5.
 That's where Meudon shook his head sadly and bailed out on me, in total surrender to Lemma A. He had hoped for a while that, even if the tape were retaped, the essential imprint of Petra might remain. Several tapings would reduce the quality of the imprinting, he said, until eventually nothing of her would be left.
He tried to console me by saying that perhaps the process would not have worked at all anyway.
Meudon became wealthy on an unrelated cosmetic underlayment for women's face makeup. He teamed up with Kim, of all the erratic and amoral, nonjudgmental strokes of cosmic fate in a neutral universe. Meudon married a beautiful young Arab woman, who was six months pregnant when he crashed the car, drunkenly and driving 80 miles an hour, on a back road en route to a glamorous Hollywood party celebrating his and Kim's IPO.
I have spent my life and my last penny on carrying on a long search. I never did marry. No woman would stay with me, because of my obsession.
Before he defected, Meudon and I brought tape after tape to the hospital and tried to reconstitute the living Petra—but none of the tapes we acquired seemed to have her on it. She might, Meudon explained, have jumped onto another tape in some subconscious struggle for survival. Her essence might have whisked away through miles of humming wire, into some other machine, perhaps for a few moments blanking out a local radio program somewhere in Dubuque or Honolulu with "Theme from a Summer Place" before my Petra was lost forever.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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