Holy Fire (24 page)

“You’re very tactful and galante.”

“No, I’m speaking as an aesthetician.”

“What do you do in Stuttgart, Paul? I’m very sorry that I took you from that work today, whatever it was.”

“I program. And I teach at the university.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.

“They let you teach at that age?”

“The European university system is very ancient, and convoluted, and bureaucratic, but yes, if you have publications, and sponsors, and a concerted demand from the students, yes, you can teach. Even at twenty-eight.” He smiled. “
C’est possible.
”

“What do you teach?”

“I teach artifice.”

“Oh. Of course.” She nodded repeatedly. “You know, I need to find someone who can teach me photography.”

“Josef Novak.”

“What?”

“Josef Novak, he lives here in Praha. I don’t suppose you know his work. But he was a great master. A pioneer of early virtuality. I’m not sure that Novak still takes students, but of course his name leapt to mind.”

“He’s a gerontocrat?”

“ ‘Gerontocrat’? A good teacher should never be scorned. Of course, Novak is not an easy man to know. The very old are rarely easy people to know.”

“Josef Novak … wait, did he do a desktop environment called
Glass Labyrinth
back in the teens?”

“That’s far before my time.” Paul smiled. “Novak was very prolific in his youth. All lost works now, of course. The tragic loss of all those early digital standards and platforms … it was a great cultural disaster.”

“Sure,
Glass Labyrinth, The Sculpture Gardens, Vanished Statues
, Josef Novak did all of those. Those were big hits then! They were wonderful! I had no idea he was still alive.”

“He lives about a block from here.”

She sat up. “He does? Then let’s go see him! Introduce me, all right?”

Paul glanced at his wrist. “I have a class in Stuttgart this afternoon … I’m a bit pressed for time today, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.”

“But I’m glad to see that you’re feeling so much better.”

“Those painkillers kicked in. Thanks a lot. Anyway, I’m always much better after I eat.”

“So you’re familiar with Josef Novak’s early work. You’re an antiquarian, Maya. That’s very interesting. It’s remarkable. How old are you?”

“Paul, maybe it would be a good idea if I didn’t see Emil for a few days. It might be better for Emil if I just cleared out of his life for a little while. I mean, considering. What do you advise?”

“I’m sure Emil will recover by tomorrow morning. Emil almost always does. But I can imagine that course of action might be wise. Considering.”

“Maybe I’ll just wanderjahr for a few days. Do you mind if I take the train back with you to Stuttgart? Just to talk along the way. If that’s not an imposition.”

“No, not at all, I’d be delighted with your company.”

“I’ll dress. All right?”

There was no place in the studio to dress in privacy. The young were not much concerned with privacy. Maya tunneled awkwardly into tights and a sweater. Paul, with perfect indifference, did the washing up.

She glanced into her pocket mirror and was horrified. The truth could not have been more obvious if it were flashing on her brow in neon. This face was not the face of a young woman. It was a posthuman face, pale and pinched and brimful of exotic forms of anguish it was not fully allowed to experience. The sculptured, waxy face of some outmoded plastic mannequin.

She rushed to the kitchen sink and set to work with cleansing gel. Toning lotion. Pore reliner. Epidermal matrix.
Foundation. Blusher brushes. Mascara. Eyeliner. Gloss. Eyelash curler. Scleral brightener. Brow pencil. She’d forgotten to brush her teeth. The teeth would have to do.

The mirror showed her that she’d beaten the truth into submission. Smothered it in cosmetics. The hair was still awful but the natural hair was always pretty bad.

She found a bright Czech shawl, her kick-on shoes, her big warm gray beret. She slipped a couple of semidepleted cashcards into her backpack. Somehow she’d be all right now. Wrapped up, warm, contained. Perfectly happy and confident.

Paul, all patience and indifference, had been studying Emil’s more recent works. He’d found a wooden box and opened it. “Did he ever show you this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s my favorite.” Paul reached with exaggerated care into the shredded lining of the box and retrieved a delicate white cup and saucer. He set them on Emil’s worktable. “He did this piece just after the change. He was thrashing at reality like a drowning man.”

