Deductions
Dad and I spend a summer in a sleepy village called Omachi, sequestered in land-locked central Honshu, a place so quiet that the sputtery clack of a rickshaw can be heard a mile away. Coiled silvery roads, freezing well water. Everything smells like pine needles. On a clear day, if you stand on the porch of our creaky mountainside lodge, you can see sweeping helicoids of wind comb through the massive ginger fields below.
On the days he's not on duty, he takes me for long morning walks. We hold hands and play a game with our fingers where we "type" out simple messages to each other in morse code, a little thing we like to do.
Finally I break the silence: "What's the best science experiment of all time?"
Without hesitation: "Eratosthenes. Second century B.C.E."
"What'd he do?"
He pauses, breathes in the stingingly cool mountain air.
"I'll tell you what he did. But first, let me ask you this: how do you know the world is round?"
"Because."
"Because?"
"Because they sailed around it, and you can't sail around something that's flat. And they took pictures of it from space and it was round."
I look up at him. His ears are backlit crimson in the yolky afterdawn. Light spills across a portion of his whiskered face.
"That's right. But they knew long before that."
"How?" I say.
"Through deduction. You see, the ancient Greeks already had a hunch it was round. For one thing, they noticed that if you were at sea and saw a ship approaching on the horizon, the first thing you'd notice would always be the sails. Or if you were traveling in the desert you'd see the approaching rider before the camel. The other was that every celestial body in the sky appeared disc-shaped, so it was natural to assume the same of Earth. But the question remained: if the planet was spherical, how big was it? A thousand miles? A million? A google-plex?" His lips bend into an almost-smile, antipating my own. "But Eratosthenes possessed an unusually clever mind. He knew from his studies that at exactly noon on the summer solstice, a deep well in the equatorial city of Syene was illuminated all the way to the very bottom. Quite straightforwardly, he reasoned that this meant the sun must be directly above the Earth at that moment, assuming its rays traveled in parallel lines. Eratosthenes then traveled 5,000 stades due north to Alexandria, plunged a wooden stick into the ground, and measured the angle of the shadow at precisely that time of day. The angle showed to be 7.2 degrees, which meant that the distance between the two cities represented 7.2/360, or 1/50 of the Earth's circumference. Simply plug in the 5,000 stades and it's easy to see that the complete distance around the globe was 50 times more ― 250,000. And as a stade was approximately 180 meters long, we find that his measurement came to 45,000km, a mere 100km off from what was later revealed to be the actual value. Using similar logic, he went on to deduce the size of the sun and moon as well as their respective distances to Earth, inaugurating the science of astronomy. And all of this from a stick and a little bit of basic geometry."
"But you don't even use a stick!" I say.
"No, but I use other tools."
"A paper and pencil?"
"Formulas, tables, graphs, equations. I rely on the work of others. Everyone must, to some extent. But the greats used nothing but deduction and imagination. Pure thought."
He gives a full smile, the simple sloping arc of reason filling him with pleasure. I smile back because I am happy he is happy.
The Junkmail of Dreams
Got up super early, did some crunches. Sunlight seared through the heavy grey dawnclouds, drawing miniature rainbows from the misty sky. I had the sense it snowed briefly overnight and melted; there was a crisp tangy quality to the air, like slightly rotten orange peels. The world seemed ionized with the flux of life and death. Phases, crystallizations. Secret exchanges.
There were a number of slugs on the damp road like stringy globs of wood glue. Where do they come from? How do they know when it's rained? Are they, in some sense, conscious?
I sat on the bench outside the hotel and had my last Nat Sherman. The American flag that protrudes from the awning sat limp in the dead wind. A garbage truck rolled by, huffing and sighing at each interval. The garbage men wore vibrant yellow windbreakers with little blue insignias on the back, not unlike prison uniforms, and when they stepped into the sun they lit up like torches. One of them lifted a heavy bag from the can and it tore open, the refuse spilling all over the sidewalk. My instinct, strangely, was to turn away. Don't know why. It wasn't that it was gross so much as it felt private. The festering extract of someone's activities and fetishes and fears ― daily applications and nightly rituals, the static-knotted lint from a carpet, empty jars of secret ointments, tissues encrusted with bodily discharge. It seemed a document of codes and inscriptions, DNA, deleted passwords, expired credit cards; the junkmail of dreams. What could be more personal?
