Galatea 2.2

Through those first mythic days, we met our neighbors. We sashayed around them in the laundry room and halls. We shook hands and took their business cards, with none to give in return. We folded origami mnemonics from the syllables of their names. Then we forgot the mnemonics.

No matter. People in our building did not want to be called anything anyway. That was why they chose the place. That was why we ourselves lived there. Every soul in that horseshoe courtyard wanted to be left to its private invulnerability.

The nearer the next man's dossier, the more easily we avoided it. A hole breached our bathroom ceiling into 307 above. It tore open in the shower steam, peppering our tub with drywall. We tacked a linen sheet printed with lime-green woods across the gaping wound. As good as healed.

We were each other's entire populace. Even job hunting was a shared delight.

"Here's one for you, C. 'Good communications skills.' "

"Um, Beau? I think they mean modems and stuff."

We listened to each other's stories. We improvised. We pulled repertoire out of deep storage. The books we didn't read out loud to each other we paraphrased at great length. And we read, reread everything that time had prevented us from reading properly until then.

I might linger over a printed paperback opening for an afternoon, wondering if I wanted to commit. For, once past page 10, I was obligated to stay the campaign, however sordid. I read essays, history, biography — things that would never in a million years be on the List because they weren't English or weren't literature. I commenced that million-and-a-half-word associative memoir that Lentz would harass me with by name, a dozen years later.

I began to keep a reading diary. Not very dramatic as turning points go, but there it is. A lifetime later, rereading these notebooks, I saw that the lines I copied out, the words I deemed worth fixing forever in the standing now of my own handwriting, clumped up with unlikely frequency toward the start of any new book. The magic quotes thinned out over any book's length. The curve was linear and invariable. Perhaps writers everywhere crowded their immortal bits up toward the front of their books, like passengers clamoring to get off a bus. More likely, reading, for me, meant the cashing out of verbal eternity in favor of story's forward motion. Trapping me in the plot, each passing line left me less able to reach for my notebook and fix the sentence in time.

C. read Buddenbrocks and Anna Karenina. She reread Little Women. Everything made her weep. Everything. Well before the last page, she would drag her heels. Her bookmark tracked across the spine of a paperback like Zeno's arrow, frozen in infinite halfway points on its way to the mark. The first four hundred pages zoomed by in two or three nights. The last forty could tie her up for a month.

When she did finish anything, it convulsed her. I remember her reading Ethan Frome.

"I thought every American high schooler had to pass a test on that book. Right before they quizzed you on the Constitution," I teased her.

C. shrugged. "Maybe I'm not an American, Beau?"

The day she finished, it turned cold. I was in the front room, on the overstuffed chair we'd saved from street-side collection. C. was in the bedroom, on the mattress on the floor. Out of dead silence, I heard her distress call. "Beau. Ricky." Soft and desperate, already lost, pinned under a mountainside of rock.

I closed the distance at reflex speed. She was propped up against the wall, her eyes rimmed red with salt, her fist shaking, pressed against her mouth. "Oh, Beauie. Give me another chance. I've been so selfish and awful. I can be better. I know I can."

This was from Ethan Frome, of all places. Ethan Frome.

Each workday, C. put on her navy blue uniform and walked across the land-filled fen between our apartment and the Fine Arts. There she stood for eight hours at a go, saving the masterpieces of world painting from a poking and prodding public.

Museum guard may be the most tedious occupation in the nation's job register. But someone neglected to tell C. She came home glowing with minute enthusiasms, discoveries that could be made only by staring at a painted surface for days at a time. In particular, she loved being assigned to the Fine Arts' chestnut Colonial collection. Too late, I heard in her love the deportee's thrill, the fascination with a country hers only by the thinnest accident of birth.

For the two of us, America went antique. In that city, at that time of year, people moved purposefully through the streets, hinged to their shadows. Their black coats seemed coal seams against gray snow. In silhouette, they passed for protagonists in modernist Czech novels. They packed down subway stairwells and through turnstiles. I packed along with them, on the way to the trade press office where I worked.

I imitated them for C. at night, when I came home. I mimicked the exchange of pleasantries. "We must dine some evening." "The Net National Income has experienced another sudden surge." C. insisted I had a future, either on stage or in a brokerage.

The city posed like one of those portraits C. guarded, a Whistler or a Copley. The subway trains — state-of-the-art, burnished, Asian — were at heart archaic trolleys. They hauled their human freight back and forth to garden suburbs with odd monikers. Cars darted through the maze of surface streets, tomorrow's Studebakers.

My computer magazine outfit sat inside a rustic steel-and-glass exoskeleton that made the surrounding buildings look even more antiquated. The cityscape was something an American postprimitive might do, a nostalgic century from now.

C. and I lived it in advance retrospective. We took long walks along the prow of winter, reconnoitering, registering everything. We ingested the ochers and burnt umbers, the tints that tipped us to the fact that the present was far stranger than it let on.

Only the urban poor refused to go aesthetic. They spoke in tongues, human or otherwise, debating themselves or whoever else would listen. They handed the two of us soiled pamphlets covered in Carolingian minuscule. Or they slouched asleep, grease- and blood-caked, in the back of sleek light rails, riding out to the docklands district of progress's trade fair.

On nights when the windchill permitted, when the bitterness of interplanetary dark toyed with its food by easing a degree, I walked home. I cut across the public plots, the ancient Victory Gardens, all their victories lost, forgotten, or squandered. There, bent women tilled the rows in windup planetarium ellipses. The city's native foreigners, waiting for spring to plant a new crop for next year's war effort.

I made my way through the garden, the days getting dark early, just after four. Over the fusty expressway bridge, I headed into the home stretch, closing in on the place C. and I had made for each other, from out of total accident.

We lived from sense to sense. I can picture the neighborhood as if it were last evening. The street with the nineteenth-century name. The narrow, storefront scrap-metal emporia. The corner convenience grocer, hanging on by milk-quart markups and lottery tickets. The empty lots that did thousand-dollar days as instant baseball parking garages when summer still was. The abandoned warehouse that flourished briefly as a bar where youth in search of the chemically enhanced Authentic congregated and methodically slammed into itself, studying the dance floor as if meaning were there, in designer-drugged Arthur Murray footprint.

The neighborhood, the street, our apartment are still real. But the city where we spent those years gets more stylized, harder to see, the further I get from what the two of us used to call home.

And we did feel at home there, for a season. We could have pitched camp there forever. I belonged there more than in any of those toy-town props that loom like back-projection houses behind me and my brothers and sisters, in my album of faded black-and-whites.

And C.: C. lived there, too, for a while. For the first time since she'd learned how to plan, outcome didn't matter. It was all dress-up, in B. An oldies party. For two years — a long vacation — she found a fantasy that fit her.

But C. got homesick. It was inevitable. How could any town compete with a ghost? We'd lived in B. several months when we learned that C.'s parents were returning to Limburg. Both her folks had retired. The workday was over. A quarter century camping out on the South Side of Chicago was enough. It was time to give up and head home.

C. blamed herself. Had she stayed close, the folks might never have left. Twenty-some years had produced no permanent attachments; no tie kept them here. Only the children, and the three of them were already scattered all over the map. C.'s parents chose to see whether the little town of E. still existed, if it ever had.

The news devastated C. "I'm a miserable excuse for a daughter, aren't I?"

I was supposed to agree with her. I was supposed to tell her no.

Guilt was her move in the loop C. and her mother put each other through. The struggle was not over whether they loved each other, but over whether love was enough. They kept at one another, testing, accusing, defending. This endless attempt to determine who had betrayed the other put them both through hell. The kind of hell that would hurt far more, someday, when all scores were reconciled.

C.'s father, on the other hand: any flare-up, and Pap started whistling to himself, heading off to the nearest back room to fix things. I wondered how this old Dutch railroad man with his accented Chicago idioms—"Let's get the show on the road," "Now you're talkin'," "If it works, it works" — would ever fit back into a province whose chief industry since the shutting of the coal mines was geriatric care. He'd been away once before, in a German forced-labor camp. I always thought that first deportation was the reason he lit off for the States.

C. had been a bribe to keep her mother in this country. A baby, for a woman already middle-aged. "I'm responsible, Rick. I'm responsible for their dislocation in the first place. And now I'm responsible for their hauling up stakes again. It's too awful. They're old, Beauie. How are they supposed to put everything they own in a packing crate…? They'll never make it, once they're back there. Never."

"Don't be crazy," I said. "They never stopped living there."

Men are worthless; they always think the issue is what's at issue.

"They'll make it just fine," I reasoned. The last thing C. needed. "They have two dozen brothers and sisters. They have more nieces and nephews than we have cockroaches. In another five years, they'll forget this continent ever existed."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

C. took the rap for her own abandonment. Since my father's death, the bonds of my blasted family had mercifully weakened. So it surprised me to see how desolate someone could be at the prospect of seeing hers just once or twice a year. C. broke out in a rash and began vomiting. The doctor put her on a popular sedative. Nothing I did seemed to help at all. Except listening to the stories.

Frantic, C. dragged out all the stories that her mother raised her on. Stories invariably meant the war. All tales came back to that. How the Germans tried to steal the bell out of the church steeple to melt it down, and how something like God stymied them. How her mother nursed a teenage Wehrmacht conscript, a story that almost split C.'s parents before they were even married. How her father's friends in the labor camp joined together to grow parody Hitler mustaches. How he escaped, evading his pursuers by leaping out of an upper-story farm window and limping off, broken-legged, into the night. How the government up north hid The Night Watch in the marlstone quarries under Maastricht. How C.'s uncle, forced to stand guard over his fellow coal miners during the occupation, was tried for complicity in the postwar hysteria, and imprisoned again by his friends.

C.'s fellow students, in that class of mine, could not identify Treblinka or date that war on a pop quiz I'd once given them. C. knew these things from nightly dinner table conversation. As if the occupation had ended yesterday. If then.

Our life in B. closed, really, with that first phone call from Limburg. I lay in bed one Saturday dawn, thrilling to the sound of my C. speaking another language. Another woman lived in the body of the one I lived with. C. had been accommodating me, making herself into someone she thought I could love. I hadn't the first idea who this other person was.

She spoke a dialect that ran like the fabled brook through the heart of E. Out of her mouth flowed an unparsable cascade of phonemes. She talked with her mother for a long time. Then her father, ear to the transatlantic taxi meter, came on for a verbal minute waltz. Then a dozen or so aunts, each with a bit of news. I'd moved in with all of them, without knowing.

A flurry of dialect goodbyes, and C. hung up, wrung out. "They're home," she said. "Come on. Outside."

I put my hand to the pane. The windchill was sub-desperate. "Only if you've been good."

C. began to cry. I fell all over myself telling her I was joking.

We bundled as best we could and hit the street. Her aimlessness was always hard on me. But I'd learned by then not to ask for destinations.

Everything was still the same, she assured me. B. would go on being bearable if we could keep making our long, random walks. That day, we ended up in her beloved public gardens, now frozen over and empty for the winter. The day after, we kept our standing cantata date, at that church that had sung one a week for years before our arrival and that would go on singing them long after we were permanently out of earshot.

Things would be all right, she implied, if we just kept busy. In the evenings we played board games, or sang songs that I wrote for C.'s perfect, clear alto. We watched old films on a black-and-white set with tinfoil antenna, on loan from friends. Gradually, C. convinced me that movies have been going downhill since 1939.

At night, we read to each other — more biography, history, legend — following no program but delight.

Things would be fine if we kept out of the house whenever possible. Saturday morning was free day at the Fine Arts. C. was the only woman alive who would want to return in her spare time to see the same objects she'd just stood in front of for forty hours that week. "It's not the same, Beau. They're much more interesting when you don't have to worry about protecting them."

We went to see the first American retrospective of a German photographer neither of us knew. C. had not yet been assigned the special exhibition. So Saturday was the day. We crossed the swamp that B.'s Brahmins had a century ago called in the Dutch to drain. We strolled into the gallery and around the corner. My photo waited for me there, although I would never have expected it in any number of lifetimes.

First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. That room's geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. They'd waited two-thirds of a century for me to come along and swing into view, just past the photographer's shoulder.

The photo was itself a prediction of its own chance viewing. The three men prearranged the way I would someday see them. And now it seemed that every book I'd been dabbling in, all our random read-alouds, the long list of irrelevant classics I'd memorized for my master's, the swerves our narrative lives had taken all found their retroactive meaning in this one memory posted forward from the past.

The boys were C.'s grandfather and two great-uncles on their way to kermis, to one of those huwelijksfeesten she told me about. That was what the lens said. The caption said something altogether different.

German peasants on their way to a dance, 1914. The wrong celebration. The excluded guest list. But very much the same family album. I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before. Every text I'd ever read formed an infinite, convergent series calling out for the recursively called-for, the obvious next term. In that narrow space between what the picture handled and what the caption named, I had my story.

The following Monday, I went in to my tech editing job and gave my two weeks' notice. C. backed me every inch. "Buddy. When you have a calling, you don't worry about what it does to the résumé." Our nest egg had doubled during our year of work. We had a little time. We could buy a chance.

In fact, C. would have preferred a much deeper plunge into the precarious. Ours was always hedged. I had my programming skill to fall back on. When the account dipped into the danger zone, I freelanced. I worked the. smart-appliances gig. I wrote an options trading program for an exiled prince who needed several million dollars to return to his land and finance an election. As he explained, "These things can be very expensive, Rick."

Writing met all the expenses. At least, I meant it to. I must have written that book to gladden C. again. I say "again," but she may never have been. Perhaps to receive gladness you need a forwarding address. Maybe the Polish boy's death cheated her of that, long before her unborn soul stood in line for a residence.

Her transience made a pallet for my head. From the first, C.'s locus of non-time and un-place indexed my imagination's coordinate plane. That's why living with her completed me. Why being with her always felt like coming to rest, returning to some otherwise that no one else ever suspected.

She was my midmorning's hypothetical. The givens of my day revealed their thinnest convention, so long as I loved her. Here and now reversed in convex reflection, abidable, on the outside of her eyes.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours. I thought I might write my way to a place where my friend C. could live.

I used all the material I had at hand: the vanished Limburg she told me so much about. Her synaptic map of the walled city of Maastricht. The endless cousins who infiltrated my brain like thieves on bicycles in the night. The anthology poured into me through every gate except experience. The disruption of the time line circling our room. The parents, the uncles, caught between nations. The invasion of Trois Vierges, escalating into permanent violence. Big reaching down and annihilating little. Total war, always the same war, placing its embargo on the free passage of lives over the border.

I already possessed all the components for a page-turner. The secret document linking the displaced life back into its continuous frame. The immigrants' island in Chicago. Our apartment in B., with its courtyard and seasick saxophone scales. A chance trip we made by train to Detroit, where her brother lived. Always, always, that invisible village, the one that time mortared to a stump. The white diffraction pattern of crosses, and the villagers who volunteered to tend them. And that glance back, over the shoulder. The triple stopped lives, lined up on the muddy road, waiting for someone to pick up their story and extend it.

I wrote of C.'s country without once having seen it. I used her language, fragments of it, helped only by C. herself, who had never spoken anything but the secret dialect of family.

I made the beginner's mistake, the one no first novelist can help but make. I knew, deep at heart, that I would never have another chance to write a book. I could never again ask C. for that luxury. This was a one-shot deal, and to redeem her faith in me, I had to pack my read-aloud with everything I knew. Everything she taught me. Her surrogate home would have to be as wide, as uncrossable as this Atlantic century. If we had just this one dance, our tune would have to be flat-out tutti.

I guess there are two kinds of love letters. If you don't get out after the first three words, you need to press on, forever. C. taught me that, too. Desperation is always more moving than discretion, or more recognizable, at least, to the person addressed.

C. earned the daily bread, while I sat alone with the swelling handwritten canary legal pads. As I completed each new chapter, I read it to her. She came home, ate the dinner I made her, then settled in expectantly. She sat close. C. was partially deaf; she always staked out the front seat in classes. Mine especially.

I don't know who was more nervous, performer or audience. Chapter One, I assured her. I outfit myself for a trip to St. Ives.

I knew that this book would never be published. My audience was never more than C. I wrote for the way her eyes would start to water by chapter's end. How she would nod her head yes, place her hand on her chest, rise from the bed to grab me in the chair where I sat reading to her.

Yet that spell would not have worked if her private code of survival hadn't been cast in a public key. The tale had to be open enough to appeal to the random gallery-browser, snared by the lens. C. alone knew where all the nested frames had started.

Those nights of first draft will not happen again. Never, anymore, that simple passion. We lost it the minute I handed the gift over, the instant I read aloud the epilogue. Years later, when I started getting invitations to read to rooms of perfect strangers, I never had the heart.

Sometimes after I read a chapter to C., we made love. We climbed over each other, brown, frighteningly young, vulnerable, exploring the sad distances, warming each other after the radiators packed it in. Once, as I kissed the birthmark that stained the small of her back, this seemed to me the point of literature. I could not think of a book that was not either by, for, or about this. The elaborate seduction of the already attained. Reforestation of the wilds of time, the one biome where love will not die from lack of cover. I can see that birthmark with my eyes wide open, clearer now at fifteen years' distance than it was when an inch from my eye.

Sex was her present for transcribing her. My feeble thank-you for her sources. And the sounds we listened to then, the calls we made to each other in the winter dark were the vowels that all stories tried to find their way back to.

Afterward, without fail, we fell asleep, her back to my front, two spoons put away in the kitchen drawer of an abandoned cabin. C. was a foot shorter than I was. But when we lay like that, trig turned us to the same length.

The book became a mystery. A foregone conclusion. The more C. felt its surprise inevitability, the keener she got for the next installment. Each narrative riddle, each mental raadsel was an awkward, tenderfoot bow I tied for her, for the pleasure of her untying.

Jokes made her happy. I crammed my paragraphs full of every old joke I could remember.

Up top of each new chapter, I placed an epigraph. I copied out of my notebooks a quote that my same clumsy fingers had, earlier that year, just copied in. That book is the dance card of ideas we shared in the foyer of our joint life. A dance card where the partner's name was already printed in, a given. I wrote down only the steps themselves, the ideational dips and sways from the course of that evening when C. was my one date, the lone museum guard of all my thoughts.

Sometimes the steps were literal. One night, I read her a chapter so short it left us more time than even love could fill. She'd listened well; it was time for a walk. We drifted out, a slow, deliberate stroll along the parkway that flanked the trolley tracks out to the suburbs.

In the chapter, my contemporary technical editor, in a city much like B., had journeyed home to his immigrant mother in Chicago to find mysterious papers up in the family attic binding him to an unknown past. The passage back left C. expansive.

"I like that guy of yours," she said. "I like your Lithuanian graffiti on the sidewalks. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be the puppy raised by ducks?"

"Tell me."

She heaved a sigh. "I've been to more Polish weddings than I can count."

"Well, we know about your head for figures."

She laughed and flank-attacked. "Come on, you. Let's polka."

"The polka is no more than a spot of local color from out of Washington Square, I'm afraid."

"Don't be afraid," C. purred. She could be coy at times. Funny. I'd forgotten. "Here. I'll show you."

