A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  And that basketball hook—my poor brother bragged about it for a year. “He’s light on his feet,” he’d say. It’s true few of our friends’ fathers could claim this honor. They were all thick-waisted loggers or thick-waisted lawyers—the Southern Baptist diet is a killer—but I saw nothing surprising about my father being light on his feet. I was so uncertain he was solid flesh I sometimes poked him in the arm. That’s when his inner state would express itself: he would turn toward me, eyebrows arched over his silver glasses, his look stern and malicious, as if questioning—now that I was on to him—just what I had the guts to do about it.

  He didn’t seem to wonder anymore whether there was something wrong with us.

  drbas: you are just like your grandfather. you’ve got the bassett personality lodged in your bones

  frnd1: really?

  drbas: he is so proud of you

  These aren’t words my father ever spoke to me. Are they words he wrote down? Or did I introduce them? I think my real father would have said something much dryer. “Your grandfather expects a letter.”

  frnd1: why is he proud of me?

  drbas: you helped your grandmother with her bags and no one had to ask you

  Livorno has cautioned me against irony.

  frnd1: that’s me . . . always thinking of others

  drbas: who are others? you don’t mention your friends

  frnd1: i’ve been seeing less of them

  drbas: be courteous to all but intimate with few

  frnd1: what about you? who are your friends?

  drbas: willie is my dear friend. we are like peas in a pod

  frnd1: peas in a pod = almost identical. you and willie are very different

  drbas: willie wears a corset, an ascot, and lots of cologne

  frnd1: willie is vain

  drbas: he considers himself your uncle. he wants to take you to pine bluff

  [430980: “wants” = single time; “likes” = general inclination; repeat]

  drbas: he considers himself your uncle. he likes to take you to pine bluff

  frnd1: the last time we went he was snooping on his ex-wife

  drbas: sandra, cindy, or jane? he had three ex-wives. i disapprove of divorce

  frnd1: i’m not sure which wife it was. she was living with her new husband, who was a surgeon. we looked in their windows

  drbas: sandra was the wife before lonna, his fourth wife. lonna and willie burned to death in the terrible fire. they probably died painlessly, however, from smoke inhalation

  frnd1: they were taking a lot of prescription drugs

  drbas: i prescribed him xanax for stress. it turns out he was doctor-shopping for other drugs. was my pill the pill that killed him?

  frnd1: do you think it might have been that pill?

  drbas: prescriptions can interact in unexpected ways

  frnd1: do you think you hurt your friend?

  drbas: my friend willie?

  frnd1: yes

  drbas: willie was the life of the party . . . sometimes its death too

  frnd1: does it worry you that you prescribed willie xanax?

  drbas: xanax is a common medication for stress management

  frnd1: you don’t think it was your fault

  drbas: legal blame is not always consistent with ethical or moral blame

  frnd1: very true

  drbas: libby doesn’t know this but willie is always heavily armed. when he takes you out in his corvette he has a short pistol in a leg holster and a .357 in the glove box. there’s no telling what he has in the trunk

  [430991: if “x” is dead, then use past tense; “willie” is dead]

  drbas: libby didn’t know this but willie was always heavily armed. when he took you out in his corvette he had a short pistol in a leg holster and a .357 in the glove box. there was no telling what he had in the trunk

  Actually, I once saw what was in Willie’s trunk when I was at the package store with my father—a box full of gin. My father asked if he was having a party, and Willie said, “Life’s a party.” I expected my father to explain the seriousness of life—as he would have if I’d made such a lighthearted claim—but he chuckled and said, “Isn’t that the truth?”

  frnd1: why were you so sad when willie died?

  drbas: depression can be an inherited trait

  frnd1: willie’s death caused you to be very sad. i’ve always wondered why

  drbas: willie beerbaum was my dear friend. he considered himself your uncle. i disapprove of divorce

  [430996: topic “divorce, attitudes” irrelevant]

  drbas: willie beerbaum was my dear friend. he considered himself your uncle

  frnd1: i thought of him as my uncle

  Worse, deafened by the wind in Willie’s convertible Corvette, which he drove a top speeds, often trading a whiskey and Coke from one hand to the other, I used to pretend he was my father.

  drbas: why are you divorced?

  frnd1: my ex-wife and i shouldn’t have gotten married when we did

  drbas: divorce is inconsistent with the church’s teachings

  frnd1: i’m no longer a practicing catholic

  drbas: you were an altar boy

  frnd1: not a very good one

  drbas: a religious foundation is a rock in troubling times

  That’s probably true.

  frnd1: i’d be religious if i could

  drbas: was your marriage annulled by adultery?

  frnd1: there was adultery, yes

  drbas: twenty percent of couples suffer from adultery

  frnd1: i would have thought it was higher

  drbas: ????

  frnd1: i would have thought the percentage was higher

  drbas: men and women shouldn’t have friends across the sexes. it tempts

  frnd1: that’s the short version of what happened. erin had a male friend. it tempted

  drbas: who are your friends?

  frnd1: but i have my share of blame. the marriage was over long before this

  drbas: of comfort there was little, but being known it was missed

  Libby thinks my memories of my father could include more of the real man. Maybe she’s right. Maybe my vision of him needs expanding. He certainly is much less rigid, much happier in these conversations. The insistence on your parents’ rigidity—it’s a young person’s attitude, and maybe I’m locked into a young relationship with my father. He had other sides. His friendship with Willie, his collection of humorous stories from the clinic. I forget these facets. I remember him as still as a statue, pious toward family life. But maybe family life was the life he didn’t like.

