2020 (12 page)

I was about to condemn the Reynolds as Philistines and threaten a lawsuit when Dusty, wearing a very sexy peasant outfit from Nepal, emerged from the house carrying a new titanium grill rack. Before I could open my mouth she set it into place over the arms of the “chair.”

My waving hands, all calluses and still imbedded with marble dust, dropped to my sides. It was obvious what they were doing: building a new barbecue. It shortly became clear that that was what the marble had been there for all along.

“Can’t tell you how much we appreciate your pitching in,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “Especially with your own work to do.”

“Hand-cut bricks,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Impressive.”

Dusty winked. “It makes you like a member of the family, yeah? Are we getting kinky or what?”

I broke out into a cold sweat. I wanted to run somewhere for a drink, and I thought for a second time of the poet a block away. Then I remembered that odd sight on the front lawn. I asked if maybe one of the Lhasa apsos had died up there.

Dr. Reynolds smiled appreciatively. “Now there’s a sense of humor.”

“I guess you haven’t heard,” his wife said with a wicked grin. “The poet finished early.”

Dusty nodded. “What an idea, yeah? He left a note. The hanging . . . I mean, the way he committed suicide . . . was like his poem, see?”

“It
was
his poem,” Mrs. Reynolds corrected, hefting another brick for the barbecue. “He recorded his final grunt. It really was terrific.”

“The guy had some imagination after all,” Dr. Reynolds said, dusting off his hands. “I was actually moved.”

* * *

Dr. Fong didn’t want to see me, but by making some insinuations over the intercom based on my present connection with a malpractice attorney, I got him to grudge me ten minutes of his time.

He was slouched behind his desk trying to hide behind an oversized surgical mask. I didn’t mind; I knew I’d have his full attention soon enough. I laid out my initial suspicions about the way he tried to stay out of the public’s eye (confirmed now, I said, by his mask, which he promptly removed). I described my research at the Institute library, my understanding of his early work on the bioelectric impulses of the brain and their relationship to each cell’s instruction set for aging.

“Sure,” I said, “maybe you were working on subcortical imaging when you put together your first diagnostic scanner. But you eventually discovered an interesting side effect of sitting under the hood. As the years went by . . . Look, Fong, I know how you spend your mornings. I know what you do to yourself.”

Fong, who’d been on the verge of ordering me out, turned petulant with denial. “You got a wrong guy,” he sputtered. His hands obsessively reached for the surgical mask, pulled it toward his face, shoved it away, pulled it toward his face . . . shoved it away. “Maybe you got some kinda problem inna brain youself,” he said, his cheeks flushing.

Over the previous week, I’d been back to spy in the bushes several more times. I’d brought along the sophisticated camera I use like a notebook to collect ideas for my work. I laid the photographs I had taken across his desk, humming the theme from
Top Neuron
as I did so. Each was time-and-date stamped by GEOS satellite feed, and the pictures made a series. Their net effect was to drain the blood from Fong’s face and to replace the beady intensity in his dark eyes with an uncontrolled twitch.

“For starters,” I suggested, “the American Board of Radiology might be interested in these photographs, don’t you think?”

Fong blanched even whiter.

“How much is Board Certification worth to a brain radiologist?” I wondered out loud. “A guy with his own Institute, substantial capital investment . . . and maybe a certain privacy to protect?”

He took it like a kid, weeping and banging EEG probes onto his desk. But after a few noisy minutes, the tantrum passed like a squall. The next thing I knew, Dr. Fong rubbed his pink cheeks and smiled. “Sooo. What you price? I think maybe you lika lose a couple years youself. I get it.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t get it. My life’s long enough. I don’t want to be turned into a kid. I just have this problem with my work.” At this point, I faltered; I really didn’t have a clear idea of what Fong could do for me, of what my price was. But I did have a notion: artists, I suggested, were able to produce only when they had a favorable bioelectrical organization of the brain; bioelectronics was the real machinery behind such metaphors as talent and imagination.

“Yeah,” he said, scratching the peach fuzz on his chin. “Maybe you right. Den again . . .” Fong got up and shuffled over to his workstation, mumbled fragments of sentences citing research.

