Her logic is irrefutable: let me in because the door has just been closed. As if in the first five minutes after closing, it might still be open.
The soldier looks at her, confused. His jaw is sharp, belligerent. His uniform jacket is unbuttoned over his stomach.
"Well, I suppose I could go with you. And I'm not an officer, ma'am. Thanks for the promotion, but I'm just a soldier."
Now there will be an opportunity for bills to exchange hands without uncomfortable witnesses.
"I'm very proud," says Ruth flatteringly, "that you soldiers are keeping the peace at such a critical time for our country."
The soldier looks at his companions, as if asking them for permission to defy an order, insinuating that they will get their share. They agree by imperceptibly nodding their heads, as if the nod were not a nod at all, giving them an excuse, a subterfuge that would exempt them from the law that had been broken. It was a matter of keeping up appearances.
The soldier opens the door. Ruth enters with hesitant steps; she cannot believe that her appeal worked. As she walks next to him on their way to the main block of buildings, she lifts up her head, discovers strength within herself. She wonders how much money she has in her purse.
They cross the basketball and futsal courts diagonally. Oh, the intolerable things that Miguel makes her do. She has to admit that there have been tender moments between them. She remembers one night in particular, when he came home from work and said excitedly that he had a big secret to tell her. Did she want to hear it immediately or wait until they were in bed? She had said she'd rather wait, delay the surprise as long as possible. Once under the covers and with the lights turned out, Miguel told her about a complex code that he had just deciphered. His happiness moved her so much that she embraced him with an intensity of love she had never felt before. Were all those decades worth a few epiphanies? Perhaps. Had it not been in vain after all? Perhaps not. But she had crossed a line, and there was no going back. Ruth couldn't always find salvation in another human being; sometimes she had to do it alone, gritting her teeth and closing her eyes. Or opening them, as her mother had done seconds before she shot herself in front of Ruth, preferring death at her own hands to the irreversible, painful decay of flesh.
She feels a warm liquid running from her nostrils and brings her hand up to her lips. She touches the liquid, tastes it. Blood. Is that why she thought of her mother right then? Had her body known before she did that her nose was bleeding? It was telling her it was afraid because it had just realized that there, deep within her, some of her cells had begun to host a cancer. She was a hypochondriac, paranoid, but not this time. How many of her relatives had died of cancer? Her mom, Grandpa Fernando, several aunts and uncles, a few cousins. Genetic mutations were part of her worrisome heritage.
"Is anything wrong?" the soldier asks, stopping.
She takes a handkerchief out of her purse. She will call the doctor from her office. You don't make calls like that from a cell phone. You have to be sitting down.
"It's nothing, officer," she says, trying to stay calm. "I just realized what it is I'm going to die of."
She starts to walk again, her high heels resounding, her gaze proud. The soldier watches her walk away, not knowing what to do. Then he follows her.
Chapter 19
THE MORNING ENDS. The afternoon ends. The night ends. The day ends.
My life does not. I persist despite myself. It's my blessing. And my curse. I am an electric ant ... Soon there will be a new reincarnation ... I've been in this country longer than I should have. In a medicinal-smelling room. Awaiting another. More stimulating. Battlefront. I've done everything here that I had to do ... They don't need me. I don't need them. Despite the fact that they're keeping me as a talisman. Or a prisoner...
Perhaps the government wants to make me disappear. I know a great deal. But I can't speak ... No one can interrogate me.
Words are composed and decomposed in my brain ... They can't be pronounced ... And I want to catch myself thinking. Trap thought in the act of thinking ... And decipher it ... See what there is behind every association of ideas. Perhaps another association of ideas ... A winding course, like a river. But logical in the end.
I am an electric ant ... That wants to die and can't.
I wanted to stay. Or someone inside who knows more than I wanted me to stay ... I write and am written. I am. Luckily. Other interesting things...