During my lunch break, I brought the molecule schematic to my friend Bill, a specialist in crystallography. He is a gaunt, bedraggled man who in another age might have been called a hippie. His frizzy apricot hair is kept in a loose braid behind his back and he wears a silver ring with a dolphin on it.
"I'm not really sure what you're asking," he said, in between bites of a pear.
"I'm asking you to identify this structure," I said.
He leaned in to examine the page, lowering his tinted, photochrome glasses which magnified his eyes to R. Crumb levels.
"I can't really tell you much given this barebones diagram," he said, sniffling. His hair smelled like eggs. "I mean, it doesn't specify the elements, so it could be nearly any metallic substrate."
"A metal?"
"Yeah, obviously. See the latticework? The way the teeth taper to a narrow apex? Probably a semi-conductor. An oxidized silicon. Coupled with some sort of honeycomb layering. Chromium, maybe. Copper." He gnawed on the core of his fruit.
"So this was engineered, you think?"
"What do you mean. Of course. Nature isn't that complicated."
He sniffled again, a long whispery djgh sound.
After work, I took a "stroll" through the park. I found a porpoise-colored rock, sat down, and thought about stuff.
The light was... wet. It seemed moistened somehow by the humidity, giving a solemn glimmer to the sliver of downtown I could make out through the trees. The buildings looked weirdly foreign. Chicago, Kyoto. Anywhere but here.
The mid-winter silence has settled in. The sound of blood rushing behind my ears is louder than the world outside. There's a wind-muffled echo to things. An added reverb to the humming Doppler of overhead jets and distant hammer clanks and pigeon caws.
What is metal?
Thinking about the diagram generated a kind of warm fluttery buzz deep in my chest, partly curiosity, partly I'm not sure what. How much of my amateur detection had I simply imagined? There were too many variables. Whoever had drawn that figure into my mirror could not possibly have expected me to invert it using projective geometry. But then, why would the resulting shape have correlated so literally to a molecular structure? Could I have manipulated it to take on a more pleasing, meaningful form?
I watched two lily pads float past each other in the pond, slow ripples hatching tiny flitting diamondboards of interference.
Experimental Epistemology?
I'm starting to see signs everywhere. Lines and ellipses are popping out of the walls like holograms.
I had this strange vision while on the treadmill this morning. Runner's high, abundant oxygen in brain. I imagined that the treadmill ― all the parts that kept it moving ― were not clunky rattling chunks of corrugated steel and felt and rubber, but pure geometric objects ― lines, cylinders, cones in motion. Silent, smooth. Because at some level, it seemed, the world was not coarse, but even and flat and symmetrical. Is everything a representation? A reconstruction? Aren't light and sound just the brain's interpretation of electromagnetic waves?
I saw the heart rate poster on the wall with its bubbly, cartoonish graph. The curve slopes up steeply from 1, peaks at 22, then continues in a long descending arc to 60+. I like how they don't even bother with anything beyond 60. Why bother. We're all going to die.
Out the window the clouds were moving directly and rapidly south, giving me the hallucinatory impression I was moving backwards.
Here's the thing. The human brain searches for patterns. It seeks to group and categorize, to find constants, programs, method. That's the whole point of the mind. And it's the end result of Binding, it's what Binding delivers us to.
But the search gets us into trouble because we often project order and meaning onto things which haven't any. We see shapes in clouds, constellations between stars. We personify and anthropomorphize. We endow anything resembling anything with significance.
In college there was a philosophy professor who on the first day had us fill out a form with all sorts of personal information ― birthday, favorite color, etc. ― and hand it in. On the second class, he handed each of us back a customized "personality analysis chart" based on what we'd written. It said things like "you tend to avoid confrontation" and "you live in fear that catastrophe could strike at any moment." Then he asked, "How many people believe this describes your personality exactly?" Almost everyone raised their hands. "How many people think it's more or less accurate?" Four or five people raised their hands. "And how many people think it's totally off?" Not a single person raised his hand. "Now," he said, "hand your sheet to the person sitting next to you." A shuffling of pages followed by a collective murmur of astonishment. We were each given the same chart.
All philosophy begins and ends with the mind. Think about anything long enough and you will eventually be led to epistemology ― to the subject of How Do I Know What I Know? ― the foundation of which lies immutably in the workings of the brain, for after you've questioned the validity of everything you've read and learned and experienced, you will come to the question of your own senses, the accuracy of your memory, the structure of the very machine doing the questioning. In seeking order, we must be aware of the innate, almost desperate tendency for human beings to ascribe it.
