A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  “Good?” Laham asks. He looks at me.

  I give him a thumbs-up. “Extremely.”

  “It shouldn’t take too long to explain ten-year-old technology,” Toler says. “But, yes, I better get going.”

  “First, a toast.” Livorno stands and smooths out his pants, triumphant. “To a revolutionary Monday.” He hands out the wineglasses and pours us generous turns. Then he makes a face full of false regret. “Now I’ll have to write an article.”

  “Everything in this computer is based on your father,” Toler says to me. It doesn’t sound like a question, but it is one.

  “There are all the ethics tests. Medical info. ELIZA. You know, the trellises.”

  “But his voice. Does it sound like him? Do you sometimes feel his presence?”

  “Just then I did.” I feel instantly embarrassed. Here in a room with four hard-brained science PhDs, I’m sensing messages from beyond. I might as well admit to wearing crystals.

  “I’m assuming one of these ‘trellises’ includes some commonsense notions of death,” Toler says.

  “Naturally,” Livorno says.

  “So what happens if I tell him he’s dead?” Toler reaches toward the keyboard, air-typing.

  Livorno takes a step between Toler and Dr. Bassett. “We can’t very well have him puzzling about the silence of the grave.”

  Toler knocks back his wine, makes a horrible grimace, and hands me the glass. “The silence of the grave,” he says. “You’ve got a way with words, professor.” He smiles and shakes our hands, making exaggerated eye contact. “I want to congratulate you three on single-handedly lurching into the AOL era.” He gives a jaunty salute as he and his assistant leave.

  “He loves me like a son,” Livorno reminds us.

  “Feels Oedipal to me,” I say.

  “Difficult to be so outclassed by your aged teacher.” Livorno nods sympathetically, then takes a happy slurp of his wine.

  • • •

  BACK IN MY OFFICE, I try to solve the real question for today: just how good is Dr. Bassett 2.0?

  frnd1: why did the chicken cross the road?

  drbas: chickens are usually kept in pens

  frnd1: how do you get a one-armed aggie out of a tree?

  I wait for his response.

  drbas: i thought we were talking about a chicken

  Dr. Bassett has officially stayed awake for two questions.

  frnd1: tell me about the girl who was abducted

  drbas: once, a young girl was abducted by persons unknown. rumor had it that the iranians were behind it, but the only persians to grace our small town in its history were the librarian’s cats. the long-lost father was a more likely suspect, i thought

  frnd1: what happened to her?

  drbas: a search party left at 9 am after much free coffee and donuts at the bakery. they returned for a free lunch and then for a free afternoon snack. the girl was never found

  frnd1: never never?

  drbas: the girl was never found

  frnd1: when did this happen?

  He takes a while to chew this over. I’ve given him a true mind-bender: “this” doesn’t just refer to a word or but to the whole conversation.

  drbas: 1979. my wife was quite concerned, as we had two boys ourselves

  Bingo.

  frnd1: where are your boys now?

  drbas: my oldest lives in michigan. my youngest is a senior in college

  frnd1: are they happy?

  drbas: do you think happiness is an important goal?

  That’s a dodge.

  frnd1: why did you have a family?

  drbas: i still have a family

  This is a mistake I often make, putting his life in the past tense.

  frnd1: okay, why do you have a family?

  drbas: why do i have a family?

  frnd1: yes

  drbas: sons are a gift from God

  Is it a line from the journals? Some synthesis? In any case, it’s crazily comforting to hear. I shake my hands out, walk to the back office. The program is good. Really, really good. You wouldn’t mistake it for a real person, but you could believe it actually knows what you’re talking about. I put my hand on the side of the stack, the brain. It hums and buzzes.

