Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

He had no pictures of her. Carousels full of buildings, and no evidence of the tour's reason. I needed to go with A. to Brugge and Antwerp and Maastricht, if for no other reason than to record the trip. I needed pictures of her, in an album, on a shelf, in a room, in a real house. I needed to own something more than would fit in the emergency suitcase by the side of a rented bed. I pictured myself, at the end of the longer slide show, with four books to my name and not one decent snapshot.

I watched the rest of Lentz's travels in silence, except for the occasional bit of narration I added for Helen's sake. Each time I recognized one of Audrey's images, I stopped breathing. Frame after frame, and how could I tell Helen the first thing about having visited them? I had gotten out, been all over. And never saw anything until we tried to show it to this blind box.

Halfway through the travelogue, and all I knew of the projector, of the magic lantern, was its images. I lived at explanation's first minute. My office at the Center was as close to neuroscience's ground zero as a person could get. If I lived to expectancy, researchers would have produced an infant, ghostly, material theory of mind by the time I died. And I would not be able to follow it. I would be locked out, as consciousness locks us out from our own inner workings, not to mention the clearest word of another. The best I could hope for would be cartoon, layman's analysis, scraps from the empirical table.

I would take the scraps, then. "What do you do?" I asked Ram, at my next opportunity. I liked the man without qualification. I felt infinitely comfortable with him. And I'd done everything in my power to avoid getting to know him.

"Do? God forbid I do anything!" He held his palms out in front of him. They were the color of aging sugarcane. The kind I ate as a child, when my father, the adventurer, had abandoned Chicago for Thailand.

"What is your field of work?"

"What do you mean by work, heaven help?"

"Aw, come on. What do you mean by heaven?"

Ram's eyes sparkled, taunting targets for a spitting cobra. He would have preferred talking philosophy over neurology, two out of three days. "Do you know what the world rests on?" he asked.

"Not its laurels, God forbid."

Ram laughed. 'That's right. Make fun of me. It rests on the backs of elephants. And those elephants?"

"The shell of a turtle."

"Aha. You've heard this one. And that turtle?"

"Another turtle."

"He's good. He's good, this fiction writer. Now, do you or do you not believe that one of those turtles must necessarily go all the way down? That's it. That is the single question we are granted to ask while in this body. East, West, North, South. Is there a base terrapin or isn't there? Cosmology. This is the issue dividing us. The one we must each answer."

"Suppose I just asked you your field?"

"My friend. My fictional friend. The eye moves. We watch it as it does so. That is all."

"Ram. You're giving me a splitting headache."

He nodded with enthusiasm. "Come with me."

He took me into his labs. He placed several clear plastic overlays on a light table, a doctor dealing out the damning X rays.

"Look here and tell me what you see."

"Scatter patterns. They look like mineral deposit maps. Like fish radars over the Grand Banks, thirty years ago."

"I did not ask you what they looked like. I asked you what you see. Arrange these for me, please."

I studied the spots. The more I looked, the less they seemed a random distribution. After my eyes adjusted, the patterns sorted themselves into three groups.

"Exactly," Ram encouraged. "You might have missed one or two, but the correlation is strong. Who says that measurement is subjective?" He tapped my first pile. "Friends." He looked at me to see if I was following. He tapped it again, then went on to pile two. "Abstract acquaintances. Yes?" He pointed to the third pile and said, "Total strangers." He scrutinized my bewildered face and shrugged. "He does not understand me, this Powers fellow."

I didn't understand him. But I liked him. I liked him a great deal.

"Come. I'll show you. Would you mind if I subject you to this Western postindustrial instrument of torture?"

He indicated a chair fitted with a head vise. It looked like a prop from bad seventies science fiction.

"Why not. It's in the interests of science, right?"

Ram chuckled. He fitted my head into the restraint. My skull suitably immobilized, he projected three slides on a screen in front of me. Three portraits. Someone out of a Vladivostok high-school yearbook. Marilyn Monroe. And Ram himself.

The laser-guided instrument tracked the center of my pupil as I scanned each photograph. It took several sequential readings and spread the data points over a plastic overlay map of the image field. In the end, the paths my eyes traced over the different faces conformed to the categories he'd previously defined. Total stranger. Abstract acquaintance. Friend.

"Here is something you will also find very interesting." Ram pulled out another envelope with a small sample group.

"Why are these interesting? They're just like all the others, more or less."

"Aha!" He held up an index finger. "That's what makes them interesting. All of the people in this group suffer from prosopagnosia. Brain damage has rendered them incapable of recognizing people anymore. They deny having seen any face, even their own, even the face of their spouse or child. Or at least they think they can no longer recognize faces. Yet clearly, the eyes. ." His hand serpentined, tracing the route of the curve's knowledge.

"Astonishing."

"You know, I think the astonishing may be the ordinary by another name. But these results do lead us to many tempting guesses. That perception is carried out in several subsystems, we can say, most certainly. That these subsystems talk to each other: indeed. That perhaps they go on talking, these subsystems, even when the others stop listening. That breaks in communication might occur anywhere, at any point in the chain. That each part of a compound task may manifest its very own deficit. That everything you are capable of doing could be taken away from you, in discrete detail."

I added to Ram's list the obvious, the missing speculation. The look of the magic lantern. That what you loved could go foreign, without your ever knowing. That the eye could continue tracing familiarity, well into thought's unknown region.

"What do I look like?" I could find no face in the world. No color or structure. The days when I might have tried to pass her off as a Vermeer look-alike were over for good. Race, age, shape excluded too much. I needed some generic Head of a Girl that had no clan or continent and belonged nowhere in identifiable time.

"What do I look like, Richard? Please. Show me." I'd pictured her so many different ways over the course of the training. I thought: Perhaps some blank template Buddha, or a Cycladic figure. A trompe l'oeil landscape that became a figure on second glance. An Easter Island head. A Feininger or Pollock. A Sung bamboo. I didn't know how I thought of her now. I didn't know what she looked like.

She insisted. I turned up a suitable likeness. "It's a photo? It's someone you knew once? A woman friend?" She would have pretended ignorance for me. Would have let me off the hook again, except that she had to know.

The list of Excellent Undergraduate Teachers came out. Student evaluations of their evaluators. A. topped the graduate instructors in the English Department. I was thrilled, and confirmed by thrill in my intuition.

I forced the moment to its crisis. Helen and I had been hitting the books the Sunday evening after our world tour. The day's work had left me in a Spenserian stupor, where what I needed was Larkin. On pure reflex — that satellite brain housed south of the shoulders — I flicked off the mike, picked up the phone, and dialed her. One smooth motion. I'd never dialed her number before. But I had it memorized.