A Working Theory of Love (5 page)

Toler’s mocking look turns on me, and I’m surprised to find it as powerful as a laser.
I want to jump out of my skin. “They’re pretty boring,” I say. “You know, don’t discriminate
based on race. Don’t kill your enemies.”

“It’s bad to kill your enemies?” Toler asks, looking at his assistant as if for applause.

“Here’s one to chew on,” Livorno says. “As a physician you must warn the police if
you suspect a patient of suicidal tendencies.”

“True,” Toler says. “No, false! Noel, this man teaches me something every day.”

“Henry, Laham needs to speak to you.”

“Can it wait?” Toler asks. “I want to see the latest vintage from Amiante Estates.”
Chuckle, chuckle. They stroll into Livorno’s office. The assistant stands sentry.

“Make yourself at home,” I say, indicating the reception desk piled high with UPS
deliveries. “There’s a kettle and some teabags hidden in there.”

“I’d
love
to get some work done,” she says with alarming sincerity. She has a nice voice and
girlish good looks. I check to see if I feel one way or the other about them. I don’t.
After this weekend, I might call a moratorium on girlish good looks.

I knock again on Laham’s door. He looks up with hopeful, bloodshot eyes. I shake my
head, no reprieve. He frowns and reaches down to the floor, where he’s hidden a can
of Bawls. He takes a grim, determined mouthful.

•   •   •

A
T A QUARTER TO FOUR,
Livorno, Toler, and the assistant pass by my door. It’s time.

We gather around Laham’s computer screen in the back room. This must be a ceremonial
choice, because we all have the same interface. But here we can view Dr. Bassett and
complete our anthropomorphism.

“It’s too bad the stack doesn’t have little blinking lights,” I say. “Like Deep Blue.”

“A good idea,” Livorno says. “An LED system could mirror verbal output.”

I was joking, but I don’t say this out loud.

“It does raise the question,” Toler says. He points to a spot in front of me. A direct
indication is beneath him. “How are you encouraging human-computer bonding?”

“Is that what you specialize in?” Livorno says, with a high, nervous laugh. I think
this is meant as repartee.

“Emotional heuristics,” Toler says. “What kind are you using?”

Livorno shakes his head, as if a fly is buzzing his nose. “None, of course.”

“What does your buddy Minsky say? ‘The question isn’t whether we can give intelligent
computers emotions, but whether we can create an intelligent computer without emotions.’”

“Minsky likes to be quoted. He likes headlines.” Livorno is struggling with the cork
on a bottle of his homemade Zinfandel, which is even worse than his homemade Cab.
His hands are shaking. “The only important question is whether in this beautiful brain”—he
gestures toward the stack—“we can grow a mind.” He gives me the bottle to open.

“You mean
implant
a mind,” Toler says.

“It’s just a few trellises. A little structure.” Livorno nods at the computer screen.
“Laham.”

Livorno has used a full two-inch cork, as if he’s bottling Château Margaux. I twist
the corkscrew to its limit, listen to the servers refiring. On the wall overlooking
the stack, posters show Einstein teaching, Tesla’s ball crackling, and the sun setting
over the Stanford dish. I would say this is how Livorno sees his life—if he can’t
be Einstein, an undisputed genius, he can at least be Tesla, a disputed genius—but
in fact the posters are Laham’s, as are the wilted money tree and the yellowed monstera
sitting in the daylight of the open back door. I can see my dusty Subaru out there,
and now that the fans are off, I can hear the bucolic industry of Menlo Park, the
whisper of drainage pipes, the whirr of hybrids.

“Okay, ready,” Laham says, unhappy.

Livorno sits down at the keyboard. He’s forgotten to ask me what the topic should
be. This could be a problem—Dr. Bassett has his short suits.

hlivo: good morning

drbas: it’s afternoon, henry

hlivo: good point

drbas: come again?

A bad sign—misstepping in the second response.

hlivo: i have a pain in my knee. can you tell me what is causing it?

drbas: a pain in your knee?

That’s good—and a surprise. He’s clarified the conversation topic.

hlivo: yes

drbas: have you been doing repetitive motion?

hlivo: i’m training for a marathon. yes, that’s repetitive motion

“A marathon?” Toler exclaims. “Can you believe this guy?”

drbas: repetitive motion can cause joint pain

hlivo: what should i do about this pain caused by repetitive motion?

“Easy there,” Toler says. “No need to lead it by the nose.”

drbas: pain caused by repetitive motion?

hlivo: yes

drbas: take 500 milligrams of ibuprofen and stop the repetitive motion

“What an advance!” Livorno says. “Neill, distribute the glasses for our toast.”

