by John Updike
When I came back with Verna’s drink and another glass of wine for myself, the young people had gone into a huddle by the table, and were muttering in a language I didn’t know. Youth: the mountain range that isolates it in a valley far from our own grows steeper, I think, as capitalism ever more ferociously exploits it as a separate market, beaming at it whole new worlds of potential expenditure—home video games and rear-entry ski boots and a million bits of quasi-musical whining cut by laser into compact discs. Ever more informational technique, ever more inane information. I saw that they were huddled because Dale was sketching on the back of an envelope little boxes connected by lines. The envelope, I noted in my sociological mood, was the telephone company’s: our nation’s trust-busting guardians broke up AT&T, with the result that our bills have become as bulky as love letters, and the line crackles like Rice Krispies when we pick up the receiver. I saw that the boxes had words in them: OR, AND, NOT. The rudiments of the new Gospel. “And you see,” Dale was saying, primarily to Richie, but Verna and even Paula appeared to be also listening as his pencil point raced along the lines, “a current and no current, a one and a zero in terms of the binary code, will give a hot output from the OR and not from the AND, but if the AND output then goes into a NOT, it comes out—”
“Hot,” Verna said, since my dear Richie was silent, baffled. Young male heads, seen from above, so oval and shaggy and blind, invite in their helplessness a ruffling. The boy looked up at my fatherly touch with a scowl of annoyance. He was with older youth now and wanted to succeed, to blend in. I gave Verna her Bloody Mary.
“Right,” Dale said. “And if instead of a single bit we put four together, in a half-byte, so it looks like this”—he scribbled some zeros and ones; his handwriting was messy and displeasing, as that of scientists for some reason tends to be, as if precision of thought precludes that of presentation, and vice versa, clergymen, especially Episcopalians, invariably sporting fine italic hands—“and then another, which looks like this, what is going to come out of the OR circuit?”
After a pause during which Richie was given a chance to answer, Verna offered in her scratchy voice, “Oh one one one.”
“Hey, you got it!” Dale exclaimed. “And out of an AND circuit, the same input?”
“Simple,” she said. “Oh oh oh one.”
“O.K.! And, Richie, if the OR circuit was then linked up to a NOT?”
“One oh oh oh,” I pronounced from above, after the silence had become painful.
“Obviously,” Dale said, still sketching. “And you can all see how with just these three simple switches, or gates, you can set up any complexity of ins and outs to analyze your input. For example, you can run these same two four-bit numbers into AND gates along with their own inverses, produced in these NOTS here, and then take those two outputs through an OR; what the output tells you, oh one one oh, is where the original inputs agreed: it’s cold where they did and hot where they didn’t.”
“Neat,” Verna said. Half her Bloody Mary was already drunk. She was now smoking one of the English Ovals, a mauve-tinted one.
“You should be going to school,” I told her.
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Dale said.
“Tell it to Poopsie here,” she said.
“Eedy-da,” Paula uttered, clutching at Dale’s paper with saliva-slippery fingers and rumpling it.
He retrieved the paper, smoothed it, and prepared with his pencil point to attack our ignorance still again. “Not to overdo,” he said, “but this gets us right into Boolean algebra, and it’s so beautiful you’ve got to get at least an inkling. Boole was some guy in the middle of the nineteenth century who developed an algebra for dealing with logical concepts, true-false statements basically, but it turns out to be just the math you need for the circuitry inside computers. An OR gate, for example, really adds, in the terms of Boolean algebra, where one plus one isn’t two or zero, as you might think from the binary base, but one; I mean, positive plus positive is still positive. And an AND gate multiplies, really, when you think that anything times zero has to be zero, and so it takes two positives to produce a positive. What the NOT gate does is invert, really, so you write that with a hat like this over the number: the inverse of zero equals one, and vice versa. And that’s basically all Boolean algebra does; but there’re a lot of theorems that follow from these basics, and it’s amazing what you can do. It tends to look confusing, but it’s simple at heart.”
