“I sometimes think my name was a problem. I was so unlike him.”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about.” Her voice is hard. She rotates in her chair to look at me. I let go of her arm.
“We can’t second-guess his choice,” I say. It’s a line she’s given me many times. I don’t know why I’m giving it to her now. I’ve always hated it.
She looks at me. Her face is angry, raw. This is not her usual performance—together, strong, shrewd—but I’m not going to accept that it’s any more true. It’s been a tough day. I think she has a question on her lips, though maybe it’s nothing that can be spoken. Just the request for reassurance, for love. I step in close and hug her sideways, not in our normal, brusque fashion, but with the implied promise to stay.
• • •
IN THE MORNING she’s up before me, showering, putting away dishes. I smell sausage from the kitchen, and I know she’s making a special breakfast just for me. I always complain about the low standards of Bay Area biscuits and gravy.
Out in the living room her things look suspiciously packed.
“You’re not leaving,” I say.
She pours me some coffee. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be sorry. You don’t have to go back down there. Stay up here with me. You can visit more friends.”
She shakes her head. “I think you should tell the computer about his death. The way he died.” She whisks the gravy, and looks in the oven at the biscuits.
“I know it sounds a lot like him.”
She closes the oven. “You told me that Henry had a theory. That if a computer seemed to be doing something then we had to say it really was doing that.”
“Operationalism,” I say. I do not like where this is going.
“Well, from that perspective,” she says. She reaches up to wipe her nose, and then walks to the sink, squirting soap on her hands and washing them.
“From that perspective,” I say.
“I haven’t lost my faith,” she says. She means her religious faith. I wait for her to pursue this thought, but it seems to pass. I don’t want it to.
“Please tell me what you mean,” I say.
“It’s not perfect, your machine. It’s got the stories. The quotes. But your father loved me. He loved your brother and you. That’s not there.”
“We’re working on it. We have a theory for that, for love.”
“You don’t need another theory. That machine doesn’t have your father’s love because you don’t believe he loved you.”
“That’s not true,” I say gently. And it’s not. I believe he loved me. I’m just not sure I ever loved him.
• • •
AFTER I DEPOSIT MY mother at the airport, I can’t go to work. I turn back for the city, but don’t know where to go once I’m there. My apartment will still be too full of the cooling smells of biscuits and gravy, of a mother’s care. So I drive. The Subaru takes me off the freeway and up into Chinatown. Libby wanted to buy some kitchen items here—“fresh from the tap,” as she says—and I go to her favorite store and fill my basket with gadgets and knives. I feel temporarily diverted, imagining the card I’ll enclose in the box, the card that will absolve me of what feels like a backlog of small failures. Out on the street again, though, I look at the crowds streaming through the fake pagodas, and I think, what is suffering in a city like this, built on suffering? What is joy in a city like this, built on joy? What does it matter that I’m here on the corner of Stockton and Post, as grim and stiff as a dime-store Indian, suffering from failures that are only small because I attempt nothing big?
I get back in the Subaru and drive. Drive and drive until I’m in Fairfax. I have the address to Raj’s condo, and I follow the winding streets that way. His Porsche is parked with admirable nonchalance, uncovered, next to a gigantic blue recycling bin. I glance around my car for a leftover chocolate bar, a real estate flyer—any excuse to knock on his door. All I’ve got are my mother’s kitchen gifts and a pile of scratched CDs.
I climb the concrete steps and knock on the metal door. The lush California anonymity of the condo complex is soothing. It’s shaped like a big shoebox, wrapped in plain black railings, and initially must have looked like an unambitious motel. Now the railing supports long banners of creeping jasmine, and small evergreen bushes flower in the dirt by the steps. It’s banal profusion, but profusion it is.
Raj lets me in. He’s dressed in workout clothes, a blue sleeveless shirt, and black shorts. He wipes his bright red face with a white towel. “I just got in from a run.”
“I need your help,” I say. “Rachel isn’t returning my phone calls.”
“Are you returning hers?” He laughs, but kindly.
“Yes,” I say. “Now.”
He waves me in. “There’s coffee.” From a stainless steel vacuum-sealed pot, he pours a sparkling black brew into a hand-shaped clay cup. Then he jogs, knees high, across the wall-to-wall carpet to his bedroom.
Carpet! This guy is without pretension.
I sip the coffee, which is delicious. Light, airy, balanced. I look out his sliding glass door to the back deck. There’s a Weber smoker, an enormous fig tree. An ashtray with four bent cigarette butts on the redwood porch table. Two of the cigarettes are sealed with red lipstick, like fake fire. I’ve always thought he was a crackpot, with his VAM Method and his feedbacks, but look at this sanctuary. It’s a temple of right and solitary living. I could afford all of this. I could afford this condo, that table, that smoker, the coffee. I’m a middle-class American and thus, by historical standards, extremely rich. And I spend—Lord knows I spend. I do my part for the economy. But my money never results in this sort of oneness. I’m neither expressed, nor complemented. He’s got his house in order. In comparison my life can seem like a rag from which only great strain can wring a drop of pleasure.
