The dinosaurs die. The young Turks move up through the ranks, fomenting their assorted insurrections. The orchestra travels to every large city on earth, getting embroiled in the hot spots of world politics. They play the Brahms Fourth in war zones until the thing is a limp carcass.
Someone leaks a grainy black-and-white photo of the Old Man, their conductor, to the press: an amorphous shot of a kid in a Nazi uniform. Crisis and dissolution. Threat of banishment from several capitals. The Old Man makes his resignation speech from the rehearsal podium, about a life in search of redemption through art, which is never enough. They read through one last Fourth, the passacaglia, sadder and more guilt-stricken than it's ever been played.
This fantasy engaged me for the length of an afternoon, during which I wrote just one actual paragraph:
Air raid sirens begin to give way to goat bells. The shell-shocked veterans lean from their packed carriage windows, refusing to believe. The horror passes, drowned in the milky clank of tin. A flock bobs at slow trainside, tended by a girl, wondrously braided.
Fatuous meandering, without narrative direction. I felt that this mountain shepherdess must have wandered over from a forgotten, juvenile book to make her cameo. She had slipped free from a spot of time that I didn't much want to deal with, let alone plagiarize.
I overflowed with scenarios of weight and hurt, scope and recovery. But for some reason, I could not work up the will to write anything more than my anemic thread. The one heading south, closing in on nowhere, the farther it traveled.
The Center exceeded my imaginary orchestra on every score. Each of its hundred research teams sawed away at private tremolos that the hive as a whole hoped would consolidate, at a higher gauge, into some sensible symphonic.
Maybe the impresarios had their suspect dossier of motives. Perhaps the players in the pit needed to step back and question this evening's program. But for dark wartime romance, the Center sat atop my epoch's cultural repertoire, undislodgeable. It was the coordinated push, the chief booking on my species' last world tour.
I skulked in the back of the Center auditorium and watched Lentz deliver a lecture for the graduate colloquium series. He was good. He kept to a wonderful mix of abstract and palpable. He compared multi-adaptive curve-fitting, backprop, greedy learning, feature construction — various algorithms that machines might employ to build complex, real-world representations.
He described the great paradox of cognitive neuroscience. The easier it is for the brain to perform a certain task, the harder that task is to model. And vice versa. "Perhaps," he joked, "that explains why scientists write such hideous prose. Or why good writers say so little, for that matter."
He stood alone onstage in front of a room of people, with nothing but an overhead projector for protection. The sadistic humor, thus depersonalized, drew waves of titters. Afterward, Chen asked him a question no one could follow. Harold followed with a challenge on grounds more ideological than empirical. Lentz handled all comers with remarkable poise, never once letting on that, offstage, he'd long passed from the domain of conventional research into speculative fantasy.
I ran into Diana in the corridor early one afternoon. She had Petey slung over one hip. They made a lovely contrapposto.
"Hey, you two! How have you been? Where's William?"
"Ach, that guy," Diana said, rolling her eyes. "I've sold him to the Brookings Institution."
She was radiant, excited.
"Listen, Rick. We've made a substantial advance in imaging technique. Time-series MRI sequences of neuronal activity. All cleaned up subtractively to give delineated pictures. Localized like you wouldn't believe. Resolutions smaller than the width of a single cerebral column. One-and-a-half-second increments."
"That's good, isn't it? I can tell. You're talking in fragments."
Diana smiled. Peter threw his pitifully small hands outward, as if he had just decided to recognize me.
"Yes, it's very good. We're not quite at the real-time movie stage yet. But we don't need anything faster. We can watch thoughts as they gather and flow through the brain."
I rubbed Pete's curved spine. "This could be the best news for monkeyhood since we decided they were our ancestors."
"Oh. Well. Fractionation carries on apace, I'm afraid. But this stuff is revolutionary. A noninvasive window onto the mind!"
She shook my shoulder with her free hand. I was grateful for this woman's existence. For her reminding me what enthusiasm was.
"Two lines of research," I listed. "Teaching. Motherhood. How many lives are you living, these days? I guess there's no point in asking how literary knight-errancy has been treating you lately."
She gave me a look, bafflement routed slowly by inference. That she could unpack, decode, index, retrieve, and interpret my reference at all was an unmodelable miracle. More miraculous still, I could watch her grin of understanding unfold in less than hundredth-millimeter increments, in split seconds.
"Harold's given up on our making it through Cervantes. We're doing Fielding and Smollett these days."
"You're joking. Not even the pros read those guys anymore."
"What can I tell you? Harold believes in a liberal education."
"If he wants liberal, he can do a lot better than Smollett. How about Behn? How about Kate Chopin?"
Diana caught Petey as he tried to slip from her arms. She nodded, humoring me. "Our book club isn't really for my benefit, you know."
"Oh. It's for the men who need to play Pygmalion?"
"It isn't that, exactly. Although. ." She trailed off in a thought I could no longer trace. "Harold. ." Her voice teetered on disclosure, then backed away. "He's a good man. A decent man." She looked up with enforced cheer. "I'm trying to bring him onto the MRI team. I think it would be good for him."
"Diana," I began. She froze in front of me, hearing the change. "I don't know how to bring this up." She waited for the blow, braced, but not flinching. I reached out to stroke Peter's ear. It didn't make things any easier.
"As far as the book club goes. It seems fulsome, even to advise you against this. But if you guys are ever curious to do a little Powers, you. . may want to skip my third book." The one where the narrator ties her tubes in fear of bearing a child with birth defects.
"Oh," she said. Thought's turbulence again deformed her face in real time. "Oh." Smiling, the connection strengthening. "We've done that one already. You're old news."
"You've…?"
"Oh yeah. I liked it. I liked the swing scene. And that moment on the lab floor. But for God's sake, you make a girl wait for it, don't you?"
I felt my face heat. "Listen. You know, I wrote that thing long before I met you."
"Well, I'm embarrassed to say, I read it long after I met you."
"I'm — I'm sorry. I hope you — I didn't know what I was talking about."
Her pitch fell to forgiveness. "No one does."
Peter began squirming again. He arched backward, ready to plunge in a dead drop. Ready to jackknife to the floor if it meant getting free. Diana snatched him back from certain destruction, as she must have done a dozen times a day since his birth. She straightened his overalls and set him on the ground. He could stand by himself, if she lent him a pant leg.
"You read my book." And still seemed game for friendship. I felt sick with unearned redemption. "You read my book. And you never told me?"