Playground, page 22
He tipped his head and lifted his eyebrows and bent down to pop a plastic bracelet charm that the children had missed into his sack. “What if it’s another way to gut the place?”
“Then Makatea will vote against it, and the country will find another lagoon to develop, somewhere in their twelve hundred miles of islands.”
“Maybe. But that’s why we’re obliged to call the matter how we see it.”
“Are we, really? You and me? Yeah, for us this place is perfect as it is—a scarred-up tiny heaven. But it isn’t ours. We only just came. I’m not sure the two of us have a right to vote, let alone Affy and Har.”
“Well, the people of Makatea have decided that we have that right, and now we’re condemned to choose. Democracy, eh? How many other places would have given us the vote on something like this? Yet another reason I’d like to protect this place from the techno-utopians.”
She thought: That, too, might be condescension. But she said, “Why do they want to build it here?”
He tipped his head toward the cliffs above them. “As the waters keep rising, we’ll be the last island to go under.”
They wandered apart and gleaned in a small inlet where pieces of acrylic and PVC accumulated. They filled their sacks to the sound of the surf, the pulse of waves that would bring in fresh crops of bright, hard plastic once their Sunday scavenger party was over.
Ina found a hoard of colored chips worn smooth in the churn of the surf like gemstones in a lapidary tumbler. “Look at these! Perfect.”
Rafi knew better than to ask how she recognized perfect. He didn’t need to know. Never again in life would he let perfect be the enemy of good. He had lived that way once, and it almost cost him everything. Combing the rocks now, he stashed away each bit of trash he came across, even the soft, crinkly, pathetic little half-serving water bottle no bigger than his fist. He’d found her again, here, after having lost her forever, found that pair of magic small beings he could see down the shore in front of him. He would never want or need anything more perfect than this.
Ina picked up a parti-colored shelf-stable drink box, now encrusted with the shells of sessile crustaceans.
“What do I do with this? If I take it for the sculpture, the barnacles will die.”
“Then leave it.”
“But it’s still garbage, Rahrah, and I touched it last! Also?” It grabbed at his heart when she looked sheepish. “It has great colors.”
His hands went up in a declaration of nonalignment. “You do you, Boo.”
Stoically renouncing her greediness, she wedged the drink box back into the rocks of its tidal pool home. “Is a thing still garbage, once life starts using it?”
He’d wondered the same thing, while out snorkeling with the kids. They’d seen an octopus who carried around a clear glass jar to make up for the shell it had lost to evolution. The creature ducked into its transparent mobile home at every sign of danger. They’d seen a pygmy seahorse clinging to a plastic drinking straw like it was a strand of host kelp. When humankind was gone, the spin-offs of their creativity would provide a resource management game for the rest of creation for eons to come.
She strode a little toward the children, who were venturing too far down the beach. Rafi strode along beside. He could not keep his hands off her. Something about Ina’s willingness to entertain the idea of seasteading left him feeling a little clingy.
“Okay, but forget about everyone else for a minute.”
“Hmm. Remind me how to do that, again?”
“You can’t really believe that inviting in a massive construction project, with industrial ships and factories and dredgers that are going to dig out the lagoon . . .”
He couldn’t even bring himself to name the upgrades that the seasteading experiment would inflict on them. It shocked him that she held her body a little aloof from the question.
“I’m a guest here, Rafi, and grateful to be one. I’ve never been happier, anywhere in the world.” She pulled a strand of hair out of her mouth. The sea wind whipped it right back into her face. “I just want this island to be well again.”
“It’s getting better. Sixty years since the mines closed, and the plant cover is almost back. The crab-catchers just had one of their best years in anyone’s memory. The rupe is returning from the brink. The fruit doves, too. All the birds, really. The reef looks more vibrant than it has since the runoff stopped. You can’t possibly want to beat everything all back down again?”
“What I want isn’t the—”
“This seasteading thing could get out of hand fast. In a few years, it could make all those years of phosphate mining look like a Junior Chamber of Commerce exhibit.”
Her eyes were on the children, fighting over a piece of bright blue sheathing the size of a sea turtle. “You’re right,” she said, a little vexed. “They’ll have to vote.”
“And they were born here.”
Their children might live their whole lives in this place. They might grow up to think of America as a crazy fairy tale, the land of movies and pop music. Chicago might never mean anything more to them than gangsters.
“We won’t even be able to explain it to them without influencing them.”
“Oh, Rafi. I don’t know. People are like sculptures. You can mold them a little when they start out, but not much. A body wants to be what a body wants to be. I’ve known who these two souls are since we first laid eyes on them.”
“You think so?” he said. But his body agreed with her. “So how will each of them vote?”
She dipped her head and grinned at her secret. “Afa will vote for progress and excitement and bold new things coming into the world.”
That sounded irrefutable to Rafi. It was partly his fault. The games they played were all about growth and development. Getting bigger faster than your opponent.
“And Hari?”
His wife snorted. “Do you have to ask? She’ll vote to please me.”
“Which means . . . ?”
“Ha! I see what you’re doing here.”
Before he could press his point, they came alongside the kids, who were battling over who had found the coolest plastic treasure so far.
