It was some seriously stupid shit.
* * *
—
Sapere Aude began wooing me at the end of my junior year. I wasn’t interested at first. They seemed like a fringe outfit and I was still committed to the respectable academic track, to earning my physics doctorate.
Until, through their headhunter, they gave me an early version of their proprietary algorithm.
It blew me away. I knew what Sapere Aude’s project was, of course. But I never could’ve guessed how far they’d gotten, how elegant and weird their algorithm was, even in those early rough stages. I spent that summer examining it but also taking it upon myself to fine-tune it.
When I sent back my list of suggested improvements, that got me the job.
I was angling for a spot in research and applications. Blattner and Hansen stuck me in sales instead. At first I couldn’t understand why, but later it made sense. Blattner and Hansen had deliberately sent me an unoptimized version of the algorithm. If I had merely said “oooh, awesome,” they probably wouldn’t even have offered me the sales job.
Look: I was only twenty-one years old. I hadn’t even yet earned my bachelor of science. It would be delusional to think I could contribute something valuable to thanaton research at that age.
In any case, I had a primitive, clunky version of the algorithm, along with a ton of nondisclosure agreements. I was one of only two dozen people in the world (I found out later) who had access to it. Blattner and Hansen had secretly vetted me, I knew; they probably had me under surveillance.
Whatever. I had nothing to hide.
But Julia was reckless.
“I bet it’s full of shit,” Julia had said. “Teach me how to do it.”
“If you think it’s full of shit, why do you want me to teach you?”
She blew smoke. “Maybe it’s not.”
“Anyway, you’re not allowed to look yourself up,” I said.
“Like a Ouija board? If you do it alone, you lose your soul?”
“I’m just telling you the rules.”
Arched eyebrow. “But there’s no rule against you and me looking each other up, is there?”
“I don’t want to know when I’m going to die.”
Julia flicked her cigarette butt away. It must’ve gone, like, twenty feet. How’d she manage that trick? Are you born knowing how—and then she did that look. Gazing into my eyes, glancing down for a second, then looking back at me again in a knowing way, like she had a secret.
“Maybe I want to know when you’ll die,” Julia said. “Find out if you’re worth investing in.”
* * *
—
So I taught Julia the algorithm.
Not as unlikely as it sounds: you don’t need to fully understand the deeply complicated thanaton theory in order to execute it. I simplified the parameters so that Julia didn’t have to solve the general case that would work for anyone, just the special case that would only work for me. Even then, it took me weeks to teach it to her. She was probably the only person outside the physics and math departments who stood a chance. Julia was smart, sure, but more importantly, she never gave up, never complained. She never even admitted it was hard.
Too much pride. She’d show everyone.
Laboring over pages of calculations, Julia would suddenly make a breakthrough—exhausted, but with an insolent glance in my direction. I bet you never guessed I was hot stuff.
This was deeply attractive to me.
But it takes more than mere effort to learn it. Some people have the knack, some don’t. Especially when it comes time to create your own metaphor through which you would access subjective mathematics. Not something you can totally teach. Some first-rate mathematicians couldn’t manage that step; some amateurs grasped it easily. In Julia’s case, I saw how she reached down deep for it. She surprised me. It seemed like she surprised herself, too.
Julia’s plan was that she’d calculate my death date—and in turn, I’d calculate hers. But we wouldn’t tell each other what we’d learned. Each of us would just write the date and time on a slip of paper, seal the information in an envelope, and keep it. Or give the envelopes to each other. Or something. I could tell there was something about this project that was thrilling for Julia. Discovery in her eyes. Something novel, weird. More interesting than whatever horseshit they teach you in business school, I’m sure.
When the night came for our final assessment, we did it at the house she rented with her friends, who were all out that night. We sat facing each other on Julia’s bed in the middle of her room, with the candles, the toneless repetitions, the invocations. That was back when the algorithm still felt eerie, and I had been warned that all kinds of unintended side phenomena might occur—I had been instructed to ignore any invisible presences that might seem to enter the room, to cover the windows, to ignore whatever shapes might seem to be writhing in my peripheral vision—it was all, I was assured, merely the side effects of the math rippling through me.
But there weren’t any side effects that night. There was something intimate about the process. Everyone feels it, the first dozen or so times you run the algorithm, an almost unbearable closeness to the subject that borders on erotic; that fades in time, but I remember it that night. Running the algorithm on Julia was the first time I’d done it for real on another actual person, and not just as a textbook exercise, and the vertigo of tracking Julia’s death through space and time, edging right up against her limits, something bottomless and demonic hemming us in on every side, was exhilarating, dizzying, but I was careful, too, even as I felt Julia closing in on my number as well, calculating closer and closer, so close to her that it hurt—
I didn’t want to do it.
I didn’t want to know when Julia would die.
I wanted Julia to live forever.
