A Working Theory of Love (20 page)

There’s absolutely no way. The only proposal I could make to her would be a dirty
night in a hotel, which might take care of this storm cloud that’s blown up around
us. But not tonight. No more drinks for me. Because I blessedly, once again, have
to go to work tomorrow.

•   •   •

I
MEET
L
IVORNO AT
the hostess stand of P.F. Chang’s in the Palo Alto mall. He looks thinner than I remember.
Gaunter. It’s an old-man thinness. It could be his white shorts, which show off an
expanse of sinewy, pale leg.

Is he using bottle tan on his face?

“I was just telling Montana here about the New Orleans marathon,” he says.

Montana is the hostess, a pretty, pleasantly blank-looking high-school-age girl. It’s
not profound blankness—just the vacancy of youth. A certain position of the head,
a set of the eyes, all of which can be transformed by twenty-two or twenty-five or
twenty-seven, her eyes sharper, head tilted down into life, ready for impact. She
just needs something terrible to happen to her, and then needs to do something terrible
to someone else. After that, she’s all set.

Montana is giving Livorno her tolerating-a-crazy-talkative-senior smile. One she probably
saw on a training video. He brags a bit more about the marathon—it’s a half-marathon,
I happen to know, but the man is knocking on eighty. It’s still impressive. But Montana
only perks up when Livorno whips out his new iPhone. I feel a little thrill when the
girl ogles it, has her thinking reset. You shouldn’t underestimate your elders, young
lady.

“Montana,” he says. “What province is Chef Chang from?”

She looks alarmed. “Our chef’s name is Mario,” she says.

Nor should you overestimate them.

We’re shown to our table, where we order lettuce cups, Mongolian beef, and Hawaiian
prawns. We both drink Arnold Palmers, and I’m so happy to be here, sitting across
from Livorno. I’ve missed him like a best friend.

“I’ll be brief,” he says. “Your father is still scrambled.”

“I guess if you made me angry, despairing, greedy, envious—and the other two—all at
the same time, I’d be scrambled myself.”

“I should be crowing. The Sins weren’t this robust last time.”

“What happened to ‘paddleball’?”

He shrugs. “We have gotten him to speak a bit. He’ll answer basic questions, but won’t
go beyond them. Sometimes, there’s a passing sense of presence, even in his refusal
to speak.” Livorno is warming up, the old delight at discovery upon him, but then
he stops, leaning back to sip his drink. “Though it could be my limited English.”

“You speak English better than I do.”

“I’m not any worse off than my colleagues,” he says. “We’ve spent the last fifty years
making wild predictions and failing to even come close. We predicted sentient computers.
We produced self-propelled vacuum cleaners.”

“Which don’t work very well.” I regret saying it.

“Exactly. And as far as natural language processing? We’ve made it to the point where
a customer can shout ‘operator’ into his phone four or five times and hope to speak
to a real person. This is hardly progress.” He beams, seeming to take some satisfaction
in his shared defeat.

“You always told me AI was philosophy, not engineering,” I say.

His smile disappears. “That’s because in philosophy you can move the goalposts. In
engineering, you just fail. And that’s where we are. Laham is preparing to return
to Indonesia. Dr. Bassett is lost in himself. In a kind of labyrinth.”

I take a bite of lettuce cup. It’s a funerary meal. My first thought is that he can’t
take this away from me. But what is
this
? My father—the chance to chat with my father’s ghost. So what if it’s mostly about
horses and Willie Beerbaum. He
has
helped me. We’ve talked about Rachel. We’ve talked about Erin.

“But what if our problems are philosophical?” I say. “What if with the gut and the
brain we’re leaving out an essential element to cobbling together a person?”

Livorno puts his hands flat on the table, pushes himself up straighter. “We don’t
have anything close to the resources to build a body.”

“I’m talking about some governing principle that connects gut and brain. Being lost
in himself, in a kind of labyrinth, separated, pulling apart on the inside—that sounds
like a common affliction. So let’s attack this head-on. What if we had a system to
unify him, so everything inside him starts to click?”

Livorno narrows his eyes, as if I’ve just gone blurry, but I don’t feel blurry. I
feel precise, maybe inspired.

“What do you mean by click?” he asks.

“Connectedness,” I say. “Connection. I was just at a retreat”—this feels like a misstep—“and
it was all about encouraging a kind of inner harmony, getting over roadblocks.” Misstep
again. I’ve got to convey my ideas before the lingo of Pure Encounters betrays me.
“Meaning psychological blocks. It’s more about attitude. It’s about wanting”—I search
for the words, but I seem to be possessed—“to click and stay clicked.”

