The Unknowns

by Gabriel Roth

  “So are you coming straight from work?” I ask her.

  “Yeah, I just got done,” she says. For three long seconds it seems as though neither of us will think of anything else to say and we will finish our drinks in silence and then go home. “How about you? Do you have a regular schedule, or are you writing your own ticket now?”

  “I make my own hours, pretty much,” I say. I don’t go into what those hours are filled with. Since the sale I have been learning how much dead time a day can hold. At some point I’m going to have to tell her about being rich, but I don’t know when: too soon and I’m showing off, too late and I’m hiding something.

  I want to ask her a question she hasn’t been asked a million times before—otherwise she goes straight to her prepared answer and the two of you are just acting out a script. But obviously you can’t ask her a job-interview question like In a fight between a bear and a shark in a neutral, jellylike medium, who would win? because then she’ll think you’re a dork.

  “So what’s the best story you’ve ever written?” I ask. It works: she stops and thinks about it, and there’s a public answer and a private answer, which is always good. She tells me about the story she won awards for, the one she sends to magazine editors when she pitches them—a two-month investigation into the shady dealings surrounding a lucrative waterfront development contract, involving the ambitious son of a casual-footwear magnate, a mayoral aide, and the aide’s partner, who was running for DA. (Even I was vaguely aware of this when it broke: there were headlines in the Chronicle, and people lost their jobs.) But then she tells me about the story that meant the most to her, the one that she remembers when she gets discouraged: a story about a Catholic church in Ingleside whose priest made some odious remarks about gay marriage, and the activists who picketed outside the church dressed as nuns.

  “It was supposed to be a quickie,” she says of the story. “Get a couple of quotes from each side, a photo of these wacky transvestite nuns. But I wound up spending three days talking to people in the congregation, watching them feed soup to homeless people, going to services, understanding what it meant to them to have, you know, guys in nun costumes outside their church every day. And once I’d done that, I had to spend time with the nuns too, and they were the coolest, funniest, most sincere people I’d ever met. Most of them had grown up Catholic and been terrorized by it. And I was so nervous while I was writing it, because all these people on both sides had really opened up to me, had taken me into their lives, and now I was trying to do right by all of them, except they hated each other.”

  “How did it turn out?”

  “I totally obsessed over it,” she says. “Right up to the last minute I was adding things and taking things out and counting the number of words quoting each side, trying to make it balanced. I got a little carried away. And then the day it came out, I got to the office and there were two messages. I’m always so worried the day a big story comes out, I dread checking the messages because it’s usually someone threatening to sue. But that day there were two messages. One was from the priest and the other was from the head of the protesters, and they both said, basically, Thank you.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say, because it is in fact awesome, and because I have a huge crush on her and am glad to be able to tell her that I think she’s awesome by pretending I’m talking about her story.

  “So what about you?” she says. “Do you get obsessed over your work that way? Do you have a, like, a favorite program that you wrote or anything like that?”

  The answer to both questions is yes, of course. But the joy of hacking doesn’t translate. If she’s like most people, computers are alien to her, mysterious electronic totems that require the ministrations of a shamanic caste of surly gnomes who live in the basement of her office building.

  “I get pretty deep into it,” I say. “And the work I did for the startup, the interface I designed, I’m proud of that. I mean, I think it’s a good solution to a particular set of problems. But talking about it gets really boring to a non-programmer.”

  “You worry a lot about keeping people on your side, huh?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were to answer my question, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I don’t think I’d be bored, but what if, worst case scenario, what if I was bored for a minute? Would that be the end of the world?”

  I have to think about this. “Well, I don’t want to bore you. I mean…” This is hard, because the reason I don’t want to bore her is that I want her to like me, and obviously I can’t say that directly.

  “I know, you don’t want to bore me, because you want me to like you,” she says. Whoa. “But you know, I’m going to make up my own mind about whether I like you, just like you’re going to make up your mind about whether you like me. And anyway, liking you is different from liking a TV show. The reason I like people is not that they never bore me. So why don’t you tell me about it, and if I don’t understand I’ll stop you and ask questions, which is what I do all day in my job, and if I get bored I’ll try to hide it until we’ve moved on to something else. OK?”

  She drains the end of her drink, sets down the glass, and turns to face me. I look at her, and she looks at me, and that thing happens when you look at each other and realize, Hey, here we are. I ride it out, and then I jump in.

  I try to describe what it’s like to get deep inside a really hard problem: loading all the pieces into my mind, seeing the relationships between abstract concepts as though they were the physical features of a landscape. I tell her about the marathon hacking runs I used to go on, first when I was a teenager and again in the desperate early days of Demo1, spending twenty hours at a stretch making a program more sprawling and complex and powerful but also more elegant, more beautiful. (It feels risky, using the word beautiful, but there’s no other way to say it.) I try to convey the experience of settling into hack mode, the way the cruft and chatter of consciousness quiet down, stripping away the self’s topsoil and allowing the deeper, truer self to emerge. We are most ourselves when we subsume ourselves in something greater is a paradox at the heart of every mystical practice, programming not excepted. This experience of logical-reasoning-as-metaphysical-transcendence has been observed in older vocations like chess and mathematics. A mathematician presented with a clever proof, or a grandmaster lighting on a devastating move, might replay the sequence in his head just to savor it, as though humming a passage from a Mozart concerto. I feel the same thing when I read or write a well-constructed chunk of code: this is logic so artful it’s indistinguishable from art.

