However: the mind of Colonel Jed Richards could be said, at the instant of the explosion, to have come to approximate, in terms of its brutal monomania, the infinite singularity of the universe prior to expansion. It had become the density of a consciousness that was capable of one last gesture, of saying I am, and almost nothing else, a perceiving consciousness, otherwise devoid of characteristics. Perhaps, in retrospect, there was muscular memory of prior cerebral function, and this muscular memory was able to ignite the oxygen tank, even to plan its ignition. Whichever Richards was in charge — the strictly muscular Richards, the proto-Richards, the amoebic Richards, the particularity of Richards — the explosion, notwithstanding, did take place, outside of NASA’s jurisdiction, and most of the ERV and its occupant were incinerated above the Sonoran Desert.
Most of the occupant.
My beautiful and eternal wife, to whom I have been wedded these many years, and to whom I will be wedded always, typed Woo Lee Koo, onto the autotranslation keyboard he had installed on the outside of the cryogenic refrigeration unit in which he kept his wife’s remains, in his office in the garage of his home in the Grant’s Pass Complex, I have come to write to you again to apologize for the slovenly way in which I have been pursuing my researches. It is now, I believe, some years since I have been here in this decadent and futile nation, years in which I have had ample opportunity to learn the secret of regeneration of necrotic tissue, and yet, to my shame, I have yet to attain the result I desire. The experiments I have conducted seem to be of little or no value. I can see the answers to the questions before me, tantalizingly, but it’s as if nature just doesn’t want to collaborate with the likes of me, as if to deny the love of two persons who only wish to repair an unjust separation one from the other.
Koo had installed the keyboard along with a screen on the interior, in the hope that someday his cryogenically preserved wife could read on the AutoTrans what was being typed to her. There was also a small keyboard inside, in case she wanted to type back. Koo recognized that this was desperate, even pathological, that in the present scientific environment there was little chance that a frozen dead woman was going to type back to him.
I know you wonder constantly if I have been true to you. And so it is my responsibility to reassure you occasionally on this subject. You may have been wondering again if there was a woman, or women, who have tempted me, and from whom I have obtained some sexual favors in order to soothe my lonely heart. Today it is my duty to reassure you that there have been no such favors, and therefore very little soothing. I was at the bank on Congress Street last week, and I would like to let you know that I still have a very healthy savings that I am keeping in federally secured treasury certificates because of volatility and downward trending in securities markets. In the course of my trip to the bank on Congress Street I espied a pretty young woman ahead of me, also making, as it turned out, a deposit. She was small hipped, as you were, and her hair was the color of straw. And despite the passing of many years, my darling wife, I would like to tell you that my heart leaped up, briefly, when it imagined that you were once again among us. I waited a respectful time for this young woman to complete her transaction, and then I averted my eyes, so that she would not feel as though I were in some way ungallant. She was not you, but insofar as she was you, she was handsome, and I felt fortunate to be in her presence, and also lucky when she had passed out of the cubbyhole of the Automatic Teller Machines. The ghosts of the past should be fleeting, don’t you think?
It was Tuesday that Koo most often wrote to his wife, Nathalie, because this was a night when his son often worked late at that restaurant. This allowed for uninterrupted time in the garage with the cryogenic refrigerator and the AutoTrans keyboard. Jean-Paul, in his youthful self-centeredness, had never once asked what the refrigerator was for, though Koo did keep some tissue samples in the front of the refrigerator. There was a false front that he’d had built into the thing according to his specifications. And so Jean-Paul had never even expressed an interest in the technology. The son, that is, disdained his father’s work.
Perhaps I ought to have spoken to this young woman in the bank, because sometimes, my darling, days can go by in which I do not engage in lighthearted conversation with anyone. One night recently, I went to the bedroom of our son, who is now eighteen years old, and who seems to be more interested in starting a business than in going on to college or university as I would like him to do. I visited his bedroom and sat down on the extra bed, because he has twin beds in that room, as I have described to you. He was perusing, or seemed to be perusing, a book of tips for entrepreneurs. I said to him that I had had the idea that we might remodel the living quarters, our quarters, with an eye toward allowing more sunlight into the rooms. And we might, I suggested, take down the wall separating his room from his walk-in closet, so that he would have more square footage. The construction of these apartments, as I have said in the past, is shoddy, and the desert is destructive to anything that is not sturdily built. There are so very many people in Rio Blanco who would be happy to do this kind of work, remodeling work. At any rate, Jean-Paul indicated to me that there was no point in remodeling his room, because he did not expect to be living with me very much longer. My darling, may I say that this conversation saddened me greatly. It is not that I feel the boy should be required to continue to live with me. It is simply that I didn’t plan for this moment to come so quickly. By concentrating on my work, I prove, again and again, that I am not very good at my daily life. I do not want to be alone, without my son, and yet I believe I have made myself alone even as he lives under my very roof. I wish that you were here to help me talk to him.
As Koo typed his weekly missive, there was in the distance a chorus of emergency sirens spreading out into the desert night. There had been water riots taking place on the far side of the pass, where the collecting pools were meant to drain into the nearly empty aquifer underneath the greater Rio Blanco area. A large undulation of homeless people, despite daytime temperatures in the area of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, had hiked over the pass and camped out beside these collecting pools, demanding that the water be handed out more democratically. They also wanted all the golf courses to be turned over to the people and xeriscaped. Koo saw some merit in these arguments. He disliked golf, wasn’t even sure how it was played, but his neglect of the water riots had more to do with his wife and his work than with any political position on water rights.
I have told you, I believe, about Alfonse, the orangutan to whom we attempted to restore liver function. Without success. I was very disappointed by the outcome of this experiment, and, as you know, I became rather fond of Alfonse. He was a willful but dignified gentleman. I find that Noelle, my assistant, the one I had over to dinner once or twice (though our dealings have been entirely chaste), has also become very passionate about the primates themselves. With acquaintance, I must say, one begins to treat these apes as though they are human neighbors or coworkers. Alfonse had no choice but to die a miserable death from liver disease. And yet there was a tragic sense that he perhaps understood himself to be collaborating with us on the project, and approved. Perhaps I have merely fallen prey to the disagreeable tendency to weep over what should be the greater glory of science. Occasionally, I will be watching a family navigating the crosswalk, just today, for example, and I will want to weep just over the fact that here is a family, a family entire, walking together in a crosswalk. Is this familiar to you? The same is true for me with some web-based programming. It causes passionate feelings. Perhaps it is the apartness of my own family that causes me to feel these things.