“But then you connect with the right person, who’s actually on your wavelength. And now your idea lives in two minds instead of one. This is a beginning. If it lives in two, it can live in four. And if it lives in four it can live in eight. There’s hope. You’re on your way.”
Rebecca left the discussion of the multiple floral bouquets until after dinner, though the unresolved conundrum nagged her so much that it killed her appetite. Despite Philip’s comparative good cheer, the essential wrongness of the whole situation seemed worse with each passing minute. When she finally broached the subject, she figured it would be best to pitch her tone toward drollery. “Philip,” she said, “as I may have mentioned earlier today, I couldn’t help but notice that you sent me three arrangements of flowers, which arrived at my office an average of two hours apart. I’m deeply flattered, but an explanation would not go amiss.”
Philip bit his lip and looked at the floor, fidgeting like a child being chastised. “Well, it’s a funny story,” he said distantly, after a moment. “It’s interesting. It’s interesting! I’d been thinking about something you said when you gave me this wristwatch. Which I’ve been wearing every day, by the way.” He held it up to show it to Rebecca. It could have stood to have a link removed from the band, and it looked like it was running slow. “You said that people who care about each other give each other gifts at random times sometimes. And it occurred to me that though love is an extraordinarily difficult thing to re-create in a computer model with a meaningful level of sophistication, the act of random gift giving is actually relatively easy to model. In fact, a sufficiently savvy programmer could whip something up, much like a lovelorn poet of an earlier century would write a sonnet for his sweetheart. It seems to me that the pleasure of a sonnet comes in mastering the restrictions of the rhyme scheme, in the service of self-expression. Programming has similar restrictions! That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“I…can’t say I’ve ever looked at it that way,” said Rebecca. “But go on.”
“Here’s what I did!” Philip said. “I set up a means for generating random numbers that were derived from the frequencies of atmospheric noise. True random numbers: not pseudo-random. I just want to point that out. And atmospheric noise is very romantic: it’s radio noise, you see, largely generated by lightning strikes. Lightning: very romantic. So. I tuned a radio receiver to static, connected it to a computer, and wrote a program that used the static to generate a random series of values. If those values stayed within a certain band for a sustained period, this would trigger a script that randomly contacted one of a selection of online flower delivery services, selected one of a number of flower arrangements constrained by expense, appended one of a selection of accompanying notes—one of which apparently had a typographical error; sorry about that—and paid for the delivery with funds I had placed in a dedicated account at an e-commerce site. I coded the whole thing in a few hours. I was clearly a little careless. First there was the typo. But I also should have added a line that prohibited the purchase of a bouquet within, say, ninety-six hours of another purchase, even if atmospheric noise conditions were satisfied multiple times during that period. The chances of that happening the way that did, three instances of satisfied conditions within such a short time frame, are—I can’t even figure them offhand. Was there some sort of meteorological anomaly today? It’s worth looking into. At any rate, the code was sloppy. A poet writes a sonnet with a rhyme that is a little forced and doesn’t sound quite right, but he’s forgiven because he made the effort. But write a program with a couple of glitches in it and suddenly it’s a huge problem!”
“The world is unfair,” said Rebecca.
“I know! Here is the problem. Here is my problem. I think about you all the time. Well, not all the time, really. Not literally. You’re like a little process running in the background, snatching cycles here and there. Sometimes it occurs to me that I think about you more than I ought to think about anything besides physics. Look at Nikola Tesla. Invented alternating current; died a virgin in his eighties. You should thank him every time you flip a light switch. If you have the gift of a mind like his, it comes with a duty to humanity that trumps your own desires, doesn’t it? And yet. And yet. As much as I might like to be, I am not the man he was. I sit at my desk and my mind drifts back to a memory. Something trivial. Like your smirk or your instep. I find myself considering my future histories instead of thinking about my work, and all those that have you in them seem to be brighter than those that don’t. Don’t you see that I don’t have time to think about this? But there are so many possible futures in which I look back on the past and see that I made a terrible mistake, through neglect or through inaction. This is a problem. This is a very interesting problem.
“I’m working through this. Here’s what I propose. You and I should just go ahead and get married. This is what we should do. It will relieve me of the peril of living the rest of my life without you, and it will relieve you of the peril of living the rest of your life without me. This is one of those rare cases where the most optimal solution is also the easiest. It’ll be great! We can save on taxes.”
“And the next morning,” Rebecca said to Kate one afternoon over drinks two days later, “he e-mailed me this Excel spreadsheet showing that, yes, we would actually save several hundred dollars on our returns under the current tax code if we tied the knot. That’s just the kind of guy he is.”
Kate sipped her gin and tonic through its slender black straw. “It’s hard for me to know how to react to this,” she said. “You seem really happy.”
“I am really happy!” said Rebecca, close to bouncing up and down in her chair. “I am. I am.”