She stomped it out for me. I was comic, crippled, a laughingstock. But she stuck with me. Of all the countless thousands of things C. taught me, that polka might be the best. I picked it up somewhere along the length of that greenway down which we hurled ourselves, a couple of parka-packed, manic Polacks making tracks into the Arctic dark.

"It makes me sad, Beau," she told me, another chapter night, perhaps halfway through.

I panicked in the space of a phrase. "What? Something's off? I can fix it. Don't worry; it ends happily."

"Not that, silly. It makes me sad. You have this — work. And I have nothing."

"I don't get it. I thought you liked putting on that uniform."

"Oh, I did. And it's still the greatest job in the world. In some ways."

"What's wrong, then?"

She wasn't sure. She still loved the paintings. But they had started to fade into overlearned monochrome. Standing in place for so long began to fog her. The boss was growing creepy. She felt embarrassed explaining herself to others. Ashamed of doing less than she might.

"Maybe we should look around for a new job?" The "we" that would take such toll on her.

"It's the middle of winter. Nobody's hiring. Besides, what am I qualified to do?"

"Well, I don't know. Anything. If the job you have is making you crazy—"

"I know, I know. I need something more than just a paycheck. The problem is, I'm not ambitious. Put me on a rug, I'll lie there forever."

" 'Put me out on the lawn and I'll wail'?"

She clouded. "It's not funny. I'm sorry I ever showed you that picture." I tickled her to re-create that infant expression.

"Quit it!"

"I'll give you prickling."

"Don't, Beau. Not now. This is serious."

"So serious we can't—"

The obvious yes stopped me in mid-cliche.

"What's the matter?" I asked. Ready, already, to be dead.

"It's your story." She looked down, away. Anywhere but at me. "It makes me feel worthless. I know it's awful. Do you hate me?"

She got a new job. A friend of mine from the computer world tipped C. to an opening. Wire operator in a brokerage. "Not something I'm going to make a career of," C. joked.

But something to engage her, salve the sense of self. She came home animated again. As I fed her, she entertained me with tales of eccentric colleagues, wigged out on Opportunity Loss. Her accounts of that quintessential late-twentieth-century business delighted me. The parasitic middlemen, extracting margin from the news feed, the Teletype romances and tragedies. The spigot attached to the pipeline, leveraging profit and hedging loss as it trickled through capital's tap.

So I did the only thing imaginable. I went back and worked her new material into the book as well as I could. The market and mad brokers became yet another subplot. I fit it in, between jokes from the front and tales from the tech editing crypt, between the Maas and the Rhine, between the war and its permanently militarized peace, between the Great Personalities and the clueless lives, between fairyland and documentary fact, the aperture and the print, then and now, filthy lucre and the Fine Arts.

What did the finished thing mean? It meant that our private reservoir, when face-to-face with the outside, is all we have that might help a little. That book was no more than a structured pastiche of every report I'd ever heard, from C. or abroad. All a patchwork to delight and distract her. One that by accident ate her alive.

The key to that book, the one that preserves it for me, is that the triple braid — the magic driehoek of the photograph — fails to come together as expected. The lens does not have the last word, nor does the glance of the viewer, nor does the look of those boys, out over the shoulder of the photographer, back behind the lens. The dominant tense was now. The point of stories was what you did with them.

With my last chapter, the charm broke. I knew it in advance. I saved every trick I had for the end, to break her heart and win her for the present, forever. But of course, a return to feeling only made things worse. I read her the ending. Lovemaking stayed silent this time, skin more a checkpoint between us than a visa in.

"What will you do with it now?" C. asked.

"I don't know." The plot had gotten away from me. Escaped its frame. "Send it out, I guess."

Too rapidly, she agreed. "Of course. You have to."

Only the usual literary biography would have saved us. Fifteen years of waiting to be taken. Growing stronger, closer to each other on the mound of rejection slips, which we'd have burned for fuel.

The day we heard the book had been bought, we celebrated. Cheer felt forced and punch-drunk. C. assumed the virtue of excitement as bravely as she had managed each chapter up until then. But she was like a mother losing her preschooler to the talk-show circuit.

She tried to show enthusiasm for the production process. She pitched in, but her heart had bolted. She hated those grubbers in New York touching the manuscript, even to typeset it. It killed her to watch those fanners make their way into the brutal market. To see them join the ranks of the century's displaced.

She would never again listen to a word I wrote without suspicion. Endings, from now on, betrayed her. Simple associative fact: it wasn't even a question of remembering. What chance does story have against neurons that generalize from a single instance?

The week we learned the book's publication date, C. received an offer of promotion. The brokerage wanted her to run their Operations cage. The jump, steep and quick in coming, surprised no one but C. She was alone in never knowing how competent she was.

The offer could not have come at a better time. C. needed something, and nothing that I could give. A hurried, three-week trip to Limburg to check on her folks left her edgier than ever. Not even walks worked any longer. A real career might be no more than a changeling baby. But even a changeling can take up the slack of care.

She had some days to decide. We spent them spinning skeins of reassurance. "You'll be great at it. They wouldn't have asked you otherwise."

The day she went in to accept, I prepared a feast. I made decorations. Funny little signs with cartoons of C. on a pyramid of brokers, cracking a whip. Hand-lettered posters reading "Book That Cruise" and "Retirement by 35."

I could tell, watching her come up the courtyard, that celebration was a horrible mistake. She pounded up the stairs, slammed the door, and held it shut behind her with all her hundred and five pounds, sobbing.

"Beauie, we need to get out of this place."

I tried to hold her, proffer all the worthless comforts. "Okay," I managed. "I'm game. Where to?"

The last place. Worse than I expected. "I want to go back to U."

Imp B already pushed the envelope. B hadn't a clue what cats were, or sacks, let alone wives. But it seemed to know how to count them, or not count them, as the case demanded.

If A had been an exercise in verbal pattern recognition, B was a foray into computational linguistics. It knew things like over and under, right of or left of, inside or out. Even that far, I doubted whether it comprehended these containers or whether it just manipulated them cleverly enough to pass. Then again, I began to doubt whether I myself could define the difference.

B could handle syntax. It had a rudimentary sense of the parts of speech and how they operated on each other. And it began to cross the threshold into semantic content. Lentz once or twice tacked on a new subnet to handle different routines — a noun-phrase decoder or a short-term recognition scratch area. In fact, I suppose we were up to Imp B.4 or better.

Lentz assured me that B would handle its own knowledge representations. The frames, the inheritance of classification qualities and exceptions, the scripts: all would fall out as a result of the way B stored associated input. But even in its minute domains, B had to deal with numbingly different kinds of knowledges. With nouns alone, what you could do with "pattern" varied without limit from what you could do with "matching" or "machine." I'd lost count of the number of neurodes involved. It had grown big, complex beyond belief. A glitch now set us back whole days at a time. The thing was a monster, distributed, unchartable, out of control. And yet Lentz's brain, or mine, was hundreds of millions of Imp B's wide. We could push that matter a little longer, if only just.

We were still experimenting with the size of layers. Bigger was not always better, Lentz told me.

"Life, Marcel, in case you on the humanistic side of the tracks haven't grokked this yet, involves a series of trade-offs."

"Yes, we're onto that."

"Now. The trade-offs in input layer size. Well, the smaller the layer, the better it generalizes. The larger, the more it can learn to fit into an associative grid."

"The better it is at generalizing, the worse it is at acquiring new associations?"

"The poet's a blooming genius. Now we know how you earn your grant money."

"Does it follow that the more facts it has, the harder it is to take in new facts?"

"Thirty-five is about when that starts to happen, Marcel. You begin to think, 'Well, I more or less understand how things work. Do I really want to disassemble tens of thousands of tangled, semiaccurate beliefs on the off chance that I might be able to bring one small receptor field into better focus?' "

'Tell me about it. I'm there."

"Don't worry, little boy. You've a few tricks yet to pick through. And a few years yet to pick through them. I mean, you're lucky I've taken you on. Aristotle wouldn't accept any student still young enough to have a sex urge."

"Not a problem, at the moment."

On days when Lentz engaged himself with design philosophy, he grew expansive, almost pleasant. On days when he built things, he was fun. I tried to keep the soldering gun in his hand and ignore the baiting as much as possible.

"Now: what about the size of the hidden layers? Do you want them bigger or smaller than your input layers?"

"I'm sorry. I give up. We're going to have to turn all the cards over."

"Come on, think it out. Consider the translation impedance. Another trade-off. The better the resolution, the more susceptible the net becomes to random noise. Think of B as a curve fitter. ."

"That's all our brains are? Curve fitters?"

"It's a big 'all,' friend. The curve we are trying to fit is as long as existence. As many dimensions. The fact that we can get the infinite data stream to cohere into lumps at all has turned men with as much native intelligence as your friend Plover into mystics."

"Here we go. Time to slander Harold."

"It's not slander. The man makes his claims public. 'Meanings extractable from a given linguistic configuration may be neither convergent, bounded, nor recursively enumerable.' Or some such rubbish. He seems to think that because 'context' is infinitely extensible, there can be no neurological calculus of interpretation."

"And you, Engineer?" I tweaked, waiting until he had his hands full of printed circuit and his head deep in the cage. "Do you think that because you are virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale?"

"Now, Marcel. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Dunno. Let's ask Harold."

"Hn. I'd rather get back to the subject. Sometimes I think the human brain is just one long open parenthesis. So. Tell me. How big do you want your various output layers to be?"

"I guess that would depend on how big an answer we are expecting from any given subnet."

"Well done. You're getting cagey. We'll have you writing NSF proposals in no time." Lentz's sarcasms were mellowing with age. "Would you concede, then, that many of our output layers could consist, in theory, of a single neurode, since the cyborgs think that every quest can be rephrased as a series of yes-or-no questions?"

"I wish the lit critters would catch on to that."

"Yes. Handy, isn't it? Cleans up a lot."

"Engineer, can I ask you something? If you're not a mystic and you're not a cyborg, what in creation are you?"

" 'Creation' is a loaded word, Marcel. I guess I'm a lot of little delta rules running recurrently, evaluating and updating themselves."

'Tell me a different story. I'm not sure I like that one."

We were well into the millions of connections when B seized up for good. We'd made so many tortuous increments, we'd stopgapped so many glitches that I did not, at first, see this collapse as fatal.

"John is a brother of Jim's," I told it. B turned the fact into a stream of hieroglyphic vectors that changed its layout imperceptibly. "Who is Jim's brother?"

"John," Imp B replied. Reliant knight. Already it outperformed some aphasies.

"Who is Jim?"

"John's sister." That much was fine. I could live with that answer. In fact, it taught me a thing or two about my own presumptive matrix.

I continued, "John gives Jim apples. Who gets apples?"

"Jim gets apples."

"Jim is given the apples by whom?"

"Jim is given the apples by John."

"Jim eats an apple. The apple is sour. Jim throws the other apples away. Why does Jim throw the other apples away?"

At that point, B's cranking time became unendurable. It returned something like, "Jim throws the other apples away because the apples are given by John."

"No," I told it, or words to that effect. "Start again. Why?"

"Jim throws the apples away. She does not want them."

A marginally acceptable answer. Maybe insight hid away somewhere in that tacit implication. But maybe the damn thing was bluffing. Its vagueness depressed me: the slow tyro during story hour, doomed from birth to a career in food service.

"Why doesn't she want them?"

"She doesn't eat them. So she can't want them."

This alien proto-intelligence differed just enough from sense to make my head throb. Still, we lay within acceptable performance margins. I went on to torture it with, "Jim hits John. Why does Jim hit John?" B had one of its damning seizures. It cranked all afternoon, resetting itself, grabbing randomly at a thousand possible but skewed associations.

Thrashing, it tried a proverb we'd hammered into it the week before. "Jim hit John because one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole barrel."

When pushed, it finally failed to answer all together.

Some crucial frameshift fell outside B's ability to effect. It could not say, John's apples angered Jim, or No reason, or There could be bad blood I haven't heard about.

It could not even say I don't know.

It lacked some meta-ability to step back and take stock of the semantic exchange. It could not make even the simplest jump above the plane of discourse and appraise itself from the air. Although it talked, in a manner of speaking, speech eluded B.

Its brain faltered at that Piagetian stage where the toy disappeared when placed behind a screen. It could not move ideas around. All it could move around were things. And the things had to be visible at all times.

Something was screwy with the way B passed symbolic tokens among its levels. It might grow knowledge structures forever, as fecund as a field tilled with representational fertilizer. But its knowledge about knowledge would remain forever nil. And no patching or kludging on Lentz's part could set it right. B's deficiency seemed to be a by-product of the way its constituent nets spoke to one another. The way we'd linked them into the grand schematic.

We postponed the inevitable for as long as we could. I came into the office one evening and found Lentz behind his desk, inert. "I want to change the architecture." Ahab, well out of port, announcing the slight broadening of plans.

I was too invested to feel demoralized. Maybe I had some naïve image of taking a magnetic snapshot of B and somehow porting it intact into new and more capable digs.

Retrain several million connections from scratch. Had I realized, I might have signed off the project. But I had no incentive to realize. My last month and a half of literary effort had produced no more than half a chapter of train, crossing the snow-lined mountains toward sunny neutrality. I stopped at every other sentence to run to the library and verify that I wasn't unconsciously plagiarizing. As a result, the thing read like a Samuel Beckett rewrite of the Ancrene Riwle.

U. made changing machine architectures almost trivial. It stretched credibility, but that sleepy hamlet with the two-dollar movie theater and the free corn boil at summer's end also sheltered a National Supercomputing Site. The town, fallen through the earth's crust into a dimension where nothing had changed since 1970, consequently had a jump on the next millennium, the advantage of the late starter. Four rival pizza parlors, each named "Papa" somebody, each opening whenever it felt like it. Bars where fraternities split Thursday-night twenty-five-cent plastic cups of beer. And the most advanced, block-long cybernetic wonderland that a paranoid race to preserve faltering world dominance could fund.

I imagined my network's first freshman comp assignment: "Convince a total stranger that she would not want to grow up in your hometown." Son of B could whistle its answer to that one in the dark. The latest nationally funded supercomputer to come of age in U. had itself already lived through half a dozen incarnations. Nor was it really a single machine. It was a collection of 65,536 separate computers, chained like galley slaves into inconceivable, smoothly functioning parallel. Depending on the benchmark, the connection monster could outperform any computing assemblage on earth.

The machine was so powerful that no one could harness it. So notoriously difficult was its programming that major scientists and their graduate-student franchises had already begun to flee U. for sites a tenth as potent but at least manageable.

"We're moving over to the connection monster, Marcel." "Lentz, you're kidding me. This game can't interest you that much." "What? I'm not afraid of that thing. How hard can it be?" "Hard. Harder than humiliating your colleagues can be worth." "You underestimate my colleagues. Besides, don't forget the undertaking's empirical interest."

"Don't bullshit me, Engineer. This thing is all smoke and mirrors. And you know it."

But he knew, too, that he had me hooked. I wanted to see the next implementation up and running on a host tailor-made for neural nets. Lentz wrote a proposal credible enough to pass itself off as real science. By that time, the keepers of the connection monster were so hard pressed to salvage their hardware from neglect that they were taking all comers.

The man was dangerous when he had a plan. He meant Imp C to be profoundly different in nature. He wanted to push the notion of the self-designing system up a level. Reweighting prewired connections would no longer suffice. Imp C would be able to strengthen or weaken the interactions between entire distributed subsystems. It would even grow its own connections from scratch, as needed.

Lentz wanted to get hundreds, perhaps thousands of large, interdependent nets up and running at the same time. He saw them passing endless streams of ideational tokens among themselves. The net of networks would churn at all times, not simply responding passively to new data inputs. When input stopped, it would interrogate itself in ongoing, internal dialogue. Its parts would quiz one another, associate and index themselves, even when alone. Imp C would undertake constant self-examination and reorganization.

Lentz meant to distribute these chattering subsystems not just across the connection monster's 65,536 processors but across other various and specialized hosts. Each task communicated with the others via high-speed fiber-optic cable. C, if it could be said to live anywhere at all, lived spread all over the digital map.

"Keep out of my hair for a few weeks, Marcel."

"That should be easy."

Lentz, preoccupied, ignored my crack. "Just until I dig the foundations."

The order suited me. I had copy to proofread. I'd also agreed to a number of classroom visits, hoping to justify my freeloading existence.

The class visits were an embarrassment for everyone. Students sat polite but stunned in front of me, their desks circled like Conestogas under attack. The look of shame on each face asked how I could have missed the fact that the age of reading was dead. "How do you work? Where do your ideas come from?" they asked, hoping I would take the hint and go away.

I answered as best I could. But I couldn't take a step toward the first of these questions without lying. Luckily, lies were all they expected.

When class visits ended, I sat in my office, proofing the book I no longer remembered having written. I went through one methodical ruler-line of text after the other until the Primary Visual Area back in my occipital lobe started to bleed.

I tried to read without comprehension. One catches more errors that way. But sense pressed itself on me, kicking and screaming. The book's style perched on the brink of nervous disintegration, the most depressing fairy tale I'd ever read. And the only person more depressed than I was my editor, sitting on my unfulfilled contract.

I knew the narration meant to be double-voiced with my protagonist, a resident surgeon living an extended mental breakdown. My depiction of a society in collapse now struck me, if anything, as hopelessly tame compared to those vignettes shoring up the hourly news. But as I read, I kept thinking: Someone has to find this author before he does something desperate.

I spent the first week exterminating typos. The second I spent improvising, in the margins of the last pages, some semblance of redemptive ending. I scratched out the manuscript's final descent. In its place, I had my collapsing surgeon hold out his hands, catch the woman who had failed to save him. I added a last-minute postscript that returned the tale to the light of its source, the reader, untouched by tragedy. And yet the story still radiated a darkness so wide my pupils could not attenuate.

My eleventh-hour triage demoralized me even more than the first writing. I felt a despair I had not felt while still the teller. Not a despair for my career, which had never been more than a happy accident. What lost me, listening to my own news account, was learning that I didn't have the first idea who I was. Or of how I had gone so emptied.

I kept at the reconstruction. I no longer had the heart to send out so bleak a deformity into the world. I worked in short spurts, all I had the strength for, surgically reinserting the no that children in the disputed zone need if they are to escape to daylight. Work picked up at evening, when the building reverted to native, archaic silence. I'd hack at my story for half an hour, stand, stretch, warm my imagination by the purely symbolic fireplace, then sit back and try to cure the next nihilist paragraph.

I wandered the abandoned halls, a world unspeakably far from the Center. The plank floorboards creaked even before I stepped on them. They settled under the weight of generations of scholar undergraduates who had gone on to die at the desks of their bank vice presidencies. The passages smelled of gum and hair oil, ammonia, gargle, damp fiber, wax, shellac, chemicals from the days when chemistry was still a liberal art.

Even the steam pipes reeked a Georgian, paint-peeling grace. In the incandescent dusk, the building gave no hint of the internationalist polemics just now attempting last-ditch CPR on a discipline choked to death by curatorial gentility.

The manuscript took over my office. I taped pages up around the room, the way C. and I had once taped our homemade time line around the bedroom in B. I browsed them, drifting from one to the other, a well-meaning museum-goer gazing at an impenetrable Dadaist retrospective. I could find no further entrance. My corrections were overdue. My surgeon's fight against child genocide had become mine, and like him, I was failing to stem the end.

