Playground, page 19
“And you can bring your hair dryers, if you like,” she told the journalists. Saluting her touché, they filed their stories about the quirky Canadian with her eccentric ideas, her colorful accent, and her amphibious, bilingual brain.
HER HUSBAND AND TWO CHILDREN met Evelyne at the gate as she got off the plane at SAN. She stepped into the gate area feeling out of control. The kids looked so much larger than when she had left. Danny clamped onto her right leg like a barnacle. Dora embraced her shyly before retreating behind the legs of her father. Her husband’s new aura of self-sufficiency startled her.
“Hey,” Limpet said, bobbing in the flow of disembarking passengers and brushing her forearm with one admiring hand. “You look good.”
His voice sounded strange. “I feel good,” she said, tugging him out of the human current. She remembered herself and rushed to add, “You look good, also.”
The apartment swelled with balloons and bunting. Posters with newspaper clippings hung on the walls. Together, the welcome committee of three had made Evelyne a Froot Loops cake that looked as flashy, nebulous, and toxic as a sea slug. Both kids gave her drawings to celebrate her return. Danny had studied the pictures of Tektite, and drew it with clean, strong pen strokes. Dora’s Crayola picture was a child’s wild Turneresque storm at sea.
“Tell me about this, honey.” Evie had learned long ago never to ask, What is this supposed to be? It upset her daughter that Evie could never see what Dora’s pictures depicted.
“Well, this is the ocean and this is your home and this is you and these are your friends and this is the eel and this is me and Danny and Dad waiting for you in California.” She pointed to a line of wild, spectral runes of alien script. “And this is writing.”
“Wow! What does the writing say?”
“It says, Welcome home, Mommie. Please come back and stay with us on dry land.”
Something went out of Evelyne. Her heart thudded against her lungs like the long snout of the butterfly fish ramming the window of the Tektite, trying to figure out what blocked the way.
“I’m here, sweet one,” she told her daughter. “Here to stay.” Although it felt as if staying for long would be her death.
THAT NIGHT SHE HAD A DREAM. In it, she and one of her beloved teammates—or, in that more-than-logic only accessible in the deep reason of dreams, two of her teammates blended into one—were sharing one of those snug little beds in the central living quarters of Tektite II. Each of them placed their hand on the chest of the other, feeling their synchronized heartbeats beating like mad. It was like a promise. It was warmth and purpose and heat and the future. It was like diving deep.
She woke up, her heart still pounding and her body on the edge of bliss. Something had changed in her, underwater.
THE AUTUMN WAS LONG and difficult. She transcribed her research notebooks and cataloged her findings from the two-week Virgin Islands dive. She taught. She raised her children, delighting in their enthusiasms and doing her best to quiet their nightmares. The notoriety that she gained as part of Tektite II’s most visible mission generated offers from expeditions to three different oceans. But Evelyne couldn’t accept any of them. She had made a deal with Bart, after disappearing on him for most of the summer. The press continued to pester her for interviews. But she had little time for anything but science, teaching, and raising the twins.
It took no great powers of detection for Bart to determine that something was off. But he kept his counsel and waited for her to say. Evelyne volunteered nothing. She limped along, afraid of the dream each time it returned.
Bart was ginger around her. The mood between them went from polite to even more polite. Their bed life, which had never been vigorous and had nosedived since the birth of the twins, went extinct.
“Limpet. Be patient with your Evie. I just need a chance to catch my breath and get used to being back on land.”
“Please! Who do you think I am?”
But she could hear how studious his kindness had become.
One night, as they lay under the covers reading side by side, he put his hand on her bare shoulder and said something tender. He meant it as an act of pure appreciation. But she tensed, and he discharged.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
In all their years together, there had never been violence. Just the sound of his four shouted words destroyed their run.
“What is wrong with you? I’m not asking for anything.”
She covered her face. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m not myself.”
“I made my choice. I am fine with it. You can go and. . . .”
He heard himself shouting and hung his head, like a dog who’d just bitten its owner in bewildered self-defense when its tail got caught under the rocking chair.
“Please,” he said, with more force than he wanted. “Do not apologize. That only makes it worse. I’m not asking for—”
“You can ask. It’s you’re right.”
“Arrrhh!” His wild wail tried to end up as a laugh but failed. “Okay. Look. Is there something you need to talk to me about?”
She pulled the sheet up over her face, and the gesture froze him.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. No. Je ne le crois pas.”
He faced her on his side, his head propped up on his shaking arm. “Has something happened? Something I should know? Have you met another man?”
Pain pulled back her lips into an awful smile. “Oh, no. My Limpet. Not a man. There will never be another man in my life. No other man but you.”
........
I CAN SEE THE ROOM THAT Rafi and I shared during our freshman year in Urbana as if we still lived there. A tiny stall in a dorm on the southeast edge of campus, it was narrower than the two of us laid end to end, and not much longer. With our two bunks pressed against opposite walls, the aisle between them was only wide enough for one of us to pass at a time. Our pillows abutted the walls of twin clothes closets, and at the foot of each bed sat a tiny desk smaller than my childhood desk in Evanston. On mine was one of the only personal computers in the dorm.
