Yes. No problem. There was no problem.
He spent the morning in a panicked rage, trying to prove to himself that he could still write. But the only paper was the foolscap, and when he wrote on it, his scrawling penmanship was re-formed into neat, fontified lines. That had been an irritation in days past, but never enough to force him to dig up real paper. Today, now… he could see that his soul was sucked out of the words before he could make them sing! It was the ultimate victory of automation over creative thought. Everything was beyond the direct touch of his hand. That was what was keeping him from finally connecting with his talents! And in the entire house there were no real paper-and-ink books.
Aha . He rushed to the basement, pulled down one of the moldering cartons that Bob had brought from Palo Alto. Inside, there were real books. When he was a kid, he had practically camped out on the living-room sofa the whole summer. They had no television, but every day he'd bring home a new pile of books from the library. Those summers, lying on the sofa, he had read his way through frivolous trash and deep wisdom — and learned more about truth than in an entire school year. Maybe that was where he had learned to make words sing.
These books were mostly junk. There were school catalogs from before Stanford went all online. There were handouts that his TAs had painfully Xeroxed for the students.
But, yes, there were a few books of poetry. Pitifully few, and read only by silverfish these last ten years. Robert stood up and stared at the boxes farther back in the basement dimness. Surely there were more books there, even if selected by brute chance, whatever was left after Bob auctioned off the Palo Alto place. He looked down at the book in his hand. Kipling. Damned jingoistic elevator music. But it's a start . Unlike the libraries that floated in cyberspace, this was something he could hold in his hands. He sat down on the boxes and began to read, all the while pushing his mind ahead of the words, trying to remember — trying to create — what should rightly be the rest of the poem.
An hour passed. Two. He was vaguely aware that Alice came down to announce lunch, and that he waved her off impatiently. This was so much more important. He opened more boxes. Some contained Bob and Alice's own junk, even more vacuous than what they had retrieved from Palo Alto. But he found a dozen more books of poetry. Some of them were… good stuff.
The afternoon passed. He could still enjoy the poetry, but the enjoyment was also pain. I can't write a jot of the good stuff, except where I happen to remember it . And his panic grew. Finally, he stood and threw Ezra Pound into the basement wall. The spine of the old book split and it sprawled on the floor, a broken paper butterfly. Robert stared for a moment. He had never harmed a book before, not even if it bore the ugliest writing in the world. He walked across the room and knelt by the ruin.
Miri chose that moment to come bouncing down the stairs. "Robert! Alice says I can call an air taxi! Where would you like to go?"
The words were noise, scraping on his despair. He picked up the book and shook his head. "No." Go away .
"I don't understand. Why are you digging around here? There are easier ways to get what you want."
Robert stood, his fingers trying to put Ezra Pound back together again. His eyes found Miri. Now she had his attention. She was smiling, so sure of herself, in maximum bossiness mode. And for the moment she didn't understand the light in his eyes. "And how is that, Miri?"
"The problem is that you can't access what's all around us. That's why you're down here reading these old books, right? In a way you're like a little kid — but that's good, that's good ! Grown-ups like Alice and Bob have all sorts of bad habits that hold them back. But you're starting almost fresh. It'll be easy for you to learn the new things. But not from dumbhead vocational classes. See? Let me teach you how to wear." It was the same wearisome nag as always, but she thought she'd found a clever new angle.
This time, he would not let it pass. Robert took a step toward her. "So you've been watching me down here?" he said mildly, building up to what he intended.
"um, just in a general way. I — "
Robert took another step toward her and shoved the mutilated book toward her face. "Have you ever heard of this poet?"
Miri squinted at the broken spine." 'E,' Y — oh, 'Ezra Pound'? Well… yes, I've got all her stuff. Let me show you, Robert!" She hesitated, then saw the foolscap lying atop a box. She picked it up and it came to life. Titles streamed down the page, the cantos, the essays — even, God help us, later criticism from the mindless depths of the twenty-first century. "But seeing it on this page is like looking through a keyhole, Robert. I can show you how to see it all around you, with — "
"Enough!" said Robert. He slid his voice down till it was quiet, cutting, overtly reasonable. "You simpleton. You know nothing and yet you presume to run my life, just as you run the lives of your little friends."
Miri had backed up a step. There was shock on her face, but that had apparently not yet connected with her mouth. "Yes, that's what Alice says, that I'm too bossy — "
Robert took another step, and Miri was against the stairs. "You've spent your whole life playing video games, convincing yourself and your friends that you're worth something, that you're some kind of beautiful thing. I'll bet your parents are even foolish enough to tell you how clever you are. But it's not a pretty thing to be bossy when you're a fat, brainless brat."
"I — " Miri's hand rose to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. She took an awkward step backwards, up the steps. His words were connecting now. He could see the veneer of self-confidence and bright cheeriness collapsing.
And Robert pursued: "'I,' 'I' — yes, that's probably what your self-centered little mind thinks about most. It would be hard to bear your worthlessness otherwise. But think about that before you come again trying to run my life."
Tears welled in the girl's eyes. She turned and sprinted up the stairs, her footsteps not a pounding of childish force, but soft — almost as if she didn't want anything about herself to be sensed.
Robert stood for a moment, looking up the empty stairway. It was like standing at the bottom of a well, with a patch of daylight across the top.
He remembered. There had been a time, when he was fifteen and his sister Cara was about ten… when Cara became independent, bothersome. At the time Robert had had his own problems — totally trivial from the altitude of seventy-five years, but they'd seemed significant at the time. Getting past his sister's newfound ego, making her realize how little she counted in the general scheme of things, that had given him such a rush of pleasure.
Robert stared up into the patch of daylight and waited for the rush.
Bob Gu got out of debrief late on Saturday. He had been delinquent about tracking events at home; the Paraguay operation had been all-absorbing. Okay, that was an excuse. But it was also the truth. There had been hot launchers under that hostage orphanage. There in Asuncion, he had seen the abyss.
So it wasn't until he arrived home that he got the local bad news…
His daughter was too big and grown-up to sit on his lap, but she sat close on the sofa and let him take her hands in his. Alice sat on the other side; she looked calm, but he knew she was totally freaked. Training jitters plus this problem at home were almost too much for her. So it was past time to face up to family responsibilities:
"It's nothing you did, Miri."
Miri shook her head. There were dark rings around her eyes; Alice said she had stopped crying only an hour ago. "I was trying to help him and…" The sentence dribbled off. Her voice held none of the confidence that had grown in it over the last two or three years. Damn . In the corner of his eye, Bob could see that his father was still ensconced in his room upstairs, silently sticking it to them all. Visiting Dad was next on the agenda. The old man was going to have a surprise.