Then Calvino had received an email from Yoshi, inviting him to his condo for a drink. Yoshi had a gift he wanted to give him. The gift was from Marley, the brilliant mathematician who for a moment had remapped his life. Marley had left Thailand eighteen months earlier. Her departure had been abrupt, a surprise. She’d vanished, leaving behind only her mathematical version of a Dear John letter. As a formula for a breakup, she had reduced their relationship to a simple equation based on the indeterminacy principle—certain lives, once entangled, would always be connected no matter their distance apart in the universe. He drafted a response saying that, while her physics worked well on the cosmic level, it was a poor guide to maintaining a sexual relationship in Bangkok.
Although Calvino specialized in finding missing persons, he couldn’t locate her. He assumed he could find her if he really tried. She had a public profile. But he never sent his letter. When she’d pulled up the ladder behind her, she’d made it nearly impossible to find which rabbit hole she’d disappeared down. Calvino accepted her choice.
The elderly yogi, in his white teaching outfit, stood framed in the door, a serene smile on his face.
“Vincent, I am pleased to see you,” he said simply, as if the previous eighteen months had been a couple of days.
Calvino followed him into the sparsely decorated main room. Yoga mats, a series of ceremonial tables with small statuettes of Indian and Chinese deities, incense sticks, fresh orchids. A wrapped present lay on one of the ceremonial tables. Nearby was a low wooden teak table with a tea service set up. Yoshi nodded at the gift. The wrapping paper was a map of the five boroughs of New York City.
“Marley wanted you to have this.”
He lifted the large rectangular gift and handed it to Calvino. Calvino scrutinized the wrapping until he found what he was looking for.
“I lived there in my last life,” he said, pointing to a street in Queens.
“Open it.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“See for yourself.”
Calvino tore away the wrapping paper, the tear line cutting through the East Village. Inside was a framed map. It appeared to represent the world, but it was unlike any ordinary map. It looked like something from a children’s book of fables. The map of New York City on the wrapping paper was realistic and to scale, but inside was a totally different kind of map, one that might have emerged under the influence of drugs or a crazy flight of imagination.
Marley’s note inside read:
“There are people for whom the world is too big, and for others the world is far too small. For both, the map is not the territory. You will have found your past self on the gift wrapping, but can you find your present territory?
“This map is a prophecy written in longitude and latitude for navigation, and mostly that works. But we can never be certain which part of a map is true and which part is imagination. Only at the end of the journey can you know whether the prophecy is true.”
Calvino looked up from the note. He handed it to Yoshi to read.
“She’s right. You found yourself on the wrapping,” said Yoshi.
“But on this strange-looking map? There’s no New York. There’s no America.”
Yoshi read the note and nodded.
“ ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ And this map is not a map. That makes finding oneself all the more interesting a challenge.”
Marley loved puzzles—making them, solving them, sending them into the world. She’d sent Calvino a challenge that was both a love letter and a riddle. Yoshi saw that Calvino was struggling to express a reaction that wouldn’t make him appear as foolish as he felt.
“The map is strange only because we no longer see its world as ours. For a long stretch of time this map guided thousands of journeys. For hundreds of years it summarized our knowledge of the larger world.”
As Yoshi watched, Calvino glanced between the framed map and the map made of wrapping paper, now torn. One printed on disposable paper while the other framed for the ages. He understood it took a wise man to digest the fundamental differences and the more he thought about the less wise he felt.
“Old maps are from an alien world,” said Yoshi. “The past doesn’t travel well when it comes to maps. When you study the features of a distant place and time, you discover how they are disconnected from our current knowledge. We smirk. We ask, why should I look at this cartoon? We look down on those who came before us as ignorant. But in the future, new generations will look down on us in the same way. Maps change. Human nature remains constant.”
He traced a finger across the ragged blue mouth of a thousand-year-old Mediterranean Sea.
“Our modern maps chart genealogy, consciousness in the brain, politics, religions, ethnic groups, wars, coups, information and the cosmos. We are a mapmaking species, using them to find our way, even wrapping our gifts with them. From satellites to Google cars, we trace one boundary after another. But there is always a new, unmapped frontier. We long to explore the territory beyond any map. Again, this is human nature.”
“Is that where Marley has gone?” asked Calvino. “Somewhere off the map?”
“Marley’s quite good at doing that.”
Yoshi’s eyes slowly closed, and Calvino watched as the elderly man descended to a place deep inside himself. When his eyes opened, he gestured for Calvino to sit on the mat.
“Maps are a kind of intelligence report, one that is edited and updated. What if you could update your own intelligence? We have about ten thousand variants in our genes that correlate to intelligence. With the tiny disconnects, errors and flaws, a genius has an IQ of 150. Push those genes to their limit, and you might find a rare person with an IQ approaching 200. If you could edit the gene variants, and you had the possibility of arranging the nucleotide polymorphisms into a perfect grammar, then human IQ, in theory, might ramp up to 1,000. But what does that mean? We can’t assume to know what it means to scale intelligence to that level. There is no precedent. We can’t know whether our values, ethics, norms or ideologies scale to that level of intelligence.”
