* * *
—
Stupid.
My son used to have a small stuffed animal that he called Lamby-Lamb. Lamby-Lamb started off white but had grown dingy. Most of its stuffing had leaked out, and it was missing an ear. But he loved that lamb. Took it everywhere. Treated it tenderly.
Until some asshole kid mocked him for it.
Called it stupid.
The next day I found Lamby-Lamb in the kitchen trash. Smeared with coffee grounds and gravy. I washed Lamby-Lamb, tried to give it back to my son. But he didn’t want it anymore. Not even to keep discreetly.
He said it was stupid.
From then on my son became more and more of a dick.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw Lamby-Lamb away, though. I keep it in my suitcase, even today. It comes with me on business trips. I didn’t tell my son for a while. But a few years later, I did show Lamby-Lamb to him. Remember Lamby-Lamb?
He looked at me blankly.
Didn’t remember it.
I thought: Kid, that’s the difference between you and me.
* * *
—
I remember the jukebox.
An old jukebox in the basement of Julia’s parents’ house. It had been down there for as long as Julia could remember, from a bar her dad had owned before she was born. The jukebox sat in the corner of the unfinished basement, near the carpet remnant and the beat-up couch that folded out into a bed and the house’s second-best television. The jukebox’s old 45s had never been changed, so it was a snapshot of a particular era of pop music—“Smiling Faces Sometimes,” “Band of Gold,” “Temptation Eyes,” “Proud Mary.”
Every once in a while, when Julia and I wanted to get away from her housemates, we’d hang out in her parents’ basement. Occasionally we slept together on the pull-out bed. Her parents didn’t care, which blew my mind; in-house fornication never would’ve flown in my family. Julia would put the jukebox on the equivalent of shuffle, and one after another the hits of the early 1970s would play, sometimes to my baffled amusement. (“Does she really sing pumped a lot of tang down in New Orleans?!”)
Julia had grown up listening to these songs. She’d played with her toys listening to these songs. She’d hung out with her childhood friends in this basement listening to these songs. Her high-school boyfriends had made it with her on this pull-out couch, listening to these songs.
Now I was in that special club.
One night the song “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” came on the jukebox. Julia and I were lying there, naked, postcoital, staring up at the crossbeams of the unfinished ceiling.
“What is that?” I said.
“The Beatles,” said Julia. “You’ve never heard it before?”
“No.”
Of course it was the Beatles. I found out later that the song was recorded in 1967, right after my hated Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but released in 1970, the B-side of their final single “Let It Be.” The Beatles had tinkered with it for three years, as though it was some long-gestating masterpiece.
It’s no masterpiece. More like the photo negative of a masterpiece. A masterpiece stumbling and collapsing into more and more degraded versions of itself.
“Play it again.”
“I thought you hated the Beatles.”
“I do.”
The needle came to the center of the 45, popped up, swung back, dropped again. “You know my name—”
Have you heard this song? Go listen to it. There are four parts, all variations on the same theme—not structured like a standard pop song, I realized, but rather like those four cycles of history.
I used to draw these parallels with Julia. She hated it. Told me to shut up.
I’d go on anyway.
As a kind of revenge, which I’ll get into later.
The first part of the song, I’d say, is like the Divine Age. It starts with a confident, bouncy progression of piano, drum, and bass, sounding like a classic Beatles pop song, with all four members of the band chanting “You know my name, look up the number” again and again in harmony, repeating the mythos with clarity and force. Although some of their voices are a little more screamy and aggressive than you’d expect.
“What are you even talking about?” Julia would say. “This is what philosophy majors do all day?”
That leads to the second part of the song, the Aristocratic Age, which transforms into a light samba of the same tune. “Good evening, and welcome to Slagger’s,” John’s nightclub cabaret emcee intones, leading to Paul crooning, in a lounge-singer voice, “You know my name, look up the number” with insinuating giggles and coos, to canned applause. In this Aristocratic Age, instead of everyone chanting in unison, as in the previous age, one singer merely repeats the magic phrase to an audience, priest to congregation, aristocrat to commoners. And thus something essential slips away. In time, the audience stops responding. John’s emcee returns to cajole the audience into clapping for the lounge singer. But the audience is silent. Nobody is listening to the authority anymore.
“Oh my God, seriously?” Julia would say. “What does this mean? You yourself do not know what this means.”
That leads the song into its third part, the Democratic Age. The song collapses into a Monty Pythonesque parody of itself. It’s the same song, but played by a grab bag of cuckoo sounds, harmonica, bongos, and piano plunking. The members of the band do silly old lady voices, still repeating the refrain but changing the phrase around, looping bits, omitting other bits, tacking on their own additions: “You know, you know, you know you know my name…” The strict mantra has passed from ritual incantation to ordinary language, where it gets altered, corrupted, and finally, lost.
“I cannot fucking take this,” Julia would say. “Are you done? Just be done.”