'Course, on the other hand, certain things do have meaning. The fact that humans desperately search for patterns is itself a pattern that has been observed and interpreted, correctly.
I'm writing this from Barnes and Noble. I've been coming here more and more often ― that way I can drink coffee (they have a Starbucks built into the magazine section) and avoid everyone I don't want to chitchat with in the library. There's a space right under the 2nd floor escalator that no one's really discovered yet, no one but me, and there's a long tall baseboard radiator you can sit on and you can just sit there and read beneath the huge window and nobody bothers you, and there's no speakers in the ceiling because there is no ceiling, just the silver underside of an escalator, so you don't have to endure that faux-flamenco crap they pump through the rest of the store like sonic tear gas. I love it. Quiet, warm, secret.
About an hour ago, I was sitting with my legs to my chest like a sit-up and reading about prefrontal cortex disorders in lower primates when I started to hear the horrible wailing of a nearby baby. It was particularly biting and tinny, punctuated by squawking mini-coughs or hiccups, and then seemed to reverse itself like a bleating animal with crazy vibrato, and then shot back forward again. I tried to ignore it. Why do mothers take their babies into bookstores? Why do they do it? But just as I started to tune it out, I heard another sound, equally grating. It was a kind of metallic purr with a rubbery undertone, like an engine squeal, like someone stomping on the gas and the break pedals at once.
Now the baby is back again, yet at no point was it clear that one sound had stopped and the other had begun. Could they be the same sound? It's impossible to tell. They're distinct, with their own sonorous inflections ― but it's as though the guttural baby's cry had been seamlessly transfigured into a fricative mechanical yawn and back again, flicking on and off the switch of my maternal instincts.
Paper of plastic
I spent the morning researching the neuroembryology of mutants.
From there the day proceeded montage-like. Quick cuts, tightly trimmed. The air was thick and magnetic; the sky a rich and watery silver-grey. What if we have been lied to? What if there are no stars or clouds and the sky is a great spherical film over which brilliant images sift and smear like ink between cells of glass.
At lunch, I heard a girl say to her friend, "I want a husband so I can dress him."
Cut to library:
Think I am developing a crush on the circulation boy. He is short and wears rumpled linen. Play with me, young lad! Can't you see I have so much more to offer than the undergrads? I would so rock your casbah. Allow me to dazzle you with my knowledge of everything. (And astonishing Humpty Dance.)
Before cellular biology, it was once thought that a female egg carried its unborn infant, complete, in miniature. A succulent paradox. That in every woman there existed infinite generations, each embryo entombed by another like matryoshka. It would mean that Eve carried all of future humanity in her womb.
Lab work was dependably rote. I often feel like a bagger at the grocery store. Myopic, detached. Science is pointillistic; each job is a minute dab of color, itself irrelevant yet indispensable to the whole. Data is spat out and slapped onto a massive chain, a dumbly efficient assembly line. Paper of plastic?
Connected twin embryos develop in symmetrical harmony like wings of a moth. Layers of amniotic yolk crisp into form. Cells fortify with geometric precision. They interpret, they calculate. They decipher and re-encrypt.
I went to the pharmacy to refill my prescription. Colors exploded from every direction. Limegreen partitions, orange carpet, menacing blue and white posterboard ads. Slogans imperative and leering. In the drop-off line, a corpulent, waxy-faced boy was jiggling. He was stomping his feet and making hissing sounds. "Calm body," said his mother. "Calm body."
I felt compelled to not work out. The prospect of running in place seemed absurd, almost grotesque. Was this our sad salute to millions of years of evolution? Were treadmills commemorative plaques to fallen ancestors torn asunder by bears?
In 1986, a surgeon found a large tumor inside a teenage boy's abdomen. He removed the cartilaginous mass to discover it was actually a parasitic twin ― a compacted lump of hair, teeth, bone, and organ tissue embedded in the boy's stomach.
Dissolve to dusk:
The sky was a muted pink, like the underbelly of a dog. Squalls of dreamlit hail came and went.
