He asked me to check out some books from the library, so he could prepare to teach his class in January.
M., his wife, remained rocklike. She exuded competence beyond belief. She lifted the skeletal Taylor out of bed and carried him— Mary holding a puppet Christ — deflated and naked, to the toilet, in her arms.
Only his mind remained luminous. Near the end, the medications did change him. But even then, his topographies fought to keep themselves intact. One afternoon before Christmas, I found Taylor in a state that was not quite sleep, but could pass for sleep in low light.
"Oh, it's you!" he greeted me. "All day long, the sounds outside this window have been turning into events from my past."
He went on to tell me, in devastating detail, about the valley of his childhood, out West. The names of all his classmates and the ways each had distinguished or humiliated himself in coming of age. The frozen rabbits hanging on the barn wall that kept the family alive all winter. Every single title in the valley library, outread and exhausted by fourteen.
Before I left town, I put another book in Taylor's hands. One for the permanent record. One he would never read. I gave him the first bound galley of my second book, Prisoner's Dilemma.
Number two was my memorial to a sick father. In it, I described every impasse of history but his. Only the passage of years, only knowing I'd never show Richard Powers, Sr., what fiction had done to him, made that fiction possible.
I told Taylor about my father. How I'd broken his heart. His lover's quarrel with the world. His disappearance at the end, his one last frontier adventure. I told Taylor about the cryptic absolution Dad sent me from the Yukon. The cremation of Sam McGee.
At my mention of the name, Taylor's lips crooked. Astonishingly, the man to whom I owed my Shakespeare and Yeats, my Marx and Freud, launched into a full rendition of the hack ballad. He did not miss a stanza. Death had no more dominion over him.
"I don't know how to say goodbye," I told Taylor. The book was my goodbye, because symbols are all that become of the real. They change us. They make us over, alter our bodies as we receive and remake them. The symbols a life forms along its way work back out of the recorder's office where they wait, and, in time, they themselves go palpable. Lived.
I left, knowing he had at best days, and at worst a month. Nothing left to do. The old friends were everywhere in attendance. Maybe I should have stayed. Stood and waited. Maybe he could have used having me around.
"Make a noise," he ordered as I took off. "See the world."
"I will," I promised. "And I'll keep you posted."
In the short night, eastward above the Atlantic, I thought of the last time I'd made the crossing. My life in U. was dead. I'd gone back to that cow town once too often. I told myself I would never get near it again.
But U. caught up with me, even in my foreign country. And that death was far worse, faced alone in E. C. and I lay on the floor of our apartment, in hypothermia, and listened to the tape of the memorial service, the fiddle tunes, that whole unbroken circle of friends telling Taylor stories, recounting their local eulogies for the man who thought only memory stood between us and randomness.
Each person who knew him surrendered some private lode of remembered event. Or they read from the page one of the poems Taylor himself did from effortless memory. They read Blake and Rossetti and Stevens. No one read "Sam McGee," because the one who was supposed to read it was lying on the floor in a little ex-coal-mining town on the other side of the world, listening to the belated tape, shivering, wrecked forever by memory.
I could give back nothing to Taylor, I, who couldn't even find a way to tell him what he had given me. All I could do for Taylor now was to turn him into character.
I held on to C., giving in to my only available response. She probably knew I would backslide long before the idea hit me. One more book, I pleaded with her, wordlessly. I needed to postpone my graduation from lying long enough to tell a double love story. To turn a helical twist that might both eulogize the man and let me live, before it was too late, the life in science from which he'd long ago deflected me.
Helen did not sing the way real little girls sang. Technically, she almost passed. Her synthesized voice skittered off speech's earth into tentative, tonal Kitty Hawk. Her tune sounded remarkably limber, given the scope of that mechanical tour de force.
But she did not sing for the right reasons. Little girls sang to keep time for kickball or jump ropes. The little boy soprano I had played onstage at twelve had been doing that. Singing the tune I'd taught Helen, keeping imitative time by bouncing a ball against a pasteup shop door.
Helen didn't have a clue what keeping time meant, never having twirled a jump rope, let alone seen one. We'd strengthened her visual mapping, but true, real-time image recognition would have required vastly more computer power than the entire Center drew. And we were already living beyond our quota.
If Helen had a temporal sense now, it came from a memory strong enough to remember configurations it was no longer in. And mark the passing of her changing, internal states. God only knows the look and feel of a sense of time without a sense of space. But that was Helen.
"You were not, yesterday," she would say to me, whether I'd been gone three hours or three days. "Yesterday" stood for any state that Helen had watched get swallowed up by its successor. "You" presumably meant that generic, external irritant that laid data on her input layers. "Were not" was her simplistic idea of negation. Although she had still to learn that absence and presence were not opposites, she was well on her way to a functional understanding of loneliness, that font of all knowledge.
One day she added, "I miss you."
The thing canonical writers always said in print. I wanted to tell her that she ought not to put the formulation in the present tense while I sat right there at the mike and keyboard. I said nothing, not wanting to undo the example of the rhymers she imitated with anything so trivial as convention.
"I miss Muffet," she went on. In growing savvy enough for figurative speech, she'd become too softheaded for the literal. Either that, or she was engaging in the neural network equivalent of silliness. If she could sing, I reasoned, I could certainly train her to giggle.
I mailed the finished copy of my fourth book to New York on the day Los Angeles set itself on fire. My story predicted that explosion, although such a prediction took no special gift. Mine was less prophecy, anyway, than memory. A child's recollected nightmare.
The prepublication notices of the book appeared not long after. Soon enough for human recollection, in any event. The most visible of the trade-press reviews dubbed the book "a bedtime tale set in a future apocalypse." This denial stuck. Everything I'd written about Angel City and its war on childhood had already played out. But so many of the subsequent reviews pushed memory into the not-yet that I began to think I had, in fact, written my first attempt at speculative fiction.
The reviews were not all bad. Chicago glowed, saving my appointment at the Center and preserving face with the home crowd. The best notice, remarkably, came from that national paper sold in street boxes designed to resemble TVs. It spoke of homeopathy, of narrating the worst so the worst did not have to happen.
Most critics, though, felt the reader had to work too hard for too bleak a payoff.
Lentz delighted in the harshest press judgments. It became almost impossible to train Helen while he was around.