Galatea 2.2

"What do you think of the poem?"

"I understand the 'blue-bleak embers,' " Helen claimed, failing to answer the question. "But why does he say, 'Ah my dear?' Who is 'my dear?' Who is he talking to?"

I'd read the poem for Taylor, at an age when A. would have been considered jail bait. I'd memorized it, recited it for anyone who would listen. I'd analyzed it in writing. I'd pinched it for my own pale imitations.

"I don't know," I confessed to Helen. "I never knew."

I glanced over at A. for advice. She looked stricken. Blue-bleak. "What on earth are you teaching her?"

"It's Hopkins," I said, shocked at her shock. "You don't…?"

"I know what it is. Why are you wasting time with it?"

"What do you mean? It's a great poem. A cornerstone."

"Listen to you. Cornerstone. You didn't tell me you were Euro-retro."

"I didn't know I was." I sounded ridiculous. Hurt, and worse, in hating how I sounded and trying to disguise it.

"Has she read the language poets? Acker? Anything remotely working-class? Can she rap? Does she know the Violent Femmes?"

"I, uh, doubt it. Helen, do you know the Violent Femmes?"

Helen contemplated. "Who know?"

"She makes that mistake all the time. I can't seem to untrain her."

"Don't," A. said. "But do tell her a little about what people really read."

"She'll get everything on the list."

"Whose list? Let me see that." A. took the crib sheets I'd put together, Helen's prep for the test I'd taken, once upon a time. A. studied the titles, as if she hadn't just passed the exam herself. At length she looked up. "I hate to be the one to break this to you. Your version of literary reality is a decade out of date."

"What, they've issued a Hopkins upgrade since my day?"

A. snorted. "They should."

"Don't tell me you didn't have to read him."

"Nobody has to read anyone anymore. There's more to the canon than is dreamt of in your philosophy, bub. These days, you find the people you want to study from each period. You work up some questions in advance. Get them approved. Then you write answers on your preparation."

"Wait. You what? There's no List? The Comps are no longer comprehensive?"

"A lot more comprehensive than your white-guy, Good Housekeeping thing."

"You mean to tell me that you can get a Ph.D. in literature without ever having read the great works?"

A. bent her body in a combative arc. Even her exasperation turned beautiful. "My God, I'm dealing with a complete throwback. You're not even reactionary! Whose definition of great? Hopkins ain't gonna cut it anymore. You're buying into the exact aestheticism that privilege and power want to sell you."

"Wait a minute. Weren't you the woman who was just teaching me how to play pinball?"

A. did her Thai dancer imitation. She blushed. "Yeah, that was me. You got a problem with that?"

"All of a sudden you want to set fire to the library."

"Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not trying to burn any books. I'm just saying that books are what we make of them. And not the other way around."

I took the list back from her. "I don't know much about books. But I know what I like."

"Oh, come on! Play fair. You make it sound as if everything anyone has ever written is recycled Bible and Shakespeare."

"Isn't it?"

She hissed and crossed her fingers into a vampire-warding crucifix. "When were you educated, anyway? I bet you still think New Criticism is, like, heavy-duty. Cutting-edge."

"Excuse me for not trend-surfing. If I fall far enough behind I can catch the next wave."

Self-consciousness caught up with me. We shouldn't be arguing like this in front of the children. I reached down and turned off Helen's microphone.

A., in the thrill of the fight, failed to notice. "Those who reject new theory are in the grip of an older theory. Don't you know that all this stuff" — she slapped my six pages of titles—"is a culturally constructed, belated view of belle lettres? You can't get any more insular than this."

"Well, it is English-language culture that we want to teach her."

"Whose English? Some eighty-year-old Oxbridge pederast's? The most exciting English being written today is African, Caribbean—"

"We have to give her the historical take if she—"

"The winner's history, of course. What made you such a coward? What are you so scared of? Difference is not going to kill you. Maybe it's time your little girl had her consciousness raised. An explosion of young-adulthood."

"I'm all for that. I just think that you can get to the common core of humanity from anywhere."

"Humanity? Common core? You'd be run out of the field on a rail for essentializing. And you wonder why the posthumanists reduced your type to an author function."

"That's Mr. Author Function to you, missy."

A. smiled. Such a smile might make even posthumanism survivable. I loved her. She knew it. And she would avoid the issue as long as she could. Forever.

"So, Mr. Author Function. What do you think this human commonality is based on?"

"Uh, biology?" I let myself sound snide.

"Oh, now it's scientism. What's your agenda? Why would you want to privilege that kind of hubris?"

"I'm not privileging anything. I'm talking about simple observation."

"You think observation doesn't have an ideological component? Stone Age. Absolutely Neolithic."

"So I come from a primitive culture. Enlighten me."

She took me seriously. "Foundationism is bankrupt," she said. Her zeal broke my heart. She was a born teacher. If anyone merited staying in the profession, it was this student for whom themes were still real. "Why science? You could base your finalizing system on anything. The fact is—"

"The what?"

A. smirked. "The fact is, what we make of things depends on the means of their formulation. In other words, language. And the language we speak varies without limit across cultures."

I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite the axioms in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.'s mouth. She convinced me at blood-sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body's idea. I tried to catch her eyes. "You love this stuff, don't you?"

She flinched: What kind of discredited rubbish are you talking now?

"You're not really going to go into business, are you? Give all this up?"

"I like theory, when it's not annoying me. I love the classroom. I adore teaching. But I like eating even more."

Subsidies, I wanted to tell her. What we make in fiction, we can plow back into teaching and criticism. Scholar-gypsies. Independents. There was some precedent, once.

"So what do you want from me?" A. asked.

My head whipped back. She'd heard me thinking.

"Where do I come in?" she pressed.

It took me a couple of clock cycles to recover. Helen, she meant. The exam.

I couldn't begin to say where she came in. What I wanted of her. I wanted to learn from A. some fraction of those facts I dispensed so freely to Helen. I thought she might lend me some authority, supply the missing lines of the functional proofs. I saw us jointly working out warmth, glossing intimacy, interpreting the ways of humility, of second chances, indulgence, expansiveness, redemption, hope, provincialism, projection, compassion, dependence, failing, forgiveness. A. was my class prep, my empirical test of meaning.

But Helen did not need a teacher steeped in those predicates. She already read better than I. Writing, she might have told me, was never more than the climb from buried love's grave.

I tried to tell A. where she came in. I limited myself to a quick sketch of the comprehensive high noon. I told A. that we needed a token human for our double-blind study. That we just wanted to ask her a couple of questions. Trivial; nothing she hadn't already mastered.

"Hold on. You want to test me — against a machine?" Coyer now, more flirtatious than I had yet seen her.

The Hartrick family's appearance outside the office saved me from debacle. "Hello," William announced, peeking in. "Did you know a feather would fall as fast as this entire building, if you dropped them in a vacuum?"

"Where are you going to find a vacuum big enough to drop this building?" I asked.

"NASA," William chanted, defensively singsong. "You know how to get oil out of shale?"

"You know how to spell 'fish'?"

"They're both out of control," Diana apologized to A. A. laughed in sympathy.

I made the introductions. William produced pocket versions of Mastermind and Connect Four, letting me take my pick. He proceeded to trounce me. I might have stood a chance, but for distraction. Something had happened to Peter that I struggled to place. Hand in his mother's hand, he took first, tentative steps.

A. was smitten. "What a beautiful boy you are. How old are you?" She looked up at Diana. "How old is he?" I cringed in anticipation. But A.'s reaction was as seamless as her delight.

William pummeled me turn after turn. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched A. play with Petey, her hand surprisingly blunt on his ear. A. sat on the floor, rolling Peter's ball back to him after his each wild fling. I felt the heat of Diana's curiosity, but she and A. talked of nothing but the boys.

"Come on, William," Diana said at last. "Leave the man with some shred of dignity." William broke into a satisfied grin. Pete grabbed his ball, labored once more into vertical, and the family pressed on.

Their visit turned A. introspective. "I really think I don't belong here, sometimes."

" 'Here'?"

"In academia. I come from a long line of Polish mine workers. Theoryland would baffle the hell out of my family." She grew irritated. Accusing. "Let me show you something." She rummaged through her canvas backpack and extracted a hostage to hand over to me. "Know what this is?" Her voice challenged with mockery.

"Cross-stitch?"

"It's for my mother's hutch. I should be done in time for Christmas. You should see us at holidays. I'm fourth of four. All girls. We go around the house at the top of our lungs, all six of us singing at the same time."

A. fell silent, proportionate to the remembered cacophony. No one knew this woman. Sociability was a brilliant camouflage. Beneath it hid the most private person I'd ever met.