He leans in; he doesn’t look outraged or disbelieving. “But what is the mechanism
of the clicking?”

“Well,” I say. The answer involves chakras, meridians, auras. Where do I start? “It’s
about love. It’s about inner love and outer love. It’s about love being part of every
interaction with yourself and the world.”

“I still don’t understand the mechanism of conveyance for this love. What is the
thing
that is doing the clicking? The gut? The brain?”

“I think it’s the limbic system.”

“The
limbic system
.” He leans back, rolls a lettuce cup, sets it down. He takes a sip of Arnold Palmer,
sets it down. He begins to crack his knuckles. “And they think human love is an extension
of some sort of primum mobile.”

“I think they also just think it’s just, you know, the feeling.”

“A theory of love.” He sips his tea. “It makes for an eye-catching press release.”

“Sure,” I say, disheartened. I should be grateful he’s even listening to me. I can
only imagine the level of desperation necessary for him to ponder these ideas. But
I want to know if he thinks we’re actually on to something. “He has a gut and a mind.
Maybe he needs a heart.”

Livorno weighs this suggestion silently. “The limbic system is a much clearer metaphor.”

“A metaphor that might work?”

“The whole idea is a bit Gnostic. Every interaction colored with love. A kind of universal
positive inclination. Rather than no—yes.”

“Rather than no,” I say. “Yes. That’s basically it.”

“There’s nothing basic about it.” He touches the uneaten lettuce cup, raises it to
his mouth. “Modeling even a discarded version of human nature is a complicated proposition.
At the very least, we need Laham. For good measure, I should buy Pride back.” He swallows,
then bares the full piano keyboard of his teeth. “This is
not
going to be cheap.”

•   •   •

I
RIP THE PLASTIC
off a laundered shirt. I adjust my hair. I’m officially back on the job, and my first
task is to visit Toler. Though he’s the competition, we’re asking him for the additional
funding. I’ll have to weather his disdain.

But as I’m walking out the door, Rachel’s uncle, Rick, calls me again. “I should be
sending texts,” he says. “I know how you kids are.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t called you back,” I say.

“I was just wondering if you could put Rachel on the phone.”

“Rachel?” I lock my door and set down my bag. “She’s not with me.”

“Oh.” He sounds embarrassed. “Well, sorry to call.”

“It’s good to hear from you,” I say, holding the phone on my shoulder as I pick up
my bag. I can feel the day shifting into gear again—Livorno, then Toler, then lunch—but
something about Rick’s voice stops me.

“You don’t know where she is?” I ask.

“We just assumed she was down there with you.”

“We haven’t actually talked in about a month.”

“You’re not dating anymore?”

“No,” I say. But why is this a secret? Was she proud to be dating me? Sweet God, I
hope she wasn’t ashamed to have lost me.

“I guess we’re a little worried about her then,” he says. “It’s been three days. We’re
trying not to be controlling, you know?”

“Can you call any of her friends?”

This suggestion is met with silence.

“She took off work,” Rick says. “I just saw those two sleeping bags gone and, you
know, assumed.”

•   •   •

I
T’S WITH TREPIDATION
that I cancel my meeting with Toler. Can you just reschedule a meeting with the super-rich?
Will he deprive us of funds out of spite? I’ll find out—tomorrow. For now I’m driving
over the mountains to the Tennessee Valley trailhead. It’s a weekday and there aren’t
many cars, but Rachel’s Honda is parked in the lot, her cell sitting on the driver’s
seat, either off or with a dead battery. Mystery solved. I know where she is. I know
she’s as safe as she wants to be. But I stand there and look down the trail, thinking
about that detail Rick mentioned—
two
sleeping bags.

Of course, she’s off camping with someone else, maybe in the spots she showed me.
That’s what you do in life. You meet someone, date them, and when it’s over you gather
the good parts and carry them into the future, shedding the bad, if possible.

Still, couldn’t she have gone camping somewhere else?

I think about leaving her a note.
Everyone worried—please call.
This way she would know that I knew. Pure passive aggression on my part. I’ve left
messages, Rick has left messages. She’ll get them as soon as she returns to the car.

So happy to have found you, and hope you’re having fun, but please do call. Want to
stay clicked.

Even worse.

I lock the Subaru and head down the main path toward the ocean, stopping at the map
to the park. There looks to be fifty miles’ worth of trails, more than I could cover
in a day, and that would assume she wasn’t hiking them herself, a moving target. All
I know is she must like this person. Three days here would be a boring stretch otherwise.
A gust of wind whips dust off the path and into my eyes. Ahead of me several women
in English riding costumes trot their horses toward the beach. The sun overhead is
hot, especially to me in my starched shirt. The usual suspects are about: egrets,
seagulls, titmice. California quail with their dashing pompadours. And people. There
are always people who seem to have the day off.

