hlivo: i apologize
drbas: don’t think about it
hlivo: so do you understand the turing test?
drbas: a judge talks with two different interlocutors, one is another person, one is a computer
hlivo: yes. and the judge tries to determine which one is human
drbas: which one?
hlivo: which interlocutor
drbas: i thought persons are always human
hlivo: yes! but the judge doesn’t know which interlocutor is the computer and which the person
drbas: people and computers don’t look the same
hlivo: the judge can’t see them. that’s why they im
drbas: im?
hlivo: im = instant messaging. it’s what you and I do right now
drbas: you mean “are doing”
hlivo: that’s right. thank you for correcting me. english is not my native tongue
drbas: we’re doing im right now
hlivo: correct
drbas: got it
hlivo: dr bassett, i want you to be in the turing test. i want you to be the person who tries to convince the judge that you’re human
drbas: when is it?
hlivo: in a few weeks
drbas: is it really important to you, henry?
hlivo: oh, of the utmost importance. it means my reputation. my legacy. everything i’ve worked for—it means my very career
drbas: then i can do that for you
“Wow,” I say.
“He corrected my English.”
“He corrected his English,” Jenn says.
“I invited him to the test and he agreed,” Livorno says.
“He thinks he’s human,” Jenn says.
“He understands time,” he says.
“He understands importance,” she says.
“We talked for hours,” Livorno says. “What a wealth of stories he has!”
“Naturally,” I say, but I feel churlish. “I put them there.”
“Of course.” Henry overflows with sympathy. “Of course you have. However, we do not have time to celebrate. We have three weeks before the contest. Three weeks to put the finishing touch on Dr. Bassett.”
“What do we mean by finishing touch?”
“We have an interesting addition,” he says. “Nothing disruptive.”
• • •
I BIDE MY TIME for the rest of the afternoon, but Jenn has basically moved into Livorno’s office. She reclines in the Wassily chairs and types on her laptop. If I listen, which I often do, the conversation is thick with code and allusion. And more troubling—silence.
At six, I hear Jenn close her computer and say she’s calling it a day. I grab my satchel and step out into the lobby to catch her.
“Walk you to your car?” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “It’s a dangerous neighborhood,” she says.
We walk together through Laham’s office. He’s slouched over his keyboard, typing madly, four open cans of Bawls next to his monitor. We step past his monstera plant and into the gravel parking lot. The rains haven’t come yet; the creek bed is dry.
“Are you proposing another ‘drink’?” she asks.
“What’s the plan with Dr. Bassett?”
“You’ll have to ask Henry. It’s his idea.”
“He said ‘our idea.’ That includes you.”
“He’s the god. I’m just a sounding board.”
“Does Henry know you’re fucking Toler? He might be interested in your pillow talk at the end of the day.”
Jenn’s face turns sour. “I’m just here to help. Without me, Henry’s left with you.”
“Me? I am this project. That’s my father in there.”
She looks towards the back door, but it’s closed. “Adam is going to win this. I worry about how Henry will take it. He’s very proud, and he should be. None of what we’re doing would be possible without innovations he made a long time ago. But that was a long time ago.”
“Toler doesn’t have Henry’s brains.”
“Neither does Henry—anymore.” She sounds truly sad about this development. “You know Adam has the gut. It was part of the deal for the funding.”
Jesus Christ. He played us as rubes. He bought the poison and the antidote. A man of his word.
“I know you’re chatting with Dr. Bassett.”
“That’s part of my job.”
“No—I know you come by and talk about your personal problems.”
She puts her tongue in her bottom lip and considers this. She must think I’ve been reading the transcripts, though I actually can’t find them. “Well.” She straightens. “Then you know more about me now than you ever did.”
“I’m going to tell Henry.”
“You’ll just make him unhappy.”
“Fine,” I say. “Maybe I’ll tell Toler’s wife.”
Her expression goes from surprise to hardness. “Go ahead,” she says. “But it’s kind of a beta male move.”
• • •
LIVORNO EMERGES FROM THE back door, dressed head to toe in Lycra running gear. He’s perilously thin, a malnourished seal. We watch Jenn drive away.
“You will be accompanying me on my jog,” he says.
In Livorno’s neighborhood in Los Altos Hills, we shuffle. Slowly, almost penitently. Livorno claims he’s keeping the pace down for me.
“I’m not sure she can be trusted,” I say.
“Who trusts her?” he says, winded.
“You know she’s Toler’s mistress.”
Livorno winces. “She’s a genuine expert. She’ll just be with us until things blow over.”
So Livorno knows. Of course he does. “Blow over with the wife?”
He shakes his head. “Adam has always been this way.”
“The marriage counselor to millions.”
“He never claimed to be more than a businessman.”
We’re circling the hobbit cliffs of Livorno’s neighborhood, our feet padding quietly in the dirt. I’m turned around, and keep expecting to come back to the Subaru, which I parked in front of his glassy California home. His neighbors’ houses are Georgian or Italianate, always steroidal. There are no holes in the illusions. The stonework is weathered, the landscaping expansive. Nothing hints these manors haven’t been handed down since the time of the House of Hanover, that seventy-five years ago this was a barren hilltop covered in sheep dung.
