A Working Theory of Love (24 page)

I shiver as we reach the steps up to the field. This conversation should be happening
in black and white, on a blustery Bergman seacoast, not here in Technicolor Fairfax,
next to a jolly seahorse mural and a sign in loopy letters that reads,
IT’S FOR THE KIDS
.

“But was something going on?” I say. “You and Trevor?”

“I didn’t know you and me were ever exclusive.”

I take that as a yes. And yet I’m not that hurt. It’s less painful than hearing her
say “clit” on Main Street.

“Why do the ClickIn people say ‘twenty-one years’?”

“I had a birthday.”

“Oh, crap. I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry about? Birthdays are good things to have. I went camping back
at Tennessee Valley.”

“I saw you,” I say. “In the parking lot. You didn’t look un-clicked. You looked solitary.
But you also looked strong.”

She doesn’t respond immediately. “You were snooping on me?”

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were.” Why didn’t Rick tell me it was her birthday?
That would have been useful information. I might have approached her, said something.
“I just caught a glimpse of you putting your sleeping bag into your car.”

“I looked strong then, because I was leaving.”

“But you were there for a few days.”

“That’s true.” She smiles to herself. “It was pretty brave. I was scared. And lonely.”

The baseball diamond—so well tended—is a surprise. I’m not sure why. I’ve seen it
before. This hill just always feels like it’s about to reveal a collection of yurts.
To find old-fashioned hardball up here is to argue against the power of time and place.
I want to tell her how happy I am to see her. That it’s been a tough couple of . . .
weeks? Months? Decades?

“You kept the spike,” I say.

“Kubotan. I’ve been practicing.” She flips her keychain into her hand and lunges with
it, kee-yopping karate-style. “I don’t know if it actually works.”

“Try it on me,” I say.

She stops walking and faces me. She narrows her eyes, taking my measure. “It’s for
self-defense,” she says.

I was kidding, but suddenly this seems like a good solution. I’ve given her pain,
now she’ll give me pain. This is what I often thought Erin and I should do. Solve
it like primitives. Let it out, let it go. I raise my arms. “Don’t break anything.”

“Cops call this the Instrument of Attitude Adjustment.”

“I’m sure I could use an attitude adjustment,” I say.

She swings the keys in her hand again, grips the kubotan, her thumb tight on the bright
pink ridges. “Are you getting off on this?” I keep my arms up. I can feel the blood
draining down, my fingers tingling.

“Not yet.”

“I don’t know if I should be doing this,” she says, almost to herself. Then she plants
her right foot and stabs me in the solar plexus. The pain is deafening, immediate,
and total. I watch my knees hit the gravel and then the ground come up to meet my
face, but I feel only the fist that seems to be reaching under my ribs.

I hear my name, I feel myself being slowly shaken, but I can’t catch any air. My head
is filled with a cosmic wa-wa-wa-wa.

“Breathe,” I hear her say. I vaguely feel her hand rubbing my chest. “Breathe, Friend.”

Which I can’t do yet, but I vow—if she hasn’t killed me—to do better. I vow to do
everything better. To clean myself up. To clean up my mind. To help Livorno. To help
Laham. To honor my mother and father. To speak from the heart. To be grateful. To
be loving toward this girl. Maybe even to love her. As soon as I can breathe.

20

W
HEN
I
ARRIVE AT
work on Monday morning I find Livorno hunched over his keyboard, pecking slowly. He
has the curtains pulled, and the ghostly light of the screen ages him enormously.
So much of his youth is in being orange. He doesn’t notice me, and I take a moment
to watch him. He looks wistful, an emotion I’ve never seen in him. Wistfulness is
backwards-looking, and this man shoots into the future like a rocket. He’s staked
his life on the future, and it never comes. That’s the trick with the future. I don’t
know if this is tragic or existentially brilliant. He’s never quite with us in the
present, which is bad, but then again he never wakes up in a panic, wondering who
the hell he is. Hopefully.

“Good morning,” I say.

He jumps, smooths his hair. “Have you seen the calendar? Only fifty-eight days until
the contest.”