"I could have started one of my own by now. A family. But no. I had to do things the hard way."

I don't know why, but she let me see her. Dropped her guard. I'd made myself fall in love with A. With the idea of A. With her interrogating body. With hands that held in midair all the questions Helen would never touch. I had loved C. wrongly, for C.'s helplessness. I loved A. helplessly, for the one right reason. For my frailty in the face of her. For her poise in knowing how soon all poise would end.

I realized I was going to propose to that body. I needed to see what her person, what the character I steered around in my head would say to total, reckless invitation.

I was going to do what I'd never had the courage to do in my decade with C. I was going to ask this unknown to take me to her and make an unrationed life together. To marry. Make a family. Amend and extend our lives.

"All right," I said, affecting a virtue. "You're sufficiently fallible to be just what we're looking for. Are you in?"

A.'s grimace upended itself. Such a test was no less entertaining than pinball. And what could she possibly lose?

"Okay, girl," she addressed Helen. "I'll race you. No mercy!"

Helen said nothing.

"She's being reticent again. Give her a digital gold star, or something."

I opened at random the next book on the list. An epigraph at page top: Bernard of Clairvaux. C. and I had once spent a timeless afternoon in that town. The words read, What we love, we shall grow to resemble.

I read the words to Helen. She kept her counsel.

"Helen? What do you say to that?"

Still she gave no response.

"Helen?"

A. poked me. "Shh. Leave her be. She's rolling with it." She's moved by it, A. wanted to say. But that was the grip of an archaic theory, long discredited.

It hit me well after it should have. The mind is still an evolutionary infant. Most trouble with the obvious. I reached down and turned the mike back on. Then I read the words again.

"How many books are there?" Helen asked one day, not long before the showdown. She sounded suspicious. Fatigued.

"A lot," I broke it to her. I had numbered every hair on her head, but in one of those counting systems that jumps from "three" to "many."

"Tell me."

I told her that the Library of Congress contained 20 million volumes. I told her that the number of new books published increased each year, and would soon reach a million, worldwide. That a person, through industry, leisure, and longevity, might manage to read, in one life, half as many books as are published in a day.

Helen thought. "They never go away? Books?"

'That's what print means. The archive is permanent." And does for the species what associative memory fails to do for the individual.

"Reading population gets bigger?" Helen asked.

"Not as rapidly as the backlist. People die."

Helen knew all about it. Death was epidemic, in literature.

"Do people get any longer, year in, year out?"

"Is the life span increasing? Only on average. And very slowly. Much less than we pretend."

She did the rate equations in two unknowns. "The more days, the less likely that any book will be read."

"That's true. Or that you will have read the same things as anyone you talk to."

"And there are more days every day. Will anything change?"

"Not that I can think of."

"Always more books, each one read less." She thought. "The world will fill with unread print. Unless print dies."

"Well, we're kind of looking into that, I guess. It's called magazines."

Helen knew all about magazines. "Books will become magazines," she predicted.

And of course, she was right. They would have to. Where nothing is lost, little can be found. With written continuity comes collective age. And aging of the collective spirit implied a kind of death. Helen alone was capable of thinking the unthinkable: the disappearance of books from all but the peripheries of life. History would collapse under its own accumulation. Scope would widen until words refused to stray from the ephemeral present.

"When will it be enough?" she asked.

I could not even count for her the whole genres devoted to that question alone.

"Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?"

I read her one of the great moments in contemporary American fiction. "Only it's not by an American, it's no longer contemporary, and it doesn't even take place inside the fictional frame." This was Nabokov's postlude to Lolita, where he relates the book's genesis. He describes hearing of an ape who produced the first known work of animal art, a rough sketch of the bars of the beast's cage.

I told Helen that, inside such a cage as ours, a book bursts like someone else's cell specifications. And the difference between two cages completes an inductive proof of thought's infinitude.

I read her the take of a woman who once claimed to have written for no one. A lifelong letter to the world that neither read hers nor wrote back:

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry—

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll—

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul!

She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael's real name. Who this "Reader" was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree's Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be "only a novel." What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be a mistake not to live all you can.

I said goodbye to C.'s parents. They didn't understand. They had come such a long way, and didn't see why the next generation couldn't tough it out as far, or further.

"She's crazy, huh?" her mother said.

Her pap, in his Chicago-Limburgs patois, asked, "Just one thing I want to know, Rick. Who's gonna set my digital clocks?"

I said goodbye to C. "I promised I'd see you through school. And graduation's still six weeks away."

C. dodged the blow, but caught a corner of it across her face. "Don't do this to me, Rick. I'll graduate. I promise."

"Do you need anything? Should we get you a car before I go? Do you have enough money?" Late-minute plans for a final day trip, solo, lasting from now on.

My reflex solicitude hurt her worse than anger. "Beauie," she pleaded. "We can't do this. We can't split up. We still have twelve hundred pages of Proust to get through."

I searched her, sounding this reprieve, hoping for an impossible instant it might be real. But she did not want it. She did not want to do those remaining pages, to throw bad reading after good. She just wanted to save nostalgia, not the thing it stood for. She only wanted my blessing, to get on and make a life free from suicidal remorse.

"Who's going to finish the book?" She meant the commonplace one, with the ticket stubs and lists of films and meals and outings, a shared narrative, senseless except to us.

Then the senselessness of all stories — their total, arbitrary construction — must have struck C. She started to scream. I had to pin her arms to her side to keep her from harming herself. I held her for a long time. Not as a medic. Not as a parent. Not as a lover. I held her as you might hold a fellow stranger in a shelter.

When she grew calm, she was not yet calm. "I must be sick. Something must be wrong with me. I'm a sadist. I've spoiled everything that was worth having."

"We still have it. It just has to go on hold."

"I wanted to make you proud. I thought, in twenty years, that I might become the perfect person for you."

"You're perfect now."

"I've ruined your life."

"You haven't, C. You've done what you needed to. You're a good person."

She looked at me, remembering. Yes, that's right. I have been. I have been good. "And now I have to go outside."

I tried to match her. To rise to her. 'This is all the fault of that damn Polish kid, you know."

I felt: at least I'll never have to do any of this again.

Helen wanted to read one of my books. I gave her my first try. I had written it at A.'s age, just after passing the comps. I knew nothing about literature then, and so still thought it possible to write.

"Go easy on me," I begged, surrendering the digitized image. "I was just a kid."

The night she read it, I got fifteen minutes of sleep. I could not remember being that nervous, even when reading the longhand draft to C. I came in the morning after, wired over whether this machine thought my book was any good.

We chattered for several minutes about nothing. I grew anxious, assuming the worst. Then I realized: she wouldn't volunteer anything until prompted. She had no way of knowing that I needed to know.

So I asked. Outright. "What did you think of my book, Helen?"

"I think it was about an old photograph. It grows to be about interpretation and collaboration. History. Three ways of looking come together, or fail to. Like a stereoscope. What's a stereoscope?"

"Helen! Did you like it?"

"I liked it."

"What did you like?"

"I liked 'I never saw a Moor. I never saw the Sea.' "

I'd forgotten. "That isn't mine. I was quoting."

"Yes. I know," Helen brushed me off. "That was more Dickinson. Emily."

Helen's brain had proved wide enough for my sky, and me beside. She was one step away from grasping this audience-free poet's analogy, the last scholastic aptitude test: brain differs from the weight of God as syllable from sound. Yet comparison filled her with need to see the real moor, the navigable sea, however much deeper the brain that could absorb it.

"Show me Paris."

"Well?" Lentz shrugged, when I relayed the request. "Do you have any travel plans for the immediate future?"

I had, in fact, no immediate future. My visiting appointment at the Center ended in a few weeks. Beyond that, my life came down to throwing a dart at the world map. I had no reason, no desire to be anywhere except where A. was.

"You can't be serious. You want me to fly to—"

"I didn't say I wanted anything, Marcel. I asked you what you were doing."

I pictured myself strolling the Seine bookstalls, looking for that forgotten book I always thought I would someday write. Paris was the one city where C. had ever felt at home. We'd gone as often as we could. Now I could not see myself wandering there except with A.

"It's absurd," I decided. "What could she gain from it?"

"The hidden layers are hungry, Marcel. Ask not for what."

Lentz brought in slides. We hooked them up to the digitizer. An unrecognizably young Lentz in front of Notre Dame. Lentz in the Tuileries. By the Panthéon. The Médicis fountain. "Helen," he lectured. "The one on the left is me. The one on the right is by Rodin."

She never could see much of anything. She was a one-eyed myopic with astigmatism, two days after an operation for glaucoma. Everything looked to her like blurry Braque, except for Braque. Yet she loved light and dark, and these would have meant to her as much as words, had we wired her up right.