“A cup-and-saucer set,” Maya said.

“Touch them. Pick them up.”

She reached for the cup. The cup sizzled under her fingertips, and she jerked her hand back. Paul chuckled.

She reached out again with one forefinger and gently touched the saucer. There was a faint electrical tingling, the feeling of something soft yet spiky brushing back at her skin. A crackly sandpaper creeping.

Paul laughed.

She gripped the cup with determination. Without moving, it seemed to buzz and writhe within her fingers. She set it back down. “Is there a battery inside it? Is that the trick?”

“It’s not ceramic,” Paul said.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It resembles ceramic, and it gleams like
ceramic, but I believe it’s piezoelectric foamed glass. Once I saw him pour a tincture into that cup. The liquid slowly seeped through both the cup and the saucer. Some quality—the porosity, or the fractal dimension, or maybe a van der Waals charge—it reacts very oddly when it contacts the fingertips.”

“But
why
?
”

“It is an
objet gratuit
. A work of artifice that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the quotidian.”

“Is it a joke?”

“Is Emil a joke?” Paul said somberly. “Is it a joke to be no longer human? Of course it is. What is a joke? A joke is a violation of the conceptual framework.”

“But that’s not all there is to it.”

“Of course not.”

“So tell me the rest of it.”

Paul restored the cup and saucer to its box, and put the box back on its shelf, with reverent care. “Are you ready to go? Then we should go.” He picked up his backpack, opened the door for her, ushered her through, locked it carefully behind him.

They walked loudly down the creaking stairs. Outside, the day was overcast and windy. They headed toward the Narodni tubestation. She walked at his shoulder. In her flats, she was as tall as he was. “Paul, please forgive me if I’m too direct. I come from very far away, and I’m a naif. I hope you can forgive me that. You’re a teacher, I know that you can tell me the truth.”

“I’m touched by your optimism,” Paul said.

“Please don’t be that way. What do I have to do—to convince you to tell me the truth?”

“Consider that object,” Paul told her very politely. “It destroys the quotidian swindle. It confronts us with a tactile violation of conventional cognition.”

“Yes?”

“The destruction of the human condition offers us an avalanche of novel creative approaches. Those possibilities
must be assimilated and systematically deployed by the heirs of humanity. Artifice is
not
Art. Although it deploys the imagination of the preconscious, it recognizes that the imagination of the unconscious is impoverished. We honor the irrationality of the creative impulse, but we deny the primacy or even the relevancy of hallucination. We harness the full power of conscious rationality and the scientific method in pursuit of the voluntary destruction and supercession of human culture.”

They walked down the stairs of the tubestation. Paul discreetly produced a laminated travel pass from an inner jacket pocket. “The human condition is over. Nature is over. Art is over. Consciousness is ductile. Science is an infinite powder keg. We confront a new reality formerly obscured by the inbuilt limits of mammalian primates. We must create work which brings this new reality to the surface, a sequence of seemingly gratuitous gestures which will form in their aggregate the consciousness of posthumanity.” Paul’s limpid gaze grew more intense. “At the same time, politically, we must not shatter the fragile surface tension of an aging human civilization which pretends to Utopian tranquillity but is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing. Beneath the repellent husk of the dying humanist agenda, we must systematically alter the physiological basis of cognition and the state of culture, and bear an honest, objective, and unpretentious witness to the results. That is the basic nature of our program as artificers.”

“I see. Can you buy me a ticket?”

“A ticket to the train station, or a ticket all the way to Stuttgart?”

“Actually, could you buy me both of those tickets? Including a round-trip ticket.”

“Why don’t you just take my Europass? It lasts till May.”

“Could I do that, Paul? That’s too generous.”

He handed her the laminated pass. “No no, I can get
another smartcard from the university. Europe is full of situational perquisites.” He approached a machine and did business with it.

