Galatea 2.2

I used, too, that ancient reader C. had carried back with her, because she could not bear to part from it. Where her parents, in that basement hole in Chicago, once used the magic book to turn Moeder gaat de doktor halen into Mother goes to fetch the doctor, I used it now to reverse the spell. Volgend jaar zal Mei mooi zijn. May will be fine, fine beyond telling.

I read until my eyes turned to wool. I listened and spoke until my brain went anemic. I'd come home from parties destroyed, in tears, ready to sleep forever. C. would hold me, an oversized changeling child, a monstrous cuckoo left in her nest. "Het spijt me, Beau. Neem me niet kwalijk. Ik houd van jou. Ik houd zoveel van jou. "

I imagined I knew what she was saying.

All the while, I was busy finishing the most American book I would ever write. Disney, Mickey, the Japanese internment, the World's Fair, Trinity Site. The Hobsons, holed up in their white wood mid-western A-frame, now a fairy tale to me.

After a day of writing, I liked to walk. Village fell away to countryside, and I might have been anywhere. I lay in a cow pasture, looking up at the sky, repeating "Hemel, hemel, hemel," trying to get the tag to stick to this unnamable Ruysdael. I felt my back against the chill ground and thought, "Aarde," until I no longer had to think to think it.

My mood in those days ranged from sad fury to rolling, social confusion. I was worse than adrift. I stood just outside the windows of the lost domain, peeking at the blazing costume party within.

Reading out loud kept us together. Kept me in the country, when I wanted to disappear. We read Flemish comic books and Frisian poetry. We went on Poe's expedition to tropic Antarctica. We started in on the million-and-a-half-word chamber-continent of Proust. We got out. We pored over the Michelins, the Fodors, the Baedekers. We waded into the guides, either in translation or, fitfully, in our newfound original.

Helen was strange. Stranger than I was capable of imagining. She sped laugh-free through Green Eggs and Ham, stayed dry-eyed at Make Way for Ducklings, feared not throughout Where the Wild Things Are. Not surprising. The symbols these shameless simulations played on had no heft or weight for her, no real-world referent.

"Skip childhood," Lentz told me. "We're running out of time."

"How is she going to know anything if we skip childhood?"

"She doesn't need to know anything." Lentz smirked. "She just has to learn criticism. Derrida knows things? Your deconstructionists are rife with wisdom? Jeez. When did you go to school? Don't you know that knowledge is passé? And you can kiss meaning bye-bye as well."

I hated him when he got arch. His archness left me so helpless with rage that I could never answer him. I knew how much Lentz believed in meaning. Helen was Lentz's meaning-paradox: our Net of nets, like some high Gothic choir, asserted significance while denying any algorithm's power to reach it. Meaning was a contour. All those wrong turns we had to bring back from the dead.

"Get cracking on the List, Marcel. Time's awasting. You want childhood? Give her Beowulf."

"She'll never make sense of it."

"Oh. As if you can." He punched me playfully in the shoulder. This was not the beak conducting the misanthropic midnight session of Mozart a few months earlier. Lentz was rearranging his own firmware in a way we weren't supposed to be able to do.

"Sense is pattern, Ricky-boy. Give her some patterns and see how she arranges them."

I sometimes talked with Helen from the English Building, through a terminal ethernetted to the campus-wide backbone. That way, Lentz could use his office for real science while I continued the training. Archaic wood and incandescence gave numbing rote the feel of a grand, nineteenth-century anatomy lecture. I had my library there as well, the books Helen soon had to study.

Perhaps I also meant to scope out the competition. Bring the fight home, into the enemy's HQ. The English Building crawled with twenty-two-year-olds, frantic with the impending Exam. Each one had made the same error in judgment, giving their lives over to books. Each had disappointed some father, whom they'd hoped only to delight forever with their ability to read and write. Not one believed they would ever get a real job.

I watched them up close, our opponents, the curators of the written language. I moved about among them, a double agent. I listened around the mailboxes, in the coffee room. Criticism had gotten more involuted while I was away. The author was dead, the text-function a plot to preserve illicit privilege, and meaning an ambiguous social construction of no more than sardonic interest. Theory had grown too difficult for me, too subtle. It out-Heroded Herod. The idea seemed to be that if mind were no more than shrill solipcism, then best make a good performance of it.

But the apprentice wordkeepers: here were my old lost friends in photocopy, only younger than I had ever been. Most were peach-fuzzed posthumanists, pimply with neo-Marxist poststructuralism. They wielded an ironic sophistication Helen would never be able to interpret, let alone reproduce. I didn't even want her to hear the tropes.

The halls rippled with an intellectual energy steeped in aggression. It took me a long time to see what that energy was. It was fear. Fear that everything theory professed might be true. Pure panic that the world didn't need them anymore:

It took just as long, mingling on the outskirts, to learn what had happened to me. I'd been gone no longer than a semester. I'd come back to the standing, eternal crew. Almost the same roster, down to their names. The only difference was that nobody hung out anymore. Folks were busy, needing two books and ten articles by age twenty-five to keep one's head above professional floodwaters.

Or perhaps the press was less industry than embarrassment. Conversation dropped to hushed flusters when I tried to join in. My offers to stand this year's successful master's candidates a round of beers were met by a chorus of "Sounds good" that dissolved in polite postponements.

One day, a grad I had several times exchanged nods with stopped me in the hall and began, "Mr. Powers, could I get you to sign this paperback?" At last it struck me. I'd betrayed my old mates. I'd done the unforgivable. Let myself get old.

After that, I read increasingly to Helen from my English office.

Books were about a place we could not get back to. Something in my voice when there might give her that little interpretive leg up.

The building's vague ache of background radiation emanated from one room, up on the third floor. I managed never to walk past it, but it swelled in my avoidance. I hadn't stepped into that room since I turned adult. I sat two flights below, in my office with its Magritte fireplace, forgetting. As if forgetting were something that could be actively engineered.

I gave Helen Blake's "Poison Tree." Way premature. I wondered what I could have been thinking. I was thinking, not of the lines, but of the day I got them:

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

"What does that mean, Helen?" I never let up on her, with this whole meaning thing.

She struggled to form the generalization. She made things up now, when she didn't know. I took that as a great step forward.

"It means, things that you say…" I prompted her. She could usually complete a sentence form with some paraphrase of the words just fed her.

"Things that you say disappear."

"And things you don't say…?"

"Things you don't say get bigger."

Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.

I needed at least to see if the room still existed. Enough time had passed. Standing in the doorway and looking would not kill me.

I climbed the patched stairs, light-headed and short of breath. I did the two floors in a deliberate, directed haze. Automatic. On muscle memory alone. I pushed my body forward, the way a sixteen-year-old dials the phone to ask for his first-ever date. The way a doctor sentences an 11:15 clinic appointment to fatal path reports.

I mounted without thinking. Thought would have inhibited action. I'd reach that room only if I got to it before I knew where I was going. I pulled up in the middle of an ordinary classroom, deserted, on the small side. A blackboard bore the message "Thurs. 3:30-5:00," ringed by a smeared white corral of eons-old microorganism skeletons. The linoleum floors had darkened into a color somewhere between the Forest of Arden and the wine-dark sea. A circle of warped wooden chair-desks had been hastily abandoned. Waneth the watch, I would someday try to tell Helen. But the world holdeth.

Nothing had happened here in this room's hundred years. Nothing that bore remembering. I started to shake. Each breath set off a body-length shudder. I could not imagine how things had gotten so cold. The two dormer windows we always had to open, even in winter, because the radiator could not be shut off, demurred above me, closed.

I don't know what I wanted. Some spectral second glance at the teacher in action. The chance to ask why the world refused to answer to the poems he'd made us memorize. I needed to revise the place— first love, discovery, vocation, eighteen. To do take two. The update. Correct the shape, improve the story I'd made of where I'd been.

I should have tried something out loud. Something from one of those beaten-up anthologies, the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition. Taylor could recite all the way back to the foundations. We would not be civilized until we could remember. He died knowing stuff he had committed to permanence at an age when the rest of us were learning Engine, engine, Number 9. Whole cantos, half-chapters from books even the titles of which I had forgotten.

A bell rang, one of those forlorn indicators of ten to the hour and class change. I left on command. The scrimshawed wood corridor complained at my weight, for some reason still insistent after all these dry-aired winters.

I hit the head of the stairwell, Middlemarch under my breath. I rounded the landing, unlocking. Maybe I never looked. Maybe I always navigated by toe-tap and hope. Halfway into the second flight, I heard a creak that wasn't me. I sighted down, along my path. It was A., the page-boy mirage I'd seen late at night, while proofing copy.

This time I knew her name. I'd tracked her down to an official departmental photograph, which led in turn to her CV. I'd learned that she was a second-year master's candidate. She had graduated from college the year my third book came out. The fact appalled me.

Seeing her again, I realized how often I had seen her since, from the end of endless halls. Only now A. was real, bounding upstairs, a meter in front of my descent. She exuded blue, robin's egg, adventure, the cerulean tidal pool. She breathed like a sleeping child, like the held breath of friends gathered in a too-small house on the eve of holidays.

I snagged on her face as she glanced up, scanning mine. Instant, reflex presumption; it made me ill. Yet I knew her.

I had to keep from greeting her. My pulse doubled, cutting my intelligence in half. My skin went conductive. In the time it took me to drop another step, a bouillabaisse of chemical semaphores seeped up through my pores and spilled out to wet the air.

She must have known. She looked away, giving no indication. Her face stayed in absolute neutral, a gear beyond adopting. Two quick strides and she skipped past a near brush with literature.

I bottomed out at the base of the stairwell. I stood, winded, like a hawk-reprieved mouse. Like an agoraphobe giving a plenary speech. I would have laughed at myself, had I been able to catch my breath.

Not only could I no longer write fiction. I could no longer live fact. I'd lost fundamental real-word skills while away. The same skills I was trying to instill in Helen.

I had learned too much cognitive neuroscience. The more I read about how the mind worked, the flakier mine became. The symptoms had been coming on for a few weeks. Faces touched off self-fulfilling panic: how will you remember this person's name? Some days before, I'd crossed a street to get to the five side when looking for an address ending in zero. Monitoring my own processes, I felt myself pitching into the ditch alongside the famous test-case centipede after the reductionists asked him how he kept track of which leg moved next.

For months, my bedtime stories had spun a decameron of long-term potentiation, recategorizing, neuronal group selection, transmitter and junctional molecules. Now, for some reason, my low-level structures, blinded by the harsh light that life's interrogation used to extract its confessions, decided to pull an Aschenbach. A Humbert Humbert. One of those old fools in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, nineteenth-century epistolary vicarage farces. I meant to make an idiot of myself.

By the time I got back to the office, my replay of the woman ascending a staircase had become one of those late-show reruns you wish they'd get a new print of. A.: the face, the name, the stranger I'd been writing to, all my writing life. All those friends whom I, confused, thought dead. The grave where buried love lived.

I disappeared from English. Went back and set up shop at the Center. Paralysis I had already. I didn't need to compound it with obsession. Three weeks without seeing A. and she'd go ephemeron, would damp down from active memory trace. She'd stop making unsponsored appearances, and I'd stop wanting her to.

Work helped. I sublimated all unquenchable hormonal flare-up desires to read that infinitely suffering creature my favorite stanzas from Piers Plowman by candlelight. Instead I read to the spreading neural net. Several times a week I invented painful contrivances by which I might introduce myself to A. Each time I did nothing but go and talk to Helen.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed — linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.

She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weight vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're so hungry you could eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

A certain kind of simile fell naturally into her trained neurode clusters. Helen's own existence hinged on metaphor-making. In fact, associative memory itself was like a kind of simile. Three-quarters of the group of neurodes that fired when faced with, say, a whale might remain intact when depicting a thing that seemed, whatever the phrase meant, very like one. Such a constellation of common firings became, in a way, shadowpaint shorthand for some shared quality.

After all, the world's items had no real names. All labels were figures of speech. One recognized a novel item as a box by comparing it to a handful of examples so small it fit into a single dimple of an egg carton. In time, one learned without being taught. Rode without the training wheels. Somehow, the brain learned to recognize whole categories, to place even those.things seen for the first time.

This much simile Helen could live with. But the higher-order stuff drove her around the simulated bend. Love is like ghosts. Love is like linen. Love is like a red, red rose. The silence of her output layers at such triggers sounded like exasperation. A network should not seem but be.

Yes, yes: we know what the thing is like. But what is it? And then I, too, would be overwhelmed. Any task in the garden seemed easier than pruning her responses, for her responses, however grammatical, were bewilderment incarnate. Her ideas were well shaped, her syntax sound. But her sense: her sense hailed from the far side of the painted veil. I can no more remember its otherness than I can recall the curve of a dream before its red-penciling by the Self.

I revived a little by reminding us both that I didn't have to tell Helen what things meant. Context spun out its own filament. The study questions themselves laddered the world's labelless data into a recognizable index. The accumulated weight of sorted sentences had to self-gloss, or Helen would die before she could come to life.

Helen's nets struggled to assert the metaphors I read her. She ratified them through backtracking, looking for a corner where they might fit into the accreting structure. She gamed the ur-game, puzzling out evolution's old brainteaser, find the similarity. A is like B. Mind in its purest play is like some bat. Speech is like embroidered tapestries. God's light is like a lamp in a niche. Greek is like lace. A pretty girl is like a melody. A people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass. How?

"My heart is like a singing bird," I told Helen. There didn't seem to be any harm in it. She still had several months to learn about irony and lies.

"What is singing?" she asked. That capacity still floored me. When her associative matrix dead-ended now, she asked for openings. Something inside her web told her her web needed supplementing.

"The bird is singing," I assured her. "But my heart feels the way a singing bird must feel."

I failed the test of interpretation I was training her to pass. I missed Helen's question altogether.

I tried her out on a longer Rossetti exercise. At that point, I didn't hope for comprehension. Rather, I read to her as one might recite genealogies to a child. No meaning; just a tune she might one day set words to:

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree.

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember

And if thou wilt, forget.

I thought she'd stumble over the "thou" or the "wilt," the "plant no X nor Y." My fears showed how little I knew what went on in Helen's hidden layers. Her neurodes connected far more to themselves than to the outside interface.

"What does it mean," she asked me, "Sing no sad songs?" She could treat clauses as objects. Her speech turned the recursive crank of endlessness.

The question surprised me. Not what I'd expected. "It means, 'Don't be sorry.' People sing songs at funerals. Singing can be a way of missing or memorializing someone. Of saying goodbye. The person saying these words doesn't want to be remembered that way."

Helen had to spell things out for me. People were idiots. No, no, no. From the top. "How do you sing?"

I had gone on one of those glorious demented sidetracks, the hallmark of intelligence. The ability to use everything in the lexicon to answer except the answer.

I'd given her "The bird is singing," "The poet's heart is singing," even "Grief is singing," when all the poor girl needed was "Uttering pure-toned pitches in time sequence is singing." Writing struck me as so impossible, my years as a novelist so arrogant, that I could have lived that life only through blatant fabrication.

How do you sing? All I could think to do was demonstrate. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. Failing to say what a thing was, I could at least put an instance in her ears.

When I returned to the lab two days later, I thought I'd dialed a wrong number. Even before I reached the door, it hit me. Sound rolled out into the hall, shock waves in bonsai packages. I'd heard music emanate from Lentz's suite once before. But this was the air of a new planet. I rounded the corner, ready already to be dead.

Inside, Helen was singing. Through her terminal mouthpiece, she sang the song she'd heard me sing. What else could she? She sang Bounce me high, bounce me low, bounce me up to Jericho. A song I'd sung once as a child, when hired by an opera company to portray a small boy. My sung, staged simulation of childhood. Helen sang in an extraterrestrial warble, the way deaf people sing. But I recognized that tune in one note.

Lentz sat behind his desk, hands pressed to his neck. He had not moved since arriving, however long ago that had been. Even through the bank glass of his specs, I saw vinegary damp.

"You did this to her, Powers!" I knew where I'd heard that mock indignation before. I recognized it, after one training. My father, the summer before his death, laughing as he scolded my older sister: How can you do this to me? How can you make me a grandfather?

I'd done nothing. A kludge of morphologies — implementations within implementations, maps that had learned to map each other— passed a milestone we hadn't even hoped to set her. Lentz and I stood by, winded, pulses racing. All we could do was listen.

She auditioned the tune. Bounce me high. Bounce me low. Only by hearing it out loud, in her own voice, could Helen probe the thing, test it against itself.

She was stuck on the first phrase, that unfinished half-stich, because that's all I'd sung her. Because that's where I had stuck. After twenty-five years, I could not remember how the rest of the tune went. Over and back Helen hummed, not knowing she possessed but half the melodic story. Bounce me up to Jericho. Lack of tonal resolution did not faze her. No one told her that tunes were supposed to come home to tonic. This was the only one anybody had ever sung her.

And in that moment, I understood that I, too, would never have a handle on metaphor. For here was the universe in a grain of literal sand. Singing — enabled, simulated on a silicon substrate. I felt how a father must feel, seeing his unconscious gestures — pushing back a forelock or nudging the sink cabinet shut with a toe — picked up and mimicked by a tiny son.

"Lentz," I whispered, so as not to distract the miracle, "is this what it's like to be a parent?"

Very like, his eyes leaked back. And I saw what it meant to want that awful next step, tasting oneself from the outside, in a flash of constructed recognition. To say the thing I made I did not make and is not mine. To know in Polaroid advance that hour when all life's careful associations will come undone.

Less than a year after we moved to E., we got a letter from the Taylors. I wrote them often, for after we bolted, I needed word from U. more than I ever did while living there. They wrote back jocular stuff: "Don't you two realize the age of Europe is over and that of North America is following in its wake? Get back over here before it's too late."

Taylor had so little time to reply that any word was an event. I kept the envelope sealed, thinking it would be fun to read to C. when she got home from her latest temp job. We'd marvel at Tayloresque sentences together, over the dinner I prepared for her.

I watched C. step off the bus, waving from the balcony as I did each evening. She shot me back one of those terrified, fatigued, smiling, full-body waves that never failed to cut right through me. The letter is dated September 17, but it must have been a cold fall. C. was already swallowed by that giant navy coat that ran all the way down to her ankles.

In the kitchen, she danced a little jig at the sight of the letter. Anything that made me happy might increase the chances for our transplantation. "Come on, Beauie. Read it, you loony-tick. What in the world are you waiting for?"

I slit the packet open and read:

"Dear Rick and C.,

"Belatedly, I take up pen, first to thank you for your welcome tape of good music and loved voices. Similarly welcome have been the letters, which I have meant to answer every day. Recent weeks have both dragged and hurried, creeping by the minute but vanishing into an unreal limbo so that even less than usual am I able to believe that months have passed since we have seen you…

"For nearly a full month I have had a succession of terrible waits after tests, each of which finished a three- or four-day vigil with more bad news. CAT scan, bronchoscopy, bone scan, and finally a week in the hospital for removal of a piece of rib for bone biopsy determined that in addition to a main tumor in the right lung I have cancerous bone in the left rib cage, ruling out an operation and leaving radiation and chemotherapy as treatment. The only test with encouraging results showed no evidence of metastasis to brain.

