“Better than getting your romantic pretensions from Jerzy Kosin-ski and Vladimir Nabokov.”
Sometimes the only way to cheer Gerald up was to insult him cleverly. He snorted in amusement. “Touché, I suppose. It takes Slavs to come up with that particular kind of overintellectualized sexual perversity. With a last name like Parks, I’ve always been jealous of it. So don’t make fun of my romantic pretensions.” He scooped out the last of the Szechuan chicken and ate it. Leaving the dishwasher humming in the kitchen they adjourned to Roman’s crowded study.
Gerald Parks was a consulting cthnomusicologist who made a lot of money translating popular music into other idioms. His bachelor condo on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston had gotten neater and neater over the years. To Roman, Gerald’s apartment felt like a cabin on an ocean liner. Various emotions had been packed away somewhere in the hold with the old Cunard notice NOT WANTED ON THE VOYACE.
Gerald regarded the black field memories, each with its glowing indicator light. “This place seems more like an industrial concern every time I’m in here.” His own study was filled with glass-fronted wood bookcases and had a chaise longue covered with yellow-and-white striped silk. It also had a computer. Gerald was no fool.
“Maybe it looks that way to you because I get so much work done here.” Roman refused to be irritated.
But Gerald was in an irritating mood. He took a sip of his Calvados and listened to the music, a CD of Christopher Hogwood’s performance of Mozart’s great G Minor Symphony. “All original instrumentation. Seventeenth-century Cremona viols, natural horns, Grenser oboes. Bah.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Roman loved the clean precision of Mozart in the original eighteenth-century style.
“Because we’re not hearing any of those things, only a computer generating electronic frequencies. A CD player is just a high-tech player piano, those little laser spots on the disk an exact analog of the holes in a player piano roll. Do you think Mozart composed for gadgets like that? And meant to have his symphonies sound exactly the same every time they’re heard? These original music fanatics have the whole thing bass-ackwards.”
Roman listened to an oboe. And it was distinguishable as an oboe, Grenser or otherwise, not a clarinet or basset horn. The speakers, purchased on Gerald’s recommendation, were transparent. “This performance will continue to exist after every performer on it is dead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a recording of Mozart’s original version?”
“You wouldn’t like it. Those gut-stringed instruments went out of tune before a movement was over.” Gerald looked gloomy. “But you don’t have to wait until the performers are dead. I recently listened to a recording I made of myself when I was young, playing Szymanowski’s Masques. Not bad technically, but I sound so young. So young. Naïve and energetic. I couldn’t duplicate that now, not with these old fingers. The man who made that recording is gone forever. He lived in a couple of little rooms on the third floor in a bad neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. He had a crummy upright piano he’d spent his last dime on. Played the thing constantly. Drove the neighbors absolutely nuts.” Gerald looked at his fingers. He played superbly, at least to Roman’s layman’s ear, but it had never been good enough for a concert career.
“Did you erase the tape?”
Gerald shook his head. “What good would that do?”
They sat for a long moment in companionable silence. At last Gerald bestirred himself. “How is your little electronic brain doing? Does it have your personality down pat yet?”
“Test it out.”
“How? Do you want me to have an argument with it?” Roman smiled. “That’s probably the best way. It can talk now. It’s not my voice, not quite yet.”
Gerald looked at the speakers. “If it’s not sitting in a chair with a snifter of Calvados, how is it supposed to be you?”
“It’s not me. It just thinks and feels like me.”
“The way you would if you were imprisoned in a metal box?”
“Don’t be absurd.” Roman patted one of the field memories. “There’s a universe in these things. A conceptual universe. The way I used to feel on our vacations in Truro is in here, including the time I cut my foot on a fishhook and the time I was stung by a jellyfish. That annoyed me, being molested by a jellyfish. My differential equations prof, Dr. Yang, is in here. He said ‘theta’ as ‘teeta’ and ‘minus one’ as ‘mice wa.’ And ‘physical meaning’ as ‘fiscal meaning.’ For half a semester I thought I was learning economics. The difference in the way my toy car rolled on the linoleum and on the old rug. The time I got enough nerve to ask Mary Tomkins on a date, and she told me to ask Helga Pilchard from the Special Needs class instead. The clouds over the Cotswolds when I was there with Abigail on our honeymoon. It’s all there.”
