Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  While most sculptors who worked in bronze tended toward the kind of abstract designs that happened to be in demand for the lobbies of office buildings, Seward, who had never attended art school other than the odd adult education course, and who also had virtually unlimited funds to back his work, began to drift toward the direction of troubling the real. His pieces traded in pranks and illusions; the question of whether they were in fact even art was not entirely settled. What was one to make of the twenty-six-foot-tall statue of Seven Year Itch–era Marilyn Monroe that stood in a Chicago plaza, with passersby shielding themselves from the rain beneath the enormous swooping canopy of her updraft-caught dress, staring up at the endless white expanse of her panties? Or the equally gigantic reproduction of Grant Wood’s American Gothic that Rebecca had seen as she drove down the road that led into the sculpture garden, with a suitcase at the feet of the dour agrarian midwesterners, festooned with oval country decals from China and India? If they were kitsch, or knockoffs of the works of true masters, you couldn’t deny that they drew the eye. (On the opposite side of the road from the giant faux Wood stood a life-size statue of a father and son, the father pointing up at the monstrosity before him in shameless awe.)

  It would have been unfair to say that Seward Johnson founded the Grounds for Sculpture solely so that he’d have a place to show his own work. The acres of carefully manicured landscape held a comprehensive assortment of pieces by artists who might well consider themselves lucky to display their efforts in spaces like these, with shimmering lakes as backdrops or culs-de-sac of hedges that made their sculptures into secrets. (Though when one wandered through the park, the true interests of the garden’s patrons were difficult to ignore: while the art that advertised itself as such earned sidelong glances and occasional moments of reverent appreciation, it was Seward’s work that drew families who lingered to examine it in detail, squinting at the individually painted hairs in a beard, or running fingers over the pleats of a pair of trousers.)

  Rebecca had agreed to meet Philip in the gallery near the visitors’ center. He was easy to find—except for the guy sitting behind an information desk, he was the only person in the capacious, warehouse-like space. The entire gallery had been given over to the sculptures of an artist whose work Rebecca found singularly disturbing: it looked like the stuff of a botanist’s nightmares. Though the floor was completely barren save for a couple of stone benches that sat in the middle, the walls were decorated with gigantic renderings of natural objects—wishbones; pine cones; something that looked like a rotted pig’s snout—whose size alone placed them in the realm of the grotesque. The twisting silver tubes of air conditioning ducts that ran across the ceiling supported slowly twirling mobiles, from which dangled strange fruits that seemed to hail from a future full of mutations: furred peapods as long as a man is tall; distant cousins of apples and oranges that had developed drooping tendrils and neon tumescences; a slumping, eyeless homunculus made from tree bark, deep in a dream of being human.

  The man sat on one of the benches with his back to Rebecca, wearing a white, long-sleeved, button-down shirt despite the warm weather. She spotted him by his tousled head of hair and his ramrod-straight posture. His head was darting from side to side as he looked at the conglomeration of sculptures above him. In most cases, when Rebecca showed up for dates, the guys looked nervous if she happened to see them first: usually, though, they were watching the door, and had on their genial game faces as soon as she made eye contact. But this one seemed like his mind was elsewhere altogether.

  “Philip?” she said softly, not wanting to startle him.

  “Rebecca!” he replied, still not turning to look at her. “I’m glad you could make it.”

  Then, instead of standing up and walking around the bench to greet her, he lifted up both feet, spun around on his behind while using his hands to brace himself, and dropped his feet to the floor again once he was facing her. It was an oddly childlike gesture from someone of his age.

  He looked almost as she expected (and she thought that he might be right after all when he said that a person’s appearance in the real world was less of a surprise when you’d seen images of them in motion first). The only feature of his face that she hadn’t anticipated was his eyes: though they were a glittering blue, they were deeply set beneath his heavy brows, and without his kindly smile to mitigate their appearance, the first impression he gave would have been somewhat sinister.