"Since then, my silence has been caused by effects of treatment. The dreaded nausea did not last long, but loss of appetite and weight did, and a fatigue so profound that I can't adequately describe it. My muscles have atrophied and I spend most of my time lying down. I am good for little more than harvesting the odd tomato, gathering windfall apples, picking some late-planted lettuce. .

"Our long silence is terribly misleading. Your departure left a large emptiness that has been italicized by this illness and our being more solitary than usual. If we possessed ESP, you would have been deluged by messages from here. Still, it is a pleasure to imagine the two of you together in the wide variety of settings you manage to inhabit. My life would seem pretty bounded-in-a-nutshell by any measure, but your joint enthusiasm in getting out and seeing the world is overwhelming.

"I've exhausted my pitiable energy, though not my love. The best way you can please me is to promise that my illness will not lead you to even the slightest tendency to avoid pleasure out of affectionate empathy. Try to adopt the opposite attitude; let me hope that thoughts of me will enhance pleasures I'd enjoy, too, if we were together."

After the first paragraph, I looked up at C. But we'd read too far to pretend the message away. I got through the whole history. Finishing, I looked up across the widening kitchen table at the college girl who had sat with me on the Quad, when still young enough to believe in consolation. This was the same woman, the same panicked doe, in the same glare that life keeps training on us until we can no longer even dread it.

An awful half-second stutter step, and C. said, "You'll have to go back to the States."

"Just to see him, at least," I pleaded, the exact reaction her reflex generosity meant to stave off. But I was not pleading with C.

I flew back to U., numb to the new feel of the place. Taylor could still get out. We went to a nearby woods. We talked. He knew he was done. The only thing for it was presence of mind. Taylor brought along his camera, took a snap of me. I wanted to take one of him, fix him forever. But Taylor had already begun to waste away and refused to be captured like that.

I showed him the excerpt from my new book that had just appeared in a glossy literary weekly. Taylor, for whose approval I'd developed my labyrinthine style, delighted in the piece's uncharacteristic breeziness. He delighted even more when I told him how much I'd been paid. "A dollar a word! That has a solid ring to it."

I had done what everyone in Taylor's line, what he himself had once dreamed of doing. I could wake up every morning and devote myself to making worlds. People read my inventions and wrote about them in turn. My words had grown careers of their own. My overnight success gave Taylor such pleasure that I couldn't bring myself to tell him I meant to quit fiction.

"I didn't want to burden you with such a prediction when you were an eighteen-year-old kid memorizing The Windhover.' " He beamed. "But however much luck always plays into such things, it was possible, even then, to imagine your getting away with something like this."

We turned to the real issue. He protected me from what his disease was doing to him. He seemed, for half an hour, the equal of any formulation he had made before the tumor came alive inside him. I asked him whether, at that stage of the illness, literature helped much. Did it make things any clearer, any easier?

Taylor stayed as brutally forthright with me as ever. He thought for a moment, to get the prosody right. "I would say that literature is not entirely irrelevant, in this circumstance. But it's not quite central, either."

Before we headed home, I asked if he had any regrets. Anything he still needed to do. Taylor told me then that, to his mind, the only two careers worth striving for were doctor and musician. I could not tell how figurative he was being.

Taylor sickened. I found a house-sit in the neighborhood, and came by every day. I sat with him as he napped, or I read to him, or we watched sports on television. Sometimes we talked, but never again like that day in the woods. He lost his appetite, shrank to insubstantial nothing. His gut stopped working. His skin gained purple-green highlights and his joints grew smooth as polished metal. When muscles gave out, he cupped his question-mark head in both hands. He sat in the sunroom until he could no longer sit up. Then we moved him upstairs, into his long bed.

He asked me to check out some books from the library, so he could prepare to teach his class in January.

M., his wife, remained rocklike. She exuded competence beyond belief. She lifted the skeletal Taylor out of bed and carried him— Mary holding a puppet Christ — deflated and naked, to the toilet, in her arms.

Only his mind remained luminous. Near the end, the medications did change him. But even then, his topographies fought to keep themselves intact. One afternoon before Christmas, I found Taylor in a state that was not quite sleep, but could pass for sleep in low light.

"Oh, it's you!" he greeted me. "All day long, the sounds outside this window have been turning into events from my past."

He went on to tell me, in devastating detail, about the valley of his childhood, out West. The names of all his classmates and the ways each had distinguished or humiliated himself in coming of age. The frozen rabbits hanging on the barn wall that kept the family alive all winter. Every single title in the valley library, outread and exhausted by fourteen.

Before I left town, I put another book in Taylor's hands. One for the permanent record. One he would never read. I gave him the first bound galley of my second book, Prisoner's Dilemma.

Number two was my memorial to a sick father. In it, I described every impasse of history but his. Only the passage of years, only knowing I'd never show Richard Powers, Sr., what fiction had done to him, made that fiction possible.

I told Taylor about my father. How I'd broken his heart. His lover's quarrel with the world. His disappearance at the end, his one last frontier adventure. I told Taylor about the cryptic absolution Dad sent me from the Yukon. The cremation of Sam McGee.

At my mention of the name, Taylor's lips crooked. Astonishingly, the man to whom I owed my Shakespeare and Yeats, my Marx and Freud, launched into a full rendition of the hack ballad. He did not miss a stanza. Death had no more dominion over him.

"I don't know how to say goodbye," I told Taylor. The book was my goodbye, because symbols are all that become of the real. They change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them. The symbols a life forms along its way work back out of the recorder's office where they wait, and, in time, they themselves go palpable. Lived.

I left, knowing he had at best days, and at worst a month. Nothing left to do. The old friends were everywhere in attendance. Maybe I should have stayed. Stood and waited. Maybe he could have used having me around.

"Make a noise," he ordered as I took off. "See the world."

"I will," I promised. "And I'll keep you posted."

In the short night, eastward above the Atlantic, I thought of the last time I'd made the crossing. My life in U. was dead. I'd gone back to that cow town once too often. I told myself I would never get near it again.

But U. caught up with me, even in my foreign country. And that death was far worse, faced alone in E. C. and I lay on the floor of our apartment, in hypothermia, and listened to the tape of the memorial service, the fiddle tunes, that whole unbroken circle of friends telling Taylor stories, recounting their local eulogies for the man who thought only memory stood between us and randomness.

Each person who knew him surrendered some private lode of remembered event. Or they read from the page one of the poems Taylor himself did from effortless memory. They read Blake and Rossetti and Stevens. No one read "Sam McGee," because the one who was supposed to read it was lying on the floor in a little ex-coal-mining town on the other side of the world, listening to the belated tape, shivering, wrecked forever by memory.

I could give back nothing to Taylor, I, who couldn't even find a way to tell him what he had given me. All I could do for Taylor now was to turn him into character.

I held on to C., giving in to my only available response. She probably knew I would backslide long before the idea hit me. One more book, I pleaded with her, wordlessly. I needed to postpone my graduation from lying long enough to tell a double love story. To turn a helical twist that might both eulogize the man and let me live, before it was too late, the life in science from which he'd long ago deflected me.

Helen did not sing the way real little girls sang. Technically, she almost passed. Her synthesized voice skittered off speech's earth into tentative, tonal Kitty Hawk. Her tune sounded remarkably limber, given the scope of that mechanical tour de force.

But she did not sing for the right reasons. Little girls sang to keep time for kickball or jump ropes. The little boy soprano I had played onstage at twelve had been doing that. Singing the tune I'd taught Helen, keeping imitative time by bouncing a ball against a pasteup shop door.

Helen didn't have a clue what keeping time meant, never having twirled a jump rope, let alone seen one. We'd strengthened her visual mapping, but true, real-time image recognition would have required vastly more computer power than the entire Center drew. And we were already living beyond our quota.

If Helen had a temporal sense now, it came from a memory strong enough to remember configurations it was no longer in. And mark the passing of her changing, internal states. God only knows the look and feel of a sense of time without a sense of space. But that was Helen.

"You were not, yesterday," she would say to me, whether I'd been gone three hours or three days. "Yesterday" stood for any state that Helen had watched get swallowed up by its successor. "You" presumably meant that generic, external irritant that laid data on her input layers. "Were not" was her simplistic idea of negation. Although she had still to learn that absence and presence were not opposites, she was well on her way to a functional understanding of loneliness, that font of all knowledge.

One day she added, "I miss you."

The thing canonical writers always said in print. I wanted to tell her that she ought not to put the formulation in the present tense while I sat right there at the mike and keyboard. I said nothing, not wanting to undo the example of the rhymers she imitated with anything so trivial as convention.

"I miss Muffet," she went on. In growing savvy enough for figurative speech, she'd become too softheaded for the literal. Either that, or she was engaging in the neural network equivalent of silliness. If she could sing, I reasoned, I could certainly train her to giggle.

I mailed the finished copy of my fourth book to New York on the day Los Angeles set itself on fire. My story predicted that explosion, although such a prediction took no special gift. Mine was less prophecy, anyway, than memory. A child's recollected nightmare.

The prepublication notices of the book appeared not long after. Soon enough for human recollection, in any event. The most visible of the trade-press reviews dubbed the book "a bedtime tale set in a future apocalypse." This denial stuck. Everything I'd written about Angel City and its war on childhood had already played out. But so many of the subsequent reviews pushed memory into the not-yet that I began to think I had, in fact, written my first attempt at speculative fiction.

The reviews were not all bad. Chicago glowed, saving my appointment at the Center and preserving face with the home crowd. The best notice, remarkably, came from that national paper sold in street boxes designed to resemble TVs. It spoke of homeopathy, of narrating the worst so the worst did not have to happen.

Most critics, though, felt the reader had to work too hard for too bleak a payoff.

Lentz delighted in the harshest press judgments. It became almost impossible to train Helen while he was around.

He entered the office crowing, "Look who's here! If it isn't my favorite manufacturer of literary astonishments. Which is not to say a good novelist," he added, graciously patronizing, "although you are that, too."

This was the lead from that same glossy with the twenty-million worldwide circulation that yesterday had predicted such a full future for me.

"Did you memorize the entire piece, Philip?"

"Just the good parts."

"You haven't wasted your weekend, have you?"

"I notice you recognized the allusion. I bet you could do the closing bit as well. You know: 'Little brother has failed to invent a story'?"

But my career had not yet been decided. All juries hung on word from the sole review anyone ever seemed to pay attention to. The institution had gone monolithic, as if the pieces appearing there no longer derived from individuals, each locked inside their sensibilities and foibles, but formed the consulates of a single, unified State Department of literary taste. An algorithm of aesthetic appropriateness.

A mixed decision in that paper of record, even a late one, could pretty much close the cover on you before anyone had a chance to open it. I avoided looking. I'd never done especially well there, and this time I was so far out on a narrative limb that I knew I was ripe for amputation. Besides, I didn't have to seek out judgment. Judgment would come looking for me.

It did, one Monday morning. I was at the console in Lentz's office, talking to Helen about ignorant armies clashing by night. The infinite repetition of supervised training had given way to a more unstructured give-and-take, where I might read a given set of lines to her a few times, if that, and carry on, letting her do the evaluating internally.

Out of the corner of my eye — how to explain to her that spheres might have corners? — I watched Lentz bound in. He carried all twenty-five pounds of the Sunday edition, nonchalantly, just taking all the world news that fit out for a spin. He dropped the pile on his already cluttered desk with a resounding thud.

I saw him, through the back of my head, without turning. He picked up the top section of the mass. "What's this? The Book Review? What's this? New fiction by Richard Powers?" A parody of Wemmick, in my favorite Dickens passage. And so, twice the pain per word. "Listen to this, Marcel. This will interest you:

"In every reader's mental library, there are books that are remembered with admiration and books that are remembered with love.

"It goes on—"

"That's all right, Philip. I get the picture."

"No, really. It says you are all right, in your own peculiar way. Just a little flawed. It says you could be good if you just kept your story simple, with lovable characters. Like The Diary of Anne Frank."

We had sat in front of that girl's house, C. and I, at dusk two years before. Up in the city for a day's sightseeing, too broken by that After-house of time to want, anymore, to move. We could not even bring ourselves to put our arms around each other.

"Hey! You could read that story to our little apparatus, couldn't you? In the original, I mean. Now, that would throw the poor girl for a loss. She wouldn't even know what hit her."

I could not look at Helen, because Helen was nowhere. I looked at the open anthology next to the microphone. "Dover Beach" seemed a sad irrelevance.

"Should we read her the review?" Lentz cackled. He scanned the page, smirking and shaking his head. "You'll forgive me if I take this like a bad winner? I'd like to think that I'm not losing a novelist friend. I'm gaining a long-term unpaid lab assistant."

I walked out, leaving Lentz chiding me with apologies and Helen wondering what had become of Matthew Arnold.

Drama got me as far as the atrium. One of those drizzly midwinter days that U. excelled in. I wasn't about to bike home. I made my way to the cafeteria where, too early, I bought lunch. Plover and Hattrick sat at a table, nursing juices. I steered myself toward them. Their conversation, rapid and personal, broke off as I pulled up.

"Keep talking," I said, nodding at their notebooks, closed on the table in front of them. "I'm just the humanist fly on the wall."

Plover examined my tray of onion rings and Italian beef. "Don't eat grease, Rick. Grease will kill you."

"Leave him be," Diana scolded. "He's too young to start being healthy."

"I know half a dozen people who have had heart attacks in their early thirties."

"Harold. Quit with the Jeremiah thing already." Diana turned to me. "We were just talking about yesterday's piece in the Tunes." She smiled. "Sorry!" Friendly, singsong, not heavily invested. The empirical bias. As if peer review weren't that consequential. As if a person's work was what it was, unchanged by decree.

Harold looked in my face. "I haven't read the book. But I know from my clinical days that people who have just undergone breakups of long relationships tend to see the world in apocalyptic terms."

Taken aback, all over the map. "Your clinical days?"

"Oh yeah. I used to think we knew enough about the way the mind works to put that knowledge to good use in the field. But I was much older then."

Diana snorted. "Harold likes to blame things on his inner child."

"Uh, if I've walked into the middle of something here, I can—"

A voice behind me declared, "Powers's inner child is about eighty and hobbles around on a crutch."

Lentz, breathing heavily, fresh coffee cup in tow, joined us. I made my face a blank.

"Coffee will kill you, Philip," Plover intoned. "Ach, God! Not cream, too. And sugar!" Harold clutched his cheeks in two Munch-like hands.

Diana spoke askance, as if to colleagues who had not yet joined us. "Rick's inner child may have progeria. But his outer child died at — what would you say, Rick? Eleven? Twelve?"

I started to grin, relieved. "You've read the book? Already?"

She said nothing. My muscles fell. I looked like someone who had goosed a friend's bottom at a crowded party, only to have the surprised person turn around and reveal themselves a perfect stranger.

"You hated it?" Dead silence. "You hated it."

"You sound surprised," Diana said.

My turn to say nothing.

"Oh, Ricky. You know it's brilliant, and all that. But it's so horrid. Misanthropic. Couldn't you have thrown us at least one little sop of hope?"

"I thought I had."

"Not enough."

"Would you buy it as homeopathy?"

"Homeopaths use very small doses. Look. We're all overwhelmed. We're all bewildered. Why read in the first place, if the people who are supposed to give us the aerial view can't tell us anything except what an inescapable mess we're in?"

The four of us sat looking everywhere but at one another. Her words rocked back and forth in me, like the last wake of a small craft.

"You're teaching the next book club section," Harold told her.

Lentz shook his head and pursed his lips. 'There are books you love. And then there are books. ."

But I had never once put fingers to keys for anything but love. I had written a book about lost children because I had lost my own child and wanted it back. More than I wanted anything in life, except to write.

Any hope that I might somehow be able to return to making fiction died at Diana's words. My work in progress was a sham, no more than a sentence climbing snowy mountain tracks in a cartoon of wartime. I was working from nothing but the desire to fulfill a contract. I would return the advance for the unwritten book to New York and call it a day.

Picture a train heading south. It works its wounded veterans over the mountain passes to a sweet, imaginary country called — by coincidence, just like the real one — Italy. Not Italy in the original edition, but taking that place's name now and in all subsequent printings.

Imagine yourself traveling to a country where you won't be sick anymore. This country is full of the thing you want most. As much of it as you ever dared ask for. Whatever that thing is. The one thing that means more to you than anything.

This country is a continuous outdoor café. When all else about the account fades like a moldy fresco, this image lives on in your inner travelogue. In this country, at this café, you can sit in the sun from dawn till dusk. On the piazza. The piazza d'. Your private pool of shade remains bathed in unimaginable azure. And iced drinks on endless tab.

You can sit on this terrace for as long as you ever wanted. The terrace is life's arrival. All you need do is picture it.

No one can chase you away, and you can do whatever you like, until closing. Until the next chapter. Watch women walking across the public square. Read. Read this story, if you like. Or talk. Toast the waiter. Sing. Listen to the next table sing. Anything.

You have never thought twice about cafés, but you might like to sit in one now. You would like to order, then spread out a book in front of you. Sit and watch people walking, from a distance. A pleasure, just to picture this pleasure. This description, the sun, the one desirable thing, yours for the asking.

Reading: yes. Of course. To spend all day — that nom de plume for "forever" — doing nothing but reading! Just entertaining the thought, just following the idea fleshes out a scenario of composite delight. Your one surreptitious afternoon in the sunny countryside, exiled, at the last minute, from wartime, from inescapable disaster.

When I came home to E., things were different. Different again. Still different.

To my astonishment, I now passed for fluent. A demotic, misleading fluency, in fact, became my undoing. A week after losing it, lying on the floor of the apartment listening to the cassette of Taylor's funeral, I found myself walking past E.'s modest hardware store. I turned in, deciding on a whim to buy an item we had needed for as long as I'd lived in Limburg. As they always did in E.'s archaic shops, the salesperson greeted me on entry and asked to be of help.

"Good afternoon. I'm looking for this mechanical device, about yay big. It's a gizmo with an adjustable center pivot that allows you to apply increased torque. ."

"Hmm. N-no, I don't think we have anything like that here, sir." She gestured with her palms outward. You see where you are: a pocket, one-church town. Little call for the esoteric. "You might try Maastricht."

"No, no. It's a common little commodity. Every home has one. You might use it to fix your plumbing, or tighten a loose dowel rod. ."

Her face stayed blank, helpful but passive. Finally, something I said broke through. Her expression fled from confusion to anger in the space of one thought.

"Do you mean a wrench?"

"That's it!" I shouted.

"Then why the hell didn't you say you wanted a wrench?"

I had been better off with the impenetrable accent and the babble grammar. I'd communicated more when the only words I had were "I don't have the words."

I went about in a daily grief that, like Taylor on the effects of his chemo, I could not describe adequately in the most native of languages. C. mistook that sadness. She felt it directed at her, at her idea to move us to this invented place.