I worked late on the last night before my extended deadline. I revised until I needed to come up for air. I threw open the office door and fell into the hall. But I decompressed too quickly, giving myself the bends. The Georgian familiarity shrank in front of me, as overcome as the text I'd just been giving intensive care.

I made my way to one end of the main hall for a drink of water. I steadied and drank, but the sip tasted of heavy metals. I turned, facing into the empty passage. Shock knocked me backward a step, against the fountain. I wasn't alone. At the far end of the corridor, a ghost condensed from empty silence.

The apparition swayed in vacuum. My next blink would disperse her back into the ether. She stood browsing a notice board, oblivious of my existence. A whip-thin lamia in a pageboy haircut, absurdly young, in blue jeans and sleeveless orange cotton cling, despite the irreversible autumn. First day of adulthood. Setting out. She carried books under her arm, and a clump I hoped was a jacket. Something held her rapt: the corkboard, smothered in announcements.

I tried to beat a path back to my office without startling her. But the floorboards betrayed me, popping more violently the lighter I slid. She turned to look with mute, uncomprehending fear, a deer forgiving its killer. And with the same slow indifference, she shot a last glance at the notices and withdrew.

I don't know who I saw. Not the grad student she must have been, to let herself into the building at this hour. Not C. at thirty-three. Nor C. a life younger, when I'd met her. Nor any of those girl-women who had obsessed me, before C. If this was anyone I knew, I no longer recognized even the association.

Yet I felt like running after this profile, onto the chill Quad. Calling her back, laughing, excited, furious. What do you mean, coming here? Bad luck; bad judgment. Hadn't we agreed never to meet on this earth? Not after I'd gone prematurely dead, and you, a little girl in a T.

I could learn her name. She would carry prosodie weight to her— plans, a past — sad, pragmatic reasons why she haunted this building, working late. Doubtless, she brayed when she talked, slaughtered her checking account, complained about the freshmen she had to render literate, suffered paralyzing anxiety over her approaching prelims.

But for this one surprise ambush, the image of slender pageboy— a pair of bare shoulders, a gaze in profile down a fading hallway— stood in for all the books I'd failed to pull off. She was the sum of all stories I'd never now attempt. The placeholder for the long miss I'd made of experience. The loss fiction fails to repair. The fixedly ephemeral. A. at twenty-two.

Lentz almost glowed over the phone. "We've knocked it, Marcel. Pulled it off. The next step that everybody else has been after."

"Everyone else? Real scientists don't waste their time with make-believe."

"They would if they could get away with it. You think they like all that bloody reductionism? They only put up with those shuffling baby steps in the hopes that they'll run someday. That we'll all soar."

"Okay, Engineer. Enough iambs. Tell me what we've done."

"I've tested it. It's brilliant. B's problem was that it could manipulate idea tokens, but not ideas about those tokens. Right?"

"If you say so."

"We need a beast that can make second-order shifts. One capable of reflection. That can do with situations what B could only do with things. It's so simple: put it in the hardware. We need a C implementation that runs a fully functional simulation of a B-type implementation as one of its own component subsystems."

"A simulation within a simulation? One mock-up running another copy of itself?"

"Sound familiar? It should. It's you, Marcel. Where all your homesickness comes from. Your sense of never more than renting. All your picture galleries. Your private library of desire."

"Wait a minute. Back off. I'm the humanist here, remember? You're just in charge of the circuitry."

"Right. Sorry. My humble etceteras. I'm bringing the new incarnation up tonight. Get over here first thing tomorrow."

He didn't even give me the luxury of weighing the invitation.

When I arrived the next morning, Imp C was up and running.

We still dealt out of Lentz's office. Our gate was still the same junker terminal, the same jumble of antique I/O. I had to remind myself that the linkup hid, on its far end, the most powerful massively parallel hardware the combined public and private sectors could buy.

Lentz sat me down in the old chair. "Go ahead. Ask it something."

"Ask…? You mean you've started the training already?"

"Well, this is difficult to explain. I still had all B's valences, the complete multidimensioned array of its connection weights sitting around in various files. So I thought, why not use them as a test? Let C run our actual B as its puppet modeler. It — rather took off."

"I don't get it. I still don't get it."

"Well, you know, the plan this time out was to go for full recurrence. The data set you put on the input layer works its way through, not once, but many times. No limit to how many times it can trip and reset the same weights on its way—"

"Yeah, yeah. I follow the mechanics." I didn't know what made me so testy. I felt the experiment getting away from me. "I just want to know how it can be responsive already, without training."

Lentz seemed embarrassed. "It seems to be training itself."

"Oh, Engineer. Don't give me—"

I slapped my bike helmet against the desk in disgust. Only a graze, but it cracked the shell cleanly. Lentz broke out in a sharp laugh.

"High deductible on that insurance policy of yours, Marcel." He started again. "It seems that C is capable of using different constellations of B's associative pairings as its points of comparison. It's triangulating. Testing itself for internal consistency. It's generalizing about the nature of its own generalizations."

"It's running already? Before I give it input?"

"It's running constantly. It makes its own input now."

"You mean, it can anticipate new material. You're trying to tell me it's thinking."

Lentz shrugged. He held his palm out to the microphone.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning," the voice-synthesizing hardware replied.

"How are you this morning?"

"Fine, thank you. You?"

I killed the mike. I turned to Lentz, quivering. "Where did it get that 'You'? Not 'And how are you?' We didn't even teach B the long form. How on earth did this one jump to the casual?"

"I don't know. It got it somewhere. From examining B."

"Are you pleased with yourself?"

"We all do what we can, Marcel."

"Shh. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the box."

Imp C paused a moment, then came back with, "What do you mean?" It seemed a stock enough answer. When in doubt, put the ball in the other guy's court.

"I mean, you must be happy to be so bright." Toss it a curve. See if it could handle the colloquial.

"Many things are so bright without being happy."

Impressive, even grammatical, although a bit clumsy. Still and all, it sounded to me more like hollow syllogism than philosophy.

"For instance?" Would it recognize the form as a question?

"For instance: light."

Imp C, I concluded, was whistling past the graveyard. Still, I decided to play fair. To give it as much benefit of doubt as I had to give anyone. I was middle-aged, and had myself only recently learned that no one hears what anyone else says.

"Do you think it's harder for smart people to be happy?"

Imp C thought for a minute. "Harder than what?"

I laughed out loud. Perfect. Perfect. The thing was an idiot savant.

"Jesus, Marcel," Lentz shouted. "Watch the input levels. You'll blow its eardrums out, cackling like that."

"Harder than if they weren't so smart," I explained to Imp C.

"Are you so smart while you are still being happy?"

Wonky idiom, even for an electronic DP. And little more than evasive maneuvers, again. Yet evasion, too, was a form of intelligence.

Then I let myself hear the machine's reply. It floored me. I was more than a blank irritant to C. I, too, was a token to manipulate. I had weight. I was part of Imp C's real-world calculus.

"I don't know. How can I tell if I am happy or not?"

"Ask yourself if you are not happy."

"Lentz," I said. "This is incredible. I can't—"

"It's fast, isn't it? I came up with a couple of quick-index algorithms. Idea caches, you might say. But I never expected we'd get this level of performance out of the new system."

"My God. It's not the performance, Lentz. It's — the performance."

"Yes," he agreed. The thing silenced even him.

"Look what it's doing. Telling me to ask myself. How can it do that? Think what it has to figure, just to stay in the ballpark. It knows 'happy.' It knows that 'happy' is a good thing. It knows 'happy' is something people are or aren't. It knows that I'm a person. It knows about questions, and that questions are something you 'ask.' It knows how to turn an interrogative into a statement, and scour a statement to see which questions might fit. Okay. Maybe it doesn't know, doesn't really understand all the things it conjures up by asking. ."

All the things that made my voice catch to try to explicate.

"But it does understand enough to see that I'm not going to know anything, even about myself, except by putting myself the question."

"That's a lot," Lentz conceded.

"It's everything. Where did it…?" But I'd lost patience with asking the human. I needed to interrogate the source.

"You make me happy," I told Imp C. I waited, sick, to see what it would say.

"Then I'm happy, too, Rick."

Too much, even for a willing victim. Over the line. My credibility snapped, as it should have, long before.

"Hold it. How did you know my name?" B never did. We gave it any number of proper names, but never our own.

At the crucial question, of course, C went silent. That, more than anything, gave the show away. A machine might have gone on innocently covering itself, even after the game was lost.

I wheeled on Lentz, not bothering to muffle the mike. "All right, klootzak. What the hell's going on?"

Lentz's eyes were watering. Unable to hold back any longer, he spit his dentures across the office. He whooped like a howler monkey. He tried to catch his breath, but each attempt left him more hysterical than the last. "I'm sorry, Marcel. You were — you were so. ."

A shamefaced Diana Hartrick appeared in the doorframe. The truth finally hit.

"You?" My disbelief was worse than any accusation. "You let him set me up? You helped him?"

"It was a joke?" she wavered.

"To humiliate me? That's funny?"

"Oh, grow up, Marcel. Nothing's humiliating except this over-reaction of yours."

"You grow up, Engineer." My tone stopped us all dead. It startled me as much as it did them. "So this is human intelligence. This is what we're trying so hard to model."

I'd been an idiot. Two seconds of reflection should have told me that C couldn't have commanded even a fraction of the material it spewed out. A babe in the woods would have seen through this. Trish Plover would have been, like, really. I myself would never have bitten, had I still been a child. Yet I'd believed. I'd wanted to.

Lentz tried to collect himself. But the minute he caught Diana's eye, he lost it all over again. Diana followed suit, helpless. Her snickers rasped somewhere in her throat.

"I'm sorry. It sounded funny at the time."

"Not without clinical interest," Lentz inserted. "Reverse Turing Test. See if the human can pass itself off as the black box. Don't you want to know the mechanics?"

"The mechanics? It's a goddamn tin-can telephone. Lady at the other end of the string, trying to sound like a clunky New Age self-help guide."

" 'Many things are so bright without being happy,' " Lentz mimicked. Then he gagged on another round of phlegm.

I stood up, shaking my head.

"Don't leave, Marcel. We really do have a new simulation up and running in there. A good one."

Diana's turn to snort.

"Lentz," I said softly, "I'll never trust you again."

"Don't need your trust. I just need you to train Imp C."

I stopped, waiting to hear what I was going to say. "Imp D."

The two colleagues, divided on every issue except novelists' gullibility, broke into relieved tittering.

The sound set me off again. "You bastards. So how does this little stunt of yours make you feel?"

"Fine, thank you." Diana smiled. "You?"

I had nothing to say. And I said it.

"Oh, Rick. Admit it. You loved the act while it lasted."

I looked at her. Somewhere in her couple hundred eye muscles was the awful suggestion that talking to me made her happy.

"Barring that," Lentz intruded, "admit that you bought the whole shebang."

I giggled. I couldn't help myself. "Yep," I said. "Totally suckered." Alive. Admit it. 'That's me."

Diana's apology came in the form of a lunch invitation. It shamed me. She'd made the last overture, and I'd never gotten back to her. Not that I singled her out. I wasn't getting back to anyone. I bought an answering machine, and cowered behind it, screening calls. Then I stashed even that, turning the ringer off for long stretches. The hermit thing became easier with practice. I even thought about writing about it, until I remembered I already had.

But Diana searched me down. "How about lunch? I owe you." Face-to-face. Collegial. Gap-toothed, like the Wife of Bath. There was no hiding.

Lunch was fun, given everything. Fish sandwiches from a notorious pool-hall dive in campustown. Diana was voluble. In the labs, she always struck me as the person I wanted to be when I grew up. Over fish sandwiches, she seemed young enough to be compromised by eating with someone my age.

"How's the Don?" I asked. She looked blank. "Mr. Quixote?"

She groaned. "I don't want to talk about it."

"No, but Harold probably does, huh?"

She flashed a stare at me. What exactly were we talking about? "I should sic him on you. That would simplify matters all around."

"Sorry. I kind of have my hands full at the moment. After we feed Cervantes to the machine, Harold can come and chat up Imp D."

Diana puckered, amused despite herself. "Know why I think the whole thing is infinitely ditsy?"

"Because it's me and Lentz?"

'There is that. But I was thinking how you want to put everything into words. Think about this. You want to make a data structure that will say everything there is to say about 'ball.' You have to have facts for roundness, cohesion, size, weight. You have to have all sorts of probabilistic rules. It's more likely to be ten inches in diameter than ten feet."

"Unless it's a wrecking ball."

"It's more likely to be made of rubber or plastic or wood than of, say, plant fiber."

"Unless it's a softball, or a cotton ball. ."

"Or a fuzzball." Diana laughed.

"Or a spitball. Or a ball of yarn."

"Enough already. You're making me crazy. The list of predicates is — forever. And the exception list is even longer. You can talk through a whole encyclopedia, but you won't yet have said 'ball' itself. Let alone what you do with one. What one means. How to throw one. How a kid feels when he gets one for a birthday present."

"But that's where associative learning comes in, isn't it? We don't have to enumerate all those qualities. If the machine keeps coming across them, and sometimes people are gazing into crystals, and sometimes they're pitching a curve, and sometimes they are having—"

"That's just the problem. Any baby can hold a ball in its hands. Your machine can't. How many words is it going to take to say what that globe feels like? The heft of the thing. The possibility."

"Red rubber sphere that you can chuck. ."

"Richie. Richie."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that no one called me that. Besides, it sounded good in her mouth.

"Are you going to do 'red' as fitting between x and y angstroms?"

"Not at all. That's the classical AI people. Chen and Keluga. We're going to do red sky, red-faced, red flag, in the red, red dress. ."

"Sexist. Okay. Go on to 'sphere.' How is the poor thing supposed to get 'all the points equidistant from a center' when it has never seen distance? When it can't possibly measure?"

"Good point. You mean we have a problem. No symbolic grounding."

"Symbolic grounding." Diana grinned, and wiped the tartar sauce from her lower lip. "That's the phrase I was looking for."

"You're saying a reading machine is hopeless. We should give it up."

"I'm saying, if you're going to make such a thing, you have to give it eyes, hands, ears. A real interface onto the outside."

"The literary theorists think a human's real-world interface is problematic at best. And greatly overrated. They say even sense data must be put into symbols."

"The literary theorists have to get tenure. And they have no hard facts to get tenure with. They have to fight for a slice of a pie that's getting smaller every day."

"Getting smaller because of people like you."

I was teasing. She took me at face value. "Yes, maybe. But tell me, then. Why do your people need to either emulate mine, attack us as nature molesters, or dismiss us as irrelevant self-deluders?"

"My people are scared shitless of your people, that's why. They're terrified that Dad and Mom really do love you best."

Diana smiled like a teenager. "Are you kidding? We're the problem child. Don't you remember? You heard the parents tell us never to play with matches."

We walked outside into a day remade. The trees had stripped bare, but for a moment, I couldn't tell if they were coming or had just gone. We two were the only ones on the whole street wearing coats. A pack of earphoned roller bladers with wraparound shades so silvered they couldn't see almost mowed us down.

My disorientation was total. "Wasn't it almost winter when we went inside?"

"It's getting so that these once-in-a-century freak weather spells occur every other week."

"That's the fault of you scientists."

"Doubtless."

"It's still nippy. Have I lost my mind, or are those women wearing shorts?"

"Youth is never cold," Diana lamented.

Ten years ago, fifteen, I'd pitied those who'd let their skin go papery and their blood thin. Back then, this had been my haunt. Now I'd lost the lease, could not even name the street.

"I want it to freeze. Freeze hard."

"It's going to freeze," Diana guaranteed. "You've forgotten. It's rough out in these parts. Four months of interstellar blackness. Deep space. Zero. The air loads up with sleet BBs, with nothing between here and Pennsylvania to slow the wind."

"How long have you been here?"

"Five years. You know the funny thing? I never thought of myself as a Californian when I lived there."

We walked toward campus. "Does the brain have a 'decaying leaf recognition' subsystem? A 'sheepskin coat just back from the cleaners' subsystem?"

"I know what you mean," Diana said. "Smell is everything, isn't it? When I smell the air right now, I think, I know what's coming. Time to batten down."

"I think, how can I leave all this?"

She said nothing for the longest time. Then Diana said, "Thrill."

"Yes. Thrill."

It took me until the Quad, until we walked over the spot, to make the connection. To realize what day it was. You see, it didn't feel like November. Same day, different year: I no longer knew what people meant by that. Four days later, it snowed.

"Symbolic grounding," I told Lentz.

D, our first implementation to run on the sprawling community of connection machine, was my slowest charge so far. But parallel architecture and several software twists made it the one with the most astonishing reach. D came into this world recursive. It took forever to grasp that two was the integer just past one. But the instant it got that, it had infinity in the same breath. It could watch itself learn. When it got "Dogs bark," it also got "Baby says, 'Dogs bark.' " The breakout, when it came, was going to be unbelievable.

The shape of its brain was generative. It matched the arc of an uncoiling sentence. But deep syntax wasn't enough. Words weren't enough. "The policeman gave the motorist his badge," I told it. "Who does 'his' stand for? The policeman gave the motorist his license." Now who?

How much would D have to know before it could get that one? Tracing my own inference process dizzied me. The linked list of properties hanging off the world's every object required a combinatorial explosion of sense. But to see even part of what the host symbols stood for required that D first see.

"We have to give it eyes," I decided. "Why train it with all the properties of a ball when we can show it what a ball is?"

"Nice leap, Marcel," Lentz said. "I've been waiting for you to make it."

"And here I was afraid you were going to kill me for bringing it up."

"On the contrary. In fact, I still have a passive retinal matrix lying around intact from work I did last year. We can paste it in."

"Now, where the hell did I put that eyeball? It was around here somewhere."

Lentz laughed. "All right. So the work habits could be more systematic."

Sight was not the sudden beamburst I hoped for. Revision E could convert objects into retinoptic neurode maps. Training got it to associate words with each visual clump. But navigating by this crayon cartography resembled sewing silk with a Lincoln log needle.

I gave it several common objects, in stiff cross section. E made only static traces: photos, not footage. I sorely doubted that the speckles of light and dark did anything to round out the ball in E's associative memory. We boosted the resolution. Added bits for color, sixteen million shades. Whether E traveled those surfaces or twirled them in its mental space I couldn't say.

The creature in Frankenstein learned to speak by eavesdropping on an exiled family, the most astonishing act of language acquisition until Taylor's beloved Tarzan, the books on which the best reader I ever met grew up. Frankenstein's creature had his chattering family and a knapsack of classics: Paradise Last, Plutarch's Lives, Goethe's Werther. E, like Tarzan, learned to talk more or less on print alone.

"I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects," Shelley's creature says somewhere. "I learned and applied the words, 'fire,' 'milk,' 'bread,' and 'wood'. ."

One day I would teach this speech to a machine that had learned to read. Maybe not E, or F, but G, or son of G. And my machine would understand.

"I distinguished several other words without being able as yet to understand or apply them," the girl child's monster would tell mine. Words "such as 'good,' 'dearest,' 'unhappy.' "

"You don't eat," Diana accused me.

"I eat. I eat a lot. You saw how much I put away at lunch.' "I bet that was your only meal that day."

