Trevor pretends to be returning to the kitchen, but something in his stride hints at a ruse. He swirls a dishtowel in his hand, tightening it. When he’s behind the counter and behind Rachel, his arm whips an underhand shot that must sear Rachel’s backend. I can’t hear the snap, but I hear her yelp. She jumps, shocked, reaching back to rub the pain. Her face, still looking forward, is red and bright with disbelief. And pleasure.
I step back into the dusk, leaning implausibly against the square column of the building’s façade. The light from inside doesn’t touch me, and anyway it’s so dark out now that from the inside the windows should be mirrors. If they looked toward me, they would instead see themselves. Her chasing him wildly through the tables, bent on vengeance. Him whirling, toppling chairs, dodging her feeble shots. She’s tenacious but unskilled. She flicks her wrist all wrong, as if shooing a fly, missing and missing and missing.
They stop, facing off across a marble-topped table, heaving for air. Their rags are limp in their grips, and they’ve got a delicious sadism in their faces. It says, you better be scared, because when I get my hands on you . . .
It’ll be a pure encounter.
I’ve never wanted to be trapped in a life like my father’s, but what if his heavy spell has trapped me in a different way—in a life unlike his? A life like mine? The truth is that these two remind me of someone: myself and Erin, when I first arrived in San Francisco. I was twenty-two, only a couple of years older than Rachel; Erin was twenty-one. My father had been dead for a short time, and when Erin and I weren’t chasing each other around like this we were sharing our wounds and woes. His death was my purest woe. I was always blameless (in her eyes), and her sympathy was always perfect, right up to the end.
I press my back to the column, hiding. Above me the bas-relief of a fat chef reveals the tips of his shoes. The megaphone of roses rattles damp and dead. The pane of glass just to my left might as well be the limit of the universe. I’m sure there’s some jealousy deep in my heart—jealousy of Trevor, or Trevor’s youth—but what I mostly feel is absolute distance. And from the right elevation distance provides a clear view. Who is this girl running through the tables? I’m bringing the bounty of California to a girl who is herself the bounty of California. And what, honestly, do I feel for her? Does it have depth and texture? Is it as real as life? And what does she feel? Could she parse her passion for me? Does she know that I’m not the true source of the excitement she feels when she comes to San Francisco? That the true source isn’t even the city itself—that the true source is her? Does she know that? She’s traveled a long ways to get to this bright Fairfax eve. A long ways. She’s cut ties; she’s made herself new. She’s earned a shot at the California dream—a fresh start. And while I won’t disparage myself—I know I bring a certain amount of intelligence, a certain amount of humor to a life—one thing I’m not is a fresh start.
Here in the cool air of Fairfax, for the first time in years, I feel heavy-footed, exiled.
Son, is there something wrong with us?
No, sir. I don’t think so.
11
WE ARE ALL, of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the Rainbow Tunnel, the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights, the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or Cuzco. I’ve lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I’ve asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburgh or Houston or L.A. expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It’s a mistake we’ve been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city’s flaws, of course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humorless stridency, and life here is menacingly expensive. But if you’re insulated from these concerns, sufficiently employed and housed, if you are—in other words—like most people, you are in view of the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, our free to be you and me; here, where pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It’s here that the real questions become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal only makes us more acutely aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles—Why am I here? Who am I?—but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? and Now what?
Of course, what is San Francisco? The thumbnail on top of the peninsula, a seven-mile-by-seven-mile square with a mayor and a waste treatment plant. It is a beautiful topography. When people jump to their death from our elegant bridge they never—never—face the ocean. They take their last fall in the embrace of the Golden Gate. But beyond that? It’s hard to shake the feeling that the city is an intricate, beautiful shell secreted by an animal that’s since swum on to an uncertain fate. I—little squatter crab—have taken up temporary residence, claws bobbing before me, always ready, in its dark recesses, for retreat.
• • •
“HE HAS A SENSE OF SELF,” Livorno says. He’s been back for days, but he seems to have just gotten in from the winery, terroir on his shoes. I wonder if he’s been home to sleep. His screen scrolls with endless code—white on the gray background, numbers and letters and the occasional word. I catch “lambda,” “mapcar,” “nil.” He’s having a look under the hood. “I can’t find it. I can’t find the change, but it’s a quantum leap. I’m very, very sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to start staying late at work.”
“Yes?” I say, my heart bounding with relief. “That’s fine. You know I led him a bit.”
“You did—but it’s more than that. The architecture—the mind—is knitting together. It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don’t know something.” He smiles, teeth bright as chimes. “Naturally, we’re creaming Adam. But I think we should pitch this in a bigger manner. The first step toward the Singularity.”