She grew defensive, self-accusing. "I know you love me, Beau. But you don't need any of this."

"Any of what?"

"I'm not sure I need any of it either. What are we doing here? My parents don't need me to take care of them, do they? They chose to come back here all by themselves."

"A good choice, no?"

"Oh yes. They're happier here than they ever were in Chicago. They haven't a minute to themselves."

"What's the problem? I thought the point was to discover what nationality you were."

"I'm further from that than I was in the States. I look at myself, and I can't even recognize what I've become."

"Gone native?"

C. laughed, protecting me. "Sometimes this country drives me up the bloody wall. The village patrol, eyeing every irregular behavior. The social agenda, all worked out for you in advance. The gezelligheid. The close little shops. The lines for everything. The little old ladies shoving you out of the way, or choosing the narrowest possible aisle in the densest country on earth to stop and gossip. Nothing's ever open. Half the country's on the dole."

"You sound like the American ambassador."

"And I've dragged you into the middle of all this!"

"I'm fine. I'm having a great time." A lie on the surface. But not, if this meant anything, deep down. "We can walk to four major language regions from our front stoop. Two hours away from three of the world's greatest museums. And green herring by the bucket. I'd never have had this chance. Except for you, C."

That much was true, even on the surface. Her gamble had thrown open all possibility, however much possibility now upended us.

When my second book came out, C.'s restlessness pitched into the distress bands. Publication of a novel is a nonevent arranged to look like news. Prisoner produced a spate of statements, positioning my career on the turnpike of contemporary letters like a dot on the AAA Triptiks. The point often seemed to be to spare people the inconvenience of reading.

It killed C. to read that I was a fresh commodity to keep an eye on. That I was intensely private. That I lived in U., when in fact I lived in E., where the shopkeepers scolded me for linguistic perversity. That I was a fast-rising star in the literary firmament who had X's brains and Y's punch lines. That the eighties had been waiting for me.

I tried to tell her. "It's all nonsense. Market-making, for an increasingly smaller market. They do it, we ignore it, and keep working. It's part of the business."

"So we're in business now?"

"No. Okay. Not business. Part of the… C. Sweet. Let's not make ourselves nuts."

"We don't need to make ourselves anything." She smacked the pile of newsprint that New York's clipping service kept sending us. "The pros will make us into anything they want."

"C. You know who we are. The pair bond. All the rest of this is somebody else's construction. Nothing's changed."

"Of course it's changed. It's not just you and me anymore. You're obligated. You have to make good on opportunity. Everyone and his typewriting monkey would kill for a shot at what's fallen in your lap."

I tried to tell her that there was no obligation, no opportunity that we didn't already have. I tried to comb out the snarls left by public evaluation. That was my job: to keep things unchanged and make them right. But the better I did my job, the more I condemned C. to the opposite employment.

Nor did it help when mourning for Taylor led me into a period of work more intense than I will ever know again. The simplest possible tune had come to me — four notes, then four more, four times over. Selection had whittled at that tune until it grew as long and polyphonic as the planetary concert hall.

The book I needed to write sat on the simplest of bases. Life remembered. Life described. It wrote down and repeated what worked. The small copying errors the text made in running off examples of itself, edited by the world's differential rejection and forgiveness, produced the entire collaborative canon.

For what turned out to be years, this seemed to me a book's only conceivable theme. And thirty, the only age that would take such a theme on — old enough for a glimpse at meaning, immature enough to still think meaning pursuable.

I would fail, of course, in my aerial survey. To make a map on the scale of one to one, to bring the people, the genomes I loved back to life would have required contrapuntal skill on an evolutionary scale. But while I worked on my variations, work itself seemed to be the grave where buried love did its living.

So I spent myself on work, writing a story about a reference librarian, a failed academic, and a life scientist who, diverted, becomes the subject of the experiment he runs. I split the story among the venues of my life. I tried to pack it with anagrams and acrostics, replies to every word anyone had ever sent me, for this would be my one long letter back.

I wanted to write an encyclopedia of the Information Age. The nearest reference library was kilometers away, tiny, and in a foreign tongue. I wrote about music, with only a cheap, portable cassette player to check my descriptions. I typed my computer saga on an obsolete 512K, low-density floppy-based machine that will forever ruin me to imagine, because C., in her technophobia, had picked it out and purchased it for me to sweeten my return to that country.

I lost myself in data and the heart's decoding urge. Nothing else had any interest. Life became an interruption of my description of it. I wanted nothing else but to read, work, travel now and again, take care of my C. And for a long time, I did just that.

The book grew beyond my ability to say how it should go. The story itself turned into an opportunity, an obligation that scared the hell out of us both. Some reentrant map inside me ran away with itself, insisting it was real. No amount of public judgment matched private possibility for sheer terror.

C. read my Gold Bug code as it took shape, variation by variation. She came home exhausted, eager for alternate life. She nagged me for new chapters. "I want my friends!"

She knew what I needed to hear, and said as much. But I think she did love that world for her own reasons. "So this is what you do all day while I'm out slaving over a hot word processor. I can hardly believe that the goof who cooks for me produced this."

I'd load up a chunk of text and seat her at the keys. Then she would scroll through my story on-screen while I lay on the couch holding my breath, pretending to occupy myself with a magazine. Every so often she laughed at some invented inanity. I still had the courage for silliness back then.

Hearing her, I looked up, relieved. Redeemed. 'Tell me!" I begged, pushing my luck. She would read out loud the line that had made her cackle. And I'd giggle along then, as if she had written the gag. She gave more generously than the first of audiences. But C. needed some story for herself, as endless and private a thing as I now had. Her devotion to my project, fierce and unquestioning, was bitterness by another name. She met my constant infidelity with encouraging smiles, and braced for the day when strangers would declare their love for a story that should never have been more than hers.

"Beauie, I'm going nuts. I'm wasting my life." The refrain of a poem I'm sure had been on my Master's Comps but which I could not place.

"What are you talking about? Think of everything you've managed since coming here."

"Hah. The DP's Progress. Maybe it's time to quit fooling ourselves. Pack up and go back."

I did not say what occurred to me: Back where?

"C. Be fair to yourself."

"That's what I'm trying to do."

"What do you want? What do you need? Just say the word."

"I don't know. Beau. I'm sorry. I'm a total mess."

I told her she was the very opposite, in as many ways as I could. We talked long and often, coming back always to the same thing. Her life split over different orders of place. Of homes, she no longer knew which was fact and which the sustaining imitation. Two native tongues were as good as none.

Source and target languages tore her down the middle. But it struck me that she might still make from that split a suture.

"Look, C. How many people can do what you do? You know two distinct names for everything. You know what they call it here and there. Seems to me, that when you can shake with both hands, you're almost obligated to be an arbiter."

She looked frightened, drawn. "Translation, you mean? They'll never let me."

"Who's to let or not let?"

"Oh, Ricky. You know how things work around here. It's such a goddamned bureaucratic society. I could be the greatest translator going and I wouldn't be able to get work without certification. You can't wipe your bleeding ass in this country without a certificate."

She had begun talking like someone else. Like her dialect self, translated into English.

"Well, if you need a certificate, then we get the certificate."

"By 'we' I take it you mean me. And how do you suggest I do that? You want me to go back to school? Be a child, all over again? I don't have the energy for all that, Beau. Nor the stomach."

"Don't have the nerve, is more like it."

"Call it what you want."

I did. The hardest names I could think of, followed by the softest. I promised her it would work out brilliantly in the end. That I would take care of her for the four years school required. That I would be there for everything, until she came out the other side, newly graduated. A translator.

It did not follow, from the questions Helen asked, that she was conscious. An algorithm for turning statements into reasonable questions need know nothing about what those statements said or the sense they manipulated to say it. Rules would still be slavish, deterministic, little more than a fancy Mixmaster.

But Helen had no such algorithm. She learned to question by imitating me. Or rather, training promoted those constellations of neurodes that satisfied and augmented the rich ecosystem of reentrant symbol maps described by other constellations of neurodes.

The only syntactic rules she obeyed emerged from the shape of her first reorganizational principle: to accommodate, encapsulate, and survive the barrage of stimulus, both inside and out. To tune its connections in search of that elusive topography that led input, output, and all enveloped layers toward unachievable peace.

Did the geometry of her subsystems give her deep structure? Did she, in some way, know the rules she obeyed? I didn't even understand the question. I could no longer even say what know might mean.

It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself. The function of consciousness must be in part to dummy up and shape a coherence from all the competing, conflicting subsystems that processed experience. By nature, it lied. Any rendition we might make of consciousness would arise from it, and was thus about as reliable as the accused serving as sole witness for the prosecution.

The window in question was so small and fogged that I did not even know why I worried about whether she had one. Mediating the phenomenal world via consciousness was like listening to reports of a hurricane over the radio while hiding in the cellar.

Helen's neurodal groups organized themselves into representational and even, I think, conceptual maps. Relations between these maps grew according to the same selectional feedback that shaped connections between individual neurodes — joined by recognition and severed by confusion. Helen's lone passion was for appropriate behavior. But when she learned to map whole types of maps onto each other, something undeniable, if not consciousness, arose in her.

She'd cribbed the first-person pronoun as a hollow placeholder sometime earlier. "I don't understand." "I want some more." This last one she pronounced long before I'd read her any Dickens whatsoever. In saying as much, she might have been going about her usual business of making classification couples, pairing signals from outside with symbols from in. She might have been in any number of precognitive states, states permitted by sheets of her neurodes learning to do to other sheets of neurodes what these, in turn, did to the shapes I presented to them.

I began to wonder, the day she asked me, "You bounced high to Jericho?" The day, secure in implication and containment, that she explained, "A runcible spoon is what you eat mince and quince with." The moment, overnight, she acquired cause and effect, exclaiming in hurt wonder, "The rose is sick because the worm eated it!"

It seemed enough of an act to call for witnesses. I could hear, in my mind's ear, my parents saying, "Ricky, go get your cello and play for the guests." I swore, at that age, that in the unlikely event I ever did something as mad as having children, I would never subject them to such humiliation. The lightest training in pride revised my resolution.

Lentz was on his afternoon visit to the nursing home. I rustled up Harold to come have a look. He arrived, gawky daughter in tow. With what remained of a memory that had gone senescent in the last year, I greeted her. "Hello, Trish."

She gave an insulted gagging noise. "Render me roguish. Turf me in all quadrants."

"I'm sorry?"

"This is Mina," Harold intervened. "And your name is mud."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I was sure I—"

"You're not the first one to confuse them."

Mina snorted again, a sound replete with connotations. "We're nothing at all alike. Trish is the stuck-up, snobby bitch."

"And Mina is the sweet one, as you see."

We read Helen "The Emperor's New Clothes." Mina was bored by the text, overfamiliar, although she had never heard it except in paraphrase. She prowled around the office until she found a copy of Rumelhart and McClelland to nose around in. Harold shook his head as I read. He didn't believe that the occasional sound and light emitting from Helen had anything to do with the words I read her.

The story ended. Maybe the only universally valid generalization about stories: they end. I felt like a showman. I turned to Harold and Mina, whose interest was again piqued. "So what do you want to know?"

Harold breathed out, hard. "You've got to be kidding." He looked around for the hidden cameras. Then he took his leap of faith. "Who told the emperor he was naked?"

I repeated the question to Helen, verbatim. She turned it over forever. She slowed a little with each new association she fit into the web. One day she would grow so worldly she would come to a full stop. Now, in front of a captive audience, she seemed to ossify before her time.

I slipped deeper into dismay with each agonizing cycle-tick. At long last, she decided. "The little child told the emperor."

Both father and daughter almost exploded. "Hoo-wee!" Harold sobered first. He began reasoning out loud. Reason: the ex post facto smoother-over of the cacophony exploding across our subsystems.

"Okay. Let's assume you guys are playing fair. That none of this is canned."

"Good assumption," I said, conscious of sounding like a poor parody of Lentz.

"The entire story never uses the word 'naked.' Well, maybe you've built a kind of thesaurus structure. ."

"She built it herself."

Mina stopped biting her cuticle. "Maybe it has, you know, like a cheat sheet of questions people might ask?"

"Good thinking, kiddo." Harold tried to pat her head, but she pulled away. "Did you choose the story at random?" he grilled me.

"It was next on the list."

"No telegraph?"

"None."

Mina fluttered her hands. "I didn't mean that he fed it specific questions. I just meant, like, it has a list of how to deal with 'Who is' and 'What is,' and all those."

Harold looked at me: You sure you haven't been piping info to the physical symbol systems? I knew his suspicion of operationalism. He often accused Lentz of playing fast and loose with the computational model of mind.

'There aren't that many 'whos' in the story," Mina elaborated. "Maybe she got lucky."

I turned to Helen and asked, "What are the new clothes made of?"

After a long time, she answered, "The clothes are made of threads of ideas."

"It's a nice way of putting it," Harold offered. But the error's strangeness relieved him.

I felt myself edging toward humiliation. I needed one good answer to show them what my girl could do. "Why don't the subjects who see the emperor naked tell him that he has nothing on?"

Both syntax and semantic here ran beyond words. If she could swallow the sentence without spitting up, we'd wow the home crowd for good.

This time, Helen answered too quickly to have thought about the sentence at all. 'The subjects are snagged in a textile."

I didn't even try to apologize for her. "Do you like the emperor's new clothes?" I wasn't sure what I was after. If she could remain composed, answer anything to a sentence with so vague a referent, it might salvage mechanism and save the day for function.

Helen's answer sent Mina into hysterics. "Did you hear that? Did you hear what it said?"

Harold twisted his mouth, amused, despite himself, by the girl's uncontrollable fit. "Yes. She said, 'Very much.' What's so funny about that?"

"She didn't! She said, 'Airy much.' Airy. Get it?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake. You're hearing things, kid."

"Daddy!"

They both looked at me, the tiebreaker. "To tell you the God's honest truth, I thought she said, 'Fairy Dutch.' "

When she caught her breath again, Mina declared, "That's the smartest parrot I've ever seen."

Harold shook his head in bewilderment. "Mere parroting would have been impressive enough. One already wonders what survival value for a cockatiel the ability to whistle the Saber Dance might have. How such a bizarre skill could earn its place in such limited circuitry. Rearranging sentence components while preserving grammar ups the ante an order of magnitude. Creating novel sentences in response to a semantic field—"

"We still have a few kinks to work out."

"Listen." Harold fell into the agitated intensity of a scientist impatient with methodology. "Can we try something here?"

"Of course. Name it."

He looked sidelong at me. Not wanting to overstep. "Kahneman and Tversky?"

I smiled. Funny: Harold would not be impressed with my matching the obscure tags, recent additions to my own neural library. He took that much for granted. Just your garden-variety marvel.

I improvised for Helen a personal variation on the now-classic test. "Jan is thirty-two years old. She is well educated and holds two advanced degrees. She is single, is strong-minded, and speaks her piece. In college, she worked actively for civil rights. Which of these two statements is more likely? One: Jan is a librarian. Two: Jan is a librarian and a feminist."

"It knows the word 'feminist'?" Mina lit up, arcing into existence at the idea.

"I think so. She's also very good at extending through context."

Once more, Helen answered with a speed that winded me, given the pattern-sorting she needed to reach home. "One: Jan is a librarian."

Harold and I exchanged looks. Meaning?

"Why is that more likely, Helen?"

"Helen? It has a name?"

"That is more likely because one Jan is more likely than two."

Now Harold took a turn laughing like an idiot.

"Wait a minute," Mina said. "I don't get it. What's the right answer?"

"What do you mean, what's the right answer?" Harold, raging affronted fatherdom. "Think about it for ten seconds."

"Well, she has all these feminist things about her. So isn't it more likely that she would be a feminist librarian than just a…?"

Mina, seeing herself about to label the part more likely than its whole, threw her hand over her mouth and reddened.

"I can't believe it. I've worked my mental fingers to the bone for you, daughter."

Harold's growl was motley at best. Helen, choosing the right answer for the wrong reasons, condemned herself to another lifetime of machinehood. Harold's girl, in picking wrongly for the right reasons, leaped uniquely human.

He cuffed her mussed hair, the bear teaching the cub to scuffle. "I'm deeply disappointed in you."

A voice from the doorway pronounced, "I'm deeply disappointed in Jan."

Diana waved as we three jerked around.

"Jesus. Don't sneak up behind people like that." Harold put hand to sternum. "That's a Lentz stunt."

"Don't let him give you a hard time, Meen. That problem is famous for being missed. And I happen to have been present when your dad made his acquaintance with it."

"Whoa. Hold on. Positivism prohibits our talking about that topic."

Mina stuck her tongue out at the bluster. Then she turned back, rapt, to Diana. Whatever problems sister Trish had with the woman, here shone only February adulation.

Mina's eyes fell matte in disappointment when Diana said she couldn't stop. "I expect a private showing sometime," Diana told me. She touched the two Plovers goodbye, and added a hand-brush for me.

Harold turned back to Helen. He scratched his chin in thought. Did physiology create that cultural cliché or had culture constructed the bodily release? The split was, in any case, linguistic.

"It's astonishing, Rick. I've never seen pattern-matching on this order. But of course, your grab bag of networks has nothing to do with human comprehension. This is to a twenty-two-year-old text-explicator what a gifted cockatiel is to Our Man in Leipzig."

He was right. Helen would never be able to decode Harold's reference, let alone figure out how he alluded to my love of Bach without the two of us ever having mentioned the topic.

"Okay, okay, you guys. Enough boy talk. I want a turn to try something. A girl goes into a music store. She flips through the bins of CDs. All at once, she starts to jump up and down and clap her hands. She opens her purse, and just as suddenly starts to cry. Why?"

I transmitted the story to Helen. "Why did the girl start to cry?"

Helen labored. In my ear, I heard a digitally sampled sob of empathy.

"The girl saw something sad in her purse."

Harold snickered. "She's still missing a little something upstairs, Ricardo." And always would be, his grin informed me.

Mina rushed to the defense. She probably made new girlfriends of all this week's high school pariahs. "Yes. But at least she knows how to pare things down. That must be tricky. Life is 99 percent extra stuff most of the time."

"Dr. Plover." I coded the gush in fake formality. We have this inverse rule, about how much you mean and how directly you can say it. "Your daughters are brilliant."

A button-bursting grimace. "Some of them are more brilliant than others."

"But we don't name names, do we, Daddy?"

He cuffed her again. This time, he kept his hand on her neck. Oddly, for her age, she suffered the touch.

"This one was always a real sharpie. She loved to fiddle with anything mechanical. No two clocks in the house ever gave the same time."

"Were you impatient to get names for everything?" I asked Mina.

Dad answered for her. The liability of owning parents who know too much.

"She generalized in startling ways. Always on the track of something urgent. The cues we set her were never the things she was after. Once, she pointed out the window at a bird. 'What that?' Remember, Snook? I think you said 'What that?' until you were four. You were very patient with our corrections of that one. She pointed and asked for the name, and I said, 'Goose.' Stickler for accuracy.

