by James Greer
-And they would have no idea.
-None whatsoever.
-I see what you’re saying. There really isn’t any kind of real world implementation I can imagine, but it sounds like really good fun. I don’t suppose you’d have any interest … No, that would be imposing.
Billy walked away with a look of profound blankness on his face. Guy and the Caltech nerd watched him go with disinterest.
-What would be imposing?
-I’d really love to see how this thing works. I do some amateur dabbling in HTML myself …
-Oh, this has nothing to do with HTML. That would be far too easy to trace. This is like reverse-engineered HTML. I actually call the coding LMTH, but that’s a kind of private joke. This involves …
-Quaternion Julia set fractals. Yes, I know. Let’s just for the sake of argument say that I don’t have any background in programming, or physics, or … math. Would there be a way to explain or even show someone like that how this works?
-In theory. But it takes a lot of computing power. I have to use the lab at Caltech to produce anything near satisfactory results.
-Wow. I would so like the chance to see that.
-What, the lab?
-Yes, of course, the lab, but also just the … process. Do you have a name for it or anything?
-No.
-Okay, well, do you have a name? Mine’s Guy Forget.
-Oh. Sorry. I’m Sven. Sven Transvoort.
-That is in no way your real name.
-I was adopted.
-I don’t have an excuse.
45. SIMILIA SIMILIBUS CURANTUR
Violet sat in the permanent twilight of Guy’s hospital room, unmoving, for hours. The soft hum of machinery and footsteps padding in the corridor were the only sounds, so she could hear the steady, regulated breathing of whatever was assisting Guy, keeping him alive, in the strict sense, though Violet could sense no life in her lover, no life in the room.
At length, she continued reading from the slim hardcover book balanced on an arm of the chair in which she sat.
-That you cannot know the terror in a word. That it will not be the worst you fear. That you bring to the last the first sign. That you choose what to disappear.
She gently shut the book.
-That you choose what to disappear, she repeated softly. -That’s a nice line, isn’t it, Guy? It’s not always true, maybe it’s not even ever true for ordinary people, but it’s hopeful.
She held the book up to his sightless eyes.
-The guy who wrote this book—my friend Jimmy, you don’t know him, he’s a writer … I mean, obviously. He wants me to paint a flower for the cover of the paperback edition. I don’t know why, but he’s a little weird. In a nice way. I mean that in a nice way. No one’s ever trusted me … I mean trusted my painting … Which amounts to the same thing …
She trailed off, put the book back on the armrest, balanced precariously.
-It’s called Tempo. The book, I mean. I’m probably going to do something for him, but not under my own name. I think one of the things I’m going to choose to disappear is Violet McKnight.
She sat unmoving for some few minutes longer.
-My poor Icarus, murmured Violet in the direction of Guy’s unmoving body. -Melted wings, third-degree burns. This is why I never get involved. It was wrong of me to interfere with Plan Charlie. I didn’t trust you. Or if I did, I didn’t trust my own trust in you, if that makes sense. Christ.
She could not help herself.
-I have no tears left, you see, Guy, there’s nothing. Her eyes glittered in the murk. Violet was lying; she was full of tears, she was at the moment a silo of tears, but she would not allow the seams to burst.
-I wanted to give you something in return for what you gave me: hope for hope, so to speak. And what I’ve ended up giving you is despair for despair, even if you’re currently unaware of that despair. Which means I have to carry the double burden of our mutual hopelessness. I’m completely prepared to do that.
-I can’t blame Sven. I created him. Or rather, I created the circumstances that led to his actions. And here you are. And here I am.
-Pleasures of the flesh, believing those pleasures to be without consequence, or if with consequences that those consequences were benign … never, never, never, never, never. Again. A body can only harvest so much sorrow
-And still I will go on. Can you explain that to me, Guy? Can you explain why I continue to exist, in the face of all reason? But what should I do? Expiate my sins in a drastic rejection of the life of men? How would that help anyone but me? How is that anything but selfish?
