by Jerry
THE DATE
Larry Tritten
The only thing we can safely say about this torrid Hollywood love story is that it will never adapt to film.
AND SO, FINALLY, as she had known he one day would, he called. There was only a moment of surprise when she heard his voice, because she had more or less subliminally been preparing herself for this for a long time, maybe even a year or two. And her reaction to the sound of his voice was exactly as she had known it would be: her libido rang like a holiday bell! Between his saying her name and her answering, there was a timeless moment filled with the pleasant satisfaction of the confirmation of her intuition and the incipient thrill of realizing that an exciting and dangerous adventure was beginning—an irresistible one. Her life had been conventional enough, too conventional, for years, and she was not going to let this go; besides, a part of her sensed that, as the old lyric said, this could be the start of something big.
“Daisy?”
“Yes . . .” She spoke tentatively, giving the word just a slight undertow of the impression that she didn’t recognize his voice, and thinking even as she did so that the game had begun. Play your part well, babe, she told herself.
“This is—”
And before he could go further, she cut in smoothly and exuberantly with, “Oh hi!!” and there was a beat, and then he said, “You know who this is?”
She laughed girlishly, and exclaimed, “Of course I do. Are you kidding!”
Another pause, and he said, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How you been?”
“The usual,” she said. “Plugging away.” And then thought to add, “All work and no play . . .”
“I know the feeling,” he said, and gave a sigh. “I’ve been working my ass off lately, late nights at the studio.” Pause. “No play?” he asked.
“Not much,” she laughed (picturing him, wondering where he was calling from). “Dawn to dusk lately. Truth is, I’m starting to feel like a machine. Cheer me up.” The last was a bold foray; she wanted to be anything but coy.
“How about dinner?” he said.
“Dinner?” She let the word linger, like an echo.
“Yeah. Have you eaten?”
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then said, “No,” letting the word melt promisingly in the aftermath.
“Would you like to go out?”
“To dinner?” Just a millimeter of coyness. Then: “I’ve got a frozen seafood linguine dinner here staring me in the face. I . . . well, go where!”
“You name it. I can get reservations at Spago. Rebecca’s. Mason’s . . . the Hamburger Hamlet? You name it. I’ve been eating alone nights, and I’m starting to go wacky from the lonesomeness of it . . .”
Lonesome rather than lonely. This was a terrific game, Daisy thought, and, smiling, she touched herself very lightly on the inside of one thigh as if in pure symbolic ordination. The touch instantly filled her mind with a sensual heat that was startling in its impact.
“Well, even the Hamburger Hamlet beats this frozen dinner,” she said casually. “Yes, I’d like to go out!” God, her glands were clamoring; she could hardly believe it. She’d always known she would go through with it, but now she could actually feel excitement burgeoning in her.
“Mason’s beats the Hamlet.”
“I’d love it.”
“Well, I’d love you to,” he said emphatically. “Is an hour enough time to get ready?”
Jesus, the things she had to do to get herself ready! “An hour is perfect,” she said. “I’ll get ready. I’m looking forward to it! Hey, how have you been!”
“We’ll talk,” he said. “I’ll pick you up . . . See you!”
“O.K.”
Talk, she thought. And that’s just the start of what well do, sweetie.
O.K. All systems were go. She raced into the bathroom, undressed, and stepped into the shower, singing Robert Plant’s “Simply Irresistible” vibrantly and loudly as she luxuriated under the enlivening spray, then emerged in a cloud of turbid steam. She caught a glimpse of herself in the foggy medicine cabinet mirror and winked seductively.
Into the bedroom. At the bureau mirror, she zeroed in on some lethal maquillage. She wanted bedroom eyes. She used two shades of mascara, radiant blue lining the upper lash, violet below, then, with a lush lavender lipstick, gave herself a 1940s vamp mouth. She chose her clothing and laid it out on the bed. Black half-cup brassiere. Sooty panties and filmy black garter belt with floral applique and little red ribbons embellishing the garters. Sheer black stockings. An electric-blue silk tank top with low, low cleavage. Matching shorts of sequins on silk. Gleaming blue satin pumps. She normally didn’t dress so completely, but this was a very special occasion. When she had put everything on, she appraised herself in the mirror. She was a dazzling display of blue light and silk and nylon and satin promise. Looking at her image, she said, “Do you really want to go through with this? You do have a boyfriend, you know.” She smiled. “Yeah, I really do,” she said huskily.
He was right on time, and when she answered the door, he was so distracted by her appearance that the obligatory show-biz hug was almost clumsy.
“How do I look?” she asked, and he simply stood back grinning, and then she hugged him again, but this time she held him for a moment, letting all of the color and fragrance and warmth of her penetrate.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
He had a Bentley in the driveway. She didn’t really think much about cars. Anyway, she knew he was rich enough to afford whatever he wanted.
A Lamborghini. Whatever. But then, so was her boyfriend.
