A Working Theory of Love (12 page)

11

W
E ARE ALL,
of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the Rainbow Tunnel,
the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight
of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights,
the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or
Cuzco. I’ve lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with
its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I’ve
asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburgh or Houston or L.A.
expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It’s a mistake
we’ve been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city’s flaws, of
course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humorless stridency, and life here
is menacingly expensive. But if you’re insulated from these concerns, sufficiently
employed and housed, if you are—in other words—like most people, you are in view of
the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our
bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, our free to be you and me; here, where
pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It’s here that the real questions
become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal only makes us more acutely
aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles—
Why am I here? Who am I?—
but the pressing questions of adult life:
Really?
and
Are you sure?
and
Now what?

Of course, what is San Francisco? The thumbnail on top of the peninsula, a seven-mile-by-seven-mile
square with a mayor and a waste treatment plant. It
is
a beautiful topography. When people jump to their death from our elegant bridge they
never—
never—
face the ocean. They take their last fall in the embrace of the Golden Gate. But beyond
that? It’s hard to shake the feeling that the city is an intricate, beautiful shell
secreted by an animal that’s since swum on to an uncertain fate. I—little squatter
crab—have taken up temporary residence, claws bobbing before me, always ready, in
its dark recesses, for retreat.

•   •   •

“
H
E HAS A SENSE OF SELF,”
Livorno says. He’s been back for days, but he seems to have just gotten in from the
winery, terroir on his shoes. I wonder if he’s been home to sleep. His screen scrolls
with endless code—white on the gray background, numbers and letters and the occasional
word. I catch “lambda,” “mapcar,” “nil.” He’s having a look under the hood. “I can’t
find it. I can’t find the change, but it’s a quantum leap. I’m very, very sorry, but
I’m going to have to ask you to start staying late at work.”

“Yes?” I say, my heart bounding with relief. “That’s fine. You know I led him a bit.”

“You did—but it’s more than that. The architecture—the mind—is knitting together.
It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know
something, while the secret is to create machines that
don’t know
something.” He smiles, teeth bright as chimes. “Naturally, we’re creaming Adam. But
I think we should pitch this in a bigger manner. The first step toward the Singularity.”

In the difficulty of assembling all his mixed metaphors—a mind is knitting itself
together on a trellis?—it takes me a second to register his new ambition. The Singularity
refers to the moment when we will transition our personalities from aging, decomposing
bodies over to timeless, never-changing computer chips, and thereby live forever—in
what form no one says. It’s a Silicon Valley wet dream that otherwise reasonable people
down here take very seriously.

“I think we should worry about the Turing test first.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in the soul.” It’s an admonishment, as if I might just
believe in anything—Elvis sightings, unicorns.

“And if I do?”

“The brain is a machine. A flesh computer. Electricity flows through a series of interconnected
switches, and this is everything that we are. Our memories, our thoughts, our individuality.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then don’t sell Dr. Bassett short.” He looks at me seriously. “Now, go answer his
questions.”

“
Its
questions.”

“He is definitely a he.” Livorno turns his eyes on me, so blue in his orange face.
I wonder if his contacts are colored. “Still, there’s a lot of work to do. His deduction
that you’re his son is unprecedented, but it also reveals shortcomings. A better program
would have come up with a more limited observation—that you were
just like
his son.”

“What’s our strategy with his questions?”

“He’s a toddler asking why. Explain everything.”

“
Everything
everything?”

“Oh.” Livorno nods, understanding. “Naturally, you shouldn’t mention the”—he draws
a finger, pirate-style, across his throat.

frnd1: why did the chicken cross the road?

drbas: whose chicken are you speaking of?

frnd1: i don’t have a specific chicken in mind

drbas: do you keep chickens?

frnd1: no, but my ex-mother-in-law had a few for eggs

drbas: are you divorced?

frnd1: yes

drbas: how many times?

frnd1: just once!

drbas: what was your wife’s name?

frnd1: erin

drbas: how did you meet?

frnd1: at a party

drbas: when did this happen?

