Arthur Clarke - Cradle

Nick pushed her away and staggered back. He felt as if he had just been hit in the face with a sledgehammer. The full impact of Jane’s comment sunk in slowly and an uncontrollable mixture of anger and hurt surged to the surface. What? What? She knows. This cloying bitch knows. Maybe they all know. What? Fuck. Fuck this altogether. And then, almost immediately, as his mind began to take the measure of the evening’s events, How do I get out of here? Where is the exit? As he walked around the house to the front (he was not about to go inside again), from deep inside Nick there now came a sound, a sound that welled up to the surface and could not be contained. This was the wail of pain, the unmitigated and ineluctable cry of the animal in total despair. Millennia of acculturation have made it rare to hear such cries from human beings. But this loud and untoward scream, which rose into the Palm Beach night like a siren from a police car, gave Nick his first comfort. While the partygoers were trying to decide what they had heard, Nick climbed into his 1977 Pontiac and drove away.

He drove south toward Fort Lauderdale, his heart still pumping like crazy and his body trembling from adrenaline. He didn’t think about anything coherently. The pictures in his mind seemed to come at random, without any clear connection between them. Monique was the focus of all the pictures in the montage. Monique in her Alaskan seal coat, Monique in her red and white bathing suit, Monique in her dress tonight (Nick winced, for just off-screen left in his mind’s eye, he could see Aaron coming down the stairs). Had it all been meaningless? Was it just a game? Nick was too young to know about the grays of life. For him it was a simple question of black or white. It was either wonderful or it was shit. Monique either loved him passionately and wanted to give up her luxurious life to marry him, or she was just using him to satisfy her sexual needs and her ego. So, he concluded, as he arrived at his uncle’s condominium in Fort Lauderdale, I was another of her toys. I was like her furs and horses and yachts and clothes. I made her feel good.

Disgusted with himself, depressed beyond belief, a headache starting to tear his brain apart from the martinis, Nick rapidly packed his clothes. He didn’t bathe or eat. He took his two suitcases down to the car, left the rented tuxedo with the managers of the complex, and drove out toward Interstate 95. A couple of miles before he reached the freeway, Nick pulled the car off on the shoulder and allowed himself a few tears. That was all. The external hardness that would characterize the next ten years of his life began at that moment. Never again, he said to himself. I will never again let some bitch make a fool of me. No way, Jose`.

Ten years later, early on a March morning in his condominium in Key West, Nick Williams would idly play with a metallic golden object sitting on his coffee table and experience again the terrible pain of seeing Monique with her husband at that party. Wistfully, with some mature chagrin, he would remember also how, when he reached 1-95, he turned left and south toward Miami and the Keys instead of right and north toward Boston. He couldn’t have explained why at the time. He might have said that Harvard was trivial after Monique or that he wanted to study life and not books. He didn’t understand that his need to start absolutely fresh came from the fact that he could not face himself.

He had not played the memory of Monique through from start to finish for five years. This morning, for the first time, Nick had been able to distance himself from the recalled emotions, ever so slightly, and to see the entire affair with a tiny bit of perspective. He recognized that his blind youthful passion had set him up for the anguish, but he was still reluctant to find Monique faultless. At least the memory no longer destroyed him. He picked up the trident and walked to the window. Maybe it’s all coming together now, he said to himself. A new treasure. A final molting of the last adolescent angst. He thought about Carol Dawson. She was vexing but her intensity fascinated him. Always the dreamer, Nick visualized Carol in his arms and imagined the warmth and softness of her kiss.

Carol watched in fascination as the octopus captured its prey with its long tentacles. “Imagine what it would be like to have eight arms,” Oscar Burcham said. “Just think of the brain architecture necessary to separate all the inputs, to identify which stimulus was coming from which limb, to coordinate all the tentacles in defense or acquisition of food.”

Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large. translucent glass window inside a dimly lit building. “Oh, Oscar,” she said to the old man with the bright eyes, “you never change. Only you can think of all these living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?”

“Aye, well I do,” Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “But it’s virtually impossible for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills, to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example, a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions, which is ridiculous.” He paused for a moment to think. “No,” he continued, “it’s more fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers. In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological experiments whose outcomes cannot be interpreted.”

Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. “You take everything I say so seriously, Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.” She stopped and looked away. “You’re the only one who does.”

Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. “Somewhere here there’s a chip… I know it for a fact… It’s almost always here… Ah, I found it.” He looked at her knowingly. “It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful, even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?”

“No,” Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium. “Well, sort of I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the technical issues, but it’s the way he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.”

Oscar looked at her intently. “Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.”

Carol was impatient and frustrated. “I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own breakfast.”