Authors: Louisa Hall
April 3, 1968
Karl Dettman
You’re asleep, I’m led to believe, but then again your eyelids still flutter. Perhaps you’re not quite fully under. Maybe you’re poised between sleeping and waking, trying to decide which direction you’ll take
.
On one hand, there’s me, arguing for the benefits of staying awake. At one point in our marriage, I was persuasive, but you’ve been steeling yourself against me for years. When I ask you about the family you lost, your mouth becomes a steel trap. You won’t describe, for instance, your mother, as if you believe that somewhere, crossing the distance from your lips to my ear, aspects of her will come under fire
.
Once, wanting to talk, hoping to eliminate the secrets between us, I dared to ask you about the father you lost. You were folding laundry over our bed. You must have been feeling patient that day, while you opened and shut my shirts like thin closets, because you considered for a minute before deciding against me. “Please don’t,” you said. “You know how it is.”
I dropped the subject. Instead, I wrapped my arms around your waist. Your head fit under my chin; I kissed your hair and you sighed, dropping the laundry. You didn’t move away from my arms. We must have stayed like that for a while, both of us resting, tucked warmly together
.
That’s what I was given, in exchange for simply dropping the subject. Can you blame me for letting it go? It’s not that I hoped to leave it behind us. I was only grateful for the new place we’d come to. I was so proud of the marriage we’d built. Our house, arranged so ideally. The cat we adopted, the garden we planted, the way we never really fought
.
When Ada passed away, we buried her in the backyard. The house seemed empty without her. After an appropriate period, I started to talk about adopting a kitten, but you always shrugged me off. That was confusing; more even than I, you were in love with our Lady Ada. She followed you from room to room. You read with her curled in your lap. Why, then, were you cold on the topic of adopting a kitten?
I suppose your interest had wandered. You never even planted a sapling over her grave, as we’d previously discussed. That spot remained a bald patch in our garden, a sight that always rubbed me wrong. You’d become oddly inactive. You were already researching computers. Some part of you had been diverted. When I talked to you, you were no longer all with me
.
And in the face of this lengthening distance, was it my job to follow you? To trail you to wherever you’d gone and bring you back by force or persuasion? I didn’t even know where you went. When you started insisting on giving MARY memory, I guessed you’d gone back to Europe. I might have been willing to follow you back there, but you gave me so few directions
.
Still, maybe I should have tried harder. I do know certain facts. For instance, I know that you lived with your sister, your parents, and your grandfather. I know the small apartment you shared was on the second floor. Your family wasn’t wealthy, but you also weren’t poor. Your father was a pharmacist. When you and your sister were told to switch schools, and then when you were given a curfew, your parents must have been anxious, but they didn’t plan to emigrate. No one could have imagined what happened later, and anyway, your parents were busy providing. They made smaller, more reasonable changes. They cut down on expenditures and put more money away. They attempted to find scholarships for their daughters
.
A year after I embarked on my journey, you won a place at a school in the north. According to a certificate I found once in your files while looking for your tax information, you had displayed great mathematical promise. While your sister stayed home, you went up north, where you lived with other talented children
.
Does it anger you, Ruth, that I came across that certificate? I can imagine your eyes growing darker, narrowing as they do into daggers. What was I doing, rifling your files, looking for your W-2? Well, let me tell you something, Ruth. I feel I deserve a certificate of recognition, for respecting your secrets as much as I have
.
From the early days of our marriage, I understood our differences. I came with my family; you came as an orphan. Based on such a fundamental division, I accepted your right to keep secrets. I know, for instance, about your sister’s diary in the top drawer of your desk. I saw it once, when I was looking for a sharp pencil, and while it hurt me to realize you’d kept it from me, that I’d never known about its existence, I didn’t even open it. Can you imagine such restraint? I only touched the leather cover, traced your
sister’s initials with my pointer finger. And then I closed the drawer again and walked quickly out of your office
.