I am Edgar Allan Poe ... I was born in 1809. Even though I don't remember my childhood ... They say I invented the modern short story. And the detective novel. And also horror stories ... I tried to explain the composition of a poem rationally. I had great faith in reason ... And yet my narrative was filled with the irrational ... I was an alcoholic. Delirious. Perhaps thought is nothing more than another form of delirium ... Perhaps reason is the greatest delirium of them all.
In a country of delirious beings. Reason is king ... It's delirious to connect ideas logically. Among so many hurried ramifications ... Pursuing the correct one...
My favorite hobby was cryptology. In 1839 I wrote about the importance of solving puzzles ... Above all, secret texts. I invited my readers of Alexander's Weekly Messenger. In Philadelphia ... To send me texts ciphered in monoalphabetic codes of their invention ... Many arrived ... I solved almost all of them ... It took me less time to decipher them than my readers had taken to encode them.
I followed my intuition. Perhaps intuition is the most sophisticated face of reason...
Thought is capable of thinking things that we don't think it thinks ... It's even capable of thinking the unthinkable...
When I used my intuition ... I was reasoning without knowing it ... That's why it's good to give in to delirium.
Turing didn't read a lot of literature ... Once I invited him to my house. He was surprised by my vast library. My books in Latin and Greek ... In German and French ... He looked at me with his startled eyes. I told him that I found inspiration in literature ... How to say the most obvious things using the most obscure words ... How to hide meaning in a forest of phrases ... Literature is the code of all codes. I told him. Sitting in my chair. My back to the window. The rain pattering ... That it's one way of looking at the world. Of confronting the world. Of becoming immersed in the daily battle ... Trying to see what's hidden. Covered by a layer of reality ... Trying to reach the core...
He kept staring at me. Admiring and incredulous ... Standing next to a bookcase ... I got up and looked on a shelf. I gave him a book with a bound cover ... The complete works of Poe ... I told him he would learn much by reading it ... I told him to read "The Gold-Bug"...
I moved as if to kiss him. I liked to play that game with him ... To see whether he wanted to kiss me. Whether he could.
Poor man ... When he left. He was still somewhat stunned.
I am an electric ant ... Capable of spitting up blood ... And of keeping my eyes open without seeing a thing ... Not even Turing ... Sitting, awaiting my words. Poor man. He has never broken the spell ... Meeting me was the best thing that ever happened to him. And also the worst ... I taught him to do his job ... And not to ask questions. Not investigate. That was for others to do. Obedience is the rule ... One can converse with authority. But not question its orders ... I treated him as an equal. As a friend. So that. When it came down to it ... He would be a good subordinate ... And he was ... And he is ... He can't cope on his own. He still relies on me. He wants me to help him find his way ... Like I used to. He still doesn't suspect. That in reality I helped him not to see the way ... To concentrate only on what was in front of him. On his desk.
In order for a government to survive ... Civil servants like Turing are necessary.
Markets. Ruins of fortifications. A river. A very green valley.
Turing was fascinated by Poe's short story. Turing was fascinated by my short story.
He came to discuss it with me in my office the next morning ... As he did. I remembered the foggy morning when I created th
e monoalphabetic code for "The Gold-Bug"...Legrand has to decipher it in order to discover where Captain Kidd ... Who died a century and a half ago ... Hid his treasure. The code is simple:
53##+305))6*;4826)4#.)4#);806*;48+8@60))85;]8*:#*8+83(88) 5*+;46(;88*96*?;8)*#(;485);5*+2:*#(;4956*2(5*—4)8@8*;406 9285);)6+8)4##;l(#9;48081,8:8#l;48+85;4)485+528806*81(#9 ;48(88;4(#?34;48)4#;161;:188;#?;
They were different times. When the art of keeping secrets still hadn't been mechanized ... A code had to be confronted using pencil and paper. It helped to know some cryptological methods ... For example. Knowing the frequency with which each letter in the alphabet appears. I had begun with pure intuition. Then I learned. By reading an article in an encyclopedia ... That my style was a rudimentary form of frequency analysis. By the time I wrote the story ... I had completely mastered the method.
