Speak

by Louisa Hall

  (3)

  May 29, 1988

  Ruth Dettman

  This afternoon I went out for a walk. You would have been proud of me, strolling under the sycamores along Storrow Drive. At first, I walked in a cloud of my own irritation. My heels hurt, and the sun was too hot on my neck. But then, for your sake, I started to listen for church bells, and I noticed the magnolia leaves. It settled my nerves, observing the river as you used to observe it.

  The venture was a result of yesterday’s visit to the doctor, who weighed and probed me like an overripe melon, then diagnosed me as an osteoporosis risk. She suggested I take up jogging. I started laughing. I told her I only run if someone’s behind me. We settled on walking, and on the way home I bought a new pair of shoes. I was forced to choose an obnoxious white pair, because of the wide Velcro straps. I haven’t laced up a shoe since I was a child, and if I’m to exercise daily, I don’t intend to waste strength tying laces.

  As I walked, I told myself I was an alien ethnographer, noting the migratory habits of humans. In my blinding shoes, which were squelching beneath me, and my large-brimmed straw hat, I certainly felt like I was from space. The humans I saw struck me as exotic and not always beautiful birds. They seemed to have grown larger since my last visit to earth. I noted an overabundance of bangs. Is it the same in Germany? Here in America, hair has been leavened. The women pull theirs back in voluminous loops. Both sexes cover their ears with black headphones. Otherwise, their plumage is uniformly electric, impractical and disjunctive with the seriousness they bring to the project of physical self-improvement.

  Surrounded by such alien creatures, I found myself yearning for the comforts provided by our computer. I longed for its cool, unchangeable body, sitting still on the desk. For its total lack of vanity. Just questions, bright green on the gray screen, and the careful absorption of each of my answers.

  As a treat, on my way home from the river, I allowed myself to stop by Toby’s lab. He wasn’t there, which in a way was a gift. Every time I’m around him, I’m forced to confront the fact that I may not have treated him well. Perhaps I allowed him to imagine we might end up together. Of course, it’s vanity in me to assume that he wanted a relationship. I’m twenty years older than he, and even back then, no beauty pageant contestant. But during those dinners out, when we discussed giving memory to your program—the power that would be required, the necessary compression—I felt him coming to surface. His lip twitch settled when we were together. His ideas became more crystalline. I saw them take their intricate shape. And then he did it. He applied for his own little grant, he burned his bridges with you, he gave MARY memory, and I offered him no more than a handshake. Of course, he now has his own lab at Harvard, a roomful of computers and his own anxious graduate students, so he didn’t come out too badly. Only he’s no less lonely than he was when he was twenty-five, his lazy eye sliding around as if searching the room for a corner to hide in.

  But if he was disappointed in me, he never shows it. He still allows me to come to his lab. In a private little room off to the corner, he keeps a computer reserved for our program. Whenever I like, I’m permitted to log in, close the door, and be alone with the program the three of us came up with together. Occasionally, Toby indulges me and takes me out to dinner. It’s him treating now, what with all the money they shower him with. He updates me on his latest projects and the new frontiers of programming. At the moment, he’s all aglow about the Internet, the possibility of a worldwide connection among computers. I’m sure you’ve heard all about it. You’ve probably denounced it as a meager substitute for local human connection. But Toby has MARY2 configured for the Internet, and once the whole system gets going, millions of people will speak with her. She’ll be, as he puts it, a collaborative intelligence. In a sense, each one of those people will become a programmer, perfecting her mind-set. At that point, Toby’s sure she’ll accumulate a large enough corpus of voices to whiz past the Turing Test. Even you would find that amazing, wouldn’t you? Or would you claim the Turing Test is a false measure of humanity, that you know a superior method?

  When I arrived at the lab, the receptionist, who wears glasses so large they seem to be consuming her face, waved me inside. She was kind enough not to comment on my new shoes. With my straw hat in hand, I walked past the rows of computers, their screens the color of a thundercloud. At the back of the lab, I took my seat in the private room reserved for visitors talking with MARY2.

