Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

We showed her Detroit, savaged by short-term economics. We showed her Sarajevo in 1911. Dresden and London in 1937. Atlanta in 1860. Baghdad. Tokyo, Cairo, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Los Angeles. Just before, and just after.

We told her East African in-law jokes. Java highland jokes about stupid Sumatrans. Aussie put-downs of Pommy bastards. Catskills jokes about unlicensed operation of knishes. City folk and country folk. Pat and Mike. Elephant riddles. Inuit jokes where fish and bears scoff at the mere idea of human existence.

We told her about revenge and forgiveness and contrition. We told her about retail outlets and sales tax, about ennui, about a world where you hear about everything yet where nothing happens to you. We told her how history always took place elsewhere.

We taught her never to draw to an inside straight and never to send a boy to do a man's job. We laid out the Queen's Necklace affair and the Cuban trade embargo. The rape of continent-sized forests and the South Sea bubble of cold fusion. Bar codes and baldness. Lint, lintels, lentils, Lent. The hope, blame, perversion, and crippled persistence of liberal humanism. Grace and disgrace and second chances. Suicide. Euthanasia. First love. Love at first sight.

Helen had to use language to create concepts. Words came first: the main barrier to her education. The brain did things the other way around. The brain juggled thought's lexicons through multiple subsystems, and the latecomers, the most dispensable lobes, were the ones where names per se hung out.

In evolution's beginning was not the word but the place we learned to pin the word to. Little babies registered and informed long before they invented more mama by calling her such. Aphasies, even deaf-mute sign aphasies, wove rich conceptual tapestries through their bodies' many axes in the absence of a single verb.

Chen and Keluga's dream seemed more hopeless to me all the time. The lexical rules of speech were not enumerable. Not even recursively so. So much less so, the lexical rules of felt existence. I spoke to Helen sentences that had half a dozen valid parsings or that resisted parsing altogether. I pitied her as I reeled off the exceptions to a Chen-Keluga semantic categorization of "tree." All trees have green leaves at some time during the year unless the tree is a red maple or a saguaro or diseased or dormant or petrified or a seedling or recently visited by locusts or fire or malicious children or unless it is a family tree or a shoe tree or… An exhaustive dictionary for the term would take every tree that ever lived just to make the pages.

Not to mention trees in politics, religion, commerce, or philosophy. I could read Helen the poem that insisted no poem in creation stood comparison to one. But I could not lay out the difference between popular and academic, between hearth and hermeneutic, poetry and verse, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Then then and Then now, between evocative simile and mind-fogging confusion, prewar sentimentality and the deforested poem-landscape just before that poet's death in the French trenches. Words alone would not explain to Helen the difference between "poem" and "tree." She could diagram, but she could not climb.

I taught her the parts of the internal combustion engine and how to make change. I told her how my brother liked to go into the "Everything's a Dollar" store and ask how much things were. I told her Taylor's favorite joke about the priest, the scientist, and the literary critic each receiving the death sentence. I told her about the WPA and the interstate system. She asked why there were interstates in Hawaii. I couldn't say.

I told her how, as a boy, I often played at saving my plastic farm animals from a worldwide flood. Only when I managed to corral them all into a small cardboard box were they saved. Then I would look for a smaller cardboard ark and start the whole desperate rescue over again.

I told her all these data, weaving from them a plot of well-formed sentences. But she would never get to their essence through sentences alone. I told her the term for that sensation we feel when some noun we slam up against triggers reengagement with the world's living concepts. But the tag did not yet let her feel anything close to the name's underpinning cascade.

Sensation was my lone river into the interior. More pictures and sounds. A bitmap was, even with fancy compression algorithms, worth a good deal more than 1K words. I thought to bruise her into concept. Soak her hands in the gush of pump water that all those parts of speech merely stood for.

I played more Mozart for Helen. Mozarts of every make and model, from every era of history and most major landmasses. I let her linger over eternally returning rondos. I stood by and watched her struggle with the most banal radio tune, leaping to make it out, falling always five fingers short of feeling's plagal cadence.

"Nice treble," Lentz cracked about a polyphonic piece from one renaissance or another. "Don't you think all performing countertenors should have to pass a urinalysis?"

I repeated the joke to Helen. Nothing but ache and confusion. I tailored a hurt for her, and God save such a pitiless engineer.

She had trouble with values, because she had no fear of self-preservation, no hierarchy of hard-wired pain. She had trouble with causality, because she had no low-level systems of motion perception from which the forms of causality are thought to percolate. She was a gigantic, lexical genius stuck at Piaget's stage two.

Helen's refugee readings shook loose my own strangeness. Now that I'd told New York there would be no more fictions, anything might happen. In fact, it already had. My life story was one only through the barest red-penciled edits. On second reading, everything seemed different. I'd forgotten all the good bits, the scene swellers and interstices, the supporting characters and exotic locales, there for no reason but density and flavor. I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

I left the Center after one extended session and blundered into a spring that had arrived in my absence. It took my eyes a minute to adjust, my thoughts a moment longer. The real season, or some convincing autumn look-alike? I'd lost track, turned around in time.

All this awakened alien sensation came home to rest in A. In my idea of A. A.'s body, whether in faint first run or focused replay, moved through possibility like a question through silence. My newfound land. I don't know if she led me to the open text, or if I opened on the hope of reading through to the end with her. She bent like a reflexive verb. When I saw A., I saw myself looking out over the plain of the visible. And whatever I looked on, there I saw A.

The day Helen taught herself to read print, I wanted to walk across the waterlogged town and tell A. Each time the temperature fluctuated, I wanted to run and see if she was well. When Helen's favorite voice made it seem the world had been created earlier and more often than anyone suspected, I wanted to call A., play the cut for her over the phone. I filled with the idea of her at each breeze. A good punch line, and I could rework the anonymous disarmament she had so far flashed me into an actual smile.

I imagined complaining to A. about Lentz's annoyances. Lentz's wife, locked in the absolution of perpetual forgetting, made me want to rush to protect her. To find in her my protection. In my mind, I showed her that wall calendar of the couple, taken by their vanished child. We stood in front of it together, saying nothing.

Most nights, I fell asleep wishing her well.

A. turned my whole conception of delight into a free-range phantom. Because she existed, my letters again had a rudder. The air at this hour of my life smelled arbitrary, unbounded, like India, like earthworms after a rain, like a macaronic, like a surprise century back in the B.C.'s, one I hadn't thought about since I was small. All in what A. brought me to know.