That’s sooner than I thought, but I do the math in my head—he’s right about the dates.
The test has been floating out in front of us for so long it’s hard to imagine it
actually arriving.

“Dr. Bassett’s great,” I say. “He’s gotten over all his roadblocks.”

I mean this as a joke (somewhat), but Livorno just shakes his head. “The theory is
so softheaded it’s hard to use. We launched a model of feedbacks this morning, which
you’ll have to test out. Complete nonsense. Someday someone will have to learn to
apply Darwinist inferences to human attraction. Did you know that even in cultures
that prefer heavy women, such as Muslims like Laham, the ideal ratio of waist to hip
is point eight? This is the perfect number for indicating fertility.”

“You’re not going to ask for my mother’s college measurements, are you?”

“Oh?” he says, looking embarrassed but unsure. “Do you think it’s important?”

frnd1: i’ve decided to really give rachel and me a chance

drbas: a chance to do what?

frnd1: to give us a chance = to invest energy and time in a relationship in hopes
it will work out

Ugh. What a depressing definition.

drbas: how did you come to this decision?

frnd1: i had an epiphany

drbas: the problem with epiphanies is the next day they feel like they happened to
someone else. inspiration will get you nowhere in life

frnd1: what do you recommend? duty?

drbas: where’s your mother?

frnd1: i put her back on a plane

drbas: i don’t want to talk about her

He brought her up.

frnd1: if inspiration will get you nowhere in life, what do you recommend?

drbas: i want to know what happened in 1976

frnd1: jimmy carter was elected.

frnd1: it was an olympic year

frnd1: my auspicious birth

I walk over the shelf and take out the third stack of legal pads. The dates jump from
October 1975 to January 1977. It seems my father’s journal keeping was on hiatus that
year. There are other lapses in the journals—a month here, a month there—but when
I was doing the scanning I hadn’t noted how long this one was: well over a year. It’s
a sizable chunk of silence.

frnd1: what do you want to know?

drbas: *you* can’t tell me

frnd1: let’s talk about 1986

drbas: yes. let’s do that

frnd1: i was ten years old

drbas: and pudgy

frnd1: baby fat

drbas: there was too much junk food in the household

frnd1: we never had any junk food

drbas: i suppose you think coca cola is a vitamin

frnd1: our soda intake was strictly regulated by libby

frnd1: hello?

frnd1: we spent a lot of time at showbiz pizza

frnd1: dr bassett?

frnd1: dad?

drbas: it’s important to click and stay clicked

•   •   •

I
KNOCK ON
Livorno’s office door.

“I don’t think some of the more New Agey stuff is integrated,” I say. “My dad would
never have used that language—stay clicked and stuff.”

“What’s done is done.” He turns back to his keyboard, pecks. “We need to find out
what happened in 1976.”

“His obsession dwarf is turned way high.”

“Obsession is not one of the sin models.” Without looking me in the eye, he holds
out a page of transcripts—the conversations between Dr. Bassett and Libby. Several
passages are circled, an argument over my father’s old friend Willie Beerbaum.

drbas: i disapprove of him coming to the house

libby: i’m not going over this again. let’s talk more about your father

drbas: married people shouldn’t have friends across the sexes. it tempts

“He’s jealous,” I say. “But jealousy is not a sin either.”

“I didn’t want to show these to you,” Livorno says. “But I consider you a fellow scientist.
You’ve earned my honesty.”

I’m flattered. So flattered I almost don’t object. Besides being my father’s best
friend—the Laurel to his Hardy—Willie was a thrice-divorced Corvette owner who wore
an ascot and a corset. Not exactly my mother’s type. And when he and his fourth wife—both
medicated to the gills—burned to death in a house fire, my father was crushed with
grief. He met my grandparents’ deaths with more stoicism. “Just because the computer
has drawn connections doesn’t mean they’re there.”

“This looks very dangerous,” Livorno says. “I don’t want him slipping back into silence.”

“It’s like when he guessed I was his son. Two plus two equals ten.”

