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.
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