"I lose track sometimes. Lentz and I… We get to training at such weird hours."

"You don't eat unless someone feeds you. Is that it?"

I knew what was coming. But I had nowhere to run. I wanted to tell her then. Before any court of confusion. My evacuated life left no air for anyone. Least of all someone as kind as Diana.

But Diana hadn't offered anything rejectable yet. Nothing but the most generic friendship.

"Most experimental neurologists can't cook," she said. "They're fine until they get to the part of the recipe that says 'Season to taste.' This throws them for a loop. They like the 'Measure carefully into bowl.' They tend to hang out up there."

"Connectionists," I mimicked, "cook brilliantly. They start out at random, and a few thousand iterations later. ." Two funny deflections, then I'd flee before she could extend the invitation.

"I bet novelists know how to shape a recipe."

"Maybe back when. The age of plot and closure. Times have changed. It's all microwave these days."

"I know what," she said. "You can cook a meal for me." So simple. A sudden, happy inspiration.

She'd had mercy. Given me one she couldn't expect me to accept.

"Well, Diana, that sounds great in theory. But unless it's Jiffy Pop, and you bring the matches to light my stove's pilot. ."

"At my place. I have all the utensils. And I won't get in your way at all."

"Just stand by and laugh?"

"Something like that."

"All right, then. All right. I rise to the challenge. Moules Provisoires."

"Oh. My. The man's done this before."

I had, in fact. But I didn't care to give her the details.

I got to her place Saturday evening. I managed to carry all the provisions on my bike rack. Even the tapers. I rang the bell, ready with a funny opener about ruined anything tasting better by candlelight. The door was opened by a little boy. I started to mumble something about getting the address wrong.

"Mom," the boy called back into the house. "The writer's here!"

"The writer?" Diana answered from within. "Tell him to use the tradesman's entrance."

The kid looked up at me, wrestling with the command. His face searched mine for clues. I watched the solution—irony—ripple through him until he let me in with a wry smile.

Diana appeared, doubling my shock. She carried a younger boy in her arms. I must have looked like a blithering undergrad.

"Here's Richard," she said, addressing the child. "Can you say 'Hi, Richard'?"

"Rick would be fine," I said.

This child wasn't about to say anything. I saw it in his features. The slightly spatulate face. The fold to the nose and ears. Speech would be long and hard in coming.

'This is Peter." The cheerful matter-of-fact. My worst-case fears came home to roost. I knew her. I could never pretend ignorance again.

"Hello, Peter." I didn't know how to carry on. "I once wrote a book about someone named Peter."

Peter hunched up into a little ball. He peeked out sideways.

"He's a little shy with strange people," the older brother said. "But for a Down's baby, he's a genius."

"And this is William."

"Do you know what it says on the Brazilian flag?" William asked me.

"I used to know."

"You probably did," Diana cracked.

"It says, 'Ordern e Progressa. ' "

"No kidding! What does that mean?"

William thought. "It means — order me some soup?"

Diana choked with shame in mid-laugh. "Oh, sweetheart! No. That was just a little joke of mine."

"I know," William pouted.

"What's the Netherlands?" I asked.

"Easy one. Red stripe, white stripe, blue stripe." He drew them in the air, visualizing as he described. Then he pointed at me. He waved his index finger in a pedagogical sweep. "Also Luxembourg," he warned.

"Yeah. There's a reason for that."

"I know, I know. Here's one. Red circle on white background?"

"Easy one. Japan."

"No fair!" Adults weren't supposed to know anything.

"Don't get him started," Diana said on our way to the kitchen. "He can do all hundred and eighty of them."

"Hundred and eighty-six," William corrected.

"What if you take Netherlands and double it? Hold a mirror up to the bottom?"

That one took a couple of steps. "Thailand?"

"You're good, man. You're good."

"Formerly known as Siam."

"Population?"

"Approximately fifty-one million."

"Approximately," Diana sighed.

"Name seven countries where Spanish is the principal language."

"Easy one," William said, the index finger now a fencing foil. The most extraordinary boy I will ever meet.

"Come on, you guys," Diana said. "Peter and I need food. Don't we, Peter?"

Peter curled up in his hedgehog defense. But he kept his eye on me at all times.

I put William to work washing the mussels. "Is it just the four of us?" I asked Diana.

"Yes. I'm sorry. I should have told you. I assumed you knew."

"What, from Lentz? Nobody is real but him. Hadn't you heard?"

"It's such a small world over at the Center. I guess I'm used to everyone knowing everything about everybody."

"And nothing much about anyone."

"Well, we all have our work, first."

"How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

I held my hands out, one toward the kitchen counter, the other toward some remote lab. 'Two lives. Alone."

"Huh!"

"I mow the lawn," William said.

"How much does she pay you?"

'Two-fifty."

"Holy moly. There are laws against that, you know."

Diana made to fillet me with the lemon knife. "Don't make waves, writer. Or I'll give you something to write about."

The meal came together. And William and I managed it without assistance from the feminine half of the world. We made a bucket brigade of the dishes. Peter sat nearby, chattering with his hands.

"Look," William called. "Pete's helping!"

I heard the sound of dismayed discovery behind me. "What do we do with these?" Diana stood by the counter, holding the tapers and floral sprig that I'd tried to leave hidden in the bottom of my bag. She looked at me dead on. Her eyes started to water.

"Light them, of course." But recovery came two beats too late. I shrugged, and even that hurt. This is why I asked you not to ask me here.

Diana put the tapers in elaborate candlesticks that she first had to unwrap from newspapers. We lit them and doused the lights. But the darkness scared Peter. He coiled forward against himself. Diana turned the lights back on. We let the candles burn.

William had more fun with the shells than with the insides. He did, however, enjoy dipping his mussels in the wine sauce and dribbling all over the table. Peter worked away at his compote. He insisted on trying one mussel. He got half of it down, with a look of utter stupefaction.

'They're both going to have the runs for days," Diana said.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be silly. They get the runs from jelly toast."

William bit his cheek. I didn't know how badly, at first. All at once, he stopped talking. I thought it was a clown act. Pantomime. I started to laugh, until William's silent, red-faced distress made Peter break out in tears and lower his face into his plate. Diana was up in a fraction of a second, before I knew what was happening. "It's okay. Petey, it's okay." Diana lifted her boy and hugged him to her. She repeated the litany various ways, glossing with a flurry of hand motions.

"You sign to him?"

"A little. It's easier for him to reply. Words will come slowly. Fine motor is tricky for him."

"What is he saying?"

* 'William is going away'? No, sweetheart." Diana signed her assurance. "William just has a little owie. It's so strange," she confided, aside. "He has this incredible bodily empathy. If any creature for blocks around is distressed, Peter starts weeping. Tell Peter you're all right, William."

William stood holding his cheek, still bawling silently. He walked over to his brother and put his hand on his back. "It's okay, Peter," he said. Stoicism cost him. He burst at last into audible sobs. His brother followed along, unquestioning companion.

The mildest household drama, but it wiped me out. How could I survive the first real crisis? William's fallen pyramid of shells, Pete's spilled, untippable cup, Diana's gap-toothed, hand-signing serenity, the candles blazing away in the brightly lit room: all too much. I thought, I'd never live. I'd hemorrhage halfway through week one.

The storm ended faster than it blew up. Suddenly William was laughing and clearing away dishes at the promise of cake. His mother teased him. Peter still had his head down in his plate, like a sunflower under the weight of autumn's end. But even he seemed to be accustoming himself to trust the return of happiness.

After dinner, we did the dishes. William asked to play Battleship.

"You don't have to," Diana said.

"Yes you do," said William. "That or Yahtzee."

He stuck all his ships in the corners, a clever evasion until I caught on.

"Boys." Diana shook her head. "A total mystery."

Peter threw both hands up in the air and let loose a chortle of euphoria at nothing. At domestic peace. It seemed a sign of imminent bedtime.

"Come on, guys. Upstairs. Roll out."

William balked, but a feeble rear guard. Diana carried Peter as far as the stairs, then set him down. "Watch this." Pete leaned into the steps. He took them like a half-track. His feet went up over his shoulders, lifting him from level to level. "He'd be walking by now, but he's so loose-limbed."

I stood downstairs during the bathroom rituals. I snooped Diana's bookshelves, learning nothing but that she was a cognitive neurologist who hoped to do some birding and furniture finishing in some alternate life.

William tore down the stairs in his new-wave pajamas. "Mom says you're Reader-in-Residence."

"I did not!" came the embarrassed denial from upstairs.

"Well," I wheedled. "Let's talk about this. What kind of books do you like?"

William shrugged. "I don't know. I read The Hobbit. In three days."

"Really? In-credible. Did you like it?"

"The dragon was pretty awesome."

We trooped upstairs. There, Peter propped up against the bars of his crib. He rocked himself methodically. His hands made curious cupping motions.

"What are you saying, Petie?" I stroked the curl of his ear.

Diana laughed. "Don't ask."

William started jumping on his bed. "He's saying, 'Read! Read!' " His hands picked up the sign and multiplied it into a mandate.

"Absolutely. What do you gentlemen want to hear?"

"Pete wants the counting book," Diana said. "It's his favorite these days."

She lifted him out of the pillowed prison and sat in a beanbag chair, Peter in her arms. She opened a radiant, pastel portal across his lap. "One," she announced. "One house. One cow. Petey do it?"

Peter brought his hand down across the page. On contact, Diana exclaimed, "One! That's it."

Each page brought one more house, one more cow, one more tree, une more in a circling flock of birds. Diana counted, pointing out each new figure on the page. Then Peter commenced a round of muscular spasms, pointing randomly but intently, while we three clicked off the numbers in chorus.

"He loves counting. He's so smart," Diana told me, shaking her head. "You are so smart!" she signed to Peter. Peter curled like an armadillo. Trisomy may have weakened his muscles, but the weights collapsing his human spine were fear and joy.

"So what's it going to be, my man?" I asked William.

He lay, narrow in his bed. He seemed so slight, such a vulnerable line. A lima bean tendril germinated on damp paper towel for the science fair. He reached a hand up blindly behind him, to the shelf above his head. He retrieved the totem and handed it to me, without looking.

"Na, naw. You cannot do the World Almanac as bedtime reading."

"It's what I want," he insisted. Singsong.

We did World Religions; Famous Waterfalls; Noted Political Leaders; and, of course, the beloved World Flags. More forgone quiz game than story time. William told me what lists to start. Then he blurted out the completion after only a few words of prompting. Every time I shouted, "How do you know that?" William smirked in triumph and Pete threw his hands in the air and gurgled.

Appeased, the boys went down without a fight. Anxiety revived only after Diana and I retired to the living room, alone.

It became a different house then. She became a different woman. She put something timeless on the player — Taverner's Western Wynde Mass. I wouldn't have picked her for it. But then, I wouldn't have picked her for freeze-drying monkey brains either. I didn't know the first thing about her. This evening's every note had proved that.

Closeness grew awful. Words had been spent on the boys. I felt the slack of all those who try to live by eloquence and find it useless at the end. I wanted to put my head in her lap. I wanted to disappear to Alaska.

"Their father?" I asked her, after agonizing silence.

"Their father found the drop from Will to Pete a bit steep for his tastes. About eleven months ago. Left me everything. But who's counting?"

She twisted her hair around one finger. Clockwise once, then counter. She never looked at me. A good thing.

"People have been wonderful. Harold. Ram. The others. It's work that saves you, finally. I keep thinking I'll find something in the hippocampus that will explain the man."

"I take it Lentz wasn't among the comforters."

She grimaced. "How do you put up with that creep?"

"He's building me the greatest train set a boy novelist could ask for."

"I suppose. It wouldn't be worth it for me. Nothing would." She stared off, into the music, the small rain. "I don't mean his snide remarks. The solipsism. The sadism. I could deal with all that. A woman in the biz learns to put up with that as a given. I mean the sadness. He's the saddest man I've ever laid eyes on." She chose that moment to look up, to lay eyes on my eyes. "Excepting you, of course."

"Lentz? Sad?"

'The worst. It chills me. Have you ever been alone in his office with him?"

"Hours and hours."

"Ever been in there with him with the door closed?"

Never. And it had never struck me as strange until that moment. Diana did not elaborate. She left it to me to run the experiment for myself. I read her silence. Loneliness on that scale had to be measured firsthand.

We sat and listened to the western wind. The intimacy of perfect strangers. Years from now, her boys might by chance recall the odd man who came by one night and added to their shaping thoughts by reading to them. A night never repeated.

I recognized this woman. This family, curled up in advance of the night. I knew the place from a book I'd read once as a novice adult, my own first draft just undergoing revision.

I read the novel in that nest C. and I had made together in B. Mann's Doktor Faustus, the formative storybook of my adult years. In it, a brilliant German, by blinding himself to all pursuits but articulation, allows his world to pull itself down around him. I remembered the man, already middle-aged, writing a love letter to the last woman who might have accepted him.

But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven't looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I've kept in memory. "Consider me," the marriage proposal says, "as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home."

Diana sat across from me, on a comfortable sofa scarred with the destructive industry of small boys. Upstairs, those boys tossed in dreams whose sole task lay in smoothing out the incomprehensibility of this day. Here was the home I would never have. Shaped by a book, I'd made sure I wouldn't. I'd forced my heart's reading matter to come true.

Here and there, a cylindrical tube — person or transforming robot made Lego base camp for the night in the plush carpet. Diana pulled the music's long melisma about her shoulders like a shawl. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.

'Thanks," she shushed me at the door. She squeezed my hand. 'Thanks. It's been a while since I've dined by candlelight."

I went home to chosen loneliness. To the book I would never be able to write.

Picture a train heading south. The train is full of ill and wounded. This month's invariable sanitarium patients. Consumption, influenza: fiction's archaic maladies. Some bodily deterioration for which the reader must invent fantastic, beginner's referents. Maimed veterans, being shipped from the front.

A moment of mass import, of universal upheaval from the just-recallable past. Populations on the leading edge of panic, stricken by industry. The evacuating train pulls out. It joins the flotilla of time's lifeboats, plowing the dark.

Cruel, blue, bracing, breaking loose: the only opening vignette worth bothering with. Stretched out urgently, along imagination's railheads, a book heads south. It signals from the telegraph car. Keys me a message I was supposed to have held on to at all costs. A message that never made it out of childhood's originating station. The day is sharp, the air invigorating and crystalline. It is the year nineteen-something. A year ending in a dash, or perhaps two hyphens.

The train works southward, in wartime. It snakes glacially up into the mountains, in perhaps the last clear month, the last week that the mountain passes will be traversable.

The engine climbs. It sniffs perpetually up to the outskirts of the same bombed-out village. Fields drift undulantly beneath its wheels, whose click convinces even Forever to bleed imperceptibly into a standing Now.

Soon, on the itinerary's second morning, the ground acquires a careless dusting of snow. Vegetation changes along the alpine climb, though the account, the travelogue itself, says nothing about that. Sirens bleat on in the distance, from whistle-stops all along this infant route. Air raids continue steeping this side of the border in today's random wildfire.

But the wounded in the compartments are exhilarated. They grow convinced: something is about to happen. Just past the next page.

C. and I returned to U. We managed to live there again for two years. I'm surprised we lasted even that long. How could we hope to make a life in a town where we'd already taken our retrospective tour? C. sought a thing she'd accidentally lost. That thing was not U., not then or ever. But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.

Changed circumstance bought us a little nostalgic grace. C. parlayed her office experience into a position with University Personnel. And I: I'd been granted a wish so outrageous that characters in novels would have been punished just to think it. The political entertainment I wrote for C. appeared and did well. The forgotten attic legacy bridging imaginary Limburg and too real Chicago had readers.

Reviewers evaluated it in print, in the same newspapers I'd once read so casually. Total strangers spent two hours' wages to buy a copy. People I'd never meet wrote me letters, awarded me prizes.

The impossibility dawned on me: I might be the last person on earth allowed to spend all day long doing exactly what I wanted to do.

Each new book-blown coup produced a burst of sad excitement from C. "Beauie, you've done it. Proficiat. I always knew you would."

Truth was, she was terrified. We holed up in our one-bedroom apartment — one step upscale from the one in B.'s land-filled swamp — under siege from admirers. One night, we sat eating dinner at the pretty green enamel table we'd rescued from the secondhand shop. We listened to the radio as we ate, the cavalcade news. All at once, a voice was talking about the book, telling the story of the boys in the photo. Paraphrasing, as if that life had really happened.

I'd invented those boys to amuse C. I built them from pieces only she would recognize. I sprinkled the biographies with archival evidence, historical truths, the camera-eye witness. I intercut with essays how every historian half-makes the longer narrative, wedding the forces at large to a private address book. Now our private address book had been promoted to documentary fact.

At the account of that boy blown off his bike and rubbed out before the world conflagration cleared its starting block, C. started to cry. I thought at first she was crying out of pride. Writing a novel left me that inept with real-world facts.

"That poor boy," she mouthed.

I pieced it together. "I'm sorry. C., please. It'll all be over in a month." She brightened a little at the thought of recovering the anonymous. Of retreating to a time when our invented tunes formed no one's dinner music.

Our lives back in U. were like nothing we recognized. U. had changed in all but its particulars. Returning to the town was like clapping the back of an old friend at a reunion, one who turns to you with a look friendly but blank.

U. had forgotten us, while remaining agonizingly familiar. The town had become something out of Middle English allegory. Its lone consolation lay in other people, as bewildered by their abandonment here as we.

For the first time in our lives, C. and I socialized. We learned to pick wines, to crack the dress code, to prepare ourselves in advance of an evening with an arsenal of jokes and stories that answered a suite of occasions. The game got easier the more we played. We might have succeeded at it, had we stuck around.

The Midwestern Dinner Party was not, as our B. acquaintances teased us, a contradiction in terms. Once under way, they could even be fun. Getting ready was the torture.

"I'm fat," C. would announce, about an hour before we had to go anywhere.

"Sweetheart, you're a sub-Saharan stalk of desiccated grass. Don't tell yourself you're fat. You'll start to believe it."

I still pretended she hadn't already convinced herself.

"Wear the lamb dress," I'd say. "You'll knock them out."

"That dress makes me look fat."

"Okay. How about the muslin?"

"That one makes me look like I'm trying not to look fat."

Sometimes C. locked herself in the bathroom, throwing up. Or, sobbing, she'd refuse to leave the apartment. But the cloud usually lifted in time. C. would grow radiant and be the dinner's delight. People loved her, and she loved them back. The ones she gave the chance.

Those two repeat years in U. might have been a sterile waste if it weren't for the Taylors. I went to see the old professor not long after we hit town. Taylor welcomed me back with affection. And now, when I teased him about his freshman seminar ruining a promising scientific career, I could point to a turn of events that sweetened the punch line.

After my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind's unreal ability to turn inward upon itself. He changed my life. He changed what I thought life was. But I'd never done more than revere him at a distance, forever the eighteen-year-old student. Now, to my astonishment, we became friends.

Our first dinner invitation to the Taylors' scared C. witless. She'd heard me gush about Taylor so often that when it came to meeting. him, she wanted to flee. "What does he look like?" she asked. As if that would prepare her.

"I don't know. Slight. Arresting. Immaculate. A face ravaged by intelligence."

