Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

In the kitchen, she danced a little jig at the sight of the letter. Anything that made me happy might increase the chances for our transplantation. "Come on, Beauie. Read it, you loony-tick. What in the world are you waiting for?"

I slit the packet open and read:

"Dear Rick and C.,

"Belatedly, I take up pen, first to thank you for your welcome tape of good music and loved voices. Similarly welcome have been the letters, which I have meant to answer every day. Recent weeks have both dragged and hurried, creeping by the minute but vanishing into an unreal limbo so that even less than usual am I able to believe that months have passed since we have seen you…

"For nearly a full month I have had a succession of terrible waits after tests, each of which finished a three- or four-day vigil with more bad news. CAT scan, bronchoscopy, bone scan, and finally a week in the hospital for removal of a piece of rib for bone biopsy determined that in addition to a main tumor in the right lung I have cancerous bone in the left rib cage, ruling out an operation and leaving radiation and chemotherapy as treatment. The only test with encouraging results showed no evidence of metastasis to brain.

"Since then, my silence has been caused by effects of treatment. The dreaded nausea did not last long, but loss of appetite and weight did, and a fatigue so profound that I can't adequately describe it. My muscles have atrophied and I spend most of my time lying down. I am good for little more than harvesting the odd tomato, gathering windfall apples, picking some late-planted lettuce. .

"Our long silence is terribly misleading. Your departure left a large emptiness that has been italicized by this illness and our being more solitary than usual. If we possessed ESP, you would have been deluged by messages from here. Still, it is a pleasure to imagine the two of you together in the wide variety of settings you manage to inhabit. My life would seem pretty bounded-in-a-nutshell by any measure, but your joint enthusiasm in getting out and seeing the world is overwhelming.

"I've exhausted my pitiable energy, though not my love. The best way you can please me is to promise that my illness will not lead you to even the slightest tendency to avoid pleasure out of affectionate empathy. Try to adopt the opposite attitude; let me hope that thoughts of me will enhance pleasures I'd enjoy, too, if we were together."

After the first paragraph, I looked up at C. But we'd read too far to pretend the message away. I got through the whole history. Finishing, I looked up across the widening kitchen table at the college girl who had sat with me on the Quad, when still young enough to believe in consolation. This was the same woman, the same panicked doe, in the same glare that life keeps training on us until we can no longer even dread it.

An awful half-second stutter step, and C. said, "You'll have to go back to the States."

"Just to see him, at least," I pleaded, the exact reaction her reflex generosity meant to stave off. But I was not pleading with C.

I flew back to U., numb to the new feel of the place. Taylor could still get out. We went to a nearby woods. We talked. He knew he was done. The only thing for it was presence of mind. Taylor brought along his camera, took a snap of me. I wanted to take one of him, fix him forever. But Taylor had already begun to waste away and refused to be captured like that.

I showed him the excerpt from my new book that had just appeared in a glossy literary weekly. Taylor, for whose approval I'd developed my labyrinthine style, delighted in the piece's uncharacteristic breeziness. He delighted even more when I told him how much I'd been paid. "A dollar a word! That has a solid ring to it."

I had done what everyone in Taylor's line, what he himself had once dreamed of doing. I could wake up every morning and devote myself to making worlds. People read my inventions and wrote about them in turn. My words had grown careers of their own. My overnight success gave Taylor such pleasure that I couldn't bring myself to tell him I meant to quit fiction.

"I didn't want to burden you with such a prediction when you were an eighteen-year-old kid memorizing The Windhover.' " He beamed. "But however much luck always plays into such things, it was possible, even then, to imagine your getting away with something like this."

We turned to the real issue. He protected me from what his disease was doing to him. He seemed, for half an hour, the equal of any formulation he had made before the tumor came alive inside him. I asked him whether, at that stage of the illness, literature helped much. Did it make things any clearer, any easier?

Taylor stayed as brutally forthright with me as ever. He thought for a moment, to get the prosody right. "I would say that literature is not entirely irrelevant, in this circumstance. But it's not quite central, either."

Before we headed home, I asked if he had any regrets. Anything he still needed to do. Taylor told me then that, to his mind, the only two careers worth striving for were doctor and musician. I could not tell how figurative he was being.

Taylor sickened. I found a house-sit in the neighborhood, and came by every day. I sat with him as he napped, or I read to him, or we watched sports on television. Sometimes we talked, but never again like that day in the woods. He lost his appetite, shrank to insubstantial nothing. His gut stopped working. His skin gained purple-green highlights and his joints grew smooth as polished metal. When muscles gave out, he cupped his question-mark head in both hands. He sat in the sunroom until he could no longer sit up. Then we moved him upstairs, into his long bed.

He asked me to check out some books from the library, so he could prepare to teach his class in January.

M., his wife, remained rocklike. She exuded competence beyond belief. She lifted the skeletal Taylor out of bed and carried him— Mary holding a puppet Christ — deflated and naked, to the toilet, in her arms.

Only his mind remained luminous. Near the end, the medications did change him. But even then, his topographies fought to keep themselves intact. One afternoon before Christmas, I found Taylor in a state that was not quite sleep, but could pass for sleep in low light.

"Oh, it's you!" he greeted me. "All day long, the sounds outside this window have been turning into events from my past."

He went on to tell me, in devastating detail, about the valley of his childhood, out West. The names of all his classmates and the ways each had distinguished or humiliated himself in coming of age. The frozen rabbits hanging on the barn wall that kept the family alive all winter. Every single title in the valley library, outread and exhausted by fourteen.

Before I left town, I put another book in Taylor's hands. One for the permanent record. One he would never read. I gave him the first bound galley of my second book, Prisoner's Dilemma.

Number two was my memorial to a sick father. In it, I described every impasse of history but his. Only the passage of years, only knowing I'd never show Richard Powers, Sr., what fiction had done to him, made that fiction possible.

I told Taylor about my father. How I'd broken his heart. His lover's quarrel with the world. His disappearance at the end, his one last frontier adventure. I told Taylor about the cryptic absolution Dad sent me from the Yukon. The cremation of Sam McGee.

At my mention of the name, Taylor's lips crooked. Astonishingly, the man to whom I owed my Shakespeare and Yeats, my Marx and Freud, launched into a full rendition of the hack ballad. He did not miss a stanza. Death had no more dominion over him.

"I don't know how to say goodbye," I told Taylor. The book was my goodbye, because symbols are all that become of the real. They change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them. The symbols a life forms along its way work back out of the recorder's office where they wait, and, in time, they themselves go palpable. Lived.