Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Slowly Connie lifts his gaze. His tight intelligent face stares into the eye of the camera. ‘Come back in an hour or two,’ he says, and returns to his book.

  The camera waits and watches, the people wait and watch. A couple of seconds more and Connie looks up from his book, his angular features softening to a smile.

  ‘Watching someone read lacks something in the way of entertainment,’ he says, and closes his book. ‘So stay a while and let’s try to understand what’s happening here, between this world of knowledge,’ he waves at the computers, ‘and this other world of knowledge,’ he holds up his book.

  The filming stops and the director takes him through his paces again. Connie resumes his position at the line of computers, he pulls down menus, he alters screens, his hands wave in emphasis, he laughs, he frowns, he cocks his head in enquiry, he’s feverish with excitement. Jack watches enthralled. Connie looks like a man in love.

  They begin rehearsing a new scene. Connie is indicating the array of computers, there’s a smorgasbord of information here, he is saying. ‘On this computer there’s the world news, on the next the program schedule at the local cinema complex. And here’s the Glenn Gould website including,’ Connie presses a key, ‘a sample of his playing,’ – the first couple of bars of Bach’s 15th Goldberg are heard – ‘and how we would like to stay and listen, but with so much on offer there’s no time to stop.’ He moves to the next screen, a blog from a sixteen-year-old Japanese snow-boarder, the next computer is downloading music, the one after that is playing a DVD of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the last displays a page from Connie’s current work in progress. ‘Actually a whole chapter,’ Connie says. He scrolls to the end of the document and laughs. ‘A regrettably short chapter.’

  ‘All this,’ and he waves his hand at the computers, ‘all this for my edification, entertainment and livelihood. And I want to take it in. And I want to do it now.’

  He sits at one computer then the next then a third. He swivels around to face the camera. ‘Imagine that I spend an entire day at the computer. How quickly will time pass, how filled – saturated – I’ll feel when finally I rise from my chair. But when I peruse the contents of the day, how much do I retain? I pour myself a glass of red,’ – ‘The booze will have to go,’ Jack hears one of the crew whisper – ‘and I settle in my armchair and try to recall. Not only do I fail to retrieve all but a handful of sites I’ve enjoyed these past eight hours, but I find I can’t sit and think. The chair is comfortable, the room is nicely heated, the wine is excellent, but something has punctured my ability to be still and reflect.’

  Connie now leaps to his feet. ‘We are at an extraordinary moment in human evolution. The very nature of thought and memory is changing. This has a profound effect on who we are, but even more importantly it will affect who we can be.’ He flits from one computer to the next. ‘We can condemn the new technology for making us lazy and superficial, or we can exploit it in order to make us newly and brilliantly smart.’

  Connie leans into the camera. ‘How,’ he asks, ‘can we preserve memory in all its tangled richness, memory whose very existence requires prolonged reflection, when the conditions for prolonged reflection have radically altered?’

  His voice is raised, he is speaking quickly, too quickly, and he is twitching with his Connie twitches, those odd shrugs of the shoulders and the prickling at the left side of his mouth, peculiarities that originally Jack thought might indicate neuromuscular dysfunction but turned out to be nothing other than Connie gripped by excitement.

  ‘There’s not one but two generation gaps opening up in the technologically advanced world,’ Connie continues. ‘Two generation gaps creating three distinct populations. Each of these populations is defined by the means it employs to acquire knowledge. The first group consists of mainly older people who turn to books, newspapers, radio and mainstream TV to learn about the world. They read, they listen, they reflect, they discuss. Their knowledge acquisition tends to be focused – no multi-tasking when this group wants to learn; it’s also language-based and, to the modern sensibility, quaintly leisurely. Then there’s the baby-boomer population. The members of this group have a choice of how they learn. They grew up in a world of books and libraries, they listened to the radio and watched TV. As children, their play tended to be improvised and imaginative with no group leader to guide the proceedings. While still young they learned how to think and developed the patience to think things through. But as well they’re familiar with the online world of immediate information. They log on to the web for instant knowledge – the date East Timor gained its nationhood, the name of the current president of France, the Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1934, the four-day weather forecast for New York, and wider searches as well: the signs, symptoms and prognosis of a rare blood disorder, the life and recordings of Bob Dylan. When they want knowledge they can choose between printed material or the web, or use a combination of both. Often they’ll start with the convenience of the web but soon realise that Wikipedia alone will not satisfy. This group understands,’ Connie’s excited twitches have shifted into high gear, ‘that there are different ways of accessing knowledge and that knowledge is not the same as understanding. This group can choose which way is likely to have the best yield in any particular situation.’

