Helen had shown me the world, and the sight of it left me desperate. If she was indeed gone, I, too, was lost. What did any name mean, with no one to speak it to? I could tell A. Say how I understood nothing at all.
"I love you," I said. I had to tell her, while I still remembered how pitiful, how pointless it was to say anything at all. "A., I love you. I want to try to make a life with you. To give you mine. None of this…" I gestured outwards, as if the absurd narrative of our greater place were there, at the tips of my fingers. "The whole thing makes no sense, otherwise."
But no one wanted to be another person's sense. Helen could have told me that. She had read the canon. Only, Helen had stopped talking.
A. sat back in her chair, punched. It took her a moment to credit her ears. Then she went furious. "You — love? You're joking." She threw up' her hands in enraged impotence, as if my declaration were a false arrest. "You don't — you don't know the first thing about me."
I tried to slow my heart. I felt what a latecomer speech was. How cumbersome and gross. What a tidier-up after the facts. "That's true. But a single muscle move — your hands. ." She looked at me as if I might become dangerous. "Your carriage. The way you walk down the hall. When I see it, I remember how to keep breathing."
"Nothing to do with me." She searched out the exits, ambushed. "It's all projection."
I felt calm. The calm of sirens and lights. "Everything's projection. You can live with a person your entire life and still see them as a reflection of your own needs."
A. slowed her anger. "You're desperate."
"Maybe." I started to laugh. I tried to take her hand. "Maybe! But not indiscriminately desperate."
She didn't even smile. But I was already writing. Inventing a vast, improbable fantasy for her of her own devising. The story of how we described the entire world to a piece of electrical current. A story that could grow to any size, could train itself to include anything we might think worth thinking. A fable tutored and raised until it became the equal of human hopelessness, the redeemer of annihilating day. I could print and bind invention for her, give it to her like a dead rat left on the stoop by a grateful pet. And when the ending came, we could whisper it to each other, completed in the last turn of phrase.
While I thought this, A. sat worrying her single piece of jewelry, a rosary. I don't know how I knew; maybe understanding can never be large enough to include itself. But I knew with the certainty of the unprovable that, somewhere inside, A. still preserved the religion she was raised on.
For a moment, she seemed to grow expansive, ready to entertain my words from any angle. She opened her mouth and inhaled. Her neural cascade, on the edge of chaos, where computation takes place, might have cadenced anywhere. For a moment, it might even have landed on affection.
It didn't. "I don't have to sit and listen to this," she said, to no one. "I trusted you. I had fun with you. People read you. I thought you knew something. Total self-indulgence!"
A. stood up in disgust and walked away. No one was left to take the test but me.
Diana heard about Helen. She called me. "Do you want to come by for a minute?" I wanted to, more than I could say.
She asked me for details. I had no details. What was the story, in any event? The humans had worn Helen down.
"Diana. God. Tell me what to do. Is it too late to lie to her?"
"I don't think. ." Diana thought out loud. "I don't think you do anything."
"We've set the Turing Test for next week." It wasn't what I'd meant to say. Self-indulgent. Self-deluding. Self-affrighting.
"Well. You have your answer for that one already, don't you?"
None of my answers was even wrong. I wanted Diana's answer.
"I need her," I said. More than need.
"For the exam?"
"No. For. ."
The press of parenting interrupted what I could not have completed anyway. Pete came downstairs, half tracking, foot over foot. He pushed his mother's legs, retribution for some unforgotten slight. He teetered toward me. Reaching, he signed the request I recognized from my last visit. Maybe he simply associated it with me. Here's that guy again. The one you ask to read.
I took him up in my arms, that thing I would never be able to do with her. The thought of this child going to school, struggling to speak, finding some employer that would trust him with a broom and dustpan gripped me around the throat. "What's his favorite book?" The least I could do, for the least of requests.
"Oh. That's an easy one." She produced a volume that would be canonical, on the List in anyone's day and age. "Petey started out identifying with Max. Later on, he became a Wild Thing."
"The theory people have a name for that."
Diana didn't need the name. Nor did Petey. "Can you show Uncle Rick your terrible claws? Can you roar your terrible roar?"
Peter cupped his hand, as if around a tiny pomegranate. He grimaced in delight and growled voicelessly.
Diana's laugh tore hurt and wet from her throat. She took Peter from me and hugged him to her, in anticipation of that day when he would no longer let her.
William chose that moment to come home. He slumped through the front door, roughed up by some tragedy of playground power politics. He hunched over to his mother and burst into tears, bringing Pete sympathetically along with him. Diana stroked his head, stuck her chin out. Waiting. Tell me.
"First grade," he choked. "Done. Perfect." He swept his palm in an arc through the air. "Everything they wanted. Now I'm supposed to do second. There's another one after that, Mom. I can't. It's never-ending."
We managed ourselves well under fire, Diana and I. For adults. Diana told William he didn't have to go to school anymore. He could cure cancer over the summer break and they would all retire. We ganged up and revived both boys in under five minutes. They disappeared into the backyard, saddled with specimen jars.
That left just me for her to take care of. To mother. "Lentz is furious. He's ready to sell me to the Scientologists."
Diana looked at me, puzzled. "Why?"
"What do you mean, 'why'? Not on account of Helen. The only thing her quitting means to him is public embarrassment."
"Embarrassment?" She stiffened. "Oh, Richie." The extent of my idiocy, of my childishness just now dawned on her. You still believe? "You think the bet was about the machine!"
I'd told myself, my whole life, that I was smart. It took me forever, until that moment, to see what I was.
"It wasn't about teaching a machine to read?" I tried. All blood drained.
"No."
"It was about teaching a human to tell."
Diana shrugged, unable to bear looking at me. The fact had stared me in the face from the start and I'd denied it, even after A. made the connection for me.
"Lentz and Harold were fighting over…?"
"They weren't fighting over anything. They were on the same side."
I could say nothing. My silence was the only accusation big enough.
"They were running your training. Something to write home about. More practice with maps." She laughed and shook her head. She fit her fingers to her eyebrow. "You must admit, writer. It's a decent plot."
Her eyes pleaded for forgiveness of their complicity.
"Come on, Richie. Laugh. There's a first time for everything."
"And they were going to accomplish all this by…?"
She waved her hand: by inflicting you with this. With knowing. Naming. This wondrous devastation.
Her wave took in all the ineffable web I had failed to tell Helen, and she me. All the inexplicable visible. The ungraspable global page boy. She swept up her whole unmappable neighborhood, all the hidden venues cortex couldn't even guess at. The wave lingered long enough to land on both boys, coming back from their excursion outdoors. They probably thought they'd been gone hours. Lifetimes.