The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (26 page)

“Playing works no other pianist could play,” I prompt.

She smiles. “Vaclavito was no longer limited to two hands and two feet. He could play duets by himself. He commissioned over two dozen works that would be impossible for any other person alive to play. The 97-note smash that ends Gazón’s ‘Singularity Sonata’ is still considered one of the defining moments of 21st century music.”

I ask for a little of that fantastic-smelling Malbec. But when she offers to get it for me, I get up, grab a glass from the wine rack, and pour it myself. Then I carry the bottle over to Consuela. As I’m refilling hers, I say, “Lots of people were never convinced. They thought the performances were prerecorded. That this was all a big money-making ploy. A last grab at fame.”

Consuela gives me a “you ain’t kidding” look. “Because how could you prove it, at the end of the day?” she complains. “We were using the most advanced cybernetic technology in the world. It’s not like you could just lift the eneural’s ‘hood’ and let people see for themselves how it worked.”

“And then, when Balusek died—”

She stops me short: “He didn’t die.”

“Sorry! When his physical body could only be sustained through
life support, the attacks became more vicious. That’s when the media turned on you.”

“I could take it. Because I knew the truth.” And she completes the thought the way Cubans often do, with an attempt at aphorism: “When you have truth on your side, you fear nothing.”

“They called you a ghoul. They said you were using your dead husband to make yourself rich.”

Consuela smiles and shakes her head like she’s dealing with a child. She contemplates her wine for a moment, then says, “He could still play the piano, there from his hospital bed! All those fancy machines were saying he was dead, but then I would say, ‘Vaclavito, would you play “Moonlight Sonata” for me?’ And then the Bösendorfer would immediately start to play it.

“There wasn’t a doctor or nurse who would pull the plug while he could still play the piano! So it fell to me. But I wasn’t going to rush anything. I waited until I was sure his migration was complete. And when it was, I had the life support turned off. And I was right. As you now know, Gabby.”

I sit at the bench again. I drink half my wine, then set it down on a side table. I’m still punchy from the aesthetic tidal wave that was Václav performing through me. And the Malbec’s making me tipsy in the more traditional way. I’m getting a little loose, a little unprofessional. I exhale with unmastered longing and say, “Yeah. If only everyone could wear this jacket for a little while.”

Consuela leans forward. “So you believe me. You know that
Vaclavito’s still alive.”

I tell her the truth. Goddamnit. “No. I think Balusek is dead. I wish I could give you another answer.”

There’s something leonine in the way Consuela’s looking at me. I feel like I’m walking into one of her lawyerly traps, but for the life of me I can’t see what it is. And she doesn’t tip her hand just yet. Innocent as a telenovela ingenue she asks, “But what about the the music you just played?”

I sigh. “People have been leaving behind huge chunks of themselves after death for eons, Consuela—in their diaries and paintings and the notes in their cookbooks and the stories they tell their children. The eneural is the latest in a long line of media that help us capture some bit of who we were when we were alive, and give it to the future. It’s the birth of a new artform. One I already love.”

She frowns skeptically. “That’s it? My husband is art to you?”

I don’t back down. “Art makes life make sense.”

“Art is a dead thing trying to tell the living how to live.”

There’s an edge there. But again, I can’t tell if it’s real, or just some manufactured anger required for some larger scheme of hers.

Only one way to find out. I pick up my wine again and say, “Look, I know you really believe Balusek’s soul resides in the eneural, and I don’t want to insult you. But you’ve gone to court to plead your case and lost. You famously consulted with the Catholic Church on the matter, and Cardinal Bianchi’s commission on cognitive protheses was quite clear on the matter: eneurals are wonderful, but they’re not
human. So the law and the church agree. Whatever Václav’s eneural has retained for us, it’s not his soul.”