  Luke has moved away from the set. He is clearly not impressed. In fact Luke, who used to be so close to Connie he would refer to him as his Boston dad, is not interested in anything Connie has to say these days. The producer is not impressed either. He is trying to get the attention of the director, but she is fixed on Connie and looks to be entirely satisfied.

  ‘Now to the third generation,’ Connie says, ‘the online, hooked-up generation who likes its knowledge fast and changing, the generation unlikely to include books as a knowledge source. This is today’s youth for whom free time has always been organised time, from baby playgroups and toddler gymnastics to after-school ballet, piano, tennis, karate, to weekend sports and vacation camps. After days, months, years of timetabled activity, this group has little experience of idle time or time spent alone in thought. This is the communication generation, who will fill every vacant moment by connecting with real friends or cyber friends or indeed technology itself. The members of this group negotiate the web imaginatively but have little experience of wandering their own imagination. As for memory, with information on tap and an array of electronic notepads, memory is exercised far less than it used to be. To lodge something in the depths of memory requires stillness, it requires that other noise is silenced, but this is not a quality of these times, nor of the third population.’

  Connie peers into the camera, his brow is creased, he is grappling with difficult issues. ‘If you believe as I do that memory is essential to identity, and if you further believe that memory and imagination contribute to the ability to abstract, then you will be concerned that the very cognitive sensibility that has taken us from the cave to the skyscraper, which has given us art, literature, music and technology itself, may now be under threat.’

  Luke looks disgusted. He retrieves his backpack and, brushing past Jack, he quits the reading room. The director, however, has no complaint. She indicates that Connie is to return to the red armchair. He settles into the leather and crosses one leg over the other. He is frowning, his lips are pressed firmly together, he is concerned.

  ‘We are faced with an ever-changing present,’ he says. ‘We live in the ever-new. To exploit the new technology, to exploit the world past and present always at our fingertips we need to withdraw, you need to withdraw, to separate for a time from your computer, your cell phone, your PDA, your iPod. Otherwise you run the risk of becoming a person without memory, the quintessential person without qualities who flies fast and ceaselessly on a stream of changing images. You could even become,’ and he is now speaking in such a rush that even the director looks bemused, ‘you could become like an old person lost in dementia who lives in the moment and a minute later has forgotten and
moved on to the next moment and the next moment and the next.’

  Connie was hard to stop so thrilled was he with his idea. And so, too, was the director, although it would benefit from some scripting, she said with a laugh. When a few minutes later Connie joined Jack and the others for a short break, he told them the notion had only just occurred to him. They moved into the foyer of the library, but with a clear sky and a bright sun outside they continued through the doors to the colonnade, and there amid the bluestone and columns and the newly washed air of early spring they found an alcove out of the wind. Helen lit up and Connie regaled them with his new thought.

  ‘How bizarre,’ he said, ‘that the modern sensibility with all its tools and information and its unabashed adoration of all things youthful might lock us into a world that resembles the evanescent, unconnected experiences of dementia.’

  Connie was fascinated by his idea, although how it would stand up to scrutiny he did not know. But for now, the wonder he felt was written across his face; just watching him, Jack felt inspired.

  Luke, who had gathered with a group of people to watch two galahs pecking the grass in front of the building – galahs in the city! – now broke away from them and made his way towards the colonnade. As he approached, Connie put aside his new idea and returned to the issue of access to knowledge.

