insights one might hook in to?

Having stumbled across connectionism, I now couldn't escape the word. I heard it in the corridors. I nursed it at Center seminars, seated in the back for a quick exit. I read about it throughout the worldwide electronic notefiles and in the stack of diversionary texts that replaced my nightly dose of forgotten fiction. Neural simulation's scent of the unprecedented diffused everywhere. I followed along, moving my lips like a child, while Lentz declared in print that we had shot the first rapids of inanimate thought.

Lentz described synthetic neurons that associated, learned, and judged, all without yet being cognizant. The next step, he predicted, would require only increased subtlety, greater speed, enhanced miniaturization, finer etching, denser webbing, larger interwoven communities, higher orders of connection, and more finely distributed horsepower.

The smartest appliance I ever assembled was no more than a slavish, lobotomized reflex. True, I got my goods to remember rudimentary things. But I had to envision those memories myself before I could implement them. There was no question of real learning, of behavior fluid enough to change its rules while executing them. Formalizing even the deepest, most elusive knowledge was trivial compared to genuine cognition.

Somewhere between then and now, the idea of thought by artifice had come to life. And Lentz was one of its Geppettos.

My mind toyed with these shiny new cognitive artifacts as if they had just been dug up from the banks of the Tigris. In his most readable piece, Lentz related the account of a distant, academic colleague who had developed a macramé of artificial neurons. This one created such a stir even pseudo-documentary TV picked it up.

The creature consisted of three layers, stacked up like mica. Each bank contained around a hundred neurodes. At birth, its eighteen thousand synapses were weighted randomly. Its input layer read letters; its output produced sounds.

Its first attempt at articulation produced streams of gibberish phonemes, much like any newborn's. But after a few hours, its reading congealed. Its cycle of monotonous syllables clumped into recognizable word shapes. Each time a sound scored a chance hit, the connections making the match grew stronger. Those behind false sounds weakened and dispersed.

Repeated experience and selection taught these synapses their ABCs. The machine grew. It advanced from babbling infancy to verbal youth.

In half a day, the network progressed from "googoo daadaa" to a thousand comprehensible words. In a week, it outstripped every early reader and began closing in on the average reading public. Three hundred simulated cells had learned to read aloud.

No one told it how. No one helped it plough through tough dough. The cell connections, like the gaps they emulated, taught themselves, with the aid of iterated reinforcement. Sounds that coincided with mother speech were praised. The bonds behind them tightened, closing in on remembrance like a grade-schooler approximating a square root. All other combinations died away in loneliness and neglect.

I read, in Lentz's account, how this network's designer peeked into the hidden layer of the adult machine. What he found surprised him. Buried in baroque systems of connection weights lay the rules of pronunciation. Complex math, cluster analysis, and n-dimensional vector work teased out the generalizations. The neurodes had learned that when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. And they'd stored the acquired insight in schemes so elegant that the net's maker claimed he could never have dreamed them up alone.

I read the journal write-ups. The science meant nothing to me. I couldn't follow it. Time and choice had left me science-blind. There was no way for me to verify if the talking box possessed any breakthrough significance. By all accounts, its biological validity was marginal at best. And God knew the thing did not come close to real thinking.

I cared for none of those qualifications. The story grabbed me. I wanted the image, the idea of that experiment. A box had learned how to read, powered by nothing more than a hidden, firing profusion. Neural cascade, trimmed by self-correction, eventually produced understandable words. All it needed was someone like Lentz to supply the occasional "Try again" s and "Good boy!" s.

My decade of letters to C. came back, fourth class. No note. But then, I didn't need one. Any explanation would just be something I would be obliged to send back in turn. I was supposed to follow suit, return hers. I told myself I would, as soon as I found a mailer and could get to the post office.

I laid the bundle in the back of a drawer, alongside the lock whose combination I'd forgotten. I told myself the scrap might be useful all the same. Useful, despite everything, in some other life some other me might someday live.

One day, tripping blindly into it, I finished my last novel. I made my final edit, and knew there was nothing left to change. I could not hang on to the story in good faith even a day longer. I printed the finished draft and packed it in the box my publishers had just used to send me the paperback copies of my previous one.

I sealed the carton with too much packing tape and sat staring at it where it lay on my kitchen counter. I thought of C.'s great-grandmother, who, before she turned twenty, had buried three such shoe boxes of stillborns in the grove above E. I asked myself who in their right mind would want to read an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history.

The calculation came a little late. I biked the box down to the post office and shipped it off to New York, book rate. New York had paid for this casket in advance. They couldn't afford to be depressed by what I'd done. The long science book had been a surprise success. They were hoping to manufacture a knock-off. I hadn't given them much of a chance.

The moment the manuscript left my hands, I went slack. I felt as if I'd been in regression analysis for three years. At long last, I had revived the moment of old trauma. But instead of catharsis, I felt nothing. Anesthesia.

What was I supposed to do for the rest of my life? The rest of the afternoon alone seemed unfillable. I went shopping. As always, retail left me with an ice-cream headache.

I figured I might write again, at least once, if the thing could start with that magic first line. But the train — that train I asked the reader to picture — was hung up at departure. It did its southward stint. Then it was gone, leaving me in that waiting room slated on the first timetable.

To figure out where the line was heading, I had to know where it had been. I felt I must have heard it out loud: the opener of a story someone read to me, or one I'd read to someone.

When C. and I lived in that decrepit efficiency in B., we used to read aloud to each other. We slept on the floor, on a reconditioned mattress we'd carried on our heads the five blocks from the Salvation Army. Our blanket was a pilling brown wool rug we called the bear.

We huddled under it that first midwinter, when the temperature at night dropped so low the thermometer went useless. After a point, the radiators packed it in. Even flat out, they couldn't keep pace with the chill blackness seeping through brick and plaster. The only thing that kept us, too, from giving in and going numb were the read-alouds. Then, neither of us wanted to be reader. That meant sticking hands above the covers to hold the book. It would get so cold our mouths could not form the sounds printed on the page. We lay in bed, trying to warm each other, mumbling numbly by small candlelight—"Silver Blaze," Benvenuto Cellini— giggling at the absurd temperature, howling in pain at the touch of one another's frozen toes. We were the other's entire audience, euphoric, in the still heart of the arctic cold.

That's how I remembered it, in any case. Maybe we never spoke the notion out loud, but just lying there in the soft, frozen flow of words filled us with expectation. The world could not get this brittle, this severe and huge and silent, without its announcing something.

Somewhere, some shelf must still hold a book with broken black leather binding. A blank journal in which C. and I wrote the titles of all the books we read aloud to each other. If I could find that log, I thought, I might search down the first lines of every entry.

Our life in B. was a tender playact. That dismal rental, a South Sea island invented by an eighteenth-century engraver. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts. I wrote expert system routines. For pleasure, we etched a time line of the twentieth century onto the back of a used Teletype roll that we pasted around the top of the room. The Peace of Beijing. Marconi receives the letter "S" from across the Atlantic. Uzbekistan absorbed. Chanel invents Little Black Dress. The limbo becomes national dance craze.

We furnished our first nest with castoffs. Friends alerted us to an overstuffed chair that someone on the far side of the ballpark was, outrageously, throwing out. No three dishes matched. We owned one big-ticket item: a clock radio. Every morning, we woke to the broadcast calls of birds.

When we weren't reading to each other, we improvised a narrative. The courtyard outside our window was an autograph book of vignettes waiting to be cataloged. The scene below played out an endless penny merriment for our express amusement.

Cops rode by on horseback. Robbers rode by in their perennial hull-scraping Continentals. Parent-free children mined the bushes for dirt clumps to pop in their mouths. A conservatory student blew his sax out the open window, even in December. He threaded his way precariously up a chromatic octave, the cartoon music for seasickness. That's how I would describe it in the book I still had no idea I would soon write. The player always, always missed the A-flat on the way up but hit it, by chance, on descending. "Something to do with gravity," C. joked.

Youngish adults in suits came by selling things. They represented strange and fascinating causes, each more pressing than the last. When the canvassers buzzed our intercom, we sometimes shed some small bills. Or we made the sound of no one home.

A heavy woman on workman's comp who walked with a cane hobbled by at regular intervals to air out her dog. The dog, Jena, who we decided was named after the battle where Hegel watched Napoleon rout Prussia, was even more fossilized than its owner. Jena would stand thick and motionless, halfway down the sidewalk, contemplating some spiritual prison break, never bothering to so much as tinkle. Its owner, whose name we never learned, waited in the doorway, repeatedly calling the beast with the curt panic of abandonment. The dog would gaze a lifetime at the horizon, then turn back in desolation.

I relayed these anecdotes to C., who lay in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to be blind and paralyzed, at the mercy of my accounts. I elaborated events for her, embroidering until the improbability of the whole human fabric made her smile. When she smiled, it always stunned me that I'd discovered her before anyone else had.

Even while we playacted it, I recognized that fantasy. It came from a collection of ghost stories that a famous editor had assembled before we were young.

I told C., from memory, the one about two men lying in the critical ward. The one, a heart patient, has the window bed. He spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community outside to amuse his wardmate. He names all the characters: Mr. Rich. The Messenger Boy. The Lady with the Legs. He weaves this endless, dense novel for the quadriplegic in the next bed, who cannot see through the window from where he lies.

Then one night the window narrator has a heart attack. He convulses. He grapples for his medicine on the nightstand between the beds. The paralyzed man, seizing his chance at last to see this infinite world for himself, summons from nowhere one superhuman lunge and dashes the medicine to the floor. When they move him to the emptied window bed the next day, all he can see is a brick wall.

'That's a great story," C. told me. In the icy dark, I felt her excitement. The world lay all in front of us. "I love that one. I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you for it."

All I had to go on was that train. It might have come from anywhere, tracing a route so simple I would never win it back. I myself could not visualize the southbound freight. How could I ask a reader to picture it?

I paid bills, caught up on old correspondence. I did all my errands in the least efficient ways that my unconscious could devise. I discovered again just how long an evening can be without any media.

