The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 3

Wake up.

I'm on the moon. Sit up in bed. Stars are piped through the ceiling screen, the same stars I see if I climb up to one of the colony's few real windows. The room is utterly silent. No creaks. No hum of motors, fans. No whir of skycars faintly through the concrete walls. No birds. And it is still. Stiller than a summer night back on Earth, somehow. As if the Earth rotates, but the moon just hangs there in the sky. Perhaps my body knows I'm underground, here. Or maybe it's come to think there's nothing outside at all. No Earth, no sun, no laws of physics. Nothing but silent squares.

I flip the switch by my bed, and sunlight now streams through the panel of fibers above me. The room is a square of yellow white. I roll to the edge of the bed, slide off and grope for the robe hanging from the door. I haven't put on any real clothing in three days. It seems fitting, somehow. I will wander the colony in my robe. If there were children here, maybe they'd stare. None of the adults will give me a second glance.

The kitchen clock is a handsome wooden analog one, but it doesn't make a sound. The narrow hands sweep around without ticking. Ten after seven, Pacific Standard Time. As if there were a Pacific. As if there were Time. The living room lies flatly under the streaming light of the sun. The low couch and coffee table are dusty. Where does the dust come from? When I lock the door behind me and step into the hall, still barefoot, I may as well be a dust mote too. Drifting. Where did I come from?

I was halfway through college when I decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist. It seemed a natural option given my growing talents for figuring people out and my growing conviction that I'd enjoy having a lot of money. The conviction that I'd enjoy having a lot of money was something I forged for myself. I thought long and hard about it and decided that, all things being equal, I'd be better off rich. The ability to read people, though, that was something that was pointed out to me.

I had always thought everyone had this ability -- that it wasn't an ability at all, in particular, but something natural to the human species. I figured (or I would have, if I'd ever thought about it) that anyone could look at someone else and divine their precise mood from their facial expression. Could tell if someone liked them or not by the orientation of their body in conversation. Could hear the lie in the half-second pause before someone answered a question. I never questioned my ability to do so. Likewise, I assumed everyone could read what I was thinking and feeling, and often as not chose to ignore the pain, boredom or raw lust I put up a workmanlike struggle to hide... just as I ignored the messy trappings of emotion I saw around me. I wasn't stripped of my illusions until I participated in one of the graduate-run studies we had to enlist in to get credit for Psych 103.

The study was fairly plain. Once we'd logged in and submitted some personal information we were given a series of images to view, films to watch and recordings to listen to. We then had to select the relevant emotion, say whether a smile was fake, tell if someone was lying, et cetera. It was an enjoyable forty-five minutes and I punched in the answers easily between mouthfuls of Chinese. I got a call the next week to verify my identity. I'd gotten a perfect score; the average among college sophomores on that test was around 20% for men, 25% for women. At first my mood was simply self-congratulatory. But soon my curiosity touched off a research binge into the science of reading people. Over the next few weeks I tore through fifty sites and thirty research papers on facial expression, body language, and vocal tone. Then I knew the science of communication was a muddy art to most. Then I knew I had a singular gift.

I take the stairs around the atrium today, slowly. My neck soon aches as I keep my head turned to the right for the whole climb, peering down into the jungle, the trees and scattered lawns shifting under a few shafts of piped-in sun. There are people down there. Siraman is cross-legged in the grass, hunched over his ebook. He's not comfortable but he's too lost in the action to move. Ben and Elise are passing an earbud back and forth. Whatever's playing, he likes it; she doesn't. The sharing is sweet but routine; she barely looks at his face when she passes it back. Then they're under the canopy and I can't see them. I'm going up and up and up.

Punching myself into the Matchlinx was oddly enjoyable too. I was rapt for all three hours. One part of my mind leapt to wonder, Why? What part of Me am I revealing by choosing the upper-left quadrant of the portrait as the most appealing? while the other part was lost in the choosing. There's something addictive about revealing yourself. I'm loath to do it to my fellow humans. Why do I want my secrets traveling around in their heads? But that relentless program had all of me, and I gave eagerly.

