I smiled. "I'm the wrong person to ask."
"Your mother's read them?"
"She says she has."
"Marcel writes Books," Lentz glossed, for nobody. "Watch what you say. We're all going to end up immortalized."
The pitcher of watery pilsner on the table had done nothing for his aggression. Tonight, though, his fight was with his colleagues. I was just a convenient sparring dummy, tangent to the main event.
I sat down. The table crackled. Talk had died away to wary philosophical sparks, now that the hard data had been expended all around. My presence threw a damper on the charged colloquium. Everyone reverted to good behavior.
Of the group, I'd met only Ram Gupta, a perception researcher of international reputation. His recent passage through Immigration could not have been choppier. The airport officer assumed this brown-skin meant to go feral the minute anyone let him in the country. The epic humiliation seemed not to have perturbed Dr. Gupta in the least.
"You are making interesting points and you too are making interesting points," Ram sang, nodding by turns at Lentz and Harold Plover. "Could we not just leave it at that? Come, gentlemen. If we all stood up and got hit by a car as we walked out this door tonight, God forbid, would any of us want this conversation to be the…?"
"I thought you people believed in eternal repetition," Lentz baited him.
Plover, a big, cotton-frayed Kodiak of a man, threw up his hands. "Terrific. Just what I need. I've already suffered an eternity of this nonsense in the last half hour alone."
"Harold, if you'd just come up with some fresh objections. ."
"We can't level any fresh objections, 'cause we got no data." Keluga, a scrubbed blond boy of about twelve, searched the circle of faces for approval. Eager grad student's night out with the grownups.
"Data?" Lentz minced. "Oh, by all means. Hartrick will be happy to shave up several hundred simian forebrains for us to run some trials. That ought to resolve the question, once and for all."
"You cut up monkeys?" I whispered to Diana. "Rhesus pieces?" I sided with Ram. Even absurdity beat public ugliness.
Lentz snorted. "Marcel, we're going to give you a seven out of a thousand for that. One more such outburst and you have to go back and sit with the poets."
"Oh, leave him be," Plover mumbled into his cups. "It was funny."
"Don't blame me," I said. "I got it from a friend at Cal Tech."
Hartrick poured herself two fingers of foam in the bottom of a fluted glass. "You're straying into metaphysics, Philip. All the data in the world couldn't prove or disprove those kinds of claims."
"What on earth are you drinking?" Plover asked me. I'd brought along my kriek, unwilling to part with even the dregs of a liquid that came to about half a dollar a swallow.
"It's a Dark Lite," I said.
"It smells like vinegar cough syrup."
"Marcel's just indulging a little self-pitying nostalgia. The cakes-and-tea thing. Watch out he doesn't get sick. If he throws up, we're going to have a million and a half words all over the table."
"Would you listen to this creep?" Plover railed. "Why do we let him do this to us?" He shook his head at me. "Don't mind him. He gets like that, even without the two beers."
I assured Plover with a glance that Lentz and I were acquainted.
Lentz, a general fighting on many fronts, engaged the nearest comer. "You're the one playing the metaphysician, Dr. Di."
" 'Dr. Di'! Of all the insulting, sexist—" Plover threw his hands up again. He forgot to release his glass before doing so, and a fair amount of beer ended up on the wall behind him.
Lentz talked through the commotion of cleanup. "You are the ones evoking mystic mumbo jumbo. Is the problem computable in finite time? That's all I want to know. Is the brain an organ or isn't it? Don't throw this 'irreducible emergent profusion' malarkey at me. Next thing you know, you're going to be postulating the existence of a soul."
Hartrick rolled her eyes. "Not in your case, Philip." Her eyes came to rest on me. "See what I mean? Care to bail us out?"
"Remember Winner and Gardner?" Ram asked, still hoping to distract everyone from their sought-for conflict. "The piece on comprehension of metaphor, in Brain? Asked to choose the correct picture for 'give someone a hand,' many right-hemisphere-damaged patients picked the one showing a palm on a platter."
Keluga blanched. "Ram, please. I'm still hitting the salsa."
"Somebody tell me what you people are talking about." I felt slightly lesioned myself.
"Oh yes." Lentz did a slow take in my direction. He slapped his thigh. "Of course. Little Marcel. You have an affiliation with — what's it called these days? The English Department?"
"They're sponsoring my residency here, yes."
"Tell us. What passes for knowledge in your so-called discipline? What does a student of English have to do to demonstrate acceptable reading comprehension?"
I shrugged. "Not a whole hell of a lot. Take some classes. Write some papers."
"That's all you had to do?"
"Oh. Well. Me. When I was a lad—"
"Shh, shh, everyone. The reclusive writer about whom nothing is known is about to tell us his personal history."
"Look. Do you want to hear this or not?"
"My. Pardon me. I had no idea we were so touchy."
"Lentz, your apologies are worse than your attacks."
"Amen," Diana cheered. "Don't let him bully you, Richard."
Lentz smiled. He folded his fingers in front of his mouth. He looked for a moment like Jacob Bronowski's evil twin. "Do go on."
I debated, then did. "When I was twenty-two, I took something called the Master's Comprehensive Exam. They gave us a list of titles. Up at the top of page 1 was 'Caedmon's Hymn.' Six pages later, it wound up with Richard Wright."
"Where did you go to school?" Harold Plover asked.
I gestured out the window, the Quad beyond. My face flushed with shame. I'd failed to swim clear of the wreck.
"This list," Lentz persisted. "What happened then?"
"Then we sat for two days and answered questions. One each in six historical sections."
"What kind of questions?"
"Oh, anything. We'd do two hours of IDs. You know. 'Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow. .' Name the author, work, location, and significance."
"Okay, so maybe I won't change fields." Keluga's crack fell flat. Plover waved his bear paws again. "Wait a minute. I know this one. The end of Paradise Lost!"
"Harold," Lentz minced. "You've missed your calling."
"Then we did a few essays. 'Discuss the idea of the Frontier and its tragic consequences in four of the following six writers.' "
"What questions did you answer?" Lentz quizzed.
I shrugged. Out the side of my mouth, I made a little grad-student raspberry.
"Hold on. This was only a dozen years ago. And you remember…?"
I ringed my thumb and forefinger, held the 0 up for public view. Lentz looked around the table in triumph.
"I suppose it would come back to me if I tried."
"Heavens, Marcel. Don't do that."
"Can I ask you something?" Keluga interjected. "I read somewhere that you studied physics. ."
"As an undergrad. You read that? You people are supposed to be reading technical journals. Where the hell is the Two Cultures split when you need it?"
"What happened?"
"To what?"
"To physics."
"It's a long story."
Lentz cackled. "Don't press the man, Keluga. He's told every paper in the country that he doesn't like to talk about himself. About this list, Powers. You think you can find a copy somewhere?"
"Oh, the departmental files have scores of them."
Lentz looked about the table, his neck flared in challenge. "Anyone object to using this list as a test domain?"