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.
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