  While I put this into words, Maya listens carefully and says “Uh-huh” and occasionally shuts her eyes and nods as if swallowing an idea, in what appears to be a kind of mental note-taking. If she’s bored, she’s good at disguising it.

  “Thanks,” she says. “Now I know something important about you.”

  “No problem,” I say. I’m not used to being reassured like this.

  “This is going pretty good, huh?” she says. At first I don’t understand what she’s referring to, and then I get it and I desperately want to kiss her.

  “I think so, yeah,” I say. “Ha! I’ve never tried evaluating a date while it’s still in progress.” By introducing the word date I’m trying to match her audacity.

  “It’s such an artificial thing,” she says, resting an elbow on the bar and propping her chin in her palm. “We both know what we’re doing, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.”

  “No, you’re totally right,” I say. “I love it. Listen, if we’re going to externalize: you have reminded me of an anecdote. Are you interested in hearing an anecdote at this juncture, or would you rather the conversation progressed in a different direction?”

  “An anecdote would be terrific,” she says. “Let me order another drink, and then you can tell me the anecdote. Is it funny?”

  “Oh, I can’t answer that,” I say. “Starting an anecdote with This is a
really funny anecdote would be a gross violation of sound anecdote technique.” We are both grinning.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” she says, holding up her glass in Freya’s direction. Freya gives me an interrogative look, and I respond with an affirmative nod.

  “This anecdote falls into the world’s-worst-date genre,” I say as Freya sets down the new drinks and removes the old, using both hands to perform the operations in parallel on Maya’s glass and mine. “It happened not to me but to my mom.”

  “Before your mom and dad were married?”

  “After they got divorced,” I say. “I remember when this happened.”

  “Got it,” she says. “OK, go.”

  “So they’d been divorced for like two years,” I say. “My mom was really wanting to start dating someone, and she wasn’t meeting anyone through her job or anything, and this was when dating services operated by mail and catered chiefly to the desperate. So she’d asked her friends at work to fix her up, and one day her friend Doreen was all like Oh my God, I have found the perfect guy for you!

  “My mom is pretty short, and she says that whenever anyone says the perfect guy for you they mean short and divorced. She meets the guy for dinner, and it’s confirmed that these are the only qualities that make him suitable for my mom. And the short thing is only suitable from his perspective, because she doesn’t even like short men; she likes tall men, just like everybody else.” I can get away with this because of the precise averageness of my height. “She once said that short men get offended when she doesn’t want to go out with them, like it’s her responsibility to help them breed more short people so that the inability to reach things on high shelves will survive to the next generation.

  “Anyway: the guy is apparently completely charmless. He drives her home from the date, and he invites himself in for coffee—as in, literally, he says, May I come inside for a cup of coffee? And it’s this incredibly complicated moment for my mom, because on the one hand she knows just as well as any other television-watching adult what coffee is a euphemism for, but she really wants to be polite—she’s a very polite person—and it wouldn’t be polite to refuse a cup of coffee to someone who’s just bought you dinner. It’s like she’s trapped in the semantic gap between the literal and the figurative meanings of the word coffee. And in the end, she just doesn’t have the vocabulary to say no—it’s not in her social-behavior repertoire. So they go inside the house, and my mom puts some coffee on and sits down very deliberately in the armchair rather than on the couch next to the guy, and they sit there and wait for the coffee to percolate. And just as she’s getting up to pour the coffee, my dad’s car pulls up outside, and he gets out in his undershirt.”

  “Whoa!” Maya says.

  “See, after the divorce my mom continued doing my dad’s laundry for a while.”

  “Get out.”

  “I swear to God.”

  “After they were divorced?”

  “She’s a soft touch,” I say. “He moved into this place without a washer and dryer, and he would bring over his laundry when he dropped me off on Sunday nights. She only did it a couple times before she told him to do his own goddamn laundry.” Years later I discovered that there were indeed a washer and dryer in the basement of my dad’s building, but I don’t get into this, because my father and his character flaws are not the point of the story. “So my mom is asking this guy how he takes his coffee when my dad walks in in his undershirt—you know, like a wifebeater? He’s spilled a bunch of tomato sauce on his shirt, and he doesn’t have anything else to wear to the class he’s teaching tomorrow.” I have fabricated this explanation—in fact I have no idea why my dad came over to pick up the laundry instead of waiting until Sunday when he’d be there anyway. Was he really wearing his undershirt? That’s how I remember it, but it’s possible that I’ve added that detail when telling the story on some previous occasion. It gives the scene more color, though. “He had called my mom, and she’d said he could let himself in and pick up the laundry, which my mom had folded for him and left in a plastic laundry basket. So my dad lets himself in, and this guy, my mom’s date, sees my dad come in the door in his wifebeater and says, What the hell is going on here?

