Roger's Version (30 page)

“You could say that.”

I ransacked the dial, trying to find music instead of the news or the talk shows that proliferated as the evening deepened. Half of the callers were drunk, and all were stirred into garrulousness by the miracle of their being on radio. I marvelled at the practiced rudeness with which the hosts shut them off. “O.K., Joe. We’re all entitled to our opinion.… I’m sorry, Kathleen, you got to make more sense than that.… Take care, Dave, and thanks a ton for calling.” Paula fell asleep; I moved her to the passenger seat and realized she had made my lap damp. I switched off the radio, its Tower of Babel.

A spiritual fatigue descended upon me, a recognition that my life from the age of fifty-three on was a matter of caretaking, of supervising my body like some feeble-minded invalid kept alive by tubes and injections in a greedy nursing home, and that indeed it always had been such, that the flares of ambition and desire that had lit my way when I was younger and had given my life the drama of fiction or of a symbol-laden dream had been chemical devices, illusions with which the flesh and its percolating brain had lured me along. There is, as the saints knew, a satisfaction in this fatigue, as if in sinking beneath despair and acedia we approach the abysmal condition that drove God in His vacuum so diffidently to say,
Let the waters swarm, let the earth bring forth
.

I pushed down on the door handle and listened to hear if
the noise woke Paula. Her breathing snagged for a second, but then resumed its trustful oblivious rhythm, and I went back out into the air, the street. A gentle cold drizzle had materialized, darkening the asphalt, tingling at my face. We do love being touched from above—by rain, by snow. I thought of Esther moving about our kitchen, her motions slowed by wine and inner reflection, and of Richie mechanically putting food into his mouth while his eyes gorged on the shuddering little screen, and I was happy not to be there for once, to be out in the tingling air in this strange part of the city, as strange to me and as pregnant with the promise of the unknown as Tientsin or Ouagadougou. I wondered if I had left one of the Audi windows cracked to let in a little air, as you would for a dog, and went back and checked. Paula asleep looked not worth stealing, a bundle of rags. As seen by the sodium glow of the streetlight she had no more color to her face and her little limp limbs than a newspaper photograph.

The nurse was gone from her desk and the secretary said my niece would be a while yet; there was only one doctor on, so he was running late. Of the three young black women I had originally seen, only the African mask was left. Her escort was gone, and her tears had dried, and she was impassively regal, princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave at the expense of the state, like the aristocrats of old. I found myself wondering how many hours it had taken to do up her hair in so many fine braids, interbraided with colored beads and tiny ringlets of imitation gold.

When Verna did at last emerge from the unseen chambers of the clinic, ten minutes before eight o’clock, she, too, was impassive; she moved carefully, as if walking on feet she could not feel touching the floor. She was carrying into the milky, flickering light pieces of paper, both big—official forms—and
little: prescriptions to be filled. Also a small parcel, something yielding wrapped in tissue paper. I offered her my arm, when her brief transactions with the secretary were over, but she ignored my helpfully bent elbow. Perhaps she didn’t see it. Below her eyes there were delicate mauve cushions, as if her face had been inflated and was not quite collapsed back onto its bone. “What’s in your little bundle?” I asked.

“Pads,” she said. In a loud ironic voice she imitated an enthusiastic child: “They gave me the cutest little pink belt to wear, free!”

Outside, the rain had subsided to a mere mist, yet I still wanted to shelter her, to be a canopy as she walked to the car one floating step at a time. Like butterflies about a statue my concern fluttered uselessly about her stoic upright figure. I found her dignity alarming, asserted now against a personal history of indignity and clenched around a determination to be revenged. She stood at the passenger door while I gropingly, clumsily poked at the little curvate handle slot with the ragged key. While patiently waiting she looked in and saw Paula’s tumbled body through the dark glass.

“Well Nunc,” she said, in that deadened voice of hers which seemed exhaled through a tube too narrow, “one down, and one to go.”

^*
“
Will it have all its needs there again, especially food and drink, and the floating of the lungs, and the surging of the bowels, and the not being ashamed of the shameful organs, and the laboring with all the limbs?”

^*
Quid enim indignius deo, quid magis erubescendum, nasci an mori? carnem gestare an crucem? circumcidi an suffigi? educare an sepeliri? in praesepe deponi an in monimento recondi?… Quodcunque deo indignum est, mihi expedit. Salvus sum, si non confundar de domino meo. Qui mei, inquit, confusus fuerit, confundar et ego eius. Alias non invenio materias confusionis quae me per contemptum ruboris probent bene impudentem et feliciter stultum. Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est dei filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est
.

^*
In hoc itaque sollemni sexuum officio quod marem ac feminam miscet, in concubito dico communi, scimus et animam et carnem simul fungi, animam concupiscentia, carnem opera, animam instinctu, carnem actu. Unico igitur impetu utriusque toto homine concusso despumatur semen totius hominis, habens ex corporali substantia humorem, ex animali calorem. Et si frigidum nomen est anima Graecorum, quare corpus exempta ea friget? Denique, ut adhuc verecundia magis pericliter quam probatione, in illo ipso voluptatis ultimae aestu, quo genitale virus expellitur, nonne aliquid de anima quoque sentimus exire? atque adeo marcescimus et devigescimus cum lucis detrimento? Hoc erit semen animale protinus ex animae destillatione, sicut et virus illud corporale semen ex carnis defaecatione. Fidelissima primordii exempla. De limo caro in Adam. Quid aliud limus quam liquor opimus? inde erit genitale virus
.

