Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"You sign to him?"

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

"What is he saying?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The dragon was pretty awesome."

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

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

Diana laughed. "Don't ask."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lentz? Sad?"

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

"Hours and hours."

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

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

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

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

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