A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  Josie proved herself to be an excellent slave. Terrified of what might happen if she had nothing to show at the end of each day, she worked harder than she ever had. She had not coded in several years, but it was like riding a bike again, or speaking a native language after living for too long in another country. She started out, tried, wobbled, stuttered, wavered, was convinced she had forever forgotten how to do it. And then, within a week, it was as if time had never passed. The developer tools—many newly created in the time since she had last written code herself—were dazzling to her, thrilling. It was like attending a school reunion, meeting old acquaintances and their new spouses and children, the intervening years rendering them far more fascinating than they had ever been before. In this dungeon, the tools were the closest thing she had to friends.

  The work focused her, saving her from the wrenching despair that overtook her each night, as well as each day when the laptop failed to appear. (Was someone else using it for work? For school? She never found any other files on it, but still she wondered.) It occurred to her—it pressed on her, the possibility lowered like a weight on her gut—that there were things she could insert into the program, indicators of her presence, cries for rescue; it occurred to her that this might be her only opportunity to evade her own murder. But what could she say? Even if she could be certain that she was in the City of the Dead, the cemetery encompassed hundreds of thousands of buildings; it was a neighborhood larger than many of the world’s cities. The thought lingered in her body, gathering strength as her body healed.

  In the meantime the malware slowly, painfully slowly, took shape. Each morning when the machine arrived—after the maddening wait to discover whether today was a day with no computer, a day of emptiness—she waited impatiently to attain the mental state called flow, when writing code no longer felt artificial, but became normal, fluent, emerging like a first language, a casual conversation with an electron. Flow arrived more and more quickly, an antidote to pain. The architecture of the program was immersive, overarching, like constructing a city, suspending the earth on a void. She envisioned it as a photographic negative of Genizah, a program that eliminated memories instead of preserving them. But to see if the program worked, she would need something to erase. And so she began to build a Genizah of Tali.

  Josie and Itamar had created an elaborate electronic archive of their daughter—the kind that many parents maintained for their children, now that Josie’s software had made it nearly effortless. It was a database of tens of thousands of photographs, video clips, medical records, report cards, art projects, all the detritus of a child’s life, preserved in digital form. But that was at home, on another planet. Josie had nothing now except what she remembered—and she discovered that her own creation had hobbled her. It had been years since she had needed to remember anything: her software had turned all memory into history, stories replaced by collections of evidence. But after many nights of staring at a sarcophagus, of pounding the walls, of feeling herself slipping into oblivion, she sensed the ancient human power stirring within her. And during the days she began, in the barest of notes, to write things down, concealing each note behind a miniature electronic door.

  Tali home from the hospital, screaming nine hours a day, she wrote, and stored it behind a tiny door that turned a faint pink when the program classed it under “baby girl,” even though Tali had never been the sweet sort of baby girl who evoked the color pink. Behind a circus tent flap that labeled itself “­entertainment”—though that wasn’t quite accurate either—she stored the words Tali riding the train around the zoo, convinced at the end of the ride that she was getting off at a different zoo from the one where she’d gotten on. Josie had thought of it as a pleasant, funny memory, but now that she closed the cheerily wrinkled tent flap over it, she recalled that it wasn’t: when she had tried to explain to Tali that the zoo hadn’t changed, Tali had become hysterical, fanatically insisting that her version of the world was real. On a shelf in a virtual closet labeled “games”—the software had not yet learned her instincts—the program filed away the words Tali playing checkers with Itamar, winning, and gloating. Through an aircraft door labeled “travel,” she wrote, Tali on a flight to Israel, shouting in Hebrew at the minyan near the bulkhead that they were blocking the emergency exit. As she wrote it down, she remembered the minyan, the quorum of ten religious men praying together in the aisle of the plane, and Tali’s fierce English whisper after Josie had tried to silence her Hebrew rant. “Safety, Mommy!” Tali had screeched in her bright orange T-shirt. “They aren’t being safe!”Tali’s fervor had surprised Josie, springing as it seemed from no experience of Tali’s at all; she wondered whose arguments were braided into her daughter’s genes. Behind a white painted door on the screen that the software labeled “playtime,” Josie wrote, Tali talking to her toys when she thinks she is alone. Behind rows of smaller doors, labeled only with paltry cryptic words like “childhood” and “emotion”—how Josie felt the aching absence of photographs and videos now, the pathetic poverty of words!—the program automatically deposited more of Josie’s memories as she typed them in: Tali insisting that she will grow up to be a man. Tali insisting that she has been permanently transformed into a peacock. Tali’s face when she gets angry. Tali’s face when she falls asleep.

  As she closed each door on the screen, Josie could not deny her growing impression that the Tali in this Genizah was very different from the Tali in the archive at home. The Tali in the photographs and video clips that Josie and Itamar had preserved was adorable, bright, a delightful child who made adults smile. But this newly remembered Tali was fierce, demanding, anything but cute. To Josie’s aching dismay, she couldn’t tell which Tali was more real.

