by Douglas Lain
After that, after the first computer, Dad took me to see the Enola Gay. He had our visit all mapped out in advance. He wanted me to see ENIAC at the American History Museum and then he wanted me to see the Enola Gay at the Air and Space Museum.
We hurried down Madison Drive, stopping only briefly for a firecracker popsicle which Dad didn’t even let me finish. When we got to the second Smithsonian I had to toss what was left into the metal trashcan by the glass doors at the entrance.
That’s all I remember, by the way. I remember Kermit the Frog, the ENIAC display, a red, white, and blue popsicle tossed in the garbage and that’s it. I don’t remember if we stopped at the Lincoln Memorial. I probably at least glanced at the Washington Monument, which is visible from where we were on Jefferson, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is lost ice cream and a lesson, the big lesson, from Dad.
What Dad wanted me to understand was that just because people could calculate faster with a computer, that didn’t make them smarter. He told me that, while the government had designed the first computer to calculate how and where to fire conventional artillery, by the time the device was fully constructed and operational, a new project was underway. Dad wanted me to know that the world’s first computer was used to help create the atom bomb.
As we looked up at the B-29 propeller plane, at its aluminum shine, and the refurbished propellers, Dad told me about Hiroshima. He told me that the atom bomb was so strong that the people hit by its blasts were burned into ash. He told me about skin peeling off babies and the way the heat would burn people’s clothing into their skin. He told me that the bomb was a terrible, horrible monster.
“And the world’s first computer helped make it possible. It helped kill thousands and thousands of people; thousands of mothers, thousands of little boys and girls.”
Dad wanted me to see the two machines. To see the atom bomb and the computer as having arrived at the same time. He wanted me to understand that a race had started after World War II, after ENIAC was built.
The lesson, according to Dad, was this: ENIAC wasn’t smart enough. ENIAC was a failure. Humanity was involved in a perpetual war between intelligence and idiocy. There was a race between the power of calculation, the power of reason, and the raw and brutal power of human stupidity.
“That’s what I do,” Dad told me. “I help the computers. I help make the computers smarter, and if I work hard enough, if I work fast enough, the computers will win.”
“They will?” I asked.
“One day the computers will be so smart, so fast, that they’ll win. One day the machines will get ahead of us, they’ll be smarter than we are dumb, and then we will be free.”
So anyhow, that’s the story I told Kufo. That was the best explanation I had for why I dropped out. That story, along with what we all knew; what you could read about on Facebook and see on YouTube, all that stuff about European nationalism, about China and Russia and the President of the United States. All that was why.
Kufo said my Dad didn’t make any sense because the atom bomb and the computer worked together.
“If ENIAC had worked better, if it had been a smarter or faster computer, well then the bomb would only have arrived sooner. Or, if ENIAC had been really good, the first atom bomb would have been more powerful and more people would have died,” she said.
“I know, right? And that’s why I quit school. I finally realized that the computers weren’t going to save us.”
Dad at the Bus Stop
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/13/17 (CONTINUED)
10:14 PM
After my money match, I doubled up on playing hooky. I got good and drunk and stopped answering Mom’s text messages, lost a bunch of casual Bash games, and ended up watching The Holy Mountain three times as we had the movie playing on a loop. The next morning I woke up around six and my head was pounding. I was covered in sweat, had a sick taste in my mouth, and my skin was stuck to the vinyl cushions. Still half-drunk, I watched The Magus wipe makeup off the faces of his two blonde acolytes before finding my shoes and heading for home.
On my way to the number 54 bus stop I tried to come up with something plausible to say to Mom but didn’t come up with anything before I had to stop to vomit. As luck would have it, there was a planter of half-dead purple cabbage on the corner of 8th and Kelly and my stomach was mostly empty.
When I was finished, standing up again and wiping my mouth with my sleeve, I spotted Dad. He was across the street from me at the transit center, pacing back and forth and listening to his earbuds. He hadn’t noticed the mess I’d made in the Brassica oleracea; maybe hadn’t even noticed me yet.
Dad was standing on the curb, next to but not under the bus shelter, squinting into the drizzle.
Staying the night at Ted’s meant that I was going to have to come clean about dropping out. I was about to face the consequences of my delinquency, but I hadn’t expected to have to explain myself so soon.
It was an overcast morning, raining a little, and I just froze in place and let the wind and rain blow into my face and into my eyes and watched as Dad used the sleeve of his sports jacket to wipe his brow.
He had to be waiting for me, but he didn’t respond when I waved. He didn’t move or react when I called his name. I crossed 8th, my head hanging in a show of shame, but when I stepped up next to him he still didn’t react. I had to wave again, right in front of his face, to get a grunt of recognition.
He had earbuds in. He didn’t really see me because he was too busy listening to Bucky.
I think I said something like, “You caught me. Are you going to tell Mom?”
Dad didn’t really hear me.
“Hey, Matthew. Watch this,” he said. Then he leaned over, put his hands down on the concrete curb, and did a handstand. With one earbud in and one out, the left earbud just sort of dangling down into the gutter, he shuffled sideways, moving his right hand over a bit. He was trying to walk on his hands but only managed to move the one hand before toppling into the street.
