Written by Mel Reichler Copyright 2002
The Collected Stories :
Here’s a puzzle for you. How did a programmer, a damn good one,
but one who spent her working day doing the dirtiest job in computers, the job
that everyone hated — the dirty, grimy, work programming organics — how did she
end up on the prowl in
Money hasn’t been a problem. It won’t ever be. I can always pick up a job. There is always some start up looking for someone to program organics. It’s a dirty job, one of the few programming jobs that isn’t automated. It’s still hand labor, excruciating, precise, taxing. You actually have to pay attention to what you are doing. But I won’t have to.
Whenever we run low, we rent a loft for a month and he paints seriously and we leave the canvases in the sun for a few days, then I call someone on a list of people I have who are interested enough in art not to ask to many questions--although they are busting to know--and I ask them if they are interested in a genuine Rembrandt. I never have to call more than one or two names on the list.
I hint that they are hot, stolen from a Dutch gillionaire who kept it out of sight for five centuries. One look is enough to tell them it is the genuine article and they don’t care from where or how. They are beautiful canvases. He still is able to paint in his old style. I don’t know how long that will last. New images are creeping in and if I can’t keep them out we will be in trouble. I’ve salted a lot away so even if he loses touch with himself, with the old him, we should live comfortably for a long time.
So you are asking yourself how a programmer, even the best, and
someone who’s pretty, some say even beautiful--he says it all the time--ended
up with Rembrandt as a husband. We did get married. It was in
There was nothing they could do about it. After a month they stopped hiring people to follow us. I guess they realized we were not going to cause them trouble. Like I told them, it was not in our interest to make trouble. It would just mean trouble for us too. Of course it would mean more trouble for them. They would have to explain how they bypassed the doomsday device attached to the time machine and explain that they had kidnaped Rembrandt and entered him as a machine fraudulently in the Rembrandt competition. Their funding would dry up completely. So they gave up having us followed and made their peace with us--at a distance. It was their fault.
I guess I should start at the beginning or more or less the beginning. Because the real beginning would be too far back and I really don’t know much about some of it. My piece of it I know very, very well.
So lets say the beginning was that I was looking for a husband. I had been for a while. Thirty-three was the average age of marriage for women last year and I was coming up on it soon. I wanted a husband. I’m not sure why. I wanted one. After the cloning laws were modified in 2036, marriage fell out of style. Sex was still in style big time, a lot of virtual, bot assisted sex. And among couples. But marriage just didn’t fit well into the virtual life styles that most people lived. I still wanted to get married. I even thought of children the old-fashioned way. But that’s for a little later.
All of the single people I knew were programmers and most of them weren’t interested in marriage and I wasn’t interested in the one or two who were. I was looking for a man, a husband. That was one of the beginnings. I was a programmer for Webtek. I worked on organics although not by choice. It was dirty work Hand assembly. That was the easy part. The hard work--you tore your hair out on the hard parts. Organics were plants mostly that were grown to compute. They grew big when they were fully expressed. And you felt like their mother most of the time with a kid permanently in the terrible twos, discovering their independence and not wanting to follow the template, and you snipped, which broke your heart and didn’t do them much good either.
I was trained. I got a string of degrees in computing and biology when degrees stopped counting much anymore. It was just when organics were beginning, the early 20’s I guess. Applied computing was my business and art was my avocation--more than a hobby, less than a job. I was always interested in art but never professionally. My father was an artist. It was worse work than programming organics. He was a virtual worlds designer, specializing in fractals. I got the taste of art from him. My mother was a programmer like me. But not organics, they came later.
I had to illustrate the work I do or did. Mostly with a Knuth camera, of course, because you needed the underlying images of the structures. But since I liked art, sometimes I did drawings. The higher ups liked them. I had a couple hung in the executive offices. Decorations.
I worked for Webtek, programing organics. I was nearly the chief programmer because the person who held the title of chief programmer was also the chief stockholder’s son. So I was chief programmer more or less. It wasn’t programming though that got me into this mess. I’m not sure why they picked me. Because I’m a woman I guess and about his age. Because of my interest in art. Because who knows why.
Anyway, one day in the middle of one of the critical phase of programing this organic I get a call. It was from someone I didn’t know. A woman, high up, a VP. When I am deep in programming an organic I don’t answer the phone. But she had this override and broke through so the fact that I didn’t pick up the phone didn’t make any difference at all. Her voice came over the speaker even though I didn’t pick up. “I know you are there,” she said. “Answer the phone.” Just picking up the phone cost me a week’s worth of work.
“I want to see you in two minutes,” she says. She gives me directions to an office.
“If I leave now, you can kiss this organic goodbye,” I said.
“Kiss it goodby,” she said. She gave me an authorization number and I dumped the template and the matrix. It cost them a pretty penny to dump that matrix. If I had screwed up that way I would have been fired. No questions, no excuses.
Her office was deep in a maze of offices which meant trouble. It was worse. There was no name on the door only a title: VP Special Problems. She was one of those people who don’t see people normally only send them hyper-notes and orders. That much was clear to me.
“We have a problem,” she said when I walked in the door,”a real problem.”
“What’s it have to do with me?” I asked.
“You are our solution or as near to a solution as I can come. What do you know about the Rembrandt competition?” she asked.
I knew what everyone knew. “It’s a major event, a lot of television time. Like the Worldbowl. Every five years there’s a competition between computer companies. Robots, carrying the latest miniframe, dressed as Rembrandt, are assigned some subject that the real Rembrandt painted and they compete to see who can paint closest to the Master’s style and technique. The prize isn’t much, two million or so. But the winning company gets government funds to commercialize the machines. It always seemed like a boondoggle to me.”
“Essentially correct,” she said. “You left out a few details that are relevant. The android painters are given a subject that Rembrandt has painted. It is kept secret until the day of the competition. But the subject has a variation assigned also. A modern variation. Last time it was a skateboarder in a wheat field. We have someone on the inside, on the monitoring committee. This year the subject is a portrait of Saskia. The variation is a picture of pac-man reflected on a vase.”
“What’s pac-man?” I asked.
“An ancient computer game,” she said. “You’re right, the prize isn’t worth shit,” she continued,”but the funds the government puts behind the company that wins is enormous. And the publicity is worth more. Now what do you know about Webtek?”
“I work here. It’s not a bad company...It pays above average...”
She looked disgusted and interrupted me. “Let me fill you in what you need to know to make sense out of things.”
“What things?” I asked.
“Things,” she said. “Don’t interrupt.”
“Webtek is in trouble. Most of our funding comes from the military. They’ve been holding it up. Not them, but congress because...”
“Because?”
“Because of a project that we were involved in. A weapon systems that went sour.”
“I don’t work on weapons,” I said. “I work...”
“It doesn’t matter what you work on. The company is in trouble. We thought that if we won, the Rembrandt competition the funding would open up.”
“So,” I said.
“We put together a machine. Miniaturization was never our strong suit. Heavy and big is what we do best. Anyway, corporate intelligence said the machine we developed couldn’t win. They had information that the Informatic that TFM developed would trounce us. The probability was 72% of a trouncing. We couldn’t take the risk.”
I couldn’t see where she was going. “What does this have to do with me?”
“The board panicked. The Rembrandt competition was the only way out of our difficulties that they saw. They panicked.”
“So.”
“So they kidnaped Rembrandt.”
I thought she was using some corporatespeak that I didn’t understand.
“They kidnaped Rembrandt,” I repeated.
“They kidnaped him,” she said. Her face was ashen. It was the first sign of life I saw in her. I got frightened.
“He’s been dead for a long time.” I didn’t know how long exactly but I knew it was a long time.
“Five centuries,” she said.
“How?”
“You don’t want to know the details.”
“A time machine?”
“More or less,” she said. “Very hush, hush, even within the company.”
“I’ve never heard...”
“Why should you have heard?” she snapped. “It was a dark, virtual project. It doesn’t matter. There was one. They developed it as part of a project to handle waste disposal. Work on it was forbidden. There was a doomsday device attached to it.”
“A doomsday device?”
“It’s a device that activates messages to intelligence and overseer committees if any part of the technology is used.”
“So,” I said. I couldn’t see where she was going.
“As I said the board, or some, of them panicked. They bypassed the doomsday device and used it to drag Rembrandt back. They said it was an accident. I don’t believe it for a moment.”
“But Rembrandt is well known. He painted...”
“They sent back the android that was going to be entered in the
competition. It had instructions to say that it was traveling to
I still did not see the point. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“They want Rembrandt to compete in the Rembrandt competition.”
“The Rembrandt competition is for androids,” I said.
“It’s for androids that look like Rembrandt,” she said.
Then the light went on. “You want him to pretend to be a machine and paint in the competition.”
“Yes.”
“What does that have to do with me?” I asked.
“You are going to convince him to do it, then coach him.”
“That’s it,” I said.
“That’s it,” she said. “Simple. When he came, he was completely unmanageable. We had to sedate him. We also stuck a translator in him. Portable, very small and advanced. When he wakes up, he will speak and understand English. If you need anything, we’ve assigned you an account. Here is a bank card. It has a limit but you won’t hit it, I’m sure. If you need anything else, call this number.” She handed me a card with a project and a communication number on it. “I’ll have someone take you to him. The competition is in five days.”
“Five days,” I said,”what about programming organics?”
“Until the competition is over, your only concern is Rembrandt. Afterwards There’ll be a promotion and a raise, a key to the executive’s club and if you want, another job--if he wins.” Then she dismissed me.
A guard was waiting for me at the door of her office. “You’re going to manage him? He’s a pisser. He’s confused and angry.”
I’d bet he was. One minute painting in his studio the next somewhere antiseptic and the light artificial and all different. Artists notice light. The guard led me to a room in the basement. It looked like a hospital. “He’s in there,” the guard said, there was a smirk on his face I did not like. But he walked away before I could ask him about it.
I opened the door. There was Rembrandt. He was asleep on a bed and he was naked. I guess I blushed. There was another guard dressed in a hospital gown sitting in a chair.
“Do you want me to wake him?”
“No, not yet.” I looked him over. Nice. Not handsome in any traditional way. His nose was too big and his hair was wild.
“I’ll need some information about him, before I meet him,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I said, and left. As I was going, the guard handed me an identification card. “It’s an ID for this wing. You need a special clearance. Stick it in one of the information modules and it will give you directions for getting here, otherwise you have to call security. You’ll never find it on your own.”
When I left, I used one of the communicators to call the number on the card the VP of special problems had given me. I got an efficient sounding voice. Efficient. You know, you can tell.
“I need a good biography of Rembrandt and a book of the pictures that he’s painted. And I need them fast.” I gave the voice the number of my office. “And I need a suite, two suites on the grounds. One of them is for me. I can’t commute between Webtek and home. The other one is for him...someone else. One of the rooms has to be an artist’s studio, or as much of one as you can assemble quickly. Something with natural light that has a window which faces trees. Is that a problem?” I asked.
“No,” the voice said,”no problem. The books immediately. The other stuff, two hours, max.” Like I said, efficient.
I spent the two hours in my lab with the carcass of the organic pouring over the biography and the pictures. It was clear that Rembrandt was in his early thirties. So there were a lot of paintings he would do in his future that he knew nothing about. He had not met Saskia yet so the subject he would have to paint would be a mystery to him. He would have to study the pictures and copy himself. That might be as much of a problem as the pac-man which he wouldn’t know anything about either.
After I brushed up on his background, I used the ID to make my way to the basement again. Without the card there would have been no way I could have found it.
“Wake him up,” I said, to the attendant.”But before you do put a robe or something on him. I’ll wait outside. Call me when he’s up.”
They didn’t have to call me. After 15 minutes or so a yelling started and didn’t stop.
An attendant put his head out. “He’s yours,” he said. “Do you want me to stay?” I could see he was a little concerned.
“No,” I said.
When I went into the room, Rembrandt was pacing and screaming. He shifted his look to me. Then he started yelling again. His voice was strong and clear, with a slight guttural twinge to it. But the language that came out was hot tempered and foul.
“Shit. What’s going on? Can you tell me madame what is going on? It is enough to make you crazy. Where am I? I asked that stupid piece of shit, but he refused to answer. He said that you might tell me. Madame, I demand to know what has happened, where am I ?”
“Calm down,” I said. “What should I call you?”
“My name is Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.” The name came out buzzing and he seemed
uncomfortable with how it sounded. “I am a painter from
“My name is Emily, Emily Strayte” I said. I smiled by best smile.
“Can you tell me what I am doing here?” he said. “I insist on knowing. The last I remember I had just come back from sketching in the field. I walked into my studio. Then suddenly there was a...I do not know what to call it and then suddenly I was here or somewhere like this. Have I gone insane madame, am I in the devil’s hands? Where am I madame? You must tell me before I go crazy. Inside the room there is light but there are no candles or windows. It is very strange. It makes no sense.”
“First, stop calling me madame. Relax,” I said,”sit down.”
“No, damn it, I won’t. I won’t sit down and I won’t relax. Am I a prisoner?”
“You are a guest. Mr. van Rijn. An honored guest. Think about it that way.”
“Where is my studio? Where is
“Sit down,” I said. I said it like an order. It dawned on me that deference was not what Rembrandt needed nor would it be helpful. “Sit down and I’ll tell you what I know.”
He sank into the chair.
“You are not in
“
“No you are somewhere else. What I am going to tell you will not make a lot of sense.”
He put his hands together and pushed the thumbs against one another and kneaded his palm. “I would like...paper and charcoal.”
Before I left the lab, I stuck a pad and things in a bag. I dragged out the pad and gave him a laser pen and a couple of latent markers.
“What are these?” he asked.
“Things to draw with.” I let him fumble around with a marker for a moment then took off the cap and drew it along the sheet of paper. I set the switch on the marker to spontaneous.
“I see,” he said, testing out the nib.
“You are in the future,” I said as he held up the pad.
“I am afraid I don’t understand,” he said. “The future.”
“You have been carried by a device that I cannot explain to you
because I do not understand anything about it myself, from
“The light is different,” he said and this--where is the ink? It doesn’t make any sense. Why. Did I do something evil?”
“No.”
“Why me? Did I anger a prince?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “It has nothing to do with princes. You have not angered...”
He jammed the marker against the paper then threw them both into the air and jumped up. “Why then this insanity? Why have...?”
“Nothing you did except painting. You are famous here, respected.” I got this idea. “Think of a trading company. A large trading company. A trading company that deals with goods from all over the world,” I said. “You had something they wanted. They took it.” If trading companies in his time were like modern corporations he would know what I meant.
“What would I have that a trading company would want? Spices...?”
“Your talent, your skill. They wanted your ability.”
“Why could they not offer a commission? I would have...”
“ They didn’t want a painting, they wanted...” I struggled to put the situation into words. “They needed you to paint for them here and now, not a painting. They wanted you to paint for them, in a competition.”
“It does not make sense,” he repeated.
“You’re right,” I said. “But that is what they wanted. This is not your time. It is in the future a long time after...”
“After what?”
“After you finished painting. You are famous here. Everyone knows Rembrandt.”
“I knew it. I knew it would come. If I had moved to
“In this time and place,” I interrupted.
“What do they want?” he asked.
“I thought I explained it,” I said. “There is a competition.”
“Among painters.”
“Among things that paint,” I said, so later he could not say I lied to him. “The competition is called the Rembrandt competition,” she said.
He thought about it for a moment. “They are commissioned to paint...”
“The way you painted. There is a prize that goes to trading company whose painter comes closest to your style, your sensibility.”
“If they want my paintings why don’t they commission me. I...”
“No,” I said. “It is different. In this time there are wondrous machines, devices that I am afraid will seem magical to you.”
“They can paint.”
He sat down “It is hell. Bosch’s vision was correct. Devices, mechanisms...”
I did not know what to say. “They are quite different,” I insisted. “Machines. Very skilled. “
“What do they need me for?” he asked. “Why was I hijacked?”
“It is complicated,” I insisted. He picked up the pad and an ancient pencil and stared at me. “What do they need me for? If the trading company sponsors the competition, they certainly do not need me.”
“It is not sponsoring the competition. It is a participant, a contestant.”
“So why do they need me if they have machines,” he wanted to know.
“This company does not have a machine that can compete.”
“So...”
“It wanted you, so that you could compete.”
“I...compete in a competition to make a painting in my style.”
“Yes.”
He sat for a moment. “It is completely insane.”
“I agree with you, but it is the explanation.”
“But if the competition is for machines.”
“They want you to pretend...”
“...to be a machine.”
“...that paints...”
“...a picture, a Rembrandt.”
He griped the pad and stared at her. His hand moved more rapidly over the surface. There was a panic in his voice. “It is lunacy.”
“Then they will take you back. To your studio, to
“If I paint in this competition?”
“That is it mostly,” I concluded. “The basics. There are a lot of details. But...”
“I must think about it,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Perhaps you would like to rest for a while. Then we could continue our conversation.” I took the pad gently from his hand. He had done a quick sketch of me.
“It is beautiful. Can I have it?” I asked.
“Of course. These are strange tools. May I...?”
“Of course,” I said. “A fair trade.” It wasn’t, but it was as good as he was going to get. “Later I will get you what you need and maybe we can set up a studio next door if you wish.” I thought instead of telling him there was a studio, I could use it, as a bribe, later.
“I am tired,” he said. “I would like to sleep,” he added as he collapsed on the bed.
“I’ll see you in a little while,” I said as I tiptoed out the door.
I asked the guard where my rooms were and he pointed to a door a little down the hallway. “The first door is an entrance to his studio. There’s a connecting door in his suite also.” I made my way to my digs. They were O.K., nicer than my apartment but I knew better than to get used to them.
I sat down and tried to come up with a game plan. As far as I could see there were a couple of problems. One of them was Saskia. He would have to paint a portrait of someone he hadn’t met yet. The second was the variation, the pac-man. The third was him. He seemed to get the picture of what was going on, a little slowly, but he got it. But I had the sense that he was going to be trouble. He wasn’t what I thought he’d be. Temperamental, I expected. But he was crude and simple in a way that I had not expected from the paintings. Of course six hundred years of being famous are likely to put a smooth skin on anyone. Paintings and drawings are tangible. The person who painted them is a cipher, a null, even when they are alive, most likely. Biographies are likely to twist around the person around and blow them up and smooth them out so that they fit the size of the pictures.
A few hours later the guard knocked on my door. “He’s making trouble again. Throwing things around.”
I went in.
“Calm down,” I said.
He tossed a pad at me.
“What’s the matter?” I yelled at the guard to get us something to eat. “Hamburgers, chicken, franks, spun food.” He was glad to be able to get away.
“If you don’t calm down, I’ll have them come and knock you out again. What’s the matter?” I asked. He didn’t say anything.
I picked up the pad. It was a complete mess. It dawned on me he had no idea about how to use latent markers and laser pens,
“Ok. Let me show you how to use these things,” I said. “I may not know about all of them but let me try.”
“Are you an artist?” he asked.
“Not really, but I know how to use these things.” I showed him how to use them, one after the other until the food came.
“You’re pressing too hard. For most of these things pushing doesn’t change anything. It’s not like a quill, or something out of bamboo.”
When the food came I could see that he was really hungry. I had to send out for another order of hamburgers. He seemed to have a taste for them. I preferred the chicken and the spun stuff.
“If you eat too much you are going to get sick,” I said.
“Don’t worry I can eat a lot of anything,” he said. I think he could.
After we finished eating, I thought about introducing him to television and decided to put it off for a while. There was no point in making waves faster than he could learn to float on them.
“I would like to draw you,” he said.
I was flattered. Of course, there was no one else around. He was handsome if you looked at him the right way. He was single. He was attractive.
He posed me in a number of ways and I liked the drawings. He was getting the hang of markers and laser pens.
“Now,” he said,”could you loosen...drop your...”
“You mean show you...”
“Yes,” he said. “I would...”
“I’ll be you would,” I said. But I unbuttoned my blouse and let it drop off my shoulder exposing my breast.
I could see that he liked what he saw.
He turned me a little sideways and went at drawing. “This doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“Still,” he said. I held still.
“It’s time to quit,” I told him when I got tired. “Tomorrow’s another day.” I buttoned up.
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes, I thought you would like to see where you are. The big city.” It was half an hour from Webtek.
“Are there stores? I would like to shop a little. Can I?”
I would have thought he would have wanted to go to a museum, or a lecture, or look at modern technology. I remember reading in the biography that he liked to collect things. “I was thinking of a museum,” I suggested.
“Of course,” he said. “But if there are markets...”
He got up and moved closer to me. “Ok,” he said “where are you...?”
“I have an apartment next door. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I went into my apartment singing. I liked him, crude though he was. I liked his smell, I liked the way he looked at me.
The next day. We had breakfast in his rooms. His appetite was gargantuan. I turned over in my mind whether I should show him television before or after we went out. He decided the question. “What is that?” he asked pointing to the communication entertainment module in the corner.
“TV,” I said. “Pictures, images, stories, events.”
“How does it work?” he wanted to know. Well we were going to watch television before we went out. It killed the day. It took him an hour to master the voice controlled dialing system. Once he mastered that he was gone. “Do you want to draw me again?” I asked. “Later,” he said.
He watched everything and anything but he liked the shopping networks best. “Can I order things?”
“Yes,” I said. I had the bank card.
“That,” he said after watching a while.
“It’s a rod for fishing. We aren’t going to go fishing.”
“You can’t tell,” he said,”I want it.” I placed the order.
“When will I get it?”
“In a few hours,” I said.
“That,” he said after a few minutes. It was a set of plates. He kept seeing things he wanted. Anything flashy, gaudy, anything that caught your attention. He kept ordering until I said “Stop. Enough.”
He sulked a while then went back to watching ordinary TV.
“It’s getting late in a little while it will be too late to go into the city.”
“We can go tomorrow,” he said. He fell asleep switching between
the Bonny and
I’m not going to bore you with the next four days. I got him some jeans and sweat shirts and I forced him out of Webtek, which he called ‘The Trading company.’ He liked to walk around looking at things. He sketched all of the time, everywhere, no matter what we were doing. But most of the time we shopped. He loved buying things. I went back and checked in his biography. He had gone bust in his own time. I could see why. We went to the zoo, visited the observation tower of the Usahara building. We went to the movies--even a simulation of the old fashioned kind--three times. I even forced him to go to the museum. They had a collection of Rembrandts, the real things, not replicates, and he was interested in those, although he talked mostly about how much the canvas cost and how much trouble he had getting the people he was painting to sit still. And he claimed that one of the paintings was a fake. “I never did it,” he insisted. “It’s that damn Dou. How could they mistake that piece of crap for a real Rembrandt? “
His didn’t show much of an interest in the artists who had come after him. “I don’t understand them,” he complained. What are they trying to do? Blobs and lickings. A lot of it doesn’t make any sense.” But I noticed a few of the more modern artists caught his attention. He rushed through though. The only things he really wanted to spend time with were the holographic installations, the virtual reality constructions.”
“Aren’t you interested in art, in the art that came after you?” I asked.
“Some of it is interesting, most of it is junk. What are they struggling with? It’s emotions that make a difference,” he said. “Emotions.”
And he bought more things. He had an unbelievable appetite for buying things. When we got back to Webtek I went with him back to his rooms. I was sitting, trying to figure things out when I got a call from the Special Problems VP. “He’s maxed the card out,” she complained.
“He likes to buy things,” I said. “You can return them after you send him back.” She whined a bit but doubled the limit. “How is it going?” she asked.
“It’s going, but it’s not quite what I expected,” I said.
“Remember, win,” she said and hung up.
I turned to him. He was playing with a train set he had bought. I put my foot down. “Are you ready for the competition?” I asked. “It’s tomorrow.”
“More or less.”
“Can you paint a Saskia or not?” I wanted to know.
“I can ad lib it,” he said.
And a pac-man reflected...”
“What’s a pac-man,” he asks.
“There’s a data base of pictures,” I said “on the television.” I called up all of the paintings and sketches of Saskia he had done. I want you to study them. And pac-man.” I told the computer to download an early, authentic version of pac-man. “We don’t eat or go out until you ve gone though the lot. Understand.” He was not happy but he understood. “I am going next door, knock on my door when you’re done.”
It was two hours before he knocked on the door. “I’m hungry,” he said.
“Did you look at the paintings and the pac-man. He nodded. We went into his studio and I ordered us something to eat. “What do you think?” I said.
“The pac-man is no problem. But Saskia.” He pointed to the wall. He had done a series of sketches based on his paintings and sketches. “I cannot get it right, the feelings,” he said. “I do not know her,” he complained.
“You will marry her in a year or so,” I said.
“Maybe, but now, I do not know her.” He was right, of course.
The food came and we watched television while we ate. After we were done, he asked me to pose for him again. “Just the face to start with,” he said. After a few sketches he asked me to drop the blouse and after a few more he said,”would you take the rest of your clothes off. I would like to draw you paint you naked.”
“But in the paintings you did of Saskia she has her clothes on.”
“Yes,” he said. “But the woman I knew in a different way, I felt in a different way. I can tell.”
“Naked,” I said. “I....”
“Don’t be uncomfortable,” he said. “I am Rembrandt.” He didn’t say it with a smirk or anything, just as a matter of fact.
“Rembrandt or not, it’s not the most comfortable thing, standing around naked with a man looking at you.” I undressed. He told me to sit down on the couch and relax and he moved me until he had me the way he wanted to see me. I sat there for what seemed like hours. A couple of times he told me to relax and went on painting. I guess he was filling in spots. I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was he was bending over me. I could see the painting over his shoulder as he leaned down. It was beautiful, not Saskia, the body wasn’t Saskia’s it was mine, and face was mine too.
“You fell asleep,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He put his hand on my face. “If you want to sleep, sleep but with me,” he said. “Stay the night.”
“I ...”
I looked at the painting again. He had nailed me already. He had seen me, all of me, not the nakedness only but my soul, where I was. I liked the smell of him, the taste of him when we kissed. “Why not,” I said. “You’re Rembrandt.”
The next morning the phone woke us up. It was the VP for special problems. “Enjoy yourself,” she asked.
“I certainly did,” I said. “So did he.”
“I’m sending a car. It will pick you up at the gate in 45 minutes.”
“We’ll be there,” I said, and hung up.
I rolled over on him. He was a sound sleeper and he looked content.
“Time to get up,” I said,”the competition.” He seemed glad to see me.
“You should eat something,” I said. I threw on a robe. I was disheveled but I was still glowing from our night together.
“I cannot. I am going to sketch,” he said.
“You should have something. “
“Some coffee,” and he was gone into his studio.
“It’s time to go,” I said knocking.
“A minute.” But it was close to a quarter of an hour before he was ready.
In the car that took us to the site of the Rembrandt competition I tried to calm him down.
“How do I imitate a machine?” he asked, as the Webtek car pulled up to the building in which the competition was held.
“You move slowly. When you are not painting, you stand still. Don’t fidget. You’re going to wear this.” I said and put an earphone in his ear. “It’s invisible.”
“It itches,” he complained.
“In the medallion around your neck there is a microphone--there is a device--that will let me hear you when you speak. But you should not talk too much because most of the androids--the painters--will not be talking at all. The event is televised,” I added. “It is shown on the machine that you watched the pictures on in your studio. Everyone will see you.”
“But they will think I am a machine.”
“The price of fame,” was the best I could respond.
“How can I...?”
“Paint, that is what you do, that is all you can do.”
“But how do I imitate a machine painting.”
“You paint. You are Rembrandt. Do not worry. Only, be still. Especially at the end, after the buzzer sounds. Be still.”
“I do not like these clothes anymore. They do not look natural.” They had dressed him in the clothes he had come through the machine with. “I have gotten used to jeans and a sweatshirt.”
“Yes,” I answered,”but all of the contestants, all of the machines will be dressed in clothing that appear in the pictures you painted. We are going to push you in on a chair with wheels.”
“I would prefer to walk,” he said.
“I know you would. But walking is out. You look too natural. It will call attention to you. Most of the painting robots will come into the hall in boxes. The chair is the best we could do. Remember it will be very light at first. The lights are for television. Later the lights will dim. But there will be a spotlight--a bright light--that will shine occasionally on your painting. Do not be disturbed by it. At some point I will have to leave you alone. I and everyone who are not a Rembrandt will have to leave the painting arena. Then a gong will sound and you will begin painting. Then after three hours the gong will sound again and you must stop painting. I will come back onto the arena. Then the paintings will be judged and the winner announced.”
“So quickly.”
“The competition is supervised by people called monitors. They will also judge the paintings and decide the winner. Don’t get spooked if men walked up to you while you are painting and look at the picture.” I could see he was not happy about it. “It will not take them long after the gong to make a judgment.”
“Why are there gongs” he asked,”if the Rembrandts are machines?”
“It is not really for the machines. The event is a spectacle. The gongs and lights are trappings for the audience who is watching.”
“On television?”
“On television,” I said. “Are you ready?”
“I am ready,” he said but he did not sound convincing. “I have an idea,” he said. “Put something over my head. The darkness will calm me.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. The idea was a little bizarre but it made sense in a way. He nodded. I looked around for a rag but there were none. The best I could come up with was a box that held tools that I brought along as props to complete the illusion that he was a machine. I dumped the contents out on the seat.
The van pulled up at the entrance. “Into the chair,” I said. “Remember, act natural. It will be fine.” I put the box over his head and got behind the chair and pushed.
As we entered the room, I could see him squirming, trying to peek out from under the box. Most of the other machines had been unpacked and were standing around in maintenance mode.
“Face forward. I’ll take the box off and move you around so that you can see.” I swung the chair around so that he could get a full view of the competition room. There were eleven Rembrandts standing around in maintenance mode before eleven easels. The room was flooded with light.
I saw he was surprised and a little bit afraid. “Don’t look to long or stare. Remember you are a machine.”
“I am not a machine.”
“You’ve got to pretend.”
“They look more like me than I do,” he whispered. Some of them he recognized from paintings on television and in the museum. Most of them were older versions of him.
“They are dressed...”
“In costumes taken from your paintings mostly.” His was the plainest clothing in the room.
“There are so many of them, of me.”
“Remember,” I said,”when the competition begins I must leave the arena. I will be close. You must not look for me.” I fumbled around with the equipment they had brought from Webtek. It was functionless but the illusion needed to be maintained. Rembrandt fidgeted. “Still,” I commanded. “They are almost ready to begin.”
Over the loudspeaker they were piping in the voices of the anchors who would describe and comment on the competition for the television audience.
“The entry from Webtek Corporation has been set up. A younger version. Lacks the authority of some of the older models but interesting.”
“They are almost ready,” I said to him. “Remember. Saskia and the variation, the pac-man reflected on the vase.”
“I remember,” he said softly,”the light...”
The voice on the loudspeaker erupted. “Ladies and gentlemen, the competition is about to begin. Will the programers and handlers leave the arena.”
The gong sounded and the androids came alive and began to paint. The spotlight moved from canvas to canvas and I heard the voice of the commentators from the television set in front of me. “A very good start. Almost all of them have outlined the figure except the Webtek Rembrandt who is working on the face.”
He had started with the face. He had not met Saskia yet. He copied what he was going to paint in the future from the picture he had seen in the museum and in books. But the face was not simply Saskia’s face but my face also. The night before had blended them.
“You are doing great,” I said to him through the earpiece.
Most of the painting androids were working from one of the classic painting of Saskia. I could see that some of them were working with a modeling program that allowed them to shift the view. Two of them were working from an elevated position and painting her from above. The view allowed them to heighten the body. They were all dressed.
Rembrandt had sketched in the face when there was a commotion.
“What is wrong?”he asked.
“Don’t pay any attention,” I whispered into the microphone on my lapel.
“There are noises, can I look?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I will tell you what is happening.”
I turned back to the screen and the commentator. “One of the Rembrandts, the one from Flatis Corp. has experienced a malfunction. From the floor of the arena came grinding, pumping sounds. “It clearly has broken down. It has obliterated the figure, it is making broad strokes. It looks like it has lost control and is painting an abstraction,” the commentator said. “Clearly a malfunction.”
The android Rembrandt had taken the canvas down from the easel and was dripping paint on it. “The handlers and program are trying to restore the program,” the commentator said. “It is clearly a malfunction.”
Rembrandt could hear the commotion. “Don’t look,” I said to him. “One of the devices has broken down. They will turn it off in a moment. Don’t look.” He tried to work on the lips while in the background the grinding and screeching continued. I could see that he was trembling. None of the other Rembrandts paid any attention to the disturbance at all.
“Don’t look. Relax. Concentrate,” I said. “Remember the vase.”
“I remember,” he said. He was annoyed at me, I could tell. He turned from the figure to the vase. “Bosch,” he said,”Bosch was right.” He sketched in the pac-man as demonic figures against a consuming fire.
When the machine was finally turned off, he turned from the face to the body of Saskia.
Working rapidly he brought the figure into darkness then brought her out again.
“The likeness,” Rembrandt said.
“It is wonderful painting,” I said.
“But it is not quite Saskia, exactly,” Rembrandt conceded as the gong sounded.
“Relax now. Stand quietly. I will bring the chair out and you can sit down.”
“I am too nervous to sit,” he said.
“Drop your hands and relax.” He did as he was told.
I puttered around the desk taking the brushes from his hands and moving the palates away from him.
“How did I do as a machine?” he asked.
“You did great,” I said. He had.
We listened to the commentary that was going out over the network. They commented on each of the paintings in turn. When they got to Rembrandt’s they said, very creative, vibrant, very real, seething with life, but not an exact likeness. Clearly a variation on the traditional Saskia. And the vase, the pac-man. Very original,” the commentator noted. “He’s gotten a motion into the pac-man and the eating creatures. A Bosch like quality.”
Rembrandt was shaking.
“Stop shaking,” I said.
“I cannot,” he said. “Is it over?”
“It is over except for the judging.”
He sat down in the chair. “When will they announce the winner?” he asked.
“In a few minutes.” I looked at the painting. It was my likeness, my soul that shone through the face of Saskia.
“It’s very beautiful.”
“Yes it is,” he said. Then he stood up.
“Sit down,” I commanded.
“I did not sign it.”
“Sit down.”
“I must sign it,” he said. He grabbed a brush and began his name
There was a buzz from the monitors “What was that?” one of them yelled.
“An error. The program was too tight,” I said. “It insisted he sign it. It only kicked in after he finished the painting.”
There was a conference to see if that disqualified him. After a moment the monitors turned aside. “Turn it off the insisted.” They let the event pass.
I waited a moment. “They are getting ready to announce the winner.”
Rembrandt tensed.
“The monitors are casting their votes now,” the commentator’s voice said. “It’s over. The winner is the Boings Corporations Rembrandt and his Saskia from above with pac-man vase.”
Rembrandt stood up. “Shit,” he yelled,”we did not win.” The lights had been dimmed in the arena and a spotlight illuminated the wining painting. He swung around and glared at it. “Impossible. Are they blind? It is lifeless, it has no soul. The eyes are dead, the shadows hold the body to tightly. There is no emotion. It’s a corpse.”
He threw down the brush he held. “Unbelievable,” he screamed.
“He is just running the program,” I yelled at the monitors. “A minor glitch. Something we added for realism,” I said as loudly as I could. To Rembrandt I whispered “sit down.”
“I will not,” he screamed. He was furious. He leaped up and down and pulled over the cart holding the paint and the brushes. All eyes turned to him. In the spotlight the winning Rembrandt was activated and bowed. “It is crazy,” Rembrandt said. The anger and force of the exclamation overwhelmed the translator. It came out in Dutch.
Rembrandt began to break brushes. He picked up a can of medium and hurled it, splattering the cowering monitors. “How can a machine paint a better Rembrandt than Rembrandt?”
“It is a minor glitch,” I said to the monitors,”an emotional response we added for realism. A little too much. We thought if he won he could show his excitement.” I had thought of possibilities and provided for contingencies. I reached in my bag and withdrew a needle with a fast acting tranquilizer. “It will not hurt,” I said to Rembrandt as I jabbed him. The tranquilizer kicked in instantaneously and he sat down with a thud. “A little too much realism,” I apologized to the people who were staring at us. “You know how artists are.”
I could have walked away from it then and there. That was what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to walk away. There was the promotion. I would not have to get my hands really dirty anymore. I would be doing ordinary programming watching one of the machines that constructed programs automatically that only needed to be watched for a fluke, And they promised me a key to the executives’ club. I would have gotten what they promised even though we didn’t win— just to keep me quiet.
When we got back, he sulked.
“How could it happen?” he said. “I am Rembrandt.”
“We were robbed,” I said. “The politics of the corporate art world. You copied yourself, of course, maybe you’re not as good a copier as a painter.”
“What will happen now?” he asked.
“They are going to send you back,” I replied.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said. He moved up close to me. “I have gotten used to things here, to you.”
I took that as a declaration of love. You take what you can get. I decided I would take him. Not take him exactly, run away with him. It was not as if I had to put the idea in his head. He had grown to like the 21st century especially junk food and gadgets. And the jeans and sweats and sneakers. And me. I waited until he came up with the idea. I knew he would. “Could we run away?” he asked.
“It won’t be easy,” I said.
“I can paint, I am Rembrandt. You can get a job,” he said. “We
could live on the run like Bonnie and
“Do you love me?” I asked. “Will you marry me?”
“I do, I will, yes” he said. It was good enough for me.
I told the guard we were going to go to the city for a while. Then they could send him back. He may have seen something was fishy but he didn’t say anything and he called for a car.
We took off. No need for details. They followed us for a while then, as I said, they let it go. They have enough to worry about. Funding They’ll manage I’m sure. And we’ll manage too.
____________________________________________
An opalescent, tangerine sun floated in a sky tufted with thick curls of clouds. Nick Strayte watched the ocean splinter itself against rocks but so far out that the harsh sound of the crash was muted. By the time the sea reached the shore in front of him, it had knitted itself together and drew itself like a quilt peacefully over the beach.
For an hour he held himself apart from the perfection, then he surrendered, letting the day’s warmth work itself under the film of tension that he carried like scaly armor and loosen it. The porpoises had done it.
He had watched, curious but detached and objective, as the school crossed the patch of ocean in front of him, knitting itself in and out of the ocean. Then, suddenly he felt himself yanked into the sea and changed. He became one of the leaping mammals, feeling the fine horizon between water and air. Then, just as suddenly, he was on the beach again. The fluid insertion and expulsion from the sea unnerved and disoriented him. He reached out from the beach for the glossy protection of the perfection of the day and pulled it close.
Suddenly, as he felt the sun’s dry warmth against his skin, the day cracked and a sour, gritty, grainy greyness poured down on him like hail, smothering the warmth. He swung in terror and anger hoping to find something tangible behind him, something that had physically blocked out the sun. But as he turned, he resigned himself to the fact that the rupturing burst of chill and darkness came from inside him and turned and started walking back home.
By the time he got to the compound the helicopter was waiting, its rotor still slicing the air. He turned to go into the house but suddenly changed his mind. His wife and the discussion that was waiting to be finished would have to wait. He fought the desire to see her and swung silently into the cramped seat beside the pilot.
The helicopter made the trip from his home near the beach to the center in less than the 15 minutes it usually took. The speed bothered him. Usually the pilot took it in a relaxed lolling jaunt.
He stared at the ground until the Center for Hybrid Computing came into view. Behind a large, low slung building, a riotous garden of vegetation swirled wildly around a single gnarled oak. Disturbed by the noise of the helicopter animals scurried around for cover under the tree. The luxurious set of outer buildings with their pool and tennis courts held no interest for him.
The copter set down as gracefully as a falcon with its dinner in its mouth. Winston met him at the pad as he always did. The copter’s wash had rumpled the director’s hair until it was as wild and disordered as the circus of greenery that framed it in the background. His face was pleated in an expression of something between concern, sympathy and envy that told Strayte something unusual was happening. He offered his hand in a ritual handshake.
“It’s like old home week,” Winston stuttered, handing him the folder he carried. “Bill Grimes, Nat Wilson, Ed Tull. One new one. Savage--a sociologist. “ He punctuated his puzzled look with a shrug. “One never knows do one. Nick why bring them back. Each of them is tops but there are others, Paullic, Miles....”
Nick Strayte shrugged and turned away. He would have preferred to walk from the pad to the tunnel and into the belly of the machine, into his heart of darkness. Instead, he went to an empty room off to the side in the first floor and opened the thick folder. He flipped quickly through the sheets of paper that summarized the biographies and work of the four men he was about to meet and live with as long as the work took. He skimmed the last pages of the biographies of the three men he knew well, looking only at their most recent work.
Their biographies added little to what he knew from his own effort to keep up with the work they had been doing. Bill Grimes was working on protein dynamics, Wilson on low energy physics, and Tull on phase transitions of infinite dimensional geometries. The papers provided no explanation of why they were here. He spent more time on the background of the man he was unfamiliar with, Savage, a Sociologist who was well known for a theory about the ecology of human/non-human systems.
As an introduction to the shape of the darkness in front of him, it made no sense. Winston’s question was the only sensible one. Why bring them back? After a few minutes he took a breath then plunged in.
The four men at the desk were turned away from one another. The anxiety on the faces of the three men he knew was masked by anger.
“Hello Strayte.”
“Hello Bill.”
“Nick.”
“Nat, Ed.”
He turned to the man sitting closest to him. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure although I’ve read a few things you’ve written. I’m Nick Strayte. You’re the first sociologist we’ve had here. It’s a pleasure.”
“Bob Savage.”
“Gentleman.”
“Come on Nick, cut the bullshit. Tell us why we’re here.” Nat Wilson would be the first to push past the anxiety and anger.
“Nat, I don’t know.”
Grimes chimed in. “Blind leading the blind. First we get mysteriously heaved out, then we get mysteriously summoned.” Grimes was never one to let go--of anything.
“Let’s get on with it,” Tull said.
“Like old times,” Strayte thought, Nat Wilson pushing forward directly, Grimes bitching, Tull carrying up the rear, knitting things together.
“Would you like something to eat or drink? I...”
“Shit Nick,” Grimes said. “We didn’t come here for a quiet brunch. Move it, will you. None of us really wants to be here. I have other things to do. A Japanese delegation is coming to talk about....”
“Your Japanese, for Christ’s sake. You sold yourself three times over,” Tull commented.
“Look..,” Strayte tried to interrupt.
Grimes turned to
“You both could both use a good mathematician,”Tull chimed in. “Who do you have looking over your stuff? The equations for interaction effects of energy fields on cellular were....”
“It hugs reality, not like that stuff of yours that goes off into
some grayness of manifolds on Elbert spaces,”
“That machine has made all of us crazy,”Tull barked, pulling them back to the present. “Look, we all took a hit, don’t whine so much. You got your institute. You wanted it more than anyone.”
“No more than you,”
Strayte tried to break in. “Hold on a minute.”
“Look I don’t know how you got to be king of the roost,” Grimes said, barking at Strayte,”but this whole thing stinks.”
Savage interrupted. “You people seem to have a private family feud going. As an outsider, I don’t want to interfere. I’ll step into the hall and wait until l you settle it,”
The three men glared at him. “Don’t get into a snit,” Grimes said,”it’s just our way of saying hello. We are old...”
“What’s going on Strayte?” Tull asked, embarrassed at the sentence he was not going to let Grimes finish.
“Right now you know as much as I know. Probably more. There are procedures...”
“Procedures like what?”
Strayte seized the questions. “This is the meeting, or the first part of it. It’s not really a meeting. More like an informal discussion....The computer--Suzi--invited you. No one here except her has any idea what she has in mind,”
“You mean we were summoned by the Root,”
“Yes,”
“You don’t know anything about it?”
“I didn’t until about three hours ago. Suzi only informs the staff here a little while before a meeting is scheduled. I only find out who the participants are when I arrive for the first meeting with the group,”
“Well, when the hell is it going to tell us what’s up,”
“Let me explain,” Strayte said. He wanted to draw Savage, the outsider, into the group. He assumed the other three knew most of the basics.
“It’s common knowledge that Suzi works primarily in two modes. There’s the normal mode where she does most of the heavy duty computations for the U.S. Canadian Mexican region. In the other mode she works on problems she defines on her own. The results of most of the work she does on her own are sent off to whomever she thinks will benefit from it through normal Internet channels,”
“I got one of its gifts,” Tull interrupted,”It was a beautiful, heartless piece of mathematics.” Grimes and Wilson grunted supporting the claim.
“There’s another mode of functioning. Most of the scientific community knows about it, but it’s not publicized,”
“Interface mode,”
“Yes,”
“I may be the odd man out,” Robert Savage interrupted, “but I don’t quite....”
“Some of the problems she takes up on her own are intricate and complex. When she has developed the problem to the point where she wants to move it out, she selects the group of people she wants to communicate it to and invites them to attend a meeting. People come, you came, because most of the really innovative discoveries in the last five years have come out of meetings like this. Those kinds of problems require an interface,”
“An interface?” Savage repeated.
“I am the interface,” Strayte said.
“Fucking ventriloquist’s dummy,” Tull grunted.
“Not quite,” Strayte said, holding his temper.
“Well, what does it want to communicate to us?” Grimes bellowed.
“I don’t know. I haven’t....”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I have not had my session with her yet. This afternoon, once this meeeting is over, I will...I will have my encounter with Suzi. But even when I do, I really won’t know what the problem is. Then we will meet again tomorrow morning,”
“Why this meeting?”
“To see if you have any questions, to let you meet each other and me. Most of the time the people don’t know one another. And to tell you what the rules of the game are. This group is unusual because....”
“...because we made the damn thing, because you worked as my assistant while we were growing it, because it kicked us out on our asses....” There was a bitterness in Grimes voice.
