She thought this over. She felt glad she had come to Praha. Here of all places she’d somehow found someone who was truly her kind of guy.
“Let’s go back to the party now.”
“No, I can’t bear to go back. My studio is just up this street.” Emil shrugged. “He’s a nice man, Paul, he means well. Some of his friends are all right. But they shouldn’t admire people like me. I made a few good pots, but I’m not Paul’s case study in the liberation of the holy fire. I’m a desperate man who destroyed himself for the sake of mud. Paul’s people should admit this to themselves. I’m a monstrous fool. They should stop romanticizing posthuman extremities.”
“You can’t go home and brood, Emil. You said you’d show me the city.”
“Did I tell you that?” said Emil politely. “I’m very sorry, my dear. You see, if I promise something early in the morning, then I can almost always fulfill it. But if it’s late at night … well, it’s something to do with my biorhythms. I grow forgetful.”
“Well, then, at least show me your studio. Since we’re so near.”
Emil locked eyes with her. A very knowing look. “You’re welcome to see where I live,” he said, meaning nothing of the kind. “If you feel you must.”
The building was dark and impossibly old. Emil’s studio was on the second floor, up a creaking set of stairs. He unlocked the door with a metal pocket key. The floors were uneven wooden boards and the walls were lined in ancient flowered paper.
Most of the floor space was taken up with tall wooden racks of earthenware. There were two big mud- stained sinks, one of them dripping steadily. A white kiln, and stained pegboards hung with tools of wire and wood. A potter’s wheel, a crowded worktable. Dusty sacks of glazing compound. A primitive kitchen full of handmade crockery in finger-grimed white cupboards. Old windows warped with damp, with lovely flowerpots sprouting the skeletal remains of houseplants. Crumpled sheets of canvas and paper everywhere. Sponges. Gloves. The sharp smell of clay. No shower, no toilet; the bath was down the hall. A sagging wooden bed with grime-smeared sheets.
“At least you have electricity. But no computer of any kind? No netlink? No screens?”
“I once had a notebook here,” Emil said. “A very clever machine. My notebook had my schedules written in it, addresses, numbers, appointments. Many helpful hints for living from my former self. One morning I woke up with a bad headache. The notebook began to tell me what to do that day. So, I opened that window there”—he pointed —“and I dropped that machine onto the street. Now my life is simpler.”
“Emil, why are you so sad? These pots are beautiful. You took a medically irrevocable step. So what? A lot of people have bad luck with their upgrades. There’s nothing to be gained by fussing about that, once it happens. You just have to find a way to live on the far side of that event.”
“If you must know,” Emil grumbled. “Look at this.” He put an urn into her hands. It was squat and round with a glaze in ocher, cream white, and jet black. The pattern was crazily energetic, like a chessboard struck by lightning, and yet there was enormous clarity and stillness to the piece. It was dense and heavy and sleek, like a fossil egg for some timeless state of mind.
“My latest work,” he said bitterly.
“But Emil, this thing is wonderful. It’s so beautiful I wish I could be buried in it.”
He took the urn off her hands and shelved it. “Now look at this. A catalog of all my works since the change.” He sighed. “How I wish I’d had the good sense to burn this stupid catalog.… ”
Maya sat on Emil’s workstool and leafed through the album. Print after print of Emil’s ceramics, lit and recorded with loving care. “Who took these photographs?”
“Some woman. Two or three different women, I think … I’ve forgotten their names. Look at page seventy- four.”
“Oh, I see. This one is very like your latest work. It’s part of a series?”
“It’s not
“You’ve created the same pot twice?”
“Exactly! Exactly! Can you imagine the horror? When I saw that photograph—it was a knife in my heart.” He collapsed on the bed and put his head in his hands.
“I can see that you regard this as something very dreadful.”
Emil flinched and said nothing.
“You know, a lot of ceramics people create work with molds. They make hundreds of identical copies of a work. Why is this so much worse than that?”
Emil opened his eyes, hurt and bitter. “You’ve been discussing my case with Paul!”
“No, no, I haven’t! But … You know, I take photographs. There’s no such thing as an original digital photograph. Digital photography has always been an art without originals.”
“I’m not a camera. I’m a human being.”
“Well, then that must be the flaw in your thinking, Emil. Instead of torturing yourself about originality, maybe you’d be happier if you just accepted the fact that you’re posthuman. I mean, people don’t remain human nowadays, do they? Everyone has to come to terms with that sooner or later.”
“Don’t do this to me,” Emil moaned. “Don’t talk that way. If you want to talk that way, go back to the party. You’re wasting your time with me. Talk to Paul, he’ll talk like that for as long as you like.”
Emil kicked a wadded bathrobe from the edge of the bed. “I’m not posthuman. I’m just a foolish, very damaged man who had no real talent and made a very bad mistake. I can no longer remember things very well, but I know very well who I am. All the clever theories in the world make no difference to me.”
“So? It seems like your mind’s already made up. What’s your solution for this so-called crisis?”
“What else?” said Emil. “What else is there to do? I can’t spend my existence going round and round in circles. I’m going to throw myself out the window.”
“Oh dear.”
“Taking the amnesiac was only a cowardly compromise. A half measure. I’m not what I wanted to become. I never will be that person. I can’t live being anything less.”
“Well,” Maya said, “of course I’m not one to talk against suicide. Suicide is very proper, it’s always a perfectly honorable option. But …”
Emil put his hands over his ears.
Maya sat next to him on the bed, and sighed. “Emil, it’s silly to die. You have such beautiful hands.”
He said nothing.
“What a shame that such beautiful strong hands should be turning into clay. Deep under the cold, hard earth. When you could be slipping those hands under my shirt.”
Emil sat up. His eyes gleamed. “Why do women do this to me?” he demanded at last. “Can’t you see that I’m a shattered emotional wreck? I have nothing to give to you. In the morning, I won’t even remember your name!”
“I know that you won’t,” Maya said. “Of course I realize that about you. I never met anyone quite like you before. It’s a very attractive quality. I don’t know quite why, but truly, it’s very tempting, it’s terribly hard to resist.” She kissed him. “I know that’s an awful thing to say to you. So let’s stop talking now.”
She woke in the middle of the night, in a strange bed in a strange city, to the soft rise and fall of another human breath. The structure of the universe had shifted again. She felt soft and sweetly wearied, deeply warmed by his sleeping presence. Having a lover was like having a second soul. She had enough spare souls for every man in the world.
In the morning she made them breakfast. Emil, just as he had promised, did not remember her name. He was cheerfully embarrassed about this fact. A quick bed-wrestling match knocked their affair into order. Emil ate his breakfast, grinned triumphantly, and started working. Maya, unable to bear the disorder, started cleaning the studio.
To judge by the state of his catalog, Emil had been living alone for two, maybe three months. The documentation of his work was out of order and out of date. She would have to see to putting the record straight. This was clearly the open-ended legacy of being with Emil. To judge from the varying competence of the
