Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Even I enjoyed this one. But C.'s pleasure exploded so sharply it laid me open. Her joyance at my ditsiness ached as it unkinked itself. Her rowdy laugh said how long it had been since its last trip this way.

The blur of linguistic borders became a game. So long as I had a copy editor back in New York, I felt safe spelunking around in language's limestone. But C. could not afford the word leak. She needed the containers to be as solid as possible, so that she could pour from one into the other without spilling.

She trained in to the city each day, to the State Language Institute, as it was called by another name. There, under the shadow of the oldest church in the Netherlands, she sat doing drills. She worked bolted to the floor in a kiddie chair-desk, like that giant Wendy on whom the betrayed Peter pulls his switchblade.

"Beau, it's classic torture, pure and simple. Intermittent punishment and praise. They just want to see if you have the animal persistence to survive brain death."

"Well. You know what they say, don't you?"

"What?"

"Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine."

"That's what they say?"

"Sometimes."

'They're all sadists. Oh, not the poets, although… I mean my instructors. My Engelse schrijfvaardigheid guy likes to reel off sarcasms in both languages until the little Dutch girls break down in tears."

"Character strengthening?"

"That's how he acts. Don't you think it's ironic?"

"What?" I hated irony. I didn't even like the word in her mouth.

"That I came here thinking I'd write my family memoir? And all I've written is the Dutch version of Article Two of the Proceedings of the International Commission on Trade Liberalization."

She still came to me in her distress. And I still thought I might protect her. Even sex now was a kind of periodic assuaging. She asked for a touch that would alleviate, not thrill. Or fear left me unable to consider thrilling.

The more care I took, the more I turned her into the needy one. And the more I did that, the needier she became. We construed her helplessness between the two of us. And that was not care on my part. That was cowardice.

It never occurred to either of us. Protection itself was killing her. The protection of love.

The worse her day went, the more I tried to load with consolations the book I worked on. I shot for the simple charm of strangeness. One night every two weeks or so, she could lose herself in four lives that had mercifully nothing to do with her own. Nothing, that is, except a prediction neither of us saw yet. A sketch of everything we would imitate in awful fact. The story we'd play out in detail.

To pollinate strangeness, I went with the familiar. I sent my protagonist Todd to Flanders, even Limburg, to report on our language derangement from another angle. I retold all our jokes, reprised our friends in all their voices. I hoped that the outside view — our life van anders om —might renew our own amazement at the unnamable escapade we'd grown too close to to know.

My Gold Bug accreted the theme she studied. The book itself became the topic it grew into. It was my act of unschooled translation. Not a how-to, but another kind of self-help manual all together. How do you put moonlight into a chamber? I might better have asked: how can the chamber see it's lit? The room still blazed as it always had. Only our eyes needed attenuating.

"Do I seem different?" C. wanted to know one evening, after a sad chapter. She still laughed out loud while reading me. But her laughs, like the book she read, had become a songbook of homesickness. She Bounded for all the world like one of my lost characters.

"Different how?"

"Than I was. Than the girl who you sat with on the Quad, the day your dad died." Than the twink you fell for and changed your life to fit.

"You seem — more substantial."

"What does that translate into, in kilos?"

I felt cold. Colder than when I received that copy of "The Cremation of Sam McGee" from a man who had died three days before. I could live with that first death, because I had the hope of her. I wasn't sure I could live with the death that now informed me.

Yet the proof seemed irrefutable. One can't love a person for her vulnerability and still hope to outlast life with her.

Every career has an exclusive corner on loneliness. The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers. During Helen's training, I received letters, even gifts, from people who had stolen something from my bedtime apocalypse. People I'd never meet.

A school principal in the catastrophically expanding western city of P. wrote how she daily watched over the kids who had escaped from my terminal pede ward. A doctor in New York sent a mug stenciled with the words "Clap if you still can." C., I imagined, would not even know the book existed until it appeared in the Low Countries, in translation.

Every era mints its trademark desolation. Mine lay in how much my time had come to see and hear. We seemed to be on the verge of a new evolution in consciousness. We'd hit upon collective awareness. Then, awareness of awareness. Now we were taking one giant step back from vantage, wrecked by how smoky the portal was, how clouded over.

The mind was one of those spy-in-the-sky satellites capable of reading license plates from outer space. Only now it was learning how to pan back. To see the assault tank the plate belonged to. To notice that tanks were everywhere. That space was deeper than any satellite supposed.

"I bit off more than I could chew, the other day," I mentioned to Helen, in passing.

"Bit off…?" Helen's associative circuits whirred, mystified.

"It means I got in over my head." Worse and worse. "I needed to say something to an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. So I decided to write her a letter."

Writing. Letters. Friendship. Regret. Volition. The simple past. The past perfect.

"I thought it would be a short letter, but the words got away from me. Before I knew it, it was many, many pages long."

Pages. Length. A screwball figure of speech. The self-surprising foundation of all our actions.

"I finished the letter and put it in an envelope. I sealed the envelope and wrote just the name of my friend on it. I mailed the letter."

Containment. Enclosure. Distributed subjects in compound clauses. Pronominal substitution. Mail. The idea of the international postal system. Distance. Physical, untraversable distance. Pickup and delivery. Longing and loss.

"But the letter never reached my friend. Why not?"

I knew for a fact that we had never talked about addresses. Nor, to my recall, had the idea come up even obliquely in all the thousands of pages we studied. I wanted to see if, from the countless bodies of knowledge Helen would need even to orient the problem, she might somehow produce a superinference, a high-level leap to the idea that, in this existence, sending a message by name alone was not enough. One had to say where in the world's infinite density the name lay.

"The letter counted how many pages?" Helen asked.

"I don't think that makes any difference."

Helen fell into hurt silence. After great length, she said, "You didn't put a rudder on your letter."

"She's getting smarter," Lentz undertoned, in awe, from far across the room.

Something had gotten into Lentz. The smugness began effacing itself. His merciless, empirical anality softened to verbal diarrhea.

He still ragged me at every opportunity. "Do we have to know that for the exam?" His wheedling lent new meaning to the old student refrain.

Helen humbled him. Her connections grew denser than even Lentz had dared hope. Her knowledge was neither deep nor wide. But it was supple.

She produced the same kind of dream logic as any new speaker. She could do the child classics: "Is it tomorrow yet?" "When does orange become red?" Her questions came even more detached, because she could neither feel nor gauge herself. Hungry-full; warm-cold; up — down: she worked these as abstract axes, not as absolutes of need. Helen accounted to nothing but weak semantics, the brittle-bone disease of word. As such, she was free to assemble the strangest skeletons gravity had yet to challenge. Her corkers worked to weaken Philip's surety. Even he found it tough to preserve syllogistic composure in the face of something like, "A lost tooth loses its appetite?"