—De Anima, XXVII

^*
Since the outset of this account I have suffered, in the margins, a birthday. I was born on one of the shortest days of the year, and my mother with her narrow pelvis writhed from dark to dark. Fifty-three! How old had Tertullian been when he composed his carnal paragraphs? At a certain age and beyond, the best sex is head sex—sex kept safe in the head
.

^*
See—and then absolutely no more footnotes!—Barth’s letter of September 5, 1967, to Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt: “… in personal encounters with living Jews (even Jewish Christians) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the basis of all my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements, yet still having to suppress and conceal it.”

IV

i

T
oward evening of this first Friday in April, Dale proceeds, with a cooling hot-pastrami sandwich in a grease-soaked paper bag, plus a small carton of high-fat milk and a pair of broken oatmeal cookies in a plastic envelope, to the building, erected in 1978, that houses the university’s violently expanded facilities for computer research and development. A concrete cube with nine times nine windows on a side, it looms above the tattered and doomed rows of tenements that stand in this section of the city, real estate that is all owned by the university and awaiting its developmental fate. Mere daily life seems meagre in the shadow of this great housing, its many windows identically deep-set in sandy-gray sockets bevelled like the slits of a bulletproof bunker. The sky this evening is turquoise, and the smaller, more nervous clouds of spring have replaced winter’s stolid mantle. Everything, suddenly, is tugging, from greening tree-tips to mud underfoot, to be something other than it is. Dale’s stomach feels high in his body, its lining chafed from within by guilty
apprehension. He has accepted money for his project; he has bitten off more than he can chew.

Though the normal world’s working hours are over, and the great rose-marble foyer of the Cube is deserted but for one lackadaisical guard who checks Dale’s laminated pass, on certain upper floors truly creative activity is just beginning, having yielded the daytime hours to more assuredly profitable projects than its own. Dale enters one of the powder-blue elevators. He punches the number 7.

The first floor of the Cube is given over to reception space, the offices of the public-relations staff, and a technical library of computer science and the great programming languages (LISP, FORTRAN, PL/1, Pascal, Algol with its ancestor Plankalkül and its descendant JOVIAL), plus a small and amusing museum displaying abaci, Inca quipus, a seventeenth-century slide rule, diagrams of Pascal’s toothed and ratcheted calculation wheels and the stepped wheels of Leibniz, a wall-sized enlargement of some engineering specs for Charles Babbage’s epochal Analytical Engine with its Jacquard cards and thousand wheels of digit storage, reproductions of selected pages of the Countess Lovelace’s mathematical notebooks and also one of her actual embroidered linen handkerchiefs, samples of the Hollerith punched cards used in the U.S. census of 1890, significant pieces of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator put into operation at Harvard in 1944, and a disassembled accumulator, consisting of ten ring counters comprising in turn ten vacuum tubes, from ENIAC, the first true electronic computer, designed in Philadelphia to calculate the trajectories of quaint, old-fashioned bombs and shells.

On the second and third floors the administrators of the Cube have their offices, and there are conference rooms and a small all-stainless-steel kitchen in which luncheons and heavy
hors d’oeuvres can be concocted for significant visitors. For the benefit of the Cube’s workers there are a gymnasium (with Nautilus equipment and a balcony running track), a meditation room (equipped only with mats and zafus), a three-bed infirmary, and storage space for bicycles and mopeds, which must be brought into the building lest they be stolen outside.

The button to the fourth floor, in most of the elevators, is taped over, and even in those elevators where the button is exposed it achieves no response unless a numbered code, changed every week, is punched into a small panel. The work done on the fourth floor is secret, and yet from this unmentionable work stem the funds upon which the entire Cube rests. The men who work on the fourth floor never acknowledge it but can be identified by their relatively formal attire—suits and neckties, whereas even the head of all research and development, a jubilant Italo-American named Benedetto Ferrari, goes about in a turtleneck or a silk shirt open at his throat to disclose a thick gold chain or some old love beads of no-longer-fragrant cedar. Once a brilliant mathematician, with his fine Italian flair for elegant shortcuts, Ferrari dazzles trustees and even charms, over the telephone, those weary men in Washington who like coal heavers of old must shovel out their daily quotas of the incessant national treasure.

The fifth floor is mostly devoted to Ferrari’s pet project, the development of adaptive brainlike hardware silicon chips for artificial intelligence—though what benefit might be brought to mankind, already possessed of so many disastrous intelligences, by the mechanical fabrication of yet more is less clear than the immaculate, feral smile of approval and encouragement that the boss bestows on all sides when he visits his favorite department. His happiness, perhaps, is that of Pygmalion, of Dr. Frankenstein, of all who would usurp the divine prerogative of breathing life into clay.

The sixth floor holds the guts of the place—the massed ranks of CPUs—VAX 785s, Symbolics 3600 LISP machines, and the Cube’s own design, the MU—churning and crunching through calculations twenty-four hours a day; thunderous fans keep them from overheating, and a floor of removable segments protects yet renders accessible the miles of gangliated cable connecting their billions of bytes with not only the floors of display-processing units above and below but also, through high-speed modems and satellites, with terminals as remotely, strategically placed as Palo Alto, Hawaii, West Berlin, and Israel. Dale, to cool his mind, sometimes likes to wander around in here on the shuddering floors, up and down the aisles of encased circuits and racked spools of magnetic tape, amid the gigantic hum of something like spiritual activity, yet an activity mixed with the homely leakiness and vibration of a ship’s engine room, complete with the reassuring human curses of grimy-handed mechanical engineers wrestling with cables and hand-tightened connections.