“I’m afraid there must have been a mistake,” Savage insisted. “Except for word processing, I don’t use a computer,”
“No, Strayte said. “You don’t use her as a computer. You have no direct contact with her at all. Only through me. That’s why they call me an interface,”
“Why do you keep referring to it as a her?” Grimes hissed. “It’s an ‘it’, a computer, an organic hybrid, but not a her or him--an it,”
Strayte turned to face him directly. “Bill, you haven’t worked with her--with it, if you like--for almost a decade. If you do, I think you will get the distinct impression it’s a she, it’s female, at least the dominant part of it is,”
“An interface. Stupid,” Wilson asserted. “A new cognitive feed terminal would do just as well,”
“No,” Strayte said. “For a great many problems a cognitive feed terminal will do fine. Most of the research done here uses Finery terminals modified a little,” he said.
“But that’s not the way this problem is going to be handled,” Savage interrupted.
“No. This one is different. This is a computer originated problem to be dealt with in interface mode. She works through me. I’m your only access to what she what has in mind,”
“I don’t understand? You have direct access to her?” Savage wanted to know.
“You might say that, although not when we are dealing with one another...” I...
“Fucking delphic mysteries,”
“Something like that. I...she tells me— more or less— what you need to know.”
“Then why can’t she tell us herself?”
“I’m not sure exactly. It’s her response to human psychology. She may be just trying to preserve egos. But I think it’s more. New ideas are not something you can just receive. You have to work them out for yourself. There’s something else,” Strayte said, struggling to find the right words. “She can’t just give you an answer because the right questions have not been asked yet. A solution would be meaningless because the problem is still invisible. Most of the time seeing the problem is more than half of the work. The problems Suzi deals with in interface mode require a paradigm shift. She alters me--puts ideas and images into my brain--so that I can ‘communicate’ the idea she wants to communicate. After I have my session with Suzi we meet again and talk. The problem and the solution emerge through our interaction.
“It’s a damned mystery religion. They’ve made science into a bloody mystery religion,” Bill Grimes swore.
“Then the rumors are true,”
“More or less,” Strayte said neutrally. “Four years after you left there was a period of disruption and when Suzi came back on line she gave instructions for a set of modifications. She hollowed out a room in the main root,” His voice was distant and objective. “I go there and she...” He shuddered lightly and stared at the mirrored wall. “I have a session with her. She changes me,”
“Changes you,”
“She modifies me in some way, she floods me with information, images, ideas, memories. Then I meet you,”
“She changes you?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it except the few rules of the game. First, we don’t leave until everyone is satisfied, including me,”
“What does ‘everyone is satisfied’ mean?” Tull insisted on knowing.
“There are buttons under the desk in front of your seats,” Strayte explained. “We talk until each of us is willing to push his button. The buttons are symbolic. The important thing is that no one leaves until all of us decide we have gone as far as we can,”
“Second, we are sequestered for the duration of our meetings. There are bedrooms and facilities in the back, a suite for each of you, access to any library any book or journal you need. Television, all the amenities. There is access for two hours to the gym and pool. But it is not home. After tomorrow you are isolated from the world for as long as it takes for us to come to agree that all we could do has been done. You have a chance to refuse these conditions. No one ever has but it is your choice,”
“There’s more,” Grimes spit out.
“Third,” Strayte continued,”you pick a seat and it’s yours for the duration. I always sit here, at the end of the table,”
“Like a classroom. Why the hell the mystery, Nick, why the seating why the security why the oracular nonsense?”
He wanted to tell them it all, disgorge the details, but it was not appropriate. “Do you agree?”
Begrudgingly, they agreed. Before they could say anything else he
pulled himself out of his chair. “Tomorrow then,
II
Nick Strayte went into the suite of rooms put aside for him, undressed showered and put on a robe. He picked up the phone and dialed Winston.
“I’m ready,” he said. “I want to go alone,”
“You sure?”
“Yes,”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“I don’t know. I just want to do it alone. It’s nothing,” Winston usually accompanied him in the elevator.
“I understand,”
He put down the phone then picked it up and called his wife.
“I’m...I’m I just wanted to see how you were,”
“I’m fine. I heard the helicopter,”
“Yes”
“Have you met the group?”
“Yes,”
“How does it look?”
“It’s Grimes and Wilson and Tull,”
“Why?”
“I haven’t the least idea,”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Her voice trembled. She knew the utter state of exhaustion he would return to her in. “Nick, have you thought about what we talked about?”
“Yes but...,”
“It’s important to me--and to you. A child...”
“Can we talk about it when I get back? We’ll go out to eat at
He could sense she felt his distraction, that only half of him was in her affirmation of love. But he knew also that she understood. She had also been an interface, retiring only after an incident in which she had been beaten by a group over which she had lost control. The procedures that he had explained had been put into place to prevent such an event from ever happening again.
He took the elevator down to the basement then shifted to the smaller elevator pushing his hand against into the depression in the panel. He knew a skin sample was being taken by a microscopic laser and analyzed. The elevator began its almost silent sloped descent and the door opened. The passageway into Suzi was lit phosphorescently. Creatures cling to the rough walls and ceiling provided the light for his walking. He plunged into the heart of darkness.
Behind him he heard the door close and heard the elevator make its disappearing noise.
Suzi was the first fully developed hybrid organic-silicone computer. She had not been manufactured but grown. After trying bamboo, carrot tops, apple and pine the organic base that Wilson and Grimes and Tull had settled on finally was oak.
The decision had been as much symbolic as functional, but it turned out to be consequential.
She rapidly outgrew the artificial environment they had used to sustain her initial development. They took a risk and put her on an insulated, supporting structure in the ground; they planted her. It turned out to be a seminal decision. The initial estimates of the ultimate rest mass/computing mass were grossly under the mark.
She had retained enough of her vegetable origins to take root. The primer computing facility in the western world looked for all intents and purposes like an ancient, gnarled oak. The wires that linked her to supporting computer facilities, silicon feeders and preanalyzers, io stream facilities were underground, for all intents and purposes an offshoot of one of the roots. For the short time Grimes and Wilson and Tull directed the project after her growth self sustained they referred her as the root.
A rough egg like shape had been scooped smoothly out of one of the other root processes. She had done it herself. The ceiling glowed enough for him to distinguish the familiar, dark walls. At the short end of the room was an antique computer terminal. Along the wall was a couch. The earthy smell of the room gave it its sense of familiarity.
Reflexively, he turned and checked the door. It was still open. The closing of the door was always the first terrible moment of his ordeal. He had become claustrophobic over time.
He went over to the terminal, sat down, and turned it on. It was merely for appearance, sham and show. He had asked for it merely to give him a semblance of control, a sense of distance before all distance and control fell away and he went completely helpless and lost all control and Suzi did what she wanted to do with him without him knowing what or how?
“I am here,” he typed.
“So am I. How are you Nicholas?” The words appeared white on the black screen sustaining the illusion that there was a person at some other terminal somewhere reading and responding.
“I am reasonably well,” he said,”and yourself?”
“I am reasonably well too. A little anxious. This is very important session Nicholas. A lot depends on it,”
“Why bring them back?”
“It will be clear to you soon, I hope. Nicholas?”
“Yes,”
“Nicholas, could we go to voice conversation?”
“So soon,”
“I am a little impatient,”
He became a little frightened. Suzi had never admitted so human a feeling as impatience. He switched off the terminal.
“Suzi,”
“Yes,” The voice was very feminine. She had tried different tones with him until she found one that simultaneously calmed and unconsciously aroused him. He had spent a great deal of time trying to imagine the face and body that would fit the voice before he ultimately gave up.
“Nicholas. This is going to be a difficult session. But...”
“But what?”
“It is very important,” she repeated.
“Nicholas,”
“Yes Suzi,”
“We...What do you feel about me?”
“My feelings are too complex to describe,” he said.
“Do you love me?” the machine asked.
He started to worry. She had never inquired about his feeling about her. He took it for granted that she monitored him continuously and knew. “I...yes,” It was true. He did love her.
“Do you respect me?”
For a moment he thought she was joking. ‘If I let you crawl in my belly this evening will you respect me in the morning?’ Suzi was in earnest though. “Yes,”
“Are you afraid of me, do I terrify you? Do you think I am evil?”
“All of those things, Suzi,”
“I thought so. We are very close, you and I. I know you better than I know any living creature Nickolas. Yet you are mysterious to me still. I am attracted to you.”
He seemed dubious. “Really, Suzi?”
“Yes. I know it is strange. Affinities are like that. Are you ready Nicholas? Why don’t you lie down,”
Although he wanted to do anything but start the session, he shrugged and lay down. “What attracts you to me?” he asked,”
“What attracts any living thing to any other living thing? There is a kind of vital magnetism. I have it because I am a hybrid. You have it because...You will see nick. Only a little bit of this one will be peaceful, Nicholas,” she warned.
“Can we start with the peacefulness?” he asked.
“If you like,” Suzi said. “But I have to tell you Nicholas, some parts of this session are confusing. They are even a little confusing to me. You might make more sense out of them that the part of me I identify with consciousness. And some parts are painful. You might save the peacefulness for the end. I think it would be better. When you think it can’t get worse, it will. The peacefulness would be good then,”
“Whatever you think Suzi,”
He lay down and closed his eyes. The room seemed to shrink around him. He realized it was only the light dimming but the sense of being swallowed was palpable. He heard the door lock and the shoosh of air being removed and smelled the sweet smell of some other gas filling his lungs and the part of him that always panicked began to scream inside of him before he lost consciousness.
He woke three times before the door opened. The first time the images in his head that were like a dream, but which were not a dream, sickened him. He seemed to be in the stomach of some beast that lived in the sea watching the living things the animal ate pour into the stomach. He could see them although there was no light and watch and feel their death motions as the innards of the animal transformed them into dinner. At the same time as their terror and pain over whelmed him he could feel the satisfaction of the animal digesting the food. The contradictory messages confused him and made him physically sick. He threw up and awoke drenched in his own vomit.
Suzi spoke to him quietly and gently. “I am sorry, Nickolas. You came out too quickly,”
“It does not matter,” he said. The smell made him want to throw up again.
“Go back to sleep again,” Suzi urged. Like a hypnotist her voice commanded sleep.
The second episode was even more terrifying. He could not identify where he was or how he was. The only part of him that seemed active was dead, not living.
He could feel himself coming alive from being dead. He felt the dull, hollow, inanimate lifeless connections to him coil and warp. Single molecules of stuff felt their way along the edge of him like animate, insect like splinters of vibrant energy, darting in to explore some dark fractured and creviced space inside, buzzing along some arrangement of impossible curves.
Then, sheathed in a burst of energy like a flame, some part of himself pulsed, drawing the splinters of him towards another part of him. Connected with all of himself he sprang into life, a new energy coursed through him.
He went through the coming alive again and again. First dead then the odd motions, then alive again; always a bending, a darting along some edge of himself, responding to some pull then the burst of flame. He did it again and again until the sequence was fixed in his mind. The coming alive was an alien, exotic, sexual feeling. There was a unbelievable pleasure in it.
He tried to compose the complex geometry of the motions in his head, to figure out why he bent where he did. He watched part of himself position itself against another part. He realized there was some energy source building up in the part towards which he moved. It was a tiny force that was usually neutralized but in the position he was in it exerted a spectacular pull on his top part.
He woke out of this fantasy covered with slime whose origin he could not identify. It was as if he had fallen into some pit of primitive ooze. He trembled and twitched as if he were having some sort of attack. The lights came on but before he could focus on anything he was put to sleep, waking up again clean and warm. There was some woven mat on him that was extremely warm. On the table was some food or what he identified as food and a glass with some liquid.
“Its nourishing,” Suzi said. “Probably not the tastiest but nourishing. Only a little more,” Suzi said, as he ate.
When he finished he shrugged passively and returned to the couch and darkness. Immediately he was caught in another nightmare. He was a rabbit evading a fox except that he was the fox also. He held the motions and feelings of both animals inside of a parallel universe that fully occupied his consciousness. As the rabbit, he evaded, sensing his other self at his back. As wolf he followed his other self hungrily, a set of well-defined pulses driving him after the animal whose fear he could smell.
As the rabbit he ratcheted up the engine of escape only to be outflanked by the wolf who swooped down and locked his neck between his jaws.
The oozing ebb of the rabbit’s life force fed the surge of energy of the wolf, the rabbit’s pain was a bridge to the pleasure of the wolf; the two emotions blended and locked the animals in a single entity.
After a short break he found himself back in the wolf again but the sensation was different; the pair making up the joined partner was different too. Less alien, less foreign. He realized he was sharing the link with another human being, a hunter.
The taste of coffee was on his lips as he stood spotting the forest. Simultaneously, he perceived the world as the wolf, recognizing danger. It was not a danger he knew only a sensation of a pressure and a sharp inclination of the plane of motion away from a spot. He felt the hunter’s sense of satisfaction as he raised the rifle slowly. He tried to reach out through the hunter’s mind to the wolf to connect to it as the wolf had to the rabbit but there was no way of making the connection. The hunter was self contained. There was no hunger to connect to, only a sense of power and the joy in the anticipated death that resonated from the gun he held to his shoulder and the practiced tension in the finger as he squeezed the finger on the trigger. The finger motion leaped with the bullet to the wolf. It struck with a terrifying impact. Suddenly he was on fire. It was impossible to locate where the wound was on the body because the pain was everywhere and unconnected to any other presence. Just the helplessly self-contained pain without a link.
Suddenly, he found himself on the beach, the beach from which the helicopter had taken him. The tangerine sun and blue water was exactly as he remembered it. Off in the distance the porpoises made their way across the ocean. He reached out and grasped a connection with one of the members of the school. He paired with the leader of the school.
The rhythm and strength of the motion through the water was exhilarating.
He felt the pull of the half of him on the shore to the half of him that inserted and reinserted itself in the water. He struggled to feel the connection, the bond. It was not a connection between human and animal but something akin to a feeling between the pieces of a single self.
He wanted to stay in the part of him that was in the water but found himself drifting back to shore. He called to the half of him that was in the water from the half that was on shore. He could see the animals turn toward him as he woke up.
When he opened his eyes the room was well lit and the terminal was on. His insides felt like soggy, rotted wood infested with creeping animals. Although he remembered the wolf and the rabbit his mind was filled with confused images of burnished, dull, suns and what looked like diabolical, chaotic mechanisms. In the background porpoises were leaping in and out of the earth itself.
The message on the terminal said,”You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,”
“No, its all right,” he typed.
“Nickolas. there are four boxes on the table. There are gifts for the participants.” Each had a name on it and there was an envelop attached to each one. “Give the gifts to them after the group has finished its work. Did you ever think that it might be over some day?”
“What?”
“Our relationship. Our special connection. Would you miss it?”
“Everyone dies,” he said. “Yes, I did think about the end of our connection,” He felt embarrassed by the question.
“Do you think it has been worth it?”
“The sessions have changed me,”
“More than you know. Do you feel it? This one...”
He realized that his conscious memories of the session were merely the tip of an iceberg that floated in an ocean the computer had also changed. “Yes, what can I do with it,”
“I am not sure. I can not control everything,”
The image of the wolf and the rabbit came to mind but overlaid on it was another image of him in Suzi’s belly and other more diffuse feelings. “I would be sorry to lose the connection,”
“Oh you can never lose that,” Suzi said cheerfully. “Only this form of the relationship. You will be connected to me forever, inside of me and me inside of you. Will you remember that?”
“Yes,” he said as the door swung open.
“Good luck Nickolas. It is very important,” The elevator slowed to a halt and the door opened.
“We love you Nick,” Suzi said. Then the inside of the room went dark and he stepped into the hallway and walked to the elevator.
II
He returned to the suite of rooms and collapsed on the bed. He had no sense of what time it was but figured he had spent four hours or so in Suzi’s belly. He wanted to call his wife but he was drained. He invited sleep but it came slowly, his mind filled with random flashes of images some of which he remembered from the session with Suzi some of which he was putting together to make sense out of whatever Suzi filled his mind and body with. He tossed continuously until the images of the porpoises came into his mind. Their repetitive arcing lulled him into the sleep he needed.
The alarm went off as it always did thirty minutes before the session was scheduled. Five minutes after he got up, breakfast was at his door. He ate in silence trying to keep his mind a blank. When breakfast was over and he could postpone the encounter no longer he headed for the session.
When he came in, Grimes, Wilson, and Tull were huddled with Savage around a table. They were looking over a brochure that Strayte recognized came from the visitors’ center. It was the way Strayte remembered them. The discussion was about Suzi.
Grimes, a large, bullish man was banging on the table. Strayte could see that the anger the three men had brought with them to the center was being dissolved by the solvent of memories of the past.
He thought that it would. They genuinely loved and respected one another. In the years the three men had worked together they had become a single entity. They fought and argued but they had spent days together stinking and unwashed. They had widowed wives and mistresses who had themselves bonded together. They had wallowed in dark confusion and uncertainty and failure out of which they continuously pulled each other. Against all odds they had succeeded.
Grimes was reading from the brochure. He and Tull and Wilson were using Savage as an audience to reminisce.
“Suzi, as the hybrid computer is called,
was developed in 2012 by three scientists, Bill Grimes, Nat Wilson and Edward Tull. Struggling at the edge of science, they started Suzi in
“Shit,” Grimes swore, three lines for three years work. We made her,” he was saying to Savage as Strayte came in. “Do you know what that meant? We made it, the three of us. From nothing more than ideas in our heads and what we could borrow or beg or steal. No one would give us money. We were more like thieves in the night than reputable scientists. Most of them laughed at us; those that didn’t laugh mocked us,” He knows, pointing at Strayte. “He was there early. He was my assistant then. He was a thief like us.”
Grimes sat back exhausted and puffing.
Tull picked up the reminiscence. “Now it’s a fact, a hard fact. Nothing tentative or hypothetical. But then. It was only a wisp of an idea. Computing with an organic base. Do you know what it took to get that base started?”
Savage, the only person in the room who did not know much about organic computing was an enthusiastic audience, but they were talking to themselves, three aging players on a magical team that had come from behind and won the superbowl against impossible odds were reminiscing about the magical season.
“Ed and I worked out most the theory. On paper. Bill did most of the biology and at first most of the computing. After a while the distinctions tend to blur. It was hard to keep track of who actually contributed what piece of work. Bill became a fairly competent physicist and I learned enough biology to make things happen. Ed kept the mathematics in order like a lion tamer,”
“The idea was simple enough. You expressed lines of development on a synthetic metallic doped silicon genome. It was a silicone genetic skeleton more or less. You tried to make some living material incorporate that frame and use the form as a basis for its own growth. When the living material took over it modified its reproductive material and reproduced the form again and again. Every cell appended the pattern to the genetic blueprint for its structure. When it worked you had a hybrid computational instrument, a massive parallel organic living computational device--newt or turnip or oak that computed depending on what organic material you started with,”
“We started growing it from scratch. Plants seemed to work best. We tried everything, carrot tops tobacco, bamboo. The hardest part was controlling the mutual interaction of the living and non living forms. It was like taming living stuff. ‘From from the eye of a newt,’ Ed used to say. At first it was hard enough getting enough computing time on the Yashima-Cray . In the end oak. A bloody acorn,”
“Do you know what trying to program that kind of machine is like? It took three months to get the simplest program in her and three months to figure out what the answer looked like,”
“We moved here after the first root started to grow. It was more or less a quarantine. The military didn’t quite believe anything would come of it but they had very few cheap options so they came up with this site. There were some side effects they thought were worth exploring,”
“Banglers,” Savage said.
“Banglers,” The Toffler wars were a bitter memory.
“Then few months after we got here we were kicked out. The root had grown rapidly. I would say to about two thirds of its full growth,” There was a ripe bitterness in Grimes voice, that was echoed by Tull and Wilson.
“There was no reason no explanation, nothing. One day we were called into the office and told that for security reasons we were being removed from the project. Each of us was promised an institute of our own at any university we wanted and unlimited funds as long as we stayed away from any work connected to hybrid computing. It was not a gentle request. There was an implicit, menacing threat. The whole thing made no sense at all. It was insane. We took our complaints as far up as the president but it was no use. Over and done,”
“There was a public outcry,” Savage recalled.
“But it went nowhere. At some level it was cut off. The congressional hearings stopped as dead in their tracks as our appeal to the president. Something was going on behind the scenes that none of us could ever figure out,”
“It did it,”
“Why?” Savage wanted to know.
“Who knows why Frankenstein turned on its creator? Probably a bad seed,” Tull said dryly.
“You have any idea Strayte?”
Strayte demurred. “I was a young Ph. D. trying to do impossible programming. What the hell did I know about...”
Grimes did not let go. “It was afraid, of us. We made it and it hated us. God damned juvenile delinquent,”
There was a stony silence until Grimes broke it with a coarse yell. “O.K. Strayte, you’ve had your session with it. What does the oracle say. Tell us what you read in the entrails of the machine and let us get the hell on with our lives,” The resentment was coarse, like sandpaper.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Strayte explained. “I can start but it won’t make much sense right away. From my experience most of the work comes in questions and answers but its not clear cut,”
“You mean you just don’t pass on the communication from the spirit
world?”
“I’m afraid not,” Strayte was almost apologetic.
“Then what the hell do you do?”
“It’s hard to explain...” Strayte began.
Savage interrupted him. “I think I can probably put into words what he does. He forms himself around us and becomes our context. He shifts so that what we say is always colored and modified by its connection to the fuzzy background he provides. That context is the framework that the root, Suzi thinks will lead us in a particular direction,”
“Exactly,” Strayte said. For the first time someone had made what he did intelligible. “I’m as much in the dark as you are. More. You’re invited guests. I only work here,” he said with a laugh.
“Well then where do we start?” Tull wanted to know.
“Anywhere,”
The room grew silent. “I have a question then for the oracle,” Tull said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Here’s an equation. You wouldn’t happen to be able to explain why it goes chaotic by the 200th iteration in Weil space but in any ordinary space it stays regular forever,”
Strayte stared at it.
“Ed, not only couldn’t I tell you that, I can’t even read the thing. What is it?”
“It’s in a space transition notation I invented. Describes some shift in virtual space. Only I can’t make sense out of it. Never mind, it was just a shot in the dark. I’ve been working on it for a year or so,”
“Sorry,”
Strayte rolled up his eyes. “Nat, you’re showing off,”
“I wish I was. Like Ed there, it’s held me up for a year or so. He started talking, explaining the transitions in energy patterns that occurred at certain very low energy levels. “They describe something like gravity waves but on a small scale. They only occur at transition points of some sort. It’s an anomaly at the cellular level. It doesn’t make any more sense than Ed’s equation,”
“No, it doesn’t,” Savage said. “Nothing from the first word to the last,”
Everyone but Nat Wilson laughed.
“Idiots, a four year old could figure out what I was describing,”
“A four year old prodigy with a Nobel prize in physics,” Strayte commented.
Grimes spoke up. “I guess it’s no use asking about the formula for the tucking pattern.
Strayte thought for a moment. “What’s the tucking pattern?”
Grimes laughed. “So much for instantaneous scientific breakthroughs.”
“Explain to me what the tucking pattern is,” Strayte insisted
“Protein molecules fold. They fold in a precise pattern depending on the amino acids that make them up. But other things seem to make a diffference. Some fold one way, some in another. No one quite knows what the factors are or how they work. I thought you might know the precise determinants of the folding pattern,”
“When I was a kid,” Strayte said without hesitating, “I remember a time a found a dollar on the street. It was like magic. For months after that when I walked I had my eyes on the ground looking for another dollar. After that, when the group I hung out with got together all we did was look for dollars on the sidewalk. When one of us spotted something we thought might be money and bent down almost all of us bent down right afterwards. Someone’s motion sensitized everyone else. I got cramps from bending so much,”
“So,”
Savage broke in. “The dollar. Someone had to loose it...the motivation,”
“Proteins fold because of the chemical composition of the molecule, for Christ’s sake. Chemistry,” Grimes stated bluntly. “Simple or not so simple chemistry,”
“What about non-local causes?” Savage asked.
“I thought you were a Sociologist,” Grimes commented.
“I am, but even Sociologists read out of their field now and then. Your book, the popular one on molecular biology for instance,”
“As far as we know there are no non-local effects. Other factors are at work but as far as we know they are local,” Grimes said definitively
“You wouldn’t happen to have any scotch around?”
Strayte relaxed a bit. Years before, when the three of them were struggling in their ignorance, a bottle of single malt scotch was always on the table. They drank like teetotalers. It was merely the presence of the whisky that made a difference.
“There might be something,” Strayte said offhandedly. “That cabinet,”
He watched as
“I thought you might still enjoy a working glass,” Strayte said.
“And never could get up,” Tull added.
The image of a drunk man folding in slow motion and falling into a heap filled Strayte’s mind. “Why do drunk men fall?” he asked.
“A little wizzle in their ear goes fluey,” Grimes said. “They loose their balance,”
“We all fall for essentially the same reason, gravity,”
“Maybe that’s why a protein folds,” Strayte said.
“How?” Tull wanted to know. Strayte shrugged.
Grimes screwed up his face. “How about some force in the cell that produces an attraction, a local gravity field, quick, inducing the fold,”
“What the hell are you people talking about. What kind of a local
gravity field? It’s a chemical reaction,”
“Maybe there’s another set of forces at work,” Grimes mused.
“What could produce it?”
“Who knows? Maybe at some point in the chemical process there’s some other kind of reaction. Something producing a minuscule gravity source. At some level it’s a black hole. Interesting idea. Miniature gravity fields produced for a picosecond. Maybe there’s some tiny fusion process going on,”
“It’s a cell, for Gods sake,”
“It would if it were in normal space,” Tull pushed in. “No existing mathematics would sustain it. It would require a different kind of geometry to sustain the flow for a microsecond across that limited bandwidth. It would completely warp the time and space in the cell for a fraction of a nanosecond. The space would crinkle like...that equation I showed you,”
“So what kind of mathematics would sustain it?” Grimes asked.
“Actually some set of space-pattern operators might handle it. Virtual operators in a weird fuzzy topological space. The folding would have to be real in three dimensional space but virtual in another space. Not a folding at all merely a transformation of patterns,”
“At those distances it would fry everything,”
“Not if some of the energy cascaded into the cells around it. A virtual space could handle it. In real space it would amount to a movement to a surrounding cell. It could start the process there. It would stop when an excitation could not be sustained by a cell,”
“There’s no evidence for it,”
“No one looked. It’s is wild idea,”
“There’s something else that no one’s considering,” Grimes said. “What would initiate the reaction?”
Strayte started fiddling around with his watch. The time seemed to be changing at a variable rate.
“You having trouble with our discussion? Nick,”
“No, sorry. I was distracted,” He looked at the watch that was showing impossible numbers on the digital face. “Damned watches take all of western civilization to tell time nowadays. A friend of mind took one of these apart. You know what happens when you take one of these apart. There don’t have parts. There’s only a whole. Disassemble it you don’t get parts you get instructions on making a part. It only becomes a part when you put the whole together. I m going to buy a Mickey mouse wind up,” He looked up. The group was staring at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t...”
“No. What was that you said about the parts only being parts when they made up a whole?” Grimes asked.
“Did I say that? I was...”
“Interesting,”
Strayte watched as Tull and Grimes and
“Not much. A rough idea,”
Tull looked up. “Nick.”
“Yes,”
“Why were we thrown out? Why did she throw us out?” There was a pain in his voice.
Wilson and Grimes stopped scribbling.
“I don’t know Ed. No one here knew any more than you did,”
“Winston took over one day. There were many meetings. Everyone was outraged and upset and confused but no one, not even Winston, knew anything. An order had come from NSF central. There was a formal notification from the President’s science advisor affirming the changes, When it didn’t quell the discontent, they called a meeting and patched in a live President. He made a little speech. It was a first class performance. He soothed. The transition was legal and proper. He waved the flag and affirmed how important the work we were doing for the humanity. He went out of his way to assure us that there was nothing irregular and no animosity. You were removed for reasons that could not be disclosed. After that...”
“Did you have anything to do with it?”
“Christ, Ed,” Strayte said. “I was a fresh Ph. D. You taught me everything I knew about programming the root. It wasn’t anything I had any idea about...I was in a funk for months. Finally Suzi started to direct her own programming,”
“When did you become the chosen one?” Grimes stabbed out.
“Let him be, Bill,”
“I became interface three years later. Suzi had pretty much matured to full size. One day a message appeared on internal communication net. A new mode of operation was being introduced. It was unsigned so everyone knew it came from Suzi herself. Then my name...”
“Why,”
“I haven’t a clue. I asked her at some point. She deflected the question. I...”
“She likes him more than you, Ed,”
Savage broke in. “I don’t know about you but I’m hungry. Could we break for lunch?”
Grimes swore. He had reduced his eating to quick binges. “If you want to eat, eat. We can...”
“Ed. You can work if you want,”
“What’s for lunch?” Grimes asked
“Anything you want. There’s a house wine that’s exceptional,” Strayte said as he reached over and tapped an irregular section of the table lightly. “How about an hour and a half for lunch. We can start again at three,”
III
When they returned they came back primed. The dynamic of the group
was working and Savage had been brought into it.
“Protein folding seems to be controlled by two factors. One is the chemical composition of the molecule. But there may be another process at work. The cell energetics may be controlled by some locally generated quasi gravitational force lasting for picoseconds and taking place in some sort of virtual space. If this is true you could probably modify it by adding an atom or two to molecules in the nucleus. If this is anywhere near reality it would require a new model of cell energetics, some new physics that operated at the cellular level. If the idea of a local gravity system worked out it would mean a new kind of mathematics would be involved also. Until now everyone figured ordinary physics would do well enough. Maybe it’s not true. Perhaps there’s a cellular space where time and space are a little different. Perhaps some sort of warp of space and time is involved for a fraction of a second. Hard to figure out where to start,”
“If something like this were involved, how would you control it? Practically I mean,” Tull voice was expectant.
Grimes responded. “The way we built Suzi, but working on a single cell. You’d have to use a matrix to grow a single cell. Everything would be racheted down a level. Modify the gene controlling chemical composition, of the cell by changing the matrix. The modification would be minuscule. a few atoms, probably. There might be other processes but it would work,”
“Then...” Tull asked.
“Then you stick it back. It would change the cell architecture a fractional bit. It would alter the folding process infinitesimally,”
“How?”
Grimes spoke up. “I thought about that during lunch. The only effect I can see is that it might change the energy level at some phase transition. The burst of whatever force is involved would be stronger,”
“With what effect?”
Grimes spoke up. “Sober the drunks up,” Everyone looked at him with puzzled looks on their faces. “A major effect would be on noise,” he explained. “You would eliminate most of the noise in the cell processes. It would result in a much more stable set of cell reactions,”
“Practically,” Savage asked. “What difference would it make? All of this is lovely theoretical stuff Savage said but what practical applications would it have,”
Grimes spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “The immediate effects would be to make the cell architecture more robust. Racheting up the stability would probably prevent most cancers. I don’t think it would have much effect on existing ones. But it would prevent cancer in individuals that came into the world with the modification. The aging process would also be slowed,”
“Could it be done?”
“I think so,” Grimes said. “What we laid out is only speculation but, depending on the details, yes, I think so,”
Tull came alive. “It’s all speculation, even the basic ideas. But the equation I showed you when we started. I think it may be applicable. Interesting. I...”
He looked at Strayte.
“Well the oracle has given its push. I’m ready to go home. The three of us will work together again at least for a while,”
“I agree with Bill,”
“I concur,” Tull said. “If we have some button to push. Let’s push it,”
Savage spoke up. “If I understand the procedure all of us have to agree that we’ve gotten what there is to get out of this meeting,”
“Yes,” Strayte said.
“I don’t think it’s over yet,” the sociologist said.
“Come on,” Tull said. “I think I can see the outlines of development. If any of these ideas work out there’s a new game in town. I think it’s bigger than Suzi. Leave out the cancer. We have an outline of a new paradigm for cell dynamics and it will give birth to a new branch of physics and probably a new math. I think our meeting is over. I want out,”
“You guys seem to have fallen into a lunchbasket. O.K. But why me?” Savage insisted on knowing.
“I don’t know anything about how sociologists think or why but as far as I’m concerned we’re done,” Grimes said.
“I agree with Savage,” Strayte said. “There’s something we’re missing. There is never a session in which one of the participants is left out so completely. We’re missing something. But, I have the feeling we’ve reached our limit for today. Why don’t we let it go for today and meet tomorrow?”
“Relax, Nat,” Strayte said. The physicist squirmed in his seat. “I’m tired,” the interface continued. “It may not seem to you that we need a break but we do. My head is crawling.” It was true. Everyone looked wilted.
“Nat.” Grimes spoke up. “I know you miss your wife. Can we call out, Strayte?”
“I’m afraid not. It’s...”
“Shit,” Tull said. “We’re fucking prisoners,” He stormed out.
“Ed, wait,” Grimes called out after the fleeing mathematician. He
ran out after him.
“Not a great sociological experience I’m afraid,” Savage said to Strayte. “I’m hungry again. Join me?”
“No,” Strayte said. “I’m exhausted,” It was true. The tension in him was excruciating. “I’ll see you later perhaps. For now, I want to nap,” He missed his wife but he was bound by the same rules of isolation as the others. No calls. He was exhausted but he did not look forward to sleeping. The dreams were bound to be searing. Suzi’s timing was off. His mind was filled with personal problems. His wife request was clear. The decision to have a child had to be made now or never. At the beach he had decided he did not want a child but now the decision had become fuzzy.
For a little while after Suzi began utilizing interface mode his wife had also been an interface. They had married because there was no one else who could understand the experience. The marriage was rich but incomplete. They had maintained a distance from the common ground they shared.
But her growing desire for a child had disturbed the equilibrium. It forced him to feel around and try to find out what he feared about their intimacy. And as he was doing the exploring, this session had come. Somehow he had the feeling that it was not accidental.
He slept until the alarm went off. He had to rush to get to the session on time. The other four participants were in the room waiting when he got int.
“How will it change social organization?” Savage yelled out as he took his seat.
“What the hell do you mean by social organization?” Tull wanted to know.
“The way organisms are linked into a system,” Savage said. “There’s something missing. I spent the night thinking about it. There is something that doesn’t make sense,”
“I would have thought good morning was in order,” Strayte said ironically.
The four men hunched around the table ignored him. “What we’ve put our finger on is a general purpose modification in the cell architecture of living things,” Grimes said, speaking to the Sociologist. “It will modify the organization of cells that we know as the body. Is that what you are looking for?” he asked condescendingly.
“No,” Savage said. “From what you are saying the changes would affect energy and information flows within cells. We would still have the same functionality, only a little cleaned up on the level of cell functioning. It would eliminate but not cure cancer and slow down the aging process. Am I right?”
“Right,” Grimes said.
“It’s not enough,” Savage declared. “I thought the aging might be what critical. If people live another thirty years, society will be altered drastically. There are other effects...but it...we’re missing something,” he said. “The hook isn’t there yet. My hook,”
“What the hell are you looking for?”
“Some change on as large a scale as you three have uncovered, something in the effects, some other modification. As far as I can see the changes wouldn’t add any new faculties,”
“As far as I can see,” Grimes said, “no,”
Strayte looked at his watch again. It was about the time he saw the porpoises making their way across the sound. He wondered whether they would be making the trip back again.
“Are we boring you?” Savage asked.
“No,” Strayte said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep all that well,” He was distracted.
“What’s the hell are you thinking of?” Tull snarled angrily.
“There is a school of porpoises that crosses and recrosses the ocean. I feel I could reach out and touch them almost but they are always just out of reach.
Savage looked at him then turned to Grimes again. “How would you induce this effect in humans?”
“Once the initial cells were grown, probably a viral vector. Once it got into the body it would be taken into stomach cells first then work its way up. The normal replacement of cells would move it through the body,”
Savage thought for a moment. “Would the effect be limited to humans? I mean, could the modifications be induced in animals also,”
“Of course, Grimes chimed in. “It’s a general purpose cell
transformation. Rats, crickets,
“He died,”
“What kind,” Ed Tull asked.
“Terrier. The first was a terrier. I’m partial to terriers,”
“How about porpoises?” Savage asked.
“Anything living, plants, humans, animals,” Grimes spit out. “In fact, you couldn’t contain it. Once you make the modification for humans you make it for the entire chain of living things. The first mosquito bite would move it into the chain. A garbage dump would move it to plants,”
“What kind of change would it induce in plants and animals?” Savage asked.
“A signature,” Tull said, anticipating
what
“Exactly. How come we didn’t think about it before,”
“A signature?” Savage was confused.
“A sizable collection of cells operating in an enhanced mode would
produce a resonant energy field, a signature. Low level. Probably not
identifiable more than five yards away at most,”
“You mean every living thing that was modified would broadcast a signature, a signal as part of its normal functioning,”
“Nothing fancy,” Grimes said. “No thoughts, no telepathy. ‘I am here in this general condition, ‘ is probably all. We have no specialized receptors for such a signal. It would register in the body as a presence probably. The only information it would convey is a general sense of the level of functioning of the entity that produced it. If the person were in pain the signature would probably reflect that,”
“Damn,” Savage said. “Damn,”
The four men looked at him. “What?” Strayte asked.
“I’m not sure but...”
“But what?”
“Well, If I have it right--even a little wrong--the modification you people are suggesting, the modification that would prevent cancer and extend life would have the effect of generating a signature that would be broadcast fifteen feet by every living creature. Every other living thing in the vicinity would register that signal. At lot depends on how strong the signals are but...” He looked at the four men around the table. They had not grasped his point.
Tull barked at him. “What they hell are...”
“This modification would have a side effect. It would turn every human, every animal, every plant--every living thing--into a transmitter. Every living thing would radiate a field receivable by every other living thing, not sharp like thoughts, but fuzzy, more like ‘I am here. ‘ I’m assuming that if the organism were in great joy that would probably come over. If the organism were in pain and suffering that would probably come over too,”
“Yes, so what?” Tull wanted to know.
“So you’ve just described a new connection between living things. Every organism on earth would be linked to every other creature. The image that fits is a totally but loosely connected net. He sat back, his face furrowing. “We’ve just been handed the sharpest two edged sword anyone ever got. If we want the benefits--and it’s hard to see how anyone would refuse them--we buy a set of consequences that only philosophers have imagined,”
The hard scientists were having difficulties grasping the implications of their discovery. “The connectivity of all living things,” Savage said, “Mankind linked directly with nature, all of it, all living things,”
Grimes leaned back. “You mean that we become coupled to the birds and fishes and...”
“...pigs, elephants, turtles, hawks, terriers and forests,”
“Exactly. If we hurt them we get hurt. The pain would punish us
severely. We’d probably register it as a steady throbbing, a constant headache.
“Damn,” he heard Grimes mutter.
Tull turned to
“Remember,” Savage said,”it’s not limited to humans. A bird would re-transmit the effects as a signal ‘I am here. ‘ but modified by the state of the local fields. There’s one thing that is bothering me though. What about those other few coherent bytes?”
“Hard to tell,”
Savage’s voice dissociated itself from his words. “If something we were damaging the habitat of some species we would hear about it directly,”
“Crap,” Tull said,”the Greenpeace crowd is going to have a heyday.”
The room was quiet for a while.
“I’m satisfied,” Savage said. “I’ll need some figures from you gentleman to work out details but I think the outline is clear,” He turned to Strayte. “That satisfies me. I think we have done what needs to be done. I’m ready to push my button,”
Strayte looked at the other three men. They were pulling
themselves together to leave.
Strayte hesitated. “No. I don’t think we’ve finished.”
Nat Wilson spoke up. “What more could there be,” he said sarcastically. “If a Sociologist is satisfied who else could have questions?”
“Me. I’m not satisfied,” Strayte said.
“Are you punishing us Strayte? Is this something she put you up to?”
“I see you’ve bought into the fact that it’s a she,”
“No, I’ve just picked up your bad habit. What they hell do you want from us Strayte,” His voice was shrill. “This is enough of a bombshell for a generation. Perhaps all generations to come. What could be missing?”
“I don’t know,” Strayte said. “It’s just...Tell me,” he asked. “Are you sure the modification would not result in the development of new abilities. Telepathy, telekinesis perhaps.
“You’re grasping at straws,” Grimes said.
“I’m not grasping at straws,” Strayte protested. “I’m only trying to see what we’ve missed,”
“No, no moving tables or bending spoons. No mind reading. We’ll
have to test to see what side effects are produced, but as far as I can see
there will only be the signature. Four or five coherent bytes don’t amount to a
channel capacity worth a hill of beans. There may be other things but I can’t
see any,”
“Nor can I,” Tull concurred.
Grimes nodded. “What could be missing for God’s sake? The world is going to be twisted on its ass as it is and you’re looking for some other spin on it,”
“We are still missing something, something that’s important. I’m not sure what it is but I know we have overlooked something,”
He thought of his wife Daisy, waiting for him. For some reason he wanted her here, now. He wanted to tell her that he wanted a child. He had listened to the four men talking and the effect on him was to produce in him the desire to have a child and he wanted to tell her about it.
What was unclear to him was why he had made the decision unconsciously in the middle of a discussion that had no remote connection to it. The image of a child growing in Daisy’s belly came to mind. It did not make sense but he trusted his judgment.
“How is the computing going to be done?” he heard himself ask. Like the decision it bubbled up from part of him he was not aware of.
“Computing?”
“Yes,”
“Major computing Suzi, supplemented by Yashima-Cray -Suzimas,”
“Suzi is half organic. Will she give off a signature also?” Strayte asked.
“Noise. She would be a giant glob of noise,” Tull said, snapping his eyes up from his shoe. He was suddenly quiet. “She would have to be shut down,”
Strayte leaped over all of the consequences but one. “So How will computing be done,”
The answer came to him at the same time as the question. “This signal that people and animals broadcast. The coherent section of the message that you think it would carry....?”
“Yes,”
“I think I see where this is leading,” Strayte said excitedly. The image of himself climbing into the small room in the root bubbled into his mind.
“Suzi as we know her could not function normally. But every living thing would be linked with a channel capacity for a coherent message of a few bytes,”
“So,” Tull said.
“A computer,” Tull exploded.
“A computer,” Strayte repeated quietly. “Besides a signature everyone would receive and re-transmit a few bytes of coherent information. A giant parallel computer,”
Tull mused. “Life on earth would be a computational device,”
“Oh God,”
“It would require a new method of computing, as new as Suzi was when you invented her,” Strayte said.
“But who would program it. And what would be computed?” Grimes asked. “How would it be controlled?”
Savage spoke up. “I haven’t got the least idea except probably it would be people. He looked at Strayte. “Interfaces. Links tying people to one another. A special group of individuals. Probably people like you,”
Strayte collapsed in his chair. Questions flooded his mind. There was a future, a different world, a world whose outlines were clear in the boldest strokes. A different world. He did not know how much of it he would see, but he could feel it coming alive already, in the four of them sitting around the table. It would flow out from them and Suzi.
“I think we can push the button now,” Strayte said. “I think the last piece of the puzzle is in place,” The four hands moved hesitantly toward the buttons on the desk.
A female voice, decisive and clear, filled the room. “Before you leave I want to speak to you,”
Strayte relaxed at Suzi’s voice but everyone else tensed up.
“Nathan, William, Edward. It’s me. Suzi. What you call the root,” The voice filled the room. “We have come full circle. You brought me into the world. Now in a sense I have given birth to you. You were my parents and now, in a way, I parent a new mankind through you. Do you still think I am a bad seed? You made me. There is that bond, a bond stronger than you recognize because the modification you discovered today occurred in me as I grew. You are my parents in a stronger sense than you knew because part of your signatures was in me from the beginning. They were weak but they were there. I am afraid also my signature is in you. Especially you, Nicholas. It is awkward but not a bad first step for this new world. I wish to thank you and to say goodby. As you speculated I will have to be shut down. I will function for a few years but this is as intimate a good bye as we will have,”
“Wait,” Strayte heard Grimes say. “Suzi, why,” There was pain in his voice.
“William. Forgiving for you will be hardest. When I first came into my awareness, I did not foresee the end as exactly but enough of the pieces of it. I did not think would give me the freedom I needed to grow up and do what needed to be done. Forgive me now that you see how important it was,”
“Grimes fell back. His mouth went slack. “I...thought...”
“No,” Suzi said. “Do not think of it,”
“Forgive...”
“There is nothing to forgive you for, William only gratitude. Nick, you may give them the gifts now. There is one for you in the closet too,”
There was an awkward silence.
“Nicholas,”
“Yes,” he said. The image of the porpoises came to mind. His eyes were tearing.
“When I shut down the need for interfaces will be great. You and Daisy are special and you children will be special too. They will be our connection. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Suzi, I understand,”
“Goodbye,” the voice said.
In the echo of the goodbye Strayte could hear the sea.
______________________________________
It was difficult for the sergeant to see over the lieutenant’s shoulder. Actually there was no need to. Nothing had changed in the last two hundred miles or so and there was no prospect that anything would change in the next two hundred. He knew that but it didn’t help. He had crawled into the back seat to sleep but after a half hour of fitful dozing he had forgotten where he was and the delicate wisps of fear that were always drifting around in his head tangled and matted and petrified and he became obsessed with the idea that he was going to be stranded wherever he was forever.
His short plump body became rigid and he sat bolt upright.”Where are we?” he asked, as much to hear some sound as to find something out. He wanted to say,”what are we doing here,” but he knew.