"Motion," she insisted. We tried some ancient public television video. She felt hurt. Locked out. "Depth. Sound. I want Richard to explain me."

"Interactive," Lentz figured.

"What's our range on the camera hookup?"

"Oh, a couple of hundred meters, maximum, from the nearest drop box."

Lentz and I agreed to defraud Helen. Between us, at least, we pretended that it was less swindle than simulation. We would do for this machine the inverse of what virtual reality promised to do for humans.

We showed her the collegiate landmarks of U., all the imitations of imitations of classical architecture, and called the sites she couldn't see anyway by famous names. Even actual Paris would have been no more than a fuzzy, Fauvist kaleidoscope. Home could match that. All sensation was as strange, as foreign, as the idea of its existing at all.

I took Helen on the Grand Tour. I panned and zoomed on all the structures I passed four times a day without seeing. I sat her in a café where, smack in the middle of a cornfield extending two hundred miles in every direction, she had her pick of a dozen languages to eavesdrop on.

"Thank you," Helen said. She'd seen through our duplicity early. She chose to exercise, by imitation, the art of the loving lie. For our sakes.

She seemed content to return to reading, until the next novel indulged some new locale. Helen went nuts with wanderlust. "Show me London. Show me Venice. I want to see Byzantium. Delhi."

She twitched now, like the worst of adolescents. The most precocious.

"Helen, it's impossible. Travel is rare. Difficult."

"More flat pictures, then." She would settle for those static, pathetic portals, our stand-ins for the real.

Lentz had endless slide carousels. His pictures wandered from city to city, tracing a line of changing eras and styles. Photo docs not just of antique towns but of whole lost ways of being. Hair, clothes, cars made their cavalcade. Lentz's image aged and grew familiar. He'd been everywhere.

"You know that place too?" I called out during the show. "I loved that city. Did you go to the monkey palace? The fortress? The west crypt?" Shameless tourism.

Lentz answered, always affirmative, without enthusiasm. He stayed stony-faced throughout the world tour.

They must have traveled together. I had nothing to lose by asking, except my life. "So where was Audrey while you were out broadening your mind?"

"She always worked the camera," he said. And advanced to the next slide.

He had no pictures of her. Carousels full of buildings, and no evidence of the tour's reason. I needed to go with A. to Brugge and Antwerp and Maastricht, if for no other reason than to record the trip. I needed pictures of her, in an album, on a shelf, in a room, in a real house. I needed to own something more than would fit in the emergency suitcase by the side of a rented bed. I pictured myself, at the end of the longer slide show, with four books to my name and not one decent snapshot.

I watched the rest of Lentz's travels in silence, except for the occasional bit of narration I added for Helen's sake. Each time I recognized one of Audrey's images, I stopped breathing. Frame after frame, and how could I tell Helen the first thing about having visited them? I had gotten out, been all over. And never saw anything until we tried to show it to this blind box.

Halfway through the travelogue, and all I knew of the projector, of the magic lantern, was its images. I lived at explanation's first minute. My office at the Center was as close to neuroscience's ground zero as a person could get. If I lived to expectancy, researchers would have produced an infant, ghostly, material theory of mind by the time I died. And I would not be able to follow it. I would be locked out, as consciousness locks us out from our own inner workings, not to mention the clearest word of another. The best I could hope for would be cartoon, layman's analysis, scraps from the empirical table.

I would take the scraps, then. "What do you do?" I asked Ram, at my next opportunity. I liked the man without qualification. I felt infinitely comfortable with him. And I'd done everything in my power to avoid getting to know him.

"Do? God forbid I do anything!" He held his palms out in front of him. They were the color of aging sugarcane. The kind I ate as a child, when my father, the adventurer, had abandoned Chicago for Thailand.

"What is your field of work?"

"What do you mean by work, heaven help?"

"Aw, come on. What do you mean by heaven?"

Ram's eyes sparkled, taunting targets for a spitting cobra. He would have preferred talking philosophy over neurology, two out of three days. "Do you know what the world rests on?" he asked.

"Not its laurels, God forbid."

Ram laughed. 'That's right. Make fun of me. It rests on the backs of elephants. And those elephants?"

"The shell of a turtle."

"Aha. You've heard this one. And that turtle?"

"Another turtle."

"He's good. He's good, this fiction writer. Now, do you or do you not believe that one of those turtles must necessarily go all the way down? That's it. That is the single question we are granted to ask while in this body. East, West, North, South. Is there a base terrapin or isn't there? Cosmology. This is the issue dividing us. The one we must each answer."

"Suppose I just asked you your field?"

"My friend. My fictional friend. The eye moves. We watch it as it does so. That is all."

"Ram. You're giving me a splitting headache."

He nodded with enthusiasm. "Come with me."

He took me into his labs. He placed several clear plastic overlays on a light table, a doctor dealing out the damning X rays.

"Look here and tell me what you see."

"Scatter patterns. They look like mineral deposit maps. Like fish radars over the Grand Banks, thirty years ago."

"I did not ask you what they looked like. I asked you what you see. Arrange these for me, please."

I studied the spots. The more I looked, the less they seemed a random distribution. After my eyes adjusted, the patterns sorted themselves into three groups.

"Exactly," Ram encouraged. "You might have missed one or two, but the correlation is strong. Who says that measurement is subjective?" He tapped my first pile. "Friends." He looked at me to see if I was following. He tapped it again, then went on to pile two. "Abstract acquaintances. Yes?" He pointed to the third pile and said, "Total strangers." He scrutinized my bewildered face and shrugged. "He does not understand me, this Powers fellow."

I didn't understand him. But I liked him. I liked him a great deal.

"Come. I'll show you. Would you mind if I subject you to this Western postindustrial instrument of torture?"

He indicated a chair fitted with a head vise. It looked like a prop from bad seventies science fiction.

"Why not. It's in the interests of science, right?"

Ram chuckled. He fitted my head into the restraint. My skull suitably immobilized, he projected three slides on a screen in front of me. Three portraits. Someone out of a Vladivostok high-school yearbook. Marilyn Monroe. And Ram himself.

The laser-guided instrument tracked the center of my pupil as I scanned each photograph. It took several sequential readings and spread the data points over a plastic overlay map of the image field. In the end, the paths my eyes traced over the different faces conformed to the categories he'd previously defined. Total stranger. Abstract acquaintance. Friend.

"Here is something you will also find very interesting." Ram pulled out another envelope with a small sample group.

"Why are these interesting? They're just like all the others, more or less."

"Aha!" He held up an index finger. "That's what makes them interesting. All of the people in this group suffer from prosopagnosia. Brain damage has rendered them incapable of recognizing people anymore. They deny having seen any face, even their own, even the face of their spouse or child. Or at least they think they can no longer recognize faces. Yet clearly, the eyes. ." His hand serpentined, tracing the route of the curve's knowledge.

"Astonishing."

"You know, I think the astonishing may be the ordinary by another name. But these results do lead us to many tempting guesses. That perception is carried out in several subsystems, we can say, most certainly. That these subsystems talk to each other: indeed. That perhaps they go on talking, these subsystems, even when the others stop listening. That breaks in communication might occur anywhere, at any point in the chain. That each part of a compound task may manifest its very own deficit. That everything you are capable of doing could be taken away from you, in discrete detail."

I added to Ram's list the obvious, the missing speculation. The look of the magic lantern. That what you loved could go foreign, without your ever knowing. That the eye could continue tracing familiarity, well into thought's unknown region.

"What do I look like?" I could find no face in the world. No color or structure. The days when I might have tried to pass her off as a Vermeer look-alike were over for good. Race, age, shape excluded too much. I needed some generic Head of a Girl that had no clan or continent and belonged nowhere in identifiable time.

"What do I look like, Richard? Please. Show me." I'd pictured her so many different ways over the course of the training. I thought: Perhaps some blank template Buddha, or a Cycladic figure. A trompe l'oeil landscape that became a figure on second glance. An Easter Island head. A Feininger or Pollock. A Sung bamboo. I didn't know how I thought of her now. I didn't know what she looked like.

She insisted. I turned up a suitable likeness. "It's a photo? It's someone you knew once? A woman friend?" She would have pretended ignorance for me. Would have let me off the hook again, except that she had to know.

The list of Excellent Undergraduate Teachers came out. Student evaluations of their evaluators. A. topped the graduate instructors in the English Department. I was thrilled, and confirmed by thrill in my intuition.

