“You see the problem,” he said. “You’ve followed the cult of originality since autographed toilets? The straitjacketing Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint? The original razor blade and follow-up hot bath?” I didn’t catch his references, but he seemed to mean that we’d reached a moment in our visual lives when innovation was itself derivative. All that was left of the painted portal sat in galleries in Soho, intelligible only with the aid of program notes. “A fellow is left with few stylistic alternatives aside from ‘Divest now.’”
I said nothing in defense—I hardly felt qualified. Had I words, I would never have stopped arguing that whatever a person did well, if it promoted possibility, was worth doing. Anything that added to the heft, texture, and density of the card catalog. I had no technical basis for debate except conviction, and so I only said, “But you are good.”
I meant to say something else—“adept,” or “gifted.” Even those would have been less than I meant. Todd knew what I was after. But a look came across his eyes, and he refused to forgo the chance to savor another slippage. “I don’t see what my moral conduct has to do with anything.”
To find a person both fine and infuriating, and inside of minutes: I’ll never feel that again. Such a spread, in one evening. It throws me even now, long after he has—hardly originally, but with excellent draftsmanship—divested.
QUICK SKETCH
Those few days before official winter were our walking tour of the known world. We walked everywhere, at any hour. I was free in the city in a way I’d never been before. When we cut our walking to a third our normal speed, the particulars of neighborhood took on specific mass. I tried the experiment again this evening: walked a block as slowly as I could without attracting the attention of unmarked cars. A slow walk—too slow to be going anywhere—changes the way everything around me holds itself.
I didn’t care where we were going. We were there already, under the shed sumacs, standing a fraction of an inch closer to one another than ambiguous. The game developed unspoken rules: we couldn’t say certain things at certain times. We dressed too lightly for the weather. We spent minutes looking up into the bone filigree of tree branches, whose lacework against the winter sky became brilliant as stained glass. Sometimes on those walks with Franklin, one-third teleological speed, I stopped moving altogether, needing to fix this, to find an outlet for the clarity springing up in me.
Todd still reached out at odd moments, took my hand, and shook it in both of his. He grabbed my fingers for no reason, his equivalent hopeless search for that unreachable fixative. The most he could convey of that one-word contradiction in terms was affection. He liked me; at the handshake instant, he again discovered and meant to take credit for me in our hands’ press, the slow walk still ahead of us.
We favored a playground three blocks from the warehouse. By the time Todd took his first nightly break, the terrain was a children’s Pompeii. Sometimes we tried the slide, hopelessly slowed by an autumn of tree gum. We compared old recipes for greasing. His involved sliding on squares of waxed paper, and he was on the verge of routing us to a store eight blocks away to buy some when I talked him into sense. More typically, we drifted instinctively to the swings. Expansive or expectant, however quickening the night, swinging seemed the thing. I would rock on mine, hardly kicking, dragging my feet in the gravel beneath. Franklin, male, shot for escape trajectory.
We would chatter or keep quiet—in those days they meant the same. One emblematic evening I watched Franklin pump to apogee and bail out, no doubt escaping one of those avuncular Flying Fortresses on a parachute that thighs sacrificed their stocking silks for. I calculated the parabola that had landed him between conflicts. We had a completely distorted historical view, he and I. By accident of timing, we thought this playground peace was the status quo.
Without Todd’s weight for pendulum bob, his swing dampened to a stop. He got back on and called to me, “C’mere. Show you something.” I hesitated, knowing the escalation. He motioned me into the sling, each leg over his, inside the chain. He helped my legs through, touching them with mute amazement. “For some reason shrouded in mystery,” he explained, trying casually to pretend our thighs weren’t touching, “this is called ‘Swinging Double Dutch.’”
“You think you’re teaching me something?” I challenged, pressing myself against him. “I was born knowing this.” I relaxed and straddled him, looked deep into his face. Neither had done this before. Not since it started counting. And it hadn’t counted until then, that moment of fragile pressure.
“Oh yeah? I learned how …”. He fought to remain clear-headed, articulate, but even pretense took his breath. “I learned this … how to … before you even got your first inflatable slip.”
“Right,” I said, adjusting myself just enough to shatter his equanimity. He rolled his eyes at my little flick of friction. We synchronized our kicks, swinging in tandem, slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum. I could feel my vee riding a fraction of an inch above his. At the top of each arc we would press, pretending innocence, ignorance of contact. I kicked in rhythm, climbing a sapling on each upswing, and on each swing back, the sapling me.
At that moment, I would gladly have gone down onto the freezing grass and lost my last ten years all over again. I felt myself at my coat cuffs, against underwear, inside my silk collar come within seconds of anything. Cut loose, I was closer than ever to learning who this boy was. Rocking and straining, folding against him to our pulse, I had the chance to find out.
I felt it irresistibly unfold, but was surprised by the rapidity. At our arc’s height, he kicked when he should have drawn in. A slight stiffening ran up his arms where I held them. Warm oscillation rippled across the gap to me—unforced, unconscious. A rush of conductance, animal-perfect rubato. Backwash erased all difference between us. No burst. Just sweet, spreading infusion, for one instant complete.