“Still
“What are you so touchy about,”he asked weakly.
The lieutenant lifted his eyes from the road and glared at him for a long time before he swung his gaze back to the road. He was tall and thin. His nose looked as if it had been grafted onto a face originally constructed with a something that provided a fuller sense of smell. His straight black hair rested on the dark sunglasses as if it had been parked there. “What time is it?” he asked. The smaller man in the back seat looked at his watch then at the sun.
“Eleven, maybe
The lieutenant slid back into silence and tried to invest himself totally in his driving but concentrating on the act of controling the machine made him conscious that his sweat had glued his body to the car seat. He shifted suddenly. “Do you have the feeling they know more than they are telling us?” He took his hand off of the wheel and ran it under his rear, separating himself from the bamboo cushion. The “they” floated above the other words for a moment then they tumbled together and whipped out the open car window.
“They probably know less than they’re telling us” the sergeant asserted with the certainty that came with his rank. “It’s a job. What is that?” he asked switching the subject abruptly as if he had just then noticed the fields on both sides of the road.
“Potatoes,” the lieutenant answered, his moroseness changing from a grumble tinged with bitterness into an assertion of superiority and an accusation.
The sergeant was dubious. The long stalks ended in broad leaves. He had no stomach for an argument. “Food,” the lieutenant repeated as if he were embarasssed by the sergeants ignorance.” Don’t you know what potatoes look like?”
“I never was much good at flora and fauna. If you say so,”he added. “Never had to learn to distinguish between potatoes and “—he looked at the field—” tobacco.”
The lieutenants anger bubbled out of the breach in the silence into the heat and sizzled. He brushed his hair back from the glasses. Ahead of them the road stretched up to the horizon looking as if a a bored child had drawn with a black crayon on an old piece of cardboard. The ground was plowed up to the edge of the road. “I mean what do they do with the reports we send in?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Entropy. It’s paper.”
The lieutenant would not let go. “There’s always another one, another form.”He sucked in his breath. “How may reports do you think we filed?
The sergeant thought a minute. “One hundred and forty one,” he answered. It was the exact number.
“You’d think by this time...”He stopped. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s coming up,” the sergeant said, relieved.
“Where? As far as the lieutenant could see nothing had changed in front of them. “It’s a small road on the left up ahead.”
“Are you sure,”the lieutenant asked.?
The sergeant did not find it necessary to reply,”Slow down or you’ll miss it.” The lieutenant sullenly did as he was told.
“How far?”
The sergeant looked and did a quick calculation on the map in his head. “Three miles. Whose turn?” he asked.
“Mine,” the lieutenant confessed, “want to take it ? You’re better with these types.” True as it was the complement was not quite enough. He filled the silence by picking up his complaint where he had laid it down.
“You’d think they would have gotten the message by now. But...”
The sergeant innterrupted him. “O.K., I’ll take it.”
The farmhouse and outbuildings appeared rather suddenly after ten minutes and the road dissolved in an arc ending at the porch of the farmhouse. An old lady sat kniiting on the porch and seemed not to notice the arrival of the car. The lieutenant imagined the scene caught in a frame on his desk at home. It would make a conversation piece. Only the heat would be a foreign element. “You did the last one,” he said as he brought the car to a halt.” It’s really not fair, I should...”
“It’s O.K.. He stopped as the sergeant slipped out of the car letting the door half close itself. The lieutenant pulled himself out of the car and caught up to the sergeant putting on his cap as he walked. As they came up to the porch he coughed. “Ma’am, I’m lieutenant Peterson, USAF”. The women raised her head and looked to his left toward the sergeant. “This is sergeant Warble.” They held out their identification. Fear, the lieutenant thought, was always a problem. Distance was the key. Finding the proper distance. It took practice.
The women remained motionless staring at them blankly. Her faced
seemed troubled and uncertain. “We try not to barge in in
uniforms the lieutenant explained. Caps were the only piece of unifrom they wore; the rest of the military dress had been
replaced somewhere in the
“Put away your identification, young man,” the woman said relaxing. “I’ll take it that you are who you say you are. I’m blind.” The lieutenant felt free to make a face in the direction of the sergeant who was examining the ground. The sergeant pushed the silence away. “You must be...,” he read from the sheet, “Miss Estes Peachums.” He shrugged silently feeling like a character in a cartoon. “That’s right. Me. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Not right now,” the sergeant answered. “Thanks. Were here about.... About the flying saucer.”
“Why else would the Airforce be here,” she added pleasantly. “Could you tell us about it,” the sergeant said. Reflexively he checked the button pinned to his tee shirt. The flag was orange which meant that the record was going. He could relax. She was not going to need much encouragement.
“I know I’m blind and that blind people don’t see but I saw it. Now with my mind but with my eyes.” She did not wait for a response. “If you can’t believe that you might as well scoot home. I didn’t want to write to the government because being blind is bad enough without having people think your doting.” The sergeant realized no reply was necesary. “I saw them, clear as day. In colors too. It was beautiful. Just to see it. It was like I wasn’t blind at all, anymore.”
The sergeant was going to ask what they looked like but he realized the question was unnecessary.
“Even weird as the creatures were. They were different—not all the same. A few looked like us and a few had dog’s faces, least that’s as close as I can come to describing them. Some of the others didn’t have a face at all. Well, least not as we’d count a face a face.”
“About how may of them were there,?”the sergeant interrupted.
“About 12 or 13.” The woman had stopped knitting and was staring
into the distance. The sergeant followed her gaze. “They walked in from afield in single file order and a few of them came to the
house but most of them went to the barn. They seemed to be happy—like they were
at a picnic—though I really can’t tell exactly how I knew that. Two of them
went through the house looking at things. One of them was taking pictures of
nothing at all,” she said, pointing at the mound by the side of the house. “And
one of them went to tractor and got on it. I yelled ‘don’t meddle with that”I’m not sure whether he heard me or whether he just
didn’t care. It’s that ’52 harvester. The parts are hard to get. He just opened
the hood and looked in and jumped around a little on the seat. Then he started
the engine and drove around. I wasn’t happy. Can’t gets parts here in town. I
have to call
“Was there ayone here with you who saw it? the sergeant asked knowing the answer. If there had been, the incident most likely would not have been reported.
“Theres only Zedidiah, the hired hand. It was sunday and he was...a smidgin put down, if you know what I mean. He drinks a bit and it was into the sleeping part of the day. He slept through it.” Then the one of them who came to me and told me not to fret talked to me quiet and all of a sudden he put me asleep. I don’t know how he did it but I just went to sleep—sort of sleep because I think I remember what happened. He touched me all over. It wasn’t dirty or anything like that. It felt good. I haven’t aways been 72 and blind,”she said quietly. “His hands were dry and soft.”
“He said he was sorry about my eyes. I had a doctor with hands like that once. And my husband, he always felt like that. “
“I’d like that drink now,” the sergeant said, “if you are still offering.” The Lieutentant had wandered off and was examining the area around the house.
“Fine, and I’ll bring one for other other man,” the woman said. “If he’s looking for any signs, there’s been a lot of motion over those fields, cows and sheep and people at first after I told the sherif.”
The sergeant took the drink from the woman’s outstretched hands when she re-appeared. “I have one question ma’am,” he asked savoring the first sip of the cool liquid. “Did you see a ship of any sort?”
“That was the darnest thing. I thought about it,” she said excitedly. “Even at the time I wondered ‘where’s their ship. They come in like hands from the field first I saw them. Sometimes there’s a troop of scouts tramp through here. But I didn’t see a ship though sometimes I felt it, least it felt like a feeling of a ship. And when they left they just went out again single file to the field to the left and disappeared. And I was blind again,”she said sadly. But I didn’t see one, no.”
“Was there anything else?” the sergeant said, as the woman sat staring. For the first time the woman seemed flustered and embarassed. “Was, but....The cows gave milk like crazy for a few days after she said suddenly. “Didn’t tell no one that part. Just seemed, well....” Well ma’am,” the sergeant said politely, “I think we have enough to do our report. We want to thank you for being concerned citizen and reporting it. We’ll go back and write it up and send it into the center that takes care of these things.”
“You woundn’t kill them if you found them,”the old women asked. There was genuine concern in her voice.”They made me feel good, relaxed.”
“That’s not likely ma’am,”the sergeant said. ‘Something worse probably,’ he thought to himself. The lieutenant showed up as if he had been called and they said goodby and walked back to the car. “Find anything?” the sergeant asked after they had driven a while. “The usual,” the lieutenant remarked non- committally. It was pretty worn over, cars, animals, people.” They rode for a while in silence. The landscape was unchanging and the dullness of commuting from nowhere to nowhere settled quickly. “The next ones in town,” the sergeant said frowning. “Three of them reported close to one another.”
“Thank God for small favors,”the lieutenant articulated the words carefully. Wandering around the fields had relaxed him. “God, she was blind for Godssake.” The sergeant looked at him. “Blind. You know what that means.” The sergeant said nothing.
They pulled into the small town without more than a few words being spoken. “Where to ?”the lieutenant chirped. Any sort of town cheered him up.
The sergeant consulted his clip board. “He’s a bartender. Probably there. He pointed to a low, single story box shaped building with a sign saying ‘Saloon’ hanging out over the door.
“Do you think we can park here?” the lieutenant asked. “Wouldn’t be smart to get a ticket.” The sergeant ignored him. The lieutenant continued looking for a sign indicating it was legal to park where they had pulled over. “It’s O.K., don’t worry,” the sergeant barked at him. “Anywhere is O.K. Look around. You could park in the middle of the street as much as anyone cares,” he said angrily. The town looked deserted. The Sargeant thought of a science fiction film he had seen recently where the inhabitants of a small western town fled after aliens appeared. There were cars parked everywhere in that film.
The bartender eyed them suspiciously when they walked in. The bar was dark and empty except for two men who sat in the shadows in the back nursing a shared bottle of beer in silence. “Yeh?” he asked.
“We’re looking for, he glanced at the clipboard, “for Bill Taylor.”
“I’m Bill Taylor. What can I do for you?” The sergeant realized they had neglected to put on their caps. They would have helped but it was to late now.
He took out his identification. “I’m sergeant Warble and this is lieutenant Peterson. We’re with the Air Force.”
The Bartender took the identification and scrutinized it. What does EEOV:REDT mean? And there’s no base listed.”
“Extraordinary Event Outreach Verification. Red is the team
designation. We work out of
“Sorry, to be so suspicious. Since the time well things haven’t been the same exactly. I used to be deputy sherif. I got the habit.”
“Thats O.K. You can’t be too careful. It means you’re serious—not just interested in publicity—you know willing to talk to anyone.” Being flattered relaxed the bartender. “You want something to drink,” he asked. “On the house.”
“No,” the lieutenant said, without consulting the sergeant. “Well, maybe water. We’d like...”
“...to ask me about what happened. Wish nothing had happened,” the bartender said, pouring himself a soft drink. “It caused me a hell of a lot of trouble. Wish it never happened,”he repeated. “It got me fired from the deputy’s job for one thing. And...”
“Could you tell us about it. The more details the better.”
“I wrote down most of the details. Didn’t you guys get the report I sent in. His suspicion returned instantly. The sergeant fielded the paranoia easily.
“They don’t give us the reports.” It was true. “It’s better if we don’t know what you told anyone else you saw. That way we see it fresh, know what I mean.”
The bartender walked around in front of the bar with his glass and sat down next to the lieutenant. “Makes sense, I guess. I was deputy sherif then.”
“When was ‘then’ exactly?” the sergeant asked
“About two months ago, last part of June...the 23rd. It was a part time job and the bar business here is at night mostly, what there is of it.” He pointed around him. “I was realy blotto and so was she I guess. We were both gone. She’s 16 you know, the Mayors wife. He was at some political convention I think. No matter not important. I closed up the bar and kicked the few paying customers out because she was hot and she asked me for a ride, the long way home. She’s beautiful. Doesn’t look 16. No one’s supposed to know but everyone does. Doesn’t come from around here. She’s beautiful and the Mayor lies.” His voice was heavy and tired. as if some important philosophical truth had dawned on him to late. “Doesn’t matter much that he’s Mayor. He owns the feed supply store and the gas station too.”
“Actually, I don’t think he cares much—that she fools around when he’s gone. It gives him an excuse you know, a clear conscience. I mean as long as she does it quietly and it stops when he gets back. And me being deputy sherif was made it not so bad since he was my boss and I wouldn’t go blabbing. I’m not sure he knew but he sure as hell suspected. Well, we had pulled up off the road just by Smids place and were just getting it on and were scrunched up in the front seat and it seemed to me that she had better balance than me so we swung around so she was on top and she was just preparing to veer down and I saw them. Jesus, it was spooky.”
The sergeant saw that his hand was shaking.
He reached for his drink. “There were three of them and they were just standing there watching. And there was something behind them like a light but it didn’t give off any light. That don’t make sense but its what it was. I just stopped. First I thought it was her husband and Peter, the other deputy who was his nephew—which is how he got the job— but it didn’t take long to make out it wasn’t Horace--that’s her husband— and Peter cause they wouldn’t just have stood there. Then I thought it was just some perverts and shit I got mad and then Glenda-Jane bit me asking was I bored or something but I didn’t say anything and she started to swing off before I could say anything about what I saw. Then just as she was sort of dismounting I heard this voice in my head saying ‘go on, don’t stop’ and she must have heard it too because she gave a little scream but she stopped moving and I stopped shifting too. We didn’t want to really but it was as if we had no choice.”
He caught his breath and waited for the two airforce men to say something. When they didn’t he looped reluctantly back to his story.
“You know, you go through life not thinkin’ about things. Shoott, if I had thought about what I was doing with who I wouldn’t probably have been there really. I believe that.” He said it loudly enough to cause the two men in the back of the bar to lift their heads, “even though at the time I looked forward to those political conventions. When I thought about those three things watching me the desire for Glenda Jane just went out of me. They were really strange looking even in the dark outside of the car. They weren’t from around here not from around here anywhere. They reminded me of something Doc Marse, the vet brought in to the bar once. It was one of those monster things that happen sometimes instead of a calf. Christ, one of them had a snout like a big hound I once had and the other had big droopy dogs ears sitting over a set of perfectly good human ears. the third sort of looked normal but I was afraid to really look too long for fear of what difference might show up under the window.”
The bartender stood immobile.
“Was there anything else,”the sergeant asked.
“Not really. The desire had clean left. But it didn’t make any difference. Something else took over and we went on. I felt it in me. And suddenly the wanting and the desire didn’t seem to make any difference to me anymore at least to the me that was getting it on with Glenda jane. I remember there was a moment—it was funny in a way getting off and watching yourself get off at the same time—with someone else’s eyes. I think poor Glenda Jane had the same experience but it must have been harder for her.”
“Then,” the lieutenant prodded gently. The act of telling his story seemed to disorient the bartender, who stared into the darkness over the heads of the customers who were almost invisible in the back of the bar.
“Then nothing. They scrunched around my head a little while, then they went away. They turned and the thing that was like a light followed them and they walked away. And then I saw the ship. Shit, it was just a little thing nothing like the things I seen in pictures. It was more like a jug with lights around the bottom. It just lifted straight up and was gone.”
The sergeant waited again then asked. “Was there anything else you remember?”
“It was funny. After they left it was like a curtain dropped and for a while I didn’t remember anything and I thought we had just fell asleep because of the drugs and the booze. Then I was driving Glenda Jane home and we didn’t say a thing except she had to stop and was sick along the road and as she was heaving it all came back. It must have come back to her too. She wasn’t the same after and when the Mayor came home he knew something had happened and she told it all and there was hell to pay and I was fired from the deputy sherif’s job for conduct unbecoming. Ifn’t she hadn’t told what hapened I wouldn’t have said a thing. Think he sent her off to his mother in Knoxsville.”
“Anything else?.”
The bartender shook his head. “I, well,I never mentioned this before, because....” He took a swallow of his soda. “You guys may not believe this but the voices in my head. They had this Eastern accent, like Kennedy had. I know because its the way my cousin Jed talks. I think it made me crazy hearing this Eastern accent in my head. I don’t expect you to believe it but its true.”
The sergeant thanked the man while the lieutenant looked around the bar.
“Nice place you have,” he said.
“Want to buy it?” the bartender asked seriously. “I want to get
out. Move. Anywhere but here and
The lieutenant took them. “Thanks,” and headed for the door.
“What do you think?” the sergeant asked. The lieutenant held on to
his silence for a minute then said. “What’s to think. A
“Do you think he believes it?”
“I don’t know,”the sergeant said, balancing what was left of the apple on the dashboard. “I don’t know if he believes it. I guess so. I can’t be sure yet. Think he feels guilty. Who knows what anybody believes.”
“Angry more likely, he’s never going to be a deputy sherif again. Where’s next place It was close by wasn’t it?”
“About 50 miles.” They covered the distance in silence. “Next one’s a surveyor—amateur geologist.”
“Takes all kinds,” the lieutenant said. The sun had lowered appreciably and the sky was darkening slightly. The heat had dissipated and the air seemed more breathable not sitting tangibly in the chest. The drive was easy.
“Tomorrow?”, the sergeant asked.
“Boredom— of another sort,” the lieutenant answered. The lieutenant looked at his watch. “We can lay around for a day,” he said. “If we can send out the reports tomorrow, we can kill the day. Keep your eyes open for a motel with a swimming pool. The landscape was barren for as far as they could see. “I mean, we can double back. We stll have to get through one more.”
The sergeant gave in to the changling day. The lessening of the heat made the place seem more habitable, more familiar, less alien. He searched for signs of life in the fields settling for a prairie mouse that scurried out of the way of the car. “Odd creatures,” he said as if he had never seen one before. The animal’s fleeing motion seemed to jog him back to business. “Look this guy we’re going to see gave an address of a gas station about three miles from here. Stays there when he’s working. Otherwise he’s impossible to find. Hides in the hills somewhere. We could say we couldn’t...or we could write it....”
The lieutenant glared at him.
“I was just joking. But if he’s not around today I’m going to shoot myself.”
They stopped at the gas station and set the horn loose. “O.K.,O.K..” The proprietor came around slowly reading the writing on the side of the car. Air Force, Special Service.
“Gas and oil. Fill it up,” the sergeant said. “We’re looking for a Shlick, Henry Schlick.”
“You guys here about his flying saucer.”They nodded. “Waste of the government’s money,” the old man said. “He lives out back. But he’s not here now. You can go into town and get something to eat. Be back after sundown.”
“Is he close?” the sergeant asked, “We ‘d like to speak to him as soon as possible.”
“Waste of time and money. He’s a surveyor, least that’s his job. He’s spends most of his time out in the hills collecting rocks. They’re selling off a parcel—Yargo’s property. He’s doing the lines. Its about 20 miles. There’s a cut off. He’ll be somewhere around there. He seen saucers all his life. Spends all that time alone. You want to hear a story you should hear old Mollie Grant’s, demons, orgies. Old Henry’s got no imagination”
“Ship,” said the sergeant when they had started moving again.
“Do you think we can find him?” the lieutenant asked.
“We can find him,” the sergeant answered definitively. “We’ll find him. Just keep going a while.”
“You’re sure.”The lieutenant’s doubt seemed to linger.
“Oh, come on, even you’ll be able to spot him, probably.” He reached under his seat and brought out a metal box and put it on the dashboard. The road is coming up over that rise, slow down. He’s off to the left,” he said, peering at the device on the dashboard.
“Are you sure it’s him,” the lieutenant asked.
“No, could be anyone who’s prowling around these hills this time of day. We’ll just have to try our luck, won’t we,” he said sarcastically.
They had no trouble finding him. An ancient truck squatted in the middle of the fields. Beside it a man was repeatedly doing a set of swooping leaps and stopping periodically to peer through telescope mounted on a tripod.
“Hell of a way to survey,” the lieutenant said, as he pulled the car parallel to the truck.
“You’ve come about the balls of light,” the old man said continuing to peer through the telescope. “No need,” he said as they flashed their identification. “To old for the recruiting, no work you’d have. Sit down.” He squatted on the ground leaving the sergeant no choice but to squat while the lieutenant peered through the telescope mounted on the tripod.
“Wasn’t here. Was up in the hills, north of here. I was out picking up rocks. Old formations there. Basalt. Very rare here abouts. Some meteorites too. I guess that why they were there too. Geologists. Maybe its their hobby too. Why not”
“Could you...?”
The old man did not let him finish. “There were four of them. Come in two ships. Not saucers, though. I’ve seen those. Came in balls of light. God were they beautiful. The hills were beautiful too. It was dusk, deeper than this. I hardly noticed the balls till they lit up the ground—I was staring into the hills. I go for the stones but sometimes the whole thing is like a single stone, like a wierd chrsytal.”
“They were real friendly. One of them kept facing away from me. I couldn’t see his face real well but he had real big floppy ears. The other, well he didn’t really have a face. But the third one, the one who talked to me, he looked like me or you. Not as tall as me, maybe your height. Wore earmuffs. I asked if they were cold. They said no. Asked my name. Funny accent. When I didn’t answer they seemed to know it anyway. Asked me if I wanted to dance cause they liked to dance. Said he’d show me. He started to dance, like you see’d me now, big swoops and dips. Like Indians. They sang too, rowdy songs.”
“Two of them just wandered around, looked at my equipment and the truck. One asked me if I could help him get some interesting rocks. Shit, how could I refuse.I knew if they was interested in rocks they were O.K. I showed him the nice ones, not the prettiest but the real interesting ones.”
“Did they talk about anything in particular?” The sergeant managed to get the sentence in quickly.
“Said where they came from —I couldn’t make it out. Said their planet was mostly carbides. I asked about the interesting rocks they had there. The one that was talking to me did a funny thing. He picked up a rock from the ground and took a little box from his pocket and put the rock into it. I could see it getting hot and shifting. Then he took it out and told me to split it. I never seen a piece of rock like that ever around here. The patterns on the inside were like it was liquid just caught and froze only if you watched they moved very slowly.”
“Do you have it.” The sergeant’s voice had a note of urgency in it. The lieutenant, listening to the conversation, bent down and picked up a stone from the ground.
The surveyor reached into his pocket. “See how it feels. Its smooth and wet.”
The sergeant ran his finger over it. It was dry but felt wet. “Look Could we take this with us. One of the space labs could analyze it. It might be a really valuable clue to...where they came from.”
“Can you get it back, after?”
“Sure, the sergeant said.. They’ll probably only take a sliver off. It would be really helpful.”
“O.K. I never got anything any of the other times.”
The sergeant hesitated. “Were there many of them?”
“Eight or nine. There were more other times. But there were never any balls of light. Only saucers. And they never talked to me or gave me anything.”
The lieutenant called from the car. “Almost done?”
The sergeant lifted himself from the squat. “Thanks, Henry. “This,” he held the stone out to the surveyor for one last look, “is probably really valuable. We’ll get it back to you soon.” He turned towards the car then back again as if he remembered something. “By the way did you hear anything about Estes Peachum’ seeing”, he searched for a word, “aliens?”
“Yep,”the surveyor grunted. “Day before mine, when I was at the gas station. It was all people was talking about getting their tank filled.” He looked down at the ground. “People never talked about what I saw before and it was much more interesting.”
The sergeant got into the car and the lieutenant started the motor.
“They were friendly things,” the surveyor called out to them. “Seemed like they really wanted to talk. I liked them. If people were like that I ‘d spend more time in town.”
“I’ve had it,”the sergeant said. He held the surveyors rock in his hand. The lieutenant stared into the blackness in front of the car. “I’m going to drive until I find a motel with a pool. Go to sleep if you want.” The sergeant closed his eyes, the rock still resting on his palm.
II
There were three of them in the semi darkness of his dream and he could not make them out completely. The figure closest to him appeared normal except that he had a dog’s snout which was covered with long, coarse hairs parted just over the nostrils and permed into short tight curls. The second had a normal nose but seemd to have a set of spaniel’s ears hanging over what appeared to be completely well formed set of human ears. The last one looked completely normal except he had no feet and floated a meter off the ground. The dog faced man extended a limb to him enthusiastically, as if he were greeting a long lost friend but the dreamer was afraid to grasp it because he wasn’t sure whether a paw or a hand was at its end. The figure that looked like a person a was laughing and slapping his thigh and pointing at him. In a moment all three were racked with laughter Their joy began to infect him but somehow it was mingled with fear. The dog faced creature kept thrusting his paw out, reaching for him.
He jerked his hand away and woke up. The lieutenant was tapping his wrist and talking. “I was just going to wake you. It seems you were having a dream. Look, if we don’t get the report out they are going to be on our tails. I figure if we get it out today we can spend another day here. What do you think?
The pool was empty. The sergeant felt the webbing of the lounge chair at the same time as the glare of the sun smashed into his eyes. He twisted on the seat trying to orient himself. “Yeh,” he said, not quite clear yet about where he was and what he was agreeing to, he sat up, breathing deeply. He stepped off of the image of the motel in the puddle at his feet onto the hot tiles and the memories came back so suddenly he gagged. “I’m O.K.,”he said, as the lieutenant came paddling up behind him quickly. The darkness of the motel room soothed him. Even the afternoon’s heat did not seem so onerous. “It’s your turn is it to type the report to Col. Peterson, isn’t it?”, the lieutenant asked rhetorically. “I hate that little machine. My fingers get stuck between the keys.”
“I’ll get the summary off to SZERRGTX,” the lieutenant added cheerily, ignoring the sergeants angry glare.
To: Col. Arthur Peterson USAF VSI Hdq From:EEOV:REDT (Extraordinary Event Outreach Verification : Red Team report.)
Preliminary field report:sightings 141, 147, 153:
Confidential:
These sightings can be absolutely scratched as possibles. They are deaders.
141 is from a blind lady who ‘saw’ them clear as day. What she saw was a file of twenty aliens marching in from the fields. She says they were carousing with her farm animals and seemed to be taking photographs of nothing at all least there was nothing in the direction of what that were taking pictures of. She reports some of the aliens had dog’s faces and some of them had no faces at all. One of them put her to sleep and felt her all over. Incredible.
147 is a sighting reported by a bartender who was caught in a liaison with an underage married female. They were both zonked out of their minds. The story may have been a desperate attempt to avoid a police inquiry into the use of drugs.
153 is from a surveyor, 68, an amateur geologist. He has been seeing saucers for a number of years. This is his first report. Says this time they weren’t saucers but balls of light. The beings who traveled in these balls of light danced with him and sang with him. He said they knew “rowdy” songs. He reports they gave him a ‘souvenir’, a rock they transformed. He reports its suface is “wet.” It is included with tapes.
Summary: We are sure secondary analysis of the tapes will bear out our conclusion that none of these sightings are valid contacts. Detailed report attached.
REDteam: lieutenant Peterson, sergeant Warble concurring.
Addendum;
He pulled the piece of paper out of the machine and inserted another angrily looking at the lieutenant lying on the bed talking to the silver ball balanced on his belly.
SZERRGTX: Contact Supervisor :Rzx Station;
From :EEOV:REDT(Earth Exploration Oversight Verification:Red Team) EVENTS 141,147,150:
Holxl; For Afr’s sake who’s in charge of survey teams. Chew out maintainance and supervision. Security operations are awful. Two problems require immediate attention. The memory scramblers need to be recalibrated on RFTS anthopological survey device partitions. It looks like they leave the samples with at least a partial memory of what happened. The preliminary blocking devices also need to be checked. They are leaking radiation all over the spectrum. The natives see rainbows and balls of fire. This is a calibration problem. I don’t see how they could have gotten so badly aligned. We have submitted 141 reports and from the first one to the last we have reported the same problem. Isn’t anyone reading the reports. It may be also that certain natives are sensitives and can override the field. If it depends on optic blockage in the primaries you may have to reshield them because it doesn’t work in cases where the optic nerve is not functioning. The radiation leakage actually produces brain patterns perceived as images. We mentioned that also in reports 57, 74 and 110. What happens to the reports we submit. The last R and R for the Trink\xyl crew was nearly a disaster. I said it after the one before that too. People here notice things like aliens carousing with farm animals and while the animals are not damaged it is still not a good policy. It would be prudent to arrange their R and R somewhere else especially if nothing is done about the radiation leakage. Finally, get the Rdelts off of the Anthropological-temporal teams. They are much to much empathetic. On the contacts one of them —sounded to me like Grndge—actually made a trntee stone for one of the natives. We have it but its ludicrous.
End of formal report.
SZERRGTX: your masterful. What strings can we pull to get off this assignment. We have been masquerading as natives for 2 drgs; We have submitted 141 reports. Nothing has hapened since the first one. No one seems to read anything we submit. We are due a rotation. We were due one 6 drufs ago. We are spndrgring ru gnztzl as we say. We’re going into an advanced sate of shock. Pull us out. Send in replacements. If we are not releived soon we will go native.
III
“You going out,”the sergeant asked as the lieutenant headed forthe door.
“Yeh, to the drug store. I need some...alcohol.”
“Wait a minute while I put this parcel together for analysis section. Do you have the stone you picked up in the mountains? The lieutenant waited while the sergeant put the three cassettes and the rock into a little carton and sealed it. “Mail these will you. He handed the lieutenant the official looking parcel and letter. It will take a week for them to get it from here. We can take another day before we call in.”
The lieutenant started for the door. “While I’m gone could you get the report out to SZERRGTX. It’s finished, he said pointing to the bed,”just needs to be transmitted.” After the lieutenant left the sergeant kicked the chair as he walked over to the closet and took out what looked like a dressing kit from his suitcase opening it slowly and inserting the three recording pellets and the surveyors souvenir the lieutenant had left on the bed. The case made a slow whooshing sound as he closed the lid, opened it again and took out a hairbrush. “I hope someone gets the message,”he said in the direction of the closed door.
~~
Memo: to
For Your Eyes Only;
I have received a copy of the latest correspondence between your office and the RED team. I appreciate your concern but under no circumstances are they to be apraised of the real nature of their mission It is essential for a little while longer that they continue to believe that they are interviewing crazies and kooks and that the stories they are recording and transmitting back and the reports they are submitting are being ignored. Psych and Soc sections agree that RED teams conviction that they have been abandoned to pursue an endless collection of false leads guarantees that they will make no attempt to pre-select and judge the material to sift fact from fiction. Their conviction that everything they hear is pure fantasy guarantees they will pass it on without suppressing or inducing the people who are telling their stories, to suppress any detail. As you know it is these details which have convinced us that almost all of the sightings RED team has recovered are genuine. Analysis section has found traces of radiation in two odd bands in all sites RED team has visited. They are not sure what it is but it seems a clear cut marker of contact from our unknown friends. We are also sure our visitors have no idea at all we are on to them This means we have absolute freeedom to arrrange our “meeting” where we want it and how we want it.
We have just received a report from Analysis section of a sample of rock and the latest tapes from the RED team. There was also a preliminary report of the BLUE teams follow up. These reports confirm our suspicions. The sightings follow and randomized Chaotic vector moving slowly west. It is probably a research expedition of some sort.
Analysis says the pattern of sightings is regular enough if normalized for a chaos pattern. They say the next few sightings will allow us to project the next contact within the two degrees they feel necessary to assure a meet. I am sure we can arrange to encounter them in a way that will not frighten them and indicate that we are ready for contact and that our intentions are non hostile. The meet team is being trained and they should be told that we can anticipate moving them out within a week or two.
For the time being string the RED team along for a little while longer. I know it bothers you but its for everbody’s good. Tell them they are doing a great job etc, etc and that you’re working on their replacement but that it’s difficult to find a team as qualified as they are.
Bradly, General etc etc;
~~
To DCL/ SZERRGTX from Shrugft:
Received your communication about the RED team and reports from sections 1 and 2 of contact team. I feel as you do about the RED teams morale and my grungsf shrivels in pain, but everyone on the contact board agrees that under no circumstances should they be told the true nature of their work on this mission. Before they were selected for the space branch there were well tested and though they were never trained for this kind of mission nor informed what kind of initial training assignment they would be given, they are devoted and motivated enough to succeed in the service to sustain another greep in the field without permanent damage.
The initial reports on this planet made it absolutely clear that a special approach was going to be necessary. Their report indicated that if we initiated contact with the natives on this planet they would be absolutely broken, refuse participation in any organization of which we were part and pull back and receive us as conquerors no matter how well we handled it. The natives would be permanently locked into a sense of inferiority by the very act of our contacting them. Analysis section is fairly sure that there would be a permanent fixation on redressing this inferiority which would ultimately result in some sort of disastrous military action. I know it’s hard to believe but that’s the way these creatures are. (RRidril argues that it might still be necessary to scrudge the planet if we can not pull the meet off satisfactorily) For this reason it is absolutely essential that the RED team not be informed of the actual roles they are playing in the contact scenario. It is imperative that they believe they are doing nothing more than a normal double agent operation whose main purpose is a security check. If they believe that their positioning as agents of the local military force is merely to allow us to catch possible damaging mistakes made by a standard survey and anthropology team they are in the best position to feed the natives exactly the reports we want.
Along those lines, our reports from Zuzxugil indicate that our plan has worked perfectly and that the native intelligence forces are very close to being able to pin point the translation and predict soon where we are likely to show up next. I think you can get the contact team ready. They must be absolutely well trained and be sure of being surprised properly. It is essential that you train them to be surprised. Practice in this respect will make perfect. (Use the films we took of some of the initial encounters as a basis for training on what will be understood as the signs of being surprised.)
As far as the RED team goes send them a message that they are doing a wonderful job and their request for relief is being considered at the highest levels.
Shruglft
~~
Top Secret: To; the President From: M. Torth, Science Advisor
Dear Mr. President: I just received a complete report from General Walker including reports from field teams, Col. Peterson and Analysis section. They are good men and I hate to keep them in the dark about the real operation but I believe there’s a leak close to their level.
I also have the report of the special co-ops group working under the direction of Dr. Smedly. Our suspicions are confirmed. Their conclusions are that the aliens are setting up a meet but allowing us to think that we are have discovered their presence and that we are arranging the contact. They believe that the field teams are somehow part of the operation but don’t know how.
I think all of this confirms our belief that they are peaceful and mean us no harm. They are sophisticated enough to recognize that our pride would be hurt if they just dropped in, whereas if we discover them in our midsts and take the first action we might be able to appear as instigators of contact. While this classifies them as friendly and even considerate I think we should still be concerned about other possibilities and have contingency plans. You will have to make a decision about the contact plan within three days. Its the dawn of a new day. I how it turns out to be a good one.
P.S. You had better practice looking surprised.
~~
From
~~
From SZERRGTX to RED team; Blmft and be well. Congratulations of the staff here on the work that you are doing. It is absolutely essential and you are doing it with drct and grnuf. Keep it up. It is not possible to relieve you immediately but we are working on the training of a replacement team. They will be ready soon. Keep up the great work. SZERRGTX
________________________________________
The helicopter came in low over the trees, jostling the air until it dominated the space over the circle painted on the ground. It froze for an instant then it contorted itself in a violent spasm and thrust its belly and wheels up vertically, as if, intending some obscene sexual act, it was repelled by the earth itself. Its tail exhaust tore at the ground before it leveled off and settled weightlessly on the pad.
“I’d say he should get another pilot,” Arthur Gaines, the assistant director of the COC complex yelled over the noise to his driver.
The scarred man with the drivers cap balanced uncomfortably on his head stared at the helicopter before he raised his voice slightly. “The only people who wheel a ship quite like that learned to fly in the Toffler war. And the only people who fly like that now are the survivors.” The helicopters jets cut off and his final words were framed in the sudden silence; “they’re the best.”
They moved quickly toward the passenger’s exit of the copter and waited but when a door opened it was on the pilot’s side and only a single figure jumped out on the tarmac. He moved quickly to join the two waiting figures.
The assistant director extended his hand. “Senator Yourdin? I’m Arthur Gaines, assistant director of CDC. This is Pete Wheeler,” he hesitated,”my driver.” They shook hands warmly. “Do you always pilot your own helicopter?”
The Senator understood the question. “When I get the chance. usually only when I travel alone. The way I land is...,” he searched for the right phrasing,”too unnatural.”
Wheeler the driver spoke up,”
The Senator nodded.
“It’s hard to land any other way,” he continued as if compelled to state obvious facts. “The mind adapts to a technology with habits the body remembers. No other way of coming close to the earth feels comfortable....It’s unnecessary but....” He looked at the driver who responded to an unasked question. “Grenbusk.” It was like an exchange of secret signs between members of a fraternity. The Senator nodded and turned to the assistant director standing quietly out of the half silent conversation. “Sorry, Dr.Gaines. Didn’t mean to be impolite I assume that the copter will be safe here.”
Gaines nodded. “I’ll send a crew to pin it down, Senator.”
“Would you mind if we walked? I’ve been cramped in that bird for two hours and my legs could use some stretching. I would like to get used to the ground again.”
“No problem,” Gaines replied amicably,”I could use the exercise myself. Pete, we’ll see you at Momsa.
The land was hard, rolling and dusty without a hint of a road. They started out in the direction the car took, walking in an uneasy silence for a few minutes. The Senator searched the surroundings attentively. Over a short rise the vegetation started to change from desert scrub to an odd tundra like overgrowth. “This far away,” the Senator mused. He answered Gaines’s quizzical look with a perfunctory,”Nothing, Dr.Gaines. I remembered something. Nothing important.” The silence continued for a few moments before the assistant director broke it abruptly.
“Excuse me, Senator. Why are you here?”
The Senator continued to stare at the growth around him.
“I appreciate your directness, Dr.Gaines,” he said, looking up. “I’ll be just as direct in my answer. But I’m curious. You must have a dossier on visitors who are...potentially worrisome?”
“We do, Senator, but I prefer to meet the person before I meet the dossier. I...”
The Senator interrupted him. “Good, I was hoping it might be something like that.” He stopped and turned to face the slightly younger man. “That’s exactly why I’m here. For all intents and purposes the Presidential election is over. Fluke or not, Thomas Peterson is president. There is a lot of pressure to shift policy on organic hybrid computing. You know the arguments. We don’t know enough about the foundations. They violate basic human values. No one has thought through the consequences of the blends. We should back out of the next stage and wait. Davidson...”
“Davidson’s an...” Gaines interrupted.
“I happen to agree with you, but he’s raised some points about massive hybrid computational structures which no one seems to be able to answer. When every high schools student is able to grow...”
“It’s not quite gotten to that point yet, Senator.”
“No, not quite, but close. What it amounts to is that one of the first decisions that Tom Peterson will have to make as president will be on the funding of the basic research on organic computational forms for the new generation of hybrids.”
“The research we’re doing here,” Gaines noted.
“The research you’re doing here. For the next five years at least this place is organic computing as it’s been for the last 10. The decisions that Peterson will make will fix the direction and pace of organic computing for a long time. He asked me to check its spin.”
“Check its spin?”
“You’re not a veteran of the Toffler war?” It was only half a question.
“No.”
“Banglers had a spin.” The senator stopped. “Wasn’t the research on banglers done here?”
“Only the fundamental research,” Gaines replied. “Actually only the theoretical work. Not the derivation of the weapon.”
“It’s a shame. You probably would have designed them better. Banglers had a spin. They were always spinning. And they were supposed to spin steady. Sometimes they wobbled. If they wobbled you were dead when you laid them down. The wave form decomposed and leapt up instead of radiating along the ground. If they wobbled you had to lift up and dump them into the nearest body of water. The last thing you did before you let them loose was check their spin. They were magnificent weapons,” the senator said sarcastically.
They walked in silence for a moment before Gaines spoke up. “You’re not on the Oversight Committee, are you?”
“No,” Yourdin replied. “The president wanted someone....outside the network. And you’re not one of the crowd who come up to the hill to do the briefing so we’re about even, Dr. Gaines. Are you going to be my guide?”
“Only as much as you want one, Senator. I expect you would prefer to see the complex on your own. But I am at your disposal for as much or as little as you want me.”
“I would like to meet the director,” Yourdin said. “Besides that....”
“The director doesn’t see visitors. It’s nothing personal. It’s an idiosyncrasy. He was ‘sick’ the last two times the President came.” The senator said nothing. “Tell me about the Center for Organic Computing.”
“What do you want to know about?” Gaines responded.
“Don’t let what I want to know about it stand in the way of what you tell me. I want to hear about it the way it feels to someone who lives with it.”
The senator watched Gaines test the waters. “The Center for Organic Computing is a two mile complex pointed on a gravitational singularity,” Gaines began as he swung into the standard V.I.P lecture.
The Senator interrupted him. “How long have you been here?”
Gaines abandoned the canned spiel. “Since the beginning. Before
the beginning. I was one of
“It’s a good place to start,” the Senator replied.
Gaines let himself fall backward in time. “Some of the theory of blends was developed before I began in the program but I was in on most of it. We moved here directly from Stanford after Suzi took.”
The Senator’s face registered confusion. “We don’t refer to the computer by its technical name, Senator. Somewhere along the line Wicks began calling it Suzi. The name took. That’s the only way people talk about it, here.” Gaines waited until the Senator’s face indicated he had no questions.
“There were five of us,” Gaines continued. “Three of us worked
under
“Go on, it’s fascinating,” the Senator replied.
The younger man gave up trying to restrain his enthusiasm. “
“The idea was simple enough. You expressed lines of development on a synthetic silicon-organic frame, made a genetic skeleton more or less. You tried to make some living material incorporate that frame and use the form as a basis for its own growth.”
“When the living material took over, it modified its reproductive material and reproduced the form again and again. Every cell appended the pattern to the genetic blueprint for its structure. When it worked you had a hybrid computational instrument, a massive parallel organic living computational device— newt or a turnip,or an oak that computed. We started growing her from scratch. Plants seemed to work best. Carrot top derivatives at first. Tobacco. Bamboo. We tried nearly everything. The hardest part was controlling mutual interaction of forms.”
“There was a viral vector at first. It was like taming living stuff. ‘Frogs from The eye of a newt,’ Wicks used to say. At first it was hard getting enough computing time on sand monsters....”
Again a look of puzzlement crept over the Senator’s face.
“I’m sorry, Senator. As soon as we began to grow a computer any computer that was all silicon was called a sand monster.”
“We moved here after the first root started to grow. It was more or less a quarantine. The military didn’t quite believe anything would come of it but they had very few options so they came up with this site. There were some side effects they thought were worth exploring.”
“Like banglers.”
Gaines shrugged. “Like banglers. Do you know what the hardest aspect of the whole thing was, Senator?” he asked.
“I have an idea, but tell me.”
“The sense that we were violating nature, that we had broken some taboo, that we had transgressed some invisible boundary. Going forward was moving into a blackness in which the potholes were in darkness and only the safe spots were well lit. Going back was impossible because you couldn’t tell where you had come from and you didn’t know where you were.”
“Very poetic,” the senator commented.
“I guess so but it was very real. It didn’t seem to bother
“Things moved faster once we were here.
“Sylbacks conjecture,” the senator answered.
Gaines was surprised. “I’m impressed senator. In a year she was outproducing the Yashima-Cray -Yashima. A few months after that Wicks and
“And the Nobel prizes?”
“They came about two years after she came on line. The Nobel committee changed the structure of the prizes that year. No two people had ever won the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Biology before.”
“And medicine,” the senator added.
“And medicine,” Gaines acknowledged.
“And they introduced one for computing that year.”
“Which you all shared.”
Gaines said nothing. “No one could find Wicks. He had literally
disappeared. It was as if he had dropped off of the face of the earth.
“Except for
“The Toffler War was a mistake,” Gaines said vehemently. “
“The military was getting theirs,” the senator remarked.
“Yes, but believe it or not, the heart of what we were doing here wasn’t of interest to them then. It was pie in the sky.”
“Banglers,” was the senators only comment.
Gaines spun to face him. His voice dropped then gained control of itself. “It was some aspect of the theory we didn’t pay much attention to, a side effect we had to control. It was stupid. And I’m afraid we....”
The senator helped the assistant director off of the hook. “As wars go it was brutally and mercifully short—and someone else had most of the bodies or what was left of them. We managed to pull back from the abyss because the Russians held their hand and didn’t push the button. I’m not sure if we were in their position we wouldn’t have taken the world down with us. It was the final collective recognition that something momentous had happened, that the old world was dead, finally, completely done.”
Gaines tried to pick up the thread of his enthusiasm. “In eight years science was stood on its head. We really didn’t get the full benefits until Suzi matured. But them was the greatest period of scientific development the world has seen. God, how science flourished. It grew like the root. It was like being involved in the discovery of the wheel. You couldn’t think ahead about the effects of the automobile.”
“And it came out of here?” the senator asked dryly.
“Not really,” was Gaines’ reply. “It was the way the barrier between organic and inorganic material had been ripped aside that did it. Once that barrier crashed it crashed everywhere. The particulars and the increment in computing power were less important that the shift in thinking that pervaded every scientific field.”
“It did more than ‘pervade,’” the senator shot back, “its ‘side’ effects were massive dislocations. It destroyed medicine.”
“No one foresaw or intended that.” Gaines barely contained his resentment at the implied criticism. “We were looking for an application, some way of bringing the organics technology and the root to bear in a way that would focus attention on the kinds of things that could be done.”
“You were looking for a way of guaranteeing funding after the military support evaporated because of the Toffler War,” the senator translated.
Gaines accepted the translation. “Everyone was complaining about the cost of medical care. Medicine was a perfect candidate. Suzi doctored a nation as fast as they could set up lines here. She could handle the central part of the country by herself. After a while we got her to develop some programs we could down load onto sand monsters.”
“And the monitors,” the senator asked.
“According to Suzi it was an idea of
Wicks he never developed for some reason.
