The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  The name of the game: Oops!

  Back when she cared about shit like that.

  The question was always money. Ideally, the settings would be fully navigable in 3D and the text would be voiced. Mette, Andres, and Seo-yeon in their spare time were scripting and programming a sample, then planning to crowdsource it and see how much they could raise. Branching narrative games have never been very popular, both among players and programmers. The latter’s dissatisfaction is that so much programming and scripting never gets experienced by any one player. As for the former, as much as they might claim to value interactivity and verisimilitude, players don’t really like choices in games that are both potentially disastrous and irrevocable. That’s a little too much like reality.

  Yeah, yeah, Mette and Seo-yeon said to Andres. But maybe the unpopularity is due to the fact that no one has yet produced a branching narrative game with great 3D graphics and a kick-ass story line. Game designers have shied away from spending enough, so the examples thus far have been visually weak, and plotted in an annoyingly deceptive way so that the alleged hundreds of choices converge on a mere half dozen possible endings. Let’s make history!

  Back when, etc.

  Speaking of too much like reality, here she is in Seattle

  without a fucking clue

  what to do

  The bus pulled in at 7:43 a.m., forty-three minutes late. 43 of course is prime, and 743 is a Sophie Germain prime, meaning when you double it and add one you get another prime, namely 1487. Sophie Germain was a brilliant nineteenth-century mathematician who was barred from a career because she lacked a cock and arguably therefore a brain, and who further disqualified herself by having two breasts, one of which turned cancerous and killed her at fifty-five. Sequences of Sophie Germain primes are called Cunningham chains, and it’s obvious that for prime numbers larger than 5, only those whose last digit is 9 can generate a Cunningham chain longer than three. Mette walked north on 6th Avenue because she could see tall buildings in the distance, then couldn’t resist a left on Weller, because The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a great flick of long ago, then right on 5th, then left on Jackson because The Lord of the Rings (but not The Hobbit), then right on 3rd, then left on Main, because who can resist a Main Street in the good old U S of A, and this randomish route brought her to what in any video game would be a beckoning quest destination, i.e., a fenced-in space of artificial falling water and granite-tubbed trees called Waterfall Garden Park, complete with, according to the sign by the gate, an Easter egg—it was the birthplace of the United Parcel Service. So this parcel sat down on a cold composite bench under a leafless birch and is waiting for some service and now it’s 9:19.

  919 is a palindromic prime.

  No one else is in the park. (It’s cold for sitting.)

  It would appear that parcel service is not forthcoming.

  how to get a clue

  re: what to do?

  It occurs to her to wonder whether 743 and/or 919 are happy numbers. She spent a couple of days when she was eight or so identifying all the happy numbers up to 1000. Take a number, square each digit, add the squares to make a new number, repeat. If the original number eventually reduces to 1, it’s happy. If it reduces to the repeating sequence 4, 16, 37, 58, 89, 145, 42, 20, 4, etc, then it’s unhappy. The implication being, it’s unhappy to be stuck in an endless loop with a bunch of other dead-end losers, whereas it’s happy to be solitary forever.

  She used to be able to identify happy numbers on sight, since there’s a relatively small number of combinations of digits that work (obviously, the order of the digits is irrelevant). But her memory’s gotten a bit hazy. She does remember that of the first 1000 natural numbers, 143 are happy. So for two randomly chosen numbers from that set, the chance that both are happy is about 2 percent, and the chance that at least one is happy is about 26.6 percent. She opens her notebook and starts figuring: 743, 74, 65, 61, 37—unhappy. 919, 163, 46, 52, 29, 85, 89—unhappy. So the message from the math gods is, she’s stuck in an endless loop. Which maybe means she should get back on a bus and return to NYC, rinse and repeat.

  Not that she believes any of this. Messages from beyond. It’s a sign of how empty-headed she is that she’s even pretending.