Amazingly, I got lost in the hotel. I stepped off the elevator and absent-mindedly headed toward my old room. But the numbers were wrong, and before I realized my mistake ― I'd actually gotten off on the right floor and headed the wrong way ― I found a large reading room I didn't know existed. There was chatter coming from inside, so I opened the door to see about a hundred teenagers sitting on the floor in close circles. At first, I thought it was some kind of high school AA meeting or group therapy for incest survivors ― something I was not supposed to have walked in on. But they were dressed in hooded black cloaks and purple corsets. Girls had drippy black mascara, boys had pubic soul-patches. Gamers, of course. But for a full, out-of-body moment, I thought I was witnessing a coven.
In the middle of the night I heard myself mumble, "A secret is a gun."
Another Message
When I woke up something was terribly wrong.
I didn't know what at first. Just a visceral sense of wrongness, disequilibrium. My forehead damp, my throat feeling like it had grown teeth. When I sat up it became suddenly obvious: the room was hellishly hot. I went straight for the terrace door and slid it wide open. A delicious gust of frost-tinged air swept in. I could feel its brisk sting deep in my lungs. I imagined I could feel it entering my blood, cooling me from the cells. Then I felt sick. Vertigo, shock.
I went to the thermostat and found it jacked up to 80. Who the hell had done that? I certainly hadn't, and the maids always turn the heat off to save on the gas bills. The feeling first ― an electrifying tingle mixed with nausea, like when the airplane plummets momentarily through sudden turbulence ― then the thought: had someone been here during the night? Had someone broken in while I was asleep, crept through the room and tampered with stuff? A second wave of thrilling terror wobbled through me. It meant that, for one thing, the first break-in had not been a fluke. It also meant that there could be a second message here.
I rushed in to check the bathroom. I shut the door behind me and turned on the hot water in the sink. Eager to find another mirror image, I reached into the shower to add more steam. My heart sputtered and kicked. While waiting for the water to heat up, I continued looking around the room for other signs, clues. I shuffled through my stuff, checked my books, my laptop. Everything in place, it appeared. Nothing out of order. I went back to the bathroom and shut the door to contain the moisture. I waited for another minute, trying to slow my breathing so I didn't pass out. By this point, enough steam had accumulated that if there was a message, I would have seen it. I turned off the water and let the vapor settle on the glass where it slowly condensed to a breathy sheen. No diagram, no inscription.
Dammit.
I left the bathroom and sat on the bed, sweating. Why the hell would someone have broken in here just to pump the thermostat up? It had to have been the maid ― she must have dusted the meter and accidentally brushed the pin to its farthest position. I got up from the edge of my bed, my forehead throbbing, and walked to the wall that held the temperature control. But when I slid the needle back down the dial with my finger, something very strange happened: the numbers disappeared. Something from inside, a small plate of some sort, seemed to be covering them.
The thermostat is a standard, disc-shaped protruberance with a semi-circular trajectory for the needle which extends from the center like the second hand of a clock:
I looked more closely at the dial. Indeed, it was as though the reading had been erased. I pushed the needle back up to the top and the 80 appeared again. Beneath it, I noticed, was the letter "C" and the number 11, concentrically alligned like a secret decoder ring in a Cracker Jacks box.
80 ― C ― 11.
Was this a message? What did it contain? A license plate? A PIN? The combination to a lock? Or nothing at all? Was I one more pathetic soul imposing her own hopes and fears onto a meaningless template? I felt a maddening frustration at not knowing. At having so little information. I was helplessly, hopelessly lost. Like a sailor without a compass.
Or... was that just it? Before proper maps or clocks, mariners in the middle ages would use astrolabes ― handheld, brass wheels ― to measure their position in space and time with regards to the sun, moon and stars:
Just as Eratosthanes had created a system of measure based on angles of shadow, the mariners charted their way across the seas by stereoscopic projection ― compressing 3-dimentional space onto a 2-dimentional plane. Was this at all relevant here? Was the thermostat being used as a kind of positioning device? But what did the alphanumeric symbols mean?
Perhaps I wasn't looking at them correctly. What if they were supposed to be viewed bottom to top, rather than top to bottom? I reversed the order, such that it read:
11 ― C ― 80
Of course! C-80 is a sub-basement lab in the medical building. I've never been there. Could this be the intended message? Could 11 simply mean 11:00? A time and a place?
Right now, it's 2:40 PM and I'm at work. Tonight I will come back to campus and head down to C-80 to see what's doing.