I stop at the foot of the Fox Trail but decide not to climb it. Same with the Coastal
Trail. I’m not going to snoop on Rachel. If I stumble across her and her camp partner,
so be it.

Walking back up to the lot I see her. She swings her backpack into the Honda’s trunk,
slams the lid down, sniffs. She gives the Subaru—parked several slots down—a long
look, though it should be impossible to know it’s mine. I bought the most standard
of standard models, and I’m morally opposed to bumper stickers. Still, I crouch on
my brushy patch of trail to make sure she doesn’t spot me. She bends down to straighten
her jeans, then stands again, smoothing back her hair into an unruly ponytail. She’s
alone, and I get the impression she has been, the whole time. She has the slow, deliberate
movements of someone who has been keeping her own counsel. I feel somewhat shamefacedly
happy she’s camping solo, and then I feel terrible she’s here by herself. But why
should I feel terrible? She’s simply a girl who walks the earth as I do. Walks it
better than I do. Imagine liking the person you’re camping with—when that person is
yourself.

17

I
’M MEETING
T
OLER
at the research wing of his company in Redwood City, where he apparently spends most
of his time. The corporate headquarters of his matchmaking company is deeper in Silicon
Valley, among a stretch of forgettable office parks that express their imperial grandeur
only through sheer cost—by square foot it would be cheaper to relocate to the Champs-Elysées.
But scrappy start-ups—even well-financed ones—should have humbler digs. Toler Solutions
hasn’t quite lowered itself to a former quilting studio, but close enough: a pressed
sandstone and glass two-story building vague enough to contain anything—a cookware
outlet, a printing press, dentists. It’s eight in the morning—I had to get up at six
to be ready. I think the early hour is punishment for rescheduling. If so, I’m happy
to receive it. Whatever makes Toler’s money smile down upon us.

I park the Subaru in front of a concrete trash can, right next to the Bentley, which—let’s
face it—looks like a Chrysler, and step up on the low sidewalk and enter the glass
door. The reception area buzzes with fluorescent lights. To the right three beanbags—bright
primary red, yellow, and blue—surround a coffee table covered in what appear to be
toys for children age three and under. A wooden train set, a stack of Mega Bloks.
To the left a young, unsmiling Asian woman stands motionless behind a large polished-wood
counter. A huge monitor behind her head plays a television commercial for Toler’s
other business. I smile at her, but she merely looks at me steadily. She must not
be the receptionist, but who else could she be? She’s standing behind a desk in the
reception.

“I’m here to see Adam Toler,” I say, grinning from discomfort. When she says nothing,
I grin harder, stretching my face as far as it will go.

“Name?”

“Neill Bassett.”

She turns to the monitor and touches it, pulling up a very full list of appointments
for Toler. My name is nowhere to be seen.

“Maybe he’s going to try to work me in?”

She turns back around, her eyebrows raised doubtfully. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
She indicates the corner of the room with the toys and the beanbags.

“Do you have chairs?” I ask, but she’s exited through a door into the depths of the
building, leaving me alone.

I walk over to the coffee table and pick up a plastic hammer. I don’t want to sit
in a beanbag—it feels debasing in advance. Legs splayed out, arms stuck to the vinyl.
But I’m tired, and besides what do I care about debasement? I’d bark like a dog—chase
a stick!—to get Dr. Bassett talking again.

“Where is he?” Toler’s voice comes from a back office. I try to scramble up from the
beanbag, but it’s a difficult process. I have to first sit on the floor and get my
legs under me, then hold on to the coffee table to get into a squatting position,
as if the toys have somehow sent me back to my toddler days. It’s at this stage that
Toler strides in, hand held in front of him. I’m ready to correct him on my name,
but he says, “Welcome, Neill.” He looks like he’s been on some radical diet since
I last saw him. He’s dropped another ten pounds easy. His skin is yellowed and drooping,
his jowly face loose as a hound’s. But he doesn’t seem to have lost any of his evil
buoyancy. “Tea? Bubbly water?” he asks. “We even have wine, and I didn’t make it in
my bathtub.” He sweeps an arm in the direction of his receptionist. “Grace, get this
man what he wants.”