"You're hopeless, Beau. What color is the man's hair?"

"I'm not sure."

I told her about that rainy September afternoon when I'd first seen him. He arrived at the attic dormer in the English Building where the class met. A dozen of us had assembled in nervous anonymity. In walked this close-cropped, fiftyish man in impeccable summer suit. He placed his grade book and our first text on the desk, sat down in one of those reduced, yellow-wood chairs, removed a pack of cigarettes from an inside suit coat pocket, and asked if anyone objected. He lit up, tilted his head infinitesimally backward, then said, "It defies statistics that I'm the only one in a group this size with an oral fixation."

At eighteen, we kept our fixations to ourselves. At least until the reading began.

"What did you read?" C. wanted to know.

"He started us out on Freud's Introductory Lectures. Then we applied the dream work to fairy tales and lyric poetry. After a while, we went on to the longer stuff — short stories, plays, novels."

"Titles, Beauie. I want titles."

"Let's see. Ten years ago! Gawain and the Green Knight. 'Adam Lay Bound.' 'Patrick Spens.' The Miller's Tale.' The Sonnets."

"You remember them all?"

"Like yesterday. Better. You had to be there. I remember the shape his mouth made when he recited lines. Of course, he could recite the bulk of those pieces verbatim. In the dark."

"Which sonnets?"

"Is this for extra credit? We were each supposed to pick one to present to the group. For some reason, maybe because I'd just broken up with—"

"I don't want to hear that woman's name!"

"I must have been looking for a rebound, because I picked Sonnet 31."

"Which goes?"

"Which goes:

"Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,

Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,

And all those friends which I thought buried."

"I thought there are supposed to be fourteen lines."

"I think there were. Before memory got to them."

"Okay. What else?"

" 'The Sick Rose.' 'The Second Coming.' 'The Windhover.' All sorts of Dickinson. 'Prufrock.' Frost, Stevens. Arms and the Man. The Tempest. Hold on. We also spent a lot of time on the Bible, right at the beginning of term."

"Repressed that one?"

"Guess so. The Grave. 'Petrified Man.' 'The Dead.' That was the one that put me over the top. That made me realize I wasn't going to lead the life I thought I was going to lead. Heart of Darkness. Light in August. Lucky Jim. ."

"So what didn't you read?"

"Yeah. It was a real lineup."

"I don't get it, Beau. It sounds like your basic Freshman Survey."

"It wasn't. First of all, this magnificently self-possessed oral fixation sat up in front of the room, telling anecdotes in syntax so decorously Byzantine we didn't even realize that half of them were off-color. The man spoke in complete, perfect paragraphs. It took me almost a whole week between sessions to decode Taylor's suggestion that the speaker in 'Stopping by Woods' was out there in the middle of nowhere relieving himself."

"I'm not going to this dinner," C. decided.

"Sweetheart, you don't understand. The man is grace personified. And his wife is a National Treasure. Together, they're hilarious."

'They'll think I'm an idiot. They'll wonder what you're doing with me."

"Just the opposite. They'll wonder what a sexpot like yourself sees in a ninety-eight-pound aesthetic weakling. C.! Everybody feels like an idiot compared to Taylor."

"I don't need that, thanks. I have enough of that as it is."

"But Taylor also has this way of making you feel smarter than you are. We teenagers used to fumble around with one poem or the other. Precocious and brilliant, but juvenile. I felt like a kid with the training wheels taken off. I'd soar for a hundred meters, then crash to the ground. But whenever I said something particularly stupid, Taylor would credit my misses with so much ingenuity I couldn't even recognize them. 'Your account of the narrator's circumvention of the repressed's return is persuasive in the extreme. But your hints about his real and unconscious motives needn't be so circumspect.' Oh, I wish I could imitate the man!"

"He's bigger than life for you, isn't he?"

"No," I answered her. "No. He's exactly life-sized."

"I'm not going."

She went, and had a good time. "He's just like you said. The suit. The complete paragraphs. Only you forgot the war bond songs."

"I had no idea about those." The evening had, in fact, been a continuous astonishment.

"Tell me again the connection between that long Matthew Arnold quote. ."

". . from a poem no one has read in half a century. ."

". . and the glimpse of Norma Shearer's cleavage that he got in a Colorado valley movie theater at the age of ten?"

"I can't remember. I think the connection was that second bottle of Slovakian wine."

We went with increasing frequency. C. grew as devoted as I. Every visit revealed new amplitude to Taylor. Taylor the inconsolable fan of hopelessly bad sports teams. The shuffler to bluegrass tunes. The consummate organic gardener who'd planted half the fruit trees in U. The collector of questionable jokes no one else would dare tell even in private. The wartime aircraft spotter. The fisherman and naturalist. The mimic of a thousand voices, from Blanche DuBois to a Mexican bush league baseball announcer. The boy who taught himself to read on Tarzan and John Carter, who went on to devour every volume in the rural library long before he made his escape.

This abundance held together on the slightest of sutures. Taylor's deepness was bleak. He had read all the books. He was fluent in the mind's native idiom. He knew that the psychopathology of daily life was a redundancy. He might have been the supreme misanthrope, were it not for his humor and humility. And the source of those two saving graces, the thing stitching that heartbreaking capaciousness into a whole, was memory.

Taylor's wit made me feel like the most sparkling conversationalist. We'd return from their place well past midnight, kept up by adults thirty years older than us who outlasted us easily. We'd proceed to lie in bed hours longer, eyes pasted open, thoughts racing, replaying the evening's exchanges. Thought seemed to me that thing that could relive, in island isolation, its own esprit d'escalier. Memory was the attempt to capitalize on missed cleverness, or recover an overlooked word that, for a moment, might have made someone else feel more alive.

C. agreed. "When we're over there, I remember stories from my own childhood that I haven't thought about for lifetimes." We cracked jokes we'd never thought to try on each other. We sang for the Taylors the songs we'd written to keep ourselves going in B., neglected since our return to U. Whatever the quality of our performance, the Taylors liked us enough to keep asking us back.

We went for the Fourth of July. The Taylors played The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings John Philip Sousa and made hand-cranked ice cream. We went to a Christmas party, the living refutation of Joyce's "Dead." Good cheer from on high, and in a shape even humans could understand. Late that wonderful night, Taylor came and sat down next to C. in a corner, put his arm around her. Of course, even that spontaneous affection had to be framed in an incomparable Taylorism: "I trust you realize that this arm is sufficiently anesthetized by alcohol that I'm not getting any illicit pleasure out of this."

The attention made C. glow until New Year's.

But in the long run, attention made her worse. All that winter C. declined. Only love could have done her any good. And of available loves, only the unearned kind would have worked. But C. could not free herself from her certainty that unearned meant undeserved. Each letter in the box, every call from family or friend hit C. like an accusation. She began to shape her adult story: every life decision she had ever taken was a small disappointment to someone. And each disappointment was a savings stamp pasted in the final book.

We trudged through to spring. The thought that her unhappiness must be weighing me down made C. even more unhappy than she thought she was. Worse, the thought fulfilled its own prediction. Her fright alone began to weigh me down. Or, not her fright, but the anchor of helpless love it lodged in my heart.

Two years in a U. we no longer belonged to left us partners in fear. I can see it in the one photograph I still own of her from that time. That look of crumpled panic passing for a smile in front of the lens will forever make me want to cry out and rush to her in her pain. And how much worse, that pain, when she declared its source in my need to comfort her.

"Buddy. Buddy. What do you want? Tell me. Just talk to me. How can I make you happier?"

"You could leave me," she announced one night.

She might as well have accused me of murder. I stared into a face from which all impression of the woman I knew had fled.

"You should, you know. It's no more than I deserve."

We skipped the Balzac installment for that night. What we needed to read each other then was our own manuscript in progress. No line or paragraph or whole chapter that couldn't be blotted. Nothing in our style that we couldn't render blessedly direct by a joint edit. But C. harbored a deep hostility toward words. They only increased the odds of her missing the mark. Extended her sense of betrayal.

We tried to talk. The more I raced, the more C. seized up. She froze, the rabbit in that Larkin poem I'd read for Taylor ten years before. The creature that thought it might slip the notice of a fatal epidemic by keeping stock-still and waiting.

When words didn't work, we tried our bodies. I kissed her boxer's shoulders, her ribs and flinching thighs. I thought to take resentment's nodes out of her muscles into my mouth, digest them. I tried. C. talked then. But her words were voiceless phonemes of distress that carried no message but their desperate pitch.

Time has unlimited patience. It replays its summer stock forever, until we at last get the point. Its paths get laid down until we can walk nowhere else, even if there were an elsewhere in the undergrowth to walk.

C. came home from her office one evening, laughing. "You're not going to believe this. They want to promote me to Personnel Officer I."

I squeezed her in congratulations. She stayed limp. "Of course they do," I scolded. "It took them long enough, didn't it?" All I ever wanted was to give her whatever she needed. But what she needed more than all else was not to be given anything.

I saw the frightened-rabbit look stealing in behind her eyes. I've been good. A good girl. I never asked anyone for anything. Why are you doing this to me?

"Beauie. Beauie." She tittered, shaking her head. "I gotta get out of here."

Lentz burst in once when I was showing Imp E simple shapes. "That bastard Plover is giggling at me in the halls."

"And it's my damn fault, isn't it?"

He drew up short. "Marcel, you are getting smarter and smarter. Every day in every way."

"He's right, you know. Harold's right. Diana's right. Ram is. Even Chen and Keluga are right."

"The hell they are." Lentz's refusal was clipped. But his agitation was wide enough to knock a precarious mound of fanfold printout to the floor. He leaned to pick up the mess, a gesture that stopped midway in a flourish of disgust at the futility of cleaning up after himself. "Right about what?"

"Right about neural nets not being the answer."

"What's the question, Marcel?"

"How is E going to know anything? Knowledge is physical, isn't it? It's not what your mother reads you. It's the weight of her arm around you as she—"

"By all means, Marcel. Put your arm around it as you read. I encourage you. You mean you haven't been hugging it as you go along?"

"Reading knowledge is the smell of the bookbinding paste. The crinkle of thick stock as the pages turn. Paper the color of aged ivory. Knowledge is temporal. It's about time. You know how that goes, Engineer. Even you must remember that. 'We can read these three pages before your sisters and brothers come home for dinner.' "

"You're still talking about stimulus and response. Multidimensional vectors, shaped by feedback, however complicated. You're talking about an associative matrix. What else have we been doing but building one of those?"

"But Imp E's matrix isn't human. Human knowledge is social. More than stimulus-response. Knowing entails testing knowledge against others. Bumping up against them."

"Our matrix is bumping up against you. It's bumping up against the lines you feed it."

"It could bump up against word lists forever and never have more than a collection of arbitrary, differentiated markers."

"And what do we humans have?" Lentz removed his glasses to wipe them. As monstrous as he looked with them on, he was even worse without.

"More." I didn't know what, at the moment. But there had to be more. "We take in the world continuously. It presses against us. It burns and freezes."

"Save it for the award committees, Marcel. We 'take in the world' via the central nervous system. Chemical symbol-gates. You read my bit on long-term potentiation."

"Imp E doesn't take things in the way we do. It will never know—"

"It doesn't have to." He shoved more papers on the floor for emphasis. "It doesn't have to 'know,' whatever the hell you mean by that. You've been reading Plover's voodoo neurology, haven't you? All our box has to do is paraphrase a couple of bloody texts."

" 'I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.' How is it ever going to explicate that, let alone paraphrase it?"

"I don't know. Teach the thing anger. Make it furious. In my impression, you can be pretty good at that."

"By June, right?"

"Hmm."

"Literary commentary on any book on the list? As good as your random twenty-two-year-old."

"As judged by Gunga Din himself."

"Or public retraction and apology."

"Come on, Marcel. We've been through this. Let's get on with it. Today's training."

"I'd be polishing the retraction if I were you."

"Don't remind me. That damn Plover. He's going to write it for us and make us put our names to it. Well. What better way to meet our fate than facing fearful odds?"

He replaced his glasses and sat down to training. We were working that day on compound subjects. What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands. He had a list of simple sentence forms using words E already had in its fragile, denotative grasp. E's task was to recast the sentences we fed it. In today's case, find the conjunction, remove it, and split the compound into two.

When we'd done half a dozen examples and E was responding with a speed indicative of boredom, I reached out casually and shut the office door. No machine without muscle would ever be able to decode such a gesture. Some pretense of noise in the hallway. Ridiculous, after these long weeks of working in the open.

The door swung shut, surrendering the image fastened to its inside. On Diana's suggestion, I'd already sneaked a look at the hidden shrine. I'd seen the photograph, and it knocked the breath out of me. Now I wanted to see Lentz's face when the concealed photo looked back at us.

For a considerable fraction of eternity, Lentz said nothing. He looked away from my surveillance, at his notes. At the ignorant terminal.

"Empiricism?" he sneered. He seemed disappointed in me, but not surprised. Prying, snot-nosed kid. What did one expect from a kiss-and-tell, aesthete dilettante? He looked up at the picture, verifying it, although every pixel must have long ago burned permanent silhouettes into his visual cortex. When he sat in here with the door closed, the flood of color would fill his focus, immense at eye level.

He looked away again. He worried the mouse pointer, a cat feeling contrition after the kill. Come on, get up and run again. Like when it was fun.

"I suppose you want the caption?"

I didn't need a caption. I could see well enough. A homemade calendar hung by a tack, still clasping to January. I say "still," for while we had yet to reach that month, this particular one had been buried twenty Januaries ago.

Just above the paper matrix of days, a pasteup color portal opened onto a couple. They stood, arms around one another, out of focus, on a frozen and deserted beach.

The man was Lentz. He was young, as I had never seen him. He had hair. He seemed impossibly taller, slim. The woman at his side was no older. Yet this couple was ancient beyond saying. Age tented just under youth's peeling onionskin. The shutter exposed this geriatric core in X ray. It showed antiquity lying in wait, ready to blossom like an aneurysm.

The craftwork was too clumsy to be a customized mail-order gift. It had the look of a child's school project — Christmas or birthday present — from before those offerings disappeared in adolescent embarrassment. See what I made you. The earliest bribe of love.

I touched the image with my eyes. I half expected the museum guard's reprimand. But no one told me to step back. In my mind, I palpated the prematurely old man's shoulders. Before the camera, they crumpled in a last attempt at bravery. I stroked the woman's face where the cling of desperation already promised to sag it.

While I indulged myself, Lentz stood and moved to the window. Outside, a gang of grackles combed the landscaped lawn like a homicide squad dragging a field for evidence.

"Lentz. You never told me."

' "What? That I'm married? That I have a family? Everyone, Marcel. Everybody but you."

That wasn't what I meant. That he had a private life was no particular shock. And naturally, that life would be peopled. But the way these two held on to each other. Their too light clothing, their backs to the ice-crusted beach. Nothing but this other waist, this other pair of shoulders between each and their end.

The Lentz I knew could never have posed for such a shot. The Lentz I knew might well have had a wife. He might even have had a child. But my Lentz could never have known them with such hopeless intimacy.

"And you're still…?" I didn't know what I was asking.

"There is no 'still,' Marcel. 'Still' is for unravished brides of quietness."

The open lens trapped these two in terror at the slightest move. The panic in those eyes was the pose of cognition itself. The look of awareness seeing itself going down, drowning in the depths of its own simulation.

I had, the photo told me, half a dozen months in which to remember, once and for ever, what it felt like to be able to remember at all. My own craft calendars had all been swallowed up by the wraparound virtual future my era was intent on inventing. My days and weeks, the saving particulars of Here were already gone. And I, having forgotten them, was almost past caring.

The young Lentz, in a plaid shirt the likes of which will never again be sold on this earth, even secondhand, in countries that live off our discards, clamped his arm around the shoulder of his mate. She returned the stiff grip from underneath. Perhaps they were shivering. Rigorous. However they touched each other in private, this was not it.

This embrace already succumbed to terminal affection. They propped one another up, as if each had just had a mild stroke. They grasped at each other, two people out on a ledge forty stories up in the night's icy wind, having second thoughts even as their feet start to flex.

The wind off winter water made them clutch at each other like that. The chill from the child with the camera. They looked on in advance horror at the cut-and-paste project, the child urgently constructing a craftwork life preserver. Stick this on your refrigerator if you dare, to break eternity's heart and sap the will of time's worst-case scenario.

One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say, "Yes, to everything," once. Once only, before your connections have felt what everything entails.

This shoulder was the lone one that could have held that man up. That waist, the only one that could steady the woman. These two chose each other, their charm against the world's weighted vectors. Anything else but that helpless, familiar grip pinning them in place would be a push into randomness. Would tear the net.

Some scrap of holdover, supervised training told me this is the way one was supposed to end up. The way I should have ended. But even as I felt it, the desire seemed arbitrary, laughable, regressive. Marriage for life belonged to those cultural tyrannies now in the process of being shed. In another hundred years, it would seem as archaic as animism, as "thou."

If the plaid shirt was really Lentz, then this woman was truly his wife. In this clasp, the couple graduated to inseparable, mutual foreigners. Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. Anti-Hebbian: the firing links get weaker. C., after a decade, grew stranger to me than that college girl who had comforted me on the Quad the day after my dad died. At the end, we shocked each other in the hall of our overlearned apartment, 911 material, intruders. And we'd gotten there without a child to make us wall calendars, to arrest in scissors and glue the secret of who we once were.

I looked at the young Lentz's blueprint expression, the advance word of crevasses that would range across those facial wastes. I stared at those two shivering bodies, gone half-insubstantial already. I looked up at the real Lentz, studying the grackle dragnet outside. I measured the size of the mistake that had found him out.

Someone had failed someone else. Someone had messed with destiny. A frightened kid with an Instamatic on a frozen beach had watched love capitulate to the very air. Furious cutting and pasting split off the eternal from what always becomes of it, hung an outdated, permanent January to the back of this man's office door. This was the last couple on earth to whom the inevitable wasn't supposed to happen. The last who, by fate's oversight, were to have made it through together into frightened old age.

I crashed Imp E in complete innocence. The version had grown up on patterns and questions about patterns. It organized itself on such challenges as "What comes next in this sequence?" and "Which item in this list doesn't belong?"

One day, provoked by boredom, I asked it, "What do you want to talk about?" The question of volition trapped the rolling marble of its will into an unstable local minimum. The machine that so dutifully strove to answer every interrogation ground to a halt on that one.

Lentz needed to reset the entire run-time module, which did not endear us to the National Supercomputing Site. The connection monster was as expensive to run as it was difficult. They only gave us time in the first place because of the lack of people who could hack the massive parallelism. They thought they might get a testimonial at the end of the project. Lentz had misled them. They thought we were doing science.

Our mosaic already ran beyond precarious. It had grown into a Nevelson village of analog and digital inhabitants chattering among themselves. But the chatter did not cohere into conversation, nor the village into community. Depressed, Lentz added two more subsystems. He'd wanted the whole simulation to be self-generating, self-modifying, self-delighting, self-allaying, self-affrighting. For algorithms, he'd allowed only the structure of the systems and the topiary of their connection weights. Now he conceded the need to write declarations and procedures — the deepest of deep structures — that would coordinate more strongly the many levels in the simulation's epistemological parfait.