  Josie revised the software in her head again and again until it wasn’t software at all, but a pathway to dreams. She opened its doors, wandered through them, descended spiral staircases until she found herself in a subterranean garage, climbing into the driver’s seat of her own car. She glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw her daughter in the backseat, black hair hanging in ragged unbrushed ropes around her little face.

  “How do we know that dinosaurs are real?” Josie heard Tali ask. “Maybe somebody just made fake bones and put them in the ground!”

  It was a real memory, this question of Tali’s, though Josie couldn’t recall when or where it had taken place. What she did remember was that the question had occasioned a discussion about carbon dating, geologic time, the book of Genesis, and Piltdown Man, all of which weirdly captivated six-year-old Tali. Tali’s obsessive interest in whatever interested her mother was creepy, Josie had often thought, as if Tali were not an actual person but rather a projection of Josie’s own fantasies. Josie tried her best to date the memory, to recall the exact situation when Tali had asked about dinosaurs being real. She really had seen Tali in the rearview mirror, she remembered, Tali wearing her puffy orange vinyl coat—which dated the conversation to last March or earlier, because in October when Josie had left for Egypt, it hadn’t yet been cold enough for Tali to wear that coat. (That coat would hardly fit her by now, Josie realized. Had Itamar bought Tali a new coat yet? She wondered, briefly, before forcing the thought from her mind.) But perhaps Josie was only inventing these details now, to console herself. It was certainly possible, wasn’t it? As a test, she tried “remembering” the incident another way—imagining that the conversation had taken place with Tali in the bathtub, or on a playground swing.

  The playground swing was implausible; Tali had never stayed on a swing long enough to talk. But soon Josie had reconstructed the memory during Tali’s bath, and it was wonderfully vivid, better even than the apparently actual memory of the conversation in the car. The bathtub memory wasn’t merely of the conversation, but of Josie’s feeling of the conversation’s falseness: her sense that Tali was asking her precisely the questions Josie had hoped she would ask, reveling in her mother’s pedantic explanations as few people ever had before, precisely as though Tali
were nothing more than one of her mother’s dreams—which the Tali in Josie’s memory actually was. The new memory was not merely visual, but also filled with odors, with textures, with the fragile humidity in the room. In the new memory Josie was running her hand along Tali’s black-fuzzed back, rubbing soap into her slick skin. Little shoulderblades rose beneath Josie’s fingers like wings. The warm bathroom air in Josie’s nostrils was heavy with whining pediatric smells: urine, toothpaste, artificial fruit. She smoothed her palm against Tali’s spine as though she were sculpting a warm and breathing child, molding her flesh, ­fashioning her from clay. Tali’s too-loud voice echoed against the bathroom tiles:

  “How do we know that dinosaurs are real? Maybe somebody just made fake bones and put them in the ground!”

  Josie searched her mind for evidence and found none. Itamar might remember the original conversation, the real event, she thought desperately. But he hadn’t been there, and even if she had told him about it, it wasn’t the sort of thing he would remember. As the software had proliferated, he had begun remembering things best when he could verify them on a screen. Josie slowly realized that her mourning for her family was layered with a shameful mourning for her phone—for her own Genizah within it, for the chance to climb through the window of the little screen in the palm of her hand and back into all the perfectly catalogued memories of Itamar and Tali, to pass through that window into the life she had once lived—and then she wondered if her phone still existed in one of her captors’ pockets, maybe just a few feet away, the tunnel to the past concealed right behind the large locked door of her cell. Deprived of the trove of material that she had digitally preserved, she had no way of knowing whether or not any of her memories were true ones—no method of carbon-dating them, no means of distinguishing her actual daughter from a Piltdown Man made of her own discarded bones. Without the software, none of it was real.

  The pit of oblivion lay just beyond the computer screen, a gaping void beneath the scrim of the false world she had created, a fall into nothingness. At the bottom of that pit, Josie knew, was the death that awaited her—and not merely death, but abandonment, the knowledge that her body would be dumped in an ancient river, that she would be swallowed by the earth and no one would ever know. It was comforting to think that Itamar and Tali already believed she was dead, that no further adjustment would be necessary. When the guards took away the computer each night, Josie closed her eyes and pretended the machine was still before her, a thin screen of memory shielding her from the abyss. With her eyes closed she could feel herself falling, and she clutched tight at every flimsy detail she could remember or imagine: the names of Tali’s teachers, the first time Tali had laughed as a baby, the kind of toothpaste Itamar used every morning, the smell of his hair, the weight of his hand in hers, the shape of the lenses of his glasses as he squinted his eyes behind them when they kissed. She understood now why everyone wanted to save these things, the endless logs of what their pets ate and what their lovers wore and what their children said. They were ropes thrown down into the pit.

  At night, when the guards took the computer away, she began to read Guide for the Perplexed.

