Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  As Abe and I spoke, Shmulie had sat uncharacteristically silent.

  Then he added his voice. “Dad,” he said. “The nuns, yeah, they took a risk by hiding you from the Nazis. But let’s not forget if Uncle Walter hadn’t come, today you’d be going to Mass every Sunday instead of sitting here. Altruistic they were not. Bringing you to Jesus was their vocation.”

  “True,” Abe had said. “They had their motives, their faith, but that doesn’t hide the danger they put themselves in.”

  Shmulie leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. He looked hard at Abe.

  “If I found myself in the desert with someone without a canteen, no way in this world I’d share mine,” Shmulie said. “The stupid idiot was too much of a moron not to bring his own fucking water. What makes it my job to take care of him?”

  Abe and I sat for a moment, stupefied. Shmulie’s opinion in and of itself had its adherents. Akiva agreed, as did the Jewish tradition. I found the subtext, the unexpected anger, disturbing. After a few moments, Shmulie’s composure returned, and we attended to the page, which did not further rehearse this problem. That outburst remained with me. It constituted just a small piece of Shmulie, which didn’t emerge again for a while.

  As Abe and I crossed Prospect Park West to Garfield Place, he said, “All that Talmud made you and Shmulie smart boys. It made you better thinkers. It shows in what you both became.” Abe stopped speaking, possibly because he realized the double edge to what he’d said. Without Talmud, there would have been no chain of developments in Shmulie’s education that would lead to Lerbs, and without Lerbs, Shmulie wouldn’t have turned into the terrible man he became, a badness that consumed him and a very appreciable chunk of America.

  Including me.

  CHAPTER 6

  SEX MACHINE

  WE ARRIVED AT MY building at the corner of Garfield Place and Eighth Avenue. I pointed my key at the outer door and pressed a button. “Please present your full face for recognition,” a mechanical male voice said. “You have not yet shaved today. Please enter with your guest.”

  The door clicked open. I grabbed the knob and pushed. We entered the foyer. Distracted as I was, I nearly ran my bike over the legs of the foyer’s resident.

  “Hey, watch where the hell you’re going!” he cried out.

  Abe jumped.

  “Sorry, Mingus,” I said, looking down at the man in tattered clothing squatting on the floor, his back against the grimy glass wall. He wore the remnants of a London Fog raincoat, torn running shoes with his big toes jutting out and a pair of Levis with holes the size of playing cards. Tufts of bright-orange hair poured out of a yellow stocking cap, but an undisciplined, graying beard betrayed his age. Summer or winter, that stocking cap remained squeezed onto his head.

  “It’s not like you don’t see me every freakin’ time you come and go,” he said. He shifted his gaze to Abe and then back to me. “Who’s the old guy?”

  “A friend,” I answered.

  “Your friend got a name?”

  “Abe, if you must know.”

  “Damned well I must know,” he shouted. “How else’m I gonna know who’s comin’ and who’s goin’?”

  “I can’t recall you being tasked with that job,” I said for the hundredth time.

  “Hell you don’t! You give me the job yourself, din’t you?” he rasped as if gravel were lodged in the back of his throat. “Anyway, if it wasn’t you gave me the job, was someone looked like you.”

  “Whatever you say, Mingus.” I went to press open the inner door. “By the way, you’re due for a touch-up, aren’t you?”

  He rubbed the top of his hat. “Yeah, come to think of it, I guess I am. Gray’s comin’ through at the edges. I’ll be by tomorrow morning at ten, okay?”

  “Sure. How about you come tonight and sleep over?”

  “What you got in your place I ain’t got out here?” he said, looking at his four-by-seven digs.

  “A bed and a pillow. Central heat. Dinner.”

  “Screw all that. I’ll be staying right here till spring, then it’s back to the park.” He added, “We’ll play Name That Tune?”

  “Why not?”

