Years later, when they at last let me into his room, Jimmy was sitting in bed as if nothing had happened. I wondered, What on earth is he doing here? There’s nothing wrong with him. In that first moment, he seemed the same person he had ever been. Unmistakable, vintage Uncle Jimmy. Then I saw just how wrong things were. His face had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad foundation. His mouth sagged down to the left, an eighty-year-old’s mouth, unable to produce anything more than a few raw vowels. His lips drooped a deep, secretive smile all over his face, the smile of a man who had seen something remarkable. His eyes bore a matte glaze, not his. Jimmy’s eyes were gone.
I thought there would be others there—friends, day shift, his mother. But I was alone, except for Jimmy and the patient behind the draw curtain. My calm collapsed beneath me like a pier gently washed out to sea. My eyes grew acid. I dug my fingernails into my upper arms, trying to reverse the process that had overtaken him, reverse everything.
He must have recognized me in some sense, because as I stepped to the bed, he rippled his ruined facial muscles. He looked roughly in my direction and erupted in a horrible, unformed call like the open modulation of an underwater whale. “Hello, Jimmy.” My tone was no closer to natural. He made the awful blast again. This time it seemed to possess syllables. The sound was edgeless, blurred, terrible. I had to force myself not to run from the room and deny I ever knew him. I put my hand on his gown, and my touch made the word come out of him again. “Jimmy,” I said, as brightly as I could without bursting. “Try it a little softer.” I put my head close to him, my ear almost onto his mouth. The less air he had to push, the less muscle he needed to control, the more chance I had of making him out.
The sound came out again, softer but no more distinct. Jimmy fought to unmangle it. His whole body shook, a weight lifter at the instant when he must either jerk the bar overhead or be crushed under the plates. I thought I heard him, in shadow, pronounce “cohabit.” The word he had teased me with for weeks when Todd and I moved in together. I must have projected it. I began to think he wasn’t saying anything at all, just releasing animal bursts from a cortex now helpless to hold them in.
“Once more, Jimmy. Don’t try so hard.” But the noise was worse, vanishing. I looked at him, shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t make it out.” My own words were themselves smudged out, my voice lost in a choke, my head rocking. I could only stop myself by putting my face down onto him, where I kept it. I felt something brush my hair. His arm, its muscles contracted into a permanent claw, was trying to move, to put its weight over me in comfort. I lifted it—he could not do it alone—and put it around my neck, where it had been trying to go.
I hunted down a resident to ask about Jimmy’s chances. Like most, I had so mastered necessity that when chance was at last the subject, I was lost. The physician was too professional to say what might be hoped. Hope was a function of structural impairment. But the implication was clear: Jimmy was setting out for an unknown place. Sitting in bed in the double-occupancy room, close up, flush against a place closed to every petition except disaster.
I went straight to the warehouse. Todd wanted word immediately, over the intercom, but I waited until I went up. At the top of the freight elevator, I froze, afraid to go in. Jimmy was there. The office floor was still warm where he had fallen, a delicate, blue, broken vessel stroked out across the tiles. He was there, working late, ready to scold me for unofficial use of combinations, to tease me boyishly about cohabiting with men. It was all as I had left it, every night I ever spent in this forsaken place. But the old arrangement, the Second Shift Club, had changed color, reddened upon contact with air.
I gave my faithful transcript. I told them about his face, his mouth, his eyes, his clawed hand. I told them about the sound he had made, syllables beyond guessing. I told about the doctor’s hedge. Dr. Ressler listened for physiological signs, Todd for any scrap that might spell forgiveness. Would it have happened without his mistake? Unanswerable, but we gave the rest of the night over to it. I couldn’t think of sleep, and so sat up the remaining hours with them. In the morning I went directly to the branch, as I had before after long nights in circumstances that would never arise again.
I spent the day combing our modest collection, reading everything I could find on brain damage. I learned that a third of a million Americans suffer cerebral vascular accidents each year. I learned that the word derived from the stroke of God’s hand. I learned that Jimmy’s injury would unfold in its own way, a way research could not fix.