I searched my notebooks for all those plots that had seemed so pressing to me while I worked on something else. At one time I'd wanted to write the story of a man who made a living by imitating a statue. He would travel to all the capitals of the world, spray-paint himself silver, don a toga, and stand unnervingly still while admiring crowds ran past and threw coins into his cup. But now, when I watched this statue-man to see what happened, all he wanted to do was improve, hold stiller longer, until people passed without noticing.

I thought of putting a seventeen-year-old up in a cubicle on top of a flagpole just outside the Mall of America for 329 days, as a combined social protest and attempt to get into Guinness.

I found a preliminary sketch for a political light burlesque. Ma and Pa Kent, out in one of those states longer than it is wide, have a perfectly formed kid. The kid sleeps through nights, eats on schedule, and apologizes for burping. "Look at that boy crawl, Mother! He's going to be president." The comedy would trace the kid's supreme calling through Smallville High, Northwest Orthogonal State, and into the arms of the PACs and party hacks. I thought it might make a pleasant vacation.

Any one of these embryo ideas seemed workable. One might even have been good, had I been another person, with another person's care and patience. I kept browsing, thinking the right plot would leap out at me. When it didn't, I told myself that the key thing was to choose and get down to it. After all, wasn't a story about figuring out what the story was about?

Mornings passed when a sick knot in my stomach informed me that I would never write anything again. I had nothing left in me but the autobiography I'd refused from the start even to think about. My life threatened to grow as useless as a three-month-old computer magazine.

I asked myself whether, if you kept private long enough, you earned the right to a brief personal appearance in public. I recoiled from the idea. But there came a point when blaming things on innocent, third-person bystanders became a lie.

And after four times out, in a search for simplicity that had wound up producing complexities beyond reading, the question became: why go public at all?

I went to the Center and played the humanist fly on the wall. I read my notebooks. I diverted myself on the net.

Autumn came and flushed out the oppression of midwestern August. Sidewalks glazed over with cool rain. The shed leaves emitted a whiff of premature winter. Flocks gathered and wheeled in V's of retreat. We entered those two glorious weeks when U.'s weather made it seem that anyone alive could start again. Recover all lost ground.

The brisk, invigorating air crippled me with anticipation. I kept still and waited, thinking this time I might not scare off the imminence that always visited, the first week of the last season.

I lived on that refrain: picture a train. Picture a train heading south. Even garbled beyond recovery, my blast of turbine steam logged its nightly reprimand.

One night I went to a bar I'd never set foot in as an undergrad. I could count in a quarter of a byte the times I'd gone for a beer while in school here. Safeguarding the precious synapses. I'd worked so hard to keep them in perfect firing order. It had all seemed so important once.

In the Low Countries, I'd developed a taste for refermented fruit beers. These were as expensive here as they were ridiculous, in the land of the thin, frozen pilsner. But a kriek was a lot cheaper than a round-trip ticket. I ordered a bottle, which the bartender had to dust off.

I sat at the bar and nursed the drink, remembering those Belgian TV shows where the contestant tried to match dozens of beers to their rightful serving glasses. The last time I'd had a beer was in a Liège hole-in-the-wall that sold eleven hundred varieties, eighty on tap. The beer menu was book-length, with an index.

I imagined explaining the Lite concept to any of C.'s one hundred and twenty first cousins. I had difficulty getting past the word's spelling. Out the window of the bar, at a distance, I could see the university Quad. I pretended it was an unknown, astonishing Grote Markt I would go explore after I finished the cherry brew.

I made another narrative stab in my head. A thirty-five-year-old unemployed construction worker in Mechelen, once-mighty Gothic town shrunken to nothing, gets obsessed with completing the spire of the city's cathedral, originally slated to be the tallest in the world. My out-of-work day laborer, whom I took to calling Joris between sips, figures the building project has just been delayed several centuries. All he has to do is get the city to pauperize itself to put itself back on the ecclesiastical map.

The tale seemed immense with potential. The only catch was that it would play to an audience of exactly one.

The bar started filling. A frat boy, in his zeal to resuscitate a dead pitcher, collided with my shoulder. "Sorry, sir," he placated, in best commerce-major fashion.

The word was a slap in the face, the young's coded self-righteousness. People under twenty-one needed to work that fact into the conversation, even if the conversation consisted of two words. In this country, youth was a socially acceptable form of bragging.

A horrible mistake coming here, to this college bar, this college town. These were the same people who had gotten tanked every night while I broke my neck studying. They had stayed twenty, while I'd dissolved into middle age. 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 ingenue 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 outtalk 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 grownups.

"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 0 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."

Plover erupted. "Philip! You can't mean this. What about your work?"

"I've worked enough for one lifetime. Besides, wouldn't this have some professional interest, if we can carry it off?"

Plover glanced around the table. A last appeal. He hooked my eyes. His looked infinitely sad, afraid of forgetting what they were alarmed about. Say something, they urged. This is absurd.

"How are you going to evaluate?" I asked. Just crediting the proposal knocked Plover down another peg.

Lentz hunched his lip. "Standard Turing Test. Double-blind. Black-box both respondents. Give them each x hours to type out an answer."

"With Richard here as the guest literary judge?" Diana asked as if, for all the disappointment I had caused them, I might still be the last hope of the good.

Lentz coughed in mid-swig. "Not on your life. Powers here is going to be my research assistant. Who did you think I meant by 'we'?"

"We thought you were using the royal plural, Philip," Plover said. "Like you usually do."

Lentz condescended to address me. "You in? Or did you have something better to do?"

The world had enough novels. Certain writers were best paid to keep their fields out of production.

"Ten months? No. I wasn't doing much of anything." I spoke the words and betrayed my genus.

Plover, pushed to exasperation, cut bait. "All right, you two. Throw your lives away. I can't stop you." Harold, I decided, had at least one teenaged child.

Hartrick refused to capitulate. "Ram will judge," she said. Ram looked nonplussed. "He's as close to a disinterested, objective third party as we're going to get."

"I tell you, I don't know this Milton chap from Adam."

"That's your qualification. We'll name the human opposition when time comes. Meanwhile, what are the stakes?"

Lentz grew thoughtful. The vexatious child, called to account. "If we win, Harold has to give up his non-computational emergent Berkeley Zen bullshit."

The table sucked in its collective breath. Plover just snickered. "If you win, we'll all be getting pink slips. The whole thing is just too witless. Kindergarten. Mechanistic make-believe. I don't know what you're up to, Lentz. But you're gonna get me to bite. I'll bet the farm."

"And if you lose?" Diana enunciated, through a thin grin. She meant to extract casuistry's penalty in advance.

"If we lose, we'll give you a public retraction. A full apology, in print. The signed disgrace of your choice."

"Harold! Did you hear that? We finally have the man where we want him. Philip, you must be slipping."

"It's a trick," Keluga pronounced.

Lentz shook his head. "No trick."

"Of course it's a trick," Plover told the future's assembled jury. "But it just might be a trick worth paying to see."

"Too exaggerated," Chen said. He shook his head and smiled. He seemed not to realize that the deal had already been struck.

Diana pulled out her Portable Cervantes and read aloud the random sentence that fell under her bookmark. An illustration of the futility that this abrasive man and I were about to embark on. I can't remember the sentence. Out of context, I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"Harold," she said. "If this huckster is right. ." She elbowed Lentz in the ribs. I didn't think he would brook being touched by another human, but he did. "If we're really at the point where we can formalize. ."

Plover raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"If they get their creature to read, do I still have to slog through this?"

Plover cast his head back, dignified in affront. "Yes. Of course."

"All of it?"

"If you want to remain friends."

She stuffed the paperback back into her handbag. She buckled in pantomime under its weight.

Plover took pity. "You can skim Part Two."

"Don't strain yourself," Lentz advised. "We'll beat you to it."

I remember thinking: thank God Don Quixote was not on the List. At least that one was a translation.

C. was a student of mine in the very first freshman composition course I ever taught at U. We were only two years apart in age. I was young for a master's candidate and she was an older transfer student, forced by unyielding rules into taking a course she didn't need. She was late for my first class, an 8 a.m. session. I was not impressed. She seemed sluggish, not particularly bright or attractive or engaging. Inexorable, at best. She did, however, sit in the front row. If she contributed anything in those first few meetings, I don't remember.

But then, this was my first time teaching. I was more than a little wired, and it's a miracle I remember anything. Not nervous: what pedagogical theorists refer to as unprepared. Having spent the previous summer reading the grammar and usage texts, the style manual and reader for the course, I at least knew the material. What I didn't know was the college freshman, and whether she or he would put up with a spindly twenty-one-year-old in torn golf shirt, face not much clearer than their own, standing up in front of the chalkboard trying to conduct the discussion.

My impression of C. changed after the first assignment. I'd given, as preliminary topic, "Convince a total stranger that she would not want to grow up in your hometown." It seemed enough of an inversion of the standard composition theme that my fosters would have to think about it before plunging in and cranking out the usual suspect sentences.

The best paper belonged to a woman named Maya. I later learned that she was seven years older than I was and the mother of three. "Trust me. You don't want to grow up in East St. Louis," she wrote.

You get born in without being asked, and no amount of asking in the world is going to get you out again. There aren't but a few ways out of East St. Louis and those are all to places you don't want to be in even worse.

C.'s was the second most astonishing. She wrote lyrically, wistfully, brutally, about growing up in Chicago on an island one house wide. She wrote about waking up to the stink of slaughtered animals from the stockyards mixed with the heavy scent of chocolate from the neighborhood factory. She wrote of the neo-Nazi marches in the park where her father used to take her for walks. She wrote of the shifting neighborhood lines, the lava lamp of fear that made families bolt for invisible, redrawn borders every two years. She wrote of the lone newcomers from the wrong side of the tracks going door to door, begging people not to move out just because their family had moved in.

I read these two papers out loud, as a pair. The kids from the hopelessly affluent North Shore suburbs with too few movie theaters took notes.

By the end of my first semester, I learned that the problem with most student writing is not grammar. You learn the rules early on or you never get them. The real problem was belief. My eighteen-year-olds never believed that the reader was real, that they themselves were real, that the world's topics were real. That they had to insist as much, in so many words.

C. knew the real the way she knew how to breathe. After that first theme, there was nothing I could do for her but let her go.