  3

  WEEKS CAN GO BY LIKE THIS. Working all day in silence, sitting at a café for lunch, coming home to my well-tended apartment. I cook dinner, sometimes a challenging dish, usually an easy one. I pet the cat, read the news online, work sudoku till my brow aches. I belong to the San Francisco Tennis Club, and I try to get down there for Doubles Drop-in and even the exceptionally grim Singles Night. Beautiful, short-skirted divorcées squirting desperation from their eyes like poisonous toads. I once asked a lawyer if she wanted to grab a drink, and she nearly jumped in my car. As she explained later, it had been too long since she’d seen another person’s apartment.

  My housekeeper comes on Tuesdays and cleans the place within an inch of its life. She’s a good-humored Brazilian woman, and I’ve fantasized about her. In my defense, it’s not a fantasy of the patrón taking advantage of the hired help, but of a sweet companionship growing between two mismatched people. Less Caligula, more My Fair Lady.

  • • •

  THE WHOLE POINT OF my trip to the hostel was a new, temporary identity, but in the end I didn’t succeed. The girl, Rachel, and I woke up in the little bed, woven like lovers. We disengaged, stiff, my head already pounding. She surveyed her clothes on the floor with dismay, as if they were shards of something valuable she’d let slip from her grasp. Everything felt apocalyptically dire. It was the right moment for me to shake her hand and go catch the 48 back to the Mission, but I did something that surprised me—I lay back down and told her exactly who I was and where I lived. I even handed her a business card. And she did something that surprised me—she laughed.

  So I feel a kind of elated foreboding, a concurrent happiness and conviction that cosmic punishment is rolling my way, when I get a note in my inbox:

  wazzup . . . me n folks r hangin 2nite at Stinson . . . wanna come? u will fit right in LOL . . . seriously luv to c u there . . . r

  It’s been three weeks since the hostel, well past the rekindling window. And I’m dazzled by the email’s superlative wrongness—its cutesy misspellings, its tone, its very existence. She’s a twenty-year-old who hasn’t graduated high school—LOL.

  How does she have “folks” already in Marin? I can only hope she’s not referring to her parents.

  I ask Dr. Bassett what to do.

  drbas: it’s normal to date before you settle down

  At work’s end I examine myself in the Subaru’s vanity mirror—there are no looking glasses at Amiante Systems—and am troubled by the innocence I find there. I’m divorced, the son of a suicide, but these tsunamis have passed without a visible trace. It’s true San Francisco men are famous for their Peter Pan syndrome, also true that I use moisturizer. Still, I’d take a face with more character. When I smile, a tight bunch of lines extends like cat whiskers from my eyes. When I stop smiling, each line remains faintly there. That’s as much mark as life seems to have made.

  And look at my clothes. They’ve suffered from the permissive atmosphere of Amiante. I look like a square Web 2.0er determined not to dress like a square Web 2.0er. There are hints of subversion, the collars too big, the pants snug in the thigh, the cuffs too French, but who is the subversion for? Laham wears a baju kurung and polyester slacks; Livorno, kitted out as an Eisenhower Republican, considers me a “classy dresser.” I feel like Toler, a man disguised as who he really is.

  I can’t imagine how this will translate with Rachel and her Marin hippie “folks,” with their dreadlocks and coarse-weave ponchos. So though
I disapprove of my actions, I go home and transform. Beat-up jeans, urban sneakers, and an ironic T-shirt—I sink down into the appropriate age range. Faux-urban to their faux-rural, but it ought to fly. I have to say, the change is convincing. If only I had a similar switch of cars, some aged European diesel drinker to dress down the shiny unironical Subaru.

  Oh well. The drive—across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the jagged wild headlands—is one of the reasons I live in San Francisco. All the money in the world has been unable to ruin the entrance to Marin.

  In the Stinson Beach parking lot, I take off my sweater and throw it in the passenger seat. The fog hasn’t blown in, and it’s hot. In fact it feels like California up here, the dreams of California. On the beach, couples—man woman, man man, man dog—pace the line of land and water. Kids sit in circles close to the rocks. There are bongo drums. I skirt wide, scanning the girls. Will I recognize Rachel? I mostly remember her sleeping in my arms that night.

