The surgeon says, “Actually, I have some questions for you.” The lack of greeting or preamble is off-putting, somehow worrisome, and then, like a conjurer, the surgeon produces a handful of small metal objects and sets them on the table. Their surfaces glitter in the narrow halogen beam, their faces reflecting the room, and the other objects’ reflections, which starts to draw him in. When the physician says, “What do you see here?” he rallies and says, “The platonic solids, cast in metal, maybe tungsten, each about four inches on the longest axis, about the length of the last two joints of a finger.”
“Good,” says the physician, and Thales scans him for signs of hope or satisfaction, but he remains impassive as he puts a tablet on the desk. He says, “I need you to interpret this for me,” and plays a video.
It shows a close-up on a woman—handsome, young, or actually not young but young-looking—and she’s sitting in some kind of sloped theater by herself, her phone in her hands, her thumbs moving. She has a thousand-yard stare, or perhaps a million—it’s a private face, and a vulnerable one, reflecting an absolute immersion, and the light playing over her is so bright it looks like she’s in a cinema, and if she is then what’s the film that’s gripped her so completely? He could try to explain all this, but he’s tired, and he wants to go home, to the hotel if he must, ideally to Rio, though the Rio house won’t quite come to mind. Nothing much is happening on the screen, though for some reason it’s hard to look away, perhaps because of the tension in her face. For a moment he wonders if this is meant to be art, though it seems way beyond the surgeon’s likely tolerance for the avant-garde. He rallies, finds words, and with an effort says, “She’s in a theater. She’s maybe about forty. I don’t think she knows that anyone’s watching.”
“Why is she there?” asks the surgeon, with an irritating serenity that reminds Thales of the Provisional Authority immigration police. “What does she want?”
“I have no idea,” he says, as politely as he can, and he’s ashamed of his evident petulance as he says, “Maybe you could explain to me why you’re asking me these questions?”
“I’m evaluating your prospects.”
“Prospects?” Thinking how his father had wanted him to study law instead of math and physics, which he’d said were respectable but essentially middle class.
“I need to assess the severity of your impairment. Your implant saved your life, but created new problems, and we’ve come to a crossroads in your treatment.”
Thales tries to interrupt but the surgeon talks over him. “There are two protocols. In one, we wind down treatment and transition you back to a fully independent life. Unfortunately, this option is available only to the rarest, highest-performing patients. The other option, the one for most patients, is, in essence, to keep you as comfortable as possible through the course of your decline, so please do your best in the testing today.”
It’s absurd, and so sudden—he wants to call his mother, get a second opinion, maybe even call the family counsel, who must have offices in the U.S., though in the stress of the moment the firm’s name eludes him, and why in god’s name haven’t they told him this before? He immediately sees that the answer is that they didn’t want to worry him in vain, and so, in the space of this brief and quiet chat, his life has been transformed, and to resist already seems as futile as throwing punches at the wind. The surgeon says, “Here’s the next one.”
The tablet plays a clip showing an old man sitting at a wide desk. It’s shot from above, backlit, low-res, maybe from a security camera. The old man reminds Thales of his father’s political friends with their immaculately cultivated health, his age less in his face than in his stillness.
A woman enters the frame, very slight, her hair long and dark.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says, sitting on his lap, but he says nothing.
“It looks like you’re going to make it,” she says again, coaxingly, as though trying to persuade a child to accept good news. “Are you happy?”
The old man says, “Once upon a time there was a king who owned everything but was afraid to die. But there was an angel, who lived far away in the northern aurora, and one night it spoke to him from the dark, saying it could grant eternal life, but its speech was all but unintelligible, less like speech than the Arctic wind. The king found a seeress who, having passed through the kingdom of death, spoke the tongues of both angels and men, for he didn’t know if the angel was from the hosts of the righteous or the fallen, and he knew he would need her when it came time to enslave them. The king and the angel bargained, and it finally gave him what he wanted, taking, in its avarice, half his treasure, for the angels spun palaces of molecular gold in the high empyrean. The king thought, Now, finally, I alone of all the men who have ever lived need not fear time. Replete in this knowledge, he closed his eyes and slept, unworried, for the first time since he’d been a boy. Waking, he found that everyone he knew had died. Looking out the window of his tower he saw that his kingdom was buried in ice.”
Thales draws breath to start to try to unpack the parable but his eyes are full of golden filaments hanging in the sky and the seeress hovering at the doorway of the kingdom of death, and that, he thinks, is the gate I have passed through, but, far from speaking the tongues of angels, I can barely speak the tongues of men, and he imagines himself turning and going back through the doorway while the seeress watches with jaded curiosity, and all the while the angel is trying to ask him if the king can be trusted but can’t find the words.
The surgeon is watching him so he tries to find something to say but now the tablet glows with migraine light, as though revealed in its insubstantiality, and the couple’s faces have become membranes without meaning. He’s going to plead for more time or another chance or try to invoke his family’s power but the surgeon says, “No,” shaking his head, and Thales can already see that his resistance is futile, and then the surgeon says, “But you’re not alone.”
“You know, I think I am,” says Thales, trying to swallow his tears.
“I want you to succeed,” the surgeon says. “I’ll boost your working memory. Let’s see if that helps.”
“Through my implant?” Thales says as the surgeon’s fingers trace patterns over his tablet’s screen.
The glare diminishes, but Thales says, “Everything feels the same.”
“Look again,” says the surgeon, and when Thales looks back at the screen the video is playing again and he finds he feels more awake and sees the significance of all the details, in fact it’s almost pressing at him how she clings to him, how he’s adjusted his legs to accommodate her weight, how two of his fingers have found the exposed skin of the small of her back, how plain she’d be but for her clothes and the tenderness in her face when she touches him.
“I’m so sorry you won’t be with me,” the old man says. “I did try.”
“Maybe you’ll figure it out.”
“I refuse to proffer false hope.”
“Well, I’m happy,” she says, but like he’s the one who needs comfort.
“But how shall I get along without you through all the time to come? How shall I ever find anyone as dear?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”