The Malbec’s almost kicked, but Consuela stops refilling hers to offer me a little. I say no and she tips the rest of her bottle into her glass. “What if they’re wrong?” she says to me; it’s not really a question. “The state and the church have changed their minds many, many times. What if 300 years from now they decide, ‘Actually, yes, eneurals are alive. Sorry for any inconvenience.’”

“Well,” I say, “assuming proper maintenance, Václav will still be around to hear that. So that’s something.”

“Yes, but what? What does it mean if Václav is still here 300 years from now?”

Consuela’s urgent, eager. I’m getting increasingly leery of her. “I don’t know,” I say noncommittally.

She peers at me, smiles a little. Her face decides something. She gets up and leaves the room. When she returns a half-minute later, she has a chrome disc the size of a frisbee in her hand.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks, and when I shake my head: “This is a neodymium rare-earth magnet. Super-strong. I had to get special permission to buy one this big.”

I don’t say anything. I watch.

“Will you sit on the sofa for a moment?” she says sweetly. I move from the piano bench to the sofa. She puts the magnet on the floor and moves the piano bench out of the way. Then she slips out of her chancletas and gets on her knees and takes the magnet in both hands,
like a steering wheel. She knee-walks over to the piano. I can see the magnet is already pulling itself toward the piano; she has to fight it. She hugs the magnet to her chest, lies on her back, and scoots herself under the Bösendorfer.

“What are you doing?” I ask vaguely, wine in hand.

She looks at me. I’d been so busy watching her antics with the magnet that I had neglected her face. Tears stream out of her eyes. “This is why I brought you here,” she says. Then she lifts the magnet upwards, and the magnet launches itself into the piano.

The jacket squeezes me so forcefully I gasp. I can’t inhale. This is what a python attack must feel like.

I am about to panic when the jacket slowly slackens its grip. Its strength fades, fades. Then it’s completely powerless.

Consuela, still on her back under the piano, sobs into her hands. My addled brain slowly assembles a kind of sense of what has just happened. My mouth understands before any other part of me, because before realization has fully dawned in my mind I can hear myself saying, “No. Oh God. No no no no no. Oh God, please no.”

Almost a month after my interview with Consuela, Leniquia Yancey, my editor at the
Squint
, comes up to my desk with a manila envelope. “Mail call!” she cheerily chimes.

If you’re thinking it’s weird for an editor to bring a reporter her mail, you’re right. Leniquia’s been checking in with me several times
a day since that interview, because frankly, I’ve been a wreck: useless at work and experiencing random panic attacks a few times a week. Every night I dream of being crushed to death.

I smile at Leniquia. “You’re a good friend. You don’t have to bring my mail every day.”

Leniquia’s constitutionally incapable of pessimism, so whenever her face grows solemn the way it has now, it’s cause for worry. “This time I really had to,” she says. “It’s from Consuela Balusek.”

The
Squint
’s mostly a wall-less workspace where snoopy reporter types spend all day overhearing each other’s shit. I look around and, yes, everyone’s pretending not to look. “Can we do this in your office?” I ask Leniquia.

A minute later, we’re in her office. “You open it,” I say to her.

She grabs a letter opener and starts slicing open the envelope. “It’s clean, by the way,” she says. “I had our guys check it.”

I make a wtf face. “Consuela wouldn’t try to kill us.”

She stops opening the letter to look at me incredulously. “After what that crazy bitch did? Erasing her husband right in front of you?”

“She thought she was freeing his soul.”

Her affect flattens. “That is pure bullshit. She didn’t think his soul was really in there. She just wanted the publicity. Think about how famous she is now. This was all part of her big plan.”

This is an old fight between Leniquia and me. I take my traditional tack: mocking her. “You’ve been in San Francisco too long amongst the godless liberals. You’ve forgotten that there are radically different
worldviews out there. Consuela’s actions are totally consistent.”