“What are you two cooking up for Dr. Bassett?”
“You won’t like it.”
“I have no doubt of that.”
“Jenn believes, and I’m inclined to agree with her, that with Adam bearing down on us we have to be bold. We think that in keeping with this system we’ve chosen, Dr. Bassett should have a processor that simulates the sexual nature.”
Next to us is a guardrail and I count the posts: one, five, ten.
“A processor,” I say.
“A small black box. It will remain in his pants, so to speak. I admit this is unconventional, but systems with emergent behaviors often have hidden symbioses. It’s a little like the Delaware eating ash with their corn for niacin.”
The Delaware? This is ridiculous. “The program is already terrific.”
“‘Terrific’ is not a quantitative measurement. We need Dr. Bassett to win against human opponents thirty percent of the time.”
“And this black box is the key.”
“You don’t deny that our sexual nature is a fundamental part of who we are. From an evolutionary point of view it’s our very essence, the seed around which the rest of us—mind, body, gut—is built. What is a virus but
the ability to reproduce itself?”
“I wouldn’t say a virus has a sexual nature.”
“The innovation may go nowhere. But we have to ask ourselves if we have done everything we can to increase his sense of being in the world.”
“With Lust and his small black box, he’ll be an old horndog.”
Livorno shudders. “You’re thinking much too literally.”
We turn left, heading up a hill from Concepcion. I can finally see the Subaru. Livorno plods ahead like a determined wind-up toy, his swinging hips scrawny in the Lycra. His breath is shallow, but he’s not sweating. Little beads of what appears to be mineral oil collect along his hairline. As always he’s odorless.
“How are you feeling?” he calls over his shoulder.
“Like a desecrator of graves.”
“I mean your knees,” Livorno says. “I’ve seen too many people train improperly and get an injury.” That seems to be the end of the conversation.
We do a strange funky chicken walk to loosen our legs as we pass under Livorno’s carport—a raked roof mounted on four metal poles—to his side door. What we called in Arkansas the back door. A large cross-stitch—BACKDOOR FRIENDS ARE BEST—often greeted you in the kitchen. Lewd jokes aside, I have to agree. In all my Left Coast years, I’ve had one friend drop by.
Livorno leads me through his time-machine kitchen, and into a living room as big and bare as a racquetball court. In the middle, on a square of rough-cut institutional carpet, sits a large veneer desk that I’ve seen at Costco. A full twenty feet away stands a matching bookcase, mostly empty, that he hasn’t bothered to square with the wall. There appears to be a photograph on the bookshelf, but if so it’s the only one in the entire room.
“When did you move in?” I ask.
“I built this house in 1962.”
His shoulders rise rapidly as he catches his breath, peering into his computer. He clicks his mouse several times and prints out a sheet that reads Marathon Training Plan for 30 to 40 year olds.
“This is the one I use,” he says, panting. He looks as if he’s waiting for me to doubt him.
“What was your father like, Henry?” The floor has a dead bounce to it. I pace around the perimeter, looking out the picture windows, then pause by the bookcase, my real goal. I want to see if the photograph reveals something about this man’s sexual nature, but it’s a bright professional shot—not new—of Livorno and Stephen Hawking. They appear to be at a conference.
“My father was a physics teacher,” he says. “Tremendously ambitious and intelligent. He played viola—was a great admirer of modern music. Stravinsky. Schoenberg.”
“You got your scientific bent from him?”
“Perhaps,” he says. “I’ve never thought about it.” He reaches out to shake my hand. “I’m sorry I can’t invite you to dinner tonight, but I have plans. No more sparring with Jenn?”
“I promise.” I leave through the side door, heading out to the Subaru. The car is invisible from the house, thanks to a bush the size of a small whale, and I sit there for half an hour, listening to the radio. I’m waiting for Jenn’s Volkswagen to roll up, but that’s me understanding nothing about the situation. Livorno has no plans. He’s probably doing something embarrassingly normal, settling into a romantic serial, cracking a Pedialyte.
• • •
I ARRIVE AT RAJ’S CONDO early in the morning. He lets me in, dressed like a Princeton undergrad of yesteryear—light slacks, boat shoes, a sweater tied in a knot at his neck. He leads me into the kitchen, pours a cup of coffee from his percolator. He yawns, indulging in a long languorous stretch, as if waking late on a Saturday after a rowing party, feeling refreshed and in comfortable possession of the world.
“What have you done this time?” he asks.
“It’s not me,” I say. I hold his gaze. I want to see his reaction. “Have you heard about the fires in San Francisco?”
He tilts his head to the right without blinking. A poker player could read these gestures as tells or not, but I have no idea if they mean anything.
“No,” he says. “Something bad?”
“A couple of sex stores have been burned down.”
“Oh?”
“Pleasures and Leathers. Play Date.”
He blows on his coffee and sips. “Hopefully, they were insured.”
