I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.
I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness's tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.
The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.
"Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ha mai saputo prima ehe cosa ci fosse in una goccia d'acqua. " I'm eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.
I didn't either, until he told me.
On our two beater bicycles we explored the countryside. We brought dried sausage and bread, and ate when we were hungry. Lunch outdoors in the countryside — a kind of mock ownership. We lived a southern version of those Brueghel wheat gatherers, breaking for meal and midday nap. Even our southern sleeps were Sleep's dream versions.
We greeted everyone we saw, invulnerable in our foreignness. Once, a farm woman, Titian-built, carrying a piece of thresher on the back of her bicycle, set down her load to visit. As if production, even sustenance, meant nothing without civility.
The woman and I chatted for some while, cheerfully unable to understand more than a stray word or two.
"Tedesco?"
"Olandese."
"Rick! You just told her you're Dutch?"
The woman laughed at what she took as a minor marital spat. Then her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "How old are you?"
I had to think. Dutch was bad enough, with its archaic one-and-thirty.
I told her. She stepped back with alarm. She flung her arms up like Giotto's agonizing angel. "What are you doing here? Where are your children?"
I interpreted for C. She shot me a good-luck look. "That one's all yours, buddy."
'I miei libri sono i miei figli." As far as I intended, it meant, "My books are my children."
An expression came across the woman's face. It would have been horror, but for the perplexity. Disgusted, she said she'd never heard such idiocy. Such sad waste.
All this happened less than two books ago. By the time I came to tell Helen this story, I did not retain enough of the language even to remember how to say, "You're right."
Helen was getting on. She was not yet long in the tooth, but neither was she a tadpole anymore. She entered what might perhaps be called youth, and I gave her Conrad's take on the situation.
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.
To remember a feeling without being able to bring it back. This seemed to me as close to a functional definition of higher-order consciousness as I would be able to give her. If we could teach Helen that, we could teach her to read with understanding.
To define that rift did not open one in her, any more than remembering a feeling revived it. For Helen to pass the Turing Test, facts would have to stand in for knowing. Our only hope that she might one day disguise herself as a master's candidate lay in the conventions of writing. The interpretive essay — the art we trained her to perform — meant viewing from afar. An aerial shot from the dispassionate high ground.
Humans had to be schooled in how to describe the maelstrom as if they weren't lost in the middle of it, in their own unbailable open boat. Helen was detachment personified. In effect, the infant adult we'd be up against would be trying to simulate the disembodiment that, to Helen, came as a fact of her birth.
But Helen needed to feel, to the extent possible, the facts of her opponent twenty-two-year-old's birth. Conrad, of course, was years beyond her. Youth was wasted on the young. Yet by letting her wade in over her head, I hoped to give my network a working model of what it felt like to learn to read. How I had felt.
I never read a book at the right time. The books I read as a child almost all came before I was ready for them. The Man Who Lost His Head, an absurd illustrated fable that, I'm sure, must have ended happily, gave me my first recurring nightmare because I read it as a preschooler. Homer in fourth grade. Shakespeare in sixth. Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury in junior high. Gravity's Rainbow, wet from high school. I read Thomas Wolfe as a freshman in college, the right age, but decades too late, in history, for it to work.
I would find books in the house, my parents' or my older sisters' or brother's. I read them like stealing. Eavesdropping. Malicious rumormongering. Staying out past curfew without permission. I hadn't a clue what any of them meant. Not a clue. Every animal they highlighted I named horse. But a horse that split and differentiated in the turbulence of foreign bazaars.
Each book became a knot. Yes, the strings of that knot were theme and place and character. Dr. Charles, with his gangrene machine. Stephen, gazing at the girl in the water. But into that tangle, just as crucial, went the smell of the cover, the color and cream resistance of the pages, the week in which I read any given epic, the friends for whom I synopsized, the bed, the lamp, the room where I read. Books made known to me my days' own confusion. They meant no more nor less than the extensive, dense turnpike of the not-I.
This not, I imagined, would figure more in Helen's masquerade than would any simulation of self. Self took us only so far. I wanted her to associate the meaning inherent in the words of a story with the heft and weight and bruise of the story's own existence. I did this by reading her things long before she was ready for them. Only by mistake, by taking the story to be coextensive with its own intruding bewilderment, could Helen pull off her impersonation.
I read her Little Women. M., Taylor's widow, had given C. an antique copy as a going-away present — their shared childhood icon. I read her Dylan Thomas, whom I had once exercised in C.'s ear in the still night, our arms around each other's grief. I read her Ethan Frome. C. had wept at the tale, wanting to be better than she was.
Helen and I had never gone sledding, as C. and I had, on the arboretum downs outside B. Helen would never know a sled from the hill it slid down, except in the dead of definition. That she would never thrill or panic under downward pull no longer bothered me. At this point, I was training her in being mistaken. Overwhelmed. The condition of knowledge at all ages, but above all, twenty-two.
I can't revive the lesson the day Helen interrupted my flow of narrative to demand, "Where did I come from?"
I remember only my total stupefaction. The lesson itself could not have triggered her question. Helen was no longer just adding the new relations I recited for her into a matrix of associated concepts. The matrix that comprised her had begun to spin off its own free associations. Where did I come from? Lentz, seated behind me at his desk, doing real science, cackled. "Reeky! You in trouble now!"
I turned to look at him. Lentz's eyes and mine exchanged mutual punch lines. Like a fetus replaying fishness, Helen had rebuilt, for the first time, the primal joke. Because I'd heard it when I was a kid, I knew not to choke. Not to launch the long explanation of semiconductor storks, the birds and bees of hammered gold and gold enameling. Not to traumatize her by telling her we'd built her, but simply to answer, "You come from a little town called U."