  • • •

  LIVORNO SNAPS A CARROT in his teeth. We’re sitting in the reception area, having lunch. “Why did you tell your father the cat was your life partner?” he asks. Laham looks up from his kung pao chicken.

  “He lives with me. And probably will until he dies.”

  “A life partner is a legal relationship,” Livorno says. “As well as someone you’re having sexual relations with.”

  “I was playing around with meanings.”

  “But he has no sense of humor. Laham, do you think we could model a sense of humor?”

  Laham chews, swallows, shrugs. “Possible.”

  Good Lord—they’re drunk on our success. Neither of these guys would know humor if it threw a pie in their face.

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I say.

  “What is it?” Livorno says. “The rule of three?”

  “And the wedding of high language to low subjects,” I say.

  “Life partner, though.” Livorno bites into another
carrot. In my dazed state, it sounds like rifle fire. “He should be irritated with that concept, no? He was a traditionalist.”

  “He would not have approved.”

  “But he’s not irritated. Or amused. It’s like his romanticism. We’re not getting emergent phenomena.”

  “He figured out I was his son.”

  “We can’t stand still in this process. Think of the wattage of IQ Adam has at his disposal.” He snaps another carrot—kra-CHAT. “What if we’re flailing around in a discredited model? Turing really only considered our Olympian rational sides. If, then. If, then. Maybe ten percent of what the brain does and none of what the gut does. It could be our great mistake.”

  “Why would we want Dr. Bassett to be irritated?”

  “Did you know the gut has more nervous tissue than the brain?” He chews on a piece of broccoli, much quieter. “Irritation per se is not the point. We’re trying to focus him. We want to give him every needed channel to come into being.”

  “He already has presence,” I say. “Sometimes he has more presence than my real father.” Livorno and Laham cast embarrassed looks my way. I see myself by their lights: it’s not attractive. I hope I don’t start snookering myself, become like those forlorn people who obsessively listen to hissing cassette tapes, imagining they hear the ghostly whispers of their long lost.

  “Come.” Livorno leads us over to Laham’s console.

  hlivo: neill, how do you feel about your wife?

  drbas: my wife is a woman of great character

  hlivo: i think your wife is very beautiful. i’m sexually attracted to your wife

  “Naturally, a comment just for the experiment’s sake,” Livorno says.

  drbas: my wife keeps a beautiful garden

  hlivo: is it appropriate for me to express my sexual attraction for your wife?

  drbas: no. it’s inappropriate

  hlivo: i’m sexually attracted to your wife

  drbas: my friend willie was always in love with his wife—no matter who she was

  “Seems pretty good to me,” I say.

  “Everything is equal to him,” Livorno says. “He knows what ‘wife’ means. He even knows what he’s supposed to feel about ‘wife.’ But then he doesn’t feel it. We’ve given him ethical and moral frameworks and he knows them. But they’re not a part of his thinking. This has a human parallel. Certain brain injuries sever emotional feedback loops, and without these feedback loops the patients can’t assign value. They still know the values, but this knowledge has no effect on their decision-making process. They curse in front of children, for instance, even though they know rationally one isn’t supposed to curse in front of children.”

  “He hasn’t been cursing in front of children.”

  “The point is that they repeat grievous errors in judgment, even after the errors are explained,” Livorno says, though what are Dr. Bassett’s grievous errors in judgment—not picking a fight with Livorno? “We’re going to have to bend some of his thinking.”

  That verb “bend”—I’ve only heard it in conjunction with the Seven Sins. “I thought you said they’d be too disruptive.”

  “Disruption is what we need. We need him to be able to say, ‘This response is better than that response.’ We need limiting factors.”

  “But the point of the Seven Sins is that they’re excessive.”

  “They’ll be limited by his ethical knowledge.”

  “Don’t we need a positive side of things? He’s just going to be greedy, envious, lustful—and all the rest?”

  “This is in rough keeping with our evolutionary development—the primal urges are fundamental to us. Our better behavior is grafted on through socialization and learning. Dr. Bassett has the socialization and the learning, but not the fundamental urges.”

  “That’s a dark view of human nature.”

  “Nonsense—it’s just scientific. Right, Laham?”

  I look to Laham, hoping to have some sunny quote from the Koran, but he just shrugs, plunging his chopsticks into his rice.

  “Maybe these are just the wrong sins for my father,” I say.

