I imagined explaining the Lite concept to any of C.'s one hundred and twenty first cousins. I had difficulty getting past the word's spelling. Out the window of the bar, at a distance, I could see the university Quad. I pretended it was an unknown, astonishing Grote Markt I would go explore after I finished the cherry brew.
I made another narrative stab in my head. A thirty-five-year-old unemployed construction worker in Mechelen, once-mighty Gothic town shrunken to nothing, gets obsessed with completing the spire of the city's cathedral, originally slated to be the tallest in the world. My out-of-work day laborer, whom I took to calling Joris between sips, figures the building project has just been delayed several centuries. All he has to do is get the city to pauperize itself to put itself back on the ecclesiastical map.
The tale seemed immense with potential. The only catch was that it would play to an audience of exactly one.
The bar started filling. A frat boy, in his zeal to resuscitate a dead pitcher, collided with my shoulder. "Sorry, sir," he placated, in best commerce-major fashion.
The word was a slap in the face, the young's coded self-righteousness. People under twenty-one needed to work that fact into the conversation, even if the conversation consisted of two words. In this country, youth was a socially acceptable form of bragging.
A horrible mistake coming here, to this college bar, this college town. These were the same people who had gotten tanked every night while I broke my neck studying. They had stayed twenty, while I'd dissolved into middle age. Even more depressing, I wasn't the only old guy in the place. At a table in the back, the smokers' section, a group of Center fellows took a rare break from experimentation to engage in what seemed, from my distance, heavy theoretical talk.
In their midst, looking even more sickly and implausible out of his idiom, my man Lentz gesticulated. His hands built and dismantled various violent tetrahedra in the air. He made some point that the half-dozen others at the table refuted with exasperation bordering on disgust. Science looked a lot like literary criticism, from across the room.
Lentz glanced my way, looking through me. We shared an awkwardness, each pretending not to have noticed the other. Each pretending the other hadn't spotted us pretending. I felt relieved that he didn't wave, but slighted.
After a while, the group's lone woman detached from the debate. She walked toward me. She was tall, amiable, dismayed, her freckles like constellations in a home planetarium. I had seen her in the corridors. I couldn't begin to guess how old she was. I'd lost all ability to gauge age.
In the time it took her to cross the room, I sketched a story about a professional guesser who learned to tell, within impossible limits of tolerance, the age, weight, height, and accumulated sorrow of anyone he met.
"I've come to recruit you," she announced, drawing up. "The good guys need help."
She dressed impeccably, forgoing the scientist's customary indifference to grooming. She wore tweed, with her ample hair rolled in one of those forties ingenue prows. The effect was uncannily archaic, as if she were about to announce that severing the corpus callosum cured epilepsy.
"Who are the good guys?"
She laughed. "Good question. I'm Diana Hartrick. I do associative representation formation in the hippocampus."
"Is that near here?"
I grinned as widely as possible, trying to pass off the idiocy as voluntary. I stuck out my hand, stupidly. In Limburg, one shakes hands early and often, with anything that holds still long enough.
"Little Marcel," I said. "Not doing much of anything, at present."
She took my hand, but her face clouded. She sucked in her mouth, a teacher unwilling to credit a bad report about a good pupil. "Now, why would you lie to me before you've even met me?"
At first I thought she meant the bit about my not working. Then the penny dropped. Dr. Hartrick, I figured, was a kind soul, but as literal as a lawyer giving the keynote at a libel convention.
"I'm sorry. That's Lentz's pet nickname for me." I gestured with my chin back toward her table.
"Oh. Him. He's why I came to get you. The man is on another rampage."
She leaned against the bar, resting a tote bag on her hip. From the side pocket, amid a sheaf of papers, issued an ancient softbound Viking Portable. Its spine was scored to pulp. I read the blurb at the top, despite the cover's being badly scuffed. "Not less than three times in his or her life should everyone read Don Quixote… in youth, middle age, and old age."
"May I?" I indicated the book.
She passed the book to me with a bemused patience long used to eccentric requests.
I flipped the book over. I opened to the copyright page. Nine-hundred-page books cost $1.85 when I was twelve. It didn't seem possible. I turned to the First Sally. In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall. .
These few words spread like truth serum through me. I was fifteen again, and working up the courage to tell the Egyptian empress who sat in front of me in sophomore humanities that the hair on the back of her neck stopped my breath to look at.
I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.
Those sixteen words from Chapter One bogged me down in old amber. Before the end of the clause, I felt mired as a Cambrian bug in molasses memory. The First Sally, a second time: it sicked a pack of ghosts on me as brutal as the ones hounding the overread Don.
I shut the volume before the rest could get out. "Thanks. That's all I needed to check."
Hartrick took the book and slipped it back into her bag without comment. "Are you going to suit up and help us do battle?"
Her words came out softly, without any of that self-effacing edge of junior faculty under the gun. In one phrase, she grew older, drier. I'd misjudged her earnestness. I was the lawyer, the literal fool who'd missed the joke.
I imagined that her line of work lent her this presence. When you see up close the countless subsystems it takes to place an image into the permanent buffer, when you measure the loop that image makes on its way to being retained, you temper yourself against the definitive. You go humble, understated, wry.
I pictured what it felt like to see the organ at work, its cartoon flickers pasted up on a PET scan. You flash a world in front of your subject's eyes and watch the watercolor washes splash around the temporal lobe, fixing that world in a holdable shorthand. This woman traced the process in real time, the mental palette exploding in desperate semaphores, trying to convince itself that the fleet whose capture it signals hasn't slipped off in night fog.
Every postmodern postsolipsist, I thought, should do a postfrontal neurology stint. The most agile of them would, like this careful woman, take to weighing the violence in their every predicate. Once they saw the bewilderingly complex fiber in its impossible live weave, theorists would forever opt for the humblest, least-obtrusive sentence allowed them.
"I'm afraid my doublet's in the wash."
She smiled, generosity itself. "Come on," she insisted. "We need somebody who can outtalk him."
I followed her back to the Center's table. Lentz was well into introducing me by the time we two drew up.
"Here's our Nonresident-in-Residence. Marcel, meet Gupta, Chen, Keluga, and Plover. You appear to be chummy with Hartrick already. Everyone knows Marcel, the Dutchman. By reputation, anyway. Does anyone actually read those things of yours?"