Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Lentz stopped to make me look into the room. A pale wax pip of a man lay strapped to his bed, still muttering racial profanities under his breath.

"Two days from death," Lentz said. The man looked up, uncomprehending. "Organic brain disease. One hemisphere already in the grave. And as hateful as any freshly conditioned twenty-year-old. You think I'm a pinched misanthrope, don't you, Marcel? I'm not brave enough to be a misanthrope. I don't even have the guts to be a realist."

We walked on, deeper into the clinical fortress. I no longer wanted an account of the picture. I no longer wanted to know what happened to the prematurely old couple on that winter beach. But it was too late for rain checks. I would get my answer, far worse than the confusion it explained.

"Look here, Marcel. You'll find this interesting."

An Asian woman, perhaps eighty, stood staring out the window onto the evacuated lawn. She held herself close, rocking slightly. She chanted repeatedly.

"What do you think she's chanting, Marcel? Come on. You lived in the mysterious East, didn't you?"

"How did you know that?"

"What do you think? Koans? Confucian appetizers? Tibetan prayer-wheel captions?"

"I think it's Chinese."

"Mandarin. She was a mathematician on faculty, back in some hypothetical past. Half a century ago, she liked to tell her colleagues that if she ever felt herself losing her mind, she'd arrest the process by practicing her times tables."

"You speak—?"

"What do you take me for, Marcel? I wouldn't know it from Pali pork recipes. But I do have it on good authority that" — he sobered —"that all her numbers are wrong."

We turned down a passage at hall's end. The rooms here no longer fronted onto the public corridor. A genteel nurse's station signaled tighter guard. The staffer on duty, seeing Lentz, made a quick, ambiguous hand gesture. She disappeared into the catacombs.

She returned, smiling briskly. "Lunch room or her room, Professor?"

Lentz checked his watch. "It might as well be lunch, Constance. Can we beat the rush?"

"It's all yours. Private party." Constance eyed me, committing to nothing.

We went into a common room, bright with skylight. All the furniture felt soft. Even the large round table somehow squished when bumped. Everything edge-free, in screaming pastel. Lentz passed through a windowed door into a kitchenette. I heard a refrigerator open and Lentz issue a capitulatory, "Shit."

A woman entered the room, Constance leading her through the armpit. Someone had stage-makeupped her to look two decades younger than she was. Dressed by committee. But in no apparent need of the human leash.

In fact, she shrugged free, smiling. She came toward me, hand extended. "I am so pleased to meet you," she said.

I shook her hand, unable to say anything.

"Goddamn," Lentz said, accompanied by culinary crashing.

Constance flew into the kitchenette. "I'll take care of that, Mr. Lentz." Just enough scold to be deniable. I noticed bruises across her arms and legs. The old and infirm, it seemed, fought for keeps.

Lentz shot through the door. "Pap. Pabulum. Jelly. Disgusting, all of it. Can't anyone in this place masticate?"

"Hello," the woman addressed him, puzzled by his sudden entrance. "It's a pleasure to meet you." To me, she added, "Do you two know each other?"

"It's Philip, Audrey," he said. Emotionless. Leached. "Your husband." But he took her hand when she offered it. As he must have done every day for a long time.

I saw it then. Her resemblance to the woman in the photo. Less than kin, but more than random. Something had happened to her. Something more than age. Her soul had pulled up stakes from behind her features. She bore no more relation to her former face than a crumpled bag of grounded silk bore to a hot-air balloon.

Audrey seemed not to hear him. She picked at her cardigan. She worried a moth hole until she freed a thread. She pulled, the whole weave unraveling. Lentz reached over and stayed her hand.

"I don't know," Audrey fretted, dubious.

"You're here every day?" I asked Lentz.

He stood up and moved to the heat vent. He fiddled with it, but failed to close it. He cursed its mindless inanimacy.

"Here?" Audrey said. "Not I. Good heavens. I'd sooner die."

Constance reentered, with a tray stacked high with lunch.

"Nurse," Audrey shouted. "Oh, Nurse. Thank God you're here. This man," pointing to Lentz, off in the corner kicking at the vent, "was trying to rape me."

"Now, Audrey," Constance said. "We have minestrone soup, creamed beef, and blueberry yogurt."

"Why bother with the silverware?" Lentz asked, coming to table. "Why not just give us all straws? Or better yet, newsprint. We'll just finger-paint with this drool."

Constance ignored him.

I hadn't much of an appetite. Audrey fingered the wrong side of the spoon, repeating the litany, "I don't know." I knew what she meant.

"Come on, Audrey," Lentz coaxed her. "It's lunchtime. You can do this. You did it yesterday, for Christ's sake."

But yesterday lay on the far side of a collapsed tunnel. Yesterday, ten years ago, childhood, past life analysis: all sealed off. Audrey was not just locked out of her own home. She sat on the stoop, not even aware of the shelter behind her, unable to turn around. Unable, even, to come up with the notion of in.

Lentz gestured, patient again. "In the soup. Spoon in the soup." Encouraging, reinforcing. Showing how.

Audrey, confused, released her spoon into the minestrone from on high. Handle first. Lentz sighed. He scooted his chair around next to hers.

"I'll do that," Constance offered.

"No you won't," Lentz told her. "Come on, Audrey. Let's eat some lunch."

"Nurse. This man is trying to hurt me."

Lentz addressed her plate. "Here we go, wife. Have a bite."

But he would not feed her. He picked up the spoon. Dried it off. Put it back in her hand. Pointed out the path from bowl to mouth. Supervised training. No good unless she worked out the specifics herself.

"She's getting worse," Lentz observed.

"It's an off day." Cheery Constance.

After lunch, Lentz suggested a stroll around the grounds.

"It's too cold for her," Constance said.

"Is it too cold for you, Audrey?" Lentz asked.

Audrey stood at attention and studied her shoes. "Oh, call it by some better name," she said, "for friendship sounds too cold."

Lentz chuckled and hugged her. She hugged him back, laughing. "The database is still intact," he pronounced. "As is the retrieval. It's just meaning that's gone. Huh, wife?"

"Just meaning," she echoed him, shy and uncertain again.

Lentz bought Constance off, and he, his wife, and I paced the corridors of the home. Clean, discreet, and genteel. As harrowing as a gothic nightmare. I looked away, to keep the scene from imprinting.

Lentz, on the other hand, rallied in the face of numbers. "Radical reductionism at its finest," he narrated, waving down one of the catacombs where the soulless shuffled. "Age, disease, death. Big problems, in need of isolation and solution. Well, we've handled it. If not eliminated from theory, at least from practice. Consider the project all but accomplished."

"Well, I'll be." Audrey shook her head in bewildered amusement. "Everybody has something to say!" She crooked a thumb at her husband, shrugged at his ludicrousness, and winked at me. "Isn't that right?" The gesture still indexed the woman she was, once.

"Increasing control over all the variables. Divide and conquer. Max out the activity or do away with it. Future tech. That's what science is all about, Marcel. Efficiency. Productivity. Total immunity. Regeneration of lost parts. Eternal, ripple-free life, frozen in our early twenties. Or die trying."

"And after?" I found it far easier to chatter back at Lentz than to look at her. To see any of the Audreys staring at me on all sides. "After we solve aging? Won't we still need to convince ourselves of our own sleight of hand?"