I found a text on the subject, reasonably up-to-date, although the pace of the field consigned all texts to the pyre every two years. The chapter on stroke recovery was a rationalist’s nightmare: people who could see a sofa, walk around it, and give its name, but couldn’t say how the thing was used. People who had no trouble explicating “Jack kissed Jill” but who were hopelessly gutted by “Jill was kissed by Jack.” People whose right hemispheres didn’t know what their lefts were doing. People in every other way intact, day after day unable to recognize their own spouses’ faces.
Some accounts went beyond science fiction. I read of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad man who had a three-foot rod blasted through his head. He lived for twelve years, intelligence unimpaired, capable of speech, memory, and reason, but with no emotional control. I read of a woman whose one hand tried to strangle her unless fought off by her other. I read of people who could not recall anything from before their accident or who could not learn anything after. I read of a concert pianist who could play the most complex concerti from memory yet who could not point to middle C.
There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia, loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing, and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything a person possessed could be taken away. I read of people who could grasp numerals but not numbers, who could define the word “pig” but couldn’t recognize one, who could write complex ideas but couldn’t make out what they’d written. There were patterns too bizarre to warrant names: the sixty-seven-year-old stricken into thirteen years of fastidious silence only to be awakened at age eighty by a train whistle’s sixth-chord that launched him into a popular tune from the year of his wedding, a half century before.
Minds reduced to a vacant stare worked their way back into replicas of their former state. Massive paralytics rose up and walked, showing no trace other than a shuffle or droop of one eyelid. Others, only grazed by God’s swipe, lived for years masking incapacities they themselves failed to suspect. I grabbed at every slight ray of optimism. Children’s brains could rewire, recover from blows that would wipe out mature adults. Jimmy’s gentleness might indicate a saving persistence of child‘s wiring. Recovery was above normal in left-handed people, and higher still in lefties who had been forced into the right-hander’s world. I’d seen Jimmy type, lift, carry, write, and wave hundreds of times, but I could not for life remember with which hand.
I was so high-strung that I even found, hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits from a well-placed lesion. Violent personalities woke from apoplexy as loving as a newborn. Pasteur’s massive stroke altered his work for the better. Dostoyevsky’s visionary power followed from lifelong epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing except that no one could predict injury’s outcome. No one knew much about the brain at all, let alone Jimmy’s. The hierarchy had too many subsystems for the loss of any piece to be understood. My only question—would it still be Jimmy inside the destroyed case?—dissolved in qualified statistics. By evening I found myself guiltily hoping for the kinder, comprehensive solution.
I went back to MOL after work. Todd stood in the computer room, source of the catastrophe, scrutinizing my face as if, at panel edge, overlooked by everyone, he might find some hint of horror’s miracle waiting to flame. Nothing I could report helped. My friends had news of their own, a wrinkle more pressing than Jimmy’s prognosis. The hospital DP operatives—Todd’s and Ressler’s opposites at that immense institution—processing Jimmy’s numb
ers, revealed that his coverage had not yet been reinstated.
“His mother called.”
“How is she?”
Todd shrugged nervously; care had to be rationed, focused to a point. “She’s either the emblem of strength or doesn’t realize what’s happened. She says the hospital needs proof of alternate ability to pay.”
The man I’d seen the night before would need feeding, clothing, changing, constant surveillance, and a year of slow, expensive therapy that might come to nothing. An after-tremor could surface with the next clock tick. The hospital staff discovered the billing irregularity and served notice in under forty-eight hours: thus health science, the keepers of the human spark, in the Information Age.
DISASTER (CONTINUED)
A part of Jimmy’s brain had dissolved in the hemorrhage faster than a sugar cube in coffee. His was near one extreme of a spectrum of tissue failure. At the other, the best anyone gets away with is a steady evaporation beginning in late teens, racking up thousands of neurons a day, making every aspect of experience—cheerful revisionism notwithstanding— continuously harder to master and easier to miss.