“In a pig’s eye it is,” Verna said, a little blearily now. Richie had already eased away and was back to poking the fire: carbohydrates sinking back into the carbon atoms compounded in the heart of a star millions and millions of years ago. I thought of Dale’s pencil point. Had the universe really been once that small? “Don’t poke it too much,” I warned my son. “You’ll make it go out.”
“We’re about to eat anyway,” Esther said, from the archway. She came closer in her zigzagging green velvet and said to Dale, “I was listening, a little bit, to your lesson. It sounded fascinating. I was wondering, would you ever like to come, say once a week, and tutor Richie? He’s having a terrible time with bases.”
“Mom, I’m not,” the boy protested. “Nobody in class is getting it, the teacher is lousy.”
“The teacher is black,” Esther told Dale.
“That shouldn’t make any difference,” Verna said quickly.
“I know,” Esther sighed. “One of these young black women with some third-rate education that these expensive liberal schools feel they have to hire. I’m all for it in principle, but not when it’s making the children stupid.”
“Richie’s not stupid,” Dale said, entering the silence Esther had stunned into being with her illiberal declaration. “I’d be happy to tutor him, if we can find a time. My hours are kind of funny, with the time-sharing and all. For my graphics I have to split a VAX 8600 with a girl doing pattern recognitions.”
“I’m sure,” Esther stated airily, “we can find an hour to suit our mutual conveniences. Richie, come help me lift the turkey out.” Peremptory, unrepentant, full of electricity, she turned her back on all of us.
“Nunc?” A small reedy voice poked softly at my side. “D’you think we could sneak another Bloody Mary in before all that food descends?”
Throughout the meal, the endless oppressive Thanksgiving feast that squeezes breath from the chest and all space of maneuver from the mind, I was conscious not only of Verna, whose sallow flesh with such confident indolence pressed against the bulging wool of her red dress, and whose flitting gestures and casual declarations seemed to my wine-tinted awareness infinitely if vaguely promising, but of Esther as seen through the eyes of Dale Kohler: an older woman, petite and wearily wise, yet with a maternal depth of tolerance and nurture beneath her crisp, taut-pulled manner.
“Does anybody want to say grace?” she had asked, the meal arrayed.
She knew it pained me to, though I could manage. The old words would roll, once my rusty mouth flopped open. I had actually composed the opening phrase and bowed my head when Dale’s eager voice broke in: “I’d be happy to, if nobody else wants to.”
Who could object? We were his helpless victims, cannibals to his missionary. He made us all hold hands. His evangelism had been learned in a folksy, nasal school. My ears shut as his words droned upward, in that voice we hear all the time over at the Divinity School, the singsong voice of homegrown Christian piety: believing souls are trucked in like muddy, fragrant cabbages from the rural hinterland and in three years of fine distinctions and exegetical quibbling we have chopped them into cole slaw salable at any suburban supermarket. We take in saints and send out ministers, workers in the vineyard of inevitable anxiety and discontent. The death of Christianity has been long foreseen but there will always be churches to serve as storehouses for the perennial harvest of human unhappiness.
A few of Dale’s words bored into my brain, some kind of remembrance, before we stuffed our faces, of all the starving and homeless in
the world, particularly East Africa and Central America, and my mind skidded off into wondering whether the UNICEF God Who would respectfully receive such prayers were not a frightful anticlimax to those immense proofs via megastar and mammoth tusk, and skidded further into thinking of meals and betrayals—the salt spilled by Judas, the chronic diet of Cronus, dinners whipped up by Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth, the circle of betrayal established wherever more than two or three gather or a family sits down as one. Verna’s hand was in my right hand and she had a rapid pulse; Richie’s was in my left and there was heat here, too, the Oedipal animus, and on my side paternal coolness, the tigerish tendency to view the cub, once born, as a competitor as pleasant to extinguish as any other. A competitor born, furthermore, into the heart of one’s own turf, which he fills with his electronic static and smelly socks and ravenous ill-educated appetite for what our cretinous popular culture assures him are the world’s good things. Emerson was right, we all have cold hearts. And my frosty mind, as Dale’s voice breathily aspired toward its final curlicue of blessing upon this food about to be so guiltily digested, skidded out of our house entirely, into the Kriegmans’, whom I imagined, as Jews and atheists, to be taking the day more lightly, without any of the spiritual cholesterol implicit in our Puritan forefathers’ self-congratulation, and to be having more fun. Jews are probably right: one Testament is enough. There were, in fact, quite a lot of Jewish converts to Christianity initially, but when the Messiah failed to reappear, as firmly promised to the first generation, and as an additional disappointment the Temple was destroyed in the year 70, they quite sensibly lost heart and let the Greeks take control of the expanding operation.
