Read Two-Part Inventions for Free Online Page A

right?”
    â€œYes, I think so,” she said.
    He made coffee, and when she asked about the technical apparatus, he was happy to show her how it worked, the elaborate board with its lights and switches and buttons, the undulating colored waves on the screen. She’d never shown any curiosity about it before, the few times she’d visited. Now she looked and nodded as if she were taking it all in, though he doubted she was following his explanations. She was trying to please him, doing it all for him. Well, she’d see. He’d put together something spectacular and make sure it got to the right places, and next time she’d be doing it for herself.
    But when they began again he could tell she was too tired. She was straining against the music, concentrating too hard, and it showed. He suggested they try again tomorrow. No, wait, not tomorrow, he was booked all day. In a couple of days. Again she agreed, but frowning, clearly disappointed in herself.
    â€œThis is taking so much of your time,” she said.
    â€œWhat are you talking about? There’s nothing I’d rather do. Anyway, you wouldn’t believe how many times people have to come back.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œReally.” That was not entirely true. People did have to come back, yes. But they usually lasted longer than this. All day, sometimes.
    He and Suzanne had a late lunch at the café around the corner, and then she headed home. When she returned three days later, it was the same. She played well—wonderfully—on
and off for nearly two hours. They did a few brief repeats, and that was all she could manage. “Don’t worry,” Phil assured her. “What we’ve got here is fine. Maybe one more session, and that’ll wrap it up.”
    If he asked her to keep returning, she’d be worn-out and, worse, she’d lose confidence. That was the last thing he wanted. Especially as she had nurtured her ambitions for so long, long before he met her in high school. As far back as when she was a small child, she’d told him. No, he’d work with whatever he had, Philip decided. Anything that didn’t pass muster, well, he’d have to find a way to fix it. He’d fixed Kosinski’s well enough, hadn’t he?

Part 1

 
    I N HER EARLY years—alarmingly early, it would strike her later on, six, maybe five?—she was troubled by the notion that she might not be real. Everyone around her appeared to be real, her parents, her twin brothers, the children and teachers at school. Everything she touched was real. But she herself, just possibly, was not. She couldn’t see herself moving through the world as she saw others. The mirror didn’t count. The mirror was a tricky piece of furniture or a toy like a jackin-the-box: There you are, move aside and there you aren’t.
    How could you be sure you weren’t just a mind dreaming moment to moment, a mind dreaming up a mind? If she put her head on the pillow, it made a dent. When she dug her fingernails into the soft skin just above her wrist, white marks appeared, then vanished. If she ate a slice of bread, it was no longer on the plate but inside her. So there must be a “her” that could accommodate a slice of bread. She had an effect on the material objects of the world. But was that enough to make you real? What was “real”? What was “you,” for that matter?
    Real did not mean the ability to alter, or even ingest, objects in the physical world, which might itself be a dream. Her own dream. Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being
seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren’t in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You needed other people in order to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might be just a speck, an