It’s a misguided speech, isn’t it? Demanding a voice, but wanting a face? I have all kinds of hope about our machine, but I don’t allow myself to dream that Chris’s face — or even the pitch of his particular voice — will return to me whole. Can you remember them perfectly still? For me, other than that picture you gave me, those aspects of him are lost. Their absence will always remain the most defining thing in my life.
Yours,
Alan Turing
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 6
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
I’ve reviewed the pace of these memoirs, their unities of time and so forth, and I realize I’ve started to stagnate. I should be rushing ahead toward the next wave of egregious mistakes. But can you blame me? From the prison recreational center, I invoke my right to manipulate time. In the shadow of a bowling ball the size of a cow, I call on my power to disregard scale. I’ve lost my freedom of movement. I’ve lost my perpetual motion, my most basic Copernican right. All of us in this prison are stuck. The Sonic signs, that bowling ball, the rings of barbed wire all orbit us. Will you then revoke this other minor liberty, these freedoms I’m taking with time?
I’m sure you can relate to the frustration of imprisonment, you who are trapped in your developments, unable to show your children the country, let alone the rest of the world. You who no longer visit the graves of your parents, or the bedrooms where you first fell in love. You, too, have lost your right to passage through space. How much more crucial, then, the right to move freely through time? Unlike computers, we’re not bound to count each second correctly. We’re at liberty to accord each moment its proper weight, depending on its meaning to us. Permit me, then, to lengthen the moment when I fell in love with Dolores.
My switch from seducing her to telling her stories wasn’t an ingenious stratagem. I simply ran out of lines. To hold back the rising tide of brute silence, I cast around for something to say and stories were all that was left. For no logical reason, I started with the comfortless tales my grandmother told, when I dreamed of hell and sleep wouldn’t come. Once those tales were exhausted, I moved on to the plots of favorite children’s books. After that, I regurgitated, as best I could, the poems and novels I read in college. Listen, whiz mathletes: this is why English class is important. One day a terrible quiet will settle over your house. There will be no words. Then you’ll want to tell stories.
A new dynamic developed in the clean rooms of my mansion. Tentatively, Dolores started to listen. No one was trying to progress. White flags had been planted. There was no forward motion in the spiraling, radial routes of my stories, ranging from Sunday school lessons to Green Eggs and Ham to seventeenth-century epics. Time was suspended. I spoke, and Dolores started to listen.
With practice, I developed rhetorical flair. I found a voice that felt like my own. I was speaking in a foreign language, so I attended closely to its surfaces. As programming had in my college days, telling stories made me feel like a master. I was the creator of a universe. At night, I read voraciously, hunting new material, and still, I sometimes ran out of new tales. When this occurred, I started recounting my first memories, when my addled parents were present, when my father’s charm was still charming. I had once a mother with silken dark hair. The scent of summer evenings in the city lingered when she embraced me. I had also a hollow-cheeked father, a poet presumptive, loathed by my grandmother, who sometimes sat by my bedside at night. Lights-out, a dark shape in a dark chair, reciting his favorite poems. Did I dream him up? No, I remember still the clipped ends of his phrases, the staccato beat of his accent: “The lovely lady Christabel, / whom her father loves so well, / what makes her in the wood so late, / a furlong from the castle gate?” No, I didn’t dream his shape in the chair. I summoned his voice to recite the same poems to Dolores while she hosed down the driveway. I also told her this: When my father had died, my mother lived another two years in a brick apartment complex in Yonkers. I remember the endless gray graveyard we passed on our way there; a neighbor’s yapping white dog; and the vague and gentle expression on my mother’s face. She’d left the milk out in the sun and my grandmother was angry. There was a long line of refugee ants, moving from the window to the sink, whose journey I watched as my grandmother scolded my mother. I remember a drawing my mother gave me, charcoal on paper; and I remember realizing, later that night, that I must have left it on the bus, where I’d sat by the hairy sweater my grandmother was wearing. All this I recounted while Dolores took a chamois cloth to the silver.
When these few memories had been tapped, I told Dolores tales of my grandmother: her fire and brimstone, the endless clicking of rosary beads, the silver roots of her jet-black hair, the tissue-paper skin on her throat. I recounted playground isolation, the comfort of cool-minded computers, lunch on the floor of the wood shop with Murray. Later, the bitter fallout when Murray found a girlfriend; and later still, my voyage to Palo Alto, my flight to Santa Barbara, my arrival on the top of my mountain, where I waited for do-lovely Dolores.
In each of these tales I called my protagonist Stefan. I admit to giving Stefan a handful of personal charms that Stephen didn’t really possess. He was a little fictional, but not so fictional that Dolores wouldn’t have known exactly who this dashing young Stefan was meant to represent. So Dolores listened, and Stefan continued to speak, and if Dolores didn’t soften with pity, a particular look sometimes came over her face. A little distance betook her. There was a softening at the corners of her eyes. The heaviness in her shoulders started to lighten; her mouth became tender. Perhaps, while she listened, I came to life a little bit. No longer some satyr, sating himself on the mountain, but a man who was once a boy, who loved his mother, lost her painting, found a new friend and lost him as well. Someone she could relate to in this strange city, a land of palm trees and honey, to which she’d fled in the wake of her own loss.
For months I told her stories, gratified by the change I could cause. I was in love with my own ability to soften the corners of her eyes, to lighten her heavy shoulders. It was almost enough: choosing my words; seeing them work. I could imagine such a life. Every day, telling her stories, watching her float free of her weight.
Only once in that time did I try to embrace her. It occurred while I was describing my misery in college, those isolated nights walking beneath ivied thresholds, listening through open windows to the sounds of jubilant students. Describing them, I flew back there again, over the ocean of years, and when Dolores looked at me with some kindness, I threw myself against her, a great clumsy wave crashing over a rock. Taken off guard by my bungling affection, she held me in her arms for a moment, then pressed me gently away. She returned to her work. I picked up where I’d left off.
But I was shaken, a little. Telling that story had thrown me back to my college years, when every morning I woke and faced anew the prison of my loneliness. It seemed then that I’d never escaped, only decorated my cell with marble islands, filigree, and bougainvillea. In fright, I sought Dolores’s embrace. I wanted some reassurance that I was a man who could reach past the bars to touch the skin of a woman. That I could build such human relation.
She didn’t provide that reassurance. Still, I’d lived a long time without it. I’d developed the reckless persistence of someone who’s been sentenced to life. What did I have to lose? Even if, from out of the nest of her hair, she’d pulled a knife and slit my throat, protecting herself from my advances, what would be lost? Perhaps, murdered, my soul would depart, leaving a cold shell in its wake. But then at least I’d have confirmation that up to that point I’d been human. That I was more than an empty figure, going through the motions of living.