We went slack. Without kick-physics, the swing settled. Our pulse-pound, synchronized so briefly, fell into diffraction, dissipated in moiré. I couldn’t begin to guess what was in his heart at that moment, let alone my own. I climbed off without being asked. He said, “So they swung Double Dutch in your neighborhood, too?” He didn’t dare look at me in the dark. Every second I spent with him was, even in the absence of hard fact, another slow assembling of artist’s composite.
We turned back, the silent tactic. By the time we arrived at his machine warren, I was alone. He was attentive, arm around my shoulders. But back at the warehouse, when Dr. Ressler greeted us, a sign of collaborator’s embarrassment passed from Todd to me: I had brought him over the edge with nothing but my body’s graze through winter clothing, the rocking of a swing.
When I left, he rode the lift with me down to the street. The night ended like all its ancestors: a handshake, the only fingerprints he conceded. He was turning back to the office when I panicked. I grabbed and spun him by the elbows. He must have thought I was trying to embrace him, for he took me up, scolded me with a dismissive kiss. “So passionate as that?” He held me, resigning, admitting. His mouth near my ear, he spoke, incredulous. “Here again. At the mercy of strangers.”
THE CONSOLE LOG
By then, I came and went as I pleased. Frank gave me a copy of the front key on long-term loan. Without incriminating anyone, I stole the sequence for the computer-room lock—the four letters M-O-L-E. I used the password freely until one evening, punching myself into the inner sanctum I was met by my sheepish friends and an angry Uncle Jimmy. Given his older cousin’s crush on me, Jimmy would probably sooner have entrusted the company’s safety to me than to Todd. But he was Operations Manager, and this was a clear-cut violation of, be it ever so ludicrous at this outpost, corporate security. He demanded to know how I knew the combination.
“I peeked over somebody’s shoulder. Jimmy, it just seems silly to make them come punch me in.”
Jim’s bureaucratic bluster was undermined by recalcitrant kindness. “With the customers we have, if it
had been anyone but me in here when anyone but you came in like that unescorted, he or she’d have put her or him in jail by now.” I apologized, and Jimmy barked acceptance. He went through the apologetic motions of chewing out Dr. Ressler, the Night Manager, exacting a promise to change the combination right away.
When I showed up the following night, I buzzed for Franklin, smiling at the ridiculous return to pro forma propriety. Frank came to let me in, wearing that smirk beloved by mass murderers and the foreign service. Just as he was about to punch in the new code Dr. Ressler had set, he stepped aside. “Go ahead,” he said. “I know you’re dying to see how good you are.”
I hadn’t the first idea where to begin. Another four-letter word, reducing the possibilities to twenty-six to the fourth power: roughly half a million candidates. I had only two clues. Dr. Ressler was the designer. And Frank believed I could guess it or he would never have set up the riddle. It also helped to have him stand by humming the intervals that have run through Western music from Art of Fugue to Schönberg, with stops along the way at Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and others. Down a minor second, up a major third, down a minor second. I cupped my hand over the keyplate, guarding my guess. I punched in the four letter tune, transcribed from German notation, and the lock sprang open. Todd emitted his high-pitched trademark laugh and cuffed me admiringly. He trooped me into the computer room and paraded me before Dr. Ressler. “She’s broken security again,” he reported. “She’s unstoppable.”
“You may find the punchline to this in your notes file,” Ressler told Todd. Franklin cleared the nearest console. The screen returned with its eternally patient prompt:
Command?
Two-fingered, amateurish, Franklin typed NOTES and hit the Return key, that quintessential late-century punctuation.
NOTES RECVD: Read (y or n)? y
Note from jsteadman, @ 12/06/83, 16:14.
Take a break! This means you! Ask your woman friend out for dinner at the Rusty Scupper. That heap of bolts won’t run any faster with you watching it! Uncle Jim.
“Heartbreaking,” Franklin laughed. “The man apologizes for giving us a deserved dressing-down.”
“I received a similar one,” Dr. Ressler said.
Todd turned to me and howled. “And what do you do first thing upon returning? A shame, for women to speak in church!” He turned back to his dialogue with the CRT.
Note @ 12/06/83, 20:23 to: jsteadman
Jimmy, We’re sorry too. Even the woman friend. Her only offense is pride in ingenuity. But I think we’ve caught her in time. Love from everyone, FTODD
Note sent.
Command?
Todd looked up from his typing to the man whose opinion meant everything. “What do you suppose Uncle Jim would say if he knew you were in possession of every combination in this joint?”
Dr. Ressler shrugged painfully. “Passwords are trivial. How many words are there in English? How many in Indo-European, including all forms and proper names?”
Both men looked at me. A hopeless task, even to estimate the order of magnitude. I tried a rough, running total, falling back upon the technical reply, “Lots and lots.” Ressler’s eyes flashed; it was bliss to see him happy.
“And folks don’t restrict themselves to meaningful combinations,” Franklin objected.
“Nevertheless, passwords are trivial. One can employ the brute-force solution. Use one computer to generate all possible combinations of letters in words of given length. Then pipe the results to the computer demanding the password. Such a solution is not elegant but is as inexorable as death.”
