Shadows on the Cave Wall

By Nancy Kress

Like CASEY’S EMPIRE, this is a story about writing stories.

There is always a gap between the vision in the writer’s head and the story that ends up on the page. Sometimes the gap is small. Sometimes it resembles the Mariana Trench— and is equally murky. A story I had not even finished writing was starting to harbor marine life, and the question came suddenly to mind: what if that gap could be reliably closed? What if there existed technology to ensure that the mind deeps which spawned stories and the language which netted them could be made identical? What would happen?

When I began SHADOWS ON THE CAVE WALL, I didn’t know what would happen. I learned that at about the same time Mary did, and with equal dismay.

“Our music, our poetry, our language itself, are not satisfactions, but suggestions.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Tuesday it was preadolescent girls for Matthew McGratty, a free-lancer we’d just put under contract. McGratty always chooses the obvious, so naturally it was a horse story. Garber said he wasn’t crazy about having his studio used for a horse story, the same studio where two months ago Garber’s great undiscovered protégé Johannsen had final-auded Greta. But McGratty had a decent if uninspired composing record, we had him under contract, and Garber had no real choice except to grumble a little about the perversion of art and the debasement of public taste and so forth, and then give the go-ahead. Garber has fits like that, delusions that G-M Press is more than just a third-rate c-aud shop for free-lancers; we on the staff humor him. And every so often we do come up with a Greta, although we’re no Harper and Simon, and for us it’s a windfall, a lucky lightning, a comet’s tail we don’t even try to grab but just sparkle in the light of before it whizzes past. Last week Johannsen signed a contract with Harper and Simon.

Still, Greta is supposed to be really good. We only had it for the last, twenty-fifth taping; Johannsen must have been running out of money, to come to us at all. Garber burst into my office, all excited, because he heard that someone on the Times might review it.

“What do you think, Mary? Jameson? Maybe Jameson might review it? Jameson would do it a lot of good. I have a feeling about this one, Mary!”

“Jameson isn’t going to review it.”

He glared at me from under lowered eyebrows. They’re nearly white now, and in his rumpled jumpsuit, Garber looks like a seedy Santa Claus reduced to dealing in hot toys. God, I love him. If I ever forgive that bitch Mummy-sweet at all, it will be because she somehow tangled Garber in her long string of husbands.

“He might review it!”

“He won’t. You know that. Think. It’s a book for children.”

“Young adults!”

“All right, young adults. But he’s not going to review it in the Times. We’ll probably do all right on it financially— although that was a pretty selective c-aud index Johannsen showed me. At least we shouldn’t lose money on it. Settle for that.”

“You haven’t even read it!”

I hadn’t, although I’d had the manuscript for nearly a month. Press of work, busy time of year, I just hadn’t had the time. Oh, hell, yes I’d had. That wasn’t the reason.

“I know I haven’t read it. Maybe it’s terrific. Maybe it’s an instant classic. Maybe it’s Hamlet for the acne set. But Jameson won’t review it. Let it go, Garber.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

I sighed. Garber was a walking lesson on how to achieve business failure: enthusiasm without judgment. That we had gotten even this far was due only to the hefty alimony Garber had pried out of Mummy-sweet, and that he had gotten so much alimony in a retroactive settlement was due only to the lawyer I’d hired for him. She isn’t ever going to forgive me, either.

“You’re wrong, Mary. This time I know it.”

“Garber, if you were a critic, and in the exact same week publishers brought out the original appearances of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Song of Myself, and The Little Engine that Could, what would you not review?”

“Greta isn’t …”

“I have to go. McGratty’s waiting for me in the studio.”

“To compare it to The Little.…”

“Garber, he’s waiting with forty-seven kids. I have to go.” I put my arms around him and kissed him on the top of his head. It was going bald; in another year he would have a tonsure. I found that I liked the idea. When I was eleven years old, Garber found out from the upstairs maid that I vomited uncontrollably after each visit from Mummy-sweet, and he took me himself to boarding school, holding my hand on the train and talking in a low, confidential voice about baseball, and caterpillars, and the marvelous way really high-quality peppermints melted first around the edges of one’s mouth.

“Mary,” he said, his arms still around me, “do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Promise?”

“Of course, Garber. Anything. You know that. Just ask.”

“When you’re home tonight, read Greta.”

“Oh, Garber, I’m really sorry but tonight I have to …”

“No. You don’t.”

I didn’t. He tilted back his head and looked at me steadily out of blue eyes that look a little more sunken every month. Five years more, the doctors say Even virotherapy doesn’t arrest it forever, any of it … not the cancer, and not the pain. It had been Garber who’d brought me my first copy of Alice in Wonderland.”

“Read it, Mary.”

My daughter, Susan, calls Garber “Grandpa.” I’ve never let her meet a single other one of her relations. Or even told her about them. When that fool of a teacher Susan is so stuck on gave them the assignment to trace their family trees, I lied and gave her Garber’s.

“I’ll read it, Garber.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. But, look, McGratty’s waiting.”

He unwrapped his arms and winked. “Have fun!” His point won, Jameson and the nonexistent review forgotten, equanimity restored. Garber is a big child. I hurried out of the office; he stayed to study the cover painting for a preschool picture book on space, smiling at the teddy bear in the cockpit and whistling to himself. Both hands rubbed his plump belly: a right jolly old elf. And now I was committed to reading Greta.

Hell.

McGratty had lined the kids up against the studio wall, three deep, well away from the computer and the aud-units. He was talking to them in that charming drawl that convinced each and every little heart that she was an utterly fascinating almost-woman, and the whole gaggle of ten-and eleven-year olds was giggling and twitching and popping moonies. The popping punctuated languishing sidelong glances at McGratty that ended in even louder explosions of moonies. He gestured with one hand, and forty-seven pairs of eyes followed the hand’s arc through the air. Under all this attention, McGratty expanded, the girls expanded. The studio threatened to explode outward from all the hot air.