  “My dad, I should point out, is not tough, but he’s big, and he could probably fit this guy in his stomach. He’s going over to the guy to introduce himself, and the guy looks at my mom and says, I don’t know what kind of sick arrangement you people have, but I want no part of it! and walks straight out the door.”

  Maya laughs at the punch line, but she seems to recognize that the story is not, ultimately, a comedy. She asks a bunch of questions about my parents, which reduce to Is he really that clueless? and Does she ever stand up for herself? My answers hint at something I realize I want her to know: I’m self-invented; I had no one to learn from. This may be why I told the story in the first place.

  When she’s out of questions, she sets up an anecdote of her own. “OK, I’ve got one,” she says. “Ready?”

  “I am so ready,” I say.

  The rest of the evening glides along as if on rails. At some point we finish the drinks and effortlessly escalate to dinner. (“So are we gonna get dinner?” I say. “Hell yes,” she says, and we nod at each other to say Nice job.) In the restaurant, as the hostess leads us to the table, I set my hand lightly on the small of Maya’s back to indicate that she should go first, and this gentle first attempt at physical contact comes off without a hitch. It’s more crowded than the bar, but we’re off in a corner and the walls are hung with heavy velvet curtains. We sit down and, perhaps in response to my boldness with the hand-on-the-back thing, Maya throws me a fastball.

  “So did you hook up with Lauren?” she asks.

  “I did,” I say. “I hooked up with her.” I can handle this.

  “But you didn’t want to pursue it?”

  “I guess not. I don’t think either of us really saw it as something to pursue. Is she… did you talk to her about it?”

  “Not really,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t get the blow-by-blow.” She does not grin saucily as she says this.

  After the appetizers have been cleared I excuse myself, walk confidently to the bathroom, lock the door behind me, and allow my limbs to go slack, rolling my head alternately clockwise and counterclockwise as the dopamine of infatuation sloshes around with the alcohol in my brain. In the safety of the burgundy restroom, decorated with photographs of tailfinned American cars and decaying neocolonial palaces, I look back in wonder at the past two and a half hours. How did I learn to do this, and will I be able to sustain it when I get back to the table? At any moment the waiter will bring my plate of medium-rare steak strips with onions and potatoes. This infusion of protein and salt is exactly what my body wants; how thoughtful, how prescient of my past self to arrange it! While urinating I look in the mirror on the left wall and only half recognize myself: a smile is organizing my features into their most harmonious proportions, and my usually sallow cheeks are flushed with beer and happiness. I pull off a couple sheets of toilet paper and dab at my forehead to take the shine off, carefully keeping the stream aimed into the toilet bowl.

  An hour later, we are figuring out what happens next. Part of me is convinced that there will never be a better time for us to have sex; another part desperately wants to get away before I can screw up. Of course, it’s not my decision.

  “So,” we say to each other outside the restaurant. Then she says, “I should be getting home,” and smiles beautifully. “Walk me to my car.”

  We pass the assortment of pedestrians—after-dinner yuppies, Latino adolescents, homeless alcoholics—who make up the Mission’s thriving urban street culture. A bearded panhandler with crimson skin mumbles at us, and some suicidal ebullience tempts me to ostentatiously drop a twenty-dollar bill into his Styrofoam cup, but I don’t, because tonight my superpowers are strong enough to defeat even my own personality.

  Here’s her car. It’s a red Acura, old, kind of bea
t-up, totally unexceptional, except that it’s hers and thus imbued with magic. I try to memorize it, as if it were a clue. “So this is it,” she says, and I turn to her, heart pounding, and our eyes lock and the world pours itself through a funnel and everything but us is revealed to be an illusion. Neither of us flinches. We hang here long enough to etch the moment onto the surfaces of our brains, so that in every one of the infinite possible futures we will each be able to remember exactly what the other looked like in the moment right before we started kissing, when we had no inkling of the world of trouble to come.

  4

  Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

  —Rodney Brooks, Programming in Common LISP

  THE DESKS IN MY new homeroom were laid out in a five-by-five grid, somewhere on which was located the socially optimal spot. My mother, unsure how long the drive to MLK would take, had erred on the side of caution, and all but three desks were still available. The choices of the first three arrivals suggested starkly different intentions: two girls in ornate sweaters sat front and center, while in the last row a boy reclined his chair against the wall, his eyes shut. The boy’s haircut was horizontally bifurcated at the level of his ears, shaggy above and close-cropped below. I considered joining him in the back row, and perhaps mimicking his insouciant posture, but that would have drawn too much attention, so I opted for a seat in the classroom’s exact center. Pleased with my choice I settled in, savored the symmetry of rows and columns around me, admired the perfect diagonals that stretched from my seat to each corner of the room. At once my satisfaction spoiled: the midpoint was the most noticeable, the most calculated. I snatched my bag and scrambled to a seat one row back and one column to the left, although no one else had come in yet. I was happy with this innocuous choice, but I feared that the boy with the haircut had seen the switch and perceived my decision-making process at work. In attempting to avoid the appearance of calculation, had I exposed my calculation? I turned back and glanced at him, and our eyes met. By looking, I had given myself away.