Christ. Have some self-respect.
But going outside distracted me at least. Bought me time against myself.
Because I don’t want to look myself up. Not really.
Really?
The books are right there.
I want to know.
Why not? I don’t care anymore. Everything is fucked anyway. It doesn’t matter. Go. Look.
I open the first book again, to start the calculation.
But Minneapolis.
But Julia.
* * *
—
I’d never gone out with a girl like Julia before. Partly because girls like Julia weren’t interested in me. Partly because I was suspicious of girls like Julia who had their shit together a bit too much.
Julia didn’t entirely understand me either. Wasting a hundred-thousand-dollar education on something as impractical as thanaton theory—a rich kid’s indulgence, Julia obviously believed, though she didn’t say as much to me out loud. Julia was the first in her family to attend college. She wasn’t going to fuck around. I met her parents, who lived close to campus, and I liked them. Her dad was an electrical contractor who drank shitty beer and walked around the house with no shirt on and blew glass in the garage, really beautiful pieces. Her mom was a vet tech who got off on smutty romance novels and clipping coupons, something I realized I had never seen anyone actually do before. When I first visited Julia’s small childhood home, I remember thinking its cramped size was exotic. Living in such close quarters with your whole family, practically on top of each other, seemed like a kind of adventure!
I had the sense not to say that out loud, though.
On maybe our fourth or fifth date, Julia and I went to a house party that had an ironic prom theme, the idea being everyone would go to Goodwill and buy dorky suits and hideous prom dresses, and we’d dance all night to bad music from our high school lives that we secretly still liked. Julia and I had our first kiss to “Into the Groove.” I was in a blue velvet tuxedo with ruffles and Julia wore a ludicrous satiny pink bridesmaid’s dress. But Julia made the cheap dress look unironic. She shone in it.
Walking to the party, on an icy hill, one of her high heels broke.
She went skidding down hard into the muddy, half-melted snow.
I was horrified. I dashed down the hill to her, helped her up. I couldn’t understand why she got so quiet after. Julia told me later that one of the reasons she ended up liking me was that I hadn’t laughed at her when she fell that night. I couldn’t understand—who laughs when a girl falls on her ass? A lot of people would laugh, said Julia, and after a while she admitted, “Maybe I would’ve laughed.” I said I didn’t think she would. Julia said, “That’s why I love you”—and I thought, holy shit, had Julia just told me she loved me? Or did that not really count yet? Did I have to wait for the magic words to be their own sentence: I love you, just the bare declaration, no qualifiers? Julia eventually did say I love you to me properly, later, of course, and I said it to her. Still, maybe this was her way of sneaking it in early.
Do you fall in love with someone because you understand them? Not at nineteen. It’s their otherness that draws you in. At nineteen you’re collecting people. Trying on different ways of being. When I was young, I always scanned girlfriends’ bookshelves, full of dead giveaways. Of course she would have that book…but they would surprise me, too. Challenge me, expand me.
(During my affairs in my thirties? Didn’t care what they read.)
Sports, for instance. Julia played high school tennis and was a scratch golfer; she actually attended our college’s dull football games. My relationship to sports was limited to a manifesto I’d written for my high school newspaper arguing for the abolition of school-sponsored athletics (which, you need not remind me, is extremely charismatic and not at all obnoxious).
And yet Julia made even sports enjoyable for me. One time we went golfing together, even though golf was the kind of stupid shit my dad did. Somehow Julia made it a blast. Granted, we were both wasted, we’d smuggled whiskey onto the course, Julia having long ago undermined my personal no-alcohol policy. But on the sixth hole I accidentally sliced the ball hard into a flock of geese. One of the birds plummeted out of the sky.
The goose hit the grass and lay there, motionless. A bunch of other geese gathered around it, honking. Staring at me like I was a villain.
