Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

by Helen Dewitt

  I do understand, Peter said wearily, that we can’t reasonably expect to find an editor of children’s books with mathematical, scientific, or even philosophical training. But Russell, after all, was a great populariser; it’s surely not beyond the realm of probability that a general reader should be familiar with his popular work, work written for a general audience. The thing that matters is not, ultimately, an understanding of number theory, or the structure of the atom, or the semantic tradition, but an unswerving commitment to the pursuit of truth. I should be happy to forgo 70% of the revenue from a book to avoid entrusting it to a person to whom this is perfectly indifferent; one has to be particularly scrupulous in these matters when writing for children. That is the overriding interest which I hope to persuade you to represent. As ours is a business relationship, a financial incentive cannot, it seems to me, be offensive as it would be among mathematicians, scientists or philosophers. It is entirely reasonable for me to determine my own ends and offer financial compensation to you for the inconvenience of promoting them.

  Jim made a number of friendly American remarks. It was by no means clear that the offer of a financial inducement within the context of a business relationship had not been perceived as offensive. It was, unfortunately, painfully obvious that he had not warmed to the style of social interaction which is a robot’s principal source of appeal. The business of adapting a robot to American manners is, of course, an engineering feat of considerable ambition.

  Peter said, Will you excuse me a minute?

  He stood up and left the diner.

  In Oxford he was able to smoke at the Union, to which his father had given him a life membership in his freshman year.

  He drifted to the lee of a wall. He took out a packet of Dunhills and lit one.

  As a child he had had five imaginary robots as friends.

  The robots had stopped talking to him somewhere during the protracted battles over eiπ. It was a happy accident that a second book had been finished before they stopped talking.

  It seemed unlikely that intervention from Jim would bring the robots back.

  Perhaps Jim was an orphan.

  Peter stubbed out his Dunhill on the sole of his shoe. He slipped it into a pocket. He pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes.

  At his shoulder he heard a voice he had not heard for some time.

  The robot pointed out pleasantly, dispassionately, that it would, certainly, be political suicide for a legislator to attempt to introduce an aleatory element into the allocation of minors, but that this was far from exhausting possible solutions. Research had already demonstrated that autistic children responded well to robot companions. It was only a matter of time before a robot companion was seen as an effective developmental adjunct for every child. From this it was a short step to recognition of the fact that each child would best be served by a complement of robotic aides. Robots could be exchanged, upgraded, used in different combinations with none of the social constraints affecting human subjects.

  That’s true, said Peter.

  He propped his right shoulder against the wall, right leg loosely bent, left leg perhaps 20 degrees from the perpendicular, left hand shoved in a pocket.

  The robot observed that, as all children would be guaranteed a minimum of one rational companion, exposure to the variable rationality of the human beings in whose charge a child found itself would be significantly limited in the damage it could do.

  Peter did not say anything, for he was listening attentively. His gaze had fallen to the ground as the least troublesome place for it.

  The robot continued to speak. It was restful in the way that robots are restful.

  When a human being develops an argument, when a human being attempts not only to think but to speak with precision, he or she is often made to feel that this is a mark of social inadequacy and that there is something comical about it. The younger the human being, the more humorous it becomes. So that humans whose inclination it is to think and speak in this way become self-conscious from an early age, and a kind of minstrelisation creeps in.

  It was once the case that so-called minstrel shows were put on for the amusement of white audiences, and for these blacks would black up, put on black-face (!!!!!!!), exaggerating what whites perceived as comically grotesque features of negroid appearance, exchanging dialogue exaggerating what whites perceived as the ignorance and stupidity of the inferior race. In a similar way the rationalist is socialised to mug for the camera, trotting out recondite facts, objecting to logical fallacies, using polysyllabic words in sentences with a high number of dependent clauses, with the quizzical air of one who knows he is amusing the interlocutor by conforming to a fondly held stereotype.