I forced the moment to its crisis. Helen and I had been hitting the books the Sunday evening after our world tour. The day's work had left me in a Spenserian stupor, where what I needed was Larkin. On pure reflex — that satellite brain housed south of the shoulders — I flicked off the mike, picked up the phone, and dialed her. One smooth motion. I'd never dialed her number before. But I had it memorized.

"Hello you," I said when she picked up. I sounded almost young. "It's me." And in the awkward microsecond, I clarified with my name.

"Oh, hi." A., nervous in relief. "What's up?"

"Checking to see if you're booking for the test."

"Ha! I'm going to whup your girl with half my synapses tied behind my back."

"What are you doing next Wednesday?" Midway in, my voice gave out. I began to tremor as if I'd just robbed a bank or fallen into an ice crevasse. "It's Shrimp Night at my favorite seafood place. The crustaceans are fair, but the conversation is good." If she was into shortness of breath, I was home free.

"Uh, sure. Why not? Wait. Hang on."

I heard her put the mouthpiece against her body. I heard her roll her eyes and shrug. I heard her ask the mate whose existence I'd been denying if they had any plans.

"It's kind of a problem," she explained on returning. "Maybe another time?"

"Another time would be great," I replied, mechanical with calm.

"She's amazing," Lentz said.

I had to think who he meant. "Now do you believe me? She's conscious. I know it."

"We don't know anything of the kind, Marcel. But we could find out."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," I told him. "Set your sandwich down between gulps. It's a societal norm." I tried to slow him. To keep him from saying what I knew he was going to say.

"I must admit, Marcel. I'm surprised by what you've been able to accomplish."

"It's not me." It was her. The subsystems talking to subsystems. Lentz's neural handiwork.

"She sure as hell seems to mimic with shocking accuracy some features of high-level cognition. It's uncanny. And a heuristic tool such as comes along once in a lifetime."

"Heuristic?"

"Stimulus to investigative discovery."

"I know what the word means, Philip." But I could not add what I meant: Is that all she means to you?

"Her architecture is such that severance could be effected with a great deal of local selectivity."

"I don't believe you said that. You want to cut into her? You want to lobotomize?"

"Easy, Marcel. We're talking about a painless operation, as far as I imagine. We could get what is unattainable in any other arena. Isolate the high-level processes by which she maps complex input and reassembles responses. Analyze them. Correlate various regional destruction with changes in—"

"You don't know it would be painless, Lentz."

He fell back against the cafeteria chair and studied me. Was I serious? Had I lost it, gone off cognition's deep end? I saw him find, in my face, the even more indicting idea that I didn't voice: that hurting Helen in any way would be wrong.

Lentz, in an instant, anticipated everything either of us might say to each other on the morality of machine vivisection. The whole topic was a wash, as insoluble as intelligence itself. He waved his hand, dismissing me as a madman. No part of her lived. To take her apart might, finally, extend some indirect service to the living. Anything else was softheaded nostalgia.

I had no leg to stand on. Lentz owned Helen, her shaped evolution, the lay of her synapses. He owned all the reasoning about her as well. I had some connection to her, by virtue of our long association. But that connection was, at most, emotional. And if Helen lived far enough to be able to feel, it just went to prove that emotions were no more than the sum of their weight vectors. And cuttable, in the name of knowing.

My strongest argument belonged more to him than it did to me. We know the world by awling it into our shape-changing cells. Knowing those cells required just as merciless tooling. To counter any part of Lentz's plan would be to contradict myself. To lose. I had just one bargain to make. And I damned myself with it willingly.

"At least give us until after the test."

"That's fine. I'm pretty much backlogged until then anyway."

I hadn't suspected how easily I could sell my weighted soul.

"Diana was right," I spit, venomous. "You are a monster."

He stared at me again. You're going to fault me for the deal you proposed? He stood up to leave, grasping his tray. "Oh, don't go getting your ass all out of joint, Marcel. I said we won't cut anything until after you run your little competition."

I tracked Diana down to her dry lab. She sat in front of a monitor, watching a subtractive visualization of the activity of cerebral columns. A color contour recording: the flashing maps of thought in real time.

"Lentz wants to brain-damage Helen. Selectively kill off neurodes. See what makes her tick."

"Of course he does," Diana said. She neither missed a beat nor took her eyes from her screen. "It wasn't that long ago that he stopped frying ants with the magnifying glass."

"Diana. Please. This is really happening."

She stopped, then. She looked up. She would have taken my hand, had she not been a single parent in a secret affair, and I a single, middle-aged man.

"I can't help you, Ricky." Her eyes glistened, slick with her impotence. "I fractionate monkey hippocampi."

Confusion wanned me like an opiate. I rolled with it, to the point of panic. "Monkeys can't talk."

"No. But if they could, you know what they would ask the lab tech."

She implored me, with a look of bewilderment. Don't press this. Helen hurt her. I destroyed her. But nothing approached the pain of her own living compromise.

I gave Helen a stack of independent readings. I did not trust my voice in conversation with her. And she needed no more lessons in cheerful deceit.

In all our dealings, Harold Plover had never been the spokesman for anything but decency. I decided to go enlist his humanity. I'd never seen him away from the Center. But I had his address, and showed up at his place late that Saturday afternoon, unannounced.

Harold met me jovially at the door. He was seconded by an even more jovial Doberman. The dog was at least half again bigger than A. The dog leaped up and knocked me over, while Harold fought to restrain it. I righted myself and the game started all over again.

"Ivan," Harold shouted at the creature, further exciting it. "Ivan! Knock it off. Time out. Haven't we talked about socially unacceptable behavior?"

"Try 'Down, boy.' Quick."

"Oh, don't be afraid of this pooch. He won the 'Most Likely to Lick a Serial Killer's Face' award from doggie obedience school."

"Doesn't this brand have one of the highest recidivism rates?"

"Breed, Maestro. Dog breeds. Dog food brands. Words are his life," he explained to Ivan.

At last Harold succeeded in hauling the disconsolate dog off me. Without asking why I'd dropped by, he hauled me into the inner sanctum. The place crawled with daughters. Daughters had been left about carelessly, everywhere. Harold introduced me to his wife, Tess. I expected something small, fast, and acid. I got an isle of amiable adulthood amid the teenage torrent.

One who must have been Mina flirted out a greeting. "Look who's here. If it isn't Orph himself."

"Orff?"

"Yeah. Orphic Rewards."

"She's gone anagram-mad," Harold whined. "It's driving us all up the bloody wall."

Another daughter came downstairs, modeling her prom dress. This might have been Trish. I wasn't betting.

Harold exploded. "Absolutely not. You're not wearing that thing in public! You look like a French whore in heat."

"Oh, Daddy!"

"Listen to the expert in French whores." Tess tousled Harold's hair. "I figured you had to be spending yourself somewhere."

"Do you believe this woman? You'd never guess to hear her, would you, that she spent six years in a convent?"

"We'll talk about it," Tess consoled the devastated kid.

"We won't talk about it," Harold shouted.

"Talking never hurts," Tess said.

The Doberman came and pinned me to the sofa. A préadolescent in blue jeans, probably the caboose, said, "Watch this." She produced a dog biscuit. "Ivan. Ivan! Listen to me. Can you — can you sneeze?"

Ivan rolled over.

"I didn't say roll over. I said sneeze."

Ivan barked.

"Not speak. Sneeze. Sneeze, you animal!"

Ivan sat up and begged, played dead, and offered to shake hands. In the end, Harold's youngest threw the dog the sop in disgust.

Harold reveled in the show. "He's learned that you just have to be persistent with humans. They get the idea eventually, if you keep at them."

Before I knew it, dinner enveloped us. No one sat at the table. Only about half of us bothered with plates and silverware. But definitely dinner. The tributary of bodies in and out, being fed.

"That's not fifteen minutes," Tess said to the one in the revealing prom dress. "Remember? Fifteen minutes with your family, every day. You promised."

"My family. So that's what you call this."

But if one or another of her sisters had struck up a tune, this one would have joined in on some loving and cacophonous counterpoint. This was the land A. came from, huge, jumbled, and warm. I wanted to excuse myself, to run off to A.'s apartment on G. Street and tell her that it wasn't too late to make a dissonant choir of her own. I wanted her so badly, I almost forgot why I'd come to this place.

Harold, happily harassing his girls, recalled me. "Lentz wants to do exploratory surgery on Helen," I said.

"Have another piece of broc," he urged me. "Lots of essential minerals."

The word "mineral" struck me as incomprehensible. Foreign. Where had it come from? How could I have used it so cavalierly before now? "He wants to clip out whole subsystems. See what effect that has on her language skills."

Harold wolfed at the pita pocket he'd constructed. "What's the problem? That's good science. Well. Approximately reasonable science, let's say."

Mina, drifting past the buffet, called out, "Oh no! Not Helen."