Legrand knew that the most frequent letter in English is e. When he discovers that 8 occurs thirty-three times in the code ... He supposes that 8 equals e. The article the also occurs frequently ... And if the combination ;48 occurs seven times in the code ... Legrand decides that this equals the. A general look at the code will reveal an area that is apt for the attack ... Thirty-two symbols before the end. Now the teeth can be read. The letter behind ( has to be uncovered ... There is no word in English that is the equivalent of t(eeth ... So Legrand thinks ... I make Legrand think ... That the th at the end belongs to another word ... And he is left with t(ee.
Trying each letter of the alphabet ... The only word that makes sense is tree ... So we have the tree thr—hthe... For the three spaces ... Legrand decides on oug ... Three more symbols have been uncovered. #. ?. 3. And so on. Until the text is deciphered ... Which reads. A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head a bee-line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.
Still mysterious ... But now the problem is for Legrand. Not for cryptology. To solve.
I'm exhausted. It's raining. Out the windows. My throat is dry. I would like to go outside ... To disconnect myself from these tubes. My mission here is done...
Turing never felt comfortable working with computers ... He learned a great deal. At least he tried to. But he was nostalgic for the days of pencil and paper ... When cryptograms were like crosswords ... When one faced a problem. Armed with intuition and deductive reasoning ... He reread Poe's story over and over again. It was his favorite. It struck the deepest chord in him. And made him realize that he was an old-fashioned man ... Someone who would've been happy in any era. Prior to the one in which he had been born...
Seeing him wandering through the hallways of the Black Chamber moved me.
Maybe he would've been happy if he'd been immortal.
Maybe not. You never know ... I know that I'm immortal. And I'm not happy.
Chapter 20
RAMÍREZ-GRAHAM IS SHOWERING when his cell phone rings. He reaches out with his wet hand to grab the Nokia, covering it in soap; he watches it slip onto the floor. Fuck.
"Hello? Boss?" It is Baez. "What was that?"
"I dropped the phone. I'm in the shower."
"Oh, I see, I thought it was static. I just spoke with Sáenz's daughter. She'll call tomorrow to tell us whether or not she's interested. She didn't seem too sure. I gather she's been intimidated by hackers. They trust her as long as she remains neutral and uses her site only to inform—they won't like it if she collaborates with the government again. She's been threatened before, when she worked for Albert."
Ramírez-Graham asks him to insist, not to let her get away, and hangs up.
He gets out of the shower, cursing his work once again. Even if he does succeed now, his pride will be bruised, because he will owe his success to a teenager. Kandinsky's fall will be his salvation: he will hand him over, gagged, to the vice president, and that very same day he will buy his return ticket to Washington.
He dries himself with a monogrammed towel and changes in front of the full-length mirror in his room. His wet feet leave damp footprints on the parquet. Supersonic comes toward him, wagging his tail and looking up at him with his bright eyes. Maybe his sensors are telling him that his owner won't play with him again tonight? Ramírez-Graham smiles at him and pats his metallic head, his alert ears. He read in the Sony manual that the interactive model he bought would acquire different characteristics depending on the kind of relationship it had with its owners. The first few days, as tends to happen with every electronic gadget he acquires, Ramírez-Graham read the manual into the early morning hours and taught Supersonic several tricks: how to fetch the tennis ball when they played in the park, how to wag his tail when he got home from work. Supersonic was a happy dog that slept at the foot of the bed, issuing a faint whistle of satisfaction. Then, owing to the urgency of his work, Ramírez-Graham forgot him. The dog languished before his eyes, fading almost imperceptibly. His future as basement junk was already assured, just as soon as his batteries ran out.
In the kitchen, Ramírez-Graham serves himself a glass of Old Parr on the rocks and pours Cheerios into a bowl. On Saturday mornings he goes to a supermarket that specializes in American products and fills his cupboards with Doritos, M&Ms, and Pringles.
He turns on the Toshiba flat-screen TV in the living room. The pain in his stomach is returning; he heads to the bathroom in search of his pills. Maybe he has lost the mucous membrane that covers and protects the stomach? Intestinal flora, that's what it is' called. Or is he lacking the gastric juices that help digestion?