  She gets up, shoulders her burden, exiles herself from the garden. West on Main, north through a park, west on Washington because Denzel, north on 1st, then soft right on Cherry because that’s her favorite pie, which her mother makes every July 4 for her own birthday and then gets teary. Munch on cherry pie for four blocks, at which point on her right is a modern glass building, which turns out to be Seattle City Hall. She has a vague feeling the famous library is nearby (she loves google-street-view-walking in random cities), and heads up 4th, and after three blocks there it is, in all its Koolhaas coolness, like a magnified head of a Rock-’Em-Sock-’Em Robot. (Andres has a YouTube channel netting him about $300 a month on which he plays and reviews toys from the 1960s.)

  Now it’s 10:21 a.m. And—1021 is another prime. And—1021, 6, 36, 45, 41, 17, 50, 25, 29—it’s also unhappy. Probability of three randomly generated numbers all being unhappy, 63 percent. If it happens twice more, the probability falls below 50 percent, at which point it becomes a message from the math gods.

  She continues up 4th, takes a left on Seneca because there’s a street in Ithaca with that name, then right on 3rd and left on Union because that’s what she foolishly wanted with Alex, then right on 2nd and left on Pine, because she foolishly pined for a union with Alex, then right on 1st and she’s sick of this game so she just keeps walking northwest on 1st, thinking of her father.

  Her mother told Mette, when Mette was six, that she thought it wasn’t healthy for her not to know her father. Her mother had not known her own father when she was growing up, which had led to all sorts of unhealthy fantasizing and false hero worship that she (her mother) thought sometimes still, after all these years, screwed up her relationships with men. (This latter part was told to Mette later, when she was maybe thirteen.) Also (when Mette was six), her grandmother Lauren was dying, and her mother realized (this was another part she said later) that if she (Mette’s mother) were to die, Mette would have no one in the world who knew her and whom she knew, to take care of her.

  So one day (when Mette was six) this guy showed up who was her father. This was at the old farmhouse. Now that she’s almost twenty-one, Mette has an idea from novels and movies that this is supposed to be a big emotional moment, fraught with tension or alienation, or maybe should involve blaming, or whatever. But at the time she just thought, “Right, a father. I figured there had to be one somewhere.” He didn’t annoy her with a lot of presumptuous questions and fake adult attention and invasiveness, and they figured out that they shared some interests, so their relationship settled pretty quickly into mainly email correspondence, which Mette far preferred, and still does, to both the excruciating tedium of face-to-face interactions and the annoying tendency toward real-time expectations of texting and messaging. And he’s been a good part of her life, and he’s a decent guy, and maybe she’s being conceited but she does have the impression that maybe she’s his only friend outside of his work, so there’s that to consider, anyway.

  She’s arrived at Broad Street. To her right, up the hill, the Space Needle looms behind an office building. It’s 10:52. 1052 is 2 times 526, which Mette has a vague memory might be a centered pentagonal number, and also 4 times 263, which is a safe prime, meaning if you subtract one and divide by two you get a Sophie Germain prime, namely 131. But most importantly: 1052, 30, 9, 81, 65—unhappy. Probability of four randomly chosen numbers being unhappy, 53.9 percent.

  She heads up Broad Street toward the Space Needle.

  The fact that she used to daydream a lot about Wishner, Steward of Chipmunks, maybe suggests she did miss having a father more present in her life, who knows? Navel gazing is not her thing. This i
s a pretty boring area of wide streets, modern office buildings, banks. It’s sunny, and the temperature has risen to probably about 50 degrees, so people are out walking, and she sees more ahead, where she can make out what she thinks is probably the old grounds of the 1962 World’s Fair, now called, apparently, the Seattle Center. There’s still a working monorail, the kind of thing her father would weirdly enthuse over.

