Supporting Cast
"Ever seen a horse give birth?"
"Please, Duncan."
"The horse's labia are like big brown wet hotdog buns when the thing comes out."
"Not again..."
"And then this huge fucking, like, object, just emerges. It's like a Brancusi cocooned in translucent goo."
"Utterly revolting."
"The thing that gets you is, it's long. It's this long, stretched-out thing. You see the face all pulled back, the baby horse face, all yanked back like it's going a million miles―"
Steph slaps him in the face with her New Yorker.
Duncan Park is our scapegoat. On top of being a dork of the highest order, a priggishly irritating though indespensibly knowledgeable lab rat, he works part-time for the FBI as a bioforensics consultant, which, of course, makes him the easiest possible target.
Everyone more or less has a role. Miranda; the voluptuous and insouciant huntress whose stockings crackle with static when she crosses her legs. Devi; the Iranian princess ― prim, amber-skinned, unassuming, heir to the Crest toothpaste fortune and loathe to admit it. Matt; the lumberjack ― lumbering, fearless, beautiful in kind of a windblown 80's teen villain kind of way, featherbacked hair and all. Steph, the provocateur ― cantankerous, irreverent, gracefully awkward, with olive skin and slightly Vulkanish ears.
And then there's me, the nomad. The ADD-addled bookworm. The Jew.
I'm typing this from my favorite spot in the hotel. I don't usually eat breakfast, but today I had an unexpected and very specific hankering for honeyed oatmeal. Maybe I'm pregnant. Hysterical pregnancy, anyone? God. It's foggy this morning. Parents turn in their keys, lead their whining, waddling children through the exit and disappear into murky, colored blobs in the parking lot. The waitstaff is doing the post-breakfast wipe-down. They're used to me by now. They like me. Before clearing the last of the buffet table, they come over with whatever's left in the coffee pot and say, "Can I warm ya up, there?" I'm their little sister, their child.
Someone told me they're planning to install a TV in the dining room. If that happens, I'm totally giving myself up for adoption.
Remote Control Rats
I have restricted my shopping to generic products, less for their reduced price than for their aesthetic value. It's straight-up Brutalism. Tissue boxes are dull yellow cubes with stenciled black text reading, TISSUE PAPER. Vitamins, vials of aspirin, nasal spray ― every store-brand pharmaceutical a creamy off-white, except the PINK BISMUTH, which is pink. I like the prosaic redundancy of the labels, their unabashed surrender to dullness. The future of consumerism?
Every night in my generic room, I watch the chemical-red afterglow of dusk dissipate into a smudgy charcoal sea. My room faces West. You can see the river, the edge of the city. I come home and open the blinds and sit in the deep-cushioned armchair and watch the darkness sheath what's left of the sun. It's immensely pleasurable to me. Not the beauty so much, although it is marvelous to see the narrowing bands of light quiver across the water, the hilltops ablaze in molten scarlet. More the reassurance that time is passing.
One curious symptom of Alzheimer's disease is a phenomenon called "sundowning", whereby patients become increasingly confused and agitated during the evening hours, presumably because their sense of time has been disrupted by the changing light. Perhaps the rest of us experience the opposite of that. We require clear evidence of change ― sunsets, shifting tides, snowfalls, flower blossoms. They seem to reinforce a desperate need for sequentiality, for motion.
Ever been to a Casino? They're fascinating spaces precisely because they do everything they can to deny the passage of time. The round-the-clock kitchen and ubiquitous pushcarts full of steaming platters, the lack of windows or clocks, the hypnotic rows of slot machines extending off into forever, the mirrored walls, the difficulty of finding an exit. It's a denial of death. Gambling is a kind of religious experience, and casinos are its temples. The patron is suspended in an eternal present. Like the Nordic lands where the sun never sets.
Maybe this is why gambling is legal in Finland.
Had to evacuate the building earlier today. One of the other labs was doing experiments on rats, getting them to inhale toxic substances, and one escaped. We heard the shrieks down the hall. Within five minutes the entire building was outside without our jackets. Some were giggling, others huddled together in familial embraces.
More and more of these bizarre experiments are being performed. A few years ago they made a remote controlled rat. I'm not kidding, you can look this up. They opened up its brain, stuck tiny little wireless electrodes inside the somatosensory cortex, and literally controlled its actions with a joystick. They "drove" the rat all around the office.
While we were shivering outside, Matt told me about the first time he had sex. He said it was traumatic because his girlfriend cried afterwards. I asked him why. He shrugged, looked at me rather matter-of-factly and said, "Sex is sad."