-I confess my sins, of omission, of commission, I confess them all. I confess only because I know you can’t hear me, or, if you can, it’s on some level where consciousness cannot penetrate, whether by choice or by a quirk of divine construction that saves the human heart from the worst excesses of its tepid and unfulfilling desires. We are all weak. We are all monstrous.
-And here’s the thing, Guy. Here’s the reason I fell in love with you—and yes, I know, I never told you that I loved you, that I love you, because it’s not in my nature to make dramatic proclamations, and further what good would it have done?—you would not have participated in the killing of anyone, ever. You would have stood up to any tyrant, and not even for the right reason, necessarily, but simply because you refused to take human cruelty seriously. That was your chief virtue—your profound lack of seriousness.
-I wanted to own that, to possess it, to somehow absorb the part of you that could laugh off any crisis, that seemed in fact to seek out crises in order to laugh in their faces. Does that put you on the side of the angels or the devil? I honestly don’t know. He who seeks hard things will have it hard, it says somewhere in the Bible, I think E-mail to Hebrews. Even people who die are granted some kind of finality to their story. Your story has no determinate end. That, to me, is the definition of tragedy. Aristotle might disagree, but he’s dead, and his story ended long ago. Probably happily.
-Should some miraculous recovery occur, I will never know. I am a ghost, darling. But I am a ghost who loved you, and I am a ghost who will always remain part of you, living or dead, the boundary line between which grows blurrier every day, if you ask me, which no one ever will.
With that Violet fell silent. She rubbed her eyes with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, because she was left-handed, which was something very few people knew, because very few people noticed anything about Violet except her remarkable beauty, which wasn’t even fourth on the list of her best attributes. But Guy had noticed.
A nurse crept in to check on Guy’s machines.
-I’m sorry, said the nurse. -I didn’t mean to intrude.
-You didn’t intrude, replied Violet. -I’m the intruder. I’m leaving anyway. She got up, slipping the book into a large suede handbag at the foot of her chair,
Anything you want me to tell him? asked the nurse. -In case he wakes up.
-That’s a really good question, said Violet, disappearing by degrees.
-Tell him that I love him, she said, from the shadows. -Tell him that there is no cure for World Fever, and no need for a cure. That he should start brushing his teeth. That … you know what?
By this time Violet was no longer Violet but a silhouette, limned by the dim fluorescence of the hospital hall.
-Tell him goodbye, said the faint outline of Violet as she vanished.
46. GUY’S MOM COOKS AN IN-ORDINATE AMOUNT OF FOOD FOR NO ONE
He’ll be hungry when he wakes up, thought Laura. Those IV tubes can’t be giving him much nourishment, he already looks too thin. And he will wake up, and he’ll wake up soon, so I’d better have enough food. Good thing I convinced Robert to get that extra freezer for the basement. That will come in handy.
The kitchen was surrounded by pots and platters of either already cooked dishes or those in preparation for the oven or stove. The bounty overflowed the kitchen and had spilled to the dining room table,
which was likewise covered in several Thanksgivings worth of turkey, mashed potatoes, squash, green beans, more turkey, ham (for those who don’t like turkey, and Laura couldn’t remember whether Guy did or didn’t), and tofu for Violet, who Laura seemed to remember was a vegetarian.
My hands are burned and scarred, thought Laura as she pulled both a pumpkin pie and a cherry pie from the stove without the aid of oven mitts, hoping by causing herself physical pain that she would forget, even for a moment, the psychic scars of her double loss. But what is that compared to the pain poor Guy must be in, somewhere in the recess of his brain, or the pain I saw on Robert’s face in his last dying moments?
