"Suppose I just asked you your field?"
"My friend. My fictional friend. The eye moves. We watch it as it does so. That is all."
"Ram. You're giving me a splitting headache."
He nodded with enthusiasm. "Come with me."
He took me into his labs. He placed several clear plastic overlays on a light table, a doctor dealing out the damning X rays.
"Look here and tell me what you see."
"Scatter patterns. They look like mineral deposit maps. Like fish radars over the Grand Banks, thirty years ago."
"I did not ask you what they looked like. I asked you what you see. Arrange these for me, please."
I studied the spots. The more I looked, the less they seemed a random distribution. After my eyes adjusted, the patterns sorted themselves into three groups.
"Exactly," Ram encouraged. "You might have missed one or two, but the correlation is strong. Who says that measurement is subjective?" He tapped my first pile. "Friends." He looked at me to see if I was following. He tapped it again, then went on to pile two. "Abstract acquaintances. Yes?" He pointed to the third pile and said, "Total strangers." He scrutinized my bewildered face and shrugged. "He does not understand me, this Powers fellow."
I didn't understand him. But I liked him. I liked him a great deal.
"Come. I'll show you. Would you mind if I subject you to this Western postindustrial instrument of torture?"
He indicated a chair fitted with a head vise. It looked like a prop from bad seventies science fiction.
"Why not. It's in the interests of science, right?"
Ram chuckled. He fitted my head into the restraint. My skull suitably immobilized, he projected three slides on a screen in front of me. Three portraits. Someone out of a Vladivostok high-school yearbook. Marilyn Monroe. And Ram himself.
The laser-guided instrument tracked the center of my pupil as I scanned each photograph. It took several sequential readings and spread the data points over a plastic overlay map of the image field. In the end, the paths my eyes traced over the different faces conformed to the categories he'd previously defined. Total stranger. Abstract acquaintance. Friend.
"Here is something you will also find very interesting." Ram pulled out another envelope with a small sample group.
"Why are these interesting? They're just like all the others, more or less."
"Aha!" He held up an index finger. "That's what makes them interesting. All of the people in this group suffer from prosopagnosia. Brain damage has rendered them incapable of recognizing people anymore. They deny having seen any face, even their own, even the face of their spouse or child. Or at least they think they can no longer recognize faces. Yet clearly, the eyes. ." His hand serpentined, tracing the route of the curve's knowledge.
"Astonishing."
"You know, I think the astonishing may be the ordinary by another name. But these results do lead us to many tempting guesses. That perception is carried out in several subsystems, we can say, most certainly. That these subsystems talk to each other: indeed. That perhaps they go on talking, these subsystems, even when the others stop listening. That breaks in communication might occur anywhere, at any point in the chain. That each part of a compound task may manifest its very own deficit. That everything you are capable of doing could be taken away from you, in discrete detail."
I added to Ram's list the obvious, the missing speculation. The look of the magic lantern. That what you loved could go foreign, without your ever knowing. That the eye could continue tracing familiarity, well into thought's unknown region.
"What do I look like?" I could find no face in the world. No color or structure. The days when I might have tried to pass her off as a Vermeer look-alike were over for good. Race, age, shape excluded too much. I needed some generic Head of a Girl that had no clan or continent and belonged nowhere in identifiable time.
"What do I look like, Richard? Please. Show me." I'd pictured her so many different ways over the course of the training. I thought: Perhaps some blank template Buddha, or a Cycladic figure. A trompe l'oeil landscape that became a figure on second glance. An Easter Island head. A Feininger or Pollock. A Sung bamboo. I didn't know how I thought of her now. I didn't know what she looked like.
She insisted. I turned up a suitable likeness. "It's a photo? It's someone you knew once? A woman friend?" She would have pretended ignorance for me. Would have let me off the hook again, except that she had to know.
The list of Excellent Undergraduate Teachers came out. Student evaluations of their evaluators. A. topped the graduate instructors in the English Department. I was thrilled, and confirmed by thrill in my intuition.
I forced the moment to its crisis. Helen and I had been hitting the books the Sunday evening after our world tour. The day's work had left me in a Spenserian stupor, where what I needed was Larkin. On pure reflex — that satellite brain housed south of the shoulders — I flicked off the mike, picked up the phone, and dialed her. One smooth motion. I'd never dialed her number before. But I had it memorized.
"Hello you," I said when she picked up. I sounded almost young. "It's me." And in the awkward microsecond, I clarified with my name.
"Oh, hi." A., nervous in relief. "What's up?"
"Checking to see if you're booking for the test."
"Ha! I'm going to whup your girl with half my synapses tied behind my back."
"What are you doing next Wednesday?" Midway in, my voice gave out. I began to tremor as if I'd just robbed a bank or fallen into an ice crevasse. "It's Shrimp Night at my favorite seafood place. The crustaceans are fair, but the conversation is good." If she was into shortness of breath, I was home free.
"Uh, sure. Why not? Wait. Hang on."
I heard her put the mouthpiece against her body. I heard her roll her eyes and shrug. I heard her ask the mate whose existence I'd been denying if they had any plans.
"It's kind of a problem," she explained on returning. "Maybe another time?"
"Another time would be great," I replied, mechanical with calm.
"She's amazing," Lentz said.
I had to think who he meant. "Now do you believe me? She's conscious. I know it."
"We don't know anything of the kind, Marcel. But we could find out."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," I told him. "Set your sandwich down between gulps. It's a societal norm." I tried to slow him. To keep him from saying what I knew he was going to say.
"I must admit, Marcel. I'm surprised by what you've been able to accomplish."
"It's not me." It was her. The subsystems talking to subsystems. Lentz's neural handiwork.
"She sure as hell seems to mimic with shocking accuracy some features of high-level cognition. It's uncanny. And a heuristic tool such as comes along once in a lifetime."
"Heuristic?"
"Stimulus to investigative discovery."
"I know what the word means, Philip." But I could not add what I meant: Is that all she means to you?
"Her architecture is such that severance could be effected with a great deal of local selectivity."
"I don't believe you said that. You want to cut into her? You want to lobotomize?"
"Easy, Marcel. We're talking about a painless operation, as far as I imagine. We could get what is unattainable in any other arena. Isolate the high-level processes by which she maps complex input and reassembles responses. Analyze them. Correlate various regional destruction with changes in—"
"You don't know it would be painless, Lentz."
He fell back against the cafeteria chair and studied me. Was I serious? Had I lost it, gone off cognition's deep end? I saw him find, in my face, the even more indicting idea that I didn't voice: that hurting Helen in any way would be wrong.