by Ken Liu
At that moment, Lydia learned who she was. She was one of the Saved. This did not mean that she had to give up drugs and swearing, or that she had to put on a white robe and roam the streets stuffing pamphlets under people's doors. It simply meant that she could now go on with her life and everything she did in the future would be full of joy because she loved God.
And so Tyler was in love with Lydia because God's light, dim though it was by the time it was refracted through Lydia onto him, nevertheless dazzled him.
He took Lydia with him to poetry readings, where Lydia met his friends who wanted to write poetry and congregated in those smoke-filled basement cafés. When Tyler read from the cocoon of the spotlight, he sought out her luminous face and bright halo of red hair in the dim light of the café because she smiled when she heard him read and he loved to see her smile.
Because she couldn't tell an iamb apart from the Lamb; because she smelled of soap and sunlight; because when she told him she would go look at stars with him she really meant it; because when he made fun of people who said "irregardless," she made him look it up in a dictionary so that he learned that it really was a word; because he knew that he could always tell when she would laugh a fraction of a second before she did.
Although Tyler's friends didn't know quite what to say at first when they heard Lydia tell her story of her encounter with Ambriel, they soon came to like her because she was nothing like what they would have expected from someone who claimed to see angels. She could hold her drink better than any of them —even Owen, who still looked like he would rather be out on the road on a motorcycle than in an office —and she would wink at Tyler when she was drunk and whisper, "I'm dangerous, and I'll eat you like air."
On Sundays Lydia did not go to church. She never went to churches because they had nothing to offer her, and in any case most churches in the city were embarrassed by her story. Instead, she brought him to meetings with people who had also been visited by angels and people who wanted to be visited by angels. These meetings occurred in the basements of churches and libraries, and they involved a lot of folding chairs and stale coffee, as well as a lot of desperation and phrases cribbed from the self-help aisles. Often Tyler wondered why he was in these meetings at all until he saw the light in Lydia's face as she told her story.
On other days they wandered the streets of the city after work. They took short road trips to small towns up and down the Pacific Coast. They talked about everything and nothing at all, and all the while Tyler gazed into Lydia's face and wanted to believe.
That month between the day he met her in a dumpster and the day she said yes, she would marry him, while feeding him pistachio ice cream was the happiest month of Tyler's life.
The only trouble was, he still did not believe in God.
On their way back from Las Aldamas, Lydia fell asleep in the passenger seat. The road was straight and smooth, and the traffic was light. Tyler put the car on cruise control and stretched his legs. He reached for Lydia's hand and turned his head to glance at her sleeping form.
Later, when Tyler tried to recall what he felt, as he watched Lydia slowly die in the seat next to him, her body upside down and held in place by the seatbelt, her back twisted at an impossible angle, the collapsed roof of the car trapping her arms, he was surprised to find that he could recall no pain from his own body at all.
But that could not have been the case. Both his legs were broken, and the heat from the flames must have been intense on his side of the wreckage, judging by the burns covering his face and arms. When he finally recovered enough to sit up on his own in the hospital, he also found that the blindness in his left eye would be permanent.
Be that as it may, the fact was that all Tyler could remember was how calm and unafraid Lydia was as she told him that she knew she was going to die, that she was not in any pain, and that she would see him in Heaven.
Then her eyes got wide, and she said, "Hello, Ambriel."
Tyler tried to twist around in his seat so he could see what she was seeing, even though he knew that he would see nothing. The steering wheel got in his way and he gave up after a few seconds. He would regret those few seconds later because he took his eyes off Lydia's face, and during those few seconds she died.
If Tyler were religious, he could have been comforted by the promise of reuniting with Lydia in Heaven. Or he could have been angry with God, and railed against Him until he could come to accept his life the way Job accepted his. But Tyler did not believe in Heaven or God.
But neither could his lack of faith give him comfort, for he loved Lydia for that light in her, and he had no name or explanation for that light except what Lydia told him. Her faith was what he loved.
To continue in his lack of faith would be to assert that Lydia's joy was an illusion, and that would kill the very heart of his memory of her. But to believe would require him to break down the barriers between fantasy and reality in his mind and embrace as fact what seemed to him a hallucination. While Lydia was alive he could delay that decision for as long as he was in love, but her death meant that he had to choose.
When Tyler finally recovered, he locked himself away from his friends. He quit his job and he unplugged his phone.
What he did was to find out everything he could about the accident, and to try to understand what happened. This was difficult because there was little the investigators could find out, and there were many blanks to be filled in. But Tyler had lots of time.
Much of a programmer's job —Tyler read —consists of untangling the web of links bridging the level of indirection between variables and values.
Variables are the electronic memory equivalents of names. Instead of working with individual bytes, a block of memory can be given a name with a variable. Variables can be made to name anything, throttle settings, social security numbers, a subroutine to wipe the disk.
Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if a variable is pointing at what it claims to be pointing at, or if it's pointing at anything at all. At the level of bits, the number of butterflies in Costa Rica looks just like the velocity of the tropical storm off the coast of Australia.
This is troublesome to every programmer in so far as the correspondence between variables and values lies at the foundation of any program's tenuous claim to correctness. If you can convince the computer that a variable names something real when it really points into the void, all bets are off.
In order to help programmers maintain the distinction between solid reality and fantastic disaster, type systems were introduced. These were mathematical constructs embodied in programming languages to ensure that a variable meant for the throttle setting would not point to, say, the current acceleration of the car. Type systems imposed the consolation of infallible order against the madness of an amoral sea of bits.
Like many other modern cruise control systems, the one in Tyler's car relied upon a microcomputer running a dedicated program.
Obviously it was very important that this program did its job correctly. The program in Tyler's car was written by a careful programmer who understood that lives depended on him getting it right. But more than that, the program was written in a language that had a very strong type system, one so strong that there was a mathematical proof showing that no matter how clever or careless the programmer was, a program that passed the type-checking would be guaranteed to never allow a variable declared to point at the fuel level to point at the subroutine for shifting gears. This was as close to infallibility as you could get in the world of bits.
All this is to say that Tyler had good reason to relax and lean back in his seat.
About two thousand years earlier —Tyler read some more —around the time of Christ, there was a star in the region of the sky dominated by the constellation Cassiopeia. The star was old and dying, and one winter night, it went supernova.
Out of this explosion emerged countless protons and neutrons traveling away from the wreckage of the old star at great speed. They are called co
smic rays, and most of them will go on hurling through the void of space till the end of time, and their fates need not concern us.
But one proton in particular arrived on Earth that sunny July day after traveling alone in the dark for two thousand years. It plunged through the ionosphere, gracefully dodging the lines of the Earth's magnetic field, and then straight through the thickening air, barely slowing down. It would have gone on and sunk itself straight into the California desert on that day, but something got in the way.
At that moment, Lydia was asleep and Tyler had his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her. Even in sleep, her face held that blessed quality of light. And their car intercepted the path of the lone escaped proton from that long ago death of a star.
The proton paid little attention to the metal casing and the plastic polymers interested it even less. It ripped right through them and, for a moment, it looked as if it would go on with its journey. It seemed that way until the proton came upon an infinitesimal bit of silicon, and for the first time in two thousand years, it took an interest in tangible matter and decided to knock the electrons out of it.
That bit of silicon happened to be a part of a capacitor. There were millions of other capacitors and transistors just like it, all of them parts of the integrated circuit that made up the memory of the computer running the program that controlled Tyler's car at that moment. The absence of those electrons, to be sure, was an insignificant anonymity by any measure in the scheme of things, but it was enough.
The loss of those electrons meant that the bit that used to represent a 1 would now be interpreted as a 0, and that bit happened to be located inside a memory cell that held a variable. The flip in that bit meant that the variable, which was supposed to give the address of the subroutine for computing throttle settings, was now pointing at the value for the fuel flow rate, exactly 1024 bytes away from where the variable was supposed to be pointing.
This was just the sort of violation the type system of the language in which the program was written was designed to prevent. A variable meant to point to a subroutine should never have been able to point at numerical data. But once that did happen, anything else was possible.
If a single-bit error on a circuit board could breach the mathematically perfect type system of a programming language, Tyler reasoned, wasn't it conceivable that a single-bit error in the brain could break down the system of distinctions between nurses and angels? All it would take was for one neural connection to be broken and randomly reattached somewhere else, somewhere it had no business to be connected to, and all the walls between the types of memories would come crumbling down.
Lydia's vision of Ambriel, and indeed her faith, was then simply the consequence of a misfiring of the neurons, a misfiring that could have been triggered by fatigue, by stress, by a stray elementary particle, indeed, by anything at all, on that long ago day in the clinic in Boston. It was really the same process that had conjured up his memory of making his grandmother cry.
In order to reason your way to faith, Tyler thought, all you needed was a single-bit error.
Contrary to what you might expect, this theory did not cheapen or degrade Lydia's faith in Tyler's mind. For this explanation allowed Tyler to understand, rationally, Lydia's life. Calling Lydia's faith an error was a level of indirection that bridged the gap between their worlds.
Moreover, errors, once understood, could be induced. The technically proficient could breach the best software security systems by deliberately inducing errors in the hardware. Couldn't the rational induce faith in themselves the same way?
Tyler decided that he would try to induce a single-bit error in his own brain. If the only way for him to meet Lydia was to go to Heaven, then rationally, he had no choice but to make himself believe in God.