He leads me through the door he just came out of, down a dimly lit hall to his office,
which isn’t as showy as I would have guessed for a Bentley owner. I think he’s tried
to communicate minimalism, humility. Or maybe something more ineffable—communicating
that he’s not trying to communicate anything. But the red leather chair I sit in has
a nice Italian feel of needless luxury, and there’s a grouping of black-and-white
photos on the wall—not too organized, not too disorganized—that imply a designer’s
touch. His desk is arranged as if for a photo shoot—a pad of paper, two black pens
side by side, and a closed brushed aluminum laptop. If it weren’t for the three Ionic
Breezes in the corners and a Tiger Woods bobblehead (an homage to Livorno?), I wouldn’t
be sure this room was anything more than a theater set.

“I don’t play golf,” Toler says. He thumps the bobblehead, sending Tiger into a frenzy,
his smiling face warning
no, no, no!
“But I’ve been so envious of Henry ever since he started his little project. The
life of the mind. That’s the thing.” He puts his hand on Tiger, stops the shaking.
“So Henry told me that you’ve come up with a groundbreaking theory. I think he said”—he
clears his throat, as if about to say something untoward—“of love.”

“Well,” I say, listening for condescension but not quite hearing it. “Love is the
word he uses.”

“I assumed you meant love as in the ‘affective reasoner’—the positive pole of attraction—but
he says this is much more fundamental.”

With my lack of technical background, this sentence might as well be in Urdu. “I’m
glad to hear he likes the idea so much.”

“How are you planning on doing it? Just a rearrangement of GSPs? Or will you be doing
some more work in the construal frames?”

Urdu again. The answer, of course, is I don’t know. I don’t know what GSPs are. Or
construal frames. I suppose I could just confess, but I feel embarrassed for Livorno,
as if I should hide his bad decision to hire me.

“Something like that.”

Toler frowns. “What was your specialization for your doctorate?”

“I have a master’s in business administration.”

He slaps his hand on the desk. “I was wondering why you were so goddamned dense. I
just assumed once he shanghaied that Indonesian whiz kid you’ve got over there . . .”
There’s a knock on the door. Grace comes in with our Earl Grey. She’s still unsmiling,
but now that she’s not hidden behind the reception desk I see that she’s wearing a
pornographically short skirt. It seems very wrong for this early in the morning. Toler
passes his eyes over her legs and then lets a yellowish lip fall in a lopsided smile.
When she leaves the room I expect some boy’s-club remark, but he says nothing. I feel
a clammy sweat above my eyebrows.

“I didn’t know Laham’s reputation preceded him,” I say. I hold on to the hot tea.
Am I trying to impress this knucklehead? What am I asking—of course I’m trying to
impress this knucklehead.

“Laham—right. What is that unpronounceable last name of his again?”

Simunjuntak, but I shrug apologetically, as if I don’t remember.

“Honestly, Neill, I prefer talking to a businessman anyway. What do engineers know
about human nature?” He blows on his tea and leans toward his desk. “I mean, you need
your engineers. But at the helm, you need an idea guy, a psychologist. I started Toler
Solutions so I could do big things—work on the future of technology, especially the
way we’ll be interacting with technology. And it’s clear to me that conversing robots
are a key part of that future. The Japanese are way ahead of us on this. They bond
socially with robots. Robots look after their elderly. They’ve got robots as candy
stripers. It’s brilliant. They’ve also made the leap toward accepting intimate relationships
between humans and nonhuman objects. You read the
Times
article on the man in love with his pillowcase?”

I did. It was deeply disturbing. But to be fair the pillowcase had a cartoon character
on it. “I think he was actually in love with a cartoon character.”

“But she needed a physical form,” he says. “Nothing elaborate, obviously—just a pillowcase.
They call it 2-D love. But 2-D won’t cut it for most of us. We’re going to need 3-D,
interaction. The next step—and this is five years away, maybe ten—is romantic relationships
with robots. Your desires and needs being met by them. Don’t give me that look. It’ll
be better than any relationship you’ve been in before. The
ideal
relationship. The cooking, the backrubs, the patient listening, the sex. All on your
schedule. And it won’t matter if you’ve brushed your teeth. You won’t have to go to
the gym. There won’t be any shenanigans with the pool boy or pool girl. It’ll be a
profound, profound shift in the market.”

The market. I thought he was going to say the world. “Romance with robots is the
next
step?”

He opens a desk drawer and removes what looks like a purple plastic flashlight, sliding
it handle first toward me. “It’s never been used—don’t worry.” This, of course, is
just the kind of sentence to make one worry. The exterior has even ridges for grip;
it’s about a foot and a half long. I leave it on the desk, but spin it around to a
surprise. Where the light would be there is a lavender-colored silicone model of a
vagina.

“Touch it,” he says.

“Yes?” I say, though I mean no.

“Tell me what you think.”

