Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Our life in B. was a tender playact. That dismal rental, a South Sea island invented by an eighteenth-century engraver. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts. I wrote expert system routines. For pleasure, we etched a time line of the twentieth century onto the back of a used Teletype roll that we pasted around the top of the room. The Peace of Beijing. Marconi receives the letter "S" from across the Atlantic. Uzbekistan absorbed. Chanel invents Little Black Dress. The limbo becomes national dance craze.

We furnished our first nest with castoffs. Friends alerted us to an overstuffed chair that someone on the far side of the ballpark was, outrageously, throwing out. No three dishes matched. We owned one big-ticket item: a clock radio. Every morning, we woke to the broadcast calls of birds.

When we weren't reading to each other, we improvised a narrative. The courtyard outside our window was an autograph book of vignettes waiting to be cataloged. The scene below played out an endless penny merriment for our express amusement.

Cops rode by on horseback. Robbers rode by in their perennial hull-scraping Continentals. Parent-free children mined the bushes for dirt clumps to pop in their mouths. A conservatory student blew his sax out the open window, even in December. He threaded his way precariously up a chromatic octave, the cartoon music for seasickness. That's how I would describe it in the book I still had no idea I would soon write. The player always, always missed the A-flat on the way up but hit it, by chance, on descending. "Something to do with gravity," C. joked.

Youngish adults in suits came by selling things. They represented strange and fascinating causes, each more pressing than the last. When the canvassers buzzed our intercom, we sometimes shed some small bills. Or we made the sound of no one home.

A heavy woman on workman's comp who walked with a cane hobbled by at regular intervals to air out her dog. The dog, Jena, who we decided was named after the battle where Hegel watched Napoleon rout Prussia, was even more fossilized than its owner. Jena would stand thick and motionless, halfway down the sidewalk, contemplating some spiritual prison break, never bothering to so much as tinkle. Its owner, whose name we never learned, waited in the doorway, repeatedly calling the beast with the curt panic of abandonment. The dog would gaze a lifetime at the horizon, then turn back in desolation.

I relayed these anecdotes to C., who lay in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to be blind and paralyzed, at the mercy of my accounts. I elaborated events for her, embroidering until the improbability of the whole human fabric made her smile. When she smiled, it always stunned me that I'd discovered her before anyone else had.

Even while we playacted it, I recognized that fantasy. It came from a collection of ghost stories that a famous editor had assembled before we were young.

I told C., from memory, the one about two men lying in the critical ward. The one, a heart patient, has the window bed. He spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community outside to amuse his wardmate. He names all the characters: Mr. Rich. The Messenger Boy. The Lady with the Legs. He weaves this endless, dense novel for the quadriplegic in the next bed, who cannot see through the window from where he lies.

Then one night the window narrator has a heart attack. He convulses. He grapples for his medicine on the nightstand between the beds. The paralyzed man, seizing his chance at last to see this infinite world for himself, summons from nowhere one superhuman lunge and dashes the medicine to the floor. When they move him to the emptied window bed the next day, all he can see is a brick wall.

'That's a great story," C. told me. In the icy dark, I felt her excitement. The world lay all in front of us. "I love that one. I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you for it."

All I had to go on was that train. It might have come from anywhere, tracing a route so simple I would never win it back. I myself could not visualize the southbound freight. How could I ask a reader to picture it?

I paid bills, caught up on old correspondence. I did all my errands in the least efficient ways that my unconscious could devise. I discovered again just how long an evening can be without any media.

I searched my notebooks for all those plots that had seemed so pressing to me while I worked on something else. At one time I'd wanted to write the story of a man who made a living by imitating a statue. He would travel to all the capitals of the world, spray-paint himself silver, don a toga, and stand unnervingly still while admiring crowds ran past and threw coins into his cup. But now, when I watched this statue-man to see what happened, all he wanted to do was improve, hold stiller longer, until people passed without noticing.

I thought of putting a seventeen-year-old up in a cubicle on top of a flagpole just outside the Mall of America for 329 days, as a combined social protest and attempt to get into Guinness.

I found a preliminary sketch for a political light burlesque. Ma and Pa Kent, out in one of those states longer than it is wide, have a perfectly formed kid. The kid sleeps through nights, eats on schedule, and apologizes for burping. "Look at that boy crawl, Mother! He's going to be president." The comedy would trace the kid's supreme calling through Smallville High, Northwest Orthogonal State, and into the arms of the PACs and party hacks. I thought it might make a pleasant vacation.

Any one of these embryo ideas seemed workable. One might even have been good, had I been another person, with another person's care and patience. I kept browsing, thinking the right plot would leap out at me. When it didn't, I told myself that the key thing was to choose and get down to it. After all, wasn't a story about figuring out what the story was about?

Mornings passed when a sick knot in my stomach informed me that I would never write anything again. I had nothing left in me but the autobiography I'd refused from the start even to think about. My life threatened to grow as useless as a three-month-old computer magazine.

I asked myself whether, if you kept private long enough, you earned the right to a brief personal appearance in public. I recoiled from the idea. But there came a point when blaming things on innocent, third-person bystanders became a lie.

And after four times out, in a search for simplicity that had wound up producing complexities beyond reading, the question became: why go public at all?

I went to the Center and played the humanist fly on the wall. I read my notebooks. I diverted myself on the net.

Autumn came and flushed out the oppression of midwestern August. Sidewalks glazed over with cool rain. The shed leaves emitted a whiff of premature winter. Flocks gathered and wheeled in V's of retreat. We entered those two glorious weeks when U.'s weather made it seem that anyone alive could start again. Recover all lost ground.

The brisk, invigorating air crippled me with anticipation. I kept still and waited, thinking this time I might not scare off the imminence that always visited, the first week of the last season.

I lived on that refrain: picture a train. Picture a train heading south. Even garbled beyond recovery, my blast of turbine steam logged its nightly reprimand.

One night I went to a bar I'd never set foot in as an undergrad. I could count in a quarter of a byte the times I'd gone for a beer while in school here. Safeguarding the precious synapses. I'd worked so hard to keep them in perfect firing order. It had all seemed so important once.

In the Low Countries, I'd developed a taste for refermented fruit beers. These were as expensive here as they were ridiculous, in the land of the thin, frozen pilsner. But a kriek was a lot cheaper than a round-trip ticket. I ordered a bottle, which the bartender had to dust off.