His pen danced across the computer tablet, words pouring from its tip as quickly as his hand could move. Beyond the array of sensors crowning his bent head, monitors blinked then throbbed with lights, and a screen flowed with images plucked from his memory: windswept evergreens in a barren rocky landscape, colorless sea dragging against a shore, a spatter of sleet on a rotting leaf in a city alleyway, then thin lemon light on a winter morning, followed by a black night salted with icy stars.

Oblivious, he bent to his pen. The poem sang in his brain, words and images flooding his mind in a barrage of sound and rush of adrenaline. He etched the vivid shape that formed there into words on the plastic tablet. The bite of his lines about the hollowness of winter filled his mouth with bitterness, then he thought of the sweet hint of birdsong that followed the cold -- and as he wrote, the gray images in the screen above him suddenly flickered with a hint of light from a red-breasted bird.

He stopped, shaking his hand to fling the cramp from his fingers. After a moment he sketched in a final line, but slid the pen over it, blotting it until it disappeared. He felt drained, as though he'd spilled himself onto the tablet.

He pushed his chair from the desk, then lifted the sensors from his head, pleased that he hadn't found them inhibiting. The final image on the computer screen faded to white. Leaning back, he scraped his fingers through his spiky gray hair.

"Sometimes the Muse shits gold on your worthless head, Devlin." He grinned, then looked quickly around the lab. The walls were thin: he hoped Kerra hadn't heard him talking to himself. Though he liked to think it was an artist's tic, he knew she saw it as one of her crazy old husband's dafter habits.

He looked back at the tablet. Well, even if Kerra's experiment failed, he'd written a decent poem. Even if Kerra had overspent the pitiful funds she'd been able to scrounge for equipment and computer time, and couldn't take the project any further, he had this. The weeks he had spent building each thread of the poem in his mind, adding elements, revising, reweaving until he could actually write the damn thing down even while being spied on by Kerra's sensors wouldn't be entirely wasted.

He heard Kerra knock, and the door opened behind him.

"You done?" she called.

"Yeah, I think so. I don't think I could squeeze another word out. Or if I did it would be the wrong one. How did it go in there?"

She laughed, leaning against the back of his chair, sliding her hands down his chest. "I think we've done it, Dev. The translators seemed to be working -- the pictures are clear and the emotional and sensory playthrough is powerful. Raw. This might be it."

So you think you've got it?"

"I do." She pulled back, then spun his chair around so he faced her. "Hiro just left -- he'd only stopped by to check on my funding report and decided to pick up a headset. You know how skeptical he is, but he got totally caught up in it. Hah! He even starting worrying about how to adapt virtual reality projectors to work on this, too, so the end users don't have to wear a headset." "Holy shit. Passive poetry. Projected on the masses." He hugged her. He loved her excitement, how the shine of it flushed her face.

"Well, Hiro thinks he should market it for individual use. And it's as active as the user likes. It's better if you pay attention to the playback -- the neural stimulation is more clear then -- but it works passively, too. That's what hooked Hiro in."

"So, can I try it?"

"Yeah, of course," she said, and he followed her into the tech room. She settled him in front of the big monitor and handed him a headset, placing the second one on her head, then sat down beside him and started the replay. Immediately the familiar words and images, both visual and aural, caught him up in swirling patterns of thought, but for each stimulant nudging his senses and memory, an echo layered the experience double in his mind, pounding it into his head. He tried to concentrate on the play and sound of his written words, but multiplied in strength by the equipment, they scraped into his head, gouging: the images, the senses, the cold, wet rain and snow, the rush of light and dark, the bleakness --

He tore off the headset, putting his head between his knees for long minutes until he could bear to open his eyes and straighten. Kerra, rapt, noticed nothing until it ended, and she removed her headset.

"Devlin, are you all right?"

His senses still reeled, but he made his voice firm. "Yeah, I'm okay. It just had a strange effect on me. It's powerful, all right."

"Yeah, it is strong. But wonderful." She smiled, then looked concerned. "You didn't like it?"

"I'm just not used to it. Let me try it again."

They put the headsets back on. He leaned a little against Kerra's thigh for comfort as she restarted the playback. He tried to relax and open his senses, but this time nothing happened. He couldn't feel anything. The neural prompters hit his brain, but instead of calling up that tangle of sense and memory, he could just hear the words he'd written, the actual poem sitting on the plastic page in the adjacent room. Nothing else. Ghost pictures played in his visual memory, but they felt distant, unfamiliar, something that happened to someone in a world so far off it had no meaning for him.