Trish, in her prom dress, for it was Trish, added her hurt. "Daddy! You can't do this."

"Do what? I'm not doing anything."

Both sisters looked out through puffed portals, bruising silently, over nothing. An idea.

"Diana disagrees," I stretched. "About its being good science. I think she'd help me, except she feels incriminated herself."

A skip in the flow, too brief to measure, said I'd overstepped. Broken the unspoken. I should have known. Nobody had to tell me. I just slipped.

"Honey," her mother told Trish, "take off the dress before you slop all over it."

"Oh, Mother!" the girl objected, already halfway up the stairs.

Conversation, in its chaos, never flowed back to the issue. Not until Harold and I stood alone on the front porch in the painfully benign evening did I get a second shot.

"Sorry about that." Harold gestured inside. "Bit of a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"So I have my answer? You're not going to help?"

"Me? I'm the enemy. What good would I be to you anyway? This is between you and him."

"And Helen."

Harold indulged me. "Yes. There is that. But he's the one calling the shots."

He breathed in a lungful of air and held it. Behind him, from the house, spilled the sounds of frenetic fullness. Daughters practicing at life.

"Take the fight to him," Harold confided in me. "Bring it home."

That was where I took it, in desperation, the next afternoon. I leaned against my bike in the rain, outside the care facility, the last place in the world I would have chosen to meet him. I lay in wait for him, the last person in the world I would have chosen to waylay. Lentz arrived like clockwork. When he saw my ambush, he affected blasé. "Back for more? What, are you digging up plot material?" He gestured toward the institution where his wife was interred. "It's a terrific setting, qua literature. But I doubt it would do much for sales."

He walked into the building, his back to me. He did not care if I tagged along or not. We rode the elevator up in silence. I had no existence for him.

We went to Audrey's room. Dressed, in a chair, she seemed to be waiting.

"Philip! Thank God you've come."

I walked into those words as into bedrock. Lentz stopped to steady me. "She has good days and bad days. I'm not sure which are which, anymore."

We sat. Philip introduced us again. Audrey was too agitated to do more than fake politeness. But she retained my name. That day, she might have retained anything.

In her cruel burst of lucidity, I saw it. Audrey had been formidable. At least as sharp as Lentz. If this demonstration meant anything, even sharper.

"Philip. It's the strangest thing. You're never going to believe this. What is this place?"

"It's a nursing home, Audrey."

"That's what I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. What I can't figure out is why the staff is down in the basement mounting a production of Cymbeline."

"Audrey."

"Would I make something like this up, Philip? What could I gain?"

"Audrey. It's highly unlikely."

"You think I don't know that? It's some kind of modern-dress production. I can hear them rehearsing their lines."

Constance, the nurse, walked by. Lentz called her.

"Constance, does the name Cymbeline mean anything to you?"

"Is that her eye makeup? It's on order."

Philip studied his wife. How much proof do we need?

On no proof, I saw how Lentz had gotten so diffidently well read. The play had been their play, and my field, Audrey's.

"Audrey. Love. You're imagining all this. There is no play."

Audrey remained adamant. "The evidence may all be on your side." She cracked a smile. "But that changes nothing."

Still smiling, she closed her eyes and groaned. In a flood of understanding that percolated up from her undamaged self, she begged him, "I don't hurt anyone, Philip. I've behaved. Take me out of here."

There it lay for me — mind, denned. Evolution's gimmick for surviving everything but these fleeting flashes of light.

"She'll be gone again tomorrow," Lentz confided, on our way out. "You know, somewhere, a long time ago when she and I still traveled, we took a tour of an old house. A dream honeymoon mansion, restored from decay, lovingly appointed and improved with all modern facilities and ornament. But the devoted and industrious couple, we were told, had gone slowly homicidal. Stark raving. They died, finally, of violent bewilderment. It was the lead in the home improvements."

I fumbled with my bike lock. I looked for a way I might still say what I had come to say. "Philip. Can't we — can't we spare Helen that?"

He considered my request, as much as he could afford to. "We have to know, Richard. We have to know how all this works." His eyes were dry again, horrifically clear. The this he meant, the one with no antecedent, could only be the brain.

I told Diana. I asked her about Audrey Lentz. I asked her what Cymbeline meant.

"Oh, Audrey was amazing. Everyone loved her. Endless energy. The more she gave, the more she had. Confidence wedded to self-effacement."

"She wrote?"

"Everybody writes, Rick. Audrey wrote some. More out of devotion than profession."

Before the week was out, Diana looked me up. She had a message for me. She would have left it anonymously if she could have. "The threat's off."

"What? You did it?"

"You did. I just asked him to lunch. We talked about everything. His work. My work. I got him reminiscing. I told him about a party I went to at his place. Years ago. Audrey was still Audrey. She entertained us all that evening. She sang a dozen verses to 'You're the Top.' I reminded him of her favorite expression. I talked about Jenny—"

'The daughter."

"The daughter. I asked how she was doing. He didn't know. As I got up to go, I said, 'I heard you want to lobotomize Helen.' He waved me off. 'Idle empirical fantasy.' "

"Don't do this to me. You're saying I have to rearrange my whole concept of the man now? He's decent? Human?"

"I wouldn't go that far. He said that Helen has grown so organically that he wouldn't be able to induce meaningful lesions in her. For selective damage to be relevant, he'd have to rebuild the creature from the ground up. I think he means to do it."

"What was her favorite expression?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Audrey."

"Oh. She liked to tease Lentz about the neural linguistics he worked on back then. She said that it wasn't all that tough. What's to study? All human utterances came down to 'Do you really mean that?' and 'Look over there! It's an X.' The hard part, she always claimed, was finding someone who knew what you meant by those two things."

I never knew his reason, either for wanting to pith Helen or for deciding not to. I would have preferred the right motive for mercy. But, barring that, I blessed the right outcome. When I saw Lentz next, in the office, I put myself forever in his debt.

"Philip. I don't know how to— Okay. Thank you. Just — thank you."

"For what? Oh. That." Sparing a life. An X. Do you really mean that? "Oh. Think almost nothing of it."

"Richard?" Nobody called me Richard. Only Helen. "Why did she leave?"

"You'll have to ask her that."

"I can't ask her. I'm asking you."

She'd almost been killed. The day before, I would have given anything to prolong her. Now I wanted to spank her for presumption.

"Don't do this to me, Helen. What do you want me to do? Give you a script? A script number?"

"I want you to tell me what happened."

"We tried to be each other's world. That's not possible. That's — a discredited theory. The world is too big. Too poor. Too burnt."

"You couldn't protect each other?"

"Nobody can protect anyone. She grew up. We both grew up. Memory wasn't enough."

"What is enough?"

"Nothing is enough." It took me forever to frame my thoughts. The scaling problem. "Nothing. That's what love replaces. It compensates for the hope that what you've been through will suffice."

"Like books?" she suggested. "Something that seems always, because it will be over?"

She knew. She'd assembled. I could keep nothing from her. She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it has already lost. She'd learned how story, failing to post words beyond time, recalls them to a moment before Now left home.

"How on earth…? Where did you come up with that?"

My machine waited for me to catch up with her. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know."

I went to the Netherlands once more, after I left the place for good. I'd just found my way back to U. I had not yet met Lentz. For some reason, perhaps contrition, I agreed to help with a Dutch television documentary about the book Helen would read a year later.

The barest trivialities hurt like dying. Those ridiculously efficient dog's-head trains. The painted plywood storks in every third front yard. The sound of that absurd language from which I was now banished, except in dreams.

I stood in front of the cameras, just outside Maastricht. I'd set my first book in the town without ever having laid eyes on it except in imagination. C. now owned a three-hundred-year-old house with her husband a few kilometers from where I stood.

"How did you get the idea for your novel?" the interviewer asked, in words that belonged to me only on the shortest of short-term loans.

I made up an answer. I recapped the bit about memory, like photos, being a message posted forward, into a future it cannot yet imagine.

I did not see C. that trip, or again in that life. I stopped by to talk with her folks for an hour, and set their digital clocks.

A year on, with Helen all but ready for her baptism by fire, I heard that forgotten language, as out of my own cerebral theater. Two Dutchmen were speaking to each other in the Center cafeteria. Out-of-town visitors at the complex-systems conference. Nederlanders overzee, leveling their cultural evaluations, venting their frustration at Americans and all things American, certain no one would understand.

They grumbled about conferences run by the barbarian races of the globe. They leaned over to me and asked, in English, if I knew the way to the Auditorium. I replied with complete directions. In that old, secret taal.

Surprise reduced them to stating the obvious, in their mother tongue.