  ‘So, what do you think of my three populations, Luke?’

  ‘You haven’t convinced me. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone under twenty agreeing with you.’ He raised a hand against Connie’s interruption. ‘Let someone toss us a question, doesn’t matter what, and I bet I have the answer before you.’

  ‘But what if there is no single answer?’ Connie said. ‘What if the answer is more in the way of analysis?’

  Luke shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, I’ll find it before you do.’ And he wandered back to the galahs.

  His mother watched him, a smile on her face. Connie, almost as if the exchange with Luke had not occurred, turned to Ava. ‘All of your novels play around with memory. So what do you think? Can events, ideas, can thoughts of any sort lodge into retrievable memory without conscious deliberation or reflection or just a moment of acknowledgment that something has happened. If, for example, you pass a fancy building and do not notice it, if you do nothing to register it, can it later be recalled?’

  Jack wanted to suggest hypnosis but had no opportunity as Connie linked his arm with Ava’s and led her down the colonnade. Just before they were out of earshot he heard Connie refer to a character from Ava’s fourth novel, a girl with a prodigious memory. ‘Now where did she come from?’

  ‘They’re so alike,’ Helen said to Jack, a smile lingering faintly as she watched them striding up and down the colonnade. ‘Easy to see why we love them.’

  Jack, too, was watching them, tall white-haired Connie and lush golden-haired Ava streaming through the electric air. At other times Jack would have seen only Ava, but now he was gripped by them both.

  2.

  The metaphors which attached to Connie and Ava were of a set. They were the sun around which revolved the planets; the star which exerted the strongest magnetic force; they were the strelitzia and anthurium of flowers, the leopard and whale of animals. Exotic and mythic, powerful and essential that’s what they were, and while Helen and Jack were aware of frailties in both, they were equally aware their frailties would never hold them back.

  In every aspect of life Connie moved into the future; through his work, Connie actually forged the future. And similarly with Ava. Every one of her achievements had taken her further from the shopgirl of her birthright. Even during her most tempestuous times, both Helen and Jack believed Ava had it all.

  True empathy is a rare thing; most people are unable to imagine what it is to be someone else and many would actually prefer not to know. Jack and Helen expected to see Ava at the centre of every group, and so they did. They expected to see her working well and effectively, and so she was. She might appear a little tired, she might be quieter than usual, but this was no reason to worry because Ava Bryant always knew what she needed and where she was going.

  So it could happen that when they moved to Oxford, Jack and Helen met with Ava every day and did not notice she was falling apart. But falling apart she was. Ava did not recognise the person she had become and had no notion of how to right herself. For years, she had imagined Oxford as a student paradise, an essential stopover on her way to the future. And yet here she was, arrived at last, and the place was incomprehensibly hostile. She had to force herself out of bed, down to breakfast, force herself to meet Helen and Jack, force herself to carry on as if nothing was wrong. And while she was a better performer than most, as the weeks passed into months she found herself with less and less energy for any sort of pretence. Yet through it all, the others failed to notice because they would not allow the possibility that Ava Bryant might ever be foundering.

  Their inability to see what was happening was intensified by Oxford itself. Helen and Jack saturated themselves in Oxford and it in turn saturated them. Life seemed looser, more elastic when released from the demands and scrutiny of home. Jack said it was like being immersed in a grand symphony. Postgraduate study was less demanding than any of them had expected, with a manageable volume of work and very few people to please. Ava, searching for explanations for her mood could not find them in the pressures of work. In fact, she would have coped better if she were busier. It took more than a month before she managed to meet her supervisor, a well-known scholar with a specialty in the Romantic poets, a moon-faced, chinless man with inflamed gums and pungent body odour, a man hard to equate with the swashbuckling fervour of his publications. Ava made increasingly desperate efforts to set up a regular meeting with him. In the end his rejection – for that’s how she interpreted it – seemed to add to Oxford’s condemnation of her. She told the others she had the best of him in his books, and while she would entertain them with mimicry of him, she would observe herself in these performances with a black and sinking horror.

