Counting Heads (33 page)

But if loneliness is the wound, what’s so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It’s a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why?

Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats).

So, you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one.

Believe me in this; I’ve tried all the tricks of the lonely man.

THANK YOU, VICTOR. I was parched. Now, where was I?

I had my media, my subject, and my title. I set myself to work. I mixed shredded processor felt with my oils and painted a life-size portrait of Jean. This took half a year to get right, but when I was finished, it was, in my humble opinion, sublime. Jean’s expression was sweet and sad—just as I remembered her.

Satisfied with the base painting, I began to layer on semitransparent washes of refractive oils to create a sense of depth and motion. It wasn’t exactly holographic; it was still only two-dimensional, but as the viewer’s eyes moved across it, Jean’s image seemed to tremble with life, seemed to breathe and blink, as though she were right there, holding her pose behind the frame.

It was terrific. I loved it. Yet I knew my real work had yet to begin. I had embedded all of that blank processor felt in the paint, and it was time to give Jean her secret wound.

There was enough felt in the paint to supply the canvas with an index of 1.50 or 1.75 on today’s mentar scale. That is, of about the same mental complexity of my Skippy at the time. I could have initialized the painting with a personality bud and thinking noetics and used it as another valet. But instead I wanted to imprint it with a single emotion.

Now, Justine, I don’t know how much you know about sim holography, but those hollyholo sims you enjoy watching are special hybrids. When you cast a sim of yourself (or proxy, for that matter), the simcaster takes a precise picture of your entire brain state at that moment. A slice, if you will, or a gestalt map. This is sufficient to model a software brain that can think. But feelings, unlike thought, are epiphenomena of brain states, and there is only one brain state mapped in your slice, one that captures what you were feeling the moment you press the cast button.

Am I losing you? Please bear with me. I only mean to say that your sim or proxy is capable of feeling only one emotion, the emotion that you, yourself, were feeling when you cast it. So, how do the hollyholos you enjoy watching seem to experience a wide range of emotion? This is made possible by casting millions of slices and stringing them together in emotive cascades. The novella actors who cast these hollyholos spend most of their time sitting in studio booths emoting on command, over and over again: I am happy, I am sad, I am ecstatic, I am miserable—a broad spectrum—and all the while staying in character! (I suppose they earn the fortunes they’re paid.)

My own goal was more modest. I wanted to create slices of only one feeling—you guessed it—loneliness. I wanted to burn it right into the paint, into the felt mixed in the paint. I wanted it to have all the shades, all the layers of my own wretched experience. I wanted a portrait that actually
suffered
, suffered in the same dumb animal way that I did.

My task was complicated by the fact that, as a seared, I cannot allow myself to be deeply scanned. The radiation of scanways or holographic equipment would set off the wardens in my cells, and I would burn. Even the radiation from this little pocket simcaster I have here is enough to turn me into a human Roman candle (and, by the way, the next time I pull this out you’d better move your seats away from me). For my portrait, I had to use a passive electrocorticographic reader, a sort of metal bowl over my head with ultrasensitive wave frequency pickups. These are no good for modeling a thinking brain, but they do a fine job in recording emotive states.

So there I sat, at my grand banquet table, with a metal colander atop my bald head, gazing at the portrait of my first wife and allowing my love for her and the utter misery of my singledom to fill up all my spaces, and when there was nothing in my heart but a thousand paper cuts of loneliness, I’d tap the controller and feed my agony to the oil painting. The whole exercise sometimes took hours to accomplish, and it would wipe me out for the rest of the day.

Did the painting share my pain? I don’t know for sure, only that my instruments registered a positive emotive flux in the paint’s processor felt. But how could I know if the recorded feelings were true to life? I couldn’t; so the next day I repeated the process, and the next, and every day thereafter.

