Charades Read Free Page B

my father and Verity Ashkenazy (the famous Other Woman in the piece), maybe they could be right and wrong. Both.”
    She is beginning, he notes with dismay, to gather up her clothes as she speaks, beginning to get dressed again, though in a rather haphazard and eccentrically disorganised way.
    â€œMaybe,” she says, “on odd days, my father is somewhere but keeps on vanishing without a trace. And on even days he doesn’t exist and never did. Which means that on even days I’m the product of an immaculate conception. Though not, I hasten to reassure you, in the precise Catholic and theological sense. Nothing to do with the sinless germination of the seed of the Virgin Mary in the untainted womb of St Ann. And certainly not, I promise you, with any pretensions toward either the messianic or the pure on my part.”
    â€œWell,” he says, bemused. “What a relief.”
    â€œOh, quite the contrary, I assure you. No. I think it was another case of microphenomena in uncertain states. I think it was parthenogenesis in the manner of amoeba. They can sub­divide themselves just by thinking about it, right?”
    Her hand sweeps through a delicate arc, a sort of visual punctuation point, and he catches hold of her wrist and pulls her toward him. “Why are you getting dressed?” he reproaches.
    â€œBecause it’s almost daylight,” she says, indicating the window.

3
    Matter, Anti-Matter
and the Hologram Girl
    â€œThe creation of a hologram,” Koenig’s colleague, the experimentalist, is saying to a cluster of awe-struck undergraduates, “begins with the splitting of a laser beam in two.” He is holding court in a corner of the Media Lab, and Koenig stops to listen. “And then,” his colleague says, “the beams spread out to caress, as it were, the entire subject — in this case an arrangement of doughnuts, styrofoam cups and one hot dog.”
    Koenig watches with the mildly patronising disdain of the theoretical physicist. There is a certain doggedness to all this, a terrier-like persistence that one has to admire, but when all is said and done, the Media Lab people are little more than brilliant technicians, dealers in nuts and bolts and razzle-dazzle. Experimentalists. It is not that Koenig is an intellectual snob, he quite absolves himself on that score. It is simply that mere electronic hocus-pocus is not particularly interesting, and nor is mere data; and he is not inclined to be swept off his feet by the narrowly empirical until he has a theory that will give it grace and shape.
    His colleague is displaying the developed holographic plate in white light now, and the undergraduates gasp as phantasmal coffee cups and doughnuts and a solitary three-dimensional hot dog float in the air. “Is that a dagger I see before me?” someone demands theatrically, lunging at ghostly colour. A scattershot of nervous laughter ricochets round the room.
    Several young women move closer to their magician-professor and one of them touches his sleeve, possibly believing that energy will leap across the gap or that sorcery is contagious.
    â€œYou can do other things. Visual music, for instance. I’ll demonstrate.” What an exhibitionist, Koenig thinks. His colleague is lapping up attention, fussing with glass plates, lasers, white light. “What I do, essentially, is tape myself playing blues on my sax, run the tape, and then transpose the music into visual equivalents with computer graphics.” He has the plate in position now. “It’s a sort of collage with photographs, mathematical notations, graphed equivalents of sound, cathode ray tubes, and electronic imagery. I call this one Blue Lady.”
    Fanfare. Koenig could swear the room is humming with trumpets, all of them blown by Professor Magician himself.
How can the students be taken in? Koenig composes an instant jazz riff of his own, hums it silently, calls it Cheap