Was he joking? I still don't know.
The Binding Problem
Disconcertingly warm day today. Further proof Armageddon is here. I am suspicious of sunny days in the wintertime, keep expecting rivers of blood, locusts.
Had a student come to my office earlier. A thin-necked sophomore named Theo Pickett, who walks with a hunched gait and stuttered cadence not unlike an emu, rapped timidly on my semi-ajar door.
"Professor Bloom? I know I'm supposed to make an appointment, but."
"Have a seat," I said, opening my palm towards the aluminum chair that's always freezing to the touch. He nodded with pinched lips and sat. "What's on your mind."
"Binding." He unspooled his scarf and draped it over his lap, releasing a rice-like and slightly canine odor.
"We haven't gotten to the Binding Problem yet, Theo."
"I've read ahead and I want to be prepared for the mid-term." His eyes carried a vigilance, a sobriety and alertness. I guessed he grew up in New York.
"It's a complex, multi-faceted issue. I'm not sure I can unpack it all for you in time for the next class."
He swung his black messenger bag from around his shoulders and removed a notebook from its wide pocket. "I just need a kind of general explanation," he said. "From there I think I can work out the finer points."
Students seem to get more aggressive each year, just as they get hipper and more attractive. How is that?
"Okay. Well, Binding is one of big issues in brain/mind studies right now, maybe the big issue. It is to us what the so-titled Theory of Everything is to the physics/cosmology world. You know what that is?"
"Like, trying to get the laws of cosmology to jibe with the laws of subatomic particles?"
The crunch of rubbers over brittle shrubs was audible through the window.
"Basically, yeah. Only, instead of quantum mechanics and relativity, we have the dichotomy between subject and object, between 'The World' and 'You,' this self that experiences The World more or less continuously. And there you are, you're in this office, which is part of The World. The reason you know it's part of The World, and not You, is that your eyes are receiving the light bouncing off the surfaces of the space and translating it into a raw stream of electrical signals, almost like binary code, which is transmitted through the optic nerve into the back of your brain, where it's broken down into its constituent parts ― color, depth, motion, luminance, etc. ― with all these little sub-areas rapidly decoding the information and processing it. All the senses work like this. You hear me talk, you hear the sound of my voice because your ears are receiving the vibrations in the air, translating them into electrical signals, which are sent via the auditory nerve to the sides of the brain, and subsequently analyzed. So, basically the same thing happens with touch and smell and taste, and the thing is they're all being received and processed at slightly different rates. Your brain is constantly taking little tiny snapshots of The World with your respective senses, and then synchronizing them into a sense of Here and Now. Each image is separate and still, and yet when we run them fast enough, they blur into an illusion of motion. You with me so far?"
"Like watching a movie."
"Right. A flip book, a movie. And this is one of the primary functions of the cortex, to break down information about The World and reassemble it in a way that is couched within the Self, often called 'core consciousness' ― that is, with the feeling that it is You doing the perceiving. In this sense, the brain is an interpreter. It receives billions of symbols every second, and then tries to give them semantic meaning. The question is, how does it work?"
Theo slid the cuffs of his ratty sweater up his forearms, revealing fresh-looking tattoos of barbed wire around his wrists. Ten years ago, this look was called punk.
"This is where 'Binding' comes in. Binding is the mystery of how all of those little broken-off percepts, the "frames" that the brain perceives, are locked into sync and animated. It's a great mystery because it involves nearly every branch of the field, and because a solution would mark an advance in science as important as the discovery of DNA. Psychologists and psychoanalysts can explain to a reliable degree why a person might feel a certain way at a certain time just as neurobiologists can describe the behavior of an individual cell under the influence of an individual variable, but as of yet, neither camp can cross the divide and explain what one has to do with the other ― how consciousness and thought and emotion emerge from microscopic transmitters and inhibitors. How is the big bound to the small? How is the inner world bound to the outer?"
The kid was scribbling his notes furiously. Waiting for him to catch up with me, I found myself wondering whether his hair was fiendishly manicured or veritably bed-headed.
"Wait," he said. "So, but, how do you even go about studying the Binding Problem, much less solving it?"
"That's a good question, and there are many different approaches. One is to figure out which brain areas contribute to the assembly process. You take PET scans and fMRIs and you see which regions light up when the subject performs a specific task. In fact, Crick performed these studies a few years ago and found that the 'awareness neurons' reside in the anterior cingulate cortex.