First it's chaos, then it's nothing, he thought. He gave up, pulled off the headset, and waited for Kerra.

She spent so many hours in the lab the next few weeks that he barely saw her. She came home late each night exhausted and happy, while he struggled to keep awake to greet her and then to survive teaching his early morning classes. Finally, nearly a month later, she insisted on taking him out to dinner. He was shocked when their cab pulled up at Caslin, one of the most expensive waterfront restaurants in town.

"Kerra, love, how can we afford this?"

She grinned, then tapped his shoulder with deliberate casualness. "Well, I have to make up for neglecting you so badly somehow, and Hiro gave me a little salary bonus. You see, he leaked word of the machine and the tech corporations are already having a bidding war. He figures we can start production next month. Next month!"

As they walked towards the restaurant she nearly danced her delight. "Don't you understand, Dev? I've done it! This is something entirely new. Bigger than virtual reality because the feed-in stimulates the reader's own memories and senses. It's a kickstart to the imagination, not a passive experience of the artist's intentions. It doesn't just happen to them -- people put themselves into what they get from the authors. Just like reading, it's a different experience for everyone but almost always powerful. Literature working on people like a spell! No one ever thought this would happen, that we could make it come alive this way. People will be clamoring for the machines!" He looked at her in shock.

"Devlin, this will fill your literature classes again if anything will!" "Kerra, on the first playback of my poem I was sure there was something in it, but the next time, nothing. Truly nothing. It was as formless and expressionless as this sky." He gestured to the clouded horizon. "There was nothing there."

"Dev, you oaf. Of course there's something there. I've played it dozens of times and each time it hit me true. And it's not just me -- Hiro and every one of his executives has been damned impressed with it."

"But I didn't feel so much as a twitch when we played it back that last time." "You were probably just drained from the writing. It's there, it truly is, believe me. Hiro wants to bundle your poem with the machine, and for you to write more while you're hooked in. Our recent tests have shown that the recording's much more powerful when we capture the author writing the work while he's wired. Recording a reader's impressions is good, too, but more diffused. We hired an Austen scholar to read Pride and Prejudice into the machine; replaying it was like walking through a movie, but better because I could put my own impressions with the reader's. As though I was right there."

He said nothing, just stared past the restaurant to the gray water.

"I'd prove it to you by taking you back to the lab, but we're here now. Come on. Perk up and enjoy yourself."

He let his desire not to dampen Kerra's enthusiasm carry him through the evening. Later, back at their apartment when her breath finally slowed on the pillow beside him, he went back into his study and turned his computer on. He called up his copy of the poem. Reading it gave him nothing. He could barely remember the experiences that prompted writing it, and the words meant nothing to him. Fog.

He'd lost whatever talent he'd had when he was young. He'd wanted so badly for his work to be appreciated. He was tired of publication in journals read only by other poets as obscure as he, tired of his small press publishers folding after producing his books. And now it was hopeless. Just when poetry might finally reach people, really crack their lives and senses open with the players, he was useless and old.

With a start he realized Kerra was in the room and talking to him. He felt the warmth as she touched his reluctant hands. What was she saying? He looked with pain at the difference between the younger flesh of her hands on his with their rising veins and the gnarl of years beginning to rise from the bones. He looked away.

"Devlin, I'm worried about you. I know you don't trust the playback and now you seem really depressed. I'll talk to Sarah, the neurologist who has been working with the equipment, and maybe she can talk to you, maybe test you for any problems. Will you come and see her and find out if there's something wrong?"

He could tell she was concerned about him, but also about her machine, and so he nodded.

The glare of light in the white sterility of the examination room irritated him, and the neurologist was looking at him with a frown folding her brow. "Nothing physically wrong. And you say you sensed the other texts from the player? Every one but your own?"

He nodded. He'd barely had the heart to try, but the neurologist had insisted. He'd listened to other pieces; he'd even enjoyed them -- the only ones that didn't touch him at all were his own.

"We've tested the machinery over and over, and it doesn't affect the readers at all. Your tests don't indicate any neural pathway problems or loss in sensory perception. You're not old yet." She gave him a sympathetic smile, but he couldn't respond. "I've played the poem myself, Devlin, and it knocked me over every time. There's nothing like it. It's so different from the texts simply read by the readers. It truly made makes me feel part of your creative process, as though I could write a similar poem from my own life. But you say it doesn't touch you at all. I don't know exactly what's wrong with you, but it could just be depression."