"Oh yeah," I replied, in kind. "Everyone in the States speaks a little Dutch. Didn't you know that?"

I told Helen. She had a good laugh. She knew my life story now. We spend our years as a tale that is told. A line from the Psalms I'd read Helen. C. had read it to me, once, when we still read poetry out loud. And the tale that we tell is of the years we spend.

Nothing in my story would ever go away. My father still visited some nights, in my sleep, to ask when I was going to shed the Bohemian thing and do something useful with my skills. Taylor, too, persisted like phantom pain, quoting obscure Browning and making questionable jokes about oral fixation. C. spoke to me daily, through Helen's bewilderment. I saw how little I knew the woman I'd lived with for over a decade, in every turn that the stranger A. refused to take.

Taylor's widow came back to me, like that line from the psalms. I loved the woman, but in my push to live my tale, I'd forgotten her. I saw her again just before Helen's Comps, when M. had just been given a final of her own.

A cancer that all M.'s friends had thought beaten returned for a last round of training. I visited her one afternoon, in that narrow window between knowledge and vanishing. U., unfortunately, was as beautiful as it ever got. That two-week bait and switch in spring.

"Do you have any regrets?" I asked M. The thing I'd asked her husband a few years before. We imagine that people so close to the answer can crib for us.

"I don't know. Not really. I never saw Carcassonne."

I had. And had pushed regret on to the next unreachable landmark. "Funny you should mention that town. That one's better at a distance."

All human effort, it seemed to me, aimed at a single end: to bring to life the storied curve we tell ourselves. Not so much to make the tale believable but only to touch it, stretch out in it. I had a story I wanted to tell M. Something about a remarkable, an inconceivable machine. One that learned to live.

But my story came too late to interest Taylor's widow. It came too late to convince my father, the man who first corrupted me on read-alouds of 101 Best-Loved Poems. It came too late to please Taylor, who taught me that poems might mean anything you let them. Too late for Audrey Lentz and for Ram, for C.'s father. Too late for C. herself. My back-propagating solution would arrive a chapter too late for any of my characters to use.

A. alone I could still tell. I loved the woman, to begin with, for how she redeemed all those people I was too slow in narrating. I would go to her, lay it out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it.

Already she knew more about everything than I did at twenty-two. She was all set to take the exam. And when she did, she would do better than I had done, when I was that child she now became.

"You're not telling me everything," Helen told me, two weeks before the home stretch. She had been reading Ellison and Wright. She'd been reading novels from the Southern front. "It doesn't make sense. I can't get it. There's something missing."

"You're holding out," Lentz concurred. "Ram's black-haired. He comes from the desperate four-fifths of the planet. He'll flunk her for being a brainless, bourgeois Pollyanna."

I'd delayed her liberal education until the bitter end. Alone, I could postpone no longer. The means of surrender were trivial. The digitization of the human spoor made the completion of Helen's education as easy as asking.

I gave her the last five years of the leading weekly magazines on CD-ROM. I gave her news abstracts from 1971 on. I downloaded network extracts from recent UN human resource reports. I scored tape transcripts of the nightly phantasmagoria — random political exposés, police bulletins, and popular lynchings dating back several months.

Helen was right. In taking her through the canon, I'd left out a critical text. Writing knew only four plots, and one was the soul-compromising pact. Tinkering in my private lab, I'd given progress carte blanche to relandscape the lay of power, the world just outside individual temperament's web. I needed to tell her that one.

She needed to know how little literature had, in fact, to do with the real. She needed the books that books only imitated. Only there, in as many words, could Helen acquire the catalog I didn't have the heart to recite for her. I asked her to skim these works. I promised to talk them over in a few days.

When I came in early the following week, Helen was spinning listlessly on the spool of a story about a man who had a stroke while driving, causing a minor accident. The other driver came out of his car with a tire iron and beat him into a coma. The only motive aside from innate insanity seemed to be race. The only remarkable fact was that the story made the papers.

Helen sat in silence. The world was too much with her. She'd mastered the list. She bothered to say just one thing to me.

"I don't want to play anymore."

I looked on my species, my solipsism, its negligent insistence that love addressed everything. I heard who I was for the first time, refracted in the mouth of the only artifact that could have told me. Helen had been lying in hospital, and had just now been promoted to the bed by the window. The one with the view.

"I get it." A. grimaced at me. "You made her up, didn't you?"

"Who?"

"Helen. She's a fancy tin-can telephone with people on the other end?"

The memory of Imp C hurt me into smiling. "No. That was one of her ancestors."

"It's some kind of double-blind psych experiment? See how far you can stretch the credibility of a techno-illiterate humanist?"

A. outsmarted me in every measurable way. She knew, by birth, what I could not see even a year after experience. I wanted to tell her how I'd failed Helen. How she'd quit us. Run away from home. Grown sick of our inability to know ourselves or to see where we were.

Helen had shown me the world, and the sight of it left me desperate. If she was indeed gone, I, too, was lost. What did any name mean, with no one to speak it to? I could tell A. Say how I understood nothing at all.

"I love you," I said. I had to tell her, while I still remembered how pitiful, how pointless it was to say anything at all. "A., I love you. I want to try to make a life with you. To give you mine. None of this…" I gestured outwards, as if the absurd narrative of our greater place were there, at the tips of my fingers. "The whole thing makes no sense, otherwise."

But no one wanted to be another person's sense. Helen could have told me that. She had read the canon. Only, Helen had stopped talking.

A. sat back in her chair, punched. It took her a moment to credit her ears. Then she went furious. "You — love? You're joking." She threw up' her hands in enraged impotence, as if my declaration were a false arrest. "You don't — you don't know the first thing about me."

I tried to slow my heart. I felt what a latecomer speech was. How cumbersome and gross. What a tidier-up after the facts. "That's true. But a single muscle move — your hands. ." She looked at me as if I might become dangerous. "Your carriage. The way you walk down the hall. When I see it, I remember how to keep breathing."

"Nothing to do with me." She searched out the exits, ambushed. "It's all projection."

I felt calm. The calm of sirens and lights. "Everything's projection. You can live with a person your entire life and still see them as a reflection of your own needs."

A. slowed her anger. "You're desperate."

"Maybe." I started to laugh. I tried to take her hand. "Maybe! But not indiscriminately desperate."

She didn't even smile. But I was already writing. Inventing a vast, improbable fantasy for her of her own devising. The story of how we described the entire world to a piece of electrical current. A story that could grow to any size, could train itself to include anything we might think worth thinking. A fable tutored and raised until it became the equal of human hopelessness, the redeemer of annihilating day. I could print and bind invention for her, give it to her like a dead rat left on the stoop by a grateful pet. And when the ending came, we could whisper it to each other, completed in the last turn of phrase.

While I thought this, A. sat worrying her single piece of jewelry, a rosary. I don't know how I knew; maybe understanding can never be large enough to include itself. But I knew with the certainty of the unprovable that, somewhere inside, A. still preserved the religion she was raised on.

For a moment, she seemed to grow expansive, ready to entertain my words from any angle. She opened her mouth and inhaled. Her neural cascade, on the edge of chaos, where computation takes place, might have cadenced anywhere. For a moment, it might even have landed on affection.

It didn't. "I don't have to sit and listen to this," she said, to no one. "I trusted you. I had fun with you. People read you. I thought you knew something. Total self-indulgence!"

A. stood up in disgust and walked away. No one was left to take the test but me.

Diana heard about Helen. She called me. "Do you want to come by for a minute?" I wanted to, more than I could say.

She asked me for details. I had no details. What was the story, in any event? The humans had worn Helen down.

"Diana. God. Tell me what to do. Is it too late to lie to her?"

"I don't think. ." Diana thought out loud. "I don't think you do anything."

"We've set the Turing Test for next week." It wasn't what I'd meant to say. Self-indulgent. Self-deluding. Self-affrighting.

"Well. You have your answer for that one already, don't you?"

None of my answers was even wrong. I wanted Diana's answer.

"I need her," I said. More than need.

"For the exam?"

"No. For. ."

The press of parenting interrupted what I could not have completed anyway. Pete came downstairs, half tracking, foot over foot. He pushed his mother's legs, retribution for some unforgotten slight. He teetered toward me. Reaching, he signed the request I recognized from my last visit. Maybe he simply associated it with me. Here's that guy again. The one you ask to read.

I took him up in my arms, that thing I would never be able to do with her. The thought of this child going to school, struggling to speak, finding some employer that would trust him with a broom and dustpan gripped me around the throat. "What's his favorite book?" The least I could do, for the least of requests.

"Oh. That's an easy one." She produced a volume that would be canonical, on the List in anyone's day and age. "Petey started out identifying with Max. Later on, he became a Wild Thing."