"Two days later, she points at a robin and says, 'Goose.' I tell her, 'No, sweetheart. Robin.' But I think, maybe I was too intent on that Christmassy, good-tasting nexus, where the kid would have been happier with 'bird.' Then she points at an airplane and says, 'Goose,' and I think, 'What's a good generic term for flying things?'

"When she gooses a jogger, and then falling leaves, and then a scrap of paper blowing across the yard, I wonder if we've birthed the reincarnated soul of Kaspar Hauser here. You know, how he used 'horse'—the one wooden toy he was given during seventeen years in subterranean nursery-prison — to mean any animal at all. I ask myself, could those evil poststructuralists be right? Do we live at the level of the arbitrary signifier, in a place where there can be no meaning because the thing being signified lies suffocating?"

Mina rolled her eyes. But she sat still for the end of the story. As if she'd never heard it.

"When she makes a break for the front door, and starts jumping up to grab the unreachable handle, calling, 'Goose, goose,' I finally hit on my idiocy. The word she had been looking for was To move fast. To be free. To escape.' "

Harold exhaled. "We tended to give her nouns, where all she ever wanted was processes."

"I've done my homework," C. pleaded at the end of a day. She'd slam shut the massive translating dictionaries or hurl a pen at the holder, not even trying to hit. "Can we go for a walk?"

Unconscious repetition of an old litany, her oldest. Her first spoken sentence. Good girl outside. C.'s requests sunk into me and snapped off. You promised me this would work out. None of this would have been necessary, with someone simpler than you,

The return to school turned out humiliating beyond expectation. More time had passed since she was twenty-one than either of us realized. Her classmates were children and her teachers sticklers for blasé condescension. She sat in molded-plastic desk-chairs and did busy work, little of it bearing on the translating of texts. At least once a week, and not limited to Mondays, she came home crying at the senseless debasement.

And it was my fault. She never said as much. But her every frustration slapped me with a paternity suit. When C. grew furious, I felt let off easy. When she was sweet with suppressing vehemence, I stood accused. Wronged, I became ridiculously reasonable. "I was just going to suggest a walk. Name your destination."

I was angry with my friend. She with me. Neither of us knew where the rage came from. It seemed petty betrayal even to voice it, so we never did. And so I nursed a martyrdom, and the two of us slipped imperceptibly from lovers to parent and child.

We still traveled, during her school breaks. We went farther afield, not because we had exhausted the three countries we could walk to from E. We needed the increasingly exotic. Someplace not walkable from where we were.

We went to Italy one term vacation. We stayed at a friend's fixer-upper villa in the little Lombard farm town of P. In preparation, I undertook a crash course in the language. For a moment in my life, I could read snatches of Boccaccio, Collodi, Levi. Four years later, I remember nothing.

We packed light. We always did. Maybe that doomed us as much as anything. We arrived with nothing, rented bikes, and, for a week or two, had never been happier.

We thought we knew how to see a town. "Mechelen falls," C. liked to joke. "Leuven falls." She kept every clipping, ticket, and photo of our conquests. She pasted them into the same album where we listed all the books we read out loud to one another.

But in Italy, in the sunny South, we met our sightseeing match. Mantua did not fall. Cremona did not fall. We did. Even the dustiest backwater towns routed us. The post office, the shoemaker's shop: any old hole-in-the-wall sat spackled over with crumbling Renaissance fresco. Guidebook stars fell everywhere, like summer meteors in shower.

We learned how trains run in a republic. We climbed campaniles and pored over baptisteries. We gnawed on osso buco and carried around slices of panettone in our pockets. For a few days, we lived our own invention. C. forgot the degradation of her return to school. I delighted in writing nothing, not a single word. We were well. We could live forever, futureless, at peace with one another.

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.

I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness's tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.

The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.

"Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ha mai saputo prima ehe cosa ci fosse in una goccia d'acqua. " I'm eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.

I didn't either, until he told me.

On our two beater bicycles we explored the countryside. We brought dried sausage and bread, and ate when we were hungry. Lunch outdoors in the countryside — a kind of mock ownership. We lived a southern version of those Brueghel wheat gatherers, breaking for meal and midday nap. Even our southern sleeps were Sleep's dream versions.

We greeted everyone we saw, invulnerable in our foreignness. Once, a farm woman, Titian-built, carrying a piece of thresher on the back of her bicycle, set down her load to visit. As if production, even sustenance, meant nothing without civility.

The woman and I chatted for some while, cheerfully unable to understand more than a stray word or two.

"Tedesco?"

"Olandese."

"Rick! You just told her you're Dutch?"

The woman laughed at what she took as a minor marital spat. Then her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "How old are you?"

I had to think. Dutch was bad enough, with its archaic one-and-thirty.

I told her. She stepped back with alarm. She flung her arms up like Giotto's agonizing angel. "What are you doing here? Where are your children?"

I interpreted for C. She shot me a good-luck look. "That one's all yours, buddy."

'I miei libri sono i miei figli." As far as I intended, it meant, "My books are my children."

An expression came across the woman's face. It would have been horror, but for the perplexity. Disgusted, she said she'd never heard such idiocy. Such sad waste.

All this happened less than two books ago. By the time I came to tell Helen this story, I did not retain enough of the language even to remember how to say, "You're right."

Helen was getting on. She was not yet long in the tooth, but neither was she a tadpole anymore. She entered what might perhaps be called youth, and I gave her Conrad's take on the situation.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

To remember a feeling without being able to bring it back. This seemed to me as close to a functional definition of higher-order consciousness as I would be able to give her. If we could teach Helen that, we could teach her to read with understanding.

To define that rift did not open one in her, any more than remembering a feeling revived it. For Helen to pass the Turing Test, facts would have to stand in for knowing. Our only hope that she might one day disguise herself as a master's candidate lay in the conventions of writing. The interpretive essay — the art we trained her to perform — meant viewing from afar. An aerial shot from the dispassionate high ground.

Humans had to be schooled in how to describe the maelstrom as if they weren't lost in the middle of it, in their own unbailable open boat. Helen was detachment personified. In effect, the infant adult we'd be up against would be trying to simulate the disembodiment that, to Helen, came as a fact of her birth.

But Helen needed to feel, to the extent possible, the facts of her opponent twenty-two-year-old's birth. Conrad, of course, was years beyond her. Youth was wasted on the young. Yet by letting her wade in over her head, I hoped to give my network a working model of what it felt like to learn to read. How I had felt.

I never read a book at the right time. The books I read as a child almost all came before I was ready for them. The Man Who Lost His Head, an absurd illustrated fable that, I'm sure, must have ended happily, gave me my first recurring nightmare because I read it as a preschooler. Homer in fourth grade. Shakespeare in sixth. Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury in junior high. Gravity's Rainbow, wet from high school. I read Thomas Wolfe as a freshman in college, the right age, but decades too late, in history, for it to work.

I would find books in the house, my parents' or my older sisters' or brother's. I read them like stealing. Eavesdropping. Malicious rumormongering. Staying out past curfew without permission. I hadn't a clue what any of them meant. Not a clue. Every animal they highlighted I named horse. But a horse that split and differentiated in the turbulence of foreign bazaars.

Each book became a knot. Yes, the strings of that knot were theme and place and character. Dr. Charles, with his gangrene machine. Stephen, gazing at the girl in the water. But into that tangle, just as crucial, went the smell of the cover, the color and cream resistance of the pages, the week in which I read any given epic, the friends for whom I synopsized, the bed, the lamp, the room where I read. Books made known to me my days' own confusion. They meant no more nor less than the extensive, dense turnpike of the not-I.

This not, I imagined, would figure more in Helen's masquerade than would any simulation of self. Self took us only so far. I wanted her to associate the meaning inherent in the words of a story with the heft and weight and bruise of the story's own existence. I did this by reading her things long before she was ready for them. Only by mistake, by taking the story to be coextensive with its own intruding bewilderment, could Helen pull off her impersonation.

I read her Little Women. M., Taylor's widow, had given C. an antique copy as a going-away present — their shared childhood icon. I read her Dylan Thomas, whom I had once exercised in C.'s ear in the still night, our arms around each other's grief. I read her Ethan Frome. C. had wept at the tale, wanting to be better than she was.

Helen and I had never gone sledding, as C. and I had, on the arboretum downs outside B. Helen would never know a sled from the hill it slid down, except in the dead of definition. That she would never thrill or panic under downward pull no longer bothered me. At this point, I was training her in being mistaken. Overwhelmed. The condition of knowledge at all ages, but above all, twenty-two.

I can't revive the lesson the day Helen interrupted my flow of narrative to demand, "Where did I come from?"

I remember only my total stupefaction. The lesson itself could not have triggered her question. Helen was no longer just adding the new relations I recited for her into a matrix of associated concepts. The matrix that comprised her had begun to spin off its own free associations. Where did I come from? Lentz, seated behind me at his desk, doing real science, cackled. "Reeky! You in trouble now!"

I turned to look at him. Lentz's eyes and mine exchanged mutual punch lines. Like a fetus replaying fishness, Helen had rebuilt, for the first time, the primal joke. Because I'd heard it when I was a kid, I knew not to choke. Not to launch the long explanation of semiconductor storks, the birds and bees of hammered gold and gold enameling. Not to traumatize her by telling her we'd built her, but simply to answer, "You come from a little town called U."

It was Huck Finn, a raft trip worlds beyond her ken, that made me realize childhood had ended. Helen's reaction to Huck's going to hell could not have been more to the point. She listened as if to the breathy account of a playground acquaintance, back from an adventure. A funny thing: all works — stories, plays, poems, articles, newspaper reports — filtered through to Helen only as so many emergency phone calls.

Midway into the transmission, when the revealed realities of power and ownership began to capsize the little narrative raft, Helen asked, in her machine deadpan, "What race am I?"

My turn to mean, by not replying.

"What races do I hate? Who hates me?"

I did not know what passage to quote her, how to answer that she would be hated by everyone for her disembodiment, and loved by a few for qualities she would never be able to acquire or provide.

The gaps in her worldliness gaped so wide one could drive a plow through them, sowing stars. She knew something about the Dreyfus case and the Boer War and the spread of Islam to the Malay Peninsula. Her ignorance, however, extended to such things as corks stuck in bottles, the surface of a liquid reflection, the destruction of the more brittle of two colliding objects, wrappers and price tags, stepladders, up versus down, the effects of hunger… I counted myself lucky if she could infer that a tied shoe was somehow more desirable than an untied one, provided the shoe was on, whatever tying, whatever shoes were.

The catalog of lapses loomed big to fatiguing, dense beyond comprehension. The simplest nouns slipped her up. Qualities must all have twinkled in her massive astigmatism. As for processes: who knew what Helen made of verbs?

What is life? I told Helen it might be the flash of a firefly in the night. The breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. The shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

The firefly, yes. I'd seen fireflies, even caught them in a jar during boyhood's obligatory assault on incandescence. Waves of them on summer nights, sheets flashing to each other like neuronal metaphor storms. Although I'd never seen the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime, I could play in my head a film of steaming bison nostrils. From what disparate clips I'd jimmied up the impostor composite was not clear. But that little shadow lay beyond my eyes. Was the thing that cast it even of this place?

I read her the definition. Helen did what she could with its images. I told her the idea was a quote, which once again changed everything. I told her the words belonged to Crowfoot. I told her Crowfoot was a late-nineteenth-century Canadian Blackfoot chief. I told her he was thought a conciliatory peacemaker. I told her that "conciliatory" meant as many different things as there were people willing to use the name. I told her these words were the speaker's last.

And in the impenetrable confusion of referents, the eddy of knowledges seen and unseen, perhaps she gained a foothold in the ineffable. One as ephemeral as mine.

A noiseless patient spider, I told her,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

Okay. We knew about spiders. Living things. Small. Industrious, predatory, brainless. The list of predicates she might spin out was as extensive as the ways of overlap in her neurodal clusters. We knew about webs. We could make a kind of geo-retinoptic map of promontories. We knew more about isolation than words could say. As for vast vacancy, that was preverbal. Built into the system.

But what does it mean, Helen? My silence asked her. Her own firing and rewiring demanded meaning of the input, rushing her upended steady state headlong to address these new links. Only sense could comfort and minister to them.

What did it mean? I didn't mention to her that I myself could barely parse that first sentence or render it grammatical. What was with that spider? What did his exploration come to? What meant that "filament, filament, filament"? What did that unreeling purpose, and what's more: what did saying it signify?

She couldn't come close, of course. So I told her:

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

To snow-blind Helen and lay down forever the trace of ideational opaqueness, I read her "Absalom and Achitophel," followed by "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot." She cut me off in the latter, in mid-heroic couplet.

"Sing." Some malfunction.

"Helen?"

She did not bother to translate my one-word, content-free question, but just repeated, "Sing."

Lentz, always nearby, supervising the supervisor, threw a fit. "What are you doing to her, Powers? The most complex and extensive neural simulator ever trained, running on the fastest massively parallel connection hardware in the world, and you're turning it into a blithering nitwit with no attention span."

"Philip. It's okay. This is what we want."

"Want?"

"Sure. She's bored by Pope and Dryden. It's only human. Trust me on this one."

"Trust? Trust you? After that last book of yours? How long do we have before you leave town?"

"Four months."

"Oh, wonderful. Four months until my utter, public abasement."

But I had no time for Lentz just then. Helen needed singing to.

"Sing to me," I discovered over time, meant make any music at all. My Jericho song, home-rolled, would do. She would accept chords from a MIDI file, digitized waveforms, Redbook Audio from off a CD, miked footsteps in the cafeteria or rain quizzing the office window-pane, the triad whistle of the phone company saying they could not complete our call as dialed.

Helen wanted organized, rhythmic pitches of any sort. Sound. She beat to steel drums, to the old Esterhazy chamber stringers, to gazebo brass bands from just off the right-hand side of ancient photographs, to tin-pan-nabulation, to the tinkling of a dead child's music box. To jazz, pop, funk, rap, gospel, chant, minimal, maximal. To fusions of infusions.

Most of all, she craved the human voice. Even after multiple listenings, Helen still thought all these voices somehow mine. She cloaked herself in the blur of swirled phenomena. Repeated training must have left her able to distinguish among the sounds and sweet airs, because she began to request some by name. Or maybe, as with baby Mina, the name did not mean the piece but stood for broader gauges — bigger triggers, knobs on a gigantic black box. Give me that again. The one that solves so many aches at once. You know. That. Goose.

Helen asked for frequent repeats of a certain North American soprano, a woman my age. Her pure high voice, in the service of spent music, made it almost possible to pretend for a moment that our worst political ingenuities were but the fierce vexation of a dream from which history might yet awaken. For a long time, Helen demanded, each evening before I logged off, this voice's rendition of a four-minute Purcell ditty called "Evening Hymn."

"Sing," she said. And if I failed to behave, "Sing 'Hymn.' " I could not leave in good faith until I put on a recording of this woman. Helen's soprano sang as if an angel toying with mortals, an Olympian back home in her sponsored village for an afternoon's pickup match. The voice sang as if it had never known or inflicted hurt, nor accepted hurt as this earth's last word:

Now, now that the Sun

Hath veil'd his light,

And bid the World good night,

To the soft bed my body I dispose.

But where, where shall my soul repose…?

Even I had trouble at times making out the words. I did not test to see if Helen could separate the sung phonemes or, higher, if a sung "sun" said the same thing to her as a spoken one. Higher still: if she could hear the sung "soul," and if she knew it to be roughly the same sound as "soul" in speech, then what, if anything, did Purcell's somnambulist have to do with Whitman's spider?

If she got that impossibly far, Helen would still not have been able to assemble the outermost frame. It amused her to listen to humans singing about the disposition, the disposal of their bodies at day's end, and their anxiety over housing whatever was left over. The text of this evening prayer could not have caused Helen much lost sleep.

She loved, too, that same voice as it haunted a tune named for its own first line. The tune, by Alfonso Ferrabosco, lodged at the turn of the seventeenth century. I don't know if Helen had a concept of epochs and succession, or whether she thought, as I did at her intellectual age, that all eras persisted somewhere, deep in the hive. I don't even know what she heard in place of these notes:

So beauty on the water stood

When love had sever'd earth from flood.

So when he parted air from fire,

He did with concord all inspire.

And then a motion he them taught,

That elder than himself was thought.

Which thought was yet a child of earth,

For love is elder than his birth.

Perhaps she liked the tune's abject simplicity. It did little more than ascend the scale, make a pilgrim's delaying spin, and wander back down again. Maybe the charm lay in that minute sigh vanishing almost before the mind knew it had begun, or in that voice, too sweet to exist in any world but the mind's ear.

These eight short lines required a density of keys that had grown unparsably more complex since their Renaissance casting. Even knowing the cosmological allusions didn't crack the conundrum, but made it more inscrutable. Each time Helen demanded that I "sing beauty," the song grew less solvable. After a while, I could no longer determine pronominal antecedents or order the terms.

The little syllogism defeated me. The "he" that ordered chaos must have been love. What, then, was the motion, love himself or something older? Which thought was "which thought" — the thought he taught them, or the thought that the love love taught them was elder than love himself? If love were his own elder, how did that make either of those thoughts younger than the earth that love made?

Untroubled by logic, Helen glided back to tonic. She seemed the maker of the song she needed.

I didn't have the heart to tell her how unbearable this music sounded, on the stage of events unfolding beyond the Center's windows. Her smallest textual interpretation would be meaningless without that context. Yet outside lay a nightmare I still thought her myopic perceptron maps need never look upon, even if they could.

Instrumental music left her more restive. The blur of raw event rattled her in ways it never would rattle a thing with a body. She struggled to turn bowed strings and buzzing reeds into phonemes. The less she could, the harder she tried.

I took her on a tour of world music. I played her the kluay and gong wong yai of my youth. I tried her on sackbuts and singing drums. I had no way of gauging her response, whether delight or agitation. She stopped me only once. In a moment of backsliding, I'd put on a tape I'd made years ago for C. A sampler of her favorites that, in comfort or in spite, was one of the few keepsakes I rescued when I made my quick evacuation from Europe.

I'd forgotten what was on the tape. We reached that ineffable clarinet, assembling, atop the reconciled chamber orchestra, the peace that the world cannot give. Helen shouted, "I know that." This piece is familiar. Mine.

I did not see how, and then I did. The Mozart that Lentz fed a nameless neural net the night before I met him. Long before we'd conceived of the idea of Helen, some ancestor of hers had learned this piece.

I felt my skin turn to goose flesh — chicken skin, as I would have called it in Dutch, as little as a year ago. Lentz had sutured her to old circuits, experiments he never so much as described to me. Helen had inherited archetypes. She'd been born wanting song. She remembered, even things that she had never lived.

Three weeks of deliberately not thinking about her, and my suppressed image of A. erupted into full-blown obsession.