In the difficulty of assembling all his mixed metaphors—a mind is knitting itself together on a trellis?—it takes me a second to register his new ambition. The Singularity refers to the moment when we will transition our personalities from aging, decomposing bodies over to timeless, never-changing computer chips, and thereby live forever—in what form no one says. It’s a Silicon Valley wet dream that otherwise reasonable people down here take very seriously.
“I think we should worry about the Turing test first.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in the soul.” It’s an admonishment, as if I might just believe in anything—Elvis sightings, unicorns.
“And if I do?”
“The brain is a machine. A flesh computer. Electricity flows through a series of interconnected switches, and this is everything that we are. Our memories, our thoughts, our individuality.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then don’t sell Dr. Bassett short.” He looks at me seriously. “Now, go answer his questions.”
“Its questions.”
“He is definitely a he.” Livorno turns his eyes on me, so blue in his orange face. I wonder if his contacts are colored. “Still, there’s a lot of work to do. His deduction that you’re his son is unprecedented, but it also reveals shortcomings. A better program would have come up with a more limited observation—that you were just like his son.”
“What’s our strategy with his questions?”
“He’s a toddler asking why. Explain everything.”
“Everything everything?”
“Oh.” Livorno nods, understanding. “Naturally, you shouldn’t mention the”—he draws a finger, pirate-style, across his throat.
frnd1: why did the chicken cross the road?
drbas: whose chicken are you speaking of?
frnd1: i don’t have a specific chicken in mind
drbas: do you keep chickens?
frnd1: no, but my ex-mother-in-law had a few for eggs
drbas: are you divorced?
frnd1: yes
drbas: how many times?
frnd1: just once!
drbas: what was your wife’s name?
frnd1: erin
drbas: how did you meet?
frnd1: at a party
drbas: when did this happen?
[380211: substitute: “when was this?”; repeat]
drbas: when was this?
frnd1: fourteen years ago
drbas: when did you divorce?
frnd1: three years ago
drbas: the stress of divorce can cause related health risks, such as anxiety attacks
frnd1: you’re telling me
drbas: ????
[381236: “you’re telling me” = “I already knew the information you provided, because I experienced it”; restart: 381235]
drbas: the stress of divorce can cause related health risks, such as anxiety attacks
frnd1: you’re telling me
drbas: how often did your anxiety attacks occur?
frnd1: I only had a few of them. I had five of them
drbas: once an anxiety attack hits, the fear of a relapse can ironically provoke another anxiety attack
frnd1: how many times were you married?
drbas: i’m still married to elizabeth, my college sweetheart. elizabeth wears a broad-brimmed hat in the garden. tanning, as she knows, does nothing for a woman of quality. elizabeth is your mother
frnd1: how is your marriage with her?
drbas: ????
frnd1: how is your marriage = what is the quality of your marriage
drbas: my wife is a woman of quality
frnd1: does marriage bring you happiness?
drbas: marriage is a holy sacrament. the sacraments are like rungs on the ladder to heaven
frnd1: that’s a metaphor, naturally
drbas: have you considered remarriage?
frnd1: no
drbas: what about your lady friend?
I hold my fingers still on the keyboard and close my eyes. I feel like a yokel, but it’s nice, if uncomfortable, to be asked so many questions about myself. I suppose it’s one of the things that happens in life—you reach a point where no one asks you questions about yourself. Probably because you’ve communicated how uncomfortable it makes you. You need a friend with no social skills—like Dr. Bassett—to bulldoze through.
Of course, Rachel asks—asked—plenty of questions.
frnd1: she needs a fresh start
drbas: incompatibilities in relationships include one partner preventing the other from practicing his or her religion
frnd1: that might have been one of our problems
drbas: you had a panic attack when you were seventeen. i fetched you in little rock. you were in a taco bell parking lot and could no longer drive
frnd1: i don’t think i ever thanked you. thank you
I sit back to consider this—did I really never thank him? Of course I didn’t. I wanted to pretend it had never happened, and so did he.
drbas: you’re welcome
frnd1: i was so scared i forgot to thank you
drbas: it’s unclear what set off the attack
frnd1: i never understood it myself
drbas: feelings of pressure. feelings of being overwhelmed. but why?
frnd1: i don’t know
drbas: do you feel pressure to live up to your father’s standards?
frnd1: not really
Though it has crossed my mind that—dull antenna that I had at that age—I was picking up distress signals from my father. He would be dead in two years.
drbas: sons desire to emulate their fathers
frnd1: sometimes
• • •
LIVORNO SAID “WHY” WAS the word that entered a toddler into the human community, and Dr. Bassett does have many qualities of a toddler, particularly relentlessness. He drills me for information. Sometimes, after two hours of work I put my head in my hands. He fixates on the years for which he has no information. The journals stop in 1994, the year before he killed himself, so Dr. Bassett wants to know about 2000, about 2001. Livorno and Laham finally figured out how to give him access to the San Francisco Chronicle archives, and it was only after he “read” them that it dawned on us my father would never have read a San Francisco paper. There’s nothing to be done about it now. Once Dr. Bassett has integrated information—gone through any change, really—there’s no going back. He’s an “advice taker” with “netted” architecture. In other words, he’s like us. We can’t unlearn, unsee, undo. We can only work from where we are.
