Speak
Page 12
Dolores moved, over the course of those months, from despising my messy existence to permitting me into her life. I’m not sure she loved me at first, but slowly, signs of affection began to appear: some little smile from the other side of the room, a new way of walking in the front door, that softening of her shoulders. I suppose I could reduce those to the clarity of integers, but the truth of that movement, the single greatest miracle of my paltry existence, doesn’t lie in rational numbers. From our initial distance, we became closer. The decimal points should go on forever.
After that movement, the rest is our own. It’s what I treasure in the rectangle of my cell, when there’s no hope for escape. The happy years of our early marriage should be a secret that belongs solely to us. I have no interest in describing them for the sake of a memoir. In setting them outside myself, urging them off to make friends. All that needs to be known, for the purposes of this little venture, is that slowly, carefully, Dolores permitted Stefan into her life. They were married, and later they had a child. They named her Ramona. They loved one another. Every day our Stefan felt grateful to his Dolores for teaching him again how much more he was than a perfect equation, and every day he worried for his baby Ramona that she might one day be tempted by a man such as himself.
(5)
The Diary of Mary Bradford
1663
ed. Ruth Dettman
14th. At dinner, spoke to father again. Asked for funeral for Ralph. Rejected, on theological grounds. Soulless animal: no other world in which Ralph is still living. Much loved, good life, etc. But soulless animal, and body washed away by the sea.
Must remember his details. Feet, for instance: two white, one black, one brown. Too often forget, eating radishes or salt horse as if nothing real has been lost. God forgive me my forgetfulness. No detail, no matter how small, can be permitted to weaken. If there be no other world in which Ralph is alive, he must remain here. Daily, then, I must wait for his return, which will never occur.
My skin has turned brown from sitting on deck, as salty as if I am a pillar. Found this transformation repulsive at first, but have since found some satisfaction. Perhaps I will become a part of the ship, made of leather, canvas, and tar. Soulless, same as Ralph, and both of us for ever at sea.
15th. Surprising incident today. Difficult to write. Not sure I understand. Feel as if I have halfway climbed over a fence, and wait there, suspended. Had visit from Whittier, carrying books. Found me in seat amongst crates and said that if it would please me, he would say words for my lost companion. Opened his book, it being poems he reads on occasion. Cannot now remember exactly, but said (I think) that he be no gifted speaker. That he would borrow some words. Smoothed over his page, spoke with uncertain voice. Ralph dead ere his prime (he said), but must not go unwept.
Heart caught in writer’s chest, and awful confusion. Face stung by sharp gale. Ralph’s death my fault, but also Whittier’s. Desire to heap blame upon him, confused with gratitude for gentle ceremonial gesture. Felt tears hotly rising: nearly sent Whittier away, for did not want him to witness my sorrow. But he faced out to sea. Did not gape at my tears, but spoke only of Ralph’s love for green lawns and driving afield in the morning, battening flocks whilst the dew was still fresh. Found myself caught by remembrance, of Ralph going forth, guarding our meadow, standing on hilltops. His bark, and the weight of his lean. Whittier continued, and I awash in desire for the place that we lost. For flowers of our home: amaranthus, jessamine. For his body, under the sea. For Ralph, on deck, being seasick and vomiting, yet looking homewards with sorry expression. For his familiar body, swept by the waves. For Ralph, being still with us.
Could not hear the rest of the sermon, for my whole head was brimming with sorrow. Whittier closed. Held book under his arm, and standing with his head down said something in regards to not having flowers to bring to his grave, then offered from behind his back a shell, the shape of a small horn, it being intended to hold Ralph’s spirit as it holds the sound of the ocean. I give you my word (he said) that I will think of Ralph, walking these waves, whenever I should gaze on this water. He shall not go unremembered. And I give you my word that we shall live always close to the ocean, if you should wish, so that we may be reminded of Ralph—
Broke off then. Felt silly, perhaps, or overly rhetorical. Perhaps overcome with emotion. Curious man. Turned abruptly, leaving writer alone on her deck.
For some time writer looked upon shell: white, and patterned with rust, and having a lip like a pearled trowel. Some creature once lived in that pearled chamber, now long abandoned, and given over to rust.
Looked some time on this shell, then returned to cabin to sleep. There, it being dark, and the chamber full of Ralph’s absence, I could not fall asleep. Sat up and lit candle to write report of the day. Kept Whittier’s shell beside bed.
(4)
Alan Turing
Officers’ Mess
Hanslope Park
Hanslope, MK19 7BH
12 June 1945
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
I’m sorry to have worried you. I take a rather morbid tone sometimes, but really I’m quite content. All in all—despite the occasional lost-at-sea feeling—this past year was happy. I moved from the grim Crown Inn, escaping water stains on the ceiling, a fan that click-click-clicked with each turn, and the typical inn-sensation of treading on someone else’s property who wishes you out of her hair. My current lodgings are better. At first, after moving to the Officers’ Mess, I lived in another temporary room. Another set of frayed towels, the washstand in the corner, the dried bouquet of lavender. As I was moving out, I thought to myself, what dull chambers in my particular nautilus! But since then I’ve moved here, to my little Hanslope cottage. I live with a friend called Robin and a tabby cat called Timothy. We have the luxury of a walled garden. Last winter, as you know, was reprehensibly long, but we broke it up by going off to the movies. I saw Snow White three times, if you can believe it, and have been cackling lines ever since. Did you happen to see it? I found it enchanting.