I imagined a whole day around her. I outfitted her hours and blueprinted her afternoons. I pictured when and how she took her meals. I let us talk over the international community's latest gossip. We laughed at every inanity, local and large. I comforted her invented distress and celebrated the triumphs I made her tell me. I put her to bed each evening to words and music. I woke her up in life's early morning and stared at her unsuspecting eyes as they blinked open in astonishment, full of grace, force, fascination, accepting, improvising, the equal to anything.

My decline accelerated, complete and irrevocable, like the best of runaway sleds. I fed on daily, exhilarating regression. I bicycled past A.'s house in the dark, something I'd last done at eleven for a girl whose name I'd forever forgotten by high school. I studied A.'s phone number in the departmental directory. I looked up her schedule in the English staff Rolodex. I learned that she taught composition and intro to fiction while finishing her own graduate course work. Feminist theory.

I memorized her office hours. She was in two mornings a week and three afternoons. At first, I avoided the building at those times. Later, I shot for them.

I told myself that my preoccupation with A. was harmless. Cultivated. A hobby. The safest hazard of my occupation. Then, one morning, it was none of those things.

I was browsing the campus bookstore, anxious, as usual, at all the volumes I would never get to before I died. I saw A. before I knew I saw her. She stood purveying Theory and Criticism, shelves that I hadn't looked at for a long time. She hovered over the lined-up spines in a reverie of self-judgment. I realized I was in trouble. More trouble than I could remember having been in.

I might have picked up on this long before I did. Any fix that the self needs to convince itself of has already failed.

I saw her no more than once in a dozen days, for less than a minute each time. We had yet to exchange a nod of the head. Hello lay outside the realm of possibility. Watching her at wide intervals was like listening to those endless Renaissance melismas where the very idea of words gets lost in a tangle of counterpoint a year longer than the ear.

A little sun, a cool breeze, this face, and I was done for. Dead. A carapace the length of my body split open. All I needed to do was step out.

A. floated free of her signifier. Her features traced a curve that encouraged my projective exercise. Or rather, my projection pinned that facilitating arc to her like a corsage. It seemed to me, then, that love must make a blank slate to write itself on. Only instant, arbitrary attachment to strangeness made real that lab where processes bested things, two falls out of three.

I talked to her so often in my head I felt in danger of hailing A. each time I saw her. No limit to how badly I might humiliate myself. At my age, such absurdity did not even qualify as licit humiliation. When C. and I had moved to B., this other girl was still kneesock-deep in dolls.

Premature mid-life crisis, I told myself. Just getting it out of the way early. On lucid days, I dropped the "early."

That A.'s enzyme contour picked some physiological lock of mine I had no doubt. The thing she set free, though, spoke like a delirious traveler stumbling back from cartographic fantasy: Prester John's kingdom. The Mountains of Kong. Someplace where spirit exceeded fluke epiphenomenon, more than mechanical spin-off.

Seeing A. made me happy. And happy, the self we build blows past the punched holes of its piano roll to become music itself. Whole verbs of standing sound, solid in the enabled air.

I did it all myself. No encouragement. Life simulating electronics. I turned A. into a conflation of every friend who had ever happened to me. I tapped her to solve, recover more loves than I had forgotten. I knew I'd invented her. Yet knowledge spared me nothing, least of all the return of conviction.

I saw, as if from above, who this woman was. She was not the C. I had known, nor a younger replay. No resemblance. No association. Or rather, both A. and C. were some reminder of a lost third thing I didn't even remember having loved.

A. was the person C. had only impersonated. The one I thought the other might become. That love of eleven years now seemed an expensive primer in recognition, a disastrous fable-warning, a pointer to the thing I could not afford to miss this time. I had come back to U. after long training in the dangers of hasty generalization. Returned to learn that no script is a wrap after just one reading.

We began to lose our English. We could no longer tell if constructions were idiomatic. "I have a hackle on that woman." "This place has a pleasant sphere." "Proof the middle, while I do the stove on."

C. and I tossed many of these word salads ourselves. We just liked certain Dutch turns of phrase. They expressed more than the ones we started with. "I get a kriebel from that thing." "I was dumb surprised. What could I say? I silented." "Neck over head" made more sense than "head over heels," and after a few repetitions, "less or more" began to feel more natural than the other way around.

We'd start out butchering translations just to amuse each other. "Want to go for a wandel?" "Are we fietsing it or footing it?" "Forget your mantel not!" By the third or fourth burlesque repetition, we'd wind up wondering from which language the words came.

We mirrored her parents, whose twenty years of Chicago English now mengseled itself back into their native Limburgs dialect. We rebuilt their private spreektaal in reverse. Those two or three nights a week when C. and I visited her folks, the four of us formed a hopeless speech community incomprehensible to anyone but us.

We learned new labels by a series of mnemonics. Ezelbruggetjes, as we now called them. Little donkey bridges. The mind as a donkey that needs leading across the tentatively spanned chasm. The problem with mnemonics is that they fail almost by definition. If they aren't memorable enough, they're just extra baggage. If too memorable, they upstage the thing they index. Ten years on, all you remember is the pointer.

I still made absurd errors of speech. But increasing sophistication made my accidents funny even to me. I asked a cousin who had just given birth how things had gone with the delivery. English's archaic "befall" had stayed current in Dutch, like some teen elopement that somehow lasted, against everyone's predictions, into old age. But I muffed the common idiom and instead of asking, "How did things befall you?" I somehow asked, "How did you come to have fallen?"

Even I enjoyed this one. But C.'s pleasure exploded so sharply it laid me open. Her joyance at my ditsiness ached as it unkinked itself. Her rowdy laugh said how long it had been since its last trip this way.

The blur of linguistic borders became a game. So long as I had a copy editor back in New York, I felt safe spelunking around in language's limestone. But C. could not afford the word leak. She needed the containers to be as solid as possible, so that she could pour from one into the other without spilling.

She trained in to the city each day, to the State Language Institute, as it was called by another name. There, under the shadow of the oldest church in the Netherlands, she sat doing drills. She worked bolted to the floor in a kiddie chair-desk, like that giant Wendy on whom the betrayed Peter pulls his switchblade.

"Beau, it's classic torture, pure and simple. Intermittent punishment and praise. They just want to see if you have the animal persistence to survive brain death."

"Well. You know what they say, don't you?"

"What?"

"Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine."

"That's what they say?"

"Sometimes."

'They're all sadists. Oh, not the poets, although… I mean my instructors. My Engelse schrijfvaardigheid guy likes to reel off sarcasms in both languages until the little Dutch girls break down in tears."

"Character strengthening?"

"That's how he acts. Don't you think it's ironic?"

"What?" I hated irony. I didn't even like the word in her mouth.

"That I came here thinking I'd write my family memoir? And all I've written is the Dutch version of Article Two of the Proceedings of the International Commission on Trade Liberalization."

She still came to me in her distress. And I still thought I might protect her. Even sex now was a kind of periodic assuaging. She asked for a touch that would alleviate, not thrill. Or fear left me unable to consider thrilling.

The more care I took, the more I turned her into the needy one. And the more I did that, the needier she became. We construed her helplessness between the two of us. And that was not care on my part. That was cowardice.

It never occurred to either of us. Protection itself was killing her. The protection of love.

The worse her day went, the more I tried to load with consolations the book I worked on. I shot for the simple charm of strangeness. One night every two weeks or so, she could lose herself in four lives that had mercifully nothing to do with her own. Nothing, that is, except a prediction neither of us saw yet. A sketch of everything we would imitate in awful fact. The story we'd play out in detail.

To pollinate strangeness, I went with the familiar. I sent my protagonist Todd to Flanders, even Limburg, to report on our language derangement from another angle. I retold all our jokes, reprised our friends in all their voices. I hoped that the outside view — our life van anders om—might renew our own amazement at the unnamable escapade we'd grown too close to to know.

My Gold Bug accreted the theme she studied. The book itself became the topic it grew into. It was my act of unschooled translation. Not a how-to, but another kind of self-help manual all together. How do you put moonlight into a chamber? I might better have asked: how can the chamber see it's lit? The room still blazed as it always had. Only our eyes needed attenuating.

"Do I seem different?" C. wanted to know one evening, after a sad chapter. She still laughed out loud while reading me. But her laughs, like the book she read, had become a songbook of homesickness. She Bounded for all the world like one of my lost characters.

"Different how?"

"Than I was. Than the girl who you sat with on the Quad, the day your dad died." Than the twink you fell for and changed your life to fit.

"You seem — more substantial."

"What does that translate into, in kilos?"

I felt cold. Colder than when I received that copy of "The Cremation of Sam McGee" from a man who had died three days before. I could live with that first death, because I had the hope of her. I wasn't sure I could live with the death that now informed me.

Yet the proof seemed irrefutable. One can't love a person for her vulnerability and still hope to outlast life with her.

Every career has an exclusive corner on loneliness. The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers. During Helen's training, I received letters, even gifts, from people who had stolen something from my bedtime apocalypse. People I'd never meet.

A school principal in the catastrophically expanding western city of P. wrote how she daily watched over the kids who had escaped from my terminal pede ward. A doctor in New York sent a mug stenciled with the words "Clap if you still can." C., I imagined, would not even know the book existed until it appeared in the Low Countries, in translation.

Every era mints its trademark desolation. Mine lay in how much my time had come to see and hear. We seemed to be on the verge of a new evolution in consciousness. We'd hit upon collective awareness. Then, awareness of awareness. Now we were taking one giant step back from vantage, wrecked by how smoky the portal was, how clouded over.

The mind was one of those spy-in-the-sky satellites capable of reading license plates from outer space. Only now it was learning how to pan back. To see the assault tank the plate belonged to. To notice that tanks were everywhere. That space was deeper than any satellite supposed.

"I bit off more than I could chew, the other day," I mentioned to Helen, in passing.

"Bit off…?" Helen's associative circuits whirred, mystified.

"It means I got in over my head." Worse and worse. "I needed to say something to an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. So I decided to write her a letter."

Writing. Letters. Friendship. Regret. Volition. The simple past. The past perfect.

"I thought it would be a short letter, but the words got away from me. Before I knew it, it was many, many pages long."

Pages. Length. A screwball figure of speech. The self-surprising foundation of all our actions.

"I finished the letter and put it in an envelope. I sealed the envelope and wrote just the name of my friend on it. I mailed the letter."

Containment. Enclosure. Distributed subjects in compound clauses. Pronominal substitution. Mail. The idea of the international postal system. Distance. Physical, untraversable distance. Pickup and delivery. Longing and loss.

"But the letter never reached my friend. Why not?"

I knew for a fact that we had never talked about addresses. Nor, to my recall, had the idea come up even obliquely in all the thousands of pages we studied. I wanted to see if, from the countless bodies of knowledge Helen would need even to orient the problem, she might somehow produce a superinference, a high-level leap to the idea that, in this existence, sending a message by name alone was not enough. One had to say where in the world's infinite density the name lay.

"The letter counted how many pages?" Helen asked.

"I don't think that makes any difference."

Helen fell into hurt silence. After great length, she said, "You didn't put a rudder on your letter."

"She's getting smarter," Lentz undertoned, in awe, from far across the room.

Something had gotten into Lentz. The smugness began effacing itself. His merciless, empirical anality softened to verbal diarrhea.

He still ragged me at every opportunity. "Do we have to know that for the exam?" His wheedling lent new meaning to the old student refrain.

Helen humbled him. Her connections grew denser than even Lentz had dared hope. Her knowledge was neither deep nor wide. But it was supple.

She produced the same kind of dream logic as any new speaker. She could do the child classics: "Is it tomorrow yet?" "When does orange become red?" Her questions came even more detached, because she could neither feel nor gauge herself. Hungry-full; warm-cold; up — down: she worked these as abstract axes, not as absolutes of need. Helen accounted to nothing but weak semantics, the brittle-bone disease of word. As such, she was free to assemble the strangest skeletons gravity had yet to challenge. Her corkers worked to weaken Philip's surety. Even he found it tough to preserve syllogistic composure in the face of something like, "A lost tooth loses its appetite?"

His renouncing in-your-face didn't prevent Lentz from indulging the occasional in-your-back. He still micromanaged my judgment calls, calculating to manufacture maximum annoyance.

"Why are you reading her that tract doggerel?"

"It's on the list, Philip."

'That? Canonical?" He broke into song. 'Times have cha-anged!"

But he had changed more, it struck me.

"Why don't you just concentrate on real literature?"

"What did you have in mind? H. G. Wells?"

"Now, there's an idea. Didn't he write a story about how we're all going to end up in cubicles, tapped into some monolithic digital broadband?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Some guy gets it in his head he wants to see his mother. In person. She thinks it's the most perverse idea she's ever heard. Damn. I can't remember what happens in the end."

"We could look it up on the Internet."

"Thank you, Marcel. I'm serious. We need to get back to basics."

"You mean 'Invictus,' and like that?"

"Speak properly, Marcel. There are children present. I mean Holmes."

"You jest. 'Build thee more stately mansions. .'?"

"Not that Holmes, you blackguard. I speak of the curious incident of the novelist in the dark."

But the novelist, I was supposed to say, did nothing in the dark.

"Know your opposition, man. Rule one. Think how you have to solve this. Plover's picking the exam passage, right? He's an old-school, sentimental classicist. Forget about everything but the dead white males. The Chaucer, the Shakespeare, the Milton. . We could have her memorize an answer for each possible—"

"Philip! Come on. They might ask anything!"

"Ah!" His eyes watered. Marcel? Got you. "But you'd do it if you could?"

"What, fake hermeneutics? Tell her all the answers in advance?"

'Tell me. Are things any different in real life? The teacher does the spiel. Marxist. Poststructuralist. Lacanian. The enterprising kid goes to the stacks and looks up the professor's old dissertation. The one the prof got published when he was junior fac by including just enough quotes from the people doing the peer review. The student commits all this party line to memory. Lo and behold, what should show up on the final but—"

"I guess I'd rather lose than cheat."

"What's cheating about it? Even if it is, it's a cheat so colossal and magnificent it takes your breath away."

"So you want Vaucanson's duck? You want that mechanical chess-playing Turk with the midget inside? Why don't we just strap some printed circuit cards on me and I'll take the exam."

"Jesus Christ, Marcel. Never mind. Ever since you thought we might actually win this thing, you've been no fun at all."

But he could not let the angle drop. The next day, he'd be at it again. "Ram is judging, right? What do we know about him? Are you reading her the Mahabharata?"

We knew, in fact, precious little about Ram. I passed him often enough in the Center's halls. He greeted me always, the epitome of cheer, with some gnomic well-wish that half the time I could not make out. When I could, I often doubted what I came up with. "Your luck, God willing, continues to be what you imagine it?" Or, "I don't even have you to ask about how the day isn't going!"

By his own testimony, he was a native speaker. Either English had gone as plural as advertised, or, along with many other fellow Centerites, Dr. Gupta had replaced the standard version with a professional upgrade.

One late spring day, his passing greetings expanded into real speech.

"I saw that I-should-praise-it-so-much-as-to-call-it-a-review of your book." His melodious, clipped, Northern Subcontinental syllables delighted me. I could not say why. "What the hell kind of ridiculous thing are they trying to pretend about this culture of yours? They think perhaps this is something that you are making up, God forbid, your so-called story? So your precious Los Angeles — the jewel in the crown, as it were — is just now discovering the condition that the rest of the world has been living in since day one?"

I decided he must be sticking up for me. "Thank you, Ram."

"No, my friend. I am the one who should be thanking you. You fiction writers are the only creatures among us arrogant enough to be the conscience of the race, as you might say. God forbid anyone should let the critic decide which of you shall live and which die. My mother wrote over one hundred of what you call fictions. She stopped reading reviews after the first several dozen of her books."

"Did you — several dozen?"

"Especially after she won India's Pulitzer Prize."

"India's Pulitzer?"

Ram laughed, high-pitched, singsong. Nothing was cultural. Nothing essential, anyway. "You know what I mean."

We fed her an eidetic image of the Bible. The complete Shakespeare. We gave her a small library on CD-ROM, six hundred scanned volumes she might curl up with. This constituted a form of cheating, I suppose. An open-book exam, where the human, in contrast, had to rely on memory alone. And yet we meant to test just this: whether silicon was such stuff as dreams might be made on.

Besides: Helen didn't know these texts. She just had a linear, digital array where she might go look them up. A kid with her own computer. A front-end index hasher helped her locate what she looked for. She could then place the complete text on her own input layers for mulling over.

This way she could read at night, while no one was around. And she didn't even need a flashlight. The one thing missing from her education was a sense of danger. The forbidden. The risk factor. Someone to come tell her to knock it off and get to bed.

In a wonderful twist, Helen acquired Chen and Keluga's physical-symbol rule base twice. At the low-level, we deep-wired many of the relationships into actual data structures. These we affixed at junctures in the net of nets, where they in effect applied semantic filters to her thought. But Helen also learned our colleagues' work by appending their culled knowledges herself, inefficiently, to her own weighted and qualified, high-level Platonic reflection.

Worldliness was massive, and deeper than any sea-dingle. It came, in the end, only in the form of a catalog.

We told her about parking tickets and two-for-one sales. About tuning forks and pitchforks and forked tongues and the road not taken. We told her about resistors and capacitors, baiters-and-switchers, alternating current, alternate lifestyles, very-large-scale integration and the failure of education to save society from itself.

We told her about wool and linen and damask. We told her about finches and feeders, bats and banyans, sonar and semaphores and trail markers made of anything the living body might shed. About mites and motes, insect galls and insecticides, about mating for life or for a fraction of a minute.

We taught her about the Securities and Exchange Commission. We told her about collectors who specialize in Depression-era glass. About the triple jump and the two-man luge. About how people used to teach their children about the big hand and the little hand. About defecation and respiration and circulation. About Post-it notes. Registered trademarks and draft resistance. The Oscar and Grammy and Emmy. Dying of heart disease. Divining with a fresh-cut alder rod.

We told her how the keys on a piano were laid out. About letterhead. Debutantes' balls. Talk radio and docudrama television. Colds and flus, and a brief five-century tour of their treatments. The Great Wall and the Burma Road and the Iron Curtain and the Light at the End of the Tunnel. About how the earth looked from space. About a fire that has raged underground beneath a Pennsylvania town for the last thirty years.

We showed her the difference between triforium and clerestory. We traced the famous pilgrims' routes through time and space. We told her about spoilage and refrigeration. How salt was once worth its weight in gold. How spice fueled the whole tragic engine of human expansion. How plastic wrap solved one of civilization's nightmares and started another.

We showed her Detroit, savaged by short-term economics. We showed her Sarajevo in 1911. Dresden and London in 1937. Atlanta in 1860. Baghdad. Tokyo, Cairo, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Los Angeles. Just before, and just after.

We told her East African in-law jokes. Java highland jokes about stupid Sumatrans. Aussie put-downs of Pommy bastards. Catskills jokes about unlicensed operation of knishes. City folk and country folk. Pat and Mike. Elephant riddles. Inuit jokes where fish and bears scoff at the mere idea of human existence.

