We hadn’t killed Hopkins. But we knew thanaton theory. We weren’t purely innocent, either. Because the time of Hopkins’s death didn’t technically exist until we measured it. By running the algorithm, by forcing the waveform to collapse, we pinned Hopkins’s death down to one particular time among many. In a way you could say we had killed him, by perhaps demanding the time of his death before the universe was ready to tell it. To do the math makes the math come true. This was where thanaton theory began to get murky, unnerving; it was where Julia stopped the conversation. She didn’t want to hear about it. Too theoretical.
We put it out of our minds and got rich.
* * *
—
I didn’t totally put it out of my mind.
I talked it over with Kulkarni, the weirdness of that conference. This wasn’t long before Kulkarni himself got weird, too, before he quit. Just like me, Kulkarni had studied the history and philosophy of science as an undergraduate, but at a better school. He was a legitimate Ivy Leaguer, a product of the East Coast, charismatic and at ease in his privilege. I enjoyed being around his fascinating preppiness, just as Kulkarni seemed to appreciate my exotic (to him) midwesternness. In any case, Kulkarni was the only person at Sapere Aude with whom I could have Renard-like discussions.
Over drinks one night, Kulkarni mentioned how our early work with thanatons reminded him of Isaac Newton.
As we talked, I began to get what he meant.
If you look at the way science actually advances, as opposed to the just-so stories you read in textbooks, you know it’s not at all an orderly succession of heroic rationalists overcoming ignorance. Science is more often advanced by quacks, cranks, and religious maniacs. Take Newton, for example—most of his intellectual effort wasn’t focused on physics. He was all about the occult. Set aside Newton’s Principia, his laws of motion, his account of gravitation, his invention of the calculus. For Newton, that was all a sidebar to his real obsessions: pages and pages raving on about biblical apocalypse, alchemy, occult geometry, magic, the whole shitshow of crazy.
Not only Newton. Not only physics. Linguistics was jump-started by medieval cranks trying to rediscover the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. Chemistry developed straight out of alchemical rituals. Geometry is just one aspect of the Pythagoreans’ mystery cult. Kepler made his living casting horoscopes and his mother was nearly burned for witchcraft. The rocket scientist who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was a full-blown satanist who did “sex magick” and hung out with Aleister Crowley, for fuck’s sake. Even quantum physics is constantly misinterpreted by flakes into neo–Tao of Physics garbage mysticism. Kulkarni confessed he had it in his own family—a mathematician great-uncle who was also a stone-cold nutjob who spent at least half of his time trying to derive some sacred glyph whose sheer geometry was supposed to obliterate any evil that could be tricked into gazing upon it. Bonkers. And yet Kulkarni’s great-uncle was a tenured professor, was published, and did legitimate work.
Same with us. When you considered the freaks Sapere Aude had on the payroll at first, and the incidents like Hopkins’s death that inaugurated us—maybe the occult is always necessary to midwife science into a paradigm shift. Maybe whenever the universe chooses someone through whom to reveal its secrets, the gates of the chthonic crack open too, and a lot of supernatural noise comes with it. And once that paradigm shift is accomplished, the occult can go away again.
Maybe. Kulkarni was really in his cups at this point.
After Hopkins’s death we didn’t have to work hard to root out the fringy witches and weirdos from Sapere Aude. The crackpots didn’t seem too keen on sticking around, either. After that conference in Minneapolis, maybe the warlocks had gotten what they needed from us.
Or maybe we had freaked out even the freaks. Maybe we’d touched some deep power that even they hadn’t seriously believed existed.
In any case, six months after that conference, the freaks were gone, their influence expunged. The death of Hopkins had cleansed us.
We were pure math now.
* * *
—
It’s been over an hour and the tow truck still hasn’t come.
Too cold in my wrecked car. The heat has all leaked out, bit by bit, and the car’s interior is officially freezing. Dirty slush slopping down from the sky now, splattering the windows. Of all the times to be out on the road. Not even on the road. In a ditch.
Alone with the books.
Stop it.
The taboo. Hopkins.
But even if I could manage to pull it off…would it be a valid self-assessment? A difficult trick, after all, a kind of partitioning of the mind: one half of you asking the nonsense prompts and calculating, the other half somehow responding with unselfconscious nonsense. Both halves independent, two noninterfering channels streaming past each other. Like playing tennis against yourself. Difficult.
Then again, I’m no amateur.
Been doing this nearly thirty years.
Jesus.
Still have some battery left. I turn on the car’s interior lights. For the first time in a long time I feel young. Nervy. My stomach pitches.
Do it.
I take out a thick pad of paper. A pencil.
I open the first book.
Okay. When will I die?
* * *
—
Renard’s and my late-night explorations moved beyond the campus.