  She had expected Oxford to inspire that same marvellous exhilaration she had felt when she started university in Melbourne. Yet as her misery thickened she began to question not only her earlier experience but her very capacity for exhilaration. She’d always had to plan so carefully for her rewards and pay upfront for most of them too, she wondered if what she had previously interpreted as exhilaration might simply be relief that, having planned and paid, the reward had duly appeared. Although in those early days at Oxford she would have settled for something considerably less lavish than exhilaration.

  Everyone in Oxford was intelligent, or rather everyone she was likely to meet, so being bright could not protect her as it had in the past. As for the sons and daughters of the ruling class who went up to Oxford on the steel tracks of family tradition rather than intellectual capacity, they were unlikely to pursue friendships with Australians, who, Ava quickly discovered, registered rather poorly on the colonial scale. Although most colonials, no matter what their other credentials, were not highly regarded, so the scholarships which she, Jack and Helen had assumed would be their tickets to Oxford acceptance had little effect other than locating them in the colonial underclass.

  Whether he was accepted or not was of little concern to Jack. His self-consciousness slithered away as he soused himself in life away from home. He worked at the library, he met with Ava and Helen, he was adopted by a group of Zimbabweans (he joked he was their token white), he had a regular spot at a popular folk club. And for hours at a time he would walk the streets of Oxford, a bristly figure hunched in his jacket, nodding and chortling to himself. So unmonitored was he, he would find himself lost, a curiously liberating experience for a man accustomed to following maps in practically every aspect of his life.

  Jack fell under Oxford’s well-documented spell. The romance of the cobbled lanes and walkways, the towers and spires, the massive blocks of Oxford stone, the pubs spiced with ancient spillages, high street shops from the Middle Ages
spruiking the latest in modern trinkets, the ornate wedding cake of the Radcliffe Camera, Magdalen’s gargoyles, the quarterjacks on Carfax Tower striking the quarter-hours: he loved all of Oxford’s wonders and oddities.

  ‘I feel a different person here,’ he said to Ava. ‘I feel new.’

  He took his long walks even during the brittle, truly frigid cold that is Oxford’s special province in winter and would return to his room hours later where his musings would collect into short bitey nuggets of a thousand words or so on topics as diverse as ‘Hair Dye and Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Policy’, ‘Deceptive Sentimentality: the Demonising of Lindy Chamberlain’, ‘The Lunacy of Humane Murder: Death Sentence by Lethal Injection’. Helen and Ava said he should try to have them published. But despite the plethora of Oxford periodicals, none wanted his articles, so he proposed instead that they start their own magazine, a monthly publication known as AA, its full title, Antipodeans Abroad, being as alluring as hemlock for most Oxonians. The magazine would feature his essays, Ava’s stories, a Modern Alchemy column with scientific news and anecdotes from Helen, together with poetry and fiction drawn from the broader student body – a quota not difficult to fill, Jack said, given that nearly everyone at Oxford seemed to be writing poetry or a novel.

  The inaugural issue of AA came out at the end of their first year, long after Ava had returned to her old self. They managed to produce three more issues, more quarterly than monthly, and what meagre sales they made barely covered the cost of the Spanish plonk which nourished the magazine’s production. AA was pronounced by Jack a magnificent failure.

  Notwithstanding their being Australians, Helen and Jack believed that Oxford would judge them on their merits. And besides, Oxford slotted so neatly into the continuing narratives of their lives that they experienced almost from the beginning a strong sense of belonging. Helen had long planned to study and work overseas. Her ties with home were neatly sustained by a weekly aerogramme to her parents, and what loyalties she valued were to the friends who had left home with her. She had found in Oxford the science of her dreams. She would walk around town as if on hallowed turf, citing what discoveries had been made in which buildings, and what discoveries were happening now. Just by being there, she said, she was a part of history.