There are trees that spread like fireworks and trees that rise like cones. Trees that shoot without a ripple, three hundred feet straight skyward. Broad, pyramidal, rounded, columnar, conical, crooked: the only thing they do in common is branch, like Vishnu waving his many arms. Among those spreaders, the wildest are the figs. Strangler trees that slip their sheaths around the bodies of others and swallow them, forming an empty cast around their decomposed hosts. Peepal, Ficus religiosa, the Buddha’s Bo, their leaves tapering into exotic drip tips. Banyans that plump out like whole forests, with a hundred separate trunks fighting for a share of the sun. That temple-eating fig in his father’s photo inhabits the boy. It will keep on growing faster with each new chunk of reusable code. It will keep on spreading, searching the cracks, probing all the possible means of escape, looking for new buildings to swallow. It will grow under Neelay’s hands for the next twenty years.
Then it will flower to become the boy’s belated thanks for an early birthday present. His homage to skinny little Pita, lugging that massive shipping box up the apartment stairs. His praise to Vishnu, known only through cheap newsprint Hindi comic books he could never read. His farewell to a species turning from animal into data. His effort to raise the dead and make them love him again. So many trunks growing downward from the same tree. The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.
THEY MOVE INTO A HOUSE down the valley along El Camino, in Mountain View. Three bedrooms: Such luxury confuses Babul Mehta. He still drives a twenty-year-old car. But every five months he upgrades the computers.
Ritu Mehta panics each time a new crate arrives. “When does it end? You’re pauperizing us!”
The garage fills with so much old gear the car won’t fit. But every component, however outdated, is a marvel of mind-boggling complexity created by a team of heroic engineers. Neither father nor son can throw even these obsolete miracles away.
The snail’s pace of Moore’s law tortures Neelay. He’s starved for more RAM, more MIPS, more pixels. Waiting for the next barrier-breaking upgrade takes a tenth of his young life. Something inside these tiny, mutable components is waiting to get out. Or rather: there’s something that these reticent things might be made to do, something humans haven’t even imagined yet. And Neelay is on the verge of finding and naming them, if he can only find the next new magic words.
He skitters through the schoolyard like a traitor to childhood. He learns the shibboleths—the famous refrains from countless sitcoms, the hooks of pernicious little radio tunes, the bios of fifteen-year-old sexpot starlets he’s supposed to be slayed by. But at night, his dreams fill not with playground battles or the day’s take-down gossip but with visions of tight, lovely code doing more with less—bits of data passing from memory to register to accumulator and back in a dance so beautiful he can’t begin to tell his friends. They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.
Every program tunnels into possibility. A frog tries to cross a busy street. An ape defends himself with barrel bombs. Under those ridiculous, blocky skins, creatures from another dimension pour into Neelay’s world. And there’s only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been. In a few years, a kid like him will be given cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger’s and SSRIs to smooth out his awkward human interactions. But he knows something certain, before almost anyone else: People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded.
He still binges on old-school reading. At night, he pores over mind-bending epics that reveal the true scandals of time and matter. Sweeping tales of generational spaceship arks. Domed cities like giant terrariums. Histories that split and bifurcate into countless parallel quantum worlds. There’s a story he’s waiting for, long before he comes across it. When he finds it at last, it stays with him forever, although he’ll never be able to find it again, in any database. Aliens land on Earth. They’re little runts, as alien races go. But they metabolize like there’s no tomorrow. They zip around like swarms of gnats, too fast to see—so fast that Earth seconds seem to them like years. To them, humans are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck into the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home.
HIS FATHER IS THE ONLY PERSON Neelay will ever care for more than he cares for his creations. They understand each other, with no words spoken. Neither of them is happy unless they’re sitting at a keyboard together. Cuffs of the neck and pokes in the ribs. Teasing and giggles. And always that gentle, head-tilted, singsong lilt: “Watch out, Neelay-ji. Be careful! Don’t abuse your powers!”
The whole wide universe waits to be animated. Together, they must create possibilities out of the smallest atoms. The boy wants scales and songs, but his machines are mute. So Neelay and his father create their own sawtooth waves, clicking the little piezo speaker on and off so fast it starts to sing.
His father asks, “How is it that you have turned into a creature of such concentration?”
The boy doesn’t answer. They both know. Vishnu has put all of living possibility into their little eight-bit microprocessor, and Neelay will sit in front of the screen until he sets creation free.