“All right, kids, line up over here. Tallest first. Let’s go!”

They stared at me like poison. A few scowled.

“Come on, let’s get started here. You, with the red pigtails … come here, honey, and we’ll get you strapped into a unit.”

She came forward slowly, standing in front of me with scrawny feet planted apart, arms akimbo.

“Not pigtails.”

“What?”

“They’re not pigtails. They’re called ‘fashion braids.’ That’s what they’re called.”

I couldn’t suppress my smile in time. “Sorry. ‘Fashion braids.’”

She looked me up and down. “And I’m not ‘honey.’”

My smile vanished. There’s always one. Behind the pigtailed redhead, someone tittered.

“My name is Nellie Kay Armbruster, not ‘honey’!” I caught the quaver in her voice under the skinny bravado, but it only increased my irritation. Ms. Nellie Kay Armbruster didn’t know what it meant to have something for her voice to quaver over. Looking at her bleakly, I saw another eleven-year-old, howling and thrashing in a room with walls padded in a fashionable pale yellow. Mummy-sweet had excellent taste, don’t you know.

“All right, then, Ms. Armbruster, if you’ll just consent to step this way …” The child flushed, and I knew I’d missed it again, the tone of companionable bantering that was supposed to make it all right. Girls this age … McGratty was looking at me with narrowed eyes. He didn’t want me upsetting his c-aud, and I didn’t blame him. Well, if he were good enough, it wouldn’t matter.

I strapped Nellie Kay Armbruster into her unit. She winced a little when I fitted on the scalp wires and then clamped her head immobile, but she didn’t even deign to notice when I pricked the needle into her arm or adjusted the screen the right distance from her pupils. Our units are about five years old, and we’ve missed out on some of the new, subtle indices, but those are more useful for adult c-auds anyway. We only do children and young adults, so only the frontal lobe cortex and amino acid indices really count, although we monitor the rest of the basic stuff, too: pupil dilation, thoracic respiration, blood flow, galvanic skin response.

When all the kids had been strapped in—the others wouldn’t look directly at me, either—I took my place at the computer and McGratty, at the author’s console, began typing.

SUDDENLY. THAT WAS HOW THE WILD PALOMINO CAME BACK INTO CARIANNA’S LIFE, LEAPING OVER THE WHITE PICKET FENCE INTO HER AUNT’S VEGETABLE GARDEN, TOSSING HIS MAGNIFICENT WHITE MANE. HE MUST HAVE COME FROM THE DESERT, CARIANNA THOUGHT IN CONFUSION—BUT SHE DIDN’T CARE WHERE HE HAD COME FROM; SHE WAS TRANSFIXED WITH DELIGHT, JUST WATCHING HIM.

Rapid, low-voltage, irregular waves appeared on my synthesis screen: McGratty’s narrative hook had engaged their attention. I scanned the individuals. Only two showed latencies. One was so uninvolved she was practically in alpha waves, and I pressed for an IQ: 72. McGratty wasn’t aiming at that audience; how the hell had her card slipped in? I punched the keys that canceled her responses from the synthesis, though I kept her individuals.

The word-by-word looked good, except for a slight flag on “transfixed.” McGratty might consider changing it; it was possible some of them didn’t know what it meant. High response to the name “Carianna.” A few subliminal-stimulus lights even flickered, and I wondered yet again why little girls always went for such flashy names. The emotional-involvement index wasn’t pronounced, but that didn’t matter much at the beginning. The attention patterns were the important thing.

THE PALOMINO SNORTED, THEN ARCHED HIS LONG NECK FORWARD TO PULL AT AUNT MAUD’S CARROT TOPS. SUNLIGHT POURED OVER HIS GOLDEN COAT. THEN, ALL AT ONCE, CARIANNA SAW THE NOTCH ON THE HORSE’S EAR. “ROCKET,” SHE WHISPERED, STUNNED. “IT’S ROCKET!”

The attention curves were still rising, with a slight dip at the sentence about the sunlight. But that’s inevitable with description, even when you keep it short. The individuals showed the beginning of emotional involvement in four girls. I checked the running evals to see if there was a conscious critical reaction to that awkward “all at once, Carianna saw” (how else would she see except all at once?) but the evals were all flat. Preadolescent girls are not a very critical audience. I’ve never monitored an adult-level composing session, although I’ve seen tapes with myself as subject. Even interpreting those made me dizzy. How complex are your reactions when you read Macbeth?

SLOWLY, TRYING NOT TO STARTLE THE BEAUTIFUL PALOMINO, CARIANNA MOVED SIDEWAYS TOWARD THE FENCE, WHERE HER LARIAT HUNG. SHE STILL COULDN’T BELIEVE IT WAS ROCKET. SHE HAD BEEN SO SURE HE WAS LOST TO HER FOREVER, THAT TERRIBLE DAY TWO YEARS AGO WHEN HE TOOK TO THE DESERT. TWO STEPS MORE, ONE MORE, AND HER FINGERS CLOSED ON THE LARIAT.

I would bet my job that not one of these New York kids has ever seen a lariat, except on video. Nor a desert, nor a wild horse, nor a carrot still in the ground!—probably not even a goddam picket fence. And as a work of art, McGratty’s story was… straight from the horse. But engagement derives from subjective significance, the unconscious effect of personal, social, and subliminal factors. It looked like McGratty was in.

CARIANNA RAISED THE LARIAT, AS UNCLE BOB HAD TAUGHT HER. ROCKET LOOKED UP, HIS NOSTRILS FLARING, OUTLINED BY THE BLAZING SUN, HE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL THAT CARIANNA FELT HER THROAT TIGHTEN. BUT HER HAND WAS STEADY AS SHE TWIRLED THE ROPE AND SENT IT FLYING TOWARD THE PALOMINO’S NECK. ROCKET REARED AND PLUNGED, TEARING UP THE CARROTS. CARIANNA CRIED OUT, DESPITE HERSELF. HAD SHE MISSED? OR DID SHE—COULD SHE—HAVE ROCKET AGAIN FOR HERSELF?

