Let the Great World Spin (15 page)

No.

Quick now. Doorwise. At the buzzer. Her mind, she knows, needs a quick dip in water. A momentary cold swell, like those little buckets outside a Catholic church. Dip in and be healed.

—Yes?

—Your visitors, Mrs. Soderberg.

—Oh. Yes. Send them up.

Too harsh? Too quick? Should have said, Wonderful. Great. With a big swell to my voice. Instead of
Send them up.
Not even
please.
Like hired hands. Plumbers, decorators, soldiers. She engages the button to listen in. Curious thing, the old intercoms. Faint static and buzz and some laughter and door close.

—The elevator’s straight ahead, ladies.

Well, at least there’s that. At least he didn’t show them to the service elevator. At least they’re in the warm mahogany box. No, not that. The elevator.

The faint mumble of voices. All of them together. They must have met up beforehand. Prearranged. Hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t let it cross my mind. Wish they hadn’t.

Talked about me, maybe. Needs a doctor. Awful gray streak in her hair.

Husband’s a judge. Wears implausible sneakers. Struggles to smile.

Lives in a penthouse but calls it
upstairs.
Is terribly nervous. Thinks she’s one of the gals, but she’s really a snob. Is likely to break down.

How to greet? Handshake? Air kiss? Smile? The first time around they had hugged good- bye, all of them, in Staten Island, at the doorstep, with the taxi beeping, her eyes streaked with tears, arms around one another, all of us happy, at Marcia’s house, when Janet pointed to a yellow balloon caught in the treetops:
Oh, let’s meet again soon!
And Gloria had squeezed her arm. They had touched cheeks.
Our boys, you think they
knew each other, Claire? You think they were friends?

War. The disgusting proximity of it. Its body odor. Its breath on her neck all this time, two years now since pullout, three, two a half, five million, does it matter? Nothing’s over. The cream becomes the milk. The first star at morning is the last one at night. Did she think they were friends?
Well, they could have been, Gloria, they certainly could have been.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 86

86

C O L U M M c C A N N

Vietnam was as good a place to start as any. Yes indeed. Dr. King had a dream and it would not be gassed on the shores of Saigon. When the good doctor was shot, she sent a thousand dollars in twenty- dollar bills to his church in Atlanta. Her father raved and roared. Called it guilt money.

She didn’t care. There was plenty to be guilty for. She was modern, yes.

She should have sent her whole inheritance.
I like fathers; I just think everyone should disown one.
Like it or not, Daddy, it goes to Dr. King, and what do you think of your niggers and kikes now?

Oh. The mezuzah on the door. Oh. Forgot about that. She touches it, stands in front of it. Just tall enough to obscure it. The top of her head.

The clang of the elevator. Why the shame? But it’s not shame, not really, is it? What is there possibly to be ashamed of? Solomon insisted on it years ago. That’s all. For his own mother. To make her comfortable when she visited. To make her happy. And what’s wrong with that? It did make her happy. Isn’t that enough? I have nothing to apologize for. I have scut-tled around all morning with my lips puckered, afraid to breathe. Swallowed a bag of air. I should have been a pair of ragged claws. What is it the young ones say? Get a grip. Hang on. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

What was it I never said to Josh?

She can see the numbers as they rise. A bustle from the elevator shaft and a loud chatter. They are comfortable already. Wish I had met them earlier, in some coffee shop. But here they are, here they come.

What was it?

—Hello, she says, hello hello hello, Marcia! Jacqueline! Look at you!

Come in, oh, I love your shoes, Janet, this way, this way. Gloria! Oh, hi, oh, look, please, come in, it’s lovely to see you.

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.