Ten billion switches, by conservative estimate, are each wired to five thousand others, regulated by neurotransmitters and neuropeptides whose scores of enzyme dialects control a chaos of simultaneous translation conveying desire, fear, torture, pleasure. No sooner does the switchboard wire itself to survive the world of experience than it begins to dismantle. It flashes out in a violent short or disintegrates imperceptibly. All that varies is the tempo.
I have until now faulted words, blamed the messenger of mangled news for keeping me from my answer. I should instead be prostrate with gratitude that words can mean anything at all, given the nature of the receiver. The thing is jerry-rigged, carrying around in its own triple fossil a walkie-talkie wrapped around a shrew-screech encasing a lizard’s intuition. Absurd paste-up: gothic chancel tacked onto Romanesque crypt fronted by rococo nave. The wonder lies in its comprehending anything, its ability to work its supreme invention, the shaky symbol set.
Word into synapse is even more approximate than substance into word. The brain, in the subtle dozen hours when it reaches its zenith, already wades through a dissipation that leaves it searching without success for those three syllables beginning with an “F” about which everything has been rubbed out except the certainty that they sat at the lower right corner of an even-numbered page. The word was “forfeiture.” The word was “filigree.” The word was “forgetting.”
A hundred trillion synaptic bits, each capable of threshold effects, compressed into a kilo and a half, split into two lumps connected by 250 million cables. Twin-view parallax resolves the field into multiple dimensions. The most complex entity ever thrown together, an organ vastly more complex than the plan that assembled it, locally violates the Second Law. Every brain extends itself with a ten-thousand-item template, puts together continuous unprecedented messages for no other reason than to model in miniature everything that exists and half that doesn’t. Five billion living brains, a hundred billion already dead, each sickeningly bound into a net surpassed only by the single thing they are bent on weaving.
Stockpiled deep in the magnificent kludge, buried in the cerebellum, hippocampus, corpus callosum, the device knows its own unwiring. Thought carries a little pattern of terror around inside it, the realization that it shouldn’t even be around, that it will soon fall back into distributed static. “What a day,” Jimmy sometimes greeted the second shift, throwing up his arms. “I should have been a chicken farmer. What else can go wrong?” He knew what else could and one day would, knew before anybody, and only his tired joke stood between him and nothing.
The map of circuits, like their mobile case, is shaped by evolution. Synapse routes that presage their own immanent shorting out must also have been selected for. What good can it possibly do to know, every paralyzing, conscious hour, that the prop holding me up to a smoky little aperture onto everything is already, even as I name the process, dissolving in a stroke or a gentle stream? Medullar terror at returning to randomness is behind every urge to pattern the world. Hardwired to fear is the breeding scream.
Desperate copulation evolved long before cerebral terror. Male dragonflies scrape a female clean of previous sperm before mating. Cheater fish slip between the throes of a thrashing couple and make their secret deposit. But the truly promiscuous, the ones who couple with everything that moves, who cannot stop propagating even to eat, who fill notebooks into the night: fear makes us father for our lives. Todd excavated me as if his organ were a fixing gauge. Learning that nothing could come of it, he left, scared off. Only wilder fear drove him temporarily back.
Natural selection edits with an eye only toward what the message says, not to what it means. It has no interest in the fittest solution, nor the most efficient. The fittest thing life could do would be to die immediately and join the overwhelming efficiency of inert space. Selection hinges on one thing alone: differential reproduction. Double faster than you die. Dissolve slower than you replicate. All organs are an attempt to leverage this edge, even this crazily immense, already unwiring circuit. I know; I can feel the pay telescope starting to flick off. By Jimmy’s count, with luck, I might get six more years.