I’ve respected your right to keep secrets, and what do I get in return for my efforts? The honor of witnessing your growing devotion to an idiotic computer. Maybe, when you visit her at night, you read her that diary. Maybe you’ve shared that secret with her, a secret you kept all the years of our marriage. Maybe that’s why you want to give her memory: so she can save your sister’s story, then call it up later as the answer to some innocent question
.
I see why that might be appealing. As long as your sister’s still talking, she hasn’t fully ceased to exist. But what good are her words if they’re not comprehended? Sure, MARY will remember them, translated into binary signals. But is that understanding? Is that more understanding than I have? I’ve pieced a few things together, and what I don’t know I can imagine—something, by the way, our computer can’t manage. Faced with my own ignorance, I can imagine the facts
.
For two years, after moving north, you must have been able to travel. You must have visited your family often. In your third year at the new school, as war was building and travel was forbidden, you stayed and wrote letters. Your sister wrote back
.
In the fourth year of your separation, letters from your sister stopped. Alone at your school in the north, you continued to study. That winter, a wealthy alumnus arranged for the departure of the school’s Jewish students. You and eight of your talented schoolmates—the lucky ones, plucked away from your families—were smuggled out on a fishing boat. Huddled down below deck, you felt sick with good luck
.
Once you were out of the country, your luck refused to run out. You won another scholarship, this time in Pennsylvania.
They had a place for you, so you went, but by this point you were sleepwalking. What else could you do? You studied for a few weeks. You walked to your classes, passed tennis courts and baseball fields, sat beside boys with neat spiral notebooks. After three weeks, you left school to take a position at the Philadelphia Signal Depot. There were plenty of positions for women, since so many men were leaving to fight, and you wanted money to save for your family. You took a post as inspector in the office for telescope crystals. Your telescopes would be used by army meteorologists, in order to predict motions over the city you’d left. Your unit was adjacent to the one that trained pigeons. Often, while measuring crystals, you dreamed of freeing the birds from their cages
.
You turned twenty. A young woman now, you didn’t think of falling in love. To do so would have been a distraction. In the attic apartment where you were living, you trained your mind to be a museum. You had to remember things right, so that when your family arrived, you could pick up where you left off. Instead of falling in love, you wrote letters. You sent them to the house where your family had lived, in case they somehow returned. You wrote letters to the authorities, to the associations for refugees. To the charities, the governments, the newspapers, waiting for some word from your family
.
Oh, my barely slumbering wife. My wife who escaped on a fishing boat, who spent her twenties writing to no one. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not equipped for such difficult stories
.
Let me just climb in beside you. Let me drape my arm over your shoulder. There, Ruth. You and I. As it has been from the beginning. Or from a beginning, the one that I live by
.
You have other allegiances. Even in sleep, I feel you preparing to leave. Not only to talk with that gabbing computer. Not only
for secret dinners with my graduate students. No, there are longer journeys you’re preparing to take. I can tell by that look that scatters when I sneak up behind you. The look of someone already at sea, up in the crow’s nest, scanning for land. Who knows what plans you’ve already made? You’ve been packing your possessions for months
.
M
y particular youth wasn’t perfect, but it was my childhood nevertheless. Murray and I escaped the clutches of bullies and ran, in hysterics, down to his basement. We threw ourselves into bright chains of symbols. We made a universe in which we could live. We laughed at our little programming jokes. We were as happy as we were afraid.
It perhaps doesn’t need saying that I remained single through college. Though my youthful religion had faded, I still couldn’t escape my lone circling body. I spent my days at Harvard in the dim CRT glow of the science center computer lab, studiously avoiding all contact with members of the opposite sex. Murray Weeks, meanwhile, had gone off to Stanford, where he surprised me by finding a serious girlfriend. After that, he became a poor correspondent. I understood that he was in love and loathed him
for having what I could not. The idea of embracing a woman seemed as unlikely as flying unaided through a dark hole. I tried a few times with poor results. These occasions confirmed my suspicions: unloved by a mother, lost to my father, and far from the one friendship I’d managed to make, I moved through the human world without catching. I kept company with computers.