Dale’s benediction at last launched and growing ever smaller in the stratosphere, we unlinked our sweaty hands, and there settled ineluctably into the center of my vision the turkey to be carved. Oh, those diabolically elusive, bloody, and tenacious second joints! And the golden-glazed skin that proves tougher than strapping tape! Esther, compared with Lillian, does a dry turkey, and you can slice the breast only so thin before crumbs and shredding compromise the slice. We were, at table, clockwise, Verna, I, Richie, Dale, Esther, and Paula, in Richie’s dusty old high chair, which Esther had recovered from the third floor and in which the little girl, abruptly exhausted by her bus ride, long walk, and bite of silver cigarette case, kept slumping asleep. I, too, while I did not slump, lost consciousness for intervals: at least, there are great glutinous holes in my recollection of our conversation.
Esther, between doling out orange gobs of squash and white gobs of mashed potatoes, earnestly asked Dale what exactly his research in computer graphics involved. He said, “It’s kind of hard to explain. A lot of it is looking for programming shortcuts that could bring raster-display dynamics closer to vector display in terms of image refresh time and memory cost. A vector display, you see, specifies to the screen two points and then draws a line between them, and even though there are a lot of lines and some of the instructions take a lot of crunching, it’s as fast as the eye can take in, by and large: I mean, you see motion happening. With raster, it’s like a newspaper photograph: you have a grid of dots, called pixels, maybe five hundred twelve by five hundred twelve, that’s some two hundred sixty-two thousand separate pieces of output, and so each frame takes minutes to generate instead of microseconds, which is what you’d need for convincing animation. Thirty scans a second is what you see on television; you can get some sense of the refresh that’s going on by wiggling your fingers in front of a live screen. Also, there’s not just dimension and perspective, there’s color and light, and light bouncing in certain patterns off of different textures—all that has to be programmed in. You look at this table now in front of you, there’s a tremendous amount of visual information, I mean, a terrifying amount, if you take into account, say, the sheen on that turkey skin, and the way it’s folded, and the way the water in the glass refracts that bowl, and the way the onions are a different kind of shiny from the bowl, and then there’s a little smoke, and look at that sliver of red in the stem of the wineglass from the cranberry sauce a foot away. The Japanese do an amazing job with that sort of thing—glass balls floating around in front of checkerboards and translucent cylinders and so forth. It means you have to calculate through the pixel, as if each one is a tiny window in the viewing plane, exactly how the beam of light you’re shooting through that little aperture would go, and if it strikes something transparent, where it would go then; maybe it will even divide.” His two lengthy forefingers went separate ways in illustration. His purple-and-green necktie began to look psychedelic, in the tawny low November filtered through our bare birches and our windows with their ornamental leaded lights of stained glass, a lurid gold and livid blue and the same poisonous red as Dale’s cranberry juice. “Some pixels,” he went on, “there’s maybe five or six separate inputs to be averaged out. I mean, it’s awesome, once you get into duplicating even a highly controlled set of objects, how it all blows up with complexity. It begins to scare you, in a way.”
“In what way?” Esther asked, having eaten the morsels she allowed herself and now exhaling cigarette smoke, a billowing twin plume from her nostrils and lips, blue in the wan sunlight, a ball of smoke as big as her head.