“Come on,” Toler says. “Tell it you can’t stop. You’re training for a marathon.”

“I wouldn’t want to take up more of your time,” Livorno says.

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” Toler says. He adjusts his Lucite spectacles.
He’s the very devil.

hlivo: i can’t stop the repetitive motion. i’m training for a marathon

drbas: do you really think training for a marathon is a good idea?

“That’s Weizenbaum’s thing,” Toler says. “ELIZA.” His voice is serious now, to himself.
He’s right. ELIZA is a real antique from the sixties that—like a good therapist—repackages
your statements as questions. One of many programs we’ve cannibalized.

hlivo: it’s good for my heart health

drbas: you’re saying it’s good for your heart health?

hlivo: yes

drbas: i suppose that could be true

“A dodge,” Toler says. He seems relieved. “Let’s have that toast.”

He’s right, too, about the dodge. I invented that sequence myself: ask a declarative
statement back to the interlocutor, then admit it may be true. It looks like conversation.
But I’ve got a feeling Dr. Bassett hasn’t completely lost the thread; he’s just unsure
whether distance running is still a topic.

“Ask him if you should be training at your age,” I say. “Don’t mention marathons.”

hlivo: should I even be training at my age?

drbas: how old are you, henry?

hlivo: i’m in the sixty to eighty category

drbas: someone your age should consider a half-marathon

Toler is silent. He exchanges an expressionless look with his assistant.

“What happened?” Laham asks brightly.

“He appears to be following the conversation,” I say.

“He’s not following a conversation,” Toler says. “He’s just tracking your searches.
Even Yahoo can do that.”

“This is of a completely different order,” Livorno says. “I’d be happy to explain
it to you, Adam, but it might take a long time.”

“Good?” Laham asks. He looks at me.

I give him a thumbs-up. “Extremely.”

“It shouldn’t take too long to explain ten-year-old technology,” Toler says. “But,
yes, I better get going.”

“First, a toast.” Livorno stands and smooths out his pants, triumphant. “To a revolutionary
Monday.” He hands out the wineglasses and pours us generous turns. Then he makes a
face full of false regret. “Now I’ll have to write an article.”

“Everything in this computer is based on your father,” Toler says to me. It doesn’t
sound like a question, but it is one.

“There are all the ethics tests. Medical info. ELIZA. You know, the trellises.”

“But his voice. Does it sound like him? Do you sometimes feel his presence?”

“Just then I did.” I feel instantly embarrassed. Here in a room with four hard-brained
science PhDs, I’m sensing messages from beyond. I might as well admit to wearing crystals.

“I’m assuming one of these ‘trellises’ includes some commonsense notions of death,”
Toler says.

“Naturally,” Livorno says.

“So what happens if I tell him he’s dead?” Toler reaches toward the keyboard, air-typing.

Livorno takes a step between Toler and Dr. Bassett. “We can’t very well have him puzzling
about the silence of the grave.”

Toler knocks back his wine, makes a horrible grimace, and hands me the glass. “The
silence of the grave,” he says. “You’ve got a way with words, professor.” He smiles
and shakes our hands, making exaggerated eye contact. “I want to congratulate you
three on single-handedly lurching into the AOL era.” He gives a jaunty salute as he
and his assistant leave.

“He loves me like a son,” Livorno reminds us.

“Feels Oedipal to me,” I say.

“Difficult to be so outclassed by your aged teacher.” Livorno nods sympathetically,
then takes a happy slurp of his wine.

•   •   •

B
ACK IN MY OFFICE,
I try to solve the real question for today: just how good is Dr. Bassett 2.0?

frnd1: why did the chicken cross the road?

drbas: chickens are usually kept in pens

frnd1: how do you get a one-armed aggie out of a tree?

I wait for his response.

drbas: i thought we were talking about a chicken

Dr. Bassett has officially stayed awake for two questions.

frnd1: tell me about the girl who was abducted

drbas: once, a young girl was abducted by persons unknown. rumor had it that the iranians
were behind it, but the only persians to grace our small town in its history were
the librarian’s cats. the long-lost father was a more likely suspect, i thought

frnd1: what happened to her?

drbas: a search party left at 9 am after much free coffee and donuts at the bakery.
they returned for a free lunch and then for a free afternoon snack. the girl was never
found

frnd1: never never?

drbas: the girl was never found

frnd1: when did this happen?

