But Less Human
Excerpt from The Comb, a novel (Coming late 2014)
I walked by the wall. But it wasn’t a wall. It was an enormous image of Zane.
As the beginning and the end of everything.
The Chairman, it said, and under it in scripted letters, S.C.X.
It stood stories high. The image just happened to be using a wall. A wall in London right near the Eye, the big wheel in the center of all of the big wheel cities.
There were thirty now.
The image was projected and could be altered or discolored, or disappear in less than seconds, to morph into another. Maybe it would be another image of Zane. Maybe something else. Something made of pixels that had been tested and deemed effective.
For making us all think something, while believing wholeheartedly that we’d thought it up on our own. For making us desire things, and for distracting us from what was irresolvable.
What could not be fixed. Or moved.
We all had things that were unfixable. We just chose to put them away. To pretend we didn’t know they were there. To let life feel easier that way.
I remembered back to when Zane was resentful of Arthur. Walking home with me and shaking his head, as if plotting to take some of Arthur’s sudden explosive glory. The undeserved celebrity of shortish and funny-haired Arthur, who had been somehow redrawn from an almost handsome nerd into a political sex symbol, the inspiration of every man who had ever worn thick glasses and muttered important thoughts while walking in a raincoat, looking down. All too aware of every crack in the sidewalk. His shoes and hair looking a bit too large for his little body.
That was his charm, I thought. Even in his most polished moments, Arthur never looked perfect. He often looked slightly guilty and disturbed by an impending attack of moral conscience, his strong jaw tightening in a way which changed his smile and made it look forced. It jutted his front teeth out, and made him look momentarily like a frightened dog.
But he looked human, and back then, that was important.
Zane thought himself far better looking than Arthur.
“But less human?” I joked with him once, and I was a bit frightened by the response.
Zane didn’t think I was kidding. As if he was actually of a different kind. For real.
I forgot about it for while, but as I stood at the wall, I remembered it now.
Zane would argue to me, in a sort of monologue that I could tell he had with himself when I wasn’t there, that he was more ready for such a transformation. More fit for star status and fame than others.
He’d always sort of glared at Arthur. I remembered the glare. He looked younger when he did it.
Ambitious, impatient. Like Shakespeare drew his villains, when they were still deciding to be villains but hadn’t quite crossed the line yet.
Zane looked a bit less young now. In his image.
He’s the Chairman, I reminded myself. The image had a purpose.
Arthur had never had this sort of status. I don’t think he’d even dreamed of it or wanted it.
It was not something that had existed back then. Arthur’s pictures in magazines and on screen inspired dreams and entertainment. The fairytale lives of others, so close yet so far away.
This was something different.
I’d pictured Zane’s dreams of fame, back then.
Of course he’d look like a superhero, I thought. Skinny legs in blue tights. A hero Invisible. Or Flying.
Untouchable and unspoiled. Deciding alone, without separate opinions to cloud his vision. UberZane, who gave advice and never needed it himself. I pictured him flying, and couldn’t picture him flying slowly.
Acceleration, I thought. A Perpetual Velocity. That would be his superpower. Everything fast. Everything intense, and then everything being fixed in the absolutely rightest way.
I used to wonder if he would smile in his superhero pictures. Like Arthur had sometimes. I recall the images. Arthur and the TV stars, Arthur and a model. Arthur at the Academy Awards.
The time when we all went, and I planned a private little party at the Argyle Hotel, where by 3am we were arguing about each of our visions for technology and God.
Arthur was serious with the President, but he smiled when he was away from her.
He could. Arthur had beautiful teeth. Both naturally and through constant care.
Zane grew up in places without fluoridated water and his teeth had never been perfect. So he closed his mouth all of the time and usually ended up looking snotty and self-important.
Earlier on, he would ask me sometimes. “Do my teeth looked ugly?” And I always said no.
“You aren’t a singer. It doesn’t matter,” I’d say.
Well they weren’t like Arthur’s teeth, but it really wasn’t something I worried about. Zane was not a smiler, I told myself, except when he didn’t plan it and then it was cute and the imperfect teeth were part of that.
I couldn’t really imagine Zane at the Academy Awards. I wasn’t sure that he’d know what to talk about.
Zane was spontaneous, I told myself, remembering more than a few moments that only he and I knew of.
But not in an Academy Awards way. It would be a different sort of spontaneity. One that he wouldn’t be comfortable with.
The image on the wall was not one with teeth. In fact, it barely showed lips. It was hard and angled and his eyes stared at me. With assumed omniscience, but without recognition. With a sense of assurance and command, but unspecifically. As if they were looking at me but also over my head.
That’s the funny thing about these huge wall images. They haven’t yet mastered how to make the eyes recognize you.
I know they can do that. But this one wasn’t yet converted to recognize me, as me.
Or so I thought.
And so I was looking at Zane, as an image, and I felt myself listening to his thoughts. What they might be, even though years had passed since I’d been able to read his mind.
I enjoyed this thought. I could see him. But he couldn’t see me. It was backwards, in a way, from what it all looked like.
Zane looked serious, and burdened. One carrying everything, stern and resigned, bearing all rationality itself as his duty and vocation.
The volatility I knew was there and appeared only when skillfully or accidentally provoked had been sublimated into the face, held as a source of power inside it, to be tapped as necessary.
Now only at his sole discretion. Not mine.
“There will be no more accidents,” I thought to myself, hearing Zane’s voice in my head.
I walked up towards the image, almost up to the point where his face turned to dots.
A woman stood behind me, and gestured at the image. I saw the outline of her reflection as a pale shadow on the wall.
A child was next to her.
I heard her say it. The woman to the child.
“Unbreakable.”
I turned to look at them, then regretted that I had.
The woman’s gaze met mine. I could tell that she expected me to nod. To agree with what she had said. To have the child see that.
But it wasn’t true, I thought, and the child should know that.
The man in the image was only human.
Not unbreakable.
But what would happen if the child knew?
I looked at the woman, and then at the child.
The child had been wearing an olive green knit hat, which was now off, and in her left hand, removed in reverence, maybe. Revealing that she was, under her bundles, a girl.
Human.
The image itself was all she knew.
It had no such limits.
I smiled, and nodded.
The woman looked pleased. The child smiled back at me. She stood up a bit straighter.
Then we turned to the image. I walked back just far away enough so that the pixels smoothed into a face.
A face which seemed to have adjusted slightly, as if it had seen the little girl’s new confidence, and was pleased.
