by BRIAN HALL
“Trash?” The stewardess is passing with her bag. Mark throws it all in.
“I can’t remember when I finally told you that my sister was killed in Yugoslavia,” he says.
“Me neither.”
“I might have said at some point that I went to Yugoslavia to see the place where she died. Do you want more coffee? I see a pot coming.”
“Yes.” To the steward she says, “Cream, no sugar.”
“I’ll have one, too,” Mark says. “Also with the nondairy creamer.”
“No, you didn’t tell me,” Saskia says.
“I’d never paid much attention to politics. Most of it seems impervious to help, so why waste time on it? But my sister did try to help, and even though it killed her, or maybe because it killed her, I respected her desire to do that more than my own desire to be left alone. When I went there I talked to people she worked with, including some government officials. The hatred between the ethnic groups reminded me of my parents’ fights, only with guns. No one was listening to anyone else, and as a consequence good people like my sister died. I met the man who’d been my sister’s interpreter, and he said that the ethnic divisions in Yugoslavia had been deliberately exacerbated by the various state medias, and that if we supposedly superior Americans had a propaganda outlet working to foment discord, then in five years we, too, would have a civil war. Well, look where we are today. My desire is still to ignore it, but for my sister’s sake, or in her memory, or whatever, I force myself to watch Fox News. It’s hard to sit through, but I think of it as doing science. These are observations I need to make if I’m going to understand why the United States might self-destruct. Just yesterday Trump won the South Carolina primary.”
“Yes, I know.”
“A scientific paper last year presented results of a study of the human Y chromosome. It offered strong evidence of a bottleneck in male diversity occurring about 7000 years ago. The most convincing theory to account for this is that, with the spread of agriculture, which enabled larger population concentrations and an increase in social stratification, more-powerful patrilineal groups killed off all the males of less-powerful groups and took their females for mating purposes. Ninety-five percent of all human males during this period appear to have been wiped out. Human in-group/out-group murderousness goes far deeper than culture or economics, it’s a biological consequence of the fact that genes good at crowding out competing genes survive to pass on to their descendants their proficiency at crowding out competing genes. It’s such a robust argument that altruism among humans is much harder to explain.”
“That’s interesting. I wonder, though—”
“Of course we humans have enormous brains. We are able to become aware of these genetic tendencies and can choose not to follow them. But most humans don’t seem to enjoy using their brains, or value its use in others.”
“Mark?”
“On the other hand, you could argue that human intelligence is destroying the world more efficiently than human stupidity. Advances in agriculture and medicine lead to billions of people, resource depletion, and climate change. It’s like forest management. The US Forest Service suppressed small fires for decades until the forests were unnaturally full of brush and deadwood, after which the fires became devastating and unstoppable. For 40,000 years, human intelligence has repeatedly figured its way out of the small fires, so now here comes the big one.”
“Mark?”
“So is it people like Trump who are bringing on the end of the world as we know it, or is it people like me?”
“Mark?”
“Hm?”
“Why are you talking about all this?”
He can feel himself blush. “I’m rattling on. I’m sorry. I must be boring you.”
“I didn’t say you were boring me. What I asked was, ‘Why are you talking about this?’”
He looks at her. He knows how maladroit he is at conversation. She has finished her second coffee and seems more awake now.
“I really am asking about your motivation,” she says. “Use that brain nobody values. Why?”
In fact, it’s a good question. He remembers there were times in the past when she helped him to see something, often right under his nose. He looks around the cabin. He’s still embarrassed, despite her assurances. He looks some more. He tries merely to see. A bunch of fun-loving primates traveling to see other primates in their in-group. So they can go together to watch sublimated in-group/out-group warfare on a field, or spend time enjoying virtual worlds with endings manipulated in order to give them an illusory but pleasing sense of justice and order. He looks out the window at the beautiful bright world, the only world for life. He looks out at apocalyptic climate change. The Mediocrity Principle dictates that it’s highly unlikely, given the span of time humans have existed on the planet, that he would just happen to live during the years when humans trigger a mass extinction event. Yet it seems increasingly probable.
His motivation? An actor’s term. He remembers Saskia told him once about an acting workshop that involved repeating a phrase over and over until you lulled yourself out of rational thought and opened yourself up to instinctive feeling. “The teacher,” she reported, “was always saying to the students, ‘Get out of your head,’ and I thought of you. You would be terrible at it.”
Maybe he says it because he’s sleep-deprived. He says it to his knees, which he only now notices are uncomfortable, jammed against the back of the seat in front of him. “I guess . . . I guess I’ve wondered a little bit, all these years, why you ended our relationship.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not blaming you. I’ve just wondered from time to time what the reasons were.”
More silence. He doesn’t look at her.
He plows on. “I wonder sometimes whether it was a mistake that we didn’t try harder to understand each other. Something my parents never did.” Now he gives her a longer time to respond. But she still says nothing. “I realize it’s ridiculous that I feel this way, since we were hardly together in the first place. But you asked.”
Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, I need to go to the bathroom again.”
“Right.” He lets her up. He waits for her in the aisle, but then the cart comes back through, this time collecting Styrofoam cups, so he returns to his seat. He shouldn’t have spoken. Another social occasion mishandled.