For her research paper, C. wrote about Aspasia of Miletus. She'd gone through the standard occult stage in high school, past life analysis and all. In her student conference, she confessed to having once written a hundred-page memoir about her former life in Periclean Athens. That would be an invaluable primary source for her paper, I joked.

Talking, from the start, disconcerted us both. We probed about the edges of the inappropriate. I didn't dare to tell her how strange it felt, to feel so familiar with a stranger. Even that much would have been grounds for misconduct charges. But C. knew. C. always knew. She had a tap on what my mind made of the outside, even before I mapped it into words.

By mutual agreement, we kept mum and avoided incident. I teased her about her previous incarnations. "Do you have any documentary evidence?"

At her next conference, she produced a photo out of her backpack. "Documentary evidence of prior lives." Flirting, under deniability's cloak.

The picture was a small Brownie black-and-white. Bits of glued felt still adhered to its back. She'd torn it from an album, to give to me. A pudgy baby sat out in the backyard, 1961. The world had died away from that moment, and there was nothing left of it but this square miniature.

"The grass was prickling my butt. That's why I'm making the Khrushchev face. My parents threatened me. If I didn't stop crying, they were going to get the camera."

"You remember all that? You can't be more than two."

"I remember things long before that. When I was almost one, my mother took me back to the Netherlands for a visit. I was petting my aunt's dog while it was eating, and it bit me."

"Well, I suppose trauma. ."

"You don't remember your first years?" Everyone did, her astonishment said. Everyone.

"I have trouble with yesterday's dinner. I find it hard to believe. . What else can you remember? How about the first sentence you ever spoke?"

"Easy one," she said, gazing at the photo. " 'Good girl outside.' "

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I'd behaved myself, and now they had to turn me loose."

"I hope you're not counting on me to be your expert consultant on literature in English," I told Lentz in his anarchic office, a week after the bet. "It's been a hell of a long time."

He practiced that acerbic smirk on me. The one he didn't need to practice. "You mean you haven't kept faith with your illustrious progenitors?"

"I just can't quote them at length anymore."

"And why is that?"

I shrugged. "Can you quote at length from Babbage and Lady Ada?"

"What would you like to hear?" He stopped clicking on his coffee-stained keyboard and challenged me. "Never mind, Marcel. We don't need to know all about literature in English. The net is going to figure that out on its own. We already know something far more useful. We know Dr. Plover, our examiner. And we know Dr. Gupta, our distinguished judge."

"How is that going to help? You aren't thinking…? We can't count on them to. ."

"No, I don't suppose one can count on humans for anything. That's the beauty of the challenge."

"Okay. So what do we know about Harold?"

"He's a Shakespeare man. Soft on the Renaissance. Not a day goes by when he doesn't feel some nostalgic twinge about the fall of man."

"Lentz, you are truly merciless."

"It's a career asset."

"All right. So assume he dotes on Elizabethan—"

"We know. There's no assumption."

"But he knows that we know. We aren't going to bank everything on the hopes that he'll pick the predictable?"

"Marcel, never underestimate the baldness of the human heart. Didn't they teach you that in Famous Novelists School?"

"Right. That and 'jab and weave.' The Big Two for gaining and keeping an audience."

"Huh. You must have been out with the chicken pox that week."

In a real Turing Test, our black box, on the other end of a Teletype, would have to convince an examiner that it performed like a real mind. Operationally equivalent. Indistinguishable. Given any topic under the sun, our machine would have to fool the questioner, to pass for a human. A perfect, universal simulation of intelligence would, for all purposes, be intelligent.

I would never have signed on to such a pipe dream. But the severely limited version of the test seemed almost formulable, at first glance. We needed do only an infinitesimal fraction of what a full Turing Test passer would have to do. But it hit me only now. What we would have to do was still infinite.

"I fail to see how prepping the thing to say something bright about one sonnet is any easier than prepping it to interpret anything on the entire List."

"It isn't. In both cases, the 'thing' will need to know some thing about everything there is to know."

"You're too subtle for me, Engineer. Tell me how our knowledge of the opposition is going to help us, then."

"Plover is a harmless, sentimental slob. Ram will do anything in his power to avoid conflict. We just have to train a network whose essay answers will shatter their stale sensibilities, stop time, and banish their sense of loneliness."

"Oh. Well, if that's all. ."

"Marcel, you're such a bloody coward. What are you so afraid of?"

"I'm afraid of wasting a year of my life."

"As opposed to…?"

"I'm afraid of becoming a laughingstock, of pursuing some phantom that everyone else in your entire science considers—"

" 'Laughingstock.' What a wonderful word." He dug the keyboard out from the pile of papers he'd stacked on it. He addressed the workstation. "Do you suppose that's like 'rolling stock'? 'Summer stock'? 'Gunstock'? Take stock'? 'Wanderstock'?"

I flinched. "That's wandelstok. And I asked you not to do that. 'Walking stick' will do fine."

"Come, now. When was the last time you heard anyone use a 'walking stick'?"

He logged on to a remote host, called a program, and keyed a few parameters into it. Sifting through a tangle of equipment, he retrieved a microphone and turned it on. "Laughingstock, laughingstock," he repeated several times into the mike.

After a few seconds — digital eternity — a matte, sexless affect responded, "Their behavior made them the laughingstock of the. ." I couldn't make out the last word. It must have been "community."

"Oh," I heard myself saying. "Oh! We're not starting from zero, are we?"

"No. Not exactly zero."

He shut down the mike and straightened himself, as much as his body could straighten. He took off those bulletproof-glass spectacles. His face sat revealed in its full saurian severity. Removing the mask seemed to leave him expansive.

"Sometimes building a general-case model is easier than solving a specific-case problem. Also, because we're not constrained to be scientific, work can go as fast as we want. And don't forget our trump card. We don't have to correspond with how the brain does things. That's what's holding up the show in real science. All we have to be is 'as intelligent as,' by any route we care to choose."

"What do you types even mean by that, anyway? 'Intelligent'?"

"Bingo. Marcel, I knew you were my boy."

"Are you tired of real science? Is this just an extended vacation for you, Engineer? Or do you have something else in the works?"

It was as if he didn't even hear me. "Here is your reading assignment for next week. No skimming! If I wanted a liability for a research assistant, I would have hired a Keluga." He handed me another stack of conference papers and journal reprints.

"I thought I was the literature consultant," I whined.

"You are. And this is the literature you'll be consulting. By the way, Marcel. About your wasting a year. You told us you weren't up to anything."

"I've just finished a manuscript."

"And?"

"I'm already toying with a new one," I lied. Lying constructively was my job description, after all.

"Are you? What's it about? Or are you one of those artists who can't whisper the letter their title starts with without jinxing the end product?"

"Well, I have this idea." In fact, I had several hundred, none of which compelled me. Ideas insinuated themselves into my good graces, begging to be saved from the void. But I, the rescue squad, seemed to be off duty.

"Yes, good. Ideas are good. 'A very good place to start,' " he sang. His voice was clear, a startling tenor.

I ignored him. It was getting easier to. "An overworked industrialist takes a vacation to — Chester, England. He is touring the city walls, the half-timbered arcades, when he's hit up for change by a street person. He pretends to be an uncomprehending German sightseer. The panhandler doesn't buy it, starts harassing him. The industrialist explodes. The beggar retaliates with some vague threat. Three months later, at a conference in Cairo, the industrialist is accosted by a vagrant who—"

"Who says, 'Remember the guy in Chester?' Introducing a whole international cartel of homeless who appear outside the restaurant windows wherever this man travels. Very nice. A moral little ghost tale. Kiplingesque. Marcel, you're better off working for me."

"Don't knock Kipling. Kipling is a great writer. Some of my best friends are Kipling scholars."

"Is he on the List?"

I shook my head. No accounting for taste.

"Let me see that damn thing. Did you bring it?"

He had asked me to. I always did as asked. Lentz took the sheaf from me and began leafing through it. He made no comment until page 4, nineteenth-century British. "Hm. Mary Shelley. This could be more interesting than we've bargained for."

I thought to tell him about my disembodied opening line. But I did not much feel like holding my slight hostage up to Lentz's ridicule. The train, after all, was no more than a vehicle. What Taylor would have called it, in the freshman seminar that made me forsake measurement for words. The train meant nothing in itself; it simply carried the story out of the terminal.

My train did not even reach past the border checkpoint into page 2. The invitation to picture this could run no further than halfway down the first right-hand side. If the line were memory rather than invention, an exhaustive search of paper space — all middle-right opening pages in every known secondhand bookshop on earth— would turn it up.

Picture these words. The letters tunnel astonishingly across the page. They form themselves into an extended consist of cars just pulling out. The cars hold together by invisible coupling-gaps. When a boy, I counted these spaces as they clicked along on the tracks of type, under my mother's breath.

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 mal-adroit 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 heartstoppingly 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.

"Rek. 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 crisscrossed 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.

I'd transferred from physics to literature because of one man, the incomparable Taylor. He led me to believe, at eighteen, that a person could lay hands on the key to all mythologies. I now saw that literature might indeed teach me about my father's death, but the study of literature would lead no further than its own theories about itself.

I took the exam and passed it. My marks were high enough to gain admission to the final stage, the Ph.D. Then, on the threshold of committing to the field I'd devastated my father by choosing, I threw that choice away as well. I decided to leave U. forever. I would change my life in every way imaginable.

But first I needed to talk to C. I showed up at her rooming house, surprising her. I'd never been there; I'd gotten the address out of the student directory. It was an unrepeatable spring morning. She came to the door sleepy, still in her bathrobe.

"Good girl?" I asked.

Her brown eyes ignited. "Outside!" she shouted. She dressed in a minute, while I waited on the porch. It was true. There was nothing, nothing in existence that she preferred over being in the sun, the wind. Just walking.

"I have to kiss these buds," she said, kissing a brace. "I haven't kissed them yet this spring. When I was a child, I thought they wouldn't grow without encouragement."

She still was that child. And she knew it.

"Would you like to go away with me?" I asked. "Somewhere. Anywhere. Your choice. Two lit majors, making a living in the real world?"