  She’s not with the bongo drums. I stroll toward a group with several bandanna-wearing dogs, struggling to look natural but not get sand in my shoes. A few girls are likely candidates. I glance at them, and then I find myself leering. Is that her? How about her? Her?

  “Neill.”

  Rachel stands off to my right, looking just like herself. I never forgot the way she looked; I just forgot that I knew. Her cascade of dark blonde hair, the flash of her bright smile, and her kind of unstudied regalness—less like actual royalty and more like a heron. What a relief. She’s leaning against the rocks with a non-hippie-ish guy who’s wearing a button-up. I instantly regret my T-shirt. They’re drinking white wine, out of real wineglasses. Rachel appears to be wearing too much eyeliner, but really there’s not much she can do to mar how pleased and self-possessed she looks. She waves at me as if from a boat that’s coming to shore. Or rather as if she’s on the shore, and I’m the boat.

  “You look beautiful,” I say. I mean it. She looks fuller, more alive.

  “Really?” she says. She’s stunned and pleased. Then she recovers. “I started jogging.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  She gestures to her companion. “This is Raj.”

  “Short for Rajasthan,” he says, shaking my hand. “Unfortunately.” He’s as Caucasian as a Smothers Brother, but this is Marin, birthplace of the American Taliban. Redheaded and sunburnt, with a last name like Kreuzer or Fitzpatrick, he might be Raj or Rasheed or Rumi.

  “You look tired,” Rachel says, patting the rock next to her. She has a new touch to her hair: a dyed braid with colored beads at the end, which hangs directly over her right eye. I reach over and tuck it behind her ear, surprising myself with the gesture.

  “I’ve been working a lot,” I say.

  “You want a little Sancerre?” Raj asks.

  I’m suspicious of anyone who names varietals, especially when there’s no other choice at hand. Something less objective is afoot, too—what is this person doing here? This person who seems a lot like me?

  “I hear you’re a software guy,” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “That’s what you told me, right?” Rachel says. “At the youth hostel?”

  Raj’s face doesn’t twitch. He appears to know how we met.

  “I work for a software company,” I say.

  “Sales,” Raj says.

  “Development. It’s hard to explain.”

  “This isn’t a test,” Raj says. “I sell real estate—I’m no Marin rich boy hypocrite.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “I’ll take some of that wine, please.”

  “I did go to Bennington. A strike against me.”

  Rachel smiles at me, and then him and then back, as if watching a pleasant tennis match.

  “You work at a stealth company?” Raj asks.

  “I’m not sure we qualify as a company. But yes we’re stealth. We make chatbots—talking computer programs.”

  “Interesting,” he says, though he seems to mean the opposite. “Rachel, when’s Trevor getting here?”

  “Maybe he got tied up at the coffee shop,” she says.

  Good Lord, is there another one of us?

  “That’s where I work,” she says to me.

  “I thought you were in school,” I say.

  “I work for school credit,” she says. “It’s not like New Jersey out here.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “It’s so good.” She swings her arm around my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek. Is she drunk? I remember this strange zone of intimacy from when I was in college. The hugging, the kissing on the cheek, which all seemed to mean nothing in the end. It took me months to understand that my ex-wife was actually interested in me—I thought she was just flexing her attraction.

  Above the ocean, the sun hangs like a scoop of magma. If the fog holds off, we might see it set.

  “I’ve been anxious to meet you,” Raj says. He’s packing a pipe, and he holds it out to me. I’m not big on marijuana, but refusing a Californian’s dope is like refusing a Pashtun’s tea. And I’m starting to feel like an asshole. If this is an elimidate he can’t be liking it any more than I am.

  I take a tiny hit. Raj nods, groovy, and accepts the pipe back. Rachel takes her arm from my neck and sits down on the sand, reclining on her elbows. A breeze tosses her hair, a meteorological conspiracy to make her more beautiful than she really is.

  “I can see how selling houses out here would be easy,” I say, nodding to the ocean’s perfect grinding against the coast.

