He did not read the review through to the end. He held the magazine open in front of him, a score to sight-sing. Around him in the bright, snug library sat four or five retirees and as many schoolchildren. None of them looked at him. The looks would start tomorrow, when he showed up on campus: the nonchalant gaze of colleagues, the pretense of business as usual, behind masked excitement.
He thought to research the reviewer, get a character sketch of the character assassin. Pointless. As Jess said: to hell with him. Any explanation Weber might construct for the attack would be just a story against this story. Jealousy, ideological conflict, personal advancement: explanations were endless. In the field of public reviewing, one scored zero for appreciating an already appreciated figure. With a target as large as Gerald Weber, one earned points only for a kill.
Even as he rehearsed these rationalizations, they sickened him. Nothing in the review was out of bounds. His book was fair game. Some other public writer found him exploitative: fair enough. He had often worried about that very possibility himself. Weber stared out the picture window, across the Common at the two Colonial churches, their harsh, believing beauty. Reading the worst left him almost relieved. No such thing as bad press, he heard Bob Cavanaugh whisper.
The book was what it was; no further evaluation would change its contents. A dozen people in shattered worlds, putting themselves back together—what was there in such a project that merited public attack? If he hadn’t authored the book, Harper’s wouldn’t have reviewed it at all. The review gave itself away: it didn’t aim to destroy the book. It aimed at him. Anyone who read the review would see this. And yet, if Weber had learned anything about the species, after a lifetime of study, it was that people flocked. Already, the core of the intelligentsia, wet forefingers in the air, were gauging the change in the prevailing winds. The science of consciousness now needed protection from Gerald Weber’s slender, anecdotal, exploitative approach. And oddly, as Weber slipped the plastic-bound issue back onto the shelf, he felt vindicated. Something in him had half-expected this moment, for as long as he’d been celebrated.
He strolled past the circulation desk, hung a left out the main doors, and followed the familiar stone path a hundred paces down the slope before freezing. He stood at the path’s end, the intersection of Bates, Main, and Dyke. He would telephone Cavanaugh, on the cell phone in his pocket, even at home, on Sunday, to ask how the man could think to hide this attack from Weber. He pulled out the shiny silver device. It looked like a remote detonator in a thriller film.
He was overreacting. The first sign of reasoned objection and he wanted to circle the wagons. He’d enjoyed public respect for so long—twelve years—that he assumed it; he no longer knew how to expect anything else. The book could stand on its own, in the face of any charges. Still: he did the math. For every twenty people who read the review, one, with luck, might read the book, while the others would describe it to friends in dismissive terms, without the inconvenience of having to look at it.
He slipped the phone into its pocket and doubled back up the path toward the bike rack. He would tell Sylvie, when he got home. She would be impervious, mildly amused. Smile and ask him: What would Famous Gerald do?
The bike ride back to Strong’s Neck was all downhill. The tide was out and July tasted brackish in his lungs. He’d wanted to get back to pure science, away from the fuzzy, mass-marketed world of science popularization. Here was a further motive. The hard left whip of Dyke Road brought him along the reedy estuary. Gravity slung him along the rill where George Washington’s Setauket spy ring had hung their lanterns at night, signaling over the sound to Connecticut, back when the terrorists were the heroes. The bike sped dangerously down the tidal embankment. In what world could the book he’d written be as evil as the book he’d just read about?
He looked back across his right shoulder. Setauket Harbor gleamed, brilliant in the midday sun. Across the blue-jade inlet, the spread wings of small sailboats skimmed. On such a day as this, anything might happen. The Bridgeport–Port Jefferson ferry lowed in the distance, a great migratory thing calling its way back to harbor. He loved his life here. A happy little birthday. He could still do that much.
