Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"Maybe the whole discipline is breaking up," I suggested. "As a relative outsider, I'd say no one seems to know quite what they want the thing to become anymore."

"Total chaos. Who's in, who's out, who's up, who's down. All that hot new stuff, the pomo and the cultural studies and the linguistic-based solipsism. I'm fed up with it. It's all such verbal wanking off. Frankly, I no longer give a fuck what happens to Isabel Archer. Neither politically, economically, psychologically, structurally, nor posthumanistically. So she's got to choose which of these three loser boys she has to marry. This takes how many hundred pages?"

Her eyes caught mine and her hand flew to her mouth. "Oops. Sorry. It's that Catholic pottymouth of mine. You are faculty, aren't you?"

"Technically. So what do you think you'll do with yourself?" Name the city. Your terms. Unconditional.

"I figure I might get a job in business somewhere. Editing or marketing or something. If I'm going to be abused, I can at least get paid to take it."

She gave me not one syllable of encouragement. No shy curiosity or even dry interest. But I had already done so much on no encouragement at all. All on my own.

It occurred to me: who A. was. Why I had come back to U. to meet her. A. was Helen's pace rabbit. Her heat competition. She had beaten the master's exam, the one we'd pitch our machine against. She was the woman who pulled love from the buried grave. The designated hitter for frailty, feeling, and whim. The champion of the humans.

"Thanks for the coffee," she said. "I have to make animal tracks. See ya!"

She disappeared faster than she had the first time.

But I had spoken to A. I'd sat three feet from her, for half an hour. Amid a corsage of coffee spoons, I replayed the conversation. I lived on that "See ya," trying to wrest it back from metaphor, to move around in it, through the latticework of lived time.

C. must have cared for my third book. She said as much in every available way, and she had no particular reason to lie just yet.

The story had mutated into a hopeful monster. Here and there, I tried to code into its paragraph cells the moves we made, the friends we loved, the events that shaped us and were worth saving. I hoped my molecular genetics might transcribe, if not an encyclopedia of successful solutions to experience, at least some fossil record of the questions. I wanted my extended metaphors to mirror speculation in the widest lens, the way the genome carries along in time's wake all the residue of bygone experiments and hypotheses, from bacteria on. But novels, like genomes, consist mostly of intron baggage. And as with evolution, you can't always get there efficiently from here.

At thirteen hundred pages, my typescript had only the longest odds against being bought. Whatever my publishers expected, it wasn't this. At best, they'd issue a desperate request that I change trajectories, free the skinny book hiding inside this sumo. At worst, they'd kiss me off and wish me well. Great fun, but. Maybe one of those avant-garde presses?

C. and I went to the post office together. We were both more nervous than we'd been the first time, years before. We didn't know what to hope for. The manuscript took up a small crate.

"Send it by boat," C. said.

"It's expensive either way," I countered. "And the difference isn't that big. We can swing it, sweet!" I giggled.

"Boat," C. insisted. "Surface rate." Her eyes clouded. In a moment, she might have shouted or turned and walked away without a word.

I cradled the box, with its long customs form marked Drukwerk. Printed matter. Several kilos of story, an attempt to feel, in music, life's first principles and to hear, in those genetic principles, living tune. I'd tried to ground creation's stepladder in its molecular building blocks. I'd written a book that aspired to understanding, when I could not even understand the woman on whom my actions depended.

We sent my book Stateward by slow boat. Outside the post office, C. kissed me long and hard. She gamboled a few steps, exhilarated by the dusk. "Come on. Let's go out to eat." We never went out. "Let's go have Chin-Ind."

We celebrated by heading into the city and dining on rijsttafel. 'The wages of colonialism," C. babbled. "Calories and imperial exploitation," she said, holding up a satay. "Now, there's guilty pleasure for you."

At meal's end, we realized that we'd forgotten to toast. C. held up what was left of her water glass. "To us, Beauie. To the pair bond. To the double helix."

"What could be simpler?" I added.

Nothing could harm us anymore. I had lived to finish my work. The rest of life would all be bonus round. Afterward, we went home and read to each other, the first time in a long time. I spooned my body against hers. Before we fell asleep, I joked, "If they don't want this one, I can always go back to programming."

"… To which the woman says, 'If you want infidelity, you'll have to find someone else.' "

"That's a joke," Helen announced. Part theory, part improv, part defensive accusation. She had learned to recognize humor: those utterances even more inexplicable than the rest of the unsolvable smear.

Or she told it in my voice alone. I felt unaccountably happy. I had for a week. Blessed by everything. And everything I looked upon felt blessed.

Her response fed my upswell. "Helen," I rambled, "thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore."

"Powers?" Lentz warned from behind his desk. "Careful."

"What? You think today's twenty-two-year-old knows from Nicean barks of yore?"

"I didn't mean that."

I looked over at him. Lentz did not glance up from his stack of journal offprints.

"Yours," Helen corrected me. "Those barks of yours."

"No, yore. Barks of yore. It means an old boat."

I did the rest of the poem for her. Oral interp. It was on the List, after all.

"Who weary, wayworn wanders?" she wanted to know.

"Ulysses?" I looked over at Lentz for confirmation. He ignored me. "Yeah. It has to be Ulysses. Do you remember him?"

"The wily Odysseus." It was impossible to tell if she had developed a facetious streak, or if she was just mimicking. "Why he wanders?"

I corrected her Creole syntax and made my best guess.

"Why is the sea perfumed?"

"Complex," I clarified. "Basically, I think it means that a sweet thing calls the wanderer home."

"It means that sweetness is like the way you go back."

"Me?"

"Beauty calls you back to me."

"Not me. The speaker of the poem. And not you, I'm afraid. A friend of the speaker's, also named Helen. If that's her real name."

Helen said nothing. Lentz said, "I told you to be careful."

Only more lessons could cure the effect of lessons. "Remember that 'Helen' is also the name—"

"Helen of Troy," Helen rushed. She had paid particular attention to the story when we'd done it.

"And the wily Odysseus…"

"Went to reget that Helen."

" 'Reget' is not a word. Recover, maybe. Retrieve. Rescue."

Lentz mumbled, "The bitch hardly asked to be rescued."

"On those Nicean barks of yore." Helen sounded almost distorted with excitement.

"Explain."

"The wily Odysseus went to Troy on old boats."

The presentation was clumsy. I had to lead the witness. But I doubted that many high schoolers could extract as much, these days. A face like the face that launched a thousand ships now called one back to port.

I hid my pleasure, not wanting to scatter Helen's synapses. I thought to correct her preposition. But I couldn't come up with a good rule for when we travel on ships and when we travel in them. Rules could be either followed or known. Not both.

"It talks of love, the words?" Helen asked. She copied my inversion, the leading question. The poem is about love, wouldn't you say?