Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I used, too, that ancient reader C. had carried back with her, because she could not bear to part from it. Where her parents, in that basement hole in Chicago, once used the magic book to turn Moeder gaat de doktor halen into Mother goes to fetch the doctor , I used it now to reverse the spell. Volgend jaar zal Mei mooi zijn. May will be fine, fine beyond telling.

I read until my eyes turned to wool. I listened and spoke until my brain went anemic. I'd come home from parties destroyed, in tears, ready to sleep forever. C. would hold me, an oversized changeling child, a monstrous cuckoo left in her nest. "Het spijt me, Beau. Neem me niet kwalijk. Ik houd van jou. Ik houd zoveel van jou. "

I imagined I knew what she was saying.

All the while, I was busy finishing the most American book I would ever write. Disney, Mickey, the Japanese internment, the World's Fair, Trinity Site. The Hobsons, holed up in their white wood mid-western A-frame, now a fairy tale to me.

After a day of writing, I liked to walk. Village fell away to countryside, and I might have been anywhere. I lay in a cow pasture, looking up at the sky, repeating "Hemel, hemel, hemel," trying to get the tag to stick to this unnamable Ruysdael. I felt my back against the chill ground and thought, "Aarde," until I no longer had to think to think it.

My mood in those days ranged from sad fury to rolling, social confusion. I was worse than adrift. I stood just outside the windows of the lost domain, peeking at the blazing costume party within.

Reading out loud kept us together. Kept me in the country, when I wanted to disappear. We read Flemish comic books and Frisian poetry. We went on Poe's expedition to tropic Antarctica. We started in on the million-and-a-half-word chamber-continent of Proust. We got out. We pored over the Michelins, the Fodors, the Baedekers. We waded into the guides, either in translation or, fitfully, in our newfound original.

Helen was strange. Stranger than I was capable of imagining. She sped laugh-free through Green Eggs and Ham, stayed dry-eyed at Make Way for Ducklings, feared not throughout Where the Wild Things Are. Not surprising. The symbols these shameless simulations played on had no heft or weight for her, no real-world referent.

"Skip childhood," Lentz told me. "We're running out of time."

"How is she going to know anything if we skip childhood?"

"She doesn't need to know anything." Lentz smirked. "She just has to learn criticism. Derrida knows things? Your deconstructionists are rife with wisdom? Jeez. When did you go to school? Don't you know that knowledge is passé? And you can kiss meaning bye-bye as well."

I hated him when he got arch. His archness left me so helpless with rage that I could never answer him. I knew how much Lentz believed in meaning. Helen was Lentz's meaning-paradox: our Net of nets, like some high Gothic choir, asserted significance while denying any algorithm's power to reach it. Meaning was a contour. All those wrong turns we had to bring back from the dead.

"Get cracking on the List, Marcel. Time's awasting. You want childhood? Give her Beowulf."

"She'll never make sense of it."

"Oh. As if you can." He punched me playfully in the shoulder. This was not the beak conducting the misanthropic midnight session of Mozart a few months earlier. Lentz was rearranging his own firmware in a way we weren't supposed to be able to do.

"Sense is pattern, Ricky-boy. Give her some patterns and see how she arranges them."

I sometimes talked with Helen from the English Building, through a terminal ethernetted to the campus-wide backbone. That way, Lentz could use his office for real science while I continued the training. Archaic wood and incandescence gave numbing rote the feel of a grand, nineteenth-century anatomy lecture. I had my library there as well, the books Helen soon had to study.

Perhaps I also meant to scope out the competition. Bring the fight home, into the enemy's HQ. The English Building crawled with twenty-two-year-olds, frantic with the impending Exam. Each one had made the same error in judgment, giving their lives over to books. Each had disappointed some father, whom they'd hoped only to delight forever with their ability to read and write. Not one believed they would ever get a real job.

I watched them up close, our opponents, the curators of the written language. I moved about among them, a double agent. I listened around the mailboxes, in the coffee room. Criticism had gotten more involuted while I was away. The author was dead, the text-function a plot to preserve illicit privilege, and meaning an ambiguous social construction of no more than sardonic interest. Theory had grown too difficult for me, too subtle. It out-Heroded Herod. The idea seemed to be that if mind were no more than shrill solipcism, then best make a good performance of it.

But the apprentice wordkeepers: here were my old lost friends in photocopy, only younger than I had ever been. Most were peach-fuzzed posthumanists, pimply with neo-Marxist poststructuralism. They wielded an ironic sophistication Helen would never be able to interpret, let alone reproduce. I didn't even want her to hear the tropes.

The halls rippled with an intellectual energy steeped in aggression. It took me a long time to see what that energy was. It was fear. Fear that everything theory professed might be true. Pure panic that the world didn't need them anymore:

It took just as long, mingling on the outskirts, to learn what had happened to me. I'd been gone no longer than a semester. I'd come back to the standing, eternal crew. Almost the same roster, down to their names. The only difference was that nobody hung out anymore. Folks were busy, needing two books and ten articles by age twenty-five to keep one's head above professional floodwaters.

Or perhaps the press was less industry than embarrassment. Conversation dropped to hushed flusters when I tried to join in. My offers to stand this year's successful master's candidates a round of beers were met by a chorus of "Sounds good" that dissolved in polite postponements.

One day, a grad I had several times exchanged nods with stopped me in the hall and began, "Mr. Powers, could I get you to sign this paperback?" At last it struck me. I'd betrayed my old mates. I'd done the unforgivable. Let myself get old.

After that, I read increasingly to Helen from my English office.

Books were about a place we could not get back to. Something in my voice when there might give her that little interpretive leg up.

The building's vague ache of background radiation emanated from one room, up on the third floor. I managed never to walk past it, but it swelled in my avoidance. I hadn't stepped into that room since I turned adult. I sat two flights below, in my office with its Magritte fireplace, forgetting. As if forgetting were something that could be actively engineered.

I gave Helen Blake's "Poison Tree." Way premature. I wondered what I could have been thinking. I was thinking, not of the lines, but of the day I got them:

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

"What does that mean, Helen?" I never let up on her, with this whole meaning thing.

She struggled to form the generalization. She made things up now, when she didn't know. I took that as a great step forward.

"It means, things that you say…" I prompted her. She could usually complete a sentence form with some paraphrase of the words just fed her.

"Things that you say disappear."

"And things you don't say…?"

"Things you don't say get bigger."

Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.