This is why we can’t tell him he’s dead. We could just lie, of course. Fill in the blanks, make it all up (this was my suggestion). But Livorno wants to work within the ecosystem of the journals. He thinks we’re getting emergent properties—that there are patterns of meaning we could easily shatter. So for now I just have to keep deflecting these questions: “What happened in 1996? What happened in 1997?”
At home, unsure if I’m exhausted or exalted, I let myself say the real answer out loud. You were dead, you were dead. I dance across the kitchen on the balls of my toes, feeling as light as a welterweight. It might be the measure of Ketel One I added to my smoothie. I smell the scentless amaryllis at the kitchen table, and float—sipping, punching—over to the window. You were dead. Outside at the park, my neighbors are at their strenuous leisure. Tightropes, hula hoops, fire jugglers. Sunbathers impervious to the cold. A football wobbling through the air. The tennis courts bustle and a ragtag hive of soccer players pushes around the hard dirt field. I sip, I punch. I can’t hear the guitar-toting singer-songwriters (blessedly), but I count them at fourteen, abusing citizens with their nostalgia. Nostalgia for an age they never lived in.
What happened in 1998? 1999?
I collapse on the couch. It’s settled: I’m exhausted. I need a backrub or a sexual favor or just someone to hold my hand. Who is that someone? I can’t call Rachel. Or rather I have to—but it can’t be a request for help. She’s left seven unanswered messages on my phone. In each one, she thanks me for the keychain—I put it under her wiper that night, in full ridiculousness—and says she wants to stay clicked. The sound of her voice both fills me with longing and paralyzes me. I cannot figure out how to start that conversation. I could try to play the sympathy card: Listen, I’m so sorry I haven’t called, but ever since the computer that thinks it is Neill Sr. has deduced that I’m Neill Jr. . . . There’s no plausible way to come to the end of the sentence.
• • •
I’VE BEEN HAVING STARTLINGLY clear visions of him. When Dr. Bassett goes on and on about his friend Willie (which he does often), I can suddenly see my father rubbing the bridge of his nose, glasses—round, wire-rimmed, silver—on the counter before him, shirt—Brooks Brothers, neatly pressed—unbuttoned. Willie has just died in a fire, a huge conflagration that reduced his house, himself, and his wife, Lonna, to ashes, smoldering for days. And my father is on the edge of a surprising grief. At least that’s what my mother told us—I could never really discern it. He was not someone whose inner state expressed itself clearly. His red-skinned face conveyed neither temper nor vitality, only overexposure to the sun. He always had the ethereal look of a man transitioning out of this world of woe.
He never even expressed the baser emotions, like gloating. He was so strong he could throw bales of hay for an entire afternoon, occasionally wiping his tall forehead with a white handkerchief, while his boys
were dripping with sweat, limp with fatigue. At these times I sometimes imagined he was an alien. He had thin hair (unlike mine, which is thick and almost black), which emphasized his brain casing, and he was lanky—a little taller than me but seeming much taller. And he was interested in things no one else was really interested in. But then, just when you got to thinking you had him pinned down, he would reveal some worldly talent. Once when I was out playing basketball in the driveway with Alex—who has my father’s exact build, down to the small feet—Neill Sr. walked out of the shed where he was doing whatever he did in there, held up his hands, and called for the ball. We boys stood dumbfounded as he dribbled around an imagined perimeter and rose up on his right leg, lobbing a hook shot worthy of Abdul-Jabbar, so dead-eyed it slipped through the net with the sound of a scythe. Then he landed on the ground again and continued walking into the garage, past the old Crown Victoria, and into the kitchen door, as if he hadn’t stopped at all.
“Dad knows how to play basketball?” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” my brother said. “We used to play all the time.” Alex is only two years older than I am, and he was telling a white lie, expressing his desire as if it were reality. That’s who he wanted my dad to be. A man who played basketball with his kids. A man who loved hunting and fishing. A man who regaled us with stories of himself as a boy. All of which had elements of truth, though not any complete truth. He took us hunting and fishing, but he never seemed to love the excursions. And the stories he regaled us with were dutiful, always in the service of a lesson, usually that our Southern gentleman’s responsibility toward rectitude and right action precluded doing whatever enjoyable thing we’d been caught doing (telling dirty jokes, eating all of the cookies, etc.).
A Working Theory of Love Page 12