Julia thought this was hilarious! I felt terrible. But here’s the thing that might be hard for me to convey to you: Julia’s laughing at an animal getting hurt and maybe killed was…attractive? From anyone else, the laughter would’ve repulsed me. But a goose getting whacked out of the sky by a golf ball is kind of funny, maybe. And even if it’s not, I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who’s more sensitive than his girlfriend about it. “It’s just a goose,” said Julia, moving on to the next hole. Her heartlessness was refreshing—or was she just pretending to be heartless? Was she trying to be kind of badass? Or maybe she just didn’t want me to feel bad for killing a bird? The explanations were all irreconcilable, but I liked Julia even if she was playing a role, and whatever, by the end of the ninth hole we had forgotten about the goose anyway and we were just laughing, who knows what for, I just remember the fuzzy hilarity of the afternoon.
I did sports stuff for Julia’s sake. She did arty stuff for me, though she persisted in her terrible taste. For movies, she didn’t like “anything foreign or black-and-white,” and definitely not the plotless weirdfests my friends and I preferred. She’d watch crappy blockbusters, and I’d have to go with her. Movies for children. Dumb computer effects. And yet she would turn around and mock any good movie that was halfway challenging as “oh so deep.” For Julia, taking art seriously was an embarrassing stage that real adults moved past as soon as possible.
That should’ve irritated me. But from Julia it was a liberation. By that point my indie rock friends and I had devolved into a passive-aggressive cultural bullying of each other; our once-exciting underground scene had become sexless, inert. With Julia, I might’ve been dancing and fucking to shitty music, but I was dancing and fucking.
Julia had the biggest room in the group house she lived in, a long room that stretched the width of the place. Her bed was in the middle of the room, a natural center stage, surrounded by books and clothes and candles and CDs strewn on the floor. Unsentimental with me in the beginning. The first time we had sex, she said, “But if we have sex, some chemical will be released in my brain that will trick me into feeling like I love you.” Sounded heartless to me. We did it anyway, but what she’d said wounded my little vanity. I remember that first time, how she turned her head to the side, eyes closed, lip curled as if suspicious, as if still withholding judgment, and as her head bobbed against the pillow she giggled a little, as if our sex didn’t involve me but was her own private joke that only she understood, that she wasn’t sharing with me…until she then looked at me, eyes wide, baffled but happy, like we had figured out something incredible together.
That’s the way I remember Julia.
Used to think of her all the time.
Now, not as much. But sometimes.
Gross old man.
* * *
—
Back to Sapere Aude’s first conference.
The conference was more than a conference. Looking back on that week in Minneapolis, the intense debates, the technical breakthroughs, the engineers mixing with the flakes—and by flakes I mean genuine weirdo occultists, kooks in hooded cloaks, crackpots with capes and tangled beards, witches with accents—who even invited them?—and then of course the sudden tragedy, it all felt larger than life. All the recklessness and brilliance and catastrophe that Sapere Aude ended up being famous for was already there.
Back then we were just getting off the ground. The world didn’t know yet what was going to hit it. But we knew. And even though now, years later, we’ve all gone our separa
te ways—some to success, others…well, others like me—for that week in Minneaopolis we were all pure potential.
Now I know that potential is a disease. It betrays you. These days, whenever I feel that limitless exhilaration, that wild fresh hope welling up—I kill it.
Keep your eye on the ball. Do the work.
In Minneapolis, Julia and I were young and in love and everyone was on fire, including the rest of the old gang, Hutchinson and Ziegler and Hwang and Wiesnewski and Kulkarni, all of them, even Hansen and Blattner, who were still idealistic, and we’d been down in the hotel bar all night, raving it up, before moving the party to Hutchinson’s room, all more than a little tipsy when the idea came up—I don’t even know who said it first—hey—let’s look ourselves up.
Even back then it wasn’t allowed. The specific taboo hadn’t developed yet; it was merely against company policy. But what Blattner and Hansen didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, right? And even though ordinarily it’d take hours or even days to complete the calculation, we’d all drilled the algorithm so many times that week on each other, and we knew each other so well, which made anything feel possible, and we were punch-drunk enough to think that if we all did the calculation together, it would be an hour’s work max, and come on, when you’re half in the bag in a strange city in a strange hotel, you do things you ordinarily wouldn’t, so why not, okay, let’s do it! Julia was the only one who seemed iffy but once we had the idea, the rest of us wanted to do it quickly before anyone chickened out. Nobody volunteered to be the subject, so like a bunch of high school dorks, we put an empty beer bottle in the middle of the table and spun it—and it landed on Hopkins, the kid! The only one in sales who was even younger than Julia and me.