Then the song crumbles into its fourth and final part, the Age of Chaos. It’s a shambling piano-jazz version of the song, with vibraphones and a saxophone, but the vocals have degraded into an animal-like muttering—grunting, growling, snorting. The words “You know my name, look up the number” are never heard again. Without the talisman of the originating mythos, the singer is unable to speak coherently at all. Language degenerates into irritable mumbling. Society splinters into barbarism, the song collapses into noise. The senseless voice rambles on for the rest of the track, continuing even after the song has lurched to an undignified close. Somebody burps.
“Shut up shut up shut up,” Julia would say.
I would overanalyze the song as a counterattack to Julia’s abuse of the song. She knew the Beatles drove me up the wall. She knew I hated this song in particular. So she seized on my dislike of the song with prankish glee.
I had told Julia the story about how I was scared of the Beatles growing up, and how I’d destroyed my sisters’ record on purpose. I shouldn’t have confessed any of that to Julia, though, because she loved to wind people up. I remember being at a house party with her soon after graduation, where the host had just bought a new stereo system that happened to have a remote control. Julia secretly pocketed the remote early in the party. Then, using the remote, Julia very gradually lowered the stereo’s volume, such that every song, bit by bit, would become inaudible by about two minutes in. The host was baffled as to why this was happening and kept cranking the volume back up, but a minute after he walked away from the stereo, the volume would start mysteriously dwindling again. One by one, Julia quietly revealed to others at the party that she had the remote and that she, in fact, was the one turning down the volume. Meanwhile the host was freaking out, shouting at the stereo, until everyone was trying not to laugh as we watched the host rant over how ridiculous it was, how he’d spent x dollars on this so-called state-of-the-art equipment, he was totally returning this stereo to the store the next day, it was such a piece of shit, etc.
Julia kept up the joke for an hour. She
loved to torture.
What does it say about me—that I found this playful malice attractive?
That is, when she directed it against others.
Because it was in the same spirit that Julia played “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” at me. To needle me. Not only on her basement jukebox. Sometimes it came on in her car, on the mixtapes she made. She left the song on my answering machine. She secretly dubbed it into the middle of one of my own cassette tapes, recording over legitimate music.
Did this make me love her more, in some perverse way?
Nope. It was just dumb shit that I tolerated. There is always dumb shit that you tolerate. She tolerated my dumb shit, too.
Like on that night in December.
* * *
—
Julia’s parents had gone on vacation. She and I had her childhood home to ourselves for the night. We had only been going out for a couple of months. I was about to return home for Christmas break, which meant Julia and I would be separated for three weeks. I dreaded the prospect. What would Julia do while we were apart? What if she hooked up with some other dude? The world was full of other dudes.
No.
I’d prove to her what an awesome boyfriend I was.
So when I came over to Julia’s parents’ house that night, I brought candles, a bottle of wine, and an elaborate meal that I had premade in my dorm’s barely functional kitchen. “We’ll have a candlelit dinner!” I said, and Julia laughed and said, “Oh, that’s adorable,” which put me on guard. Like when a girl says that you’re “cute”—that “adorable” cuts both ways.
The dinner went over well. I don’t even remember what we ate, though, because of what happened later.
We had just entered the part of the relationship when you start feeling comfortable having sex regularly. It no longer had to be an intense drama every time. The stakes weren’t so high, we could relax, let loose a bit, have fun. Or so Julia seemed to feel. I was still trying to prove something. But Julia was in a goofy mood that night. She had drunk pretty much the entire bottle of wine, our clothes were mostly off, and she was standing on the bed wearing only sweatpants, doing fake karate for some reason, I forget why, with a lit cigarette in her mouth.
She had also put “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” on the jukebox, which drove me up the wall.
“Turn this song off.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Come on. I hate it.”
“Baby, don’t I know it.”
“You should see yourself posing right now. Your tough-girl cigarette and your bossy tits.”
“What a dumb thing to say.” Then Julia giggled, as though she’d just made a delightful discovery: “You’re dumb, you know that? You’re actually really fucking dumb.”
We were laughing, not because this was funny, but because it was fun being stupid together, even though “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” was still playing, and I truly couldn’t stand the song…
But right after the song ended—it started up again!
“No!” I shouted. “Not again!”
“Yes again!”
I kept saying “no, no, no” but Julia thought it was hilarious. Apparently she had put the jukebox on repeat.
“You know my name…”
I tried to slip out from under Julia, to get off the fold-out bed, to turn off the song or at least change it. But before I could lunge at the jukebox, Julia was standing over me on the bed, she grabbed the rafters above her head and stuck her bare foot on my chest, pushing me back down, cackling “The price of my love tonight is listening to the Fab Four! You must face your fear!” and I was kind of laughing, but not totally, because I had planned this to be a romantic night on my terms, with my candlelit dinner and everything, I had wanted to impress Julia, but the whole thing had turned into a farce.
I didn’t want to be cute or adorable, I didn’t want stupid jokes, I didn’t even want romance, maybe it was the wine but I wanted to dominate, I wanted real fucking. “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” kept playing, but I didn’t even care about the song, because I wasn’t hearing anything, and in a kind of aroused anger I grabbed Julia, she shrieked and tumbled and after a scramble she was under me, and even as that clunky Beatles song kept playing, soon we were having sex, the way I thought I wanted, my eyes shut tight, thinking to myself impress her, blow her mind, break her open, and then I looked down at Julia.