We told her about revenge and forgiveness and contrition. We told her about retail outlets and sales tax, about ennui, about a world where you hear about everything yet where nothing happens to you. We told her how history always took place elsewhere.

We taught her never to draw to an inside straight and never to send a boy to do a man's job. We laid out the Queen's Necklace affair and the Cuban trade embargo. The rape of continent-sized forests and the South Sea bubble of cold fusion. Bar codes and baldness. Lint, lintels, lentils, Lent. The hope, blame, perversion, and crippled persistence of liberal humanism. Grace and disgrace and second chances. Suicide. Euthanasia. First love. Love at first sight.

Helen had to use language to create concepts. Words came first: the main barrier to her education. The brain did things the other way around. The brain juggled thought's lexicons through multiple subsystems, and the latecomers, the most dispensable lobes, were the ones where names per se hung out.

In evolution's beginning was not the word but the place we learned to pin the word to. Little babies registered and informed long before they invented more mama by calling her such. Aphasies, even deaf-mute sign aphasies, wove rich conceptual tapestries through their bodies' many axes in the absence of a single verb.

Chen and Keluga's dream seemed more hopeless to me all the time. The lexical rules of speech were not enumerable. Not even recursively so. So much less so, the lexical rules of felt existence. I spoke to Helen sentences that had half a dozen valid parsings or that resisted parsing altogether. I pitied her as I reeled off the exceptions to a Chen-Keluga semantic categorization of "tree." All trees have green leaves at some time during the year unless the tree is a red maple or a saguaro or diseased or dormant or petrified or a seedling or recently visited by locusts or fire or malicious children or unless it is a family tree or a shoe tree or… An exhaustive dictionary for the term would take every tree that ever lived just to make the pages.

Not to mention trees in politics, religion, commerce, or philosophy. I could read Helen the poem that insisted no poem in creation stood comparison to one. But I could not lay out the difference between popular and academic, between hearth and hermeneutic, poetry and verse, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Then then and Then now, between evocative simile and mind-fogging confusion, prewar sentimentality and the deforested poem-landscape just before that poet's death in the French trenches. Words alone would not explain to Helen the difference between "poem" and "tree." She could diagram, but she could not climb.

I taught her the parts of the internal combustion engine and how to make change. I told her how my brother liked to go into the "Everything's a Dollar" store and ask how much things were. I told her Taylor's favorite joke about the priest, the scientist, and the literary critic each receiving the death sentence. I told her about the WPA and the interstate system. She asked why there were interstates in Hawaii. I couldn't say.

I told her how, as a boy, I often played at saving my plastic farm animals from a worldwide flood. Only when I managed to corral them all into a small cardboard box were they saved. Then I would look for a smaller cardboard ark and start the whole desperate rescue over again.

I told her all these data, weaving from them a plot of well-formed sentences. But she would never get to their essence through sentences alone. I told her the term for that sensation we feel when some noun we slam up against triggers reengagement with the world's living concepts. But the tag did not yet let her feel anything close to the name's underpinning cascade.

Sensation was my lone river into the interior. More pictures and sounds. A bitmap was, even with fancy compression algorithms, worth a good deal more than 1K words. I thought to bruise her into concept. Soak her hands in the gush of pump water that all those parts of speech merely stood for.

I played more Mozart for Helen. Mozarts of every make and model, from every era of history and most major landmasses. I let her linger over eternally returning rondos. I stood by and watched her struggle with the most banal radio tune, leaping to make it out, falling always five fingers short of feeling's plagal cadence.

"Nice treble," Lentz cracked about a polyphonic piece from one renaissance or another. "Don't you think all performing countertenors should have to pass a urinalysis?"

I repeated the joke to Helen. Nothing but ache and confusion. I tailored a hurt for her, and God save such a pitiless engineer.

She had trouble with values, because she had no fear of self-preservation, no hierarchy of hard-wired pain. She had trouble with causality, because she had no low-level systems of motion perception from which the forms of causality are thought to percolate. She was a gigantic, lexical genius stuck at Piaget's stage two.

Helen's refugee readings shook loose my own strangeness. Now that I'd told New York there would be no more fictions, anything might happen. In fact, it already had. My life story was one only through the barest red-penciled edits. On second reading, everything seemed different. I'd forgotten all the good bits, the scene swellers and interstices, the supporting characters and exotic locales, there for no reason but density and flavor. I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

I left the Center after one extended session and blundered into a spring that had arrived in my absence. It took my eyes a minute to adjust, my thoughts a moment longer. The real season, or some convincing autumn look-alike? I'd lost track, turned around in time.

All this awakened alien sensation came home to rest in A. In my idea of A. A.'s body, whether in faint first run or focused replay, moved through possibility like a question through silence. My newfound land. I don't know if she led me to the open text, or if I opened on the hope of reading through to the end with her. She bent like a reflexive verb. When I saw A., I saw myself looking out over the plain of the visible. And whatever I looked on, there I saw A.

The day Helen taught herself to read print, I wanted to walk across the waterlogged town and tell A. Each time the temperature fluctuated, I wanted to run and see if she was well. When Helen's favorite voice made it seem the world had been created earlier and more often than anyone suspected, I wanted to call A., play the cut for her over the phone. I filled with the idea of her at each breeze. A good punch line, and I could rework the anonymous disarmament she had so far flashed me into an actual smile.

I imagined complaining to A. about Lentz's annoyances. Lentz's wife, locked in the absolution of perpetual forgetting, made me want to rush to protect her. To find in her my protection. In my mind, I showed her that wall calendar of the couple, taken by their vanished child. We stood in front of it together, saying nothing.

Most nights, I fell asleep wishing her well.

A. turned my whole conception of delight into a free-range phantom. Because she existed, my letters again had a rudder. The air at this hour of my life smelled arbitrary, unbounded, like India, like earthworms after a rain, like a macaronic, like a surprise century back in the B.C.'s, one I hadn't thought about since I was small. All in what A. brought me to know.

But I did not know A. at all. All I knew was her name.

I still worked at times from the computer lab housed in the bowels of English. Helen and I could talk anywhere. She did not care where on the campus backbone I logged on. She seemed perhaps marginally stiffer over the ASCII link than she was in conversation. But that was Helen's lone grudge against the remote humanities. The lab swarmed at all hours with students trying to coax paper assignments out of recalcitrant keyboards. I entered the fray one afternoon, almost spinning around and leaving when I saw her. She perched over a stack of Henry James novels, pushing the hair from her eyes and leaning into her typing.

I took the terminal behind hers, short of breath, as if I'd sprinted there. I considered turning myself in to the campus police to spare her the bother. My telltale heart had to work flat out to be heard over the machines' chorus of cooling fans.

I telnetted over to the Center, managing to make the link, to hit the right keys by accident. A., six feet in front of me, hacked in agitation at her writing. I threw her off somehow, sitting this close. The scent of my pheromones.

Of course, I represented nothing to this woman, not even agitation. Her trouble was real, mechanical. She aimed her exasperation at the keyboard. Server lag held up the show, and her client computer failed to respond. She suffered a network virus, the brainchild of some software prodigy who would not have defaced the decal on a stranger's car but who thought nothing of malicious destruction of stored idea.

A. fumed in analog rage. She thrashed at the command and control keys, using the mouse cruelly. She snorted like a bull. She threw one hand up in the air. To no one at all, she called out, "What's the waiting period on handguns in this state?"

I'd heard her so often in my sleep that the sound of her voice shocked me. No one stopped typing even long enough to chuckle.

She couldn't kill me more than once. I leaned forward, matching her tone. "Shorter than the wait on network response." I looked down and saw myself from a distance, quaking like a sixteen-year-old.

She swung around to register me, distracted. "I thought as much." She turned back to her screen. I lived out that life where those were the only words we would ever exchange.

Another aggravated minute and she looked around again. "You're not, like, digitally literate by any chance, are you?"

I mumbled something so doped it belied any claim to competence. But I stood, walked over, and despite the attack of palsy, helped her retrieve her afternoon's work from the ether.

"Magic," she declared. She gathered her printout and disk. She stuffed them, along with the pile of James, in a black rucksack. "Thanks! I gotta run." And she abandoned me to the endless process of revision.

I saw her some days later at the department mailboxes. It took two beats to convince myself I could greet her legitimately.

She took three to respond. "Oh, hi." She reached out a hand, not to touch, but to affix me in space. Her wrist went down and her fingers up, pointing at me. A confiding gesture, a cross between a fifties hand soap commercial and a brass-extended Thai classical dancer. "From the computer lab, right?"

I introduced myself.

Her mouth made a cipher of uninterested surprise. "Oh. You're the Parasite-in-Residence, aren't you?"

"Yep. That's me." Yep? I heard Lentz whisper to me. Yep?

"I heard you were arrogant." I thought it might be worth telling Helen: the various names for isolation.

"I–I have an image problem."

She gave her name. I tried to look as if I were committing it to at least short-term memory.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"I was just heading for a coffee," I answered. My first since the age of fourteen. "Care to join me?"

She looked up. The hand again, calculating. Worth it, not worth it? She would have bolted in an instant if she knew I wanted her company.

"I guess I could use a cup. I've this deadly seminar at two, and I need all the help I can get."

I maintained myself on the way to the café. If not Garrick or Gillette, I at least avoided utter nitwittery. I felt disembodied. Detached. Steeped in emergency-room calm. War coverage with the sound turned off.

We talked shop, the one shop we had in common. Grad school was her life. I'd lived through it recently enough to pretend I remembered it. I told her the story of my existence, or at least the radio mix. Everything but the essentials. I told her how I'd always thought I'd be a physicist, until I heard Taylor interpret texts.

"Where was that?"

"Ai! I'm sorry. Here. All here."

"Professor Taylor? I don't think I've heard of him."

"He died. A couple of years before you arrived." Traceless in her generation.

"And you never finished?"

"Not in so many words, no. I guess I wrote my first novel instead."

She laughed. "Probably more worthwhile than the diss." The way a person might say that stamp collecting might be worth more to the race in the long run than, say, investment banking. "What made you leave?"

I told her how specialization left me parochial. I told her that theory and criticism had shaken my belief in what writing might do. I told her about my father's death and the seminar where we counted the feet of that Robinson sonnet on mercy killing.

I was talking too much. "How about you? How far along are you?"

She grew restive and subdued all at once. "Not as far as I thought."

"You've taken the master's exam?"

"Yeah." Miles away.

"When?"

She laughed. "Who wants to know?" She took a slow sip. "It seemed like such a landmark while I was doing the run-up to it. I worked so hard to prepare. Then two days, a few questions. They say okay, you know this stuff. It's over. You don't even get a chance to flex."

"But now it gets fun, right?"

"You think? I'll be middle-aged by the time I get the doctorate. No offense."

I hiked up a grin. "None taken."

"And no matter how good I am, I might be waiting on tables afterward, like all the other Ph.D.s in literature. They lied to us, you know. By accepting us into the program. They implied we'd have jobs when we were done."

"Nobody gets work?"

She snorted. "One in four, in a good year. And some of those who get jobs are repeats, out for their third or fourth time. The whole profession is a total pyramiding scheme."

"And by the time you guys get the chain letter. ."

"It'll take more new bodies to finance the payoffs than there are undergraduates in the galaxy."

A. stopped to greet a passerby and to wave at someone seated two tables away. She knew half the people in the café. I, too, now fit somewhere in her star system's outer orbits.

"I wouldn't feel like such a sucker if the whole process weren't such a bilking. This is the most class-conscious society I've ever been part of. The department superstars lord it over their minor tenured colleagues, who saddle all the junior faculty with shit work, who take it out on the senior grads, who have no time for the master's candidates, who hold the undergraduates in contempt. That's not even mentioning the nonacademic staff."

"Is it that bad? I'm out of the loop." So far out that I could not even pick up her rhythm.

"Worse. We carry the same teaching load as faculty, and get paid maybe a seventh what you do. Socially, we're pariahs. I doubt the turf wars in business are half as bitter."

"How can the fight be so ugly over so small a piece of pie?"

A. grunted. "It's ugly because there's nothing to fight over."

We could buy a house. She'd never have to worry about making a living again. I could call New York, tell them I had another book in me after all. She could spend all day living, recovering the pleasure of the text.

"Maybe the whole discipline is breaking up," I suggested. "As a relative outsider, I'd say no one seems to know quite what they want the thing to become anymore."

"Total chaos. Who's in, who's out, who's up, who's down. All that hot new stuff, the pomo and the cultural studies and the linguistic-based solipsism. I'm fed up with it. It's all such verbal wanking off. Frankly, I no longer give a fuck what happens to Isabel Archer. Neither politically, economically, psychologically, structurally, nor posthumanistically. So she's got to choose which of these three loser boys she has to marry. This takes how many hundred pages?"

Her eyes caught mine and her hand flew to her mouth. "Oops. Sorry. It's that Catholic pottymouth of mine. You are faculty, aren't you?"

"Technically. So what do you think you'll do with yourself?" Name the city. Your terms. Unconditional.

"I figure I might get a job in business somewhere. Editing or marketing or something. If I'm going to be abused, I can at least get paid to take it."

She gave me not one syllable of encouragement. No shy curiosity or even dry interest. But I had already done so much on no encouragement at all. All on my own.

It occurred to me: who A. was. Why I had come back to U. to meet her. A. was Helen's pace rabbit. Her heat competition. She had beaten the master's exam, the one we'd pitch our machine against. She was the woman who pulled love from the buried grave. The designated hitter for frailty, feeling, and whim. The champion of the humans.

"Thanks for the coffee," she said. "I have to make animal tracks. See ya!"

She disappeared faster than she had the first time.

But I had spoken to A. I'd sat three feet from her, for half an hour. Amid a corsage of coffee spoons, I replayed the conversation. I lived on that "See ya," trying to wrest it back from metaphor, to move around in it, through the latticework of lived time.

C. must have cared for my third book. She said as much in every available way, and she had no particular reason to lie just yet.

The story had mutated into a hopeful monster. Here and there, I tried to code into its paragraph cells the moves we made, the friends we loved, the events that shaped us and were worth saving. I hoped my molecular genetics might transcribe, if not an encyclopedia of successful solutions to experience, at least some fossil record of the questions. I wanted my extended metaphors to mirror speculation in the widest lens, the way the genome carries along in time's wake all the residue of bygone experiments and hypotheses, from bacteria on. But novels, like genomes, consist mostly of intron baggage. And as with evolution, you can't always get there efficiently from here.

At thirteen hundred pages, my typescript had only the longest odds against being bought. Whatever my publishers expected, it wasn't this. At best, they'd issue a desperate request that I change trajectories, free the skinny book hiding inside this sumo. At worst, they'd kiss me off and wish me well. Great fun, but. Maybe one of those avant-garde presses?

C. and I went to the post office together. We were both more nervous than we'd been the first time, years before. We didn't know what to hope for. The manuscript took up a small crate.

"Send it by boat," C. said.

"It's expensive either way," I countered. "And the difference isn't that big. We can swing it, sweet!" I giggled.

"Boat," C. insisted. "Surface rate." Her eyes clouded. In a moment, she might have shouted or turned and walked away without a word.

I cradled the box, with its long customs form marked Drukwerk. Printed matter. Several kilos of story, an attempt to feel, in music, life's first principles and to hear, in those genetic principles, living tune. I'd tried to ground creation's stepladder in its molecular building blocks. I'd written a book that aspired to understanding, when I could not even understand the woman on whom my actions depended.

We sent my book Stateward by slow boat. Outside the post office, C. kissed me long and hard. She gamboled a few steps, exhilarated by the dusk. "Come on. Let's go out to eat." We never went out. "Let's go have Chin-Ind."

We celebrated by heading into the city and dining on rijsttafel. 'The wages of colonialism," C. babbled. "Calories and imperial exploitation," she said, holding up a satay. "Now, there's guilty pleasure for you."

At meal's end, we realized that we'd forgotten to toast. C. held up what was left of her water glass. "To us, Beauie. To the pair bond. To the double helix."

"What could be simpler?" I added.

Nothing could harm us anymore. I had lived to finish my work. The rest of life would all be bonus round. Afterward, we went home and read to each other, the first time in a long time. I spooned my body against hers. Before we fell asleep, I joked, "If they don't want this one, I can always go back to programming."

"… To which the woman says, 'If you want infidelity, you'll have to find someone else.' "

"That's a joke," Helen announced. Part theory, part improv, part defensive accusation. She had learned to recognize humor: those utterances even more inexplicable than the rest of the unsolvable smear.

Or she told it in my voice alone. I felt unaccountably happy. I had for a week. Blessed by everything. And everything I looked upon felt blessed.

Her response fed my upswell. "Helen," I rambled, "thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore."

"Powers?" Lentz warned from behind his desk. "Careful."

"What? You think today's twenty-two-year-old knows from Nicean barks of yore?"

"I didn't mean that."

I looked over at him. Lentz did not glance up from his stack of journal offprints.

"Yours," Helen corrected me. "Those barks of yours."

"No, yore. Barks of yore. It means an old boat."

I did the rest of the poem for her. Oral interp. It was on the List, after all.

"Who weary, wayworn wanders?" she wanted to know.

"Ulysses?" I looked over at Lentz for confirmation. He ignored me. "Yeah. It has to be Ulysses. Do you remember him?"

"The wily Odysseus." It was impossible to tell if she had developed a facetious streak, or if she was just mimicking. "Why he wanders?"

I corrected her Creole syntax and made my best guess.

"Why is the sea perfumed?"

"Complex," I clarified. "Basically, I think it means that a sweet thing calls the wanderer home."

"It means that sweetness is like the way you go back."

"Me?"

"Beauty calls you back to me."

"Not me. The speaker of the poem. And not you, I'm afraid. A friend of the speaker's, also named Helen. If that's her real name."

Helen said nothing. Lentz said, "I told you to be careful."

Only more lessons could cure the effect of lessons. "Remember that 'Helen' is also the name—"

"Helen of Troy," Helen rushed. She had paid particular attention to the story when we'd done it.

"And the wily Odysseus…"

"Went to reget that Helen."

" 'Reget' is not a word. Recover, maybe. Retrieve. Rescue."

Lentz mumbled, "The bitch hardly asked to be rescued."

"On those Nicean barks of yore." Helen sounded almost distorted with excitement.

"Explain."

"The wily Odysseus went to Troy on old boats."

The presentation was clumsy. I had to lead the witness. But I doubted that many high schoolers could extract as much, these days. A face like the face that launched a thousand ships now called one back to port.

I hid my pleasure, not wanting to scatter Helen's synapses. I thought to correct her preposition. But I couldn't come up with a good rule for when we travel on ships and when we travel in them. Rules could be either followed or known. Not both.

"It talks of love, the words?" Helen asked. She copied my inversion, the leading question. The poem is about love, wouldn't you say?

"Hah!" Lentz cleared his throat with the syllable. " 'Love' is the envelope wrapped around 'uhgh,' to make the groan pronounceable in polite company."

"You are bad news, Lentz," I told him.

