What else was there to do? Koo watched the video, trying to divine the meaning of symbolic locutions still possible for his son. Patient seems able to understand language, but is unable to communicate well. Patient seems to be attempting to formulate some prolonged farewell with romantic partner, V. Roberts, despite limited linguistic skills. Koo himself, as he watched, was unable to sit still. He couldn’t stop himself from getting up, crossing the room, wearing down a portion of wall-to-wall carpeting, stuffing some empty carbohydrate into his mouth, that bowl of peppermints he had on his desk, going back to the screen, trying to rethink his strategy, remembering about the peeling wallpaper in the office, dictating some more notes, castigating himself for his paucity of ideas, despairing, and it was in the course of this that he did suddenly hit on a possibility.
Perhaps it was only fair to let Jean-Paul know about the reanimation experiment, and to allow him to make some kind of farewell to his mother. Koo even dictated the thought into his recorder, and it was just then that he had his idea. If the infection took a more leisurely course on the planet Mars, if it was possible to slow the course of infection by refrigerating, why couldn’t he put Jean-Paul into the freezer for a few hours? Had no one explored this? Woo Lee Koo had trouble getting his thoughts to settle down, so worried was he about his difficult but lovable son, and when he tried to come up with his hypotheses, he found that he flitted around from idea to idea without being able to land.
At the same time, there was a rather moving speech taking place on the screen before him. Vienna Roberts had risen to the occasion and supported her boyfriend throughout his lurid ordeal. Koo also made a note that any theory of the bacteria had to take into account the fact that she showed no sign of infection.
“I get that you are not well, and maybe you think your time has come, but I want you to know that I don’t accept it, and you just shaking your head isn’t going to convince me. For me, your time just is not coming. If I were going to show the same symptoms as you, I’d already have the symptoms, which means I’m probably clean, so why don’t you just let me hug you?”
To which his son shook his head, again.
“Look at it another way”—wiping her eyes—“the day arrives for every lover, that day when she’s not a lover anymore, and it could be five days after she meets him, or five years, or fifty years, but no matter what that time is, the time when lovers are parted, have to be parted, no matter what has happened in all the intervening time, whether they have been unfaithful, or have taken each other for granted, or maybe they couldn’t really be intimate, or however they approached it, no matter what happened in all that time, there’s never a lover who doesn’t wish that she didn’t have a few more minutes. The end of love is when you can no longer see the possibility of a few more minutes, and when you start totaling up what’s lost. And that’s when you always wish you had done better talking through things, you know, because there was a time that was the last time you could express yourself, and you almost always wish you had expressed yourself better, because it’s the way people are, that they never get it all down in words, and in this case, if something is going to happen to you now, I really want to say that it’s partly because of me, because I—”
A cessation of the conversation at this point, by reason of a surfeit of feelings.
“—I was the one who had this selfish idea about us having to go out there, out into the canyon. If it all has something to do with that, with what I thought I wanted, and you didn’t even want it, then it’s up to me to be able to say it’s okay for me and I’m not worried about infection, or whatever you want to call it. It’s up to me to say whether it’s okay for me to hug you or be hugged by you, or whether I can kiss you or wrap my arms around you on the bed, or lie on top of you.”
Son, again, with the vigorous shaking of the head, no. It was clear to Koo that Jean-Paul was still able to indicate in the negative, and therefore the affirmative, but what of more complicated grammatical structures?
For some reason, Koo suddenly noticed that Vienna Roberts was actually wearing trousers. An unlikely garment for the slut. Had there been some kind of costume change? These denim trousers were sitting low on her hips in a way that revealed some of her pale belly and her bony hips, and it occurred to Koo that the pants belonged to his son. Perhaps she was wearing these low-slung slacks because she was already appropriating clothing from him, fetishizing his clothes, the clothes from the former Jean-Paul. Before he could halt the proceedings, the girl began removing her particle mask, unhooking it from her dainty little ears, as if this was somehow to express more emphatically her romantic thoughts, and Koo knew now that he should march across the unit and intercede, and yet he was unable, for the moment, to stop watching. It was as if this were some kind of perma-cam web broadcast, such as you might see on the independent or pirate channels, where everything was about how realistic were its means of production, which really meant: how tiresome, how shattering, for example, that program, Prima, about the first family on Mars.
Jean-Paul made a gesture, laying ahold of each elbow, as if to indicate that he was cold, and the girl took note.
“Do you want a—”
Pointing to a stack of wool blankets that Koo himself had brought into the room to deal with temperature extremes. But Jean-Paul shook his head vigorously. He didn’t want the blanket. Any blanket.
“Well, then, do you want me to hold you? Would you just, like, let me—”
Another vigorous shake of the head in the negative, so vigorous, in fact, that there was a tiny crimson spattering across the pillow and on the bedclothes.
“What, then?”
Jean-Paul pointed out into the hall. And thus the drama of Jean-Paul’s illness would temporarily recede from the view of omnipresent video cameras. His father had an idea where the young lovers were going, because it was a place in the unit that had often appealed to Jean-Paul when he was a boy: the bathroom, with its paling lamps. Why a boy from Asia, by way of France, had been so enamored with the brutish and homely pigmentary affectation of the paling salon was unclear to his father. Paling, in general, was no better than sniffing glue, in terms of the kinds of difficulties it so effectively promoted. But Jean-Paul had always liked it as a child, and when he could not go into an actual paling salon to soak up the ultrahigh-frequency transmissions of the irradiators, then he would apply the caramel dyes of would-be Bollywood actresses, those trying to make it big in the Sino-Indian musical espionage film circuit.