He takes a while to chew this over. I’ve given him a true mind-bender: “this” doesn’t
just refer to a word or but to the whole conversation.

drbas: 1979. my wife was quite concerned, as we had two boys ourselves

Bingo.

frnd1: where are your boys now?

drbas: my oldest lives in michigan. my youngest is a senior in college

frnd1: are they happy?

drbas: do you think happiness is an important goal?

That’s a dodge.

frnd1: why did you have a family?

drbas: i still have a family

This is a mistake I often make, putting his life in the past tense.

frnd1: okay, why do you have a family?

drbas: why do i have a family?

frnd1: yes

drbas: sons are a gift from God

Is it a line from the journals? Some synthesis? In any case, it’s crazily comforting
to hear. I shake my hands out, walk to the back office. The program is good. Really,
really good. You wouldn’t mistake it for a real person, but you could believe it actually
knows what you’re talking about. I put my hand on the side of the stack, the brain.
It hums and buzzes.

3

W
EEKS CAN GO BY LIKE THIS.
Working all day in silence, sitting at a café for lunch, coming home to my well-tended
apartment. I cook dinner, sometimes a challenging dish, usually an easy one. I pet
the cat, read the news online, work sudoku till my brow aches. I belong to the San
Francisco Tennis Club, and I try to get down there for Doubles Drop-in and even the
exceptionally grim Singles Night. Beautiful, short-skirted divorcées squirting desperation
from their eyes like poisonous toads. I once asked a lawyer if she wanted to grab
a drink, and she nearly jumped in my car. As she explained later, it had been too
long since she’d seen another person’s apartment.

My housekeeper comes on Tuesdays and cleans the place within an inch of its life.
She’s a good-humored Brazilian woman, and I’ve fantasized about her. In my defense,
it’s not a fantasy of the patrón taking advantage of the hired help, but of a sweet
companionship growing between two mismatched people. Less
Caligula
, more
My Fair Lady.

•   •   •

T
HE WHOLE POINT OF
my trip to the hostel was a new, temporary identity, but in the end I didn’t succeed.
The girl, Rachel, and I woke up in the little bed, woven like lovers. We disengaged,
stiff, my head already pounding. She surveyed her clothes on the floor with dismay,
as if they were shards of something valuable she’d let slip from her grasp. Everything
felt apocalyptically dire. It was the right moment for me to shake her hand and go
catch the 48 back to the Mission, but I did something that surprised me—I lay back
down and told her exactly who I was and where I lived. I even handed her a business
card. And she did something that surprised me—she laughed.

So I feel a kind of elated foreboding, a concurrent happiness and conviction that
cosmic punishment is rolling my way, when I get a note in my inbox:

wazzup . . . me n folks r hangin 2nite at Stinson . . . wanna come? u will fit right
in LOL . . . seriously luv to c u there . . . r

It’s been three weeks since the hostel, well past the rekindling window. And I’m dazzled
by the email’s superlative wrongness—its cutesy misspellings, its tone, its very existence.
She’s a twenty-year-old who hasn’t graduated high school—LOL.

How does she have “folks” already in Marin? I can only hope she’s not referring to
her parents.

I ask Dr. Bassett what to do.

drbas: it’s normal to date before you settle down

At work’s end I examine myself in the Subaru’s vanity mirror—there are no looking
glasses at Amiante Systems—and am troubled by the innocence I find there. I’m divorced,
the son of a suicide, but these tsunamis have passed without a visible trace. It’s
true San Francisco men are famous for their Peter Pan syndrome, also true that I use
moisturizer. Still, I’d take a face with more character. When I smile, a tight bunch
of lines extends like cat whiskers from my eyes. When I stop smiling, each line remains
faintly there. That’s as much mark as life seems to have made.

And look at my clothes. They’ve suffered from the permissive atmosphere of Amiante.
I look like a square Web 2.0er determined not to dress like a square Web 2.0er. There
are hints of subversion, the collars too big, the pants snug in the thigh, the cuffs
too French, but who is the subversion for? Laham wears a baju kurung and polyester
slacks; Livorno, kitted out as an Eisenhower Republican, considers me a “classy dresser.”
I feel like Toler, a man disguised as who he really is.

I can’t imagine how this will translate with Rachel and her Marin hippie “folks,”
with their dreadlocks and coarse-weave ponchos. So though I disapprove of my actions,
I go home and transform. Beat-up jeans, urban sneakers, and an ironic T-shirt—I sink
down into the appropriate age range. Faux-urban to their faux-rural, but it ought
to fly. I have to say, the change is convincing. If only I had a similar switch of
cars, some aged European diesel drinker to dress down the shiny unironical Subaru.

Oh well. The drive—across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the jagged wild headlands—is
one of the reasons I live in San Francisco. All the money in the world has been unable
to ruin the entrance to Marin.