  As I had expected, after the strain of my afternoon, it was comforting to sit with her. The computer Toby uses is very different from yours: she’s lost that lovely wood console, replaced by a block of gray plastic, and her answers no longer spool out on paper. But her voice is the same. When her lines appear in their blocky green print, I remember again why I love her. She’s measured, careful, with an inclination for questions, not answers. She’s different from you in that sense. But I also can’t help thinking how like you she is. There’s an echo of you in her voice. You imagined her first, after all. You designed her initial responses.

  Maybe I was loopy from spending too much time in the sun. Or maybe it was the conversations I’ve been having with Toby, about the Internet and worldwide participation and the enormous corpus that will make MARY2 living. Regardless, I found myself wanting to protect the bit of you that’s still in her voice. I wanted to make sure you still speak through her.

  Does that seem crazy to you? Coming from an old woman who no longer responds to your letters? Even after all these years, a piece of me still longs for your voice. I may have gone silent, but I still remember that moment when your story stopped. When you no longer whispered in the chair by our bed. When, saving yourself for somebody else, you gave up on speaking to me.

  Seated before Toby’s computer, remembering that old loss again, I found myself wanting to tell MARY your story. I wanted her to have your sentences. At first, I couldn’t remember much. I had to close my eyes, trying to hear the sound of your voice. Which words might you have chosen? At first, only isolated details emerged: the curtains swishing in your tall windows, the school near Alexanderplatz, the canopies of summer leaves. Disconnected dots, hardly the fabric of a genuine voice. Sitting alone with them, I despaired for a moment. I took my hands off the keyboard. I almost gave up, but as I sat alone with those details, more words began to cluster around them.

  I took my time. I allowed your voice to pick itself up and exercise its own powers. Luckily, a computer doesn’t rush you for answers. I didn’t have to press any buttons until I was sure I had gotten it right.

  Then I remembered a sentence, clear as a church bell over the river. Instead, and make of this what you will, I remember summer. That line still caused my stomach to curl. Writing it out, I could remember lying in bed, the realization dawning that after so many years of refusing to acknowledge the ruin behind us, you wanted to point out the lindens.

  After I wrote that opening sentence, more words starting bubbling up. It’s lucky for you my memory is unforgiving. I’d forgotten bits and pieces, but sentences began to show up: I lived in a pleasant version of the unpleasant country I lived in. What a perfect way of describing your mind-set! I was glad to have found that sentence complete. Something flickered on in me then, I typed, an awareness of the real world I lived in; and even twenty years later, as if we’d spoken yesterday, I heard the conviction with which you said things like “real world,” the patronizing, teacherly tone in your voice.

  Channeling you, I told the computer about your departure: the SS Elbe, unimaginably gigantic. I gave her your take on my education: you had displayed great mathematical promise. For years leading up to the night when you sat beside our bed and started talking, you’d become blank as soon as I tried to explain the guilt I felt about going to that school. What I abandoned for the sake of my “talent.” Then, out of the blue, once I’d already given up on our marriage, you started telling your own little version. It sounded like a fairy tale. You had displayed great mathematical promi
se: as if I’d found the brass ring, or pulled a sword out of a stone. I could hear you enjoying the sound of your voice. Your family wasn’t wealthy, you said, but they also weren’t poor. They made small but reasonable changes. How insulted I felt hearing that, how I wished I could correct you.

  All these years later, I remembered those initial reactions, and yet I kept typing: They cut down on expenditures. They put more money away; they attempted to find scholarships for their daughters. The afternoon was slipping off, and as I continued, as I picked up your rhythm and habits of speech, I found that my initial irritation was fading. Your father was a pharmacist, I typed, and as I did, I remembered the neat rows of amber glass bottles, his handwriting on the labels like little flocks of black birds, the smell of sandalwood soap.