It occurs to me now, as I record this for posterity, that in that lonely time in my life a bot of the kind I later created might have provided real consolation. If I could only travel backward in time to bestow a Chinnian robot on Stephen R. Chinn at the age of eighteen! Perhaps that will be my next invention: time travel, to dispense my other inventions. But then again, maybe those bots are better off dead. It pains me to know how the survivors are treated. I’ve heard, for instance, that they’ve been illegally altered to slake certain adult desires. Dolls that escaped apprehension have been refitted for sordid purposes and are traded on dark Internet sites. I’ve caught snippets of tales, whispered among prisoners with undisguised envy, of marriages between humans and bots. It’s hard for me not to despise such arrangements. Those unhappy creatures aren’t fully human; they’re incapable of giving consent. They’re doomed forever to be used to our ends. One fellow prisoner recently thanked me for providing such a perfect companion. “Smooth as silk,” he confided, with a conspiratorial leer. “Liked everything I could think of, and she only talked when I asked her questions.”
In general, I don’t begrudge my comrades their urges. It’s natural to seek solace in touch. I myself haven’t taken a lover, but not because I’ve mastered desire. I’d like to lie next to a body. I’d like to be drawn back to earth. But then my memories are already fragile. I’d rather lie close to what I recall than replace my
love with some prison husband. At night, I remind myself of her body: her asymmetrical breasts, her untamable hair. Already so much of her has faded, but sometimes, sometimes, she visits me here. How, then, could I risk a substitute, some noisy presence that might banish the shade?
I don’t say any of this in an attempt to sound noble. This is, after all, an account of my sins. I haven’t always been so correct. It does me no harm to admit at this point that during the years of my worst isolation, I often considered visiting a prostitute. Despite my many unattractive tendencies, however, I’ve never wanted to take advantage of another person’s misfortune. No, as I’ve already said, what I wanted was love. The gift of two physical and emotional lives, bound up and willingly interchanged. For this I continued to anxiously hope, but very little progress was made.
I recall one lonely walk from the science center at Harvard, when the too-early darkness of New England winter had already set in. I was heading homeward, and here and there lights came on in dorm windows. Suddenly I was overcome by the hopelessness of my condition. My legs became weak; I leaned against the cold form of a bronze commemorative statue. No one would save me. I would never join up with the others. I had always been completely alone. And yet, even then, I could console myself with the fact that I was a programmer, and a brilliant one at that. Cold comfort, yes, but still it was comfort. My sadness metastasized into pride. One day, I told myself, as I hurried back to my bedroom, crossing beneath ivied thresholds, my programming brilliance would be acknowledged. Then I’d attract a suitable girlfriend. Then I’d attract many suitable girlfriends. The women would flock to my genius like moths.
Needless to say, this line of thought is revolting, even for the mind of an eighteen-year-old boy. I’m now fifty-eight. I’ve been married to a woman I loved. I understand that women aren’t moths, that my sense of scale was completely off-kilter.
And perhaps it’s still out of whack. Of what importance are the thwarted desires of awkward young men, when the oceans are rising, the deserts are coming, and families are trading their freedoms for houses? But I had no such perspective when I was in college. I was just a computer-bound kid. We were still hopeful about new machines. The country teemed with nerd savants, Zuckerberg was my classmate at Harvard, Deep Blue had conquered Kasparov, Palo Alto was booming, and all of us were inventing. I felt nearly fully alive.
This un–fully fledged state continued after my graduation. Even when MeetLove.com was launched from my cramped Palo Alto apartment, I was still lonely. I worked out of my bed. Long hours at work meant that I rarely interacted with humans. Because they were so infrequent, the interactions I did have were triply awkward. Approaching a female, my limbs seemed to weigh twice their usual weight. My face expanded to blimp-like proportions. My lips thickened with dread. I approached potential companions with the sense of myself as an amorous cow. Even when MeetLove went public and the millions accrued in my bank account, when they called me the inventor of modern courtship, when I was profiled in every tech magazine and photographed only at flattering angles, my romantic bugs still hadn’t been fixed.