“There were apartments above both stores, Raj. Someone could have been killed.”
“Someone can always be killed.” He flashes a grin at me. “Was anyone killed?”
“No,” I say.
“I find this potential for danger—this constant potential for danger—to be a red herring.”
“I’m just here to ask if you can keep Rachel away from Trevor.”
“That’s actually asking a lot,” he says. “You have time for a drive?”
Again, no. “Sure.”
Raj’s gentility becomes absurd behind the wheel of the Porsche. He looks like the villain from a movie for teenagers, rich but with a wooden heart. Raj’s heart isn’t wooden, though—it’s invisible. I don’t know what’s going on in there. I just know we’re headed to Bolinas. He pounds the gas, and the Porsche whirrs and whines up the mountain. We feel close to the engine’s power, as if lashed to a rocket. Raj take the turns sharp, counting on the car to grip like a tarantula. He laughs at the animal fun of Gs, laughs too at the fact that I’m plainly scared. The rock walls swipe at us; then we seem to be flying through the air, nothing under us but a whispery plummet into the ocean.
“I can never find this place,” I say, shouting over the engine.
“That’s how they like it,” he says.
“Seems futile in the age of Google Maps.”
“True,” he says. “They might have to change tactics. My mother and father actually lived there in the late sixties. They were members of the Bolinas Border Patrol—that’s the group that tears down the highway signs so people can’t find the town. They were trying to protect the little bohemian life that was springing up. Poets and painters, and a lot less drugs than San Francisco. They met at Esalen. Big hippies. I’ll show you some pictures sometime.”
My stomach turns over in the next sharp curve. “I bet you wish they bought real estate.”
“That’s what I’m getting to. They wanted to protect Bolinas, but not bad enough. They weren’t willing to do what was really necessary.”
We reach some peak spot, and then take off down a road that cuts wildly through the mountains, as if drawn by a surveyor with the shakes. I suddenly feel what Erin must have felt that time in Spain—that I have no control, that the person behind the wheel, who I normally trust, is unknown to me, has been possessed by some demon. It’s an odd opportunity to inhabit her experience, but I take it, keeping quiet, holding myself through my fear. We bottom out on Highway 1 and zoom up the road, past the little white wooden elementary school, and into Bolinas proper.
“So we ended up with the worst of all worlds,” Raj shouts over the top of the car, as we’re getting out. “Marin hypocrites.”
A middle-aged woman holding her sandals in her hand looks at us sharply.
“Bobo zombies,” Raj says, paying no attention to her.
“Are you going to lock the car?” I ask.
“The stealing these people have done”—he points all around us—“was finished long ago.”
We walk, passing the little seaside houses, the pub, the diner, the surf shop, the art galleries. I can see how his parents’ strategy wouldn’t work. If you build a beautiful, hip place—an exclusive place—you’re basically an unwitting resort developer. Artists are always the Johnny Appleseeds of gentrification. But what were his parents supposed to do differently? Cut down all the trees for an amusement park? Lure in a HoJo’s?
On the beach, a golden retriever launches airborne, snatching a Frisbee from the sky. Raj claps his hands. “Hella good.”
“It’s beautiful here,” I say, but he ignores me, holding his arms out into the Pacific wind.
“We’re spiritual creatures,” he says. “There’s no denying it. And the vacuum in our souls—the vacuum that ninety-nine percent of people deny is even there—just sucks out all the resources for life. Do you think anyone buys material goods out of a sense of fullness? Do you think that ever happens in someone’s mind? ‘I’m so happy with my marriage I’m going to buy my wife some jewelry.’ No. They think, ‘We’re in such a funk—I’m so bored—I’m going to buy my wife some jewelry and hope like hell it wakes us both up. Maybe if she loves the diamonds some of that love will be misdirected at me.’”
“That’s not true. You can buy someone a gift out of love or happiness. Generosity.”
“Think about the few times you’ve bought something like that. There wasn’t a hefty dose of desperation in the act?”
“I did it in my marriage,” I say. “Which was one long dose of desperation.”
“There really aren’t that many persons anymore. There are organisms. Persons need fulfillment; organisms need stimulation. You can’t sell a person anything—you can only sell things to an organism.”
“So we need stimulation—why not let us have stimulation?”
He takes his time answering this question. He shuffles in the sand, looks up at the sun.
“It’s like Bolinas in the seventies,” he says. “Even if you and I can’t exactly recognize it, Trevor knows it’s a last stand.”
“A last stand he’s going to lose.”
Raj watches something in the distance. I try to follow his gaze but there’s nothing in particular to see, just sun on water. “He doesn’t think so. He thinks he has to do everything in his power to fight back.”
“Everything?”
He looks at me, then looks away, shrugging. “I don’t know if he could even answer that question. You tear down a few signs and hope that works. If it doesn’t you go on to Plan B. If Plan B doesn’t work you go on to Plan C.”
“Then Plan D and Plan E . . .”
“No. That’s the thing. Plan C is where they stop.”
A Working Theory of Love Page 27
