Vincent’s real name is Michael. Plath had not known that. But it seems right.
Stab a pin. “Don’t you like that?”
“Like?” Vincent answers. “It doesn’t hurt.”
There’s a girl laughing. She’s four years old, just like little Michael. He doesn’t understand the sound she’s making. He feels shame.
And now a scene that makes Plath extremely uncomfortable. Nothing wrong just nothing a stranger should see. She moves on.
Look out, the Christmas tree is falling over!
A long wind-swept beach. It’s not at all like the South African beach she’s been seeing in her own mind’s eye. This is black seaweed and twisted driftwood on white sand under a dark sky.
A cigarette. Vincent says, “I don’t see the point.”
“Tripped on a root, fell down, cut the hell out of my knee,” Vincent says.
“Sine, cosine, tangent,” he says.
“I don’t need it,” he says. “I see it in other people, and it makes me curious. I wonder what it would be like. But I don’t think I need it.”
Plath said, “Jin.”
“Yes.”
“He can’t feel pleasure, can he?”
The three-second delay in his answer was the answer. “He has anhedonia. He doesn’t experience pleasure. Not in the usual sense.”
Plath tried to remember if she had ever seen Vincent smile. Even now he was Vincent to her, not Michael. Vincent he had to remain.
“I’m not some kind of psychiatrist, here,” she said plaintively. Nijinsky had moved out of her view. Anya Violet was there. Was that jealousy in her eyes? “I don’t know what any of this means. All I know how to do is scramble someone’s brain, I don’t know what to do to help him.”
Nijinsky didn’t answer. She waited …and nothing. Because he had nothing. Because this was desperation time, and no one really knew how to help Vincent.
The best they had come up with was finding a way to excise the memory of the fatal battle. Somewhere among billions and billions of cells in Vincent’s brain there were memories of the dead biot. Memories of defeat.
If you take a brain and flatten it out, it makes a surface about the size of two pages of a newspaper. That was then crumpled up and shoved into a fluid-filled sac, which is in turn squeezed into the cranium. In the m-sub even a square inch is a large area. She was doing the equivalent of walking around on a football field in which someone had buried a single Easter egg.
She was poking that field blindly with a stick, hoping to find the egg.
Nijinsky’s phone rang. “Yeah.”
A plant he had once grown from an avocado pit. Dead on return from a family vacation. Sadness. He could feel that.
Getting a flu shot as an adult. He likes the prick of pain.
“Okay,” Nijinsky said and clicked off. “Wilkes says Vincent is reacting, his eyes and mouth are moving. Like …Never mind, keep going.”
Plath had not wanted to be in the same room as Vincent. Somehow that would have made it worse.
In a gloomy classroom, the desk all the way to the left, a spitball hits the side of his head.
Bong hit, lungs hurting, coughs and can’t stop. Someone laughs. He feels strange.
Anya Violet wearing nothing but red panties walking toward him on bare feet. He’s intensely aroused. It’s almost painful.
“That’s recent,” she whispered, embarrassed to be seeing this. But yes, now she’s a voyeur, because she wonders, fleetingly, if this is how Keats sees her, how he feels when he looks at her.
They could find out. Somewhere far from here. The beach, the mythical, not-real beach. And what would that be, she asks herself, a date? A really long date? She who refused to consider falling in love was now seeing herself in hiding with Keats? For the rest of their lives?
Her biots, which had been traversing millimeters between probes, now barely moved. Would more recent memories be in closer proximity?
She placed a marker exactly on the spot she had stuck. Now she began probing in a circle around the spot.
A boat? A ferry. A ferry moving through dense fog. “Michael Ford. Don’t turn around.”
Plath froze.
Vincent, resting elbows on a chilly steel railing. His skin was clammy from the fog, his hair felt limp. There was a girl wearing a biking outfit seated to the right, far enough away not to overhear anything. The girl had cast one or two impassive-but-interested looks at Vincent.
He had looked at her when she bent over to retie her shoe. Desire. He could feel desire. He wanted while nevertheless knowing he would gain no real enjoyment.
He could want.
But he was here for a purpose and the bike girl with the long legs was not the point.
He felt someone approaching. He guessed this was it.
A whispered voice. “Michael Ford.” Not a question, a statement. “Don’t turn around.” An order. Obedience was assumed.
Curiosity. Vincent felt curiosity, too. His other emotions were intact. Only this one thing was missing: joy. He could fear, he could care, he could loathe.
Could he love?
Plath opened her eyes, and Anya was staring at her. Her dark eyes were wet with need.
Vincent listened, tried to analyze the voice he was hearing. Male or female? It was subtly masked by electronics.
Vincent’s mind searching for clues. Was the figure in the fog tall or short? Fat or thin? White, black, Asian . . .
“Who are you?” Vincent asks.
“Lear,” the unidentifiable voice says.