They are. My therapist and I have been over it several times. If you believe in a human soul, and in a Catholic heaven, and that your husband’s soul resides in an eneural, then, QED, you have prevented your husband from entering into an afterlife of bliss, for your own mortal, selfish reasons. After much soul-searching, she decided she had to erase Balusek publicly—in front of a reporter—to show the world the pitfalls of that thinking: immortals never get to go to heaven. They’re destined to an eternal Hell on Earth.

“There is no way a woman of her intelligence and education could possibly believe that,” Leniquia insists, arms crossed.

All I would need is a week with Leniquia in Miami to prove to her how wrong she was. But for now we’ve reached our traditional impasse. “Are you going to open the letter?” I ask her.

She smiles and shakes her head clear. “Almost forgot!”

She finishes cutting through the top and blows open the envelope. From it she extracts a picture and a note.

We look at the picture together. It’s a photograph of Consuela and Guy Sauveterre, Chair of the Board of Regents for the Smithsonian Institution. They’re wearing expensive suits and are sitting on a piano bench, hands on knees. Behind them is a 97-key Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand.

I grab the note. “Dear Gabby,” I read aloud, “I’ve had Vaclavito’s backup eneural installed in the Bösendorfer and donated it to the Smithsonian. You’ll be receiving an invitation for its debut. I hope by
then you will have forgiven me. Please come. Que Dios te bendiga y proteja. Consuela.”

Leniquia’s mouth hangs open for a good five seconds. Finally all she can manage is, “Bitch had a backup?!”

But I understand completely. I can’t get over the validity of her logic: so perfectly consistent! A soul can’t be mechanically reproduced, goes Consuela’s thinking. By definition, a soul is singular. So when they made the backup copy of the eneural, they didn’t copy Václav’s soul: just his mind. In her eyes, she sent her husband to heaven by destroying his original eneural. In the meantime, she’s donated the soulless backup to the Smithsonian, thus preserving his art on Earth forever.

“Eneural ex machina,” I say to the piece of paper in my hands. And breathe.

I was heading toward Parking Lot Four on the east side of campus, mentally reviewing the interview I’d just had with NPR’s
All Things Considered
about my new book, when I almost kicked a pigeon.

I’m a physics professor at CalTech specializing in unspeakable information, and my new book is called
The Grid of Time
. The idea is this: what if time, instead of being a single dimension, itself contains multiple dimensions? Well, my book contends, it would unify a lot of disparate theories: if only it were true. The book is the kind of speculative, sweeping thought-experiment that all the cool physicists are writing these days. I am probably wrong about almost everything. But I hope I’m wrong in the ways that will someday lead us to science. That’s exactly what I said to my kid-gloves NPR interviewer, and she seemed, in her throaty, sleepy, liberal-media way, duly impressed.

And then I almost kicked a pigeon. Though I was too distracted to see it at the time, in hindsight I can describe exactly what happened: the pigeon stood in place as I approached, as inert as an abandoned football, watching me approach with one curious eye. Only at the last moment did its little birdbrain realize that I was about to kick it, and, once kicked, there would be no turning back on this XY point on time’s Cartesian grid, and the pain and consequences of the kick
would forever be a part of its history. It therefore decided to get out of the way, with a commotion of wings that startled me back to our shared dream of the world.

There on the sidewalk, surrounded by the cool of an autumn night in Pasadena, I got down on one knee and said to the pigeon, who was now eyeing me gravely, “Sorry little fella. Didn’t see you there.”

All was forgiven. It immediately came ambling up to me, eager for a handout. I laughed. And when I find something funny, I often switch to Spanish. “¡Ay, pero niño!” I chastised. “¡No debas ser tan confiado! ¿No sabes que cuando yo era un niño, maté a puñaladas una paloma ….”

I fell quiet. To the pigeon, who stared at me with one curious eye, it must have looked as if I had suddenly shut down, like an unplugged robot. And in body I had. But my mind, like a ghostly projector that had started itself, began playing the reel of the time I killed a pigeon in the kitchen sink of my boyhood home.