Rainbows End (5 page)
“Yes.” The memory was there, now that he thought about it. He grinned. “But I was always the last to get on board. I got my first PC in 2000.” And that was because the rest of the English Department was brutalizing him for not reading his email.
“Whew. Okay, you can imitate any of those old styles with that. Just lay it out flat on the arm of your chair. Your son has this room set to play the audio, but most places you’ll have to keep your fingers touching the page if you want to hear output.” Robert leaned forward to get a close view of the paper. It didn’t glow; it didn’t even have the glassy appearance of a computer display. It was just plain, high-quality paper. Reed pointed at the outline items. “Now press the menu option that corresponds to your favorite system.”
Robert shrugged. Over the years, the department had upgraded through a number of systems, but — he pressed his finger to the line of text that said “WinME.” There was no pause, none of the boot-up delays he recalled. But suddenly a familiar and annoying musical jingle was in the air. It seemed to come from all around, not from the piece of paper. Now the page was full of color and icons. Robert was filled with nostalgia, remembering many frustrating hours spent in front of glowing computer screens.
Reed grinned. “A good choice. WinME has been a simple rental for a long time. If you picked Epiphany, we’d be whacking through their licensing jungle… Okay, now the rest should be almost exactly what you know. Crick’s Clinic even has some of the modern services filtered down so they look like browser sites. This isn’t quite as good as what your son and I use, but you won’t have any more trouble with ‘invisible voices’; you’ll see Rachel and Dr. Aquino on the page here, if you want. Be cool, Robert.”
Robert listened to Weber’s mix of probably dated slang and tech talk, to the joviality and the phrase structures that might suggest sarcasm. Once upon a time, all that would have been enough for Robert to calibrate this fellow. Today, just out of the murk of senility, he couldn’t be sure. So he probed a little. “I’m all young again?”
Reed sat back, and gave an easy laugh. “Wish I could tell you that, Robert. You’re seventy-five years old, and there are a lot more ways for the body to break down than the MDs have even imagined. But I’ve been on your case for six months. You’ve come back from the dead, man. You’ve almost got the Alzheimer’s licked. It makes sense to try these other treatments on you now. You’re going to have some surprises, mostly for the good. Just take it easy, roll with the punches. For instance, I noticed that you recognized your son just now.”
It was strange to poke into that dimness, but… “Yes. I knew I couldn’t have a son. I wasn’t old enough. I just wanted to go home, I mean to my parents’ home in Bishop. And even now, I was surprised to see that Bob is so old.” Consequences were crashing down upon him. “So my parents are dead — “
Reed nodded. “I’m afraid so, Robert. There’s a whole lifetime that you’re going to start remembering.” “As a patchwork? Or oldest memories first? Or maybe I’ll get stuck at some point — “
! But he didn’t think Reed would appreciate which was the more valued rank. “Yes. Professor — well, Professor Emeritus — of English. At Stanford.”
“Okay then. You were a smart guy. You have a lot to learn, but I’m betting you’ll get those smarts back. Don’t panic if you can’t remember something. Don’t push too hard, either. Practically every day the docs are going to restore some additional capability. The theory is that this will be less disturbing for you. Whether that’s right or wrong won’t matter if you keep cool. Remember you have a whole loving family here.”
Lena
. Robert lowered his head for a moment. Not a return to childhood, but a kind of second chance. If he could come all the way back from the Alzheimer’s, if, if… then he might have another twenty years left, time to make up for what he had lost. So two goals: his poetry, and… “Lena.”
“I remember being married to Lena and raising Bobby. We split up years ago. But then… I also remember her being with me when the Alzheimer’s really started to shut me down. And now she’s gone again. Where is she, Reed?”
Reed frowned, then leaned forward and zipped up his equipment case. “I’m sorry, Robert. She passed away two years ago.” He stood and gave Robert a gentle pat on the shoulder. “You know, I think we’ve made really good progress today. Now I’ve got to run.”
In his former life, Robert Gu had paid even less attention to technology than he had to current events. Human nature doesn’t change, and as a poet his job was to distill and display that unchanging essence. Now… well,
I’m back from the dead
! That
was
something new under the sun, a bit of technology somewhat too large to ignore. It was a new chance at life, a chance to continue his career. And where he should continue his art was obvious: with
Secrets of the Ages
. He had spent five years on the cantos of that sequence, poems such as “Secrets of the Child,”
“Secrets of the Old.” But his “Secrets of the Dying” had been an arrant fake, written before he really started to die — no matter that people seemed to think it was the most profound canto of the sequence. But now… yes, something new: “Secrets of the One Who Came Back.” The ideas were coming and surely verse would follow.
Every day there were new changes in himself, and old barriers suddenly removed. He could easily accept Reed Weber’s advice to be patient with his limitations. So much was changing and all for the better. One day he was walking again, even if it was a lurching, unstable gait. He fell three times that first day, and each time, he just bounced back to his feet. “Unless you fall on your head, Professor, you’ll be fine,” Reed said. But his walking got steadily better. And now that he could see — really
see
— he could do things with his hands. No more pawing around in the dark. He had never realized how important sight was to coordination. There are uncountable ways that things can lie and tangle and hide in three dimensions; without vision you’re condemned to compromise and failure.