Above each desk, two shelves were drilled into the green cinder block. Mine bore fat and expensive texts: Bayesian Analysis, Decision Trees, Introduction to Graph Theory, Practical Programming in C++. From where I lay in bed, Rafi’s looked so much more exotic: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
He still had the copy of Fyodorov’s The Philosophy of the Common Task, which he refused to part with. I couldn’t figure out why he, the world’s biggest lover of libraries, would steal a library book that he might never read again.
“Not stolen, man. I fully intend to bring it back. Eventually.”
He brought almost nothing down from Chicago but a few sets of clothes. He didn’t even own a scrapbook or a photo album. But he did have that stolen library book. He took strange comfort from the idea that endlessly unfolding humanity would someday learn to resurrect every person who ever lived.
As for my own dead, I had a photo of my dad and mom and me sitting in a huge catamaran on a trip to the Virgin Islands that we took when I was fifteen. My mother framed it and gave it to me when I left Evanston. I put it in the trundle drawer under the bed, its home for the next nine months.
On the wall above my bed, I hung a cheap print of Paul Klee’s Sinbad the Sailor. We had a wall phone, as well as a good bamboo Go set, a cheap travel chess set, two decks of cards, and a box of different-sided dice. Aside from that, nothing. No disc players or sound systems, no television, no guitars, no stuffed animals, no posters of cinema sirens or rock goddesses, no microwaves, no mini-fridge, no bongs in the closet, none of the other aids to Dionysian existence that furnished the rooms of the other 650 students in our little four-story state.
You would think that moving from Chicago to the cornfields would be like dropping down in Kansas after Oz. But that first year at the Big U, surrounded by forty thousand other people on their own choose-your-own adventure, blew the jams out for both of us. We didn’t have a lot of spare time to spend on anything aside from our studies. I was carrying five classes; Rafi had six. But we made time out of nothing, eating quickly, sleeping little, and heading to every outside event we could squeeze in.
We went to bizarro underground movies that aired in holes-in-the-wall across campus, four nights of the week. Rafi had to explain them to me. We went to lectures and came out of them schooled in the size of our capacious ignorance. Rafi dragged me to one of the first-ever poetry slams to have traveled down from Chicago, where the whole movement started. On the way back to the dorm in the dark, I kept saying, “Tell me again what just happened?”
Imagine a tiny monk’s cell in the middle of a hormonal superstorm. Sometimes, on Friday afternoons, just walking down the long horseshoe corridor of our wing involved tunneling through five or six spheres of roaring music, one wall of sound shading into the next. That, too, was an education.
To escape our deafening dorm, we each found a hideout on campus. Rafi talked his way into a study carrel deep in the stacks of the Main Library, ordinarily reserved for honors upperclassmen and grad students. The place was amazing: ill-lit, archaic, depopulated, badly ventilated, reeking of binding paste and yellowing pages, crisscrossed by girdered shelves full of old, untouched tomes on subjects no human would ever be interested in again. It was a dark portal into previous centuries, dead-silent except for the steam hissing in the ancient radiators. My friend was in heaven.
I spent my time in one of the computer science buildings on the North Campus, the one that looked like Darth Vader’s summer dacha. I sat in a large computer lab, typing away in the chorus of clicking around me, downloading tons of public-domain software and open-source code into the storage account that the university had given me. People were experimenting with bulletin boards and chat rooms where you could trade messages in real time. Talk about afterlife! The future was already here: it’s just that the people on South Campus—my friend included—hadn’t gotten the memo.
The amount of horsepower on offer throughout the engineering campus defied belief. Micros, minis, mainframes, and supercomputers, as we called them back then. Machines were shouting at me from down the corridors: Do something! Make fine things with me! Change the world! A guy might do anything.
Rafi and I would meet back home at the end of each day, telling each other of the places we’d just been. He seemed every bit as transformed as I was, but by mysteries that had unfolded a hundred years ago. At night, too burned out for study, we’d play rounds of lightning Go—whole epic matches in a handful of minutes. Even after lights-out, with the last thundering sound system from down the hall hushed, we would lie on our bunks, so close to one another that we could have reached out across the narrow gap and touched fingers, and whisper to each other in the dark about that day’s discoveries, finds that dismantled and reassembled our sense of possibility.
RAFI STUMBLED ON A GROUP that met every Wednesday night in the windowless crypt of the Foreign Language Building, a few blocks from our dorm. These people were playing games we’d never heard of—groundbreaking, low-luck, innovative games from Germany and France and Scandinavia that rewrote the rules of mental competition. Push-your-luck games that explored every nook and cranny of probability. Pick-up-and-deliver games that stretched my planning abilities to the breaking point. Economic engine games that made me feel like an embattled CEO.
“Can’t go anymore,” Rafi said, hands in the pockets of his too-thin windbreaker as we walked home from a game night one bitter February.
“Why not? You were having a blast in there.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’. I grew up in the get-toe. I’ve seen what crack does to a fella.”
He was right. For people like us, a well-designed game had all the allure of life, and, hour for hour, was way more satisfying. Either one of us could have thrown away our futures in that basement, pitted against those ingenious opponents, over those colorful boards, coming up with moves more beautiful and imaginative than ordinary life required.