The four of them didn’t even make it to the shores beneath Teopoto, on the northern headlands. Long before then, their sacks filled up and they had to head back. Before they did, they had their picnic—spicy roasted breadfruit with tomatoes right out of the fa’a’apu.
They dumped out the bags in the back garden, in a pile by the door of Ina’s studio. Plastic in every stage of wear. Afa and Rafi counted to see who had the most of their rarest color, and the boy let out a whoop when he won.
The defeated father scooped up two handfuls of trash and let the pieces drop like a waterfall. It made no difference if the island approved or rejected the seasteading project. Ever-growing human ingenuity would bury them eventually, either way. Rafi dipped his head and regarded his wife. His smile said, It’s game over for this place, isn’t it?
But Ina smiled back as if she’d just won the lottery and hardly knew how to start cashing in.
........
ON THE SUNDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, we three biked out to a pathetic little pond that Downstate Illinois had promoted to lake status, in the absence of any other serious contenders. Real cold was late in coming that year, but it was chilly enough for sweaters. The wind was stiff, and we worked hard to make it across fifteen miles of open prairie.
At the lake, the two of them messed around in a leaky dinghy that someone had abandoned on the dock, while I stayed on land, spread out on one of Ina’s woven blankets, doing the Times crossword and looking for clues to the cryptic words in the cloudless sky.
Over a picnic lunch of peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches with dried apricots, she came up with our first joint homework assignment.
“We should hold a little lecture series. Just the three of us.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said. “I’m game.”
But Rafi closed his eyes and hung his head in one hand. With the other, he pawed her shoulder. “Oh, God, no, darling. Don’t do this to me.”
“You know. Like the way that other people have book clubs? Only the book is you. We each take a night. Whoever’s turn it is needs to put some stakes on the table. Take the other two of us to their sanctum sanctorum.”
I looked at Rafi. “You studied with the Jesuits. What the hell does that mean?”
“I think it means, ‘No contest.’ No, wait. ‘You shall have the body.’ ”
Ina slapped him on the forearm hard enough to make him squeal. “That’s Islander for, Don’t be a little prick.”
“Aw! Did you hear that, Toddy? I think she loves me.”
“For who you really are.”
Ina Aroita pressed on, unflustered. Flustering wasn’t her idiom. She pointed her pinkie at me. “Mr. Spock. You go first.”
“Take you to my sanctum sanctorum?”
“Please, bro. Don’t encourage this nonsense.”
Ina linked her arm in Rafi’s and pulled him toward her on the picnic blanket. “Do this for your friend,” she told me. “We have to build up this boy’s immune system.”
Rafi seemed desperate. “I don’t know about this. Seriously. It sounds kind of precious.”
Ina exploded. She pushed his arm away and scrambled up. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Stop being such a self-protecting little coward.”
I sucked air. By accident or intimacy, she had found an accusation that gave Rafi as much pain as anything she might have hurled at him.
Rafi sat straightening his glasses with one finger, frozen in dignity. I knew the posture; he was debating whether to ruin the picnic and set the day in flames or hold on to this woman who, only a minute before, had seemed his one best way forward in life.
I looked at Ina. She wavered. She hadn’t expected to draw so much blood. She pretended not to notice, which was wise and probably saved the two of them, at least for a little longer.
“Or we could start a weekly pinochle game.”
Rafi snorted, despite himself. Something in him understood what the contrived ritual meant to her. She’d never had anyone in her life she could play such a game with, except her two disciples.
“All right. I will do this thing. But I want to go on record as saying that no one in my world either knows or cares what the fuck a sanctum sanctorum is.”
He was lying, of course. He had no more world anymore but the two of us. But that world had shifted. All three of us were more than a little subdued for the rest of the abbreviated picnic and on the fifteen-mile bike ride back home.
INA HAD NOWHERE REACHABLE to go for Thanksgiving break. Rafi did, but he stayed in town with her. An easy choice. I went back to Chicago and spent the holiday sleeping on the pull-out couch in my mother’s one-bedroom apartment on Howard Street near the CTA stop, and working with her on a picture puzzle. It was the only way the two of us could be in the same room and not go to war.
Hunting for pieces, we were on safe ground. It was a two-thousand-piece puzzle of Constable’s The Hay Wain. I can still remember the strange way that the shapes and colors of the individual pieces would turn into other things than what I thought they were, when snapped into place. My mother and I were building a time tunnel, not just back to the childhood I never had, not just to Constable’s 1821, but back several millennia, to the first magic picture puzzles from history’s beginning. That’s how my brain works. How it used to work, I mean.
Protected by the shared task of the puzzle, I tried to talk to my mother about my father.
“He really messed me up, you know? Messed us both up, badly.”
My mother shot me a look, as furious as the looks she used to train on him. “You shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. No man should have to endure what your father did.”
And that was the last time I ever tried to talk to her about Saint Micky Keane.
WHEN I GOT BACK down to school in early December, I took Rafi and Ina up North of Green with me, to my little carrel on the second floor of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I sat them down in front of my terminal, which had a direct Ethernet connection to the university’s networked mainframes. I pulled up a window and opened a session with CRIK.