She returns. They perform the awkward shuffle so that she can sit. “I know you don’t watch a lot of movies,” she says, “but by any chance have you seen Serendipity?”
“No.”
“It’s your standard rom-com. The male lead, played by John Cusack, has the usual rom-com bro, who he can go drink beer with and trade funny or rueful lines about women and life. But the unusual thing about Serendipity is that the bro, played by Jeremy Piven, majored in Stoic philosophy in college, so he’s always quoting Epictetus to Cusack. It’s actually a brilliant idea, because a rom-com, until the end, is mainly about disappointment and longing and obstacles so severe they seem like malign Fate. You know, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth,’ and so on. What I’m saying is,” and here she puts her hand on Mark’s, “you need a friend like that. Not just anyone to talk to, but someone versed in the Stoics. It’s actually occurred to me before that you might like Epictetus. He’s not doing that head-banging epistemological stuff, he’s concerned with ethics and happiness, very down-to-earth and usable.”
“I could just read Epictetus,” Mark says. “I don’t need a friend to quote him to me.”
“No, you need a friend.”
Mark doesn’t say anything.
“And you also need Epictetus. There’s even a scene in Serendipity that takes place on a plane, I can’t remember where it is in the plot, but Cusack is quixotically flying somewhere to search for his fated mate, and he’s having doubts, so the quote Piven gives him is, �
�If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.’”
Mark finally looks at her. She took her hand away a while ago. “How do you remember that?”
“Like I said, I’m an actor. I’ve also been rereading Epictetus lately. You can read the whole Handbook in an hour, it’s like twenty-five pages.”
“Okay.” Mark feels deflated. What did he expect? He also feels a welter of things he can’t process right now. He also can’t think of anything to say. Which is probably best. This is why he hates talking to people. (He’s dimly aware that it’s not a good sign that he hates talking to people.) He remembers something his mother used to say, when his father tried to explain himself: “You’ve already done enough damage.” He retrieves his book from the seat pocket in front of him. “I think I’ll read this for a while,” he says.
Saskia gets out her own book. It’s almost as unwieldy as his. “Lucky Per,” she says, showing it to him. “Great Danish novel, terrible translation. We’ll be a couple of weirdos, reading in the last row.”
Mark doesn’t answer. He tries to concentrate, can’t, pretends. Half an hour later, the plane begins its descent toward Copenhagen. The baby, which he still can’t see, starts to cry.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
She didn’t know ferries came this small. There would be just enough room for one car, if she and the other passenger jumped overboard. Thirty-five seconds after the scheduled time of 3:00 p.m. it pulls away from the quaint half-timbered town and throbs down the channel toward open water. The motor hums an 80-herz E. Temperature in the upper 30s, a cloudy sky with a crawling blob of blue far to the south. She’ll reach the island by four. The Danish flag on the halyard snaps and flutters in totally convincing fashion.
She remembers a few years ago walking around the Greenpoint neighborhood to dezombify after a night-long bout at the screen and seeing on top of one of the houses an old Yagi television antenna getting buffeted by the wind. She’s always liked Yagis, their rectilinear insect-feeler shapes. She filmed it as it described chaotic motion, twitching and flexing, occasionally erupting into wild gyrations. It looked alive, signaling with its arms for help, every now and then totally freaking out. Mette downloaded the film to her computer and spent a day creating a model, building the object, experimenting with different tensile strengths, resistance, restrictions of freedom of motion at the joints, wind forces and so on, until she had designed an algorithm that imitated it pretty well. She made a video that began with the original film of the antenna, then morphed into her animation, which she colored in hysterical reds and oranges, and added another algorithm that occasionally shot off nested waves of yellow lines that looked like psychic stress, or maybe sweat propagating in particle-wave duality. She posted it on her channel to join the few dozen other animations she’d done over the years and forgot about it. Six months later the film was bought by a South Korean production company for the opening clip of a K-drama about five young men sharing a house in Seoul, just barely managing to keep their shit together while they fucked up in quirky ways, disappointing and/or disgracing their parents. (She watched the first episode.) The company paid her a flat fee, but the drama was a hit, and suddenly thousands of people were viewing her original clip and saluting each other with messages like “Who else came here because of Moonlight and Sunshine Boys?” Seventeen percent were going on to look at some of her other clips, and within three months the ad revenue of her channel septupled.
As a programmer, she’s never had trouble making money. She likes to chipmunk it away. Wishner mentions a guy named Lang Elliott who studied chipmunks in the Adirondacks. Elliott excavated a few burrows in the spring and found that most of the chipmunks still had plenty of winter food stored. One chipmunk had enough nuts for at least two more winters. And why not? You never know when the next asteroid will strike and block out sunlight for a few years, or when humans will find an opportunity to use all those missiles chipmunked underground. Or when you might need to buy at short notice an insanely expensive plane ticket involving multiple airlines from Seattle to Dublin to London to Denmark. Since she was digging into her stores anyway, she splurged on a suite at a fancy hotel last night in Copenhagen. (Home of the Copenhagen Interpretation! One of her first YouTube postings, when she was thirteen, was an animated whiteboard explication of the double-slit experiment.) This morning she treated herself to a sumptuous breakfast, then caught the train to the cutesy town, with the ferry leaving forty minutes (plus thirty-five seconds) later.