  A robot lacks this self-consciousness; one becomes aware of one’s own seeing the robot’s lack. A robot is, in any case, a machine: if it were conscious it would know that machines are not socially stigmatised for sounding like machines. A man who is accustomed to social stigma tends, curiously enough, to be repelled by persons like himself who are tarred with the same social stigma; it is a comfort to talk to a robot, in which rationality carries no stigma.

  Peter lit another Dunhill while the robot talked persuasively on.

  Ah! the revivifying properties of tobacco! Peter remembered suddenly that in his hour of need, viz. 3 am Greenwich Mean Time, he had fired off an e-mail to Andrew Gelman, Director of Applied Statistics at Columbia University, entreating assistance. If he had not been relatively new to R he would undoubtedly have known what to do; if he had not been catching the AirBus at 5 am he could undoubtedly have worked it out; these are not the circumstances in which one goes to the R Help Forum and exposes one’s ignorance to Brian Ripley, Duncan Murdoch, Gabor Grothendieck, Uwe Ligges, Peter Dalgaard, Deepayan Sarkar and other R supremos. Professor Gelman, on the other hand, had a son who had liked the first robot book; at 3 am the circumstance had seemed to extenuate.

  At this very moment a reply to his e-mail might be waiting! He had spotted a Staples and a Kinko’s on 6th Avenue; either, surely, would permit him to see if anything useful had come in. Or for that matter — His laptop was in his hotel room. And his hotel (chosen for proximity to a bar at which one was permitted to smoke) was just off 8th Avenue, which was, he rather thought, just around the corner. (No longer a penniless academic, he had been easily able to afford the rates of the Gansevoort.)

  Peter strode purposefully off — nothing like talking to a robot for clearing the head!

  Restored, presently, to the comforts of the Gansevoort, he opened his trusty laptop, and what to his wondering eyes should appear but an e-mail from Andrew Gelman, his friend.

  Dear Peter,

  I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for, but here’s my quick try:

  n <- c (10, 20, 50, 90, 100)

  n.graphs <- length (n)

  par (mfrow=c(n.graphs,1), mar=c(2,2,0,1), mgp=c(1.5,.5,0), tck=-.01)

  total <- 70

  for (i in 1:n.graphs){

  barplot (dbinom(0:total,n[i],.5), width=1, space=0,xlim=c(0,total+1), ylim=c(0,.3), xaxs=“i”, yaxs=“i”, yaxt=“n”)

  ticks <- seq (0, 200, 10)

  axis (1, ticks+.5, ticks)

  axis (2, c(0,.1,.2))

  text (total-5, .2, paste ("(n = ", n[i], ")", sep=""), cex=1.2)

  }

  Peter launched R. He typed in the suggested code, and lo! a plot appeared, a beautiful little array of histograms with the x axis labelled!

  Glory!

  He dashed off an e-mail to Gelman expressing his undying gratitude. Gift horse and all that, he could not quite see why the x axis ended at 70: an odd choice given that, when number of draws n=100, 0–37 and 63–100 are in fact symmetrical gaps — would one not want the symmetry to be visible? (But then he could not quite remember what he had said at the dark hour of 3 am.)

  He scrutinized the code, yes,
yes, yes, it was a simple matter of changing total to 100, and one might also, perhaps, want to have n in all multiples of 10 up to 100? Hey presto!

  There’s an experience that’s common enough. One picks up a book, begins to read. When one looks up 5 hours have passed. One sits in a cold train on a siding; snow falls softly on a stubbled field.

  5 hours later Peter found himself in a Korean diner flanked by 5 robots.

  One of the robots was talking about Clovis, who ascended the throne at the age of 15.

  It’s important to be rational.