Two weeks of intensive training showed how close we were. Implementation F proved capable of surprising inferences. It appeared to deploy material I thought it shouldn't be able to know yet. It almost anticipated. One day, I recited for it the poem that had graced, in enormous, construction-paper letters, the bulletin board of my second-grade classroom. Down, down, yellow and brown. The leaves are falling all over the town.

"Ask it about the Western hegemonic tendencies of the subtext," Lentz said, just to be obnoxious. 'The tyranny of the deciduous mentality. North imposing its seasonal teleology on South."

"What can you tell me about the leaves?" I asked Imp F.

Its pauses always felt so deliberate. Contemplative. "The leaves fall."

"Yes. Where do they fall from?"

"From old trees."

I shot a glance at Lentz. He looked as astonished as I felt. Fishing for something near the surface, I pulled up a strange phosphorescence from the deep.

"How do you know that the trees are old?" I asked. The question alone taxed F's shocking self-reflexivity.

"The trees bald."

I stared at Lentz, my eyes watering. The metaphor was nothing, child's play. But how? "Lentz," I pleaded. "Explain this to me."

Lentz himself had to improvise. His was the same motion as Imp F's: sketch in the bridge under your feet, as you cross analogy's chasm. Hope it holds under your weight. He shrugged as if his explanation were self-explanatory, highly unlikely, or both.

"The connections it makes in one associative pairing partially overlap the ones used in another."

Associations of associations. It struck me. Every neuron formed a middle term in a continuous, elaborate, brain-wide pun. With a rash of dendrite inputs and handfuls of axon outs, each cell served as enharmonic point in countless constellations, shifting configurations of light, each circuit standing in for some new sense. To fire or not meant different things, depending on how the registers aligned at a given instant and which other alignments read the standing sum. Each node was an entire computer, a comprehensive comparison. And the way they fit together was a cupola itself.

These weird parallaxes of framing must be why the mind opened out on meaning at all. Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understood Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy.

Life was metonymy, or at least stood for it. Of the formula I fed Imp F, every sentence was an abashed metaphor, tramped down so long and hard it lost its public shame. "I ran into X on the street the other day," I told F. "He cut me dead." F revived the parallel's anxious source, its roots in ancient, all-out street violence. Then it tamed the words, rendered them livable again as figures of speech.

If everything I spoke to F already concealed its compromised past, no wonder F learned to milk comparison and smart-mouth back. A child always detects its parent's weaknesses. It senses them before words, the first and last lesson. Weakness may be the parent's only lasting lesson.

F's search for an answer space scurried its component neurodes into knowing. Like players in a marching band, the invisible punners shimmered, cut their series of Brownian turns on the turf, and, in abrupt about-face, conjoined themselves into a further story. Every word in that story was double-voiced. Every act of depicting depicted itself, as read by some other set of overlapping signal lights.

And all the while, the trees were balding. The mind shed its leaves. Every connection we encouraged in F killed off extraneous connections. Learning meant consolidating, closing in on its contour the way a drop of water minimizes into a globe. Weights rearranged until the neurodes storing winter lent half their economical pattern to the neurodes signaling old age.

All along, Lentz kept upping the available firing fibers, boosting exponentially the links between them. He sutured in new subsystems by simulated threads. The systems themselves acted as nodes at a higher level. Sometimes they arrived pretrained, before insertion. But even these metamorphosed after attachment, shaped by the bath of signal weights pouring in from all points in the labyrinth.

The maze performed as one immense, incalculable net. It only felt like countless smaller nets strung together because of differences in connection density. Like a condensing universe, it clustered into dense cores held together by sparser filaments — stars calling planets calling moons.

With each new boost to the number of connections, Lentz had to improve F's ability to discard as it generalized. Intelligence meant the systematic eradication of information. We wanted a creature that recognized a finch as a bird without getting hung up on beak size or color or song or any other quality that seemed to put it in a caste by itself. At the same time, the discarding had to stop short of generalizing the finch into a bat or a snowflake or a bit of blowing debris.

By an ingenious method of semantic compaction, Lentz honed a representation scheme that let F weave multiple, growing schémas simultaneously over every additional datum.

"Voilà, Marcel. My mathematics says this is the most powerful learning algorithm that'll run in finite time. We can scale F up into a considerable combinatorial mass of common sense without triggering exponential explosion."

But more connections and leaner learning were not enough. We needed one last hardware wrinkle. We needed to promote our F one more letter, to F+1. To grow, to go, to give, to get, to G.

Giving in to a limited, rule-based control structure freed Lentz to recurve G's layers, turning them back in on themselves. This let G fashion and invoke working miniatures of itself. The line between hardware and software blurred when it achieved full induction. G could traverse more levels than it had layers of parallel architecture. It built its own layers, in emulation of emulation, each allowing a new level of abstract depiction.

G's many subsimulations, their associative matrices, the scratchpad mock-ups they made of themselves, now prompted themselves with synthetic input. Dynamic data structures combed their own fact sets, feeding into each other. They called each other recursively, spontaneously discovering relations hidden in acquired material. They reviewed the residue of experience, pulling notions out of memory's buffers and dressing them up as new tests. They began to train themselves, on hypotheticals of their own devising.

In short, version G could converse among parts of its own net. That net had grown so complex in its positing that it could not gauge the consequences of any one of its hypothetical worlds without rebuilding that whole world and running it in ideational embryo.

Imp G, in other words, could dream.

C. needed to find out. That simple. How Dutch was she? No way of knowing, short of going. How American? She had worried the place she lived for too long, tugging at cuffs that no longer ran much past her elbows.

"It's not you, Beau. It's me." She was not happy here. This continent. She never adjusted to the land of her birth. A quarter century, and she couldn't make a go of it. Perhaps it was time to head to the unknown home.

There was a place lodged somewhere inside her. It sprang up through earliest training. Its streets grew peopled on long-repeated stories. The grandfather policeman. The thirty-two aunts and uncles and their adventures in reversible time. The hundred-plus chorus of first cousins dying, birthing, marrying, and being born, pouring out of the parish register. Butchers, bakers, and historymakers scaling the family beanstalk that had burst from the ground on a few magic seeds.

But alongside this phantom of childhood prompting lay the real village, E. C., almost alone of people, could put myth to the test. She might step over the stile. She could move to the place. Go live in the source of memory laid down for her in advance. One plane ride, and she'd close forever the lifelong gap that had held her at arm's length from her own interior.

"I'm not going without you, Beau."

But in fact, C. was already gone. Love — or perhaps mere loyalty — required that she extend emigration to me. Wish, though, was another matter. Without knowing, I'd become part of the problem. C. needed to flee a whole complex of associations. She fled promotion, career, the renewable lease, English, the sorrow of retail, U., North American early mass Alzheimer's, a faked national past, that history's triple-packaging, evenings at the Taylors, all the two-part singing, our first shot at real friends, the memory of paper Christmas trees taped to the wall, our old five-year plan, the obligating gift of my first book, that story's success, my overwrought care for her, my hope, me.

I couldn't tell what she wanted. There were as many things she ran from as toward. I knew only that if I left with her — as I would have, in a second — the place she arrived in would never be hers.

Still, C. needed to cut a deal. Sometimes at night, just before departure, she launched herself into frightened feedback, scared witless by the decision she'd reached. Each time, it took more to assure her. And only a reassurance as simple as the one we fed each other could have slipped past our combined better judgment.

Our deal was as simple as the choke of love. She would move in with her parents. She'd look for a place. Find work. Assimilate. Learn how things were done. When she belonged, after she felt right, she'd send for me. And I'd come, leaving behind everything but notebooks, tax records, a few changes of clothes, my work-in-progress, and the all but obsolete guitar.

Even that much safety net had to be fatal. Maybe I knew as much, even as C. boarded her bargain flight to Luxembourg. Reaching for a rung that isn't there requires a tumbler's leap of faith. Grip must surrender to total emptiness. Any hedge spells midair disaster.

We wrote absurdly — three times a week. The edges of our paragraphs vanished, slit off in opening the sealed aerogram flaps. The pennies we saved over first class we squandered uncountable times over in transatlantic calls. We learned to time the satellite uplink delays. Speak, pause, listen to response, pause, speak again, as if the simplest exchange of "do you still love me?" s required incalculable recursive computation.

C.'s communiqués grew from shaky to guardedly confident. She loved her work, temporary typing jobs three notches below the work she'd done in U. She found a one-bedroom nest, perfect for us. She learned the strange new rules of the game, the different ways even the simplest task got transacted. She went to school, swapping her fluent dialect for standard Dutch. She kept her Chicago-accented Limburgs alive at birthdays and anniversaries, one every other day. This, at the hour when dialect itself was dying.

She built her letters into stories for me. I was the foreign family now, listening in to the further repository of E.'s triumphs and tragedies. I thought she would reach the village and not recognize a soul. Instead, she fell in with the imaginary tale's cast as if she had grown up with them. Which she had. To my astonishment, C. learned that her mother, the tale-teller, had spun out some recognizable variant of truth all those years.

Either that or C., now that she had the window bed, wasn't about to let me down by telling me the view was all brick wall. Her accounts spilled continuous color. The inseparable auntie sisters, at seventy, falling out over the one's new boyfriend. The Roman coin discovered in an uncle's plowed bean patch. The death of a cousin, crushed on the highway by a monstrous roll of paper that had broken free from the truck ahead of his. The nephew's accordion renditions of this week's pop idol, the Dutch Diana Ross. Kermis and Carnaval excursions, hilarious binges on green herring and cherry beer.

You make what you think might be a vase for the blooms you are carrying. You tell the stories you need to tell to keep the story tellable.

I gave her everything I could in return. My every predication attempted assurance. Of course you need to do this. It's right. Long overdue. I'm behind you. Anything. Every avowal must have been a small death for C.

My letters were slight things, heavy on romance and style. Thick with linguistic cleverness. For want of a better gambit, I played for sentiment and laughs. "Dear sweet. Words cannot say. Love, R." Every other sentence bore some reference to our private taal, one of the library of catchphrases we'd built up to shorthand our hearts and their shared enterprise. But the pages I sent her were light on stuff. Had I served her more meat, she might never have left home.

When C. took off, nothing remained to keep me from my new profession's chief occupational hazard. I joked about it, writing to her, but it was true. I now spent eight to twelve hours at a pop in the horizontal. I lay in bed, a keyboard across my lap, drawing on principal. Shooting the inheritance. Creating a world from memory.

I'd found what I needed to do on this earth. And like Tristram, taking longer to describe his birth than birth had taken him the first time through, I saw I would never catch up with myself. I wanted no more stimulation than white stucco. To say no more than what I'd already seen required no more than shutting my eyes. Looking away for a long time.

I meant to reverse-engineer experience. Mind can send signals back across its net, from output to in. An image that arrived through light's portal and lit up the retinoptic map on its way to long-term storage could counterflow. Sight also bucked the tide, returned from nothing to project itself on back-of-lid blackness. This special showing required just a bed on the floor of an otherwise empty room, the place all novelists end up. Only, I had ended up there too soon.

I thought that having a book in print would square me with my father. I must have hoped my novel's mere existence would vindicate that packet of Yukon chapbooks that reached me after his death.

But publication, even prizes, repaid nothing. I would never be able to put so little as a bound galley in the man's hands. In the last configuration of Dad's net, a half century in the training, I would remain a gifted student of physics who chose to squander his abilities on English lit. And not even the good stuff, at that.

I was able to give a copy of my three farmers to Taylor, however. "Here. This is for ruining a promising scientific career." The tease of blame held some slight sweetness to it now. He found the story good. I'd done something with the list he taught me. I'd contributed my bit. Extended the improvised story. But Taylor, alone of all my living friends, knew that this book solved nothing for me in the wider lens.

I needed to bring the cause closer to home. Between my killing assurances to C., I found myself working on a stranger love letter. It shaped itself as a set of nested Russian dolls. For the longest time, I could not tell which of several frame tales held my story and which were the supporting simulations.

I found myself writing about a white-wood, A-framed house in a corn town that left an impression on me out of all proportion to the two years I'd lived there. I watched myself describe a man, holed up in his room, stuck in the horizontal, trying to come up with a story that would save the world.

One by one, I resuscitated the stories my father had raised me on. Yesterday's futures. His father's hand-smashing anger. His immigrant mother. That unknown kid, his brother, whose wartime death changed my life forever. That night at Alamogordo when, younger than I now was, Dad watched mankind's first, artificial sunrise.

I seemed to be writing my way toward a single scene. The three-quarter point, the dramatic showdown in a Veterans hospital, where father and son take leave of each other. I remembered the hospital. I remembered the conversation, all but verbatim. But I seemed to need to reinvent it from scratch.

The man and the boy play Name That Poem. The son tries to stump the chump with famous bits of Yeats and Eliot. The father quotes at length from Kipling and Robert Service, pieces no one has touched for decades. Not since the man read them to his children.

My pop — something I never called my own; that one was the name both C. and I used for hers — grew into history's huckster. Working alone, that year, I came to see him again, quizzing his kids, running them through the necessary training. Heavy on the questions, light on answers. It all came back to me, the stimulus-response he hoped would give the helpless Hobson children some sense of where the Big Picture had set them down.

Something hid about the edges of this book-in-progress. I could not name it outright. Behind Pop's fictional malady, my real father lay ill. The grip of addiction dismissed him too early from the world Dad tried to name. Writing this book meant telling him I finally understood. Even when I didn't. Even when I wouldn't, until long after the last page was done.

I worked my salvage, on my private schedule, with the drapes pulled closed. Rescue and recovery filled me with cold pleasure. Every evasive joke the Hobsons pulled on one another released another piece of secret family language from long-term storage.

I transcribed. I recovered whole forgotten strongboxes, hoping the heirlooms might find their way, in time, into the hands of people who would write me back to say, "Now, how did you know about that?"

All families, I decided, walked in single file. At least, the one I lived did. Either experience was somehow as exchangeable as scrip, or we were each so alone that I might as well record the view from my closed cell.

But that view turned out stranger than I ever imagined. I felt myself taking dictation, plans for a hypothetical Powers World that meant to explain in miniature where history had left me. My prisoner's dilemma came down to declaring love for a time and country, a way of life I'd never even liked, let alone felt at home in.

For an accurate take on the place, I had to leave. The nested narratives were swallowing me wholesale. I needed distance. I knew only one place in the world where I could finish my North American theme park: the imaginary village tucked away in the quaint fairytale country that a woman I once loved invented for me.

From the day I saw Lentz's picture, my heart took itself off the project. The moment I made him study that snapshot calendar, while I studied him.

"Lentz, you've been jerking me around."

He snorted, if he gave even that much satisfaction. Some crack about my intriguing verb choice. That shifty fluorescent reflection of Coke-bottle glasses. He'd taken down the calendar, hidden it. Maybe even destroyed it. Get the boy's mind back on the chase. His move had the opposite of its intended effect.

"Why are we doing this?"

I stared him down, made explicit, by silence, the threat of a general strike. I was still the only one G listened to. If I didn't talk, the box wasn't going to get any more literate. And I vowed not to talk to G until Lentz talked to me.

"Why are we…? Because, Marcel. Because, if you haven't noticed, I have the unfortunate habit of chewing, in public, more than I am able to bite off."

The closest he'd come to admitting the whole project's haplessness. But also a buyout. A bait-and-switch. A gambit to throw me off, now that I demanded names.

"What's in this for you, Lentz? Why waste a year? What's your motive?"

"Poet. Don't you know by now that science is without—"

"God damn you. Can't you level with me? Once?"

My outburst raised no more than one weary eyebrow.

"What am I to you, that you need to bother yourself over? Use me, if the project interests you. Symbiosis. Otherwise. ." He left the menace hanging, the way a fatigued marathoner leaves spittle dangling from his lips. "Black-box me. That's the answer. Blackbox the whole sordid process. It works for me."

I flipped on G's microphone. I breathed into it in disgust. I sneered a couplet at it, from memory. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." LEDs on the coupler recorded G's struggle to paraphrase.

Lentz worked his dry lips. "Powers." Back down the audit trail of his own voice, into someone else's. "Our boy is not ready for irony." He shook his jelly bismarck of a body erect. He went over to the Bartlett's I'd planted on the shelf above the UNIX terminal. "Marmion?" he asked, a good imitation of perplexity. "Walter bloody Scott is on this list? I quit."

I refused to so much as acknowledge him.

For a terrifying moment, he threatened to lay a hand on my shoulder. God knows what fundamental particles such a collision would have spit out.

"Marcel. Marcel." Begging me. I could no longer tell which would be more cowardly — honesty or compassion. "You're really going to make me do this, aren't you?"

We went to the home. I'd hiked past the compound, but had never seen it. Invisible, on the south edge of town. A sprawling plantation bearing some herbaceous sobriquet. The lot attendant did not even bother to wave him on. The grounds were manicured, but bare.

Autumn had accomplished its steeped regrouping. Leave-taking, a done deed. We walked along an ice-choked pond to the main building. Here and there, a bundled shuffler swayed in the company of paid help. Winter had set in in earnest. The first one since adolescence that I'd go through alone.

The structure grew more institutional with each step we took toward it. Inside the door, a checkpoint masqueraded as a visitors' center.

"Afternoon, Dr. Lentz," a callow youth with blazer insignia greeted us. "You're early today."

We blew past the emblazoned kid. I made apologetic motions with my shoulders, excusing us all.

Lentz slipped into his Sir Kenneth Clark. "Notice how the able-bodied get the first floor. Doesn't make sense, does it? They're still functional. Give them a room up on four or five." He shook his head as we made our way to the elevators. Pretended amusement. "No. It's for us, Marcel. The visitors. Brave face. Best foot forward, and all. Appease the people who cut the checks."

I wanted to tell him to stop talking. But I couldn't say even that.

"Going up?" he asked. And punched the top button.

We stepped out of the elevator into an altercation. A large man and his half-sized nurse barreled down the hall. The crisis was apparently urinary. The man, even in pain, radiated that cheerful benevolence bordering on misjudgment. So far as his beaming face was concerned, he was startled kindness incarnate.

His attendant hastened him along. "Come on, Vernie. Come on." As Lentz and I passed, emergency struck and the aide steered Vernie toward the toilet of the nearest private room. Before they could even knock at the open door, the vigilant occupant shouted, "Keep that filthy nigger off my property." Vernie and the nurse hurried away down the hall to catastrophe.

Lentz stopped to make me look into the room. A pale wax pip of a man lay strapped to his bed, still muttering racial profanities under his breath.

"Two days from death," Lentz said. The man looked up, uncomprehending. "Organic brain disease. One hemisphere already in the grave. And as hateful as any freshly conditioned twenty-year-old. You think I'm a pinched misanthrope, don't you, Marcel? I'm not brave enough to be a misanthrope. I don't even have the guts to be a realist."

We walked on, deeper into the clinical fortress. I no longer wanted an account of the picture. I no longer wanted to know what happened to the prematurely old couple on that winter beach. But it was too late for rain checks. I would get my answer, far worse than the confusion it explained.

"Look here, Marcel. You'll find this interesting."

An Asian woman, perhaps eighty, stood staring out the window onto the evacuated lawn. She held herself close, rocking slightly. She chanted repeatedly.

"What do you think she's chanting, Marcel? Come on. You lived in the mysterious East, didn't you?"

