A school principal in the catastrophically expanding western city of P. wrote how she daily watched over the kids who had escaped from my terminal pede ward. A doctor in New York sent a mug stenciled with the words "Clap if you still can." C., I imagined, would not even know the book existed until it appeared in the Low Countries, in translation.
Every era mints its trademark desolation. Mine lay in how much my time had come to see and hear. We seemed to be on the verge of a new evolution in consciousness. We'd hit upon collective awareness. Then, awareness of awareness. Now we were taking one giant step back from vantage, wrecked by how smoky the portal was, how clouded over.
The mind was one of those spy-in-the-sky satellites capable of reading license plates from outer space. Only now it was learning how to pan back. To see the assault tank the plate belonged to. To notice that tanks were everywhere. That space was deeper than any satellite supposed.
"I bit off more than I could chew, the other day," I mentioned to Helen, in passing.
"Bit off…?" Helen's associative circuits whirred, mystified.
"It means I got in over my head." Worse and worse. "I needed to say something to an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. So I decided to write her a letter."
Writing. Letters. Friendship. Regret. Volition. The simple past. The past perfect.
"I thought it would be a short letter, but the words got away from me. Before I knew it, it was many, many pages long."
Pages. Length. A screwball figure of speech. The self-surprising foundation of all our actions.
"I finished the letter and put it in an envelope. I sealed the envelope and wrote just the name of my friend on it. I mailed the letter."
Containment. Enclosure. Distributed subjects in compound clauses. Pronominal substitution. Mail. The idea of the international postal system. Distance. Physical, untraversable distance. Pickup and delivery. Longing and loss.
"But the letter never reached my friend. Why not?"
I knew for a fact that we had never talked about addresses. Nor, to my recall, had the idea come up even obliquely in all the thousands of pages we studied. I wanted to see if, from the countless bodies of knowledge Helen would need even to orient the problem, she might somehow produce a superinference, a high-level leap to the idea that, in this existence, sending a message by name alone was not enough. One had to say where in the world's infinite density the name lay.
"The letter counted how many pages?" Helen asked.
"I don't think that makes any difference."
Helen fell into hurt silence. After great length, she said, "You didn't put a rudder on your letter."
"She's getting smarter," Lentz undertoned, in awe, from far across the room.
Something had gotten into Lentz. The smugness began effacing itself. His merciless, empirical anality softened to verbal diarrhea.
He still ragged me at every opportunity. "Do we have to know that for the exam?" His wheedling lent new meaning to the old student refrain.
Helen humbled him. Her connections grew denser than even Lentz had dared hope. Her knowledge was neither deep nor wide. But it was supple.
She produced the same kind of dream logic as any new speaker. She could do the child classics: "Is it tomorrow yet?" "When does orange become red?" Her questions came even more detached, because she could neither feel nor gauge herself. Hungry-full; warm-cold; up — down: she worked these as abstract axes, not as absolutes of need. Helen accounted to nothing but weak semantics, the brittle-bone disease of word. As such, she was free to assemble the strangest skeletons gravity had yet to challenge. Her corkers worked to weaken Philip's surety. Even he found it tough to preserve syllogistic composure in the face of something like, "A lost tooth loses its appetite?"
His renouncing in-your-face didn't prevent Lentz from indulging the occasional in-your-back. He still micromanaged my judgment calls, calculating to manufacture maximum annoyance.
"Why are you reading her that tract doggerel?"
"It's on the list, Philip."
'That? Canonical?" He broke into song. 'Times have cha-anged!"
But he had changed more, it struck me.
"Why don't you just concentrate on real literature?"
"What did you have in mind? H. G. Wells?"
"Now, there's an idea. Didn't he write a story about how we're all going to end up in cubicles, tapped into some monolithic digital broadband?"
"I wouldn't know."
"Some guy gets it in his head he wants to see his mother. In person. She thinks it's the most perverse idea she's ever heard. Damn. I can't remember what happens in the end."
"We could look it up on the Internet."
"Thank you, Marcel. I'm serious. We need to get back to basics."
"You mean 'Invictus,' and like that?"
"Speak properly, Marcel. There are children present. I mean Holmes."
"You jest. 'Build thee more stately mansions. .'?"
"Not that Holmes, you blackguard. I speak of the curious incident of the novelist in the dark."
But the novelist, I was supposed to say, did nothing in the dark.
"Know your opposition, man. Rule one. Think how you have to solve this. Plover's picking the exam passage, right? He's an old-school, sentimental classicist. Forget about everything but the dead white males. The Chaucer, the Shakespeare, the Milton. . We could have her memorize an answer for each possible—"
"Philip! Come on. They might ask anything!"
"Ah!" His eyes watered. Marcel? Got you. "But you'd do it if you could?"
"What, fake hermeneutics? Tell her all the answers in advance?"
'Tell me. Are things any different in real life? The teacher does the spiel. Marxist. Poststructuralist. Lacanian. The enterprising kid goes to the stacks and looks up the professor's old dissertation. The one the prof got published when he was junior fac by including just enough quotes from the people doing the peer review. The student commits all this party line to memory. Lo and behold, what should show up on the final but—"
"I guess I'd rather lose than cheat."
"What's cheating about it? Even if it is, it's a cheat so colossal and magnificent it takes your breath away."
"So you want Vaucanson's duck? You want that mechanical chess-playing Turk with the midget inside? Why don't we just strap some printed circuit cards on me and I'll take the exam."
"Jesus Christ, Marcel. Never mind. Ever since you thought we might actually win this thing, you've been no fun at all."
But he could not let the angle drop. The next day, he'd be at it again. "Ram is judging, right? What do we know about him? Are you reading her the Mahabharata?"
We knew, in fact, precious little about Ram. I passed him often enough in the Center's halls. He greeted me always, the epitome of cheer, with some gnomic well-wish that half the time I could not make out. When I could, I often doubted what I came up with. "Your luck, God willing, continues to be what you imagine it?" Or, "I don't even have you to ask about how the day isn't going!"
By his own testimony, he was a native speaker. Either English had gone as plural as advertised, or, along with many other fellow Centerites, Dr. Gupta had replaced the standard version with a professional upgrade.
One late spring day, his passing greetings expanded into real speech.
"I saw that I-should-praise-it-so-much-as-to-call-it-a-review of your book." His melodious, clipped, Northern Subcontinental syllables delighted me. I could not say why. "What the hell kind of ridiculous thing are they trying to pretend about this culture of yours? They think perhaps this is something that you are making up, God forbid, your so-called story? So your precious Los Angeles — the jewel in the crown, as it were — is just now discovering the condition that the rest of the world has been living in since day one?"