So teams of researchers go off to figure out exactly where. Then you have a bunch of other scientists who study what happens when these awareness neurons fire. They'll ask, for instance, is there a particular chemical brew that contributes to consciousness? Or, does the rate at which the 'awareness neurons' fire have something to do with the conscious states being activated? It's all good stuff, important stuff, but totally and resignedly reductionist. Which, yes, is necessary, but at a certain point makes you go, Okay, now what? I mean, once you've boiled down the 'neural correlates of consciousness' to a group of very specific attributes, what do you do with them? Because you've only described; you haven't explained…"
I continued to debrief Theo for another fifteen minutes, rambling on about nested heirarchies and neural nets, feeling more and more as though I was on the verge of an anxiety attack ― either from excitement about the topic, or fear that my own professional contributions to Binding were futile. He sat, chin perched on one hand, eyes darting back and forth from his lap to my face as he worked to process all the information. I imagined his twenty-year-old mind frantically searching for the room to fit these chunks of knowledge, like packing a full apartment into a station wagon.
There is something at once delectable and repulsive about youth. Young flesh is smooth and taut, perfectly packaged; even the scrapes and bruises are pregnant with yolky essence, eager to burst and spill, and yet so quick to heal. But it's also ignorant of how it wants to be handled ― curious, yes, but somatically uncultivated ― and this ill-defined palette, freshly varnished and light-weary, like a developing photograph, is uncomfortably reminiscent of childhood, of band-aids, apple juice, splinters and Calamine lotion. Perhaps part of what attracts us to youth, though, is the combination; its very corruptibility, its impressionableness, which bequeathes to the leering mentor, the aging widow, the pedophile, a sense of absorbable grandiosity, a promise of spiritual replenishment.
The smell of frozen flower beds from the winterized greenhouse one floor below lofted intermittently through the office. I longed for spring.
Not Even Wrong
"Have you ever considered, Brodsky, that you are completely wrong."
Our grant had come through, $50,000 less than what we asked for, and the Professor grumpled around the lab all day, making obnoxious comments.
"You are sub-wrong. You aspire to be wrong."
The lives of scientists are shrouded in mystery. In the 21st century, the public's collective imagination resides in the scientist far more than any other archetype. We have replaced the priest, the shaman, the warrior, the sorcerer, the detective; we embody man's deepest hopes ― the promise of immortality, the transcendence of time and space, as well as his most vivid fears ― the mishandling of knowledge, technology gone awry, nightmares of mutant robots marauding the earth. In reality, though, most of our days are spent gossiping and checking email. Sure, we do science-y stuff too. We mix things in beakers, we look through microscopes, we check our notes and we type numbers into calculators. But lab work is work and most work is menial. I lick a lot of envelopes. I adjust knobs and set stopwatches. I put things in piles. I order dye. I search for articles in the on-line library. I replace boxes of High Five® latex gloves. I tweak, I rinse, I double-check. It's a job.
Of course, as a job, the pay is crap. I don't have to worry because I came in to mad cash when Dad died. But the others have to take on other work, which is crazy, considering the hours we put in to this one already. Some work at the library, some bartend. Steph's job is by far the most interesting, though ― she moonlights as a psychic.
Let's be clear: she doesn't believe for a second that she actually possesses superhuman powers. No psychics do. But her clients are certainly convinced, and she makes ducats exploiting their credulity. The trick, of course, is to couple vague guesswork with simple deduction. Add a bit of faux-Delphian poise and the customer will do the rest. Begin with the obvious. If the client appears sad, she's probably lost something or someone recently. (The word "recently" is key, because it's totally subjective and could mean earlier that day or five years ago.) If she appears anxious, she is probably anticipating having to perform or be judged somehow. Unconsciously, she's telling you everything, so just spit it back to her and you'll have earned her trust. "You'd be amazed," Steph says, "how many times people say, 'there's no way you could know that!'" But obviously, there were ways, and she'd found them.
"The other word for that is fraud," says Matt.
"Whatever," says Steph. "They get what they want, I get what I want."
"You're capitalizing on their insecurities. You're using desperate people for financial gain."
"Oh spare me. This is how the world works. Doctors, stockbrokers, clergymen. We pay them for their confidence."
"Accountability through invisibility. Very clever."
"Works for me, works for them. I sleep well. Anyway, how do you know I'm not psychic?"
This is the argument we are subjected to almost daily. They are, of course, secretly in love.
Cryptoaesthetics
Traffic heavy on the way home. It's one of the few things that really gets to me. Makes me want to scream, claw apart the upholstery. Physicists have likened traffic to fluid dynamics. Supposedly one car can make a difference. If you slow down as you approach the traffic, you actually influence the stoppage ahead. Hasn't worked for me yet.