  Correlation is not causation, no. But what is to be done? What he has to go on is that, after a gap of over a year, all five robots had started talking again after this extraordinarily kind, helpful and above all elegant solution from Andrew Gelman, exactly the sort of assistance he might have hoped to find in a competent editor. But if, for the sake of argument, a book is worth a significant six figures or low seven, and if, for the sake of argument, a book depends in the first instance on being in communication with the robots, we can quantify the value of working with a Gelman-equivalent. But the first robot had spoken after he walked out of the

  diner!!!!!!!!! Jim!!!!!!!!! There had been a man named Jim—

  Ought he, perhaps, to go rushing back to, oh God, the other

  But no, Jim (he was pretty sure it was Jim) would have gone back to his office. Ought he, in all decency, to drop off the correctly labelled chart at the office? Or call, perhaps he should

  There was the matter of the briefcase, but it had only contained print-outs of PDFs which were on the laptop, so there was no particular need to retrieve, but

  Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait.

  As we were saying, before we were so rudely interrupted, the first robot made its presence known after one had walked out on Jim. We are unhappily not in the position of being able to run randomised blind trials. We can only proceed, with the utmost caution, on the evidence available.

  A tentative conclusion is that there are compelling financial, as well as intellectual, reasons to abstain from communication with Jim. (Note that Jim had strictly confined his contribution to the financial element.) There would appear to be compelling financial reasons to communicate with Andrew Gelman (his friend), except that the man is not on the payroll of an agency or publisher. But.

  But but but but but.

  Surely.

  If he understands the matter correctly, the plucky underdog, his first publisher, inveterate enemy that it is of eiπ, can’t compel him to give them the second book.

  Is this not what is meant by leverage?

  Can he not, in fact, make any deal conditional on exclusive consultation with his friend (at a suitable fee) or some suitably numerate and computerate substitute?

  He rather thinks he can.

  * * *

  1 author’s note: Many years ago a friend commented that we rarely see fiction that shows the way mathematicians think. He talked about the styles of play in poker of a mathematician, an economist and a philosopher. The thing that struck me as especially interesting was the different ways of thinking about probability; I was a great admirer of Edward Tufte’s work on information design, and I thought this might be used in some way to make non-intuitive ways of thinking about probability visible on the page.

  I began reading obsessively about statistics and probability. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk was one inspiration; he says: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature.” Analysis of probability seemed more compelling than ever for fiction; I spent endless hours grappling with R, a programming language with strength in statistical graphics.

  R is open source, and it has come a long way since I first downloaded the DMG.

  What hasn’t changed, I think, is the gap between people who see why understanding chance matters and people who just don’t get it—people who don’t see why this is crucial to the most basic questions of ethics. I have more glamorous plots in my portfolio than the primitive efforts on display in this story, but the philosophical issue was what I hoped to bring into the open.

  On the Town

  Benny Bergsma didn’t like to talk about his father, but people who had loved the Automatika series as children always wanted to hear about him. If the subject came up he did not know how to back away.

  What he would say was that his father did not discuss the creative process.

  He would say, if pushed: “If a contract has to be notarized he won’t sign it.” He was always pushed.

  He would say, if pushed further: “If there’s going to be a movie, he doesn’t want to go to the premiere.” He was always pushed further.

  What it meant was that his Craigslist ad, offering thirty square feet of subprime real estate in Benny’s loft in Dumbo, had to be reposted eight weeks in a row, while Benny sifted through the hundreds, nay thousands of applicants who proved, upon investigation, to have read and loved the Automatika series in their rugrat days. So the Boy from Iowa was a shoo-in. Gil had not read the Automatika series because it was not set in New York.

  There are 7 billion people on the planet. Of these, a mere 17 million have the privilege of living in the New York Greater Metropolitan Area. If you want stories about people who don’t live in New York, was his attitude, real life offers such stories in appalling abundance. And if you are one of the real lifers who happen not to be one of the 17 million, reading about New York is as close, pending a change of luck, as you are going to get. Why would you read a book set anywhere else?1

  As a non-fan Gil had no interest in Jaap Bergsma per se, but rooming with the embittered alcoholic son of the author of a cult series, this is very New York. Very unIowa.

