Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  Thomas Kuhn had described this procedure as the construction and competition of rival paradigms. I was prepared to be less fancy, and recognize a lie when I saw one. (But which one was the lie?)

  Didn’t this leave out the moral intentions of the act, and the degree of commitment your true liar had to the propositional system—its data and their internal relations, as he accepted them—that he attempted by his falsehood to subvert? For surely a lie was a prudential evasion (unless motivated by sheer pathology) uttered within a covert meta-affirmation, its goal being, say, the attainment of power, or the avoidance of aversive consequences, in principle describable on that meta-level in exactly the same terms by both liar and lied-to?

  Besides, there were more varieties of truth than one. Did not even this unorthodox definition apply only in those part-axiomatic realms where the Falsification Test held sway: viz, the austere universe of scientific discourse? While a scientific theory could reasonably be construed as a lie by the honest lights of its antagonists, I might hardly implement the same rubric in dealing with the rich ambiguities of fiction, of art in general: ambiguities that bid to resolve, with benevolent, dialectical prodigality, the contradictories of linear imposition.

  Well, I bought none of this. I was convinced of the deep identity of science and art, if only because they both pertained to the same class of neural algorithms. It was the same brain that did the sums as did the petit-point, the oratory, the hunting&gathering, the nuclear physics, the philosophy and the dishes. It was the same brain, overloading, leaking ions and neurotransmitters, and running its programs haywire, that sent Caroline Muir into the madhouse and delivered unto Ray Finlay the mystical trance which passeth understanding.

  The mysteries of Art! I laughed. The Muse! How unlike the crass operationalism of science, according to some. Regard the Reader, withdrawing attention from signals at skin, muscles, deep gut, delegating all that inconceivable mental power and complexity of cerebral function to a phantasmic, prompted construction of human and environmental replicas, previously schematized with almost total incompleteness by the Writer who, in a comparable state of inwardness, had employed similar hierarchies of abstraction (sub-routines all of a human brain with its grievously fallible memory, absurdly limited attention span, constipating dogma, barbarously blatant stereotypes, ploys old before Homer) to mime out an interior shadow play.

  Yet the undeniable delight of this process, I told myself, was of heightened, not diminished, not reduced, not denuded, but magnified and robust experience.

  In part, I mused scientifically, it was due to the compression of time. An initial practitioner (the Writer) spent days, months, years engaged in the programming and interrogation of his or her sub-routines, modifying them, checking for parity errors, testing them for consistency, pith, even “validity”—and distilled the results into an input meant to be experienced full-bore by the subsequent practitioner (the Reader) in mere hours.

  Add to this the artist’s specialties—verbal facility, perhaps; peculiar insight, or simply peculiar views; keen eye, ear, fancy—and the Reader obtained the frisson of living inordinately beyond his or her means. Next to this gratuity, the simple traditional pleasure of storyhearing—wish-fulfilling content—ran a beggarly second. Tinker, tailor, rich man, poor: what booted it, if the tale were well told?

  So, I realized, by my earlier accounting I had here two lies. The first was the Writer’s: that these lay figures lived, that this schematic was more than a rudimentary sketch of a map of a map. The second was a lie shared by all the Writer’s Readers: that they were not gazing at lines of print but witnessing other lives entire; that, in the worst case, they were no longer themselves but someone other, in a denser, more selective universe.

  I rebuked myself. This critique was philistine, asinine! To equate Art with Deceit was to reach for your Luger. What else could humans share except abstractions? The touch of a hand and one’s emotional joy in it (or fear!) were finally electrochemical abstractions borne to and within the brain by jostling neurotransmitters. If these abstractions were decked out with our elaborations, shading them the colors of our choice, where was the metaphysical burden? What else was feasible?

  I sighed, putting the last of the photographs back on the missing hike’s study desk.

  1983: the mystical tree

  “It looks much prettier from up here.”

  “If you discount that brown furry stuff they seem to have hung over the front of the city offices.”

  Coming up to the fourteenth floor in the slightly grubby lift, crepitating from the lobby of the Queens Lodge Motor Inn, seeing Grant Moore and his portapak-toting cameraman to the opened window of the main function room, Marjory has no love left for Melbourne in December.