Tour Director got them as far as Italy. Weber stood on the Ponte Vecchio, scanning the boutiques that had lined the bridge for centuries. A brief history of capitalism: butcher shops giving way to blacksmiths and tanners, giving way to silversmiths and goldsmiths, giving way to coral jewelry and neckties that would set you back weeks of salary. In the middle of a plume of people chattering scores of languages, he watched Sylvie, giddy with new euros and Florentine sun, nose around a window full of Nardin watches, just for play. Just pretending, happy to be away, someplace fully imaginary.
They had been all over the Duomo the day before. Already, Weber failed to form a detailed picture of the church’s interior in his mind. That morning, she had picked out the night’s entertainment, a performance of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
“Serious?” he’d asked her.
“You kidding? I love Renaissance opera. You know that.”
He didn’t ask how long she’d loved it. He couldn’t afford the answer. He studied her now, in the flowing crowd. When the light was right, at a distance, she could pass for a Japanese tourist. A holiday in this country, her favorite spot on earth, took decades off her. She looked as she had before they married, the girl for whom, a million years ago, he’d once performed a campy Schubert chorale, words by that rhymester Willie the Shake, sung to her with his friends over the phone as a Valentine, as if it were a collegiate glee number from 1928:
Who is Sylvia? What is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she,
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.
Young Sylvie, when she stopped laughing at the rendition, scolded them all for singing without her. “Hey! Start again. Give me a part.”
Still her, still his traveling companion, despite the years. But how they’d gotten from that year to this, Weber couldn’t say. He could still name most of the cities they’d vacationed in, if not when, or what they’d seen. Now Florence in high summer: madness, he knew, even when they’d planned the trip. But July was the only time they both could get away, and the hot, dry press of crowds just made Sylvie happier. She turned and smiled at him, a little embarrassed at her window shopping. He smiled back as best he could, unable to take a step toward her through the stream of sightseers on the old bridge. Love doth to her eyes repair, to help him of his blindness.
The Times review had appeared just before they left the States. He’d read it at the breakfast table, as Sylvie tried to pull him out of the house to the airport. “Take it with,” she said. “It doesn’t weigh anything.”
He didn’t want to bring it. They were going to Italy. Reviews not welcome. By the time they got to LaGuardia, he’d rewritten it in his head. He could no longer tell what he actually remembered from the evaluation and what he was fabricating. He did know that whole phrases in the Times were lifted from the Harper’s piece. Surely any reader who read both would see the duplication.
He called Cavanaugh from the airport. “I wouldn’t let it worry you, Ger,” his editor said. “Strange days in America. We’re looking for something to lash out at. The book is selling fine. And you know we’re there for you with the new contract, whatever happens to this one.”
By arrival in Rome, Weber was ready to expatriate. Resentment had given way to doubt: perhaps the Times review wasn’t cribbed, but was merely independent corroboration. The idea ruined him for sightseeing. Their second night, in Siena, he and Sylvie argued. Not argued; struggled. Sylvie was being way too supportive. She refused to credit any of his qualms. “They might have one point,” Weber had suggested. “Looked at the wrong way, these books could indeed be seen as milking others’ disabilities for personal gain.”
“Piffle. You’ve been telling the stor
y of people whose stories don’t get told. Letting the normals know that the tent is much bigger than they thought.”
Just what he’d told her he was doing, all these years.
“You’re tired. Jet-lagged. Bouncing around in a foreign country. Of course this whole thing makes you feel a little shaky. Hey! It could be worse. You could have some Medici hit man knifing you in the back for your art. C’mon. Abbastanza. What do you want to do tomorrow?”
Exactly the question that worried him. What to do tomorrow, and the day after. Another popular book was out of the question. Even lab work felt shaky. His research team already treated him differently—a new impatience with his low-tech, folksy anecdotal style, a hunger for more penetrating research—the sexy stuff with Big Imaging that was cracking the brain wide open. He was just a popularizer. An exploitative popularizer, at that.