One possibility was to weaken the body. Starvation, dehydration, exposure to the elements. Errors were more likely when the body's defenses were down. This was the path of the mystics of the desert. Tyler decided that he would try that first.
He drove the rental car south and then east until he was in Arizona, close to the border with Mexico, the edge and then the heart of the Sonoran Desert. He drove until the roads were no longer roads and then he walked. He walked until he decided he could no longer find his way back, and then he walked some more. Eventually he found himself surrounded on all sides by clumps of saguaro cactus. He was very hungry and thirsty by then, so he sat down and waited for his body to fail.
"Don't take this the wrong way," Owen had said to him before he left. "But I used to think that you were never going to make it as a poet. I thought you didn't have enough imagination. And now I think you have too much."
Tyler had not seen Owen for a few weeks while he was locked in his own apartment trying to understand Lydia's death. They were sitting in their favorite coffee shop, and it was raining outside, a rare autumn shower.
"Programmers are not really numbers people," Tyler said. "We are words people. The numbers people work in hardware."
"Seems like you're planning on some hardware work yourself. You are telling me you want to hack your own brain to get religion into it."
"I miss her," Tyler said, instead of arguing.
"It won't be like real faith," Owen said, instead of telling him to stop acting crazy and get on with his life. Tyler appreciated that. "Even if it works. Even if you get visions of angels singing hosannas."
"How do you know what real faith is like? You don't believe in God either."
"I don't need to believe in God to tell you that you're going to fail. You want to believe in God because you love Lydia. But you've already decided that believing in God is an error, a mistake, without ever having experienced it. You want to force yourself to accept as true what you have already decided to be a lie, and that's a gulf that cannot be bridged."
"You have not worked through the logic," Tyler said. "What good is a rational explanation for faith if I do not test the hypothesis?"
Owen shook his head. "If you are looking for a faint star, you will not see it if you look directly at where it is. You have to look to the side, and let it catch your eye unaware. Some things cannot bear to be directly examined."
"A level of indirection then," Tyler said to the saguaro cactus beside him, and he began to laugh. How long had he been sitting in the desert? It seemed like days. Night was coming. It was going to be cold.
"You always think too hard," the cactus said.
"Lydia, is that you?" This is a good sign, Tyler thought. Auditory hallucinations always came first, didn't they? But the voice didn't really sound like Lydia. It was too distant and too fine, like a glass harmonica. He looked around for an angel.
"So you think my brain was broken? A missed connection, that's all it was?" The cactus said.
"No, not broken." That was the wrong name for it. That was the problem. He needed the right name.
He wanted to tell her all about variables and single-bit errors and the type system of memories. He wanted to explain to her how he wanted to experience what she did so he could be with her. But he was very hungry and thirsty, and he felt dizzy. So all he said was, "I miss you."
Bright lights were approaching him in the dark. He waited for the feeling of being pierced by the light, of being overwhelmed by the certainty that it was all going to be okay, of love, of being saved. He waited for the walls in his mind to collapse.
The light stopped in front of him. Several figures appeared in the light. Their hair were halos of light and their bodies were limned in fire. He was a little surprised that the light was not as bright as he had expected. It was painful to look into the light, but not like Lydia had described it. Which angels are these?
"Maybe it's because I have only one eye now," he said to himself.
"It's okay now," Owen said. "Everything is going to be all right."
They carried him into the back of the ranger's car and began the long drive back.
Next he tried drugs, but the effects were not per
manent. Meditation just made him tired. He read up on electroshock therapy, but no psychiatrist would agree to his demands. "You don't need therapy," they told him. "Go home and read the Bible. Besides, I would lose my license."
He even went to the churches. But their faith seemed empty to him. He felt nothing sitting in the pews, mouthing the words to the hymns, listening to the sermons that seemed devoid of meaning.
I want to believe, and I can't . He looked around; no one had the kind of light in their faces that he had seen in Lydia. You think you believe, but you don't. Not really, not like Lydia.
Owen never said, "I told you so."
Eventually Owen managed to convince him to come out to the cafés at night again. He thought the poems being read were wretched. Why wasn't anyone writing about the lack of that light? Why wasn't anyone writing about the persistence of memory or the type system that was at the same time so fragile and so difficult to breach? Why wasn't anyone writing about the pain that came from not being able to believe?
So he got a new job programming databases at a bank, and he started to write again. He even managed to get some of his poems published. His friends took him out to celebrate. He was excited and happy, and a girl who looked nothing like Lydia took him home, despite the scars on his face.
"What's your name?" He said.
"Stephanie," she said, and turned off the light. And he would always remember her as Stephanie-Who-Looked-Nothing-Like-Lydia.
He moved on.
"Would you go get Lydia for dinner?" Jess said to Tyler from the kitchen.