  She crosses Broad Street and now, with the Space Needle only a hundred yards ahead, the sidewalk is getting crowded. In Astoria, she used to lie in bed—at this juncture in a personal recollection people always say “for hours,” but the activity she’s remembering probably maxed out at twenty minutes—where no one could see her but the birds, which fact she liked (her near-invisibility), and she’d think of the birds with gratitude as she watched them cross her field of vision, or hover in view, etc. Some of the first graphic programming she ever did was encoding different parameters to see how convincingly she could model the flocking behavior of starlings. She knew someone else had already done this, but she wanted to figure it out for herself and who knows, maybe come up with something better. The assumption for all these types of behaviors is that each individual follows a small number of simple rules, and that the complexly ordered behavior of the whole is an emergent phenomenon. (She ended up merely reproducing the original study in a more cumbersome form. Hey, she was only fourteen.) Plausible rules for people on a crowded sidewalk: collision avoidance, obviously. Probably a cultural tendency everywhere except England and Japan to shift to the right in doing so. Probably more individual variation than among birds, for example a spectrum of favorite speeds whenever allowed. Might be fun to fool around with the modeling, if she were still interested in anything.

  Around the time she was trying to program bird flight, she was in Astoria Park hoping to see a chipmunk, and she came across something someone had painted on the path. They’d used a stencil to create a flock of birds, so when you looked down at the pavement it was as if you were looking up into the sky. The flock crossed the path, spreading as it went. There was a break in the middle of the flock where the person had painted, also with stencils, “How do you decide where you belong?”

  Avoiding collisions by shifting to the right, striving to maintain her preferred pace, she arrives at the traffic turnaround at the base of the Needle. She looks up. Sixties Futurism against a blue sky. Her father would gesticulate, exclaim, lecture. Why is he so happy all the time? What’s wrong with her? It’s now 10:59. 1059, 107, 50—unhappy. Probability of five randomly chosen numbers all being unhappy, 46.2 percent. Math gods’ message received. Height of Space Needle Observation Deck, according to the sign: 520 feet. Divide by 16, take the square root: 5.7 seconds. She closes her eyes, counts out the seconds in her head. Opens her eyes again.

  Oops.

  She stands there for what seems a very long time—actually, twelve minutes—while people pass to either side, occasionally bump against her. Human Brownian motion. Voices in her ears. It makes her feel claustrophobic. When chipmunks are overcrowded, their bodies produce more androgen. The male offspring of females with excess androgen display bisexual tendencies, leading to less reproduction.

  She looks up at the Needle again. Is she merely play-acting? The thought fills her with self-disgust.

  She has never met three of her four grandparents. Her father’s father, Vernon Fuller, now deceased, was Tamias Newmanensis, Steward of Newman. Of her father’s mother (name forgotten, also deceased) she knows only that she wanted to be an astronomer but was thwarted, probably because she was a woman. Her mother’s father, Thomas Hansen, ironically the only one of the four still living, seems to have made, long ago, according to her mother, a genuinely serious stab—so to speak!—at suicide. She wonders what drove him to it. She wonders how he mentally prepared himself. She wonders why it is, exactly, that she has never met him.

  Sunday, February 21, 2016

  Saskia wakes from a nightmare about Benigno Aquino.

  She was twelve when he was assassinated in Manila. She didn’t know anything about politics in the Philippines, but Bill sometimes watched news on a portable TV sequestered in a dark corner of the living room, and over his shoulder she saw the footage. The interior of a plane, soldiers swarming around a man. The news report explained that Aquino was returning to Manila from political exile, and had been aware that he might be killed. The moment that stuck in her head ever afterward occurred in his last moments on camera. Trying to smile, he took hold of a seat belt strap near the cabin door and pulled on it as the soldiers bustled him out. It was probably unconscious. Of course he was frightened. He held on to the strap for maybe one second while they propelled him forward, then he dropped it and disappeared through the door. Moments later, out on the tarmac, one of the soldiers shot him in the back of the head.

  Her dream was of that one second, that strap between the seat and the scared man, lengthening out straight like a lifeline, then falling.

  She gets up, showers, dresses.