  But a warm grin spread across his face. He slid sideways on the bench and gently patted the empty space he’d vacated. “Come here!” he said. “Sit down.”

  She did so, smoothing her flowery pastel sundress over her lap, clasping her hands together in mock primness. “Philip, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, too!” He gestured at the artwork around him. “Isn’t this place unsettling!” he said excitedly.

  “It certainly is,” Rebecca replied.

  “Did you get a chance to read the Finkel paper I sent you?” he asked eagerly, and then, before Rebecca could respond that she’d intended to get around to it but hadn’t been able to fit it into her busy schedule, he said, “Because the thought that goes into the design of online dating sites is very interesting! Listen. Consider this. Imagine there is an online dating site that works nearly perfectly. It was coded in a garage by a couple of college dropouts. You open an account, you answer some questions, and within three days it matches you with the love of your life. It is amazing! It is so amazing that it attracts investors. The garage becomes an office. Now the coders are surrounded by men in suits. Now the service that was once free requires a subscription; now the terms of service are quietly altered, and the data the site gathers is sold to corporations that do who knows what with it. Money changes everything! A man in a suit says to a whiz kid: ‘People who visit this site find true love in three days. But after this, they become less interested in the site: they stop updating their profiles, and when they log in it’s only to observe, not participate. Stale profiles are unreliable for our own data-mining purposes, and of less value when sold to others. Information is money, and we are leaving money on the table. What if you made a slight alteration to your algorithms, so that the site matched people with their soulmates in an average of five days instead of three? What would be the harm? In fact, it’s clear that we are deeply undervaluing true love here. Is active participation on our site for seven days, or ten days, or six months, too much of a price to pay for what we offer?’ When the possibility of profit enters the situation, the engineering problem changes. It is no longer: What is the best way to introduce people to strangers with whom they are highly likely to fall in love? It becomes: How can we best maximize revenue? And yet: imagine an online dating site that never matches people together successfully. Customers log on to the site and open profiles; they visit the site for some period of time; they lose interest because it offers no hope of providing the service it promises. Word of mouth spreads; revenue falls; the site dies because it is too inefficient. So the goal is not maximum efficiency in pairing mates, but optimal inefficiency. The site maximizes revenue when it takes as long as possible to make matches without taking so long that its members give up and stop using it. And once you realize that inefficiency is coded into the design, that the site’s true purpose is not to match you with a mate, but to keep you actively participating in the site for as long as possible, then you can take steps to mitigate that inefficiency. The key to success, I think, is to treat the site as your opponent, not your facilitator: it’s like the house in a casino. You should strive to take any communications off-site as soon as possible, for one thing: when routing them through the site both parties continue to be susceptible to the phenomenon known as choice overload. Now, choice overload works like this: Imagine that I offer you a choice of one of three delicious cakes for dessert. You will say, ‘What good fortune,’ and select one. But what if I offer you a choice of one of eleven cakes? You will become temporarily paralyzed by the ma
gnitude of the choice; you will realize that selecting any one of them deprives you of the potential experience of ten others. It will take you longer to choose; you will choose more inefficiently. Now, notice that every page loaded by Lovability features a reminder of how many members are on the site. Hundreds of thousands of members! Think of all that choice! Notice that next to a profile picture are links to eight other profiles, of people who are similar but not the same. Surely one of these other eight must be better than the profile you’re reading now. The promise of a more suitable mate is only a click away, perhaps with an unexpected interstitial survey to deal with, a minor nuisance at best. You see? The mediator that promises you a valuable service does not in fact have your best interests at heart. Best to cut it out of the chain of communication as fast as possible; best to move quickly to meet in person. Which is what we have done. We have outsmarted the house by leaving the casino. I’m very happy to see you! Rebecca,” he finished, slightly short of breath, “I would greatly enjoy it if you and I went for a walk together in the sculpture garden.”