Her face was covered in blood.
I screamed.
I scrambled off of her as though electrocuted.
Julia’s face was bloody, the pillow under her was bloody, there was blood on the sheets, blood on my face too, what was happening? Julia looked like someone had cut her face open.
Julia was laughing so hard.
This was a nightmare. Had I hurt her? What had happened?
“You’ve got a bloody nose.” Julia whooped. “Oh my God, I wish you could see what you look like. I made your nose explode. I fucked the blood right out of you.”
You would’ve thought I’d be embarrassed.
But the night went so much better after that. My last fears about Julia vanished. I didn’t have to try so hard.
I had nosebled all over Julia during sex and she didn’t laugh me out of the house.
After we cleaned up the bloody sheets (“it looks like I had an abortion on this thing”), we watched TV and drank more and had sex again, and then again, because we were nineteen, and I remember thinking to myself, just remember this night, take a little home video in your mind right now, hold on to what’s happening, because it’ll never get better, I couldn’t imagine life getting better than this.
We were still in the Age of the Gods.
The Julia problem was solved.
* * *
—
My attraction to physics came from the same part of me that liked to feel that problems could be solved.
The same part of me that felt at home in the eighties. Physics felt clean and definite. Well-defined problems with well-defined solutions. Complicated phenomena could be simplified and modeled until they were tractable. When I solved a physics problem, I could draw a box around the answer and feel satisfied.
Of course, real-world physics doesn’t work that way. Not just the groundbreaking physics of an Einstein or a Stettinger; even everyday professional physics isn’t so cut-and-dried. But I was attracted to that sensation of order and logic. Physics gave it to me.
Renard didn’t seem to have any particular love of physics. It didn’t satisfy an emotional need for him. That’s why it was kind of irritating that he was better at physics than I was. I liked physics, I struggled with physics, I cared about physics. Renard just glided effortlessly through physics as if unimpressed.
He was more interested in the Flickering Man.
In the latter weeks of camp, Renard convinced the instructors to excuse him from the morning lectures and labs. He spent all day with the FARGs in the AV Room. Not to play the game anymore, though. Renard was now actually combing through the game’s source code, reverse engineering thousands of lines of assembly language in order to find out in what circumstances the Flickering Man would appear. When I asked Renard why he was going to such lengths just to win a game, he replied that it was rumored that the programmers who made the game had put the Flickering Man in for a reason. Renard admired these programmers, and he seemed to believe he was on the trail to some secret of theirs that nobody else had yet guessed; he wanted to be the first to track down what these programmers had so carefully concealed.
At the library, I found a picture of that very group of programmers in a back issue of a personal computing magazine. Of course the programmers all looked like Charles Mansons, the long hair, the beards, the creepy smiles. Even worse, they lived on a commune somewhere in California, very on-brand for exactly the kind of seventies shit that freak
ed me out.
When Renard saw me with that computer magazine, he must’ve known what I was thinking, the connection I was making in my head, because he only said, “Computers were born in the seventies too, you know.”
Sure.
So were we.
* * *
—
Closer. Too close.
I feel the answer coming closer. As though it is outside the car right now. How close do you want it to be? My death date is wandering somewhere in the snow, it’s prowling around me, it’s circling around the car, it’s closing in. Maybe I don’t want it closer. But my actions are pulling it toward me. My calculation reeling it in.
I can stop anytime I want.
Can I?
My number is outside the car now. I scribble fast across the notebooks, flipping through the Books of the Dead. I can stop anytime, right? But I can’t, and soon the number will be in my hand—I accidentally break the tip of my pencil.
Shaking.
No further.
Don’t go further.
The invisible thing waits for me in the snowstorm. Pulsing just outside my window.
Don’t go on.
* * *
—
The last night of camp, when Renard and I were in the steam tunnels, he admitted to me that his family was rich. He said it in an embarrassed way, as though he had been long postponing this confession. Apparently his father owned some engineering company, did work for the aerospace industry. It occurred to me, as Renard was talking, that he regarded me as a salt-of-the-earth type, that he considered me working class. This was the first time anyone had ever thought of me that way. I enjoyed my unearned blue-collar cred.
The steam tunnels were cramped, dark, and dirty. Pipes and wires bristled on either side. There was graffiti down there that seemed decades old. Renard and I crept along, single file, and the pitch blackness jumped with our swinging flashlight beams. The tunnel we were in seemed to go on and on, and it was so late, I had been getting by on so little sleep, the darkness scrambled and pulsed, I was following Renard about ten feet behind and then we were wading through sludgy, rusty water, I realized there were electrical wires down here, maybe even exposed ones, we could be electrocuted at any second, indeed already I felt a bit electronic, I felt as though I was walking through the endless hallways of Renard’s video game, and when my flashlight’s beam flicked past his back sometimes it seemed to be Renard, and sometimes not, it was him walking forward but in the half shadows and my exhaustion it might have been the Flickering Man himself walking backward, staring at me.
Dare to Know Page 8