The synthesis of evoked potentials was so thick it looked like a Rorschach smear. Good readings on the glutanic and aspartic acids that go with prolonged attentiveness, nice curves on emotional engagement and subliminal stimuli, even the start of a negative cortical variation, and it was early for that. I glanced at the evals: flat. But, then, McGratty’s preselects had included no IQ’s over sigma one. He knew his limits. Within those limits, it looked promising, unless he stumbled badly later in the story, and even if he did, we could probably fix it. Three or four more c-auds, and the story would evoke exactly the response patterns that sold the best. Another triumph for American fiction.

No, that wasn’t fair. After all, Nellie Kay Armbruster had as much right to have her cortical attention engaged by whatever happened to engage it as did the readers of Shakespeare or Joyce. And McGratty’s opus might even make us a little money, while the preselects for something like Greta were always incredibly restricted: bright, intense “young adults” with a lit-passion of 11 or better.

I didn’t want to read Greta.

Rocket plunged over the edge of a convenient mesa, and one of the girls gasped loudly. Quickly I checked the distraction-wave index: nothing. The others were so absorbed they hadn’t heard her.

McGratty was in.

“Look at this, Mary,” Garber said. The printouts from McGratty’s c-aud spread over his desk, looping in tangled coils and trailing gracefully to the floor. A coffee mug sat on top, spreading a leisurely brown stain over an aspartic acid curve. Garber ignored all of it, squinting through his sunken blue eyes at a piece of green paper.

“Look at what?” I said, removing the coffee mug.

“That’s the third one this week. I think they’re growing.”

He handed me the paper. It was a leaflet printed in blurry block letters on cheap poison-green newsprint.

THE UNSUSPECTED DANGER

What is the most dangerous enemy presently in the United States? What force poses the most long-term threat to you, your children, and their children? Do YOU know?

It’s not what you may think! This is a hidden danger, a danger to the MIND. It’s the so-called “composing-audience” writing of the books you read, the books your children read, and YES! even the textbooks they use in their schools! Do you want your children guided by teachings and so-called “art” composed by machines? Haven’t we lost enough of our humanity to the computer? Aren’t enough of our decisions already removed from our own human hands to cold and inhuman machines? How brainwashed and helpless do YOU want to be before the all-powerful computer?

YOU CAN HELP! Just detach and return the attached coupon with a 50¢ donation to help the crusade against dehumanization and brainwashing!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

□ YES! I want to cry out against control of my mind by a machine! Enlist me as a crusader! 50¢ donation enclosed.

□ Send me more information on computer control of school textbooks!

I laughed. “It’s nothing but a con for suckers, Garber.”

“With what fifty cents buys now? I doubt they’re even covering their printing costs.”

“A bunch of splitbrains, then.”

“Maybe.” He drummed his fingers on McGratty’s printout, a muffled noise like the falling of fat, cushiony rocks. A loop of the printout creased in erratic folds. “But there’s a lot of them out there, then. Practically every time I leave the building I get one of these shoved at me.”

“Garber, why are you even concerned? Of course there’s a lot of splitbrains out there. There’s supposed to be a lot of them; the tourists wouldn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth out of New York if it weren’t swarming with splitbrains. And you know what this garbage is as well as I do—it’s just the inevitable fussing about any move to automation. People fussed when babies were conceived in tubes. People fussed when electric looms wrecked handweaving. People even fussed when eating with forks replaced fingers, for chrissake—did you know that?” Garber didn’t answer. One of his most endearing traits is his acceptance of other people’s melodrama. Specifically mine.

“It’s true. Forks. They yelled ‘lifeless’ and ‘inhuman’ and ‘foul’ until, after a while, they saw that it was just another tool, and the yelling died down and everybody went home. This is just the same. Another tool. So why are you upset?”

“I don’t know.” He gave me a little, indulgent half smile for my performance, but kept on drumming his fingers. I slid McGratty’s now-wrinkled printout from under them and began rolling it up.

“Mary, I talked to Jameson today.”

“He’s not going to review Greta?”

“No.”

“Well, I expected that.”

“He sounded … strange. Evasive. Something had upset him. A lot.”

I shrugged and kept on rolling. “So he’s being sued for libel. Or divorce. Or bankruptcy.”

“No, it didn’t… feel like anything personal. Just something big.”

I stopped rolling and looked at Garber. He may have no business judgment whatever, but he can have a shrewdness, an intuition, about people that I’ve learned to think twice about. Even if it did fail him spectacularly in the case of Mummy-sweet.

“What sort of a something big?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think it’s connected with that nonsense?” I nodded toward the poison-green leaflet.

Garber frowned, Santa Clause with a wayward reindeer. “No. Not directly, anyway. But something’s up, somewhere. And of all the big-league critics, Jameson’s been the one singing loudest hosannas for c-auds.”

This wasn’t strictly accurate, but I allowed Garber his hyperbole, although the picture of a wizened little Times literary critic as a hosanna-singing archangel was pretty funny. “New Century renaissance”—Jameson had been the first to come up with the term, but now they all used it, all sounded equally enthusiastic hosannas. And why not? Critics may distrust authors, but they love and delight in truly good writing. “Renaissance” is even too pale a word for the works that have come out of the last twenty years, since c-auds. To know for sure when your vision as a writer has gone beyond the peculiarities of the singular. “I.” To be able to hammer at that vision until it reaches and moves readers at the subliminal, universal level of involuntary body responses, not merely the tangled and ego-guarded one of verbalized “criticism.” To move that hammering from a lonely, locked-room struggle to a shared struggle, a cooperative act between creator and a selected, involved audience who also became creators, participatory gods. Is it any wonder that the New Century Renaissance has given us The Golden Grasses, Cranston’s Mountain, All the Winning Numbers, A Sheep of Mantua? Critics like Jameson don’t care if Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays or c-aud “wrote” The Golden Grasses. The play’s the thing. So what was wrong?