“You really need to come to a session,” Raj says. He’s dressed for work, toweling off his short hair. “You’re not morally opposed, are you?”
“I gave up moral judgments in my twenties. I just doubt a session is right for me.”
“Do you think it’s right for Rachel?”
“That’s not for me to say.”
“That is a much-improved attitude.” He pours himself a cup of coffee and shakes his head. “So what makes you think you deserve my intervention on your behalf.”
“I don’t deserve it. I just need it.”
“Every time you come around Rachel gets scarce. Then when I start seeing her at sessions I know you’ve dropped off the map again.”
“Do you want me to promise that I won’t interfere with her Pure Encounters work?”
“I wouldn’t believe you if you did,” he says, walking over to the sliding glass door. He opens it and the Marin day pours in like orange juice. He steps outside and lights a cigarette, talking over his shoulder to me. “You’re a pretty mixed-up guy. She’s told me about your computer program.”
“It’s just my job.”
“You know what that’s going to be used for,” he says, looking at me, exhaling through his nose. I have a sudden flash of worry: has he caught wind of Toler’s project? The future of sex, the future of love.
“Does Trevor know?”
“He’s the one who told me,” he says. “About those Russian chatting robots.”
I take a breath. So Raj doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t know.
“The term is chatbots.”
“They pretend to be foxy Russian ladies who want to do Internet sex talk. It’s a ruse to trick people out of their credit card information.”
“I would think you would approve of the punishment.”
He laughs. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But seriously—I know you don’t think you�
�re involved in this, but you’re involved. You’ll go down in the textbooks as the man who separated us from each other.”
“I doubt I’ll make it into any textbooks.”
His expression says, surely you jest. He returns his attention to his backyard, which he surveys regally. “You need something,” he says. “Maybe ClickIn. Like at the retreat. Break through those roadblocks. You know, what our parents would have called hang-ups.”
“My parents would have called them scruples.”
He plants his cigarette into a terra-cotta pot full of them and returns inside. He comes close to me, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks red and sun-damaged. I’m afraid he might put his hand on my shoulder, then I think I’d like him to put his hand on my shoulder.
“Your life is still open to you.” He checks his watch. “Rachel should be out of ClickIn soon.”
• • •
THE “SESSION” IS CLOSE to the Coffee Barn, in a former wushu studio. The windows are covered in silhouettes of men in pajamas doing impossible strikes and parries. By the time I arrive, Rachel is waiting outside, her barista apron rolled underneath her shoulder. She’s in plain sweatpants and a fleece, her hair clipped behind her. She’s made no attempt to pretty herself up. This must be her way of saying, I commit to nothing by speaking to you.
“You want a coffee or something?” I ask.
Her eyes are red. Behind her the other ClickIn students amble out, hug goodbye. They looked dazed.
“At the Barn?”
“Of course not,” I say, though it’s exactly what I was imagining. I look down the street, searching for the right venue for whatever this is—a reunion? An initiation? A groveling?
“You want to go sit by the baseball field?” I ask.
We walk down the sidewalk. I keep a respectful physical distance, though we do brush hands once. She doesn’t pull away.
“Were you VAMing in there?”
“ClickIn and the VAM Method are different,” she says. “Did you know I’m afraid of real limbic click because of my relationship with my father?”
“Is ClickIn with your clothes on or off?”
She’s quiet. “I just asked you a question. You know, about myself and how much you know me?”
“I’m sorry. No, I didn’t know that about your father.”
“Not that it’s any of your concern, but we wear clothes to ClickIn. When I do the VAM Method my clothes are off. That’s when my intimate puts his hand on my clit.”
In the bright noontime sun, these words land with a thud. I wonder why I asked. I must have needed a little salt in my wound. It sort of works. I feel a low throb of jealousy, but my main feeling is that there’s nothing so disheartening as a dirty word used cleanly.
“When you say relationship with your father what do you mean?”
“It was distant. Un-clicked. Like my relationship with you.”
We walk two more blocks and downtown runs out. We take the short slope up to the playing fields.
“Maybe I’m afraid of real limbic click for the same reason,” I say. It seems possible—perhaps plain common sense. But it also carries the slight stench of ingratiation. “You know the day I came up to Fairfax to give you the spike? I saw you flirting with Trevor. I kind of knew you had a thing for him—even if you didn’t know. Which isn’t the point. I felt right then that I saw our future. Or actually your future.” I didn’t—don’t—seem to have one. Only a past and a present. “And it was a beautiful future—it just didn’t have me in it. So I called it off.”
“Calling it off,” she says, “involves calling.”
“I did call.” Though I didn’t tell her any of this. “I thought you needed a fresh start.”
“From you?”
“From life.”
“There are no fresh starts,” she says. “It’s like they tell you in ClickIn, it took you twenty-one years to get this way. It’ll probably take another twenty-one years to not get this way.”
I shiver as we reach the steps up to the field. This conversation should be happening in black and white, on a blustery Bergman seacoast, not here in Technicolor Fairfax, next to a jolly seahorse mural and a sign in loopy letters that reads, IT’S FOR THE KIDS.