She stopped and stared. It was the question we'd been asking each other from the first student-teacher conference. Only she'd been holding her breath, hoping we would vanish before asking.

"I have to tell you something. I'm involved with someone."

I suppose I knew. But asking, in all its awfulness, was the only way to write myself into this solitary future. Unless I asked, point-blank, I would never escape the second guess. I'd said it out loud. I was free now to forget her. To live out adulthood alone and in good faith. Whatever I cared to do.

"Take care," she intoned. "See things for me, wherever you end up."

I moved to B. I rented a room in the heart of the city. I got a job as a second-shift computer hack, the complete opposite of the life I'd been leading. I wrote about that job years later, in my third novel. I used Taylor as model for my hero, a man who gives up a promising career in science to devote himself to music composition. And I cast myself as the shiftless graduate-school dropout who squanders his talent.

The job was perfect. I worked alone, all night. For part of the shift, I had nothing to do but read. I read Rabelais, Balzac, Freud, Henry Adams, Max Planck. I read at random, obeying only the forgotten principle of pleasure.

In my few daylight hours, I fell in love with women constantly. Bank tellers, cashiers, women in the subway. A constant procession of pulse-pounding maybes. I never did more than ask one or two to lunch.

I frequented the Center's cafeteria. The food was marginal, depending on the hour I arrived. It consisted of the indifferent fried batter that everywhere kept alive this nation's scientific research effort. The lunch conversation, on the other hand, played like the chatter in creation's greenroom. I could eavesdrop in any direction, and trawl the same topic: the nature of the knowable, and how we know it.

For those researchers who bothered to stop and eat, lunch was the hour of collegial consolidation. Too much work at minute magnifications without looking up led to snow blindness. That was the idea behind the Center, the country's largest institute for interdisciplinary study. That was why a third of the complex gave itself over to common grazing space. The plan, in the end, involved a linkup of all locales.

One noon, I brought my stack of reading down to the cafeteria and sat over an Italian beef on wet onion roll. All around me, scientists came up for air, gauging the rest of the global, accreting index under construction. A few tables away, Plover and Hartrick sat scribbling diagrams on a scratch tablet. I thought of joining them, but didn't want to disrupt those with real work to do.

Instead I read. The articles were getting easier to get through. I read how supervised training helped a net grow cleverer at associating any input with desired output. And I got cleverer as I read. But the brain does things in massive parallel. Out of the edge of my eye, as I read, I saw someone jerk across the room holding a bottle of juice and a packet of batter fries. A ghost doomed to walk the earth awhile in human form. The apparition of Lentz shocked me. Broad daylight should have dissolved him. He seated himself at an empty table, as far from other bodies as possible.

Plover and Hartrick saw him too. Harold wanted to go keep the solitary figure company. Diana pointed to the writing pad and screwed up her face. Finally, she acquiesced. They decamped to his table, where Lentz welcomed them with little more than bare recognition. I thought it safe to join the three of them.

I sat down with what was left of my sandwich. Plover greeted me. "Here he is! Slot B of the sinister cybernetic assemblage. How are you two getting on with your attempt to automate literary criticism?"

I liked this man. 1 saw him building model rockets as a child, or testing out vaccines on his pet gerbil. I held up the journals, my lunch-hour reading. "I feel like some watcher of the skies. ."

"When a new planet swims into his ken?" Plover completed. An eager schoolboy.

His quick fill surprised me. I replaced my image of the model rockets with one of a boy reading The Norton Anthology under the covers by flashlight.

'That's enough, Marcel," Lentz said out of the corner of his mouth. "We don't want to give away any trade secrets."

"Is it ready, then?" Plover teased. "Let's go try this toy out." He'd hooked and landed the best of natures. "Okay. Okay. Here's one. Name this tune:

"I am a little world made cunningly

Of elements, and an angelic sprite. .

"Key that one into the old input layer and see what it comes up with."

I couldn't fight this man. The lines were pure love to him, a pleasure to be squandered and so increased. His face, as he quoted, radiated the ingenuous enthusiasm that gets drummed out of professionals around the time of the Ph.D.

"Where's that from?" I demanded. "I know that one."

Plover raised his hands and strapped both thumbs. "Diana? We've stumped him. We've stumped the chump!"

"Now, Harold," Lentz sneered. "Leave the writer alone. He may be washed up, but he isn't Donne yet." He fished a journal from the bottom of my stack, one I hadn't reached yet. He opened to a piece he'd co-authored with a famous Irish neural networker. Holy Sonnet number 5 sat atop the article.

I gaped like a drowning guppy. Plover looked crestfallen. He scanned the epigraph, dignity injured.

"Have you noticed how many of these open with a quote?" I said, to cover my humiliation. "Fashionable. I'm glad to see literature is still good for something."

Diana jumped into the awkwardness. "Philip. On the subject of revealing trade secrets. Explain back-propagation to me."

"Marcel? How would you like a chance to redeem yourself?"

"Well, as I understand it—"

"Oh, don't give us that, Marcel. Give us the facts."

"As I understand it, you present the net with a pattern of input. This signal pattern flows from neurode to neurode along branching, variously weighted connection paths. If the sum of inputs on the receiving neurode exceeds its signal threshold, it, too, fires and passes along more signal. Spreading activation, it's called."

I looked at Lentz to see if I had it right so far. He had his hands together, fingers to lips. And he was smirking.

"The signal pattern spreads through the net from layer to layer. A final response collects at the output layer. The net then compares this output to the desired output presented by the trainer. If the two differ, the net propagates the error backward through the net to the input layer, adjusting the weights of each connection that contributed to the error."

"Bra-vo, Marcel. Who's your teacher? Now, the question is: Which would you rather be able to do? Explicate that process or interpret Donne's Holy Sonnet?"

"I don't think that's the question," Diana sighed. "The question is whether back-propagation violates the directionality of the axon-to-dendrite signal."

Lentz pulled his head back on its stalk. He arched his eyebrows. "What have we here? The dabbler's expertise!"

Diana looked as if he'd just slapped her. Her lip shook. She would have stormed off if Harold hadn't restrained her.

"Philip!" Plover frothed. "Just shut up for a second, will you? You fault us for taking issue from a position of ignorance. But we're challenging you to provide the refutation. Isn't that better than reflex rejection? Torches and scythes?"

"Torches and scythes are ever so much more picturesque."

"Oh, for the love of… I give up." Plover traced a shorthand of his bear-paw exasperation.

"Uh-oh. About to invoke the deity. We're in trouble now. Whatever happened to radical skepticism in religious matters?"

"Philip, you. ." Plover tripped on his tongue in his disgust. "Why bother publishing your results, if you don't want people to follow you?"

"I get nervous when I'm followed too closely." Lentz inserted a fry into his mouth like a young child hammering blocks into a toy workbench.

"So you can't be bothered with anyone who isn't already in the inner sanctum."

"That's not true. Why, I've taken Marcel here and have already turned him from near-ignoramus into marginally literate page boy."

" 'Sweets grown common lose their dear delight.' Is that it? Lentz, that's the most elitist thing I've ever heard anyone on public funding say."

"Marcel, tag that line for me, will you?"

Citing seemed the quickest way out of trouble. "I think it's Shakespeare."

"Shakespeare's not elitist?" Lentz countered. "In any case, most of my grants are corporate, these days. By the way, Harold. 'Most elitist' is not up to your usual elegant prose."

"When you boys are finished," Diana murmured, "I wouldn't mind an answer."

Lentz cackled. "All right, Marcel. Time to straighten out the masses again."

"I guess the idea is that backward error propagation may resemble higher-order brain processes. True, individual nerve pathways are one-way. But neuronal paths as a whole do connect portions of the brain in two directions."

"I get it," Diana said. "Feedback signals from muscle tissue to the primary motor cortex, and the like?"

Lentz snorted. "This is just Marcel's guess, you understand."

I wondered if I would be able to work with the man a whole ten months.

Diana's face wrinkled. "But it's not quite the same thing, is it? Is presynaptic Hebbian change the same thing as…?"

But Lentz had stopped listening. He was peering into his juice bottle, preoccupied. Almost consumed by distraction. "Nothing," he declared. "Nothing is the same as anything else."

By whatever mechanism, that lunch is set into my cortex. I can take out the tape and view it at will. From this distance, its edges are ridiculously sharp, the definition absurd. These frames extend a longer clip, animated by the persistence of vision.

Diana later told me how memories are laid down when the thumb-sized basal forebrain bathes the hippocampus in acetylcholine. The chemical somehow changes a synapse's shape, she claimed, altering the connections between cells. And a key flooder of the chemical pathways is fear.

That lunch is burned into my memory because I sat through it terrified. Lentz scared me. Harold's hurt, Diana's dismay triggered my impulse to fly. I was afraid of everything these three might say to each other. Spooked by the open rupture begging to take place. Every word of anger was my fault.

For a long time, I thought that what frightened me was the prospect of failure. My biggest anxiety seemed to be that we'd pour ourselves into this folly and never get it to do more than gibber. That a previously productive researcher would take me on a ten-month wild-goose chase.

It's taken me this long—this long — to see. The fear that laid down that indelible trace was the same one I've nursed since boyhood. The fear that we might realize our dreams.

Lentz built Implementation A more for my education than as a prototype with any real pretensions. The beast wasn't winning any beauty prizes, either in looks or in conception. Lentz cobbled up a card cage to the back plane of your basic vanilla workstation. A few I/O devices, registered antiques all, hung off the ports, windows to this poor contraption's soul.

"The super-rich always drive beaten-up old Chevies," Lentz assured me. "You have to grasp the inverse snob value. Always dazzle your audience with misdirection. If we get Three Blind Mice' to come out of this, it'll knock them dead."

However humble, the rig gave us an entree. A workable learning algorithm can run on any platform. The brain, Lentz had it, was itself just a glorified, fudged-up Turing machine. Our cerebrum-to-be had no neurons, per se. No axons or dendrites. No synaptic connections. All these structures hid in simulation, dummied up in the standard linear memory array. The bare troika of Boolean operators brought them into metaphorical being. We used algorithms to imitate a non-algorithmic system. Implementation A was a ghostly hologram. It froze our words the way a scribbled shopping list, falling from a book where it has spent a misplaced lifetime, revives that longhand you thought you'd live alongside forever.