“So what’s wrong, Garber?”

“I keep telling you, I don’t know!” He frowned again, then shook his head vigorously from side to side like some mangy, whitened bear, and smiled. It’s Garber’s favorite trick for erasing trouble, for reorienting himself to some inner, serene world. The anxieties just shake out of his ears or something, and poof! they’re gone. It’s what he did when the doctors told him about the cancer; it’s what he does after each virotherapy session; it’s what he did after he told me all those years ago that he was divorcing my mother. Shake, shake. God, I envy him.

“Have dinner with me, Mary. I’ll take you to Cellini’s.”

“I can’t, Garber. Susan’ll be home.”

“I thought Tuesday she had Star Scouts.”

“She quit. ‘Too babyish.’”

“Then bring her along. She’ll like Cellini’s.”

I was tempted. Discreet service, good wine, the illusion of space and leisure in the midst of New York’s steel caves. Cellini’s incomparable beef Wellington. The relaxed luxury of inconsequential shop talk away from the pressing decisions of an actual shop. Garber was wonderful at that; in the pampered atmosphere of a good restaurant he seemed to expand and glow, like the rosy potbellied candles on each table, into a genial incandescence that shone benignly on all. The quality of mercy.

But Susan would object when Garber and I talked shop; I would object when she insisted on having a cocktail; Garber would object, with genuine if genial distress, that Susan and I were battling yet again. He would remind us how well we used to get along when Susan was a baby. Susan would say that she was not a baby and would thank everyone to remember that. I would reply, with some heat, that Garber hadn’t said she was, and Garber would look from Susan to me and back again with pained, puzzled incomprehension and ask Susan how her teacher was. Then we’d listen for forty minutes to the wonders of the handsome Mr. Blake, who understood young women perfectly even if he didn’t try to publish babyish books for them.

“I can’t, Garber. Really.”

“Well, next week then. We’ll do it next week.”

“Love to.”

“Anyway, you promised to read Greta tonight.”

Damn.

“You will read it, Mary?”

“I’ll read it.”

He kissed me good-bye, giving me one of those measuring glances that always seem out of character. I just missed the subway. While I was waiting for the next one, a thin anemic-looking kid pushed another one of the poison-green leaflets into my hand. C-AUD: A DEAD END FOR HUMANITY. I tore it into little pieces, threw it on the subway tracks, and got slapped with a fine for malicious littering.

“I got a D,” Susan announced over the spaghetti. She widened her eyes at me and held her fork upright, like a spear. “Ms. Lugo gave me a D.”

“Ms. Lugo? What happened to Mr. Blake?”

Susan rolled her eyes heavenward. “I told you, he’s been out because his mother died. Ms. Lugo is the sub. And she gave me a D on my family-tree assignment!”

“Why?”

“You should know! It’s your fault!”

“My fault?”

“You know it is. And when Mr. Blake comes back on Friday, he’ll see that D and ask me about it, and I just can’t bear it!”

I twirled spaghetti on my fork with great, calm deliberation.

“And just how is this D my fault, Susan?”

“We’re suppose to have all this oral history to go with the family tree we had to do. I told you. And all I had to put on my cassette was those things you told me about Grandpa Garber, because you were so busy writing or whatever that you wouldn’t hardly even talk to me. So Ms. Lugo marked “skimpy content” and “lack of effort” on the checklist and gave me a D.”

“Honey, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing!”

“Don’t call me ‘honey’! I hate it when you call me ‘honey’!”

Twice in one day. I put down my fork and forced myself to speak calmly to the hysterical, overgrown prosecutor sitting in my daughter’s chair. J’accuse.

“Susan, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing. It wasn’t that at all. It was because …” Because what? Because the family tree I gave her was Garber’s, and I don’t know any more about it. Because I don’t know what her father, that anonymous donor of sperm, might have had for his oral history. Because I don’t want to give her mine, don’t want her to look at herself as the cast-off granddaughter of a rich bitch whose notorious cruelties revolted even the mostly unrevoltable set that spawned her. Because I don’t want Susan to look at me in the lurid and violent light that any recitation of my own childhood would have to, in Susan’s eyes, set me in now and forever, world without end.

“Because of what?” Susan demanded. “Because of what didn’t you tell me more for the project?”

I couldn’t answer her.

Two large tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. She jumped up, dashed them away, and screamed at me across the spaghetti. “You don’t have a reason! You know you don’t! You just don’t care if I get a D on my project, you just don’t have time to talk to me about it, you just have time to lock yourself in your room and scribble your own things! You don’t understand me at all!”

She ran from the room. A second later I heard the door slam, catch on something in the way, then slam again, this time successfully enough to shake the pictures on the wall. Victoria Falls shuddered and slid to the floor.

I pushed away the plate of congealing spaghetti. All right, I told myself again, it’s just normal preadolescent mother-daughter wangling. Her body’s under a lot of stress, it’s changing too fast, this is all normal, the tears, the lightning highs and lows—all would pass. I understood. Didn’t I? I did. I had been that age once; I knew what it felt like to be Susan with her “D” or Nellie Kay Armbruster with her fashion braids; I knew what—

No. I didn’t know what it felt like. Not from where Susan was standing. I only knew what it had looked like from where I had been, such a vastly different and splintered place that I’d been an emotional mutant, adapted to fit an alien landscape, and thus alone. I couldn’t reach my daughter that way, through the tunnel of a common experience. There wasn’t one. My childhood was useless for that.