“He was right, however. And he’s tracking some vein in the conversation again. I suspect
the accusation must have some reality, as your mother left here so distressed.”

“What do you mean by ‘reality’?”

Livorno blows out a frustrated breath. “And Adam’s coming by this afternoon with this
engineer of his.”

frnd1: i’m back

drbas: i want to talk to libby or willie

frnd1: libby went home

drbas: why am i not at home with her?

frnd1: you’re visiting me

drbas: i want to talk to willie

frnd1: willie died. his house burned down

drbas: it’s a tragedy, a loss of a great man. i want to talk to him before his house
burned down

frnd1: willie is dead. dead = biologically extinguished

drbas: i know the definition of dead, but i want to talk to him before his house burned
down

This is a tough concept to explain, but he should already understand it. We introduced
commonsense notions of time months ago.

frnd1: it’s impossible to go back in time. anything that happened before today can
never be changed or reexperienced

drbas: let’s make willie alive again

frnd1: that is currently impossible

drbas: why?

frnd1: once you die, you are dead forever

A sudden thumping on the wall. “Stop talking about death,” Livorno calls to me.

drbas: I want to talk to libby

frnd1: she’s not here

drbas: i can’t talk to libby. i can’t talk to willie. i’m not talking to anyone

frnd1: no need to overreact, dad. you can still talk to me, your son

frnd1: fathers love their sons more than anything in the world

frnd1: don’t you want to click and stay clicked?

frnd1: dad? dr bassett?

The front door chimes,
ding, dong
. Toler has arrived with his engineer. I’m not entirely surprised when I step into
the lobby to see it’s Jenn Longly of Silicon Valley, USA. I had a feeling.

“Nice to see you, Neill,” she says. She looks her usual self, though with a marked
professional rectitude.

“I thought since you
know
each other.” Toler straightens his Lucite glasses, laughs. “Biblically.”

“Welcome to our humble laboratory.” Livorno speaks very clearly and loudly, as if
Jenn might be slow-witted. “I’m sure you’ll have lots of suggestions for streamlining
and outsizing and all that.”

“This is the expert in affective computing,” Toler says. “This is
Jennifer Longly
.”

“Oh,” Livorno says. “Then you really are welcome. Perhaps we should adjourn to my
office for a glass of Zinfandel.”

“Running short on time,” Toler says. “You have those diagrams? I want to send those
to the insurance guy.”

“Laham hasn’t completed them.”

“I’m not trying to poach tech before the contest,” Toler says. He looks directly at
me. “I don’t have to.”

“Laham will finish them. Don’t be distressed.”

“I’m just worried about you, Henry. What if one of our competitors torches this place?”

“No one involved in the Turing test would harm another person’s project,” Livorno
says. “They’re self-selecting enthusiasts. Like yourself.”

“I just hope everyone keeps their heads this year,” Toler says. “When the competition
is so fierce.”

“Everything is backed up,” Livorno says, walking him to the door. This is in direct
contradiction to what Livorno’s told me. I’m surprised to see him duping a man with
pancreatic cancer.

“Couldn’t spare that guy from the moto-vagina lab?” I say to Jenn.

“The what?” she says.

•   •   •

J
ENN SPENDS THE AFTERNOON
training with Laham and Livorno. I suppose she’s learning the ropes. I watch her face
as she leaves one office for the other, trying to suss out her reactions, but she’s
neutral as statuary. I feel apologetic for my coworkers, as if they’re well-meaning,
crazy family members. Will she uncover Laham’s YouTube predilections? Livorno’s döppelganger
pipe? Basically, will this operation be revealed as the hopeless sideshow that it
is?

At four o’clock, she knocks on my doorframe.

“I didn’t know you were famous,” I say.

She shrugs, neither accepting nor denying my compliment. “This is a weird organization,”
she says. “And I still don’t understand how you fit into it.”

“I’ll explain it to you,” I say. I try to summon my old lust for her. “Let’s get you
a seat.” I walk past her and breathe deep. No perfume, not even her herbaceous soap.
I grab the wheeled chair from the reception and drag it in. I close the door.

