“So you’re nuking money again.”
“Yes, it’s a thing I tend to do.” Oscar sighed. “It’s the basic American way. It’s my only real path to legitimacy. With serious money, I can finance candidates, run court challenges, set up founda-tions. It’s no use wandering around the margins with our bears and tambourines, dancing for pennies. Cognition will become an industry soon. A massive, earthshaking, new American industry. Someday, the biggest ever.”
“You’re going to turn my science into an industry? When it’s illegal now, when people think it’s crazy just to mess with it? How is that supposed to happen?”
“You can’t stop me from doing it,” Oscar told her, lowering his voice. “No one can stop me. It will come on very slowly, very gently, so quietly that you hardly feel it at first. Just a gentle lifting of the veil. Very tender, very subtle. I’ll be taking it away from the realm of ab-stract knowledge, and bringing it into a real and dirty world of sweat and heat. It won’t be ugly or sordid, it’ll seem lovely and inevitable. People will want it, they’ll long for it. They’ll finally cry out for it. And at the end, Greta, I’ll possess it totally.”
A long silence. She shivered violently in her chair, and the feath-ered mask dipped. She couldn’t seem to meet his eyes. She lifted a silver oyster fork, probed at the quiescent gray blob on her plate, and set the fork back down. Then she looked up, searchingly. “You look older.”
“I know I do.” He smiled. “Shall I put my mask on?”
“Is it all right to worry about you? Because I do.”
“It’s all right to worry, but not during Mardi Gras.” He laughed. “You want to worry? Worry about people who get in my way.” He swallowed an oyster.
Another long silence. He was used to her silences now. They came in flavors; Greta had all kinds of silences. “At least they let me work in the lab now,” she murmured. “There’s not much danger they’ll ever put me in power again. I wish I were better at my work, that’s all. It’s the only thing I regret. I just wish I had more time and that I were better.”
“But you’re the best that there is.”
“I’m getting old, I can feel it. I can feel the need leaving me, that devouring gift. I just wish that I were better, Oscar, that’s all. They tell me I’m a genius but I’m always, always full of discontent. I can’t do anything about that.”
“That must be hard. Would you like me to get you a private lab, Greta? There would be less overhead, you could run it for yourself. It might help.”
“No thank you.”
“I could build a nice place for you. Someplace we both like. Where you can concentrate. Oregon, maybe.”
“I know that you could build an institute, but I’m never going to live in your pocket.”
“You’re so proud,” he said mournfully. “It could be doable. I could marry you.”
She shook her masked head. “We’re not going to marry.”
“If you gave me just a week, once a quarter. That’s not much to ask. Four weeks a year.”
“We couldn’t stand each other for four whole weeks a year. Because we’re driven souls. You don’t have the time for a real mar-riage, and neither do I. Even if we did, even if it worked, you’d only want more.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. Of course I would want more.”
“I’ll tell you how it would work, because I’ve seen it work. You could be the faculty wife, Oscar. I’ll still put in my eighty-hour weeks, but you can look after me, if I’m ever around. Maybe we could adopt. I’ll never have any time for your kids either, but I’d feel guilty enough to get them Christmas presents. You could look after the house, and the money, and maybe the fame, and you could cook for us, and who knows. Probably you would live a lot longer.”
“You think that sounds bad to me,” he said. “It doesn’t sound bad. It sounds very authentic. The problem is, it’s impossible. I can’t keep a family together. I can’t settle down. I’ve never seen it done. I wouldn’t know how to sit still. I’ve had affairs with three different women since last August. I used to line my women up one at a time. I can’t manage that anymore. Now I multiplex them. Giving you a ring and a bridal veil, that wouldn’t change me. I realize that now, I have to admit it. It’s beyond me, I can’t control it.”
“I despise your other women,” she said. “But then, I think of how they must feel, if they ever learn about me. At least that’s some comfort.”
He winced.
“You haven’t ever made me happy. You’ve just made me compli-cated. I’m very complicated now. I’ve become the kind of woman who flies to Mardi Gras to meet her lover.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. I feel so much more pain now. But, I feel so much more awake.”
“Do you think we have a future, Greta?”
“I’m not the future. There’s another woman out there tonight, and she’s all dressed up and she’s very drunk. Tonight she’s going to have sex with her guy, and when she ought to be smart, she’ll just say ‘oh, the hell with it.’ She’ll get pregnant at Mardi Gras. She’s the future. I’m not the future, I’ve never been the future. I’m not even the truth. I’m just the facts.”
“I must be human after all,” Oscar said, “because I only get the facts in little bits.”
“We won’t ever marry, but someday we’ll be past this. Then I could walk with you on the beach. Feel something for you, just as a person, in some quieter, simpler way. If I have anything to give like that, it will be at the very end of my life. When I’m old, when the ambition fades away.”
Oscar rose and went to the glass doors. It was a very bitter thing to tell him, because he felt quite sure that she would in fact be doing that thing, in her old age. Wisdom and communion. But she would be doing it with someone else. Never with her lover. With a worship-ful grad student, maybe a biographer. Never with him. He stepped outside, shot his cuffs, and leaned out on the opulent grille of the balcony.
A large organized group was methodically working their way down Bourbon Street, under the blue and white banner of an extinct multinational bank. The revelers, grim and unsmiling, were neatly dressed in sober three-piece tailored suits and polished shoes. Most groups of this sort would throw cheap beads at the crowds, but the proles had cut all suppositions short: they were simply throwing away wads of cash.
“Look at these characters,” Oscar called out.
Greta joined him. “I see they’re in their holiday gear.”
A five-dollar bill attached to a fishing weight came flying up from street level, and bounced from Oscar’s shoulder. He picked it up. It was genuine money, all right. “They really shouldn’t be allowed to do this sort of thing. It could cause a riot.”
“Don’t be grumpy. I feel better now, it’s all right. Let’s go and break the bed now.”
She lured him into the bedroom. The damp air sang with erotic tension. “Shall I keep the mask on?”
He took his jacket off. “Oh yes. The mask is definitely you.” He set to work on her in a particularly levelheaded and elaborate fashion. During their long separation he had had enough time to imagine this meeting. He had formed a multilevel erotic schemata with a number of variable subroutines. The sheets were soaked with sweat and the veins were standing out on her neck;. With a strangled cry she tore the mask from her eyes, tumbled out of bed with a thump, and hurried out of the room.