“Here it is. My holy of holies.”
I put CRIK through its paces, asking it what it knew about Hawaii. It knew quite a little bit, not surprising, since I’d been feeding it Hawaiian facts for weeks.
Rafi was not impressed. “Uh, dude? ‘A collection of pieces of land rising up above the surface of the ocean’? That’s what we warm-blooded types call ‘too obvious to mention.’ ”
I was hurt. “There has never been anything like it on Earth.”
Ina knit her brows. “Freaks me out a little, Toddy.”
“And when it knows everything in the world that is ‘too obvious to mention,’ when it can draw every commonsense inference that any warm-blooded—”
“I’ll still be able to beat it at poetry and Go,” Rafi said.
Ina asked CRIK all kinds of homesick questions about Hawaii. Why did the U.S. overthrow the Kingdom? How many Olympic golds did Duke Kahanamoku win? How did Eddie Aikau die? Where was the best place in Honolulu to buy ice cream? Of course CRIK failed me. There were massive holes in what my golem could do, more holes than clay.
I apologized. “It’ll take centuries before any machine can answer those kinds of questions.” In fact, it took about thirty years.
Ina stared at the terminal, trying to see it the way I did. “But . . . couldn’t an encyclopedia tell you a lot more, a lot more easily?”
“We’re automating the encyclopedia.”
She frowned, wondering how that might be desirable. “You’re something, Mr. Spock.”
Rafi said, “You see what I’ve had to deal with, all these years?”
“I chose Hawaii out of tens of thousands of possible domains. It knows things about fish and trees and Presidents and the laws of physics. . . .”
But I could feel my entire sanctum going south.
I opened a new window onto another project I’d been recruited to help on, something the NCSA was months away from springing on an unsuspecting world. I felt sure this one would impress them. I typed a string of arcane letters and symbols into a primitive prompt at the top of the screen. After several seconds, a painting began to form from top to bottom, line by line across the CRT. Underneath the accumulating image there appeared a few paragraphs of text.
A grin filled Ina’s face. I was pandering shamelessly to her, but this time it worked.
“Gauguin! D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?” Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Rafi flapped his wrist in the air. “Damn, baby girl! You’re impressing me.”
Ina floated her finger in the air above the image, Gauguin’s vision of Tahiti, from 1898. “I don’t understand. Why is this picture in your computer? Did you scan it from a book or something? A little present for me because you knew I was coming?”
“It’s in Boston.”
“I know it’s in Boston. At the MFA.” She sounded as impatient as I’ve ever heard her. Something she didn’t get about what I was showing her made her anxious.
“No. I mean, this page is in Boston. This data is coming from a machine at MIT.”
“What do you mean? What ‘page’?”
I flipped through a stack of printed notes and typed more arcane symbols into the window’s prompt. After a bit, a picture of the famous Nefertiti bust appeared. I had become a little obsessed with the sculpture, for reasons that neither of them needed to know.
“This one’s coming over the network from Berlin.”
Ina gasped and clapped her hands. “From the Neues Museum?”
“Well, the page is on a machine at Humboldt University.”
She shook her head in disbelief, beginning to see. Even Rafi sat forward on his rolling office chair.
“Bro. You could do this ten times better with a CD-ROM. Add a ton of bells and whistles plus a fancy interface, and everything would still load a million times faster.”
She slugged his bicep. “Wake up, mister. Don’t you get it? From my little apartment on Daniels, on my dinky little Amiga, I could go to any museum in the world.”
She didn’t get it, either. I didn’t get it. None of us had the faintest idea what was coming.
Ina turned and looked me in the eye. My heart pounded and I couldn’t hold her gaze.
“So this is you?”
“This is me. The innermost of the innermost. Nothing more inner than this.”
“This is what you want to give your life to?”
“That’s right.”
Rafi looked at me sideways. “You’re lying, man.” And he was right.
“Why?” Ina said.
“Why, what?”
“Why do you want to automate the encyclopedia? Why do you want to send art museums around the world?”
“I. . . . What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“Did something happen to you, growing up? Something you’re trying to fix? Something you need to give to someone?”
“I loved computers the moment I saw one. I think I was born this way.” I’d forgotten, entirely, what I loved before I loved computers.
Rafi shook his head as I spoke. He knew my roots, every bit as well as I knew his. “No, brother. That ain’t it. But whatever. If it makes you feel good to think so, then think so.”
I don’t know how it took me until right now, telling all this to you, to see what my onetime friend already saw, a third of a century ago.
Ina dismissed Rafi’s objections as some quibble between boys. The Young Strategy. The Keane Defense. She hugged me and pecked me on the cheek. “Cool beans, Mr. Spock. You get an A.”
My whole body flushed with her reward.
ALTHOUGH HE’D WATCHED ME humble myself to Ina’s ritual, Rafi still wanted out. Ina clucked at him and wagged her finger in his face like a windshield wiper. “You promised.” When he still balked, she sighed. “Fine. I’ll go next. Wednesday night. At my studio space in the art building. You two can sit and behave yourselves while I do my thing.”