  ACCORDING TO THE VOLUME’S introduction, Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon—Rambam, as he was called in the book’s Hebrew half, or Maimonides on the book’s French side—had died in the year 1204 in Cairo, where he had been chief physician and surgeon to the sultan Saladin. As Josie gleaned from a cursory flipping through the book, the surgeon spent most of the first several hundred pages explaining why God had no emotions and no qualities, and why anyone who read the Hebrew Bible in a literal fashion was an idiot. Not needing several hundred pages to be convinced of this, Josie had almost given up reading when a page toward the end of the book fell open before her.

  There are five theories concerning divine providence, she read.

  Divine providence?

  Providence, a pious French footnote clarified, concerns not only divine protection (providing of necessities, etc.), but also divine omniscience and foresight, which is directly related to divine protection through the Holy One’s understanding and anticipation of mankind’s needs.

  Josie looked around her cell, at the sarcophagus encasing a forgotten corpse, and almost laughed. The man in the “Jon’s Bar Mitzvah” T-shirt was her providence now, she thought. Or whichever guard was bringing the food, or deciding when she would die. But she kept reading.

  First theory. There is no providence at all for anything in the universe; all parts of the universe, the heavens and what they contain, owe their origin to accident and chance.

  Chance would explain a lot, Josie thought. But she had to admit that it was contrary to evidence. The arrangement of protons and electrons in the world, she had had occasion to notice, was not only not random, but was even somewhat adjustable by the likes of herself. She had gotten into that car of her own accord on her last night of freedom, with no one forcing her. No one had made her come to Egypt either; she had simply fallen for Judith’s flattery. The only chance involved in her captivity, as far as she could see, was that Judith was her sister—that Judith had hated her, that Judith had preyed on her vanity and enticed her into going on this absurd and arrogant mission to deliver intelligence to the developing world like a god from on high—and that Josie, solely because of the random fact of sisterhood, had taken her seriously. But that didn’t count as chance either, unless Josie thought of Judith as a kind of virus, a morally meaningless opportunistic infection that ate her alive. That, too, was contrary to evidence.

  Second theory. While one part of the universe owes its existence to providence, and is under the control of a ruler and governor, another part is abandoned and left to chance…. Providence sends forth sufficient influence to secure the immortality and constancy of the species, without securing at the same time permanence for the individual beings of the species.

  Interesting, Josie thought, and slightly more palatable. But what mechanism governed what was chance and what wasn’t?

  This is the view of Aristotle, the text clarified: Everything which does not come to an end and does not change its properties (such as the heavenly spheres, and everything which continues according to a certain rule), is the result of providential management. But that which is not constant, and does not follow a certain rule, such as instances in the existence of the individuals of each species, is due to chance and not to management. For instance, when a storm or gale blows, it undoubtedly causes some leaves of a tree to drop, breaks off some branches of another tree, and stirs up the sea so that a ship goes down with a whole or part of its contents. Aristotle sees no difference between the falling of a leaf and the death of the good and noble people on the ship.

  This struck Josie as rather circular, to say that things that didn’t change were under “management” (for what further management would be required?) while things that weren’t, weren’t. The example of men drowning in a shipwreck puzzled her even more; she sensed that that was the real question here, the question of catastrophic accidents. It was her own question, too—but only if she considered what had happened to her an accident. At what point did securing immortality for the species stop and securing immortality for individuals begin? Were the dinosaurs extinct due to the will of God, while a single baby stegosaurus’s fate was left to chance? More relevant, was she herself only fair game for chance now, since Tali had already been born to perpetuate her genes and continue the species on her behalf? The logical absurdities that followed from this idea were worse than the first.

  Third theory. According to this theory, there is nothing in the whole universe, neither a class nor an individual being, that is due to chance; everything is due to will, intention, and rule … Each leaf falls according to the divine decree.

  This, Josie thought, was plausible—particularly if one violently neutered the idea of “divine decree” into something less debatable and equally immutable, like “laws of nature.” She thought of the many brilliant and proud people she
had worked with over the years, and their almost universal, gleeful disdain for the possibility of the unknowable. Her career had been spent surrounded by the outspoken atheism of nerds. It had always struck her as an immense arrogance. Pretending to agree with them was something that still shamed her, even after her success. But the idea of everything following the divine decree was too depressing to consider, leaving everything pointless while claiming to do the opposite. If no one could explain or predict divine or even natural decrees, then this idea was no different in practice from theory number one.

  Fourth theory. Man has free will, and therefore has the ability to act meaningfully in obedience or disobedience to divine law…. All acts of God are due to wisdom; no injustice is found in him, and he does not afflict the good.

  Josie looked at the shackle around her leg, at her beaten body chained in a dungeon, and remembered the thought that had haunted her since she first awoke in this abandoned tomb: that she had earned this, that her arrogance alone had driven her into this pit. She still suspected it was true. Perhaps Nasreen was right, and her life had been a cultivation of the trivial; perhaps she had added little good to the universe. Josie had lived her life in an aggressively rational world, but this unacknowledged belief in the ultimate justice of the universe lingered within her like a ghost.