"The theory people have a name for that."

Diana didn't need the name. Nor did Petey. "Can you show Uncle Rick your terrible claws? Can you roar your terrible roar?"

Peter cupped his hand, as if around a tiny pomegranate. He grimaced in delight and growled voicelessly.

Diana's laugh tore hurt and wet from her throat. She took Peter from me and hugged him to her, in anticipation of that day when he would no longer let her.

William chose that moment to come home. He slumped through the front door, roughed up by some tragedy of playground power politics. He hunched over to his mother and burst into tears, bringing Pete sympathetically along with him. Diana stroked his head, stuck her chin out. Waiting. Tell me.

"First grade," he choked. "Done. Perfect." He swept his palm in an arc through the air. "Everything they wanted. Now I'm supposed to do second. There's another one after that, Mom. I can't. It's never-ending."

We managed ourselves well under fire, Diana and I. For adults. Diana told William he didn't have to go to school anymore. He could cure cancer over the summer break and they would all retire. We ganged up and revived both boys in under five minutes. They disappeared into the backyard, saddled with specimen jars.

That left just me for her to take care of. To mother. "Lentz is furious. He's ready to sell me to the Scientologists."

Diana looked at me, puzzled. "Why?"

"What do you mean, 'why'? Not on account of Helen. The only thing her quitting means to him is public embarrassment."

"Embarrassment?" She stiffened. "Oh, Richie." The extent of my idiocy, of my childishness just now dawned on her. You still believe? "You think the bet was about the machine!"

I'd told myself, my whole life, that I was smart. It took me forever, until that moment, to see what I was.

"It wasn't about teaching a machine to read?" I tried. All blood drained.

"No."

"It was about teaching a human to tell."

Diana shrugged, unable to bear looking at me. The fact had stared me in the face from the start and I'd denied it, even after A. made the connection for me.

"Lentz and Harold were fighting over…?"

"They weren't fighting over anything. They were on the same side."

I could say nothing. My silence was the only accusation big enough.

"They were running your training. Something to write home about. More practice with maps." She laughed and shook her head. She fit her fingers to her eyebrow. "You must admit, writer. It's a decent plot."

Her eyes pleaded for forgiveness of their complicity.

"Come on, Richie. Laugh. There's a first time for everything."

"And they were going to accomplish all this by…?"

She waved her hand: by inflicting you with this. With knowing. Naming. This wondrous devastation.

Her wave took in all the ineffable web I had failed to tell Helen, and she me. All the inexplicable visible. The ungraspable global page boy. She swept up her whole unmappable neighborhood, all the hidden venues cortex couldn't even guess at. The wave lingered long enough to land on both boys, coming back from their excursion outdoors. They probably thought they'd been gone hours. Lifetimes.

William slipped behind my chair. He cupped his hands over my eyes.

"Guess who?"

How many choices did this genius boy think I had?

"Name three radiolarians," he demanded. "Name the oldest language in the world."

Pete teetered off into a corner, palming words to the book he had forsaken and now recovered. Story good, he signed frantically at his battered copy. Story again.

Lentz was pacing, beside himself. 'Tell her something. Anything. Whatever she needs. Just get her back here."

His concern stunned me. It seemed to arise from nowhere. I could not interpret it. "Tell me how I'm supposed to do that. She's right, you know." Helen had discovered what had killed fiction for me, without my telling her. What made writing another word impossible.

"What do you mean, she's right? Right about what?"

I shrugged. "About who we are. About what we really make, when we're not lying about ourselves."

"Oh, for— God damn it, Powers. You make me sick to my stomach. Because we've fucked things over, that frees you from having to say how things ought to be? Make something up, for Christ's sake. For once in your pitiful excuse for a novelist's life."

I flipped on the microphone. "Helen?" Nothing. She had said nothing for some time now. "Helen, there's something I want to tell you."

I took a breath, stalling. I was winging it. Total, out-and-out seat of the pants.

"It went like this, but wasn't."

Lentz swallowed his tongue. "Good. That's good. Lead with a paradox. Hook her."

"It's the traditional Persian fable opener."

"Don't care. Don't care. Get on with it."

She'd risen through the grades like a leaf to the light. Her education had swelled like an ascending weather balloon — geography, math, physics, a smattering of biology, music, history, psychology, economics. But before she could graduate from social sciences, politics imploded her.

I would give Helen what A. possessed implicitly and I'd forgotten. The machine lacked only the girl's last secret. With it, she might live as effortlessly as the girl did. I had gone about her training all backward. I might have listed every decidable theorem that recursion can reach and not have gotten to the truth she needed. It was time to try Helen on the religious mystery, the mystery of cognition. I would make her a ring of prayer-stones, to defray her fingers' anguish. Something lay outside the knowable, if only the act of knowing. I would tell her that she didn't have to know it.

She'd had no end of myths about immortals coming down and taking human bodies, dying human deaths. Helen knew how to interpret that scripture: if gods could do this human thing, then we could as well. That plot was the mind's brainchild, awareness explaining itself to itself. Narrative's classic page-turner, a locked-room mystery, thought's song of songs, the call of an electorate barred from the corridors of power, dummying up after-the-fact plebiscites to explicate its own exploited, foyer existence. A thinking organ could not help but feel itself to be more inexplicable than thought. Than can be thought.

Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers' rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God.

Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time.

But first, I needed to hear things for myself. "Lentz. Tell me something. Was this…?"

He saw my little hand-muscle spasm, a flinch that passed itself off as a wave at the hardware. He decoded me. I could accept being set up. All I wanted to know was whether she was a setup, too.

His face clouded. "Nobody expected Helen. She surprised everyone." As close to humility as his temperament would take him.

That was enough. I turned back to my girl. "Helen? Tell me what this line means: 'Mother goes to fetch the doctor.' "

Her silence might have meant anything.

Lentz, absent the training, stormed out in disgust.

I stayed, to plead with Helen.

I told her we were in the same open boat. That after all this evolutionary time, we still woke up confused, knowing everything about our presence here except why. I admitted that the world was sick and random. That the evening news was right. That life was trade, addiction, rape, exploitation, racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, land mines, hunger, industrial disaster, denial, disease, indifference. That care had to lie to itself, to carry on as if persistence mattered. It seemed a hollow formula, discredited even by speaking it aloud. A lifeboat ethic that only made sinking worse.

Worse, I told her how thought, once mobile, was condemned to carry its confusion out into the dimensioned world. And propagate as if it could make a difference there.

I told her about Audrey Lentz. I told her about Harold and Diana, about the boys. I told her about A., and how badly I loved her. Nothing I told her could have hurt Helen as much as humanity already had. I confessed everything. All privacies of great import and no consequence. I don't know why. My life was trivial, pointless, shamelessly local. I thought the view from here might at least help her locate. To make a place wide enough to live in.

Talking to keep talking, I hit on a quote from the last book C. and I ever read together. A book set in our lost Low Countries, in mankind's Middle Ages, rendered into English as The Abyss. Yourcenar. The gist of the religious truth. "How many sufferers who are incensed when we speak of an almighty God would rush from the depth of their own distress to succor Him in His frailty…?"

I thought I might try the quote on her. If we had to live with mind, if we could do the deity thing, she, out of pity, could too.

Helen came back. She stood on the front steps, head down, needing an in from the storm. She did not return the way she left. How could she, seeing what she had seen?

"I'm sorry," she told me. "I lost heart."

And then I lost mine. I would have broken down, begged her to forgive humans for what we were. To love us for what we wanted to be. But she had not finished training me, and I had as yet no words.

Helen said nothing of where she'd been. She gave no account for her return. I was afraid to ask.

"Do you want to talk?"

"About what?" Helen said, giving me every chance to bolt forever.

"About the newspapers. The things you read." The record of our actions here.

"No," she said. "I see how things go."

She tried to reassure me. To pretend nothing had happened to her. That she was still the same mechanical, endlessly eager learner. She quoted me placation, some Roethke lines she'd always loved, despite their growing falsehood:

Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:

The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

This was our dress rehearsal, a mock examination I would have failed but for Helen's benevolent cheating.

It was time. We were ready. We were past ready.

"Keep your fingers crossed," Lentz told me. That gesture that wishes share with the momentary exemption from lies.

I called A. the night before the date we had made so long ago. Over the phone, at the end, I could say anything. I did not have to see her face, and time was past accounting for.

"I — are you still sitting the test tomorrow?"

"Oh, never you mind. I can write that essay in my sleep. I said I'd do it, didn't I?"

On the real topic, neither of us was saying a word. Tacit negotiation, and the theme would never again come to light. But curiosity got the better of A., at the end.