  How easy it is, how effective, to kill troublesome people. Joan of Arc was propelled to her death with the same speed. The law required that she be handed over to the secular arm for punishment, but instead she was hurried straight from the ecclesiastical tribunal down to the marketplace where the wood was heaped and waiting. How stunning it is that once you kill a person, that person never comes back.

  She locks her apartment, goes downstairs to the street. Eight o’clock, the tops of the buildings in sunlight, close to 50 degrees already. Back to the kind of climate change she likes. May as well enjoy what you can. She walks to a deli on Manhattan Avenue, grabs an empty seat along the counter, asks for a cup of coffee. She needs some people around her for a few minutes. Bad night. Mark called her Friday morning to relay Mette’s text message to him: Don’t worry. Taking time to think. Life choices. It was typical of him, and it annoyed her, that he seemed to believe her message meant they shouldn’t worry. It also annoyed her that Mette had texted him, while ignoring all but one of Saskia’s messages. Okay, maybe “hurt her” is a more accurate characterization. But there she goes again, right? Focusing on her own feelings.

  Silas is on shift this morning, wiping down tables. A good way into a role is to decide how the character inhabits her body, so Saskia often watches the way other people move, later imitating them in her apartment. Silas is great. He looks like he’s maybe twelve, slender and small for his age, all his accessories conspiring to make him look even smaller—the thick black frames on his windshield glasses, his inflated Nikes, his attenuated Afro like a peacock spray. His never-changing facial expression might be called a) dreamy, b) spacy, or c) catatonic. Think Shelley Duvall in Three Women. He bobs up and down as he walks in those clodhopper shoes, taking longer strides than you would expect, all in slow motion, as though he’s in a weaker gravitational field than everyone else. After two or three steps, the rhythm of his walk sets his right hand to undulating at the wrist, in toward the hip, then out. After a couple more steps, his fingers start to snap at the end of the outward swing, seemingly of their own accord.

  Of course she’s trying to distract herself. What else can she do, since Mette won’t answer her? Did she say it annoyed her? She raised Mette more or less entirely on her own, yet the girl is so much like her father it drives her crazy, the two of them seem to understand each other in some spatiotemporal hyper-dimension to which ordinary humans have no access. And to make things worse, it feels like karmic payback for Saskia’s ignoring of her own mother. At least it gives her some sympathetic insight into her mother’s burden, though of course too late to do either of them any good. And at least Mark, unlike her own father, seems to be a decent enough human being, if of no help nor clue.

  Mette has never told Saskia a thing about her life outside the apartment. Saskia doesn’t know whether she’s satisfied with her programming job, or her private projects, or whether she’s ever dated anyone, ever had sex, what h
er orientation is. She assumes Mark doesn’t know any of this either. If she wants us to know, she’ll tell us, she can hear him saying with that tone of If A = B, then B = A. Saskia called Mette’s workplace again yesterday, and no one who happened to be there—a lot of them seem to work remotely a lot of the time, and she’s never met any of them, and doesn’t know any of their names—could tell her a fucking thing. Okay, it’s only been five days. And Mette has plenty of money (Saskia’s fairly sure, though she doesn’t exactly know this, either), so she could be holed up in a decent hotel somewhere if she wanted, and it’s not like she’s not used to being alone. And since she and Mark are alike, maybe Mark has been right all along and if she were in a bad emotional place and were contemplating something drastic she’d have texted I’m in a bad emotional place and am contemplating something drastic.

  In any case, there’s nothing Saskia can do about it at the moment, so she may as well drink her coffee and think about something else, like that woman by the window with the long face and sadly too much makeup and penciled circumflex eyebrows and low-set mouth crowded with corn-kernel teeth who’s squeezing her steaming teabag—the steam billows and writhes evilly against the light from the street—over her cup with her spidery fingers dancing and this wonderfully vivid fastidious expression produced by drawn-back lips and tidy doubled chin. The five-inch golden hoop earrings and gold-threaded purple shawl are a bit much, who’s the costume designer?