LOSING THE SIGNAL
How much space might he clear away in himself for this brilliant, two-manual experiment in naming? He has no precedent, no Jeanette template, no chromosome locus synthesizing the next step. Dr. Koss is his only instructor. They test the limits of their freedom, walk openly through town, feeling the violation, not daring to believe what they do. Their walks are exercises in synchronization. Their legs cadence. They talk in overlap, complete one another’s sentences, laugh at each other’s jokes before they’re made. A small miracle, for once in this life, not to have to explain.
She spends the night, an extended, sleepless night of semaphores. Jeanette stands peach-naked, stretches, touches her toes in morning’s light, showing herself to him. “How do you like your eggs?”
He would ask: Are we wrong? Am I destroying something real and immediate in you? Are you denying your husband’s sacrifice, losing the intimate, accumulated weight of your past? But her eyes are sparks, looking for affirmation of the rightness of this moment. He must not violate her joy, and says, “Ova easy.”
The article appears, makes the rounds at Biology. It includes a photo of Ressler among Faces to Watch and gives a bastardized, erroneous thumbnail treatment of his mutagen investigations. It paints him as arcane, isolated—qualities that may have been requisite for serious creative effort in the past but at this hour are inimical to effective science. On pub date, log-jammed almost at solution, he wants nothing more than to be brought back into the fold, to work together with Ulrich toward some common persuasion.
The Life photo essay horrifies him: a sad, indelible feeling as he flips through the sickeningly permanent pages. Perpetual artifact, preserved in a thousand long-term vaults. A million copies faithfully reproduce his every imperfection. Too late to recant: his face, his thin nose, his words badly quoted and out of context, his arrogant self-assurance—Stuart Ressler, rising science star, split, flapped, and pinned out like a cat in undergraduate anatomy. Proliferated throughout the English-speaking world.
The fallout of bad-faith fame follows him into his first office visit following publication. Minor notoriety will not help patch matters between Ressler and his increasingly erratic office mate. Ressler braces on entering and shouts out something friendly. But Lovering just sits among the ruined piles of papers, his Baalbek of print, indifferent and still. Walking toward his desk, head down, hands in pocket, Ressler is shaken by Joe’s voice, struggling to shake off catatonia. “Do you know the price we’re all paying to improve the world?”
Ressler stops and faces Lovering. He chooses each word, multiplying the odds against the growing sentence a hundred thousand times per syllable. “I’m not sure what you mean, Joe.”
“What I mea
n? The world. The world. Toot la moaned. The big picture. Come on. We’re both adults. We don’t have to get into semantics here.” Ressler can’t even respond. Scrambling through the repertoire, all inappropriate, he just bobs his head on its universal joint. “Unnatural prospect! All the way back, all the way back to fires in caves.” Lovering drops into a movie monotone. “And I work for them!”
“Who do you work for, Joe?”
“Who the hell knows? Big state school. The money’s been washed through so many agencies it’s wetter’na Baptist. But it’s the government at bottom, isn’t it? All that dough.”
The logic eludes Ressler. “Half the scientists in this country have worked for the government since the war.”
“What do you mean, ‘since’? Who told you they’ve stopped shooting?” Ressler backs toward his chair, out of the stumbled-upon line of fire. He can say nothing. “What does it cost to eradicate the Black Death? Ask GM. Ask Coke.”
“Joe …”
“Shut up.” Brutal, suppliant, drunken. “I’m talking.” Ressler wants only to be out of the room, to allow the fit of latent humanity to work itself out in privacy. But Lovering won’t release him. He stares at Ressler, pleading, the look of a spaniel, hindquarters smashed beneath the wheel of a car, asking why his years of service have been so rewarded. His smile changes to pity. “Education, learning, progress. You know what we’re going to find out, we researchers? We’re going to finally get down to that old secret code in the cell, and the string is going to come out spelling D-U-M-B space S-H-I …”
“Joe. Would you like to go out for a beer?” Ressler’s intonation is so soft it startles the man silent. The invitation sounds slightly frayed coming out of his mouth. He has forgotten how to ask the question right. But Lovering remains distracted.
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