Machines Like Me

He was still in his moment of immediate abandon. I had sometimes wondered if the charge was like slaking a desperate thirst. He had told me that in those first seconds it was a gorgeous surge, a breaking wave of clarity that settled into deep contentment. He had once been untypically expansive. ‘You can have no idea, what it is to love a direct current. When you’re really in need, when the cable is in your hand and you finally connect, you want to shout out loud at the joy of being alive. The first touch – it’s like light pouring through your body. Then it smooths out into something profound. Electrons, Charlie. The fruits of the universe. The golden apples of the sun. Let photons beget electrons!’ Another time, he’d said, with a wink, as he was plugging himself in, ‘You can keep your corn-fed roast chicken.’

Now he was taking his time to reply to Miranda. He must have progressed to the second stage. His voice was calm.

‘Alms.’

‘Arms?’

‘Alms. Don’t you know this one? Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion.’

I said, ‘You’ve lost me. Oblivion?’

‘Shakespeare, Charlie. Your patrimony. How can you bear to walk around without some of it in your head?’

‘Somehow, it seems I can.’ I thought he was sending me a message, a bad one about death. I looked at Miranda. Her arm was around Mark’s shoulder, and he was gazing at Adam in wonderment as though he knew, in a way that adults immediately might not, that here was someone fundamentally different. Long before, I’d owned a dog, a normally placid and obedient Labrador. Whenever a good friend of mine brought his autistic brother round, the dog growled at him and had to be locked away. A consciousness unconsciously understood. But Mark’s expression suggested awe, not aggression.

Adam became aware of him for the first time.

‘So there you are,’ he said in the sing-song way of adults addressing infants. ‘Do you remember our boat in the bath?’

Mark moved closer against Miranda. ‘It’s my boat.’

‘Yes. Then you danced. Do you still dance?’

He looked up at Miranda. She nodded. He returned his gaze to Adam and said after a thoughtful pause, ‘Not always.’

Adam’s voice deepened. ‘Would you like to come and shake my hand?’

Mark shook his head emphatically so that his entire body twisted from left to right and back. It hardly mattered. The question was merely a friendly gesture and Adam was retreating into his version of sleep. He had described it to me variously; he didn’t dream, he ‘wandered’. He sorted and rearranged his files, reclassified memories from short to long term, played out internal conflicts in disguised form, usually without resolving them, reanimated old material in order to refresh it, and moved, so he put it once, in a trance through the garden of his thoughts. In such a state he conducted in relative slow motion his researches, formulated tentative decisions, and even wrote new haikus or discarded or reimagined old ones. He also practised what he called the art of feeling, allowing himself the luxury of the entire spectrum, from grief to joy so that all emotion remained accessible to him when fully charged. It was, above all else, he insisted, a process of repair and consolidation from which he emerged daily, delighted to find himself to be, once again, self-aware, in a state of grace – his word – and to reclaim the consciousness that the very nature of matter permitted.

We watched as he sank away from us.

At last, Mark whispered, ‘He’s asleep and his eyes are open.’

It was indeed eerie. Too much like death. Long ago, a doctor friend had taken me down to the hospital mortuary to see my father after his fatal heart attack. Such was the speed of events, the staff had forgotten to close his eyes.

I offered Miranda a coffee and Mark a glass of milk. She kissed me lightly on the lips and said that she would take Mark upstairs to play for a while until he was collected, and that I was welcome to join them at any time. They left and I returned to the study.

In retrospect, what I did there for a few minutes came to seem like a delaying tactic to protect myself a little longer from the story, now an hour old, that was engulfing the media networks. I picked up some magazines from the floor and put them on the shelves, clipped together some invoices and tidied the papers on my desk. At last I sat down at the screen to think about earning a little money myself, in the old style.