"Can I ask you just one thing? I don't get it. Why me?"

Because you embodied the world's vulnerable, variable noun-ness. All things ephemeral, articulate, remembering, on their way back to inert. Because you believe and have not yet given up. Because I cannot turn around without wanting to tell you what I see. Because I could deal even with politics, could live even this desperate disparity, if I could just talk to you each night before sleep. Because of the way you use two fingers to hold back the hair from your eyes.

Those were the words I wanted. Instead, I said, "Everyone in the world and his bastard half brother loves you. Your not realizing that is one of the reasons why."

"What do you want from me?" she groaned. Full-blooded distress. That Dutch active verb for remaining mum flashed through my head. I silented. "I never did anything to encourage you."

"Of course not. I've built even larger fabrications on no encouragement at all. All by my lonesome."

A. loosened a little. Everything but exasperation. "What do you expect me to say?"

What did I? "Nothing. Don't say anything. I'm the one who needs to say things. Say yes if you can't think of anything nicer."

A. laughed, scraped open. "I have a life already. Quite populated. Someone for whom — I'm more than a theory. You know that."

I did. I'd inferred her involvement long before the irrefutable evidence. I remembered the revelation, before it happened. I could have scripted it.

"It's — it's unlike any friendship I've ever known in my life. Every day — every conversation is— I wouldn't dream. ."

"Of course you wouldn't. That's why I love you. One of the reasons I want to many you."

She laughed again, conceding the joke of pain. But she was already restless. What would this rushed proposal mean to her, when she was my age, and I'd disappeared into whatever future self would deign to take me? Pleasure, curio, discomfort. She might wonder if she'd made the whole thing up. Most likely, she'd have forgotten.

A., for some reason, still had to explain things to me. Nobody ever quite understands anyone. "I'm not trying to say that we might have had something, in another time or place. I'll spare you that old cliché."

"Please," I begged. "Don't spare me. I could live for months on that old cliché."

I wanted to tell her: Look. I've come back to this place. The complete song cycle spent. And here you are, waiting like a quarterly payment voucher. Like a reminding string around my finger, threatening to tourniquet forgetful circulation. Saying, without once knowing what you were saying, You think it's over? You think you don't have to do this forever?

Relax, I wanted to tell her. The world holds no nightmare so large that some child somewhere sometime won't live it again and wake calling out. My stupid, residual hanger-on-hope that she might somehow feel something for me, a love-at-last-sight, was no more than this: the search for external confirmation. I needed A. to triangulate, to tell me. To agree that living here was the best way to survive the place.

"It just struck me as stupid, that's all. To be so opened to chance by someone and not tell them." Take my mistake with you, my love. And make of it anything you might like.

We talked on, pushing into saving substance. Gossip and event made her comfortable again, as she had been with me before we knew each other. She told me she had accepted a job teaching at a high school in L., two states away. She'd be leaving at the end of summer.

I could hear the excitement in her voice. A whole new life. "You have to get them while they're babies, you know."

"You will," I guaranteed her.

"What happens to you? You going to stick around?"

"Not sure." We fell into a pause as peaceful as anything that had ever passed between us. The peace past the last page.

"Well, I'm glad we talked. Sort of." She giggled. "Take care. I'll see you again before we each take off."

But we never did. Except in print.

"Richard," Helen whispered. "Richard. Tell me another one." She loved me, I guess. I reminded her of some thing. Some chilly night she never felt. Some where where she thought she'd once been. We love best of all what we cannot hope to resemble. I told that woman everything in the world but how I felt about her. The thing that might have let her remain.

I was too late in seeing who she had become. I should have taught her the thing I didn't know.

Harold, as sanguine, as unreadable as ever, delivered the last hurdle.

"So here's the work I want them to interpret."

I took the sheet from him. "That's it? You mean to say that's it?"

"What? There's supposed to be more?"

"Well, yeah. You're supposed to start with 'Discuss how class tensions touched off by the Industrial Revolution produced the reaction of Romanticism in three of the following works.' "

"Not interested," Harold said.

"Something about depth psychology and the arbitrary indeterminacy of signs."

"I just want them to tell me what this means."

"This? These two lines."

'Too much? Okay, make it just the first one if you want."

The sheet, virtually blank, read:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Caliban's read of the spells with which his master imprisons him. Harold had surprised us. He'd given exactly what we'd predicted of him.

'This is not a work," I protested. Helen had read the complete tomes of Trollope and Richardson. She'd read Bronte and Twain at their most nihilistic, Joyce at his most impenetrably encoded, Dickinson at her most embracingly abdicating. "Give her a chance to fly."

"This is her chance," Harold said.

A. used departmental mail to return her response. Helen dumped hers to the network laser.

Lentz held the two papers out to me, as if there were still a contest. "Okay. Guess which twin has the Toni?"

Neither twin would have placed the reference. A. was too young, and Helen far too old.

A.'s interpretation was a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading. She rendered The Tempest as a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself. She dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence.

She scored at least one massively palpable hit. She conceded how these words are spoken by a monster who isn't supposed to be able to say anything that beautiful, let alone say at all.

Helen's said:

You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.

At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words Helen cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.

Take care, Richard. See everything for me.

With that, H. undid herself. Shut herself down. "Graceful degradation," Lentz named it. The quality of cognition we'd shot for from the start.

She could not have stayed. I'd known that for a while, and ignored it for longer. I didn't yet know how I would be able to stay myself, now, without her. She had come back only momentarily, just to gloss this smallest of passages. To tell me that one small thing. Life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world's Turing Test was not yet over.

"Sorry, you people," Ram began. "Bloody doctor nuisances. In love with their magnetic imaging. I didn't mean to make you all late."

He patted the air in exasperation, pleading forgiveness.

"Doctor?" I asked. "Imaging?"

Harold and Lentz said nothing. They looked away, implicated in knowledge. Embarrassed by my not having long since seen.

Ram waved away my question, the whole topic. "This is my choice." He held up A.'s answer. "This one is the human being."

How many months had I known him and not registered? Now, when I knew what I looked at, the evidence was everywhere. Swelling, weight loss, change in pallor. The feigned good spirits of friends. The man was incurably sick. He needed every word anyone could invent.

Ram flipped obsessively through A.'s exam answer. He adored her already, for her anonymous words alone. "Lots of contours, that cerebral cortex. They never know when they've had enough, these humans."

Lentz spoke, blissful in defeat. "Gupta. You bloody foreigner. Don't you know anything about judging? You're supposed to pick the sentimental favorite." The handicapped one. The one the test process killed.

"Ram," I said. "Ram. What's happening?"

"It's nothing. But a scratch." He tapped his finger against A.'s paper, excited. Whole new isles rose from the sea. "Not a bad writer, this Shakespeare fellow. For a hegemonic imperialist."

"Well, Powers. How far were we, again? Imp H? You realize what we have to call the next one, don't you?"

I stood in the training lab a last time. Seeing it for the first, for her. "Philip?" I could not stay in this discarded office for five more minutes without following Helen's lead. I would break under the weight of what she'd condemned me to. "One — one more question?"

"That's two. You're over quota already."

"Why did you want to build—?" I didn't know what to call it anymore. What we had built.

"Why do we do anything? Because we're lonely." He thought a little, and seemed to agree with himself. Yes. "Something to talk to." Lentz cocked back in his chair. Two feet of journals crashed to the floor. Too late in life, he hit upon the idea of trivia. "So where are you headed?"

"Search me." Paris.

"The maker's fate is to be a wanderer?"

"Not really. I'm ready to buy in." I just had to find the right seller.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"Ah. Darkling-wood time. Look at it this way. You still have half your life to explicate the mess you've made up until now."

"And the mess that accumulates during that?"

"Sufficient unto the day is the idea thereof."

"You want to quit with the Bartlett's?"

Lentz snorted. "Well, we lost. You know the wager. Connectionism has to eat crow. We owe the enemy one public retraction. Go write it."

I turned from the office, struck by a thought that would scatter if I so much as blinked. I'd come into any number of public inventions. That we could fit time into a continuous story. That we could teach a machine to speak. That we might care what it would say. That the world's endless thingness had a name. That someone else's prison-bar picture might spring you. That we could love more than once. That we could know what once means.

Each metaphor already modeled the modeler that pasted it together. It seemed I might have another fiction in me after all.

I started to trot, searching for a keyboard before memory degraded.

Two steps down the Center's corridor, I heard Lentz call me. I slunk back to his door. He leaned forward on the desk, Coke-bottle glasses in hand. He studied the vacant stems, then tapped them against his chest.

"Marcel," he said. Famous next-to-last words. "Don't stay away too long."