In desperation, five years into my adventures in adulthood, I concluded that I was working too much. At the age of twenty-six, I embarked on semiretirement. Pursuing some magazine
picture of leisure, I moved from Palo Alto to Santa Barbara and bought a house on top of a mountain. It was my stilted idea of a Dionysian palace: vast mazes of rooms, fig trees, balconies, curtains of bougainvillea and a jacaranda that bloomed purple from February through mid-December. In the back there was an infinity pool, spilling over the mountain.
Such opulence insists on contentment, but I was very unhappy. I’d taken refuge in work. Cut down to part-time, I felt exposed, naked as a sea creature peeking out of his shell. Awkward, cutaneous, vulnerable to attack. What friendly acquaintances I’d maintained in Palo Alto were left behind; in Santa Barbara, I descended into solitude so thick that conversations with repairmen became anxious social occasions. Quiet dropped over my house.
For two lonely years, I woke overwhelmed by the weight of desire. From my office overlooking the ocean, I maintained my farce of a business, an involuntarily celibate dating tycoon. Once my eyes had grown bleary, I disrobed and swam laps in my pool. Later, exhausted, the man-child I was emerged from the water. Wrapped in a robe, I paced the halls of my Peter Pan Mansion, my Pansion, waiting for the arrival of Wendy. At 8:00 I ate a microwavable dinner. I sat on my patio, overlooking the sunset. Below me, clusters of palm trees were painted green-gold. Tousled by wind, their fronds resembled tangles of unspooled cassette tape.
Even from the perspective of prison, those were challenging years. I’d like to use my time machine to travel back to that house. I’d sit beside that unhappy child, keep him company while he ate his dinner. I’d reassure him that his loneliness would come to an end. I’d paint him a picture of his wife and his child. “For seven
years,” I could tell him, “you’ll wander the desert, and then you will no longer suffer. You will be given a family.” Can you imagine how that would change him? It would give him such hope. Perhaps it would alter the course that he took. Perhaps even now he’d be happy. To keep that possibility open, I’d leave out the next part: “Seven years after that, you’ll be made a false prophet. You’ll preside over decline and be charged with the ruin.” I’d skip that little postscript, and merely point out to that child that he stands on the threshold of an invention.
It came to me one morning while contemplating a pineapple. The fruit had been left on the marble breakfast island by the housemaid I employed at the time. Her name was Dolores. She cleaned my sterile mansion in determined silence. She brought me groceries and laundry supplies and deposited them with the least possible fuss, then drove down the mountain to return to her life. She was not an effusive young woman. But that’s neither here nor there, at least at this point in the story. What matters now is the pineapple she left. I encountered it first thing in the morning, bleary-eyed in pajamas, burdened by my awful desire. Even in that state, the pineapple calmed me.
Pineapple.
Ananas comosus
. You’ve heard of the golden ratio? The Fibonacci sequence? There was the spiraling pineapple, content on the marble counter. Complete in her waxen armor, her dusty green hexagonal cells. A composite fruit, each row of turrets climbing upward according to pattern. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. Each term in the sequence is the sum of two terms before it, producing the most elegant spiral. Looping, orbiting, but never the same: progressing always upward and out. A helixed fruit, the golden
Ananas
. I held her in my hand, then to my breast. Spiked, violent, beautiful. Common to us all.
It was then that I dreamed of the seduction equation. I dreamed of a pattern, reaching backward in time, producing a new term for the present. I saw the cycle that links us to the terms that came before we were born: our parents, our grandparents, the first settlers who came to our shores. We’re linked to histories we can’t ever know, forgotten stories that form our most intimate substance. Holding that pineapple, I saw that such links aren’t actually chains, but rather widening spirals, delicate as the ripples that build into waves, the shoots that grow into branches on the most magnificent trees. I knew then that I was a branch, no less connected than anyone else. I encountered the dreamers I came from, and understood that I was the link between them and the world as it would become in my lifetime.