Gary’s eyes fell shut. The crickets outside sounded like water running interminably in pipes. From the distance came a rhythmic canine barking like the downthrusts of a handsaw.
“The truth,” Caroline said, “is that forty-eight hours sounds just about right to me. I don’t want my children looking back on Christmas as the time when everybody screamed at each other. Which basically seems to be unavoidable now. Your mother walks in the door with three hundred sixty days’ worth of Christmas mania, she’s been obsessing since the previous January, and then, of course, Where’s that Austrian reindeer figurine — don’t you like it? Don’t you use it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is the Austrian reindeer figurine? She’s got her food obsessions, her money obsessions, her clothes obsessions, she’s got the whole ten-piece set of baggage which my husband used to agree is kind of a problem, but now suddenly, out of the blue, he’s taking her side. We’re going to turn the house inside out looking for a piece of thirteen-dollar gift-store kitsch because it has sentimental value to your mother—”
“Caroline.”
“And when it turns out that Caleb—”
“This is not an honest version.”
“Please, Gary, let me finish, when it turns out that Caleb did the kind of thing that any normal boy might do to a piece of gift-store crap that he found in the basement—”
“I can’t listen to this.”
“No, no, the problem is not that your eagle-eyed mother is obsessed with some garbagey piece of Austrian kitsch, no, that’s not the problem—”
“It was a hundred-dollar hand-carved—”
“I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars! Since when do you punish him, your own son, for your mother’s craziness? It’s like you’re suddenly trying to make us act like it’s 1964 and we’re all living in Peoria. ‘Clean your plate!’ ‘Wear a necktie!’ ‘No TV tonight!’ And you wonder why we’re fighting! You wonder why Aaron rolls his eyes when your mom walks in the room! It’s like you’re embarrassed to let her see us. It’s like, for as long as she’s here, you’re trying to pretend we live some way that she approves of. But I’m telling you, Gary, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Your mother’s the one who should be embarrassed. She follows me around the kitchen scrutinizing me, like, as if I roast a turkey every week, and if I turn my back for one second she’s going to pour a quart of oil into whatever I’m making, and as soon as I leave the room she’s going to root through the trash like some fucking Food Police, she’s going to take food from the trash and feed it to my children—”
“The potato was in the sink, not the trash, Caroline.”
“And you defend her! She goes outside to the trash barrels to see what other dirt she can dig up, and disapprove of, and she’s asking me, literally every ten minutes, How’s your back? How’s your back? How’s your back? Is your back any better? How’d you hurt it? Is your back any better? How’s your back? She goes looking for things to disapprove of, and then she tries to tell my children how to dress for dinner in my house, and you don’t back me up! You don’t back me up, Gary. You start apologizing, and I don’t get it, but I’m not doing it again. Basically, I think your brother’s got the right idea. Here’s a sweet, smart, funny man who’s honest enough to say what he can and can’t tolerate in the way of get-togethers. And your mother acts like he’s this huge embarrassment and failure! Well, you wanted the truth. The truth is I cannot stand another Christmas like that. If we absolutely have to see your parents, we’re doing it on our own turf. Just like you promised we always would.”
A pillow of blue blackness lay on Gary’s brain. He’d reached the point on the post-martini evening downslope where a sense of complication weighed on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids, his mouth. He understood how much his mother infuriated Caroline, and at the same time he found fault with almost everything that Caroline had said. The rather beautiful wooden reindeer, for example, had been stored in a well-marked box; Caleb had broken two of its legs and hammered a roofing nail through its skull; Enid had taken an uneaten baked potato from the sink and sliced it and fried it for Jonah; and Caroline hadn’t bothered to wait until her in-laws had left town before depositing in a trash barrel the pink polyester bathrobe that Enid had given her for Christmas.
“When I said I wanted the truth,” he said, not opening his eyes, “I meant I saw you limping before you ran inside.”
“Oh, my God,” Caroline said.
“My mother didn’t hurt your back. You hurt your back.”
“Please, Gary. Do me a favor and call Dr. Pierce.”
“Admit that you’re lying, and I’ll talk about anything you want. But nothing’s going to change until you admit that.”
“I don’t even recognize your voice.”
“Five days in St. Jude. You can’t do that for a woman who, like you say, has nothing else in her life?”
“Please come back to me.”
A jolt of rage forced Gary’s eyes open. He kicked the sheet aside and jumped out of bed. “This is a marriage-ender! I can’t believe it!”
“Gary, please—”
“We’re going to split up over a trip to St. Jude!”
And then a visionary in a warm-up jacket was lecturing to pretty college students. Behind the visionary, in a pixilated middle distance, were sterilizers and chromatography cartridges and tissue stains in weak solution, long-necked medicoscientific faucets, pinups of spread-eagled chromosomes, and diagrams of tuna-red brains sliced up like sashimi. The visionary was Earl “Curly” Eberle, a small-mouthed fifty-year-old in dime-store glasses, whom the creators of the Axon Corporation’s promotional video had done their best to make glamorous. The camera work was nervous, the lab floor pitched and lurched. Blurry zooms zeroed in on female student faces aglow with fascination. Curiously obsessive attention was paid to the back of the visionary head (it was indeed curly).
“Of course, chemistry, too, even brain chemistry,” Eberle was saying, “is basically just manipulation of electrons in their shells. But compare this, if you will, to an electronics that consists of little two-and three-pole switches. The diode, the transistor. The brain, by contrast, has several dozen kinds of switches. The neuron either fires or it doesn’t; but this decision is regulated by receptor sites that often have shades of offness and on-ness between plain Off and plain On. Even if you could build an artificial neuron out of molecular transistors, the conventional wisdom is that you can still never translate all that chemistry into the language of yes/no without running out of space. If we conservatively estimate twenty neuroactive ligands, of which as many as eight can operate simultaneously, and each of these eight switches has five different settings — not to bore you with the combinatorics, but unless you’re living in a world of Mr. Potato Heads, you’re going to be a pretty funny-looking android.”
Close-up of a turnip-headed male student laughing.
“Now, these are facts so basic,” Eberle said, “that we ordinarily wouldn’t even bother spelling them out. It’s just the way things are. The only workable connection we have with the electrophysiology of cognition and volition is chemical. That’s the received wisdom, part of the gospel of our science. Nobody in their right mind would try to connect the world of neurons with the world of printed circuits.”
Eberle paused dramatically.
“Nobody, that is, but the Axon Corporation.”