The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (13 page)

The DropToday agency specialized in the hunt for the new Grail, the greasy golden
seal’s head that had begun to think for humans. There was a lead to follow: the
spectacular melodrama of Gravity, who was wandering through the deserts of the world
after leaving the Pope at the altar, dressed as a bride, holding a suppository.
Gravity himself was impossible to follow, but his movements could be calculated
using geographical logarithms. He also left a trail of slime. Laboratory tests
revealed that this slime was principally composed of an organic substance, newtonia,
whose cells could expand in response to sexual desire. The expansion was practically
unlimited and the discovery of the cell membrane’s flexibility and strength
revolutionized the textile industry. From then on, the substance was used to make
shirts for basketball players, who kept getting bigger and taller.

Sparky, the funny drop, became a humorist. He strung together a bunch of old jokes
and got up every night in a bar in Baden Baden adjoining the casino to run through
his routine. He was slotted in between a pair of sopranos and the Sensitive Steel
Robot, and the master of ceremonies presented him as “the funniest drop in the
world.” The jokes were terrible, but the comic effect was produced by the contrast
between his diminutive size and his stentorian voice, between his helpless condition
as a drop, easily squashed by a fingertip, and the way he fancied himself as a Don
Juan, eyeing off the fat ladies of the
nomenklatura
, who had come to the
spa town to blow the rubles that their husbands had squeezed from the udder of
Soviet corruption. Even before he opened his mouth, his look assured him of a
certain indulgence: the top hat, the close-fitting dinner suit, the monocle, the
cane, all adapted to his spherical form, without arms or legs. Quite a few members
of the audience would gladly have bought a reproduction, to take home as a
souvenir.

The season at the casino lasted three months. The rest of the year Sparky hibernated
in a log cabin in the middle of a forest, leading the life of a hermit, without
servants or neighbors. Like so many humorists, he was a melancholic and a
misanthrope. The telling of jokes exhausted his humor and left him feeling bitter
and empty. He would have liked to call himself Sparky, the Drop of Gall. He used the
same jokes year after year, as if to see how long they’d go on getting a laugh,
although they were tattered and shabby, falling apart from the wear. They appeared
before his eyes at night, trying to scare him, floating over his canopied bed. And
when they realized it was no use, they slipped away to the wasteland, sighing.

Melodious voice, voice of the woods.

Evenings of classic beauty in Buddhist lands. Men and women walking through poor
neighborhoods carrying little silver pitchers full of water. Everlasting poverty
resisted all the interventions of the permanently new. The only permanent thing was
everlasting dailiness. And yet . . . suddenly everyone looked up into the sky. And
in the sky there was a drop, the drop that decided to make itself visible. It was
red, pink, greenish, saffron, orange, turquoise, slightly phosphorescent, velvety,
tense, and it had a dimple. It was full of itself but hollow, empty, a little hole
in the air. It descended slowly, reaching ground level before night fell. The
impoverished Buddhists tried to grab it. In its fluid form, it served as a hinge
between the public and the private. The existence of the poverty-stricken Asian
masses had become a public issue, a social problem, to be measured statistically;
privacy and secrets were limited to the lives of the rich. The silver pitchers,
purchased with slowly accumulated savings and cherished as personal or family
treasures, prefigured the public-private nexus. The drop made them anachronistic. In
the end, no one dared touch the drop, and a delightful park sprang up around it,
which by virtue of its sacred status served as a sanctuary for the little foxes that
would otherwise have become extinct.

But the forest kept invading the Buddhist lands. And with the forest came snakes,
which ventured into the villages and drank the goats’ milk and the blood of the
children. They coiled around the bare legs of the lotus worshippers and tripped them
up. There was a historical solution to this legendary misadventure: as soon as the
poor gave up carrying those pitchers, they had both hands free and were able to do
battle with the slippery snakes.