I thought out loud. “Every possible combination? Wouldn’t writing the program be prohibitively difficult?”
Ressler smiled at my impeccable novitiate’s thinking. He liked being reminded of the old place. He shook his head and said, “I could write that program in a dozen lines.”
Todd clapped his hands. “Go to it.” Ressler scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper, then showed us his handiwork:
For first letter from A to Z
For second letter from A to Z
For third letter from A to Z
…
Word = first letter + second letter + third letter … try word
…
Next third letter
Next second letter
Next first letter
I looked at his program, feeling the rush of forgotten terrain opening. He said, “The ellipses are for longer words. In the loop, one could start with blanks instead of A’s, to include all words shorter than the number of imbedded cogs. You see …” And I did see; my first glimpse of the synthetic achievement of language. “You see that the nested loops produce words in simple combinatorial order: AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on.”
“How long would it take such a program to run?” I asked, the cumbersome coordination of loops within loops dawning on me.
“Some time. Lots and lots.”
“That’s why God invented operators,” Todd contributed.
“To speed the search, you could pipe likely lists—say our online file of the hundred and twenty thousand most common English words. That’s a gamble, however. If the word is not on the list, you’re left with no systematic way of picking up the pieces.” At that moment, I saw in the exhausted face a look so unlikely I almost missed it. Gratitude at the chance of exchange, at stumbling across a listener after years of having no audience but himself. A look full of wonder that he was being thrown back, after everything, on the shifting ambiguity of first letter plus second letter plus third. He motioned toward the console, asking Franklin, “Do you have anything running at the moment?”
“Work, you mean? What a curious idea.” Franklin turned to the keyboard. At the system prompt, he typed the command LOG.
20:36 Dumping console transactions to log. Mode brief. Begin when?
“What time did I show up tonight?” he asked Ressler, his eyes on the monitor.
“As I recall, you were here ten minutes before closing, camped over the terminal, waiting eagerly for the last remote teller to log off so that you could bring your machine down and begin the end-of-day processing.” Todd winced at the portrait and typed a time. A thermal printer embedded in the tabletop began bruising a roll of paper, producing a printout that varied only in detail from the scraps that, hopeless pack rat, I scavenged for inclusion in the capsule.
Command? EOD
18:37 Begin end of day processing. Mount Sys Pack on Spindle 1, Master Client File on Spindle 2, Client Backup on Spindle 3, and scratch on Spindle 4. Oldest cycle date tape in tape drive. Hit any key when ready?
18:43 End of day underway; backing to tape …
18:58 Backup complete. Rewind tape and unthread.
19:01 Conditioning Master File …
19:20 Master File conditioned. Merging transactions …
19:42 Transactions merged. Ledgering new trans file. Running newacct. Running purge. Running trial balance.
19:46 End of day complete.
Command? PAY
19:46 Begin Tuesday pay cycle processing. Thread payroll tape, General Ledger pack on Spindle 3. Position checks in printer. Hit any key when ready?
The latest fable from Homo fabulus. Todd whistled at the history of his evening. “Do I really live this way?”
“Check your partitions,” Ressler said.
Command? TASKCHECK
20:38 Partition 1: Payroll check ok.
Partition 2: Report Generator check ok.
No other partitions active.
“Steady as she goes. What do you have in mind?”
“Open a third partition. Give it a half a meg.”
Todd gritted his teeth and shouted, papier-mâché-set style, “I don’t know if the engines will stand it, Captain.” He tapped a few keys. “Et voilà. Bitte.”
“Now. Do a part reset.”
“Don’t know how.”
Ressler hit a key combination I missed, and the screen read:
Sys 1652 Exp Ver 4.2
partition reset
login:
Ressler typed FTODD. The screen prompted for a password. “Turn around,” Ressler said. Seconds later, he called, “Done.”
password: xxxxxxx
System Date and Time: 12/06/83 20:40.45
User ftodd logged in.
“American Satan!” Todd shouted. “You couldn’t possibly have learned that by brute force.”
“No, sir.”
“Selected list?” I suggested, and was rewarded by a warm no.
He let us savor the trick before confessing, “I have to admit to charlatanism here. I did not actually crack your password. I simply jumped to partition two, called up your record page, and blind-piped your password from the user profile to the unsuspecting partition.”
Even his charlatanism was clever. Todd was greatly amused by the piracy. “What would Uncle Jim say if he knew you could kick this machine around?”
“Now that is more dangerous to corporate security than knowing a few passwords.” He turned to me. “Your friend turns out to have an interesting password that you might be able to hit using the Short List.” Just as I was about to pump him for data, Todd shouted from his place at the keyboard. Ressler gave a yelp and lunged to prevent Todd from punching any more keystrokes. But it was too late.
Command? EDIT
20:45 Entering editor in partition #3. Files belong to user ftodd: pnotes eoderrors daybook herri
Enter name from list or new file to create: security
20:45 Opening new file: security
File creation error.
Command? EDIT
Command? WHAT GIVES?
20:46: Command string not recognized.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 37