In middle age, the boy will be able to drag a cute icon and drop it into a tree diagram, producing in one flick of the wrist things that took him and his father six weeks of evenings in the basement together to create. But never again, this sense of the inconceivable, waiting to be conceived. In the redwood-trimmed lobby of the multimillion-dollar office complex paid for by a galaxy right next to this one, he’ll hang, for many years, a plaque inscribed with the words from his favorite author:
Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD NEELAY makes his Pita a kite for Uttarayan, the great kite festival. Not a real kite: something better. Something the two of them can fly together without anyone in Mountain View thinking they’re ignorant cow-worshippers. He tries out a new technique for animating sprites he read about in a mimeographed hobby magazine called Love at First Byte. The idea is clever and beautiful. You rough out the kite in different sprites, then poke them directly into video memory. Then you shuffle them onto the screen like a flip-book. The first little flutter makes him feel like God.
His brainstorm is to write the program so that it can itself be programmed. Let the user key in the melody of his choice, with simple letters and numbers, then make the kite dance to that rhythm. The grandeur of the plan spins Neelay’s head. His Pita will set his own kite dancing to a real Gujarati tune.
Neelay fills a loose-leaf binder for the project with notes, diagrams, and printouts of the latest version. His father picks up the binder, curious. “What is this, Mr. Neelay?”
“You don’t touch that one!”
His father grins and bobs. Secrets and gifts. “Yes, Neelay, my master.”
The boy works on the project when his father’s not around. He takes it to school, that maze of halls full of organized torture that will inspire many a dungeon crawl of his later making. The black notebook binder looks official. He pretends to take notes in it, while working on his code. His teachers are too flattered to suspect.
His plan works like clockwork until fifth period—American literature, with Ms. Gilpin. The class is reading Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Neelay kind of likes the story, especially the part where the baby gets stung by the scorpion. Scorpions are outstanding creatures, especially giant ones.
Ms. Gilpin drones on about what the pearl symbolizes. To Neelay, it’s a pearl. He’s beating his head against a real problem: how to synchronize the dancing kite with the music. He flips through pages of printout when the solution jumps out at him: two nested loops. It’s like the gods draw it in bright chal
k on his mind’s blackboard. He burbles to himself, “Oh, yeah!”
The class bursts out laughing. Ms. Gilpin has just asked, “No one wants to see the baby die, do they?”
Ms. Gilpin daggers everybody silent. “Neelay. What are you doing?” He knows not to say a word. “What’s in the notebook?”
“Computer homework.” Everyone laughs again at the insane idea.
“Are you taking a computer course?” He shakes his head. “Bring it here.”
Halfway through the journey up to her desk, he considers tripping and spraining his ankle. He hands over the notebook. She flips through it. Drawings, flowcharts, code. She frowns. “Sit down.”
He does. Ms. Gilpin returns to Steinbeck while he soaks in a pool of injustice and shame. After the bell, when the room clears, he returns to Ms. Gilpin’s desk. He knows why she hates him. His kind will drive hers extinct.
She opens the notebook to grids filled with images of blocky kites. “What is this?”
She has no idea of Uttarayan, or what it’s like to have a father like his. She’s blond, from Vallejo. Machines are her enemy. She thinks logic kills everything fine in the human soul. “Computer stuff.”
“You’re a smart boy, Neelay. What don’t you like about English? You’re so good at diagramming sentences.” She waits, but can’t outlast him. She taps the notebook. “Is this a game of some kind?”
“No.” Not the way she means it.
“Don’t you like to read?”
He feels sorry for her. If she only knew what reading could be. The Galactic Empire and its enemies are sweeping across the entire spiral of the Milky Way, waging wars that last for hundreds of thousands of years, and she’s worried about those three poor Mexicans.
“I thought you liked A Separate Peace.”
He liked it enough. It even punched him in the lungs, a little. But he can’t see what that has to do with getting his private property back.
“Doesn’t The Pearl interest you? It’s about racism, Neelay.”
He stands blinking, as at his first contact with alien intelligence. “Could I just get my notebook back, a little? I won’t bring it to class anymore.”
Her face crumples. Even he can see how he’s betrayed her. She thought he was in her camp, but he has slipped away from her over the weeks and turned enemy. She touches his notebook and frowns again. “I’m going to hold on to it for now. Until you and I are back on track.”
In a few years, students will shoot their teachers over less. He goes to her office at the end of the day. He fills his mind with sincere reform. “I’m very sorry about working in my notebook when you were teaching.”
“Working, Neelay? Is that what you were doing?”
She wants a confession. She wants him to thank her for saving him from the perils of playing games while all the rest of the class was hard at work extracting fiction’s pearls. Fifty hours of effort on his father’s kite lies four feet away, unreachable. She wants to humiliate him. Outrage boils over. “May I have my damn notebook back? Please?”
The word slaps her. Her eyes set and she goes to war. “That is a demerit. You swore at a teacher. What will your parents say?”
He freezes. His mother will fell him with one great blow, like so much jhatka meat.