But not me. Not now
. And two days after that…
… he was playing Ping-Pong with his granddaughter. He remembered the table. It was the one that he’d bought for little Bobby thirty years ago. He even remembered Bob taking it off his hands when he finally gave up his home in Palo Alto.
Today Miri was pulling her punches, lobbing the ball high and slow across the table. Robert moved back and forth. Seeing the ball was no problem, but he had to be very careful or he’d swing too high. Careful, careful went the game — until Miri had him down fifteen to eleven. And then he won five points, each stroke a kind of spastic twitch that somehow smashed the white plastic into the far edge of the table.
“Robert! You were just fooling me!” Poor, pudgy Miri raced from one corner of the table to the other, trying to keep up with him. Robert’s slams had no spin, but she wasn’t an expert player. Seventeen to fifteen, eighteen, nineteen. Then his powerful swings got out of tune, and he was back to being a staggering spastic. But now his granddaughter showed no mercy. She racked up six straight points — and won the game.
And then she ran around the table to hug him. “You are great! But you’ll never fool me again!” It didn’t do any good to tell her what Aquino had said, that the reconstruction of his nervous system would cause randomly spiky performance. He might end up with the reflexes of an athlete; more likely the endpoint would be something like average coordination.
“What was Great-Aunt Cara like?” she asked him one Saturday morning. “She was a lot like you, Miri.”
The girl’s smile was sudden and wide and proud. Robert had guessed that this was what she wanted to hear.
But it’s true, except that Cara was never overweight
. Miri was like Cara, right in those last years of preadolescence when her hero worship for her older brother had been replaced by other concerns. If anything, Miri’s personality was an exaggeration of Cara’s. Miri was very bright — probably smarter than her great-aunt. And Miri was already into the extreme independence and moral certainty of the other.
I remember that persistent arrogance
, thought Robert. That had been an enormous irritation; breaking her of it had been what drove them apart.
Sometimes Miri had her little friends over. The boys and girls mixed pretty indescriminately at this age and in this era. For a few brief years they were almost matched for muscle. Miri loved to play doubles at Ping-Pong.
He had to smile at the way she bossed her friends around. She had them organized into a tournament. And though she was scrupulously honest, she played to
win
. When her side got behind, her jaw set in angry determination, and there was steel in her eyes. Afterward she was quick to acknowledge her own failures, and just as quick to critique her playmates.
Even when her friends were gone physically, they were often still around, invisible presences like Robert’s doctors. Miri walked around the backyard talking and arguing with nobody — a parody of all the cellphone discourtesy that Robert remembered from his later years at Stanford.
Then there were Miri’s grand silences. Those didn’t match anything in his recollection of Cara. Miri would push gently back and forth on the swing that hung from the only good-sized tree in the backyard. She would do that for
hours
, speaking only occasionally — and then to the empty air. Her eyes seemed to be focused miles away. And when he asked her what she was doing, she would start and laugh and say that she was “studying.” It looked much more like some kind of pernicious hypnosis to Robert Gu.
Weekdays, Miri was off at school; a limo pulled up for her every morning, always at the moment that the girl was ready to go. Bob was gone nowadays, “to be back in a week or so.” Alice was home part of each day, but she was in a distinctly short-tempered mood. Sometimes he would see her at lunch; more often, his daughter-in-law was at Camp Pendleton until midafternoon. She was especially irritable when she came back from the base.
Except for Reed Weber’s therapy sessions, Robert was left much to his own devices. He wandered around the house, found some of his old books in cardboard boxes in the basement. Those were almost the only books in the house. This family was effectively illiterate. Sure, Miri bragged that many books were visible any time you wanted to see them, but that was a half truth. The browser paper that Reed had given him could be used to find books online, but reading them on that single piece of foolscap was a tedious desecration.
It was remarkable foolscap, though. It really did support teleconferencing; Dr. Aquino and the remote therapists were not just invisible voices anymore. And the web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn’t be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A “vandal charity” was what they called themselves.
And that eventually got him into the News of the Day. The world was as much a mess as ever. This month, it was a police action in Paraguay. The details didn’t make sense. What were “moonshine fabs” and why would the U.S. want to help local cops close them down? The big picture was more familiar. The invading forces were looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Today they had found nuclear weapons hidden beneath an orphanage. The pictures showed slums and poor people, ragged children playing inscrutable games that somehow seemed to deny the squalor all around. There was an occasional, almost lonely-looking, soldier.
, he thought. Not for the first time — or the thousandth — he wondered how his son could have chosen such an ugly, dead-end career.
Robert hung around the kitchen, watching mother and daughter slide trays from the fridge. “TV dinners, that’s what we used to call this sort of thing,” he said. In fact, this stuff had the appearance and texture of delicious food. It all tasted like mush to him, but Reed said that was because his taste buds were ninety-five percent dead.
Miri hesitated the way she often did when Robert tossed out some idea she hadn’t heard before. But as usual, her response was full of confidence. “Oh, these are much better than TV junk food. We can mix and match the parts.” She pointed at the unmarked containers sizzling in — well, it looked like a microwave. “See, I got the ice-cream dessert and Alice got… angel-hair blueberries. Wow, Alice!”