But within his normal human life span, he’d made himself immeasurably large, a perceptual giant, so that to him, the white-frocked orderlies would appear and disappear like lightning flashes. To him, there’d be a shimmer in the doorway; it would spit out a heartbeat’s worth of incomprehensible blather, and vanish. Lazlo had shifted to geologic time. He’d become a glacier creeping across a landmass. For him, a day was the beat of a hummingbird’s wing. A week was the length of a breath, and felt like pressure in the ears, relieved with a yawn. His own body must have been a thing of wonder, a blazing electrical arc that sparked from bed to wheelchair to bed and back without a thought. Did he even register the trays of food put before him? Wheelchair tours of the grounds?
Surely not. He did it all with an attendant at his side, his body nothing more than a carriage for his brain. The domestic rituals by which we mark the passage of our days became averages for him, a slur arcing across a line clogged with sixteenth notes. If he spent eight hours a night in bed, that added up to a respectable, and noticeable, fifty-six hours a week. But disconnected, each instance of sleep like a blink of the eye, did it all add up to a deep slumber? Or had he, unable to detect his body’s daily motions, separated from the need for sleep entirely? Is it possible that by the end of his first week at Pickering he’d stepped out beyond the end of his own life and was living in a future after he’d died?
He would have spent a hundred hours a week in front of the white wall in his room. He would have seen the wall. He might have registered the sunlight racing across the plaster, the expansion and contraction due to humidity and temperature, the wall pulsing like a vein, the birth and growth of cracks that crept and spread, the subtle shift of color as the paint leached pigment. His body sat there for years, the wall all the while throbbing with life. Where was he?
In that first week, he still would have been evolving, thus capable of recognizing Schiff’s presence, however brief. Lazlo’s question, Are you speaking to me? took the duration of the first tape to complete. Each of the four remaining tapes was an hour and four minutes long, identical to the first. I ran them all through the same process, and did I get secret messages from the beyond? Messages to Turk, to his sons? Confirmation of his scientific breakthrough? Did he quote Goethe, the fly’s thousand dead eyes? Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”?
Blame Schiff for adhering to clinical procedure, leading off with the same question every day: How are you feeling today, Dr. Brunn? One tape a day for five days. Same question, same answer.
I called Dr. Schiff and asked if there were more tapes. I asked him if he had any recollection of the interviews, or any notes.
I could hear him smile and shrug through the phone.
The young Schiff didn’t work weekends, and when he returned to Pickering the Monday following Lazlo’s committal, the patient had gone mute. He never spoke again. I suspect Lazlo had entered a new phase of communication, an adaptation that took advantage of the disparity between his perceptual advance and his physical equipment. His further communications may yet be awaiting discovery, hovering somewhere out there in the future, encoded in the molten core of our planet, awaiting rebirth in a leaf. By that second Monday morning, could he even tell Schiff was there?
Are you speaking to me?
My beneficent madre-in-waiting, architect of the Gedanken, spending her peaceable retirement in repose, puffing on an assortment of electronic one-hitters and watching the Criterion Collection from bed. If not for the bathrobe, a garnet terry-cloth number that had become her day-lounge uniform, you’d have thought Turk a starlet in nova.
Darling, she said when she opened the door.
Hi, I said. I was aware that I might have looked—what, predisposed? Intent, in any case, a seeker arrived from a great distance, having traveled across the wastes, through wind and weather, beset by bandits, transformed by my journey into the foreigner now beseeching her from the doorstep, and it made me self-conscious, so I affected an attitude of perfect me-ness: casual, blithe, amicable.
Good god, what’s wrong? she said, and pulled me inside. What happened, dear? Is your father all right?
Oh yes, I said. I assume he is.
Something downstairs? she said. Downstairs being her name for the business, because we had to call it, well, something.
No, no, everything’s fine.
Is it?
Turk, I said, when your father was getting on, near the end, did he talk to you about his work?
Oh, here and there.
Anything about the device he was working on?
I see. I’ve been down this road, Turk said. And no, not that I recall. I tried to piece it together, you know, but only after he’d gone up to Pickering, after the tape decks were stolen—that put a real scare into me.
He never said anything to you about what they were supposed to do?
No, Turk said.
I have something for you, I said.
Oh? How exciting, Turk said sotto voce, folding her hands together as if she were