When she was fifteen, sixteen, she was often angry at her mother for being irresponsible about money, chasing her stupid actor’s dream while the two of them barely got by. Why didn’t she learn some programming, do it part time? Mette was willing to teach her. But she gradually became more tolerant. It must suck to want to do something you’re not very good at, or that the world has little need for, or both. When her mother started doing voice work for video games Mette thought, Dreamer, shake hands with reality. She started contributing a quarter of basic expenses such as rent and food when she was seventeen, upped it to a third last year. Now that she thinks about it, it’s kind of inexcusable that she hasn’t been contributing half. It’s also maybe a little embarrassing that she hasn’t considered what the loss of her income might mean to her mother.
Still, in the final analysis, not her problem.
The ferry is rounding a low headland at the end of the channel and she can see from the GPS on her phone that the island should be coming into view. That beige-gray line on the horizon must be it. According to the Danish Ministry of Tourism site, the island’s highest point is less than two meters above sea level. Meaning, So long soon. They’ve already built dikes, which have been breached twice in the past decade. (Dreamers, shake hands . . . ) All that work, plus this toy ferry running twice a day, for only twelve inhabitants, including the nutjob in the windmill.
Her mother always said she never knew where her father was when she was a kid. Mette finds it hard to imagine that information Dark Age. When she decided in Seattle to locate him, she knew only his first name and that he lived in a windmill on a Danish island. It took her seventeen minutes: database of old mills in Denmark narrowed to ones on islands, modern photos of same (Google Maps, plus mill-loving Instagrammers, who, it turns out, are thick as thieves), assessment rolls for owners of renovated ones. It helped a little that Thomas seems to be an uncommon name for Danes of his generation.
She watches the island creep closer.
Her mother has never liked to admit it, but she, too, often gets depressed. Mette wonders if the struggle to make money or to succeed in her career helped keep her going. Or maybe the struggle of being a mother to Mette. From Mette’s perspective, it’s been hard to see the point. Mette has always had the impression that her mother, unlike herself, doesn’t enjoy being alone. For evidence, there’s that parade of partners. Mette was always rooting for her. Maybe her mother only wants short-term fixes. But Mette doubts it. There were one or two relationships that, when they ended, really broke her mom up.
The ferry sounds its horn, a low B with a rumbly G-sharp underneath that starts and ends a second after the first tone. Either two apertures, or the metal casing of the horn vibrates at a separate pitch. They’ve entered an area of ice on either side of the dredged channel. The water under the ice appears to be only a foot or two deep.
A hundred years ago there was an amateur mathematician named Paul Wolfskehl who got rejected by the woman he loved and decided to commit suicide. Since he was a mathematician, his plan had to be both precise and conceptually satisfying, so he decided to shoot himself in the old noggin at the stroke of midnight. That meant he had a few hours to kill. He read a paper by a mathematician named Kummer, who was trying to disprove a mathematician named Cauchy, who had been trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. Wolfskehl thought he saw a way he could disprove Kummer’s disproof of Cauchy, so he worked on his idea all night and missed his
appointment. He was wrong about Kummer, but now he was in love with Fermat’s Last Theorem—which, it occurs to Mette, you might say had never yet abandoned a suitor. So instead of killing himself, he founded the Wolfskehl Prize.
Fifty years ago, another mathematician, named Yutaka Taniyama, did manage to off himself. He had tried and failed for years to prove a conjecture involving L-functions of elliptic curves. He left a suicide note that has haunted Mette over the past few days, so much so that she knows parts of it by heart. Until yesterday I had no definite intention of killing myself . . . As to the cause of my suicide, I don’t quite understand it myself . . . Merely may I say, I am in the frame of mind that I lost confidence in my future.
Today, an unimportant computer programmer and hack mathematician, rejected in love and without confidence in her future, either does a Wolfskehl or a Taniyama. Is she still near enough to Copenhagen that, so long as no one looks, she can do both? Neither Fermat’s Last Theorem nor the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture can save her, because the former was proved in 1995 and the latter in 1999.
Well, there’s always the 3n + 1 problem. Ha ha.
They’ve arrived at the island. The ferry honks again, turns around, backs into the slip. She and the other passenger, a woman, walk off. There’s an empty expanse of gravel and two prefab buildings with red metal roofs, both locked and empty. A one-lane road heads off between brown fields patched with snow. She lets the other woman pull ahead, so there’ll be no danger she’ll be spoken to. All the blue in the sky has disappeared, the stiff wind is cold. After five minutes she comes to the one cluster of houses on the island. (None of this is a surprise, she previously google-viewed everything.) There are eleven, seven of them large, looking like manor houses with flanking outbuildings. Since there are only twelve permanent inhabitants, some of these must be summer residences, unless the island is filled with loners who like to rattle around in a dozen rooms like marbles in a maze. Anyway, rich people.