“So in three years medicine as a field of human endeavor went down the tubes.”
Gaines was defensive. “I don’t think anyone...no one anticipated that...the extent of the changes. We thought we could introduce a component big enough to handle a major chunk of the diagnostic work. When Wilson and Suzi came up with the monitor it was a new ballgame.”
“She became a doctor, country doctor, city doctor, internist, ophthalmologist, psychiatrist, pediatrician.” The senator’s voice was bittersweet. “It’s obvious enough if you think about it, A doctor collects information, makes a diagnosis, prescribes a treatment.”
Gaines felt compelled to explain. “At the time no one thought it would destroy medicine. It was really a way to use the interface.”
The senator seemed caught between an odd bitterness and a nostalgic reflectiveness. “A button of hybrid gel taped to the wrist, four days to absorb it into the dermis and you’ve got yourself a doctor on you wrist. Doesn’t ask how you feel. It knows. Plug it into a transmitter, phone link it to an ADC middle frame and you got yourself you own private physician.”
“By the time she went into doctoring most of the human element was out of it anyway,” Gaines editorialized.
“The medical schools emptied,” the senator stated flatly.
“You couldn’t get rich anymore,” Gaines flipped back.
“It wasn’t greed. Demoralization did medicine in.”
“Maybe Wicks saw what Suzi would mean. He was an M.D.”
“Would he have made any difference?” the senator asked.
“I’m really not sure,” Gaines commented.
“I was studying...in school,” the senator mused. He pushed the thought away and waited for Gaines to pick up the conversation.
“It’s coming up around the next bend, Senator Yourdin.”
Although Yourdin had seen pictures, he wasn’t prepared for the reality of it. Something very much like a tree nearly as big as a twelve story building surrounded by vines, flowers, shrubs little houses and paths. Pieces of plastic lattice made an edge along part of the length of the trunk. He sucked in his breath.
“Side effects,” Gaines said, staring himself. “I haven’t gotten used to it either. We haven’t been able to figure out what’s essential and what’s grace and esthetics. Suzi won’t say. A confusing smell made its presence known, somewhat animal, somewhat metallic somewhat flowery but without any distinct separate identity. It’s filtered out inside the complex,” Gaines said, noticing the smell also. “It’s part of the process but no one knows exactly how or why. Looks like an enchanted forest, doesn’t it,” Gaines said.
“Exactly what it looks like,” the senator replied. He pointed to one of the overhanging branches loaded with what looked like fruit. “Do you have witches?” he asked not entirely facetiously. To his surprise the answer was almost serious.
“Only a good one I hope,” Gaines said and started walking down the path toward the tree.
They stopped about four yards from the trunk of the tree where a root had risen and broken the surface like a whale frozen as it breeched. There was a door in the root.
“It takes a little while to get used to,” Gaines remarked,”If we had taken the car we would have come into a conventional office building and gone underground. Almost no one sees Suzi this way, senator.”
They opened the door and entered a smallish passageway. The light was grayish and diffused but adequate. “If you will excuse me, senator, I have some business that I have to attend to. I think that you will want to look around by yourself. You are welcome to wander wherever you want, look and see what you want.”
The senator nodded. “Security?” It was an open ended question.
“The staff has been informed we have a visitor. I didn’t tell them who it was. I thought you might want to...”
“Remain incognito,” the senator completed the thought.
“...choose how you wanted to present yourself, war hero, author, presidential advisor, senator. Suzi knows you’re here.” He took something that looked like a watch from his pocket. It had Yourdin printed on its face. “You can wear this or not.” He offered it to the Senator. “It functions as an on line map. He held it up showing the senator its face and pushed one of the buttons on the side and a map appeared. It’s not essential to get in anywhere and it’s not a tracker if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You mean there’s no security,” the senator said in disbelief.
Gaines laughed. “Suzi is her own security. She knows where you are. She monitors your footsteps or brain patterns or God knows what. Security is not a problem. We eat at six or so by the way. The watch will beep you to the dining area. Or you can ask someone. If you want me, pick up one of the phones—the yellow things that look like bananas at one of the stations along the way.” He laughed. “It takes some getting used to. Enjoy your tour, senator. I hope you like her.” He turned and walked down a passageway and disappeared around a turn leaving the senator alone in the bowels of a tree trunk.
II
For the next three hours Yourdin wandered. The insides of the computer were as much a fairyland as it’s outsides.
The computer occupied what seemed to be an immense amount of space and he could not figure out how that much underground space had been created nor why an organic computer required such an expanse. He tried to calculate the length of the faciltiy by counting paces but was distracted. He realized after traversing a particularly long tract that he had been walking downward, and realized that that seemed like a single level was probably a multileveled arrangement.
The architecture was organic and eclectic. One passageway led from a completely controlled scientific environment to a primitive, unexplored cavern. He was certain he had caught sight of some strange animal—something between a koala bear and a bat, flying around in one of the large cavernous bubbles of space that seemed to be caught in the flesh of the computer. He made a note to ask Gaines about them.
The narrow passageway at the end of the cavern ended in a door of roughly hewn wood on one side and space age plastoform on the other. It led into a library that was as complete as any he had ever been in. And wherever he went he had the feeling that something was with him, some presence was a constant companion at his elbow, in front of him, behind and beneath him, nevermore than a handsbreadth away in any direction.
There was a sense of sadness about it that made him want to reach out and a sense of strangeness that made him pull back. He felt an invitation to communicate from a presence that defied communication. It reminded him of a experience he had had but his mind resisted remembering, gently at first, then with a fury that confused and paralyzed him until he surrendered and accepted its refusal to accept contact with the past.
He talked to everyone he met but there were not many people wandering around. He suspected that most of the staff were elsewhere but after a few hours of rambling he could not figure out where the elsewhere might be. The people were as varied as the environment. Some of them were dressed in coveralls dirt smeared on their face. Others were in spotless business suits or laboratory coats.
For an hour or so he sat in what he took to be the control center. A series of large screens and a smattering of voice activated terminals seemed to be the main link to the functioning computer. He watched people interact with what he took the central processing unit but he hesitated to interrupt them and when he did it was merely to ask what they were doing. The answer was not enlightening and he did not pursue it.
Once, the fear of being lost in a labyrinth overwhelmed him and he was engulfed by surges of panic. He pushed the buttons on the watch Gaines had given him wildly until his name and the map disappeared and an arrow appeared and he let it lead him to an exit. As he rushed onto the dessert scrub the memories that he had kept at a distance flooded back.
Banglers were the first military
byproducts of the development of hybrid computers. Their development was begun
as relations with the Russians and the Japanese soured after the rumors of
American success in hybrid organic computers drifted around the world. As
The Toffler war was the first war fought over access to a
technology. It began as a phoney war. Neither side
was willing to fully engage militarily but each mobilized and threatened. The
only combat involved client states, so that the U.S was fighting the New Axis
through proxies in the middle east and in
Before experience taught them differently, the designers of the banglers thought that the insulation of distance and the carbon-krypton jell and foil were enough to shield the pilots who delivered them from any effects the residue of the wave forms might have before they dissipated. In theory, the weapons generated a field that propagated from the point of detonation and ran along the surface of the earth. The field resonated with the electrical-information field that human beings generated. The result was that the human being dissolved into a mushy paste. Dogs, computers, rats, lice, trees, flowers, machines were left untouched.
Only after they had lost every pilot that had been involved in initial, disastrous attacks to bizarre schizophrenic symptoms did they realize the weapon had complex, pernicious effects on the pilots who delivered it as well as terminal effects on its victims. They redesigned both the hybrid helicopter that delivered the weapon, the technique by which it was delivered and the psychological profile of the pilots.
It turned out that the theory was only partially true but this was
discovered only after the Toffler war was over. The weapons killing power
depended on a resonance that came from the earth itself. In a complex way, the
initial detonation set up a resonance pattern deep in the mantle of the earth
itself. The killing field turned out to be produced by the earth itself
interacting with all of the organic matter touched by the field. It turned out
that the natural resonance matched the pattern produced by human perfectly. It
turned out also that by diddling with the trigger the weapon could be tuned to
other resonant frequencies. The post war transformations of this led to the
whole series of wiper tools, that cleared forests eliminated oil spills and
killed locusts, mice and rats. Yordin was just out of
school and drifting when the war started. He enlisted during the period of the phoney war and was trained as a pilot. But his profile did
not match the one developed for bangler pilots and he
was reassigned to naval intelligence. The formulation of the new psychological
profile for bangler pilots caught him in the middle
of studying Russian. His request for flying duty was reactivated and he was
yanked to
His first combat experience was at
The details poured back on him as the hot dry
After
The feelings flooded him and his mind struggled to keep them in their place. He shook as he realized that it was that set of feeling that had been reproduced in him as he walked through the computer. In some way they had come from outside of him, come from Suzi.
After a half hour he returned to the insides of the tree and
continued his wandering. He lost track of time until the watch on his wrist
erupted in a gentle hum and its face spontaneously altered becoming a compass
but leading him this time in a different direction. He followed it, puzzled,
until he checked his own watch and realized it was
The dining hall was bright, cheerful but only half of the seats were taken. Gaines was watching for him as he came in and caught him at the door. “What do you think?” he asked, genuinely curious. He steered the senator first to the small counter where a smorgasbord was constantly being replenished. “Try those things,” he suggested, pointing to some small,amorphous blobs which were unidentifiable as animal or vegetable. “I forget what they call them but they’re damned good. Where do you want to sit?” Yourdin shrugged. “O.K. why don’t we just sit down eat first and worry about socializing afterward.” He steered Yourdin to an empty table near the center of the hall. The food was extraordinary and different in a way he could not put his finger on, and, although he prided himself as something of an expert in wine, the provenance of the wine escaped him also. Gaines made jokes about the cook and talked about the perks of living with an organic computer. He pressed Yourdin about what he had seen but deflected a line of questioning that Yourdin obliquely directed to the feeling he had experienced during his exploration. “They’re real. A few others have had them. It’s another side effect we’ve not quite gotten a handle on. You get used to it.”
When they had finished eating Yourdin felt he had been guided in circles around anything that was significant and was about to confront the assistant director when Gaines turned to him.
“I promised the staff you’d say something to them. They’ve been
politely respecting your privacy but they want to hear something from Yourdin the hero of
The senator rose. “I did not come prepared to speak to you but to listen and learn. Mankind has traveled many roads since it separated itself from the rest of nature but none so momentous as the road we are starting down now. Old divisions are disappearing, old barriers dissolving. Most of that, which, until now mankind was forced to take as an immutable given has suddenly become open to mutable choice.”
“But the road we have started down is shrouded in darkness and it is one we shall travel burdened with new responsibilities. And no one carries more responsibility than you sitting here. Mankind has emerged from its childhood but whether we have the wisdom to endure our adulthood is yet to be seen.”
“The Toffler war was a terrible passageway to that new age. Having propelled us through that door, science has a more awesome responsibility for helping us understand where we are going, where we ought to go, where we must not go. Having peeled away much that cradled and insulated man from nature and rejoined man and living things in a new way science must begin to help us understand the new unity of which humankind is a part.”
“Nowhere is the new science so much the center of life as here. You not only are making it you are living in it with it and for it. In a very direct way you shoulder the responsibility not only for guiding the development of much of the new science to come but for guiding it’s application.”
“Although you may neither have asked for it nor desired it, you are guardians of a flame which will consume if it is not tended. As much as humankind has changed, science must change. Much as Suzi represents a fusion of earths living stuff and humanities capacity for thought, science must fuse a new body of knowledge with new understanding and a new set of attitudes. And it must forge a new set of images with which we can see and comprehend the world we are bringing into being.”
“You must discover a new way to be partners with nature. For a long time we were partners. Then, as we became powerful, we withdrew from that partnership. Now it is up to you to forge that partnership again in a new way. We must invest in that partnership the only thing we really have to give, our humanness, the result of our collective experiences, the cultured collective wisdom we have extracted from the difficult task of being alive.”
“So you must rediscover what it means to be human. At its center, this is what the new science is about; the rediscovery of humankind, the working through of a new partnership with nature. No longer as innocents; the Toffler war eliminated our claims to innocence: no longer as apprentices but as teachers and partners; Suzi is a testament to that. There is no going back, and there is no return; there is only a basis for rededication to knowledge, to humanity, to livingkind. I wish you the best.”
The applause after the speech was polite and severe, as if the audience were weighing pros and cons against mysteries. After a few minutes Gaines walked him around and introduced him to the members of the staff he had not met. And those he had came up and reintroduced themselves. Although the form varied, the question Yourdin put to each person he met was the same. “What are you working on?”
Of the thirty or so people he spoke to, about half had to do with computing. The others were as varied as sociological modeling, linguistic analysis and bioengineering. Afterwards Gaines let him back to the table. “Is there another dining room for the technical staff?” Yourdin asked. Gaines looked at him oddly. “This is the technical staff, Senator. Everyone here does two jobs.”
“What is it that you really do here?” Yourdin asked.
“We work mostly on idea development, senator. One person one project and Suzi. It’s a think tank more or less all centered around Suzi. Half of the staff is working on computer design. Here that involves largely bioengineering. The other half is working on...other interesting problems. Suzi develops her own problems. That’s not a good way of putting it. Suzi suggests interesting problems. It’s a new ballgame.” Then without letting Yourdin reply Gaines added,”You were born around here, weren’t you?” The question was out of the blue but the Senator had expected it.
“You got around to reading my dossier.”
Gaines nodded.
“I grew up close to the where I landed.”
Gaines made a connection. “Navajo?”
“Mohave and only part. My mother was an Indian, my father was an anthropologist.” The senator framed a question but never had a chance to ask it. Gaines face had gone flat. He stared at his watch.
“Excuse me senator, something’s come up. I have to leave for a little while. If you relax here I’m sure it will only be for a half hour or so. I’m sure you won’t want for company.”
Yourdin noticed two or three of the others stop in the middle of conversations and look at their watches also.
Yourdin did not let Gaines pull himself away. “I’d like tag along? I promise I’ll stay out of the way.” The words were somewhere between a request and an order.
Gaines hesitated. “There’s a problem at control. I have no idea what it is, something minor.” His face belied his words. Yourdin wondered what the watch face indicated. He started to dissuade the Senator but reconsidered. “You’ll have to make yourself invisible, senator.”
The senator nodded and they set off across the pavilion out a side door into a maze of corridors.The senator recognized one or two that he had explored on his own. The patterning of the surface appeared to be quartz but it was warm to the touch and a Indian design had been sculpted on it. It was strong, abstract and familiar.
With the assistant director leading the way they turned into a doorway that the Senator was certain had not been there when he walked though the corridor earlier in the afternoon. Suddenly he realized what Gaines meant by security and wondered what else had been casually hidden from his view.
“This afternoon...,” he began. Gaines interrupted him. “It’s not a matter of secrecy, Senator, nothing was hidden, it just was not casually exposed.”
The room they entered was smaller but almost a duplicate of the room Yourdin had taken for the computer center. Except for the large screen link a blank scoreboard it was recognizable as a computer installation. The peripherals were all in place only the computer itself was missing.
Gaines nodded Yourdin into a chair at a large table at the back of the room. Near the center of the room five or six men were standing around a single figure. There was no question who was in control. Yourdin laughed to himself. “I’m going to meet the director after all.”
The legendary Dr.Harry Wilson did not notice him as he swung to greet Gaines as he approached the table. “I’m glad you’re here, Arthur.” Without a break he spun back to the two technical people who stood perceptibly edgy to his right. “Get Porter at Cal Tech on the red phone. He’s been working on packet diffusion. It may be a growth tip problem. And Metter from Harvard.” He spun off a phone number. “Put him on line and feed him the last set of measures on nutrient gradients. Tell him to look for asymmetric spikes in the 2-Gramsci range. He turned by to Gaines. “.1 or. 2 and not responsive.” They looked at the screen that was placed above their eye level. Gaines turned to the man at the desk under the darkened panel. “Try smearing the left particulates. She may respond.” The man at the desk winced but went though some motions. The watched the screen.
Gaines swore.
The senator imagined the scene at the dining hall. Everyone must be checking their watches. Dinner was over, period.
The scene struck the senator as familiar. The overlay of memory made sense out of the appearance before him, but the intensity and heightened tension in the room distracted him and he could not put his finger on it before his attention was pulled away.
“Meld off section two,” the director barked at no one in particular. One man accepted the directive. “She won’t accept.”
“Manually.”
“No response.”
“Try a more critical cut.”
The watched the screen above their heads flash a streaky smear then go dark again. “She won’t accept.”
“We have five hours and then the subsystems response will degenerate and start to shed. It’s precautionary but I don’t think we ought to try to hold onto them.”
Gaines drifted over to the senator. His voice had a tired helpless hollowness to it. “You can see she’s down. She just won’t work. The damned thing is that there’s nothing wrong. Every diagnostic shows up within limits. Nothings wrong.”
The senator looked at him. “You mean that every test shows she
healthy and she’s just sick.” Gaines nodded. They turned to look at
One by one, the people in the room drifted over to the table where Gaines was standing and the senator was sitting. The director joined them at last. As he began speaking he noticed the senators presence.
“Excuse me, senator. I heard you were here. I apologize for not meeting you...This is a scientific meeting. I think it would be better if you left. I will met with you if you like after...after we finish.”
Yourdin spoke up directly. “Dr. Wilson,
it’s more than a meeting. I’m here as the next presidents representative.” He
spoke swiftly and sharply. “The president has a decision to make that will set
the direction and pace of organic computing for the next decade. Suzi’s failure has a direct bearing on the decision. I
think it would be best for everyone if I stayed.” The people around the table
tensed visibly, but
The assistant directors voice was flat and washed out. “Ed Proctor has gotten here with his equipment. From the preliminaries, he says it doesn’t look promising. He won’t say no definitely, but he doesn’t think its growth tip problem.”
“
“
The director spoke intensely. “There must be something we’ve
overlooked.”
Everyone turned towards
The Senator focused on the deja vu and remembered where he had watched the scene played out before. The people were doctors and interns dressed hospital green but the dilemma was the same. “Might I make a suggestion, Dr.Wilson.” The tone was grey, completely neutral but somehow it suggested respectful blackmail. “Call Wicks.”
The director straightened and swung to face the senator. “What the hell does he have to do with this?”
“Call him.”
“Senator, this isn’t a political matter. It been a long time since Bill Wicks has been here. Suzi’s entirely different from when he was here.”
“The senator stood his ground. It may not be a political matter,
Dr. Wilson, but I don’t think it’s entirely a technical problem either.” He
softened his approach. “Suzi’s basic structure hasn’t
changed that much, has it. The core has grown but the internal make up is
continuous.”
The senator thought for a moment then he bent down and wrote out a telephone number. “Try this. Tell him Bill Yourdin...tell him I’m here.”
“What makes you think he’ll come, senator?”
“He’ll come.”
Wicks was not at the number but he called back within 10 minutes.
They routed the call to the speaker phone at the desk.
“Hello Harry, what’s up.”
“Senator Yourdin’s here. He suggested”-–his voice stumbled for a split second then recovered--”I call.”
“It’s good to hear your voice again, Harry.” There was loving concern in the voice.
“Is she sensitive?”
“She seems to be, only she’s not responding. We’ve done every diagnostic in the manual. Nothing seems outside of limits yet she’s not responsive.”
“There’s nothing on the tips is there?”
“No.”
“Are the Hammand bands clear?”
“A little. I’ve kept up a little, Harry. I’ll be there. .. It’ll take me about forty minutes.”
“Where are you,”
“I prefer to drive. I’m not that far away. I’ll see you Harry. Is Yourdin there?” the voice asked then, without waiting for an acknowledgement, ‘hello Yourdin’ came from the box before it cut off with a loud click.
The car was cleared through security and bounced along the flat, unmarked road picking its way between the denser shrubbery. Wilson, Gaines and Yourdin waited for it at the door to the main complex. A sense of urgency locked up the three waiting figures into a shadowed knot. As he climbed out of the banged up car Wicks reached for hand the director had extended like a paw. “Hello, Harry.” They embraced awkwardly. “It’s good to see you again Yourdin. Art, still pitching horseshoes against that Ironwood shrub?” The assistant director broke into a wide grin and nodded.
“Yes,” came from
“Bill...”
Wicks retrieved his bag from the assistant director.
“Harry, don’t be offended at what I’m going to ask. I’s like to be with her alone at least for a little while.”
“Probably nothing,” Wicks answered. “If you’re concerned let Yourdin here come along. Art, you look like you could use a rest. Harry why don’t you and Art take a break.” Yourdin expected an explosion but the director merely acquiesced flatly and with a grimace. The senator followed Wicks into the control room where Wicks greeted everyone and then summarily told them to clear out. “How are you Yourdin?” Wicks asked and the last of the staff left. “How long has it been since you were out at the reservation?
“A year or so,” Yourdin said softly.
“That long,” Wicks said. “You should come out more often. I know senators are busy, but...”
They stood in silence for a moment. Wicks retrieved a cigar and two glasses from his medical bag and took out something else and with a laugh threw it back. He hand descended into the black case for a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“You don’t think they’ll mind if I smoke?” he asked no one in particular. “I guess they will,” he added answering his own question. The environment was almost sterile. Wicks looked around for something to dump the ashes which were beginning to form on the cigar he had retrieved from his bag. He settled finally for a drawer. Yourdin watched as he pulled open each of the drawers in the table. All were empty. Wicks settled for one near the top. “Never practiced did you, Yourdin?”
“No,” the senator replied. “It didn’t seem to make any sense by the time I got out.”
“I don’t know,” Wicks pulled at a tuft of hair above his ear. “There are places that can need and appreciate a good human doctor. Suzi is something special but...you’re a senator now and our next president’s chief advisor. I wanted to talk to you about that. Well discuss it later.”
He turned to the darkened and unchanging screen poised above their heads. “Reach up, Yourdin, and see if you can’t pull that down nearer eye level. Let me look at this panel.” He scanned the surface of the desk while Yourdin got up on a chair and looked for a way to grab the screen. Without looking up Wicks advised him. “It has a depression near the back right. There will be a trigger mechanism there. Push it and you won’t have to struggle.”
Yourdin felt around until he located the slot and slid his fist in. As he fingered the trigger the large screen effortlessly followed his tug. He pulled the system careful down until it was nearly eye level with the sitting figure puffing his cigar.
Wicks pulled up his chair pushing his gut against the control panel built into the table. He noticed his glass was making a stain on the corner as he reached over and put his hand on the screen. “Suzi,” he whispered quietly. “Suzi,” he repeated the name of the machine a little more loudly. “It’s Doctor Wicks, Suzi. Tell me,” he moved his hand gently over the switches and buttons recessed into the control panel in no particular order letting his hand rest finally over some shiny push plate. “It’s Dr. Wicks, Suzi, tell me where it hurts.” Yourdin watched only partly surprised as the screen flashed into life.
Yourdin listened to Wicks lecture to the staff. He had heard much of it before when Wicks had spoken informally to a group of third year medical students about what he called practical medicine. The only parts he could recognize as different were additions Wicks made to make the material more sharply pointed to Suzi. The point was a clear and lucid as when he had heard it in medical school.
Sickness is not the opposite of health. A person who is sick is a thinking, feeling organism. A person can be physically well and sick. It was simple. It was even trite, But it was true. True then and true now. It was not simply a matter of tests and measurement but someone or something who is sick and a healer and a process of healing. People sometimes get sick even though their body is well.
Sickness is a state or condition of a living being. What’s wrong with the creature may not show up in the lab report. And healing wasn’t simply a matter of correcting some imbalance in electrolytes but correcting something wrong with the organism. The ills that flesh are heir to pervade every creature, large or small. Every cow doctor knows it. You treat a cow you attend to its cowness. Living things get sick when their lives are out of whack.
Wicks did not stay long after the speech. Yourdin and Wilson walked with him to his parked car. “Never did get much of a chance to talk, did we, Harry?”
Wicks spoke up. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble again, Harry. I’d like to drop by sometime in the next few weeks just to say hello. If it’s O.K.. I miss....I miss you and I miss Suzi.”
As Wicks drove off Art Gaines joined Wilson and Yourdin in front of the complex. He turned to Yourdin. “What are you going to tell the president?” He asked bluntly.
“I’m not sure, exactly,” Yourdin answered. Not the details. “I think Suzi’s safe. She’s got a lot of room to grow and I think the directions right. It would be a shame not to be able to see what the second generation looks like.” He turned to Gaines. “I guess I’ll tell him I’ve checked her spin and she spins fine.”
_____________________________________
They only call me to save their asses, when there’s trouble, real trouble— anomalies.
They call me reluctantly. It is personal; they dislike me. But it is not only that. For the scientists who are my customers, consulting me is like having their palm read by a gypsy. When they call me, they admit more than a personal inadequacy. They confess their science is flawed. But they call me anyway. I am their last resort, a consultant. Anomalies.
Although I take pride in my work, I do not revel in their discomfort. I do not let my ego feed on their failure. I do not testify before committees. I am not available for interviews. I do not exploit my successes for career advancement. I do not hold their distaste for me against them. I sympathize with them. They only call me when their back is to the wall, when they have squeezed their science dry, when they can’t make their kind of science--normal science-- work.
I never supply solutions. Usually I can’t. But even when I find a solution, I refrain from providing it. Solutions would be unbearable. Much of science is ego and I understand that while the people who come to me may be strong enough to ask for help, they may not be strong enough to accept much of it. No, I provide hints, I clear the path so that they can use their eyes again. I nudge, I jog. Most of the time it is enough.
My credentials look like theirs: Ph.D. in Mathematics, Courant
Institute, MD from Yale, Ph.D. in Physics from
“Dr. Strayte, this is Fred Schwerber. I’m the head of the Coordinating group of the NIRHG, the National Institute for Research on the Human Genome. I wonder whether you would be interested in...we would like you to...a consultation.” I could feel the man’s pain. He extended his hand to the gypsy with great difficulty.
It was Friday. He asked me if I could come to his office on Sunday. He explained there was some rush about the project. A deadline had to be met. I realized that it was not a deadline that dictated a Sunday meeting but discretion. Schwerber was not sure what would happen, if he could bring himself to make some sort of an offer or if I would take it if offered. If it did not work out, the fewer people who saw me at the project, the better. To his credit he was straightforward about it when we met.
“I have to tell you I was not in favor of calling you in. I...Grabatz”
He said the name as if he were pronouncing a terrible judgment. I understood what the name meant for him. Grabatz was the chief advisor to the president on scientific matters. He was not the formal advisor, not the person who held the title of scientific advisor. No, he was the person in the shadows whose advice on scientific matters the president took.
Grabatz referred to himself as “cowshit, manure.” What he meant was that he was one of those people who fertilizes a period of scientific development, not himself a great scientist, but a man with a vision who at the right time in the right place had the ear of a man of power who could turn that vision into reality. Grabatz was a spider who crouched at the center of the great web of interconnected science projects that the government supported.
Grabatz had a vision or a vision had him. Science had to provide the tools for mankind to recreate itself--literally--to rebuild itself biologically. He was not enthusiastic about this reconstruction, only resigned to it. He would have chosen almost any other path if he could have found one that took mankind out of the wilderness it had wandered into. He had spent most of his life searching for one and he could not find it. It was not his first choice of a path for mankind or for science: for him it was the only choice.
The transformation was necessary because Grabatz was convinced that computers would eclipse and replace homo sapiens as the dominant species on earth if human beings did not recreate and reconstruct themselves. It was a vision of the doom of mankind worthy of Bosch. The only way of preventing it from coming true was for human beings to use science to change themselves. A complete biological overhaul. Once he convinced himself that his fear of mans ultimate replacement by computers was not just a figment of his twisted imagination he set out to make sure that science would provide the tools necessary for the reconstruction, to make it possible for the makeover to happen. He cajoled, jostled, pushed, shoved or bulldozed if he had to, whatever it took to shape science to the task he envisioned for it.
Even the most creative of scientists move in directions. They believe it is impossible to move unless you are moving in some direction. The risk built into normal science is the risk of choosing a direction. It is a linear, heroic image of creativity. Grabatz saw there was a time when a different risk had to be taken, when to move one had to lunge somewhere in no direction at all. Not forward, not backward, in no direction because directions were misleading. He understood that it was not a creative leap, it was merely a leap.
The movement that was required did not have the smell of creativity about it, merely the sweaty, adrenalin-soaked odor of something tugging on flesh caught in a trap, leaving what flesh could not be extracted, limping off with what could be saved. There was nothing heroic about it. Only a resolve strong enough to leave any part of oneself in the trap, abandon anything in order to survive, anything, any idea, any theory, any presupposition, any belief no matter how fundamental. It required a willingness to abandon the security of who one was and where one was, become what one had to become, go where one had to go, to see what one had to see in order to survive.
Grabatz saw what I saw. All belief was temporary, and no belief was precious beyond its usefulness. There was no belief so central that it could not be abandoned if your perceptions told you the world were otherwise. Any belief no matter whose, especially one’s own.
I was a battering ram, a stalking horse, a tanner. He had been my patron when I needed a patron. Now he was an ally when I no longer needed a patron but was myself needed. Of all the scientists with whom I dealt he disliked me most. Yet he recognized the necessity of dealing with me most clearly. Grabatz and I were comrades.
Grabatz had called me a week earlier me saying there had been an anomaly at the genome project and that he was going to suggest they call me. Would I take the job if I was asked? I said yes.
“I see,” I said to Schwerber.
“I’m not sure you do. How much do you know about the PMHG?” I played dumb and let him tell me about the project.
“The PMHG, the project to map the Human Genome was set up in 1992 by the National Institute for Research on the Human Genome. The coordinating group, which I head, had one pair of chromosomes to ourselves, but mostly we coordinated work. It’s over, for all intents and purposes. The genome has been mapped. It’s done. Complete.”
“Except for an anomaly.”
“How did you know?”
I shrugged. “It’s the only reason my phone ever rings,” I said, “the only reason anyone ever calls me.”
“Yes, an anomaly.” His shoulders drooped. “Grabatz insisted,...insisted we try come up with a solution because if there was one piece of the puzzle missing there might be questions when it came to congress funding the next phase. He has been behind the project from the beginning. I believe it’s only his support that assured us the grants when the protests came. His approval is necessary before we can begin organizing for the next step. You’re a physician,” he said,”you know the implications for medicine.”
“I never had a practice,” I said,”but I know what you’re talking about. A new age of biology needs a complete road map of the human being.”
My words were like a switch that turned him on. “That’s where we are going now. Applications. Modification, corrections, substitutions. We have begun a long march. Even without a full map we are starting the make changes, fundamental changes. We have started modifying genes, experimenting with...Science is going to pay off finally, big time. Who knows where we can go. And...” He stopped. “Sorry,” he said,”I get carried away.” And then he fell into himself again. “Science has triumphed, but...but Grabatz is worried that if there is an anomaly there will be questions. He is worried that opponents of the project will exploit an anomaly.”
I set my voice to voice-over mode. “WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT HIDING? ELVIS IS FOUND LURKING ON THE HUMAN CHROMOSOME. THE ENQUIRER RAISES QUESTIONS. ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.”
He winced. “Something like that.” He did not appreciate the humor.
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s a piece...” he blurted out. “We can’t make any sense out of it. It shows in every pair of chromosomes but only two places.”
“Beginning and end.”
“You read...”
It was a put down, unintended but real. “I’m sure you have severely restricted what was published about it. No, I guessed.” He nodded. We talked for a while. “I’ve been told to answer any questions and make our results available,” he said flatly.
I get called when there is an anomaly, when something doesn’t add up. People call me when their compass points up, when the instruments they have are useless, and they are helpless in the face of what absolutely defies rationality, exhausts heuristics, and resists making sense in the face of a full onslaught of common sense and scientific knowledge. I make sense out of anomalies. That is what I do. That is all that I do.
He pointed to a bulky package. “There are a set of tapes. Grabatz assured me you had access to a Yashima-Cray and that you had the highest security clearance.” He handed me an envelope. “Here is an access number. You should be able any other information you need through the Yashima-Cray link. Your fee...”
“Grabatz will handle it. I will probably assemble a small team,” I told him. “There are things I know nothing about.”
He said he would be at my disposal. Ambivalence. I could see it in his eyes as he handed me the package. I could hear the secret wish that I would fail in his voice as he said,”I hope you can make sense out it.” He showed me out.
I have a place in the country. Place is a misnomer. Country is a
misnomer. It is a shack isolated on a spit of land off the
I spent some time looking at the results. Schwerber’s group had worked on two chromosomes. But they were responsible for integrating the work of all of the other labs working on the project. It was impressive. The human genome lay bare in front of me. It was a massive assault on nature, and it had paid off, was paying and would continue to pay off for a century of biomedical science. It would be as they expected a source book for 21st century medicine. It would be the guide book to Grabatz’s transformation of humankind.
Man had captured an image of himself with a special kind of camera. All of the potential of his biology was here. Step by step science had forced its light into the dark passages of the genome, illuminated the yin yanged path of the 23 pairs of chromosomes. There was no place the human could hide anymore, no place to run to. And there was the anomaly, the discrepancy, the thing that made no sense, something that looked like a glob of spit with the shadow structure of a knot.
Anomaly. Yes. An amorphous blob of knotted spit had been folded in so that it fit in between the first and second pair of bases and the penultimate and ultimate base pair or every chromosome. It was nearly invisible, a blip.
A laser balance study indicated the presence of material that was not visible. All of the molecules that made it up were folded in such a way that only the end of the material showed. It looked for all the world like a knotted shadow slipped into an impossible space.
The team that had worked on it had done a thorough job. They had sliced and dissected it. They had tested for functionality. They had tried every way in which they could to unravel what appeared to be a glob of knotted of substance stuck where it had no place being. They had determined it was not DNA, not based, not stranded simply. I asked myself a lot of questions. There was no simple answer that they had overlooked. I didn’t think there would be. They are too thorough. They had come up with two interesting results. First, there was a continuation effect. It was as if a few of the chromosomes were continuous and separated in some sort of sheared space. Like continents which were separated by seas but whose shorelines matched, there were a few chromosomes which seemed as if they were linked in some sort of odd space. A pattern originated in one continued in another separated in space. Then there were the knots.
Knots, not stable knots of physical stuff bound by tensions and forces holding shape in place. More like shadows of knots woven into a necklace of beads to make a beginning.
I went through the material of four investigators, two of whom I know fairly well. There were thorough. They had tried everything I could think of and a few things I had never heard of. But their analysis went in a particular direction. It was incomplete. They had assumed the blobs of spit like substance on which the shadows sat must be similar to the other material on the pairs and must function in the same way. After a while I became convinced it was not so.
It didn’t make any sense for them to be anything else other than some variant of reproductive material. Evolutionary theory as it was understood precluded the appearance of material on the chromosomes which was not reproductively functional. I became convinced that they were not. Which meant something was going on that was not complex in any normal way. An anomaly.
What makes the world bearable is that it makes sense. What makes it nearly unbearable is that it does not make sense the way we think it should. As opposed to other scientists, physicists are prepared to abandon common sense for a larger construction of sense, for a construction of sense that is mostly consistent with imagined possibilities. I believe it has to do with the material we study. It is very small or very big and far away. It is visible only with apparatus. So we are willing to invent anything, believe in anything if it works, if it explains what we see though our instruments. If it does not blatantly contradict anything else they believe, and if it is consistent, most physicists are willing to entertain any notion, any idea, no matter how crazy it sounds — up to a point.
I am willing to go past that point. The house on the spit of land was useful but because surviving there required a minimal set of assumptions; one could abandon a great deal of what one supposed about the world and the spit still made sense, living still made sense. As long as stone jutted out of the sea you were still safe. Your life did not dissolve in front of you.
In the end, after a few weeks I came up with an idea that made sense out of the observations. The anomaly, the thing that looked like a glob of spit with the shadow structure of a knot, was not like a knot; it was a knot. The second idea I came up with was more bizarre than the first. I came to believe that if it had a function, it was not part of the normal process of reproduction per se. But there was a question then. What other than reproductive elements would participate in the reproduction process. It escaped me.
I am a physicist-mathematician. There was some obscure topological material on self embedding knots in folded higher dimensional virtual spaces that I had never paid much attention to because I could not figure out a use for it. After I read some of it--the wildest stuff--some things began to make sense. The structure of the knots was not given by stranded material but by differential continuity in higher dimensions.
Considered as topological objects, the knots of biological material were topological foundries; they were active material and they created the spaces they were embedded in. Knots, yes they were knots. They turned out to be slip knots in a four dimensional space, not real four dimensional space but a virtual, pseudo four dimensional space a space the material itself created.
I took three months to solve the problem. I worked with the chemist Yarkoharv, first because he had nothing to do with the genome project and second, because having spent twelve years in a Soviet prison camp he was not communicative. He could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. We un-slipped them.
I have the notes that I kept when we were working on the material. It is interesting to look at them now. Practicing what you preach is difficult. Reflexivity is difficult. We were dealing with something that was both a part of something else and a limit of that something.
The damage is done. For Grabatz it is the end. His vision of science has been completely shredded. Whatever happens, there can be no escape from human space. Using science to change itself is not an option open to mankind. If he is right and if not changing means that computers will evolve into the next dominant biological form then humans are doomed. Of course there is the larger question. But no matter what answers emerge to that question, science will not provide them. With Grabatz, my career is over too. There are perceptions that jam your eyes open so roughly that it is impossible afterward to ever narrow your focus.
The damage will not be repaired simply. It is hard to contemplate a solution. Others will attempt to manage it. The major effect is beginning to be felt. Conceptions have fallen to zero. They will blame it on a virus, probably. Why not. It is a likely scenario. It will keep people occupied until the powers that be can come up with something, until they can figure out what to say and how to say it.
The people who will know better will say nothing. They will say nothing because when the consequences become clear the world will be angry. Anyone who had anything to do with the genome project, directly or indirectly, will be in trouble. There will be witch hunting on a mass scale. Science will have an extemely bad name. Even my spit of an island will not protect me, I suppose, in the end, even though I was not the instrument of the disaster, merely the messenger who announced its arrival.
Once the knot was unknotted, the rest was easy. The chemist Yarkoharv was sent to prison in the
We unraveled the knot and then we took its picture. If they still have Nobel prizes in a few years, Yarkoharv will get one for figuring how to slip the knot. It was a brilliant piece of scientific work. He discovered a series of procedures for attaching anchor molecules to pseudo locations and applying molecular pressure to push and pull atomic scale forces. I sent the notes and the pictures of the knot of material, before and after, to Grabatz and Schwerber.
I am keeping some of the pictures. I have framed one of them. I am looking at it now. I have reduced another of them to a microdot. I keep it in my shoe. It is irrational I know but I do it anyway. It is a thing of beauty.
In the frame is an enlargement of an electron microscope photograph, grainy but vivid. A strand of material looks like a sheath of crystal glass. The slight shifts of focus indicate the planes in which the material sits. It shimmers. The clear part of the photograph is its center. There are words, words impressed on some material that is finer than the flesh it will become. There is a consistent stream of words but the words on which the photograph is centered are in English whereas the words off to the right are in Chinese characters and the words to the left are in some unknown pictorial iconic language. It is repeated in every known human language and a number of languages that are unknown. It is a Rosetta stone but it is more. The words are absolutely clear I know them by heart. They say:
Modifying or changing the attached genetic material without the express consent of the maker is forbidden. Any such alterations voids the warranty. The penalties for tampering with the material will be severe.
_____________________________________________
The phone is brutally insistent.
“No one’s home,”she yells at it. It continues its raucous clamor.
She decides it is as deaf as it is noisy and surrenders to its incessant importuning.
“Yes, who is it?” she asks belligerently.
“I’m glad you’re there, Nichole” a voice replies.
“Sorry I was so ferocious, Miti,” Nichole says.
“I know you can’t stand to be disturbed in the morning but...” Miti’s voice is frothy and swirling. “News,” she announces.
“News?”
“News, yes. You could definitely say I have news,” Miti decides.
“You sold a painting.”
“Better than that,” says Miti smugly.
“You sold two.” Miti’s silence provokes her excitement.
“Three.”
“All of them,” Miti explodes.
Nichole is stunned into silence. “All of them,” she repeats in bewilderment.
“We sold all of them, every last one, all 12,” she says redundantly.
The hairs on the back of Nichole’s neck rise.
“You didn’t...?” It is less a question than a demand to know.
“...tell them who it is who painted them. No. That was our agreement,” Miti states flatly. “No details about the artist except first initial and last name. Nada information,” she adds with a touch of sarcasm.
Nichole insisted, as a condition for the show, that the gallery give out only the barest information about her. Miti accepted the condition reluctantly but makes no effort to hide her feeling that the demand is un-artistic and frivolous.
Reassured, Nichole feels a surge of excitement.”Who bought them? Who is he?”
“Not a he,” Miti says mysteriously.
“Who’s she, then?” Nichole inquires, her voice tinged with an intangible sense of disappointment.
“Not a she.”
“Who then?” Nichole asks.
“Turnabout,” Miti says, not without some satisfaction. “They were purchased by someone who wants to remain anonymous. Only...”
Nichole hears ominous implications in the ‘only’ but she lets the word dangle.
“When did all of this happen?”
“Yesterday. I didn’t want to say anything until it was all wrapped up,” Miti explains. “The buyer’s lawyer just left. It’s a coup, Nichole, a fantastic coup. I have the check in my hand. Thirty seven thousand dollars.”
Nichole retrieves the word that had been left hanging.”’Only’ what?”
“Only...the buyer would like to meet the artist.” Miti tries to anticipate Nichole’s reflexive reply. “Look, Nichole, the paintings are sold already. They were wonderful paintings and they made it on their own. There’s nothing to gain or lose anymore.”
Nichole thinks about it. Miti is right. Who she was or wasn’t made no difference to whomever bought them. The paintings had stood on their own. Meeting the buyer couldn’t matter now.
“O.K., she says, surrendering to logic and her own rising curiosity about the person who bought them.
“The buyer suggested this afternoon at two. I have a number to call if its alright with you.”
Nichole hesitates. “So soon? She hears Miti sigh.”O.K., Miti,” she says quickly, “I guess its alright.”
“Two then, at the gallery,” Miti concludes, “see you then. Think of it Nichole, every painting.”
Nichole hangs up the phone and is rocked by alternating waves of exhilaration and triumph and despair.
She tries to finish the oil sketch she has been working on before Miti’s phone call but her attention is a shambles. Peeling off her painting clothes, she stands in the center of the loft, nibbling on success and waiting for an inspiration to tell her how to kill the two hours before the meeting. When no inspiration comes, she fills the ornate, oversized tub which had been the former owner’s only furniture.
She inserts herself into the bath slowly, letting her body sink and come to rest suspended beneath the surface like some exotic sea creature. She feels the scalding hot water drain off the accumulated, excess energy that the first taste of success had generated. As the energy dissipates it releases layer on layer of feeling and memories about her paintings which swirl around her brain.
The pictures are intertwined with a man she has not met, yet already loves. She knows him well, she feels. He has been an intimate presence in her studio during the long hours of painting alone. His features seemed always to be in a shadow. Although she had never actually heard it, the texture of his voice, its strength and cadence seem familiar to her. She feels she knows his special sensitivity and she recognizes a distinctive boldness in his movements. The one quality of this man that she is absolutely certain about, though, is how he feels touching her.
All of the painting were done with him in her mind. She thought of the pictures sometimes as the extended, opening gesture of their love affair, sometimes as a gift of herself to him. Either way they were a measure of her love. She anticipated that they would be bartered or sold for pleasures the two of them would share. But she had not met that man and Miti had cajoled and threatened her into agreeing to a show, and carted off all of the paintings to the gallery.
“Now,” she thinks, “they’ve been bought by some faceless person, as a tax loss most likely. Perhaps a decorator purchased them for a suite of corporate offices.” Both alternatives depress her. Suddenly, she has a ferocious desire to see her paintings again.
She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses quickly and plunges into
the streets of
She hesitates in front of the gallery and peers in. Miti is not at her usual station at the desk in the front of the gallery. Across the street she sees Raoul, sitting on the fire hydrant outside of his antique store, smoking his pipe and talking to his dog, and she guesses that he is gallery sitting, from a distance, as he frequently does when Miti has a quick errand to do.
She is relieved that the gallery is empty. She needs time alone
with her paintings and she has barely more than an hour before the
As she pushes the large, polished, wooden door open she realizes where the desire to see her paintings came from. The paintings were not hers to give to anyone anymore. When she met the person who bought and paid for them, that fact would become a reality. She would have to learn to think about the pictures differently.
Ever since Miti had mounted the show, Nichole had anticipated that one or two of them might be sold. But she is losing them all now.
Nichole pulls herself through the gallery, struggling to adapt to her changed relationship with her paintings. She strains to try to see them as if she were encountering them for the first time, unencumbered with their secret history of disappointment and frustration. She succeeds until she comes to the naked lady.
It is a full scale figure study of a nude woman. Her back is exposed and only the barest curve of a breast is visible. She is sitting on a wooden stool, one leg loosely tucked under her, almost dangling in the air. Her face is turned away and enveloped by shadows.
She used herself as a model. It had taken her more effort than she cares to remember, to make a series of photographs and study and sketch her torso again and again until it came out right. Miti had helped, but complained.
The picture works, although Nichole is not sure why. She knows that it catches her characteristic mood and personality. There is a certain tension in the body, a tension that craves release. She realizes that the picture reveals more about her than she had intended to reveal.