Everyone laughed! Even Hopkins laughed, though already he looked a little pale. I could tell he didn’t want to do this but he was a good sport. We had all become close that week. In those early days Sapere Aude was more than a company. It was shaggier and weirder, more intimate, especially at this conference, which I had thought was going to be a kind of standard sales or training conference. Instead it was a combination brainstorming session, emotional debate, supernatural invocation, and collective freakout. I knew there were things going on behind closed doors in that hotel that were suspicious yet might’ve been indispensable in getting Sapere Aude off the ground, and indeed, once we shaved off the rough edges and got the math right, Blattner and Hansen flushed the self-proclaimed occultists out of the company, quietly paying the hotel thousands of dollars to look the other way regarding whatever unnatural activities had occurred in their rooms—I remember drunkenly opening the door to the wrong room, which was pitch-dark except for a metallic glow coming from the bathroom, there was the sound of an animal’s cry or a squeaky laugh, and I caught a glimpse of a ragged figure in the bathroom mirror staring at me before a woman with no eyebrows and an empty stare shut the door in my face. I was told some of those rooms were permanently locked after that, never to be used again, but really, the most disturbing thing that happened that week happened in our room.
We were all so tipsy it was a miracle that any of us were able to perform the calculations on Hopkins, we were slurring the assessment I’m sure, scrawling out the equations on pads of paper emblazoned with the hotel’s logo, pawing through our brand-new Books of the Dead, half out of our minds, but then again we all knew the algorithm cold at that point, knew it backward and forward. Running the assessment calculations was second nature. Not everyone there was from Sapere Aude; Hutchinson had picked up the pretty-boy bartender and lured him up to our room, though we knew Hutchinson had a wife and kids, but his wedding ring came off that week, and he picked up that twentysomething boy so smoothly and matter-of-factly that we all figured this was Hutchinson’s normal MO, maybe even a tacit understanding of his marriage; it wasn’t our business anyway, nobody cared about Hutchinson’s wife. Hutchinson seemed so old to me back then, so sophisticated. He probably wasn’t more than thirty-five. A kid to me now. Still married, I hear.
We lit candles around the darkened room—standard operating procedure in the early days, the black candles, the carefully toneless repetitions, etc., we cut all that stuff out when engineering zeroed in on a purely mathematical method, and even I forget how unsettling it could feel when we were first starting out; it gets omitted from the histories so people think our algorithm runs on pure logic, but no, something hungry and invisible around us demanded to be acknowledged and sated—we closed the curtains and the room felt small and special, becoming our whole world, all of us in giddy sync, rapidly chanting the nonsense sentences to Hopkins and Hopkins firing back nonsense just as quickly, his dimpled face laughing, having fun now, even Julia was into it, though I wonder what the pretty-boy bartender thought of us—he’d probably come up to Hutchinson’s room expecting a quick blow job but now he was stuck with these weirdos engaged in some combination of math problem and pagan ritual, and yet he lingered, maybe feeling the thanatons buzzing in the air around us, all of the particles together slowly turning and pointing at Hopkins—back then I could still feel it; as you get older, you lose that feeling of thanatons, their queer prickling as they flit and flicker through the air, just like how, as you grow older, you lose the ability to hear very high-pitched tones, like how when I was a kid the green monochrome monitor for my Apple II clone in the basement continuously emitted a high whine—anyway, thanatons are like that, they tingle when they’re charged up, and the atmosphere was flooded and buzzing with millions of tiny quivering invisible arrows, sharpening, blowing through us, millions every second…
We had our answer.
Pencils down. We all arrived at it more or less at the same time. The only one who didn’t know was Hopkins. The bartender too, I guess. But nobody wanted to say it.
“What?” said Hopkins, his smile fading.
“Six minutes,” said Ziegler.
* * *
—
Of course Ziegler was the one to say it. Because it had to be a joke, right?