But I could do something else with that childhood, and had been doing it, for months now. I could transform the whole abusive nightmare into something that made sense, perhaps even beauty. Dickens had done it for his childhood of grinding poverty, in Oliver Twist. Rashi had done it for hers, in Gremlin. If the private past could be transcended, transformed into the public vision …

I left the spaghetti on the table. I left the unread copy of Greta on the floor, next to Victoria Falls. I left the fine for malicious littering of the poison-green pamphlet in my coat pocket. I left Garber’s mysterious worry about Jameson’s mysterious worry, and Susan’s worry about her D, and my worry about Susan, and I went into my bedroom and scribbled some more on the secret manuscript I had been scribbling on every night. The manuscript that I knew would make it all hang together, turn it all into some kind of integrated sense, make it all worthwhile.

I wrote until I fell asleep, sometime after two, still slumped at my desk. When I woke a few hours later, the light cube had burned out. My shoulders and arms felt stiff, circulation had stopped in one leg, and my mouth tasted foul. It was nearly dawn. In the half-light from the window my writing lay lightly on the crumpled pages, a lacy pattern of dim shadows.

AND SO LITTLE AGNES CAME HOME AGAIN, MUCH THE WISER FOR HER ADVENTURE. AND HER MOTHER MET HER AT THE DOOR, AND HER LOVING BROTHERS, AND, BEST OF ALL, TAGS. HE BARKED AND ROMPED, AND LITTLE AGNES KNEW SHE COULD NEVER, EVER LEAVE HIM AGAIN!

I stared at the monitor screen in disbelief. Alpha waves— four of the individual curves showed alpha waves! Leaning around the edge of the computer, I searched for the four kids. All of them had their eyes closed. Kids still staring at their screens were slumped in their seats, and a slump is hard to do when your head is held immobile. The evoked potentials were low and monotonous, the acid curves flat, the subliminal stimuli not even registering. Only the evals showed activity, a high curve that didn’t need my training to be interpreted: they hated it.

At the master console the proud author typed the last period and beamed through her bifocals.

Garber, I thought. Let Garber handle it. Garber would tell her better than I.

I released the helmets and the kids scrambled out gratefully. The author bustled up, patting lavender curls squashed by a net so carefully arranged that I fought a sudden urge to play tic-tac-toe in its symmetrical squares.

“Well, it went splendidly, didn’t it, my dear? Just splendidly. My, I find a c-aud studio so interesting!”

I stared at the printout as if it were the Rosetta stone, and hoped she couldn’t read graphs.

“Why don’t you just go ahead to Mr. Garber’s office, Ms. Tidwell, and I’ll be along as soon as I sort these out.”

“Oh, I don’t mind waiting for you, dear. Not at all.”

“Well, it’s just that it might take a while.”

She laughed brightly, a kind of chuckle around big horse teeth. “Oh, I guess I can wait, all right. I’ve waited twenty-two years, you know. That’s how long I’ve been working on Little Agnes’ Adventure. On and off, of course. You can’t rush inspiration, you know—what’s that, dear?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just … cleared my throat.”

“Would you like a cough drop? No? You have to take care of yourself, dear, a young woman like you. I learned that, I should hope, in all my years of teaching—did I tell you I was a schoolteacher, dear? Retired, now, as of last year. Taught forty-four years. And then I said to myself, I said, Ida Tidwell, if you’re ever going to take that book and publish it, now’s the time. So I just pulled my savings out of the bank—you sure you don’t want a cough drop? That does sound bad!”

“No … no.”

“Well, you know best, of course. So I just pulled my savings out and came to Mr. Garber with my manuscript, and here I am, a real live author! My, I can’t wait to see Little Agnes in print.”

Garber. Yes. Let Garber do it.

“Can I help you roll those up, dear?”

“No. No, thank you. Ms. Tidwell, may I ask you something?”

“Certainly, dear. About Agnes? Was some part not clear?”

“Not about Agnes. Ms. Tidwell, what was it all those years?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What did you teach? Was it English?”

“Oh, my, no, dear!”

“Not literature?”

“I taught algebra.”

I smiled gratitude on behalf of forty-four years of literature classes. “Tell you what, Ms. Tidwell, I know you must be tired from this long session. If you’ll just run along”—oh hell, I never say things like “just run along”—”to Mr. Garber’s office …”

“Oh, I don’t mind waiting, dear.” She smiled at me with baby-blue eyes, serene and flat as an empty sky. “This is all so very exciting for me. It’s always been my dream, you know, to write a book. And I knew I could do it. I knew it would make everything all worthwhile.”

“What?”

“What … why, dear, what’s the matter?”

“What did you just say?”

“I said I knew the book would make it all worthwhile. All those years of teaching algebra. Why, dear, you look so—”

“I’ve finished here. Let’s see Mr. Garber now, shall we?”

I ushered her into Garber’s office, put the printouts on his desk, and pleaded my bladder. When I returned from the toilet, twenty-five minutes later, she was gone, but the office still held the unmistakable feel of disaster. There’s a theory that any monitor’s repeated experiences of seeing brain waves related to graphic interpretation leads to a slight rise in natural sensing of electromagnetic auras. Nobody’s ever proved it. But Garber’s office was soggy with ineffectual disillusionment, wadding up the air like damp tissues.

“Was it very bad?”

“If you’d stayed, you’d know.”

“I’m sorry, Garber, really I am. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

He swept the rolls of printout off the side of his desk and toward the wastebasket. They missed.

“Garber, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but about her contract … her life savings—”

“I already refunded it.”

I walked over and kissed him. “I should have known you would. Then there’s no real harm done, is there? She’ll get over it. Don’t look like that—people have to learn every day that they don’t have talents they’d hoped for.”

He looked at me with a sudden intensity.

“After all,” I said, too loudly, “the city is swarming with would-be writers, everyone knows that. Scratch a schoolteacher and you find a c-aud applicant, right?”

“Right,” Garber said. “Yes. Well.” He reached for my hand and began playing with the fingers, crossing and uncrossing them. A silence stretched itself too long, then went on even longer.

“Mary …”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

“Nothing.” With the hearty air of a man skillfully changing the subject, he added, “Hey—did you look out the window yet? Look down there. They’ve been at it all morning.”

