Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"It goes on—"

"That's all right, Philip. I get the picture."

"No, really. It says you are all right, in your own peculiar way. Just a little flawed. It says you could be good if you just kept your story simple, with lovable characters. Like The Diary of Anne Frank."

We had sat in front of that girl's house, C. and I, at dusk two years before. Up in the city for a day's sightseeing, too broken by that After-house of time to want, anymore, to move. We could not even bring ourselves to put our arms around each other.

"Hey! You could read that story to our little apparatus, couldn't you? In the original, I mean. Now, that would throw the poor girl for a loss. She wouldn't even know what hit her."

I could not look at Helen, because Helen was nowhere. I looked at the open anthology next to the microphone. "Dover Beach" seemed a sad irrelevance.

"Should we read her the review?" Lentz cackled. He scanned the page, smirking and shaking his head. "You'll forgive me if I take this like a bad winner? I'd like to think that I'm not losing a novelist friend. I'm gaining a long-term unpaid lab assistant."

I walked out, leaving Lentz chiding me with apologies and Helen wondering what had become of Matthew Arnold.

Drama got me as far as the atrium. One of those drizzly midwinter days that U. excelled in. I wasn't about to bike home. I made my way to the cafeteria where, too early, I bought lunch. Plover and Hattrick sat at a table, nursing juices. I steered myself toward them. Their conversation, rapid and personal, broke off as I pulled up.

"Keep talking," I said, nodding at their notebooks, closed on the table in front of them. "I'm just the humanist fly on the wall."

Plover examined my tray of onion rings and Italian beef. "Don't eat grease, Rick. Grease will kill you."

"Leave him be," Diana scolded. "He's too young to start being healthy."

"I know half a dozen people who have had heart attacks in their early thirties."

"Harold. Quit with the Jeremiah thing already." Diana turned to me. "We were just talking about yesterday's piece in the Tunes." She smiled. "Sorry!" Friendly, singsong, not heavily invested. The empirical bias. As if peer review weren't that consequential. As if a person's work was what it was, unchanged by decree.

Harold looked in my face. "I haven't read the book. But I know from my clinical days that people who have just undergone breakups of long relationships tend to see the world in apocalyptic terms."

Taken aback, all over the map. "Your clinical days?"

"Oh yeah. I used to think we knew enough about the way the mind works to put that knowledge to good use in the field. But I was much older then."

Diana snorted. "Harold likes to blame things on his inner child."

"Uh, if I've walked into the middle of something here, I can—"

A voice behind me declared, "Powers's inner child is about eighty and hobbles around on a crutch."

Lentz, breathing heavily, fresh coffee cup in tow, joined us. I made my face a blank.

"Coffee will kill you, Philip," Plover intoned. "Ach, God! Not cream, too. And sugar!" Harold clutched his cheeks in two Munch-like hands.

Diana spoke askance, as if to colleagues who had not yet joined us. "Rick's inner child may have progeria. But his outer child died at — what would you say, Rick? Eleven? Twelve?"

I started to grin, relieved. "You've read the book? Already?"

She said nothing. My muscles fell. I looked like someone who had goosed a friend's bottom at a crowded party, only to have the surprised person turn around and reveal themselves a perfect stranger.

"You hated it?" Dead silence. "You hated it."

"You sound surprised," Diana said.

My turn to say nothing.

"Oh, Ricky. You know it's brilliant, and all that. But it's so horrid. Misanthropic. Couldn't you have thrown us at least one little sop of hope?"

"I thought I had."

"Not enough."

"Would you buy it as homeopathy?"

"Homeopaths use very small doses. Look. We're all overwhelmed. We're all bewildered. Why read in the first place, if the people who are supposed to give us the aerial view can't tell us anything except what an inescapable mess we're in?"

The four of us sat looking everywhere but at one another. Her words rocked back and forth in me, like the last wake of a small craft.

"You're teaching the next book club section," Harold told her.

Lentz shook his head and pursed his lips. 'There are books you love. And then there are books. ."

But I had never once put fingers to keys for anything but love. I had written a book about lost children because I had lost my own child and wanted it back. More than I wanted anything in life, except to write.

Any hope that I might somehow be able to return to making fiction died at Diana's words. My work in progress was a sham, no more than a sentence climbing snowy mountain tracks in a cartoon of wartime. I was working from nothing but the desire to fulfill a contract. I would return the advance for the unwritten book to New York and call it a day.

Picture a train heading south. It works its wounded veterans over the mountain passes to a sweet, imaginary country called — by coincidence, just like the real one — Italy. Not Italy in the original edition, but taking that place's name now and in all subsequent printings.

Imagine yourself traveling to a country where you won't be sick anymore. This country is full of the thing you want most. As much of it as you ever dared ask for. Whatever that thing is. The one thing that means more to you than anything.

This country is a continuous outdoor café. When all else about the account fades like a moldy fresco, this image lives on in your inner travelogue. In this country, at this café, you can sit in the sun from dawn till dusk. On the piazza. The piazza d'. Your private pool of shade remains bathed in unimaginable azure. And iced drinks on endless tab.

You can sit on this terrace for as long as you ever wanted. The terrace is life's arrival. All you need do is picture it.

No one can chase you away, and you can do whatever you like, until closing. Until the next chapter. Watch women walking across the public square. Read. Read this story, if you like. Or talk. Toast the waiter. Sing. Listen to the next table sing. Anything.

You have never thought twice about cafés, but you might like to sit in one now. You would like to order, then spread out a book in front of you. Sit and watch people walking, from a distance. A pleasure, just to picture this pleasure. This description, the sun, the one desirable thing, yours for the asking.

Reading: yes. Of course. To spend all day — that nom de plume for "forever" — doing nothing but reading! Just entertaining the thought, just following the idea fleshes out a scenario of composite delight. Your one surreptitious afternoon in the sunny countryside, exiled, at the last minute, from wartime, from inescapable disaster.

When I came home to E., things were different. Different again. Still different.

To my astonishment, I now passed for fluent. A demotic, misleading fluency, in fact, became my undoing. A week after losing it, lying on the floor of the apartment listening to the cassette of Taylor's funeral, I found myself walking past E.'s modest hardware store. I turned in, deciding on a whim to buy an item we had needed for as long as I'd lived in Limburg. As they always did in E.'s archaic shops, the salesperson greeted me on entry and asked to be of help.

"Good afternoon. I'm looking for this mechanical device, about yay big. It's a gizmo with an adjustable center pivot that allows you to apply increased torque. ."

"Hmm. N-no, I don't think we have anything like that here, sir." She gestured with her palms outward. You see where you are: a pocket, one-church town. Little call for the esoteric. "You might try Maastricht."