Every day there were new changes in himself, and old barriers suddenly removed. He could easily accept Reed Weber's advice to be patient with his limitations. So much was changing and all for the better. One day he was walking again, even if it was a lurching, unstable gait. He fell three times that first day, and each time, he just bounced back to his feet. "Unless you fall on your head, Professor, you'll be fine," Reed said. But his walking got steadily better. And now that he could see — really see — he could do things with his hands. No more pawing around in the dark. He had never realized how important sight was to coordination. There are uncountable ways that things can lie and tangle and hide in three dimensions; without vision you're condemned to compromise and failure. But not me. Not now . And two days after that…
… he was playing Ping-Pong with his granddaughter. He remembered the table. It was the one that he'd bought for little Bobby thirty years ago. He even remembered Bob taking it off his hands when he finally gave up his home in Palo Alto.
Today Miri was pulling her punches, lobbing the ball high and slow across the table. Robert moved back and forth. Seeing the ball was no problem, but he had to be very careful or he'd swing too high. Careful, careful went the game — until Miri had him down fifteen to eleven. And then he won five points, each stroke a kind of spastic twitch that somehow smashed the white plastic into the far edge of the table.
"Robert! You were just fooling me!" Poor, pudgy Miri raced from one corner of the table to the other, trying to keep up with him. Robert's slams had no spin, but she wasn't an expert player. Seventeen to fifteen, eighteen, nineteen. Then his powerful swings got out of tune, and he was back to being a staggering spastic. But now his granddaughter showed no mercy. She racked up six straight points — and won the game.
And then she ran around the table to hug him. "You are great! But you'll never fool me again!" It didn't do any good to tell her what Aquino had said, that the reconstruction of his nervous system would cause randomly spiky performance. He might end up with the reflexes of an athlete; more likely the endpoint would be something like average coordination.
It was funny, how he paid attention to the day of the week. That had stopped mattering even before he lost his marbles. But now, on the weekends, his granddaughter was around all day.
"What was Great-Aunt Cara like?" she asked him one Saturday morning.
"She was a lot like you, Miri."
The girl's smile was sudden and wide and proud. Robert had guessed that this was what she wanted to hear. But it's true, except that Cara was never overweight . Miri was like Cara, right in those last years of preadolescence when her hero worship for her older brother had been replaced by other concerns. If anything, Miri's personality was an exaggeration of Cara's. Miri was very bright — probably smarter than her great-aunt. And Miri was already into the extreme independence and moral certainty of the other. I remember that persistent arrogance , thought Robert. That had been an enormous irritation; breaking her of it had been what drove them apart.
Sometimes Miri had her little friends over. The boys and girls mixed pretty indescriminately at this age and in this era. For a few brief years they were almost matched for muscle. Miri loved to play doubles at Ping-Pong.
He had to smile at the way she bossed her friends around. She had them organized into a tournament. And though she was scrupulously honest, she played to win . When her side got behind, her jaw set in angry determination, and there was steel in her eyes. Afterward she was quick to acknowledge her own failures, and just as quick to critique her playmates.
Even when her friends were gone physically, they were often still around, invisible presences like Robert's doctors. Miri walked around the backyard talking and arguing with nobody — a parody of all the cellphone discourtesy that Robert remembered from his later years at Stanford.
Then there were Miri's grand silences. Those didn't match anything in his recollection of Cara. Miri would push gently back and forth on the swing that hung from the only good-sized tree in the backyard. She would do that for hours , speaking only occasionally — and then to the empty air. Her eyes seemed to be focused miles away. And when he asked her what she was doing, she would start and laugh and say that she was "studying." It looked much more like some kind of pernicious hypnosis to Robert Gu.
Weekdays, Miri was off at school; a limo pulled up for her every morning, always at the moment that the girl was ready to go. Bob was gone nowadays, "to be back in a week or so." Alice was home part of each day, but she was in a distinctly short-tempered mood. Sometimes he would see her at lunch; more often, his daughter-in-law was at Camp Pendleton until midafternoon. She was especially irritable when she came back from the base.
Except for Reed Weber's therapy sessions, Robert was left much to his own devices. He wandered around the house, found some of his old books in cardboard boxes in the basement. Those were almost the only books in the house. This family was effectively illiterate. Sure, Miri bragged that many books were visible any time you wanted to see them, but that was a half truth. The browser paper that Reed had given him could be used to find books online, but reading them on that single piece of foolscap was a tedious desecration.
It was remarkable foolscap, though. It really did support teleconferencing; Dr. Aquino and the remote therapists were not just invisible voices anymore. And the web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn't be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A "vandal charity" was what they called themselves.
And that eventually got him into the News of the Day. The world was as much a mess as ever. This month, it was a police action in Paraguay. The details didn't make sense. What were "moonshine fabs" and why would the U.S. want to help local cops close them down? The big picture was more familiar. The invading forces were looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Today they had found nuclear weapons hidden beneath an orphanage. The pictures showed slums and poor people, ragged children playing inscrutable games that somehow seemed to deny the squalor all around. There was an occasional, almost lonely-looking, soldier.
I'll bet this is where Bob is , he thought. Not for the first time — or the thousandth — he wondered how his son could have chosen such an ugly, dead-end career.
Evenings they had something like a family meal, Alice and Robert and Miri. Alice seemed happy to do the cooking, though tonight she looked like she hadn't slept for a couple of days.
Robert hung around the kitchen, watching mother and daughter slide trays from the fridge. "TV dinners, that's what we used to call this sort of thing," he said. In fact, this stuff had the appearance and texture of delicious food. It all tasted like mush to him, but Reed said that was because his taste buds were ninety-five percent dead.
Miri hesitated the way she often did when Robert tossed out some idea she hadn't heard before. But as usual, her response was full of confidence. "Oh, these are much better than TV junk food. We can mix and match the parts." She pointed at the unmarked containers sizzling in — well, it looked like a microwave. "See, I got the ice-cream dessert and Alice got… angel-hair blueberries. Wow, Alice!"