“But I can’t help but feel—and I wouldn’t be being honest with you if I didn’t say so—that there’s something really weird about this guy that you’re sort of ignoring. I mean, you told me this story about the wristwatch and the flowers and all that, and the way you tell it, it sounds sentimental and cute. But look at the facts. This is a guy who figured he’d have more time for his work if he wrote a computer program to pay attention to his girlfriend instead of doing it himself. Isn’t that actually kind of horrible? And then when he got caught—because don’t think you would have ever found this out if he hadn’t gotten caught—he didn’t even apologize: he was like, ‘I put a lot of work into writing that program, and you should understand that computer programs are really just like poetry.’ I mean, if you look at it that way, it’s one of the most terrible things I’ve ever heard.”
“But it’s not like he meant anything bad by it,” Rebecca said. “I got three bouquets of flowers out of it. That’s really, really sweet. As for the computer software—he’s really rational! Which means that sometimes he might not see the world the way the rest of us see it. And he’s not the most, you know, socially adaptable person. But he’s good! A really good person. His heart is totally in the right place.”
“Rebecca,” said Kate, “I think you’re overlooking a lot of real problems here! And I think you’ve been overlooking these problems for so long that you’ve just gotten used to it. First of all, I think you’re being forgiving of this guy because he’s passing off this kind of disaffection for human beings as geekery, like he’s got Asperger’s or something and he can’t help it. I mean, that comment he made about the two of you getting married so he could save you from a mistake. What the hell kind of thing was that to say at one of the most important times of his life?”
“Kate, that’s just his sense of humor! It’s really understated, really dry, really self-mocking. It takes some getting used to.”
“Like, oh ha-ha, isn’t it funny how I’m not actually joking? Ha-ha? Is that the kind of sense of humor we’re talking about? Now. The second thing. And the nerd stuff is kind of minor, but this is a serious concern, if you’re talking about marriage. I know you were over the moon when you met this guy. And he’s brilliant, yes, and he’s really successful. But I can tell from the way you talk about him th
at he’s starting to change, that he’s not the person you met even a year ago. That he’s getting obsessed with this project he’s working on, spending more and more time with it, worrying about it all the time. And what I’m afraid of, and what he all but directly told you himself, is that this is a guy who is going to put his own precious ideas ahead of your well-being if he’s forced to make a choice. And maybe he’s even right that humanity needs people like that in order to progress. And maybe he even is one of those people, even if saying so is just incredibly, unbelievably arrogant. Good for him, he’s a genius, and without people like him we’d still be trying to make fire by banging rocks together to strike a spark. Great. But is this the kind of person you want to be married to?”
“Kate, I wanted to tell you this and now you’re—”
“And it’s not like you’ve ever been on your own, either. Have you, Rebecca? Really? The closest you’ve even been to living on your own is college, and there we were all taken care of pretty much night and day. And then you moved back in with your parents, and you went from there to moving in with this guy with no time by yourself in between. All I’m saying is: don’t rush into this, when you haven’t really lived life yet—”
“Kate, what the fuck. I wanted to share this great news with one of my oldest friends and you’re just—”
“Oh, Rebecca. I’m sorry.”
“What the fuck. God—”
“I didn’t mean to make you cry, Rebecca.”
“I just—I just—”
“I’m so sorry. I was way out of line.”
“How many times. How many times have I listened to you say you met some great guy on the Internet or whatever, and three days later you’re telling me you dumped him because of stuff he wanted to do in bed, or he didn’t wash his car often enough, or some stupid shit like that. Because he wasn’t perfect. If you hold out for perfection you’ll end up alone.
“And Philip is great. He’s wonderful and he’s brilliant and he’s funny and he’s amazing. And when he proposed to me I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. And I’m not going to let you ruin that. I won’t.”
“Becca, you’re right to say this. You have every right.”
“Kate—”
“I take it all back. I don’t know why I said all that. I don’t know what got into me. I take back everything I said.”
Rebecca said nothing as her sobs subsided. Her eyes stung; the back of her throat tingled.
Kate reached across the table and placed her hand on Rebecca’s. “I take it all back,” she said again. “I feel like I’ve ruined our friendship. Will you forgive me?”
Her eyes squeezed shut, Rebecca quickly nodded.
“Thank you,” Kate said. “I’m really happy for you. Really. I mean it.”
12
MODERNIST CUISINE
The thing about memories wasn’t that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies. Rebecca clearly remembered what Sean was like at the age of five or six, with a precocious light in his eyes even though he came a little late to his early childhood milestones, like walking and toilet training and speech. (His pediatrician regularly hinted that he might turn out to be on the spectrum, but Rebecca chose to ignore him: her son was perhaps a little eccentric, and maybe a touch slower than the other kids of his cohort, but in a couple of years that was sure to even out.) She effortlessly remembered the times when he’d been rapturous over some simple pleasure like a piece of candy given as a surprise, or when he’d recoiled in comical displeasure after curiously licking the terminals of a nine-volt battery, or when he’d made some cute remark that betrayed a misunderstanding of the adult world that he’d someday enter. But she had extraordinary difficulty remembering Sean at seven months, when he was a little defecating machine. Those times did not come to mind unbidden. (“All he does is piss and crap and puke and cry,” Philip had said, marveling at his son’s furious transmutation of mass to energy, though when changing time came he was nowhere to be found.) The part of her unconscious that was responsible for calling up memories of the strange boy at random times was a careful, prudent censor. In her mind her son was always clean and smiling, with the wonderful man he would become lurking in wait behind the boy’s shining eyes.