During the drive from West Hollywood to Brentwood, he talked casually about work, the movie business—facile, ordinary conversation, but she didn’t miss the sharp appreciative sidelong glances he gave her several times. It was all primal ritual now. She was ready. He was ready. After all these years of friendship . . .
In the restaurant they got an isolated table and settled into the polished leather and woodsy ambiance of the place with chilled Gibsons, his suggestion. There was more small talk, but all very relaxed (they both knew), and very warm, and by the third Gibson, very, very warm. When they were ready to order, he suggested the grilled chicken, and then, as if having made a faux pas, changed it to the grilled salmon.
“I like to let the guy order for me,” she said agreeably. When the waiter was gone, he said, “Daisy.”
“What?”
“I just wanted to say the name,” he said. “I love it. It’s fabulous.”
She actually burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ! You’re kidding.” She touched his arm, letting her fingers linger. “If you only knew how much I always hated it! You know, I actually almost changed it, seriously. Daisy! God, I always thought of the dog in ‘Blondie’ !”
“Funny,” he said quietly. “I always thought of it as a bit of pure metaphoric music. Daisy. Daisy Miller. Daisy in Gatsby. Daisy Clover . . . I think of a field of flowers by Monet.” He smiled, just looking at her.
It’s really happening, she thought with whelming pleasure. Oh, you faithless broad! She was feeling really loose now after three Gibsons.
And they had another one after dinner. And then they were leaving, but before he opened the door of the Bentley for her, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently and gave her one of those long, melting kisses that can only be described as delicious because they’re all taste, mainly the foretaste of the exquisite thrills they were both acknowledging were now imminent.
“I want you,” he said.
“God, I want you,” she breathed.
“Your place or mine, princess?”
“Let’s just get to a bedroom,” she said, and she kissed him again, taking all the initiative. After so long, so very long, this was superlative. And she was hotter than Palm Springs on the Fourth of July.
They went to his place at the beach. The door to the bedroom loomed before her like one of those magical portals to another world in
a fantasy film. The bed was not a water bed, which surprised her, because it suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t had sex on anything but a water bed for years. Well, chacun à son goût.
But the blue silk sheets were like rippling water, and he undressed her with a perfect blend of finesse and lust, kissing each shoe after he removed it, draping the stockings around his neck after he removed them.
“Incredible,” he whispered.
“Get those pants off and make love to me,” she blurted.
Which he did. Skillfully. Avidly. Passionately. Dynamically. Heroically. Lovingly.
Afterward he said, “Want a drink?”
“I want you,” she said. “More of you.”
The kiss was quintessentially romantic.
“That’s no problem,” he said. “I can’t get enough of you. I’ve wanted this to happen for years.”
She looked him in the eyes. “But we do have a problem, don’t we? We’re both, uh, with someone. And we are all friends.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Neither do I. Kiss me again.”
The kiss led to more . . . and more.
During a lull he said, “Your outfit goddamned near knocked me out. Normally I just see you in a blouse or top, but you really put on the ritz tonight.”
“This is better than sex with your own kind,” she said. “God, I can’t get enough.” She was thoughtful for a moment. “The only thing is . . . Don. Jesus, what will he think?”
He sighed. “Who cares?” he said. “Maybe this will give him some incentive to get off his tail and do something productive . . .” He thought for a moment, then laughed. “Like invent a better mousetrap!” His four-fingered hand moved very gently through her soft eiderdown toward her cloaca . . . again!
“Oh God, Mickey, oh Christ,” she breathed hotly, opening herself to him . . . again. It was the hottest night in the history of Hollywood, she thought, and goddamned well the most wonderfully memorable.
LEARNING TO BE ME
Greg Egan
I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.
I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: “Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel.
And it too wonders—(I knew, because I wondered)
—it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.
As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody l. had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.
Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: “Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?” We all replied, unthinkingly, indignantly—“The real human!” When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, “Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever.”
We beat him until he bled.
By the time I was fourteen, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked “Are you the jewel or the human?” had to be “The human”—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world “I am the jewel”—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body—was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).
However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was only one person, one identity, one consciousness. This one person merely happened to have the (highly desirable) property that if either the jewel or the human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy, a matter of robustness, no more.
That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch—three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It was exactly what I would have expected of them.
“We didn’t seem any different to you, did we?” asked my mother.
“No,” I said—truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.
“That’s why we didn’t tell you,” said my father. “If you’d known we’d switched, at the time, you might have imagined that we’d changed in some way. By waiting until now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re still the same people we’ve always been.” He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, “Don’t touch me!”, but I remembered in time that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.
I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; after all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deactivated. Fora week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect copy, and no differences are ever detected.
The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be replaced.
The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.
My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.
When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again.
Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given cont
rol of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress—but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he haemorrhaged.)
I knew by then that the jewel’s “teacher” didn’t I monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the tissue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain critical neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and—given some very reasonable assumptions that nobody could disprove—bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathematical rigour.
At first, I declared that within these errors, however small, lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be “half-way” between “human” and “machine” ? In theory—and eventually, in practice—the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any difference at all—when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural attrition?