The drop, enthroned at the center of the fox park, was named God Prospero
Brilliantine. He didn’t move or speak or gesture. But all thoughts converged on him.
The anthropologists of tea studied his social effects and his composition. Was he
made of gel? Cerebral matter? Nougat? They couldn’t tell. From the smell, they
thought he might be a lunar particle. They gave up on the effects, because they were
always indirect, too indirect. The poor folk established a tradition of making silk
caps for the foxes; each family had its particular color and pattern. As with the
pitchers, they spared no expense, saving up to buy the best silks, even if it meant
going hungry. The anthropologists were puzzled. They felt they were touching on the
secret of poverty, but from a distance, by remote control.

A drop settled in a foggy country. He lived in a three-story, French-style house, an
incongruous, stately edifice, built on top of a cliff. He withdrew to his study on
the third floor, set up a camera with a telephoto lens on his desk, and, dressed in
a tartan bathrobe, smoking three pipes as he watched the churning of the waves,
managed his companies and investments all over the globe. None of his many employees
in the world’s great capitals ever suspected that the mastermind behind the
operation was a drop. They knew he was eccentric and suspected that he was a
misanthrope, perhaps even slightly mad. He had adopted a communication system based
on images, which were decoded by computers. It was exceedingly inefficient: tens of
thousand of images were required to translate a single word (and even so there was
often confusion). The method could be justified as a security measure, given the
confidential nature of his messages, but that was just an excuse; its real purpose
was to cover up the supremely implausible fact that the great financier was a drop
of Renaissance paint.

Not all the drops adopted such capricious ways of life, or were engaged in such
memorable adventures and discoveries. Most of them, in fact, adapted to the usual
ways of getting by: the skeptical conformism of the majority, the minor pleasures of
home and work, a comfortable enough routine. They had the same dreams as everyone
else; their opinions belonged to the common stock. And when they had to vote (since
democracy was spreading around the world), they wondered, as we all do, about the
ultimate meaning of life.

All the drops were the
Mona Lisa
, and none of them were. The submarine
goddess of the Louvre no longer existed, in the Louvre or anywhere else, although
millions of memory membranes preserved her reflection for a human race without
illusions, but not without images. Déjà vu sprang from the heart of every being,
smoke without fire, flower without fruit. There are no two people in the world (this
calculation has been confirmed) separated by more than six common acquaintances.
Both the living and the dead can serve as links. And the law of social entropy
always ends up shortening the chain. The general, irreversible tendency is toward
recognition. Demographic explosions are really implosions. The time will come when a
single man, Anti-Adam, will run into himself and see that the two of him are exactly
the same, like peas in a pod or two drops of water, or, rather, like a single
drop.

One drop settled in Argentina, the land of representation. He took the very Argentine
name Nélido and set about finding a girl to marry. A few hours would have been
enough for anybody else. But he was shy, awkward, and conversationally handicapped.
He tried for years, without any success. He seemed to be under a curse, or to be
dogged by bad luck, but not even he could pretend not to know that luck, good or
bad, was a thing of the past. He never turned down an invitation to a party or a
gathering, went dancing, took yoga and painting classes, participated in
demonstrations and marches, searching desperately, almost like a dog with his tongue
hanging out. He knew that opportunities had to be seized as they arose, that it
could all depend on an instant, so he sharpened his attention, cultivated his
spontaneity, practiced his charm. It’s not that he wasn’t sincere; on the contrary.
He wanted, he needed to find a soul mate, and at the end of each day that had passed
without breaking the divine porcelain of his solitude, he could feel the bitterness
of failure shriveling his tiny droplet’s soul.

He even thought about turning queer. After all, a partner is a partner, love is love,
and maybe it wouldn’t be so noticeable in a drop. But he soon put the idea aside,
not because of any moral or aesthetic scruples, but simply because it would have
been more difficult. And anyway, he didn’t want to do anything unusual; he wanted to
have a wife to hug and kiss and cuddle on cold winter nights like everyone else . .
. You can’t get more normal than that. It’s the original urge of every living being,
the motor of eternity that powers the car of time.