He nodded. It had been a difficult winter with Kerra gone so much.

"Are you writing?"

He shook his head.

"Well, maybe you just need to start writing again. At least I can tell you for certain there's nothing physically wrong. Your senses are sharp as a man half your age."

He didn't feel reassured. Without stopping by Kerra's lab, he headed directly out of the research complex, deciding to make the long walk home. While taking the buses to and from the college where he taught, he hadn't really noticed that it was still the same kind of gray winter that had inspired his poem. Even walking, though, he felt strangely insulated from it. The February light didn't depress him or excite him again into the mood of his poem -- it was just nothing. On impulse he turned into the park. It was one of the places he'd been thinking of when writing the poem, and he thought being there might spark him to feel something, anything; but he wandered past the leafless trees swaying in the winter wind as though through a paper landscape. The darkness, the chill, the emptiness, the small signs of sleeping life meant nothing to him, repaid his attention with the same blankness he felt when he had replayed the poem.

That poem, he thought. It has contaminated the world for me.

Kerra came home in time for dinner. She was obviously relieved by what Sarah had told her. "I'm glad there's nothing physically wrong, though maybe you should talk to a psychiatrist to see if you really are depressed."

"I don't think so. Kerra, I walked back through the park --"

"You walked back? It's a long way."

"I needed some air, needed to be in the trees and wind where the poem had come from, but it wasn't there. I couldn't capture any feeling there at all in one of my favorite places in the city."

"You were upset and tired, Dev. You'd just been through all those tests. Did you expect a walk through a park to work magic?"

"Yes," he said. "It always has before."

He paused a moment before speaking again, but he needed her to understand what this meant to him. "Kerra, even when you lost the baby, the park had something for me. Today it had that same wealth of nothing that the poem has." She stared at him. He could see her fight the urge to withdraw. "Dev, you're depressed. I'll try to spend more time with you. I'm sorry I've been so wrapped up in the project."

"No, I don't feel sad or neglected. I feel nothing."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I," he said. "Maybe there isn't anything to understand. Depression. Or something. I'm sorry."

The corporate wheels were racing now, and he let Kerra talk him into licensing his poem for the machine. He'd never exactly wanted fame for his poetry, but he couldn't resist the idea of so many people experiencing the world through his work, and of the recognition he'd receive. Still, he wished it were for any other of his poems. He couldn't believe her faith in it, and how she kept marveling to him as her growing production team played and replayed it as they fine-tuned the prototype machinery.

She assured him that even outside the machinery it was the best poem he'd ever written, and she wasn't the type to flatter and she wasn't stupid -- she'd been his best literature student at the college even though she was a technology major. She loved literature, and that had drawn him to her in the first place. He let himself get involved in helping her test more writing on the player. The company began to hire other writers to work directly onto the recorders. Hearing the playback from a poem written on the machines was a kick like a drug, and could lift him right out of himself. The team hired beat poets, dub poets, language poets, tribal poets, street poets, surrealist poets, other nature poets, and even the work of more cerebral philosophical poets played both on the mind and the senses. At the level of blood and bone the poems spiked into his head as nothing else could.

Shakily, images and words for a new work of his own began accumulating in his head, this one about a spring vacation in the coastal rainforest of the Pacific Northwest he and Kerra had taken a few years before, back when they were newlyweds. Kerra had made him feel young, started him writing again with a young man's fervor. They had rented a cabin at the edge of the forest preserve on the Olympic Peninsula, going for hikes in the woods and on the long sandy beaches, while he spent the evenings trying to write it down.

He remembered how the wildflowers had seemed to break from the forest clearings into the light, how he had thought he could sense the movement of sap through the limbs of the trees. How heady it made him feel -- once, he had slid out of his jacket and pulled his shirt off, standing in a beam of sun that poured like silk through the cedars. Kerra had stared at him till she'd finally took off her own jacket and shirt and followed him into the patch of sun. He described the whole experience on his computer, plotting out everything he wanted to say, and when he was sure he was ready to write the actual poem, he went to Kerra's lab and had her hook him back into a recorder. Slowly the shape of the poem coalesced, and in a push of adrenaline and anxiety, he forced the words into order in his mind and spilled them onto the plastic tablet, letting his memories of the richness of the rainforest, the cold rain and the warm sun, carry him back there.

