Robert Sawyer: Wake

Her mother sounded defensive. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. Besides, she can study right here at UW. They’ve got one of the best math departments in the world. You said it yourself when you were pushing for us to move here.”

“I didn’t push. And she wants to go to MIT. You know that.”

“But UW—”

“Barb,” her father said, “you have to let her go sometime.”

“I’m not holding on,” she said, a bit sharply.

But she was, and Caitlin knew it. Her mother had spent almost sixteen years now looking after a blind daughter, giving up her own career as an economist to do that.

Caitlin didn’t hear anything more from her parents that night. She lay awake for hours, and when she finally did fall asleep, she slept fitfully, tormented by the recurring dream she had about being lost in an unfamiliar shopping mall after hours, running down one endless hallway after another, chased by something noisy she couldn’t identify…

No periphery, no edge. Just dim, attenuated perception, stimulated — irritated! — by the tiny flickerings: barely discernible lines ever so briefly joining points.

But to be aware of them — to be aware of anything — requires … requires…

Yes! Yes, it requires the existence of—

The existence of…

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: Being of two minds…

Date: Saturday 15 September, 8:15 EST

Mood: Anticipatory

Location: Where the heart is

Music: Chantal Kreviazuk, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”

Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books we’re doing this year in English class. I got them then either as ebooks or as Talking Books from the CNIB, and have now read them all. Coming attractions include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood — Canadian, yes, but thankfully wheat-free. In fact, I’ve already had an argument with Mrs. Zed, my English teacher, about that one, because I called it science fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming “It can’t be science fiction, young lady — if it were, we wouldn’t be studying it!”

Anyway, having gotten all those books out of the way, I get to choose something interesting to read on the trip to Japan. Although my comfort book for years was Are You ThereGod? It’s Me, Margaret, I’m too old for that now. Besides, I want to try something challenging, and BG4’s dad suggested The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, which is the coolest-sounding title ever. He said it came out the year he turned sixteen himself, and my sixteenth is coming up next month. He read it then and still remembers it. Says it covers so many different topics — language, ancient history, psychology — it’s like six books in one. There’s no legitimate ebook edition, damn it all, but of course everything is on the Web, if you know where to look for it…

So, I’ve got my reading lined up, I’m all packed, and fortunately I got a passport earlier this year for the move to Canada. Next time you hear from me, I’ll be in Japan! Until then — sayonara!

Caitlin could feel the pressure changing in her ears before the female voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve started our descent toward Tokyo’s Narita International. Please ensure that your seat belts are fastened, and that…”

Thank God, she thought. What a miserable flight! There’d been lots of turbulence and the plane was packed — she’d never have guessed that so many people flew each day from Toronto to Tokyo. And the smells were making her nauseated: the cumulative body odor of hundreds of people, stale coffee, the lingering tang of ginger beef and wasabi from the meal served a couple of hours ago, the hideous perfume from someone in front of her, and the reek of the toilet four rows back, which needed a thorough cleaning after ten hours of use.

She’d killed some time by having the screen-reading software on her notebook computer recite some of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to her. Julian Jaynes’s theory was, quite literally, mind-blowing: that human consciousness really hadn’t existed until historical times. Until just 3,000 years ago, he said, the left and right halves of the brain weren’t really integrated — people had bicameral minds. Caitlin knew from the Amazon.com reviews that many people simply couldn’t grasp the notion of being alive without being conscious. But although Jaynes never made the comparison, it sounded a lot like Helen Keller’s description of her life before her “soul dawn,” when Annie Sullivan broke through to her:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. Never in a start of the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

If Jaynes was right, everyone’s life was like that until just a millennium before Christ. As proof, he offered an analysis of the Iliad and the early books of the Old Testament, in which all the characters behaved like puppets, mindlessly following divine orders without ever having any internal reflection.

Jaynes’s book was fascinating, but, after a couple of hours, her screen reader’s electronic voice got on her nerves. She preferred to use her refreshable Braille display to read books, but unfortunately she’d left that at home.

Damn, but she wished Air Canada had Internet on its planes! The isolation over the long journey had been horrible. Oh, she’d spoken a bit to her mother, but she’d managed to sleep for much of the flight. Caitlin was cut off from LiveJournal and her chat rooms, from her favorite blogs and her instant messenger. As they flew the polar route to Japan, she’d had access only to canned, passive stuff — things on her hard drive, music on her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something she could interact with; she craved contact.

The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn’t wait until they reached their hotel so she could get back online. But that was still hours off; they were going to the University of Tokyo first. Their trip was scheduled to last only six days, including travel — there was no time to waste.

Caitlin had found Toronto’s airport unpleasantly noisy and crowded. But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly by what must have been wall-to-wall people — and nobody said “excuse me” or “sorry” (or anything in Japanese). She’d read how crowded Tokyo was, and she’d also read about how meticulously polite the Japanese were, but maybe they didn’t bother saying anything when they bumped into someone because it was unavoidable, and they’d just be mumbling “sorry, pardon me, excuse me” all day long. But — God! — it was disconcerting.

After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she’d visited a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from the door was usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a strange washroom when she was familiar with the basic design of the fixtures; she had no idea what she was going to do if she got stuck somewhere that had only Japanese squatting toilets.

When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there she realized she was disoriented — because she was in the Orient! (Not bad — she’d have to remember that line for her LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on conversations not to invade people’s privacy but to pick up clues about her surroundings (“What terrific art,” “Hey, that’s one long escalator,” “Look, a McDonald’s!”). But almost all the voices she heard were speaking Japanese, and—