They boarded the Praha tube and clung to the hand straps. She looked at him. She loved the way he swept his hair back behind his ears. She admired the fine sweep of his dark mobile eyebrows, the line of his hooded eyelids. It was a comfort to be in his physical presence. He was so young.

“Tell me something else, Paul. Go on.”

“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian. It is only a matter of time, and time is our one inexhaustible resource. There is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines.”

“What you just said. It’s so beautiful.”

He smiled. “I like to think so, too.”

“I wish I were that beautiful.”

“I think you’re making a category error, my dear.”

“All right—then I wish I could
do something
that beautiful.”

“Perhaps you already have.” He paused. “It’s a truly interesting concept, ‘beauty.’ An intersection of three worlds …”

The tubetrain pulled into a stop in the Muzeum station and an absolute horde of tourists piled in, a jostling mess of backpacks and bags and alien chatter. They stood amid the crowd, swaying on their hand straps. He’d tried to convince her that he could disturb the universe and the two of them were standing packed amid a horde of indifferent strangers like animals in a cattle car.

It began to get very hot within the train. A muted series of cramps gnawed away deep inside her and when she had come sweating out of the far side of the pain she realized that this was a day when she could do something truly crazy. Something mad and spontaneous and psychically automatic. Levitate. Leap off a building. Throw herself on her aching belly and kiss the feet of a policeman. Fly to the moon and dig into its white chalky soil and absolutely
grope for Luna
 … Paul looked at her with undisguised concern. She gave him her brightest smile.

At the central train station she limped off to the ladies’. She did business with hygienic machines, drank two cups of water, and departed in better order. The pretty face in the mirror, with its dilated eyes and a little dotting of sweat beneath its layered treatments, seemed to blaze with the holy fire.

Paul was being very considerate. He got them beanbags in first class with a nice fold-down table. The Stuttgart express was a very rapid train.

“I love European trains,” she babbled, her scalp glowing beneath her beret. “Even the really fast ones that spend most of their time underground.”

“Maybe you should wanderjahr to Vladivostok,” Paul said.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“It’s a tradition in our group. Vladivostok, the far edge of the Eurasian continent. You have a Eurocard now, and you said that you wanted to drift. Why not drift to Vladivostok? You’ll be alone quite a while. You can relax and marshal your thoughts. You can reach the far rim of Asia and return in about four days.”

“What do you do once you reach the Pacific Rim?”

“Well, if you’re one of us, then you go to a certain obscure Vladivostok ptydepe—sorry, I mean Public Telepresence Point—and you perform a gratuitous act. Our group maintains a constant scan on this particular Vladivostok
PTP through a conceptual sieve. Any gesture sufficiently remarkable to attract the attention of the scanner will be automatically mailed to everyone in our netlist.”

“How will I know if my gesture is sufficiently gratuitous?”

“By intuition, Maya. It helps if you’ve seen other performances. It’s not a matter of merely human judgment—our sieve program has its own evolving standards. That’s the beauty of the beauty in it.” Paul smiled. “How does anyone truly know how anything is out of the ordinary? What is ordinariness? What makes the quotidian so seemingly frail and yet so totipresent? The membrane between the bizarre and the tedious is inherently ductile.”

“I guess I’m missing a lot, not being in your network.”

“Without a doubt.”

“Why does your group even meet physically at that bar in Praha, if you’re so thoroughly netted?”

Paul considered this. “Do you have your translator? Is it working?”

“Yes. Benedetta gave me a translator at the Tête.” She showed Paul her diamond necklace.

“How very good of my valued colleague Benedetta. Any machine of Benedetta’s would translate Français, I imagine. Put it on.” Paul clipped a sleek little pad to his own ear.

Maya worked her diamond beads and tucked the golden bird’s nest in her ear. Paul began speaking Français. “[You can still understand me, I presume.]”

“Yes, my machine is working fine.”

“[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Français as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low … and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot … and if not too many people are speaking all at once … and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing … and if we don’t
complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]” He gestured broadly. “[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.] ”