“It’s interesting.”

“Do we need to reschedule again?” he says. His voice is serious, almost menacing.
I know he’s jerking me around, and he knows that I know that he’s jerking me around.
But this knowledge changes nothing. I’ve been sent to get money; he has money. Power
dynamics don’t get much clearer. I press the right labia with my thumb. It’s high-quality
silicone, very smooth, as firm as the stress balls I use for carpal tunnel.

“It doesn’t feel real.”

He takes up the flashlight, points at his face as if he’s going to tell a ghost story.
He pokes it absently. “It’s better than real,” he says. He doesn’t sound insulted
so much as doubtful. “You need lubrication obviously. It’s a primitive device.”

“It’s purple.”

“And I’ll tell you why.” He lowers the “flashlight,” then flicks it across the desk
with such speed I catch it in my lap. “Guess how long they’ve been making these? Since
World War II. But they never sold. Why? They were flesh-colored. They even had fake
hair on them. Stiff black bristles like a shoe brush. I’m serious. But then a very
clever company started making them in purple, bristle-free, now they’re in every frat
house in the country. They’re standard issue for the thirty and under set. You might
have one.”

“I’m over thirty.”

He nods, but I’m not sure my comment makes any sense. It’s true I don’t own one of
these, but why don’t I? If the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he can’t sit
quietly in his own room, then here’s a device to keep man quiet in his room. I find
the frank masturbatoriness unsettling, but dear Lord, I hope it’s not because I fear
sex toys interfere with my limbic click.

“Well, you’re the holdout, I guess. But the color is key. The kids think they’re hilarious.
When they were flesh-colored they were just creepy. It was like masturbating with
a prosthetic hand.” He leans back, his palms in prayer position under his chin. “Now
it’s just whatever. A thing you do.”

“I wouldn’t call that romance,” I say.

“It’s a start.” He shakes a finger at me. “True, we probably won’t fall in love with
something with no eyes. Eyes are kind of a basic requirement. But let’s break this
romance question down like businessmen. Forget the evolutionary point of view—women
like providers, men like fertile wombs, blah, blah. That’s lazy academic thinking.
The only evolutionary benefit of love is pair-bonding to aid in the raising of offspring,
something other species accomplish much more efficiently. Eagles, gibbons, swans—you
name it. From an evolutionary point of view we don’t need love to perpetuate our genes.
We don’t need love to raise our children. So is love just a random emergent property?
Maybe. Maybe it’s a social construct. Who knows. What’s important from our point of
view, again as businessmen, is that even if love is an illusion, it’s an illusion
more powerful than reality. This is where engineers will go astray, and I’m telling
you, this is where Henry will go astray. He’ll think the scientific reality is what’s
important when it’s beside the point. I’m kind of in the business of love, you might
say. So I’m going to give you my own working theory—this one based on exhaustive couples
research. We’ll call it a present to you. Love is about acquisition and deal-making.
You have certain assets. You want to make sure you get the best deal for your assets.
This is the fundamental human behavior romance is built on. You know when you see
some middle-aged schlump with a beautiful Russian wife? You think, wow, she must close
her eyes and go to her happy place. But you’re wrong. She doesn’t see him in the same
way. He’s Marlboro. He’s Harley-Davidson. He’s freedom. This is all enormously attractive
to her. After a few years she gets the swing of the U.S. and cans him. We’ll say she
was a craven fortune hunter, but we won’t be right. She had genuine feeling for him—the
feeling of having made a good deal. Then her personal capital went way up. She was
suddenly making a bad deal.”

“He’d be primed for the purchase of a sex robot,” I say. Then I wonder what’s possessed
me.

“Here’s the tricky part, though, from a business point of view. The main mechanism
of love and attraction might be deal-making, but we can’t say that. Falling in love
with a robot can’t be like being super-psyched you got a Tesla. The minute you phrase
the transaction as a transaction, the magic is gone. So rather than think about love
as the kind of major purchase decision it is—how does this model compare to other
models in my price range—we project some ideal qualities onto the beloved. One, this
person or thing cares for me. Two, this person or thing speaks to my deepest self.
Part one is easy. Need fulfillment. You’ve got your physical needs”—he points at the
“flashlight”—“you feel bonded to the person or thing that meets those needs. That’s
basically marriage in four-fifths of the world. Bot-wise, we’ve got that one figured
out—those challenges are just engineering. But it’s part two—this person or thing
speaks to my deepest self—that’s the conundrum. That other fifth of the world—the
advanced people, the rich people. Europeans, Americans, Japanese to some extent. How
can we get them to see themselves—see their ideal of themselves—in a robot?”