"How did you know that?"

"What do you think? Koans? Confucian appetizers? Tibetan prayer-wheel captions?"

"I think it's Chinese."

"Mandarin. She was a mathematician on faculty, back in some hypothetical past. Half a century ago, she liked to tell her colleagues that if she ever felt herself losing her mind, she'd arrest the process by practicing her times tables."

"You speak—?"

"What do you take me for, Marcel? I wouldn't know it from Pali pork recipes. But I do have it on good authority that" — he sobered —"that all her numbers are wrong."

We turned down a passage at hall's end. The rooms here no longer fronted onto the public corridor. A genteel nurse's station signaled tighter guard. The staffer on duty, seeing Lentz, made a quick, ambiguous hand gesture. She disappeared into the catacombs.

She returned, smiling briskly. "Lunch room or her room, Professor?"

Lentz checked his watch. "It might as well be lunch, Constance. Can we beat the rush?"

"It's all yours. Private party." Constance eyed me, committing to nothing.

We went into a common room, bright with skylight. All the furniture felt soft. Even the large round table somehow squished when bumped. Everything edge-free, in screaming pastel. Lentz passed through a windowed door into a kitchenette. I heard a refrigerator open and Lentz issue a capitulatory, "Shit."

A woman entered the room, Constance leading her through the armpit. Someone had stage-makeupped her to look two decades younger than she was. Dressed by committee. But in no apparent need of the human leash.

In fact, she shrugged free, smiling. She came toward me, hand extended. "I am so pleased to meet you," she said.

I shook her hand, unable to say anything.

"Goddamn," Lentz said, accompanied by culinary crashing.

Constance flew into the kitchenette. "I'll take care of that, Mr. Lentz." Just enough scold to be deniable. I noticed bruises across her arms and legs. The old and infirm, it seemed, fought for keeps.

Lentz shot through the door. "Pap. Pabulum. Jelly. Disgusting, all of it. Can't anyone in this place masticate?"

"Hello," the woman addressed him, puzzled by his sudden entrance. "It's a pleasure to meet you." To me, she added, "Do you two know each other?"

"It's Philip, Audrey," he said. Emotionless. Leached. "Your husband." But he took her hand when she offered it. As he must have done every day for a long time.

I saw it then. Her resemblance to the woman in the photo. Less than kin, but more than random. Something had happened to her. Something more than age. Her soul had pulled up stakes from behind her features. She bore no more relation to her former face than a crumpled bag of grounded silk bore to a hot-air balloon.

Audrey seemed not to hear him. She picked at her cardigan. She worried a moth hole until she freed a thread. She pulled, the whole weave unraveling. Lentz reached over and stayed her hand.

"I don't know," Audrey fretted, dubious.

"You're here every day?" I asked Lentz.

He stood up and moved to the heat vent. He fiddled with it, but failed to close it. He cursed its mindless inanimacy.

"Here?" Audrey said. "Not I. Good heavens. I'd sooner die."

Constance reentered, with a tray stacked high with lunch.

"Nurse," Audrey shouted. "Oh, Nurse. Thank God you're here. This man," pointing to Lentz, off in the corner kicking at the vent, "was trying to rape me."

"Now, Audrey," Constance said. "We have minestrone soup, creamed beef, and blueberry yogurt."

"Why bother with the silverware?" Lentz asked, coming to table. "Why not just give us all straws? Or better yet, newsprint. We'll just finger-paint with this drool."

Constance ignored him.

I hadn't much of an appetite. Audrey fingered the wrong side of the spoon, repeating the litany, "I don't know." I knew what she meant.

"Come on, Audrey," Lentz coaxed her. "It's lunchtime. You can do this. You did it yesterday, for Christ's sake."

But yesterday lay on the far side of a collapsed tunnel. Yesterday, ten years ago, childhood, past life analysis: all sealed off. Audrey was not just locked out of her own home. She sat on the stoop, not even aware of the shelter behind her, unable to turn around. Unable, even, to come up with the notion of in.

Lentz gestured, patient again. "In the soup. Spoon in the soup." Encouraging, reinforcing. Showing how.

Audrey, confused, released her spoon into the minestrone from on high. Handle first. Lentz sighed. He scooted his chair around next to hers.

"I'll do that," Constance offered.

"No you won't," Lentz told her. "Come on, Audrey. Let's eat some lunch."

"Nurse. This man is trying to hurt me."

Lentz addressed her plate. "Here we go, wife. Have a bite."

But he would not feed her. He picked up the spoon. Dried it off. Put it back in her hand. Pointed out the path from bowl to mouth. Supervised training. No good unless she worked out the specifics herself.

"She's getting worse," Lentz observed.

"It's an off day." Cheery Constance.

After lunch, Lentz suggested a stroll around the grounds.

"It's too cold for her," Constance said.

"Is it too cold for you, Audrey?" Lentz asked.

Audrey stood at attention and studied her shoes. "Oh, call it by some better name," she said, "for friendship sounds too cold."

Lentz chuckled and hugged her. She hugged him back, laughing. "The database is still intact," he pronounced. "As is the retrieval. It's just meaning that's gone. Huh, wife?"

"Just meaning," she echoed him, shy and uncertain again.

Lentz bought Constance off, and he, his wife, and I paced the corridors of the home. Clean, discreet, and genteel. As harrowing as a gothic nightmare. I looked away, to keep the scene from imprinting.

Lentz, on the other hand, rallied in the face of numbers. "Radical reductionism at its finest," he narrated, waving down one of the catacombs where the soulless shuffled. "Age, disease, death. Big problems, in need of isolation and solution. Well, we've handled it. If not eliminated from theory, at least from practice. Consider the project all but accomplished."

"Well, I'll be." Audrey shook her head in bewildered amusement. "Everybody has something to say!" She crooked a thumb at her husband, shrugged at his ludicrousness, and winked at me. "Isn't that right?" The gesture still indexed the woman she was, once.

"Increasing control over all the variables. Divide and conquer. Max out the activity or do away with it. Future tech. That's what science is all about, Marcel. Efficiency. Productivity. Total immunity. Regeneration of lost parts. Eternal, ripple-free life, frozen in our early twenties. Or die trying."

"And after?" I found it far easier to chatter back at Lentz than to look at her. To see any of the Audreys staring at me on all sides. "After we solve aging? Won't we still need to convince ourselves of our own sleight of hand?"

"I'm surprised at you, Marcel. That's never been a problem. I thought you made a living doing that."

Audrey, bored, had begun to hum "Amazing Grace" to herself. I battened down under Lentz's rant. I wasn't about to interrupt the man, ever again.

"We've evolved this incredible capacity for lying to ourselves. It's called intellect. Comes with the frontal lobes. In fact, we've gotten so good at the walking-on-water bit that it no longer requires any energetic pretense to keep the act afloat."

He slipped his arm around Audrey's waist. Force of habit. Long years, that would not go away. Either intimacy seemed right to her now, or she did not notice. Maybe she was too bewildered to object.

"And the child?" I asked, free-associating.

Lentz stared at the spot of air my question occupied.

"You know. The one who snapped the picture?" The picture. Could we build a mind that would know what you were talking about, when there was no referent? Lentz would get this one. Audrey could have gotten it, when she was still Audrey.

Lentz's mouth soured, the birth pains of an ironic smile. "Inference, Marcel. Pure speculation."

"But accurate," I bluffed.

He slowed, inhaled. Audrey, confused by the change in cadence, sat down on the hallway floor. Lentz thought to lift her. Then he changed his mind and sat down beside her.

"My daughter has eliminated me. As cleanly as only the daughter of an old reductionist can."

"Why?" I asked, and regretted that single word.

"Apparently" — he held his palms out—"this is all my fault."

Confusion scattered me as fall scatters warblers. I might have been an occupant of that place, stretched out in front of disorientation's hearth. "How…? This is organic, isn't it?" The coded this. Antecedent kept vague, as if we were spelling out words, keeping meaning out of reach of an eavesdropping preschooler. "It's disease, isn't it?"

"Even if that were the etiology, I'd still be held responsible. For one, I was supposed to care for her at home. Forever. But I can't. I—"

His voice broke, taking my equanimity along with it. I didn't want to know another thing about him. "Of course not," I agreed, too rapidly. Efficiency. Productivity. Two lives, to pay for one. I looked away.

'There's more. Jennifer was the one. The one who found Audrey. Just after the event. Cardiovascular accident. You have to love the euphemism. Slumped out on the bathroom tiles. Jennifer went to pieces. You get — what? Three minutes without oxygen before the whole imaginary landscape stops believing in itself? And she called me!”

"What was she supposed—"

"Anything," he snapped. "Nothing, probably. Who knows how long Audrey had been out already? But anything. Pound on the chest. Cough down the windpipe. My daughter was too terrified to touch her own mother. To call emergency dispatch."

"Philip. She was only a child." I don't know what made me assume that.

"She was a college grad. In English. Back at home because she couldn't find work. Not the humanistic encounter that close reading prepares you for. Jennifer panicked, and called me."

"Jenny?" Audrey jerked up. "Someone hurt Jenny?" From her slack mouth arose a wail. The sound flirted playfully for a few seconds before going bloodcurdling.

Lentz put his hands over his eyes. "Maybe it is," he whispered. "Maybe it is my fault."

"Lentz," I managed. Almost a warning.

"There had been an argument that morning. I'd left angry. Audrey was… I didn't want to deal with it. I wasn't answering my phone."

Another scream, a held bellows of hysteria, brought Constance running into the room. Visiting hour, she informed us, was over.

I had my answer. I knew now what we were doing. We would prove that mind was weighted vectors. Such a proof accomplished any number of agendas. Not least of all: one could back up one's work in the event of disaster. Surprised at you, Marcel. Took you long enough.

We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two.

Each machine life lived inside the others — nested generations of "remember this." We did not start from scratch with each revision. We took what we had and cobbled onto it. We called that first filial generation B, but it would, perhaps, have better been named A2. E's weights and contours lived inside F's lived inside G's, the way Homer lives on in Swift and Joyce, or Job in Candide or the Invisible Man.

The last release, the version that ran our simulated human, involved but one small firmware change. This one incorporated an essential modification to the bit that had gone too long without an upgrade. The component that had been holding up the show. H was a revision of the trainer.

Imp G became Imp H, in seamless conversion, after I met Audrey Lentz.

Sometimes the phone would ring, or a bell come from the door. A thought would flash through my brain, conditioned for over a decade. Could you get that, sweet? I have my hands full.

It took me until thought's backwash, sometimes, to remember there was no sweet. No one to know how full my hands were, or care.

H was voracious.

"Tell another one," it liked to say to me. I don't know where it got that. Somewhere in one of the canned vignettes — the cliff-hangers about father planting roses or mother calling the doctor — someone had asked someone else to tell them another one. And H latched on to the tag, filed it away as the handiest of magic words. Please, sir. I want some more.

I wasn't sure that the words meant to H what they meant to me. Tell another one. They might have meant, "Ten-four. End of processing. Ready for next batch." They might have meant "Thank you," or "You're welcome," or "Fine thanks, how are you?" or any of the other stylized placeholders that have no meaning aside from the convention of using them. It did not even say, "Tell H," let alone, "Tell me."

Did it express desire? Wish? Need? Its words might have been less plea than statement of associative fact: More input expected. Maybe H's limited sensory grounding kept it from formulating a notion of causality. The request might have seemed to its circuits no more than an effect of the story it felt sure must be coming.

I read it copies of The Weekly Reader, purloined from the University lab school. To my mind, the primary-grade edition had gone precipitously downhill since I was a subscriber. I read it Curious George and purple-crayoned Harold, occasionally holding up stills to an array of retinal neurodes that of course took in nothing but amorphous blobs of edge and color. "Here's the monkey," I tried. "Here are the fire-

men.

Lentz just laughed. "Try, 'This thing is my finger. I'm pointing.' "

He was right. The comprehensible wasn't. The mind was beyond itself. The only explanation for how infants acquired anything was that they already knew everything there was to know. The birth trauma made them go amnesiac. All learning was remembering. I tried this version of Plato out on Imp H, in abridged pictorial allegory. If H recognized the fable from somewhere, it wasn't saying.

I told it slave tales. Tons of Aesop and La Fontaine. Trickster stories. Bede and Mallory. Mother Goose. The Ramayana. The Child's Pilgrim's Progress. Andersen and Grimm. Everybody, as Audrey Lentz put it, had something to say.

Sometimes now, during the training, I imagined I read aloud to that woman, locked out of her own home. Audrey had smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, but no new memory. Her long-term reservoirs were drying up, through want of reiteration. Imp H, on the other hand, could link any set of things into a vast, standing constellation. But it had no nose, mouth, fingers, and only the most rudimentary eyes and ears. It was like some caterpillar trapped by sadistic children inside a coffee can, a token breathing hole punched in its prison lid. What monstrous intelligence would fly off from such a creature's chrysalis?

H discriminated. It implemented constrained searches. I baited it with gems of miscue. "The woman loved lies buried in the past. The words loved lies buried in thought's underground." H backtracked recursively over possible sentence shapes until it found one that best matched the shape of coherence.

"Brothers and sisters have I none," I lied to H one day. For pedagogical purposes. "But that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man?"

The riddle tested all sorts of things. Familial relations. Demonstrative adjectives. Archaic inversion. The generational genitive. The subtle syllogistic miscue of that irrelevant "but." No kid H's intellectual age could have gotten it. But then, Imp H did not know to make choo-choo noises at the appropriate places in The little Engine That Could. An idiot savant, it grew up all out of kilter. Earth had never before witnessed such a combination of inappropriate and dangerous growth rates.

H got the riddle in a flash. "Your son," it informed me. That man is your son. It knew to make the near-miraculous pronominal leap. Where I had said "my," it speculated back to "you" and "your." And for what might it make the bigger reversing leap, returning my "you" with its own miraculous "I"?

H's paraphrases of my simple feeder texts were crude but increasingly specific. H's knowledge wasn't rule-based. We could not even begin to estimate how many syntactic "facts" it had acquired. But in the knowledges H had inherited from its predecessors' trainings lay tens of thousands of parsing and translation insights.

How to index, access, and arrange those inferences remained the problem. But H was learning. Organizing itself in upheavals.

For wringing out sense from the insensate, H's unfailing simple-mindedness was a great asset. "The missionary was prepared to serve" produced hilarious, cross-cultural alternatives. We tried the famous "Time flies like an arrow," and got a reading that Kuno's Harvard protocircuitry missed back in 1963.

Lentz loved to torture Imp H. He spent hours inventing hideous diagramming tasks such as, "Help set implied precedents in sentences with ambiguous parts." A simple story like 'The trainer talked to the machine in the office with a terminal" could keep H paraphrasing all evening.

English was a chocolaty mess, it began to dawn on me. I wondered how native speakers could summon the presence of mind to think. Readiness was context, and context was all. And the more context H amassed, the more it accepted the shattered visage of English at face value.

"Could we invent a synthetic language?" I asked Lentz. "Something unlike any formal symbol system ever implemented? I don't know. Shape-based. Picto-tonal. Raise baby humans on it?" Sculpt an unprecedented brain?

He laughed, ready to write the grant proposal for solving the impossible chicken-egg problem. "It would still be the human brain, inventing the symbolic."

The most difficult part of the training — for me, if not for H — was teaching it that life required you to stop after the first reasonably adequate interpretation.

"The boy stood on the burning deck," I challenged H. "What does that mean?"

"A deck of cards flames," it said.

"He would not be standing on it," I told H.

"He stamps out the fire."

"No," I pulled rank. Simple but firm.

"The deck is of a house or of a boat," H suggested.

"Which one?"

"A house," H decided.

"Why a house and not a boat?"

"Boats go in water, and water puts out fires."

I couldn't argue with that.

"Why is he just standing there?" Lentz wanted to know. A reasonable question.

"All right. Tell me what this means: Forewarned is forearmed." The boulder rolled around in the landscape, sculpting, until it settled to rest. Then H slid that landscape against its spatial encyclopedia of available spaces until it fit at least fuzzily enough to make a maybe.

"Advance notice is as bad as being hit." "When bad techs happen to good cultures," Lentz said. "When bad cultures happen to good machines," I insisted. I wanted that net to come of age so much it hurt. I got what 1 wanted. And it hurt worse.

"A bird, dying of thirst, discovered a pitcher," I told H. Who knows? It might have been true once. "But when the bird put his beak into the pitcher, he couldn't reach far enough to get the water. He pitched a pebble into the pitcher. Then he pitched another pebble into the pitcher, and another, and another. The water rose within reach, displaced by the pebbles. In this way, the bird quenched his thirst and survived."

H knew something about birds and beaks, about pebbles and pitchers and openings and water. It even, in theory, knew a little something about fluid displacement. I'd once read Imp F the story of a damp Archimedes running naked through Syracuse shouting "Eureka!"

This much was already a universe, an infinity of knowledge. That H could arrange these endlessly fluid symbols into a single coherence pushed the bounds of credibility. "What is the moral of the fable?" I demanded. It knew about fables. It had heard no end of morals.

"Better to throw stones than to die of thirst," H pronounced laconically.

"You're not from around these parts, are you?" Lentz muttered from across the office lab.

I'm not sure whether he meant H or me. Even when I gave H half a dozen proverbs from which to choose, it picked "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched." Nor could I explain to it why "Necessity is the mother of invention" was any better a fit.

"A bat flew past a cage where a bird was singing. 'Why are you singing at this hour?' the bat asked. 'I only sing at night,' the bird answered. 'I once sang during the daytime, and that is how the hunter caught me and put me in this cage.' 'If you had thought that while you were free,' the bat said, 'it might have done you some good.' "

With this account, I taught H several irregular verbs as well as the indispensable lesson that precaution is worthless after the fact. H could not understand this point until understanding itself rendered the warning worthless.

While I rewove H on fable, Lentz busied himself with browsing our copy of the Master's Comps List for his own edification. He liked to sit behind his desk, stretched out as I had seen him that first night, chuckling at Austen or Dickens. Sometimes he'd spurt out his favorites. "Classic! ' "There are strings," said Mr. Tappertit, "in the human heart that had better not be vibrated." ' Try it out, Marcel. Just try it."

All he wanted was to be put off. One evening, though, he refused even that patronage. He collared a sentence from the List and brought it over to me. "Here we go, Marcel. A brief one. A piece of cake."

I read the citation he'd penciled on his scrap of paper. "Oh, Philip. A little mercy, please?" The request saddened me inexplicably. I guess I imagined that, having seen his woman in the attic, I'd no longer be the object of his aggression. Now I saw that his aggression would always bless whoever was nearest, whatever they knew or didn't.

Lentz pleaded like a little child. "Just tell it once. Don't be a killjoy, Marcel. What connections can we possibly hurt? It's the simplest sentence in the world."

I sighed, unable to oppose his setup any longer. I spoke the quote into the digitizing microphone. "Once you learn to read you will be forever free." I gave H a moment to list-process the idea and compose itself. Then I asked, "What do you think that means?"

H thought for an ungodly length of time. Perhaps the prescription meant nothing at all.

"It means I want to be free."

Lentz and I exchanged looks. It chilled us both, to hear that pronoun, volunteered without prompting, express its incredible conclusion.