Ten stories below, pickets marched. I could just make out the block lettering on the poison-green signs.

C-AUD ARTIST FRAUD

GIVE BOOKS BACK TO HUMANS!

CHILDREN DESERVE MORE THAN MECHANICAL MINDS

“They had a bunch of children marching with them earlier,” Garber said. “Tots of about six or seven.”

“Are they all nonviolent?”

“So far.”

I shrugged. “Then let them march. What does it matter?”

Garber swiveled his chair back toward his desk and said, as though it were an answer, “Jameson videoed me this morning.”

“He called you?” G-M Press is definitely not accustomed to getting videos from famous critics.

“He’s sending me a manuscript to read.”

I sat on Garber’s desk. “What kind of manuscript?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. But he made me promise to drop everything else and read it instantly. He looked disturbed, rumpled, and upset, but in an odd sort of way.”

“What sort of odd sort of way?”

“Like a journalist with an exclusive on the Titanic. Mary, what do you think art is for?”

I blinked. Abstractions are not Garber’s style. No one at G-M Press asks what art is for, unless he’s being high-camp humorous; Garber was not. It was a question I hadn’t even heard spoken aloud since lecture classes at college. Garber was looking at me with the rumpled half embarrassment of a man who knows he’s just said something faintly impractical and ridiculous, and I looked away and fumbled.

“Garber, I couldn’t—”

“No, forget it. Stupid question.” He shook his head from side to side, the old mind-cleaning bounce, and came up smiling.

“Dinner at Cellini’s?”

Susan’s oral-history project hung in the air, joining Ida Tidwell’s tears and Garber’s abashed rhetoric.

“No, you can’t, I know,” Garber said. “But next week? For sure?”

“For sure.”

As I left, he went back to the window, watching the picketers with mild geniality. Ms. Tidwell’s printouts unrolled a little more on the carpeted floor.

It had started to rain. I put down the last page of Greta, leaned over the desk, and opened my tiny bedroom’s one window. Outside it was dark, with smeared blurs of light shining through the rain, and soft splats as the drops hit the screen. Drifting in were those summer-night smells that even New York can’t totally obliterate: damp earth, wet dust from the screen, and, improbably, roses.

Were there roses in the minipark across the street? Suddenly it seemed very important to remember. I leaned my forehead against the dark wet screen, its slippery wire squares reminding me of Ms. Tidwell’s hairnet, and tried to picture the park. One chipped bench, one maple tree protected by a ten-foot whitewashed cage, one litter basket overflowing with objects not bearing close examination, and one flower bed. Were there roses in the flower bed? And if so, were they red or pink or white or yellow? Long-stemmed or clustered on low bushes? Straggly or well pruned? Buds or already blowsy, their ripeness turning messy, dropping silky petals like specks of blood?

I couldn’t see the roses. All I could see was the child protagonist of Greta.

It was a fabulous book. Literally: a book fabled, beyond human expectations, removed from the mundane not because of what happened in it, but because of what it made of what happened. Huckleberry Finn without the leaky ending. A female Holden Caulfield brought with power and poignancy into the 1990’s. Oliver Twist without bathos. Johannsen had painted Greta’s rite of passage with the uncompromising harshness of a Faulkner, the detail of a Colette, the controlled compassion of a Steinbeck.

So many literary allusions. But they weren’t quite right, after all. It wasn’t those other masters Johannsen had echoed, it was me, my own deepest resonances in the subconscious, or wherever the hell they’re supposed to be kept now, so that as I read, little shocks of recognition and discovery flashed between me and the badly typed pages. More: Greta was the universal childhood experience, being a stranger in a harsh and unfamiliar adult land, lifted to a peak so lucid and sharp that it might have been the prototype for Twain, Dickens, et al, instead of their culmination.

I saw that I had set the last page crookedly on top of the rest. I straightened it carefully, taking a long time to get it exactly right, all four corners perfectly aligned to slide the manuscript into its cardboard box. There was a stain on one corner of the box; it looked like jelly. Meticulously I rubbed it with a tissue, then an eraser, until the smear was gone and the rubbed nap all lay in the same direction.

Then there was nothing else to do.

Greta had done it all.

I undressed, hanging my jumpsuit with mathematical care. Shoulders equidistant on the hanger, boots lined up at right angles, toothbrush plumb-line vertical in its holder. The hairbrush free of all pulled strands. Everything necessary attended to. The key to the locked drawer holding my manuscript made a tinny, gurgling sound as I flushed it down the toilet, but it didn’t clog the pipe.

I went to bed.

At a third-rate c-aud publisher, art is for making money. But now I thought about McGratty and the little girls he had entertained so well. I thought about Garber dying, and Ida Tidwell smiling so much over so little. I thought about Susan and about Nellie Kay Armbruster, both glaring at me as if we belonged to different species, with no possible hope of first contact. I thought about Johannsen, composing Greta out of whatever universal vision blazed from him through G-M’s aging equipment to his c-aud, and back again. And again. And I thought about Mummy-sweet. All that pain, then: wasted. Never used; never transformed; never, dammit, justified. Not by me.

The rain stopped. The sliding sounds of traffic on wet pavement drifted in the dark window. A dog barked.

So what do you do, when somebody else builds the pyramids where you needed to put up your bark hut? First you think, a dead dream, and then you tell yourself that the least you can do is avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés. Then you realize that even telling yourself that is a cliché, and so is the realization that it is. Then you plod round and round the same tired track, trying not to see what’s there—or, rather, trying to see what’s not there, the unique deep contribution that all of a sudden is now neither unique nor necessary, nor even, by comparison, very deep. You listen to traffic. You listen to your own heartbeat, and to those weird New York night sounds that are never identifiable but always familiar: thumps and hoots and blurred, distant wails from God-knows-what. You pick apart into bloody shreds everything that ever happened to you, everything you’ve ever done, and finally you make yourself stop that because soggy self-pity won’t help, only survival-oriented tough-minded hard-nosed gut will help, kid, so stop ya blubberin’ and strap on that there gun. And then you tell yourself to avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés.

