The Breath of Suspension (10 page)

Roman stared at the multiple rolling porcelain boards on the wall, all of them covered with diagrams and equations in many colors of Magic Marker. There were six projects up there, all of which he was juggling simultaneously. He felt a sudden cold, sticky sweat in his armpits. He was juggling them, but had absolutely no
understanding
of them. It was all meaningless nonsense.

The previous week he had lost it in the middle of a briefing. He’d been explaining the operation of some cognitive algorithms when he blanked, forgetting everything about them. A young member of his staff had helped him out. “It’s all this damn management,” Roman had groused. “It fills up all available space, leaving room for nothing important. I’ve overwritten everything.” The room had chuckled while Roman stood there feeling a primitive terror. He’d worked those algorithms out himself. He remembered the months of skull sweat, the constant dead ends, the modifications. He remembered all that, but still the innards of those procedures would not come clear.

The fluorescent light hummed insolently over his head. He glanced up. It was dark outside, most of the cars gone from the lot. A distant line of red-and-white lights marked the highway. How long had he been in this room? What time was it? For an instant he wasn’t even sure where he was. He poked his head out of his office. The desks were empty. He could hear the vacuum cleaners of the night cleaning crew. He put on his coat and went home.

❖

“She seemed a lovely woman, from what I saw of her.” Roman peered into the insulated take-out container. All of the oyster beef was gone. He picked up the last few rice grains from the china plate Abigail had insisted they use, concentrating with his chopsticks. Abigail herself was out with one of her own friends, Helen Tourmin. He glanced at the other container. Maybe there was some chicken left.

Gerald Parks grimaced slightly, as if Roman had picked a flaw in his latest lady friend. “She
is
lovely. Roman, leave the Szechuan chicken alone. You’ve had your share. That’s mine.” Despite his normal irritation, he seemed depressed.

Roman put the half-full container down. His friend always ate too slowly, as if teasing him. Gerald leaned back, contemplative. He was an ancient and professional bachelor, dressed and groomed with razor sharpness. His severely brushed hair was steel gray. For him, eating Chinese takeout off Abigail’s Limoges china made sense, which was why she had offered it.

“Anna’s a law professor at Harvard.” Gerald took on the tone of a man about to state a self-created aphorism. “Women at Harvard think that they’re sensible because they get their romantic pretensions from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters rather than from Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel.”

“Better than getting your romantic pretensions from Jerzy Kosin-ski and Vladimir Nabokov.”

Sometimes the only way to cheer Gerald up was to insult him cleverly. He snorted in amusement. “Touché, I suppose. It takes Slavs to come up with that particular kind of overintellectualized sexual perversity. With a last name like Parks, I’ve always been jealous of it. So don’t make fun of my romantic pretensions.” He scooped out the last of the Szechuan chicken and ate it. Leaving the dishwasher humming in the kitchen they adjourned to Roman’s crowded study.

Gerald Parks was a consulting cthnomusicologist who made a lot of money translating popular music into other idioms. His bachelor condo on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston had gotten neater and neater over the years. To Roman, Gerald’s apartment felt like a cabin on an ocean liner. Various emotions had been packed away somewhere in the hold with the old Cunard notice NOT WANTED ON THE VOYACE.

Gerald regarded the black field memories, each with its glowing indicator light. “This place seems more like an industrial concern every time I’m in here.” His own study was filled with glass-fronted wood bookcases and had a chaise longue covered with yellow-and-white striped silk. It also had a computer. Gerald was no fool.

“Maybe it looks that way to you because I get so much work done here.” Roman refused to be irritated.

But Gerald was in an irritating mood. He took a sip of his Calvados and listened to the music, a CD of Christopher Hogwood’s performance of Mozart’s great G Minor Symphony. “All original instrumentation. Seventeenth-century Cremona viols, natural horns, Grenser oboes. Bah.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Roman loved the clean precision of Mozart in the original eighteenth-century style.

“Because we’re not
hearing
any of those things, only a computer generating electronic frequencies. A CD player is just a high-tech player piano, those little laser spots on the disk an exact analog of the holes in a player piano roll. Do you think Mozart composed for gadgets like that? And meant to have his symphonies sound
exactly the same
every time they’re heard? These original music fanatics have the whole thing bass-ackwards.”

