Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"No, no. It's a common little commodity. Every home has one. You might use it to fix your plumbing, or tighten a loose dowel rod. ."

Her face stayed blank, helpful but passive. Finally, something I said broke through. Her expression fled from confusion to anger in the space of one thought.

"Do you mean a wrench?"

"That's it!" I shouted.

"Then why the hell didn't you say you wanted a wrench?"

I had been better off with the impenetrable accent and the babble grammar. I'd communicated more when the only words I had were "I don't have the words."

I went about in a daily grief that, like Taylor on the effects of his chemo, I could not describe adequately in the most native of languages. C. mistook that sadness. She felt it directed at her, at her idea to move us to this invented place.

She grew defensive, self-accusing. "I know you love me, Beau. But you don't need any of this."

"Any of what?"

"I'm not sure I need any of it either. What are we doing here? My parents don't need me to take care of them, do they? They chose to come back here all by themselves."

"A good choice, no?"

"Oh yes. They're happier here than they ever were in Chicago. They haven't a minute to themselves."

"What's the problem? I thought the point was to discover what nationality you were."

"I'm further from that than I was in the States. I look at myself, and I can't even recognize what I've become."

"Gone native?"

C. laughed, protecting me. "Sometimes this country drives me up the bloody wall. The village patrol, eyeing every irregular behavior. The social agenda, all worked out for you in advance. The gezelligheid. The close little shops. The lines for everything. The little old ladies shoving you out of the way, or choosing the narrowest possible aisle in the densest country on earth to stop and gossip. Nothing's ever open. Half the country's on the dole."

"You sound like the American ambassador."

"And I've dragged you into the middle of all this!"

"I'm fine. I'm having a great time." A lie on the surface. But not, if this meant anything, deep down. "We can walk to four major language regions from our front stoop. Two hours away from three of the world's greatest museums. And green herring by the bucket. I'd never have had this chance. Except for you, C."

That much was true, even on the surface. Her gamble had thrown open all possibility, however much possibility now upended us.

When my second book came out, C.'s restlessness pitched into the distress bands. Publication of a novel is a nonevent arranged to look like news. Prisoner produced a spate of statements, positioning my career on the turnpike of contemporary letters like a dot on the AAA Triptiks. The point often seemed to be to spare people the inconvenience of reading.

It killed C. to read that I was a fresh commodity to keep an eye on. That I was intensely private. That I lived in U., when in fact I lived in E., where the shopkeepers scolded me for linguistic perversity. That I was a fast-rising star in the literary firmament who had X's brains and Y's punch lines. That the eighties had been waiting for me.

I tried to tell her. "It's all nonsense. Market-making, for an increasingly smaller market. They do it, we ignore it, and keep working. It's part of the business."

"So we're in business now?"

"No. Okay. Not business. Part of the… C. Sweet. Let's not make ourselves nuts."

"We don't need to make ourselves anything." She smacked the pile of newsprint that New York's clipping service kept sending us. "The pros will make us into anything they want."

"C. You know who we are. The pair bond. All the rest of this is somebody else's construction. Nothing's changed."

"Of course it's changed. It's not just you and me anymore. You're obligated. You have to make good on opportunity. Everyone and his typewriting monkey would kill for a shot at what's fallen in your lap."

I tried to tell her that there was no obligation, no opportunity that we didn't already have. I tried to comb out the snarls left by public evaluation. That was my job: to keep things unchanged and make them right. But the better I did my job, the more I condemned C. to the opposite employment.

Nor did it help when mourning for Taylor led me into a period of work more intense than I will ever know again. The simplest possible tune had come to me — four notes, then four more, four times over. Selection had whittled at that tune until it grew as long and polyphonic as the planetary concert hall.

The book I needed to write sat on the simplest of bases. Life remembered. Life described. It wrote down and repeated what worked. The small copying errors the text made in running off examples of itself, edited by the world's differential rejection and forgiveness, produced the entire collaborative canon.

For what turned out to be years, this seemed to me a book's only conceivable theme. And thirty, the only age that would take such a theme on — old enough for a glimpse at meaning, immature enough to still think meaning pursuable.

I would fail, of course, in my aerial survey. To make a map on the scale of one to one, to bring the people, the genomes I loved back to life would have required contrapuntal skill on an evolutionary scale. But while I worked on my variations, work itself seemed to be the grave where buried love did its living.

So I spent myself on work, writing a story about a reference librarian, a failed academic, and a life scientist who, diverted, becomes the subject of the experiment he runs. I split the story among the venues of my life. I tried to pack it with anagrams and acrostics, replies to every word anyone had ever sent me, for this would be my one long letter back.

I wanted to write an encyclopedia of the Information Age. The nearest reference library was kilometers away, tiny, and in a foreign tongue. I wrote about music, with only a cheap, portable cassette player to check my descriptions. I typed my computer saga on an obsolete 512K, low-density floppy-based machine that will forever ruin me to imagine, because C., in her technophobia, had picked it out and purchased it for me to sweeten my return to that country.

I lost myself in data and the heart's decoding urge. Nothing else had any interest. Life became an interruption of my description of it. I wanted nothing else but to read, work, travel now and again, take care of my C. And for a long time, I did just that.

The book grew beyond my ability to say how it should go. The story itself turned into an opportunity, an obligation that scared the hell out of us both. Some reentrant map inside me ran away with itself, insisting it was real. No amount of public judgment matched private possibility for sheer terror.

C. read my Gold Bug code as it took shape, variation by variation. She came home exhausted, eager for alternate life. She nagged me for new chapters. "I want my friends!"

She knew what I needed to hear, and said as much. But I think she did love that world for her own reasons. "So this is what you do all day while I'm out slaving over a hot word processor. I can hardly believe that the goof who cooks for me produced this."

I'd load up a chunk of text and seat her at the keys. Then she would scroll through my story on-screen while I lay on the couch holding my breath, pretending to occupy myself with a magazine. Every so often she laughed at some invented inanity. I still had the courage for silliness back then.

Hearing her, I looked up, relieved. Redeemed. 'Tell me!" I begged, pushing my luck. She would read out loud the line that had made her cackle. And I'd giggle along then, as if she had written the gag. She gave more generously than the first of audiences. But C. needed some story for herself, as endless and private a thing as I now had. Her devotion to my project, fierce and unquestioning, was bitterness by another name. She met my constant infidelity with encouraging smiles, and braced for the day when strangers would declare their love for a story that should never have been more than hers.