Not only did Rebecca’s mind perform careful elisions of Sean’s history to make him seem like some kind of Platonic ideal of himself, but lately—and she thought this had started in earnest around the time she also began feeling that there was something a little wrong with the world, that everything was upside down—she had found herself imagining what Sean might look like now, as if she were peering through a rent in the thick velvet curtain that divided the timeline in which she existed from all the others that were possible. Even now, as she was driving down Route 1 with Philip beside her in the passenger seat, she could almost see some older version of Sean behind her, a little blurred around the edges, gleaming even as he was swaddled in darkness. He would have been nine now. Nine is the age of wearing T-shirts silk-screened with the images of toys you love (and the thing portrayed on Sean’s slender chest morphed from a winged robot with missile launchers slung beneath its armpits, to a Tyrannosaurus rex wearing gauntlets and greaves, to a currant-eyed rodent wreathed in lightning). Nine is the age at which you can stretch out in the backseat of a car and touch one door with your hands and the other with your feet (and while Rebecca saw him lounging there, the hem of his shirt riding up to expose the soft flesh of a stomach that begged for a startling tickle, he was also curled there in a fetal position, attempting to shield himself against some secret and trivial terror). As protean as the vision seemed, Rebecca was half inclined to ask Philip if he saw the boy back there as well. But there was no way to bring up the subject without sounding like someone who didn’t know how to put an end to grieving.
Philip and Rebecca were on their way to Carson Tyler’s apartment for dinner. Kate would be there, too—it’d be just the four of them. Though Carson had extended the invitation and was doing the cooking, Rebecca sensed Kate’s hand in it—she didn’t see Carson as the type who’d propose something so domestic and double-datey. “Please don’t bring anything,” he’d said in the e-mail, but no one ever means that—on the way over, Rebecca had insisted on stopping by a grocery store to pick up a half-dozen freshly baked red velvet cupcakes, each topped with a spiraling mountain of cream-cheese frosting and dotted with pastel sprinkles. No matter what Carson made, there would be something to look forward to at the end of the meal. It was impossible to say why red velvet cupcakes, in particular, tasted so good—“red” was not a flavor—but without the coloring, they’d be unremarkable. Something about their deep crimson hue made your eyes tell your tongue that you were eating something special.
Philip held the clear plastic container full of cupcakes in his lap, staring silently at the road in front of him. Rebecca knew that things had been increasingly going wrong at work between him and Carson: Philip seemed to think, or possibly fear, that Carson was becoming disinterested in the work and burning out. (“I heard him complaining about tweaking,” he said over what was Rebecca’s breakfast and his…dinner? What meal did you have at seven a.m. when you were coming back from work and you were just going to go to sleep afterward? “At the edge of the field ninety-nine percent of experimental physics is tweaking. I saw worse than this in my early career, far worse. He doesn’t know how lucky he has it.”) Rebecca figured that Carson would not be inclined to invite his boss (and his boss’s wife!) over to his apartment for a home-cooked meal. But Kate would not be aware of such lab politics; even if she were, she would probably find them trivial, especially when compared to the fun that she and her girlfriend Rebecca would have, putting their feet up while a dude cooked for them.
Philip had turned the car radio to NPR (Rebecca had given up on teaching him the custom that the driver had the privilege of selecting the radio station). The subject under discussion was a new and as
yet unnamed psychiatric syndrome that seemed to be spiking sharply in the tri-state area: psychiatrists were dealing with a number of patients who weren’t feeling depressed, exactly, so much as feeling—
“That something’s wrong with the world!” Rebecca shouted, bringing Philip out of his reverie.
“—that something’s wrong with the world,” the psychiatrist being interviewed continued. “Lately one out of three patients who come into my office, they say something like, ‘I don’t know how to describe this, and I don’t know what the name is for it. But I have this feeling that I’m not what I’m supposed to be.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I have this weird feeling that the shape of everything is wrong.’ I even had one who came right into the office and pointed at me and said, ‘You aren’t right. You’re not right.’ ”
“Listen!” Rebecca said, pointing at the radio.
“What I want to suggest,” the psychiatrist continued, “is that the reason we can’t readily identify this disorder is because it is new and peculiar to the twenty-first century. It is the first genuinely new disorder of the Information Age, directly caused by the lifelong pervasiveness of communication technologies.”
“Nonsense,” Philip said. “This is the kind of thing that’s dreamed into existence by doctors and hypochondriacs.”
“If you consider human history in its entirety,” the psychiatrist said, “for most of it we had only a passing knowledge of what went on beyond the borders of our town, or even past the fences that defined our property. But now in nearly every room we enter, there is some kind of screen, of a computer or a phone or a tablet, that acts as a window on a much larger world. And as we sift through that constant flow of information, we develop the illusion of control. We believe that since we know so much more about the world than our benighted ancestors, we have a far greater capability than they did to direct our own destinies.”
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