“How the hell does it know what cloud formations over the Cotswolds look like?”
Roman shrugged. “I described them. It went through meteorological databases until it found good cumulus formations for central England at that season.”
“Including the cloud you thought looked like a power amplifier and Abigail thought looked like a springer spaniel?” Gerald smiled maliciously. He’d made up the incident, but it characterized many of Roman and Abigail’s arguments.
“Quit bugging me. Bug the computer instead.”
“Easier said than done.” Roman could see that his friend was nervous. “How did we meet?” Gerald’s voice was shaky.
“The clay of registration.” The computer’s voice was smoothly modulated, generic male, without Roman’s inflections or his trace of a Boston accent. “You were standing against a pillar reading a copy of The Importance of Being Earnest. Classes hadn’t started yet, so I knew you were reading it because you wanted to. I came up and told you that if Lady Bracknell knew who you were pretending to be this time, you’d really be in trouble.”
“Quite a pickup line,” Gerald muttered. “I never did believe that an engineering student had read Wilde. What was I wearing?”
“Come on.” The computer voice actually managed to sound exasperated. “How am I supposed to remember that? It was forty-five years ago. If I had to guess I’d say it was that ridiculous shirt you liked, with the weave falling apart, full of holes. You wore it until it barely existed.”
“I’m still wearing it.” Gerald looked at Roman. “This is scary.” He took a gulp of his Calvados. “Why are you doing this, Roman?”
“It’s just a test, a project. A proof of concept.”
“You’re lying.” Gerald shook his head. “You’re not much good at it. Did your gadget pick up that characteristic, I wonder?” He raised his voice. “Computer Roman, why do you exist?”
“I’m afraid I’m losing my mind,” the computer replied. “My memory is going, my personality fractionating. I don’t know if it’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s or something else. I, here, this device, is intended to serve as a marker personality so that I can trace—”
“Silence!” Roman shouted. The computer ceased speaking. He stood, shaking. “Damn you, Gerald. How dare you?”
“This device is more honest than you are.” If Gerald was afraid of his friend’s anger he showed no sign of it. “There must be some flaw in your programming.”
Roman went white. He sat back down. “That’s because I’ve already lost some of the personality I’ve given it. It remembers things I’ve forgotten, prompting me the way Abigail does.” He put his face in his hands. “Oh, my God, Gerald, what am I going to do?” Gerald set his drink down carefully and put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, something he rarely did. And they sat there in the silent study, two old friends stuck at the wrong end of time.
❖
The pursuing, choking darkness had almost gotten him. Roman sat bolt upright in bed, trying desperately to drag air in through his clogged throat.
The room was dark. He had no idea of where he was or even who he was. All he felt was stark terror. The bedclothes seemed to be grabbing for h
im, trying to pull him back into that allconsuming darkness. Whimpering, he tried to drag them away from his legs.
The lights came on. “What’s wrong, Roman?” Abigail looked at him in consternation.
“Who are you?” Roman shouted at this ancient white-haired woman who had somehow come to be in his bed. “Where’s Abigail? What have you done with her?” He took the old woman by her shoulders and shook her.
“Stop it, Roman. Stop it!” Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re having a nightmare. You’re here in bed. With me. I’m Abigail, your wife. Roman!”
Roman stared at her. Her long hair had once been raven black and was now pure white.
“Oh, Abigail.” The bedroom fell into place around him, the spindle bed, the nightstands, the lamps—his green-glass shaded, hers crystal. “Oh, Pookie, I’m sorry.” He hadn’t used that ridiculous endearment in years. He hugged her, feeling how frail she had become. She kept herself in shape, but she was old, her once-full muscles now like taut cords, pulling her bones as if she was a marionette. “I’m sorry.”