I stayed married to a man I no longer loved, because after all who can love so well and for so long? That was my fault, not his. To the end, to his end, I think he loved me. In his way. Just like he loved Guy. In his way. He never treated me badly, he never abused me, he provided for me and for our children. He was, for all his faults, a good man. My children too. Marcus and Guy. I loved my children even when they disappointed me, or worse, ignored me, as if a mother’s love was something that could be taken or put back like the mealy apples I choose not to buy at Meier’s, because this is America and we do not have to buy mealy apples if we do not want them, although sometimes, of course, you do want mealy apples, for instance when you are making apple pie, they’re better for baking. I should have made an apple pie too. Who doesn’t love apple pie? With whipped cream or even better vanilla ice cream on top.
I’ve played by the rules and it’s time the rules started playing me back. One does not lose both a husband and a son in the course of one day, far away from each other, for separate and unrelated reasons. Guy was not a soldier, he had not been sent to a war zone to die, thus preparing his mother for the inevitable news, which is no longer delivered by telegram as in movies, I’m quite sure, but I don’t know how they do it these days. Maybe someone in a uniform still comes to your door, and you let them in, and perhaps he is accompanied by an Army psychologist, or better yet a grief counselor, which is very close to “consoler,” but I was given no such consolation. In part because my son is not even dead, I have been denied the reality of his passing, and am left with the brutal fact of his vegetable body, which Marcus insists cannot grow, or think, or act, and that I should unplug the machinery that feeds his vital functions, but how can you ask a mother to do such a thing, especially now?
Marcus is not cruel, I shouldn’t have said that. My one remaining link to the world, and I brush him off like a pesky fly. Does he really love me? Does anyone? Do I love myself? There are good things about both of us, Marcus and me, there are things worth saving, or at least preserving. I do hope he will come to his senses and stop looking for happiness in dark places.
I don’t know if I have enough tinfoil to cover all these dishes. That’s what happens when you don’t plan ahead.
47. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VILLAIN SVEN TRANSVOORT
Is anyone really wondering, I wonder? I mean, now that the reader understands that my role was perhaps more extensive than I had originally indicated. In your place—though I won’t presume to think for you, that would be arrogant—I would certainly assume that if I, Sven Transvoort, possessed even a modicum of shame I would spend the rest of my life in hiding, atoning for my many sins. But that would not be true to my nature, you see. Or perhaps you already see. It’s difficult divining the thoughts of a reader one has never met, and will most likely never meet: this is why most writers write to and for themselves, or more precisely for an ideal version of themselves, a reader capable of understanding all the abstruse allusions and hilariously funny personal jokes which no ordinary person could possibly appreciate. While I am new to the writing game, I do understand, I think, how this tendency accounts for the bitterness one unexpectedly encounters should one find oneself in the unfortunate position of talking to a writer at a cocktail party, for instance. Whatever the actual content of the conversation, the inevitable subtext is, “I’m not appreciated. I’m misunderstood. No one gets me. No one, not one reader, even the fanatics who send me articles of their intimate clothing, has ever approached the empyreal heights my prose dares them to climb, no one save myself has ever planted the flag of comprehension on the lofty peak of my mountainous accomplishment. And really, that was just a minor work, an aperitif. The storm brewing inside me, even as we speak about the rising cost of real estate here in Los Angeles, which has more significance than you, puny mortal, could possibly grasp, will rattle the gates of heaven with its wondrous insights, its lyric prose, and its consummately perfect form. And no one will ever know. Not for a hundred years after my death, when the shallow tides of popular culture have washed away the bitter taste of ‘relevance,’ will some enlightened scholar unearth my work, like a treasure trove of sea glass on a rocky beach in Maine, in summer, when the blackberries grow thick on thorny vines …”
And so on. Or maybe that’s just me, maybe I’m the only one who thinks unreasonably high of himself, and the rest of the ink-stained wretches, to use the cliché currently in vogue, are filled with such self-loathing that the mere thought of whatever it is they last published fills them with shame, and horror, and what drives them to keep writing is the hope against hope that maybe, by some miracle, the next effort will rise above worthlessness to attain, at least, some kind of adequacy. These, I imagine, are the kind of writers who read their reviews, all of them, and who spend most of their days Googling themselves to see if some obscure weblog chronicler has chanced upon one of their books and written something not entirely unkind. Which notentirely-unkind mention will be immediately discounted by a misquote, or an easily perceived complete failure to understand the point, the essence, the what-have-you of the book, whereupon our poor self-loathario plunges ever deeper into the slough of despond (The Pilgrim’s Progress, citation needed).