But it was no joke. The number was correct. We’d all come up with the same result. No chance of all of us all making the same mistake in the same way. Hopkins was going to die in six minutes, no, five now, and some jackass (maybe the bartender) had set the timer on the kitchenette’s microwave oven, and it was already steadily counting down. Not funny, guys, come on, Hopkins said, and Ziegler and Hutchinson and the others said, No, this is the result. Someone open the drapes, blow out those stupid candles, said Kulkarni. Four minutes. All the lights flicked on, mercilessly bright. Hopkins said, You’re reading it wrong, and Julia said, No, we’re reading it right, and I remember the way Julia’s face screwed up, I think she was the first one who fully understood what was about to happen, she wouldn’t even look at me, at Hopkins either, and Hopkins said, It’s wrong, you calculated wrong, you’re reading it wrong. Three minutes. Kulkarni said, Do you have any medical problems? No! shouted Hopkins, and then, this is ridiculous, but his eyes were on the clock too, all of our eyes were on it, I reached out to Hopkins and said, Come on, relax, but he wrenched his arm away and said, No way, maybe you’ll kill me, and I said, Come on, Hopkins, you know me, and he shouted, I don’t know you, I don’t know any of you, oh my God I’ve got to get out of here, I need to call my, I need to call Mom, holy shit I’m going to die. Two minutes and everyone was freaking out and someone knocked over the wine bottle and it glugged out in a red stream on the carpet, Mom, somebody, Julia tried to touch him but Hopkins twisted away, snarling, then suddenly he was doubled over, gasping, and the room went silent for a second and then we were all screaming, Someone call a doctor! Kulkarni was on the phone and Julia tried to hold Hopkins but he wouldn’t let her, he was heaving, he couldn’t breathe, something was wrong, something was very wrong, but we knew it would happen, thirty seconds now, twenty, Hopkins fell to the ground, calling for someone, anyone, to help him, and the microwave went off, beep beep beep.
* * *
—
Ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Hopkins’s brain exploded in his skull. The aneurysm had been lurking there for who knows how long, the coroner said, just waiting to blow. So it’s not like we had killed him.
But it felt like we had. Blattner and Hansen should’ve fired all of us, if only because the optics were terrible. Stettinger quietly disassociated himself from Sapere Aude, of course—he’d never been directly involved in our day-to-day workings, though he did sit on the board to lend us legitimacy. Blattner and Hansen had paid through the nose for that, had wined and dined “the reluctant revolutionary” for months before they wore him down and got him to sign on in the most limited way.
Well, that was over now.
And yet—insensitive as it is to say—from a business point of view Hopkins’s death was the best thing that could’ve happened to us. Kicked Sapere Aude into the public consciousness. All of us swore never to reveal how we’d looked up Hopkins’s death six minutes before he died, how we’d predicted his death to the minute. But of course word got out. Maybe it was the bartender. Or maybe one of us—Hutchinson?—correctly guessed that such a story would make Sapere Aude notorious before we’d closed a single sale.
The Hopkins incident became a kind of instant urban legend. People knew what we claimed to be selling, they knew that we’d had a conference at that hotel. And the coroner’s report was public record. Reporters couldn’t resist connecting the dots. The story fit the larger narrative about us, especially in those early days when the public looked at us as a bunch of sinister oddballs and geeks. At any rate, the myth took off.
People began to take us seriously.
Blattner and Hansen probably were surprised we decided to stay on, considering how freaked out we all were. But then orders began rolling in, and then Blattner and Hansen couldn’t fire us anyway because now there was too much business, even before we officially went live, and Sapere Aude had to make hay while the sun shined. Hopkins wasn’t forgotten, obviously; we talked about him all the time. A kind of mascot, a sacrificial lamb. Nothing brings a group together like a shared death or shared guilt, and we had plenty of both. Felt crass, but the opportunities were huge and we rationalized to ourselves, Hopkins would’ve died anyway, whether or not we predicted it. I don’t think anyone was so boorish as to say, “We must keep going for Hopkins’s sake” or “Hopkins would’ve wanted us to continue,” but the result was the same: we made a shit ton of cash.
Dare to Know Page 6
