Zimmerman never hesitated. It shocked Spiegel, and saddened him. But working for TeraSys by then, Spiegel had little moral leverage to preach against selling out. Ted worked up the piece in a little under three weeks. It was "Simple Gifts," returned to sender. Thirty seconds of hosanna from the world's first, radiant hoedown. Heavenly counterpoint, put to the service of a multinational consumer-products conglomerate intent upon wrapping its insidious agricultural chemistry in the patina of Shaker innocence.
He did that? That was Ted? Adie, incredulous, remembered the commercial spot. Remembered it in the back of her throat. The kind of manipulative, nostalgic sound track that you wept over in the solitary shame of your living room, with all the shades pulled down.
The delighted corporate sponsors paid Zimmerman well. Ted made a hundred times more for those three weeks of work than he'd made for all the other music he had composed in his life. The lump sum helped to cover what the prison college's group insurance refused to pay, when Ted at last had to move into Warren County's second-best assisted-care facility.
Life was truly long. Ted spent his days strapped in a bed in a nursing home in the Buckeye state, a forty-year-old avant-garde composer surrounded by the perfect audience: deaf nonagenarians. At least he had a private room — a cinder-block single compartment, the same dimensions as the one his old friends now redecorated.
Ted and Steve had spoken only twice since Adie's arrival out West. Spiegel stopped calling him. Ted could no longer hold the receiver. Even after one of Ted's nightingales bought him a speakerphone, Spiegel quit returning Ted's calls. It was not just cowardice. Ted's voice had gotten so faint and slurred that Steve had to ask him to repeat everything three times and still couldn't make out the half of each message. The brain was still intact, but it had begun to waver into places where Spiegel was not yet allowed. Silence seemed the more merciful ordeal. Spiegel had not visited, nor had he seen pictures. And yet here was the place where the man now lived. Where else but this prototypical layout? Planks standing in for linoleum; cambered casements for molded plastic. The bed pressed up against the back right corner of the narrow box. No doubt the real bed was a tubular steel hospital apparatus wrapped in acrylic blankets. But in the invalid's mind, surely it resembled this rich red wood piled high in an eidolon of eiderdown. And next to the bed, the rickety table: the perfect stand for Ted's MIDI sequencer, executing its archaic scores on a whole orchestral palette of digitally sampled instruments, playing them out through a pair of tinny speakers where Van Gogh's water pitcher stood. Perhaps a nurse came in and worked the mouse for him. Perhaps the machine, unlike Spiegel, still understood Ted's voice well enough to take dictation. Perhaps the picture frames on the walls above his bed held snippets of laser-printed score, keepsakes of Ted's long, aural adventure.
This was the room that Spiegel helped to furnish, no matter what chamber from the sunny South Adie thought she outfitted. The two of them collaborated, carving down the cubes into the objects each hid. Thousands of polygons hung suspended in space on the intersecting beams of five projectors. The shaving mirror alone ran into the millions of bits, dozens just to fix the location and color of each hung pixel. Behind its flinty blue reflection, voltage differences snaked through an array of registers in a conga line so long that all that the human eye ever saw was this massive epiphenomenon, this simple looking glass that bore no earthly relationship to the worlds of oscillating semiconductance surging beneath its surface.
Over the weeks that Spiegel and Klarpol refinished their storeroom of old furniture, Jackdaw assembled a library of interactive definitions— reusable ball bearings that animated all the room's moving parts. Through the staked pains of software's sieve — check lower bound X; check lower bound Y; check lower bound Z; check upper…, set StepRate…, fix ShadeOffset…; for Rotltem from -180 to 180, step StepRate, if ShadeOffset <X then … else if … — Jackdaw began to implement what the barest corner of any self-respecting efficiency apartment did glitchlessly a trillion times over, every unthinking second.
It no longer sufficed for each of the room's austere furnishings, their continent-wide sheets of bits sliding along the moraines of video memory, merely to mimic solidity. Deeply nested C routines now invested the smallest collection of boxels with real-world behaviors. The same host electronics that sculpted these statues of colored air could also sense and respond to the room's angelic visitors.
The visitors' solid hands still passed through everything they tried to feel. But now a thumb and forefinger, pinched around the phantom drawer knob, could pull it open. Even the designers felt the uncanny effect, moving the wood-grained logic of an object they could not even touch. However incorporeal, the towel ruffled when brushed. The windows cluttered shut at the first mime of force against them. And when the transient user, suckered by half a billion years of evolution into believing the visible, reached out by reflex to pat the bedcovers, those sheets miraculously turned their corners down as if waiting for the idea of a sleeper to curl up and inhabit them.
Water wanted to pour. Shirts wanted wearing; picture frames, straightening. An eerie hideout rose up around its makers. The ghostly placeholders began to stand in for their leaden referents. For finally, the brain conversed less with stuff than with appropriate response. It operated upon the working symbol, and for that, the less carrying weight, the better. Dimension, color, surface, motion — the full play of functional parts — implied a tenant who seemed eternally to have just stepped out for a moment. The visitor moved through a furnished efficiency where all the comforts and amenities performed as they should, with only the apartment's occupant eternally not at home.
The room solidified as the year dissolved. Expectation shot through Spiegel every time, standing on the floorboards, riffling through the Dutchman's evacuated things. Adie's belief, too, reached critical mass. Technology wanted something from them. The play of emulated, Arlesean light teetered on the verge of some announcement.
Whatever time passed outside the Cavern, the artist's bedroom hung in an eternal noon. The bedroom's blaze enveloped its makers, even as they worked at their midnight cubicles. The three of them settled into the silent routine of roommates, the new nuclear family sharing this close, sunny starter home. They worked alone, coming together at times to putter and refine. Perpetual nesting, permanent spring cleaning. The shared task of home improvement made talk unnecessary.
Ade? Spiegel said one night, violating that pact of silence. Can I ask you something?
The eyes said, "Do we need to?" The mouth said, Sure.
The celibacy thing?
Yes? She dragged out the initial letter in epic wariness. And what exactly would you like to know about the celibacy thing, Stevie?
He thumbed his nose at her, some avuncular nineteenth-century gesture new to him, its origins a total mystery. Not celibacy per se. I've already assembled as much data about that particular subject as I care to, thank you. What I want to know is, don't you… don't you ever miss it?
"It" being non-celibacy?
"It" being a partner. Companionship. A warm body in the house on a damp night.
Well, I have Pinkham, you know. She turned toward the creature, who lay curled up in his favorite spot on a rag rug inside a coil of coaxial cable at the Cavern mouth. She patted her thighs in invitation. Pinkham looked up, ascertained the absence of crisis, yawned, and curled down again. He refused to step near the simulated room. It bewildered him.