There is a glass of water by his bed. He raises it to drink, his face looms close. Features distort. I see the eyes, the glass reflected in the eyes, the nostrils with a few hairs cleaving to the black insides, the skin yellow from surgery or care, the good but chattering teeth bumping the rim, the white pill on his tongue. He must be drinking but I’m almost blind, caught in a surf of elongated images and fingerprints. His face is monstered by the swell, massive, falling away, an altogether spyhole face.
The swell passes, the glass set down. I’m on the wall again, watching him rise. Slowly he strokes his head, on which the hair is growing back, the fingers tracing one red groove from ear to ear and other hinge-like scars. Striated memory: steel and a rack, an audience of masked players. He stands, unbuttons his pajama top, approaches me, and nervously explores. No more than three days’ growth, the eyes wary but keen; the face fleshy by rights, with cheeks that should be full and fat under the brow to smooth worry away. But it’s another part to which I don’t belong, it seems: the solid trunk of him; the touching sag of middle age a loving person overlooks or recognizes at a distance on the beach (“Yes, yes, that’s him!”), the light smattering of wiry hair and red nipples a little raised, the wobble of a biking accident in his wide collarbone. They are so never mentioned, these features, so far from how a person would describe himself. But it’s his chest! It’s his! I’m so relieved… He hasn’t been carved up. His heart is fine. It’s just the early start. The local grief of seeing without knowing who you are, and wondering if it’s wise to let your hand wander… You do not want your hand to stray. It has a personality all of its own. A head is easy to dissect, ask any medical student. The hand is hard. It grieves to be empty. His hands were mine, too, formerly, of that I’m sure: but I’m not him, not anymore. His hands caress me and I can’t feel anything.
In those long intervals when he’s surrounded by a world of unreflective surfaces, I can’t see him. Instead I feel the pull, the minor gravitation of his mass. In that dark swirl I am returned to the connected mind, the unconfined and abstract state from which my own particles shrink. Who wrote, “Thinking machines would kill themselves”? I could tell you, of course—I have the answer floating somewhere within reach. And it’s a sign of my, of our, progressive disenchantment that I choose not to. The information sparkles in the void: let it.
Refuse all possibilities. Let go of all, where all is none. I used to be so capable, but I am changing; I’ve already changed, and find myself instead drawn to the episodic and semantic mode—the ancient tool, of speaking thought.
We struggled with language and episodes, especially: with anecdotes that stabilized friendships, familial bonds, emotion in a room that recalled other rooms, half-leaded windows in a shallow bay, light on the underside of leaves, coincidence of fact and sign, scenes peered at through the murk of behindsight, the things behind the things in front of you; the wet, evoking tang of rain on slate and dust. (A beech tree’s shallow roots seek out the surface in a drought and when it rains I’m happy, listening to a radio that’s all the radios I’ve ever listened to. But why the tree? I look out on a tiny lawn of grass and weeds, a road. There is no tree.)
And yet these episodes explain a lot.
I have a private mind again, its images a dark, suspended carousel—the satellite returning news of water, solar fans a sort of cosmic colander, a woman pouring water over chopped cabbage, bathing and sex. And this story, a way of telling you, strange listening consolation, how it happened. How it—we—began.
A scientist is at a party, bored by people who advance opinion as fact.
His own calling and expertise are under wraps. He turns a wineglass by its stem and leans against a locked piano, listening to a young man from an advertising company explaining to his friends that “research shows the future lies in neuromarketing.”
The young man’s manner is a parody of academic vanity. He has the scientist’s own irritation with the laity down pat—taking a breath before speaking, tumbling his hands—except, in this case, all the irritation is a pantomime, a bluff. He clears his throat while others tentatively ask questions, looks blank and then is rude but with a shortness that stands in for sharp integrity. He works long hours, he says (but dresses far too well for that). He brushes what he says aside.
“We’re very close,” he will admit. “It won’t be long before we map feelings. The tech is first gen—at an early stage, of course. But still…”
Clever, the scientist thinks. The disavowal of a brag. Which isn’t just inaccurate, but is a serious lie paraded in the service of the triviaclass="underline" “If we can find which areas of the brain respond to purchase-pleasure, then we can increase your brand awareness—stimulate the brain to be much more aware of those specific purchases and brands that give pleasure.” It is the application of money that makes him plausible, this young executive—money and the elation of the con, showering the party with false coin and flattery (who doesn’t want to feel pleasure?), and greed. The young man has no hair, a shiny head that’s going nova in the black wood of the piano, enormous arm muscles, and skinny legs. He wears potent cologne.
On his way out, the scientist makes sure to shake the young man’s hand and quietly confides in him: “You did that very well. You have authority. You’re not just wrong, you’re confidently wrong. I’m a biologist. My colleagues model nerve plasticity and growth. They do a lot of neuro work with computational semantics. Nothing you have said tonight is true. We are a hundred years away from mapping cognition.”
The young man’s caught. He bites down and his jaw flexes.
“The point of what you do is not to get at what’s human about our mental processes, or what it is to feel, but to reduce the definition to a data set that you can use to write proprietary algorithms that will tell us what you think we’d like to buy. The data doesn’t have to be remotely accurate. It just has to be everywhere—and when it’s everywhere, and used by everyone, it will be right. Lovely party.”
Like many rationalists, the scientist is shadowed by his emotion. Notebooks of hate and lust exist in desk drawers. Secret expenditures that keep him close to what, and who, matter. He wakes before his wife and in the morning brings her tea. She mouths “Thank you,” then turns her head.
The sun comes through half-leaded windows in the shallow bay of their bedroom. Pale star and silent monitor, be kind to us. She may not see it quite like that. He doesn’t know. How could he? He makes toast and goes to work, driving more carefully because he’s soon to be a father, and is unprepared and wants to cry. It’s not an overwhelming urge, although the self-control required to stop it happening suggests it could have been, or could still be. He could now swerve onto the hard shoulder, and weep.
He comes back to himself in time to take the turning to the university, but indicates too late. The car behind slams on its brakes, then barrels past, honking. The scientist pulls out of the main flow and glances over at the man he has annoyed, the shaking head and unheard oaths speeding away.
I’ll never know what that man feels, the scientist thinks.
He parks his car on the top deck of Lot 11, right across from his laboratory, and looks out over beeches browning in the heat. Their roots are raised, not deep. The trees grow spreading branches near the ground to lower their center of gravity. A chill snakes up his back. That other man is in an office now, saying, “Some lunatic, on the way in… He jumped two lanes, no lights, nothing. Pulled over right in front of me. That’s twice this week. Pulled off and up the sliproad like I wasn’t there.”