Sometimes we ventured into the small town that surrounded the college. After lights out we would take off on “borrowed” bikes, and pedal to some greasy spoon diner and eat egg-and-bacon skillets and drink coffee and watch the midnight people come and go. Or we would sneak into an overgrown playground in the backyard of a shuttered preschool and carve graffiti on the jungle gym and swing sets. Or hang out in some alley, watching drunks stumble out of a bar. Sometimes we got chased. But we never got caught.
We were only in eighth grade. I felt badass.
Late one night we visited the river that cut through downtown. There was a park near it, closed after dusk, unlit and always empty. Renard and I biked to the park and he went down to the river. I followed him.
“Let’s swim,” Renard said.
He nonchalantly took off his clothes. Renard sometimes hung out naked in our dorm room in an oddly casual way. At first I had wondered if Renard’s occasional nakedness was some implicit gay invitation. But in fact Renard had a null sexual vibe. His nakedness was impersonal, clinical.
I took off my clothes too and we waded into the river. It was swifter than it looked. For a few minutes we just bobbed along in our shadowy part of the water, steadying ourselves against the current, watching the lights of the city around us, our heels digging into tumbled cinder blocks in the riverbed to keep from being swept away. Cold dark water slipped all over me. I stared up at the black sky full of cold little pinpoints. The water moved so fast around me I felt like any second I could be swept away down the river and sucked underwater.
Renard said, “One hundred years from now, you and I will be dead. Everyone we know will be dead. Nobody will remember any of us. A hundred years from now this place will be totally different. There will be a different cast of characters. They won’t care about us. A hundred years after that, those people will be dead, too, and there will be a new generation that doesn’t care about them either. People are born, they have their thoughts and emotions and dreams, life feels so real to them, they grow up, they die, and none of it ever mattered. It’s like they weren’t even real.
“What will this river be a hundred years from now? A million years? Humans will be gone, probably. Some new intelligent creature will dig up our cities and wonder about us, like how we dig up the cities of the ancient Greeks or the Native Americans.
“There used to be big Native American cities around here, did you know that? I hadn’t known. My family was taking a cross-
country road trip and came to Cahokia in southern Illinois, just a few hours from here. There were dozens of flat-topped pyramids and earthworks and mounds. One of them is over a hundred feet tall. Apparently there used to be a big city there about a thousand years ago. They called it Cahokia. Thirty thousand people. And whoever planned it out were geniuses, it was all carefully engineered, the mounds and buildings laid out according to geometrical and astronomical patterns. And that’s without modern surveying equipment. They say thousands of people would come to this city on pilgrimages, for rituals and feasts, people from all over the country, mingling and trading. It was bigger than London or Paris at the time. This is all before anyone from Europe even set foot here.
“Now there’s nothing. A bunch of hills outside of St. Louis, most of them dug up or destroyed. Most people don’t even know about it. Nobody cares. When Europeans first came across it, the city had already been abandoned for centuries. We don’t even know the city’s real name—the Europeans called it Cahokia only because that’s the name of the tribe that happened to be living around there at the time.
“But Cahokia had lasted five hundred years. Longer than the United States has been around. Someday our number will come up, too. And nobody will remember our names either.”
Black water flowed all around me. I floated, looking up at the stars, so cold.
* * *
—
I remember hearing, in some college philosophy lecture, about the idea of historical cycles—that all civilizations, large and small, pass through four distinct stages. How societies come together, and how they fall apart.
It was probably bullshit. Still, it was one of those ideas that stuck in my mind long after college. I probably don’t even remember it accurately, but I do recall that, when my professor was talking about it, it made a certain psychological sense. That it might’ve even been true beyond its scope. That those same four stages occur with smaller groups, too. With social scenes, with friendships. With romantic relationships. Even with your relationship to yourself.
The trick is knowing what stage you’re in.
The way I remember it, before the cycle begins, everything is chaos. A struggle of everyone against everyone. We’re hungry and desperate in the wilderness. We have no tribe. We don’t understand the universe around us. We’re atomized and alone in our separate apartments.
But then a mythos rises out of that disorder. A compelling idea that brings people together. It can be as simple as a law: “You can do whatever you want in the garden, but don’t eat from this tree.” Or a pact: “Let’s all agree that everything in this book is important and true.” Or an action: “Every seven days, we must sacrifice an animal at this rock.” Or a choice: “We could have chosen anyone in the world to be friends, or lovers. But we chose each other.”
There’s only one requirement: the mythos must be arbitrary. The more unjustifiable it is, the better it works. The forbidden fruit is important precisely because it is forbidden. The book is important and true only because it is crazy and impossible. An animal sacrifice is compelling because it wastes the animal. The decision to fall in love is crucial only because we know there are others out there who are probably better for us.
This starts the first stage of the cycle, what the professor called the Divine Age, the Age of the Gods. This new mythos binds a new community together. Rituals are invented. You and everyone around you feel like you are spontaneously acting under the urging of the same inspiration. Your religion gushes sacredness and meaning. Your friends are fascinating. Your girlfriend can do no wrong. You want to protect this special new thing that has come into the world.