  And so Rebecca and Philip went for a long, leisurely amble through the Grounds for Sculpture. Philip found the abstract works in the garden as engaging as most of the other visitors found Seward Johnson’s attempts at realism: he seemed drawn to the clean, perfect math of their arcs and lines. Unless a given work had a sign next to it strictly forbidding contact, he’d get up close to touch it, in a way that Rebecca found endearingly intimate: running his finger along the inside of a swooping curve, or knocking with a knuckle to hear the timbre of an echo. When the sculptures featured red plaques dissuading human touch, Philip looked as if he felt cheated.

  He talked a lot, about random vaguely science-y subjects: the physics that governed the trajectories of golf balls and the benefit provided by their dimples; why the bubbles in a freshly poured pint of stout appeared to float downward instead of upward; the enormous amounts of metadata in which Twitter messages were wrapped. His mind was pleasantly magpie-like, alighting briefly on one subject or another for a quick explication, and moving on once it got restless. If he didn’t talk much about himself, he also avoided the nonsense that guys usually pulled on first dates, the coyly dropped hints from which you were meant to infer their salaries or their sexual prowess. Listening to him talk was a little like watching over someone else’s shoulder as they surfed the Internet, but someone who knew how to go to cool out-of-the-way places and read about cool things, not someone who just stuck to screwing around on Facebook.

  Eventually they sat down at a lakeside table to take a break from walking. The table was one of Seward Johnson’s tricks: it had places set for four for dinner, with china plates and silver utensils and folded cloth napkins and poured glasses of red wine, but all of it was fashioned from bronze and resin. A pair of peacocks strutted together along the shore, lazily trailing a riot of blues and greens behind them. Rebecca was pretty sure that this was the first time she’d ever seen one of the birds up close. They were shockingly, sublimely beautiful: photos didn’t do them justice.

  Philip placed his chin on his hand, grasping the stem of the wine glass in front of him as if he were about to lift it to drink, even though it was permanently riveted to the table beneath. “A counterfactual,” he said. “We are at dinner. The lighting is nice—on the table there are candles or something. Now: I remember something I read in a foolproof guide to picking up women. If I follow its precepts, it promises to turn me from a zero into a hero. It says at the beginning of one of its chapters: Remember to show some interest in your date! It’s not just about you! So I ask you: What do you do?”

  “What do you mean, what do I do?”

  “How do you spend your days? How do you earn a living? For instance, if someone asks me this, I have responses with differing degrees of granularity: I might say, ‘I am a physicist,’ or ‘I am an experimental physicist,’ or ‘I’m mainly concerned with problems of spacetime.’ So: What do you do?”

  “Oh, I’m just a local girl.”

  “Local girl is not something to be preceded by just. Most of the women I come across these days are scientists: local girls are a novelty to me. Second: local girl is what you are, not what you do. It’s a good thing for you that I’m so socially clumsy: otherwise I would be picking up on a certain reticence here.”

  This is why it was hard to go out on dates with guys older than you! Not because you’d be into different music, or because an older man’s joints could forecast the weather, but because at this particular point in history, the difference between being in your twenties and being in your thirties was often the difference between having a blackout season and not having one. Most people Philip’s age were actually doing something, because they’d had more of a chance to try.

  “Well, I’m kind of in between things right now,” she said.

  “Between what and what?”

  Jesus! “Between graduating from college and whatever will let me move out of the house where I’ve been living like a teenager, pretty much.” It sounded more snappish in her ears than she’d intended, but she felt better once she owned up to it. “My mom is a librarian. My dad is a Unitarian minister.”

  “Hm,” Philip said, in a tone perhaps a little less damning than Rebecca expected, considering that she’d gone ahead and dropped all her bombshells on him at once. “Yeah, it’s pretty ordinary,” she continued. “I work odd jobs here and there so I don’t just sit on my ass, but it’s been really hard to find something steady, with an English degree. No one will hire you unless you have experience, and without a real job that has a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks, you can’t get anything that people want to call experience. It kinda sucks.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I feel like a failure.”

