Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I needed at least to see if the room still existed. Enough time had passed. Standing in the doorway and looking would not kill me.

I climbed the patched stairs, light-headed and short of breath. I did the two floors in a deliberate, directed haze. Automatic. On muscle memory alone. I pushed my body forward, the way a sixteen-year-old dials the phone to ask for his first-ever date. The way a doctor sentences an 11:15 clinic appointment to fatal path reports.

I mounted without thinking. Thought would have inhibited action. I'd reach that room only if I got to it before I knew where I was going. I pulled up in the middle of an ordinary classroom, deserted, on the small side. A blackboard bore the message "Thurs. 3:30-5:00," ringed by a smeared white corral of eons-old microorganism skeletons. The linoleum floors had darkened into a color somewhere between the Forest of Arden and the wine-dark sea. A circle of warped wooden chair-desks had been hastily abandoned. Waneth the watch, I would someday try to tell Helen. But the world holdeth.

Nothing had happened here in this room's hundred years. Nothing that bore remembering. I started to shake. Each breath set off a body-length shudder. I could not imagine how things had gotten so cold. The two dormer windows we always had to open, even in winter, because the radiator could not be shut off, demurred above me, closed.

I don't know what I wanted. Some spectral second glance at the teacher in action. The chance to ask why the world refused to answer to the poems he'd made us memorize. I needed to revise the place— first love, discovery, vocation, eighteen. To do take two. The update. Correct the shape, improve the story I'd made of where I'd been.

I should have tried something out loud. Something from one of those beaten-up anthologies, the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition. Taylor could recite all the way back to the foundations. We would not be civilized until we could remember. He died knowing stuff he had committed to permanence at an age when the rest of us were learning Engine, engine, Number 9. Whole cantos, half-chapters from books even the titles of which I had forgotten.

A bell rang, one of those forlorn indicators of ten to the hour and class change. I left on command. The scrimshawed wood corridor complained at my weight, for some reason still insistent after all these dry-aired winters.

I hit the head of the stairwell, Middlemarch under my breath. I rounded the landing, unlocking. Maybe I never looked. Maybe I always navigated by toe-tap and hope. Halfway into the second flight, I heard a creak that wasn't me. I sighted down, along my path. It was A., the page-boy mirage I'd seen late at night, while proofing copy.

This time I knew her name. I'd tracked her down to an official departmental photograph, which led in turn to her CV. I'd learned that she was a second-year master's candidate. She had graduated from college the year my third book came out. The fact appalled me.

Seeing her again, I realized how often I had seen her since, from the end of endless halls. Only now A. was real, bounding upstairs, a meter in front of my descent. She exuded blue, robin's egg, adventure, the cerulean tidal pool. She breathed like a sleeping child, like the held breath of friends gathered in a too-small house on the eve of holidays.

I snagged on her face as she glanced up, scanning mine. Instant, reflex presumption; it made me ill. Yet I knew her.

I had to keep from greeting her. My pulse doubled, cutting my intelligence in half. My skin went conductive. In the time it took me to drop another step, a bouillabaisse of chemical semaphores seeped up through my pores and spilled out to wet the air.

She must have known. She looked away, giving no indication. Her face stayed in absolute neutral, a gear beyond adopting. Two quick strides and she skipped past a near brush with literature.

I bottomed out at the base of the stairwell. I stood, winded, like a hawk-reprieved mouse. Like an agoraphobe giving a plenary speech. I would have laughed at myself, had I been able to catch my breath.

Not only could I no longer write fiction. I could no longer live fact. I'd lost fundamental real-word skills while away. The same skills I was trying to instill in Helen.

I had learned too much cognitive neuroscience. The more I read about how the mind worked, the flakier mine became. The symptoms had been coming on for a few weeks. Faces touched off self-fulfilling panic: how will you remember this person's name? Some days before, I'd crossed a street to get to the five side when looking for an address ending in zero. Monitoring my own processes, I felt myself pitching into the ditch alongside the famous test-case centipede after the reductionists asked him how he kept track of which leg moved next.

For months, my bedtime stories had spun a decameron of long-term potentiation, recategorizing, neuronal group selection, transmitter and junctional molecules. Now, for some reason, my low-level structures, blinded by the harsh light that life's interrogation used to extract its confessions, decided to pull an Aschenbach. A Humbert Humbert. One of those old fools in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, nineteenth-century epistolary vicarage farces. I meant to make an idiot of myself.

By the time I got back to the office, my replay of the woman ascending a staircase had become one of those late-show reruns you wish they'd get a new print of. A.: the face, the name, the stranger I'd been writing to, all my writing life. All those friends whom I, confused, thought dead. The grave where buried love lived.

I disappeared from English. Went back and set up shop at the Center. Paralysis I had already. I didn't need to compound it with obsession. Three weeks without seeing A. and she'd go ephemeron, would damp down from active memory trace. She'd stop making unsponsored appearances, and I'd stop wanting her to.

Work helped. I sublimated all unquenchable hormonal flare-up desires to read that infinitely suffering creature my favorite stanzas from Piers Plowman by candlelight. Instead I read to the spreading neural net. Several times a week I invented painful contrivances by which I might introduce myself to A. Each time I did nothing but go and talk to Helen.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed — linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.

She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weight vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're so hungry you could eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

A certain kind of simile fell naturally into her trained neurode clusters. Helen's own existence hinged on metaphor-making. In fact, associative memory itself was like a kind of simile. Three-quarters of the group of neurodes that fired when faced with, say, a whale might remain intact when depicting a thing that seemed, whatever the phrase meant, very like one. Such a constellation of common firings became, in a way, shadowpaint shorthand for some shared quality.

After all, the world's items had no real names. All labels were figures of speech. One recognized a novel item as a box by comparing it to a handful of examples so small it fit into a single dimple of an egg carton. In time, one learned without being taught. Rode without the training wheels. Somehow, the brain learned to recognize whole categories, to place even those.things seen for the first time.