My spirits lifted. I think what I wanted was something like a neurological hotline, a direct link to the Muse. I hoped there was something he could do to me with his scanner.

My hopes turned out to be desperately naive. “Nah,” Fong said. “No way.” He rattled off an explanation out of information theory, the gist of which was that art violated ordinary stochastic processes so often it couldn’t be properly modeled, even with chaos theory and fractals.

“What am I going to do?”

“Maybe you come up wit’ idea fo you work. You gotta be patient.” Fong giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I say, you be patient. If I’m a Doctor, you patient anyway. Pretty good joke, yeah? How about you gimme pictures? I can do noting fo you—maybe you like try couple minutes inna machine anway?”

I did try a few minutes under the scanning imager for the hell of it, on Fong’s speculation I just needed “little charge, maybe.” I felt some tingling in my head, a warm pleasant sensation like the flood of endorphins, during the session. Either my anxieties about being turned into a fetus or the procedure itself kicked up a vivid childhood memory. The slight pressure I felt on my forehead became the brim of a blue Chicago Cubs hat.

But when my ten minutes under the hood were over and I pushed myself out of the chair, I felt the familiar twinges in my forearms, my knees, my back—shaping and moving stone wears you down over the years—and I felt the by-now-familiar gnawing ache of an empty imagination. In short, I felt like my old self again.

“Don’t count on having seen the last of me,” I told Fong, packing in the photographs. “We haven’t settled this thing between us yet.”

* * *

I marked time up on Great Barrington Street by first constructing, then de-constructing, a sizeable crate in the Reynolds’ driveway, describing it with such theoretical mystifications as “the invisible sculpture of the inner eye,” and “the space of space,” temporarily, at least, throwing up a smoke screen. In the evenings I locked myself in the garage, exercising furiously at the rusting home health spa the ophthalmologist had at one time built into a corner. I didn’t have any real ideas for the sculpture I was supposed to produce—and now I didn’t even have any material to shape it from, either—but in part of my gut I did begin to feel that strange confidence, which I associate with any eventually successful artistic endeavor, that everything was going to work out. Another part of my gut warned that the sensation might only be a temporary euphoric effect of Dr. Fong’s treatment.

Socially, I lived peaks and valleys. I spent two pleasant Sunday dinners with the Reynolds and their neighbors, showing them my slides of the moon. They were such a receptive audience that I tried to legitimize the now dismantled crate by describing it as a transparent echo of my moon rocks, and so now “the space of space of space in space,” but I had to draw back when I heard someone start giggling. For a week, Dr. Reynolds wore his wife’s breast prosthesis, which the American Ophthalmology Association was recommending for meditating on feminine vision. Then he took up target shooting. His wife and Dusty continued to fight about lingerie. At a post-inaugural barbecue, the pristine marble by now covered with soot, Andrea Reynolds smeared kangaroo drippings on Dusty’s tigerskin microskirt, and the bad blood between them simmered for days. My mornings at least had become very pleasant. I’d taken to walking up the block to visit the poet’s grave and playing with the Lhasa apsos, who were using the turned earth to bury their bones.

I got so involved, in fact, in the day-to-day of living on Great Barrington Street that I almost forgot my mission, and came to think that maybe I’d done my job with the empty crate and the hot air about space in space, that I could satisfy the Reynolds with The Emperor’s New Statue, you might say, and just walk away from it after all.

Mrs. Reynolds brought me up short three days before the conclusion of my grant when she called me down to her home office at nine in the evening. She was sitting at her steel roll-top desk, a triptych of computer screens flickering with figures that I gradually recognized as previous years’ tax forms. She was wearing a copy of Dusty’s microskirt, mesh stockings, and red platform shoes. Her legs were crossed and her calf was swinging urgently. “Just counting up our investment,” she said with a smile. “Just wondering when you’re going to deliver.”

I put together a smile, looking down with false modesty, seeing on my shirtfront a three-inch-long stain of Béarnaise sauce. “I’d be giving you less than it’s worth, don’t you think, Andrea, if I didn’t keep the surprise till the right moment?”