  “That’s a thing we have in common then,” Philip said. “I felt like a failure just yesterday. And the day before that.” He thought about it for a moment. “The day before that, too.”

  “See, but you’re just being nice! This is like next-level failure: I can’t even get anyone to give me the chance to do something so I can be bad at it! I can’t even call it frustrating anymore, because to be honest, I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I mean, for a lot of people of my generation—that’s not what I mean—”

  “Please continue.”

  “—it’s kinda what you do now. It’s not like your life is like: something great happens, then something bad happens, then something awesome happens. It’s just a constant, low-level samey-same feeling that’s not that good.”

  “Some more pessimistic types would say that you have exactly described the day-to-day feeling that often comes from doing science,” Philip said, quietly placing one of his hands over the wrist of the other. “I’m serious! I have what most people would consider to be a rather prestigious job. It is not an exaggeration to say that I am on the cutting edge of human knowledge. But being on the cutting edge means that I’m confronted each day with my own incredible ignorance. Some days—and sometimes these can be the best, most promising days—I leave work knowing slightly less than I believed I did when I arrived! If I understand one thing that most people don’t, it’s how little I actually know. I have good days. Sometimes what I do is exhilarating! But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that sometimes it’s not.”

  “Well. Here we are, a couple of failures, then. Though I feel pretty sure you’re underselling yourself.” Impulsively, Rebecca reached out and touched Philip’s hand. “You want to go get a drink?”

  They had a drink at a little place on the sculpture garden’s grounds called the Peacock Café: one of the restaurant’s namesakes was placidly preening itself in front of the entrance. Philip got a can of Dr Pepper. Rebecca ordered a Corona with lime, and she didn’t realize how tense she’d been, and how intimidated she’d felt by this guy, until she had a drink. Just the slight shock of the bottle’s cold glass touching her lip made her loosen up a little. And it had been hot out there, too—a good long gulp, and another,
and she felt refreshed. She started to feel, well, interesting.

  She began to regale Philip with tales of the little ignominies of the blackout season, while he drank his soda through a straw. There was the time she worked retail in a department store, selling designer shoes until she couldn’t take it anymore. She remembered kneeling before an angry dowager, the woman’s foot naked in front of her face, its gnarled, spotted toes as long as fingers. (“She says, ‘Young lady. Young lady. These shoes made my feet bleed. It’s an absolute outrage.’ And she’s waving around a pair of Ferragamos that have little flecks of blood inside them. And I’m thinking: The problem here is your feet are totally prehensile. You’ll be better off heading over to Accessories and getting a nice pair of gloves.”) She told him about the time a couple of years ago when she’d picked up work going door to door for the U.S. Census, getting the info from stragglers who’d failed to fill out the form. (“And someone would answer the door, and they’d be drunk or high or whatever, and I’d say, ‘Okay. I’m from the Census, and I need you to count the number of people in your house and tell me the answer.’ This one guy, I could smell the weed on him, he opens the door and he’s got a half-eaten Hot Pocket in his hand. He looks at me and takes this huge bite out of his Hot Pocket. I give him the spiel, and he says, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and he points at himself and says, ‘One.’ Then he takes another huge bite of the Hot Pocket: finishes it off. Then he licks his fingers and goes back in the house. Just leaves the door wide open. I stand there for maybe three minutes, I don’t know what’s going on, and then he comes out again, with this big smile on his face like he’s just figured out how to cure cancer. And he says: ‘Two.’ ”)

  Philip listened to her stories with rapt attention. “That was interesting,” he’d say (and Rebecca was thinking that on their second date, which she was already taking as a given, she’d gift him with a thesaurus as a well-meant tease). Finally, when she told him about a job she turned down—the details she’d found out were vague, but it was an opportunity that had been relayed to her by Kate through one of Kate’s friends, something about three hundred dollars cash if she showed up at this particular house in a nice neighborhood, wearing a Catholic schoolgirl skirt—Philip shook his head in wonder and said, “Your life: it is very interesting to me. Do you like food?”