“But was something going on?” I say. “You and Trevor?”
“I didn’t know you and me were ever exclusive.”
I take that as a yes. And yet I’m not that hurt. It’s less painful than hearing her say “clit” on Main Street.
“Why do the ClickIn people say ‘twenty-one years’?”
“I had a birthday.”
“Oh, crap. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about? Birthdays are good things to have. I went camping back at Tennessee Valley.”
“I saw you,” I say. “In the parking lot. You didn’t look un-clicked. You looked solitary. But you also looked strong.”
She doesn’t respond immediately. “You were snooping on me?”
“You didn’t tell anyone where you were.” Why didn’t Rick tell me it was her birthday? That would have been useful information. I might have approached her, said something. “I just caught a glimpse of you putting your sleeping bag into your car.”
“I looked strong then, because I was leaving.”
“But you were there for a few days.”
“That’s true.” She smiles to herself. “It was pretty brave. I was scared. And lonely.”
The baseball diamond—so well tended—is a surprise. I’m not sure why. I’ve seen it before. This hill just always feels like it’s about to reveal a collection of yurts. To find old-fashioned hardball up here is to argue against the power of time and place. I want to tell her how happy I am to see her. That it’s been a tough couple of . . . weeks? Months? Decades?
“You kept the spike,” I say.
“Kubotan. I’ve been practicing.” She flips her keychain into her hand and lunges with it, kee-yopping karate-style. “I don’t know if it actually works.”
“Try it on me,” I say.
She stops walking and faces me. She narrows her eyes, taking my measure. “It’s for self-defense,” she says.
I was kidding, but suddenly this seems like a good solution. I’ve given her pain, now she’ll give me pain. This is what I often thought Erin and I should do. Solve it like primitives. Let it out, let it go. I raise my arms. “Don’t break anything.”
“Cops call this the Instrument of Attitude Adjustment.”
“I’m sure I could use an attitude adjustment,” I say.
She swings the keys in her hand again, grips the kubotan, her thumb tight on the bright pink ridges. “Are you getting off on this?” I keep my arms up. I can feel the blood draining down, my fingers tingling.
“Not yet.”
“I don’t know if I should be doing this,” she says, almost to herself. Then she plants her right foot and stabs me in the solar plexus. The pain is deafening, immediate, and total. I watch my knees hit the gravel and then the ground come up to meet my face, but I feel only the fist that seems to be reaching under my ribs.
I hear my name, I feel myself being slowly shaken, but I can’t catch any air. My head is filled with a cosmic wa-wa-wa-wa.
“Breathe,” I hear her say. I vaguely feel her hand rubbing my chest. “Breathe, Friend.”
Which I can’t do yet, but I vow—if she hasn’t killed me—to do better. I vow to do everything better. To clean myself up. To clean up my mind. To help Livorno. To help Laham. To honor my mother and father. To speak from the heart. To be grateful. To be loving toward this girl. Maybe even to love her. As soon as I can breathe.
20
WHEN I ARRIVE AT work on Monday morning I find Livorno hunched over his keyboard, pecking slowly. He has the cu
rtains pulled, and the ghostly light of the screen ages him enormously. So much of his youth is in being orange. He doesn’t notice me, and I take a moment to watch him. He looks wistful, an emotion I’ve never seen in him. Wistfulness is backwards-looking, and this man shoots into the future like a rocket. He’s staked his life on the future, and it never comes. That’s the trick with the future. I don’t know if this is tragic or existentially brilliant. He’s never quite with us in the present, which is bad, but then again he never wakes up in a panic, wondering who the hell he is. Hopefully.
“Good morning,” I say.
He jumps, smooths his hair. “Have you seen the calendar? Only fifty-eight days until the contest.”
That’s sooner than I thought, but I do the math in my head—he’s right about the dates. The test has been floating out in front of us for so long it’s hard to imagine it actually arriving.
“Dr. Bassett’s great,” I say. “He’s gotten over all his roadblocks.”
I mean this as a joke (somewhat), but Livorno just shakes his head. “The theory is so softheaded it’s hard to use. We launched a model of feedbacks this morning, which you’ll have to test out. Complete nonsense. Someday someone will have to learn to apply Darwinist inferences to human attraction. Did you know that even in cultures that prefer heavy women, such as Muslims like Laham, the ideal ratio of waist to hip is point eight? This is the perfect number for indicating fertility.”
“You’re not going to ask for my mother’s college measurements, are you?”
“Oh?” he says, looking embarrassed but unsure. “Do you think it’s important?”
frnd1: i’ve decided to really give rachel and me a chance
drbas: a chance to do what?
frnd1: to give us a chance = to invest energy and time in a relationship in hopes it will work out
Ugh. What a depressing definition.
drbas: how did you come to this decision?
frnd1: i had an epiphany
drbas: the problem with epiphanies is the next day they feel like they happened to someone else. inspiration will get you nowhere in life
A Working Theory of Love Page 24