Finally you roll over and sleep, because even the pyramids don’t change having to get up early to go to work, and fix your daughter’s breakfast, and stop at the bank to pay the utility. And sometime in the night the rain starts again, smelling of phantom roses.

In the morning the pickets were back, treading an oval on the sidewalk. Seen up close, they were an odd lot: two kids with the single scalp-strip of curled hair that is the current fashion in parent-annoyance, an intense academic type wearing middle-age badly, a woman dressed in nurse uniform, cap, and stethoscope, and an old spoonhead I had seen last week carrying a sandwich board for Harvey’s Eats. They carried a new collection of signs:

HUMAN BOOKS FOR HUMAN HEARTS

SAVE OUR CHILDREN’S MINDS

A C-AUD IS A COMPUTER’S BAWD

(That was the academic.)

IS NOTHING SACRID?

NO SEA TO SHINING C-AUD

“‘Sacred’ is misspelled,” I said, to no one in particular. One of the kids squinted at me.

“It should be s-a-c-r-e-d.”

He scanned the signs until he saw the one I meant, carried by the spoonhead. I ducked into the building. No one tried to stop me, although the nurse gave me the pitying look of the elect for the damned.

Garber wasn’t in his office. My desk was cluttered with the usual jetsam, all claiming to be important.

The computer tech wanted payment for the last set of equipment repairs.

The utility company regretted to inform us of a rate hike.

Ms. Ida Tidwell had submitted another application for a free-lance c-aud. This one was for a book called Tiny Tina’s Lesson. Check enclosed, drawn on a savings bank.

Matthew McGratty wanted to explore the possibility of renegotiating our contract. He had received this offer from a well-known publisher he didn’t feel at liberty to name… .

I was staring at it all with profound disinterest when Garber came in. He entered quietly, gently, almost as if he were apologizing for something, or afraid of intruding on mourning. He looked terrible. His suit was even more rumpled than usual, his sunken blue eyes rimmed with purple shadows. I tensed, knowing he would discuss Greta, and bracing myself for—what? We had never talked directly about my writing. For unspoken pity, then. For penetrating looks and restrained curiosity. But instead Garber just laid a package on my desk.

“Read this, Mary. Now. Please.” He didn’t look at me.

“Garber, what—”

“Please.”

He turned and left, closing die door behind him. Gently.

I opened the package. It was a manuscript, a photocopy, marked “To C. Jameson. Molloy Press. C-AUD 22, final taping.” The title was Floor of Heaven. I thought a moment, then located the title in The Merchant of Venice. The author was a name instantly recognizable, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a brilliant writer with the sort of reputation that even high school sophomores have heard of. I had reread her last book twice. What was she doing sending a manuscript to Garber, via Jameson? It made no sense.

I began to read. Twenty pages in, I realized that, in the essentials that truly count, the characters and meaning and nuances of emotional and intellectual theme that make a book what it is, I knew the book already.

I had read it last night.

Garber was sitting in his office, with the lights off. He’d pulled his chair over to the window and looped back the curtain, and he sat in the half-light with his hands folded on his belly, gazing out. It had started to drizzle. Far below, the corners of the pickets’ cardboard signs curled over on themselves like sea waves.

I laid Floor of Heaven on his desk.

“Collusion …” I said, the word trailing off into nothing. The author of Floor of Heaven was neither unscrupulous nor insane. No motive. More loudly I said, “A bad practical joke.” Garber didn’t answer, but I rushed on.

“Of course, Garber. That’s all it is. Some arrested-development who’s willing to go to elaborate lengths to … to scare Jameson!” Only, of course, Jameson wasn’t scared. “To make him look foolish, then. Utterly, ridiculously foolish, in print.”

Garber smiled.

“It happens all the time. Literary hoaxes. So much a part of publishing history that it’s … practically obligatory, every once in a while. Patriotic, even. That’s all it is.”

Garber gestured out the window. “They’ll be ecstatic,” he said, smiling, still smiling, and I exploded.

“Come on, Garber, one duplication doesn’t prove anything! Even random chance allows for some total improbabilities! If all the monkeys in the British Museum began typing—no, that’s not right, if all the monkeys in the world—”

“No,” Garber said, his voice quiet against my shrillness. “No, one duplication doesn’t prove anything.”

“—began typing all the books in—all the books in the British … oh, hell, Garber.”

“Yes,” Garber said. He was still smiling, a remote smile that made me uneasy. I looked away.

“So what happens next?”

The smile widened. “Jameson showed me his article. To be published next week. Quite a privilege, actually, considering who he is, and that when all this came up he thought my name was ‘Farber.’ It’s quite a story. About Plato.”

“Plato?”

“Plato.”

“The ancient Greek Plato?”

“That’s the one.”

“How …” I almost had it, but it slipped my mind. A long time since college.

“Jameson gave me a copy.” Garber opened his desk drawer, drew out a pile of paper, and pulled the third and fourth sheets. Sections were circled with thick, waxy red, and I knew that Garber must have marked it, not Jameson. Garber is probably the only company president in New York who keeps PreSchool Crayolas in his desk.

“Just read that,” he said, still with the same casual, remote smile. “Go ahead, read it, skip the rest and start there.”

Jameson was given to parenthetical clauses. His dense, twisty sentences snaked themselves at me from the page:

But all these esoteric theories, fascinating sport though their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in the end to a theory so old that it is embarrassing to realize by how many centuries we may have been anticipated. Two books, independently written, yet identical in character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.

We have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist “handled” a theme— as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts—was more important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer need give only a “fresh reworking” to an archetypal experience, and the result was a new and separate work of art.

But what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances, of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And, furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences, the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet to True Romances, were valued only because the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the human brain?