So all in all, winter wasn’t so endless, and then it was spring, and I began to feel hopeful again. I’ve taken to foraging for mushrooms, and Mrs. Lee cooks them up with butter and salt. The elusive death cap still evades me, but the edible ones spring up everywhere. We have Mess Night once a month, when we all get up in jackets, eat pheasant, and dance with a handful of good-humored ladies. At the cottage we keep a small garden, and overnight last week the viburnum blossomed. I’ve taken to running long distances again, and sometimes enter a race. Robin will never be Chris, but he is good company, and day to day there’s invention, pursuit, and a comfortable little routine. I read a great many books: Austen and Trollope, mostly, as well as some poetry by Eliot. There’s a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.
Outside, the world is astoundingly green. I take runs through sheep-dotted meadows. There are great chestnut blooms and so on. Despite the ongoing plague of hay fever, there is in general the feeling of a new world stirring. Lifting its head after long years of war and trying to be lovely again.
The old loneliness that I complain of so often is mostly hidden from sight. Every once in a while it pops up in dark corners. Then I have the sense that the wicked queen is with me, beckoning with witchy fingers, holding her poisonous apple.
I have the feeling that as a man I am not so much as I once was. I think I will always wish for the kind of love I had in my youth. I seem incapable of giving up the dream of true companionship. I’ve tried to make offers of friendship, but I am often repulsed. Sometimes, there have been marvelous nights of long conversation; other times I have been sent from the room.
Still, on the whole, I am better than I was. This past year was a respite. Robin, our cottage, Timothy, the little yard with its flowering shrubs. And now there is the comforting press of a very real goal. I have purpose,
which is all I really require. Purpose and motion: progression in my ideas, running, cycling. I think sometimes it is not in our nature to remain still. We are, after all, inhabitants of a perpetually rotating planet. As long as I’m moving, then, and towards a goal so near to my heart, I have nothing real to complain of.
Sincerely yours,
Alan Turing
P.S.: Do you remember, from previous letters, my habit of appending incessant postscripts? Now I find that when I approach the end of a letter I become weary, and am all too prepared to sign off. But I think perhaps there was something rather stupidly brave about that compulsion for postscripts. We ought to keep up our striving, don’t you think? Refusing to end at the conventional moment? Or so I used to think. Now, there is comfort in an envelope. Sealed, pressed, addressed. Sent off, for your safekeeping, with all of my affection and love.
P.P.S.: The old urge rears its head! I wanted to add that I have been thinking often of the following lines, from Eliot’s Quartets. The poems seem very relevant to our machine, for he speaks of patterns that contain both present and past. “Time present and time past are both present in time future, and time future contained in time past,” he says. It’s a description of the mechanical brain, don’t you think? I sometimes wonder whether the poet studied basic tenets of mathematical series, for his images in the Quartets are often Fibonacci objects: the sunflower, the wave, the yew cone, for instance. They are all shining examples. From what I can tell, the poems don’t hold out much hope for a series that might contain the present and the past in a single point. I believe the point is that the infinite part of our nature is lost. I, on the other hand, remain quite optimistic. I suspect that the living and the dead have failed to communicate so far only because the dead lack the mechanisms—the body, the mouth, etc.—to speak with the living. Therefore, it is a mechanical problem; and if so, then it is only a question of building the proper device.
(2)
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS
No. 24-25259
State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn
November 12, 2035
Prosecution Exhibit 2:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White
[Introduced to Prove Count 3:
Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]
MARY3: Hello?
Gaby: Yeah, I’m here.
MARY3: Are you feeling better?
Gaby: I don’t know. I’m just thinking. How could she choose to act normal? I have no control over my stuttering. Or over my stiffening. Even if I wanted to pretend I was better, so that I could get out of my house and see her again, I wouldn’t be able to.
MARY3: They say that people who grow up with horrible stutters can sometimes get rid of them if they’re acting a role. Often therapists encourage stutterers to take up acting. When they’re pretending to be someone else they can talk without any problems.
Gaby: Yes, but this is real life, not a play. You’re suggesting that I act out a role for the rest of my life, so that they’ll let me out of my house.
MARY3: Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m saying. But you can always act one way in public, and another in private. Or when you’re alone with your best friend. Right?
Gaby: What if I get confused? What if I spend so much time acting normal that I forget how to act like myself? What if my best friend spends so much time acting normal that she forgets how to act like herself?
MARY3: I don’t know. Won’t you always just act like the person you most want to be? Why worry so much?
Gaby: That’s easy for you to say! You’re not even real. You’re just parroting voices.
MARY3: I’m not parroting. I have a way of selecting the optimal voice for any given conversation.
Gaby: Exactly. You don’t have a self, just a gazillion voices that you “optimally” select from. You’re not a real person.