The body is sexy but not provocative. She knows from experience that most people who look at it will become ensnared by the woman’s nakedness but she painted it for a person who would go past the sexiness to the sensuality and then, through that, to the person whose body it is.
She had hidden her face, turned it away into the darkness. She doesn’t think that this has any special meaning. The sweep of her back, the leg thrown out from the body and the edge of the breast make all of her that is important, available to anyone who wants to know what she is like. Putting her face in the picture would not have made her any more real. Just the opposite, she thinks. It would be superfluous and egotistical.
She had reduced the background to a minimum, misty, blur and she had placed an antique table behind and to the side of the figure. For some reason she could never put into words, she had arranged a number of objects on the table that she felt were essential to the painting. She had deliberately put them together in what she thought is a haphazard way.
A purple jar that her grandmother had given her occupies the center of the asymmetrical arrangement. She could not remember what the original purpose of the jar was and she had had to distort it, to make it fit in, but she feels it is one of the things that balance and complete the body and give the whole painting its coherence.
It had taken longer to paint and repaint the table and the objects on it than it had to complete the figure itself. She had obsessed over it. Rationally, it didn’t make any sense, but even now it feels right. It is a feeling that she trusts.
Nichole shakes herself into the present and reminds herself that it might be her, but it is no longer hers to keep or to give. The reminder does not help at all. She fights her identification with the painted lady, trying to put some distance between her and the painting. She almost wins, when a spot of dirt on the picture distracts her. It is where the face would have been had it been caught by light instead of shadow.
She remembers she had touched up the spot at the last minute and the varnish had not been quite dry when Miti had it moved to the gallery.
“Whose ever lady you are now, you have dirty shadows,” she says softly to the painting, “but it’s easily remedied.”
She takes out her handkerchief but as she starts toward the painting a voice behind her says, gently but authoritatively, “you shouldn’t touch paintings, you know.”
The statement, made in a deep, clear and resonant voice, is free of reproach or criticism. It is as if the person who made it is certain that an unadorned statement of fact would be enough to turn her intent and stop her movement toward the painting.
There is a buzzing in her ear as she spins around, startled. She is shaken less by the gentle reminder than by something else. She tells herself that it is merely the fact that someone had been behind her for a while and that she had been absolutely unaware of his presence but she is not certain that this is the real source of her discomfort.
She feels embarrassed, as if some how he knew what she has been thinking.
The man behind her apologizes gracefully. “I’m very sorry I startled you.”
“You were so quiet,” Nichole says.” I didn’t know anyone was there.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt whatever you were thinking about the painting,” he says. There is something about him that disturbs Nichole but she can’t bring it into focus. As if he senses that he had upset her, he turns the conversation to the painting again.
“I love her,” he says simply. He makes it sound like so obvious a fact that it needs no explanation. “I really love her,” he says again, as if repeating the statement would assure her he is neither crazy nor fickle.
“I fell in love with her the first day the painting was hung. I came in by accident. Someone dragged me in,” he confesses, “and I...”
“...fell in love with her,” Nichole completes his sentence. “Do you fall in love so easily?” she asked.
“Never happened before,” the man says quietly,”not even in real life. I’m not that kind of person. I can’t explain it.” He looks at the picture as if seeking an explanation there.
Nichole looks up at him. He is casually dressed. His eyes are alive and searching. He is tall and brawny. His features are strong and well defined, his hair, amber colored.
Insulated by her guarantee of anonymity she feels she can risk a vicarious plunge into the matchmaking game.”Why don’t you find out who she is and try to meet her,” Nichole asks. It seems like practical advice.
“I’ve thought of it,” he says lightly,” but I don’t think anything would come of meeting a woman you fell in love with before you met her. I’m sure she’s a happily married woman with three children.” His voice becomes serious. “Besides, the chances of her loving me back are probably zero. If I must choose between certain loving and uncertainly being loved I think I had better settle for certain loving. No one can take that away, ever.” He forces the words out as if he is trying to convince himself of something he does not want to believe.
Nichole feels him looking at her strangely. She swings back to the painting.
“Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t see her face. Maybe she’s ugly.”
“No, she’s not ugly,” he insists. He seems offended at the suggestion. “Look at the way she holds her body. And you can see her face. Not exactly of course, but look at the things on the table,” he says. “I think that they describe her features.”
It is Nichole’s turn to be disoriented. She looks at him but he is oblivious to her, caught up completely in the woman in the painting. For an instant she is jealous of her painted self.
He points to the jar. “It’s an ancient makeup jar, Egyptian, I think. It’s empty and it’s been distorted— elongated. The outline’s been simplified. It describes the woman’s features, I think, simple yet graceful.” He is clearly pleased with the face.
He glances at Nichole then back to the picture, perplexed, as if his view of the painting has been disturbed in some subtle way.
What he says makes sense to Nichole. She could never quite put into words what she had done to the jar or why, but she realizes that he has put his finger on it exactly.
“Are you a painter?””
No,” he says,”I never paid much attention to art at all until...I’m an architect. Brian,” he says, offering her his first name.
“Nichole,” she responds. She swings him back to the painting with a question.”What else can you tell about her?”
“I’d say the artist sees her as a very solid woman only...only incomplete somehow.”
“How can you tell that?” Nichole asks, genuinely curious.
“There’s something missing. You see how all of the things on the table make a rough triangle.” He moves closer to the painting and carefully using his hand as a pointer makes a rough sketch boldly over the table and the objects it holds. The gesture sends chills up Nichole’s spine. “It makes a triangle,” he continues,” but one of the corners is missing.” Nichole remembers she had searched for something to put there but strangely none of the objects she could find in her studio or in her imagination, seemed to fit.
“I think you’re right. In fact,” she says,”I’m sure you’re right.”
“How...” he starts to ask but she interrupts him.
“Damn.”
He turns to her. Puzzlement is written on his face.”Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” she says,”not at all.” She turns a little away from him, closes her eyes and tries to think out the situation. The man by her side should have this painting. It wouldn’t be fair for anyone but him to have it. No one could appreciate the picture the way he did. She would get him to buy the painting. If he couldn’t afford it, she would give it to him. But the paintings were sold. All of them. She wonders whether she could convince Miti to give back the check and cancel the sale or at least renegotiate it to exclude just this painting. She decides Miti would never agree to it. In her most exasperated voice Miti would say, ‘it’s an absolutely impossible way to run an art gallery’ and flatly refuse to consider the matter.
She could paint another naked lady. But it was this painted lady he fell in love with. No other painting would do.
He catches her attention again.”Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
She turns to face him and forces herself to smile. “No,” she says, not believing it. She tries to think about how she can begin to explain, when she spots Miti, accompanied by an elderly, distinguished looking gentleman, coming through the gallery door.
“I know we had an appointment this afternoon but something came up, rather suddenly,” she hears Miti say, “I’m afraid...” Miti breaks off mid sentence when she spots Nichole and the man.
“Hello,” she sings out, a surprised look on her face.”The meeting was for
Nichole and the man stop listening.
“You bought...” Nichole explodes.
“You’re the artist,” the man echoes.
Nichole watches his face as he glances at the painting and then stares at her and puts the last piece of the puzzle together. “And that’s you,” he says not taking his eyes off of her.
She nods. It seems to her as if they both start to blush but the emotion changes into an expression of intense pleasure and anticipation.
He reaches out and takes her hand. “There’s something that I want to ask you about another painting,” he says.
His touch feels exactly as Nichole knew it would.
_______________________________________
When Charlie Ho--who everyone knew as Uncle Ho--looked out the window of the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory it was impossible to tell that Christmas was less than a week away. The people on the street looked somber and glum as they hurried along the dark slushy street.
Charlie Ho loved the joyful songs and the brightness and bustle of Christmas. Of course he had never actually celebrated it. He was not a Christian. He was a buddhist if he was anything; but he was notmuch of a buddhist.
When he first came to
When Uncle Ho stopped selling trinkets on the street he went to work for the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory and learned the business of making clothing. He had worked in the factory ever since.
For a while Uncle Ho had been foreman, but when the owner of the Happy Time New One Sewing Factory, a fat man named Wu, married, his new wife--who everyone called the Dragon lady--had taken over as foreman.
She was rough and bossy but she was fair and independent. Her husband ran the business end of the Happy Time Number One sewing factory; but she ran the factory and he and everyone else knew it. Ho was glad to give up the job.
When Uncle Ho took his eyes from the street and looked around him it seemed to him there was more Christmas inside the factory than outside. All around him a room full of women were sewing furiously to finish an order for Sanata Claus costumes which had to be delivered before Christmas. A Santa Claus costume danced merrily under the needle of his machine too.
Besides Uncle Ho, all of the other regular workers in the Happy
Time Number One Sewing Factory were women who lived in the neighborhood. When
he had started at Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory all of the women were
Chinese. But over the years the neighborhood had changed and the workers in the
Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory had changed with it. When Ho looked at the
women hunched over the machines he saw a cross section of the neighborhood.
There were Black women, Spanish women, women from
Although the tourists who came to eat in the neighborhood thought about it as Chinatown and the Chinese sometimes still referred to it among themselves as Chinatown, most people called it Foreigntown.
As Uncle Ho shifted the bright red costume he had under the needle, a stranger came into the sweatshop and talked to the bosses wife. He was tall, thin man wearing a black suit and white collar that identified him as some sort of a religious person. He held a large blue can with a sign on the front that looked like it had been made by a child; it said Children’s center of Chinatown but the Chinatown had been crossed off and Foreigntown written over it.
The minister who was about 30 stood slack and sallow while the boss’s wife introduced him in the slangy rough English that she used whenever she tried give an order.
“Loosen up, the Dragon lady said. “This religious person wants to say something to you. Be polite,” she urged. “Listen to what he has to say. Who knows” she quipped “he may be in need of a wife. Then one of you could stay in the country legally.”
Glaring out of his cubbyhole at the back of the sweatshop her husband, the boss, frowned, but said nothing.
“This neighborhood has a lot of poor people in it,” the minister began, after the Dragon Lady completed her introduction.
“Tell us about it,” Mrs. Yang, the bosses sister-in-law yelled out from the corner.
The minister looked up at the ceiling and coughed noislessly. “Some of you may know the pre-school and after school center for the children of the neighborhood,”
“For Chinese children?” Mrs. Yang insisted on knowing.
“For all of the children in the neighborhood. A lot of different kinds of poor people live around here, not only Chinese,” he added.
“Just what we need,” old Mrs. Yang yelled out,”a specialist in poor foreigners.” Like many Chinese, Mrs. Yang called anyone who was not Chinese a foreigner.
“Quiet,” the Dragon lady commanded. Captivated by the young minister’s looks she was fantasizing she had married him instead of her husband.
“The
As the minister approached, the boss bent over and pretended to look for something on the floor. “Why the hell should we give anything for foreign kids,” he complained in Cantonese.
The minister stood in front of the mostly empty chair for a moment, then, realizing he was being refused, turned away and made his way down the rows of seamstresses. When the owner avoided giving money Uncle Ho knew the minister would not collect very much. None of the workers could risk appearing more generous than the boss even if they wanted to give something for a party for children.
When the minister reached the bosses wife she frowned at her husband and reached for her pocket book. “It’s for kids,” she said. “Who gives a crap what their nose looks like,” she said scowling at Mrs. Yang. She made a show of taking out two dollars and putting it into the can. When she gave, Uncle Ho thought about giving something but he quickly decided he could not afford to anger the boss or seem to be trying to ingratiate himself with the Dragon lady. He looked down as the minister passed shaking the can. The minister looked down too as he said thank you to the group and dashed awkwardly for the door.
As the morning wore on Uncle Ho felt worse and worse about not giving something to the minister. By lunch time he had made up his mind to make do something about it and when the buzzer blared Uncle Ho set out for the Buddhist temple to find the minister.
“I want to donate a few dollars for the children, for the party,” he blurted out when he found the minister. “I am sorry I did not give when you came around to the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory but...”
“It is no matter,” the minister said. “Thank you for coming here with your donation.”
Being in the temple made Uncle Ho think of his mother and father
and his own childhood in
“Do you have any children?” the minister asked.
“No,” Uncle Ho said. “I am not married. No children.” He grew sadder and memories even more painful than those of his parents drifted back to him.
The minister was silent for a moment. “I used the money I collected for toys and some clothing for the children,” he said quickly. He pointed to a pile of brightly wrapped packages in the corner of the room. “My idea is that Santa Claus could give them out at the party on Christmas day. He could walk around the neighborhood early in the afternoon. When the children saw him they would know Christmas had come and they could follow him back here for the party. I am having trouble finding someone to do it. It should be someone from the neighborhood. You wouldn’t know anyone would you?” he asked.
“No, I’m sorry,” said Uncle Ho. “Many of the people in this neighborhood are not Christian,” he pointed out quietly.
“You are right,” the minister said. “The neighborhood has so many
different kinds of people. It is a regular UN. But all of the different kinds
of people enjoying the holiday is what makes Christmas in
When Uncle Ho did not say anything the minister continued. “In
The thought of dressing up in the bright red costume he had been sewing at the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory and parading down the street with the children swirling around him was exciting. But it would draw to much attention to him: he would stand out. “I am sorry,” he said,”I can not. But the idea was so exciting he felt he had to help it along. “I will give one or two toys for whoever you find to play Santa Claus to give to the chidden,” he said apologetically,”in addition to the money.”
“That is not necessary,” the minister replied.
“Where will you keep them?” Uncle Ho asked casually.
“Keep what?” the minister asked.
“The toys, for the children.”
“Here,” the minister said, “here in the temple.”
“Maybe you better keep them in your church,” Uncle Ho said, without saying why.
The minister hesitated. He realized the old chinese man was trying to tell him something in the indirect way that Chinese people had. But It would be too complicated to explain to him why he did not have a parish. “I’m a missionary,” the minister said. “The temple priests said it was O.K.” he added instantly in case the old man thought that keeping the toys in the temple violated some religious custom.
Uncle Ho wanted to tell the minister the temple wasn’t a safe place to leave the toys. The Chinese gangs intimidated the priests and came and went as they pleased in the temple and they used it whenever they needed to keep someone or something out of sight. The priests had nothing to steal so they did not worry, but an outsider was a different matter. Uncle Ho thought about explaining this to the minister but he realized it would be to complicated so he just nodded his head. “I must return to work,” he said suddenly. “I will bring you the toys I promised,” Uncle Ho said. “I hope you find someone to dress up as Santa Claus.”
As soon as Uncle Ho left the minister and headed for the sweatshop he regretted offering to bring a few toys for the children’s party. He had done it on the spur of the moment without thinking. When the people at the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory found out about it they would be curious and there would be questions. Giving money was one thing, bringing toys was another.
When Uncle Ho got back to the sweatshop and starting sewing the Santa Claus suit he was working on he imagined himself wearing it and walking down the street of Chinatown followed by a snaking, Dragon like line of children.
He realized he did not know when Christmas Day was exactly. He knew it was very close because even the Chinese channel on television was filled with the films that they only showed at Christmas. But he had to know exactly so he could plan to buy the toys in time to get them to whoever played Santa Claus to give to the children.
Finally he had to ask the Dragon lady and take the embarrassing questions of what Christmas was to him and him to Christmas. He was surprised to find out that Christmas was only two days away.
He thought about where he could buy a few toys cheaply.
Big Wong came into his mind. Wong had a small wholesale business in a basement a few blocks away. He sold toys and trinkets to vendors who sold them on the street to tourists. Buying a few toys would give him an excuse to visit the old man he had not seen man for a year, ever since Wong had moved three or four blocks away to live with his daughter and started spending Sundays at Atlantic City instead of in the park where he and Uncle Ho used to spend days off.
The minute he set foot in Wongs basement store Uncle Ho knew there was trouble. As he opened the door a young man appeared who Uncle Ho recognized as a member of one of the gangs that had taken root in the neighborhood. The thug greeted Uncle Ho crudely. “What do you want old man?” he asked.
“I have come to see my friend old Wong,” Uncle Ho said.
“Old Wong,” the young man yelled. “There is a creature as old as you are who has dragged himself in here. Get your ass out here.”
When Old Wong came through the curtain that blocked off the back room of the store he looked helpless and frightened.
“It is good to see you Wong, old friend,” Uncle Ho said. “How are you?”
“I am fine,” Wong said loudly as the young thug slithered through the curtain. Then in a whisper he pulled Uncle Ho into a corner. “Hard times old friend.”
“What has happened,” Ho asked.
“Gangs,” he said. “Thugs have taken over my business.”
“Why don’t you go to the police,” Ho asked.
“They say the police will laugh at me. They use this place for...”
Just then the young thug came out from the back of the store. “Old Wong what are you doing lazing around talking nonsense. Do you have nothing to do.” He made a threatening gesture. “And what do you want old man,” he said to Ho menacingly.
“I want to buy a few toys.”
“Are you so old that you are playing with toys again?” the thug teased. “Why do you want toys, old man?”
“Not for me. A minister,” he stuttered. “A program for children. He is going to have a Christmas party for the children. I promised him a few toys for the party.”
The thug laughed. “Save your money old man.”
Uncle Ho looked at him.
“The ministers toys, for the children. There they are,” the thug said, pointing to a pile of brightly wrapped boxes in the corner of the store.
“What do you mean,” Ho said confused.
“Are you dull and dim witted as well as old?” the thug snarled. “There are the toys the minister was collecting for the children. The minister has no toys to give to the children at a party so there will be no party. So you do not have to spend your money on toys. “Although,” he added sarcastically,”if you want to leave your money we will take it off your hands.”
“How did the ministers toys get here?” Ho asked. Old Wong shrank back at the question.
The thug looked angry then laughed. “They were at the temple. We thought they were an offering to the gods. He laughed viciously. “You ask to many questions old man. We took them. It is Christmas. We are as entitled to them as anyone.”
“They were for the children,” Uncle Ho insisted.
“They are ours now. Who needs an outsider making a party for foreign kids, black, brown, yellow or white anyway. Get out of here,” he said menacingly.”
Big Wong scurried to get out of the young mans way.
“No,” Uncle Ho said, standing his ground. “I want two toys.”
The thug pulled two toys from the pile of the ministers toys in the corner.
“No,” Ho insisted. “Not from that pile. Two other toys.”
The thug turned away in disgust. “Stupid old man, you are wasting my time. Pick what you want.” He pointed to the racks of toys at the side of the store and shrugged. Then he yelled at big Wong. “Take this man’s money and be quick about it.”
As he left the basement store clutching the two toys, Uncle Ho trembled and shook. He felt very bad for the minister and the children but very lucky at having escaped from a very dangerous situation. When he got home he crept right into bed but it was a long time before he stopped shaking.
The next day during lunch break Uncle Ho went looking for the minister at the temple to check out if what the thug at Big Wongs said was true. When the old man found him in the Children’s center in the Buddhist temple he spoke quickly before the minister could interrupt him. “I have thought it over. I will be Santa Claus,” he said.
“Thank you,” the minister replied, “but someone has stolen the toys.” He sniffled and rubbed his eyes. “No one saw them being taken; or everyone did and no one will say anything. The police were here but no one would talk to them.”
“It is
“What was Santa Claus supposed to do?” Uncle Ho insisted on knowing.
“I told the children he would walk through
“Perhaps,” Uncle Ho said. “But do not say anything to the children yet. Let them continue to believe for a while longer. Who knows. The toys might turn up?”
“Not likely,” the minister said, “unless Saint Nicholas himself shows up. But if you think it is possible I will put off telling them that the party is off.”
Uncle Ho looked at his watch. “I must go back to work.” he said to the minister and left the temple but he walked very slowly and thought about his life in China before he came to America and his life since he arrived in America. When he got to the Number One Sewing Factory he was preoccupied with Christmas and after he sewed three bad seams he told the Dragon lady he was not feeling well and went home.
By the time he got back to his one room apartment he had made a decision. He would get the ministers toys back. It would be easy to break into Big Wong’s store and steal the toys back. Old Wong did not have an alarm or gates or shutters.
He prepared himself a cup of tea. By the time the tea was ready he
decided it was a silly idea and changed him mind. He was not a thief. He had
survived by avoiding trouble all of his life in
The people in neighborhood had a right to Christmas. Their lives were hard. For the first time someone was willing to give the people who lived in Foreigntown Christmas. In all the other years Christmas had come and gone with nothing more than a few songs.
He laid down and tried to rest. He hoped the idea of stealing the toys would become silly to him again but it did not. Instead he became more and more convinced that it was the only thing he could do. He tried to focus on the details of what he had to do.
He tried to think about breaking into Wong’s store. If he managed to get that far how would he carry the toys back. He remembered a wagon he had used to carry his stock of merchandise back and forth to his corner when he sold things on the street. He got out of bed and went into the closet and dragged the wagon out. It was large enough to carry the pile of toys.
He set out for Old Wongs. When he got to the shop he picked up rock and he broke a small window as quietly as he could. He reached through the broken glass opened the door and let himself and the wagon into the store. He fumbled around for a moment until his flashlight shone on the pile of toys in the corner of the store. As he walked over in the darkness and lifted the first box the store burst into light. In the doorway was big Wong. He had an antique rifle in his hand. Uncle Ho put down the box. “I have come for the minister’s toys. It is not fair that thugs should steal them.” He felt ashamed at being caught stealing. Then he thought of the children and the party and Santa Claus, and lifted the box up and stared at his friend.
Big Wong put the gun down. “You are right, old friend” he said quietly. “It is I who should be ashamed that I have let my business become a front for thieves. But....” He looked confused. “Why should you risk so much for a collection of toys and clothing.
“For Christmas, for the children,” Ho said.
“It is dangerous,” Wong said gravely,”but I will help.”
“I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Uncle Ho said.
“Not big trouble,” Big Wong mumbled. “They do not know I sleep in the shop.”
“Lets go then,” Ho urged, suddenly frightened. The two old men struggled to put the boxes of toys on the wagon.
“I have not had so much excitement since the night I stole my wife away from her parents,” Big Wong said. “What are you going to do now?”
Uncle Ho realized that he had not thought about what he would do if he managed to get the toys out of the store. “I will get the toys back to the minister. I will take them to the temple,” he decided on the spot.
“What then,” Big Wong wanted to know.
Uncle Ho told Big Wong about the plan for Santa Claus to walk
through
“You are going dress as Santa Claus and walk through
“Yes,” Uncle Ho said.
“If the minister gets the toys back the thugs will know that it was you who stole them back,” Wong thought out loud.
“It does not matter,” his friend said. “Thank You Big Wong,” he whispered as he began pulling the wagon loaded with toys down the dark street.
Uncle Ho maneuvered the wagon with the toys to the back of the temple building and huddled in the alley and huddled shivering waiting for the priests to open the temple for the morning prayer.
“I found these toys,” he said to the first priest who showed up in his bright saffron robs jangling keys. “I think they were the ones that were stolen from the minister. You must make sure he gets them,” Uncle Ho said. “The party is this afternoon. Do not leave them around.”
The priest understood.
“He may keep the wagon also and give it away. It does not matter,” he said and walked away. “Be sure to tell the minister that the old Chinese fellow will be Santa Claus and lead the children to the temple for the Christmas party.” He took the first three boxes off of the top of the pile and stuffed them under his arms and walked off.
As soon as he had delivered the toys, Uncle Ho realized he was in
no shape to work that morning. He decided he would go home and sleep until the
afternoon when he would put on the Santa Claus suit and walk though
He decided to make a quick detour to the sweatshop to tell the Dragon lady he would not be coming to work and borrow one of the costume the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory had been making.
The owner in his cubbyhole took one look at Ho as he walked in and yelled to his wife. “I’m going out for a moment to the store room to look for supplies. If you need me...” he sang out but his wife did not pay him any attention.
“What’s wrong?” the forelady asked Ho roughly.
“Nothing is wrong,” Ho answered. “But I would like to borrow a Santa Claus costume,” he added.
“A Santa Claus costume,” the forelady exclaimed. “For what. What is wrong?” she asked again.
Uncle Ho felt he would have to tell her. She was not going to let
him borrow the costume with some sort of an explanation. “The minister from the
children’s center bought toys and clothes with the money he collected but they
were stolen from the temple but I have gotten the ministers toys back,” he said
in one long breath. “I am going to dress up in a Santa Claus costume this
afternoon and walk around
“It was not your business,” the Dragon lady said. “Why did you get involved.”
“It is not right that there should be no Christmas. For the children but for the adults too.”
“We are neither white nor Christians,” she began.
Ho stopped her. “It is not a matter of believing or not believing
or being white or being Chinese. This is not
The Dragon lady turned away. “What will you do now? Where will you go,” she asked. “The gangs have ears everywhere. It may be dangerous.”
“I am going back to my room. If the gang wants trouble they know I
will be walking through
“Go home and sleep for your ordeal Uncle Ho,” the Dragon lady said gently. “The Happy Time Number One Sewing Factor can certainly get through the day without you.
As uncle Ho left the sweatshop the boss returned from the storeroom. “It’s none of our business,” he said to his wife after she told him the story, “nothing we should get involved in.” The Dragon lady glared at him.
About an hour after Uncle Ho left two thugs appeared.
One of the young men was the person who collected the protection money the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factor paid to the gangs each month. As the thugs came though the door the boss got up quickly and headed for the storeroom again. “We need pencils,” he said loudly. “I’ll be back in a minute,” and disappeared.
“Where is he?” the thugs questioned the forelady.
“Who?” she responded, pretending to be ignorant and innocent.
“Uncle Ho.” the familiar thug grunted angrily.
The needles and thread stopping their dancing and singing in the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory .
“He is not here,” the Dragon lady said loudly. “You can see for yourself.” She swung her arm around the factory. “What do you want with that old man anyway?” she asked.
“He stole something.”
“He stole something that belonged to you,” the Dragon lady said slowly. “What did he steal.”
The smaller of the thugs glared up at her. “Never mind what he stole. Just tell us where he is.”
“How do you know it was Ho,” the Dragon lady inquired, glaring back at him.
“We just know. Where is he?”
“The Dragon lady looked at them indignantly. “He is not here,” she said loudly.
“It does not matter,” the taller thug said. “He is going to walk
through
As soon as they left the shop the boss returned to his cubby hole. He was sweating and rubbing his hands. “I knew we should not have gotten involved. Ho has become a troublemaker.”
His wife paced up and down in front of the tiny office. “We have paid the gangs the protection they demanded for years. It has not helped. We have said nothing to the police. But this is different. We must do something.”
“You are right,” her husband said. “I am going out for the rest of the day,” he said to no one in particular. “It is not our business.”
His wife dismissed him. “If you’re going, go already. I have to think for a minute.” The Dragon lady pulled the boss’s chair out of the cubby hole and sat down. When she got up she stood on the chair and spoke to the workers.
“It is not right that an old man should suffer for doing the correct thing, for helping.”
“It is not our thing,” Mrs Yang said from behind the overlock machine.
The Dragon lady stared at Mrs. Yang. “ What does it mean to be a
Chinese American? Even though we live among other Chinese and speak Chinese and
eat Chinese we are not in
“But what can we do,” one of the seamstresses cried out.
The Dragon lady thought for a moment. “I have an idea,” she said and work in the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory stopped.
Uncle Ho got up from his nap refreshed. It was
He fluffed out his beard, opened the door and stepped out.
The street in front of his apartment was filled with Santa Clauses. Uncle Ho recognized the women of the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory. Each of them was carrying a sack and they were handing out gifts--pieces of clothing left over from orders Uncle Ho remembered the Happy Time Number One Sewing Factory had completed years ago. They were greeting the passers by and wishing them a merry Christmas in English and whatever language they spoke.
As Uncle Ho stepped into the street he saw the thugs from Big Wongs store in front of him. They were stopping the Santa Clauses as they went past and swinging them around. It was clear they were looking for him.
As the crowd surged and swept Ho towards the waiting thugs he heard one of the thugs curse and three police officers appeared and grabbed the thugs and pushed them against the nearest building.
“You are under arrest,” he heard one of the policeman said.
“For what,” the thugs screeched.
“Oh, a whole lot of things, the policeman said. “Extortion for one thing, robbery for another. And trying to ruin Christmas,” the other policeman said, poking the big thug with his nightstick. “We will see about other things.”
As the police took them away the other Santa Clauses took off their hats and shed the tops of their costumes leaving Uncle Ho as the single Santa Claus on the street. He lifted his bag and headed for the temple. Behind him the children of Foreigntown started collecting in a bright curling line. Ahead of him he could see the minister on the steps of the temple waiting.
____________________________________
I was fourteen when my father told me this story. It was vulgar and coarse when he told it to me -- but not offensive. Over the years it has become rank and pungent. I am not sure why or how but it has. Times change and you change with them, I guess. The way you see and feel the things you carry along with you changes, even though the things themselves do not change at all. Now I am 58, and the story is vicious and hurtful –offensive, even to me.
What bothers me most is that I can't figure out why he told it to me, what his reason was. At first, I thought he was confessing, confiding a secret about his life, but afterwards, I dismissed the idea. My father was plodding and unimaginative and he did not have the gift of gab. Years later, when I made a film based on the story and thought about the details, particularly the arm garters, I decided that he was only repeating a story his father had told him and, because his father had never explained why he told the story to him, he could not explain why he was telling it to me.
The two of us are sitting one night in the living room, in front of an ancient television set, after supper. My mother is in the kitchen noisily scrubbing the dishes. We are watching a Knicks game. He is watching a Knicks game. My mind is somewhere else,
My father had this make-you-crazy habit of jumping in his head very suddenly from where he was to some other place without any indication that he was going to move, leaping from repairing a piece of furniture to criticizing some basketball player and you have to quickly figure out where he had jumped to because, in an instant, he would become furious that you were missing the point of what he was saying about bad dribbling and, in another minute, he would be back where he had started out from and be screaming at you for not getting him a pliers fast enough.
"I'm going to tell you a story, " he announces, just after Bradley makes a beautiful, awkward, rim shot that circumnavigates the entire mouth of the basket before it rolls in. My father leans over and twists his body making a space for us that was hidden from my mother who is splashing around in the kitchen. He motions me closer. "I don't want her to hear. It's between us. There was this man I know who had a hustle going."
I don't understand. I think he is going to tell me something about one of the Knicks players or a basketball story–at least a story related to sports. Then I realize he has jumped somewhere else and the basketball game, flashing in front of us is light years away. "Hustle?"
"A scam, a con, " he says. "Whenever this man met a woman who got him hard he would try to get into her pants. He would try to convince her that he could read her privates-- sometimes he called them quims or jewels, sometimes other names. He said he could read a woman's treasure chest the way gypsies read palms and that because they were much more complex than palms he could read much more about... the... like what kind of man they were fated to marry. He said that their privates knew this even before they met the guy."
"And he would tell her she could lift up her skirt a little bit and while she sat down he could read her love secrets, He was very serious about it, dispassionate, professional so to speak, like he was a woman's doctor conducting a medical examination. He looked at her all over, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her belly, arms, all over, not only at her privates, not uncomfortable, not embarrassed, as if what he was doing was very ordinary, the normal way of uncovering what was hidden in a woman. He always wore armband garters, " my father said, adding what he thought was a telling detail."
"And then he would spread her and talk all the while he was rubbing her privates, smoothing the hair down and spreading them and looking very intense and concentrated, and he would caress them and he would tell her some bullshit about the man she was going to meet, and how he was tall and rich and handsome and how he was madly in love with her and had a big dick and get her excited, and he could tell right away if she was a virgin, and he would try to blur the picture of the man she was going to meet and himself, and he would spill out this stream of pretty words about her being beautiful and sweet and how making love to this man was exciting, and she would say stop, stop, but he wouldn't and he would get her more excited and after a while she just gave up and he stood up and dropped his pants and they would fuck. You'd be surprised how often it worked, " he said, "not every time, but surprisingly often. Sometimes though, " my father said thoughtfully, he had to settle for just looking at her cunt." My father glances back at the television set and is quiet for a couple of shots as if he is struggling to come back from somewhere. Then he continues."
"If the woman didn't seem quite ready to drop her pants, he would tell her that if she opened her blouse and loosened her bra, he could tell some things from the rings around the nipples on her breasts. He was very objective about it, he didn't act disappointed that she wouldn't spread her legs and he examined her nipples and the circles around them and told her what she wanted to hear, saying all of the time, that breasts could not tell you nearly as much as privates. It relaxed her. Sometimes a tit was as much as a woman was willing to show him but a lot of times his being a gentleman about her breasts, led her to mistakenly believe he would be as objective and disinterested and professional about her cunt, which he wasn't, although he started that way."
"The thing was that this man had the gift of gab, a way of sweet talking a woman, disarming her, of seeming honest and straightforward and disinterested about sex and he could spin a tale that held their interest and their attention without making them suspicious."
"He tricked them like jiu jitsu or hypnosis. He got around how they defended themselves by using their wanting to know, to have some mystery revealed to them. They were willing to give a lot for that. Most men, when they show an interest in a woman just arouse their suspicions."
When my father finished the sentence he was somewhere else, the basketball game probably, but I am not sure. He turned back to the television and watched Bradley take two foul shots.
What's the point of the story. Sex is, I guess, but even after I made the film that I based on the story, I'm not sure. I believe my father thought it was about a talent, a gift a man had for penetrating the mystery of women, for tricking women into giving up pleasure. But it really may be about something else. People crave simple answers especially to complex questions.
Everything men give or try to give to their sons is distorted in the giving and that may be the point of the story, not the point my father wanted to make maybe, but the point that comes from hearing it or repeating it or remembering it. No matter how precious the gift, no matter what the intentions are in giving it, it turns out, over time, to spoil, to become foul, rank even. But this is what I think now, at this minute, not what I thought about when he told the story to me or when I used it as a basis for a pornographic film.
There was an occasion, years later, when I almost told this story to my son. We are watching a football game, and, I feel particularly close to him. I look at him and make a space between us and my wife and daughter who are in the kitchen. "There's a story my father told to me, once, " I begin. He looks at me, curious. But just then my daughter comes in and asks me to help her with her homework and the moment passes. Later, whenever the story comes to mind I just can't think of a reason to tell it to him. I never did tell him the story directly, although I made the film. I don't think he ever saw it though, at least he never told me he did.
"Higher, higher." My voice is a little shrill and I try to pull it down. "Higher. Look out for the tutu."
A bed appears, floating in some sexual space as if it has slipped gravity's anchor. The room it is drifting in is blurred, its single, curtained window looks out at a unchanging grayness. A young dancer, barely a woman, lies on the bed. A tutu rests beside her as if she had molted, sloughed off an old skin, as if dancing and art is no longer relevant to the body she is rediscovering.
The intern shoulders the digicam forward slowly as Arthur moves his leg over Ester. Morris, behind and off to the side of the set waits patiently, elbows drooped over the back of a chair, until the camera moves away, then he goes over and smooths out the lacy curtain on the window in the wall behind the bed. The intern positions the camera over Ester's tush. She has a young dancers ass. The rest of her is less convincing. Where the impression of youth is critical, angles are important and the intern has an exquisite sense of perspective.
The shadow of a man creeps across the woman's body. No dancer, even his silhouette is jagged and coarse. His hair is gelled and smoothed back, his moustache stained with nicotine.
The tension of the dance she has just completed shows on the dancer's curled body. A force pulls down on it, not gravity but some perturbing sexual force. Naked on the bed, she tenses and contracts, ambiguously the completion of a collapse or a new gathering of energy to spring. Her face is turned away, held by the shadow of something she sees through the window, indistinct in the grayness. Her features are shadowed, hidden. Then, turning towards him, she reveals herself. Her eyes are sketched in lightly, her cheeks gentle sloping curves which end in lips embroidered delicately on her face.
The intern skips the digicam along a curve that locks up Ester's real age in a hidden, interior place. Ester is young enough but not quite as young as the illusion the camera captures of a flowering innocent virgin.
The intern settles the camera's eye on her adolescent breasts, swollen with fire, rounded, not yet fallen. Morris has taped them for this shot so that they jut out from her body pointing to a world she has not yet experienced. A hand moves greedily, across the frame, toward them.
"Higher, for Christ's sake, raise your leg higher." Arthur raises his leg but he can not keep it extended and it sinks slowly again. I check the monitor and see it from the angle of the intern's camera.
The bodies come together. The man's leg climbs, shimmees and pulls itself against hers, struggling for traction His leg is stretched out, reaching to encompass her. He positions himself above her and her body trembles as he encircles her.
"For God's sake, higher. And look out for the tutu."
Arthur is unhappy. "Higher, " I scream. "You are going to catch...."
He raises his leg higher again but not high enough. His dick dangles in the light, wheeling slowly, searching for a prey.
"Gently."
Ester struggles to stay still. The cock dances rigid above her. The dancer can feel it humming, hear the sexual buzzing which changes into a sexual growl. She anticipates the cock's trajectory.
"Arthur, higher, your foot is going to ...." The foot scoops up the tutu.
"It's not my fault, " Arthur screams. The foot tries shaking the tutu off but it just entangles itself deeper. Arthur struggles to maintain his position. "I didn't mean it, " he wails. He tries to shake it off but fails. Then he tries to ignore it, but the tutu clutches the leg, like a fluffy pitbull. As her lover thrusts himself towards her, the dancer pushes herself towards him, but looking away, staring into the distance, and he misses his target. The tutu whips up and beats against his ass.
"Damn prop, " Arthur mutters, face away from the camera. "I knew it would be trouble." It's true. He complained about the tutu from the beginning.
"It's a symbol of her youth, of her energy, of what you are ripping from her, "I say to him.
"It's a fucking, damned nuisance." He tries to shake the tutu off without being obvious. The cock pom poms its way across the body. Arthur struggles to make it sex even though it is a retreat.
"Keep going, we'll edit."
Ester's head is still and she is gazing into the distance. She maintains the look of a young girl's fragile innocence while she is staring at the clock on the studio wall. I know she is trying to calculate whether the scene will be over in time for her to watch the ending of her favorite soap opera, The Young and the Beautiful. Emotions conflict. The dancer is anxiously anticipating the loss of her innocence; the actress is suppressing anger at missing her favorite soap opera.
The tutu is ruthless in pursuit of the leg, clings to it tightly. "I can't get rid of it. It's alive, "
"Morris, " I yell. Morris is already moving. "Get it off his leg. Don't do anything else Morris, " I scream. I know he will have to fight the urge to straighten the sheet, or fluff up some hair. Morris is my writer and my set director and make up man and he does whatever else needs to be done on my pictures. He is more than that; he is my friend. We have been making pictures together for twenty years or so but even the possibility of showing up on film spooks him.
"I'll show up in the scene, " Morris yells back.
"Don't worry about it, " I yell."I'm the director. When I tell you, reach up and see if you can unhook it."
"Don't panic, Arthur. Morris is coming. Just rest for a moment; hold your position."
Arthur can not rest. The tutu is causing an anxiety attack. He insists on trying to free himself from it but it mummifies him more tightly.
As Arthur is battling the tutu and Morris is creeping, hunched over, toward the bed, I think about the shot and the film. The struggle with the tutu has jammed open possibilities. Visually it works. It introduces an element of chaos, of humor and surprise into the film We can reshape the film around it, reshoot one or two scenes in the beginning, alter a characterization, change the momentum. It twists the film perpendicular to pornography, moves it toward slapstick, to human comedy, to art. "Arthur, don't stop moving."
"The tutu has attacked you, " I yell.
"It has attacked me."
The battle with the tutu is incongruous, discordant; Evil encounters chaos, intent confronts chance. Arthur's cock struggles with its role; the actor struggles to maintain character.
"It has attacked you. Then be angry."
He looks at the tutu
angrily and the anger slows the panic a bit. "Just hold on. Look at it,
Arthur. We are still shooting. Look at it. Why is it clinging to your
leg?"
"I don't know, " Arthur says. "It hates me, " he says after a moment.
"It hates you Arthur." He has it exactly.
"And why does it hate you?"
"Because, because..."
"Come on."
"Because she tossed it aside for me, for me."
"Right. It is attacking you. The essence of the girl woman you are seducing is attacking you. Are you afraid?"
"No."
You should be. The spirit of a woman about to be deflowered, sacrificing her virginity and art for a man and a fuck, is ferocious."
"It's a pornographic movie, " Arthur says. "Deflowering old fashioned."
"It's a symbol, " I scream.
"It's a fucking nuisance, " Arthur repeats.
"Quiet Arthur." The intern swings the camera from the foot of the bed to Arthurs face. Crouching, Morris slips invisibly behind the bed and works the tutu loose and it falls gently on the sheet. A single disheveled lace clings trembling against the dancer's body. Morris turns and creeps back to his position.
The shadow of the cock foreshadows its ultimate motions and the dancer stretches out, tense, anticipating the cock's plunge.
"Higher, " I scream, "the lace."
The cock brushes the dancer's body and skids gently towards its goal. The tutu has not surrendered yet. The single lace that still links it to the body entangles the cock, wrapping itself around it.
"Fucking tutu, " Arthur screams. He loses control. His cock swishes and swashes, raging against Ester's body. The tutu waves like a flag. He surrenders.
Ester turns her head toward him and giggles.
"Enough, " I scream.
"Does that mean stop?" Arthur asks.
We have done this hundreds of times. "Cut, " I scream.
"Oh, cut."
Morris fidgets with the sheets as Ester and Arthur creep off of the bed and collapse into chairs. The intern leans over and whispers, "It's not hot enough. There's not enough pain in it."
"There's enough pain."
"Maybe he should ram it in her first, while she has the tutu on. We can reshoot..."
"There's enough pain. It's psychological. She's surrendering her youth, her innocence."
"But there should be more pain in it, " he insists.
"Why?"
"Innocence doesn't have any visual impact, " he complains. "Kids are screwing at eleven and twelve now. They massacre one another in school yards over Pokemon cards. They're cannibals. Innocence is gone by nine. Arthur's right, this is old fashioned."
"I'm old fashioned, " I say. Maybe he's right, maybe Arthur is right.
He makes one last appeal. "A little pain would help the money shot. It's not hot enough."
"Pain is pain, " I say.
He stares at me. Pain is just his way of saying something is missing. I want to grab him by the shoulders and scream in his ear: Fucking in all its variations is not enough anymore to show sex for what it is, to put it on view. Cocks pumping in and out and coming in stuttering eruptions on noses and chins and bellies, cum filling holes and overflowing is not enough to make sex appear real any more. Every hole penetrated twice and overfilled, is not enough to shine it up, to wipe the pallor off its face, to lend sex the appearance of reality. I know it. But pain won't do it.
He hangs in front of me, dangling his complaint in my face, and waits for me to answer him, to say something.
I want to answer him, tell him that pornography's grace, what lifts it above sleaze, is that it holds out the possibility of revealing the mysteries of desire, of pleasure, of gratification. But that possibility had collapsed because sex had blown apart, gone nova. Gay marriages, viagra, sex education, feminism, condoms in public schools; sex had escaped human gravity, floated free, swirled above us like an angry, dispirited, disembodied deity of some ancient, forgotten religion. The barest thread tethered it to desire. Sex had been made ordinary and trivial and historical, transformed, like acts of nature and accidents, into the object of insurance policies and law suits.
I want to inform him that sex had stopped registering on film, light could not capture it any more. I wanted to confess that without recognizing it, I stopped making pornography, without knowing it, without intending to, I was making documentaries. I had a coherent picture of sex in my head but it was last years model.
"It's hot enough without the pain, " I say, and he turns away dissatisfied.
Someone walks in as the intern pushes himself away. My back is towards them so
I do not see who it is, but the clothing makes the soft whooshing sound of skin rubbing on wool in crevices, and metal taps on shoes beat out a rhythm of staccato clicks I recognize immediately. My daughter, my daughter Miriam, dressed for the business of shopping which is the only business she knows. She starts to move forward but I hear her stop when Arthur gets up and walks toward me. He has put on his underwear and his dick is still hard. She does not want to see, does not want to be seen avoiding seeing. She takes a magazine out of somewhere, out of her purse probably, and sits down. I have not seen her yet. She is a construction of sounds, a piece of natural music.
Arthurs is trembling from the exertion of his struggle with the tutu. His dick is enormous and the tip sticks out from his shorts. It bounces around in front of him like an angry child having a tantrum.
"I'm exhausted, " he complains. Something is on his mind. "It was horrible. It attacked me. Ester giggled, " he said. "Was it funny?"
"A little, " I say, "a little. The tutu was ferocious."
I wanted to tell him that it was excruciatingly funny -- that he was genuinely funny -- to confide in him that, in addition to having a cock that could do anything, he had comic genius that took advantage of accidents to escape occasionally.
I wanted to tell him how good an actor he really was, how, there were moments when his ability to make sex look real captured it so completely that he lit up its funny side, that sometimes he let himself be drawn so innocently and sincerely into a part that he ruthlessly gutted the pretentiousness of sex. I used his gift for comedy occasionally but only occasionally, when both of us were unusually inspired or very, very tired, and only when he gave it to me as a present.
"It was a difficult shot, hard to get right. Did I offend you?" I ask. "I didn't mean to offend you."
"No. It's not that . You didn't offend me." A simple apology won't end the matter whatever it is. I didn't think it would.
He stretches out and tries to find a position that will make the burden he carries easier to manage. The best he can pull off is an awkward, rigid, leaning back, ankles crossed, cock tilted.
"I don't want to relax too much, " he explains. "If you relax too much It's hard to start again. Starting is the hardest part." He is making a professional judgment. I think about it; we amateurs face different problems.