That was how Keith made me feel: known. And I came to see he made most everyone feel that way. I even knew how he did it. It was the look in his eyes when he was listening to you, the way he would lean forward, the way he had of putting his other hand on yours in a handshake, or touching your arm to get your attention without any hesitation or awkwardness, like he knew you wouldn't mind. It was the way he'd respond not to what you said but to what you were trying to say, picking up on where you were heading and smoothly taking you there, as if that was what he'd been about to mention too. I was conscious of all these things. And yet somehow the science is still an art. Somehow he was more than the sum of his parts, more than the smile, the easy personal revelation, the offhand compliment. Because I could tell you exactly what made that man likeable -- I could write a dissertation on it -- and yet somehow it doesn't add up to the end, the avalanche, the crushing squeeze he put in my chest that went on to steamroll my job and my life.

It's quiet in the lounge on top of the atrium. Not quiet; silent. Not everyone keeps the hours they kept back home, and not everyone was from the U.S. anyway, but it's seven-thirty and most, still, are in bed. I pad over the thick carpet in my bare feet. I know the sunlight is streaming beneath me, crawling through the fibers in the walls to spill out over the little park, but it might as well be flowing through me; from the sun above, somewhere, through these concrete walls, and me, and the floor. I may as well be transparent.

I paid the $200 to contact Keith Wright after the Matchlinx delivered him. And he accepted the contact and set up an appointment. He had no questions for me. Keith had not a blind, but certainly an enthused, faith in technology; at the least, he's what they've always called an early adopter. The newness of a thing and the soundness of a theory was enough to gain his participation, forget the actual implementation of it. He was ready to jump in. I didn't know all this at the time, of course, but I would learn.

I felt transparent at that moment I met him in the waiting room. I felt sure he would see something in my gaze, know he stirred something in me when I saw him. I was a hair embarrassed. But he was a stranger meeting his therapist for the first time. He pushed himself up from his chair and dropped his newspaper on the seat next to him. The look on his face was blank and open, prepared to smile.

"Nice to meet you," he said, his hands enveloping mine. I remember. I was a tad off guard still, some inner part of me still a half-second behind, believing I was already known. His gaze was right on mine like he didn't have a fear in the world. I had an uncommon instinct then to look down at my feet, but I caught it in time.

"Come into my office," I said.

And that was that. My first schoolgirl crush, at thirty-eight. Except there he was then on the plush chair across from me, and there was the door that was closed, and the white-noise whoosher, and there were he and I in our chrysalis alone to probe all the man's most closely-shepherded secrets, for an hour a week those five months.

Now I pad across the lounge and let myself fall into a chair by the center table, the one below the window. The real window, two by two feet square. The view is into the night of the universe, and my unconscious eye counts more stars, adding the half-seen specks into an internal picture of eternity, than my conscious eye can see or understand. I slide my feet onto the table, letting myself lie parallel to the view. If I lie here long enough I feel as though I could fall upward into it. I try not to think at all. I try to remember without thinking, and let the drifting feeling quietly separate the atoms of me until I can feel only what's in between.

I don't remember every session of therapy, but I have a clear memory of that day. He sat forward on his chair, half out of it, sharp elbows on his knees and his hands free to work the air in front of him. His height was compressed into a slightly hunched angle of restless energy. He'd come from the capitol and he had on a suit, expensive wool, grey, big black shoes for his long feet. The ring on his left hand caught the light slanting through the window. He had a grey tie that wasn't on very tightly, and a hint of careless stubble that was out of place on his boyish face. His hair was brown and almost curly and it was falling over his ears. No one would mistake him for a conservative.

I noticed he was finishing up a mint.

I opened my lips, and habit took over. "Tell me a little about yourself, Keith," I heard my voice say.

He grinned out of one side of his mouth, the faintest shrug threatening under the shoulders of the grey suit. "I feel like I'm losing myself." His voice had become small, and I felt my ears tune in of their own accord. "I'm not sure who I am anymore... that's why I'm here. I'm a politician," he finished. He leaned back a hair in his seat and let his hands clasp in front of him. And I was taken suddenly by a surge of something tender under my ribs. The rational side of my brain noted his lack of pretense and also the lack of apparent anxiety over the minute disclosure. And the other side, whatever side that is, felt like a stone somewhere had been turned and the earth beneath had a momentary taste of the sun's heat radiating from its surface. No one is a liar, deep down. No matter what passes our lips, none of us can help being who we are at every moment. The truth will out, whether in accent or timing or tic. Yet there was something about this man that was so flowingly genuine, even in his complaint of lost identity, that the cruder parts of me literally could not help but stir in response. I wanted to help him.