  “You’d like it up here with us,” Raj says. “You seem like a free spirit.”

  What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  “Hey, hey!” a boy shouts, slouching our way. It’s Trevor. I’m relieved to see he’s young—really young—not like us at all. He’s wearing—as predicted—a knit poncho and rope sandals. “Raj, Rach, what’s up?” He’s all low fives and kisses on the cheek, as affable as a puppy.

  “This is Neill,” Rachel says.

  “The famous Neill!” he says. “What up?”

  “Neill makes chatbots,” Raj says.

  “Whoa,” Trevor says, plopping down right next to Rachel and signaling for the pipe.

  “It’s a talking computer program,” Raj says.

  “Like for folks with no friends?”

  “There’s no commercial application yet,” I say. At some juncture in my life, I apparently became the kind of person who says “commercial application” in a normal conversation. Maybe I’m just off balance—I don’t know how to respond to what up?

  “I know the first thing the corporations will do,” Trevor says, exhaling a long plume of smoke and looking serious. “Robot phone sex.”

  I laugh, but no one else does. It’s apparently not a joke.

  “We don’t even believe in regular phone sex,” Trevor clarifies.

  Raj nods, and Rachel looks out at the ocean. I scan the denominations, wondering who “we” might be. There is something of the evangelical sheen of Mormons with these two guys, but we’re smoking dope. Ditto with Jehovah’s Witnesses. What’s left? Catholics? Lutherans?

  “Simulated phone sex,” Raj says, “does sound like many things wrong with the world rolled up into one.”

  “I wouldn’t overstate,” I say. “There’s poverty and war and genocide.”

  “Have you ever heard of ‘Bend Over Boyfriend’?” Trevor says, getting up to his knees and coming close to me. He smells of coffee beans. “It’s like a package you buy—at sex stores. For sixty-nine ninety-five you get a strap-on, some lube, and an instructional DVD. It shows women how to do their boyfriends up the butthole.”

  “Gross,” Rachel says.

  “Why would a woman want to do
that? Seriously? Because she’s totally desperate. They go home—Arctic winds. They’re not clicked. Some company says, ‘Give me seventy dollars and I’ll get you clicked. Just stick this thing in your boyfriend’s back door.’ And bam they buy it. It’s corporations exploiting our fears and our weaknesses. You say it’s not as bad as a war, but it is a war. And we’re losing.”

  Rachel stands to brush the sand off her legs. “I’m checking out the water.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Trevor says, leaping to his feet.

  She holds out a flat palm, waves no. “You stay here and talk about back doors,” she says.

  Trevor makes an exasperated noise and throws up his arms. He returns to us men, smiling. “There’s something wrong with me.”

  “You’re too strident,” Raj says.

  “I shouldn’t have been talking about that stuff in front of Rach.”

  “Strap-ons?” I say. “Or war?”

  “She’s a special young woman,” Raj says, pouring us the last of the wine. “I’ve liked her from the first day she came to a meeting.” He’s looking at me. “Neill, you should come to a meeting.”

  The gratuitous use of my name always makes me nervous—it’s a tactic learned in cults and MBA programs.

  “I’m a very tolerant person,” I say. “As long as I don’t have to be involved.”

  “I know Pure Encounters has a reputation, but none of it is true.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” I say. I’ve never heard of Pure Encounters.

  “It’s not about sex. It’s about connection—clicking.”

  “It’s, like, a spiritual practice,” Trevor says. “It’s about purity of the self—the only way to have purity in your encounters. And about resistance to these fucking corporations, these fucking soul-sucking . . .”

  “Trevor,” Raj says.

  “I’m sorry, dude,” Trevor says. “I don’t know what’s got into me.” But he smiles and leans back in the sand. It’s clear he knows exactly what’s gotten into him, and it’s a good thing and he likes it.

  “If meetings aren’t your thing,” Raj says, “come to a retreat—we do a whole men’s retreat thing.”