“Then you are a Dutch agent.”
“Oscar, we own them. They surrendered. We’re a large and slowly drowning country that defeated a small and quickly drowning country. That’s reality, it’s the world, it’s what we live in.”
“Mr. President, I agree with you. I’m glad that I know the truth now. It’s a shattering truth that just destroyed every ambition I have ever had, but I’m glad that I know the truth. It’s the highest value I have, as the person that I am, and I won’t surrender it. I don’t want your job.”
“Well, you’ll never work in this town again, son. I’ll have to fix it that way.”
“I know that, Mr. President. Thank you for your courtesy.”
__________
The Mississippi River had cut New Orleans in half, but if anything, the flooding had added to the city’s raffish charm. The spectral isolation of the French Quarter was only intensified by its becoming an island; there was an almost Venetian quality to it, intensified by the gondolas.
The official parades down Canal Street were well policed, but it was very loud on Bourbon Street, where spontaneous crowds accreted, with no raison d’être other than entertaining one another.
Greta stepped away from the green and peeling window shutters. “It’s so good to be here,” she said.
Oscar enjoyed the Mardi Gras crowds. He felt at ease as the only sober being in a huge, jostling mess of flat-footed drunks. Among them, but never quite of them. It was the story of his life. “You know, I could have gotten us onto one of those parade floats. Throwing out beads and bangles and free software. That looked like fun.”
“Noblesse oblige,” she murmured.
“It’s a local krewe thing. Very old, very New Orleans. The local debs booked up all their dance cards in the 1850s, but they tell me that cadging a float ride is doable. If you know who to know.”
“Maybe next year,” she told him. A subtle rap came at the door’s mahogany paneling. Hotel staffers in white jackets and boutonnieres arrived with a rattling sandalwood pushcart. Oysters, shrimp, iced champagne. Greta left for the bedroom to change for dinner. The locals silently busied themselves at the linen table, lighting the candelabrum, opening the bottle, brimming the glasses. Oscar patiently escorted them back to the hall. Then he clicked off the light.
Greta returned and examined the candelabrum. She was dressed in deep brown antebellum lace and a feathered vizard. The mask really worked for him. He loved the mask. Even in the thickest sprawl of Mardi Gras she would be a striking creature.
“Chocolate truffles?” she said eagerly.
“I didn’t forget. Later.” Oscar lifted his champagne flute, admired the golden bubbles, set it back down.
“You still don’t drink, do you?”
“You go ahead. I’ll just admire it. With half an eye.”
“I’ll just have a sip,” she said, licking her long upper lip below the feathered edge of the mask. “I have this little problem with impulse control…”
“Why let that slow you down? This is Mardi Gras.”
She sat. They dabbed a bit at their shrimp cocktails. There were deadly little crystal plates of horseradish. “Did I tell you that I had a cellular cleansing done?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I resented it, you know. That I hadn’t chosen to do it to myself. And then, there was the blood pressure, the stroke risk. So, I had my brain tissue cleaned out.”
“How was it? Tell me.”
“It all felt very normal. Very flat. Like living in black and white. I had to go back again, I don’t care anymore, I just had to.” She put her long pale hands on the tabletop. “What about you? Can you stop?”
“I don’t want to stop it. It works for me.”
“It’s bad for you.”
“No, I love bicamerality. That’s what I really like about our little gift and affliction. All those other troubles, humanity’s stinking little prejudices, the race thing, the ethnic thing…It’s not that they disappear, you know. That’s too much to hope for. They never disappear, but the new problems screw them up so much that the old problems lose center stage. Besides, now I can multitask. I really can do two things at once. I’m much more effective. I can run a business full-time while I work full-time for legalization.”
“So you’re making money again.”
“Yes, it’s a thing I tend to do.” Oscar sighed. “It’s the basic American way. It’s my only real path to legitimacy. With serious money, I can finance candidates, run court challenges, set up foundations. It’s no use wandering around the margins with our bears and tambourines, dancing for pennies. Cognition will become an industry soon. A massive, earthshaking, new American industry. Someday, the biggest ever.”
“You’re going to turn my science into an industry? When it’s illegal now, when people think it’s crazy just to mess with it? How is that supposed to happen?”
“You can’t stop me from doing it,” Oscar told her, lowering his voice. “No one can stop me. It will come on very slowly, very gently, so quietly that you hardly feel it at first. Just a gentle lifting of the veil. Very tender, very subtle. I’ll be taking it away from the realm of abstract knowledge, and bringing it into a real and dirty world of sweat and heat. It won’t be ugly or sordid, it’ll seem lovely and inevitable. People will want it, they’ll long for it. They’ll finally cry out for it. And at the end, Greta, I’ll possess it totally.”
A long silence. She shivered violently in her chair, and the feathered mask dipped. She couldn’t seem to meet his eyes. She lifted a silver oyster fork, probed at the quiescent gray blob on her plate, and set the fork back down. Then she looked up, searchingly. “You look older.”