“It’s off the map,” said Calvino. “By the way, are we talking theoretically or are we talking about Marley?”
“Both,” said Yoshi. “If someone is ten times smarter than you, can you comprehend that level of intelligence? I have my doubts. Just as if I based my idea of the world on this map, and you told me there were other lands I hadn’t seen.”
“But Marley’s told you that she’s working on intelligence?” said Calvino.
“She’s funded a private artificial intelligence project, and she’s had some success. Major breakthroughs are years away. She’s pushing at the outer edges of knowledge. But she feels no need to commercialize her findings.”
A twinkle in Yoshi’s eye signaled his agreement with Marley for her to keep the research results off the market.
“I assume Marley’s found something,” Calvino said, “and she’s asked you for advice.”
It would have been a natural thing for her to do. Yoshi had once been her professor and mentor. She would go to him.
“She knows human intelligence is only a temporary scaffolding to reach a much larger, complex structure. Perhaps we can enhance our intelligence tenfold. Impressive. But AI has even greater potential. There’s no limit except the laws of physics. An intelligence that’s a thousand or a million-fold beyond ours? It’s possible. She’s always been exceptionally intelligent. She knows, no matter how good the map, that we will always be one step short of our destination. We are one upload short of artificial intelligence. One funeral short to the end of history. I will confide in you Marley’s conceit. She believes we can complete that last step, upload, or formula. So far Marley has found, what all before her have discovered—there is always one more step.”
“Is there any way I can talk to her, Yoshi?”
“Not yet. The time isn’t right.”
“Meanwhile, her way to communicate is through maps?”
“Accep
t the gift, Vincent. Try to understand she truly cares about you. She has her own ways of communicating, and once you come to appreciate them, you’ll find them richer and deeper than anything you have ever imagined.”
When their visit had ended, Yoshi lifted the framed map and carried it as he escorted Calvino to the door. Inside the lift to the lobby, a young Thai couple stared at it, giggling at the map’s absurdities. Another farang caught carrying an out of date, wrong-headed map of Thailand. Calvino returned their smiles but said nothing. He wondered how many ships had been lost taking this particular map as a reliable guide.
Maybe getting lost had a different meaning in the past. Had there been a greater sense of wonder and mystery, and an expectation that nothing was quite as it appeared? What he held was like a hobbit map. Marley had, for her own reasons, wished him to project himself into this hobbit-like world.
As he walked to the street, he ran Yoshi’s parting words through his mind: “We can map most things, including violence, crimes, wars and hijackings. Now we can even assign probabilities that are updated each minute, as new acts emerge from a particular space. An interactive map of violence, one that is dynamic, allows the police to predict muggings.
“This map was a watershed. The world it depicts, which now looks like a wild leap of the imagination, was in fact a documentary representation of the world that people then believed to be true. See where the landscape pools, overflows and cascades down the side of mountains? That wasn’t an idea from a dream state. That was once how the nature of the world was communicated between people. Marley wants you to travel with her, and this is her way of bringing you along.”
SEVEN
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”—George Orwell
CALVINO ARRIVED IN his office on Sukhumvit Road early the next morning, nodding to Ratana, his secretary, as he walked past her desk. She looked dressed to kill in a gray vest worn over a sleek black dress and high heels.
“Nice dress,” he said, as he turned to do a double take.
He was already eating a sandwich that he’d bought at the Villa Market around the corner: ham, cheese, lettuce and mayo.
“I bought you one,” he said, laying a plastic bag on her desk.
She looked up and acknowledged him before turning back to her posting on Twitter. He’d bounded out of bed that morning with a mission, a new case, and he wanted to start working on the Osborne-Sky case map. Matrimonial cases were like trying to map a bowl of spaghetti. But then he was Italian, he told himself.
“I’m working on a new map.”
She pulled a serious face. She didn’t approve.
“I’m not certain if the time is right for you to accept a new client,” she said.
“It’s for an old client: Osborne. He thinks his girlfriend is cheating on him.”
Any time she heard Osborne’s name, Ratana sighed while maintaining her smile, one of those contradictions that Thais are masters at.
“He exploits what happened to Rob. That’s why I don’t like him.”
“This case will square accounts. It’ll close the books.”
Calvino was thinking that Ratana was looking very good indeed.
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’m certain this time.”
He winked and disappeared into his office.
Taking a seat behind his desk, Calvino turned on his computer. He opened a modified software program that combined the traveling-salesman mathematical problem with a program designed for psychologists to map the relationships of couples seeking marital counseling. A blank template appeared on his screen.