Roman listened to an oboe. And it
was
distinguishable as an oboe, Grenser or otherwise, not a clarinet or basset horn. The speakers, purchased on Gerald’s recommendation, were transparent. “This performance will continue to exist after every performer on it is dead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a recording of Mozart’s original version?”

“You wouldn’t like it. Those gut-stringed instruments went out of tune before a movement was over.” Gerald looked gloomy. “But you don’t have to wait until the performers are dead. I recently listened to a recording I made of myself when I was young, playing Szymanowski’s
Masques.
Not bad technically, but I sound so young. So
young.
Naïve and energetic. I couldn’t duplicate that now, not with these old fingers. The man who made that recording is gone forever. He lived in a couple of little rooms on the third floor in a bad neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. He had a crummy upright piano he’d spent his last dime on. Played the thing constantly. Drove the neighbors absolutely nuts.” Gerald looked at his fingers. He played superbly, at least to Roman’s layman’s ear, but it had never been good enough for a concert career.

“Did you erase the tape?”

Gerald shook his head. “What good would that do?”

They sat for a long moment in companionable silence. At last Gerald bestirred himself. “How is your little electronic brain doing? Does it have your personality down pat yet?”

“Test it out.”

“How? Do you want me to have an argument with it?” Roman smiled. “That’s probably the best way. It can talk now. It’s not my voice, not quite yet.”

Gerald looked at the speakers. “If it’s not sitting in a chair with a snifter of Calvados, how is it supposed to be you?”

“It’s
not
me. It just thinks and feels like me.”

“The way you would if you were imprisoned in a metal box?”

“Don’t be absurd.” Roman patted one of the field memories. “There’s a universe in these things. A conceptual universe. The way I used to feel on our vacations in Truro is in here, including the time I cut my foot on a fishhook and the time I was stung by a jellyfish. That annoyed me, being molested by a jellyfish. My differential equations prof, Dr. Yang, is in here. He said ‘theta’ as ‘teeta’ and ‘minus one’ as ‘mice wa.’ And ‘physical meaning’ as ‘fiscal meaning.’ For half a semester I thought I was learning economics. The difference in the way my toy car rolled on the linoleum and on the old rug. The time I got enough nerve to ask Mary Tomkins on a date, and she told me to ask Helga Pilchard from the Special Needs class instead. The clouds over the Cotswolds when I was there with Abigail on our honeymoon. It’s all there.”

“How the hell does it know what cloud formations over the Cotswolds look like?”

Roman shrugged. “I described them. It went through meteorological databases until it found good cumulus formations for central England at that season.”

“Including the cloud you thought looked like a power amplifier and Abigail thought looked like a springer spaniel?” Gerald smiled maliciously. He’d made up the incident, but it characterized many of Roman and Abigail’s arguments.

“Quit bugging me. Bug the computer instead.”

“Easier said than done.” Roman could see that his friend was nervous. “How did we meet?” Gerald’s voice was shaky.

“The clay of registration.” The computer’s voice was smoothly modulated, generic male, without Roman’s inflections or his trace of a Boston accent. “You were standing against a pillar reading a copy of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Classes hadn’t started yet, so I knew you were reading it because you wanted to. I came up and told you that if Lady Bracknell knew who you were pretending to be
this
time, you’d really be in trouble.”

“Quite a pickup line,” Gerald muttered. “I never did believe that an engineering student had read Wilde. What was I wearing?”

“Come on.” The computer voice actually managed to sound exasperated. “How am I supposed to remember that? It was forty-five years ago. If I had to guess I’d say it was that ridiculous shirt you liked, with the weave falling apart, full of holes. You wore it until it barely existed.”

“I’m still wearing it.” Gerald looked at Roman. “This is scary.” He took a gulp of his Calvados. “Why are you doing this, Roman?”

“It’s just a test, a project. A proof of concept.”

“You’re lying.” Gerald shook his head. “You’re not much good at it. Did your gadget pick up that characteristic, I wonder?” He raised his voice. “Computer Roman, why do you exist?”