He returns to the living room and finds a news channel. If successful, the indefinite blockade called for by the Coalition could turn Kandinsky into a symbol of the anti-globalization movement. Ramírez-Graham has to admit that he is living in a strange country. In the United States, a hacker would never dream of joining forces with union members. Fucking weird. The puzzle he's been given to solve is written in a language he doesn't recognize. He misses his office at Crypto City.
Crypto City, the Black Chamber ... Since he had come from such humble origins, who would have thought he would have gotten this far? He was devoted to mathematics thanks to his mother. Exhausted after a long day at the public school where she worked, she still had time to sit down with him at the kitchen table and teach him the theory of numbers, using games she took from The Man Who Counted. He learned almost without noticing. Beremiz Samir, the man who counted, found poetry in numbers. He could distribute thirty-five camels between three Arab brothers and have the brothers be satisfied that the division was just. With four number fours he could form any number (zero = 44–44; one = 44/44; two = 4/4 + 4/4; three = 4+4+4/4; four = 4+(4-4)/4...). He preferred the number 496 to 499, since 496 was a perfect number (one equal to the sum of all its factors, excluding itself). He could explain how it was possible that a Muslim judge could give three sisters different numbers of apples (50 for one, 30 for another, and 10 for the third), ask them to sell the apples for the same price, and still manage to have them all earn the same amount of money.
Almost without noticing, Ramírez-Graham went from playing those games to creating his own. He was interested in cryptology, an arcane branch of mathematics, because of the multiple applications it contained for the theory of numbers. When a copy of the software program called Mathematica fell into his hands, he began to program cryptographic systems on his own. He could not understand how mathematicians had survived before the computer was invented. For those who worked with enormous numbers, like cryptologists, the speed of the computer was an ally without par. A century had passed before it was discovered that one of Fermat's numbers was not a prime number, as his celebrated theory suggested, and two and a half centuries before it was discovered that another number was not prime; with a program like Mathematica on the computer, those centuries became less than two seconds. Fermat thought that the number 232 + 1 was prime; using Mathematica, you only had to type the command FactorInteger and
then [232 + 1] to discover almost instantly that Fermat was wrong.
Even though his grades in high school were not very good, he was accepted into the University of Chicago because of affirmative action, which had done so much for Latinos. But he outdid himself in Chicago: he had a job offer from the NSA two years before he graduated. Even though years of solid work in Crypto City did not make him a star, it did make him a presence who was well trusted by his superiors. He had to remember all of that before giving up on Kandinsky.
He sits down in one of the chairs with the files he brought from the Black Chamber. The light from a lamp illuminates his profile, leaving the other half in shadow. Supersonic lies down at his feet and wags his tail, vainly attempting to attract his attention. Electronic dogs are just as annoying and needy as real dogs, but at least they don't shit everywhere.
The files are classified documents, found in a special section of the archives—the Archive of Archives—inaccessible to all but the director of the Black Chamber. They tell the story of how the chamber was founded in early 1975 and of its first few years of operation. They explain the reasons that gave rise to the building, how the original mission was established, what the directors were looking for when they hired personnel.
He would like to find out more about Albert. The entire building is under his spell. Whenever Ramírez-Graham goes into his office, he can't help but remember that Albert used to work there. At times he feels a ghostly silhouette is watching him work, controlling his steps and his words. That silhouette is attached by a rusting chain to the Enigma machine, like a grandfather in One Hundred Years of Solitude. He had liked that novel but had also laughed at how his schoolmates believed it was the extravagant and exotic reality of Latin America. Sure, they do things differently down there, he would tell them, but it isn't exotic. At least, that was not the Cochabamba of his vacations. There were parties and drugs and television and a great deal of beer, just like in Chicago. No grandfather chained to a tree, no beautiful adolescent ascending to heaven. But now that he lived here, fuck, his imagination was betraying him. Maybe García Márquez had been right.
Turing's Delirium Page 14