He watched art and science conspire to float that full, stuffed body among the foliage. Out of the electronic paintbox, she emerged, rising from the wedge of face, the coils draping her neck, extending through the crescent of almond opening just above her knees and down to those
curious, stub toes.
Spider donned a pair of glasses and walked clear around the couch where she lay. She remained remote, aloof, still, exuding the hint of something he could not figure. We did this. It's beautiful.
Their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this — this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. The flawless chestnut manikins, their grade-school desks fastened to the front of his, whose strands of brunette hair he'd once tried to number. The white film enigmas, beckoning to him to join them behind the projection screen. The cycles of magazine sirens, that March Cosmopolitan cover from his second year at Stanford, the anemic, skewed-thigh, dazed-eye vision he'd preserved for ongoing reference, the visible deed to this land of American license he'd somehow landed in. He rebuilt her in detail at nights, on his drive home down the mountain, through the newly air-dropped communities where no one could tell him apart from any of the thousands of other thirty-year-old transpacific immigrant virgins with pronounced epicanthic folds wandering around the Greater Seattle area. Her crude constructedness tapped some secret in him, a figure beckoning at the entrance to the impenetrable undergrowth that fringed his life. A texture map that lay on a couch just past recall, prodding his body from its long forgetfulness.
Where does she come from? he asked Adie.
From the mind of a supremely bizarre customs officiai in a cold Paris atelier.
No. I mean… the way she looks. Where did he get her?
She showed him the river flowing through this figure. All the prone female flesh, up on one elbow, turned three-quarters to face the plane of paint. Those countless, recumbent, thinly veiled Renaissance mistresses, passed off as Venus. Titian's Urbino goddess, Madame Récamier, the naked Maja, ripe Olympia… She showed him the long genealogical tree, art's ancient bloodline: this fetishizing, fawning, degrading, loving, lurid intimacy played out in front of centuries of voyeurs, these canvases like mirrors on the ceiling of the race's collective motel room, rented, as always, this evening, by the hour.
As the spinning leaf programmed the light, so this strange almond algorithm programmed Spider Lim's body to take up some history too long to understand. The female nude wanted something from him, something commanded in a lost language, something Spider Lim hadn't the visual vocabulary to comprehend.
He took to avoiding the Cavern while the jungle group worked there. But his cure produced the symptoms it worked against. His policy of containment only multiplied the woman's nighttime visits. Soon, she came to him as regularly as a cross-sound ferry, demanding that he examine her every surface, gaze on her where she lay wrapped in a long, self-extending pageant, a tableau vivant he'd never dreamed himself capable of seeing…
But those who toured it at open house felt its leap in technique, its advances in surface modeling.
Seven or eight explorers pressed into the Cavern, taking turns wearing the master tracking glasses.
My word, Jonathan Freese admired. It sure does feel robust.
And responsive, O'Reilly added. Not a whole lot of depth effect yet. But at least a body can recognize what's in front of it.
Sue Loque just nodded her all-natural fright wig, like a teen keeping the beat under a pair of headphones.
Pretty flicker-free, Jackdaw said. Nice ray tracing. Not too much latency as you walk around.
The moon soaked them all in silence, from up in the highest branches. A handful of jungle visitors stood loose in their own overrun seedbed.
Steve Spiegel broke the spell. Explain something to me, Ade? What exactly is the dame on the sofa doing in the middle of all this malaria action?
Ha. Does that trouble your little bourgie norms? Adie jabbed her college chum in the ribs, her first attack on his underbelly in a dozen years. The underbelly had grown softer in the interim. So had the jab.
Sue jingled her tire-iron bracelets. She's listening to the music, obviously. To the spooky ebony guy in the Day-Glo skirt.
No, no, Spider said. She lives there. She's some kind of jungle spirit. Like the other.
Like him.
Yeah, right. On a Louis Philippe divan?
Uh, Rajan wavered. You white people do happen to notice that she's
buck naked?
No one heard Karl Ebesen enter the room, until he snarled. Idiots. The woman is not in the jungle. The jungle is in the woman's living room. It grows in through her window, while she dreams.
10
The Jungle Room feels strangely familiar.
Your eye recognizes the place at once, although it has never been there. Or say your eye has been there, long ago. Back before childhood's childhood. Before your eye was even an eye. And say that you've toted this spurge around inside ever since, a keepsake of long-abandoned cover.
Origins converge in the Jungle Room. Choose your myth of preference: the garden banishment, the wayward chromosome. Either way, this green is a return engagement. Nostalgia sprawls from the overgrown nooks. Life leverages every cranny. Moonlit creepers spread a welcome mat. The pennant of mangrove branches announces Old Home Week.
Fronds appear with all the shocking clarity of fronds. Perhaps they began as metaphors. But now they grow into the species they once only represented. The Jungle Room creeps steadily toward arboretum: taxonomy without the formaldehyde, ripe fruit without the fall.
Something yearns to return to first vegetation, only this time at a cool remove. The body wants back in its abandoned nest, but now free to come and go, like a shameless tourist, without the fatal danger of travel, free to name the lush sprawl of this place from the safe vantage of a divan.
Here is the shape of reforestation, eons in germinating. Till this novel test patch, more flexible than the original starter bed. Speed the green revolution. Onto the teak's living trunk, graft a woody emblem. Fuse the fact of the branch to its depiction. Join stump and symbol into a single thing, a tree you can walk around, prune, replicate. The tree you came down from. The one you'd happily climb up again.
This is the aim of all bootstrapping: to lift the first curse and make dreams real. Here you can shed your wood skeleton and travel at will through groves of pure notion. Here you can gather up the pieces of something that shattered once, long ago, in childhood's childhood. Here you can reassemble all lost growth, and even back it up onto magnetic tape.