"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

THREE

I was on a plane to L.A. five days later as soon as McNair was well enough to see me, and I was well enough to fly. The two dates fortunately coincided.
There wasn't much else that was lucky in this mess.
I was a total blank on the conversation that Jenna was sure I had had with McNair.
He said when I had finally reached him by phone that he more or less remembered it, but his bout with the flu had left him a bit fuzzy on just about everything he had done (he few days before. Not an outright memory loss like Jenna's and Claudia's and mine. Just your garden-variety blurry memory that lots of folks have when they're sick or getting that way. Stuffed heads and watery eyes were never conducive to clear recollections. But given the endangered species that memories seemed to be these days, any loss was notable, especially one which might hold a clue to the cause of the bigger losses.
The plane arrived twenty minutes early, amazingly. I had the cabbie drop me off a flew blocks from McNair's home on Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of the UCLA campus. I used the found time to take in the scenery around here a walk down the block was like going to the New York Botanical Gardens. I spotted a large, tropical insect feeding on an orange flower. I looked more closely at the vibrating form, suspended in breath-taking air just beyond the petals. It was actually a tiny hummingbird, splendid in blues and greens. I had never seen one before like this in the real world, outside of an aviary....
Even the sign SUNSET BOULEVARD had a magic. Gloria Swanson, Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Erich von Stroheim... What was that line? "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!"
I knocked on McNair's door.
An attractive blonde, clad in loose canvas shorts and halter top, let me in with a big smile. "Phil D'Amato? I'm Rhonda, Robbie's wife he's in the sunroom." She looked to be in her late twenties, about twenty years younger than McNair. She led me to the sunroom.
It was sunny indeed, bedecked with palms of varying size and foliage. McNair was reclining in a chair. He made to get up when I entered the room.
"No, please, sit," I said, and gestured for him to stay in the chair. "Thanks for letting me come see you." He didn't look very good worse than I'd expected. He was still pretty sick.
He coughed and braved a smile. "It seems we have some common interests," he said.
Rhonda pointed me to a wicker chair with pillows. "Can I get you something to drink, Phil?"
"Uh, sure, thanks orange juice."
"You bet," she said, and left.
I turned to McNair. "So I see you're still struggling with the bug I can come back tomorrow."
"I think it's finally leveling off five lousy days," he responded. "I look worse than I feel."
"What are you taking for it?" I asked.
"Not much," he replied. "Just a lot of vitamin C, zinc candy, garlic I like the natural stuff."
"Nice if it works," I said. At least he didn't seem any worse than I'd been if anything, a little better.
"So, you got your Department to fly you out here," he asked, and cleared his throat. "Easier prying funds from police departments than university departments, I'd imagine." He laughed, coughed, and drank from a tall glass of iced tea. Condensation ran down its sides.
"The city doesn't want to get bit in the ass by some mystery epidemic," I said. "The scares we've had the past few years are enough."
McNair nodded, and sipped more tea.
I looked at him. "My problem is I don't quite know where to begin," I said. "Possibly you told me something important in that phone conversation that I can't remember."
McNair returned the gaze.
Rhonda came in with my orange juice. "Here you are, Phil."
"Thanks." I sipped. It was delicious.
She put her arm around McNair and kissed his cheek. They made a striking couple, sun and night.
"I guess I remember most of that conversation," McNair said. "It was mostly about the alphabet."
"Yes?" I encouraged.
Rhonda kissed him again, gave me a smile, and left the room.
"About its history, its origins," McNair continued.
"Why would I think that was important?"
"Ah, that's easy. Because most people think the alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians as a memory aid a shorthand, slang improvement over hieroglyphics, to keep track of their maritime transactions."
"We're going a little too fast for me here I don't get what you mean by slang hieroglyphics." I loved the way this guy talked and thought. It was almost poetry. But it was hard to pin down the meaning.
"Oh, sorry," McNair said, and took some more tea. "That's basic to media historians and anthropologists. The Egyptian hieroglyphic system ruled the world of writing then, you see. But it was a difficult system to learn and use you had to master a separate little picture, or combination of pictures and little strokes, for every word you wished to write."
"Like Chinese writing today?"
"Precisely," McNair replied. "But the alphabet is much faster, slicker, cooler twenty-six letters that look like nothing in themselves, and therefore you can make them mean anything you want them to. All you have to do is recombine them like DNA, right? Looks nothing like the organisms it commands proteins into being. That's one of your specialties, isn't it?"
I smiled. "Usually for me it's DNA tagging death, not life."
McNair continued. "Anyway, the smart money says that the Phoenicians cooked it up invented the alphabet as a quick way of keeping track of all of their commercial wheelings and dealings."
"Fascinating," I said, though I still couldn't quite see what relevance it had to our current problem of memory loss. "How far did they, ah, wheel and deal? Did they encounter an illness somewhere which weakened their memory, and that's why they invented the alphabet?"
"Good question," McNair replied. "You asked me that on the phone last week. 'I don't know about that,' was my answer. I mean, I don't know if the Phoenicians suffered any plagues. I can look into that. But how far did they roam in their ships, buying and selling and trading? Well, the Mediterranean was their lake. And they traded for tin as far north as England. Some people think they even made it across the Atlantic, to the East Coast."
Rhonda entered again, with an apology. "Sorry to interrupt," she said. She turned to McNair. "Samantha's here with her master's thesis she said you told her that you wanted to see her for a minute when she got here."
McNair nodded.
Rhonda turned to me. "He always makes a point of personally accepting his students' theses," she explained. "Samantha's one of his best students."
McNair started getting up, and I helped him.
"See? I told you I was better than I looked," he said to me, and walked out of the room. He was a bit wobbly but in no danger of falling, with Rhonda holding his arm.
I shook my head in admiration. Always good to meet another stubborn soul.
I looked at the near wall and two bookcases of handsome oak, chock-full of great titles.