I felt my head nod. I heard my voice coming out of my throat. "A noble calling," it said. "But not the easiest one to keep your head in. I could understand losing yourself."

But I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the lines of his face and wondering why I hadn't heard of him before. Keith Wright, Keith Wright... but nothing is ever new, and no relation is ever new, since in the moment of introduction the newness passes out of it. Now there was never a time when he was not in my life. There are only degrees of me, and him.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 2

The day I read his name on the Matchlinx, I'd never heard of Keith Wright before. Three weeks after our first appointment, I could probably reel you off more facts about his life than his own mother could. I could certainly tell you more about him than his wife.

Born in 2178 in Annapolis. Well-to-do family. Went west at 18 to attend UCLA in person, at the same time I had my little girl head lost in the Bombay Schlox, seeing the swirling heaves of animation on the insides of my eyelids when I lay down for bed each night. I had graduated to real-life drama and a near pregnancy at the same time he was graduating with a degree in business. On to Stanford, on to the agriculture juggernaut -- where he married Lysa D'Agostino, who had the gall to be a far-left agrobusiness protester (and still does, come to think of it) -- and on to politics and Sacramento and my office.

But first there was the Matchlinx. The personal survey I'd spent three numbing hours completing to get listed supposedly knew the measure of me as a woman, and could theoretically and for a low fee hook me up with any client whose personal style of disclosure happened to suit my personal style as therapist, as surely as it'd been hooking up man and wife, or adulterer and adulteree, for years. The fact that nobody knew how it worked... that even now, nobody knows how it works... was and is immaterial. Over two thousand questions, inquiries, and prompts to choose between random shapes, colors and suggestions, each selection to be returned in five seconds or less. No time to think. The computer does the thinking. The computer came up with it. With a little raw material from the human researchers, of course. But there's no system like an evolving system, and there's no evolution like the one a big mass of circuits can run in a billionth of a second -- and move on to the next.

You would think it would be the death knell for true romance the day they proved a computer could predict more than compatibility -- that it could predict chemistry, pheromones, black magic, animal passion, je ne sais quoi, whatever it is that's in the air when two people click. But to call that the death of romance or intrigue would be to forget the frailty of our kind. Since when did chemistry ever predict happiness? When did the course of true love ever run smooth? (And when there have been breakups, when has there not been a whole industry to step in and patch things up... or soothe your pain, tell you what a jerk he was, and find you somebody new?) In the end, the system that promised an end to our groping in the dark became one more weapon in our arsenal of self-inflicted woe. If that's not romantic, what is?

I finally ponied up and got on the system because I'd been burned. My last client had turned sour on me, becoming ever bitterer about how the psychoanalysis was going until by winter he abruptly cut off contact and decided to sue me for irreparable damage to his mental health. He'd decided he'd been abused, and my continuing effort to get him to paint his family with a brush less dark caused him untold pain and suffering. The abuse was a new idea to me. I still don't know what to make of it. Either way, the suit was dropped a week later, and that was the last I heard of him. But the experience left me with gaps in the previously rock-solid faith I had, the belief that I could pretty much read anyone, on anything, given enough time.

Maybe I just wasn't given enough time.

I have all the time in the world up here. Yet I haven't sat in an office chair or picked up a secure headset since I got here, and I won't. It helps that no one here could pay me for a session. If I were so inclined, I could hand out therapy for free, but who would I be to counsel any of them? My counseling days are over. Now, I don't even give out advice. And what kind of a psychiatrist would give it away for free, anyway? How would you trust them?

The Matchlinx was happy to dispense advice in the newly developing area of therapist-client relations, for $200 a match. A fair price, presuming the therapist gets along well with her client. I knew the system was still gathering data on the dynamics of that particular relationship. I wasn't sure it mattered, then. I'm not sure it matters now. The system is larger than the design. It brought me Keith. After that first visit, all I wanted to say was, "I'll take him."