He let Kerra load the program onto the playback machines, but asked her to leave as he played it back. Nervously he sat in the new playback theater the company had set up, and finally brought himself to press the control for the projector.

It pushed it all back to him: more than he could bear, doubled like the first playback of his other poem. It pressed everything about that vacation so heavily in his mind now, he couldn't stand the weight of it bearing down on him, images ripping through his memories: the cedars, the streams, the ravens, the eagles, the rotted nurselogs bursting with the new life of saplings and huckleberries and bracken, everything shoving through the mat of dead leaves into the light, Kerra's skin in that honeyed light. What had seemed tentative and foolish and beautiful now felt like thunder tearing into his senses. Nausea flooded him and he fumbled to pause the machine. He sat in the silence until he recovered, then tried again. Now the memories that the player tried to reach weren't there. There was nothing there to react to the player's information.

He called Kerra back to the room.

She sat through playback enraptured, while he watched the play of her reactions to the poem cross her face.

As it ended, she smiled. "Devlin, you managed to catch everything about that week! It's marvelous!" She stared puzzled at the raw loneliness on his face. "Let's play it back one more time. Just once. Listen now."

Nothing. A familiar void emptied the place in his memories where the joy and connection he had found in the rainforest had grown.

"Kerra, the other writers, do they go through this?"

"No, of course not, none of them. Well, there was that one guy who gave us that stupendous love poem. He broke up with his girlfriend, then blamed us, but he was just a kook."

"Are you sure? What if what's happening to me happened to him, too?"

Kerra frowned, then said softly, "Lack of confidence in his own work?"

"Kerra, I'm not a foolish old man. Playback burns it all out. I write from my memory, from what my senses and emotional reactions have told me about the world. I don't write pretty fictions. I'll bet that young man was in love with his girlfriend until playback."

"Devlin, it's just life. Relationships change, especially that young intensity. I remember that madness, don't you?" Kerra teased.

He couldn't help but grin. At the beginning of their relationship they had both been mad for each other. As they had been during that trip to the rainforest, hadn't they been?

Kerra didn't notice how his smile turned to confusion. She wrapped her arms around him. "You're not jealous of all the time I'm spending refining the machine, are you?"

He patted her back and stepped away. "Of course I'm not. I do miss the time we used to have together, but I know that this development stage will over soon enough. I'm happy for you; it's just that playback -- of my own poems are least -- well, it's as though it rips the experience from me or overwrites it with scar tissue my mind can't read. It does something to me. Now I can't even get the poems to mean anything to me on paper. It burns the experience out or something. Pulls chunks of my life out."

"Devlin, you're overwrought from writing and teaching and trying to help with the project. You need some rest. I'll come home early tonight and we can have a quiet evening together. We'll talk then." She squeezed his hand. With a breath of air from the carpeted door she was gone. She didn't come home until two in the morning, and Devlin was lying in the dark bedroom, waiting. He watched as she undressed in the light from the adjoining bathroom. Her face was tired and blank. She didn't remember her promise to come home early. She didn't seem to be thinking about him at all. She barely even looked at his side of the bed. As she slid into her nightshirt he recalled the light on her skin in the forest. And felt nothing.

"An enhanced form of verbal stimulation of memory: words, sound, and imagery charged with neural stimulators to open the listener's mind to emotional and sensory memory. A hyperreality no longer virtual, but the audience's own response to the world filtered through the work of talented contemporary and classical artists of the language...." He looked at the flyer for Kerra's trade demonstration in disgust. Pompously poetic techtalk. He'd been invited, the author of Exhibit A, but he wouldn't be there. They had plenty of other writers to bring.

He watched Kerra fold a silk blouse into her suitcase. She'd seemed so distant since his last attempt at writing into her machine had failed.

"You're sure you won't at least come to California with me? You could rent a car and hang out at the beach." Despite her words she was still remote. He shook his head. "Too much grading to do. It's the end of the quarter." "Bring it."

He just looked at her. "And I think Bill at Stone Hammer Press might be interested in doing my next book. I want to get the manuscript ready." "The player is ready to hit the world and you're working on a book? You've got a poem that will have an audience of millions, and you're still thinking of books with press runs of 500?"

"It's all I've got. Every time I write, I lose. I write for your players and I lose. I write for print and I hardly need to bother for all the world cares, and if I don't write I lose myself."