That leads to the second stage of the cycle, the Aristocratic Age, the Age of Heroes. Harmony can’t last so it has to be enforced. Social unanimity breaks down, so it must be manufactured. The mythos no longer feels alive and present, but mechanisms develop to honor it. To enforce these mechanisms, rank and power appear—between the ruler and the ruled, the priest and the congregation, the performer and the audience, the loved and the lover. In the name of perpetuating the mythos, its representation must be frozen in one enduring form. The rituals, which used to be exhilarating mystical dramas spontaneously experienced by everyone, are now scripted liturgies enacted by professionals, to be watched by an increasingly disaffected populace.
This disenchantment leads to the third stage of the cycle, the Democratic Age, the Age of Men. When rituals become bureaucratic, when shared mythos stops creatively improvising and merely repeats itself mechanically, people begin questioning. The ruled interrogate the ruler. The congregation investigates the priest. The audience critiques the performer. The lover suspects the loved. Skepticism develops in order to debunk and dethrone the old heroes and systems. But this skepticism ends up disproving more than originally intended—not only are rank and privilege debunked, but even the primal mythos is disputed. Liberated from the oppression of a mythos that had long ago stopped being genuine, and its associated ranks and codes and laws, a new equality and freedom break out. But never for long, because without a shared mythos, and without credible leaders to defend it, the society weakens. The original mythos becomes corrupted, degraded. Language is debased. Equality leads to a free-for-all. Communication breaks down. With no shared mythos, nobody can agree on even the basic premises of life. All that remains of the exhausted society are three things: a mythos nobody seriously believes in anymore, rituals nobody earnestly participates in anymore, and skepticism. And skepticism alone can’t sustain anything.
That causes the final slip into the fourth stage, which is chaos again. Without a functioning mythos, everything in society collapses when put to the slightest test, crumbling with surprising speed, sweeping away the inspiration of the Divine Age, the laws and rituals of the Aristocratic Age, and even the hard-won freedom and equality and science of the Democratic Age. Splintering accelerates, and everyone becomes incomprehensible to each other, eventually even to themselves. The world endures chaos until a new compelling mythos comes out of nowhere, another a bolt of inspiration, and brings us back into the Age of the Gods.
But those will be different gods.
* * *
—
My fingers are freezing but my pencil is flying. The symbols I’m writing down only make sense to me. Muttering to myself in the back of the car, posing nonsense prompts to myself (“Freeborn octogon reality hum shakes”), answering with corresponding nonsense (“Squeak under shovel grip dragon”), noting the valence and spin of each phrase, pivoting from it, calculating on it, deriving the next answer.
Repeat.
It feels good. I didn’t expect how easy it’d be, how right it would feel, how thrilling even. I’m absorbed in the technical aspects of the problem, in playing both sides of the equation. I barely even notice the freezing cold; my entire world has become this thanaton calculation because I’m not even thinking about the end result anymore—my death—I’m simply engrossed in the challenge of negotiating the reflexivities of running an assessment on myself, the work is fascinating, and so I’m on fire, it’s a joy to blaze through it this quickly, every step falling neatly into place, my number floating somewhere outside the car, somewhere in the frigid blizzard, buffeted by the wind, coming closer, until…
What if you’re another Hopkins?
Shut up and calculate.
The pleasure of finding precisely the right thread. Of pulling it and then watching the entire fabric come apart, all at once. To find the little golden pearl that had been hidden within. The number, shining there.
Take it.
In seconds I will have my answer.
* * *
—
After Hopkins died, Julia wanted to quit. She tried to convince me to quit, too. She was more scared than the rest of us. In retrospect, maybe she was the right amount of scared.
But the rest of us—Hutchinson, Ziegler, Hwang, etc.—well, who knew what was goi
ng through their minds? But I remember what was going through mine: The money is good. Don’t quit just because you have the jitters.
I convinced Julia to stay on.
Then I had the best three years of my life.
Better than your manic string of affairs after you broke up with Julia? Yes. Better than your cozy marriage to Erin? Yes. Better than the birth of your two sons, better than raising them? If I’m being honest—go ahead, fine, I’m a jerk, a shitty father—yes.
Back then Julia and I were rich and in love. Genuinely rich, both of us pulling in huge at Sapere Aude. And genuinely in love—that is, crazy in-your-twenties love, which nobody should confuse with placid, middle-aged affection, the good-enough thing that Erin and I agreed to call love.
Real feeling.
I don’t remember exactly what I said when I broke up with Julia at that Starbucks in Bloomington. I suppose I thought the good times were limitless and anonymous. That I could reboot my life with someone else and it’d be just as good.
I do remember what Julia said.
“Stupid,” she had sobbed. “You’re so, so stupid.”
Dare to Know Page 7