After a week of anhedonia, he discovered a surprise weakness for Italian liqueurs with exotic nineteenth-century labels, as if he were some second-generation nostalgic lush returning to the fatherland. He couldn’t concentrate on the old buildings, even his beloved Romanesque. Sylvie felt him soldiering through the ancient towns, but she never scolded him. Siena, Florence, San Gimignano: he took more than five hundred pictures, mostly of Sylvie in front of world-famous landmarks, dozens of them from the same angle, as if both woman and monuments were in danger of disappearing. He was cramping her holiday, and he worked to lighten up. But finally his militant gaiety made her sit him down in a dusty trattoria across from the Palazzo Pretorio in Prato and lecture him.
“I know you’re gearing up for an ordeal when we get back. But there’s no ordeal. No one to fight. Nothing’s changed. This book is as good as anything you’ve ever written.” Exactly his worst fear. “People will read it and do what they can with it, and you’ll write something else. My God! Most writers would kill for the kind of attention you’re getting.”
“I’m not a writer,” he answered. But perhaps he’d inadvertently given up the day job, as well.
Back in Rome on their last evening, he lost control. They were sitting at a café on the Via Cavour. She reminded him that they were having drinks that night with a Flemish couple she had met.
“When did you tell me this?”
“Which time?” She sighed. “Male pattern deafness.” What other wives might have called self-absorption. “Come on, Man. Where are you?”
Against his better judgment, he told her. He hadn’t mentioned the reviews for days. “I’m wondering if they might actually be right.”
She threw her hands into the air like a ninja cheerleader. “Oh, stop! They’re not right. They’re just professional climbers.” Her composure maddened him. He found himself saying absurd things in increasingly incomprehensible fragments. Finally he got up and left. Idiot, fool: he wandered at random through the Roman web, as the sun sank and the twisting streets disoriented him. He got back to the hotel after eleven. The Flemish couple had long since left. Even then, she did not rebuke him as he deserved. He’d married a woman who simply didn’t understand drama. That night and on the plane the next day, she extended the same professional cool she gave her most erratic Wayfinder clients.
They made it back home intact. Sylvie was right: no ordeal awaited. Cavanaugh called with a few reassuring reviews, figures, and translation offers. But Weber still had book promotion to get through before summer’s end. Readings, print interviews, radio: more proof, if his research team needed any, that a man couldn’t serve two masters.
At a reading at Cody’s in Berkeley, a member of the otherwise respectful audience asked how he responded to the press’s suggestion that his personalized case histories violated professional ethics. The audience hissed at the question, but with a disguised thrill. He stumbled through an answer that had once been automatic: The brain was not a machine, not a car engine, not a computer. Purely functional descriptions hid as much as they revealed. You couldn’t grasp any individual brain without addressing private history, circumstance, personality—the whole person, beyond the sum of mechanical modules and localized deficits.
A second listener wanted to know if all his patients always gave full approval. He said of course. Yes, but with their deficits, did they always fully understand that approval? Brain research, Weber said, suggested that no one could ever second-guess another’s understanding. Even as he spoke it, it sounded incriminating. Even he could hear the blatant contradiction.
Weber looked out into the standing-room-only crowd. One attractive middle-aged woman in a madras dress held a miniature video camera. Others had audio recorders. “This is starting to feel a little like a feeding frenzy,” he laughed. Something off with the timing. The audience hushed, nonplussed. He caught a rhythm at last, limiting the damage. But fewer people waited in line for signed copies than the last time he’d come through town.
The ordinary colors of his day took on a new cast: all too much like a case he’d once detailed. He knew Edward only from the literature, but in Wider Than the Sky, Weber made Edward his own, describing him, perhaps, as if he’d discovered him. Edward was born partly color-blind, like ten percent of all men, many of whom never discover their condition. A lack of color receptors in Edward’s eyes left him unable to distinguish reds and greens. Color blindness was itself uncanny: the unsettling suggestion that any two people might disagree about exactly what hue a given object actually had.