When Dad stood up he had a grease stain on his back. His blue blazer was ruined, but he didn’t pause. He just stuffed both earbuds in, took a breath, and then tried again. He did another handstand, this time in the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, and started walking.
“Follow me,” he said. “We’re on a schedule.” With both earbuds in there wasn’t any trouble.
Dad was still walking on his hands when the number 82 bus pulled up right in front of him. The doors opened and Dad did a backflip onto the bus just as the doors opened.
“What’s the fare?” he asked.
“Two dollars and fifty cents,” the driver told him. The bus driver didn’t notice Dad’s stunt but when Dad didn’t have any change he grew impatient and finally looked over in our direction.
I paid both of our fares and followed Dad to the back of the bus. When we sat down I started in, trying to explain why I’d dropped out. It’s odd looking back on it. Why didn’t I ask him about his stunt? Why wasn’t I curious?
Guess I’m some kind of egomaniac or something.
I told him about how fucked up I was. How fucked up he’d made me with his history of computers and the Cold War. I told him that I was an apostate. I’d given up on his religion of progress and reason and that was why I’d dropped out. I didn’t believe in this life that he’d given me. I couldn’t find any motivation to strive after a little box with a family in it, on some street somewhere; a life I didn’t want and would never, ever, get. I told him that there was no chance for me. There was no future for me.
And, here’s the really infuriating thing, Dad agreed with me. Not right away, of course. He didn’t even listen to me actually. It took him awhile to take the earbuds out. We were halfway home before he was really listening to me, and I had to tell him the whole thing again.
I really laid into him. I blamed him for everything. I told him that his stupid computers weren’t going to save us; told him that abando
ning his family didn’t make him a hero but was super shitty. I told him that he was a terrible Dad, and he nodded.
“Yep,” Dad said.
He kept smiling no matter what I said. Like I said, we were in the back of the bus, in the middle of the last row of seats, with this older white guy in a red baseball cap on one side of us. He looked like the kind of guy who might spend his weekends teaching his grandkids to golf on the front lawn of a retirement center. On the right was another teenager like me. There was a girl with neon yellow hair, or maybe with green hair. I imagine she was wearing cat-eye glasses, but who knows.
These two were listening to me more closely than he was. When I explained that I’d been pretending to go to school for over a month, the girl with neon hair shut her mouth and glanced in my direction. It was something like an emotion I think, but there was nothing from Dad. Just this permanent smile.
“You’re probably right,” Dad told me. “You probably don’t have a future. You’re probably fucked, but we haven’t given up yet. There is still hope and all that sort of thing, right? Every man to his post, etcetera etcetera …”
Dad and I weren’t talking about the same thing. That is, I was talking about something I didn’t really know but only felt, and Dad was talking about facts. I said I didn’t think I could ever get that life in the suburbs, the wife and the kids and the picket fence or whatever. Dad thought I didn’t have much of a chance of living at all.
“I’ve told you about the dead hand, haven’t I?” Dad asked.
“The what?”
“The Russians, they’ve got a dead hand.”
The old man golfer looked in our direction, at Dad. He was sitting really close to Dad and stared right at him while Dad explained this doomsday device called the Dead Hand and how the Russians set it up under the code name Signal back in the 60s.
“You know, like in that Kubrick movie,” he said, and I had to ask which one.
“Doctor Strangelove,” the old man said.
The Dead Hand system was still running. It was set so that if there was a nuclear explosion anywhere in the former Soviet Union then intercontinental missiles would be launched at the United States.
“Even if there isn’t a nuclear explosion, actually,” Dad said. “Even if their computer just thinks there’s an explosion or thinks there might be an explosion.”
From my point of view, Dad was changing the subject. It was like the time he told me about dead bees on my birthday, or the time we went to see a Pixar movie and he secretly recorded it on his phone until an usher caught him and we were both asked to leave. I guess he’d been recording the movie for his AI. For Bucky, or a prototype of Bucky.
But Dad wasn’t changing the subject at all, and he told me that, officially, he was a dropout too. He told me he was out in the cold.
“At first we thought we’d just slip him some quetiapine but the simulations indicated that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be enough. Killing him in his sleep wouldn’t be enough,” Dad said.
“Killing who?” the girl with neon hair asked.
“What’s quetiapine?” the old man in the baseball hat asked.
Dad sort of woke up at that point. He looked back and forth at the other two passengers, leaned around the old man and looked out the window, and it was as if he was just realizing where he was. Like he’d forgotten that he was on a public bus. Maybe he’d forgotten what city he was in.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the old man. “But who are you again?”
“Uh, what?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Ted. Ted Phillips.”
Dad turned toward the girl and she sort of flinched at the sight of his smile. “Hiya!” Dad said.
“Hi,” she said.
“What is quet—” the old man tried again, but Dad cut him off.
“Do you really think,” Dad said, “that’s a line of inquiry you want to continue exploring?”
