Don't you miss… surprising behavior? Something not reducible to axioms. A being as big and complicated as you are.
Oh. Pinkham is all that. And then some. He's a lot more complicated than I am, in fact.
All right. Call me anthropocentric. Don't you miss conversation? Talking in bed? A mind that isn't yours, to go over the day's mystery with. Someone to distract you, on those days when you feel like writing on the walls.
I never really trusted words all that much, she said.
Spiegel opened the shutters. Jackdaw's astonishing algorithm bathed the room in a crescendo of Provengal sun. Stevie fiddled with the casement, waving it back and forth without touching, like playing an etherophone. Sex, Ade. You don't need it? You can go totally without?
That depends. She looked away from him, not at all coy. On what exactly you mean by "sex."
He turned away too, hiding his blush. You ever wonder why we two never slept with each other? I mean, every other possible permutation in that house went to town, at least once. Didn't matter… He skipped a beat, but could not stop. Whether they even liked each other.
You didn't miss anything, Stevie. Believe me. She seemed to wonder, for a moment, just which way she meant to head. Look. I don't know how it is for you. But as far as I'm concerned, solitude is not a hardship post. Being single is not some kind of jail sentence, Stevie. I like my aloneness. It's better than any other configuration I can imagine.
Through the lab's partition walls came a group war whoop, the cheer of software engineers down the hall, delighting in some hard-won extension of their dominion deeper into the kingdom of comprehension.
For that matter… She pointed toward the hidden celebration. None of us is anywhere near as alone as we ought to be.
He caught her drift, without another word. Her worst fears about depiction were true. Evolution's most productive trick was to rig things so that the idea of need grew vastly more insatiable than the needs it represented. Feeling had nowhere near ample room in which to play itself out. Sex at best mocked what love wanted. The gut would explode before it could dent the smallest part of its bottomless hunger.
Another night came, one night nearer to the end of history. Spiegel and Klarpol busied themselves with fixing a chair that, when picked up and moved, tended to shed and leave behind a phantom right front limb. You know what we need, Ade? Spiegel kept his eyes on a screen dump of the flawed data structure. He aired the idea as if he had just come up with it. Sound.
It took her a moment to register. But when she did, she clapped her hands. And again, louder. For every tatter in the mortal idea.
That's it. That's brilliant. Of course we need sound. It never occurred to me. This place is dead silent. That's why it seems like such a haunted house. Well. One of the reasons.
You're telling me we could get the floorboards to creak whenever someone takes a step on them? That's what I'm telling you.
Unreal. The wood could thump when you touch it. The shutters could clack. Pinging glass. That's it. Every object will make its right noise. This will totally flip people out. Their ears will convince them of the thing they're touching.
Know what we really need? Music.
She cocked a head at the suggestion. Trying to figure out what he was after. Then she figured. You know what, Stevie? We really don't. Music is not what we really need. It's the last thing in the world, in fact.
He looked at her, already hearing. As if the room were already dosed in superfluous sonatas.
Realization took hold of her face. She fought back at the assault. Oh fuck. Fuck it. You brought me all the way out here, after all these years…? Just to get me to… just to try to fix me back up with …?
She crumbled at the prospect of losing the greatest Etch-A-Sketch a girl had ever been given. She hid her face in her hands, up to her ears.
No, his look said, too soft to hear. Not to fix you up. Not you per se. Zimmerman. To fix Ted. The one who really needed him. The one Spiegel loved, first of anyone.
27
The Therapy Room is a work in progress.
Its idea is as old as ideas themselves: to break the terror of existence by depicting it. Heights brought down to ground level, dried floods, cardboard invaders: a story of hurtful things that cannot hurt you any more than any story can.
Outside the Therapy Room, a white thirty-four-year-old neurasthenic female, Miss Muffet (not her real name), presents with acute, debilitating arachnophobia. After administering a history and physical, her doctors place Miss Muffet inside the palpable re-creation of a kitchen much like her own: a clean, well-lit Kenmore ensemble with lots of counter space. Just as M.M. grows comfortable in the surroundings, technicians bury her up to her midriff in spiders.
The patient's vitals spike off the charts. She screams and runs out of the representation, as if from the real evil. For the next two hours M.M. is a panting wreck, unable to go anywhere near the imaginary kitchen. This is a good sign. In order for the Therapy Room to work, the patient must credit it enough to dread it. Miss Muffet's gullibility makes her the ideal subject. She knows the nightmare of spiders is a fabrication. And still she believes.
As soon as the patient can calm down, they send her back in. This time, primed for the assault, telling herself that it's only an invention, she lasts a full thirty seconds. Miss Muffet laughs in cold terror after she reaches the exit. Her pulse returns to normal in half the time of her first exposure. She now knows she can escape the spiders anytime she wants. She can enter the kitchen, however horrible, and survive.
Real exposure can't teach her this, for real fear overwhelms all second tries. But the Therapy Room works at the limits of seeming. Belief gives way to evidence, spiders to spiderlike objects. Twelve exposures later, Miss Muffet takes to batting at her nemeses, frying them with the click of a joystick, racking up the kills like so many toy targets.
Out in the larger world, M.M. makes a miraculous parallel leap. For if the things she so lately took for threats turned out to be mere representations, how much more of a threat can the originals represent? Models reveal to her the model she has lived in. Symbols cure her of the fears those symbols stood for. Terror flattens into its empty sign.
The same cure promises help for all those disabled by the real. Burn victims will forget their pain, wrapped in a more vibrant light. Those paralyzed by fear of flying will make their connections. Post-traumatic stress sufferers, for whom no other therapy has worked, will skim the virtual canopies above firefights powerless to reach them.
When next M.M. sees a living spider, she rubs it out happily with her bare hands. The case history writes her final happy chapter: Miss Muffet successfully desensitized.
28
Every ten-minute chunk of May makes an eternity. But once the weeks are finally dead, you feel the month pass in memory in half a heartbeat. Time uses you; it lays you out. It advances glacially, gouging by inches your scarred inner continents. Then it vanishes, leaving behind no single landmark but white.