No.
At least he had his desk.
Of course Briony could not be compared to a decadent Weimar cabaret singer. On the other hand I knew I could accomplish whatever it took to destroy myself. I could imagine her staring at me in a kind of end-of-it-all sorrow as I did the Far West equivalent of a cock-a-doodle-doo dive off the mountaintop. As we sat to catch our, or rather my, breath, and drank our bottled water, I said to her, Briony, not many people could have persuaded me to climb up here.
But, Professor, it’s good and aren’t you glad you did? Don’t you feel happy? Because a climb like this gets the good brain hormones going.
I said: Please don’t call me Professor, call me Andrew. That’s what the other students call me, after all.
She smiled. OK, I will, then. Andrew. I don’t know what to make of you, Pro— I mean Andrew. I’ve never met anyone like you before.
Howso, I said.
I don’t know. I’m not bored with you. No, that isn’t the word, I’m not bored in my life, I’ve got too much to do to be bored—
That was true, she had her classes, her gymnastics, her cheerleading, she waited table in the faculty dining room and on weekends she put in hours at a local old people’s home.
— but your moodiness, she said, I don’t know, that’s so unusual, a powerful thing, almost like your way of life. And it’s such a personal way to be up in front of a class. It almost seems like a strength, like someone who has an affliction and is brave about it. When it’s just, I don’t know, a worldview that’s very solemn.
And I said: Briony, I think if we carry this as far as I’d like to, I will end up depressing you into marrying me.
Oh, how she laughed! And I with her. At that moment we were no longer teacher and student. She must have realized this because she grew quiet, not looking at me. She made a ceremonious thing of unscrewing her water bottle and holding it to her lips. I detected the faintest flush on her throat. [thinking]
Yes? You were saying?
No, I was just thinking. Suppose there was a computer network more powerful than anything we could imagine.
What’s this?
I remember trying this idea out on her. And never mind a network, just this one awesome computer, say. And because it was what it was, suppose it had the capacity to record and store the acts and thoughts and feelings of every living person on earth once around per millisecond of time. I mean, as if all of existence was data for this computer — as if it was a storehouse of all the deeds ever done, the thoughts ever thought, the feelings ever felt. And since the human brain contains memories, this computer would record these as well, and so be going back in time through the past even as it went forward with the present.
That is a tall order, even for a computer.
Not for this baby. Consider the possibility that there are things you don’t know, Doc.
I consider that every day.
I’ll tell you one thing you may not know: The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, a neuroscientist will tell you the same thing. And all we need is the right code to extract what the cell knows, what it remembers.
Sounds poetic.
I’m talking science here, I’m telling you my computer to end all computers that sucks up the mental and physical activities of every living thing — I mean, let’s throw in the animals too — necessarily then can go back in time and move into the past as readily as it moves along with the present. Do you give me that?
OK, Andrew.
So what that means, what that means …
Yes?
… that at least on the microgenetic level couldn’t there be the possibility of recomposing a whole person from these bits and pieces and genomic memories of lives past?
You don’t mean cloning.
No, dammit, I don’t mean cloning. We’re talking about how this computer could crack the code of every cell of every human brain and reconstitute the dead from their experiences. Isn’t that something like reincarnation? Maybe it wouldn’t be perfect, you couldn’t always see her, maybe if you reached out she would be just a shade of herself, but she would be a presence, and the love would be there.
Who are we speaking of now?
What possessed me to tell Briony all this? If this computer could come up with the code to read the makeup of our cells, in birth, in death, in the ashes of our cremation, in the rot of our coffins, and of course it could because of what it was, then we could recover our lost babies, our lost lovers, our lost selves, bring them back from the dead, reunite in a kind of heaven on earth. Do you see that?
Well, maybe on a speculative level …
But if you accept the premise the logic is sound, will you give me that?
I give you that.
But you still don’t know what this computer is, do you? Oh, Doc, if there was such a computer, it could do anything, finally. I mean, call it by its rightful name. And I could have my baby with Martha brought back. And I could have my Briony, and we would bring our baby home and we would be a family.
II
YOU ASKED ME to keep a diary or daybook. Writing is like talking to yourself, which I have been doing with you all along anyway, Doc. So what’s the difference. I’m writing from Down East: This morning it’s like the winter fog has frozen. To walk the fields is to feel yourself breasting the air, leaving behind you the sound of tinkling ice and a tubular indication of your form. But I need places like this. I am safe here. I mean, for all we know I put you in danger every time I walk into your office.
And now, later, the wind has come up and blows snow against my window and I must turn on the light. I have nothing to read here but the cabin owner’s complete works of Mark Twain, MT embossed on the cracked binding. How MT dealt with life was to make a point of explaining children to adults, and adults to children. Isn’t that so? Or to write of his neighbors with amused compassion. He went to ridiculous church for the sake of his wife. Invested in an unworkable Linotype machine. Hobnobbed with the Brahmins of Boston. Slyly skewered the self-satisfied gentlemen enjoying his after-dinner speeches. Noted the anointed barbarity of kings. But always, always, it was to wrap himself in society. To keep himself snugly within what Searle, a guy whose work I teach, calls “the construction of social reality.”
And just now, loud as a clap of thunder, a poor dumb gull riding the winds has bashed his head against the windowpane. I exchange looks with his glazed eye as he slides a smeared red funnel down the snow on my window.
Another day: I see through the fog the humped green heron, out there on the piling. All huddled into himself, a gloom bird, one of us.
Now, later, the sky turned cold and clear, the wind cuffing the seawater, and I imagine a warm swamp somewhere filled with the jumping frogs of Calaveras County. I mean, you read him and he does put one over. But for me the intemperate ghost of MT rises from his folksy childhood and rages at the imperial monster he has helped create.
I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense of his white hair and mustache and suit, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes. He despairs of the likelihood that the world is his illusion, that he is but a vagrant mind in a futile drift through eternity.