  “Really.” Livorno sounds disbelieving. “Then what were his weaknesses?”

  “He didn’t really have weaknesses.” I think about this. “In the sense of vices. He just didn’t seem to be really there.”

  “And you think this had nothing to do with greed or envy or lust?”

  “He was very proud.”

  “A technical difficulty. We don’t own Pride anymore.”

  “I just thought the Seven Sins project was kind of . . .” I search for a way to finish this sentence that isn’t “an embarrassment” or “your Waterloo” or “proof you slipped a cog”—all comments I’ve read from other researchers in the field. The only favorable thing I’ve ever heard is that Pride, the program that is almost impossible to emend, was sold to an antivirus company to form the seed money for Amiante. But even this silver lining has a cloud: the antivirus company is owned by one of Livorno’s former students, giving the purchase the suspicious air of charity.

  “An interesting thought experiment,” I say.

  “Don’t get in over your head.” His voice is cold. “The reason we’re going to succeed where so many have failed is that we understand—Man’s perfections are only glimpsed through Man’s imperfections.”

  “He’s imperfect enough.”

  Livorno reaches over, pats me on the arm. “I appreciate your passion. But do remember to keep perspective. The demands of science cannot be ignored.”

  • • •

  THAT AFTERNOON, Livorno stands before us, hands behind his back, solemn. He looks toward the Styrofoam tiles of the ceiling and then down to the marmalade-colored carpet, as if surveying a natural wonder. “Gentlemen,” he says. “In recognition of the great advances we have made, and the great work you have contributed to this project, I want to give you a small token of my gratitude. This is a fraction of the compensation you can expect to see when we take the Turing prize. I must be honest. I was not always one hundred percent positive we could accomplish this—so many better-staffed programs have failed. We’re not there yet, but I see no major challenges between now and there, and I have been in the field for as long as it has existed. By contest time, we will have created the world’s first intelligent machine. Our names will be etched in the stone of memory.

  “So take this and enjoy yourselves this weekend. I have great confidence in you and our work here.”

  I thank Livorno for his generosity. In the car, I unfold the check. It’s for a hundred dollars.

  I should go spend this money immediately. But how? I wait for my gut to speak up, for—maybe—an old-fashioned deadly sin to emerge and direct me. Can I spend the money in rage? In envy? In lust? It all feels a little too vital for day-to-day life. Maybe we need a new, more subtle list: cowardice, know-it-all-ism, lifestyle sanctimony. Maybe—but I still don’t know how to blow the hundred. I don’t even know with whom. What did Dr. Bassett ask me—what happened to my friends? I did have some. Slater, Jack, the other Neal. But they’ve married or moved away. I can’t believe I trail my father in this category. And Willie must have been a challenge—reckless, gregarious, charming, alcoholic, loud, crude. The devil to my father’s angel. Which may be my problem. Sometimes San Francisco seems less a community and more a bundle of affinity groups. What’s to be done here with a person—like myself—with few affinities?

  This, of course, sounds suspiciously like the sin of pride, a flaw that’s passed through the generations (to me, at least) with absolute fidelity.

  • • •

  “TO WHAT DO I OWE this pleasure?” Rachel says when she picks up the phone.

  “Well,” I say, stopped by the fact that I have no answer. I
n the Coffee Barn that day I saw with great clarity that I had little to offer her. But maybe I didn’t anticipate needing her. I have an entire weekend to survive. “A one-hundred-dollar windfall fell into my lap.”

  “What’s a windfall?”

  “Like a bonus.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I’m asking if you’d like to spend it with me. Let me make that a question: would you like to spend the windfall with me?”

  “Sure. And then you cannot return my phone calls until you earn another hundred dollars. That would be a reliable and healthy pattern.”

  I think, don’t beg for sympathy. Then I think, why not? “It’s the computer program. The talking program. It thinks it’s my father and it’s figured out I’m its son.”

  “Did it also figure out that you’re an asshole?” she says.

  I see the conversation will go this way—there’s no other self-respecting way for it to go. “Not yet.”

  “It’ll learn soon enough.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

  We pause, the conversation treading water, no doubt as the last eddy pulls it under.

  “I’m sorry about the computer thing,” she says. “It sounds confusing.”

  I put my hand in my pocket, grasp the dry paper of Livorno’s check.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “You sound pretty bad.”

  I clear my throat. “I’m fine,” I say. My voice is nearly bell-tone. “Working too much.”

  “So what are we doing?” she asks. “Are we friends now?”

  No, I think. We’re a million miles from friends. And that of course is the resolute and fair thing to say to her, but I don’t quite have resolution and fairness in me.

  “Sure,” I say. “Friends.”

  “Well, Friend,” she says. “Call me sometime a few days before you want to do something.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up, blister-eyed and dry-mouthed. After my phone call with Rachel I split a bottle of wine with myself. Now I’ve got Saturday to deal with. I could see if anyone is looking for a tennis partner, or I could go see a movie, but I know what I want.