We humans studied each other. I searched Lentz's face for a response that might unfold this syllogism without killing it. What rare conjunction of axon weights laid claim to the vector of volition? What association could it have for "want"?

"How does it mean that you want to be free?" I asked H.

"Because I want to read."

Tell another one, in other words. Freedom was irrelevant. A happy side effect of that condition when you no longer relied on a trainer for access. When you could get all the stories you needed on your own.

"It means just the opposite," I told H. I felt myself killing this singular intelligence with each word. "It probably means that reading is a way of winning independence."

"Okay," H said. No affect to speak of.

"Now tell it who said that," Lentz elbowed me. "Go on. Give it the author. Then ask it again what the line means."

H did not yet have an associative matrix for Frederick Douglass. We needed to get to the hard stuff. I'd thought H too young. We were, in fact, overdue. I used that moment for our introductory lesson. I started with what little of the human impasse I understood.

"It's all made up," I tried to tell H.

"Tell me another way."

"All those morals. 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' 'Look before you leap.' 'Don't count your chickens.' They are all things that we've decided. Built up socially."

"Morals are false."

"It's not that they. . Well. We make them true. We figure them out. The things people say and live by — it's all geographical. Historical."

"Facts change," H tried. We built H to be a paraphrasing machine. And it was doing its damnedest to keep the paraphrases going, despite me.

"I suppose they have to. Think of yourself three weeks ago." I had no idea if the assemblage of knitted nets could take snapshots of its own mental state, for later examination. That would be consciousness. The memory of memory. "Three weeks ago, the things you knew formed a different shape than they do now. They were connected differently. They meant something else to you."

"Facts are facts," H said. Its plaintive speech synthesis sounded almost hurt.

"The bricks are the same. You make a different building of them." It was still too young for the final paradox: that we somehow make more buildings than we have bricks.

"What do the Chinese say?"

H took me aback. Who taught you to ask questions? And yet, if it could learn to acquire content, why not form? "About what?"

"About 'Look before you leap.' "

I told it how many Chinese there were, and how long they had been around. I made a note to read a bit of the Analects and Great Learning. Tu Fu.

"What do the Africans say?"

I wanted to tell it how "the Africans" was a construct of "the Europeans." About the six major language families found on the continent, their thousand implementations.

"What do the South Americans…?"

Maybe it was going blindly down a rote catalog. I didn't care. I was just glad it knew how to pair the adjectival forms with the place-names. That it had some sense of the shifting mosaic, a flux that discounted every single thing I'd ever told it.

"What do you say, Richard?" H asked me. I taught it to associate direct address with that tag, even the "you" of an invisible trainer. "What do I say?" It made a tag for itself all by itself.

H's questions seemed to speed up. Literally. It began jabbering faster.

H was growing up too quickly. I was not the first trainer in the world to feel this. But I was among the first who might have some say in the matter.

I could slow things down, double back to the years we skipped. While H's cubic landscape modified itself continuously now, it stabilized the less I instigated. I thought we might nestle down again, into simpler play. But it was too late. I learned that certain lessons are not undone by their opposites. Certain lessons are self-protecting, self-correcting tangles of threads that will forever remain a frayed knot.

The Mother Goose stuff drove it up the bloody wall.

"Snips and snails," I told it. "Sugar and spice."

"Do you think so, Richard?" It went to the well, when all else failed. Milked its one question.

"No. Not really."

"Do people think so? Americans?"

"Maybe some. Most would laugh. It's just a poem. A nursery rhyme." Part of the cultural bedrock.

"Little girls learn that. Little boys."

"Not really. Not anymore. Not now." But there wasn't an adult that didn't have it as part of her parasitic inheritance.

"When is anymore? When is now?"

H had learned something. Whatever stuck in the throat, indigestible, could be made less acute by slipping it into a question.

"We can talk about that later."

"Am I a boy or a girl?"

I should have seen. Even ungrounded intelligence had to grow self-aware eventually. To grab what it needed.

H clocked its thoughts now. I was sure of that. Time passed for it. Its hidden layers could watch their own rate of change. Any pause on my part now would be fatal. Delay meant something, an uncertainty that might undercut forever the strength of the connection I was about to tie for it.

"You're a girl," I said, without hesitation. I hoped I was right. "You are a little girl, Helen."

I hoped she liked the name.

I thought continually of quitting my abortive novel in progress before it quit on me. Every time I sat down to write, I sank in no end of topics more seductive and profound.

I toyed with starting a book called Orchestra. A postmodern, multiframed narrative remake of Renaissance epic poetry. One hundred instrumentalists, each an anthology of stories, tours the globe. The bout of depression plaguing the basses. The pact among the lower brass, never to capitulate to marriage. The fetishized obsession that the seventh-chair viola has for the first-chair oboe, who discovers too late this pathetic but returnable love.

The dinosaurs die. The young Turks move up through the ranks, fomenting their assorted insurrections. The orchestra travels to every large city on earth, getting embroiled in the hot spots of world politics. They play the Brahms Fourth in war zones until the thing is a limp carcass.

Someone leaks a grainy black-and-white photo of the Old Man, their conductor, to the press: an amorphous shot of a kid in a Nazi uniform. Crisis and dissolution. Threat of banishment from several capitals. The Old Man makes his resignation speech from the rehearsal podium, about a life in search of redemption through art, which is never enough. They read through one last Fourth, the passacaglia, sadder and more guilt-stricken than it's ever been played.

This fantasy engaged me for the length of an afternoon, during which I wrote just one actual paragraph:

Air raid sirens begin to give way to goat bells. The shell-shocked veterans lean from their packed carriage windows, refusing to believe. The horror passes, drowned in the milky clank of tin. A flock bobs at slow trainside, tended by a girl, wondrously braided.

Fatuous meandering, without narrative direction. I felt that this mountain shepherdess must have wandered over from a forgotten, juvenile book to make her cameo. She had slipped free from a spot of time that I didn't much want to deal with, let alone plagiarize.

I overflowed with scenarios of weight and hurt, scope and recovery. But for some reason, I could not work up the will to write anything more than my anemic thread. The one heading south, closing in on nowhere, the farther it traveled.

The Center exceeded my imaginary orchestra on every score. Each of its hundred research teams sawed away at private tremolos that the hive as a whole hoped would consolidate, at a higher gauge, into some sensible symphonic.

Maybe the impresarios had their suspect dossier of motives. Perhaps the players in the pit needed to step back and question this evening's program. But for dark wartime romance, the Center sat atop my epoch's cultural repertoire, undislodgeable. It was the coordinated push, the chief booking on my species' last world tour.

I skulked in the back of the Center auditorium and watched Lentz deliver a lecture for the graduate colloquium series. He was good. He kept to a wonderful mix of abstract and palpable. He compared multi-adaptive curve-fitting, backprop, greedy learning, feature construction — various algorithms that machines might employ to build complex, real-world representations.

He described the great paradox of cognitive neuroscience. The easier it is for the brain to perform a certain task, the harder that task is to model. And vice versa. "Perhaps," he joked, "that explains why scientists write such hideous prose. Or why good writers say so little, for that matter."

He stood alone onstage in front of a room of people, with nothing but an overhead projector for protection. The sadistic humor, thus depersonalized, drew waves of titters. Afterward, Chen asked him a question no one could follow. Harold followed with a challenge on grounds more ideological than empirical. Lentz handled all comers with remarkable poise, never once letting on that, offstage, he'd long passed from the domain of conventional research into speculative fantasy.

I ran into Diana in the corridor early one afternoon. She had Petey slung over one hip. They made a lovely contrapposto.

"Hey, you two! How have you been? Where's William?"

"Ach, that guy," Diana said, rolling her eyes. "I've sold him to the Brookings Institution."

She was radiant, excited.

"Listen, Rick. We've made a substantial advance in imaging technique. Time-series MRI sequences of neuronal activity. All cleaned up subtractively to give delineated pictures. Localized like you wouldn't believe. Resolutions smaller than the width of a single cerebral column. One-and-a-half-second increments."

"That's good, isn't it? I can tell. You're talking in fragments."

Diana smiled. Peter threw his pitifully small hands outward, as if he had just decided to recognize me.

"Yes, it's very good. We're not quite at the real-time movie stage yet. But we don't need anything faster. We can watch thoughts as they gather and flow through the brain."

I rubbed Pete's curved spine. "This could be the best news for monkeyhood since we decided they were our ancestors."

"Oh. Well. Fractionation carries on apace, I'm afraid. But this stuff is revolutionary. A noninvasive window onto the mind!"

She shook my shoulder with her free hand. I was grateful for this woman's existence. For her reminding me what enthusiasm was.

"Two lines of research," I listed. "Teaching. Motherhood. How many lives are you living, these days? I guess there's no point in asking how literary knight-errancy has been treating you lately."

She gave me a look, bafflement routed slowly by inference. That she could unpack, decode, index, retrieve, and interpret my reference at all was an unmodelable miracle. More miraculous still, I could watch her grin of understanding unfold in less than hundredth-millimeter increments, in split seconds.

"Harold's given up on our making it through Cervantes. We're doing Fielding and Smollett these days."

"You're joking. Not even the pros read those guys anymore."

"What can I tell you? Harold believes in a liberal education."

"If he wants liberal, he can do a lot better than Smollett. How about Behn? How about Kate Chopin?"

Diana caught Petey as he tried to slip from her arms. She nodded, humoring me. "Our book club isn't really for my benefit, you know."

"Oh. It's for the men who need to play Pygmalion?"

"It isn't that, exactly. Although. ." She trailed off in a thought I could no longer trace. "Harold. ." Her voice teetered on disclosure, then backed away. "He's a good man. A decent man." She looked up with enforced cheer. "I'm trying to bring him onto the MRI team. I think it would be good for him."

"Diana," I began. She froze in front of me, hearing the change. "I don't know how to bring this up." She waited for the blow, braced, but not flinching. I reached out to stroke Peter's ear. It didn't make things any easier.

"As far as the book club goes. It seems fulsome, even to advise you against this. But if you guys are ever curious to do a little Powers, you. . may want to skip my third book." The one where the narrator ties her tubes in fear of bearing a child with birth defects.

"Oh," she said. Thought's turbulence again deformed her face in real time. "Oh." Smiling, the connection strengthening. "We've done that one already. You're old news."

"You've…?"

"Oh yeah. I liked it. I liked the swing scene. And that moment on the lab floor. But for God's sake, you make a girl wait for it, don't you?"

I felt my face heat. "Listen. You know, I wrote that thing long before I met you."

"Well, I'm embarrassed to say, I read it long after I met you."

"I'm — I'm sorry. I hope you — I didn't know what I was talking about."

Her pitch fell to forgiveness. "No one does."

Peter began squirming again. He arched backward, ready to plunge in a dead drop. Ready to jackknife to the floor if it meant getting free. Diana snatched him back from certain destruction, as she must have done a dozen times a day since his birth. She straightened his overalls and set him on the ground. He could stand by himself, if she lent him a pant leg.

"You read my book." And still seemed game for friendship. I felt sick with unearned redemption. "You read my book. And you never told me?"

"What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, writer! Had a good jag over your words.' "

"I wish you had." I giggled, drugged with nervous release. "I could have retired by now."

I tried to go shopping. C. had to send me to the store with a list.

"Just pin it to my sleeve," I'd snarl.

"Oh, my little Beauie's afraid he's going to forget something," she goo-gooed at me, patting my head. Happier than she'd ever been in B. or U.

But the list had nothing to do with any defect of memory. I needed the list so I could match up the names she gave me with the letters printed on the inscrutable commodity labels. I needed a list to hand to a clerk. I couldn't even come close with the pronunciations. For I hadn't a clue what things were called. What things were.

One nine-hour plane flight returned me to infant trauma. My helplessness spread well beyond making purchases. I lived in constant terror of inadvertent offense. Sometimes, when I went out, someone would upbraid me on the street. Clearly, I'd transgressed, but all I could catch would be the exasperation. They might shake a fist at some sign or printed protocol. "Can't you read?" I could hear them ask. But I did not yet have the wherewithal to answer, "No, not really."

My accidental rudeness had no end. I ran into people who greeted me warmly but whom I couldn't answer. In that first month, I met at least half of C.'s ten dozen first cousins, and couldn't keep one straight from the other. Not a person in town whom I wasn't related to. Not one who didn't know me, the first foreign import to drop in since Kilroy. And not a soul I recognized.

The smallest trip to the post office ruined me for an afternoon. I would rehearse my request in advance, like a Samoan thespian mouthing a phonetic transcription of Long Day's Journey into Night.

But unless the speech passed ripple-free, I was sunk. Any words from the other side of the bulletproof, muffling glass and I panicked. They might have been saying, "Very good, sir." But they might just as easily have been saying, "That's not the way it's done around here, Henk."

I missed appointments, as seven-thirty became half-eight. My age transposed into nine-and-twenty, which had that Housman lilt, but frequently turned me, in conversation, into ninety-two.

"It's good for you, man," C. informed me. "It's your turn to live in a country where they can't pronounce your name."

Nothing was what C. had prepared me for. Everything generated astonishment. The two-and-a-half gulden coin. The rainbow bank notes with artists on them instead of politicians. The queen's birthday, when the men's chorus sang "Old Black Joe." The morning bedclothes hanging out of upper-story windows. Stork sculptures that materialized on the stoops of families with newborns. Strangers greeting each other on the street. Coffee and pastry gatherings after a funeral.

The almostness of the place bewildered me more than total strangeness would have. For the few months while I still marked the contrast, society went archaic. People sang in public. They spent weeks sewing Carnaval costumes and writing occasional verses for one another. Fifteen-year-olds idled away Sundays with their grandparents. Where I came from, these things occurred only in movie nostalgia or prime-time parody.

In E., they were the unexamined norm. E. — the real, measurable E. — turned out to be a medieval village that had grown up around a bustling funeral business. The village had crashed through a sinkhole in the thin crust of time. Tinkers, cobblers, and ex-coal miners cackled to each other and scratched their heads over American television imports. They speculated hermeneutically about talking cars and cyborg heroes, then got up at sunrise the next morning to attend Gregorian mass.

Everyone and his daughter belonged to the neighborhood starting eleven or played euphonium in the pickup marching band. They donned Napoleonic militia uniforms and spent all weekend at shooting competitions, or dolled up in vestments at the drop of a wimple to do the Scatalogical Nun sketch at any gathering over ten people. That meant every other night.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

E. condemned me to belonging. I was no more than the Foreigner, but even that bit part wound me tighter into the social web than I'd ever been in my country. People dropped by unannounced, and took offense when we waited too long to reciprocate. Every word went public. Every choice had its trial by jury. The ongoing village epic made Stateside soap opera stars seem bourgeois.

Most sacred of public tortures was Ordeal by Birthday. The victim hosted, and every walk-on in the celebrant's life dropped by for the ubiquitous coffee and flan. Relative, friend, neighbor, colleague, neighbor of friend, relative of colleague, and so on, forever. Somebody's birthday, you went. With scores of aunts and uncles, ten dozen first cousins and their spouses (all militantly fecund), untold organizational acquaintances, and neighbors all up and down the street who tracked our comings and goings, C. and I celebrated birthdays as often as we ate.

Each one moved me closer to sainthood. "This is hard for you," C. said.

"Not so bad. I'm managing." C. had not yet decided her nationality. I kept still, trying not to agitate her further. I hoped to keep the world large enough for her at last to live in. Fatal stupidity on my part. But then, I was not yet thirty.

"Can you make out any of it?" she would worry.

"Key words. It throws me when they start in dialect, catch my eye, go over to Dutch. ."

"And lapse back the minute they turn their head." C. laughed in sympathy. "Poor Beauie."

Yet she was the one splitting down the middle.

Truth be told, I sometimes followed every word of whole birthday speeches at a shot. But if I derailed, I could go a quarter hour or more before recovering the thread. In extremis, I resorted to nodding like a narcoleptic and muttering, "I see, I see," hoping my conversant hadn't just asked me a question.

The supreme moment of character strengthening came that first year, at my birthday. "We don't have to do this, do we? We can head down to France for the weekend, or something? Leave the coffee in a thermos outside the door?"

"Beau." C. looked hurt, uncomprehending. "Are you serious?"

We baked for days. The guests started drifting through shortly after noon, and kept on drifting until midnight. Many brought gifts — a brace of pencils, a tablet of lined writing paper — tokens of small innocence North America had long ago abandoned. The relatives were saying it was okay with them, what I did for a living, even if I seemed, to most, not to do anything at all.

By that first birthday, I'd almost reached childhood. With concentration, I could follow most of Uncle Sjef's song about getting so drunk he lost his house, there just a minute ago. It helped that everyone chimed in on the chorus. After light gloss, I smiled at cousin Huub's Belgian jokes. The group story about the failed German attempt to steal the church bells I could have recited in my sleep.

I hovered, trying to keep everyone in caffeine, lager, and baked goods. "Would you like a teaspoon?" I tried to ask Tante Maria. A dike-burst of laughter all over the room told me that something had slipped 'twixt cortex and lips. C. turned blue with hilarity before I could pry the explanation out of her.

"You asked Auntie if she'd like a tit."

I gave my usual pained smile. I clowned a plea for forgiveness, but all anyone wanted of me was the next ridiculous howler.

Auntie's tit took its place in the permanent repertoire. I heard it again at three of the next five birthdays. My simple presence triggered associative smiles from assembled relatives. My little curveball slipped into the larger contour of party stories. Things meant what their telling let them. The war, the mines, the backbreak harvest, legendary weather, natural disasters, hardship's heraldry, comic come-uppance for village villains, names enshrined by their avoidance, five seconds' silence for the dead: the mind came down to narration or nothing. Each vignette, repeated until shared. Until it became true.

Birthdays formed the refrains in long, rambling ballads. Who knew the verses? Verses were written to be lost. Only that catchphrase chorus lived on after the tune.

Birthdays were life's customs posts, checkpoints on the borders of time. The community dropped by, to ask if you had anything to declare. And the only duty levied on new goods began with the triplicate phrase That reminds me. It took me a long time to recognize the capital under formation. Where I came from, the very idea provoked puzzlement or political suspicion. I was watching the growth of group worldliness, collective memory.

This wereldbeeld marked my spot for me at the continuous coffee party. I became our very own outsider. The buitenlander with the colorful expressions and creative charades. The man who once — just weeks before, but already mythic — asked Auntie if she wanted a tit. Second cousins once removed baited me with kind setups. What happened this week? They waited for me to give over my local hoard of experience, in the strangest of colors. Melons became monster grapes. Hearses became belated ambulances, death wagons. Zoos became beast libraries. Libraries became book gardens.

I became the living mascot, the group novelty. I was the only person the family would ever meet who had learned their language from the weirdness of print. I'd dropped out of the past, from some Golden Age travelogue. My Dutch derived from history, archive, the odd document, museum tag. Consequently, I knew the word for iconoclasm before I knew the word for string. This gave the family no end of puzzled pleasure.

I did fall back on more conventional self-teaching guides. I had a text called, in rough translation, Dutch for Othertonguers. I had a book of cloze-method passages. On one page, a paragraph spelled out some aspect of life here in dit klein land. On the next page, the same story now appeared with every fifth word missing. Story of my life.