Counting Heads

by David Marusek

  I won’t bore you, Myren Vole, with the cockamamie insights revealed in this retrospective. I will only say that the producers managed to unearth a surprising variety of archival vids and photos of my childhood family and that these were difficult for me to view without a fair amount of heartache. They had a home movie of me and my first wife, Jean Scholero, back in the late twentieth century when I was first making a name for myself with my paintings. That was especially hard to watch. I hadn’t thought of Jean in quite a while. And of course they couldn’t resist using the surveillance vids of me that day in 2092 when the slug hog-tied me on the patio of the Foursquare Café in Bloomington, from whence I was delivered to Utah for deconstruction.

  I will mention only one conclusion of the retrospective and that because of the degree to which it riled me. It was hinted at in the production’s title—“On the Surface.” The show’s writers accused me of being shallow. Specifically, they asserted that either I had no feelings or I was incapable of expressing them in my work. They cited the cold, inhuman quality of my paintings and emphasized the fact that when I reinvented myself in the twenty-first century, I did so as a specialist in package design. Artificial skin, battlewrap, tetanus blanket, novelty gift wraps. Everything on the surface—get it? The wrapper—not the gift.

  Myren Vole, have you ever been accused of being superficial? Here, the first draft of my legacy was being written before my eyes, and this was what was being said of me? That I was superficial? Believe me, the vid threw me off my feed. It shattered my soporific routine. I spent the entire next day stewing over it. I composed a long, insightful rebuttal to the show’s producers, which I never sent. Thursday rolled around, and I was in a terrible foul mood and I canceled the banquet at the last minute. Canceled all of them. Fired my publicist.

  I decided then and there that my best rebuttal would be to “reinvent” myself once again. I was still capable of doing that, wasn’t I? I wasn’t dead yet.

  I HAD BEEN out of the art biz for a while, and a whole raft of new tools and techniques had come into use in the meantime. I ordered in some of everything: story wire, smart sand, smart clay, professional holography equipment, rondophone traps, aerosol sculpture gases, liquid stone—you name it. I spent eleven months playing with this stuff, getting to know what it could and couldn’t do. I didn’t have a work in mind yet, except that I wanted to do a piece about Jean, my long-lost first wife. She was my subject.

  Before Eleanor, Jean was the only woman who had truly touched me. She was my first love and you only get one of those, no matter how long you live. To my lasting shame and regret, it was I who had driven her away. I was too full of myself in those early days, too wonderful for my own good.

  I spent about a year with my new toys creating works about Jean while trying to uncover my theme. I sped through a number of motifs: unexpected attraction, energetic eroticism, identification with the body, jealousy, spooky union, fights, obsession/compulsion, self-hatred. Eventually, I realized I was attempting to re-create a young man’s palette. And though that makes sense—Jean and I had been young then—now I was old.

  This realization only spurred my efforts. I was deeply engaged in the hunt. My former routine was in shambles. I left it to Skippy to send me food every few hours in case I was hungry. I lay down on the nearest couch whenever sleep overcame me. It was almost like the good old days.

  As I zeroed in on my vision, I eliminated media that didn’t seem to serve my purpose. Rejected were the iteration sequencers, photonic wax, and gene splicers, the robotics, and most of the holography equipment. Eventually, I narrowed my media down to one old one and one new. I decided to do a rather conventional, flat portrait of Jean in oil paints. For this I even retrieved from storage some of my beloved old boar-hair and sable brushes.

  The new medium I chose was an organic gestalt compiler of the sort used to record emotive slices for hollyholo sims, like your Jason and Alison across the way.

  The very first time I set brush to canvas, a title for the piece popped into my head. I would call it “Her Secret Wound.”

  Well now, I thought, I wonder what that means. What wound? Why secret? I didn’t have a clue, so I mixed some browns and umbers with thinner and set about firing off quick sketches on paper to try to discover Jean’s secret wound.

  I hadn’t handled a brush in over a century, and I had to relearn how to paint, but it came back, and soon I was knocking out little story boards of our ancient life together. The ups and downs, the miracles of understanding and the betrayals. After two months of this, I picked up my head one day and saw it: the wound was actually my own, not hers. The wound was loneliness.

  What is loneliness, Myren Vole? I am speaking of the garden variety, the kind we all encounter. No matter how wrapped up we are in our lover’s embrace, it manages to slither in for a short stay now and then, eh?

  In truth, there’s not much to say about loneliness, for it’s not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour.

  Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear.

  Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddle-some Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror—duration.

  Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated—as my daughter used to say—to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain?

  Likewise, most pain loses its edge over time. Time heals all—as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life’s most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week.

  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.