I taught again that spring. I was better; the class was worse. No one wrote on Aspasia. I booked hard in preparation for the exam at year's end. One fine May day I found myself sitting in a graduate colloquium on prosody, scanning the inverted feet in a sonnet by Edwin Arlington Robinson called "How Annandale Went Out." We'd been at the iambs and trochees for a good two hours before it struck me that no one had yet mentioned that the poem was about euthanasia. Whether to let the sufferer die.
I'd transferred from physics to literature because of one man, the incomparable Taylor. He led me to believe, at eighteen, that a person could lay hands on the key to all mythologies. I now saw that literature might indeed teach me about my father's death, but the study of literature would lead no further than its own theories about itself.
I took the exam and passed it. My marks were high enough to gain admission to the final stage, the Ph.D. Then, on the threshold of committing to the field I'd devastated my father by choosing, I threw that choice away as well. I decided to leave U. forever. I would change my life in every way imaginable.
But first I needed to talk to C. I showed up at her rooming house, surprising her. I'd never been there; I'd gotten the address out of the student directory. It was an unrepeatable spring morning. She came to the door sleepy, still in her bathrobe.
"Good girl?" I asked.
Her brown eyes ignited. "Outside!" she shouted. She dressed in a minute, while I waited on the porch. It was true. There was nothing, nothing in existence that she preferred over being in the sun, the wind. Just walking.
"I have to kiss these buds," she said, kissing a brace. "I haven't kissed them yet this spring. When I was a child, I thought they wouldn't grow without encouragement."
She still was that child. And she knew it.
"Would you like to go away with me?" I asked. "Somewhere. Anywhere. Your choice. Two lit majors, making a living in the real world?"
She stopped and stared. It was the question we'd been asking each other from the first student-teacher conference. Only she'd been holding her breath, hoping we would vanish before asking.
"I have to tell you something. I'm involved with someone."
I suppose I knew. But asking, in all its awfulness, was the only way to write myself into this solitary future. Unless I asked, point-blank, I would never escape the second guess. I'd said it out loud. I was free now to forget her. To live out adulthood alone and in good faith. Whatever I cared to do.
"Take care," she intoned. "See things for me, wherever you end up."
I moved to B. I rented a room in the heart of the city. I got a job as a second-shift computer hack, the complete opposite of the life I'd been leading. I wrote about that job years later, in my third novel. I used Taylor as model for my hero, a man who gives up a promising career in science to devote himself to music composition. And I cast myself as the shiftless graduate-school dropout who squanders his talent.
The job was perfect. I worked alone, all night. For part of the shift, I had nothing to do but read. I read Rabelais, Balzac, Freud, Henry Adams, Max Planck. I read at random, obeying only the forgotten principle of pleasure.
In my few daylight hours, I fell in love with women constantly. Bank tellers, cashiers, women in the subway. A constant procession of pulse-pounding maybes. I never did more than ask one or two to lunch.
I frequented the Center's cafeteria. The food was marginal, depending on the hour I arrived. It consisted of the indifferent fried batter that everywhere kept alive this nation's scientific research effort. The lunch conversation, on the other hand, played like the chatter in creation's greenroom. I could eavesdrop in any direction, and trawl the same topic: the nature of the knowable, and how we know it.
For those researchers who bothered to stop and eat, lunch was the hour of collegial consolidation. Too much work at minute magnifications without looking up led to snow blindness. That was the idea behind the Center, the country's largest institute for interdisciplinary study. That was why a third of the complex gave itself over to common grazing space. The plan, in the end, involved a linkup of all locales.
One noon, I brought my stack of reading down to the cafeteria and sat over an Italian beef on wet onion roll. All around me, scientists came up for air, gauging the rest of the global, accreting index under construction. A few tables away, Plover and Hartrick sat scribbling diagrams on a scratch tablet. I thought of joining them, but didn't want to disrupt those with real work to do.
Instead I read. The articles were getting easier to get through. I read how supervised training helped a net grow cleverer at associating any input with desired output. And I got cleverer as I read. But the brain does things in massive parallel. Out of the edge of my eye, as I read, I saw someone jerk across the room holding a bottle of juice and a packet of batter fries. A ghost doomed to walk the earth awhile in human form. The apparition of Lentz shocked me. Broad daylight should have dissolved him. He seated himself at an empty table, as far from other bodies as possible.
Plover and Hartrick saw him too. Harold wanted to go keep the solitary figure company. Diana pointed to the writing pad and screwed up her face. Finally, she acquiesced. They decamped to his table, where Lentz welcomed them with little more than bare recognition. I thought it safe to join the three of them.
I sat down with what was left of my sandwich. Plover greeted me. "Here he is! Slot B of the sinister cybernetic assemblage. How are you two getting on with your attempt to automate literary criticism?"
I liked this man. 1 saw him building model rockets as a child, or testing out vaccines on his pet gerbil. I held up the journals, my lunch-hour reading. "I feel like some watcher of the skies. ."
"When a new planet swims into his ken?" Plover completed. An eager schoolboy.
His quick fill surprised me. I replaced my image of the model rockets with one of a boy reading The Norton Anthology under the covers by flashlight.
'That's enough, Marcel," Lentz said out of the corner of his mouth. "We don't want to give away any trade secrets."
"Is it ready, then?" Plover teased. "Let's go try this toy out." He'd hooked and landed the best of natures. "Okay. Okay. Here's one. Name this tune:
"I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite. .
"Key that one into the old input layer and see what it comes up with."
I couldn't fight this man. The lines were pure love to him, a pleasure to be squandered and so increased. His face, as he quoted, radiated the ingenuous enthusiasm that gets drummed out of professionals around the time of the Ph.D.
"Where's that from?" I demanded. "I know that one."
Plover raised his hands and strapped both thumbs. "Diana? We've stumped him. We've stumped the chump!"
"Now, Harold," Lentz sneered. "Leave the writer alone. He may be washed up, but he isn't Donne yet." He fished a journal from the bottom of my stack, one I hadn't reached yet. He opened to a piece he'd co-authored with a famous Irish neural networker. Holy Sonnet number 5 sat atop the article.
I gaped like a drowning guppy. Plover looked crestfallen. He scanned the epigraph, dignity injured.
"Have you noticed how many of these open with a quote?" I said, to cover my humiliation. "Fashionable. I'm glad to see literature is still good for something."
Diana jumped into the awkwardness. "Philip. On the subject of revealing trade secrets. Explain back-propagation to me."