“Some kind of drug maybe,” the girl said.
Dad leaned across the old man and pulled the yellow cord. “We’re getting off here.”
“But this isn’t our stop,” I said. We weren’t even inside the city limits yet.
“Yes it is.”
Dad popped an earbud in as we walked to the exit, and then, when we were out on the sidewalk and inhaling exhaust fumes, as the bus pulled away, he popped the other earbud in place.
“We’re walking home from here,” he said.
And we did. For two hours we walked down Powell from 168th, past two Plaid Pantries, a 7-Eleven, a pawn shop, and even a hookah club without exchanging a single word. Dad kept his earbuds in and his phone out. It was just like old times.
High School as Ambermill
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, MESSENGER LOG, 04/15/17
8:32 AM
I decided to go to school today to see who was still there. Found the parking lot was empty except for a Subaru Outback and one of those egg-shaped security robots. I think Bucky has commandeered all of them, all the K5 security bots. Anyhow, I watched the egg in the parking lot for a while as it rolled back and forth in a rectangular pattern. I even took a picture of it on my phone.
8:33 AM
Checking the GameCube Economy FB page I see Bucky wants to turn my high school into Ambermill from WoW.
8:35 AM
WoW stands for World of Warcraft. Have you ever played that game?
8:48 AM
I followed a flying drone that was circling the school for a while, watched it hover around the double-arched windows on the south side and then float up to the roof. It crossed over to where some guy in a chroma key suit was waiting. He was sitting under the bell at the front of the building. His legs, clad in green spandex, were dangling in front of the clock and when the drone got to him it hovered in place, probably pausing for a quick wireless data transfer from the kid’s augmented reality goggles.
The new gamers are everywhere, all of them helping to set up the GameCube economy.
8:55 AM
Inside the halls are empty and the classroom doors are locked.
Well, the halls are empty except for a few drones flying around and one hall monitor named Bobby Rayburn. I took Latin class with Bobby last year. He’s the kind of guy who volunteers to be a hall monitor and who tells you stories about what he did at band camp and what he’s recently watched on YouTube. He’s a big fan of Sargon of Akkad.
8:57 AM
I used to think that if there was going to be a school shooting at Jefferson that Bobby would be the shooter.
I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
9:12 AM
I’m in the computer lab now. They opened it up for us.
At first, I thought Bobby was going to be no help at all. He wanted me to explain why all the classroom doors were locked. He wanted to know where everybody was. He seemed to be on the verge of tears.
He was all, “Where is everybody? Are they late or truant?”
He was really upset because the second bell was about to ring and he hadn’t sent anyone to the office or collected a single late pass.
“It’s not a holiday. Is it? Am I even supposed to be here?”
I told him that I didn’t know. Told him that I’d dropped out and that I don’t have to know anything anymore, but that didn’t stop him from asking me more questions that I couldn’t answer. He asked me if he could go home, like I was in charge.
I took pity on him and walked with him to the office.
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
“It’s the rapture,” I told him. “Finally happened after all.”
Bobby looked at me like he believed it.
9:15 AM
The teachers were having a meeting in there and didn’t want us around. Principal Dendoss looked really upset. Her wrinkle-free, lime-green polyester pantsuit was, somehow, wrinkled. Apparently almost no students showed up yesterday either. Worse, it was pretty much the same story throughout the whole district.
My fifth-period biology teacher, Mr. Craig, asked what the district was going to do about it, but Ms. Dendoss didn’t answer. She just told Mr. Craig to shut up, to shut his trap. Then she told Bobby and me that we weren’t supposed to be there. They were having a private meeting. Students should be in class, not in the office. Bobby apologized but he stayed where he was. He still looked like he was going to cry. Standing there in his sweater vest, rubbing his acne-covered chin like he’d just gotten punched, he managed to stand his ground.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Dendoss,” he said, “I’m sorry, but the door to my class is locked. Where am I supposed to go? Is school canceled?”
“Yeah, Kelly,” Mr. Craig said. “Is school canceled? Where are we supposed to go?”
Ms. Dendoss didn’t answer but scowled at both of them, and then lifted the piece of paper she was holding over her head.
“I have a statement from the district, Todd, but I can’t read it in front of students.”
“Come on, Kelly,” Mr. Craig said. But Ms. Dendoss shook her head no, and then said it again.
“This is a private meeting,” she said. “Please leave.”
“Where? Where am I supposed to go?” Bobby asked. His voice was whiny, but defiant too.
“He has a point,” I said.
“Go home,” Ms. Dendoss decided.
Bobby wouldn’t budge. He didn’t want to go home because he’d have to try to explain his early return to his mom and because he didn’t want to be marked down as truant. He gave both reasons. Ms. Dendoss and Bobby went back and forth on the truancy question for awhile, and finally she asked him where he did want to go. When he said he didn’t know, that he wanted to go to social studies but the door was locked, she looked like she was going to kill him.
“Open up the computer lab,” I said. “We can hang out there until you guys figure it out.”