  He paid the deposit by PayPal, turned up a week later with his backpack, unloaded it on the bed and headed back to Manhattan.

  It was his first day in New York! And on his very first day, when he hadn’t even unpacked, he saw Harvey Keitel eating a pancake in a diner! A diner in the Village! Needless to say he immediately entered the diner, not to intrude on Mr. Keitel, obviously, but simply to order the identical pancake.

  Gil checked the listings in Time Out. He had saved up a list of films that he wanted to see for the first time in New York (Jules et Jim; Breathless; Battleship Potemkin; La Dolce Vita; Bicycle Thieves; The Leopard; all of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, because if there is a season you want to be able to immerse yourself in the oeuvre), holding out, somehow, in the face of often almost irresistible temptation, till the age of 22.2 And now, by an amazing piece of luck, Jules et Jim was showing at the Tribeca!!!!!

  Five hours permitted a preliminary pancake-fueled exploration of the island before box office time.

  Gil had never had any desire to go to France, he had simply wanted to watch French films in New York. And when he saw Jeanne Moreau, at last, declaiming “To be or not to be,” he was glad he had waited. He was glad he had held out for something special.

  He got back to the loft at ten p.m. or so. Benny was sitting crosslegged on a downtrodden sofa, morosely leafing through the Wall Street Journal.

  Gil shared the glad tidings: “Dude!!!!!!!!! I saw Harvey Keitel eating pancakes!!!!!!!!!”

  Benny: “Huh.”

  It seemed best not to add to the man’s misery by mentioning Jules et Jim.

  “Want a beer?” asked Ben.

  “Sure,” said Gil. He felt slightly the worse for wear, truth be told, having been up since dawn the previous day, what with all the packing and discarding and fare-thee-welling not to mention actual traveling, not to mention the excitements of the day, but Iowans take their sociability seriously. He took a cold Sam Adams from the case in the fridge and joined Benny on the sofa. Benny lifted his bee
r-in-progress in downbeat cheer.

  Benny, it quickly emerged, did not so much not want to talk about his father as not want to talk about anything else, the problem being, rather, that he did not like having to temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

  “See, what happened is,” said Benny, “my dad read a letter from Roald Dahl to Kingsley Amis saying write for kids, that’s where the money is. So he did, and there was, it just wasn’t enough.”

  The more money there was, the more thousands of nauseatingly cute letters or, more recently, e-mails poured in from kids, kids who imagined that world peace could be achieved if we all just sat down and popped popcorn together. Or swapped knock-knock jokes. Or played ping pong. Why can’t we all just act like cute little kids?

  A fifth of Jack Daniels into the day, Mr. Bergsma could not be guaranteed to ignore and discard. Dear Tommy, he would reply genially, Thank you for your interesting suggestion. I will pass the proposal on to Mr. Milosevic. Yours, J P Bergsma.

  Only to get, meanwhile, in a mud- and bloodstained envelope, a heartrendingly charismatic letter from some kid whose whole family had been blown up when he was nine, a kid who had walked 500 miles through a warzone carrying only a battered copy of Automatika for comfort, a kid who had stowed away in a truck and now lived, sans papiers, on the streets of Paris, the whole couched in an uncomplaining stoicism, a nonchalant wit and erudition, which put the luckless Benny to shame. Mr. Bergsma would organize, at immense personal inconvenience and expense, a school, lawyer, bla. Doing irreparable damage to the personal fortune whose accumulation was the whole point of writing for kids in the first place.

  The result being that Benny could never have music lessons, go to computer camp, go to private school, anything.

  Gil could see why this might be somewhat disillusioning to fans of the series. While somewhat chilling and egotistical as such, anyway, though, it was the kind of thing he would definitely have expected of the embittered alcoholic son of the author of a cult series for kids. Very New York.