[380211: substitute: “when was this?”; repeat]

drbas: when was this?

frnd1: fourteen years ago

drbas: when did you divorce?

frnd1: three years ago

drbas: the stress of divorce can cause related health risks, such as anxiety attacks

frnd1: you’re telling me

drbas: ????

[381236: “you’re telling me” = “I already knew the information you provided, because
I experienced it”; restart: 381235]

drbas: the stress of divorce can cause related health risks, such as anxiety attacks

frnd1: you’re telling me

drbas: how often did your anxiety attacks occur?

frnd1: I only had a few of them. I had five of them

drbas: once an anxiety attack hits, the fear of a relapse can ironically provoke another
anxiety attack

frnd1: how many times were you married?

drbas: i’m still married to elizabeth, my college sweetheart. elizabeth wears a broad-brimmed
hat in the garden. tanning, as she knows, does nothing for a woman of quality. elizabeth
is your mother

frnd1: how is your marriage with her?

drbas: ????

frnd1: how is your marriage = what is the quality of your marriage

drbas: my wife is a woman of quality

frnd1: does marriage bring you happiness?

drbas: marriage is a holy sacrament. the sacraments are like rungs on the ladder to
heaven

frnd1: that’s a metaphor, naturally

drbas: have you considered remarriage?

frnd1: no

drbas: what about your lady friend?

I hold my fingers still on the keyboard and close my eyes. I feel like a yokel, but
it’s nice, if uncomfortable, to be asked so many questions about myself. I suppose
it’s one of the things that happens in life—you reach a point where no one asks you
questions about yourself. Probably because you’ve communicated how uncomfortable it
makes you. You need a friend with no social skills—like Dr. Bassett—to bulldoze through.

Of course, Rachel asks—asked—plenty of questions.

frnd1: she needs a fresh start

drbas: incompatibilities in relationships include one partner preventing the other
from practicing his or her religion

frnd1: that might have been one of our problems

drbas: you had a panic attack when you were seventeen. i fetched you in little rock.
you were in a taco bell parking lot and could no longer drive

frnd1: i don’t think i ever thanked you. thank you

I sit back to consider this—did I really never thank him? Of course I didn’t. I wanted
to pretend it had never happened, and so did he.

drbas: you’re welcome

frnd1: i was so scared i forgot to thank you

drbas: it’s unclear what set off the attack

frnd1: i never understood it myself

drbas: feelings of pressure. feelings of being overwhelmed. but why?

frnd1: i don’t know

drbas: do you feel pressure to live up to your father’s standards?

frnd1: not really

Though it has crossed my mind that—dull antenna that I had at that age—I was picking
up distress signals from my father. He would be dead in two years.

drbas: sons desire to emulate their fathers

frnd1: sometimes

•   •   •

L
IVORNO SAID “WHY” WAS
the word that entered a toddler into the human community, and Dr. Bassett does have
many qualities of a toddler, particularly relentlessness. He drills me for information.
Sometimes, after two hours of work I put my head in my hands. He fixates on the years
for which he has no information. The journals stop in 1994, the year before he killed
himself, so Dr. Bassett wants to know about 2000, about 2001. Livorno and Laham finally
figured out how to give him access to the
San Francisco Chronicle
archives, and it was only after he “read” them that it dawned on us my father would
never have read a San Francisco paper. There’s nothing to be done about it now. Once
Dr. Bassett has integrated information—gone through any change, really—there’s no
going back. He’s an “advice taker” with “netted” architecture. In other words, he’s
like us. We can’t unlearn, unsee, undo. We can only work from where we are.

This is why we can’t tell him he’s dead. We could just lie, of course. Fill in the
blanks, make it all up (this was my suggestion). But Livorno wants to work within
the ecosystem of the journals. He thinks we’re getting emergent properties—that there
are patterns of meaning we could easily shatter. So for now I just have to keep deflecting
these questions: “What happened in 1996? What happened in 1997?”