  “Don’t be a grouch. Look, stick your head out. You’re not agoraphobic, are you?”

  “You mean acrophobic, Grant. I have very few fears, none of them irrational.”

  “What the fuck are they doing down there?” Grant puts his arm lightly across her shoulders. On one of the playing fields fifty meters below them and beyond the roaring traffic, several teams of brightly clad brights swirl and flow, step and halt, interpenetrate and coil apart like some Tai Chi kindergarten ballet.

  “It’s a simulation game of Ray’s. Like Dungeons and Dragons, but more cerebral. Like chess but more fluid. I hope your team on the ground is getting some of this, it won’t be worth a peso from here.”

  “They better be, or I’ll have their balls.” He squeezes her trapezium slightly with his thick, smoke-browned fingers. “You’d be surprised what we can get from up here. Good as a chopper, except for panning. Bill has his zoom right down the front of their dresses.” He gives a booming chortle. “Wanna smoke?

  “I’ve given them up.”

  “The other sort. We’d have to go down to my room of course.”

  “If that’s what you have in mind I think you’d have to extend yourself to something for this itching I have in my nose.”

  “It’s probably just your nasal septum losing its footing,” Grant tells her. “I can probably get some from Mark when he comes up after he’s shot as much of this as he can stand. What are they doing, a Rite of Spring number for Big Brother?”

  “Hardly original, Grant.”

  “Only four more weeks to 1984, Marjory.”

  “Yes, that’s been mentioned a few times in the press. See that group in the middle? They’re flipping their scarves around so you can see the green or red lining.”

  “The footy season’s over.”

  Corning upon them from behind, Joseph explains, “They’re quarks and gluons.”

  Bill the cameraman grunts, changes his focus slightly.

  “Fuck. Do tell. Hey, I know you.”

  “We met at Jean-Pierre’s bistro nine years ago.”

  “During that big bash you buggers had. You’re…Joe Williams.”

  “Joseph.”

  “Right.” The function room is virtually empty; all the hikes not participating in the simulation are down on the playing field watching. “They’re being atoms, are they?”

  “Subnuclear particles. The constituents of nuclei, of protons and neutrons.” Everyone on the grass spins, coalescing into groups of twos and threes, merging, rebounding, their scarves twining and folding, red flipping to green, yellow to red, green to yellow. It is like a mating of insects with three sexes.

  “The gluons transmit what we call a ‘color’ charge. That’s what bonds the quarks together. It gets stronger the further apart they are. Close up, as you can see, the quarks and gluons are free to jostle each other about.”

  He’s right; it is as if the triads are governed by an invisible cattle fence. Their members roam and flutter, switching scarves, never moving beyond arms’ breadth.

  “Who are those guys in white caps? They’re breaking the rules.”

  “Photons are allowed to,” Joseph says.

  “If you’re gunna be like that.”

  “The co
lored ones get together and make up heavy particles called hadrons. Photons are particles of light. Well, waves really. They transmit the electromagnetic force holding electrons in orbit around protons.” Abruptly the scarves come off, are tossed wadded through the air. Several small children dart from the edge of the field, collect them, run off. The dancers take striped caps from their pockets. To unheard music, their choreography modulates to a higher blocking. Bunches of checked caps form. Individuals in merry cherry bands run at them, hands waving; slow; touch, grope, rebound, bond.

  “We’ll have a bloody newkyular explosion if they keep that up.”

  “No, the Simulation randomizer has changed the matrix. That’s a small segment of a brain you’re seeing now.”

  “Hey, this is good,” the cameraman says too loudly. Grant taps his own unencumbered ear. “Oh. Listen, see if you can get some sound for yourself. Skyhooks.”

  “Shit, I should have thought of that,” Marjory says. She dashes from the room. After a moment the function hall’s acoustics come alive with thundering rock.

  “They’re brains?” Grant yells

  “Neurons. And neurotransmitters going back and forth between them. This is a simulation of drug action. Those people with the bright red hats represent brain chemicals like norepinephrine and acetylcholine that control messages to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.”