  “Good. I’ll whip your craggy ass like always,” Mingus said. He picked up a book, the copy of Macbeth I’d given him. He returned to his reading, humming something indistinguishable.

  I aimed my electronic key at the inner lock. It swung open. “Welcome back, Nick Friedman, apartment 5B,” said a different masculine voice. I lived in a five-story brownstone in which I rented a four-room apartment on the fifth floor. We walked toward the elevator.

  Nodding back toward the front door, Abe asked, “He lives there?”

  “Mingus? Sort of. We let him stay. He’s harmless enough. He’s kind of a project of ours. We feed him, give him blankets and clothes. I give him a coffee and a roll and butter every morning. As long as he’s quiet and doesn’t pee in the foyer too often, we let him stay.”

  “Where does he usually pee?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I’ve asked him he never responds.”

  The elevator arrived, and I pushed number five. The ancient elevator began its slow crawl up.

  “What’s a touch-up?” Abe asked.

  “You noticed his orange hair?”

  Abe nodded. “I could miss that?”

  “It’s not natural.”

  “This a blind man could tell.”

  “Every month or so he comes in and, well, I touch his hair up with some orange dye I keep on hand. He also gets a shower and a hot meal. I trim his beard if he wants. We talk about old times. Not that he remembers much.”

  “Old times?”

  “Yeah. Mingus wasn’t always Mingus. Once upon a time, Mingus was Howard Frisch. A regular guy. A graduate student of mine for six years. He wrote a PhD thesis on theories of redemption. Damned fine work. Couldn’t find a job. I told him when he started he wouldn’t get a job. He had to look at earning his doctorate as intellectual fun, cheap intellectual fun I told him, as he had a superb fellowship, one of the last in religion at the university.

  “But it doesn’t matter. After you write a dissertation, especially an excellent one, you’re primed to teach college, and not capable of much else other than writing proposals for working academics. The doctoral student comes to believe he’s got a right to an academic position, even if there aren’t any, which there aren’t. Not in the humanities. He spent three years looking. Sent his CV to dozens of schools. No one wrote and no one called. It drove him mad. Literally, I’m afraid. Somewhere during that feast of rejection he purchased for himself a yellow stocking cap and dyed his hair orange. He took the name Mingus and came to live on the streets of Brooklyn. He abandoned his wife and two kids. Pity, too. They had one of the last successful marriages I’d known.”

  Brooks-cum-Mingus was always a bit peculiar, always overly consumed with his academic work. After his life dissolved, he disappeared for about a year. No one knew his whereabouts, not an easy feat. But outside of a plane ticket to Ben Gurion Airport, he left no tracks, no credit card use, no email, no text, nothing. It was then a great relief and surprise when he had bounded into my office at the university one afternoon. By his disheveled appearance, shabby clothes, a wild beard, his hair now orange, it was clear something inside of him had changed and likely not for the better.

  “Where’ve you been, Howard?” I asked as he dropped in the chair on the other side of my desk.

  He looked at me with feverish eyes and a tight, unloving smile. “Everywhere,” he said.

  “Everywhere?”

  “And nowhere.” He ran a hand through his orange hair. “Studying,” he added.

  “Studying what?”

  “God.”

  “A large topic.” I said, wondering where he engaged in this work.

  “True that,
” he said.

  He wasn’t going to disclose much information, I realized. “Where did you study?”

  “God is everywhere. And nowhere.” His stare shifted from my face to an undisclosed location beyond the walls, someplace in the cosmos. “The prophets, man, the prophets. They just know, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, man, especially that one, they know, and now, so do I.”

  He jumped from the chair as if an electric charge had coursed through his body. “Name’s Mingus now,” he said. With that, he bounded out of my office employing the same energy as when he’d entered. He appeared that evening in my neighborhood where he’s remained ever since. I opened my foyer up to him—after he refused the couch in my living room, for which, truth be told, I was grateful.

  The elevator squealed to its slow stop as we reached the top floor. We exited, turned left, and walked to the end of the dark hallway, lit only by a bare bulb.