Lentz did a good job of making the hardware transparent to me. He hooked up topologies the culmination of a decade or more of tinkering. He explained every link in the process. But I was exhausted, wiped out from my own recent work. I tried for the gist and took the rest on faith.

The gist consisted of vectors. A stimulus vector, converted by the net's self-reorganization into a response vector. We started with a three-deep array of neurodes, enough for a test start. Each field was the size of the net that had learned to pronounce English. Implementation A would be spared this task. Lentz wired it to a canned speech synthesis routine. We worked at the level not of phonemes but of whole words.

At first I typed input into the system. My text ran through a huge lookup table — Lentz's laborious list of the 50,000 most common English words, arranged in order of rarity. Each word got a number, like a runner in a triathlon. These numbers in turn plunged headfirst into our randomly weighted terrain.

The ersatz brain cells juggled the pattern, until those in the output layer replied in noise. The box answered back each time I typed to it. But it answered gibberish. Like any nursling's, its voice was awash in gabble.

If I kept at the same stimulus, however, the output organized. Activated paths strengthened; inert routes atrophied away. The blathering gave way to consistent conversational response. What those responses were, however, neither Lentz nor I could say.

Still, our rewiring meshes had, of their own device, begun to imitate the world's simplest animals. They grew conditioned. They habituated. They de- and re-sensitized. Outwardly, at least, our neuron-simulation mimicked the response of living tissue.

Down the hall, on all sides of us, biologists split the lark, the functional organism. They ran planarians through mazes. They rapped lobotomized sea slugs on their antlers. Harold and Ram studied recovery and compensation in damaged brains. Diana removed small sections of monkey hippocampi and pegged them to changes in the creatures' ability to learn. The mind strove to open itself up, Pandora's ultimate black box.

We, too, performed our bit of the reductionist dragnet. Implementation A was our attempt to make a metaphor for a metaphor-making neural mechanism. But what creature the inner workings of that self-appointing assembly mirrored was anyone's guess.

The first bottleneck was not mechanical. The problem was me. Lentz hovered over me as I keystroked. He jabbed at the air. He feinted at the keyboard. He smudged the video screen with agitated digits. My typing drove him up the bloody wall.

"Marcel, how many words have you typed in your life?"

I studied the fixture above his head, calculating.

"Not the exact figure, you nit. Just give me the order of magnitude."

I shrugged. "Millions."

"You type like a chimp taking a running lunge at Hamlet. Who taught you?"

"Autodidact."

"How the hell are we supposed to get anything done? What do you peak at, twenty words per minute? And what you lack in speed you make up for in blundering. What's with the three-and-a-half-finger method, anyway?"

"Feel free to take over. It's all yours."

"Oh, don't be such a bleeding passion plant. No, it's no good. We're going to have to go to voice recognition. It'll cost us a week. And it's about as accurate a transcriber as a female Korean immigrant."

"Jesus, Lentz. If anyone hears you, we'll be run out of town. This is nineteen nin—"

"But more reliable than your piggies, anyway."

Speech recognition, in that year, was well on its way to being settled. Its frontier towns had grown into small St. Louises. We needed only follow along in the land grab's wake. Lentz refined the Center's prepackaged speech-processing routines. He linked the voice input module to the front end of our existing net. He cabled a Karaoke microphone into the A-to-D converter. He sutured the pieces together like a microsurgeon reattaching a severed nerveway.

Before we could train the network, I had to train the recognition routine to place my voice. I spoke words to it, then whole phrases. I repeated each out loud until it bled into a meaningless semantic gruel. When we succeeded in turning sounds into text with acceptable accuracy, we started again with the learning algorithm. Once more from the top.

"So are we using supervised training, graded training, or what?" I asked Lentz.

"Marcel, don't try to impress me. Save that for your hapless readers."

"Seriously. I'd like to correlate what I've read with—"

"For the word compilation, the net will compare its own output to the desired output you supply it. It will then adjust its synapses to imitate you as closely as possible."

"That's supervised."

"Am I supposed to give you genius prize money now?"

I liked Implementation A. I felt comfortable chattering to it. I read slowly, distinctly, for hours at a shot. I learned to work late at night, like the other loners and fanatics.

A answered me. Our infant had a comeback to everything. Lentz wrote a decoder to throw its vector outcomes on the screen. The thing LISP'd in numbers, for the numbers came. Its patterned responses condensed into syllables, then words in themselves. Correspondence grew more comprehensive. I did not always know what A was trying to say. But I could hear it struggle to say it.

We taught A some couple thousand words, about a quarter of the core active vocabulary a person might resort to. When it had these words under its belt, we tried it on simple combinations. After countless rounds of phrase-drill, Implementation A started to spit my words back parsed. Or at least it behaved as if it were parsing.

Between training sessions, I read the famous two-volume study of nets. The connectionist bible, it suggested maturable machines were already in sight. The math proved it: self-rearranging switchboards could generalize, selectively associate, even project. I took the math on faith, having long ago sacrificed my math to the study of fiction.

Then, everyone in the field took something on faith. Much lay beneath the surface, in the tangled, hidden layers. But I felt particularly vulnerable. I went to more colloquia and got progressively less out of them. Each week the speakers got younger. They grew more gleeful about having been born when I was already doing the crystal diode radio kits and the earthworm dissections. If I needed to grasp all understanding's lacunae before our contraption could understand me, we would lose our bet by a long shot.

I could at least follow the pictures, if not the argument's text. I visualized the spin glasses, complex similes for mental topology. I walked through the landscape of imagination, where every valley formed an associative memory. I could follow the story of the math, if not the substance.

And the story was drama itself: the tale of a gardener loose in that mnemonic landscape. An English Elizabeth, who cultivated it, or would have, had her life not been pruned back at twenty-eight, beyond the root.

I could follow the shape of the Hebbian Law: if two neurons fire together, their connection grows stronger and stimulation gets easier the next time out. Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest. I saw the law as a teacher prowling her class, slapping the wrists of bad students and rewarding the good until they all stood up and pledged coordinated allegiance.

But as yet, I could not hear what the pupils were pledging.

Lentz and I continued to putter. I read where the most famous worker on the wet side of brain research called God a tinkerer. I felt nothing like God. I felt like an arthritic macaque in finger splints.

For breathers, I frequented my other campus office, in the English Building. McKim, Mead and White, 1889. There I lived my alter ego — picturesque but archaic man of letters. The Center possessed 1,200 works of art, the world's largest magnetic resonance imager, and elevators appointed in brass, teak, and marble. The English Building's stairs were patched in three shades of gray linoleum.

Hiding out there provided a healthy antidote for too much future. After immoderate reading or training sessions, I needed the correction. But the building left me edgy as well. The edginess of the erotic. The scent of those halls went down my throat like a tracheotomy tube. English light flushed me with desire, a desire awakened by the memory of itself, wanting nothing more desperate than to be put back to sleep.

This was the building where I'd once taught C. Worse, this was Taylor's building. And everything Taylor had long ago alerted me to circled back on the primacy of narrative desire. Desire, he taught me, was the voicegram of memory. But I had reached an age when I was no longer sure that I wanted to remember the perpetual eroticism of eighteen, the erotics of knowledge, the words I'd traded in here, in these halls.

The more I learned about the architecture of memory, the more convinced I became that I was losing mine. I could not concentrate on even idle conversation. I would slink into English and sit in my nineteenth-century office, staring at the bricked-in fireplace, waiting for a surreal locomotive to emerge from it. Or I'd try to join the corridor conversation on a film or book review I was sure I'd seen. But I could not follow the preliminaries through to their web of consequences. I was elsewhere, and elsewhere back-propagated, endlessly.

In the mornings, I'd try to write. I now had perhaps three pages. In those pages I did nothing but unwind my first line. I made my relative clauses jump through all sorts of novel hoops. The performance could have gone on for several hundred pages on style alone. I could get my train to leave most eloquently. But I could not get it to go anywhere but back.

Sustaining so much as a paragraph became impossible. I'd juggle the first verb in my head, overwhelmed by my own weighted backlist. I thought of the four books I'd written between leaving U. and returning. The round trip seemed too immense. I no longer had the heart to extend it.

I'd missed my connection. Stranded at the terminal. I didn't want to write anymore. I was sick of speculation and empathy and revision. All I wanted was to read word frequency lists to Implementation A.

Lentz thought it time to see if Implementation A made sense. We drilled it for days on two-word sentences. Then we prompted A with nouns, to see if it could supply a valid predication. We would see if A acquired, by example, the pattern of generating grammar.

It recognized the simple S-V phrases we fed it. Dogs bark. Birds soar. Night falls. You vanish. Father hugs. Baby cries. It could distinguish these ideas from the formulations that we earmarked as inappropriate for well-brought-up machines to use in public.

But when it came time to perform, A clutched. It seemed to stab at pattern-completion. It formed sentences by chance guess.

It could learn words. It could identify well-formed sentences. But Implementation A refused to elaborate its own. No matter how Lentz tweaked, Imp A seemed baffled by the task. It would not take the first generalizing step to learn the language.

Lentz tacked into the failure. He tried everything he could think of to coax the machine up a notch. Nothing worked. Asked to complete a thought, the network improvised wildly. Fish…? Fish sky. Shines? Hopes shines. Forests floor. Laugh efforts. Combs loneliness. Even when, by chance, it got the syntax right, the sense was not even random.

Imp A spoke the way a toddler gave directions. Its eager-to-please finger serpentined over all possible routes. This way? That's right! Or is it this way? Sure, if you like. Where's the horse? Come on, point to the horse. That's not a horse. That's not a horse either.

Yet it was, at least, pointing. Maybe our putting the request as pointedly as we did flustered it.

"Couldn't we hard-code a properties list? I mean, someone here must have compiled a semantic catalog. ."

"That's your coeval, Keluga. He's trying to write the entire Roget's as a series of nested, rule-based schematics. Containment, relation, exclusion. ."

"Coeval? I'm thirty-five, Lentz. That guy's a kid."