To answer your original question, then, Sven: I am in hiding, and as you may have guessed, in a small Northeastern town that gives on the ocean, battered in winter by gales of an almost unimaginable force, but which I find somehow comforting: God’s anger has a kind of majesty that nevertheless fails to touch me, or at least harm me. But I’m not in hiding out of guilt or shame or any of those writerly emotions described above. I’m in hiding, or perhaps more appropriately I have recused myself from the thrum of quotidian human affairs, because I do not like people, and people, in general, do not like me. The things I have done, while wider in scope than previously admitted, yes, I did because … for reasons that … well, if the reader requires any further explanation I would urge him (or her, I am no misogynist) to go back and consult my previous entries, all of which I stand by unreservedly. The Guy Forget episode remains for me, will always remain for me, an enchanting parenthesis. The root cause of my hatred may not be as rational as mere jealousy, but reason is overrated in the affairs of men. Or women. I hated Guy from the moment he walked out of the Smog Cutter, and later, still, into my gallery, and I resolved to destroy his life. To steal his girlfriend, to convince him that a bogus technology was the key to his future, and to watch in glee as he was arrested for a crime that he was driven to commit by his absolute conviction that he had stumbled upon a figurative goldmine. That I failed in all of these aims is, I think, not a failure of execution but a bad joke by the gods of chance. I also perhaps underestimated Violet’s capacity to love, or at any rate to love Guy.
In any case, I win. My objective has been accomplished, and I am in the clear. The technology I pretended to show Guy that night at Caltech does not work, could not work, is not even physically possible. Any attempt by his idiot friend Billy to sell that technology will result in complete embarrassment, which to be honest is the best one can hope for a simpleton like him. Any further punishment would be gilding the lily. I would like to see his face when he presents his “invention” to the venture capitalists in Menlo Park, but we can’t have everything we want, otherwise Violet would be here right now, filling my pipe, bringing me a sherry, stoking the
fire in my hearth and my heart.
We can’t have everything we want. Some people don’t get anything they want. I have, at least, the satisfaction of partial satisfaction.
A funny thing. Today’s my birthday, you know. I’d almost forgotten. I’d almost forgotten to celebrate. Because the birth of Sven Transvoort, adopted Taiwanese orphan, raised and then well provided for by two well-meaning but let’s face it ultimately fatuous and condescending parents—I mention this only because no one knows my real birthday, and picking today, April 1 … I mean, that’s not really very nice, is it?
At that moment a knock on the door. Who on earth, thought Sven, it’s eight o’clock at night and I don’t know anyone …
-Domino’s Pizza! announced a voice from behind the heavy door, in answer to Sven’s query.
Cautiously, he opened the door. -I didn’t order …
-No sir, this was bought and paid for long distance. Said it was a birthday present. Very specific instructions.
-Who? How?
-Among these instructions there were several provisions insuring complete anonymity on the part of the purchaser.
-Are you by any chance studying …
-Second-year pre-law at Bangor College, sir.
-Okay. Sven reached into his pockets, came up empty. -I’m afraid …
-No gratuity will be necessary, sir. All that’s been taken care of.
He accepted the pizza and closed the door. Set the box down on an ottoman and stared at it for perhaps five minutes, considering.
With one swift movement Sven reached over and flipped open the cardboard box. He froze. His eyes widened in fear, a position they would maintain for more or less the rest of his miserable existence.