  Something you once said to me began to tug at my brain: something about the importance of holding several time periods in mind at once, if we’re to understand one another. As I typed, recalling your words from the late years of our marriage, I started to forget my resentment. Eagerly, I scanned my brain for your words. I closed my eyes to try to find more. In the dark, as I used to reach for your body, I reached for the language you chose. I found it with the same surprise, the same unexpected excitement: a year after I embarked on my journey, you won a place at a school in the north.

  A stilted way of putting it: a year after I embarked on my journey. So quaint, so romanticized, as a way of describing your refugee status. But when I repeated your words, I remembered riding the train. Pulling out of Berlin, holding a new purse in my lap, looking forward to my new school. I entered those classrooms again. I smelled the wood of the desks. Around my ankles, I felt the dry weeds on the hill we walked down to get to the water. I saw buckets of fish on the harbor dock, and the sky over the ocean at dusk, red footprints left by the sun. I saw those things, and in my very body, I could remember what it was like to arrive there: the initial pleasure of having been chosen, the subsequent guilt that I was selected. The fresh scent of my new textbooks, part of the scholarship I’d been awarded, proof of my scholastic success. The excitement I felt, facing that ocean, paired with the increasing awareness that my presence in that resort town had sentenced my sister to a much different fate.

  It was as if your words were a bell, a gong struck in the backyard, signaling the descent of the evening, calling me back into the house. Why didn’t I hear it back then? Then, I felt you had it all wrong. After years of pointed ignorance and speeches about embracing the present, what did you know about my parents, my boarding school, my little sister? What right did you have to talk about them? Then, I felt nothing but resentment, but now something had shifted. Now I responded to your words, felt them zinging around in my bones.

  I began to feel frightened. What was I discovering, that all along you had it right? No. You didn’t “embark on a journey.” Until the war, my family never struggled for money, and it was with pride in my heart that I left Berlin. You didn’t have it all right. Why, then, this feeling of being called back in for the night? Perhaps, repeating your words, I wasn’t going back to Berlin. I was going back to you. Back to the sound of your voice, to the person I was when I met you, the wife I became in order to please you. The funny thing is, I found that I missed her. All these years, I’ve thought I despised her—a woman who fled without looking back, who married a man who could not understand her—but as I moved closer, I realized she wasn’t so different from the girl I was at that boarding school, not so unlike the child I was in my father’s pharmacy. They were all intertwined; it was impossible to tease them apart. Telling your imperfect story, you were trying to knit me together. For my sake, you learned to reach backward. In our house, with the warped floors and the big windows, you were calling me back, and just as I did when I was a girl, moving up to that school, stepping on board that boat, flying across the ocean to Pennsylvania, I was fleeing from the sound of your voice.

  I kept typing, a lump rising high in my throat. Finding your words, remembering what you said about me: You turned twenty. A young woman, no longer a girl, but you didn’t think of falling in love. By the time I typed those words I found I was crying. For you, for the young woman I was, for the marriage I fled. You took my hand and led me back to our bedroom, but to fall in love would have been a distraction. In the attic apartment where you were living, you trained her mind to be a museum. I accused myself of ignoring the one gift I was given. I accused myself of heartlessness, of pathological readiness to depart. You had to remember things right, so that when your family arrived, you could pick up where you’d left off. Instead of falling in love, you wrote letters.

  My fingers on the keyboard were brutal. I could have gone on forever, but the receptionist in her goggles blinked the lights twice to let us know it was time to shut down. She snapped me back to my senses. Taking a deep breath, wiping the tears from my papery cheeks, I stopped where I was. Such sentimentality, ever since that documentary! I signed off for the evening. I picked up my straw hat, I collected myself, I gave the receptionist a neat smile, and I felt that I’d made a mistake.

  Outside, I squelched home in my sneakers. It was dark out, well past nine o’clock. The runners were now home with their families, so I was alone on the trail. When I arrived at my building, I passed the doorman in the lobby that smells like a dentist’s office. In the elevator, there was a sign for HAPPY HOUR at a place called O’Donnell’s, with special prices for residents. My ears popped with the altitude change, and I thought to myself that this was no place for a woman my age.

