« Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they'd buried Simon. »
[...]
« Neither Walt nor St. Brigid saw him. Walt would find him in time, though. He had found him on Broadway at his moment of need; he would surely find him again. Lucas and Catherine would go into the book, for the book was never finished. Lucas would recite it to Walt and everyone. He would recite what Walt had not yet written, for his life and the book were one thing, and everything he did or said was part of the book. »
[ part I ]
« Cat said, "I think you're unhappy. Is somebody making you do something you don't want to do?"
"You'd do the same thing. Wouldn't you?"
"What is it you think you and I would do?"
"We're all the same person. We all want the same things."
"Can you let me come meet you? Don't you think we should talk in person?"
"Nobody really dies. We go on in the grass. We go on in the trees."
He was spinning out. Cat kept her voice calm.
"Why do you think that?"
"Every atom of mine belongs to you, too."
Click. »
[...]
« Cat said, "But might someone, reading him today, interpret him as patriotic? Could Leaves of Grass be read as some sort of extended national anthem?"
"Well, you wouldn't believe some of the interpretations I've heard. But really, Whitman was an ecstatic. He was a dervish of sorts. Patriotism, don't you think, implies a certain fixed notion of right versus wrong. Whitman simply loved what was."
"Indiscriminately."
"Yes and no. He believed in destiny. He imagined that the redwood tree was glad for the ax because it was the tree's destiny to be cut down."
"So he had no particular sense of good and evil."
"He understood life to be transitory. He was not particularly concerned about mortality." »
[ part II ]
« "All right. In the third protocol, I gave you poetry."
"Why?"
"To regulate you. To eliminate de extremes. I could put a cap on your agressive capabilities, I could program you to be helpful and kind, but I wanted to give you some moral sense as well. To help you cope with events I couldn't foresee. I thought that if you were programmed with the work of great poets, you'd be better able to appreciate the consequences of your actions."
"You programmed each of us with a particular poet." »
[ part III ]
« "Well. Okay. Let's try another subject. The voice I'm speaking in right now, what you know as my voice, and by extension my, shall we say, personality, is programmed. Cadences, vocabulary, modulation, slang, all of it designed by Emory Lowell to make me seem more human. Plus, of course, these involuntary fits of poetry. What's in my brain is different. I listen to myself speak - I'm listening to myself right now - and it's strange to me. It doesn't match what I hear inside my head. The impulses are my own, I make a decision to say this or say that, but the expression is beyond my control. I suspect that if you could somehow see inside my head, if you could see the circuitry going through the motions, you'd recoil. You'd understand that I'm mechanical. And heartless."
"I am same," she said.
"What you say doesn't match what's in your head?"
"Yes."
"Of course it doesn't. You're speaking a foreign language."
"In my language."
"You mean, back on Nadia, you felt this divide between who you appeared to be and who you knew yourself to be?"
"Yes." »
« The woman leaned forward. Her eyes took on a remote, cloudy light. She said, "No one is safe in a city anymore. Not if you're rich. Not if you're poor. It's time to move back to the country. It's time to live on the land again. It's time to stop polluting the rivers and cutting down the forests. It's time for us to live in villages again."
"Why are you doing this?" Cat asked.
The woman sighed and tucked an errant strand of ghost-white hair behind her ear. She could have been an elderly professor, fatigued by her students' youth and opacity but still hopeful, still willing to explain.
"Look around," she said. "Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don't rot. Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There's no dung in the milk. There's milk, as much as we want. The church can't roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can't stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn't, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn't get poison, they'd put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can't build the new ones fast enough. We're bombing other countries simply because they makes us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women's breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?" »
« It seemed, as he loaded the plates onto the belt, that the machines were not inanimate; not quite inanimate. They were part of a continuum: machines, then grass and trees, then horses and dogs, then human beings. He wondered if the machine had loved Simon, in its serene and unthinking way. He wondered if all the machines at the works, all the furnaces and hooks and belts, mutely admired their men, as horses admired their masters. He wondered if they waited with their immense patience for the moment their men would lose track of themselves, let their caution lapse so the machines could take their hands with loving firmness and pull them in. »
[ ... ]
« She would tell him there was not, could not be, a fire.
She said, "I work there."
"Lucky you're not there now," he answered.
Catherine reached for Lucas, held him close to her. They watched together as the flames unfurled, demonstrating their beauty, which was neither cruel nor kind. They watched the water rise in brilliant threads and fall back to the pavement as rain. They heard the sirens blare.
And now, finally, Lucas understood. It had all been for this. It had been done so that Catherine would not be at Mannahatta when the fire came. Simon had loved her; she was wrong about that. He had not married the machine, he had sacrificed himself into it, as the saints gave themselves to glory, as St. Brigid gave herself to the fiery circle of her headache. Simon had known - for he was intimate with machinery, Lucas had learned how intimate - that the sewing machines at Mannahatta adored and desired their women but were too puny to take them as the greater machines took their men. Simon had known, he had guessed (had the machine told him?) that the sewing machines were waiting to take their women in the only way they could.
And Catherine alone had been spared. »
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