  “What, inside your head?”

  “And your body. It’s a pity we’re not down there, you can’t get the fine detail from this distance. There are codes for the different transmitters—dopamine, serotonin, GABA, the endorphins, ACTH.”

  “Good Christ!” Grant turns from the window, digs into his shirt pocket for a Camel, blows horrible smoke in Joseph’s eyes. “Last time we met you were on the bludge. What have you done, a brain surgeon’s course?

  “If you must know, I’ve been teaching myself Samoan.”

  “Go on. Say something.”

  “My pronunciation’s probably terrible.”

  Grant grins. “I won’t let on.”

  “E a pe a ta sisiva.” To his shame, Marjory returns at this moment. She smirks at him.

  “What’s it mean?”

  Joseph blushes, looks out the window at the dancers, in time to see the psychoactive drugs coming in from the outer boundaries of the mind’s fleshy world, through the blood-brain barrier, into Caroline’s poor battered brain to soothe the whirling violence of her own hopelessly fucked-up interior communications. Neat and ordered as a commercial. Hugging the cross-checked receptors beyond the synaptic cleft, the major tranquillizers block off the buzzing, eager transmitters.

  The manic Skyhooks record stops dead; Lou Reed drones. Oh Jesus, she was Caroline, too.

  In go the antidepressants, spinning and slowing, gripping hands together in a barrier at the vesicle source of the transmitters, norepinephrines and serotonins straggling back from their journey across the synapse, exhausted, seeking oblivion but blocked against absorption by this tricyclic wall. So away they go once more, jittering clowns juggling their messages of phoney glee across the abyss. And now their return journey is hazardous with monsters, bizarre Chinese masks a decade out of date.

  “Shit, Grant,” the admiring cameraman reports, “there’s three bloody Chairman Maos down there.”

  The transmitters quail, menaced by MAOs. Not a moment too soon the Marines arrive, Green Berets to inhibit these impertinent interlopers. Joseph smiles at Wagner’s lunatic contribution to the simulation schema. Who else would embody monoamine oxidase inhibitors so grossly? And the neurotransmitters are free, carrying their wretched counter-revolutionary messages across the gulf of the synapse and into the brain, into the soul, into the damaged crazy heart. If this is true, Joseph tells himself at last, if this is true, if all that jabbering Freud and Laing and Lacan is finally just the froth on the churned soup of neurotransmitters, the tread on a tire whose wheel and axle are broken from the motor, why, then Caroline was the victim of her neurochemistry after all, as are we all, nudged and pushed by peptides a few dozen or hundred atoms long, atoms made of dumb whirring quarks and their color-drunk gluons, everything skeining in a vacuum of babbling lacy rushing hiss, no tachyons, no block universe of destiny and destination, a gabble of GABA, a hawking of quarks, transmitters with no senders and receptors governed only by the clever mechanisms of inert chance. You can go anywhere in a universe like that, Joseph tells himself in a blazing rush. Caroline was right. You can get a ticket and go. Just go.

  “It means Feel like a dance?” he tells the interviewer, balder now than in 1975 but chunkier, more macho if such a thing is possible.

  “Not with you, mate.” Grant places his hand once more on Marjory’s shoulder. “Not with you.”

  “Ua lapo’a le pe’a i lo le mogamoga,” Joseph mutters. “Aua tou te fa’amasino atuina ne’i fa’amasinoina outou.” He leaves them to it.

  A DOG’S WIFE

  …one

  On the evening of our last day together, Spot and I ventured into Puerto Rican midtown. Drugs dealers conveyed their wares and their opinions to others of their kind on every corner. One in every four of these corners held a dilapidated French restaurant striving to sustain identity and solvency. Young men struggled past us under the load of their gigantic quadraphonic portable sound systems. Spot danced with pleasure; this milieu was not alien to his roots. It pleased him to strut beside me, a streetwise kelpie in Hell’s Kitchen.