But Edward’s color vision was stranger still. Like far fewer people—one in tens of thousands—Edward was also synesthetic. Edward’s inherited synesthesia was consistent and stable throughout his lifetime. His took a standard form: seeing numbers as colors. For Edward, numbers and hues actually fused, the way that smoothness usually fuses with comfort and sharpness with pain. He complained as a child that the colors on his number blocks were all wrong. His mother understood; she had the same fused wiring, too.
Those with the condition often tasted shapes or felt, in their skin, the texture of spoken words. These were no simple associations, no flights of poetic fancy. Weber had come to see synesthesia as something as durable as the smell of strawberries or the chill of ice: a left-hemisphere function, somehow buried beneath the cortex, a signal-crossing that every brain produced but that only a select few brains presented to consciousness, something not quite shed in evolution, or perhaps the advance scouts of mutation’s next reel.
Edward, both color-blind and synesthetic, was his own story. The look, sound, or thought of the numeral one caused him to see white. Twos were bathed in fields of blue. Every number was a color, the way that honey was sweet or the interval of a minor second was dissonant. The problem came with fives, and nines. Edward called them “Martian colors,” hues unlike any that he’d ever seen.
It puzzled the doctors at first. After some testing, the truth came out: those numbers were red and green. Not the “red” and “green” that his eyes saw and his mind had learned to translate. But red and green as they registered in the brains of the color-sighted—pure mental hues for which Edward had no visual equivalents. Colors that his eyes could not detect still registered in his undamaged visual cortex, triggered by numbers. He could perceive the shades by synesthesia; he just couldn’t see them.
Weber had told the story years ago, concluding with a few thoughts about the locked room of personal experience. The senses were a metaphor at best. Neuroscience had revived Democritus: we speak of bitter and sweet, of hot and cold, but we come no closer to actual qualities than a rough thumbnail. All we could exchange were pointers—purple, sharp, acrid—to our private sensations.
But years ago, these ideas had been for Weber just writing, without aroma or tone. Now the words came back, rasping and clanging, springing up everywhere he looked: Martian colors, hues his eyes could not see, flooding his brain…
In August, he flew to Sydney, an invited speaker at an international conference on “The Origins of Human Consciousness.” He had his problems with the evolutionary psychology crowd. The discipline was too fond
of explaining everything in terms of Pleistocene modules, identifying gross, falsely universal characteristics of human behavior, then explaining, with ex post facto tautology, why they were inevitable adaptations. Why were males polygamous and females monogamous? It all came down to the relative economics of sperm versus egg. Not exactly science; but then, neither was his writing.
To Weber, much conscious behavior was less adaptation than exaptation. Pleiotropy—one gene giving rise to several unrelated effects—complicated attempts to explain characteristics in terms of independent selection. He had serious doubts about walking into a room full of evolutionary psychologists. But the meeting gave him a chance to try out a talk that he didn’t dare present anywhere else: a theory about why patients who suffered from finger agnosia—the inability to name which finger was being touched or pointed to—often also suffered from dyscalculia—mathematical disability. He wasn’t expected to break new ground with his speech. He was simply supposed to play himself, tell some good stories, and shake lots of hands.
The flight from New York to Los Angeles began badly, when his shoes triggered the security detectors and they found a nail-care kit he’d stupidly packed in his carry-on. It took a while to prove to the guards that he was who he claimed to be. In L.A., he transferred to the Sydney plane, which sat at the gate for an hour before being canceled. The pilot blamed a hairline crack in the windshield. Forty people on the plane: doubtless the crack would have looked smaller had there been four hundred.
He disembarked and sat in LAX for eight hours, waiting for his rebooked flight. By the time he boarded, he’d lost all sense of time. Somewhere out over the middle of the Pacific, he developed mild gaze tinnitus. When he looked to the left, he heard ringing in his ears. When he looked straight, the ringing went away. He thought about canceling his speech and returning to New York. The problem worsened throughout the in-flight dinner and movie. But after the forgettable film, the symptoms vanished.