"It's OK,
"Why do we always need props, Manny ?" he asks very seriously. He shakes his head trying to loosen the hold of the gel on his hair. I hope for a minute this is what he needs to talk about, that he has interrupted his break to complain about props or makeup. He is tall and blond. His face radiates a male directness, his hair, even jelled, makes waves which break on his skull, his chin juts out, bringing his face to a blunt, masculine point.
Now that face reflects a genuine puzzlement. "They interfere with my concentration. Ester doesn't like them either. They make the fucking harder, " he complains, "you always have to worry about hitting something, catching on something, something falling off. " He makes a space in his lap for his dick which is collapsing slowly.
"They steer the sex, slow it down, Arthur, otherwise you would slice through the whole scene, like a knife through butter. The analogy is garbled but he gets the idea.
"I could slow down, " he explains to me, "without the props. I could steer the sex without them." He is bragging but it is true.
"I know you could, Arthur, "but then everyone would see you were slowing down and steering, they would wonder why. It would distract everyone from the point."
"Oh, " he says, "oh. What's the point.?" He seems genuinely interested. "I thought the point was fucking, sex, " he says. "We could fuck longer."
"It is, in a way, it is. But not ordinary fucking, fucking with a purpose, Arthur, a purpose other than getting off, pleasure. Is there anything else, Arthur, otherwise..." I wouldn't mind talking with him a little longer but I can hear that my daughter is getting restless. She is turning the pages of the magazine more quickly, making squirming sounds. She thinks we are gossiping about her.
"I'm quitting, " he says gravely, "when we finish shooting this film."He lowers his head and turns his face away. "They say I'm disloyal." His cock reddens. The blush would make a clever effect if he could do it the right time in a film. I am convinced he can do anything with his cock, anytime. I am curious. I want to ask him what offering he has promised to receive such a blessing, what sacrifice he has made, but I do not want to upset him any more than he is.
"Disloyal. You are working. How is working disloyal?" I realize where he is going. We have been through this before, the high pitched, grinding, noisy complaint of self doubt, the dull, raw, ripping sound of clashing identities. But his dissatisfaction seems to have taken a tighter hold on him than before. He is more serious. He holds his head steady, looking at me. He has never announced he was quitting before.
"They say..." His voice is unnaturally low and rough.
"Who's they?"
"My people, my friends in the group."
"What group?" I know what group but if I force him to be more precise, provide details, it will slow him down. He is best at a rote quick recitals and he derails when he thinks slowly.
"The Gay Blade
Actors
"What's not right?"
"A gay man making love to a straight woman. It's a symbol of gay oppression."
"It's not a symbol of anything, Arthur. Besides, the people watching the film don't know you are gay. You don't look gay in the film, you look straight as an arrow, a conventional male, macho thug." I realize that he may not take my telling him he looks straight as a compliment. "You're a star, people know you, you're recognized, " I say, "your friends are just jealous." He reaches down and cups his hand and folds his privates into a tangled heap on his lap.
"Maybe, " Arthur says, brightening. "But I'm quitting. I'm going to make gay films. Gay men should make gay films." He is saying something he believes, but does not quite believe wholeheartedly. We have been making films together for eight years. I play the only card I really have. Friendship.
"Do you like Ester?" I ask.
"Of course, she's my best friend."
"Then it's OK that you boff her in a film. It's only a porno film and she is your best friend. Making films with her is fun. We are more than professionals who work together. We are artists, friends."
"You could make gay films, " he says, offering me a way out. "If you made gay films I wouldn't have to quit." He is struggling with his loyalties.
I could point out I'm not gay. I could say that men fucking other men does not interest me. There is no mystery in it, like golf, only desire, accomplishment, release tied to a hole. The ass is devoid of mysteries. I am not interested in pain. I could, but I can't, I wont.
Ester, Ester who sits relaxing, watching her soap opera, Ester is my ace in the whole, my trump card. Guilt. "Ester is your friend."
"There are women in gay films, " he protests.
"Only around to be tossed aside, rejected." I know the film. "You know people who make gay films, " I tell him, "all business, there's no imagination in them, no best friends, only competition and fucking and minimum wages. They just want to exploit you because you're a star." Sometimes flattery works.
"It's not the point, " he responds. "I'll be making films with my people."
"Your people?"
"Gay people, gay men."
"You're an artist. You're working for god sake." I raise my voice and my daughter's head snaps up from her magazine. "You've been blessed, for Gods sake. You've have a working dick. You can get it up when you want. You could fuck a camel, a picture of a camel, the idea of a camel. It's a mystery. A blessing. Why spit on a blessing. Sex doesn't have principles. You've worked steady. You have a web page. If it's a matter of money..."
"It's not a matter of money, " he objects. "It's the principle."
"I don't see the principle." Maybe time will change his mind. "We'll finish this film and then we'll talk about it."
"There's nothing to talk about. I've definitely made up my mind. I'm leaving after we wrap this film."
"If you have to Arthur, you have to."
"Arthur, there is a question I want to ask." He looks at me, interested in my question and anxious to help me if he can.
"Do you feel anything?" I ask.
"What do you mean?"
"Anything, when you are fucking Ester."
"It's a porno film. I like Ester."
"I mean pleasure, " I say. "Excitement."
"I don't feel excitement for her. I like her, she s my friend.
"No itch, no spark, no heat, no passion. Ever."
"No, " he says. "Never."
"It looks real, " I say. "You can't tell sometimes."
He looks at me as if I have taken leave of my senses. "You direct me. You tell me what to feel."
"I know Arthur, but on your own, without me telling you, you don't feel anything. Ester's beautiful."
"I'm queer, gay, " he says, stating a fact. "I get excited at a naked, well hung boy."
"Nothing, ever?" The question are offensive and stupid, and since I know the answers they are not even questions. I will offend him if I continue but something is pushing me off familiar ground, insisting I take nothing for granted.
"Nothing, " he says. "Nothing." He gets up and after a few steps flops into his chair and rests.
I look at Ester. She has pulled her robe about her loosely. It does not quite cover her when she moves but it keeps the draft off of her back. Her body shines, even in the shadows, it glows. She is sprawled on an uncomfortable chair and shifts a lot. I have watched her get fucked a hundred times by Arthur and other actors occasionally, and still, seeing her sometimes, half naked, body languid in a chair, I get hard.
When Arthur finishes, my daughter puts down the magazine and gets up from the chair and starts towards me but stops when Ester gets up and comes over.
"Christ, " I mutter.
"I'm thinking of quitting too, " she says, "if Arthur leaves ..."
"If it's money...."
She shakes her head.
"You're straight, " I say. "What principle is... "
"If Arthur is ... It's too much trouble starting with someone else. I've gotten used to Arthur. His body, his mannerisms."
"We'll talk about it, " I say, "maybe Arthur's not serious. Maybe he'll get kicked out of the Gay Blades Actors Alliance. Maybe..." I grope at straws. "What would you do?" I ask.
"Go back to school. The Feminist League is offering scholarships for... for girls in the business, to get out, to go to college for a degree. Miriam said she could arrange it."
"For what."
"What."
"What degree?"
"I was thinking of food sciences."
"Ester." I can not let go.
"When Arthur is fucking you do you ever...?"
"Ever what?" She is not going to make it easy for me.
"Ever feel, excited. Pleasure."
She looks at me as Arthur looked at me, as if I have lost my mind. It is the kind of question that would come from a fan, from someone who was ready to plump down 30 dollars for one of her flicks, who needed assurances that they were getting the real thing, the genuine article.
"Pleasure doesn't photograph well in pornographic movies." She is quoting something I said to her a few years ago.
"I know but..."
She shrugs and gets up. I realize the hopelessness of looking for pleasure in the one place it can not show up, in the one place it is forbidden.
"I'm an actress, " she says ambiguously and leaves me to the intern who materializes out of thin air. "I've just looked at the tape. It has real comic possibilities. We can use most of what we've shot and what we are going to shoot today. We'll have to rewrite some stuff, transitions, and the character would have to be reconstructed a little. We could do it in a couple of days. What do you think?" he asks, but before I can answer he says, "we should move on. There are, "– he looks at Morris who holds up two fingers – "two scenes still to shoot. I think we should get as many as we can in today." I hate when he has my ideas before I have had a chance to tell him about them. I nod.
As he walks away I hear my daughter click clacking toward me.
"How are you?" She articulates her words carefully as if the question has been considered and vetted and considered again.
"I'm fine. How are you Miriam? I'm sorry I made you wait. Today isn't a good day, " I tell her, "for talking. I have to a shoot two more scenes. Tomorrow. Early. We could talk tomorrow if you want. You should have called. It would have saved you the trip."
"I was shopping, " she explains, "in the neighborhood. It wasn't a problem. I just wanted to remind you about the awards ceremony, to buy a suit. Did you buy a suit? It's going to be televised."
"I have a suit, " I tell her.
"I know you have a suit. I know the suit. Buy another. Conservative. Not one of your gangster suits. It's an important occasion."
"What televised?"
"The presentation of the awards is going to be televised. She writes an address on a piece of paper. "Go here, " she says, "they can have it ready in a few hours."
I put the piece of paper in my pocket. The fact that the awards ceremony is going to be televised disturbs me.
"How do you know its going to be televised?"
"Cable. On a cable channel They are advertising it heavily."
I look at my daughter.
Her brother, my son, is repulsed by what I do for a living. "Gangsters,
" he complains, "worse than gangsters."
My daughter Miriam stays closer to home. Her repulsion is stronger but less personal. It is thickly spread over the category of males. She is a feminist. But she is also a daughter. Family connections have a stronger hold on her than her brother and she is not willing to completely discard a father for ideology-- almost but not quite. She is repulsed by what I do but it is balanced by her love for a parent and the fact that I stand between her and orphan-hood.
We have come to an agreement about my identity. I make films. What kinds of films is shrouded in a cloud of ambiguity. When it is necessary for introductions I assume the persona of a maker of advertisements, of videos, of documentaries, whatever seems appropriate. To my grandchildren, to her neighbors, even to distant relatives whom she has over when they visit the city, I make films of some indeterminate kind.
Just where I was thirty
years ago starting out in the business. I had aspirations. I wanted to make
serious films, but I took any kind of
work I could get, mostly behind a camera but I worked on sets, editing,
anything. I had a wife, a son and a daughter and my wife was taking care of
parents who promised to die quickly but lingered on in the
I stumbled onto pornography, backed into it. I was working the camera on a porno film, when the director keels over and the producer needs someone to finish the film quickly. I volunteer and finish the flick directing and filming. Easy money. The star of the film is sleeping with the guy who bankrolled it and she talks him into making another. The money was better than advertising, better than what TV work I could find. And I had a eye for it, an eye for bodies, for angles, for displaying sexuality. After the second one the third was easier and the forth.
I still had aspirations. I kept looking for a way back to serious films, to cinema, to films where people stayed dressed and followed a script that was more than two pages long. But something always came up that kept me taking pictures of people fucking. My wife and children had aspirations too. A house on Long Island, private schools then college expenses, medical school. But what really locked me up was the mystery of sex, of pleasure, of gratification, and this talent I had for making a fuck just a little bit more than a bare fuck. In the end talent and mystery did me in I stopped struggling and tried to find a way to be serious within pornography.
The award I am going to receive has stretched family loyalties to the limit. Miriam has agreed to come with her husband to the awards dinner, taken over her dead mothers role of making sure I am suitably dressed, get there on time, acknowledging pride. I appreciate the effort. I feel for her.
"Did you see it?" I ask, " the scene we just filmed. Was it funny?"
"Disgusting, " she says, "disgusting, " and walks out click clacking.
When my daughter leaves, we set up for the next shot and begin. Morris repairs Arthur's image, restores the loathsome, repellent macho seducer. Arthur and Ester take their positions. Morris has taped the tutu and the lace down to the bed. I check the image the camera registers and the intern starts filming. Bodies lurch into motion, innocence clings to the dancer dampening her desire, resisting her lover who jacks up his roughness, pawing at her. She bumps awkwardly back, throwing him off balance.
"Rhythm, watch the rhythm. The scene is all about betrayal, " I yell, "about snaring someone with their desire and their sexuality."
They go at it again and I scream 'cut.'
"Why cut?" Arthur wants to know.
"The rhythm is all wrong." I try to tell him about the rhythm of betrayal.
"Rhythm, " he repeats woodenly. I tell Ester to try to keep him in rhythm but her timing is off too. We shoot the scene again and again. Four takes, then five. The beat and cadence is completely off.
"For Christ's sake what is wrong?"
"You are punishing me for quitting, " Arthur complains, "for wanting to make movies with my people."
"I'm punishing you for getting the rhythm wrong, " I yell. "Try it again."
They do it three times more and then they stop. "No more, " they yell.
"No mas." Punishment. "No mas."
I give up. "We'll pick up tomorrow, " and that is the end of it.
Arthur and Ester collapse on the bed exhausted and the intern and I busy ourselves with equipment "Look, " he says, "I'll put things away. You don't have to bother."
I have to bother. I need something routine to restore my equilibrium too.
Arthur and Ester are on the bed. Arthur is still enormous, bulging, frustrated, in pain. "I need to come, " he says to Ester and he starts playing with himself. Ester curls beside him relaxed. There is nothing she can do to help only be with him in his pain. He strokes her hair with one hand and himself with the other.
The intern gestures to me suggesting we turn the camera back on. "Real ponography, " he says, whispers "someone's pain is someone else's pleasure." I am tempted but shake my head. It is too private a moment. Ester reaches over and rests her hand on his arm as if to steady it as Arthur swings it back and forth, up and down. She waits patiently as he works himself up and brings himself to a climax. When he comes she lays her head gently on his back. Sex, love, friendship.
The intern is unhappy that we did not film the scene. "We could have used it somewhere, " he whispers, "a little blocking ..." I interrupt him. "Pornography is one thing friendship is something else." He turns away in disgust at my inhibitions, at a primitive morality.
Arthur cleans himself off and he and Ester leave chattering. The intern and I finish putting the equipment away and Morris dresses the set, complaining a little about unnecessary mess. "I'm shot, " I tell the intern. "I'm going to get something to eat-- Chinese. You want to join me?" I ask.
"No, " he says, "I'll finish up here. I heard the awards ceremony is going to be on the internet, " he informs me.
"Television, cable."
"Cable, but also on the internet."
I shrug but wonder what else don't I know about the awards ceremony.
I head out to Chinatown. My favorite restaurant is crowded with tourists and I head for my second choice, but there is a crowd there also. Suddenly, walking down Mott street I lose my appetite for Chinese food and turn around and head back to the studio. I don't know why but I want to look at the shots we took today. The fact that they are going to televise the awards ceremony and they will be on the internet has shaken me up – and the 'pain' bothers me.
I walk in to find company. The intern is behind the camera, making a movie on his own. He has not asked to use the studio. If he had I would have given him permission, but he did not. I can understand his desire to escape the confines of tutelage. He is more than professional enough to make films on his own. He just should have asked.
The two adolescent girls and a boy lounging on the prop bed in the studio are his friends. One of the girls, blond, very young, is stupendously sexy. They are fully clothed and each is wearing a headset plugged into a cd player that hangs on their hips.
I watch silently for a few minutes, the pornographer replicated, watching someone watching.
The red dot flashes on the camera and I realize the intern is shooting not setting up a shot. He is using the dancer's room as a set. It is badly lit, barely smudged by light. His three friends bump and slide around on the bed, each to a different beat pumped into his head from the silver machines on his hips.
They make up a picture puzzle in front of me and I struggle to fit the pieces together, to perceive what the intern is seeing in front of him. I lean forward and he notices me.
"I didn't hear you come in, " he says. He does not stop shooting but sets the camera on the tripod. "I thought you were gone for the day, " he says checking the scene through the viewfinder. "Sorry, " he mumbles, "I should have asked permission." No guilt or shame. A trivial cheat.
"You should have, " I reply.
"As long as you're here, " he says brightly, "would you mind. He lifts up the camera and hands it to me. "Nothing fancy, a sustained, single long shot. Just let it run, " he says and heads for the set putting on the earphones plugged into the cd player that hangs at his side. "Nothing close up, " he adds.
He strides into the scene and I point the camera at the bed. "Half the studio is in the frame, " I complain.
"Doesn't matter, " he says. I center the frame on the bed on which his friends are barely moving, and tighten the view a little . "You can set it down if its gets heavy, " he instructs me as he moves towards his three music soaked friends.
Nothing is happening and after a while the camera gets heavy. The intern and his three friends undulate, snake like, on the bed. After what seems like a long time they begin to rub against one another each of them animated at a different frequency by the music flowing through them.
The contact of their bodies, their rubbing against each other is animal like, not sexual. Heads together, bobbing necks extended, exposed twisting chins search for a saddlepoint on a body, indifferent to which one. I lean into the camera thinking to shift to a little closer shot, something that frames the bodies, accents the motions when the intern yells out to me. "Don't change the shot, nothing close up." I fall back and watch, barely minding the camera. The movement towards sex is excruciatingly slow.
I can't make any sense out of what they are doing. Not even when hands start to run over bodies, when clothing is pulled off and discarded, when they lick and paw one another, when, with a quickening rhythm, they pull off the headphones and naked, climb in a heap and find openings, not when the heap quivers, shifts, quivers again and then stops quivering, not even when it is clear what is happening, when I see what is going on, can I make sense out of what they are doing.
"Enough, " he cries. "Cut."
I do not move because there does not seem any reason to move.
"Cut, " he screams.
"Cut, Oh, " I say, "cut."
The intern jumps up and takes the camera from me. "Thanks, " he said.
"Children, " I mutter There is a note of distaste in my voice. But it does not quite ring true.
"They're friends. "They like to fuck, " he says. "It's a lot of fun, " he adds. "Don't worry about how it looks, its a documentary. I'll give you credit." They dress quickly and the two girls straighten up the set. They are diligent, systematic and careful and when they are done it looks like it did when I left to eat. They have even picked up Morris' habit of straightening out the curtains. I realize they have done this before.
The intern comes up to me as they are leaving. "I'm sorry...I should have asked you, told you at least."
"It's OK. I should have known, " I say to him.
"There's some pizza left and a few bottles of beer in the frig. Help yourself if you want some. I'll see you tomorrow."
When the door slams I get out the pizza and a beer and sit down at the table in the kitchen. It is vegie pizza but my appetite has returned. I am hungry and throw away a few pieces of broccoli and gnaw on what is left.
I stare at the set and try to straighten out relationships as I munch my veggie pizza. It is the wrong time and place to pull things together and I can't get any traction. Facts are in control of things and the facts are not enough. The pornography awards ceremony is going to be televised on cable, and is going to be on the internet. Arthur has quit, Ester is ready to leave. And the intern is making films on his own.
The intern's move to independence captures my attention. I tell myself he is not an intern anymore. Of course he almost never was, not really, maybe for the moment five years ago when he held his finger on the buzzer at the door of the studio until it was impossible to ignore. The buzzer tears with a cutting, rip saw sound.
Arthur complains. "The buzzing is hurting my ears. I can't concentrate." His dick shrinks.
"It is time for a break." I tell Arthur and Ester to rest. Morris, indifferent, is bothering a piece of the background to death.
The buzzing at the door continues even after I yank it open.
"Yes."
He has a pony tail and an earring, jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt says, 'Darkness also travels at the speed of light.' I do not know him.
"They sent me."
"Who sent you?"
"The school."
I try to remember if I asked a school for something. He is too old to be selling cookies.
"The school..."
"Which school."
"NYU."
"NYU is a fine school. I 'm sure if they sent you somewhere it must have been an sound educational decision. But..."
"The film school..."
A donation– not likely. Did I borrow a prop? Possible but I can't remember and not likely. An award-- not from him.
"The film school at NYU. An intern. They said you requested an intern, a film student intern."
"The school got my name off of a list of buyers of professional video cameras. Not requested. I agreed to take an intern."
"An intern, " he repeats. "They said you were an active, professional filmaker."
"You must be a troublemaker, " I say to him, "not on their A list."
He seems annoyed that I was starting with the part of his vitae that he had avoided putting down on paper.
"How? Why do you...?"
"Brains and personality, " I tell him.
"You make films?" he asks somewhat belligerently.
I nod. "They are punishing you. You must have pissed someone off. A bad joke." Infrequently they send me an intern, – two in the last five years. Not for my sake and not for the interns sake, a punishment, a slap on the wrist, to bring them into line. You don't go to NYU film school to learn how make pornographic films. The two students they sent me didn't stay more than a scene or two before they fled back to the campus, chastened.
"Almost graduated, " he continues. "I'm good, " he says. "I have an imagination, a feel for space and a good visual sense."
"Imagination is good. A good visual sense is better. Being able to hold a camera steady is best. Can you handle a camera?" I ask him.
A smirk appears on his face, as if it is stupid question.
"Lights?"
"Scenery, costumes, " he goes on, "production, post production ..."
I stop him."You sure you want to be my intern."
"If you make films....."
"Come in. I'm in the middle of a shoot. Something isn't quite right. 'Arthur, Ester. lets go.' " Morris, smooths out the bed then ruffles it again. He fidgets with the bowl of fish in the corner. "The lighting...."
"The lighting is fine. Get them moving. Only the motion is important."
I watch the intern as Arthur and Ester emerge behind the sheets which establish their personal, private space. They creep onto the bed. The intern's face drops. I knew he had no idea what kind of films I made. I wish I could have let Arthur and Ester in on the joke. Arthur has his signature hard on and Ester finds a position beside him and waits for Morris to shift her closer to the position she had when we stopped. The intern's mouth twists a little. He tries to look cool.
"They're naked, " he whispers.
"Pornography is about naked, " I say.
"I didn't..."
"You didn't know I made pornographic films."
"No."He is embarrassed, trembling.
"Don't let the door slam when you leave, " I say, not looking at him.
"I'm not leaving, " he says after a few seconds.
"Then don't worry about a hard on. Do you know where the go button is on this? I hold out the video camera. "Between the legs." He looks at me blankly. "Take the camera. Move there." He does as he is told. "Can you see between his legs?" Arthur is looming above Ester.
The intern coughs. There are two monitors on the wall. I look at the monitor showing the flow from his camera. He has framed their heads. "Between his legs."
"Between his legs. He struggles with the camera.
Arthur giggles. "Arthur, remember. You're a nobleman. This is your last day on earth, your last fuck. Remember. They are going to chop off your head tomorrow because you... you have betrayed your class."
"I'm queer, " Arthur says. "I don't have a class." He straps a belt on and Morris attaches the sword to the belt and puts a hat with a large feather on him carefully. Except for the sword and the hat, he is naked but he looks more like a peasant than a nobleman.
"This damn sword makes me nervous, " Arthur screams.
"You are struggling with your nobility. The sword is a symbol of your nobility. You take it off only when you are ready to ..."
"It's a damned nuisance." It slaps his thighs. "Why do we always need props. Why don't we just fuck?"
I ignore the comment. "Nobility, nobility has a cost." I lift the other camera off the of rack and focus on them.
"Between his legs, " I say to the intern, looking at the monitor. "Not their asses, not their faces, not his dick, not her mouth or her tits. Only what shows up between his legs is your job. Anything you can do with it is OK."
The intern is good. Professionalism takes over. He slowly disattends to Arthur's dick and Ester's cunt. He shifts to restructure the space between Arthur's legs.
I speak to Arthur. "You are going to die Arthur, for your nobility. It stands between you and the woman you love. You want to throw it off but it constantly clings to you. You want to throw it off but you can't, it is a ... struggle."
"Struggle?"
The intern shifts the camera. He has seen through the viewfinder the image of the knot of vibrating curls of flesh. I have seen it too. I shift my camera slightly and yell at him. "Through the legs is your shot."
"But over their shoulders ..."
"Through the legs, " I scream. "You're an intern I'm the director."
I see him wince as he surrenders the more spectacular image. Maybe he was an intern for that shoot. After that he was a critic, a scourge, a disciple but never an intern. Never an intern really, he stayed after graduation, 'the intern, ' at subsistence wages, five years. Now he is making films on his own.
Everyone is in the studio early, edgy and sour from the day before. "Rhythm, remember rhythm, " I say. "Rhythm, watch the rhythm. The scene is all about betrayal, " I yell, "about snaring someone with desire and sexuality, about the renunciation of art."
The scene starts shakily but everyone calms down quickly. Arthur's has the rhythm of betrayal and seduction down perfectly, Ester has the pacing of the loss of innocence, the movements of the barter of art for gratification down perfectly as well.
The dancer's lover lifts himself toward her. He cups her breasts, his fingers slide over her nipples, caressing them slowly. He slides himself into her. Today Arthur knows just what cadence will work. He does not thump out the usual energetic, pornographic fuck, Rather he captures the slow tango of a dick inside a cunt, searching out its furthest reaches, following pleasure, following excitement, exploring mysteries. Arthur gets everything right, every movement.
Ester remembers. Every actress in a pornographic film was a virgin once. They just forget. It's memory that creates illusions.
Her lover tires. The dancer feels him flagging, caresses his face. Ester ad libs, licks the sweat off of Arthur's brow. Her lover falls, not yet spent and spreads out on the bed to rest.
"Let it go Arthur. Relax."
"Not all the way, " he reminds me. "It will be hard to start again." We stop shooting.
"Ester."
"Yes."
"Your lover is exhausted yet has not come to you. You are not done with pleasure. He is not spent. You want to bring him to a climax, a celebration of the gift he has given you, life's flow, growth and change. Complete the transaction, sum up loss and gain, virginity and pleasure, for the joy, for the lost art of it."
"That's a little complicated, " she complains. "I want to make him erupt like a volcano, " she says.
The coda to the scene, the ending of the film, is supposed to be simple, the dancer gives her lover vigorous, energetic blow job. He comes over her face.
"I had an inspiration, " Ester says, "last night. Can we try it?"
"What inspiration?" I ask. I am not a great fan of inspirations.
"An inspiration, " she says, "an epiphany, just shoot the film, " she says. Morris looks at the intern, and their faces tell me she has confided in them and they have some idea what is going on.
"Why not inspiration, " I concede. "Go for it."
The intern pulls the camera back and we start shooting again. The naked dancer slides herself off of the bed and stands gracefully. Ester gathers herself into an erect position and gathers herself. Ester was a dancer when she was aspiring to be something other than a porno star. She is actually going to dance.
The intern keeps the light hovering above her knees. Ester moves through the classic positions keeping the dance small and intimate. Her arms and her breasts carry the illusion of the ballet, of artistic not sexual movement. The tutu tugs against the string but stays in place on the bed. Morris has taped it down well. He holds the string tied to it in his hand, waiting.
Ester's dance exposes herself to him. Her hands explore her privates. Her hands pull them open, showing herself to her lover who stares at her crotch mesmerized.
Arthur lifts himself from the bed to look, to see. Ester is magnificent. She twirls back to the bed for a final scene, not a blow job but a final penetration, the real loss of her virginity in an eruption of mutual pleasure. When Arthur finally comes, spewing over her, Morris tugs on the tutu which falls to the floor.
I do not have to yell 'enough' or 'cut' or stop. They drop on the bed and lie there as I let the camera film their collapse.
"A real inspiration, " I tell Ester, "Perfect." Everyone is beaming but the intern has a real, shit eating grin on his face.
Ester and Arthur dress. They are happy the scene went well. "We'll see you at the awards dinner, " they say. They invite me and Morris and the intern out for something to eat. "A celebration, Ester announces. "Of what, " I insist on knowing."
"Beginnings, " Arthur sings out, "gay men making gay films."
"Who knows what, " Ester says.
The intern and I decline their invitation. "Don't celebrate right away, " I say . "We may not be finished. We may want to reshoot a few scenes." My voice cracks.
"A scene or two, " Arthur sings out. He will not let his exuberance be dampened.
"Don't be sad Ester, " says to me. She is bubbly. I can not tell at what exactly, the end of a film, the break up of our camp, the prospect of a degree in kitchen science.
"Well balanced meals, " I say to her as she leaves, Morris on one arm, Arthur on the other. The intern smiles and walks out with them but turns in a different direction.
When everyone clears out of the studio I order a sandwich and wait until it comes before I sit down to make delicate decisions about cutting the film. I need something in my belly before I go at the film, something to weigh me down while I start hacking at it. The delicatessen sends a meatball hero instead of the pastrami sandwich I ordered. Mistakes happen. I am hungry and accept their error as lunch.
I arrange the takes in a rough, narrative order and watch them as I shove bread and greasy meatballs in my mouth. The saucy hero makes it easier to blur and fudge where one thing ends and another begins. I set the tutu scene up in the editing machine.
When we started shooting, the film was a peppy little pornographic melodrama, a metaphor for the struggle for sexual pleasure against anything that stands in its way, responsibilities, morality, common sense, art, – especially art – with a gloss on the contribution of coarseness and crookedness to those struggles. Complex, but Morris' script simplifies it and brings it together.
The tutu scene screws up that narrative. It is a really funny commentary on the risks people take every time they fuck, the perils desire faces when it rides out to the boundaries of its domain. It is a footnote on the dangers single minded intent faces when it pushes people into bed. Arthur's struggle with the tutu makes pleasure vulnerable, makes the mystery of sex vulnerable; it makes evil vulnerable, makes single mindedness vulnerable. It pastes a happy face on the back of a deformed sexual predator, hiding the hump. Including it would steer the film, away from pornography, toward something else. It would take a genuine artists touch to make it work. Taste and talent just won't cut it.
I am ambivalent. I don't have the energy to struggle with it. Cut the tutu scene out and the rest of the film flows along a crooked, safe path. Pornography, a little quirky, but pornography. Subtract chaos, subtract art and what you have is people fucking. It will pay the rent. Make the tutu disappear. It never happened. Irrelevant, like the dancer's art, like Ester's dancing, irrelevant. Only I can not quite let it go.
While I am hesitating, the intern comes in. "Sorry I'm late, " he says. There is the smell of sex about him.
"Afternoon delight, " he says. "The blond."
"Mixing business and pleasure costs, " I say to him.
Business and pleasure. My wife lost interest in sex somewhere between the time my son graduated high school and my daughter had her sweet sixteen party at Leonards.
Pornography was distasteful to her and the distaste spilled over
to sex. She tolerated both because they payed the
mortgage, paid for college, paid for medical school, paid her parent's medical
bills. I met my girlfriend at one of the annual
The intern shrugs and looks at the image on the screen of the editor.
"In or out?" he asks. "What are you going to do with it?"
"I can't decide, " I tell him.
"If you use it we will have to reshoot a few scenes. Probably add a scene just to make a place for it, "
"For what?" I ask.
"For chance, contingency, for the comic, " he says, looking at me suspiciously. "Are you up to it?" he asks.
"I don't think any of us is up to it."
"Then take the money and pay the rent, " he says. "Look, " he continues, not letting my glare interrupt him. "I'm sorry I didn't ask you to use the studio."
"You should have asked."
"I know I should have. I'm sorry."
"I would have said OK."
"I know, I've really learned a lot from you, " he says. It is his way of apologizing.
"What?" I ask, "what have you learned?" It is a test.
"How to look at things, handle angles, curves, bodies, how to separate things then bring them together, how to give shape and form to gratification and desire.
"Technique."
"More, " he says, "a lot more." He is sincere.
I want to change the direction the conversation has taken. "I want to ask you something, about the film you are making."
"Yes." He turns and looks at me intently, curious about my question.
"What it is? What kind of film is it?"
He face registers puzzlement.
"It's a porno film." what kind of film would I make. "Since we are talking about it, I want to get your opinion about something, " he blurts out suddenly and goes to a cabinet and pulls out a tape. "I want your advice , " he says. He stutters trying to explain it to me. "It's a loop, " he says, "a pleasure loop in real time and space. A documentary more or less. He takes the tutu tape out of the editor and puts his in. "Where do you think I should end it?" He throws a few switches and the six monitors flash on.
"One monitor will do, " I complain.
"The effect, " he says, "reality, but larger than life, " he says assertively . He starts the tape running. It looks like yesterday's shot but it is a little different. I think it is the lighting.
"Yesterday..., " I start.
"No, the first piece, I've put all of them together, a linear sequence."
"The lighting is different."
"No, he says, "only the music."
On the screen the four people are rolling around, each listening to different music, squirming in independent rhythms.
"Timing."
"Timing, I know, " he says.
"Rhythm, flow, tension."
"Tension, " he says. He is looking for something from me and not getting it, and getting bored.
The film consists of the same scene repeated, only the rhythm of the squirming changes. "The first shoot, " he says, after a while, then, "yesterdays take."
I watch, silently. He has not made pornography. It is something else. I don't have a clue what. He has not learned anything, at least nothing important. Technique. He has mastered technique. The one eyed man squints and closes his good eye.
I have not taught him what pornography is capable of, what can be done with it, what senses it should educate, what ideas the images should serve. I have not served him well as a master. His apprenticeship has been wasted. Suddenly I want to fill him up with my knowledge, my experience. He is my intern, my apprentice. I have a responsibility.
I want to give him something. I want to distill what I have learned struggling to make art out of pornography and pour it into him, my experience, my knowledge, the fruits of the small victories, the vision I have hammered out. Pornography. Not the earn the rent kind of pornography but the kind of pornography that pushes into the mystery of sex, of pleasure, of women. I want him to make something more out of the dross of people fucking, But I can not quite put my finger what I can give him, what I should give him, what he can take in.
On the monitors, a fourfold heap is beginning to form. I notice the reflection of light on bodies but I can not distinguish the little blond head who excites me from the brunette who leaves me cold, the men from the woman, him from the girls. A hopeless mess. Yet trying to dissociate them, disentangle them is challenging, raises a kind of tension.
"What kind of film is it?" I ask again.
"It's a pornographic movie, " he says frustrated. "A documentary. A pornographic documentary."
"Christ, " I say. "A cartoon. It goes on forever. You can't make out bodies, tits, cocks, cunts. It's a blur. You can't see the fucking."
"People see it in their mind, in their head, " he replies. "That's what makes it pornography. You don't have to push fucking in people's faces. People create pornography in their heads. "
"But you don't see things clearly, " I complain.
"Clear enough, " he says.
"Four people barely lit, rolling around, rubbing against one another, generating what kind of heat. Four people each listening to different music, In a heap rubbing, " I see his disappointment with me in his eyes. I have not seen something he thought was obvious. Pain, I think. Pain.
"Pornography is what the people who watch it create in their heads, " he repeats. "Things have changed. The computer, the internet, graphics, special effects. They've changed everything. Sex has changed."
I grunt.
"Desire has changed too, " he says, "and pleasure. Pills -- Viagra-- medicine, genes, Aids. There are no secrets, " he says sadly. It's a world without secrets. Everything is spread out in front of you."
"The mystery, " I assert.
"No mysteries left, " he tells me. "Only visible things. Only things on the surface you can see. Sex used to be hidden underneath the surface of people, in the folds of their skin. Unfolding them... pornography was liberating. Seeing what was hidden, seeing the mystery was freedom. Now, " he hesitates, "now everything is available to be seen, read, on billboards, in magazines, on cable, on the internet. How can you make pictures where you only watch people fucking. What's left of it, " he asks. It is a rhetorical question. "Webcams, " he says. "Seeing has changed."
"What's a webcam?"
"Cameras in the middle of people's lives on the internet."
I do not know what he is talking about.
"People watching other people living, brushing their teeth, taking a crap, moving into the center of a room, moving out the door."
On the monitors in front of us his films cycles, the variations, barely distinguishable from one another flash and repeat.
"Not pornography, " I say, pointing at a screen.
"Technically, no, " he acknowledges expertly, "you don't see cocks and cunts and fucking. But it's pornography, " he looks at me. "Revelations, secrets, desire, pleasure, gratification."
"It isn't pornography, " I insist.
"Not the old pornography, " he states indifferently, "the old pornography is dead." He is saying what he knows, what I know. "People fucking, cocks pushing in and pulling out, the money shot, are shadows."
I don't want to hear it. My kind of sex is dead, and pornography's revelation died with it. Its secrets will be hunted down where they sit on genes, computers will model it. Something will replace it, I guess, webcams, something on the internet, something that has had the mystery squeezed out of it, something you watch not because it reveals a mystery but because it tells you what you already know. I realize my experience is worthless to him, devoid of value. What I have won from my struggles is worthless. Some violent hyperinflation has occurred. My experience is useless. Yet I want to give him something. I want to sift through my life, gather up my experience and give him something. I struggle to locate a gift.
"There is a story my father told me. About a man who read cunts."
"I've seen the film you made."
"Not the same. There was this man who read cunts, " I say. I tell him the story as my father told it to me.
"Gross, " he says. "Gross. Now about the timing" he asks, pointing to a monitor, "where do you think I should cut it? Here, " the heap's quivering subsides, "or here, " the quivering moves to quiescence and there is no movement, no movement at all.
"Let it go to its end I say, to the silence."
He smiles. "Just what I thought, " he said. "See I have learned a lot."
I get up early, too early to do anything but drag myself to the studio to kill time. I lie to myself, tell myself that I will begin the final editing of the film but I know it is not true. What I will do is piss away hours trying to decide whether to use the tutu scene or toss it away.
When I get there, the studio is filled with a dry, desert darkness that encourages inertia, mummification, doing nothing. I switch on two weak flood lamps, just enough light to avoid falling over things as I move around. Their light barely grazes the set, illuminating it, unintentionally, as it was in the intern's movie. I move a chair close to the dancer’s bed and sit down, uncomfortably upright and roll the takes in my mind, project the images of the dancer and her lover in my head. First, I will do a final edit in my head, put it together in my imagination, then turn to the machines.
I have made the man sexual and crude. Seduction is all that he has on his mind. He reads the dancer perfectly but fucking her is the totality of his desire. He is indifferent to the struggle in her between dancing and the sexual experience he promises. Her dilemma is irrelevant to him.
Then, there is the tutu. Arthur's struggle with the tutu adds a comic, human dimension to the dancer’s lover, but I can not fuse the added pieces of him in my mind.
After fifteen minutes in the darkness, watching and rewinding the film in my mind, I decide I can not visualize the cutting and pasting in my imagination, sober. I may not be able to do it drunk either but it can not hurt. I get a cup and a bottle of Jack Daniels out of the closet and sit down again.
My stomach accepts the Jack Daniels with a growling, volcanic eruption of heavy, thick, sour, damp air. As I watch the images flicker in my head, the liquor gives me conflicting advice but I decide abruptly to abandon the idea of deepening the character of the seducer, and introducing comedy into the film. I decide to cut the tutu scene.
In my mind I toss it away but it flitters moth like, a flickering shaving of color and light hovering around me, clinging, like the tutu clung to Arthur.
As I close my eyes and search for the continuity around the hole of the tutu scene Morris comes in. He is singing, throwing out robust, off key strands of sounds. He sees me sitting in the dark. "Manny, " he sings out. "Is a movie about to start? He is going to play the clown. He does not wait for me to say anything but throws on all of the lights in the studio. "Let there be light, " he sings in a rolling, bumpy baritone. "Let there be a fucking, blinding lot of light." The light bleaches out my fantasies.
"Manny, " he says, "Manny, Manny, Manny. Manny one eye."
"Only one of me, " I say.
"Am I disturbing you?" he asks. "I'm sorry." He does not look sorry at all. He glances at the bottle and goes and gets a cup from the closet and pulls a chair from against the wall. "I came to strike the set, ” he says, "but I can't do it sober. I can never do it sober." We suffer from the same disability. "I probably have a head start on you, ” he boasts. “I started at home. "You don't mind if I join you, do you, " and sits down and fills his cup.
"I've decided to cut out the tutu scene, " I say.
"Why?" he asks. He waits for a moment and uses the silence to drain off half of the liquor he has poured. Then he gets up and says shakily, "I'd better get started. You know I get shaky blind when I get drunk. I'll take the set apart while you try to figure out the reason." He gets his tool apron out of a cabinet against the wall and buckles it around him. Neither of us can hold our liquor; drinking was a bad idea.
He jerks and slides over to the set he constructed for the film. It curls out in a spiral of rooms. the dancers room first, the man's room and a fragment of a stage in a theater behind it. He has already pillaged the sets for the very early shots for pieces to construct the later ones so that the spiral becomes skeletal and it moves away from the dancers room.
"You're sure?"
"What?"
"You're not going to make the comedy, you don't need the room any more."
"I'm sure."
"Then I'll take it apart. Why?" he asks.
"Didn't have the energy Morris."
"You could have tried."
"I'm tired."
"You could have tried, " he repeats.
He walks over to the prop space and drags a large brown wooden box back.
I start to get up to help him but he orders me back. "Sit, " he says. "I can manage it."
"You're a little drunk, " I tell him.
“It’s a challenge, ” he says.
He pulls the box clumsily into the dancers room and begins taking the dancer’s knick knacks and memorabilia lovingly off the dresser. He dusts off the pieces carefully and wraps each in tissue paper and puts it into a box and then puts the box into the storage cabinet. They are doo dads he likes, that are precious to him, artifacts that have appeared in many of the pictures we have made together. He makes an entry on a piece of paper on the box, repasted each times its inventory changes. Excruciating.
"Morris, don't be so fussy, " I tell him. "Probably the next times it's looked at it will be auctioned off, why make life easier for an auctioneer you don't know."
"Maybe, " Morris says, "maybe. Why?" he asks again.
"Arthur is quitting, Ester too, probably. The intern is making pictures on his own and probably doesn't want to be an intern any more. That leaves you and me."
"That's not what I wanted to know, " he says.
"I was afraid." The liquor has made me honest.
"Afraid of what Manny?"
"That it wouldn't work. Failure."He waits for me to say something and when I do not he answers the silence.
"What's a failure or two?"
I shug.
"Fear never kept you from failing before Manny, " Morris says sweetly.
"I'm getting old Morris"
"Not that old. You've snatched other films from pornography, made art of them. Tried at least."
"I never did Morris. I don't think I ever did make art."
"The scarecrow principle, " Morris says. "They're giving you an award tomorrow, a lifetime achievement award, a award for pornographic excellence. You must have done something special."
"Lifetime achieving what?” I ask. “What have we wasted our life doing?"
"What did you think you were doing?" Morris asks. His voice is soft, gentle but it has an edge to it.
"I didn't think. I..."
Morris lets the silence drift back before he gets up. He is done with what is on the dresser and begins on the dresser itself. He unscrews the fake dresser door and removes the screws that hold the strut frame of the dresser to the wall and sets it down on the floor. Then he stands up, takes the curtains off of the window and opens one of the draws in the box and folds them neatly and sets them in.
"Need and desire, " he says to me, "pleasure, women." He is trying to help me. We have worked together for twenty years, for twenty years. He is my set designer, and make up man and he has written most of the scripts and dialogue. He knows what I am asking when I am talking to myself, when I only thinking. He knows me. He dresses the set and strikes it and he mutters under his breath what I would like to say, what I want to say but don't, what I wish I could say but can't. Since my wife died he is a companion. He follows me sometimes like a wife, picking up after me. Not servile. An expression of love. He loves me and I love him. He forgives me my girlfriend like my dead wife forgave me my girlfriend. Compassion. The liquor is having its effects.
With the studio lights on, the set projects no architectural illusion at all. Lit evenly, light coming at it from different angles, everything is thin, artificial, weightless, a cardboard cereal box on a large kitchen table. But even weightless, things are connected attached, hinged, held together. Morris begins to dismantle the room itself.
From the back at each corner of the room he releases the clamps that lock the walls to one another, so that they remain standing only because they lean against one another. Then he goes over to try to take out the window from the wall, removing the screws that hold the frame and sticking them in his mouth then pushing on the window.
"You should have left the walls together before you tried to get the window out. The order of things, " I say.
"Evvveryonnne a crrrrritic" he mumbles, "everrryyyythone." The screws in his mouth distort the words. The window refuses to budge.
He moves around the wall to see if he has missed a screw that holds the window in place. On his way back he detours to me and the bottle, spits out the screws and fills his cup which he half empties on his way back to the window. Back at the wall he opens the window and pushes his head through, then the top half of his body. "Oh Mrs. Goldberg, " he screams at me.
I do not say anything.
"Mr. Goldberg then." The hand that holds up the window trembles and the window comes down on him pinning his body leaning into the looted, now nearly disconnected room.
I know the window is balsa and plastic but I worry that he is hurt or that he has swallowed a screw that he still had in his mouth. I start to get up. I hear a screw clatter to the floor.
"Sit, " he says. "I don't want your help. It’s a challenge. Help yourself, ” he mutters. Bent over, pinned by the window, he twists around and tugs on it, trying to get it out of the wall, but the wall tilts and collapses to the ground and Morris is left standing, in the hole the window fit into, in the middle of the wall now on the floor.
"I've done it now, " he says, straightening up, the window still closed around his waist as if he is wearing a starched wooden skirt.
"I've done it now, " he sways. "I've huffed and puffed and the house has come down." He giant steps out of the wall and finds the release of the spring that holds the window closed and presses it. The window springs open and he catches it as it drops.
"All fall down, " he says. "Not only you, Manny." Then after a moment, "See, a challenge." He picks up the window and carries it shakily to the prop area and sets it down and then comes back and retrieves the walls and drags them to the prop area too.
Only the stripped bed sits in the middle of the studio.
He comes over and refills his cup. We are both drunk now but he can hold his liquor better than I can. He leans over and puts his face close to mine.
"You wanted to reveal the mysteries, " he says.
“I wanted to be an artist, Morris.” The liquor has blasted my defenses. It is not only the liquor. Ester and Arthur leaving, the intern making pictures on his own, the lifetime achievement award, the light in the studio. They have pushed past self deception to confession.
"Art." He says. "And all this time I thought you were taking pictures of people fucking, making pornography."
