After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this kind of landscape now?”
Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”
“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”
“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m afraid. . . .”
Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”
“I know.”
On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as Sax recalled. “Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say.
“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking— it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in Hiroko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’— and within a week everyone is convinced that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is spotted regularly.”
But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.
And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every detail vivid!
But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the details.
He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.
Well— still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.
“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something— good. See how beautiful it is— in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere. . . . It’s self-organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”