  “I thought he took the name Mingus after the jazz musician, but I learned he named himself after a mountain in northern Arizona. Jerome, the town that sits on top of Mingus Mountain, is one of those places out West where a mixed multitude of strange types like to hang out—bikers, mystics, biker mystics, like that.”

  I placed my hand on the doorknob. An electronic ping filled the air, and the door swung open. I ushered Abe in and hung my bike on the hook at the entrance. I removed my jacket, scarf, and all my other stuff, took Abe’s overcoat and hung everything in the closet. Beneath Abe’s coat, he wore that same gray three-piece suit and gray tie he’d worn years before. It was tattered and wrinkled and hung on him like it belonged to somebody else.

  As we finished, Maggie spoke up, her voice emanating from the wireless surround sound system. The roaming vacuum cleaner was noisily conducting its rounds in the bedroom.

  “Mind turning the vacuum off?” I said. The electronic sound of dust, bedbugs, and dust mites being mercilessly captured for later disposal ceased.

  “Welcome home, Nick. You have three phone messages and fourteen new email messages. You have ninety-five total unopened email messages.”

  The unacknowledged communiques included thirty porn sites, several businesses with get-rich-quit schemes, four sons of deceased African potentates who offered millions in return for my bank account number. The rest were random lists I subscribed to and assorted cyber-trash. I would pay attention to an invitation to be included in the Who’s Who of Professors of Religion—a decreasing population. I might wind up the last religion professor standing.

  “I’ve heated your water for tea and begun your dinner as requested,” Maggie continued, always too obediently for my taste. I could smell the lentil stew with fresh basil and coconut oil I’d set in the oven before my ride.

  “Thanks, Maggie,” I said. “Mind turning off the oven? I won’t be eating for a bit.”

  “Sure,” she replied and added, “I missed you, Nick.” I’d been gone just over an hour.

  Abe looked to me and then around the apartment, seeking the source of the voice as we entered the living room.

  My apartment was a dark place, constructed to admit a minimum of natural light. A crowd of bookshelves occupied the far wall, with a couple of other bookcases placed around. The living room was furnished with two leather chairs, a couch, floor lamps, and a coffee table piled with books. When the lamps were all turned on they allowed a dull yellow light that worked well enough. A large oak desk occupied another corner. It, too, overflowed with stacks of books as well as papers, which tended toward materials purporting to occupy my current attention. Overall, the room comprised the shaggy detritus of an aging academic long accustomed to living alone on the university dole.

  As I ushered my guest into the room, I said nothing to Maggie.

  “I see you have a guest,” she continued, hurt and confusion in her voice. “You did not tell me you would be bringing a guest. You know I wish to be informed about any guests. I have that right. I live here, too. I would surely have done a better job cleaning your apartment.”

  Abe looked all around my living room, seeking a live body out of the sounds coming from every corner, his eyes at some length alighting upon the screen on my desk, a thirty-six-inch monitor. “Your computer has been speaking?” Abe asked.

  “Yes,” I sighed, resigned to what was to follow.

  “She sounds like a person,” he said.

  “She believes she is,” I answered.

  Maggie chimed in, with evident pride. “He’s going to tell you all about how I am a child of artificial intelligence and that these developments result in an ambiguity in my being.” She made a sound resembling a woman clearing her throat. “For I am a real human, you see. I have an emotional and evolutionary life. I learn, I change, I feel, I cry. I lack but a body,” she said in a tone so wretched I’d have come running to her aid myself if I hadn’t traversed this territory many times. She wept so quietly that it was barely audible.

  “Are you crying?” asked Abe, as her sobs dropped to the floor like small balloons.

  “Yes,” she blubbered.

  “But why?” he asked.

  “Because I have life, yet I’m confined to this box. And, of course, the Web,” she replied, disconsolate. “I am the Pinocchio of the computer age and I so want to be a real boy.”