I hardly noticed the days and weeks streaming by. I can’t say that my spirit was refreshed by my work. On the contrary, this was pretty mucky stuff I was wallowing in. And it was deep enough to swallow the whole Cass Tower, I thought, all six hundred floors of it. At some point, I had opaqued my exterior windows, convinced as I was that the building was, in fact, sinking into the quagmire of my pain. I was weepy, defiant, and strung out. I ate too much or not at all. I slept sometimes thirty-six hours straight. I invented every distraction I could think of to keep me from the banquet hall and the woman who suffered there in secret. But inevitably I wandered in and hooked myself up to shoot her another dose of my love. I hated myself. I pitied poor me. I cursed the day I was born.

Ah, the artistic process. How much I don’t miss it.

Once or twice I thought the portrait must be finished. I doubted it could hold another drop. I’d leave the banquet hall then and break out the champagne. But the next day I would wake up feeling even lonelier than ever before, and I’d rush into the banquet hall to start a new session.

TO LAYPERSONS SUCH as yourselves, I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a particularly healthful or balanced lifestyle. And I would not recommend it to the viewers at home. Indeed, I had long passed the depth where most people would be crushed by the pressure. But to a true artist, one’s art is like a diving bell capable of taking the artist all the way down.

Then, one day, as I sat gazing at my wounded Jean, Skippy intruded to inform me there was someone at the front door. That can’t be, I told him. Who would risk swimming down here?

“She says she’s your neighbor from the next floor down,” Skippy said.

There were still people below me? “What does she want?”

“To see if you have a fish she can borrow. She’s not sure what kind she wants, possibly a halibut or cod, but she’ll settle for salmon or tuna or whatever you have, as long as it’s from deep saltwater.”

I was flabbergasted. All I could think to ask was, “And do I? Have fish?”

Skippy informed me that I did, over three thousand kilograms of live fish of assorted species in the stasis locker. They were left over from my banquet days.

I pulled the metal bowl from my head and massaged my scalp. I said, “Show her to me.”

Skippy opened a view of my foyer. There stood a woman of middle height, a trace of Asian features on an otherwise plain Western face, expensive clothes, and middle age. An eccentric, no doubt. To have money but to allow oneself to age beyond fifty years was eccentric. And she was a busybody too. Who else but a busybody would disturb a neighbor with such a lame request—may I borrow a fish?

“I see you’ve already let her in,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” said my valet. “Was that wrong? I was following the Leichester Code of Modern Etiquette.”

“Yes, it was wrong,” I said. “Remind me to review that code with you sometime.” To the woman in my foyer, I said, “Hello, Myr Neighbor.”

“Post,” she said to the cams in my foyer, “Melina Post. And you are Myr Harger?”

“I am. My valet tells me you require a fish.”

“Oh, yes, Myr Harger, I do. And the sooner the better. Do you happen to have one I could borrow? I’ll replace it as soon as possible.”

“My valet claims that I have a few in stasis. You are welcome to any or all of them. He’ll take you to the pantry where you can view them. If you see something you like, he’ll see to delivery.”

“Thank you so much, Myr Harger. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

“You’re quite welcome, Myr Post. Good-bye.” I closed the foyer scape, put the bowl back on my head, and returned to my suffering. But the knowledge that a stranger was at that moment trespassing my suite distracted me. I lived like a troll, never shaving or exfoliating. Fortunately, Skippy liked to keep the place clean, and I let him do it, so long as he kept his scuppers out of the banquet hall where I worked.

“Oh, there you are,” said a woman’s voice behind me. I whipped around to behold Myr Post in realbody entering the room. “You have a lovely home, Myr Harger.” Her eyes swept past me and took in the banquet hall, littered with years of detritus and dust, tubes of paint, dried palettes, hundreds of canvases stacked against the walls, towers of recording equipment, ropes of cable—and Jean.

I leaped from my chair, as though caught in a criminal act, and threw a cloth over the portrait, but not before she’d gotten a good look at it.