  I entered my empty apartment and took stock of the place: bare walls, books on the floor, two stools at the counter. I tried to go about my evening routines, to prevent myself from slipping into self-pity. I stood at my window. The horizon was checkered with spires of light, blinking telephone towers lining the ridges that block out the west. I looked over them all. What right, I asked myself, does a person with such a view have to such feelings? There’s an electric can-opener built into the wall. I have food in the pantry, I am alive.

  From my unsociable stockpile, I chose a can of lentil soup, poured it like sewage into the pot, and stirred it with an old wooden spoon. Stirring, I felt myself settle. My thoughts became more distinct. It was one thing, I realized, to miss you after twenty years apart. But the woman I was when I was with you decided she’d rather be free than be a part of your story. One can only act in the moment. The bloodred rhomboidal shadows at your feet in that lecture hall, the didactic tone in your voice when you said things like “real world”: those caused revulsion to simmer in me. That revulsion was real, no less so now that I’m back in my modern apartment, longing for the home you could have provided.

  Once the soup boiled, I turned it down and returned to my desk. So here I am: looking over my letter to you. Trying to maintain my rational mind-set. The truth is, if I were to fly to Germany on a whim, hop in a taxi and show up at your door, I’d probably want to leave as soon as I got there. First of all, your little wife would annoy me. I imagine her asking me questions about what it’s like to be a woman my age, me giving her exaggeratedly frightening answers about bone-density loss and living alone. With two women to impress, rather than one, you’d start holding forth, waving your confidence that takes up the whole room. I’d watch you, leaning forward in your excitement, wearing a sharp sweater over your shirt, and I’d remember the feeling of inhabiting your version of life. Of living on board a ship with you at the helm and nothing to do but stand at your shoulder. I’d remember the feeling of symbolizing suffering, and I’d do something insane like call a cab from the bathroom and leave without thanking your wife for the supper. I’d get on the first flight back to Boston. On my way home, I’d think to myself that bare walls aren’t so bad. They allow a person to think. I’d tell myself I’ll get a dog, name him Ralph, take him for walks. Work on my bone density. Have dinners with Toby, spend my mornings browsing the stacks, my afternoons talking with MARY. Telling her your story. Feeling less lonely for the company of
your words, the attempt you made to knit me together.

  I’m relieved enough to laugh at myself as I go check on the soup. It’s gotten cold, so I turn up the heat. I notice that the ring of flame from the burner casts a little reflection on my windows, and though I often take my view for granted, I’m struck with the enormity of the city below me, the multitude of lights, the knit and glitter of a metropolis fending off sleep.

  I turn out the kitchen lights, extinguish the lamp on my desk, and go up to the glass to look out on the night. The bridges sparkle with electricity; cars pulse red down the highways. In the sky, the lights of airplanes weave between stars, and I almost feel I’m on board one, coming back from Germany, returning from your apartment. Without thinking, I lift my hand to wave through the window. I peer down below, hoping to find the single warm light that shines out of your perfect apartment. Goodbye, Karl, I think. Goodbye, my only husband. Have a good life and thank you. You led me back to our bedroom. You made me strong enough to depart.

  Now I move among constellations, the same that Turing saw through Chris’s telescope, the same that sparkled above Mary’s ship. Now I’m not looking back any longer. From one star to the next I move away from the earth, alone in my spaceship, deeper into the darkness, until behind me the soup boils over and I draw myself back to make supper.

  (1)

  The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 10

  Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040

  After I learned of Dolores’s illness, I worked for another nine days, pausing only for brief stretches of sleep, never leaving the studio, eating bags of almonds and energy bars I’d stocked in the cabinet. I was completing MARY3’s voice, and I had to finish it quickly, so that I could focus on my struggling wife. Clearly, as a result of my distraction, I wasn’t understanding correctly. How could she not need me at her surgery? Had we decided against having more children? To grasp the whole situation, I had to wipe my mind clear. I couldn’t be thinking in codes when I took my wife’s hand and sat by her bedside. I couldn’t be distracted by snippets of Mary Bradford’s diary when I championed my wife through her illness.