"Bad news," Helen agreed.

Her two words knocked me speechless. Somehow during the endless sessions, she'd trained herself to hear a third person in the room.

I whistled low. 'That's my baby."

Lentz, too, was nonplussed. But tried to hide it. "Bad news? Am I? Tell me: What form would good news take?"

"All about love," Helen repeated. She had learned the even more impressive and necessary skill of ignoring a nuisance. Then she made the kind of sloppy, hasty generalizing stab we'd built her to make. 'They are all about love, isn't it?"

"Helen?" My stomach crawled up my windpipe. We were all dead.

"Every poem loves something. Or each wants something in love. Something loves power. Or money. Or honor. Something loves country." On what catalog could she be drawing? "I hear about something in love with comfort. Or with God. Someone loves beauty. Someone death. Or some poem always is in love with another lover. Or another poem."

I waited until I had control of my throat again. I don't know what she made of the extended silence. "What you say, Helen," I deliberated, "is true. But only in the most general sense. The word doesn't have the same sense in all your cases. The similarity is too big to mean anything. It's the differences that interest us. The local. The small picture."

"Then I need to be small. How can I make me as small as love?"

I lost it. I could find no words.

Lentz, too, failed to get away cleanly. But he was faster into the breach. "You heard her, Powers. She wants to make herself small enough for love."

"How am I supposed to tell her…?"

"How do you think? Get the letters."

All I could do was make myself small. I waited for him to tell me I hadn't heard right. He didn't. "How do you know there are letters? Not that I'm admitting there are."

"Now, really. Thirty-five-year-old returns alone from Europe? To the Midwest? And there are no letters?"

I brought in the letters. I'd rescued hers on a brief salvage run a few months after my deportation from E. For two days, while C. hid on the other side of the province, I picked through my possessions and decided what would fit in two suitcases.

For two days, everything I looked on herniated my chest. My self hemorrhaged. Certain things would not fit into my bags. The view of the river valley from the hill outside town. The decent shower stall I had promised C. for a year and never installed. The raw herring and the fruit beers.

The letters, however, fit. The book her parents had learned English from fit. The only sweater C. ever knitted, that never fit me, fit.

C. sent my letters back, special fourth class, the minute I had a forwarding address. I ended up curator of both ends of a dozen years of correspondence. I meant never to read a word of it again. I had no idea why I saved so much as a page. Now I had a reason. Helen.

I started at the beginning. I chose from the stack, opening envelopes without knowing anymore what each contained. I tried to set the context of each passage, as far as I could recall it.

'This one I wrote to her while taking the bus up to my father's funeral.

"Dear C., Thank you for seeing me off this morning. These are full days for me, as I try to piece together what is past and passing. Our new friendship is part of that fullness, and as with any feeling, it scares. A pleasing scare, though.

"I was very young then," I apologized. I flipped forward; this was a bad idea. Disaster. "Okay. This one she wrote me from U., just before we moved to B.

"How are you, my Ricky? I'm anxious to hear from you. It's been almost twelve hours. (What a wimpess, eh?) I imagine you sniffing autumn or working hard, making plans and saying goede dag to everyone, or perhaps lying quietly in the dark, one hand spread flat against that curve of your chest, thinking of nothing in particular, calm beneath the growing excitement of what we are up to…

"I'm enjoying The Wanderer—about halfway through — especially as it's turning out to be quite different than I expected. I wonder if later in life we'll be able to remember those qualities of adolescence — the crystal sharpness, the total rage of emotion, the significance in every triviality. Sometimes, even this close, I forget, and when I do remember it's only with gratitude that I am past it, have survived, moved on.

"I am no literary wiz, as you well know. I cannot read a work with my head but only in my ribs, where my first love for words began. And my ribs say yes to this book.

"Are you sure sure sure? Sure you know what we are doing? Sure you want me along on this exploration? Well, teacher knows best. .

"In the meantime, get out as often as you can, friend. See everything for me. I enclose, from U., a bit of early autumn to remember on.

"It's a leaf," I told Helen. I held the crumpled shred of ocher up to the digital camera. It looked like nothing at all.

The pile gave me temporal vertigo. Aerograms, postcards, stationery of all races colors and creeds, handmades proclaiming "Hartelijk Gefeliciteerd" or "Happy Sinterklaas." Reading the letters to Helen took longer than the dozen years their writing had taken.

'This one was from her folks' place, before they left Chicago. She must have been on vacation.

"Today, inspired, I finally picked up a pen and started working on the piece I've been mulling over since school. A day in the life of a young woman (surprise) frustrated by her existence, art, MEN, people, work. You heard this one before? It's a search for control and a study of how difficult that is for a woman of her (my) age. I have a wonderful first sentence where I compare morning light to a cup of cold coffee. Yech!"

"She did that stuff, too?" Lentz interrupted.

"For a while.

"I'm enjoying, though. You really shook me out of my lethargy over the phone yesterday. I even wandered over to the pianny today and tried out a few tunes. .

"Ugh — my stomach has decided, since it's midnight, that now is a good time to rebel against everything I shoved in it earlier. Hang on, folks— I've got to be more careful of what I eat.

"I think I will retire now. I kiss you in my thoughts, love. Ik houd van jou. See if you can translate."

"Tell me the strange words," Helen demanded. Funny. "Strange" and "foreign" were the same word in Dutch.

"They mean, 'I hold of you.' "

"They mean, 'I love you,' " Lentz corrected. I suppose the guess didn't require too much inspiration. His tone, informative. Empiricism at its gentlest. "Give us more of yours."

I picked at random one I wrote from U. while she was in Limburg alone, on her private scouting mission.

"Today, Thanksgiving, although flat on my back in bed nursing my first bad cold in years, I'm struck with amazing gratitude, knocked out by my good fortune at having had a few moments to know you. C., without the place you make, without your ratifying vantage, life's whole, fluke, majestic, thermodynamic-cheating trick would beat like an ornate, functionless Victorian cast-iron engine. .

"You feel like the seasons to me: fixed, monumental, periodic, but forever surprising in particulars. I think of how, in the spring, you insist that the buds need kissing before they will come out. ."

"Didn't you ever write her any news, Marcel?" Forgiving. Curious.

"I wish I had." She might have been able to live with news. "The ending is nice, though: 'Until I can tell you in person, this is my thanks, for everything.' "

I read her reply from E., beginning,

"Beau, you won't believe our luck. I've found a place for us! People told me I'd be on the list forever, but by total accident, the perfect apartment just fell into my lap. It's a free-gazelle flat, as they call bachelorette pads. It will be even cozier with two. It's all skylit, the kitchen is small but lovely, and there's even a nook where you can put your feet up and finish that endless story of yours. ."

I opened the next one. "I'm sorry," I apologized to both Lentz and Helen. "I can't read any more."

Then my eyes fell on the first line of the sheet I was holding. From E., to my mother's address. During my trip back for the publication of that novel I'd written in that Limburg free-gazelle's flat. I read on, unable not to. Read, to see what happened.

"Beau, I'm afraid this letter is all bad news. My cousin G. died yesterday. You know how sick he was, but the whole family is reeling from how fast things went. N. and the kids were with him throughout. She says that, given his disease, the end was peaceful and almost happy when it came.

"N. was amazing. G. went into a panic brought on by combined suffocation and heart failure. N. kept telling him, just picture yourself on a train heading south, to your favorite café in Italy. Imagine yourself seated out in the sun, doing the things you love most in this life. Drinking a pils, reading a defektive, ogling the pretty women.

"N. stepped out for a minute, to catch her breath. When she came back, G. was dead. The kids were upset because just before he died, their dad kept making this hooking gesture with his hand, and they couldn't tell what he wanted. N. explained that he was pulling a train whistle, and that everything was okay. ."

I stopped and raised my head. "I'd forgotten," I pleaded with Lentz. "I have no memory of this. Not even now. Not even rereading." "Forgotten what, Marcel? What are you talking about?" I couldn't take it in. Half a year, trying to make a novel out of a story that already lived to fruition in three paragraphs. Three paragraphs that I had not just let fall but had annihilated.

"The woman loves, now? Loves Beau?" Helen called me by a name. Whether she knew the name to be another word for "you" or even me was another matter. The question bayed over me, one of those alpine dogs trained to nuzzle up to avalanched corpses.

I debated telling Helen about the one postcard from C. I no longer had. In the months following our split, in one of several vacillations, she sent me a picture of Brueghel's Harvesters. For a message, she quoted the line I had written her, from the book she had seen me through.

If by some accident we get separated, meet me back here.

I wanted to hurt C., hurt her as badly as I could without her knowing I meant to. I wanted to tear the picture up. Then I asked: What would hurt more? I waited a month. Then I packed up various legal papers she had stored in the States — old tax returns, medical records — and sent them to her without a note. In the packet, I returned the wheat fields.

She wrote back just once more, to say she was getting married at the end of the month. She wouldn't mind if we made a financial settlement.

And thanks for the postcard, Beau. Yes, that's the place.

Saying everything but the definitive. I'll be there. In my mind.

I chose not to tell Helen this ending. Instead, I answered, "She says she still does, sometimes. In my sleep."

Helen would have fidgeted if she had digits. "Who can love who? Can any thing love any thing?" Could you love me, Richard? For example.

"It's hard to say what will or will not turn a person's head." I evaded what she did not ask outright.

"Turn a head?"

"It's a body thing," Lentz tortured her. "You wouldn't understand."

He gave her no more than the education she asked for. His functional example. The way Lentz loved. Helen grew up quickly after that.

I turned thirty-two — the Goldberg number — just after submitting my finished draft. I came up for air in the spring of '89, returning to the world just in time to watch it yank itself into another place. "Bliss" is the wrong word for what it felt to be alive then, and I cannot use "heaven," because I was no longer young. Commotion, maybe. The sick thrill of checkpoint chaos.

Even from E., the air that year smelled epochal. Event fell, for once, inside perceivable wavelengths. The angel of history took up painting its canvas with a house brush. From a day's drive, out to the outer reaches, all the textbooks went into another edition. Each week scrapped and revised the only rules C. and I had ever lived under.

When the changes erupted, we two, along with everyone else in the mediated world, tuned in. Each night C. and I stared at global upheaval until there was no more footage to stare at. Then we went over to ears and did radio, on into the night until we lost the signal.

We got our word from the outside through a little rathole in the bottom of the cell door. News arrived on a bandwidth so narrow it stripped off everything in the message but the garbled header. And we were among the lucky ones, with options. When the Dutch got too parochial, we checked the Belgian coverage. If the German accounts collapsed into myopia, we fell back on the British or French.

Our border-town smorgasbord of sources still left us like deaf and blind children in front of a burning house, with nothing to tell how the fire blazed except the heat on our faces and the signs shouted into our hands.

Nothing could ever be the same again. But what things would be was beyond either of us. For that matter, what they had been would never be certain, now that they were gone.

The world's orphans seemed to be taking adult nonsense by the collar and reprimanding it. We watched them filling squares, sitting atop barbed-wire walls, everywhere dismantling the forbidden. For a few exhilarating weeks, the picnic fed on itself. "What a win," C. said. Then a glance my way: "It is a win, isn't it?"

A season sufficed to tell. It wasn't a win. It wasn't even a breakeven. Tanks, the old treaded correctives, rolled out and recommenced forcing the child army's lengthy and painstaking rout.

As quickly as it started, See It Now flicked out, leaving nothing but assorted body counts. By New Year's, the message settled in: clear the streets. Go back to your houses. Even those, like C. and I, who had done nothing but stand by and watch, were expected to return to our daily gauge, the scale of the dazedly private.

For two months, through a glazed window, time had seemed on its way somewhere. We might have contributed, or at least comprehended. But when the goods came to market, we were again waved off.

Now more than ever, C. chafed at the work she had chosen. "They're predicting a big rush on translators over at school. European integration. Return of stability to Asia. A few hundred million new potential owners of major appliances in the former East Bloc alone. The problem is finding a Dutch translation for 'New World Order' that doesn't have unfortunate associations."

C.'s fears were irrational but not unreasonable. Hers was the purest cynicism: hope concealing itself from itself. A day came when she no longer had the heart to let me talk her out of it.

That winter never froze, so there was no spring thaw. On the first jacket-free day that C. wasn't buried in papers, we went for a long walk. We rewarded ourselves with outside, although neither of us had been particularly good.

We wandeled along the cow paths that connected E. to a nearby rolling region called Klein Zwitzerland. For long stretches, the land looked as it had for the last millennium. We headed at random, swinging between the nearest copse and its far clearing. We talked about current events, those that were no longer current. The ones we would never get past.

We lost track. Imperceptibly, we doubled back on our path. We found ourselves at that spot past which her father's postwar dray horse would not go, because of some political calamity it could still smell.

We drifted, as if by chance, alongside the American war cemetery that had decided C.'s fate so many years before she was born. We stood above it on a slight rise, looking down across the diffraction pattern of markers, the crucifix moiré. C. flashed me an almost haughty try-and-stop-me. She tore off down the hill, the liberating troops behind her.

The graves were tended now by an endowed institution. Volunteer work would disrupt no more generations. Memorial cottage industries had sprouted up around it: a chapel. An unknown's tomb with eternal flame. A huge panoramic map with arrows and counterarrows that attempted to triangulate history's meaning.

"You like this stuff, huh?" C. said. "You're a boy, right?"

I rubbed her shoulder: Forgive me. I've done nothing. She pulled away. Walked back. Took, then dropped my fingers.

After a search, we found the grave of the Polish kid. We stood in front of it, pushing twice his age. The day's warmth caught in my throat.

"How many times have you heard my mother tell you this story?" C. asked. "How many times have you heard me tell it?"

I shrugged. I already knew the Hebbian rule, in everything but its particulars and name. Repetition made things real. I already knew that I'd repeat the story myself until I discovered what to do with it.

'The woman never remarried. Six weeks, at eighteen."

C.'s face puffed red and phlegmy. She reached out and touched the white limestone, helping rub the name along its hunt for oblivion. She looked grim, already steeled for the death blow.

"Beau? Maybe we have to have a child."

As the forgotten allusion had it, the contract 'twixt Helen, A., and me was not for one or several months. Our training might have gone on forever, but for the fact that the bet had a due date. Helen, in the straightaway, began asking more questions than she answered.

My interrogation of A. escalated, too. Most often, she met my inquiries with friendly concessions that dinner might be fun, in, say, a week or two. Vague, ambiguous, preoccupied, as preoccupied as I became when the weeks went by without connection. The longer I put off posting her my rambling, poetic confessions, the more alive restraint made me feel.

I wanted to shower her with little trinket-gifts of false consciousness. Plant jokes, pluck, and deliver them in bunches. Call and ensure she was dressed properly for the weather.

I fed Helen on all the spines that poked out from under A.'s arms. I read her the critical studies, whose cachet now far exceeded the primary texts those studies had all but abandoned. What A. knew, Helen had to be able to follow. For A., though she did not know it yet, would be Helen's exam partner. I tried to be selective. The general death of the author would be hard on her. She had not yet gotten over Little Nell.

" 'Once more the storm is howling,' " I told Helen. " 'And half hid under this cradle-hood and coverlid my child sleeps on.' "

"What is Gregory's wood?" she wanted to know. "Where is the Atlantic? Who is that great Queen? What is a Horn of Plenty?"

"It's not important."

"Why isn't it important? What is important?"

"The poet is praying for his daughter. He does not want her to be beautiful at the expense of being kind."

"Helen again." Helen laughed. "Helen everywhere."

"I guess," I allowed, too tired to update her. "He thinks it would be better if the child grew up wise. Glad. 'That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, and have no business but dispensing round their magnanimities of sound.' "

" 'Merriment begin a chase. . merriment a quarrel,' " Helen read, from her digital copy. " 'Assault and battery of the wind'?"

"He means the storm." How many fallacies I committed, with that mean. "Remember? The howling? He means all the anger in the world. The hatred."

" 'Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.' He means the storm won't blow the bird from the bough."

"Very good, sweet. If the mind has no hatred, hatred cannot hurt it."

" 'An intellectual hatred is the worst, so let her think opinions are accursed.' "

" 'All hatred driven hence, the soul recovers radical innocence and learns at last that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting.' "

A figure in uniform slammed around the office-door frame.

"Sir, please leave right now by the south central stairwell. We have an order to evacuate the building."

I looked at him with total vacuity.

"Now, sir! We're asking that you not dick around, please." He slapped the frame with a rigid palm, then sprinted to the next office to spread the alarm.

I sat flapping a moment, as wash flaps in the real's breeze. I tried to shake myself into focus. Which of the various evacuations was under way? I ticked off the short list, calculating, until it hit me that calculation was moot.

I scanned the office: what to try to rescue? Lentz was abroad at one of connectionism's endless professional gatherings. What would he want saved? I cared for just one thing here, and she wasn't even here. She wasn't even a thing but a distributed process. Nothing of Helen existed in this room except her accoutrements, eyes and ears and mouth, dumb machines not worth carrying out.

Through the window, knots of scientists gathered on the south grounds. From my distance, they might have been refugees from any of the world's violent misgivings. They milled among handcarts of hastily heaped equipment, papers, floppies. We might have been in one of those perennial urban war zones, where research goes on in lean-tos of corrugated tin, on the run from the savagery it has armed and encouraged by whole catalogs of neglect.

I stood paralyzed. Instinct instructed me to duck down until sanity condescended to flit back to the feeder. I would have, had not another uniform shouted from the hall, behind a human trail drive. "Let's go. Move it, now."

I told Helen I would be right back. In the main corridor, people congregated, vocalizing. The uniforms tried to move them along, with limited success. One officer gestured back toward Lentz's. "Is everyone out of there?"

I threw my hands up in the air. They came down clasped, against my head. "Yes," I screamed at him. And followed in shame to the safety outside.

There a police line condensed, a bumblebee black-and-yellow plastic strip erecting a barricade from nothing. One of those two-D Euclidean imaginaries that separate the sentient body from the site of politics. The Center's refugees clustered in chains, splitting and linking, staring back at the magnificent, emptied building as if the mystery might yield to visual inspection. Researchers clumped in conversation; even clueless outrage had to be talked out.

The police herded back the mass. They told everyone to go home until further notice. The MRI team, beyond frantic, pressed for information. Their equipment trapped inside the building included a behemoth prototype that cost more than the GNPs of half a dozen southern nations. I saw Ram at a distance. He was trying to comfort a distraught colleague whose brain bursts could have been read from across campus without an imager.

I came across Chen and Harold in the crowd. They stood picking lint off each other's tweed jackets. "Hey, Ricko," Harold greeted me. "Bomb scare. Somebody made a threat this morning on the radio call-in program."

"Hey," Chen echoed. He turned back to Harold. "Why you are not nervous?"

"Ha. I've done this before."

"The Center has had bomb scare before?"

"Oh, not here. In another life."

"Harold," I interrupted. "She's still in there."

His face ticked with panic. "She can't be. She's—" He drew up short when he hit on whom I meant. "Oh, for God's sake. You have her backed up somewhere, don't you?" His irritation was audible and crushing.

