Once in her lab I stared around me, amazed! It was the biggest surprise of a pretty surprising night; the office part of the lab was filled with sculpture! Small pieces, large pieces, abstracts, human and animal figures… made of metals, ceramics, materials I couldn’t identify. What is this? I said.
You know, we develop materials here, she said. Superconductors and like that. These are throwaways from various experiments.
You mean they just come out like this? I said stupidly.
She laughed shortly.
You sculpt them, I said.
Yes, that’s right. I’m going to have to get all these home….
You could have knocked me over with a feather, or at least a pillow. Who knows what depths these southern tidepools conceal? Any step might plunge you overhead in the brine….
Doris went to work on the computer, and soon the printer was ejecting page after page of records. We need to do the rest in John’s office, she said. That’s tricky—I’m in my lab all the time at night, but there’s no reason to be in his office. You’ll have to keep a lookout for security, and the cleaning robots.
We tiptoed down the corridor into her friend’s office. Again the computer, the print out. I kept watch in the hall while Doris xeroxed pages from a file cabinet. She began to fill boxes.
A cleaning robot hummed down the hall toward us. Feverishly I disarranged an office between us and it, hoping to slow it down. I didn’t get out in time, and it bumped into me coming in the doorway. “Excuse me,” it said. “Cleaning.”
“Quite all right. Could you please clean this office?”
“Excuse me. Cleaning.” It entered the office and uttered a little click, no doubt dismayed at the mess I had just made. I dashed past it, back to Doris.
She was done xeroxing, and about two hours later she was done printing out. We carried box after box into the parking lot, finishing just ahead of the cleaning robot’s entrance.
Outside we had a bicycle built for two, with a big trailer attached behind. We piled that trailer so high with boxes that when we got on the bike, it was as if it were set in cement. There we were, absconding with Avending’s entire history, and we couldn’t move an inch. Both of us jumped up and down on the pedals; no movement. What would security say when they saw us? Thieves, escaping at zero miles an hour.
I had to get off and apply the Atomic Drop to the trailer to get us started, and then run around and leap into my saddle, to hop furiously on a pedal that moved like an hour hand. Unfortunately the right turn we took onto the street killed our momentum. It was necessary to apply three Atomic Drops in succession to get us moving again. After that it was a matter of acceleration. Once we got up to about five miles an hour, we found we could maintain it pretty well.
The next day Doris quit her job. Now she is getting Tom to help her go through the records she stole. It is unclear whether they will be of use, but Tom thinks it is possible the two companies have illegal sources of capital, or will obtain them to help finance the complex. Worth looking for, he says. And something in the records made him suggest that Hong Kong might be implicated. So our raid is justified. Fierce Doris strikes again!
She gave me one of her sculptures, in thanks for my help. Big slabs of a blue-green ceramic alloy: a female figure, tossing aloft a bird, a raptor in its first downstroke. A wonderful sense of movement. We stared at it, both embarrassed to speechlessness.
Have you been sculpting long? I asked.
A few years.
What inspired you to begin?
Well—I was running experiments on certain materials under pressure, and when they came out of the kiln, they looked funny. I kept seeing things in them, you know, like you see shapes in clouds. So I started to help bring the shapes out.
I’ll put this in my atrium when they’re done working, I said.
…Work on my house continues apace. Right now it looks like the Parthenon: roofless and blown apart. They assure me it will begin to coalesce soon, and I hope so, because some strange things have happened when I am home alone, and perhaps when the house is finished they will stop happening.
…Of course I still feel disoriented—unprotected, in the midst of growing a new shell, of building a new life. But the old life in Chicago seems more and more like a dream to me—a very long and vivid dream, admittedly—but a dream still, and like a dream it is growing less intense and less easy to remember as I drift further away. Strange, this life, isn’t it? We think, nothing could ever get more real than this! Then this becomes nothing more than a darting fragmentary complex of pure mentation, while a new reality, more real than ever! steps in to obscure all previous candidates. I never get used to it. Well—write soon, please—I miss you—xx oo—
6
Been on plane four hours now. Liddy finally asleep. Tapping on lap keyboard. Might as well distract myself.
Strategies for changing history. Invent the history leading out of this world (please) into the world of the book. Causes of utopian process gaining upper hand.
Words scroll up and disappear forever, like days.
Lincoln not assassinated, no, no, we know it didn’t happen that way, we know we can’t take that road. Not useful. Someone appears to lead us, no! No Great Man theory here. No individual can save us. Together or not at all.
Together or nothing. Ah, Pamela—
Some group. In power or out. Act together. Say lawyers, the law? Still can’t escape the feeling that there’s where a difference could be made, despite my own experience. Remake the law of the land. Say a whole class of Harvard Law School, class of ’12 goes out to fill posts of all kinds, government, World Bank, IMF, Pentagon. Save the twenty-first century. Plausible? No. A story. But at least it’s possible, I mean we could do it! Nothing stopping us but inertia, ideology. Lack of imagination! Teachers, religious leaders… but there are few politically active people in any group. And to agree on a whole program of action, all of them. How implausible can something be before it’s useless? It’s conspiracy theory, really. We don’t need that either.
History changed by a popular book, a utopia, everyone reads it and it has ideas, or vague pokes in the direction of ideas, it changes their thinking, everyone starts working for a better world—
Getting desperate. Marcuse: one of the worst signs of our danger is we can’t imagine the route from here to utopia. No way to get there.
Take the first step and you’re there. Process, dynamism, the way is the life. We must imagine the way. Our imagination is stronger than theirs! Take the first step and you’re on the road.
And so? In my book?
Stare at empty screen. My daughter sighs in her sleep. Her sleeping face. It’s a matter of touch, and if you can’t touch the one you love—can’t see her—
We’re thirty-five thousand feet above the earth. People are watching a movie. The blue curve of the world, such a big place, so much bigger than we ever think, until something takes us….
Words scroll up and disappear forever, like
The night of Hank’s Mars party they rode into the hills in a big group, bike lamps bobbing like a string of fireflies. The Lobos formed the core of the party, then Oscar was along, and Tom and Nadezhda, weaving dangerously on a bicycle built for two. They came to the end of the paved road near Black Star Canyon and left the bikes behind. Hank’s backpack clinked as he led them up the dark trail. Oscar stumbled in the forest twilight: “Humanity lands on the fabled red planet, and we celebrate this feat by wandering in the dark like savages. It’s 2001 run backwards. Ow!”