Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

But the letter sabotages itself. It engineers its own rejection. It bares a loneliness that it knows will scare off any attempted comfort. I haven't looked up the passage since first reading it. I will never read it again. The real thing might be too far from the one I've kept in memory. "Consider me," the marriage proposal says, "as a person who suddenly discovers, with an ache at the lateness of the hour, that he might like to have a real home."

Diana sat across from me, on a comfortable sofa scarred with the destructive industry of small boys. Upstairs, those boys tossed in dreams whose sole task lay in smoothing out the incomprehensibility of this day. Here was the home I would never have. Shaped by a book, I'd made sure I wouldn't. I'd forced my heart's reading matter to come true.

Here and there, a cylindrical tube — person or transforming robot made Lego base camp for the night in the plush carpet. Diana pulled the music's long melisma about her shoulders like a shawl. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.

'Thanks," she shushed me at the door. She squeezed my hand. 'Thanks. It's been a while since I've dined by candlelight."

I went home to chosen loneliness. To the book I would never be able to write.

Picture a train heading south. The train is full of ill and wounded. This month's invariable sanitarium patients. Consumption, influenza: fiction's archaic maladies. Some bodily deterioration for which the reader must invent fantastic, beginner's referents. Maimed veterans, being shipped from the front.

A moment of mass import, of universal upheaval from the just-recallable past. Populations on the leading edge of panic, stricken by industry. The evacuating train pulls out. It joins the flotilla of time's lifeboats, plowing the dark.

Cruel, blue, bracing, breaking loose: the only opening vignette worth bothering with. Stretched out urgently, along imagination's railheads, a book heads south. It signals from the telegraph car. Keys me a message I was supposed to have held on to at all costs. A message that never made it out of childhood's originating station. The day is sharp, the air invigorating and crystalline. It is the year nineteen-something. A year ending in a dash, or perhaps two hyphens.

The train works southward, in wartime. It snakes glacially up into the mountains, in perhaps the last clear month, the last week that the mountain passes will be traversable.

The engine climbs. It sniffs perpetually up to the outskirts of the same bombed-out village. Fields drift undulantly beneath its wheels, whose click convinces even Forever to bleed imperceptibly into a standing Now.

Soon, on the itinerary's second morning, the ground acquires a careless dusting of snow. Vegetation changes along the alpine climb, though the account, the travelogue itself, says nothing about that. Sirens bleat on in the distance, from whistle-stops all along this infant route. Air raids continue steeping this side of the border in today's random wildfire.

But the wounded in the compartments are exhilarated. They grow convinced: something is about to happen. Just past the next page.

C. and I returned to U. We managed to live there again for two years. I'm surprised we lasted even that long. How could we hope to make a life in a town where we'd already taken our retrospective tour? C. sought a thing she'd accidentally lost. That thing was not U., not then or ever. But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.

Changed circumstance bought us a little nostalgic grace. C. parlayed her office experience into a position with University Personnel. And I: I'd been granted a wish so outrageous that characters in novels would have been punished just to think it. The political entertainment I wrote for C. appeared and did well. The forgotten attic legacy bridging imaginary Limburg and too real Chicago had readers.

Reviewers evaluated it in print, in the same newspapers I'd once read so casually. Total strangers spent two hours' wages to buy a copy. People I'd never meet wrote me letters, awarded me prizes.

The impossibility dawned on me: I might be the last person on earth allowed to spend all day long doing exactly what I wanted to do.

Each new book-blown coup produced a burst of sad excitement from C. "Beauie, you've done it. Proficiat. I always knew you would."

Truth was, she was terrified. We holed up in our one-bedroom apartment — one step upscale from the one in B.'s land-filled swamp — under siege from admirers. One night, we sat eating dinner at the pretty green enamel table we'd rescued from the secondhand shop. We listened to the radio as we ate, the cavalcade news. All at once, a voice was talking about the book, telling the story of the boys in the photo. Paraphrasing, as if that life had really happened.

I'd invented those boys to amuse C. I built them from pieces only she would recognize. I sprinkled the biographies with archival evidence, historical truths, the camera-eye witness. I intercut with essays how every historian half-makes the longer narrative, wedding the forces at large to a private address book. Now our private address book had been promoted to documentary fact.

At the account of that boy blown off his bike and rubbed out before the world conflagration cleared its starting block, C. started to cry. I thought at first she was crying out of pride. Writing a novel left me that inept with real-world facts.

"That poor boy," she mouthed.

I pieced it together. "I'm sorry. C., please. It'll all be over in a month." She brightened a little at the thought of recovering the anonymous. Of retreating to a time when our invented tunes formed no one's dinner music.

Our lives back in U. were like nothing we recognized. U. had changed in all but its particulars. Returning to the town was like clapping the back of an old friend at a reunion, one who turns to you with a look friendly but blank.

U. had forgotten us, while remaining agonizingly familiar. The town had become something out of Middle English allegory. Its lone consolation lay in other people, as bewildered by their abandonment here as we.

For the first time in our lives, C. and I socialized. We learned to pick wines, to crack the dress code, to prepare ourselves in advance of an evening with an arsenal of jokes and stories that answered a suite of occasions. The game got easier the more we played. We might have succeeded at it, had we stuck around.

The Midwestern Dinner Party was not, as our B. acquaintances teased us, a contradiction in terms. Once under way, they could even be fun. Getting ready was the torture.

"I'm fat," C. would announce, about an hour before we had to go anywhere.

"Sweetheart, you're a sub-Saharan stalk of desiccated grass. Don't tell yourself you're fat. You'll start to believe it."

I still pretended she hadn't already convinced herself.

"Wear the lamb dress," I'd say. "You'll knock them out."

"That dress makes me look fat."

"Okay. How about the muslin?"

"That one makes me look like I'm trying not to look fat."

Sometimes C. locked herself in the bathroom, throwing up. Or, sobbing, she'd refuse to leave the apartment. But the cloud usually lifted in time. C. would grow radiant and be the dinner's delight. People loved her, and she loved them back. The ones she gave the chance.

Those two repeat years in U. might have been a sterile waste if it weren't for the Taylors. I went to see the old professor not long after we hit town. Taylor welcomed me back with affection. And now, when I teased him about his freshman seminar ruining a promising scientific career, I could point to a turn of events that sweetened the punch line.

After my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored and elicited the mind's unreal ability to turn inward upon itself. He changed my life. He changed what I thought life was. But I'd never done more than revere him at a distance, forever the eighteen-year-old student. Now, to my astonishment, we became friends.