In the Stinson Beach parking lot, I take off my sweater and throw it in the passenger
seat. The fog hasn’t blown in, and it’s hot. In fact it feels like California up here,
the dreams of California. On the beach, couples—man woman, man man, man dog—pace the
line of land and water. Kids sit in circles close to the rocks. There are bongo drums.
I skirt wide, scanning the girls. Will I recognize Rachel? I mostly remember her sleeping
in my arms that night.

She’s not with the bongo drums. I stroll toward a group with several bandanna-wearing
dogs, struggling to look natural but not get sand in my shoes. A few girls are likely
candidates. I glance at them, and then I find myself leering. Is that her? How about
her? Her?

“Neill.”

Rachel stands off to my right, looking just like herself. I never forgot the way she
looked; I just forgot that I knew. Her cascade of dark blonde hair, the flash of her
bright smile, and her kind of unstudied regalness—less like actual royalty and more
like a heron. What a relief. She’s leaning against the rocks with a non-hippie-ish
guy who’s wearing a button-up. I instantly regret my T-shirt. They’re drinking white
wine, out of real wineglasses. Rachel appears to be wearing too much eyeliner, but
really there’s not much she can do to mar how pleased and self-possessed she looks.
She waves at me as if from a boat that’s coming to shore. Or rather as if she’s on
the shore, and I’m the boat.

“You look beautiful,” I say. I mean it. She looks fuller, more alive.

“Really?” she says. She’s stunned and pleased. Then she recovers. “I started jogging.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She gestures to her companion. “This is Raj.”

“Short for Rajasthan,” he says, shaking my hand. “Unfortunately.” He’s as Caucasian
as a Smothers Brother, but this is Marin, birthplace of the American Taliban. Redheaded
and sunburnt, with a last name like Kreuzer or Fitzpatrick, he might be Raj or Rasheed
or Rumi.

“You look tired,” Rachel says, patting the rock next to her. She has a new touch to
her hair: a dyed braid with colored beads at the end, which hangs directly over her
right eye. I reach over and tuck it behind her ear, surprising myself with the gesture.

“I’ve been working a lot,” I say.

“You want a little Sancerre?” Raj asks.

I’m suspicious of anyone who names varietals, especially when there’s no other choice
at hand. Something less objective is afoot, too—what is this person doing here? This
person who seems a lot like me?

“I hear you’re a software guy,” he says.

“No,” I say.

“That’s what you told me, right?” Rachel says. “At the youth hostel?”

Raj’s face doesn’t twitch. He appears to know how we met.

“I work for a software company,” I say.

“Sales,” Raj says.

“Development. It’s hard to explain.”

“This isn’t a test,” Raj says. “I sell real estate—I’m no Marin rich boy hypocrite.”

“That’s good,” I say. “I’ll take some of that wine, please.”

“I did go to Bennington. A strike against me.”

Rachel smiles at me, and then him and then back, as if watching a pleasant tennis
match.

“You work at a stealth company?” Raj asks.

“I’m not sure we qualify as a company. But yes we’re stealth. We make chatbots—talking
computer programs.”

“Interesting,” he says, though he seems to mean the opposite. “Rachel, when’s Trevor
getting here?”

“Maybe he got tied up at the coffee shop,” she says.

Good Lord, is there another one of us?

“That’s where I work,” she says to me.

“I thought you were in school,” I say.

“I work for school credit,” she says. “It’s not like New Jersey out here.”

“And that’s good?”

“It’s
so
good.” She swings her arm around my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek. Is she drunk?
I remember this strange zone of intimacy from when I was in college. The hugging,
the kissing on the cheek, which all seemed to mean nothing in the end. It took me
months to understand that my ex-wife was actually interested in me—I thought she was
just flexing her attraction.

Above the ocean, the sun hangs like a scoop of magma. If the fog holds off, we might
see it set.

“I’ve been anxious to meet you,” Raj says. He’s packing a pipe, and he holds it out
to me. I’m not big on marijuana, but refusing a Californian’s dope is like refusing
a Pashtun’s tea. And I’m starting to feel like an asshole. If this is an elimidate
he can’t be liking it any more than I am.

I take a tiny hit. Raj nods, groovy, and accepts the pipe back. Rachel takes her arm
from my neck and sits down on the sand, reclining on her elbows. A breeze tosses her
hair, a meteorological conspiracy to make her more beautiful than she really is.

“I can see how selling houses out here would be easy,” I say, nodding to the ocean’s
perfect grinding against the coast.