But Julia kept assessing me. Kept running the algorithm on me.
I only pretended to do it for her.
She thought I was doing math.
I was writing her a letter.
I didn’t know whether Julia would ever read my letter. But I had to write it, I had to tell her how I felt about her while it was still white-hot in me. Things I never could say out loud, because of the unsentimental curve of her lip, her readiness to mock me as soon as I got too emotional—my emotions were clumsy—and I could only express myself in clich’s, and she was merciless to me when I “talked like a movie.” We were only supposed to open our envelope much later in life; “maybe we’ll be broken up by then, maybe we’ll be married,” Julia said—there, she did it again! Sneaking married in casually, just like she snuck I love you in before, but precisely negated with that equally probable maybe we’ll be broken up…
I finished writing my letter. Put it in a blue envelope. Sealed it. Wrote her name on it. Pushed it across the bed to her.
“Done,” I said.
Julia’s eyes got a little wider. She stared at the envelope. Looked up at me. “You really know when I’m going to die?”
Don’t lie. But don’t tell her the entire truth either. “I didn’t want to know. So I calculated it up to the final step. If you want to know, all you have to do is multiply the two numbers in that envelope.
That’s your death date.”
That much was true. I had calculated her death almost completely, even to the point of where it generated the weird little fable that my method always produced as a mathematical lagniappe—a string of cryptic symbols that could be translated later. I had put that in my pocket.
I didn’t tell her about my letter to her.
“I’ll do the same for you.” Julia chewed her pencil, wrote a bit more, then lay her pencil down. Leaned back. “There. It’s done except for the multiplying.”
“Seal it,” I said.
Our original idea was that we would exchange the blue envelopes.
Aft
er the breakup, Julia ended up keeping both of them.
* * *
—
I wonder if she ever opened my envelope to her. I wonder if she read my letter.
If she thought about it before she married Keith. The children I speculated we’d have. The life I predicted we’d share. That version of us.
Drowsing in my seat on the plane now, thinking of that night we exchanged the death envelopes. On her bed, her smoking after sex, the smell of her cigarette. Exhausted, sweaty, exultant and afraid and confused and happy. Julia looking up at the ceiling, looking self-sufficient in her happiness, but I knew the truth, I thought, that satisfaction is mine, I caused that happiness, we had crossed some great line together, done something never before done by anyone, we were young, we were masters of everything, what true love feels like.
* * *
—
Do you love me now?
Not romantically. Even I’m not deluded enough to expect that. Julia’s married. Keith—well, the less said, the better. Three kids. I mean the love underneath the love. The appreciation. The look she gave me at the party, our first date. The slight awe we have of someone who we think is great. The giddy cherishing. The feeling lucky that she wants me around.
Maybe Julia still has those blue envelopes.
If she does, I could check what I calculated last night against what Julia had calculated nearly thirty years ago.
Had I simply fucked up my calculation, somehow?
No.
I’m dead. I’m alive.
Something else, I sensed, was more deeply fucked.
* * *
—
A few days after Julia and I calculated each other’s deaths, I found the scratch papers of our calculations. On them were symbols representing the little extra fairy tale that my thanaton metaphor always generated—though unfinished, since the calculation was unfinished. Translated from math to English, it goes like this:
One sunny afternoon, a king and a princess were riding on horseback through the woods.
They came upon a cave. It was a black hole in the side of a grassy hill. The king wanted to continue riding on home to their castle. But his daughter, the princess, was fascinated by the cave, for the hill was said to be enchanted.
So the king drew his sword and took the princess by the hand, and together they entered the cave.
In the darkness, something knocked the sword out of the king’s hand. He heard it clatter down into the depths of the cave.
The king let go of his daughter’s hand to find his sword.
And so they lost each other.
The princess heard the king calling out for her. The king heard the princess calling out for him. Neither could find the other in the darkness, though both could still glimpse daylight shining from the mouth of the cave above.
And yet this cave’s darkness was not empty, but rapidly filling with visions.
The princess gasped. “A bird! There is a beautiful golden bird fluttering just ahead of me!” And although at first it was only her imagination, now in fact a glorious bird was winging its way through the darkness. And the king cried out, “I sense there is a great treasure here!” just as his hand closed upon a precious cup that did not exist a moment before.
And so the darkness filled with their fantasies.
Outside the hill, day dimmed into night. Little by little, the king and the princess could no longer see the opening of the cave above. In the darkness, they could not find their way out.
And the king and the princess grew afraid.
In her fear, the princess felt something horrible at her back, and she cried out, “A goblin! There is a goblin behind me,” and although it had been only her imagination, now there was a goblin snickering in the gloom. The king whispered, “I feel the breath of a dragon before me,” and although a moment ago there was no dragon, now a dragon moved through the shadows.
And so the darkness filled with their fears.