"You're both post-Tupperware. Chen is Keluga's supervisor. Outrageous. The Bergen and McCarthy of AI. Chen knows every algorithm in existence, but can't speak a single natural language, including his own. Keluga grew up on Hollywood robots and the microprocessor revolution. One of those brats who got his first PC free in a cereal box. He gets nervous when a sentence doesn't start with 'While' and end with 'Wend.' He's going to reform English by taking out all the inefficient synonyms."

"But is his list any good? Couldn't we just use the semantic data structures as a reservoir of associations that the net could dip into?"

"We could. But it wouldn't be satisfying. That's not the way the cells do things."

"I thought the point wasn't to duplicate mind. I thought—"

"The point is to get this boutique of ICs to comment intelligently on William Bloody Wordsworth. Are you going to give me rules for doing that?"

I said nothing. Lentz realized he'd gone overboard. He regrouped and spoke again.

"We could try to feed it algorithms for everything. There are only slightly more of them than there are particles in the universe. It would be like building a heart molecule by molecule. And we'd still have a hell of an indexing and retrieval problem at the end. Even then, talking to such a decision tree would be like talking to a shopping list. It'd never get any smarter than a low-ranking government bureaucrat."

Lentz returned to the net design. I could do little to assist hut run upstairs to the laser and retrieve the printouts. Lentz liked to crack morose asides while he worked. "You better start thinking of how you're going to fill the rest of your year."

Sometimes he would set me tasks, puzzles that weren't clearly puzzles until after I solved them. "Fill in the blank, making a simple, two-word sentence. 'Silence. .'"

". . fears," I suggested. "Make that 'Silence fears.' "

"Oh, very good, Marcel. I knew there must have been a reason I asked you to be my apprentice."

But the more he joked, the worse Lentz's asthmatic anxiety grew. We washed up at the starting block. My future again began to seem as unbearably long as my past.

Angry, Lentz lobotomized the thing. "Just punishment," he declared. "This box didn't deserve to think." Hurting the circuit seemed no more sadistic than forcing it to learn in the first place.

He blurred the device's retention. He reduced the scope and breadth of connections. Then he tested it a last time in its weakened state, empiricism now taunting all three of us. To my astonishment, the learning algorithm rose up from its reduced straits and began to get the picture.

Miraculously, Implementation A began to pick up our patterns, arranging our words into meaningful relationships. "I might have known." Lentz sounded disgusted with himself. "Too much retention. It was learning. But learning got swamped in its own strength. The creature was driving itself batty, holding on too tenaciously to everything it had ever seen. Dying of its own nostalgia. Mired in the overacquired."

"Autistic," I remember saying. Particulars overwhelmed it. Its world consisted of this plus this plus this. Order would not striate out. Implementation A had sat paralyzed, a hoary, infantile widow in a house packed with undiscardable mementos, no more room to turn around. Overassociating, overextending, creating infinitesimal, worthless categories in which everything belonged always arid only to itself.

A few deft neurological nicks and a new run-time behavior did the job. Implementation B lived inside the same hardware, indistinguishable from its short-lived predecessor. This time, fuzzy logic and feedback-braking kept the box as discriminately forgetful as any blossomer.

From the get-go, B was a different animal.

Diana Hartrick came by. She surprised me one Saturday afternoon. The air had just started to turn chilly. I remember that she had a denim windbreaker on and was shivering on the stoop when I let her in.

"Hi. I know you're not supposed to drop in unannounced in this country. ."

"Not a problem. I lived half my adult life in a country where dropping in unannounced was de rigueur.'''

"Good. I was on my way to the lab. I thought I'd bring you this." She handed me a Ball jar full of soup. "I figured a single guy could use some. I'm afraid it's very hearty. You may want to thin it out some when you heat it up." She stopped to look around my place for the first time. "Hey! I thought you were staying until summer."

"I am."

"What's the matter? Aren't you comfortable here? It looks like you're trying to weasel past worldliness without actually having to touch it. By the way, you'll want to plug your fridge in for the soup. Unless you'd like to share it with the microorganisms."

"Thanks. You wouldn't happen to have a bowl on you, would you? Just kidding."

Diana rocked her head side to side. Her thin horizon smile said: Artists. Or words to that effect.

"Look. I came by to tell you that you don't have to do this, you know. Lentz is a maniac, but he's a harmless maniac. He won't hurt you if you bail out. None of us took the bet seriously in the first place. It's so. ."

"Quixotic?"

" 'Deranged' was the word I was searching for. Harold has started to fret about your squandering your talents on this."

I shrugged. "There's no squandering. It interests me."

"Well, the minute it stops interesting you, drop it like a hot potato. And if that man starts to get on your nerves, tell him to go to hell. That's the only diction he understands."

"I was going to ask. What's the matter with him? Why is he like that?"

"Well, we all have our own theories. Harold's is the most charitable. He thinks the man is just trying in his own warped way to be loved. I think his limbic system is diseased. That reminds me. If you get tired of playing mad scientist with the home electrode kit, you are always welcome to come and see how it's really done."

"Thanks. I'd like to."

"Do you really live like this? Where are your things? Where is your library?"

"Lost in transit."

Diana cringed. Her hand flew out like a magician's released dove, but stopped short of my shoulder.

"Sorry. It's none of my business. I just wondered how you can work. All my notes are spread over the margins of my texts. I'd be lost without them."

"Lost is not so bad. It's practically an advantage in my line."

"Mr. Powers, Mr. Powers." She shook her head again, tisking through her grin. She did not buy me. But the sales pitch, at least, tickled her.

"Well, just remember. You're under no obligation to build this mechanical master's student. When you see how hopeless the holiday is. ."

"Straight back to the mines," I promised.

Dr. Hartrick fished for her keys while heading for the door. At the threshold, she made one more stunned survey. "You'll — you should at least come by sometime." She sounded doubtful. "I can cook you a real meal, anyhow. You do eat, don't you?"

Sometimes I ditched the bike and walked to the Center. Self-inflicted mental Polar Bear Club. U. was threaded through with time holes, and not just mine. Most of the residential streets were still brick. The houses had verandas, balustrades, features that have passed out of the language. The streetlamp globes threw off a gaslight yellow that turned the underside of the leaves that had not yet fallen a weird, otherworldly teal.

C. and I took a last retrospective stroll through those streets a dozen years before. We walked slowly that night, half speed, not knowing how to abandon the markers. We were leaving together this time. We'd stumbled onto that inevitability that neither of us thought would ever happen.

I never asked her. I don't even know how she learned where I had gone. Just: one day, a card in the mail. The picture showed a forgotten town nestled in a stream valley. I couldn't read the description on the back. Language locked me out. But I could read her message. "R. — May will be fine next year. C."

Of all the million things the ambiguous message could mean, I knew the one it did. I woke up around noon after a late shift of computer operations and The Magic Mountain. I went to check the mail. Her card was the last thing I expected. The first I hoped for. I'd waited every day, I suppose, at some low level. I would have been just fine never hearing from her again. I would have worked forever.

I quit my job. I left B. and went back to U. She was waiting for me. She'd acted honorably, done things right. Now she was free to get out and see the world. We went as slowly as we could. We tried to get to know each other again, without too much backfill. But I had no job, she was graduating, and we had lost a lifetime once already.

We made love for the first time in a single bed belonging to someone neither of us had ever met. We lived together for three weeks in a house I was watching for a friend of a friend. The whole scenario was invention itself. We would never have a house of our own.

Somewhere, there is a picture C. took of me in that house's yard. I'm ringed with a garland of dandelions she wove me. My trident is a dandelion rake — the Poseidon of lawn care. We would never have a yard, the two of us. Not even a rented one.

"If I asked you again…" I asked her one day.

"I'd jump at the chance. That's if you asked me again."

Before we left, we took that compilation walking tour. We walked like a thresher squeezing a field dry. We named every landmark we left behind.

"That's where I lived when I first came down," she pointed out. "That's where my boyfriend lived. Here's where I met for choir. This is the clinic where I helped my roomie through her crisis."

"Here's where I lost my virginity," I showed her. "I spent a year in this bizarre co-op. Taylor lives a block down from here. Ah, the library. I booked like a madman for the Master's Comp. Nine months, up in a study carrel on deck eight."

By tacit agreement, we saved the Quad for last. Neither of us said, Here's where we first learned we weren't necessarily alone. Neither of us needed to say anything.

C. was game for anywhere. She would have followed a dart thrown at a world map. I told her how beautiful B. was, how full and alive. Leaving seemed like a story we told each other, then lived as it unfolded. How they skipped town together and relocated, with nothing but a $4,100 bank check to their names. How they rode for twenty-two hours on the Lake Shore Limited, next to an enormous gentleman who warned them of the dire consequences of reading.

How they arrived at South Station in bleak, freezing drizzle. How they stood soaked in grime-coated twilight, trying to find a bus stop. How she burst into tears: Where have you taken me?

Even hardship felt like a giggle. An adventure. I would have pitched permanent base camp in a war zone with that woman. And I made her feel safe, for a while. As if even this wrong turn were part of an ingenious thread. We were young then, and would live forever. All those disasters, bad judgments, breakages, mistakes: we protected each other, simply by insisting we were still together and happy. That nothing mattered but care.

Now, sometimes, as I trained B or walked back from the Center at nights to my deserted bungalow, panic ambushed me. Some mental picture would trigger it — remembering I'd left the cognitive oven on with something in it. The slightest reminder reached out and laced my ribs. Someone was in trouble, trapped in front of a station in an unidentifiable city without cash, map, or language. And I could not buffer or save them. Someone pitching into free fall. Either me or my old friend.

We settled into B. We found a place. We printed up résumés, complete with convincing Career Goals. Jobs, however anemic, dropped on us like a godsend. I took up work as a technical editor. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts.

My images of the two of us, in those early days, needed no gallery guard. C. and I, on our first Thanksgiving, dressing the ruinously expensive Cornish game hens when we didn't have two dimes to rub together. Listening, setless, to the sounds of the big game next door, holding our breath to hear who was ahead. That Christmas, crayoning a tree onto several sheets of newsprint and taping it to the apartment wall.