Perhaps that was the problem: he didn’t have mortality to spur him on. After all, in
his franker moments, he had to admit that there was a difference between a drop of
oil paint and a young man, from a woman’s point of view, at least. This was brought
home to him every day, not only in his fruitless quest, but also in his work. And it
was a mistake to think of those two aspects of his life as separate; he had read in
a magazine that eighty percent of relationships begin in the workplace. He had a job
in a factory that manufactured cardboard boxes, but there was no chance of starting
a relationship there because he worked all on his own in the little printing unit,
and anyway there were no women workers. (They had hired him to roll his tiny round
body over the spring-loaded stamp that printed the words “
MADE IN
ARGENTINA
” on the cardboard.) So the only possibility was at his other
job, selling candy and cigarettes in a kiosk (he started at four after leaving the
factory and worked till ten p.m.). Opportunities might have arisen there, and they
did, but they weren’t the right kind. Customers approach a kiosk from one side or
the other, and they see the vendor at the last minute, suddenly, without any time to
adjust. They’ve come to buy something completely banal like a chocolate bar or a
pack of cigarettes, so they’re not expecting anything beyond the kind of everyday
interaction that people generally have with their fellow human beings. Encountering
a colored drop a millimeter in diameter instead of a familiar human form, they were
unpleasantly surprised. It was hard to establish, or maintain, any kind of rapport.
As for the regulars, they simply stopped noticing him and conducted the transaction
in an automatic, absent sort of way.

Eventually, Nélido came to believe that the disease contained its own remedy. A
fairly obvious thought occurred to him. If he wasn’t a man, if he was a drop, and a
drop from the world’s most famous artwork, he wasn’t constrained by human laws, so
he could do anything. In a picture, a drop of paint is powerless, entirely dependent
on the matter surrounding it, the artist’s intentions, the effect, and a thousand
other things. But once the drop has become independent, and ventured into the world
to discover the strange taste of freedom, everything changes.

And yet it hadn’t worked like that. Nothing had changed. How odd. Perhaps because the
laws that apply to beings of any kind, from the most complex organism down to the
atom, come into effect universally as soon as one crosses the threshold of reality.
The fantastic drop’s reality was the same as that of a human being.

This insight, which had emerged from the experience of a humble Argentine cigarette
vendor, was confirmed at the cosmic level as well. There were drops that crossed the
last frontier and left the planet behind. They realized that they had been going
round and round the world of humans by force of habit, simply because it hadn’t
occurred to them to try the measureless expanses of the universe. One drop set off,
then others followed. It wasn’t hard at all for them. They didn’t need to breathe,
and they weren’t affected by radiation or adverse conditions in the ether. At most
they softened a bit in the proximity of suns and hardened when the temperature
plummeted below zero. Distances were not a problem. They could cover three hundred
thousand light years in a second, thanks to the partitioning of time that had
occurred when they dispersed. So the galaxies saw them go whizzing past. Beneath the
red skies of those dusks in the void, the drops took charge of organizing matter,
leaving the atoms and particles gaping in surprise.

No one was bored in the cosmos. It was as if fierce races were being run in those
vacant abysses: luminous, mechanically complex racing cars running on endless
circuits. Darkness opened behind screens made of light painted on nothingness, a
light without shadows but not without figures. And from a single point of darkness
on the screens, new universes opened out, becoming The Universe. Roaring curves, the
beams of the headlights sweeping through titanic basement spaces, nebulae for
barriers.

Two drops met at one of those inconceivable intersections of parallel lines. On a
distant planet, in a sphere of gas, in the midst of a density festival, a drop cast
its shadow on a ground of rocky atoms. Because of the drop’s perfectly spherical
shape, its shadow was always the same, wherever the suns and moons happened to be.
Another drop was approaching from the opposite direction in a rocket. They
communicated via microphones. The shadow of the spacecraft expanded and contracted
like bellows. The sky remained black, with ringlets of helium.