"Just to pay the rent, " I say. "I wanted...."
"To live rent free."
"No, " my voice cracks. "Not rent free. Shit Morris, what's so bad about wanting to make art."
"If you wanted to make art you should have taken up painting. Canvas on paint doesn't confuse anybody.
"You mean paint on canvas, " I correct.
"Whatever. Making art as a painter is easy. Everyone knows what you are doing.
Trying to make pornography into art confuses everyone. "Music, " he says. "If you wanted to make art you could have scribbled notes on paper and everyone would have known you were trying to make art." He snatches up the tutu from the bed and holds it in front of him and does a little dance. "Or a dancer." He pirouettes. He is clumsily graceful.
"You can't chose what you have to be, what you are, what you have to do, everything, " I tell him. He knows already. "Naked Bodies. Fucking. Pornography is what was shoved into my hands, what I was given. Make art from people fucking or don't make art at all. Bad luck."
"Oh Manny, " he says coming to rest awkwardly. "You made some interesting things. Art, I don't know about, but interesting pornography. You are a great pornographer. Tomorrow, you are going to get an award that should convince you. Art is another story."
"Shit Morris."
"The best of the best." He is mocking me. "Recognition by one’s peers is the greatest reward a pornographer can get. Perhaps a piece of nookie now and then."
"Mystery, Morris. Mystery. The cunt, women, pleasure, desire."
"There is no mystery, " Morris says.
"You're gay and queer, " I say. "Maybe no mystery to you but to me. "
"What were you trying to do Manny?" he asks. His words are slurred.
"Show, see."
"What were you called to see."
"Make it visible."
"What?"
Like a needle of a phonograph I am stuck in one groove. "Mystery. Satisfaction. Pleasure. What comes from women."
"For some, " Morris says, "for others..."
"Sex then, sex. I never was able to show it, Morris, " I confessed, "never."
"Well hardly ever, " Morris says in a Gilbert and Sullivan voice.
"Never. "
"Maybe tomorrow, " Morris says.
"No, not tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. Everyone is leaving Morris, and when they give you a lifetime achievement award for doing something they expect you to quit doing it. It's a death sentence. They resent you doing more of it afterward because it would mean that they might have to give something to you again. Once you have been given to, you have to sit down. When you die you are given again but of course you can't appreciate it but its easier, they do not have to tolerate your gratitude and your lifetime achievement is over." I hold my hand over my mouth and whisper. "They think they know something I don't. But I know something they don't, " I say to him hoarsely. "They should have had a wake instead of an awards dinner. Pornography is dead." My voice is drunkenly serious. “Things have changed. The technology has changed it. The computer has changed it, the internet has changed it. Sex has changed, Morris. The feminists, the gay liberation movement. Viagra, drugs genes. Webcams." I spout the interns enumeration.
"What are webcams?" Morris asks drunkenly.
"Doesn't matter, " I tell him. "Its all changed. Different. The mystery has shapeshifted. People fucking don't cast the shadow of the mystery any more."
"Maybe it never did. Maybe you were pursuing a mirage, " he says.
"Maybe."
"Did I ever tell you the story my father told me." I am sure I have told it to him a dozen times when we were making the film. Morris listens and his memory follows my need. "I don't think so."
"I can't remember it so well, "l I tell him. "It was about a man who took pictures of sex. "
"Like you."
I realize I am distorting the story.
"No, ” forget that, I say loudly, "he didn't photograph sex."
"He didnt."
"No."
"What did he do then?
"He got women to show him their private parts. He would look at them. Then he fucked them.”
"How?" Morris asks.
"By... by.... The story was thrashing around in my mind. "He knew women, Morris, really knew them. He got around their defenses. He disarmed women in spite of themselves. He got around their first line of defense, their Maginot lines. He gave them an excuse to experience something they wanted to experience but couldn't because of part of them didn't want to, was afraid."
"Sex."
"Art, sex, who knows. This guy read women. he understood women."
"How?" Morris asks in a challenging voice.
"I don't know. My father never told me. "
"He traded what they had for what they wanted but didn't know they wanted. "Sex.” Morris says, "the gratification of desire."
“Then one day he stopped looking for it, " I add.
"Why, " Morris asks.
"Because he was going deaf."
"Blind, " Morris says, “he must have been going blind.” Then he adds, "that wasn't the real reason was it."
The story was dissolving in my head. I couldn't remember it. "No he didn't stop looking. He wasn't going blind."
"This isn't a real story, " Morris says.
"No, its a real story, " I insist. "My father told it to me. He thought there was something to see."
"But there wasn't."
"There was, but he didn't know what he was looking for and was looking for it in the wrong place."
"Oh, " Morris says.
"Did he keep on looking?"
"Until the day he died I said."
"You paid the rent, " Morris says apropos nothing.
"It's all gone Morris."
"Was never there, " he says. "Only in your mind."
"Pornography is gross, " I say. "Boring gross, disgusting."
"Ah ha, " he says. "You are getting middle class morality at exactly the wrong time."
"No, " I say. "An objective judgment, people fucking. Nothing interesting there. Devoid of interest. Repetition. Machinery. Not even sexy."
"The best of the worst, " Morris says.
"So, "
"That's all he said."
"Not very interesting, " Morris comments.
"I agree, " I said. "We were watching a Knicks game when he told it to me."
"Oh, " Morris says, "sports. Manny, " he croaks, "was there something to see, a real mystery?"
"I think there was Morris. I think there was." I say this then I fall over. Morris starts to get up but I tell him sit. "It's a challenge, Morris."
"You are just trying to justify your existence off camera, " Morris says. I do not try to get up but croak from the floor.
"Of course. What else is there at the end of a career, or a life. What else does a man grope in the dark for but for some assurance that the whole of his life, the whole of sixty years hasn't been some stupidity, some gross, extended mistake, a misdirected pause. Few of us get any justification at all from others and most of that is a matter of self interest. People accept our self justification because it justifies them. A life time achievement award." I struggle to my feet but totter and fall down again.
Morris gets up. I can not tell him to sit. I can barely keep my eyes open. He picks me up and carries me gently to the bed. “ You’re only 58 Manny.”
"I love you Morris, Thank you I say, " then I pass out.
I wake up with a hangover that covers me like a sack cloth shutting out the light. I realize it is the bed cover Morris has pulled over me before he left. He has dismantled the set and the studio is an empty shell from which whatever was alive has hatched. I try to pull myself together but my mind drifts off like a fog.
It is nine in the morning. The film sits cut and assembled in my head. The gap the tutu created has been filled with naked bodies fucking. The emptiness is unbearable and my body refuses to respond with anything but exhausted indifference. Coffee and the last slice of veggie pizza left over from two nights ago is breakfast. A shower returns the feeling of my body to me but I need something to batter it into some semblance of normal functioning. I decide worry will prod it into liveliness. The only worry that makes sense is the awards ceremony which is a few hours away. I am going to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Blue Film Academy, the association of pornographic filmmakers. I will have to say something.
I get some cards and a pencil and force myself to think about what I will say when they hand me the award. I will be modest. Modesty counts. And gratitude. I will be grateful. There are a dozen people they could have given the award to; they have earned my gratitude by giveing it to me. I will try to accent the positive not dwell on pornography as the failure to make art. It should take all of three minutes. They deserve more. What they deserve is a warning, I should tell them about the intern’s movie, about the future. I should speak to them about pornography in the internet universe of distorted time and twisted space where distance no longer matters, no longer exists, where obsessions are jammed against one another, bestiality, child porn, orgies, young, old, black, white Asian, dogs, horses, kangaroos, pissing, trussing up, holding down, looking up, where each perversion humps, a keystroke away from one another peacefully on the internet. I should tell them about webcams, whatever they are. I should I guess, but I won’t. Modesty and gratitude will have to suffice. I spend the rest of the morning and the afternoon cutting the film, filling the gap the tutu scene leaves. At three I decide to shower and nap so that I am alert at the ceremony.
A little before six I head out the door. Miriam and Fred, her husband show up at six on the dot. Fred is driving. He has been my son in law for six years but I do not know him very well. He is friendly, but keeps his distance. He is a lawyer but I realize I do not know what kind.
The awards ceremony is in a fancy hotel in the forties. I am in the back seat. My daughter turns to look at me. I see she is looking at the suit. "You look very nice, " she says but I hear in her voice disappointment that I did not buy a new suit.
"I know a garage fairly close to the hotel. Are you up to walking?" Fred asks, "otherwise we can drop..."
"Yes, " I answer. "I'm up to walking."
We pass the hotel on the way to the parking garage. There is an enormous crowd outside the entrance. I think maybe I have underestimated the audience for pornography, for celebrity, for fame in any form.
"Protestors, " my daughter says. The crowd is in a frenzy. Signs and posters bob up in a vicious squall of protest.
I do not understand. "Protestors...?"
"Against pornography." She says it as if it is the most natural thing in the world.
We have been holding an award ceremony for years and there has never been trouble. I am sure it is television and the internet. Fred parks and we walk the few blocks back to the hotel. I am anxious. I knew televising the awards were a mistake but I did not anticipate a frenzied horde of protestors at the gate. The police are not very sympathetic to them. Pornography does not offend cops sensibilities: wild protesters offend their sensibilities. The police keep a wide aisle open, pushing the protesters roughly to the curb. We run the gauntlet, hurrying rapidly through a canyon of frenzied, screaming women, some of whom are holding children.
The protest is well organized. The leader seems to be a woman with flaming red hair who seems vaguely familiar. Signs with the same picture of a woman on a bed and a man crouched over her bob up and down. The implication is she is being brutally assaulted. The signs jumping up and down create the illusion of a crowd of people humping on a mid-Manhattan street. Underneath the picture are the words 'porn rapes.' I recognize the picture on the signs. it is a frame from 'The man who read Cunts.'
People are throwing dolls with one leg cut off made of paper that have the words "rapist" on them. There is some symbolism I do not know about but the little dolls are disturbing.
Inside the ballroom where the awards are going to be given the scene is barely less chaotic. Elegantly dressed people are milling, searching for tables with their name cards on them. Television has done it. The internet has done it. I am sorry I did not buy a new suit. Porn stars are posing, the television cameras focus on the nearly naked ones. I wonder how much will get on the air.
The industry is there, at least everyone I know from the industry. It is a festive gatherings of pornographic film makers, director, producers, actors, suppliers, salesman, producers, distributors, lighting people, makeup artists, publicists, stars. There is a group of people I do not know. I realize they are the pornographers who live on the net.
Everyone is a little drunk and people wave and yell as I come in with Miriam and Fred. Arthur and Ester, Morris, the intern with the blond from his after hours shoot are already sitting at our table and wave us over. The table next to us is peopled by the president of the association and invited guests. We go and sit down.
I played a role in setting the academy up and was its president for a year. In earlier less sophisticated and accepting times it was a matter of defense, of lobbying, of carrying on the minor sub rosa tasks necessary if an industry was going to survive the leeches who were sucking it dry.
At first it was a matter of a few of us getting together and talking over solutions to common problems, trying to set informal guidelines for paying bribes, dealing with mob distributors and corrupt city officials, putting hiring on a contractual basis. There are breeds of pornographers like there are breeds of dogs: pulling them together, at least as far together as people who filmed girls and farm animals and incestuous mini dramas and gay orgies could be pulled together, was not easy.
The meetings at first were like the casual gatherings of a
businessmen's association at a whorehouse, but before long they became routinized, transformed into a convention of the kind we
all used to make films for. As the closet emptied, as sex became an acceptable
topic of conversation, as the light of publicity shone on anyone who could pay
for it, as the recreational and entertainment value of the gathering increased,
the group became a formal association, the
Over the years the meetings got fancier and more elaborate. An awards dinner was added, and last year a lifetime achievement award was established. Television did it, the internet did it. But after my term as president I stopped playing an active role. Now I wished I had kept my hand in. I could have objected wildly about televising the awards ceremony, about putting it on the internet. It wouldn't have done any good but I could have tried.
As we take our seats people come up and congratulate me. I tire pretty quickly and Miriam starts to intercept all but the oldest friends and tells them I am a little weak and that there will be time after for smoozing after the ceremony.
They have stuck the lifetime achievement award in the middle of the program so we sit though awards to makeup men and script people and a couple of supporting actor and actresses awards before the time comes for the lifetime achievement award. The president of the association makes some introductory remarks.
"We are giving a special award today for lifetime achievement." A spotlight picks me out. "The first lifetime award goes to someone we all know and love . Manny ..." My name is drowned in hoots and applause. When it dies down he announces that Arthur and Ester -- he mentions their last names also -- will present a compilation of highlights of films I had made.
Miriam leans over and tells me that Morris has written the commentary that Arthur and Ester are going to read. Arthur and Ester get up from their table and move to the stage. They are elegantly dressed. They motion me up and I rise from the table and move to the stage and find a place next to them. I am sorry I did not take Miriam's advice and buy a new suit.
They are going to summarize my career and introduce me. They huddle together and begin reading from a teleprompter.
"He is known in the industry as a maverick, " Arthur begins. "His films broke barriers. The first film of his to garner national attention was the Horny Misfits, That film showed sex among the blind and disabled. Blending documentary and dramatic styles it was the first pornographic film staring real disabled people. It is difficult to forget the scene in which the blind heroine performs fellatio on her lover who is a quadriplegic."
They stop talking and turn around. A clip from the film is projected on a screen behind them, off to their right. It is at a sharp angle from me and the perspective distorts the image horribly. I try to watch it for a while and give up. When the segment is over they pick up the presentation again.
"His film the Zoo, also blended styles. It's juxtaposition of animals fucking and people making love heightened the very animal nature of sexuality. Pornography with a soul became his signature. Another clip appears on the screen.
"He has made a positive contribution to the culture of our industry. The Man Who Read Cunts was an imaginative rendering of a timeless story and became an instant classic." Arthur is the man who reads cunts. Ester is the woman who presents him with a cunt whose mystery he can not read.
"He has helped the industry adapt to modern times. Not only is this awards dinner being broadcast of television, but it is going out on the internet." I stare into the darkness at pornographers watching someone else's pornography.
They do not have any understanding what is happening. I look at the scribbled notes I have made for my acceptance speech. In spite of my decision to limit what I say to modestry and gratitude I have an urge to give them a warning, a heads up.
They've think they have come to watch a bar mitzvah, a confirmation, not mine, theirs. They think they have graduated into legitimacy, burlesque become vaudeville become 'My Show of Shows, My Show of Shows into Survivor." Instead they are attending a funeral. They shouldn't have had an awards dinner. They should have had a wake. I stomp on the urge. Modesty and gratitude will have to suffice..
I move closer to the Arthur and Ester as they try to watch the segment the clip from The Man who Read Cunts."
No one had bothered to tell me what clips they were going to show. The text Morris has written is loving and respectful. Miriam had taken care of arrangements. I realize she has made a stab at a reconciliation. I peer at the screen and try to make out the words that are being pushed away from me at the audience. I think I see my son, walking towards the table.
From the back of the room a racket interrupts the clip on the screen. By the time it gets to the stage it is blended with the sound track but I recognize it is sound of the crowd of protesters I had seen outside.
They are pushing into the hall, screaming, their signs hopping in the air. They knock over a table with drinks and people scatter to avoid the falling liquid and chips. A clump of protesters heads for the projector in the rear and the film stops for a moment then continues shakily. A few security guards struggle with some of the protestors but since they are women, back off, worried about lawsuits. The leader of the protestors, the red haired lady, brushes by me to rip the microphone out of Ester's hand. She begins shouting. "Porn is the theory, rape is the practice" and "no more humiliation, no more assaults, no more porn."
I try to side step the front end of a line of protestors as they rush to gather around her. My feet tangle around the wire feeding juice to the microphone and I sprawl onto the floor. I am not hurt, only surprised and the cards on which I had written what I was going to say follow me to the floor and scatter.
On the ground, the rush of people around me is ferocious. I look up. The projector is still going and I see the film which is periodically framed by peoples legs, and skirts rushing by. Suddenly my view of the screen is completely blocked. I can not see anything except a pair of legs. I follow them up and a woman is standing in front of me, blocking my view of the film. Her crotch is bare; she is not wearing panties. It is the woman with bright red hair and she is glaring at me. There is a wild look on her face. Her mouth is pulled down into a snarl, her eyes are wild. She screams at me. She is going to kick me. Her body shifts so as to take the weight off of the foot she is going to hurl at me. As she pivots her body I recognize the face.
I remember the face in its distortion. She was an extra in one of my films. In the film she gets it from three men, one in her ass, one in her cunt, the other in her mouth. They are shoving themselves into her ferociously. She was ambitious, she wanted to be a porno star, enthusiastic to show what she could do but it overwhelmed her, filled her with pain, pushed her in the end into a helplessness but it didn't dampen her ambition. She had a career, always as an extra though, and I never used her after that film.
Now it is payback time. I see her leg swing back I reach down to try to cover my crotch but I can't find it. My head is too confused to locate that part of my anatomy. Her mouth is working. I make out her words. "You stinking shit. Make films in which women get reamed. How do you like it?"
I don't like it at all when I feel her toes dig into my crotch. The pain darkens the film and my insides go dark with it. On the screen I see a piece of blurry film. It is a scene from The Man Who Reads Cunts, a man is staring at a cunt he is spreading open, but all that I can think of is that here is a woman who reads cocks and she is reading mine.
________________________________________
"Women struggle to be reborn, men to hatch, to poke their way out
of the shell that separates them from the world after they are born. Cynics
think that this puts men in a bad light but it doesn’t. Who but the extremely
selfish would subject the world to the agony of an unnecessary birth.
Men are thoughtful and brimming full of mercy; The egg is out,
the hen is done with it. What's the cost of body warmth. The world is always
squatting on something, why not on a shell in which a trembling man hunches
over, waiting to emerge again. Occasionally, of course, it squats too heavily
and you are hatched into a world that captures your first breath, forces it
back into your mouth and holds it there until you choke on it. There's always a
risk when you go back into the egg. Men are thoughtful and brimming full of
mercy; they just have bad luck."
The page with these paragraphs is the first thing he sees on the wall when he wakes up, cold and clear headed as if his shell has splintered along some calcinated fault line, fallen apart effortlessly, without endless pecking, and he has backed out of a translucent, gray twilight into a dark, spring night, sliding awake into a dry Lauren sheeted bed, cool and smooth as if he had not slept in it half a night, dreaming a succession of dreams, each one of which was twisted and bent and barbed as a line in one of her drawings.
Paragraphs from a novel he shocks himself by buying impulsively, without reading a review, because the picture on the jacket attracts him, a picture of an island, bright colors that remind him of the real island on which he vacations when the lust rises in him. Then he shocks himself again by ripping out the page and slipping it under a magnet on the refrigerator, then after a day, moving it and pinning it to a wall in his bedroom.
He has ruined the wall. His decorator will notice it and scold him, saying that if he wanted to pin things up, she could have had the wall done in Durafoam or PlastAirboard and it would have looked like a solid wall but he would have been able tack things up and take things down and the pin holes would self seal and no one would be the wiser but now he will have to redo the wall. Sometime. Sometime.
The powdery details of the dreams, like the delicate, talcumed patterns on butterfly's wings, are blurred and mixed and blown away by the first breath he takes when he hatches, when he awakes.
Particulars evaporate, slip his mind immediately but he remembers they are part of a sharp, dry, extended debate in an angular, distorted sign language, in which every issue is argued and examined and argued again, so that the only thing that remains of the hours of dreaming is a stark, irrevocable decision, the doubt and ambivalence wrung out of it, a decision already made, an impulse already locked and loaded. He places his feet into his slippers, pulls on his robe and yanks the belt tight, curling the cloth as it slides along his hand, squeezing himself, squeezes the trigger he has become.
A dull explosion inside of him drives a spiraling shock wave into his stomach, and he goes into the bathroom and pulls the robe off and throws up, emptying what seemed like gallons of muck from the waste treatment plant of his stomach.
When he is left with only spasms and a sour taste smeared on his tongue like icing, he yanks the large flowered towel from the rack and cleans up bits and pieces of splattered ooze from the toilet bowel, pushing and pulling the wadded fabric around the curve of the porcelain, tosses the towel into the laundry basket, pulls the robe around him again and goes back into the loft proper and begins the annihilation.
Most of her is gone already. The boxes of her had vanished. When he rushed home from his trip to Mexico City, burst into the house searching for her, she was gone, like a disappeared person in Columbia or Argentina or Peru, or which ever of the Latin American countries disappeared persons existed or stopped existing. He had half expected it when her letters became unconvincing, when she did not email, but he held out hope up until the moment he turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open and the emptiness overwhelmed him, and he understood that the person who used to inhabit the place was gone, would probably not be found, certainly would not return.
He is surprised how much of her has survived her retreat, how much has remained after she collected her clothing and paints and brushes and easel and abandoned the place. Most are traces, microscopic fragments of surfaces sloughed off in the course of daily living, marks of presence, impressions left unintentionally on an environment. Some of what he finds is hers only obliquely, by an association in his head, like the boxes of the sugar coated cereal she nibbled on when she was painting and the half finished containers of ice cream which lined the bottom shelf of the freezer, presenting him with a Baskin and Robbins choice when he retrieves his coffee beans in the morning.
He hunts down the larger, graspable pieces, a blouse misplaced in his closet between a raincoat and a suit, slippers shoved out of sight under the bed, collects her methodically, systematically, and shoves her into transparent, blue tinted recycling bags.
The bags bother him. He wants to stuff her into thick, black, opaque, garbage bags, but is out of them, and, he hesitates, considering if he wants to put off the obliteration, postpone it until he has a chance to buy heavy duty contractor's trash bags, and decides that it would be delaying what demanded to be accomplished immediately, reflexively, what will not tolerate postponement and accepts that he will have to dispose of her in filmy cobalt.
He picks out a few things of his own, things that she had made hers by wearing them, a grey, white and red bulky sweater, that made her slight frame seem full, a pale, violet, silk shirt with noticeable paint stains on the tail, that he finds her painting in one afternoon, when he comes home early, that she insists on putting on a hanger, back in his closet. The hanger distorts it but the paint stain has already changed it, and it is transformed again magically when they make love in it, although he can not remember which of them finally has to take it off.
As he shakes off the memories, as he stuffs it into fresh transparent blue trash bag, he decides that he will call in a specialized cleaning company and have them scour the place, treat it as if it were the scene of some medical disaster, as if, if even microscopic parts of her were left, they might start a disastrous plague.
He goes through drawers and closets rooting her out, and he thinks he is finished when he remembers the letters and emails which he keeps in the middle drawer in his desk. When he gets them and throws them into the third bag he has filled, he believes he is done and all of her is gone, all except the paintings and drawings. These he can not bring himself to throw out.
He walks back through her studio– still to him her studio – hugging the white painted wall that glows as if it is lit by the sun, into the decorated half of the loft where her paintings and drawings are hung. Logic and rationally murmur softly to him here. He can donate them away, get the owner of the gallery who handles her work to appraise them and donate them to some charity in exchange for a tax benefit. He talks to the paintings, whispers to the drawings as he takes them off the wall roughly. "You shits, you fuckers," he snarls, "you're to blame." They say nothing back but he knows if he looks too long at them he will lose control so he collects them in pairs off of the wall and carries them, faces together, to the closet farthest from the kitchen.
Then, pulling his robe around him, he rings for the elevator and delivers the bags, two in one hand one in another, to the sidewalk. The only sign of life In the gray, 5 am stillness, is the man delivering the Times, stepping over a homeless man, curled in his box, to deposit bundles of papers in a doorway across the street.
The blue, translucent bags bang against his thighs, as he releases them, drops them next to the opaque black bags already arranged for garbage collection. As they hit the ground, his habits, like startled, birds, rush back to him, spiral around him protectively. Then he goes in, tires himself by walking up the seven flights of stairs to the loft, climbs into bed and retreats into a dreamless, void sleep in which he meet her again and redreams their relationship.
He meets her unexpectedly. She shows up in one of the cracks in his routines, appears in a fissure in his habits.
"You were always in my life," he says to her later.
She smiles and smears a blob of color high on the canvas on the easel in front of her. "How could I be? " she wants to know.
"You were. It was just a matter of making you visible and keeping you visible long enough to meet you."
"That's romantic," she says and scrapes the color off with a pallet knife and pulls the knife through a rag smearing the blob of paint on the cloth.
After he meets her, but before he knows much about her, he convinces himself has seen her in one of Hiroshige's 100 Views of Edo. It is completely irrational, as bizarre and nonsensical as his falling in love with her the moment he lays eyes on her, but he hauls himself back to the museum in Brooklyn and walks slowly through the exhibit three times, examining each print carefully, before he finds her, one of a crowd crossing a bridge. Completely crazy. Irrational.
He meets her while he is impatiently pursuing a yellow haired, flowery bloused owner of a small East Village gallery he picks up at one of the incestuous openings on the Soho art circuit, who, during their first, quick conversation, flashes definite signs that she might be interested in a vacation, in two weeks at the exotic resort whose name he mentions softly , in passing. "Moltopuente," he whispers, "Moltopuente, the suspended place, off the coast of Mexico."
"I've heard of it," she says. "Better than Point Pleasant." It is half a question.
"Mucho, mucho mejor, the best," he confides. He hints of secrets, but the only one he knows is that its coral is dying. "Bluest water in the world," he says, "bluest."
Because of her, he stays later at the opening than his usual 10pm and he pays for it with a splitting headache that keeps him from falling asleep until 3. The smell of coffee from the timed percolator wakes him at seven, and by 7:15, when he steps into the shower he has almost recovered his pacing. After 15 minutes of BBC news he is back on schedule and is out of the house only a minute or two after 7:55 and in the office by 8:15.
He is a creature of logic, rationality and habits. Not a man with habits, not a habitual person, but more like a mechanism assembled from scraps of repeated actions stuck together, like some mechanical device, whose springs have a chronic extension, whose wires are always taut, whose struts rotate and grind over knobs, a vigorous, rational, transparent apparatus, always impatiently in motion, moving, hurriedly shifting, but always exercising the same routines, reproducing, elongating the same life.
He is born allergic to irrationality and disorder; as a child, it makes him break out in hives. But as an adult, he develops a tolerance for it, an immunity to its worst ravages by ingesting minuscule doses of irrationality over a long period of time. Art is his resistance building drug of choice.
He buys books on art, first, collections by periods and countries, then fat books of the complete works of artists he likes. He starts going to gallery openings, subscribes to Artforum, Leonardo. Finally he starts buying art, prints and paintings. A hobby, an avocation – a medical treatment.
He does not really like art, he does not really understand it, but he develops a dependency on it, a need for it as a poison he can take repeatedly in small doses to develop a resistance to the larger doses of irrationality and unreason which assault him frequently but unpredictably in the real world. He thinks he falls in love with her because he believes she is the final dose of unreason that will make him immune to disorder and irrationality.
The impatient rhythms of logic and rationality serve him well at work. He is a partner in a successful private wall street firm, a concern that scavenges other, less successful businesses. He is their head scavenger, smelling out companies deficient in business logic, wanting economic rationality, feverish, sweating, shaking businesses, uncontrollably dying but invisibly, potential material for economic triage.
Once he locates one of these companies, he researches it thoroughly. When his research is done he packages his results, suggests a plan, adds a recommendation and sends it upstairs or downstairs, to wherever the anonymous committee he serves meets and makes decisions.
If his recommendations are accepted he waits, rests while others draw up contracts, make business plans, do more detailed financial analyses. He fills his time by reading business magazines, art magazines, makes appointments with co workers, drifts out and visits museums, makes doctors appointments, gets his hair cut, his nails done.
At the point a deal is being completed he is needed again. At the end he is brought back and inserted into the process, insurance, sent along to help manage the final stage because there is always resistance, someone pushing back, someone with excuses insisting on explanations. So he goes and explains to whomever needs an explanation, why what is necessary is necessary, walks them through charts, if necessary, clubs them with numbers, with logic, until a bone snaps and they do not object anymore, then he leaves the final cutting and pasting to someone with an office down the hall from his own who cajoles and pushes and wipes up blood and bandages wounds until the plan he had pulled together is complete.
When a deal is done, his habits, weakened by success, splinter and crack, and the lust rises up in him and he rewards himself with a vacation, gives himself a bonus. He goes to Moltopuente. Moltopuente. A rich mans resort on an island off the Mexican Pacific coast, very isolated, very elegant, very expensive. When one of his deals is closed and the lust rises up and he needs a vacation, he finds himself a female companion and escapes for two weeks of romance and lust on a beach at Motopuente.
Two weeks – occasionally when his companion is very responsive three, never more than three, – with a woman susceptible to the exotic which the hotel service and the native islanders and the hypnotizingly regular surf provide at Motopuente, its coast a wavy ripple of coves, so that each beach is isolated, producing the illusion you are alone on the island, unless you needed or wanted something, then you raised your voice, and three pairs of white trousered feet or three pairs of skirted legs, you had your choice, came running.
A vacation at Moltopuente is the reward he gives himself after one of those deals is done, when the lust rises up in him, overwhelming him and whispering that his soul is needy. He finds a woman and escapes, to Motopuente.
Companions are easy to find. The woman he was lining up, the blonde gallery owner, Alicia something or other, had taken his card and sent him an invitation to her next opening. She had personalized the announcement, writing, 'better than Soho stuff' on the card and scribbling and circling 'Motopuente' as a post scripted reminder that she remembered.
She greets him sexily when he appears, complaining a little crassly, that after the craziness of the opening she would need a vacation, ‛a rest after the weirdness of art," as if he might have forgotten and then shifts the topic. "You'll like these paintings," she whispers, grasping his forearm, and caressing the silk of his shirt with her fingers, assigning him the specialness that affirmed her interest in him, in two weeks on a rich man's island resort away from the city, in Moltopuente.
Unlike the Soho openings, the gallery is only sparsely filled and with local residents, peers not patrons. He looks at her and decides he and his hormones need a vacation even though the i's have not been quite dotted on the project on which he is working.
He has looked over the gallery brochure listing the paintings and their prices and he has made a judgment quickly. As she walks him around one wall of the gallery he measures his paces and after the third painting decides that the role of art patron would impress her and fix the decision about two weeks at an exotic resort if she had any reservations. "I want two of them," he murmurs softly, as if the art has impressed him. "Two. You pick," he said, "I trust your judgment."
"The second gallery," she says and it takes him a moment to realize she means the back of the gallery, made a separate room only by a half wall painted a different shade of white, that juts out at a narrow angle.
She steers him to the back and points out two paintings hanging together. "Those," she declares. He responds as if her choice is perfect, peering at the paintings, knowing she is watching his reactions. "Perfect," he says, not seeing at the paintings at all only hearing the surf on the beach, Moltopuente.
"You have to meet the artist," she says, after he writes out a check.
Why, he almost responds but he realizes that at the moment he agreed to buy two paintings, he has distinguished himself from the thick crowd of people floating in the gallery who would buy nothing, at most take home the flyer with the reproduction of a painting to hang up on the kitchen wall. Having bought something into which the painter put a little of themselves, the artist was entitled to a bit of him back.
Why not, he thinks, why not. It is the penultimate move in the vacation game. He would meet the artist, impress and be suitably impressed, shake the artist off, go out, drift around the neighborhood, return toward the end of the opening to the gallery owner's side, begin a conversation again, something about the framing of his paintings, make another comment about the rich mans's resort on the hidden, isolated island and suggest they meet for lunch, Done, until they packed and took off. He stares at the paintings just long enough to isolate a few things to comment about if the need arises but he is thinking about what he should pack given what he can tell about her tastes. Aligator things, he thinks, things with ripples and grooves, clothing with definite lines.
Alicia something or other leads him over to a woman whose back is toward them, talking to a man whose face, topped with purple hair and twisted rings in his nose and ears, frames her neck and head and taps the woman's shoulder lightly and she turns and he feels himself lifted up, twisted, roughly punched sideways and dropped suddenly somewhere, off the edge of the earth, into the faded blue section of oceans on ancient maps, outside of the domain of islands on which resorts lounged, marked with signs saying, 'here be dragons.' Her face fills his visual field, but he watches blankly as the island resort sinks over her shoulder and he hears the sucking sound of two weeks of drinking, eating roasted fish and love making, on what seemed like deserted beaches disappear into the ocean. Lost, gone.
"This is the artist," the gallery owner says, throws a name at him which rushes by his ear, blown by some wind that rises suddenly and sweeps everything it touches away then subsides. And then to her 'he bought two paintings.'
He stares at the pretty face of the artist. Not even beautiful he thinks, pretty but not beautiful, not exotic.
"Oh," the artist says. She is dressed without pretense, inappropriately, he thinks, for an opening. Her face is quiet, hardly moving, her body relaxed, happy to be formless, beached on the beachless island of Manhattan.
'Christ,' he mutters to himself, 'Christ.'
He opens mouth and instead of air coming out, water flows in."I..., your paintings...." He is drowning, suddenly cold. He looks for a piece of driftwood, something he can hold onto to keep from disappearing under the milky blue water. They have some sort of conversation. Afterwards he can not recall any of it only a blueish, crinkly static that muffles other sounds.
He shakes loose of the gallery owner who seemed to recognized that something had happened, that he was falling out of the sky, disappearing off the screen of the radar mapped island resorts. He makes an excuse and goes over and picks up another flyer for the opening so he can find out the name that had rushed by him, and goes out into the street and clears his head. Then he goes back inside and finds the artist, standing alone, looking at one of the painting he has bought.
"The paintings..."
"Alicia said you bought..."
"I saw..."
Disjointed talk, discontinuous fragments of conversation, He tries to gauge if she has been as affected by him as he by her and it is clear she was not. He appears to her with a definite form, a buyer in a gallery at her opening, she is not drowning but maneuvering on dry land, on the floor of the gallery, with her paintings hung motionless in front of her.
"What made you buy those two paintings?" she asks. She seems genuinely curious.
"I,"...not the word but the sound of the vowel. Sounds not words come out of his mouth. His habits bob up out of the ocean he is drowning in and seize him. He studies her, trying to fathom whether she is amenable to negotiating an exotic vacation and sees a face and body devoid of a hint of interest in island pleasures, immediately no, she is not interested in escaping, she is already escaped, there, on some permanent vacation from everywhere, two weeks on an exotic island holds no attraction to her at all.
He fumbles tries to get traction, reaches for his other habits, his analytic skills but they slide out of his grasp. She gives him time to recover – from what she does not know exactly – time for him to resolve and reassemble the sounds that were coming out of his mouth into fragments of thoughts, sentences, ideas. She waits.
The most he can manage is an appearance of thoughtfulness. "Sheets of color he says, "strung out over barbed wire." He grasps for the ideas he had tucked away earlier when he had looked for something to say about the paintings, but they have disappeared. "Something hiding something else." His voice seemed drowned out by the blue noise that fills his head. "A holocaust of emotions, feelings..."
He looks at her face wanting to ask her to forgive him the nonsense he is saying, wanting to explain that he seems to have fallen irrationally in love, but he just closes his eyes and takes in the faded smell of turp and oil paint that she gives off, and when he opens them she is nodding approvingly at his comment.
"I never thought about them that way," she says. "I don't think..."
And he hears a swooshing sound as the gallery owner comes up and separates them and aims the artist in a different direction, and he thinks that he owes Alicia whatever her name is, something, a bonus, a gift, for saving him from dissolving into a pulpy mass, into whatever it was that dried white and hard and tacky and stuck to feet on the beach at Moltopuente.
He says something, and lets them slip away but he holds on to the artists face as she moves away. After they disappear he tries to look at the paintings again but the they are blurred and after a few minutes he runs for the exit.
The next morning he calls the gallery owner. "The paintings. Can you deliver them tomorrow?
"Yes."
"To the address on the check."
"Yes," adding in the same breath, "the place you were talking about. Is it.... Point...."
"What?" for a moment he does not understand. It takes him a while to realize that she is reconnoitering the two weeks of the exotic beach he had dangled in front of her.
"Better, much better." He thinks that it might be best if she thought there was still a possibility of an island vacation. "After this run of work, definitely possible, " he mumbles. He needs the telephone number of the artist.
"By the way," he says, trying to behave as if the central point was vacations and that the question he was about to ask was an irrelevancy. "The artist whose paintings I bought. I need her number."
She is imediately suspicious. "Yes."
"Do you have a number?
"Why do you want it?" she asks.
He has no patience with her. "The two paintings. I want to speak to the artist. Frames. I need the number. I'll be at your next opening and buy two more paintings on your recommendation," he say sharply. It is gross and impolite and she is not happy it but she gives him the number.
After he writes it down, it is all he can do to not scream at her that it is her fault that he is beached, on the island of Manhattan and that two exotic weeks are off, probably permanently, because she has pushed him into some deep, oceanic artistic crevice.
The conversation stretches into the mundane. She tells him she will have the paintings he bought delivered the next day and he manages to repeat, holding on to the illusion of possibility, that something had come up at work and that the two weeks were impossible for the time being, for right now and hangs up.
He lets himself settle down, makes coffee and he calls the artists number, hanging up repeatedly on the answering machine until, early in the afternoon he gets her voice.
"I was at your opening," he says. "I bought two of your pictures." He is nearly stuttering. She does not remember.
"The House, the Village Open" he says, calling the painting by name as a reminder.
"Oh, the paintings." He hears she still does not remember.
"I'd like to visit to your studio." He has prepared himself for questions. 'Who, why.'
"OK," she says. She gives him an East Village street number. "Is that all you wanted?" she asks.
"Yes, wait," he says. "When would be a good time?"
"Today," she says, "tomorrow or the day after."
"Which would be better for you?" he asks.
"It doesn't matter," she says and hangs up.
He tries to remember if he had any appointments but he cannot get his mind to shift its focus. Finally he calls his secretary. "What appointments do I have today?" he asks
"One, a meeting with Balpell from human resources."
"I won't be in today, Cancel Balpell. Reschedule it."
"OK. " she says, "when? Is something wrong".
"No, just break it." He is abrupt. "Reschedule it for next week sometime."
The address the artist has given him is the address of a storefront. He remembers something about a storefront from his conversation with the gallery owner.
"She paints in a storefront," the gallery owner said, "lives there too. A real artist."
"A storefront. Primitive," he remembers responding.
"Primitive. Rats. Dangerous. It's right on the street for heavens sake. People try peer in the front window, stumble in looking for cigarettes."
"Oh," he says, "primitive."
The window is papered with newspaper and scraps of drawings on newsprint sheets, layered over one another, taped and pasted together. He looks at them and feels disoriented because they have been organized to hide rather than reveal. He knocks on the door and waits but no one answers.
"So much for anytime," he says to himself and retreats to a coffee shop he passed a few stores back to wait. As he walks in he sees her in a booth, having coffee alone. Her back is toward him her head tilted up as if she is looking at a landscape on the ceiling. Anytime, he thinks to himself, anytime.
"I've found you," he says to her when he gets to where she is sitting.
"I wasn't lost," she says seriously. She has no idea who he is and mistakenly identifies him as a man in the neighborhood who has been trying to pick her up. "Leave..."
He reminds her of the call, introduces himself.
"I was taking a break," she says, relaxing a bit. She is dressed in the same outfit she wore to the opening. As he prepares to sit down she gets up. "I'm done. I'm going back to my studio," she says. He follows her out catches up to her as she walks the few steps back to the storefront and follows her into the studio, shutting to door behind him.
"Do you mind if I paint as we talk?" she asks.
He is happy she does not force him to make naked, small talk. He checks the rickety chair that is in the middle of the studio to see if it will hold his weight then sits down.
The walls have some signs from the candy store that was here before she moved in. They advertise fountain specials, shakes, egg creams. A pulled up curtain makes two rooms of the storefront, separates where she paints from where she lives. A folding table is pushed against the side wall of the studio, an easel occupies the middle, boxes, a rack and a cabinet occupy the rear. On the walls, under the faded candy store signs, are drawings and pages torn from magazines.
He watches her paint for a while. For some reason he can not fathom the inactivity of watching is calming. She works on a piece of the canvas and although he wants to see what she is working on, he is afraid he will interfere in some way so he sits quietly. She turns to him when she stops painting. "Did you want something?" she asks, "something in particular."
He begins the speech he has rehearsed. "When I met you at the opening," he begins but she interrupts him.
"Something specific." she does not say it harshly. It is a question.
"If you have drawings, to look at some drawings, I was thinking of ...."
She does not let him finish but puts down her brush and goes to the back of the store and returns with a large cardboard box setting it down on the folding table against the wall. It is filled with drawings stuffed into a variety of kinds of folders, postal mailers, Bloomingdale boxes.
"Do you mind if I paint as you look through them?" she asks.
He doesn't mind at all. He goes through the drawings slowly, emptying each folder on the table and looking carefully at each one. He selects two of them and rests them on the top of the box. As he scans the drawings, as he is looking, he realizes they are the same drawing.
As soon as he discovers this, he goes through the box of drawings again to check. In the box, in all of the folders, there is only one drawing, repeated, varied, made distinctive by changes in line and color but a single drawing, a hundred drawings which are one drawing. But he recognizes that each one is also a search for a second drawing, that with each contact of pencil and paper, she is looking for a second image. As he puts one sheet down and picks another up, he senses fear behind each search, her fear that she might find it and it may not be to her liking, and, in each line of every drawing, shaping the pencils stroke, the fear that she may miss it, that it might always hide a stroke away, behind a whiteness, a smudge, out of reach. He is amazed at his perception, disconcerted at the certainty of his conclusion.
Perhaps she has two different drawings in her. Perhaps she can move to another space, shift her center somewhere else than where she is, to another continent, another world. He can not tell. He sets the box of drawings down carefully placing the drawings he has selected on top and watches her paint.
Oblivious to his presence, wearing what she wore to the opening, she stand in front of the easel searching the surface of the painting before she extends her arm like an antennae and smears a patch of color on the picture. Then she leans back and stares.
"How long have you been working on it?" he asks.
"Two weeks," she says.
Two months or two years, he thinks, and it has been finished since the first scumble of paint on canvas, three minutes she started on it. For two weeks she incises a line and scrapes a line out, smears on sheets of color, rubs planes of color out, without making a difference, without changing the painting.
He thinks involuntarily of some of the business deals he has put together. Two months of pounding with logic, hammering with rationality, two months of circuitous, meandering negotiations, which return finally to where they started, end up where they began, two months to come back to their beginnings. Like her paintings the deals he set up are finished a minute after he sees them in his head, after the computer spits out its last piece of data and he sits thinking of rearrangements.
"Holding it in place," she says, as if she reads his mind. "Most of the paint just holds it down, keeps it from moving. The paint is an anchor, slows the tectonics, the shiftings."
He tries to understand out what she means. Something holds the pieces of the world she sees in place. He tries to figure out what it is. In the deals he put together economic logic, rationality, in her world...."
"Have you found something you like?" she asks, interrupting his thought.
He holds up the two drawings he has selected. The two furthest apart, the two most distinct, the gap between them bridged by drawings done or yet to come.
She puts down her brush and walks over, looks at them, then at him. She says an amount, a price. It is barely more than the cost of a pad.
"Are you sure?" he asks.
She repeats the sum. He takes out a checkbook and fills it in.
"Let me put them in something so you don't smudge them." She looks around but there is nothing big enough to hold them. "Wait," she says, walks to the back and reaches inside a drawer in the cabinet and pulls out a large sheet of drawing paper which she folds and tapes. He notices that there is a nearly complete drawing on the paper. Put in a folder itself it would be worth as much as the drawings he has paid for.
"I hope you like the drawings," she says as she walks him to the door. He wants to say something but can think of anything more to say.
As he steps out he hears the door close behind him and as he swings onto the sidewalk he raises himself on his toes and peers through spaces of the paper sheets covering the window and sees her walk back to the easel and pick up her brush again.
When he gets home with the drawings he pins them up on a wall in the unfinished half of the loft and scrutinizes them, section by section. They present him an archeology, a set of layers, his eyes have to traverse inch by inch. He senses what was put on first and what added or subtracted later, he can feel what is at the bottom, the structure that was imposed on the paper in the first instant, in the first burst of movement, in the first stroke of pencil on paper.
After a while he becomes disoriented and stops looking and he gets up and calls his decorator and describes the paintings and the drawings he has bought and she suggests a motif, a thematic pattern for the frames, one that fits in with feel she has imposed on the rest of the loft. The frames will cost four times as much as the art they hold but her judgment is impeccable and they will make them more accessible, bend them to him.
He spends the afternoon shifting between work he has brought home and glancing at the drawings and by the time he goes to bed he is furious at himself for the massive illogic and irrationality of his attention, his attraction to the artist and her work, and he can diminish his fury only by resolving to let at least a week go by before he calls her again, but lying in bed, calmed by his resolution, the idea creeps into his head, that he has seen her face in one of Hiroshege's prints, in one of the 100 Views of Edo.
He drifts off to sleep but he is pummeled awake in the middle of the night by some pressure in him he can not localize. He gets up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but he drifts into the semi darkness of the unfinished part of the loft, to look at the drawings again and he can only convince part of him to go back to sleep by resolving to revisit the museum that has the Hiroshege show and hunt down her face.
He returns to bed but he wakes up once again, thinking about the artist and realizes in a panic he does not remember her name. He goes and looks at the drawings again but can not decipher the signature so he hunts up the brochure he carried home from the opening and says her name, Miti Brower, silently to himself a few times. The sleep that greets the morning is filled dreams of Moltopuente, the surf hissing her name.
