Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I found myself writing about a white-wood, A-framed house in a corn town that left an impression on me out of all proportion to the two years I'd lived there. I watched myself describe a man, holed up in his room, stuck in the horizontal, trying to come up with a story that would save the world.

One by one, I resuscitated the stories my father had raised me on. Yesterday's futures. His father's hand-smashing anger. His immigrant mother. That unknown kid, his brother, whose wartime death changed my life forever. That night at Alamogordo when, younger than I now was, Dad watched mankind's first, artificial sunrise.

I seemed to be writing my way toward a single scene. The three-quarter point, the dramatic showdown in a Veterans hospital, where father and son take leave of each other. I remembered the hospital. I remembered the conversation, all but verbatim. But I seemed to need to reinvent it from scratch.

The man and the boy play Name That Poem. The son tries to stump the chump with famous bits of Yeats and Eliot. The father quotes at length from Kipling and Robert Service, pieces no one has touched for decades. Not since the man read them to his children.

My pop — something I never called my own; that one was the name both C. and I used for hers — grew into history's huckster. Working alone, that year, I came to see him again, quizzing his kids, running them through the necessary training. Heavy on the questions, light on answers. It all came back to me, the stimulus-response he hoped would give the helpless Hobson children some sense of where the Big Picture had set them down.

Something hid about the edges of this book-in-progress. I could not name it outright. Behind Pop's fictional malady, my real father lay ill. The grip of addiction dismissed him too early from the world Dad tried to name. Writing this book meant telling him I finally understood. Even when I didn't. Even when I wouldn't, until long after the last page was done.

I worked my salvage, on my private schedule, with the drapes pulled closed. Rescue and recovery filled me with cold pleasure. Every evasive joke the Hobsons pulled on one another released another piece of secret family language from long-term storage.

I transcribed. I recovered whole forgotten strongboxes, hoping the heirlooms might find their way, in time, into the hands of people who would write me back to say, "Now, how did you know about that?"

All families, I decided, walked in single file. At least, the one I lived did. Either experience was somehow as exchangeable as scrip, or we were each so alone that I might as well record the view from my closed cell.

But that view turned out stranger than I ever imagined. I felt myself taking dictation, plans for a hypothetical Powers World that meant to explain in miniature where history had left me. My prisoner's dilemma came down to declaring love for a time and country, a way of life I'd never even liked, let alone felt at home in.

For an accurate take on the place, I had to leave. The nested narratives were swallowing me wholesale. I needed distance. I knew only one place in the world where I could finish my North American theme park: the imaginary village tucked away in the quaint fairytale country that a woman I once loved invented for me.

From the day I saw Lentz's picture, my heart took itself off the project. The moment I made him study that snapshot calendar, while I studied him.

"Lentz, you've been jerking me around."

He snorted, if he gave even that much satisfaction. Some crack about my intriguing verb choice. That shifty fluorescent reflection of Coke-bottle glasses. He'd taken down the calendar, hidden it. Maybe even destroyed it. Get the boy's mind back on the chase. His move had the opposite of its intended effect.

"Why are we doing this?"

I stared him down, made explicit, by silence, the threat of a general strike. I was still the only one G listened to. If I didn't talk, the box wasn't going to get any more literate. And I vowed not to talk to G until Lentz talked to me.

"Why are we…? Because, Marcel. Because, if you haven't noticed, I have the unfortunate habit of chewing, in public, more than I am able to bite off."

The closest he'd come to admitting the whole project's haplessness. But also a buyout. A bait-and-switch. A gambit to throw me off, now that I demanded names.

"What's in this for you, Lentz? Why waste a year? What's your motive?"

"Poet. Don't you know by now that science is without—"

"God damn you. Can't you level with me? Once?"

My outburst raised no more than one weary eyebrow.

"What am I to you, that you need to bother yourself over? Use me, if the project interests you. Symbiosis. Otherwise. ." He left the menace hanging, the way a fatigued marathoner leaves spittle dangling from his lips. "Black-box me. That's the answer. Blackbox the whole sordid process. It works for me."

I flipped on G's microphone. I breathed into it in disgust. I sneered a couplet at it, from memory. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." LEDs on the coupler recorded G's struggle to paraphrase.

Lentz worked his dry lips. "Powers." Back down the audit trail of his own voice, into someone else's. "Our boy is not ready for irony." He shook his jelly bismarck of a body erect. He went over to the Bartlett's I'd planted on the shelf above the UNIX terminal. " Marmion ?" he asked, a good imitation of perplexity. "Walter bloody Scott is on this list? I quit."

I refused to so much as acknowledge him.

For a terrifying moment, he threatened to lay a hand on my shoulder. God knows what fundamental particles such a collision would have spit out.

"Marcel. Marcel." Begging me. I could no longer tell which would be more cowardly — honesty or compassion. "You're really going to make me do this, aren't you?"

We went to the home. I'd hiked past the compound, but had never seen it. Invisible, on the south edge of town. A sprawling plantation bearing some herbaceous sobriquet. The lot attendant did not even bother to wave him on. The grounds were manicured, but bare.

Autumn had accomplished its steeped regrouping. Leave-taking, a done deed. We walked along an ice-choked pond to the main building. Here and there, a bundled shuffler swayed in the company of paid help. Winter had set in in earnest. The first one since adolescence that I'd go through alone.

The structure grew more institutional with each step we took toward it. Inside the door, a checkpoint masqueraded as a visitors' center.

"Afternoon, Dr. Lentz," a callow youth with blazer insignia greeted us. "You're early today."

We blew past the emblazoned kid. I made apologetic motions with my shoulders, excusing us all.

Lentz slipped into his Sir Kenneth Clark. "Notice how the able-bodied get the first floor. Doesn't make sense, does it? They're still functional. Give them a room up on four or five." He shook his head as we made our way to the elevators. Pretended amusement. "No. It's for us, Marcel. The visitors. Brave face. Best foot forward, and all. Appease the people who cut the checks."

I wanted to tell him to stop talking. But I couldn't say even that.

"Going up?" he asked. And punched the top button.

We stepped out of the elevator into an altercation. A large man and his half-sized nurse barreled down the hall. The crisis was apparently urinary. The man, even in pain, radiated that cheerful benevolence bordering on misjudgment. So far as his beaming face was concerned, he was startled kindness incarnate.

His attendant hastened him along. "Come on, Vernie. Come on." As Lentz and I passed, emergency struck and the aide steered Vernie toward the toilet of the nearest private room. Before they could even knock at the open door, the vigilant occupant shouted, "Keep that filthy nigger off my property." Vernie and the nurse hurried away down the hall to catastrophe.