—

i t wa s a s if s h e could travel through the electricity to see him. She could look at any electronic thing—television, radio, Solomon’s shaver—

and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage. Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against the freezer. She would open the door then and blast herself with cool. What she liked about it was that the light wouldn’t come on. She could go from warm to McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 87

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

87

cold in an instant and she could remain in the darkness and not wake Solomon. No sound, just a soft plop of the rubber- edged opening, and then a rush of cold over her body, and she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transistors, the hand- set switches, through the ether, and she could see him, all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he sat under the fluorescents, amid the long rows of desks and mattresses, working.

She had inklings, intuitions about how it all worked. She was no slouch. She had her degree. But how was it, she wondered, that machines could count the dead better than humans? How was it that the punch cards knew? How did a series of tubes and wires know the difference between the living and the dead?

He sent her letters. He called himself a hacker. It felt like a word to chop down trees. But all it meant was that he programmed the machines.

He created the language that tripped the switches. A thousand micro-scopic gates fell in an instant. She thought of it as opening up a field. One gate led to another, and another, over the hill, and soon he was on a river and away, rafting down the wires. He said that just being at a computer made him so giddy that he felt he was sliding down the banisters, and she wondered what banisters he meant, because there had been no banisters in his childhood, but she accepted it, and she saw him there, in the hills around Saigon, sliding down the banisters toward a concrete basement in a cinder- block building, stepping to his desk, punching the buttons alive.

The crisp cursor flicking in front of his eyes. The furrow of his brow. His fierce scan through the printouts. His laughter at a joke as it rippled along the row of desks. The breakthroughs. The breakdowns. The plates of food on the floor. The Rolaids strewn on the desks. The web of wires.

The whirl of switches. The purr of fans. It got so hot in the room, he said, that they would have to step out every half an hour. Outside, they kept a water hose to cool down. Back at their consoles they would be dry within seconds. They called each other Mac. Mac this, Mac that. Their favorite word. Machine- aided cognition. Men against computers. Multi- access cognition. Maniacs and clowns. Must ask coyly. Might add colostomy bag.

Everything they did centered around their machines, he said. They divided, linked, nested, chained, deleted. Rerouted switches. Cracked passwords. Changed memory boards. It was a sort of black magic. They knew McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 88

88

C O L U M M c C A N N

the inner mysteries of each and every computer. They stayed inside all day. Working with hunches, failures, intangibles. If they needed sleep they just slid in under the desk, too tired to dream.

The Death Hack was his core project. He had to go through the files, key all the names in, add the men up as numbers. Group them, stamp them, file them, code them, write them. The problem was not even so much the dying as the overlap in the deaths. The ones who had the same names—the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Sullivans and the Johnsons. Fathers with the same names as their sons. The dead uncles with the exact initials as the dead nephews. The ones who went AWOL. The split missions. The misreported. The mistakes. The secret squadrons, the flotillas, the task forces, the reconnaissance crews. The ones who got married in little rural villages. The ones who stayed deep in the jungle.

Who could account for them? But he fit them into his program as best he could. Created a space for them so that they became a sort of alive. He put his head down, worked it, asked no questions. It was, he said, the patri-otic thing to do. What he liked most was the moment of creation, when he solved what nobody else could solve, when the solution was clean and elegant.

It was easy enough to write a program that would collate the dead, he said, but what he really wanted was to write a program that could make sense of the dying. That was the deep future. One day the computers would bring all the great minds together. Thirty, forty, a hundred years from now. If we don’t blow one another asunder first.

We’re at the cusp of human knowledge here, Mama, he said. He wrote about the dream of widely separated facilities sharing special re-sources. Of messages that were able to go back and forth. Of remote systems that could be manipulated through the telephone lines. Of computers that were capable of repairing their own malfunctions. Of protocols and bulk erasers and teletype printouts and memory and RAM

and maxing out the Honeywell and fooling around on the prototype Alto that had been sent across. He described circuit boards like some people described icicles. He said that the Eskimos had sixty- four words for snow but that didn’t surprise him; he thought they should have more—why not? It was about the deepest sort of beauty, the product of the human mind being stamped onto a piece of silicon that you might one day cart around in your briefcase. A poem in a rock. A theorem in a slice of stone.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 89

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

89

The programmers were the artisans of the future. Human knowledge is power, Mama. The only limits are in our minds. He said there was nothing that a computer couldn’t do, even the most complicated problems, find the value of pi, the root of all language, the most distant star. It was crazy how small the world truly was. It was a matter of opening up to it.

