Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Instrumental music left her more restive. The blur of raw event rattled her in ways it never would rattle a thing with a body. She struggled to turn bowed strings and buzzing reeds into phonemes. The less she could, the harder she tried.

I took her on a tour of world music. I played her the kluay and gong wong yai of my youth. I tried her on sackbuts and singing drums. I had no way of gauging her response, whether delight or agitation. She stopped me only once. In a moment of backsliding, I'd put on a tape I'd made years ago for C. A sampler of her favorites that, in comfort or in spite, was one of the few keepsakes I rescued when I made my quick evacuation from Europe.

I'd forgotten what was on the tape. We reached that ineffable clarinet, assembling, atop the reconciled chamber orchestra, the peace that the world cannot give. Helen shouted, "I know that." This piece is familiar. Mine.

I did not see how, and then I did. The Mozart that Lentz fed a nameless neural net the night before I met him. Long before we'd conceived of the idea of Helen, some ancestor of hers had learned this piece.

I felt my skin turn to goose flesh — chicken skin, as I would have called it in Dutch, as little as a year ago. Lentz had sutured her to old circuits, experiments he never so much as described to me. Helen had inherited archetypes. She'd been born wanting song. She remembered, even things that she had never lived.

Three weeks of deliberately not thinking about her, and my suppressed image of A. erupted into full-blown obsession.

I imagined a whole day around her. I outfitted her hours and blueprinted her afternoons. I pictured when and how she took her meals. I let us talk over the international community's latest gossip. We laughed at every inanity, local and large. I comforted her invented distress and celebrated the triumphs I made her tell me. I put her to bed each evening to words and music. I woke her up in life's early morning and stared at her unsuspecting eyes as they blinked open in astonishment, full of grace, force, fascination, accepting, improvising, the equal to anything.

My decline accelerated, complete and irrevocable, like the best of runaway sleds. I fed on daily, exhilarating regression. I bicycled past A.'s house in the dark, something I'd last done at eleven for a girl whose name I'd forever forgotten by high school. I studied A.'s phone number in the departmental directory. I looked up her schedule in the English staff Rolodex. I learned that she taught composition and intro to fiction while finishing her own graduate course work. Feminist theory.

I memorized her office hours. She was in two mornings a week and three afternoons. At first, I avoided the building at those times. Later, I shot for them.

I told myself that my preoccupation with A. was harmless. Cultivated. A hobby. The safest hazard of my occupation. Then, one morning, it was none of those things.

I was browsing the campus bookstore, anxious, as usual, at all the volumes I would never get to before I died. I saw A. before I knew I saw her. She stood purveying Theory and Criticism, shelves that I hadn't looked at for a long time. She hovered over the lined-up spines in a reverie of self-judgment. I realized I was in trouble. More trouble than I could remember having been in.

I might have picked up on this long before I did. Any fix that the self needs to convince itself of has already failed.

I saw her no more than once in a dozen days, for less than a minute each time. We had yet to exchange a nod of the head. Hello lay outside the realm of possibility. Watching her at wide intervals was like listening to those endless Renaissance melismas where the very idea of words gets lost in a tangle of counterpoint a year longer than the ear.

A little sun, a cool breeze, this face, and I was done for. Dead. A carapace the length of my body split open. All I needed to do was step out.

A. floated free of her signifier. Her features traced a curve that encouraged my projective exercise. Or rather, my projection pinned that facilitating arc to her like a corsage. It seemed to me, then, that love must make a blank slate to write itself on. Only instant, arbitrary attachment to strangeness made real that lab where processes bested things, two falls out of three.

I talked to her so often in my head I felt in danger of hailing A. each time I saw her. No limit to how badly I might humiliate myself. At my age, such absurdity did not even qualify as licit humiliation. When C. and I had moved to B., this other girl was still kneesock-deep in dolls.

Premature mid-life crisis, I told myself. Just getting it out of the way early. On lucid days, I dropped the "early."

That A.'s enzyme contour picked some physiological lock of mine I had no doubt. The thing she set free, though, spoke like a delirious traveler stumbling back from cartographic fantasy: Prester John's kingdom. The Mountains of Kong. Someplace where spirit exceeded fluke epiphenomenon, more than mechanical spin-off.

Seeing A. made me happy. And happy, the self we build blows past the punched holes of its piano roll to become music itself. Whole verbs of standing sound, solid in the enabled air.

I did it all myself. No encouragement. Life simulating electronics. I turned A. into a conflation of every friend who had ever happened to me. I tapped her to solve, recover more loves than I had forgotten. I knew I'd invented her. Yet knowledge spared me nothing, least of all the return of conviction.

I saw, as if from above, who this woman was. She was not the C. I had known, nor a younger replay. No resemblance. No association. Or rather, both A. and C. were some reminder of a lost third thing I didn't even remember having loved.

A. was the person C. had only impersonated. The one I thought the other might become. That love of eleven years now seemed an expensive primer in recognition, a disastrous fable-warning, a pointer to the thing I could not afford to miss this time. I had come back to U. after long training in the dangers of hasty generalization. Returned to learn that no script is a wrap after just one reading.

We began to lose our English. We could no longer tell if constructions were idiomatic. "I have a hackle on that woman." "This place has a pleasant sphere." "Proof the middle, while I do the stove on."

C. and I tossed many of these word salads ourselves. We just liked certain Dutch turns of phrase. They expressed more than the ones we started with. "I get a kriebel from that thing." "I was dumb surprised. What could I say? I silented." "Neck over head" made more sense than "head over heels," and after a few repetitions, "less or more" began to feel more natural than the other way around.

We'd start out butchering translations just to amuse each other. "Want to go for a wandel?" "Are we fietsing it or footing it?" "Forget your mantel not!" By the third or fourth burlesque repetition, we'd wind up wondering from which language the words came.

We mirrored her parents, whose twenty years of Chicago English now mengseled itself back into their native Limburgs dialect. We rebuilt their private spreektaal in reverse. Those two or three nights a week when C. and I visited her folks, the four of us formed a hopeless speech community incomprehensible to anyone but us.

We learned new labels by a series of mnemonics. Ezelbruggetjes, as we now called them. Little donkey bridges. The mind as a donkey that needs leading across the tentatively spanned chasm. The problem with mnemonics is that they fail almost by definition. If they aren't memorable enough, they're just extra baggage. If too memorable, they upstage the thing they index. Ten years on, all you remember is the pointer.

I still made absurd errors of speech. But increasing sophistication made my accidents funny even to me. I asked a cousin who had just given birth how things had gone with the delivery. English's archaic "befall" had stayed current in Dutch, like some teen elopement that somehow lasted, against everyone's predictions, into old age. But I muffed the common idiom and instead of asking, "How did things befall you?" I somehow asked, "How did you come to have fallen?"