2312

“That’s what my mom used to say,” Wahram said.

“Like horror stories, where you try to shock yourself awake or something. But all that stuff is wrong. Say you attend the death of a person and help them out. All the images you see are out of horror stories. You see that those images came from where you are. But you stay anyway. And after a time you see that’s just the way it is. Everyone goes there. You help but really you can’t help, you just sit there. And eventually you’re holding the hand of a dead person. Supposedly a nightmare. Bones thrust up out of the ground to clutch you and so on. And yet in the actual act, perfectly natural. All of it natural.”

“Yes?” Wahram said, after she had stopped for a while.

She heard him and went on. “The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your R m, only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force. Life wants to live. But eventually a link breaks. The energy stops getting to where it needs to be. The last ATP gets used. Then we die. Our bodies return to earth, go back to being soil. A natural cycle. So…” She looked up at him. “So what? Why the horror? What are we?”

Wahram shrugged. “Animal philosophers. An odd accident. A rarity.”

“Or common as can be, but-”

She didn’t continue.

“Dispersed?” Wahram ventured. “Temporary?”

“Alone. Always alone. Even when touching someone.”

“Well, we can talk,” he said hesitantly. “That’s part of life too. It’s not just lizard stuff. We throw ourselves out and span the gap, sometimes.”

She shook her head sadly. “I always fall in the gap.”

“Hmm,” he said, nonplussed. “That would be bad. But I don’t see how that could be right. Given what you’ve told me. And what I’ve seen of you.”

“It’s how it feels that matters.”

He thought about that for a while. The lights passed them overhead, he pushed her on the cart. Was that right? Was it how you felt about what you did that made it good or bad, rather than what you did, or what others saw? Well, you were stuck in your thoughts. The current medical definition of the term “neurotic” was simply “a tendency to have bad thoughts.” If you had that tendency, he thought, looking down at Swan’s bare scaly head, if you were neurotic, then the material to work with would be nearly infinite. Was that true? Well, here they were, little spins of atoms which felt inside that something mattered, even while looking out at the stars, even inside a tunnel that looped downward forever. Then the spin would decohere and collapse. So, faced with that: good thoughts or bad thoughts?

He whistled the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth, thinking to drag her through her black mood and out the other side, by way of the old maestro’s deepest tragedy, the Ninth’s first movement. He shifted ahead to the repeated phrase near the end of the movement, the one that Berlioz had thought proof of madness. He repeated it. It was the simple tune he had used for walking uphill all his life. Now they were walking downhill, at the top of a great circle, but it fit his mood perfectly well. He kept on whistling the eight notes over and over. Six down, two up. Simple and clear.

Finally Swan, sitting below him on the cart, her back against the bar he held, facing forward, spoke again, but slurring her words a bit, and talking as if to Pauline. “I wonder if people know we’re alive. You can never tell. It meant everything at the time, but then the time changed, and you changed, and they changed. And then it’s gone. She doesn’t have anything to say to me.”

Long pause. Wahram said, “Who was your child’s father? You had one each way?”

“Yes. I don’t know who the father was. I got pregnant on Fassnacht, when everyone is in masks. Some man I liked the look of. She knows who it is, she had him traced.”

“You liked the look of a masked person?”

“I did. The look of what you might call his demeanor.”

“I see.”

“I wanted to keep it simple. It was a conventional practice at the time. Now I wouldn’t do it that way. But you never know until it’s too late. You develop a folie a deux for a few years, it’s very intense, but it’s a folly, and after you come out you can’t look back at it without feeling… You have to wonder whether it was a good thing or not. You miss it but you regret it too, it’s stupid. I keep on doing things, but I still haven’t figured out what to do.”

“Live and make art,” he said.

“Who said that?”

“You did, I thought.”

“I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. But what if I’m not a very good artist?”

“It’s a long-term project.”

“And some people are late bloomers, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, I suppose. Something like that. You keep getting chances.”

“Maybe. But, you know, it would be good to be making progress somehow. Not making the same mistakes over and over.”