Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I skulked in the back of the Center auditorium and watched Lentz deliver a lecture for the graduate colloquium series. He was good. He kept to a wonderful mix of abstract and palpable. He compared multi-adaptive curve-fitting, backprop, greedy learning, feature construction — various algorithms that machines might employ to build complex, real-world representations.

He described the great paradox of cognitive neuroscience. The easier it is for the brain to perform a certain task, the harder that task is to model. And vice versa. "Perhaps," he joked, "that explains why scientists write such hideous prose. Or why good writers say so little, for that matter."

He stood alone onstage in front of a room of people, with nothing but an overhead projector for protection. The sadistic humor, thus depersonalized, drew waves of titters. Afterward, Chen asked him a question no one could follow. Harold followed with a challenge on grounds more ideological than empirical. Lentz handled all comers with remarkable poise, never once letting on that, offstage, he'd long passed from the domain of conventional research into speculative fantasy.

I ran into Diana in the corridor early one afternoon. She had Petey slung over one hip. They made a lovely contrapposto.

"Hey, you two! How have you been? Where's William?"

"Ach, that guy," Diana said, rolling her eyes. "I've sold him to the Brookings Institution."

She was radiant, excited.

"Listen, Rick. We've made a substantial advance in imaging technique. Time-series MRI sequences of neuronal activity. All cleaned up subtractively to give delineated pictures. Localized like you wouldn't believe. Resolutions smaller than the width of a single cerebral column. One-and-a-half-second increments."

"That's good, isn't it? I can tell. You're talking in fragments."

Diana smiled. Peter threw his pitifully small hands outward, as if he had just decided to recognize me.

"Yes, it's very good. We're not quite at the real-time movie stage yet. But we don't need anything faster. We can watch thoughts as they gather and flow through the brain."

I rubbed Pete's curved spine. "This could be the best news for monkeyhood since we decided they were our ancestors."

"Oh. Well. Fractionation carries on apace, I'm afraid. But this stuff is revolutionary. A noninvasive window onto the mind!"

She shook my shoulder with her free hand. I was grateful for this woman's existence. For her reminding me what enthusiasm was.

"Two lines of research," I listed. "Teaching. Motherhood. How many lives are you living, these days? I guess there's no point in asking how literary knight-errancy has been treating you lately."

She gave me a look, bafflement routed slowly by inference. That she could unpack, decode, index, retrieve, and interpret my reference at all was an unmodelable miracle. More miraculous still, I could watch her grin of understanding unfold in less than hundredth-millimeter increments, in split seconds.

"Harold's given up on our making it through Cervantes. We're doing Fielding and Smollett these days."

"You're joking. Not even the pros read those guys anymore."

"What can I tell you? Harold believes in a liberal education."

"If he wants liberal, he can do a lot better than Smollett. How about Behn? How about Kate Chopin?"

Diana caught Petey as he tried to slip from her arms. She nodded, humoring me. "Our book club isn't really for my benefit, you know."

"Oh. It's for the men who need to play Pygmalion?"

"It isn't that, exactly. Although. ." She trailed off in a thought I could no longer trace. "Harold. ." Her voice teetered on disclosure, then backed away. "He's a good man. A decent man." She looked up with enforced cheer. "I'm trying to bring him onto the MRI team. I think it would be good for him."

"Diana," I began. She froze in front of me, hearing the change. "I don't know how to bring this up." She waited for the blow, braced, but not flinching. I reached out to stroke Peter's ear. It didn't make things any easier.

"As far as the book club goes. It seems fulsome, even to advise you against this. But if you guys are ever curious to do a little Powers, you. . may want to skip my third book." The one where the narrator ties her tubes in fear of bearing a child with birth defects.

"Oh," she said. Thought's turbulence again deformed her face in real time. "Oh." Smiling, the connection strengthening. "We've done that one already. You're old news."

"You've…?"

"Oh yeah. I liked it. I liked the swing scene. And that moment on the lab floor. But for God's sake, you make a girl wait for it, don't you?"

I felt my face heat. "Listen. You know, I wrote that thing long before I met you."

"Well, I'm embarrassed to say, I read it long after I met you."

"I'm — I'm sorry. I hope you — I didn't know what I was talking about."

Her pitch fell to forgiveness. "No one does."

Peter began squirming again. He arched backward, ready to plunge in a dead drop. Ready to jackknife to the floor if it meant getting free. Diana snatched him back from certain destruction, as she must have done a dozen times a day since his birth. She straightened his overalls and set him on the ground. He could stand by himself, if she lent him a pant leg.

"You read my book." And still seemed game for friendship. I felt sick with unearned redemption. "You read my book. And you never told me?"

"What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, writer! Had a good jag over your words.' "

"I wish you had." I giggled, drugged with nervous release. "I could have retired by now."

I tried to go shopping. C. had to send me to the store with a list.

"Just pin it to my sleeve," I'd snarl.

"Oh, my little Beauie's afraid he's going to forget something," she goo-gooed at me, patting my head. Happier than she'd ever been in B. or U.

But the list had nothing to do with any defect of memory. I needed the list so I could match up the names she gave me with the letters printed on the inscrutable commodity labels. I needed a list to hand to a clerk. I couldn't even come close with the pronunciations. For I hadn't a clue what things were called. What things were.

One nine-hour plane flight returned me to infant trauma. My helplessness spread well beyond making purchases. I lived in constant terror of inadvertent offense. Sometimes, when I went out, someone would upbraid me on the street. Clearly, I'd transgressed, but all I could catch would be the exasperation. They might shake a fist at some sign or printed protocol. "Can't you read?" I could hear them ask. But I did not yet have the wherewithal to answer, "No, not really."

My accidental rudeness had no end. I ran into people who greeted me warmly but whom I couldn't answer. In that first month, I met at least half of C.'s ten dozen first cousins, and couldn't keep one straight from the other. Not a person in town whom I wasn't related to. Not one who didn't know me, the first foreign import to drop in since Kilroy. And not a soul I recognized.

The smallest trip to the post office ruined me for an afternoon. I would rehearse my request in advance, like a Samoan thespian mouthing a phonetic transcription of Long Day's Journey into Night.

But unless the speech passed ripple-free, I was sunk. Any words from the other side of the bulletproof, muffling glass and I panicked. They might have been saying, "Very good, sir." But they might just as easily have been saying, "That's not the way it's done around here, Henk."

I missed appointments, as seven-thirty became half-eight. My age transposed into nine-and-twenty, which had that Housman lilt, but frequently turned me, in conversation, into ninety-two.

"It's good for you, man," C. informed me. "It's your turn to live in a country where they can't pronounce your name."