"I'm sorry you're being such a dog in the manger about this, Dev. I just don't understand you. There will be a huge audience for your work on the machines. All the New York publishers are scheduling recording sessions for their new releases. And you've said how futile the whole small press game seems. This is so much more real."

He tossed the flyer on top of the suitcase. "Kerra, have you tried it yourself?"

"Tried what?" she asked.

"Recording yourself, something you've written. Or written something right into the machine."

Kerra looked disconcerted. "Well, of course in early test runs when I didn't have any assistants I had to do it all myself, and I read fiction and poetry in. But I'm no writer, and I didn't even try writing on the machine until after you wrote the rainforest poem. Then I wanted to write something for you, to thank you for that poem, but I realized I can't focus my emotions and images the way you've trained yourself to. The playback simply wasn't any good. Not effective at all."

"Wasn't any good, or playback destroyed something? The first time you played it did you think it had worked?"

"I -- I did think so, but it was such a mess, and then it didn't. Really. It was as though I hadn't written anything. The words were meaningless."

"That's what I'm telling you, Kerra. That's what happened to me. It does work but it works too powerfully, so I could hardly bear to experience playback the first time. Then next time, nothing, no effect at all, and worse yet, the parts of my life that I put into the poems is gone entirely."

Kerra's phone buzzed twice. "My taxi's here, Devlin."

"Kerra, do you believe me?"

"I don't know, Devlin, I'm trying to think, and I've got my presentations tomorrow..."

"That piece you tried to write that didn't work, Kerra, what was it about?" She closed and zipped the suitcase, then threw her bag and briefcase over her shoulder. She wouldn't look at him.

"Kerra?"

She paused at the doorway, reluctant. "It was about you. Us."

He fumbled with Kerra's keys to let himself into the lab, then fumbled with everything, from the light switch to the multitude of recording controls. It was hard enough to make sure everything was up and running, the settings the machines were left at would have to do.

He settled himself at the desk and chair, fussing with the sensor array. He tried to remember if there was anything special about the way Kerra had put it on him before.

As he picked up the pen and fiddled with the placement of the tablet, he looked down at his hands. They looked flabby and pale. He looked quickly away, staring at the blank wall until images began to tumble into his mind, then the words and sounds to shape them.

At first he sifted each word, sculpting each phrase, building lines like soldiers against the white field, polishing stanzas into armies. But then the words flowed in a blind torrent, and he shook cramp from his hand again and again. He had to start from the beginning of the world and work through it all, every detail, write all he could think of down and the words spilled over the tablet as fast as his hand could move. He didn't worry about craft, just the river of sentences line by line, the rhythm of each phrase pouring into the next.

Even when he paused to rake his fingers through his hair it was only an instant before he had his pen to the tablet again, the spate unchecked.

He wrote about the humor of Chaucer's blunt rhythms and Shakespeare's wily mind, the bravado of the Romantics and the literalness of the classicists, the freedom of set forms and the restrictions of free verse. He wrote about the rhythms of writers who loved sound above all, those who loved the game of words, those who loved to tangle thought into meaning, and those who loved them all. How a poem could mean one thing one day, and the next be about five other things. How a poem could both make a world and destroy it. About how it could make meaning to shred it. He wrote about how as a young man he had thought poetry could save the world, and how when he was older he thought it could save nothing, or that maybe it already had saved the world so long ago the world had forgotten it. He wrote about how much he loved the awkward shapes of black type on paper, the thrill of his published work and his disappointment when it seemed only few people wanted or were able to read his work. How that world seemed worn and useless now, but how poetry still lived in his head. He wrote about the times when the words tumbled from him as they did now, and the times when he seemed to have to create each word from scratch. He wrote out everything he loved about sound, about the rhythms of vowels and consonants, about the play of image and idea, about the difficult clutching in air to find the one right word with the one right sound. And how that mattered to him, how it created him and how it tore him apart. How he didn't want to live without this music in his head, but how when he wrote it kept him so aware of every blade of grass and shaft of light, of his every emotion that it flayed him.

He wrote until his hand cramped so badly the pain threw the last words right out of his head. Sweet blankness. He lifted the sensors from his head, then paged through the scrawl on the tablet. He hoped everything was there because now he was an old man, and spent.

Thoughtfully, he put the sensors on again, adding a few short words about that. Then he headed out to the tech room to play it back -- then to play it back again.

 
 

Originally published in Odyssey.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.