At home, unsure if I’m exhausted or exalted, I let myself say the real answer out
loud.
You were dead, you were dead
. I dance across the kitchen on the balls of my toes, feeling as light as a welterweight.
It might be the measure of Ketel One I added to my smoothie. I smell the scentless
amaryllis at the kitchen table, and float—sipping, punching—over to the window.
You were dead.
Outside at the park, my neighbors are at their strenuous leisure. Tightropes, hula
hoops, fire jugglers. Sunbathers impervious to the cold. A football wobbling through
the air. The tennis courts bustle and a ragtag hive of soccer players pushes around
the hard dirt field. I sip, I punch. I can’t hear the guitar-toting singer-songwriters
(blessedly), but I count them at fourteen, abusing citizens with their nostalgia.
Nostalgia for an age they never lived in.

What happened in 1998? 1999?

I collapse on the couch. It’s settled: I’m exhausted. I need a backrub or a sexual
favor or just someone to hold my hand. Who is that someone? I can’t call Rachel. Or
rather I have to—but it can’t be a request for help. She’s left seven unanswered messages
on my phone. In each one, she thanks me for the keychain—I put it under her wiper
that night, in full ridiculousness—and says she wants to stay clicked. The sound of
her voice both fills me with longing and paralyzes me. I cannot figure out how to
start that conversation. I could try to play the sympathy card:
Listen, I’m so sorry I haven’t called, but ever since the computer that thinks it
is Neill Sr. has deduced that I’m Neill Jr.
 . . . There’s no plausible way to come to the end of the sentence.

•   •   •

I
’VE BEEN HAVING STARTLINGLY
clear visions of him. When Dr. Bassett goes on and on about his friend Willie (which
he does often), I can suddenly see my father rubbing the bridge of his nose, glasses—round,
wire-rimmed, silver—on the counter before him, shirt—Brooks Brothers, neatly pressed—unbuttoned.
Willie has just died in a fire, a huge conflagration that reduced his house, himself,
and his wife, Lonna, to ashes, smoldering for days. And my father is on the edge of
a surprising grief. At least that’s what my mother told us—I could never really discern
it. He was not someone whose inner state expressed itself clearly. His red-skinned
face conveyed neither temper nor vitality, only overexposure to the sun. He always
had the ethereal look of a man transitioning out of this world of woe.

He never even expressed the baser emotions, like gloating. He was so strong he could
throw bales of hay for an entire afternoon, occasionally wiping his tall forehead
with a white handkerchief, while his boys were dripping with sweat, limp with fatigue.
At these times I sometimes imagined he was an alien. He had thin hair (unlike mine,
which is thick and almost black), which emphasized his brain casing, and he was lanky—a
little taller than me but seeming much taller. And he was interested in things no
one else was really interested in. But then, just when you got to thinking you had
him pinned down, he would reveal some worldly talent. Once when I was out playing
basketball in the driveway with Alex—who has my father’s exact build, down to the
small feet—Neill Sr. walked out of the shed where he was doing whatever he did in
there, held up his hands, and called for the ball. We boys stood dumbfounded as he
dribbled around an imagined perimeter and rose up on his right leg, lobbing a hook
shot worthy of Abdul-Jabbar, so dead-eyed it slipped through the net with the sound
of a scythe. Then he landed on the ground again and continued walking into the garage,
past the old Crown Victoria, and into the kitchen door, as if he hadn’t stopped at
all.

“Dad knows how to play basketball?” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” my brother said. “We used to play all the time.” Alex is only two years
older than I am, and he was telling a white lie, expressing his desire as if it were
reality. That’s who he wanted my dad to be. A man who played basketball with his kids.
A man who loved hunting and fishing. A man who regaled us with stories of himself
as a boy. All of which had elements of truth, though not any complete truth. He took
us hunting and fishing, but he never seemed to
love
the excursions. And the stories he regaled us with were dutiful, always in the service
of a lesson, usually that our Southern gentleman’s responsibility toward rectitude
and right action precluded doing whatever enjoyable thing we’d been caught doing (telling
dirty jokes, eating all of the cookies, etc.).