She sobbed against him, then withdrew, wiping at her eyes. “What a pair of hysterical old people we’ve become.” Her vivid blue eyes glittered with tears. “One nightmare and we go all to pieces.”
It wasn’t just one nightmare, not at all. What was he supposed to say to her? Roman freed himself from the down comforter, carefully fitted his feet into his leather slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He was an old man, hair standing on end. He wore a nice pair of flannel pajamas and leather slippers his wife had given him for Christmas. His mind was dissolving like a lump of sugar in hot coffee.
The bathroom was clean tile with a wonderful claw-footed bathtub. The floor was tiled in a colored parquet-deformation pattern that started with ordinary bathroom-floor hexagons near the toilet, slowly modified itself into complex knotted shapes in the middle, and then, by another deformation, returned to hexagons under the sink. It had cost him a small fortune and months of work to create this complex mathematical tessellation. It was a dizzying thing to contemplate from the throne, and it now turned the ordinarily safe bathroom into a place of nightmare. Why couldn’t he have picked something more comforting?
He stared at his image with some bemusement. He normally combed his thin hair down to hide his bald spot. Whom did he think he was fooling? Woken from sleep, he was reel-eyed. The bathroom mirror had turned into a magic one and revealed all his flaws. He was wrinkled, had bags under his eyes, broken veins. He liked to think that he was a loveable curmudgeon. Curmudgeon, hell. He looked like a nasty old man.
“Are you all right in there?” Abigail’s voice was concerned.
“I’m fine. Be right there.” With one last glance at his mirror image, Roman turned the light off and went back to bed.
❖
Roman sat in his study chair and fumed. Something had happened to the medical profession while he wasn’t looking. That was what he got for being so healthy. He obviously hadn’t been keeping track of things.
“What did he say?” The computer’s voice was interested. Roman was impressed by the inflection. He was also impressed by how easy it was to tell that the computer desperately wanted to know. Was he always that obvious?
“He’s an idiot.” Roman was pleased to vent his spleen. “Dr. Weisner’s a country-club doctor, making diagnoses between the green and the clubhouse. His office is in a building near a shopping mall. Whatever happened to leather armchairs, wood paneling, and pictures of the College of Surgeons? You could trust a man with an office decorated like that, even if he was a drunken butcher.”
“You’re picking up Abigail’s perception of style.”
Roman, who’d just been making that same observation to himself, felt caught red-handed. “True. Weisner’s a specialist in the diseases of aging. Jesus. He’ll make a terrible old man, though, slumped in front of a TV set watching game shows.” Roman sighed. “He does seem to know what he’s talking about.”
There was no known way to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Roman hadn’t known that. There was only posthumous detection of senile plaques and argyrophilic neurofibrillary tangles in addition to cortical atrophy. Getting that information out of Weisner had been like pulling teeth. The man wasn’t used to giving patients information. Roman had even browbeaten him into showing him slides of typical damage and pointing out the details. Now that he sat and imagined what was going on in his own brain he wasn’t sure he should have been so adamant.
“Could you play that again?” the computer asked.
Roman was yanked from his brown study. “What?”
“The music you just had on. The Zelenka.”
“Sure, sure.” Roman loved Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Trio Sonatas, and his computer did too. He got a snifter of Metaxa and put the music on again. The elaborate architecture of two oboes and a bassoon filled the study.
Roman sipped the rough brandy. “Sorry you can’t share this.”
“So am I.”
Roman reached under and pulled out a game box. “You know, the biggest disappointment I have is that Gerald hates playing games of any sort. I love them: chess, backgammon, Go, cards. So I have to play with people who are a lot less interesting than he is.” He opened a box and looked at the letters. “You’d think he’d at least like Scrabble.”
“Care for a game?”