While I was sitting there behind a river of red brakelights, I started thinking about my very first friend, Naoko.
My dad and I were living in Japan in the late 70's when mechanical dolls ("karakuri-ningyo") were all the rage. And I remember Naoko complaining to me about her rock star figure, how her guitar would only make one sound. So I opened up the little panel in her lower back to access the wiring, applied my thumb to the yellow wire while pressing the switch on the guitar, and was able to manipulate her pitch. I also managed to get the red lights on her earrings to flicker at a faster rate. Naoko was so thrilled she gave hers to me. Like pretty much all kids, Naoko assumed objects were whole; they were like bodies, innate and intact and incapable of being tampered with from the inside out. I shared these assumptions myself, but the moment I took those robotic innards between my fingers ― a feat motivated by pure audacity and a kind of bullying showmanship ― the entire mythology vanished. In its place was the another kind of enchantment: that of materialism.
Remember the Commodore 64?
The home computer that was just a grey keyboard you plugged into your TV? You could ask it to run a program in MOS, and then you saw how it worked; all the commands written out like driving directions on MapQuest, and from there it was a cinch to hack the games, make them do all sorts of naughty things.
This kind of nerdy mischief continued all through childhood. Stole games off other machines with my modem, which back then required an actual phone. Hacked into the school mainframe to change my grades like Matthew Broderick in War Games, which, by the way, is an awesome movie. At 14, I was snatching credit card numbers to order stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalogue. The novelty of naughtiness eventually wore thin, yet I continued, driven by a relentless curiosity of systems. The best way to learn about codes is to break them. In fact, "break" is a less appropriate term than "take apart." All systems yield their secrets by being dismantled. I was peering under the hood of a program to see what was connected to what, and what happened if this cable went to that input, and if this switch was off instead of on. Stealing data such as credit ― and what is capital but a stream of binary traffic? ― was the natural way of "testing" a theory. If I could successfully "purchase" a fiber optic cable without getting caught, it was proof that I understood how codes were written and unwritten, how astronomical primes were swapped, how the I'll show you mine if you show me yours protocol of computer age transactions actually operated. They didn't teach you that shit in school. And there weren't any books on hacking in the local library.
But computers and networks, I eventually realized, were not ends in-themselves. They were simply conduits ― great wefts of structure and pattern holding nothing of instrinsic value. What was credit but another empty signifier? The thing that interested me was abstract form itself, the strange symmetries and liquid diagrams beheld by the mind's eye. To me, codes and ciphers were the true objects of beauty, not the information they contained. Call it a mathematical modernism, a manifesto of cryptoaesthetics; the convinction that all of nature could be reduced (or "compressed" in)to a secret discourse of proportion and chance, hide and seek. Everything from germs, which evolve to usurp the "code-breaking" effect of antiobiotics, the adaptive properties of chameleons and the ink of squid, to nuclear launch codes and satellite triangulation programs ― all are bound by an invisible lattice of cardinality.
We delight in the acquisition of secrets, even artificial ones like riddles, crossword puzzles and games like Chess and Scrabble, because they help to sublimate the desire to obtain forbidden knowledge. It's why I like mystery novels. Not only are they about codes ― essentially all of them are about the retrieval or protection of information withheld from others ― but the structure of the quests themselves are a kind of encryption to be deciphered by the reader.
Take the one I'm reading now. It's about this guy. He's a hit man, although we don't know it at first, and we follow him around as he stalks this other character. And he keeps assembling these clues, each one revealing something new about the central narrative. Like so:
And then you become aware of this other story within that story which does the opposite ― contradictory information flowing "centripetally," like this:
So there's this whole structure/counter structure thing going on, and eventually the two narratives negate each other in a kind of paradox like Escher's "Drawing Hands."
Reminds me of something cool that Dad taught me years ago called the Duality Principle, the central proposition of projective geometry, which describes two figures acting as maps of the other. (Brianchon's theorem and Pascal's theorem describe "dual" figures, because the points on the former describe the qualities of the lines on the latter, and vice versa.) It's always been a conviction of mine that detective stories aren't actually stories. They're intricate designs which happen to be in narrative form. The now all-but-forgotton pulp writer, Thomas Stephen Keeler, would actually draw out the plotlines before approaching the typewriter. This one was used for Song of the Seven Sparrows:
I read somewhere that Mildred Wirt Benson, who ghostwrote the first slew of Nancy Drew mysteries (under the pen-name Carolyn Keene), continued to compose plotlines to the later books long after other writers had taken over the actual writing. Any true reader of genre fiction would understand why.