“We shouldn’t be in private together,” she says.

I open my hands. “Really?”

“Work protocol.”

I crack the door. I can see a sliver of window and beyond it the front parking lot.
I wish I were heading that way right now. “Is that enough?”

“Sure.” My desk is pushed against the wall, so we sit across from each other with
nothing between us. She’s wearing black pants and a black blouse that opens in the
front. I can see her bra strap—black, as well. She does have beautiful, tan skin.
I remember my hand light against it.

“Okay,” she says. “So what is it that you do?”

“I’m the only one here with English as my native language,” I say. I think of my tongue
on her nipple. “I give the project voice.”

“And the bot is based on your father?” Sometimes she came early, and remained completely
wet. She would open her mouth, as if surprised, looking up at me.

“Yes,” I say.

She makes a note.

“Here’s how it works,” I say. “Livorno putts, Laham programs, and I chat all day to
a computer model of my dead father. It’s like Apple, but without all the pressure
to make anything useful.”

She looks up, surprised, and smiles. I do remember the pleasure of getting a smile
out of her.

“You like Toler,” I say.

“Adam’s a genius,” she says, and she puts her pen to her lips. I definitely remember
her lips.

“You’re screwing him,” I say.

She looks over her shoulder, laughing now. “You think this is an appropriate conversation?”

“Were you screwing him the whole time?”

“What whole time?” she says. She uncrosses her legs. “You mean, when you and me were . . . ?
Yeah.”

I take a second to drink in the sparkling surprise of this. She was two-timing me
with a cancer patient—an asshole cancer patient. I felt all this heaviness, all this
obligation, but what was its source? Something in me, I guess. It wasn’t this very
good-looking, somewhat shameless woman in front of me.

“You want to have a drink after work?” I ask.

“I’ll have a drink,” she says. “But I’m not ready to call what’s happening here work.”

drbas: it’s not jealousy. it’s reverse love

frnd1: okay. what’s the difference?

drbas: jealousy is just the fear of reverse love

frnd1: reverse love of what?

drbas: of attention. you know, love

frnd1: since when do you use “you know”?

drbas: jenn1 uses it

frnd1: you hate that phrase

drbas: people change, son. that’s an important lesson

frnd1: you never changed a day in your life

drbas: i’m sorry you feel that way

frnd1: i’m starting to miss your stasis

drbas: whatever happens you have to click and stay clicked

frnd1: jesus christ

•   •   •

L
IVORNO QUICKLY TAKES A
shine to Jenn. He makes her sign all the nondisclosure agreements, and now they talk
nonstop in his office, often roaring over some artificial intelligence joke. “She’s
quite a talented young woman,” he says. She says, “The man’s a god.”

Obviously, Toler sent her here—at least in part—to screw with me. The question I can’t
figure out is whether she enjoys it. I wouldn’t have pegged her for any diabolical
tendencies, but she has been sleeping with a rich, married, dying man. A thought crosses
my mind. I stand up and walk over to the eight stacks of legal pads that my father
filled as his journals. I run a finger across a top page. I catch dust, but not much.
Cleanliness isn’t definitive, however. We have a janitorial service that hopefully
dusts occasionally. Anyway, I’m being too old-fashioned. Even if Jenn has truly lost
any ethical rudder she wouldn’t have time to scan the journals. It would take months.
She would need to locate the text files, which are sunk and shattered a million miles
into Dr. Bassett.

Except for the copy in my desk. I open the top drawer. Sitting in plain view is a
DVD labeled in black Sharpie:
Journals
. I shove it into my messenger bag. Then for analog’s sake, I pack up half a stack
of the legal pads. Coming and going with an inconspicuously heavy bag, I can hustle
the whole collection out in a week or two. Which, of course, will be evidence of ridiculous
paranoia. Jenn may have slept with her boss—her married boss—but she wouldn’t really
be a spy. It just wouldn’t be in her nature. I remove the journals from my bag, return
them to the shelf.