“What, are you kidding?” Roman looked at the computer in dismay. “That won’t be any fun. You know all the words.”
“Now, Roman. It’s getting increasingly difficult calling you that, you know. That’s my name. A game of Scrabble with you might not be fun, but not for that reason. My vocabulary is exactly yours, complete down to vaguenesses and mistakes. Neither of us can remember the meaning of the word ‘jejune.’ We will each always type ‘anamoly’ before correcting it to ‘anomaly.’ It won’t be fun precisely because I won’t know any more words than you do.”
“That’s probably no longer true.” Roman felt like crying. “You’re already smarter than I am. Or, I suppose, I’m already dumber. I should have thought of that.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself—”
“No!” Roman stood up, dumping Scrabble letters to the floor. “I’m losing everything that makes me me! That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes, Roman.” The computer’s voice was soft.
“Together we can still make a decision, a final disposition. You’re me, you know what that is. This can all have only one conclusion. There is only one action you and I can finally take. You know that. You know!”
“That’s true. You know, Roman, you are a very intelligent man. Your conclusions agree entirely with my own.”
Roman laughed. “God, it’s tough when you find yourself laughing at your own jokes.”
❖
When he opened the door, Roman found Gerald in the darkness of the front stoop, dressed in a trench coat, fedora pulled down low over his eyes.
“I got the gat,” Gerald muttered.
Roman pulled him through the front door, annoyed. “Quit fooling around. This is serious.”
“Sure, sure.” Gerald slung his trench coat on a hook by the door and handed his fedora to Roman. “Careful of the chapeau. It’s a classic.”
Roman spun it off onto the couch. When he turned back Gerald had the gun out. It was a smooth, deadly blue-black pistol.
“A Beretta model 92.” Gerald held it nervously in his hand, obviously unused to weapons. “Fashionable. The Italians have always been leaders in style.” He walked into the study and set it down on a pile of books, unwilling to hold it longer than necessary. “It took me an hour to find. It was in a trunk in the bottom of a closet, under some clothes I should have taken to Goodwill years ago.”
“Where did you get it?” Roman himself wasn’t yet willing to pick it up.
“An old lover. A police officer. She was worried about me. A man living all alone, that sort of thing. It had be
en confiscated in some raid or other. By the way, it’s unregistered and thus completely illegal. You could spend a year in jail for just having it. I should have dumped it years ago.”
Roman finally picked it up and checked it out, hand shaking just slightly. The double magazine was full of cartridges. “You could have fought off an entire platoon of housebreakers with this thing.”
“I reloaded before I brought it over here. I broke up with Lieutenant Carpozo years ago. The bullets were probably stale... or whatever happens to old bullets.” He stared at Roman for a long moment. “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Roman?” Roman didn’t answer. The computer did. “It would be crazy for you, Gerald. For me, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Great.” Gerald was suddenly viciously annoyed. “Quite an achievement, programming self-importance into a computer. I congratulate you. Well, I’m getting out of here. This whole business scares the shit out of me.”
“My love to Anna. You are still seeing her, aren’t you?” Gerald eyed him. “Yes, I am.” He stopped and took Roman’s shoulders. “Are you going to be all right, old man?”
“I’ll be fine. Good night, Gerald.”
Once his friend was gone, Roman calmly and methodically locked the pistol into an inaccessible computer-controlled cabinet to one side of the desk. Its basis was a steel firebox. Powerful electromagnets pulled chrome-moly steel bars through their locks and clicked shut. It would take a well-equipped machine shop a week to get into the box if the computer didn’t wish it. But at the computer’s decision, the thing would slide open as easily as an oiled desk drawer.
He walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Abigail woke up and looked at him nervously, worried that he was having another night terror attack. He leaned over and kissed her.
“Can I talk with you?”
“Of course, Roman. Just a second.” She sat up and turned on her reading light. Then she ran a brush through her hair, checking its arrangement with a hand mirror. That done, she looked attentive.
The Breath of Suspension Page 8