What you want is your machine to speak back to you, Mama. It almost has to be human. You have to think of it that way. It’s like a Walt Whitman poem: you can put in it everything you want.

She sat by the fridge and read his letters and smoothed his hair and told him it was time to go to sleep, that he should eat something, he should change his clothes, that he really needed to look after himself.

She wanted to make sure he wasn’t fading away. Once, during a blackout, she sat against the kitchen cabinets and wept: she couldn’t get through to him. She stuck a lead pencil into the wall socket and waited.

When the electricity came on the pencil jumped in her fingers. She was aware of how it might look—a woman at a fridge, opening and closing the door—but it was a solace, and not something Solomon would suspect. She could pretend that she was cooking, or getting a glass of milk, or waiting for meat to thaw.

Solomon didn’t talk about the war. Silence was his way out. He chatted instead about his court cases, the insane litany of the city, the murders, the rapes, the cons, the hustles, the stabbings, the robberies. But not the war.

Only the protesters came in his range—he thought them weak, guileless, cowardly. Gave them the stiffest sentences he could. Six months for pouring blood on the draft board files. Eight months for smashing the windows of the Times Square recruiting office. She wanted to march and protest, to meet all the hippies and yippies and skippies in Union Square, Tompkins Square Park, to carry a banner for the Catonsville Nine. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. We must support our boy, said Solomon. Our sweet little tow- headed one. Who slept between us not so many years ago, curled against us. Who played train sets on the Oriental rug. Who outgrew his blue blazer. Who knew fish fork, salad fork, dinner fork, the broad tines of life.

And then, from nowhere, blackout, all blackout, ever blackout.

Johsua became code.

Written into his own numbers.

She lay two months in bed. Hardly moving. Solomon wanted to hire McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 90

90

C O L U M M c C A N N

a nurse, but she refused. She said she would snap out of it. But the word was not
snap,
more like
slide.
A word Joshua had liked. I will slide out.

She began to walk around the house, through the dining room, around the living room, past the breakfast nook, toward the fridge again. She put Joshua’s photo front and center. She leaned against it and talked to him.

And the fridge collected things that he might have liked. Simple things.

She cut them out and pasted them on. Computer articles. Photos of circuit boards. A picture of a new building at PARC. A newspaper article about a graphics hack. The menu from Ray’s Famous. An ad from
The
Village Voice.

It struck her that her fridge was beginning to look hairy. The phrase almost made her smile. My hairy fridge.

And then one evening, the little clips fluttered to the floor and she leaned down and read it again. LOOKING FOR MOTHERS TO TALK TO. NAM

VETS. P.O. BOX 667. She had never really thought of him as a veteran, or having been in Vietnam—he was a computer operator, had gone to Asia.

But the ad made her fingers tingle. She brought it to the kitchen counter, sat down, quickly wrote a reply in pencil, then went over it with ink, stole quietly out the door, slunk into the elevator. She could have mailed it right downstairs in the lobby, but she didn’t want to; she ran outside to Park Avenue, middle of the night, in a snowstorm, the doorman stunned to see her going out the door in her nightdress, slippers on:
Mrs. Soderberg, are you okay?

Can’t stop now. Letter in hand. Mother seeks bones of son. Found in blown- up café in foreign land.

She ran down to Lexington to the mailbox on Seventy- fourth. The white breath leaving her for the air. Toes wet with snow. She knew that if she didn’t send it right then, she never would. The doorman nodded shyly when she came back in, cast a quick flick of his eyes to her breasts.