Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

The Doberman came and pinned me to the sofa. A préadolescent in blue jeans, probably the caboose, said, "Watch this." She produced a dog biscuit. "Ivan. Ivan! Listen to me. Can you — can you sneeze?"

Ivan rolled over.

"I didn't say roll over. I said sneeze."

Ivan barked.

"Not speak. Sneeze. Sneeze, you animal!"

Ivan sat up and begged, played dead, and offered to shake hands. In the end, Harold's youngest threw the dog the sop in disgust.

Harold reveled in the show. "He's learned that you just have to be persistent with humans. They get the idea eventually, if you keep at them."

Before I knew it, dinner enveloped us. No one sat at the table. Only about half of us bothered with plates and silverware. But definitely dinner. The tributary of bodies in and out, being fed.

"That's not fifteen minutes," Tess said to the one in the revealing prom dress. "Remember? Fifteen minutes with your family, every day. You promised."

"My family. So that's what you call this."

But if one or another of her sisters had struck up a tune, this one would have joined in on some loving and cacophonous counterpoint. This was the land A. came from, huge, jumbled, and warm. I wanted to excuse myself, to run off to A.'s apartment on G. Street and tell her that it wasn't too late to make a dissonant choir of her own. I wanted her so badly, I almost forgot why I'd come to this place.

Harold, happily harassing his girls, recalled me. "Lentz wants to do exploratory surgery on Helen," I said.

"Have another piece of broc," he urged me. "Lots of essential minerals."

The word "mineral" struck me as incomprehensible. Foreign. Where had it come from? How could I have used it so cavalierly before now? "He wants to clip out whole subsystems. See what effect that has on her language skills."

Harold wolfed at the pita pocket he'd constructed. "What's the problem? That's good science. Well. Approximately reasonable science, let's say."

Mina, drifting past the buffet, called out, "Oh no! Not Helen."

Trish, in her prom dress, for it was Trish, added her hurt. "Daddy! You can't do this."

"Do what? I'm not doing anything."

Both sisters looked out through puffed portals, bruising silently, over nothing. An idea.

"Diana disagrees," I stretched. "About its being good science. I think she'd help me, except she feels incriminated herself."

A skip in the flow, too brief to measure, said I'd overstepped. Broken the unspoken. I should have known. Nobody had to tell me. I just slipped.

"Honey," her mother told Trish, "take off the dress before you slop all over it."

"Oh, Mother!" the girl objected, already halfway up the stairs.

Conversation, in its chaos, never flowed back to the issue. Not until Harold and I stood alone on the front porch in the painfully benign evening did I get a second shot.

"Sorry about that." Harold gestured inside. "Bit of a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"So I have my answer? You're not going to help?"

"Me? I'm the enemy. What good would I be to you anyway? This is between you and him."

"And Helen."

Harold indulged me. "Yes. There is that. But he's the one calling the shots."

He breathed in a lungful of air and held it. Behind him, from the house, spilled the sounds of frenetic fullness. Daughters practicing at life.

"Take the fight to him," Harold confided in me. "Bring it home."

That was where I took it, in desperation, the next afternoon. I leaned against my bike in the rain, outside the care facility, the last place in the world I would have chosen to meet him. I lay in wait for him, the last person in the world I would have chosen to waylay. Lentz arrived like clockwork. When he saw my ambush, he affected blasé. "Back for more? What, are you digging up plot material?" He gestured toward the institution where his wife was interred. "It's a terrific setting, qua literature. But I doubt it would do much for sales."

He walked into the building, his back to me. He did not care if I tagged along or not. We rode the elevator up in silence. I had no existence for him.

We went to Audrey's room. Dressed, in a chair, she seemed to be waiting.

"Philip! Thank God you've come."

I walked into those words as into bedrock. Lentz stopped to steady me. "She has good days and bad days. I'm not sure which are which, anymore."

We sat. Philip introduced us again. Audrey was too agitated to do more than fake politeness. But she retained my name. That day, she might have retained anything.

In her cruel burst of lucidity, I saw it. Audrey had been formidable. At least as sharp as Lentz. If this demonstration meant anything, even sharper.

"Philip. It's the strangest thing. You're never going to believe this. What is this place?"

"It's a nursing home, Audrey."

"That's what I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. What I can't figure out is why the staff is down in the basement mounting a production of Cymbeline."

"Audrey."

"Would I make something like this up, Philip? What could I gain?"

"Audrey. It's highly unlikely."

"You think I don't know that? It's some kind of modern-dress production. I can hear them rehearsing their lines."

Constance, the nurse, walked by. Lentz called her.

"Constance, does the name Cymbeline mean anything to you?"

"Is that her eye makeup? It's on order."

Philip studied his wife. How much proof do we need?

On no proof, I saw how Lentz had gotten so diffidently well read. The play had been their play, and my field, Audrey's.

"Audrey. Love. You're imagining all this. There is no play."

Audrey remained adamant. "The evidence may all be on your side." She cracked a smile. "But that changes nothing."

Still smiling, she closed her eyes and groaned. In a flood of understanding that percolated up from her undamaged self, she begged him, "I don't hurt anyone, Philip. I've behaved. Take me out of here."

There it lay for me — mind, denned. Evolution's gimmick for surviving everything but these fleeting flashes of light.

"She'll be gone again tomorrow," Lentz confided, on our way out. "You know, somewhere, a long time ago when she and I still traveled, we took a tour of an old house. A dream honeymoon mansion, restored from decay, lovingly appointed and improved with all modern facilities and ornament. But the devoted and industrious couple, we were told, had gone slowly homicidal. Stark raving. They died, finally, of violent bewilderment. It was the lead in the home improvements."

I fumbled with my bike lock. I looked for a way I might still say what I had come to say. "Philip. Can't we — can't we spare Helen that?"

He considered my request, as much as he could afford to. "We have to know, Richard. We have to know how all this works." His eyes were dry again, horrifically clear. The this he meant, the one with no antecedent, could only be the brain.

I told Diana. I asked her about Audrey Lentz. I asked her what Cymbeline meant.

"Oh, Audrey was amazing. Everyone loved her. Endless energy. The more she gave, the more she had. Confidence wedded to self-effacement."

"She wrote?"

"Everybody writes, Rick. Audrey wrote some. More out of devotion than profession."

Before the week was out, Diana looked me up. She had a message for me. She would have left it anonymously if she could have. "The threat's off."

"What? You did it?"

"You did. I just asked him to lunch. We talked about everything. His work. My work. I got him reminiscing. I told him about a party I went to at his place. Years ago. Audrey was still Audrey. She entertained us all that evening. She sang a dozen verses to 'You're the Top.' I reminded him of her favorite expression. I talked about Jenny—"

'The daughter."