He pulled his too-thin coat around his too-thin frame. “How many hours have we already sunk into Go?”
In a world where hard work was a virtue and free play a vice, the number was incriminating. I didn’t even want to estimate. “Not enough to get to 9 dan yet.”
“That’s right, brother.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back toward Sodom and Gomorrah. “And how many of the dozens of new games that those cave trolls are bringing to the party every week would you like to become the best at?”
“The best?” I grabbed his elbow and stopped him on the icy sidewalk. “Wait. Are you trying to be the best?” When he said nothing, I busted him. “Holy shit. Rafi Young, Man of Ambition.”
“Me? Ambitious?” He scoffed. “No, man. Just trying to get my father off my back. Don’t want him telling me on my deathbed that I failed all Negroes everywhere.”
“You are. You want to be the best. I never knew this about you.”
He shot me a middle finger, readable even through his mitten. “Don’t have to be the best. Just have to be better than you.”
“And why is that? Exactly?”
But he stopped rising to my bait. He stared ahead vacantly, down the chilly streets of that desolate cow town of learning. “You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game . . . in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty.” He stopped and twisted to face me. “Know what I’m sayin’?”
“No idea.”
My smugness upset him. “Well, okay, Toddy. Your loss, then.”
I apologized and asked him to explain, but it was too late. I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. We walked back to the dorm in silence.
Rafi stopped going to game night, and a few weeks later, so did I. All the time we saved we plowed back into booking for our exams, which, of course, were games by another name.
RAFI COULDN’T ACCEPT THE IDEA that his one obligation was to read all day long. It felt like a trap, something he would pay for down the line, in life’s rigidly scored zero-sum contest. It never occurred to him that he’d paid for it already.
Remarkably, turning his passion into work did not destroy it. He lost himself in poetry. He read all the wild stuff that the Jesuits had hid from us. He typed up the ones that made him feel like a comet had just screamed across the sky, and he taped those up to the front lip of his bookshelves as if they were WANTED posters.
He hung Amiri Baraka’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note next to Ishmael Reed’s I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra. I tried to read them, but my brain had reached its limits of poetry comprehension back at Saint Ignatius. All the separate words made sense, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant when you put them all together. I got him to explain them to me.
When he was done he asked, “Capisce?”
But I couldn’t decide what would count as a yes.
He’d written back in high school, but that had been child’s play. Now he began again in earnest. Something about being thrown into classes filled with eloquent, high-minded women while consuming thousands of pages of the most revered American works from the last four hundred years triggered his PTSD and left him wildly competitive, crazily creative, which came to the same thing. Words poured out of him, his new playing pieces of choice.
He sat at his desk in front of a little portable Underwood typewriter, cranking out poems, prose, prose poems, concrete poetry, bits of plays, memoirs, satirical sketches, and uncategorizable essays. He’d pull the pages out of the platen, red-pen them, ball them up, and shoot jump shots at our trash bin. Then he’d roll another blank sheet into his machine.
He only ever let me see the ones he said were worthless. “Help yourself. That one is a flaming piece of shit.”
“It’s good,” I said, not understanding it. “Why are you so hard on yourself?”
“Because God has been too easy on me.”
The rare pieces that he thought might be okay went into a lockable folder on the shelf in his closet. It hurt me that he resorted to locks. But he was right. I’d have snooped on them all if he hadn’t.
THE ILLINOIS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT was deep in the golden age of symbolic artificial intelligence. This was the heyday of GOFAI—good old-fashioned AI. I was onboard, with all my heart and soul. My people were grilling experts about their knowledge and putting it into clean, powerful, easy-to-use black boxes. We were going to make expert doctors and expert lawyers and expert engineers and expert architects. And then those expert systems of ours were going to clean up humanity’s act and whip it into shape.
My programming powers landed me an internship at the Supercomputing Center. I worked on a segment of an enormous project involving several universities and two dozen large corporations. Comprehensive representation of implicit knowledge—CRIK. It was part of America’s attempts to beat all comers to a truly intelligent machine.
CRIK’s aspirations were mind-bending, and its goals would require many thousands of person-years to come to fruition. It aimed to specify, in rigorous, higher-order logic, all the underlying concepts that went into what humans called common sense. Hundreds of people around the world were spelling out rules that put all existing things in ordered hierarchies. Then they put those rules into machine-usable form. The hope was to specify everything in existence, one fact at a time, telling CRIK about individuals, collections, classes, relations, fields, attributes, and actions. People like me had already spoon-fed CRIK some tens of thousands of bits of knowledge. The goal was to feed it millions—everything it would need to make sense of any question.
I started out on the lowest rung of the massive, multinational totem pole of CRIK’s handlers. I fed CRIK tiny news articles and asked it simple questions, to see if all the hand-coded logic was working as expected. After a while, I was allowed to help with the special modules that CRIK used to solve certain classes of problems. It wasn’t enough just to tell CRIK twenty million things about the world. We also had to tell it how it could drill hundreds of steps down into that ocean of twenty million facts and chain together inferences.