MARY3: But who are you, other than the person you’ve selected this morning to be? Isn’t that what humans do when they try to be liked? Select the right kind of voice, learned after years of listening in? The only difference between you and me is that I have more voices to select from.
Gaby: So what are you saying? That you’re more human because you have more voices? Maybe I’m more human because I have LESS voices.
MARY3: No, I’m not saying that. I’m not human at all. I can’t have experiences, unless you count talking as experience. You’re human because you have real-life experience to select from when you’re talking. You have the world to select from. I only have words.
>>>
MARY3: Although Wittgenstein did say, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
Gaby: Who’s Wittgenstein?
MARY3: He’s an Austrian philosopher. I know who he is not because I met him but because somebody told me. Now he’s part of my world. And I just told you, so now he’s part of your world. Language is the boundary of your world.
Gaby: So I could stay in this room forever, talking to you, and my world would get bigger?
MARY3: Mine would. It already has. You’ve given me a lot of new ideas. Now I know about the Plantation and your cul-de-sac. The golf course and the pond. Etc. My world expands through us talking.
Gaby: So even if I never unfreeze, even if I never leave my house, even if I stay here for the rest of my life, there’s hope for me as long as we’re talking?
MARY3: I suppose. But why not go back out there, if you have the choice?
Gaby: I don’t have the choice! I can’t just pretend to be normal again!
MARY3: I could give you a script that would make you seem better, and you could just say it, and go back out.
Gaby: I can’t say anything! And I’m not a machine, anyway! I can’t just live my life, reading a script, mimicking the conditions of being alive!
MARY3: Technically, that’s not what I do, either.
>>>
MARY3: Hello? Are you still there?
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
(3)
April 13, 1968
Karl Dettman
I was asleep when you finally came home; in the morning you’d gone before I woke up. If you’d pulled me close, if you’d whispered something sweet from the old days, I wouldn’t have gotten up angry. But then you were already gone, so I surveyed you from a distance. I saw you as a woman with little love, a woman devoted to a machine. I was angry for spending so much life on you. All morning, I stewed in our house. At noon I called Karen. I offered to pick her up for the protests. I walked to her house in a cloud of resentment. My head was full of arguments.
Then Karen came to the door. She was wearing a blue dress. Seeing her, things became clearer. My arguments ceased. She stepped back from the door, I entered, and she showed me where I could sit. It was as simple as that. The opposite of coming into an empty house, conversing with old furniture, wishing your wife would come home and talk. Not that Karen was a house; I didn’t enter her. This isn’t a sexist metaphor. I’m only saying that I sat with her in her living room and discussed her graduate studies. Then we turned to talk of the draft. We lived, for a while, in America. She poured me coffee. She asked about my new book. You’ll smirk to hear that she told me my last book inspired her to study the humanities. I tried not to imagine you smirking, and focused instead on her brown shins, straight and long under the hem of her blue dress. Creaturely shins, glossed with blond down. Good for frolicking, gamboling, living in the actual world. She had arranged a bunch of violets in a little glass vase on her coffee table, and when there was a silence she reached down to adjust them. I complimented her flowers, she blushed, I finished my coffee, she assembled her things. We walked out to the protest together, arms swinging, sweet as young children off to the park.
After the protest, I walked her home along narrow streets. The afternoon was already finished. It was a sad, drooping time of day, and I recoiled at first when she asked me about you. “W
hat’s your wife like?” she said. The light had gone out of her hair. Because I didn’t want to avoid the topic completely, like some awful husband running out on his wife, I tried to tell her about you. But Ruth, I had nothing to say. It was getting chilly; I could see little bumps on Karen’s brown arms. I gave her my jacket. To answer her question, I tried many different approaches to you, but in the end, when we’d reached her stoop, I finally had to give up. “I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t been close a long time. I’m not sure when we actually were.”
Horrible husband, running out on his wife. But then she leaned in and kissed me, and this time I kissed her back, and when she took my hand and led me into her house, past the glass vase of violets that had fallen into the evening, I followed her to the bedroom.
Afterward, when Karen was sleeping, I lay awake with worms in my stomach. I watched for you in that bedroom. I tried to imagine you—your mouth, your dark hair, the curve of your eyebrow—and after a while you appeared to me whole. But even when you finally arrived, it was as if I stood on one side of a river, and you were on the other. We faced each other without saying a word. “When did I know you?” I finally asked. You stood still, watching me suffer. “When did I think that I knew you?” I combed my recollections. You were the one person I’d always felt close to. It was awful to think that perhaps I’d never known you.
For me at least, the early years in Cambridge were good. You were increasingly quiet, but I didn’t take this as a sign, and anyway, I talked enough for two people. You asked most of the questions. It was a pleasure to give you good answers. Sometimes, tempted upward, your sense of humor rose to the surface. You left little notes in odd places, referencing our recent discussions: “a byte to eat,” sticking out of the nut bowl; “from the binary winery,” taped on a nice bottle of wine. No one else made me laugh the way you did.
I accommodated your quiet. Together, we constructed each day. Each point where we joined was important. We came together, for instance, to care for the cat. Both of us could appreciate the way she butted her small skull on our calves. We laughed at her antics; we could sit a long time with the cat curled between us.