“I know I do.” He smiled. “Shall I put my mask on?”
“Is it all right to worry about you? Because I do.”
“It’s all right to worry, but not during Mardi Gras.” He laughed. “You want to worry? Worry about people who get in my way.” He swallowed an oyster.
Another long silence. He was used to her silences now. They came in flavors; Greta had all kinds of silences. “At least they let me work in the lab now,” she murmured. “There’s not much danger they’ll ever put me in power again. I wish I were better at my work, that’s all. It’s the only thing I regret. I just wish I had more time and that I were better.”
“But you’re the best that there is.”
“I’m getting old, I can feel it. I can feel the need leaving me, that devouring gift. I just wish that I were better, Oscar, that’s all. They tell me I’m a genius but I’m always, always full of discontent. I can’t do anything about that.”
“That must be hard. Would you like me to get you a private lab, Greta? There would be less overhead, you could run it for yourself. It might help.”
“No thank you.”
“I could build a nice place for you. Someplace we both like. Where you can concentrate. Oregon, maybe.”
“I know that you could build an institute, but I’m never going to live in your pocket.”
“You’re so proud,” he said mournfully. “It could be doable. I could marry you.”
She shook her masked head. “We’re not going to marry.”
“If you gave me just a week, once a quarter. That’s not much to ask. Four weeks a year.”
“We couldn’t stand each other for four whole weeks a year. Because we’re driven souls. You don’t have the time for a real marriage, and neither do I. Even if we did, even if it worked, you’d only want more.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. Of course I would want more.”
“I’ll tell you how it would work, because I’ve seen it work. You could be the faculty wife, Oscar. I’ll still put in my eighty-hour weeks, but you can look after me, if I’m ever around. Maybe we could adopt. I’ll never have any time for your kids either, but I’d feel guilty enough to get them Christmas presents. You could look after the house, and the money, and maybe the fame, and you could cook for us, and who knows. Probably you wou
ld live a lot longer.”
“You think that sounds bad to me,” he said. “It doesn’t sound bad. It sounds very authentic. The problem is, it’s impossible. I can’t keep a family together. I can’t settle down. I’ve never seen it done. I wouldn’t know how to sit still. I’ve had affairs with three different women since last August. I used to line my women up one at a time. I can’t manage that anymore. Now I multiplex them. Giving you a ring and a bridal veil, that wouldn’t change me. I realize that now, I have to admit it. It’s beyond me, I can’t control it.”
“I despise your other women,” she said. “But then, I think of how they must feel, if they ever learn about me. At least that’s some comfort.”
He winced.
“You haven’t ever made me happy. You’ve just made me complicated. I’m very complicated now. I’ve become the kind of woman who flies to Mardi Gras to meet her lover.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. I feel so much more pain now. But, I feel so much more awake.”
“Do you think we have a future, Greta?”
“I’m not the future. There’s another woman out there tonight, and she’s all dressed up and she’s very drunk. Tonight she’s going to have sex with her guy, and when she ought to be smart, she’ll just say ‘oh, the hell with it.’ She’ll get pregnant at Mardi Gras. She’s the future. I’m not the future, I’ve never been the future. I’m not even the truth. I’m just the facts.”
“I must be human after all,” Oscar said, “because I only get the facts in little bits.”
“We won’t ever marry, but someday we’ll be past this. Then I could walk with you on the beach. Feel something for you, just as a person, in some quieter, simpler way. If I have anything to give like that, it will be at the very end of my life. When I’m old, when the ambition fades away.”
Oscar rose and went to the glass doors. It was a very bitter thing to tell him, because he felt quite sure that she would in fact be doing that thing, in her old age. Wisdom and communion. But she would be doing it with someone else. Never with her lover. With a worshipful grad student, maybe a biographer. Never with him. He stepped outside, shot his cuffs, and leaned out on the opulent grille of the balcony.
A large organized group was methodically working their way down Bourbon Street, under the blue and white banner of an extinct multinational bank. The revelers, grim and unsmiling, were neatly dressed in sober three-piece tailored suits and polished shoes. Most groups of this sort would throw cheap beads at the crowds, but the proles had cut all suppositions short: they were simply throwing away wads of cash.
“Look at these characters,” Oscar called out.
Greta joined him. “I see they’re in their holiday gear.”
A five-dollar bill attached to a fishing weight came flying up from street level, and bounced from Oscar’s shoulder. He picked it up. It was genuine money, all right. “They really shouldn’t be allowed to do this sort of thing. It could cause a riot.”
“Don’t be grumpy. I feel better now, it’s all right. Let’s go and break the bed now.”
She lured him into the bedroom. The damp air sang with erotic tension. “Shall I keep the mask on?”
He took his jacket off. “Oh yes. The mask is definitely you.”