“You’d like it up here with us,” Raj says. “You seem like a free spirit.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

“Hey, hey!” a boy shouts, slouching our way. It’s Trevor. I’m relieved to see he’s
young—really young—not like us at all. He’s wearing—as predicted—a knit poncho and
rope sandals. “Raj, Rach, what’s up?” He’s all low fives and kisses on the cheek,
as affable as a puppy.

“This is Neill,” Rachel says.

“The famous Neill!” he says. “What up?”

“Neill makes chatbots,” Raj says.

“Whoa,” Trevor says, plopping down right next to Rachel and signaling for the pipe.

“It’s a talking computer program,” Raj says.

“Like for folks with no friends?”

“There’s no commercial application yet,” I say. At some juncture in my life, I apparently
became the kind of person who says “commercial application” in a normal conversation.
Maybe I’m just off balance—I don’t know how to respond to
what up?

“I know the first thing the corporations will do,” Trevor says, exhaling a long plume
of smoke and looking serious. “Robot phone sex.”

I laugh, but no one else does. It’s apparently not a joke.

“We don’t even believe in regular phone sex,” Trevor clarifies.

Raj nods, and Rachel looks out at the ocean. I scan the denominations, wondering who
“we” might be. There is something of the evangelical sheen of Mormons with these two
guys, but we’re smoking dope. Ditto with Jehovah’s Witnesses. What’s left? Catholics?
Lutherans?

“Simulated phone sex,” Raj says, “does sound like many things wrong with the world
rolled up into one.”

“I wouldn’t overstate,” I say. “There’s poverty and war and genocide.”

“Have you ever heard of ‘Bend Over Boyfriend’?” Trevor says, getting up to his knees
and coming close to me. He smells of coffee beans. “It’s like a package you buy—at
sex stores. For sixty-nine ninety-five you get a strap-on, some lube, and an instructional
DVD. It shows women how to do their boyfriends up the butthole.”

“Gross,” Rachel says.

“Why would a woman want to do that? Seriously? Because she’s totally desperate. They
go home—Arctic winds. They’re not
clicked
. Some company says, ‘Give me seventy dollars and I’ll get you clicked. Just stick
this thing in your boyfriend’s back door.’ And bam they buy it. It’s corporations
exploiting our fears and our weaknesses. You say it’s not as bad as a war, but it
is a war. And we’re losing.”

Rachel stands to brush the sand off her legs. “I’m checking out the water.”

“I’ll go with you,” Trevor says, leaping to his feet.

She holds out a flat palm, waves no. “You stay here and talk about back doors,” she
says.

Trevor makes an exasperated noise and throws up his arms. He returns to us men, smiling.
“There’s something wrong with me.”

“You’re too strident,” Raj says.

“I shouldn’t have been talking about that stuff in front of Rach.”

“Strap-ons?” I say. “Or war?”

“She’s a special young woman,” Raj says, pouring us the last of the wine. “I’ve liked
her from the first day she came to a meeting.” He’s looking at me. “Neill, you should
come to a meeting.”

The gratuitous use of my name always makes me nervous—it’s a tactic learned in cults
and MBA programs.

“I’m a very tolerant person,” I say. “As long as I don’t have to be involved.”

“I know Pure Encounters has a reputation, but none of it is true.”

“I didn’t think it was,” I say. I’ve never heard of Pure Encounters.

“It’s not about sex. It’s about connection—clicking.”

“It’s, like, a spiritual practice,” Trevor says. “It’s about purity of the self—the
only way to have purity in your encounters. And about resistance to these fucking
corporations, these fucking soul-sucking . . .”

“Trevor,” Raj says.

“I’m sorry, dude,” Trevor says. “I don’t know what’s got into me.” But he smiles and
leans back in the sand. It’s clear he knows
exactly
what’s gotten into him, and it’s a good thing and he likes it.

“If meetings aren’t your thing,” Raj says, “come to a retreat—we do a whole men’s
retreat thing.”

Not a chance. I fought off Southern Baptists for the first twenty years of my life,
and am now unconvertible. I don’t believe in purity, and I hate the word “encounters.”

“Rachel is a member?” I ask.

Raj nods. “Pure Encounters isn’t for everyone. But it’s made for people like Rachel,
who’ve had some, you know, impure encounters.”

I don’t think he’s referring to the youth hostel, an encounter so pure it was almost
distilled. We watch a mutt—is it possible to have a pit bull–Dalmatian mix?—thunder
by, in pursuit of a tennis ball. Rachel is in the distance, picking up a shell. The
water races up, surrounds her ankles and wrist.

“She’s got an old soul, your girl,” Raj says.