“I’m afraid I’m losing my mind,” the computer replied. “My memory is going, my personality fractionating. I don’t know if it’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s or something else. I, here, this device, is intended to serve as a marker personality so that I can trace—”

“Silence!” Roman shouted. The computer ceased speaking. He stood, shaking. “Damn you, Gerald. How dare you?”

“This device is more honest than you are.” If Gerald was afraid of his friend’s anger he showed no sign of it. “There must be some flaw in your programming.”

Roman went white. He sat back down. “That’s because I’ve already lost some of the personality I’ve given it. It remembers things I’ve forgotten, prompting me the way Abigail does.” He put his face in his hands. “Oh, my God, Gerald, what am I going to do?” Gerald set his drink down carefully and put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, something he rarely did. And they sat there in the silent study, two old friends stuck at the wrong end of time.

❖

The pursuing, choking darkness had almost gotten him. Roman sat bolt upright in bed, trying desperately to drag air in through his clogged throat.

The room was dark. He had no idea of where he was or even who he was. All he felt was stark terror. The bedclothes seemed to be grabbing for him, trying to pull him back into that allconsuming darkness. Whimpering, he tried to drag them away from his legs.

The lights came on. “What’s wrong, Roman?” Abigail looked at him in consternation.

“Who are you?” Roman shouted at this ancient white-haired woman who had somehow come to be in his bed. “Where’s Abigail? What have you done with her?” He took the old woman by her shoulders and shook her.

“Stop it, Roman. Stop it!” Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re having a nightmare. You’re here in bed. With me. I’m Abigail, your wife. Roman!”

Roman stared at her. Her long hair had once been raven black and was now pure white.

“Oh, Abigail.” The bedroom fell into place around him, the spindle bed, the nightstands, the lamps—his green-glass shaded, hers crystal. “Oh, Pookie, I’m sorry.” He hadn’t used that ridiculous endearment in years. He hugged her, feeling how frail she had become. She kept herself in shape, but she was old, her once-full muscles now like taut cords, pulling her bones as if she was a marionette. “I’m sorry.”

She sobbed against him, then withdrew, wiping at her eyes. “What a pair of hysterical old people we’ve become.” Her vivid blue eyes glittered with tears. “One nightmare and we go all to pieces.”

It wasn’t just one nightmare, not at all. What was he supposed to say to her? Roman freed himself from the down comforter, carefully fitted his feet into his leather slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He was an old man, hair standing on end. He wore a nice pair of flannel pajamas and leather slippers his wife had given him for Christmas. His mind was dissolving like a lump of sugar in hot coffee.

The bathroom was clean tile with a wonderful claw-footed bathtub. The floor was tiled in a colored parquet-deformation pattern that started with ordinary bathroom-floor hexagons near the toilet, slowly modified itself into complex knotted shapes in the middle, and then, by another deformation, returned to hexagons under the sink. It had cost him a small fortune and months of work to create this complex mathematical tessellation. It was a dizzying thing to contemplate from the throne, and it now turned the ordinarily safe bathroom into a place of nightmare. Why couldn’t he have picked something more comforting?

He stared at his image with some bemusement. He normally combed his thin hair down to hide his bald spot. Whom did he think he was fooling? Woken from sleep, he was reel-eyed. The bathroom mirror had turned into a magic one and revealed all his flaws. He was wrinkled, had bags under his eyes, broken veins. He liked to think that he was a loveable curmudgeon. Curmudgeon, hell. He looked like a nasty old man.

“Are you all right in there?” Abigail’s voice was concerned.

“I’m fine. Be right there.” With one last glance at his mirror image, Roman turned the light off and went back to bed.

❖

Roman sat in his study chair and fumed. Something had happened to the medical profession while he wasn’t looking. That was what he got for being so healthy. He obviously hadn’t been keeping track of things.

“What did he say?” The computer’s voice was interested. Roman was impressed by the inflection. He was also impressed by how easy it was to tell that the computer desperately wanted to know. Was
he
always that obvious?

“He’s an idiot.” Roman was pleased to vent his spleen. “Dr. Weisner’s a country-club doctor, making diagnoses between the green and the clubhouse. His office is in a building near a shopping mall. Whatever happened to leather armchairs, wood paneling, and pictures of the College of Surgeons? You could trust a man with an office decorated like that, even if he was a drunken butcher.”