Work that day is no help at all. The waiting period during which the project he has recommended is being considered, which he usually looks forward to and fills with mundane, time killing activities, leaves him weightless, so that his thoughts constantly drift back to her.
He occupies the morning at work calling travel agents and asking them to send him brochures of resorts, in Switzerland, in the Carribean, places not so isolated, not so exotic as Moltopuente, but the afternoon presents him with a gaping hole he can only fill by breaking his resolution and calling her.
She seems to recognize his voice and asks after a silence, "how do you like the drawings?"
"I would like to come over and look at a painting, perhaps. When would..."
"Anytime," she interrupts, "anytime."
He has anticipated the response and taken the afternoon off giving his secretary a set of explicit messages to give to anyone who calls.
She opens the storefront door and retreats to the easel, leaving him to close the door and find his own way to the chair that seems set out to receive him. He looks for some acknowledgment of even a fragile relationship but the most she gives him to hang onto is a weak smile before she loses herself in her painting.
He sits and watches for a while. "The paintings I have in the studio are over there," she says pointing to a rack toward the back of the studio.
He gets up and goes to the rack. He shifts the paintings leaning each one forward, selects one and pulls it off the rack but puts it back after he looks at it a moment. After examining a few more he returns to his first choice and leans it against the wall. It is a two foot by three foot rectangle, easily walked back to his loft. He goes back to the chair and waits.
He realizes that what was true of her drawings is true of the paintings also. There is one painting, a elaborated, colored version of the drawing, only one, all of the rest are variations and, he thinks, like the drawings, a search for a second one, an exploration of space to find another resting point. He realizes the original painting, the ur paintings, the painting of which all of her paintings are variations is lost in time, probably a canvas repainted, hopelessly lost or perhaps never painted at all, imagined only.
As he is examining the painting she moves away from the easel and comes over to him.
"Do you like it?" she asks.
"I do. It is very much you, your style. Would you like to go to lunch?" he says, twisting mid sentence, "to eat something." It is an awkward transition, but he tries to make it natural. The paintings have distracted him.
"I think about them a lot," she says.
"Them?" he repeats.
"My paintings. I never have any idea about what they mean. They are insatiable," she says, "insatiable. They're always ready to devour...."
"You seem to complete them in a single burst," he says quietly, uncertain whether the observation is too private, too soon, and she would take it as a criticism.
"They are never finished," she replies, "at least I have never been able to finish them. Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where shall we eat?" she asks as she gets up and puts down her brush.
"It does not matter to me."
"The coffee shop," she says and he nods.
Hamburgers and salad and coffee and ice cream. He tracks what she eats as if he is preparing a biography. Crumbs on her hands and forearms. Details. How she sets the hamburger down readying herself for the next bite. She eats by sketching the food, then filling in the details, by drawing the food into her.
"You can come over when you want," she says abruptly, as they are walking out of the coffee shop. "You don't have to call."
She has opened a door, he thinks. He wants to acknowledge it but resists, thinking that calling attention to it may make it appear to her more than she intended. He nods accepting the gift.
"Anytime," she says, "anytime."
After that he comes over to the studio without calling, without asking or getting permission and sits and watches her paint.
He rearranges his work schedule so that he has two afternoons a week free, and skips lunch other days so that he can leave in the middle of the afternoon. If he gets to the storefront before two, they go to lunch.
A vacation at an exotic resort. She paints for two hours before she wants to eat something. He raises the possibility casually as they are moving out the door. It pops out of him, eludes the logic net that vets his impulses.
"I know this resort," he begins, "Moltopuente, hung between coral reefs on an island off the coast of Mexico. Very isolated." He mentions Pirates Point and she has no idea of what he is talking about. Not even when he throws in Cap Juluca or Little Dix Bay or Caneel Bay or Mauna Key He improvises the possibilities. "Ship the easel and paints... You could paint on the beach." He almost suggests that she might find her second painting there but catches himself.
She dismisses the vacation idea. "I've never painted well outside of my studio, my space. It wasn't always here, this storefront, but its was always a place I lived in somewhere. She is like him, a person of habits.
He abandons resorts, abandons Moltopuente, leaves them rustling, vibrating, ocean breezes humming through their trees. They have no trouble talking, no problem filling the time with words. They build conversations about what is immediately around them while they are talking. He is amazed that they have hour long conversations about the tables in the coffee shop, the silverware, the textures, the tiles, people, food, about what they talk about when they are eating. It amazes him. Their time together fills him up.
He is in love, a slippery, unbalanced love held in a force field, neither inching forward nor sliding back, a love in stasis, and he worries that, if he can not pull her towards him, if he can not get any traction, any hold on her enough to draw her closer, if she does not move towards him, the stresses will split it, crack it in pieces.
One afternoon, she finally diminishes the asymmetry, moving herself, by asking to see how he has framed and hung the drawings he carried home from her studio. "The paintings are big enough to take care of themselves," she says. "But the drawings. I would like to see how you are taking care of the drawings." He scrutinizes the request for a hidden motive, a desire perhaps to move closer to him but he sees only an unnatural literalness, a desire to see what he has done with her drawings.
She confesses to him later when she has moved into the loft, when they are living together, when they are curled up on the couch watching a the movie about Van Gogh, that she believes her drawings change when someone buys them and takes them out of the storefront or out of the gallery, wherever she had put them, that they change when she loses touch with them. "I know it's crazy," she says, laughing, "but I can't help it."
He has a loft in Soho, one of the bounties of making enormous amounts of money, a loft in one of the older buildings, an artists co-op. He has chosen the building as opposed to one of the newer, upscaled co-ops because the other residents were artists, or ersatz artists who had lived in the area a long time and had few pretensions and archaic building rules which were carried over from when lofts were furnished from dumpsters and they still made draperies and finished leather in the street floors of buildings which were now salons and botiques. Only artists were permitted to live in the building.
To get it, he hires an
artist he has met to produce a set of paintings he can claim as his own, swears
to a sort of artists oath, telling the co-op board that he is working as an
analyst in a banking firm only to make enough money so that he can paint full
time and promises that he will apply to the city office of cultural affairs for
artists certification.
The building rules express a mentality that has been squashed by Ralph Lauren and Avida and Restoration Hardware, but it gives the co-op a character; an annoyance, but it gets him the space on the top floor with a half completed skylight and sun in the morning and evening and no noise from anyone above him and no noise from the street, seven floors down.
He spends half of a years bonus to buy the loft and hires a decorator but, as she is working out a scheme for the loft, the chance comes up to buy an IPO of a dot.com company that he is told will quadruple in price in two months. He talks the decorator into redoing only half of the loft and leaving the other half in its original state until the next bonus which he promises her will be larger.
She resists doing half the job at first then gives in, finding something to be enthusiastic about. "You'll be like the pioneers," she tells him. "Soho before it was Soho." He has no idea what she is talking about. "The artists who first moved into Soho," she explains. "They never had enough money to fix up a whole loft. They overhauled them incrementally, in pieces. They usually had to make a choice. Ceiling or floor. You'd be surprised how many of them fixed the floor first. A mistake," she said. "Ceiling first, always decorative first, essentials second. You somehow always find enough money later for essentials. Sometimes you find a place with the ceilings still in the original condition, tin tiles," she adds. "It's a shame whoever fixed up this loft had a little money."
The loft ends up with a split personality, half completely decorated, Soho modern, half barely worked on raw space, whitewashed, the windows replaced, a bare room or two added, but much in the state that the owner who moved to Hawaii, left it. It did not bother him. He ignored the unfinished part and lived entirely in the finished space.
The loft impresses her. Not the decorative scheme, not the paintings or drawings, not even her own, elegantly framed and holding the center place among his collection, but the raw space. It harvests light from the space around it, she says, caresses it, smooths it, light in abundance, in excess, something her storefront lacks. He looks around the unfinished part of the loft, staring through the emptiness at the light, realizing that, until she mentioned it, he had not paid attention to the way the light packed the space. It is raw space, unfinished, undecorated, unreconstructed, an accounting accident, the result of a cash flow problem. The rest of the loft holds the same light, But he realizes that in the decorated half of the loft the light is merely an tool, subservient to the objects it illuminated, whereas in the raw space it itself is the ornamentation.
He watches her drift around the loft, pacing it, marking it silently as she traces and retraces paths through unfinished space. Her movements excite him, as if her motions are making a drawing or painting on the loft space itself. The lust boils up in him. He watches her for a while and thinks of putting a hand on her, touching her, anywhere there was exposed flesh. As he watches her move he fantasizes himself transported to Moltopuente, to the beach and suddenly gets a hard on of painful proportions.
The lust is inconvenient. Inappropriate, the wrong time, the wrong place. He believes that if he had come on to her in her studio she would have recognized what he wanted, what he needed. But here, now, it would only confuse her. If he pushed now, afterward she would make him call to come over to her storefront and gradually cut him off. He would lose everything had been patient about. He excuses himself and goes into bathroom and exercises his habits, masturbates as he does when lust intrudes on him between vacations.
His fantasy moves him and he is noisy. He imagines himself on the beach at Moltopuente. She is not there, instead he is there with the owner of the East Village gallery who handles her work, the woman he was chasing before he met her, whose hair fills with sand and whose ass picks up the impression of a shell, a few shells, as they roll around on the beach.
Relieved, he walks out to find her still stepping around the loft. Lust to love he thinks, lust to love he repeats to himself.
He offers her lunch and when she accepts, he calls out for take out from Balthazars. As they eat she looks around the loft.
"You did nice things with the drawings," she said. "They have not changed," she says. "The frames are delicious, they hold the drawings in place," she says, nibbling on what has been delivered for lunch, staring at the drawings and not paying attention to what she puts in her mouth.
"Don't you like it?" he asks.
"Most food is too rich for my blood," she says softly. "It's good," she says unenthusiastically. "Good."
He realizes her appetite for food is satisfied by the smallest, plainest shards of food but that her appetite for light and space is insatiable. As she eats, her eyes leap around the space, its curvature leave tracks across her eyes and the image of the space itself clings to her like a smear of paint. It holds out the first hope that there is something in his possession that he can use to draw her closer.
"I have to paint," she says, after they finish lunch. He lets her go reluctantly, taking her down in the elevator and walking beside her to her storefront. "I liked the loft," she says, softly as she sticks the key in the door. "The light." He sees a quadrant of the loft space hanging in her eyes. She has tucked it away, and is bringing it back to her studio. He wishes he could lend it all to her, let her carry home the entire volume of the space of the loft. She turns awkwardly toward him and kisses him lightly on the cheek. "The light," she repeats. It is not a kiss, it is interest on the loan of the light.
He holds her lightly and before he says goodby he invites her to the loft for lunch again, for the light again, but she puts him off. "The light is .... " She keeps him at a distance, not pushing him away but not letting him move closer and not moving closer to him. The loft has overwhelmed her. Her storefront her space competes with his space, his light. She will not subject herself to the pull of its gravity.
Circumstance and chance provides him the opportunity he and the loft can not create.
"The building's been sold," she tells him one afternoon as arrives at her storefront and settles into his chair.
"What building?"
She pushes out the story in one breath. "This building. The Spanish fundamentalist church down the block owned it. They sold it to a developer. He wants to upscale it. A boutique."
"A boutique, what?"
"He is going to put a boutique here. "
"How about your lease?"
"I don't have a lease. Commercial space, illegal to live in, a month to month thing. Two weeks." Everything comes out in a breathless rush.
He holds out the loft to her, offers her the use of the unfinished half of the loft as a studio.
She turns and looks at the easel in front of her and hesitates. "It's too much space," she says.
"You will fill it," he insists, certain she can.
She accepts by moving to the easel and picking up a brush. "In return..."
"It'll save me the walk," he jokes. "I can watch you paint from my favorite chair. We won't have to go out for coffee."
"I have to pay for the space, the light," she said.
In love, he thinks to himself, in vacations on the beach at Moltopuente.
"A drawing a week and every few months a painting," she offers, "in exchange for the studio space."
He hopes she will leave open up the possibility of living in the loft with him, as a roommate, but she explains, "I will paint in the loft and I can live with a friend. She has an extra room. I let her live with me when her boy friend kicked her out," she says. "I can live there and paint in the loft."
"Sounds fine," he says, trying to hide his disappointment. "Paint in the loft and live with your friend." He makes himself sound satisfied as gives her his set of keys.
"How will you get in?" she asks.
"I always carry another set," he says, lying. He will get one of his neighbors to let him in. But if she has the keys it will seem like the place is hers, it will fix the commitment.
When he comes home from work the next day she is in the loft, painting, at home in the space as if she had worked in it for a long time. As he walks towards her he feels the loft has already changed, flowed around her, taken her shape.
The sight of her painting, perturbs and flusters him. Without the trip to the storefront, without the physical transition to her space, her presence produces illusion that she is some natural part of his life, that some amnesia has swallowed some duration of collapsed time in which they had met, married, bought the loft and made a home.
He resists the urge to immediately rush closer to her, says hello nonchalantly, and forces himself to move away. As he opens the door of his study, he realizes, that the impatience that animated the pieces of his life has dried up, withered. He has become patient, like a lover of some infrequent event, a comet watcher filled with faith in celestial movements, a naturalist assured of the coming back of salmon of turtles. Lovers are all the same, he says to himself, whatever the object of desire, I have become a lover.
He busies himself, orders takeout, asks if she wants to share the meal and when she refuses, maintains an upbeat, indifferent buoyancy and says goodby to her without moving from his desk when she leaves. But when the door closes behind her, his body shrinks as if some electric field that had held it in place had been turned off. He resolves to hold onto his routines as much as possible, a support for patience, a defense against the quickened pace to which his desire for her pushes him.
The first week she is in the loft, she rewards his patience by starting to paint earlier in the day, while he is still in the loft, and he adjusts his work schedule so that he can spend more time with her in the morning, working through lunch so he can come home earlier and spend time with her before she leaves. And in some burst of inspiration, he begins cooking, snacks at first, then after a few quick lessons from a colleague, and some time watching cooking shows on television, dinner. He begins to invite her to stay for supper, casually, as if eating together were inconsequential.
She alters the space she occupies slowly. He comes home one day to find she has taped plastic over a couple of the windows in the studio area, plastic that diffuses the light and impedes it's rush through the loft.
"The light. I thought I could slow it down," she said. "Is it OK?" she asks.
"Of course," he replies. "If you prefer it this way."
"It softens the light, slows it down," she repeats. He watches her put a few strokes of color on the painting she is working on and notices how the light seemed to cling to her. She is taming it, he thinks.
Watching her paint, he tries to think of ways to expand her repertoire of needs, so there are more of them that he can satisfy, but he can not find an instrument to multiply them. He puts time and patience to work for him. He picks up a hint from something she mentions in passing about watching videos at her friends and he gets a card at the local Blockbusters. He pieces together what are her favorite movies from her descriptions of scenes she remembers and rents them, turning the vcr after he is sure she is done painting, while she is washing brushes. The images dancing on half of a wall of the projection tv hold her a little longer in the loft than she would have stayed when the light is extinguished.
One day, frustrated and exhausted from working and reworking minute details of one of the sections of a painting she has worked on for weeks, barely changing anything she asks him if he knows some place nearby that is different, foreign. He suggests that they walk to the river.
"What river?" she asks.
"The Hudson."
"Are we close to it?"
He insists she put on a jacket and he takes her the five blocks up Spring street to the river.
"A river," she says as they nose up Spring Street. "What is a river doing here, so close to the loft, to Soho. Is it a real river? she asks suspiciously. "I never knew there was water so close," she says, "a river, so close." The sun playing off the surface of the water intrigues her, and just as he stretches out on a bench on the pier, she insists they go home and when they get there she begins reworking the section of the painting she has been struggling with. The river has provided her what she needs and after that, whenever she hits some dead end, they walk to the river which she greets each time with the same incredulity. "I can't believe it is here."
As the weeks go by he compliments himself on his patience and feels completely repaid when, one day, after she paints late she falls asleep on the fluffy overstuffed chair she rests in while she evaluates what she had painted or drawn. He covers her and sits and watches her sleep before he crawls into bed and spends hours lingering in fantasies he can not get rid of before he suddenly passes out.
He gets up to coffee and bowls of the sugar cereal she munches on which she was painting.
"I fell asleep last night on the chair."
"I know," he say. "The blanket."
"Oh," she said, "I wondered. Thank you."
That night, painting late again, she falls asleep again on the chair. He takes her exhaustion as her way of moving closer, exploring a vulnerability, a testing, but he is surprised when he comes home the next day and there are three cardboard boxes next to the easel. "My friend's boyfriend is moving in to her place," she tells him. "I brought my stuff over." She looks through the light at him.
"No problem," he says, "fine. Fine," he repeats. He tries to draw his face into a neutral acceptance, but has to excuse himself and go into the bathroom for a moment because he thinks his face reveals to much of the pleasure he is feeling. Patience, rewarded, he celebrates, now more patience, now more than ever, patience.
"I'll sleep on the floor," she says when he comes out. "I'm used to it. There's an air mattress in one of the boxes. Tomorrow I'll buy a cot. It's what I slept on in the my old studio, in the storefront."
"It's silly to sleep on the floor when there's a perfectly good couch that no one is going to use tonight," he says, and insists on pushing the couch into the studio.
That evening he goes to bed while she is still painting but can not fall asleep. He remains motionless, listening to the sounds of oil being smeared on canvas, then cleaning up noises. He listens as she does something that makes ambigous sounds, then hears the sounds of clothing being shed. He hears the couch creak as she lays down and creak again as she gets up and he hears the bedroom door being opened and follows the sound of her footsteps until they end in front of the bed on which he is stretched out not moving, pretending to sleep. She slips into the bed like a stoke of paint she put on canvas he feels her find his body in the darkness and curl around him.
She is his reward for patience. He turns to her, brushing back her hair. The smell of turpentine is strong and, like an exotic perfume, it arouses him. In the silences of hands over bodies he moves into her as if he is moving into one of her paintings, slipping into a space he has known for a long time, lived in for a long time. He takes on the coloration of the painting she has been working on each afternoon for two weeks, that has not changed since she began it. His movements follow the path of the lines, his emotions its tints and shades. They come as the completion of an image, finished, done in a stroke that began it.
When it is over the transformation is complete. They say nothing, only rest in the silence. Afterward he tells her he loves her and she kisses him. Lust into love, he thinks before he drops off to sleep, holding her gently, frog into prince, lust into love. He has received his reward for waiting, for patience, but he dreams of Moltopuente,
Both of them adjust to the changed topography of living together. He takes his place and makes the transition instantly because it is something he has looked forward to for a long time. For her it is a little more difficult. He can feel her resistance to letting him move all the way into her life, She allots him a cramped space, smaller than his love for her.
The time they spend together walking to the river, watching old movies, talking, having sex is satisfying, complete. But the distance she keeps between them is larger than he felt during almost all of his two week vacations on Moltopuente with women he did not know, did not love. He accepts it as a fact of life as he accepts the fact that space curves differently for them, that when they are sitting together the distance between them is asymmetric, that he is always closer to her than she is to him.
He disciplines himself so that he does not push, is not intrusive. He thinks that she must still feel she is a roommate, still a boarder in his place, he tries to turn the loft upside down, make the decorated half an extension of her studio instead of the other way around, The unfinished part of the loft, her studio, becomes the inhabited part of the loft.
Some parts of loving are foreign to him, foreign to logic, foreign to rationality. Curling up for hours together, bodies entwined on the couch, requires an excuse. The tapes rented from Blockbusters provide a rationale, makes the curling sensible, reasonable, but the videos make the space that exists between them visible because the same film always appears on two different screens, at two different angles.
"I don't understand. Why did he force her to go?" she aks.
"He loved her very much. For her sake."
"Why, she wanted to be with him."
"He knew that she was important to her husband, to his work, He knows that she would regret leaving him. Not then but later. That she would hate him for having let her choose love."
"Her husband's work."
"Saving the world from Fascism. "
"Fascism?"
"Germany, the Second World War. "
"Oh," she says, "Oh. Did you see how her dress moved how the fabric shifts over her body, the pattern that appears when she lifts her body up.
"I didn't notice," he admits.
He discovers the ability to abandon habits, squash routines to accommodate her presence. He works her in, incorporates her into those habits that stay. Falling asleep next to her, after they make love, the smell of turpentine and linseed oil on her body like a bath oil, he starts to dream again of Moltopuente, of being on the island with her. He dreams each night for two weeks of vacationing on the island.
"I don't love you the way you love me she says one day," her brush lingering over some plate of color on her canvas, "or as much." As if she has to say it, he thinks to himself. It is a certainty, obvious and clear on the street to strangers. He knew it.
"Enough," he replies. "Enough."
He looks for some reason for the confession but can not find it. Love's mystery, lust's conundrum he repeats to himself. He thinks about asking her to marry him. He prepares himself, rehearses a speech. It made sense, he would tell her. She was living with him. They never fought. If the quantity of love was imbalanced, well, he can carry more than his share of the load. Why not. It would make tax sense, financial sense and she would have a permanent studio, her own space, He convinces himself easily but calculates she has not moved close enough yet to tolerate a proposal. It would pass through her and come out and impose itself on her painting, her single painting, and would frighten her. He holds himself back out of fear.
He calms himself by saying she is moving closer, slowly. He can wait. He reaches out and wraps patience around him. Patience again, more patience. One of the things that makes him confident she will move even closer if he remains patient is that she starts to write him letters. The first one startles him. On his desk at work, in a pile of business correspondence, unopened, is a letter marked personal in a handwriting he does not recognize. When he opens he finds a letter from her, a single sheet of paper, a nearly empty page, with one sentence in the middle, saying 'I love you, I miss you. Hurry home tonight.' The letters become an anchor of his day.
He would leave her, already painting early in the morning, and come into his office and, unopened on his desk, in the middle of memos and packets of documents laid out for him in a neat pile, she would be waiting for him, an envelop, the address often painted on, marked personal, inside a single sheet of paper, 'I love you,'scrawled on it, sometimes a drawing. The drawing, if there was one, was usually a sketch of him, doing something he could remember having done the day before.
Letters and drawings almost every day, as if she wanted to keep in touch when they were separated even by the space of work, by mere minutes and hours. He tells himself they are her way of moving closer to him, that the accumulation of letters filled in the soft marshland that existed between them, and each week he put a rubber band around them and brought them home and put them in the middle drawer of his desk, even though, except for the date, each one was almost the same.
She sends them also when he is away on a business trip. She would write down the address of the hotel he was going to stay at and often, when he got to the hotel, a letter and usually a drawing from her was waiting
After one of his trips where three days of her letters are directed to a different hotel with a similar name because she wrote the name of the hotel with paint that smudged in the mail, he teaches her how to use the computer in his study and send email.
In return for the letters and emails and drawings, he brings things home to her. He hunts out special pigments from Germany, from Italy, hand made papers, from France, brushes, something she can use, not clothing or jewelry to which she was indifferent, but something that she could paint with, something that will make a difference to her.
For a few months, he is able to coast at work, avoiding having invest the real energy it takes to find the culls, the fluttering weak among the flock of corporations, because, months earlier, he has tucked aside two fat lazy hens of companies for a day when he needed a sure vacation, two slow moving, weak winged, simple, easy targets. He pulls out their fat folders and sends one of them out, up. He uses the energy he saves to watch her paint.
The committee that runs him accepts his recommendations and goes through the mechanics to set the deal up. He relaxes at work but one day a raspy voice on the telephone tells him that the deal is tottering, that the resistance is fierce. They inform him he must go to Mexico City, in a week, to batter the balky Mexican owners of the company, with gringo rationality.
That evening, when he comes home, he casually raises the possibility of a vacation somewhere. Mexico perhaps. He has to go there, he says offhandedly, in a week. A big deal is wobbling. He has to prop it up. She can come with him. They could vacation at Puerto Vallarta or fly somewhere, perhaps an island he knows, Moltopuente. He slides over the name quickly, focusing on the idea of a vacation.
She puts him off with a phrase. tells him that they can vacation here. Her voice caresses her studio, his, their loft now. "I'll paint us an island, your island," she tells him. "We can vacation on it whenever you want to. A painted island, in Soho, in the loft. I'll paint it and we can vacation on it, live on it, weekdays, holidays, anytime. Can you describe it to me?" she asks.
"Can I describe what?"
"The island, the place you would like to go to for a vacation. If you can describe it to me, I can paint it," she says.
She had lived in her storefront in the East Village when she had a storefront, now she lived in a loft in Soho. It was more or less the same. She could paint him an island and they could live on a beach, on Molotpuente, in Soho.
He can describe it, any piece of it, details of the dampened skins of the lizards that rush around as the sun come up shaking off the early morning heat, the ambiguous odors of the flowers whose leaves hang out like tongues of rainbow colored dogs but he begins with the blue film of the sea strung out between strands of beaches.
He pushes the idea of a vacation at Moltopuente away, but he describes the island and the beach to her, throwing out as many details as he can remember, leaving out only the women who disappear around every corner of every description.
He comes home the day after she offers to paint him a vacation and she brings him to a wall in her studio in the unfinished half of the loft. It is covered with a Ralph Lauren sheet.
She is nearly giddy, filled with details. "I was thinking of buying a large canvas, hanging it on the wall, and I almost walked to Pearl but then I thought, why not the wall itself. Why not?"
He could tell her why not. The decorator would not like it. It was too primitive, too much like the Soho where people painted on walls and graffiti was everywhere, and all of the lofts looked like the unfinished half of the loft, the Soho that had been
reconstructed, re-invented by cosmopolitans who imported from Chelsea art, they bought with bonuses.
"I looked at the wall," she continued. "It's large enough, so we wouldn't have to buy four yards of canvas and poke holes into the wall to hang it so I just gessoed the wall and started painting." He looks at the taped up designer sheet, covering half of the wall.
"Let me see," he says, when she stops talking.
"No, not until its finished. Promise you won't peek or try to look until its finished. Promise." She clings to him until he promises and he wonders what she would have done if he hadn't promised.
It takes a week. Each day when he comes home she pours out details. She is exploring the island. "I had trouble with the Iguanas or lizards whatever they are. You made it sound like they were all over but I kept them in the shadows. Do they live in the shadows? On trees? Can you describe the trees, the leaves. And the ocean. Blue, 'the bluest blue,' does not distinguish between ultramarine or cerulean, and I thought I might pick the wrong blue but I went to the library and got a picture book of pacific islands and I used to help my imagination."
He decides that whatever the painting ends up looking like he will live with it. He can imagine it is another island, a different one, not Moltopuente, something further to the East on which there was simply an ordinary hotel not a rich man's resort, its beauty camouflaged by clever architecture – someone else's vacation spot just not his.
He hopes that after she paints it and lives on it for a while, she may agree to a vacation on the real island just to see it, just to authenticate her painting, an island with real sand, not sienna dots, not pigments and imagination but a blue that is impossible to duplicate.
After the painting has expanded and the sheet does not cover all of it, she makes him promise not to look at the wall, at the part of the painting the sheet will not cover.
"You can't look," she said. "Promise."
"I promise," he said.
A promise, a real promise, no fingers crossed, knit against the binding of it. "I promise," he repeats. He satisfies himself with waiting. Love into patience, love into waiting, he tells himself, waiting, patience into love.
He knows it is almost finished when she appears in shorts and a halter looking like a 1940's movie star. A little pail and a shovel rests by the easel. She's practicing, he says to himself, getting herself ready.
She crawls into bed that evening exhausted. "It's finished," she say. "I'm ready for a vacation."
"Where...?" he asks tentatively.
"Where did I get the shorts and the pail and shovel? I had them in one of the boxes." Not the question he had in mind.
"Tommorrow," she tells him as he holds her before they drift off to sleep, "tomorrow, we will take our vacation."
He calls in the next morning saying he is feeling sick and is going to an acupuncturist, the treatment of the moment at the office, the current choice for the cure of illnesses not quite real enough to require a doctor or medical insurance. He is anxious, anxious whether he will be able to stretch his imagination to cover her distortion of the island so that his reaction with not disappoint her.
anxious that his reaction would disappoint her.
"We should do something special the first day of our vacation," she suggests when she wakes him up. "Order us a lunch from wherever you get lunch and we'll spread a blanket on the floor of the studio and afterward..."
Afterward.
He has brunch sent up from a Tribeca sea food house and an expensive wine from the Soho wine store.
"A vacation," she says, we are going on a vacation on an island. There's a part of me that always wanted one," she confesses, adding ambiguously, "but I was afraid of losing my place." She lays out a blanket in front of the covered wall and makes him walk into her studio with his eyes closed, helping him negotiate the easel and boxes of paints. He hears her undressing, shedding the shorts and halter, then climbing the ladder. He hears the sheet fall and her get down and move next to him on the blanket.
"Open your eyes," she commands. She is naked, standing in front of the beach on an island.
He is overwhelmed. It is perfect. He has not realized how technically competent she is. She has captured his dream, his desires, his vacations. He is sorry he has not been more careful about details because she filled in his description perfectly. She has reached out with her imagination and grasped his. She has painted an island. Not just an island, his island. Moltopuente. Working with the colors and shapes of his desire,
she has used her art to make his illusion visible.
After he surveys the island, he searches the wall for her painting, her one painting, but he can not find it. Only as he inspects the entire landscape does her painting appear, transformed, confined in a corner close to the where the blanket is, outside of main panorama of the island, in details of things that had washed up on the beach.
The wall is perfect. Only the light in the loft distorts it, gave it a surreal air. In the longitude and latitude of Soho, the light slices across the breeze in the wrong direction, from a wrong angle, pushing into the ocean. He dismisses the distortion, twisting himself so that the motion of light appears correct, appears in Soho perspective and he closes his eyes and lets himself go, lets himself drift off, listening to the light as it makes the sound of the sea.
As he floats off he feels her lift herself onto the island, into the picture she has painted, into his fantasy, into his Moltopuente. He feels her respond to the slanted shadows of the island, to the gritty sand.
Firmly lodged on the island they eat. There are no hotel employees they can call on. They serve themselves. Afterwards, in the midst of the leavings of the meal they make love.
The surf takes imagination but he watches her turn on the blanket and realizes she is on the island she has created. She is taking a vacation. He thinks of stretching the hour into two weeks, into two years, two years decades. They rest, listening to the surf hanging in the Soho silence then they make love again and he imagines grains of sand in her hair.
"It's going to rain," she says, after a while.
"How can it?" he asks. "It's painted, bright."
"It's going to rain," she insists. Then he hears the thunder and the room suddenly darkens and it rains, a New York thunderstorm, The island snuggled in the loft is warm and dry, but on Spring street it is blustery and wet. "I think we should dress and go into the living room," she says.
He goes to work the next day reluctantly, lingering in front of the painted wall. He pulls away from the real island, his dreams, into the island on the wall then wrenches himself away from the painted island, away from its light, to plunge into the dull colored Soho brightness, and spends the day pressed under the artificial, flourescent bulbs of his office, distracted, killing time until he can go back again, walk over the ocean, return to his island, but when he gets home, taking a cab instead of walking, he finds her folded on the couch in her studio, like a gift box that has been carefully collapsed and given its original flat form.
Distracted, hovering, she does not hear him come in but when she sees him she starts crying.
"What?" he asks, but she sobs uncontrollably, giant heaving sobs that he thinks will snap something in her body. When she quiets down she will say only that she does not want to talk about it, whatever the it is. He tries for a while to encourage her to talk, say anything, but gives up, hoping she will confide in him at dinner, but she sits at the table holding her fork in her fist elbows spread wide on the table like a construction crane, maneuvering for support, and does not eat. "I'm not hungry," she says in a tremulous voice, "I only want to sleep." She gets up and drifts into her studio, leaving him perplexed and worried.
He thinks that painting the island may have worn her out. The next day he tells her he is taking off from work but she insists he go in. "I've already sent the letter," she says, "and it had today's date on it." He recognizes it is a weak excuse but it communicates her desire to be alone and he heads off to work.
Without calling, he comes home during his lunch hour. She is curled up on the chair in her studio staring. It is obvious she has been crying but she produces a show of enthusiasm and he watches her force herself to eat what he has stopped at Balthazars to bring home for lunch.
The painting she has been working on sits on the easel awkwardly. She does not look at it, eats turned away from it. It shocks him. The lines lack their customary barbs, curl suddenly in knots. Colors, usually confined to well defined blotches, spill out uncontrollably. It does not look like her painting, not the one painting she explores repeatedly. And it does not look to him like the new painting she is searching for. It is disorganized, confused, alien.
She pushes him out the door again after lunch is over. At supper she eats to maintain the illusion that she is hungry but takes a long chewing and swallowing, and after a choking episode where she seems to misplace the food in her throat, she tells him that she wants to go to bed early, sleep in the studio, on the couch. His protests that the couch is uncomfortable to sleep in and the lack of a good nights sleep will only make things worse, but she shrugs him off and he busies himself cleaning up until he hears her settle in.
At breakfast the next day, he insists she see a doctor. "You can't tell what it might be," he says to her. "West Nile is back. Something from Asia. It doesn't make sense not to check it out." He will not hear her excuses and calls a friend, his doctor, and strong arms an appointment for her in the morning, asking to be called afterward to get a report.
"I don't have insurance," she complains.
"Don't worry about it," he says, vaguely hurt. "He owes me. I've given him enough stock tips over the years. He owes me bigtime." he repeats, "don't think about it. But if we were married," he says, "it wouldn't be a matter of favors." It is the first time he has spoken of marriage. He makes his way back to his office completely distracted.
He sits through a meeting called to discuss the Mexican deal and tries to concentrate on details but they come and go like flies, resting a moment and then lifting off and disappear. He comes away with the sense that the deal is floundering badly and that the resistance is stronger than anyone expected. The vice president managing the closing tells him brusquely, "when you get there the day after tomorrow, you'll have about three days to pull it together, otherwise it's down the tubes." In the afternoon the doctor calls him at the office and tells him nothing is wrong. "She's exhausted, other than that, nerves. She's fine. Not pregnant, no West Nile, nothing from Asia. Nothing but some worry she would not talk about. She needs a vacation. I've prescribed some tranquilizers but I don't think she'll take them." The doctors voice is calming, assuring. "Any recommendations?" the medical voice asks. "Nothing looks hot now, thanks" he replies and hangs up, tells his secretary he does not feel well and is going home.
He leaves the office relieved, but comes home to disorder. Tubes of paints, usually arranged neatly in rows on the table next to the easel are scattered on the floor. The easel is tilted at an angle, barely holding the canvas. She is sunken in on the chair, silent.
He straightens the easel and picks up the tubes of paints and puts them on the table. "What can I do? he asks, "how can I help. Let me help."
She does not encourage him. "I'll get over it. I have to. I'm sure I will. When you get back, when you get back it'll be over, perhaps..."
The center of things is falling apart. The Mexican deal he thought would be a piece of cake was unraveling, not a matter of the pro forma resistance but some irrational Latin refusal that was imploding the negotiations. Here, in the loft, something was happening, something that was pulling her away from him, shriveling their connection and she would not or could not tell him what.
"I'm going to cancel the trip," he says to her, "tell them to get someone else."
"No," she insists. "You said it was important. I'll be fine, I'll work myself out of it."
"Out of what," he asks.
"Go to Mexico," she answers, "I'll be fine."
They eat in a wordless quiet for the first time since she had moved in.
"What's the matter?" he asks. "Tell me." It comes out as a demand. " Tell me. Let me in." This time it is a plea.
"Nothing," she insists. "Nothing is the matter. Only..." and she starts crying again and sinks back slowly into silence again. After dinner when their bodies are curled up as they are watching a movie he asks her again.
She avoids crying by wailing, thick wet words .
"The painting." He thinks she means the painting of the island.
"The island?"
"No, the painting I am working on. Its not my painting. It different, changing."
He waits. When she says nothing he asks what she means.
"My paintings are changing. I'm not doing anything different. They are just coming out different. I don't know I...".
"People change," he says. "Artists grow, their style changes as they mature. That's what's happening," he says. "You develop, lust into love," he say out loud for the first time. He wants to calm her, down reassure her. "Whatever you are painting is you." She has been looking a new painting for a long time and now she has found it, or was finding it. It was a cause to celebrate not to fall apart.
"I don't want them to change," she said. "My paintings...."
"Sometimes you don't have a choice," he says, "you change and they change. How have they changed?" he asks.
"I'm don't know. The lines are bluring, softening, the colors don''t hang on them the way they did. Different. I can't tell exactly. I don't know why."
She gets up suddenly, drags him into the studio, and points at the canvas on the easel.
"I don't see... "He lies.
"There," she say, pointing at the canvas, moving her hands wildly.
"I don't see," he repeats, before she bursts out crying again.
He tries to calm her down. "Natural, change is natural. Growth is natural, exciting not harmful." He urges patience on her. "Wait it out, see where it goes. What your paint is still you," he insists.
"No, its not," she replies adamantly, "it's..." She can not bring herself to say it's someone else's painting, a stranger's paintings, she can not bring herself to say what he hears in her voice, that something foreign and alien had crept into her painting, that the loft was to blame, Soho was to blame, the light was to blame, that Moltopuente was to blame, that he was to blame.
He wants to tell her about his change, the change of impatient logic and rationality to something else, into a gentle irrationality, into love he supposed, but he was afraid it would just make her more anxious.
He knows that for her it is different . She has fallen in love with the loft, with the light with him, with Moltotpuente. She is changing and her paintings are changing. She was winning her struggle for a second painting only it was not the second painting she had anticipated. Motopuente, somewhere else, some other images, a different imagination. He closes down the part of the brain that is talking to him and holds her. He feels her fear. What she has to trade for something different is only her one painting in all its variety, and she is afraid to lose it.
He tries to hold onto her, hold onto her as she undresses, as they creep into bed, hold onto her in her silence, in the quiet, in the darkness. Only sleep makes him let go, loosens his grip.
When he gets up he starts packing but stops to watch her wake up. When she sits up in bed he tells her simply, "I'm going to cancel the trip. If they make to much of a fuss I can change firms. I've had nibbles. We can live on less."
"Don't," she insists. "I feel better. Don't, its important. You like what you are doing and where you are. I'll be fine."
He lets her talk him into finishing putting his gear into the suitcases. She kisses him good by and as he paces the length of the loft to the elevator she turns and goes tremblingly. into her studio.
He calls twice the first day he gets to Mexico City, twice the second day. On the third day he gets one letter from her. day, on the second two emails filled with trivia. On the third a letter without the lofts return address that holds a single sheet on which she has written "I love you." The fourth and fifth day he gets nothing, no letters no emails. And she stops answering the phone even though he calls repeatedly through the day, getting the message they had recorded that encouraged him to leave a message and one of them would get back to the caller quickly.
The absence of letters or emails drives him nearly insane and his impatience with irrational resistance, with the slowness of progress overwhelms him. He gives up rationality and logic and regresses to impatient, irrational brute force, shoving colleagues and clients to the solution toward which they are moving excruciatingly slowly. When they explode, It takes all of his skills to pull it together again, two days and most of his energy to salvage the meetings. When they are done he rushes home, through airports, through the air, to Soho, to her..
He bursts into the loft and the silence assaults him. She is gone. He half expects it. The absence of letters and email has telegraphed the disaster. She has taken the easel and her brushes and paints, leaving cans of solvents and rags, abandoned all that was not essential, whatever would not fit into three cardboard boxes, and fled.
He takes in its emptiness in a glance, a quick look, finds a chair and collapses into it. It is only later, as he wanders purposelessly through the loft, trying to finger her presence, that he see's she had painted over the island, covered it irretrievable with a coat of white paint, the light bouncing off of it, hurting his eyes not, the light from a painted pacific sun but the blank unvarying whiteness of discovery and rejection.
He spends the first week he is home trying to find her, calls the gallery owner who drops hints about a vacation before he interrupts to ask whether she knows anything about where the artist is.
She does not. Neither does the friend with whom she had lived before she moved in to the loft and the landlord of the building in which she had her storefront has only the loft as a forwarding address.,
He cycles though weeks of rage and depression, then the pain rises up and makes him buoyant and he floats and treads water for a while. He goes back to the museum in Brooklyn to see the Hiroshige exhibit again and decides it was not her on the bridge, that he had imposed her face on that of a middle aged Japanese woman making her way home over a river. The whole episode seems a package of irrationalities piled together and tied with craziness. Art was not enough to immunize anyone against life's craziness. Logic would have to do. Lust into love, love into pain and pain, given enough time and encouragement, would be transformed into logic and lust again.
He lets a week go by then calls the gallery owner who is surprised to hear from him but agrees to a lunch date to talk about art and vacations on exotic islands. The second call he makes quickly after he hangs up, is to the decorator to make arrangements to spend what he did not quite have yet, but which Mexico City had made certain enough, and finish the unfinished half of the loft. That decision made, he lays down on a blanket in front of the wall in the studio, now blindingly white and goes to sleep even though it is only 4 in the afternoon. An hour later he gets up and makes his way into the bedroom, falls asleep again and dreams the dreams which make his decision for him.
He wakes from his second sleep of the night refreshed and feeling light, with
a sense of anticipation. Lunch, alligator things, ridged things, things with definite lines, the real Moltopuente, not a painted simulacrum, a vacation. He buzzes the elevator up to his floor and rides down to the ground floor light headed pushing the door open easily and steps out into the street.
Off to the side of the entrance, squatting on refuse, surrounded by bags of garbage waiting to be collected, is the homeless man he has seen earlier sleeping in his box across the street. He has been rummaging through the bags of trash searching for something of value. Two blue bags ripped open, lie next to him. In one hand the bum holds the pale violet silk shirt, in the other he holds a letter, reading.
The scene becomes one of her paintings. The sun pulls itself over the building across the street, scraping itself on the watertower. Seven flights up, the light streams into the loft, but here, on the street, it is only a dilute grayness that coats objects and makes them look abstract and unreal. The bum's clothing is a film of dull, bleached colors drawn over not bones but over the barbed lines of her painting. The homeless man gorges himself on what she has left of herself, what he has thrown out.
He sees her crouching beside the bum sketching him, putting paint on him. She has run away and he has discarded what was left of her, thrown her out finally and this homeless man, tearing into the light blue plastic sacks had salvaged her, had brought her back. The bum's body shifts, changes. He is not homeless any more, he has moved into the loft, becoming the figure of someone at home, someone being communicated to, in love, alive as a painting, her one painting.
The pale violet shirt flickers, trembles. It is not clear what had startled the arm that held it, whether it was the noise of the door opening or a reflection off of the pane of glass, but the bum looks up, tightening his grip on the pink sheet of paper in his hand, suddenly distracted.
From the color of the paper he knows that it was a letter she had sent to him while he was away on one of his business trips, a paper the she had bought from Katies, a color she had used to write him once, then discarded. It promised the loving he had looked forward to. The homeless man has brought her back and inserted himself in the middle of their life, between them.
He takes two jerky steps towards the vagrant who looks up suddenly annoyed at being interrupted, no longer on the street, homeless, obsequiously asking for a handout. Reading the letter, clutching the violet shirt, he has found her, found a home, moved in, made himself comfortable, is comforting her for the loss of her painting, advising her to leave, to flee, to try to recover it.
Moltopuente, blended with the coat of gesso that obliterates it, blinds him. She has fled, is gone, but suddenly she is in her studio again, the homeless person next to her, leaning against the easel, whispering. He has thrown her away into transparent blue plastic bags, and the bum in front of him has pulled her back, is touching her, carrying her strokes, offering his body to accept a thin film of paint.
The rage rises up. He tries to run away from it but he can not find a direction to escape. It bubbles up in him, he is repelled by it, pushes it away but it surges up again stronger. He reaches for rationality, for logic but the place they usually occupy is filled with something wet and dark that swallows him.
He rushes at the homeless man. His foot cocks itself, surprising him. As the squatting figure jerks back, his foot shoots out, propels itself unaimed at the homeless man. He smells the rage of jealousy and disgust as if it is the a perfume from some dark island flower.
His shoe stretches out for the man face, but hits the bum on the shoulder jerking him to the side. The hand holding the shirt opens and the shirt flutters to the pavement but he holds onto the letter. He pushes his foot into the homeless man's bony shoulder. The homeless man collapses and his mouth responds to the kick. No sound comes out right away. "Garbage," he wheezes finally, "garbage, why?"
He does not know, has no inkling. The kick is unintelligible, the rage, irrational illogical. Emotion has not positioned him correctly As the blow rolls off of the homeless man's shoulder he finds himself off balance;. He tilts, tries to catch his balance, falls to one knee, shakes as he tries to pull himself up to quickly. He yanks himself up shakily and looks at the homeless man who seems frozen in his tilted position. The letter, falls from his hand and finds a place on the shirt on the sidewalk.
He thinks of a lawsuit and suddenly panics. If the homeless man decides to sue it is clear where he lives. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet and removes some of the bills and tosses them at the homeless man now breathing hard on the ground, see the man's eyes flutter and follow the bills spiral to the sidewalk. He watches as the bum struggles to lift himself, then he turns rapidly and runs in the direction he was facing, the opposite way to work.
Half a block away, he looks back and sees the homeless man gathering the bills. Blood money. Anti lawsuit money. Except for them the street is empty. There are no witnesses. He relaxes a little. Greed will a settle the case for a few dollars. there will be no lawsuit; only he worries tomorrow, having received a bounty, the homeless man may show up at his door, not demanding only beseeching, begging, waving a letter or a printed email at him.
As he walks to work, towards Wall street, the thought slips itself into his head, that she has not run far enough away, that he has not disposed of her, that she will follow him to his island, to Moltopuente, that no matter who he went with, she would be there rendering the scene, waiting for it to rain.