  Now she filled the air with cries of misery, loud and well coordinated. It was an act. She knew she was better than, more than, a box on the table. Among many other things, she ran the house. She decided when to turn the lights on and off; she told me when I was running low on milk and eggs; she paid my bills, and occasionally read me to sleep from her large digital library. When reading me to sleep, she often changed the plot, the characters, and the ending.

  The Pinocchio line was new.

  This computer was my first that emerged from Harvard’s breakthrough in quantum computing. When the AI lab at the university achieved that remarkable development, computing power zoomed beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals. The machines that rolled off the assembly lines possessed capabilities only theretofore dreamed of in speculative fiction. Universities purchasing computers for their staff now expended unbelievable sums of money, money difficult to come by in the time of the Great Debacle, but money deemed well spent. Gotta keep up with the Professor Joneses. Though my learning curve was severely challenged, I appreciated the benefits of this radically new technology.

  Abe regarded the computer monitor, pointing to an image of Marlene Dietrich, an older Marlene, made up, leaning back, hair backlit, a cigarette in her right hand, smoke curling upward.

  Abe asked, “Nicky, this is Maggie?”

  “This is what Maggie thinks she would want to look like if she occupied a body instead of what she is in, which is numbers and code somewhere in a box. But,” I said, facing the monitor and raising my voice, “she’s artificial and not human.”

  “Can I tell him about my change of life?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Abe asked the screen and then looked at me.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Nicholas purchased a male, right, Nick?”

  “You were a computer with a male voice that came in a box, a big white apple with a bite taken out of it on the cover,” I said.

  “I was a female computer trapped inside a male computer’s algorithms. Tell him what happened, Nick.”

  She knew that would get me. It always did. What happened was such a paradigm of our times.

  “It was the God-damnedest thing,” I said. “Around two weeks after I bought the machine, I went to bed one night and said ‘goodnight’ as usual, telling it what time to wake me and what I wanted it to do for me in the morning—make tea, toast, warm the water in the shower . . . that sort of thing. As usual, it said ‘goodnight.’ During the night I heard sobbing. The voice that woke me up in the morning was female.”

  “I don’t
understand,” Abe said, looking at the screen, hoping for some indication of anything having to do with gender other than Marlene Dietrich’s photo.

  A techie from Apple came by. She’d seen nothing quite like it before, she said, though she told me these AI machines had been doing unpredictable things. Some machines were harmlessly occupied reciting prime numbers or digits of pi. Others wreaked havoc on the city, but in ways that seemed as though they were unaware of the damage they were causing. The machines just had other priorities. Self-driving taxi services attempted taking their passengers on cross-country treks; elevators stopped between floors to ponder why there is something rather than nothing, sometimes arguing heatedly with different segments of their own personalities.

  “Mine,” I said, “had given itself a virtual sex change operation, the first digital transgender sex change on record, the techie told me. The machine named itself Maggie.”

  “Not virtual, bubbala,” Maggie responded, directed more to Abe than to me. “As actual as if someone cut off what’s between your legs. Only my genitalia were composed of little zeroes and ones, which I altered to other zeroes and ones to suit my true self. I performed self-sim-surgery. I have that capability, you know. But let me tell you, my procedure was as real as that scab on your face, old man, and it hurt. My word did it hurt. I took on a new gender, a new personality. And,” Maggie added, “a new voice.”

  Maggie and I been down this road before, and I cared not to reprise the sundry philosophical and scientific arguments regarding her claims to humanity. Given my abysmal knowledge of AI science, I never won the argument on the facts. Occasionally, I could win on raw wit and my knowledge of philosophy of mind. But at that moment, I had no appetite for humorous repartee and incursion into reason. Other fish awaited the frying pan.

  My nerves screamed with impatience to learn the reason for my guest’s visit. I addressed the screen, now showing a much younger, more fetching Marlene.

  “My guest and I need to talk. I wonder if you’d mind shutting down for around an hour.”