“
Justin
talked about surprise. All along, I’ve been talking about fulfillment.” The lines around her hard eyes showed her age and the years she’d spent in court. I saw in them too a real hunger, echoed in her desperate outfit, in the urgent way she swung her leg. From the basement I could hear the pings of Doctor Reynolds’ laser pistol.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, that’s when my idea crystallized.

* * *

On the morning of the final day of my grant I went to see Fong. He was furious at my proposal. I guaranteed that if he cooperated just this once, he could have the digital photographs and the backups, and he’d have seen the last of me. He reluctantly agreed.

When I got back to Great Barrington Street I had my hands full aborting an official unveiling barbecue which Justin Reynolds had, without telling me, planned for that night. He was only persuaded to cancel the affair when I insisted that the work was “intimately personal,” and that the presence of others at the unveiling would dilute its worth. Andrea Reynolds—I could almost see the tax figures flashing behind her eyes—concurred.

At 7 
P.M.
I blindfolded the three members of the Reynolds family. Then I drove them down to Fong’s Institute in their mag-lev station wagon.

Fong put them under the three scanning machines. He was sweating, anxious, pissed. He had important clients, it turned out, for the equipment, which I was taking up overnight. Dr. and Mrs. Reynolds and their daughter were calm, chatting among themselves. Andrea murmured about an increase in net worth, the Doctor kept saying “Om,” or “home,” I couldn’t quite tell. As she went under the steel apparatus, Dusty speculated about how maybe her hair was finally going to turn out the right color.

It happened that just before we switched the power on I decided to change something in the piece; it was this last minute adjustment, the final stroke at the deadline which convinced me that my personal genius had returned. With Fong sputtering, I upped the amperage to Dr. Reynolds’ hood and lowered the current to his wife’s. Then I reversed Dusty’s leads. Fong gasped.

As the switch contacts were closing, Dr. Reynolds asked what was going on.

“Think sleep,” I told him. “We’re talking dreamlife here. We’re talking possibility.”

* * *

We shut the machines down at seven in the morning. I instructed the Reynolds to take off their blindfolds, and as they did so I made a traditional unveiling speech, thanking my generous patrons.

“I’m proud to present to you,” I concluded, “my most recent work of art—yourselves.”

Dusty noticed the changes first. She was struck by size of her bosom, the width of her hips. “Hey, dads,” she said, then faltered, surprised with the husky depth of her voice.

“Happy birthday,” I told her. “You’re twenty-two years old.”

“
Wingy
,” she blinked, adjusting her skirt. She glanced at her parents, blinked at the sight of her father, swallowed hard. Then she looked at me with a big smile. “Just, um . . . You mind if I like leave right away? I’m like only interested in mature individuals now?” She took the keys to the station wagon with her.

The acrid smell of burnt insulation and overheated electronics filled the air.

Dr. Reynolds had slipped out of his chair and wandered off to Dr. Fong’s workstation. The dirty blonde cowlick of the ophthalmologist precisely mirrored the tuft of black hair protruding from the back of the brain radiologist’s head. Reynolds called up some research. Fong pointed to a row of figures . . . and they turned away to poke at a crude model spaceship. Reynolds looked happy as a clam. I heard the phrase “group practice.”

Andrea Reynolds was doing stretching exercises while inspecting her reflection in the floor to ceiling window.

The lines near her eyes were gone. Gravity had disinherited her shape—she really was a knockout. Her figure brought to mind my dancer girlfriend from the past.

“Bravo,” Andrea Reynolds said. “This is certainly a work of art. And . . . unexpected, all right.” She studied her image. “Almost criminal. How old am I, really? I mean, I look potentially illegal for what I feel like. . . .”

I consulted the chart Dr. Fong and I had made up during the night. “You now have the body,” I told her, “of a twenty-
one
-year-old woman. Which makes you—metabolically speaking I guess—a year younger than your daughter at the moment. If you’re keeping score.”

She preened herself. “Who’s competing?” she asked with a wet smile. Then she kissed me, and I came to understand how I might spend the medical leave I figured I could now twist out of Justin Reynolds by way, let’s say, of a gratuity.

I was thinking in terms of a sanitarium in Tahiti, on one of the outer islands. My latest work had taken so much out of me—and now I had to compose a title—that, well, I felt I’d be needing a rest, a break, some way to recharge my batteries.