He set to work on her in a particularly levelheaded and elaborate fashion. During their long separation he had had enough time to imagine this meeting. He had formed a multilevel erotic schemata with a number of variable subroutines. The sheets were soaked with sweat and the veins were standing out on her neck. With a strangled cry she tore the mask from her eyes, tumbled out of bed with a thump, and hurried out of the room.
He followed her in alarm. She was digging desperately in her purse. She came up with a pencil stub.
“What’s…” he began gently.
“Shhh!” She began scribbling frantically at the back leaf of a New Orleans travel guide. Oscar found a cotton bathrobe, put it over her shoulders, found his pants, sipped half a bottle of cold mineral water. When his temples stopped throbbing he returned to the balcony.
There were extraordinary scenes down on Bourbon Street. Their balcony, divided into segments, stretched the length of the little hotel and there were four women and three other men on it. There was a bizarre interplay between the people up on the balconies and the crowds at street level.
Women were showing their breasts to crowds of strangers, in exchange for plastic beads. Men were hoarsely yelling for the spectacle and throwing the beads as bribes. Women in the streets would display themselves to the men on the balconies, and the women on the balconies would display themselves to men on the streets. There was no groping, no come-ons; cameras would flash and gaudy necklaces would fly, but there was a ritual noli-me-tangere atmosphere to these exchanges. They were strangely old and quaint, like an elbow-link in a square dance.
A pretty redhead in the balcony across the way was tormenting her crowd of admirers. She would kiss her boyfriend, a grinning drunk in a devil suit, and then lean out with an enormous dangling swath of gold, green, and purple beads around her neck, and she’d teasingly pluck at the hem of her blouse. The men below her were booing lustily, and chanting their demands in unison.
After torturing them to a frenzy, she slung the beads over her shoulder and bared her torso. It was worth the wait. Slowly the stranger deliberately caressed her own nipple. Oscar felt as if he had been fish-hooked.
He went back into the hotel room. Greta had leaned away from her scribbling. Her face was pale and thoughtful now.
“What was all that?” he said.
“A strange thing.” She put her pencil down. “I was thinking. I can think about neurology while I have sex now.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s more like dreaming about neurology. You had me all excited, and I was right on the edge…you know how you can sort of hang there where it’s wonderful, right on the edge? And I was thinking hard about wave propagation in glial cells. Then suddenly it came to me, that the standard calcium-wave astrocyte story is all wrong, there’s a better method to describe that depolarization, and I almost had that idea, I almost had it, I almost had it, and I just got stuck there. I got stuck there on the edge. I couldn’t get loose and I couldn’t quite come and the pleasure kept building up. My head started roaring, I was almost blacking out. And then it came all over me, in a tremendous rush. So I had to jump out of bed to write it down.”
He stepped to the table. “So what does it look like?”
“Oh”—she shoved the paper away—“it’s just another idea. I mean, now that I can see it down on paper, there’s really no way that a glial syncytium can behave like that. It’s a clever notion but it’s not consistent with the tracer studies.” She sighed. “It sure felt good though. When it happened. My God, did that ever feel good.”
“You’re not going to do that every time, though.”
“No. I just don’t have that many good ideas.” She looked up, her lips still swollen from the grip of his teeth. “Don’t you think of something else, too?”
“Well, yes.”
“What?”
He drew a little nearer. “Other things that I can do with you.”
They climbed back into bed. This time, she did black out. He didn’t notice her deep slide from consciousness, because her body was still moving rhythmically, but her eyes had rolled up in her head. When she began to speak to him, he blacked out at once.
“Are you with me?” she whispered blindly.
“Yes, I’m here,” he said, struggling to speak through his body’s gasping. They had merged now, together, from areas of cognition so low and so blind to conscious awareness that they were barely able to manifest themselves. But they had chosen a good moment to take the mind’s central stage. Their sweating bodies began to slow, to melt together gently into deep relaxation. It was all very easy now, a vast moonlit Pacific of sexuality, washing some distant shore. They could breathe together.
When
they woke, it was ten PM. Streetlights crept through the blinds to stripe the ceiling. Greta stirred and yawned, prodded his bare ankle with her foot. “It’s sweet to have these little naps, after.”
“We seem to be making a habit of passing out.”
“I think dreaming is good for us.” She pulled herself out of bed. “Shower…” Her voice faded as she padded off. “Oh, they have a bidet! That’s great.”
He followed her in. “We’ll wash now. We’ll get dressed,” he told her cheerfully. Lovemaking was behind them now, always tensely awaited but maybe just a little bit of a burden, in retrospect. Still, he felt good about it. They were all purged, the tension had sung out of them; they were having fun together. “We’ll put on our masks, we’ll go out and have some coffee. I’ll take your picture in the street, it’ll be fun.”
“Good plan.” She examined her smashed hairdo in the mirror, and grimaced. “One martini too many…”
“You look great. I feel good, I feel so happy now.”
“Me too.” She stepped into the shower and set it to hiss.
Distraction Page 52