That much was almost cheating to remember. All I had to do was turn my eyes to some neutral screen — the wet leaves in the gutters as I walked, the fat gray cumulus — and I could see any scene from that year I could bear to look at. The focal trace that printed those pictures now lent its apparatus to the reverse process. Ouija-like, it retrieved from the file and held my attention on the reduced film of a place now past verifying.

Lentz had speculated about that strange doubling in one of his more controversial articles. Memory was a parasite, he proposed. It opportunistically used perception's circuitry for its playback theater.

And I have that whole parasite intact. Nothing required to bring it forth but numbness. True, the specifics of that moment have grown stylized. Artist's conceptions. I can check nothing. C. kept the book, the one where we pasted the paper trail of our shared existence. The documents are all elsewhere, trashed, or transferred to a stranger's long-term storage.

I came to him depressed.

"It's mind-fogging," I told him. "Incomprehensible. I've been reading. We don't have an agnostic's prayer in hell, do we? One hundred billion neurons. That's twenty for each person on earth. How many trillion synaptic connections? And all arranged with anatomical precision into who knows how many tangled subsystems. ."

"Sixty-three," Lentz supplied. He was leaning back in his office chair again, reclined, as on the night I first saw him. I couldn't tell if he was being snide or if he'd finally flipped.

"And even the most trivial of the subsystems solves problems so far past our ability to compute it makes my limbic system spin. We'd need an exponential number of exponents just to number the firings on the way to a self-reflective thought. If we scale our toy up even a little bit bigger than it is now, the thing will grind to a standstill. Responding intelligently to 'Good afternoon' would take it a lifetime."

"Well, we could always tell Plover and Hartrick that Teacher's Pet needs a slight extension to get its paper in. Say, no later than the next Ice Age."

Lentz pulled up a subroutine on his terminal and began to massage it. He was a hyperactive child, happiest when several things happened at once.

"Even if we could keep track of the wiring. ." my voice cracked. "Even if we could get all our tin-can telephones spaghettied up to the same switchboard: there still wouldn't be enough processing power in this part of the galaxy to synchronize their firing."

Lentz chuckled. "That's too exaggerate."

It was eerie. His cruel imitation was tone-perfect. Chen, to the letter. The vicious ear alone would be tough to duplicate on the most advanced of machines.

"Come on, Marcel. Buck up. It's not so tough. What saves us is that we don't have to do everything. No motion, no vision, no smell or sensation, no pain, no reflex response, no process control… If you knew what it took to reach out and grasp an object, to pick up a glass, you'd be completely incapable of doing it,"

"If all we had to do was pick things up. We're trying to get something to understand."

"Marcel, I've never seen you like this. Remarkable. What happened to the cold fish we've come to know and love?" He spoke askance now, more intent on the screen than on me. The hypnotic, half-attentive intensity of someone pretending concentration. "Listen. I've been trying to explain this to you. In some fundamental way, it's easier to do high-level stuff than low-. It takes fewer neurons to link 'walk,' 'through,' and 'doorway' into some associated cluster than it takes for you to carry out the words."

"Maybe so. But think how many clusters—"

"You're overwhelmed because you're still thinking like Plover. You still think we have to lay out the rules and specify all the computations ourselves. That would be incomprehensibly complex. But we're not going to write out those calculations. We're going to feed the already languaged world to Imp B and let it take the bits apart and reassemble them."

"Yeah, yeah. You've done that lecture. But, Engineer. The size! Think of what we'd have to tell it before anything made sense. We're talking an index magnitudes bigger than the universe it points to."

"The universe will be its own index. The isomorphic contour map, the way the data get packed together."

"What does that mean? Okay. Suppose we read it the line 'He clasps the crag with crooked hands'. ."

"Oh no. Not him. Anybody but him."

"Then we have to tell it about mountains, silhouettes, eagles, aeries. The difference between clasping and gripping and grasping and gasping. The difference between crags and cliffs and chasms. Wings, flight. The fact that eagles don't have hands. The fact that the poem is not really about an eagle. We'll have to teach it isolation, loneliness. ."

"It'll know all about those. It'll grow into knowledge you won't even need to spell out. Knowledge will be a by-product of the shape its weight-landscape takes, from bending to the spoken world's shape."

". . how a metaphor works. How nineteenth-century England worked. How Romanticism didn't work. All about imperialism, pathetic projection, trochees. ."

Lentz started laughing. At least that meant he heard me. "Yes, there's a certain density out there it will have to become comfortable with. Give it time. How did you acquire that density? Half a meg, half a meg, half a meg onward."

"Me? I don't know what the bloody poem means. I wouldn't analyze that thing again if my life depended on it."

"That's my point. We humans are winging it, improvising. Input pattern x sets off associative matrix y, which bears only the slightest relevance to the stimulus and is often worthless. Conscious intelligence is smoke and mirrors. Almost free-associative. Nobody really responds to anyone else, per se. We all spout our canned and thumb-nailed scripts, with the barest minimum of polite segues. Granted, we're remarkably fast at indexing and retrieval. But comprehension and appropriate response are often more on the order of buckshot."

"I'm beginning to see. You're not elevating the machine. You're debasing us. Took me long enough."

"Don't be too hard on yourself, Marcel," Lentz cooed. "Much of intelligence isn't really that bright."

"I can't believe this. You're serious, aren't you?"

"Massively parallel pattern matching. We only pretend to be syllogistic creatures. In fact, we identify a few constraints, then spin the block endlessly until it drops in the hole. Have you read an undergraduate paper lately? You should see what I have to deal with in the intro sequences alone. And the stuff I teach requires no real world knowledge at all! You know the old 'Show your work for partial credit'? It's when they show their work that I want to give even the ones who solve the problem sets a zero."

"Are you exempting yourself from this critique of intelligence?"

"Not really. This conclusion stared me in the face for thirty years before I saw it."

"All right. Let's say you're right."

"Let's do."

"It doesn't change the facts. In order to produce a remotely plausible association matrix for six measly Tennyson lines, our candidate will need a file cabinet two global hemispheres wide."

My objections were starting to bore Lentz. He stood up. It always frightened me when the man assumed the vertical. He began fiddling with the jumpers on the new neurodal processor board prior to fitting it into the expansion chassis. I thought of those brain surgeons who stimulate conscious patients' cortexes and what synesthesias the probe elicits.

"That's a pretty figure of speech, Marcel. And doubtless it's the sign of some nominal intelligence on your part. But have you read your own school papers lately? Give me Middlemarch, I'll spin you off a few amorphous generalities, all qualified and deniable."

"What do you know about that book?" I asked, too quickly. It was Taylor's book, the one he'd given his scholarly life to. The one I'd written on, analyzed for him. The novel where I'd discovered novels. The mere title in Lentz's mouth sounded creepy, as if I'd been spied on.

Of course he ignored me. Lentz ignored all direct challenges. Only the shrewdest or most slow-witted of machines could hit upon that conversational tactic.

"Even if you're right," I retreated, "it would take us forever to teach it sufficient amorphous generalities."

Lentz roused himself from distraction. "What do you want? We have ten months. Ten months is several generations these days. Plus, we don't have to be humanly intelligent. Our brain doesn't have to correspond to real mentation. We just have to be as good at paraphrase, by any route we care to take. And for that, we can fly, flat out. If you ever stop talking and pitch in."

I stood and helped him assemble the new card into Imp B's backplane. Manual labor: the extent of my contribution to date. "It strikes me that the thing we're trying to get as good as is damn near unparaphrasable."

"Oh, pish. It's the easiest thing in the world to take in a human. Remember AI's early darling, ELIZA, the psychoanalyst? 'You remind me of my father,' the human types. Tell me more about your father,' the machine answers. Remember the student who found the thing up and running on a deserted terminal? Struck up a conversation. Got steadily more frustrated. Ended up shrieking at the sadist on the other end to quit jerking him around."

Exactly how I ended up every time I talked to Lentz. "So all we're building is a deception?"

"Consciousness is a deception." Lentz grimaced. He stared into some middle distance. The pause was long and awful. I didn't know how to fill it.

At length, I had to say something. "You're not suggesting that Son of B is going to be conscious, are you?"

"Don't be obtuse, Marcel. You're making this argument a duck shoot. No, of course not. Nor do we have to make it conscious. We don't have to give it sensations either, or even make it think. We just have to make it a reasonable apple-sorter. Get it to interpret utterances, slip them into generic conceptual categories, and then retrieve related 'theoretical' commentary from off the prepackaged shelf."

"And what are we doing next week?"

"Touché, Marcel. You're right, for once. Let's just take the baby steps first."

"As they say to sky divers: that first step is a killer."

"Nah. The first step's a Cakewalk. We can beat the hell out of a developing infant, in any case. First off, our baby never needs a nap. Never. We can feed it around the clock, once things start to take off. Second, a kid's neurons aren't even fully myelinated until age twelve or so. They're erratic. Trying to get them to potentiate is like writing in Jell-O."

Not long after that conversation, I learned that the only child Lentz ever raised had disowned him.

I still thought of B as a composite of makeshift components. Silk-screened cards populated with ICs on the one side and word frequency lists by parts of speech on the other. Each of its distributed, loosely linked subsystem nets was a community of neurodes, and each neurode a community of shifting allegiances.

Day after day, I trained these micro-circus animals to respond to my voice. Pattern generalization became simple sentence parsers, the way push-ups become pectorals. The stacked layers began to recognize — and even make — rudimentary distinctions. I told it: John is taller than Jim. By copying the repeated ur-models, it then reassured me that, yes, Jim is shorter than John.

But even such simple manipulations of properties could throw it for an infinite loop. The kettle has more coffee than the cup, but the cup is fuller. That conclusion needed to wash recursively through the mesh several times before B got comfortable with it.

As with many younger sibs, B turned A's personality inside out. While it handled the two-word sentence drill with curt aplomb, it turned garrulous at anything longer. This second set of arrays found more patterns in our sentence prompts than either of us intended.

"B is sick," Lentz greeted me one day on my arrival at the lab.

"Oh no. Don't tell me."

"By 'Don't tell me,' I assume you mean Tell me.' "

"What's it doing now?"

"Watch."

Though the machine would respond to no voice but mine, it answered to anyone's typing. It couldn't tell who was at the keys. It answered all comers, cheerfully presuming the typist had nothing but its best interests at heart.