“Well, I mean, just in trying to duplicate Creation on this one simple plane of visual information. You see, it’s not quite like a photographer sitting down in front of a scene, or even a painter doing what’s in front of him dab after dab. In computer graphics, you store the mathematical representation of the object, and then you can call up the image of it from every perspective, in wire-frame diagram or with the hidden lines removed, or in cross-section, say with a mechanical part you want to analyze. And it does it, generally—we’re talking vector now—instantly, as far as our eye can tell, though even here with some of the crunching you can feel the computer begin to labor, and the delay can get up to a second, which feels like an eternity if you’re used to working with computers.”
An eternity. In a grain of sand. My eyes itched. Clouds of food particles. Receptors high in the nostrils can detect one particle in a million. Freud claims our sense of smell was freighted with poignant meanings when we walked on all fours, our noses closer to the dung-laden ground. We are base. A broad neck on a woman seems to invite a man to pounce, then lie there luxuriating like a fucked-out lion. Copulation from the rear nature’s standard way; how did we ever get turned around? Frontal nudity, rated X. In Adam’s fall / We sinned all. Verna was eating steadily, in silence. Could it be she was hungry? In this day and age can anyone not an African still be simply hungry?
“I like the way,” Richie contributed, “they turn things over and over like in TV station identifications or in Superman I, where the three bad guys are condemned to space.”
“Yeah,” Dale said, “tumbling. That’s fairly trivial to achieve, that sort of deformation and exaggerated perspective and so on, once you have the information; then it’s just a matter of shifting and stretching coördinates under some pretty straightforward transformations. Simple trigonometry.”
“Trig, ugh,” the boy said.
“Come on, Richie. Trig is beautiful, wait till you get to it.”
Wait till you get to sex, I hallucinated that he was saying. The odd thing, Richie, is, that’s it. It’s a grand surprise nature has cooked up for us, love with its accelerated pulse rate and its drastic overestimation of the love object, its rhythmic build-up and discharge; but then that’s it, there isn’t another such treat life can offer, unless you count contract bridge and death.
“The theory of it, I mean,” Dale was saying. “And now with computers you don’t have to do all that looking up in tables and long multiplication we used to do, the computers do it all for us. Just the little hand-calculators that cost ten ninety-five; in 1950 it would have taken a big refrigerated room to hold all those circuits you can put in your vest pocket now, if you wear a vest. But, hey, how come I’m doing all the talking? Professor, tell us about
heresy or something.”
“Yes, you should eat before it all gets cold,” Esther solicitously told Dale.
“Nobody ever wants to hear about my poor heretics,” I informed the table. “Tertullian, for example, whom I’ve been dipping into, to refresh my Latin. What a writer—crazy for language, when he takes off it’s like Shaw, he’ll say any mad thing to keep the ball rolling. Or like Kierkegaard, when he got the wind up. But Tertullian had a sweet, humanist side, too. He claimed, for instance, that the soul is naturally Christian: anima naturaliter christiana. And—you mathematicians—he did some of the basic Christian calculations. He invented the Trinity; at least he used the word trinitas for the first time in ecclesiastical Latin. And he put forward the formulation una substantia, tres personae for God, and for Christ the notion of a double essence, duplex status, rather nicely, non confusus sed conjunctus in una persona—deus et homo. An AND gate, I guess that would be, Dale?”
“Actually,” the young man said, smiling and swallowing, “I think that’s an OR. It’s harder to get through an AND than an OR.”
“Let the boy eat,” Esther said. “That’s very interesting, dear. You notice, Verna, that nobody asked us about our specialties?”
The child, bless her, ignored my wicked wife and turned to me. “What made him a heretic, Nunc? He sounds pretty straight-arrow.”
“Before I answer that very intelligent question, who would like some more of this bird, this homely half-hacked Paraclete of ours?”
Richie held his plate toward me. “Just white slices,” he said. “Thinner than you cut them before.”
“God damn it, you can’t cut them any thinner with this dull knife; they fall apart!” My profanity startled even me: I traced it back to the third glass of white wine and the fact that Richie wears braces on his teeth, to which orange and white bits of food were clinging, a repulsiveness all the worse for his being unaware of it.