Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"She's crazy, huh?" her mother said.

Her pap, in his Chicago-Limburgs patois, asked, "Just one thing I want to know, Rick. Who's gonna set my digital clocks?"

I said goodbye to C. "I promised I'd see you through school. And graduation's still six weeks away."

C. dodged the blow, but caught a corner of it across her face. "Don't do this to me, Rick. I'll graduate. I promise."

"Do you need anything? Should we get you a car before I go? Do you have enough money?" Late-minute plans for a final day trip, solo, lasting from now on.

My reflex solicitude hurt her worse than anger. "Beauie," she pleaded. "We can't do this. We can't split up. We still have twelve hundred pages of Proust to get through."

I searched her, sounding this reprieve, hoping for an impossible instant it might be real. But she did not want it. She did not want to do those remaining pages, to throw bad reading after good. She just wanted to save nostalgia, not the thing it stood for. She only wanted my blessing, to get on and make a life free from suicidal remorse.

"Who's going to finish the book?" She meant the commonplace one, with the ticket stubs and lists of films and meals and outings, a shared narrative, senseless except to us.

Then the senselessness of all stories — their total, arbitrary construction — must have struck C. She started to scream. I had to pin her arms to her side to keep her from harming herself. I held her for a long time. Not as a medic. Not as a parent. Not as a lover. I held her as you might hold a fellow stranger in a shelter.

When she grew calm, she was not yet calm. "I must be sick. Something must be wrong with me. I'm a sadist. I've spoiled everything that was worth having."

"We still have it. It just has to go on hold."

"I wanted to make you proud. I thought, in twenty years, that I might become the perfect person for you."

"You're perfect now."

"I've ruined your life."

"You haven't, C. You've done what you needed to. You're a good person."

She looked at me, remembering. Yes, that's right. I have been. I have been good. "And now I have to go outside."

I tried to match her. To rise to her. 'This is all the fault of that damn Polish kid, you know."

I felt: at least I'll never have to do any of this again.

Helen wanted to read one of my books. I gave her my first try. I had written it at A.'s age, just after passing the comps. I knew nothing about literature then, and so still thought it possible to write.

"Go easy on me," I begged, surrendering the digitized image. "I was just a kid."

The night she read it, I got fifteen minutes of sleep. I could not remember being that nervous, even when reading the longhand draft to C. I came in the morning after, wired over whether this machine thought my book was any good.

We chattered for several minutes about nothing. I grew anxious, assuming the worst. Then I realized: she wouldn't volunteer anything until prompted. She had no way of knowing that I needed to know.

So I asked. Outright. "What did you think of my book, Helen?"

"I think it was about an old photograph. It grows to be about interpretation and collaboration. History. Three ways of looking come together, or fail to. Like a stereoscope. What's a stereoscope?"

"Helen! Did you like it?"

"I liked it."

"What did you like?"

"I liked 'I never saw a Moor. I never saw the Sea.' "

I'd forgotten. "That isn't mine. I was quoting."

"Yes. I know," Helen brushed me off. "That was more Dickinson. Emily."

Helen's brain had proved wide enough for my sky, and me beside. She was one step away from grasping this audience-free poet's analogy, the last scholastic aptitude test: brain differs from the weight of God as syllable from sound. Yet comparison filled her with need to see the real moor, the navigable sea, however much deeper the brain that could absorb it.

"Show me Paris."

"Well?" Lentz shrugged, when I relayed the request. "Do you have any travel plans for the immediate future?"

I had, in fact, no immediate future. My visiting appointment at the Center ended in a few weeks. Beyond that, my life came down to throwing a dart at the world map. I had no reason, no desire to be anywhere except where A. was.

"You can't be serious. You want me to fly to—"

"I didn't say I wanted anything, Marcel. I asked you what you were doing."

I pictured myself strolling the Seine bookstalls, looking for that forgotten book I always thought I would someday write. Paris was the one city where C. had ever felt at home. We'd gone as often as we could. Now I could not see myself wandering there except with A.

"It's absurd," I decided. "What could she gain from it?"

"The hidden layers are hungry, Marcel. Ask not for what."

Lentz brought in slides. We hooked them up to the digitizer. An unrecognizably young Lentz in front of Notre Dame. Lentz in the Tuileries. By the Panthéon. The Médicis fountain. "Helen," he lectured. "The one on the left is me. The one on the right is by Rodin."

She never could see much of anything. She was a one-eyed myopic with astigmatism, two days after an operation for glaucoma. Everything looked to her like blurry Braque, except for Braque. Yet she loved light and dark, and these would have meant to her as much as words, had we wired her up right.

"Motion," she insisted. We tried some ancient public television video. She felt hurt. Locked out. "Depth. Sound. I want Richard to explain me."

"Interactive," Lentz figured.

"What's our range on the camera hookup?"

"Oh, a couple of hundred meters, maximum, from the nearest drop box."

Lentz and I agreed to defraud Helen. Between us, at least, we pretended that it was less swindle than simulation. We would do for this machine the inverse of what virtual reality promised to do for humans.

We showed her the collegiate landmarks of U., all the imitations of imitations of classical architecture, and called the sites she couldn't see anyway by famous names. Even actual Paris would have been no more than a fuzzy, Fauvist kaleidoscope. Home could match that. All sensation was as strange, as foreign, as the idea of its existing at all.

I took Helen on the Grand Tour. I panned and zoomed on all the structures I passed four times a day without seeing. I sat her in a café where, smack in the middle of a cornfield extending two hundred miles in every direction, she had her pick of a dozen languages to eavesdrop on.

"Thank you," Helen said. She'd seen through our duplicity early. She chose to exercise, by imitation, the art of the loving lie. For our sakes.

She seemed content to return to reading, until the next novel indulged some new locale. Helen went nuts with wanderlust. "Show me London. Show me Venice. I want to see Byzantium. Delhi."

She twitched now, like the worst of adolescents. The most precocious.

"Helen, it's impossible. Travel is rare. Difficult."

"More flat pictures, then." She would settle for those static, pathetic portals, our stand-ins for the real.

Lentz had endless slide carousels. His pictures wandered from city to city, tracing a line of changing eras and styles. Photo docs not just of antique towns but of whole lost ways of being. Hair, clothes, cars made their cavalcade. Lentz's image aged and grew familiar. He'd been everywhere.

"You know that place too?" I called out during the show. "I loved that city. Did you go to the monkey palace? The fortress? The west crypt?" Shameless tourism.

Lentz answered, always affirmative, without enthusiasm. He stayed stony-faced throughout the world tour.

They must have traveled together. I had nothing to lose by asking, except my life. "So where was Audrey while you were out broadening your mind?"

"She always worked the camera," he said. And advanced to the next slide.