  “Ghetto blasters,” he told me, as one kid bopped past in a drench of Hispanic pop. It was a phrase I had never heard before. The acoustic values were sensational. “Third world briefcase,” he said, with a yip of amusement. The Walkman craze had not breached the barrio; it came to me that these unfortunates genuinely needed the joint benefits of conspicuous consumption and enhanced personal presence. A news report roared in our ears, simulcast from two swarthy youths passing us in opposite directions, creating a disturbing illusion of dopplered spin.

  Whining abruptly, Spot crouched with his ears pricked, swinging his head from side to side in a manner which recalled (I say with some shame) the mascot on His Master’s Voice recordings.

  “Los astronautas Joe Engle y Richard Truly visitaron ayer el trasbordador espacial Columbia y dijeron que todo luce ‘bellisimo’ y en perfecto estado para el lanza miento de mañana,” the reporter said rapidly, “siempre que el tiempo lo permita.”

  1983: punctuated equilibrium

  Joseph takes the slow elevator, puts his life in risk crossing Queen’s Road. At ground level Melbourne is disgusting. Early summer tawdry, old Heralds blowing along the gutter, a miasma of stoned gloom seeping from Fitzroy Street with its hundred child prostitutes, its five hundred hapless twitching junkies, its drab poets and drunks and dreary fuck movies and greasy souvlakia joints and the flat sea at the end of it. Just go.

  At the edge of the oval he watches, sun crushing down in his eyes, as Ray’s astonishing simulation segues through its modes, its holonistic transforms. The hike dancers are glazed with sweat but some impulse keeps them there, some intuition of a primal order in things. Joseph’s admiration for the wit, even the splendor of the strange game cannot disguise from him his final severance. Now the core dancers have become B lymphocytes, primary genetic source of antibody resistance to invasion. Funny how that theme comes up over and over. Viral intruders surge in, each with its antennae, its color coding of antigen proteins. Now they clash, they do one another cruel damage, and at last the sinister doomed mating is consummated, a single fated stochastic lethal romance between antigen and antibody, the antibody one of a million variants laid up in advance by a lottery of internal genetic shuffling, and now the victorious antibody clones its own message, defender of faith and home, and transmits itself a hundredfold, in symbol at least on this tired plot of grass, a thousand, a millionfold, a carnivorous beast of hungry proteins unleashed by host against dying overwhelmed invader.

  And the randomizer clicks; the drooping dancers reach for Cokes, for rolls t
hick with rancid ham, fatty burgers and souvlakia dripping with yoghurt, lukewarm water in plastic jugs, anything to keep them to the simulation under the sun. Already, barely refreshed, they are into a new and higher level of the life spiral, the contest of the genes, selfish and altruistic, shuffling their cards in a game of stable Mendelian strategies, the theory of games worked out in a dance of murder and parish-pump sociality, God damn, the swinging equilibrium between dove and hawk, strategies vying and falling in their embodied genes and genes in their embodied bodies, levels on levels, holons out of holons, retaliators gentle as doves unless attacked, then brutal as hawks, bullies passing themselves as hawks but fading at the test, the scientist of genes, the venture capitalist of genes, the prober-retaliator…How much of this makes sense to the watchers, let alone the viewers who’ll get five minutes if they’re lucky on Four Corners or Sunday Magazine or 60 Minutes or whoever bloody Grant Moore is pulling his fifty thousand bucks from these days, and all they’ll make of it is a bunch of stupid bastards who waste their time with that bloody stupid elitist Mensa rubbish.

  Marjory’s scent reaches him as her arms go around his waist from behind. “I think it’s just about over.”

  “Yes.” He touches her hand, squeezes her fingers lightly. “Ray should be tickled pink, it’s gone off beautifully.”

  She releases him, stands at his side leaning on the wooden fence. Music blows across the flattened grass. The sound system down here is not nearly as effective as the acoustics in the function room. “What did it mean, Joseph?”

  “The Samoan?” He looks her in the eye. “An old proverb. A flying-fox is bigger than a cockroach.”

  “Oh.” She blinks, looks across the field, waves to her husband as he comes toward them from the middle of the oval. The simulation has finished. Hikes wander off in twos and threes, picking up their trash, their discarded clothing. The field is littered with fragments of color coding. “That’s a big step for a man from Brunswick.”