It was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to reality. What we see, what we call reality, is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others, as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And sometimes these authors’ made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.

Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist’s mind, one artist’s fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human reality within the brain. The results have been fitfully brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has done so, of course, is the technology of the composing-audience, that bringing together of many minds to cast light from all angles on an experience, until the fragmented shadows from each overlap and are again whole, and all the racial and archetypal responses are cast cleanly on that cave wall, in their one universal form.

How many such forms exist buried in the human mind? We don’t yet know, but if the virtual congruence of Greta and Floor of Heaven is any indication, the number may be more sharply limited than we formerly thought. Or wished.

What this posits about the definitive pinnacles of art is …

“ ‘Fragmented shadows’ is lousy,” I said, too loudly.

“What?” Garber said.

‘“Fragmented shadows.’ On the fourth page. It’s a lousy image. You can’t fragment a shadow. It’s a mixed metaphor. Or something.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

I knelt on the floor next to his chair and put my arms around him. “We’ve got lots of time, though, Garber. It’s not as though G-M Press will be obsolete tomorrow. Finding these archetypal works, or whatever, will take time. Years.”

“Yes.”

“And anyway, now that I think about it, Jameson’s talking about the masterpieces, the heights of experience. All this probably won’t even apply to us at all! We’ll just keep on as we always have, turning out entertainment for children!”

“Yes.”

“We won’t really be that affected at all. Kids will always need variety, even if it’s ‘fragmented.’ They don’t care. It’s not as though G-M ever expected to produce a masterpiece, for chrissake.”

Garber didn’t answer.

“But maybe we just will, anyway!” I said, and heard my own desperate brightness, and tried not to wonder what Garber’s private dreams as a publisher had been. “And, in any case, there’s lots of time!”

He looked at me steadily. The jolly elf was gone, the scatterbrained enthusiast was gone, the casual fatalist was gone. He was the Garber who had come to see me in the sanitarium, the Garber who’d taken me to boarding school on the train, the Garber who’d stripped me of all my old destructive defenses, and so also stripped himself.

“I don’t have lots of time, Mary.”

I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say.

The shoulder of his jumpsuit felt rough against my cheek. I kept my arms around him, and we watched the pickets walking below in the rain. A bus went by, and three prohibitively expensive taxis, and a pair of kids who probably should have been in school. They wore yellow rainsuits and walked through every puddle, splashing and stamping. From what I could see at this distance, they never looked at the pickets at all. But from this distance, I couldn’t see much.

Garber stood up, shook his head vigorously from side to side, and grinned.

“So what’s this about more deathless prose from the pen of Ida Tidwell?”

I got to my feet. “You won’t believe it, Garber; you just won’t believe it. It’s for this incredibly sappy proposal—”

I managed to remove the manuscripts of both Greta and Floor of Heaven from the desk without actually looking at either of them. Then those of us who were not scaling the definitive pinnacles of art went back to work.

“Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” Susan said, before I had closed the apartment door. “I just hope you’re satisfied.”

“And it’s nice to see you, too,” I said wearily.

“Mother—”

“Look, do you think I could at least get my coat off before you start in, Susan? At least?”

She folded her arms and waited, boulder silence under downy brows. Her shoulders were trembling. The sofa overflowed with crumbled paper, her recorder, cassettes, books, and tissues. I hung up my coat very slowly.

“All right, Susan. What is it?”

“Mr. Blake is back. He’s back, and he saw my D that substitute gave me on my oral history project, and he said I could do it over to raise my grade. Only my grade won’t raise, because I know it won’t be any different this time; I still don’t know enough stuff to do it right, and I’ll end up with two D’s, and it’ll junk my whole quarter’s grade! I hope you’re satisfied!”

She scowled horribly, and I saw the insane effort not to cry in front of me, the enemy. Had grades mattered so much to me, at ten? Had the handsome Mr. Blakes? No, of course not; both had been lost in bigger nightmares. But Susan was not me.

“You don’t care. You just don’t care,” she said. “Lya’s mother told her heaps. Cassettes and cassettes worth!”

Not me, and not in my version of pain. But she was in pain, however trivial it might look to me. What is art for? Garber had asked, and I had thought I’d known the answer: to transform and justify pain. If we can. But not all of us can. What if the alchemy is missing?

“Mr. Blake looked at me like he was so surprised, and so disappointed in me. And he asked me what happened because I never get D’s, and I started to cry. …”

What is art for? To order human experience, to reach toward some ultimate expression of what we are. And if that ultimate expression has already been reached?

“… all the other kids looking at me bawling, and Mr. Blake just standing …”

So it’s been reached. What then? Or, rather, what before— long before, when pain was the daily expectation, and language too crude for the transformation to beauty. The base of Jameson’s pinnacle, before the long climb to the dizzying top. When shadows on cave walls was not a metaphor, but the real thing, flickering with hidden menace all night long. All the way back.

“…so embarrassed I wanted to die, and you just treat me like a child anyway, and—”

All the way back.

“Susan, honey—no, I know you don’t like to be called ‘honey’—Susan, then—Susan, come here. Sit down. No, there on the sofa—sit next to me. Listen. I know you’re not a child anymore, even if you … I know it. You’re old enough to … I know. I’ll help you with your history project. Sit down.”

Susan glared at me, eyes mutinous through a sheen of tears, but she sat.

“Wait right here, Susan. I have to get something, something I want you to see, want you to read. I have to get—”

I remembered the key flushed down the toilet. What I would have to get was a crowbar. Pry open the desk drawer, or see if I could break the lock—but that part could wait, after all. The written manuscript could come later, had always come later. Susan would have to read it, yes, it would make it easier for her to understand if she read it, easier to see where I had changed things, reaching for…but later.

All the way back.

I drew a deep breath.

“Listen, Susan. I’m going to tell you something that happened to me, when I was your age. It’s part of our family. It happened. Listen.

“Let me tell you a story. …”

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