But the decisions are all in the past. My decision to enter psychology. My decision to use the Matchlinx. His decision to find a therapist, to use the Matchlinx. I didn't think much on it when I did it. Now I think about it all the time. Like I said, there's not much else to do up here. When the program returned his name and my eyes scanned the shape of those letters for the first time, that was the first note. When I got myself sunk into five hours under the goggles that night after our first session, the curiosity and reward centers of my brain pulsing with every scrap the engines turned up about him, that was the first chord. The reality of our interaction was only the page this requiem is written on. And here we are In Paradisum, and the moon with its starkness is only the page.

My mind is full of memory. That night I followed link after link, chasing his name through all the ether, I wasn't yet conscious of myself in my obsession. I was simply enjoying myself. I was reading the fascinating stories from Leftly and the Journal and learning about the very nice man who was my new client, who needed help because despite his position in the thick of the fight against agronopoly, he felt he was losing his soul. I remember my favorite story. It was a snippet from the Times, written after he became a state representative, looking back at his first year in office. It was one of those stories that points out a trait of character and purports to prove that it was there all along, able to be seen by anyone with the eyes for it. It was a sort of a silly story. The uncanny influence of Keith Wright, it said, was such that he not only managed to get both Luke Mead of Mead Monsanto and Jerry Carter of Agripath to come to Sacramento for lunch at his house with him, but that by all reports they all three, joined by Lysa, stayed into the night and up till past four AM. Just talking. Both men missed their flight. It's true that some time later, checks were forthcoming from both men for development of nitrogen reclamation processes. But the thing that got me was the missed flights.

Keith was just Keith; he wasn't a negotiator of especial skill, or he would have been more than state representative. He was, and probably remains, a very nice man. He was, and probably remains, a reasonably good-looking man, and one who happened to smell like soap the night I gave in and threw my arms around his surprised and lightly warm self.

Tonight I think I'll take a long bath. We don't have water for baths here, per se, but we do have soap, of a sort. In paradisum.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright

It's a long story how I got here, but mostly it's because of him. I shouldn't be saying this. It's supposed to be embarrassing. But it's hard to care anymore. There isn't much of anything up here... no scenery, no cities, no culture, no air. It's hard to hide. There's not much left now in the way of pretense or shame. And sometimes a person gets to wishing for a little intimacy, even if it only comes through the sharing of suspect thoughts.

We all don't have much to do up here. The two million dollars tossed into a governmental black hole in order to come here could have started me my own consulting company back home. Or it could have gotten me a nice house and a few boats. Although most likely it would have stayed in that savings account until I died, accumulating. Now it's nothing. And I have no house at all, just my square apartment. And I have no job at all, and I have no assets at all, but I do have my food, clothing and shelter taken care of by my government. And I have nothing to do now but surf the web, walk the perimeter, and lie down in bed and look out at the stars.

I could talk to the others, I could keep going to the chess games in the hall. But my motor's running out of steam. Most everyone here is in the same straits as me. Almost everybody's getting taken care of by the government. Either they're legitimate scientists doing legitimate research, or they're the colonists, the ones who paid big to be guinea pigs, the embarrassments, the forgotten, gathering lunar dust up here with no hope for an honest wage. We're on hold. They can't stop meeting our basic needs but they don't seem interested in sending us more resources or colonists either. There is no money going into the marketing of the thing. We're a book that only sold a thousand copies, and the publisher's giving up.

And I resist going back. The Trines, who used to come over every other night and made me laugh until I felt like I'd done a hundred sit-ups, left a couple weeks ago. They were visibly distraught about my not going with them. They worry about me. I don't tend to worry. I just want to stay.

It's very quiet here. Lots of time to think. Most of the time, I think about Keith. Not in the present terms -- I don't think about where he is right now anymore, whether he's at work or at dinner or with his wife. I don't think about him in future terms either -- not whether he'd ever leave her, or what I'll say to him when the party's over. I think in terms of the past. That's all that holds my interest now. Present, future, who cares? Look out the window to see the present and the future. There's one word for it.

One of my favorite memories is of the day I met him. I've never liked anyone so fast in my life. I've never felt that way about a client. When I saw him in the waiting room my first thought -- I remember explicitly, not just like it was yesterday, but like it was happening again right now -- was that he already knew me. Not that I knew him, not that I'd known him all my life, not that he was my soul mate... none of that... just the eerie feeling that I was familiar to him. It was in the pit of my stomach and the back of my head simultaneously, and it was something instinctual. So without thinking, in another split second I was introducing myself to settle the score.