"Harold. She's not a program. She's an architecture. She's a multidimensional shape."

"You run her on silicon, don't you? Somebody downloads all those hosts to tape every week and archives them to remote sites."

"But she doesn't run on one machine. Her parts are spread over more boxes than I can count. She's grown to scores of subassemblies. Each one takes care of a unique process. They talk to each other across broadband. Even if we had the connects and vectors for each component system, we'd never get her reassembled."

Harold fell quiet. I could follow his thoughts. If the threat detonated, Helen would be the least of the Center's tragedies. The real hostages — clues to mental illness and immunological disorders, cathedrals of supercomputer engineering, insights into complexities from market turbulence to weather — dwarfed our strange sideshow. Only respect for the hours I'd put into the training kept him from annoyance. He gave me too much credit to credit what I thought.

"Well." He grimaced. "There seems to be no way to rescue her, then."

"Humorous," Chen decided. Chen was a theoretician. Chen stood to lose nothing, even if the fifty-five-million-dollar building and its irreplaceable contents collapsed in rubble.

I walked away, furious at idiocy in all its levels. My mind raced, and I gunned it. The Quad teemed with undergrads, heading for their two o'clock, indifferent to the fact that their campus flagship was about to blow.

Reflex landed me in front of English. The basement computer lab might have crawled with my colleagues. A. might have been there. I would not have known. I linked in to the Center over the coaxial backbone. I could not hear Helen's voice to read how it sounded. But the words that came across the screen asked, "Something is happening?"

I told her what was happening, as best as I could figure it.

"Helen could die?" Helen asked. "Extraordinary." She'd liked the story of how the novelist Huxley, on his deathbed, had been reduced to this one word.

She waited for me to say something. I could think of nothing to say. Helen had to do all the talking. "To a little infant, perhaps, birth is as painful as the other."

"Bacon," I said. It had not been that long.

"Francis Bacon," she encouraged me. "What says Browne? Sir Thomas?" she quizzed. By emulation.

"We all labor against our own cure."

"Never mind." She often said Never mind when I think she meant Don't worry. "Death will cure all the diseases." She meant that I, too, could pass the exam. If I put my mind to it.

In the end, the day belonged to those who stuck with the status quo. By evening, the Center's bomb scare had never happened. Time's hoax-to-explosion ratio increased infinitesimally.

The perpetrator was a junior professor in philosophy with a book out on Austin and Wittgenstein who, for reasons that now seemed obvious, had just been denied tenure. The police snagged the "Short-Fuse Philosopher" when he called the radio station back to elaborate.

Booked and jailed, he stuck by this second call, a linguistic equivocation that he seemed to hope would keep him from a decade in prison. He claimed his threat was never more than a moral subjunctive. The Center was draining the university dry, reducing the humanities to an obsolete, embarrassing museum piece. He'd made his point, he said. If there were any justice, there would have been a bomb. He'd proclaimed no more than hypothetical detonation, for which he expected no more than a hypothetical sentence.

"She's conscious," I accused Lentz, the instant he unpacked.

He mugged. "Welcome back to you, too, Marcel. Pronouncements, still? Sure she's conscious. At least as conscious as a majority of the state legislature."

"I'm serious." I told him about the bomb evacuation. About tapping in to Helen from the remote link while she was trapped in the building. "She asked me if something was happening. She figured out what was going on. She knew what it spelled for her."

Lentz jerked his neck back, unable to decide whether to delight in my ingenuousness or to decimate it. "Are we back to Implementation C?" The one where the humans combined to sucker me. "Weizenbaum's ELIZA? The Rogerian psychologist simulator? 'How are you?' 'Fine, thanks.' 'Let's talk about why you think you are fine.' Powers, you're like the student who stumbled onto a terminal where the program was running and thought—"

"No comparison."

I remembered the story. The student thinks he's on a Teletype, talking to a human. He converses, growing frustrated at the program's metagames. Finally, he dials the phone and gets the human he thinks he's been typing to. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" "What do you mean, what the hell do I think I'm doing?"

"No comparison. Don't insult me, Lentz. I know what she said."

"Rick. She associates. She matches patterns. She makes ordered pairs. That's not consciousness. Trust me. I built her."

"And I trained her." Lentz just stared at me, until I snapped. "Since you are all-knowing about matters mechanical, perhaps you can tell me how you came to be such a patronizing little shit."

By way of answer, he stood up. I saw us fighting, and wondered how I might even the odds enough so that beating him to a bloody pulp would have more than just clinical interest.

Lentz walked over to Helen's console and flipped on the microphone. She burbled, as she always did, at the promise of renewed communication.

"How do you feel, little girl?"

"I don't feel little girl."

He faced me. "Gibberish. She doesn't even get the transformation right."

"You're kidding me. You don't see…? She means all sorts of things by that. She could—"

"All the meanings are yours." He returned to the mike. "Were you frightened?"

"What you is the were for?"

"Damn it, Helen. We're giving you quality time here. Please tell me: what hell that mean?"

"It's obvious," I answered for her. "She wants to know which Helen you are asking. Which one in time."

"Oh. You mean: 'When?' But let's not take points off for style. You realize that a conscious entity just coming through the fright of her life would know which 'you' I was talking about."

"It wasn't a big deal to her. She didn't make any special—"

"Please, Marcel. I'm asking her. Were you frightened yesterday, Helen?"

"Frightened out of fear."

"What's that from, Powers?"

"Antony and Cleopatra."

"When did you train her with it?"

"Two days ago."

"This is worse than key-word chaining. She's neither aware nor, at the moment, even cognitive. You've been supplying all the anthro, my friend."

"I'm not your friend. I thought you were an advocate. I thought you believed in the capability of nets."

"I am. I do."

"But just as a sleight of hand."

"The bet was, we could build a distributed net whose text interpretation reasonably mimicked an arrested human's. All we contracted to was product. We didn't promise to duplicate anything under the hood."

"A kind of black-box forgery, you mean."

Lentz just shrugged. 'That's operationalism. The Turing Test. Can you pass off your simulation as functionally equivalent to the thing you're simulating?"

'There's an error lurking in there somewhere."

"Explain yourself, Marcel."

I flung my hand out toward Helen's console. "Full 'functional equivalence' would mean consciousness. If you simulate everything completely, then you've modeled the whole shape and breath of the living package. How does the black box behave when operations challenge themselves? When function looks under its own hood?"

Lentz grimaced. "Elan vital, Marcel. Mysticism."

"A behavior is not just its implementation. Function also has to include. ." But I didn't know what else to call what function had to include. I felt slightly out of control. That mundane contradiction in terms. "How would we know, then, whether a perfect copy…? When does an imitation become the real thing?"

Lentz scrunched up, bothered. "What's the real thing? What would it take to simulate awareness? Awareness is the original black box. Stop and think of the put-up job that high-order consciousness itself works on us. 'Everything's under control. Everything's handled— unanimous, seam-free.' The brain is already a sleight of hand, a massive, operationalist shell game. It designs and runs Turing Tests on its own constructs every time it ratifies a sensation or reifies an idea. Experience is a Turing Test — phenomena passing themselves off as perception's functional equivalents. Live or Memorex? Even that question is a simulation we fall for every second of our waking lives."

"Irks care the crop-full bird?" Helen burst in. "Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

Lentz almost spit in mid-clause. "Marcel. I have to grant you. She does have a disconcerting ability to pull appropriate quotes."

"Lentz! Listen to her. You think those are just quotes to her?" I felt myself getting hysterical. "What if they're real? What if she means something by them?"

"What if my grandmother had had testicles?"

"She'd be your grandfather," Helen reassured him.

I stared at Lentz's face, where a stain of dismay spread over the icy deep.

Children were out of the question. They always had been. And now more than ever.

"C. We've talked about this. There are a billion and a half too many of us already. How can we two be parents? We don't even know what we're doing or where we want to live."

She flashed me a look. She knew what she was doing. She knew where she wanted to live.

"Which is it?" she mouthed.

"Which is what?"

"Which is your reason? The billion and a half too many? Or the two of us?"

For years — forever — my reason had been C.'s. She'd seemed set, pleased with what we had. I'd always thought the choice was mutual. Now I saw it had all been me. C. had drawn the whole curve of her adult life out of deference and fear. Three months from graduation, she came up empty-handed. There was nothing left to be afraid of.

"Why didn't we ever get married?" she wanted to know.

"I thought that was all right with you."

"What does that mean, Rick?"

"I promised you my life, in privacy. It's easy to break a public contract. You just go to court. You can't break a private promise." And leave, with nothing, the one you promised all.

"How come we never signed the contract, too? What could it have hurt? I wanted everyone to think you were proud of me."

"Oh, C. Proud? I love you. Who is going to know that if we don't?"

"What were you holding back, Ricky?"

"Nothing. You have everything."

She challenged me with silence. If that's true, then ask me. Ask me now.

I couldn't. I couldn't even say why I couldn't. I always insisted I could make C. happy. But all that insisting left her more convinced of her unworthiness. Even if a public pact had worked, she'd always have resented being deeded someone else's happiness.

I meant to stay with C. forever, in precariousness. I knew no other way to continue that scrapbook we had started, seat-of-the-pants style, a decade before. My refusal to marry her was a last-ditch effort to live improvised love. It was my holding back. My failing her. My departure.

Gold Bug appeared in the States. Half a world away was not far enough for safety. When I finished my double thwarted love story, I thought that judgment was irrelevant. But life begins and ends in judgment. C. and I kept still and hoped for reprieve.

We got what we hoped. The book won a slice of attention. Those who still read read with a promiscuous hunger that would try anything once. Readers persisted in searching for a desperate, eleventh-hour fix. It might take any form at all, even this long, molecular strangeness.

C. and I flinched for weeks, coiled, waiting to be hit. The blow, when it fell, was a clap on the back. We sat dazed at the breakfast table, passing back and forth the glossy weekly with a readership even here, in our little ex-coal-mining town, where English was exotic novelty.

"That's not you, is it?" My first public photo made C. laugh bitterly. "I wouldn't recognize you without the caption."

"It's a haircut double," I tried, too hard. "Another reclusive writer with the same name, trying to pass himself off as Dutch. But note the palm trees in the background."

"You've made it, Beau. You've arrived."

I heard it in C.'s voice. My success killed her last chance. Somehow we'd lost our story.

"Nothing's changed, C. It's still the same book. I'll write the next one the same way. For the same reasons." To extend the parallax you give me and help refract sense from everything we come across.

She looked away, no longer believing or satisfied by belief.

I grew gentle. C. never could endure gentleness. She might have survived yelling. She might have been able to live with me, had I fought fair and shown anger.

"Buddy. Sweetheart. What do you want? Just tell me what you want."

But the only thing she'd ever wanted was the thing I took away by doing for her.

We fell. C. became skittish. She buried herself in schoolwork, her final translation project. She'd sit for meals, but do no more than nibble, chafe, and make polite conversation. Sometimes she grew giddy, hilarious. Her generosity screamed for help. She showered me in attentions and gifts — dried banana mixes, a pair of field glasses to spy on frescoed church vaults, books she knew I coveted but would never buy for myself.

Her hours became erratic; I never knew when I would see her or who she would be when I did. One night, she failed to come home at all. From the balcony where I always watched her get off the bus, I clocked the empty coaches each half hour until they stopped running. After midnight, as I prepared to phone the police, she called. She was all right; she'd explain when she got in.

That night was a night such as everyone spends at least once in life. C. walked in around midmorning. We couldn't look at each other.

"I'd better pop you some corn," I told her. Always one of her favorites.

"Ricky. Don't. Don't be nice to me. I can't bear it."

I popped her some corn. Not to outhurt her. To have something to do with my hands. I brought the bowl to where she sat. She would not look up, say a word, or eat.

"C. Beau. Say something. What's happening?"

C. froze, the classic small mammal in the headlights. Only: I was the headlights. It took me ten years, but at last I learned it. That comfort she showed me on the Quad — the internal calm I loved and built my own on — was dread. Paralysis. Her crumpled, engaging smile had never been more than sheer terror.

She said nothing. The more I needed to hear, the harder she bolted. My need gagged her, and her silence made me desperate.

"It's somebody else," she sneered. "That's what I'm supposed to say, right?"

"Is it somebody else?"

"I don't know."

"Suppose it were somebody else."

"P. At the Institute."

"Your teacher? The one that makes the Dutch girls cry?"

But that sadistic skill was mine alone. And C., in tears, chose her nationality.

Love became fierce after that. Sex, stripped of all ends, went ballistic. Our shy, awkward, ten-year delectation turned to sick and lovely heroin, worth any degradation to suck up. Doomed pleasure injected us with rushes neither of us knew we could feel. Caresses, each the last, burned in their care, and bites that began as tender mnemonics left bruises lasting weeks.

Our last abandoned love act delivered the violence we were after. That night, in the dark, in our blushing bed, we sexed each other like alley strays, grilling each other's skins with nails, teeth, anything that would hook. We choked on those forbidden little cries that stoke lust by flattering it. We told desire that everything else was a lie. That we were not us until mindless in itch, incapable of any more than the odd feral syllable.

Spent, dripping, we held each other. This grace, at least, we shared, even if only humiliation. Sense slunk back. When it did, it struck me with fascinated horror that the condom we'd been using had vanished. Our barrier against birth lay nestled somewhere up inside her. We stared in incomprehension. In that awful second, we each accused the other of subconscious engineering.

We did what we could to counter. Then the long, stunned aftermath of accident.

"What if it's happened?" C. asked me, afraid. "What if I've conceived?"

"I don't know. What would you want to do?"

She seemed lifetimes away. She wasn't talking to me. She listened to some invisible messenger. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what to hope for. Part of me wants it all to be taken out of our hands. Maybe we think too much, Beau. Maybe we've always thought too much."

I thought a baby now, with things so volatile, would be disaster. She felt my failure of will, and to her, it was already a murder.

"What do you want?" she dared me. "What do you think?"

To be born is as painful as to die. "I think we need to wait and see what we are talking about."

We waited. We waited seven weeks. In hope or fear, C. missed a period. She threw up continually. She wasted and turned the color of a sunken copper statue. Then one morning, we got an All Clear that left her suicidal with relief.

Not long after, she announced at dinner the end of the narrative.

My life with C. was a long training. I learned most of my adult truths with her. I learned how to travel light, how to read aloud. I learned to pay attention to the incomprehensible. I learned that no one ever knows another.

I learned her condition of statelessness, steeped in survivor's guilt. I learned how to make a virtue of necessity. How to assume a courage when I had it not. I mimicked that skill she exercised without thinking, for which I loved her most of all. I learned from her how to keep fitting myself against those things that left me for dead.

I learned that only care has a prayer of redressing the unlivable terms of politics. Yet I learned that a love fostered on caretaking crippled the loved one, or, one day — worse — it did what it promised and worked its worldly cure.

"How would you like," I asked A., "to participate in a noble experiment?"

I winced to hear myself talk to the woman. I still took a 50 percent hit in intelligence each time I saw her. Actual attempts at conversation halved that half. Sentences of more than five words I had to rehearse well in advance. I hoped A. might have a fondness for the pathetic. That idiocy lent me comic appeal.

I had lived by the word; now I was dying by the phoneme. The few good cadences I managed to complete competed with countless other claims on A.'s attention. We could not speak anywhere for more than three minutes without someone greeting her effusively. This self-possessed child, who I'd imagined spent solitary nights reading Auden and listening to Palestrina, was in fact a sociopath of affability.

The bar where we sat overflowed with her lost intimates. "Experiment? Just a sec. I'm getting another beer. You want something else?"

She curved her fingers back and touched them to my shoulders. I was finished, done for, and had no objections.

I watched A. take our glasses up to the bar. Within a minute, she, the bartender, and a knot of innocent bystanders doubled over with laughter. I watched the bartender refill the beers and refuse her proffered cash. A. returned to our booth, still grinning.

"Do you play pinball?" she asked. "They have this fantastic machine here. I love it. Come on."

She bobbed into the crowd, not once looking back to see if I followed.

My pinball was even more pathetic than my attempts at conversation. "How do you get this gate to open? What happens if you go down this chute?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," A. answered. "I just kind of whack at it, you know? The lights. The bells and whistles." Volition was moot musing. The little silver ball did whatever it wanted.

Everything I thought A. to be she disabused. Yet reality exceeded my best projections. A. engaged and detached at will, immune to politics. She sunned herself in existence, as if it were easier to apologize than to ask for permission.

That spring body — its fearless insouciance, the genetic spark, desire's distillation of health — made anyone who looked on her defer to the suggestion of a vast secret. And when she looked back, it was always with a bemused glance, demure in her pleasure, reining up in decorous confusion that nobody else had put things together before now, had gleaned what was happening. Every living soul had gotten lost, forgotten its power, grown old. She alone had broken through, whole, omnipotent with first growth, her ease insisting, Remember? It's simple. And possessing this, A.'s mind became that idea, however temporarily, forever, just as the meter of thought is itself a standing wave, an always, in its eternal, reentrant feedback.

In A.'s company, everyone was my intimate and beer and peanuts all the nutrition I needed. Prison, with her, would be a lime-tree bower. In those scattered minutes that she let me trot alongside her, I could refract first aid from the air and prosody from stones. I could get by without music, without books, without memory. I could get by on nothing but being. If I could just watch her, I imagined, just study how she did it, I might learn how to live.

I kind of whacked at the pinhall. A. laughed at me. I amused her — some kind of extraterrestrial. "That's it. Squeeze first. Ask later."

"But there has to be some kind of system, don't you think?"

"Oh, probably," she sighed. She took over from me when I drained. She tapped into the bells and whistles, entranced. "So what's this noble experiment?"

I had fifteen seconds between flipper twitches to tell her about Helen.

"Well, it's like this. We're teaching a device how to read."

"You what?" She stopped flipping and looked at me. Her eyes swelled, incredulous, big as birthday cakes. "You're joking. You're joking, right?"

I took A. to the Center. Two whole hours: the longest I'd ever been in her presence. That day doubled the total time I'd spent with her up until then. I blessed Helen for existing. And shamed myself at the blessing.

A. watched as I stepped through a training demo. Helen enchanted her. She could not get enough. "It can't be. It's not possible. There's a little homunculus inside, isn't there?"

"Not that I know of."

Delight grew anxious. A. wanted to speak to the artifact herself, without mediation. She asked for the mike. I could not refuse her anything.

"Who's your favorite writer, Helen? Helen? Come on, girl. Talk to me."

But A.'s voice, on first exposure, disquieted Helen as much as it had me. The nets clammed up as tight as a five-year-old remembering the parent-drilled litany, Stranger, danger.

"Pretty please?" A. begged. "Be my friend?" She wasn't used to rejection.

"Let's talk about 'The Windhover,' " I suggested to Helen.

"Good. I want to," Helen said.

A. clapped her hand to her mouth. Her eyes would have wetted, her heart broken with ephemeral pleasure, had they known how.