Finding the shortest path between points wouldn’t necessarily establish a connection between Fah and a male lover, if she had one. The blank map on the screen needed information of multiple contact points to assess the strength of any one point over another, and an algorithm to figure out the shortest path between Fah and the males mostly likely to be lovers.
He removed Marley’s note from his jacket, smoothed it out on his desk and read it again. What was Fah’s interior territory? He read another of her tweets for a clue: “Junta spokesman to foreign journalists: ‘Thai people have different way of thinking to you. I have a different upbringing to you.’ ” When he’d seen Fah with Osborne, it seemed to him that was an opinion she might have shared with the junta spokesman. Calvino wasn’t certain whether her tweets were intended to be subversive or sympathetic.
There was only one way to find out—leather on the pavement, covering the turf one step at a time. Such cases had taught him that lovers had a ninety percent probability of living within eight kilometers of each other. There was an irony in that while it was easy to maintain an overseas relationship, road traffic in Bangkok was bad enough to kill relationships separated by just ten kilometers. He keyed in Osborne’s address and the addresses of Fah’s university, her favorite restaurants, nightclubs and Starbucks.
Calvino sat back in his chair, hands behind his head, looking at the screen. It wasn’t much of a matrimonial case map. There was too much missing information about the men in Fah’s life to know where they met. He needed time to build a case map, starting with a representation of Fah’s personal network—Oak and Palm, her fellow students. He would add her history with Osborne and her connections to others in his life. Then he would move on to the “hot spots,” the overlapping communication tunnels that connected them. And when he had finished such a map, what would it tell Alan Osborne? That he had a picture of about the same level of accuracy as the Tabula Rogeriana, 1154, or something more like a detailed street map of the five boroughs of New York? If Marley had been trying to tell him anything, it was to follow how information was exchanged, saved, routed and used among a group of people. Sex was another form of social co-operation, but getting to that level of detail required a lot of work and a piece of good luck.
Fah was a beautiful woman. The old saying, “The menu isn’t the meal,” applied to beautiful women as much as to food. His first task was to understand Fah’s territory, and that meant defining its boundaries. To figure out her intentions, he needed to understand how a young Thai university student kept by an older farang navigated through her Thai network, the cultural barriers and her political connections, and familiarize himself with the society she kept and the kind of people she communicated with.
If she was cheating on Alan Osborne, it would show up somewhere inside that complex social network. If she wasn’t cheating but was up to something else, there would be signals showing a set of patterns suggesting the true nature of her relationship to other men. It was one of Calvino’s Laws never to presume infidelity, because it causes an investigator to ignore or discount connections that don’t support this theory. Osborne speculated that she was being unfaithful, but he had no solid evidence. It would be a mistake to accept Osborne’s speculation as the investigation’s fated destination.
When Calvino looked up from his computer screen, Ratana stood in front of his desk, holding out a cup of coffee.
“You may need this,” she said.
“You forgot the IV needle.”
He took the coffee mug and pressed it to his lips, keeping his eyes on his secretary, who sat in the chair normally reserved for clients. She had that concerned look of a mother, a wife or a close friend who carries a sadness or disappointment. An unofficial moratorium on new cases had been breached.
“Is that a new dress?”
“You notice the dress. But you don’t notice how Osborne is using you.”
“It’s a minor investigation. Maybe a couple of days. It’s not like I’m overloaded with work.”
Calvino’s maps had stirred up a set of bad memories Ratana had sought to forget. The thing with bad memories is they come with periodic reminders. His latest contact with Osborne reminded her of Calvino’s creation of a montage of the Bangkok car bombing. Ratana associated that work of art with Calvino’s mental breakdown and wondered if his thoughts were returning to the m
urder scene without his realizing it. If that was the case, was he on his way to a second breakdown? She worried about him but kept the depth of her concern to herself.
“Are you okay?” she asked, acting a little distracted, as if her mind was somewhere else.
“Don’t I look okay?”
“I can’t read what’s in your head.”
“Welcome to the club. Neither can I.”
Calvino couldn’t blame her. Many people he knew had fallen into silence and self-absorption after the coup, as they tried to wrap their minds around a life under martial law and a junta.
“Never ask a man about to pick a lock if he’s worried what’s on the other side of the door,” he said.
He wanted to ask her if she was okay, but the time wasn’t right.
“Osborne asked me to find evidence of his girlfriend’s infidelity. I’m working on the lock.”
“Khun Alan should be the last person to demand faithfulness.”
“His girlfriend’s been disappearing at night for hours. She’s been using the curfew as an excuse not to come home. She doesn’t tell him where she goes, who she’s seeing or what she’s doing, other than she’s working on a paper in a study group. She’s young.”
“How young?”
“She’s made about twenty-three orbits around the sun.”
“Half a century younger than Khun Alan.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way. A century was a large number, more than a lifetime except for a tiny number of people who refused to die. Half a century remained a substantial historical marker. And maybe that was the way Fah thought of Alan Osborne, as an object of history.
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