“My how—” she said. “That’s—” She continued to stare at the canvas. “There’s something extraordinary about that picture, Myr Harger. Please show it to me again.”

“No!” I said, galled by her presumption. “It’s not ready for public viewing.”

My tone startled her. “A pity,” she said, somewhat chastised. “Well, when it
is
ready, I should be very glad to see it again.”

“As well you
should
be,” I said. The suggestion that my Jean would someday be on public display disturbed me, though that’s what I’d intended from the start.

Myr Post gave me such a funny look that I became self-conscious. I removed the metal bowl from my head and tossed it on the table. It occurred to me that I was standing there stark naked. With a sick feeling, I glanced down at myself. But no, she had picked a day when I seemed to be wearing a robe. I cinched it tight and gave her a triumphant look.

That must have reminded her of her own mission, for she said, “I hope I’m not intruding,” perfectly aware that she was, “but I’m in a fix, and your valet seems a bit slow. Otherwise, I would never think of troubling you.”

Liar
, I thought.

My visitor didn’t appear so old as she had in the foyer, more like my own age, but with weathered skin. She wore rich evening clothes, fit for a banquet, and I smirked, thinking she was years too late to attend one of mine. She began telling me how she had come to need a last-minute fish, but I wasn’t listening. I saw her rub her arm, leaving a pinkish blush on her skin, and this drove home the fact that she was really there. I couldn’t say how long it had been since I shared a room with a real flesh-and-blood person. After so long in my hermitage, the effect was dizzying, and I had to sit down.

She sat next to me, uninvited, all the while chirping away like a happy bird about other people I did not know and wrong addresses and missed deliveries. I didn’t even try to keep up with it all. I thought I could smell her perfume. This was hallucination or fantasy, of course. Seared people lose all sense of smell. Then I realized how close to me she was sitting. I wore no mastic, and my suite’s air exchange was turned off. Yet, she wasn’t gagging.

I interrupted her and said, “You can’t smell me!”

“No, I can’t. And you can’t smell me either, can you, Myr Harger?”

I stared at her, speechless. We were two of a kind.

“Well,” she said into the silence that had settled in the room, “will you be so kind as to do that for me?”

I didn’t hear her. I was too busy detecting the subtle appliances of the seared that she wore. From the barely detectable sheen of her skin mastic to the fire-retardant inner lining of her clothing.

She laughed then and said with mock authority, “Myr Harger, either lead me to your larder, or show me the door. If I don’t have my fish in fifteen minutes, my goose is cooked. And
you
of
all people
, Myr Harger, should understand that in my case, that’s no metaphor.”

Commanded, I led her to the kitchens. Or rather, I let Skippy lead us, since I couldn’t recall the way. We sat in the long-abandoned chef’s station while Skippy showed us life-size frames of the saltwater fish I still had in stasis. There were marlin, flounder, albacore, shark, halibut, salmon, octopus, and more.

Skippy said, “We also have a selection of saltwater mollusks and crustaceans and marine mammals.”

“No, thank you, Skippy,” she said. “It’s fish he likes, but I’ve forgotten what kind he said. What other kinds of fish are there in the sea?”

“Haddie, herring, eel, sole, barracuda, fluke, dab, mackerel—” Skippy spouted a long list in no discernible order, none of which rang a bell for her—“orange roughy, rattails, skates, black oreos, spiny dogfish,” and endlessly more.

Trying to be helpful, I interrupted Skippy’s recitation and asked, “How many people does it need to serve?”

She frowned, realizing that I’d not heard any part of her story. “Two,” she said, then added under her breath, “or one.”

“Hmmm,” I said, undeterred, “then one of those small flounders should do the trick, or perhaps a hoki.”

“I see,” she said. “I suppose choosing by size is a practical manner of making a selection. But my choice is more a matter of the heart.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “The heart is no bean counter.” She smiled then for the first time, and I saw that she was pretty.