Well, forgive me. The news report struck close to home. But it’s impossible to dwell on such things when the sun is out and the beach is warm. Come visit. Perhaps your brother could take us to some concerts, and I could reserve a tee-off time at Pebble Beach. Say hi to Carol when you write.
Pamela drops by. The kids want to spend the weekend with some friends. Does he mind not seeing them? He had baked a pumpkin pie and bought three tickets to a basketball game, but he says, “No, it’s all right.”
She hesitates in his doorway, so he asks her if she’d like a glass of wine and some pie. She accepts.
“I’ve decided to have the operation,” she tells him. “Oh?”
“My doctor convinced me. And it’s not so bad. They can’t get all the tissue, but they can get enough to significantly reduce the chances.”
“But it’s not a hundred percent effective?”
“No.”
He dabs whipped cream onto her wedge of pie. “Well, if you’ve made up your mind.” “I’m scared, Sam.”
He sits opposite her with the spoon in his mouth.
“I’m told that for six to twelve weeks after the operation, the sensation in my breasts will be reduced. Some women never get full feeling back in their nippies, but most do.”
“Your breasts are lovely, Pam.”
She blushes and so does he.
Deidre was a burst of autumn as a baby, red hair, brown eyes, reaching for Pamela’s breast, or tumbling on the pink nursery floor, mouth open, waiting for the words to come. Toby, a beautiful mid-winter snowdrift, pale white skin, thick black eyebrows, blessing Adams with beatific smiles and pleas urable grunts. The range of color in a kid as he speeds toward your life and then away, leaving you wordless in the wake of the brilliant violet-to-red rainbow of the Doppler Shift.
Rosa cooks spaghetti Raphaeclass="underline" garlic, a thick tomato sauce, artichoke hearts.
“I talked your wife — ”
“Ex-wife.”
“Out of having that silly operation.” “Did you?”
“Actually, I shouldn’t take credit for it. She decided herself, but I was against it all along. Parmesan?”
“Thanks.”
“She’s a smart lady. A little naïve, but time’ll take care of that.”
“She’s nearly forty years old, Rosa. If she doesn’t know the ropes by now, she never will.”
Rosa shakes her head. “She lost fifteen years being married to you.”
“Now wait — ”
“I’m not criticizing you. But it’s true — you both figured it was her job or her desire or whatever to stay home with the clothes. It’s the way you were brought up. She has a lot of catching up to do outside the home and she’s sharp. Her heart’s in the right place. She’s committed to art and politics, but she expects too much from them, maybe … really thinks she can make a difference overnight, but she’ll learn. Already I can see her developing a sense of irony about herself. That’s good.”
“This Black Muslim kick you’re on — isn’t that a bit naive?
Rosa rolls her noodles with a fork, like a stockbroker reading ticker tape. “You’re too young to remember Henry Wallace, but in 1948 he ran for president against Harry Truman. He was vice president under Roosevelt until he got fired, sort of, for opposing the war.”
“I’ve heard Pam’s Uncle Otto talk about him.”
“Well, he became a one-man party and say what you will about him, I believe to this day if he’d been elected we’d have avoided Korea, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs — all that crap. I really do. But of course he didn’t have a chance — that’s what I was naïve about. Truman managed to slap the ‘communist’ label on him, and that buried him. So I been there already. I’ve had my hopes up. Frank, my late husband, and I flirted with the Communist party for a while but then we heard about the Stalinist purges. We couldn’t believe that these people, who we thought were going to guide us in establishing harmonious communities all over the world, could be capable of such horror. So I been to the dance and had my foot stepped on. I got the proper sense of irony about myself, but I’ve also got the desire to be active still. Pam just doesn’t know how hard it is yet — that’s her only fault. But she’s not the kind to quit. She’ll learn, and learn to laugh.”
“She quit on me.”
“No.” Rosa looks at him seriously. “The circumstances changed for both of you. But there was no quitting.”
I hope your decision to live with Jack has proved to be a happy one.
I’m lying.
No, not really.
Be smart.
P.S. They found oil on Spitsbergen. We were a good team.
He tapes the card to a rock about the size of a small cat, puts the rock in a box marked FRAGILE. It will cost a fortune to mail, but Carol will be pleased. It is neither pretty nor valuable, just a rock.
“The system is carefully balanced, though operations appear random,” Carter says. “It’s important for the operations to appear random. People need to believe they have some degree of personal freedom, hmm? Freedom is possible only in a random universe. Therefore, if the integrated nature of the process were revealed, people would rebel and destroy the system. There’d be chaos.
“Don’t confuse me with the nature of things, Sam. It’s bigger than all of us. I’m just a component, like you or anyone else. The man on the street fears technology. He thinks the future’s a cloud of waste. I’m saying that the system is self-perpetuating and self-correcting. Minor destruction is inevitable as the system purifies itself, but annihilation is not built into the program. Mistakes condition the future, and I’m telling you the future is preservation.”
Adams remembers his last visit with the children. He stopped at an arcade so Toby could play a video game. Screaming men in motorcycle helmets ran around the screen trampling dim figures called phantoms. Sometimes the phantoms ate the arms and legs of the little men, but as long as the head or torso remained, the player continued to function.
Adams spreads his maps out on the table: the world, the earth’s crust, the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields. The charts are scientifically accurate and up to date, yet Adams feels something is missing.
Legends are comprehensible. Purposes well defined. Where does the problem lie?
It occurs to him that the world itself is missing from his maps. On one, the planet has been reduced to a photographic reproduction. On another, to a set of numbers. Each new interpretation is an extra inch of kite string, but the string is endless, and the kite, out of sight, keeps tugging beyond his ken.
When Deidre was a baby she learned words quickly: Mommy, Daddy, Toby (which for several months she pronounced simply ‘bee). She picked up personal pronouns — he, she, you — but struggled with “me.” The last name she learned was her own. Pamela would hold a mirror in front of her chubby face, say “Baby” or “Deidre.” She was delighted by her own reflection and dutifully repeated the words, but made no connection with the image until much later.
Most of our words are directed away from us, Adams thinks. Intrigued, he sets out to map the human mind.
For weeks he gathers models, from Aristotle’s theory to the latest neurological research. His first thought is to unify the best models with current ideas to form a definitive map. There are so many models, however, each with its own value and charm, that he decides to make a series.
There are mythic models, psychological models, linguistic, philosophical, political, scientific models. Some choices have already been made by virtue of historical significance. One cannot exclude Freud. Existential philosophy should not be ignored. And thinking of Than, he decides to draw a map of the mind according to Hegel.