Ms. Gilpin checks her watch. Too late to send him to the principal. Her boyfriend is picking her up in ten minutes. They’ll laugh together over the pigheadedness of this Indian boy with his notebook full of hieroglyphs. How he insisted that it wasn’t play. She turns into a pillar of authority. “I want you back at this desk tomorrow morning, before the first bell. Then we’ll talk about what you have coming to you.”
The boy’s blood hammers and his eyes burn.
“You may go.” Her eyebrows do a little push-up of command. “Until tomorrow. Seven a.m. sharp.”
HE NEEDS TO THINK. He skips the bus and heads home on foot. The day is one of those eerie Central Peninsula imitations of heaven—seventy degrees and clear, the air thick with bay laurel and eucalyptus. He drags along the familiar route at half his usual pace, past the modest middle-class bungalows that people will soon pay a million and a half for, just to tear down and rebuild. He has to make a plan. He swore at a teacher, and his old, golden life shatters in the single, terrible syllable. This disrespect of white people will cripple his father. Patience, Neelay. Reserve. Remember? Remember? Word will spread through the community of Indian expats. His mother will die of disgrace.
He walks along the fingerprint-whorl of tree-lined streets, that neighborhood hemmed in by three highways. Four blocks from home, he cuts through the park, the place he goes whenever his parents force him outdoors. The path snakes through a gauntlet of low-slung encinas with phantasmagoric branches growing since California was Spain’s remotest outpost. If he’s ever noticed the species at all, it was only in the movies: the trees of Sherwood and Bagworthy, stand-in forests to frighten Pilgrims and challenge castaways. When Hollywood needs trees, it turns to the only nearby broadleaf that will do.
They beckon, bizarre, dreamlike, contorted. One huge beam of branch swoops toward the ground like it’s lying down to rest. A single swing, and from that low branch Neelay shimmies up into the roost, where he sits like he’s seven again. There, he takes stock of his ruined life. From high up in this crazy cantilevered oak, looking down on the sidewalk where two kids swing a stick at pebbles and a humpbacked white-haired woman walks her dachshund, he can see this whole mess from Ms. Gilpin’s eyes. She wasn’t wrong to reprimand him. And yet, she stole his property. The whole disaster, from up in this crow’s nest, has what Ms. Gilpin might call moral ambiguity.
He makes room on the oak’s sinuous branch for the two boys from A Separate Peace. He watches them play their white-guy, prep school games of love and war in their tree above their river. Way below, the brown-green California ground bounces each time a breeze pitches the branches. He knows almost nothing of his parents’ world, but one thing is as certain as math. Shame, for Indians, is worse than death. Ms. Gilpin may already have called them with details of his crime. His head throbs at the thought and his tongue tastes metal. He hears his mother howl: You let that rat-haired woman humiliate your whole family? Soon a distant country filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins will know what he has done.
And his poor father, who has made himself invisible for years, just for the right to live and work in this Golden State: he stares at Neelay in horror, wondering how a child might be so arrogant as to think that he could talk back to an American authority and live.
Neelay peers down from this oak aerie onto the path below, his mind a mass of tangled code. An idea flashes through him, a glimpse of easy peace. If he could get dusted up a little bit, it might win him the sympathy vote. You can’t beat up on a wounded boy. Delicious terror strokes his neck, like it does when he watches old Twilight Zones. The idea is nuts. He must suck things up, go home, and take his punishment. He leans out for a good look at the big picture, his last for a while. His parents will ground him for months.
He sighs. Steps down onto the branch below him to descend. And slips.
There will be years to wonder whether the branches jerked. Whether the tree had it in for him. Limbs slam him on the way down. They bat him back and forth like a pinball. Earth rushes up. He lands on the concrete path and bounces on his coccyx, which cracks the base of his spine.
Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand—a thousand thousand—green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and out through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, rea
ching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down.
HE WAKES DAYS LATER in the hospital, strapped down and vised. Tubes restrain his arms and legs. Two wedges press against each ear, arresting his head. He can see nothing but ceiling, and it isn’t blue. He hears his mother shout, “His eyes are open.” He can’t understand why she keeps sobbing those words, like they’re a bad thing.
He lies in a cloud of narcotic unknowing. Sometimes he’s a string of stored code in a microprocessor bigger than a city. Sometimes he’s a traveler in that country of surprise that he’ll come to build, when machines are at last fast enough to keep up with his imagination. Sometimes monstrous, splitting tendrils come after him.
The itching is insane. Every spot above his waist is unreachable fire. When he drops back down to earth again, his mother is there, curled up in the chair next to his bed. A change in his breathing wakes her from her sleep. His father is there, too, somehow. Neelay worries; what will his employers say when they discover he’s not at work?
His mother says, “You came down out of a tree.”
He can’t connect the dots. “Fell?”
“Yes,” she argues. “That’s what you did.”
“Why are my legs in tubes? Is that to keep me from breaking things?”
The Overstory Page 11