Lentz typed B a little story: "Friends are in a room. A chair is in the room. Richard talks to Diana. Diana sits in the chair." Each word converted to a token, a matrix of strengths. These tokens laced together into sentence vectors. The vectors rolled around through the net landscape, marbles seeking the most available basin. The place they landed, the way they fell, was what they meant. The sieve sorted every configuration that entered it. And each sort changed forever the net configuration.

"You ready?" Lentz asked me. Then he typed, "Who is in the chair?"

B flipped out. "Friends is in the chair. The chair is in the chair. Richard talks to in the chair. ."

It wouldn't stop prattling. "It's got St. Vitus' dance," I said.

"It's got St. Vincent's malaise," Lentz countered.

He was right. Figuration was driving B as batty as a poet. It framed meaning too meagerly, extending semblance too far. It pushed the classic toddler's tendency to overgroup. Had its digits been skeletal, it would have pointed at anything sitting on a bookshelf and called it a book.

"We'll need to cut the graded feedback and go to more rigorous supervision," Lentz said. 'This beast is going to have to learn that not everything will fly."

It made sense. I'd read some developmental neurology. A newborn's synapses far outnumbered those of an adult. Perhaps building effective pathways required that many useless ones had to die. Short of slitting B's metaphoric throat with Occam's razor, we were going to have to rein it in.

For the time being, we decided to pare back B's associations with definitive answers. Repeated treading across the desired path would force Imp B to hack a right route through its lush profusion.

Now, when B started to do its permutational thing, I learned to say no. I would tell it the proper answer, however problematic. However much it hurt, I made it play straight. B took this right answer, matched it to the verbal diarrhea it had produced, and step by painful step went back over its connections to see where it had gotten carried away.

Only this reduction of limitless possibility made learning possible again. And only real learning — nothing mechanical or predictable— would satisfy me.

It pained me, one false spring dusk late in the season, as I walked home along the soon-to-be-crusted-over streets, to hear myself thinking in terms of satisfaction. I thought I'd left the word behind, in the reweighted and long-since-extinguished past.

Imp B always did rub me the wrong way. Nothing violent. I just never cared for it, although I tried not to let that impede our work. I guess the way its linked nets responded to input reminded me too much of all my own little rickies, drowned in fecundity, unable to damp generalization down or clamp it into the manageable.

But as B grew less poetic and more docile, I began to miss the willful driveler. I'd taken perverse delight in watching it conclude, from "If you want me, I'll be in the office," that until you want me, I'll be at home.

Lentz seemed unhumbled by this second lesson in unbounded verbal space. "What do the literary theorists say about reading books these days?" As if I could paraphrase for him, in an afternoon. As if, armed with my paraphrase, he might tack on a couple of preprocessing, feed-forward subsystem nets that would address any conceivable problem.

"First off, they're not books anymore."

"Texts," Lentz corrected himself. "Excuse me." As always, he knew more than he let on.

"Well, let's see. The sign is public property, the signifier is in small-claims court, and the signification is a total land grab. Meaning doesn't circulate. Nobody's going to jailbreak the prison house of language."

"How about getting paroled for good behavior?"

"Come on, Engineer. Come clean for once. Tell me all that doesn't depress the hell out of you."

"No, it doesn't. It just means we have as good a shot at this as any waffling poseur. We can get our supernet to sound exactly like a fashionable twenty-two-year-old North American whiz kid imitating a French theorist in translation by, say, this time next month."

"Engineer—"

"I'm serious, Marcel. I've seen the stuff you're talking about. Gnomic is in. We just have to push 'privilege' and 'reify' up to the middle of the verb frequency lists and retrain. The freer the associations on the front end, the more profound they're going to seem upon output."

"Fine. Do as you please. You obviously don't need me for any of it. And I don't need to spend a year working on a pointless and cynical scam. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in tech writing."

"Marcel, sit down. Marcel! Don't be an infant," Lentz ordered. His voice broke. It shocked me. I didn't think he'd care. Certainly not about something as trivial as my packing it in.

"All right," he stammered. "I didn't mean that. I'm sorry. I was joking. A little self-deflation. It's been so long since I've been satisfied with anything I've done that I get critical. And I forget that not everybody is as detached as I am. I thought you understood. I'm sorry."

I just watched the man. All footwork. All of it, the contrition as well as the cynicism. He himself had long ago lost the ability to tell what he was after or when he was being genuine. But the astonishing thing — the thing that made no sense — was that he wanted me around. The game was no fun, it was worthless to him otherwise. I couldn't figure it, and I didn't want to leave without knowing.

I sat back down, as deliberately as possible. I drew out my answer, curious to see what I would say.

"Imp B?" I asked. I wasn't sure what I meant by the question.

Lentz answered without pause. "A noble cause, in any case. And not without theoretical interest. Let's do it for ourselves. I mean, of course we'll show them what we come up with and all. But let's just work, and forget about the bet."

I looked at the man. The bank safety-glass lenses protected him from eye contact.

"To hell with that." I laughed. "My kid is going to ace that exam!"

"Okay, okay." Lentz cackled alongside me. "Anything you say." His eyes seemed to be watering. He actually put his hand on my shoulder, but just as quickly removed it.

We worked hard on sentence parsing, on relationships and comparisons, on simple semantic decoding. B did not get any more likable in the training process. But it grew undeniably clever at pattern matching and manipulation. The fact that it curve-fit countless serial streams of input vectors and could generalize the shape of a simple sentence at all punched my lights out.

May will be fine next year, I assured it. Father hopes to plant roses in the front yard. Mother goes to fetch the doctor.

We were in Lentz's office one weekend afternoon when he said, "It's time to give the kid something a little more obscure."

He rooted through the chaos of his bookshelves. From behind a stack of papers that had begun to recycle themselves, he pulled a fifties-era thermos bottle, a stained coffee mug inscribed Opa, and a ring of what for all the world looked like assorted roller-skate keys. Clearing this hole allowed him to shove around the rest of the junk in his packed office as if it were all some giant 15-puzzle.

This shoving at last released a book that seemed to have been stuck in deepest hiding. Squirreled away, like a boy's soft-core magazine. The pale pink fata morgana photograph on the jacket had been torn and taped clumsily back together. I knew the book even before he dredged it up into view.

"Oh no. Engineer. Lentz. Give me a break. Not that one. I've seen full professors make a total debacle of that book."

"Well, now, Marcel. We're not going to do the book. Heaven forfend. Just this bit."

He dropped the text open in front of me, a horny thumbnail over-scoring the harmless epigraph to Chapter One.

"Just that?"

"Just that."

"You're insane, you know."

"Oh yes. I'm quite aware of that. Wait," Lentz delayed me. "I want Plover to see this. Let's hope our prize pupil doesn't choose this moment to act up."

He limped down the corridor, making good time for a sixty-year-old whose body had been nothing but a nuisance to him for half those years. He returned with a dubious Harold in tow.

When he saw me, Harold's face lit up. "Ave, Scriptor! Are you keeping this charlatan honest?" Had I taken the least step toward him, he would have wrapped me in a bear hug.

Harold's spontaneous affection depressed me. I'd done nothing to get this fellow to like me, and the fact that he did made me feel dishonest. My sense of unearned credit was interrupted by the appearance in the doorway of a sullen teenage girl.

"Trish," Plover commanded. "Trish. Take the headphones off. Take — the — headphones. ." He pantomimed in affable, immense semaphore. Trish complied, rolling her eyes toward a spiritual mezzanine.

"This is the novelist whose books I showed you." Harold turned back toward me, to make sure I was the person he meant. "Richard, this is Trish. The second of the Plover Amazons."

She shook my hand, then looked around the lab for sterilization equipment.

"How many in the tribe?" I asked.

Harold started ticking off his fingers. "I don't know. I've lost count."

"Oh, Daddy!" Trish moaned. A mentally deficient father: the only thing that could have driven her to address me. "Don't listen to him. He's been insufferable ever since Mom let Sue go to Italy."

"Hear that? 'Insufferable.' Trish is the literary one. She writes poetry."

"I do not. They're song lyrics."

"She'd like you to look at them sometime."

"No way!" Trish shouted.

Lentz snorted at the collocation. "Is Hartrick going to come have a look at this?" he asked.

I felt the tension before the sentence was even half out of him. Harold looked ready to strangle the little man.

"No. Just do your stuff. Let's see what you got."

"What you have" Trish corrected. This time, Dad rolled his eyes.

I spoke to B. I launched into the singsong nursery rhyme that, for reasons that I've long since forgotten, I'd used to open my first novel.

"As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. ."

I stumbled and hung up on the lines. Harold reminded me how they went, and I got all the way through.

Everyone held their breath. "Well?" Lentz said. "Go ahead, then. Get on with it. Pop the question."

I posed the query with which my firstborn book began.

"Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?"

Somewhere on the curve of unfathomable syntaxes lay the desired answer. Our network of nets took less than half a minute to triangulate it. "One."

"Way cool!" Trish exclaimed. She moved toward the terminal, excited. I noticed something wrong with the way she walked. Then the shoe dropped: she was on roller blades.

Plover broke out in a belly laugh. "This is for real?"

Trish took the microphone. "Open the pod bay doors, HAL!" Vectors danced across the screen, but Imp B kept its counsel. Trish pouted.

"It may be less impressive than it looks," I demurred. "I assume it just ignored everything in the riddle that it couldn't fit into the main predication."

"It's impressive enough," Lentz said, laconically. "Unfailing literal-mindedness may be the most impressive thing going."

The epigraph I read to Imp B, like the book it opened, came from a distributed nowhere. I don't know why I used it. If I had to gloss it, I would say the line was about walking head-on into the parade of not-you, somewhere along time's dirt track. No matter how long and elaborate history's procession, the eye meeting it along the muddy road is always first person singular.

That book came to me during our first year in B., the richest year in my life. I thought we were happy then, but who can say? Our happiness may never have been more than bravery. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That was my favorite line, that pilgrim winter. I liked the idea that we grew to become our attitudes. And attitude, during our stay in B., felt like happiness, deep and artesian.

We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winter starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.