And I expected him to return the handshake with warmth in his eye and a smile, but to see his expression, you'd think he'd never seen me before a day in his life. And he hadn't.

I feel like a baby up here, or an invalid, all my needs taken care of, no undue demands on my stamina or intellect. Maybe that's why I stay; he made me feel the same way. Not taken care of, and not unchallenged, or not usually -- but a peculiar type of infant or a cripple, next to him. I was always the hungry one. And he was Keith Wright, a client and an infatuation, and a stranger. He was very good at not meeting my needs. And what can I say, considering those needs were overwhelming, immoral and possibly criminal? He was healthy. I was not. A forevermore tragic turn of events, considering I was the therapist.

Now I have all my needs taken care of. I'm back in the amniotic sac. Where is he now? In the past, that's where, that's all. Where am I? I'm on the fucking moon. Right now.

And I'm sitting here with my one-button remote. Make that two buttons: Pause. Rewind.

Kendlin the Cold

Kendlin woke up with a good, deep ache in his muscles. He was pleased. The air was cold, and where his breath steamed out of the hole he'd made in the haystack it had frosted the hay all around with shiny specks. He didn't want to move just yet. He wasn't entirely warm, but warm enough. It was deep winter. He could see some of the field around him, the grass heavy with frost. No snow had fallen during the night. The sky above the trees was a blinding white.

He toyed with the idea of spending the whole day inside the pile of hay. What does it look like, where I crushed the grass in the dark last night? Are there tracks? Is it obvious? Where did they make camp? Is the weather holding them down? Did they get drunk in an inn last night?

He squirmed around in his wool blankets in the hay, letting the errant straws tease fresh skin. His thighs were the sorest, the muscles hot and heavy. He squinted out at the sky. What if it snows today?

It was the 246th day. He had not spoken with anyone in at least a fortnight, not since the man lying in the road, but he saw the blood outside the farmhouse from a recent slaughter. It was feast-time, he knew. His own stomach was starting to wake up. He fished around in his bag for the dried beef he'd filched a few miles back. It was eaten before he remembered to taste it. His mind was elsewhere.

Where would they be? Making themselves at home in the farmhouse? Malech has a way with people. They could be eating feast-time mutton right now. What is it now? Three hours past dawn? Look at the sky.

He settled further into the tumbled pile of hay, only half warm and half comfortable. Still half hungry. He determined to wait out the day here. His breath slinked out into the cold. He felt around for another strip of meat and shoved it in his mouth.

Ten minutes later he was on his feet, shaking straw out of his hair and resettling the hay pile. His pack was on his back in a moment and he was off across the field, trying to get the blood pumping into his cold-shocked limbs. He kept on walking for three hours before he stopped by a mostly frozen stream to have a drink and another bite. The woods were completely silent and there was no sign of any animal, not even a bird. The only motion was the water beneath the ice and Kendlin's hand moving from his bag to his mouth.

The sun seemed already to be on its way to setting by the time he was done. He pulled his pack back on and hopped the stream, pushing his way through the brush up the slope opposite. The light disappeared steadily as he walked. It was the deep grey twilight of a thickly clouded afternoon that released the first snowflakes, spinning into the trees and settling, at first to melt, on the sodden leaf litter around him.

The wind picked up as evening came on. Now he was walking up and up, now he was pushing across a ridge, maple and oak rubbing their branches in the air above his head. The snowflakes were fat and slothful. Kendlin got to a cleared place on the ridgeline as night came on, and looked out over the valley to see no sign of life but a few drifts of chimney smoke that barely stood out against the dim horizon. Frozen lakes glowed blankly pale as if lit from below. One spindly thread of road bisected the scene.

His feet were numb and the fronts of his thighs stung with the wind. The snow was beginning to stick, and now every step he took left sign enough for a good huntsman to follow. Soon he'd be leaving tracks plain to anyone. He'd already forgotten the haystack and the morning. All that remained of the day was to move fast and let the white balm cover over and smooth what it would. He set himself a faster rhythym and kept his cold legs pumping. It was dinnertime and dark. Let them try to catch him now.