A world of dreams was created within the dark hill, from the king’s and his daughter’s fantasies and fears, and then those dreams themselves dreamed dreams, until dreams and dreamers were confused and none could escape the enchanted darkness.
The king and princess forgot who they were.
They lived within the cave’s darkness for perhaps a night, or perhaps a thousand years.
When day broke, sunlight shone through the entrance of the cave. And when the king and the princess saw this light, they began to remember who they were.
But when the king and the princess tried to escape the cave, their dreams and the dreams of their dreams held them back. Some dreams begged, “Don’t leave us, we will vanish without you!” and other dreams threatened, “If you try to leave us, we will destroy you!” And the bird dazzled the princess, and the cup grew heavy in the king’s hand, and the goblin seized the princess, and the dragon battled the king, until both king and daughter were overwhelmed by their dreams, and the dreams of their dreams.
And so the king and the princess were dragged back into the cave.
And yet sometimes, before the sun set, the king and the princess did for a moment find each other. But the king no longer knew he was king. Nor did the king recognize the princess, for she seemed to be only another dream.
Not knowing each other, not even knowing themselves, the king and princess turned away from each other and forgot themselves again for another night, or perhaps a thousand years…
The story breaks off there. Since I hadn’t properly finished the calculation, the story never concluded either.
I think of that story sometimes. I know it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an epiphenomenon, an arbitrary by-product of the math. I never even told Julia the story.
But one night I told it to my sons. As a bedtime story.
When I finished it, they said:
“I hated it.”
“That was stupid.”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
The boys wouldn’t say. Then they got irritated and started making fun of the story, making fun of me. I stood there in the darkness, taking it.
I stopped telling my sons bedtime stories.
And hated myself for not wanting to tell them bedtime stories anymore.
* * *
—
I dreamed of the girl with no face.
It was the dream I had at the end of physics camp, after the FARGs told me my fortune with those twigs—and, I was beginning to realize, many other times, too. In the dream I would be following the girl, or I would happen upon the girl somewhere, or I somehow knew the girl was near. Sometimes on campus. Sometimes elsewhere. Her back was always to me.
In the dream she entered some building I was hesitant to enter, something like a bar or restaurant. The inside was empty but mazelike, with hidden coves and blind alleys and blocky little nooks.
The girl turned.
I was frozen.
Even though I was looking at her, I couldn’t see her eyes, her nose, her mouth. But something was coalescing, composing itself out of the cloudiness of her head, a flickering face taking shape like a jumping flame, a face I was desperate not to see.
I woke up sweating.
I wandered around the house with the lights on. Standing near the open refrigerator. Sitting in the family room and looking at the wall, counting down the minutes until morning.
It was only a matter of time.
* * *
—
I don’t feel good. It’s a full flight, everyone packed in. People on either side of me are working on their laptops, the computers’ frantic calculations spiking knives to my brain, stab stab stab. The old nausea heaving up inside me. I take out my headphones and say excuse me to the guy next to me. I squeeze past him and his computer.
I start down the narrow aisle to the bathroom.
The sight of so many people crammed together in their seats—it always reminds me of that watershed incident, in the early days of Sapere Aude. Some rich asshole, a client of Ziegler’s who boarded a plane, announced to everyone after takeoff that he’d just had his thanatons analyzed and that he was going to die mid-flight, and so that meant the whole plane was probably going down, that they were all going to die together.
You can see the videos of this online. How quickly the situation deteriorates. People freaking out in their seats. Other people just frozen. The flight attendants trying to calm people down. The loudmouth asshole just cackling louder, louder: We’re all gonna die together! It won’t be long now! Let’s get drunk! Suck my dick! I’m death, bitches! After a few minutes of this, the guy has provoked the whole plane into an uproar, and to make it worse they’ve hit turbulence, it looks like it’s really going to happen, people are crying and praying, but then some huge guy comes from the back of the plane and grabs the loudmouth asshole and kills him! He just picks up a random person’s laptop and bludgeons the asshole’s head until it opens like a watermelon. When he’s done the asshole’s face is completely unrecognizable.
The crazy thing is, nobody stopped the guy who killed the asshole. Not even the owner of the laptop. In fact, by the end everyone on the plane was pretty much cheering him on. When the asshole’s head broke open you could feel, even in the shaky low-quality videos, a surge of relief in all the passengers, a feeling somehow similar to how I felt when I rolled that ottoman over Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and broke it into pieces—and then there was just this horrible, holy silence.
The plane landed fine.
None of the other passengers were even hurt.
I’ll say this for Sapere Aude: that asshole died right on schedule.
* * *
—
The legal system didn’t know what to do with this case. Was it really murder if it was scientifically certain, via thanaton theory, that the guy would’ve died at that moment anyway? The case dragged on for years. I was stunned but somehow felt it was right when the courts ruled that the huge guy was blameless in the death of the loudmouth asshole.
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