Conspiracy Theories
Pictures of maimed Congonese in the paper this morning. Ears and noses hacked. Lips cut clean off for speaking ill of the Lord's Party, purled into syrup-brown, scooped-out discs. One woman was missing both breasts.
When interviewed, the Party members justified the mutilations with familiar platitudes ― "unfortunate means to necessary ends" and such.
I'd like to run a PET scan during one of these interviews, see which areas light up when people are lying to themselves as opposed to when they lie deliberately to others. We would find out quite a bit about human beings using this technique. We would discover, I think, many gradations in the species of lies. The rules we give ourselves and then break and then deny having broken or excuse ourselves from. Between conscious and unconscious self-deception lies an infinite bleed of grey.
There's a budding science to this now. Researchers from many different disciplines ― neuroscience, forensic psychology, etc. ― are attempting to piece together a methodology for the study of deceit. There is quite a bit of technology available, with varying degrees of reliability, devoted to lie detection. We're all familiar with the polygraph from cop shows, which measures the level of anxiety associated with lying, but there are all sorts of other gadgets that measure related signifiers such as heat radiation and pupil dilation. In fact, I believe there's a symposium on this during the nanotechnology conference beginning later today. Someone developed a microprobe that actually follows the density of blood through the brain like a magnet and sends a signal to a nearby computer, reporting its position in real time. It's faster than fMRI and far more location-specific than an EEG. This way, at least in theory, you could get an intimate portrait of what happens neurologically when people lie, learn what areas become involved in what order, and from those observations begin to erect a more fundamental theory of deception. I'm not a gear-head, but I gotta say that's kind of cool.
Time Travel
Had lunch at the Red Herring ― outrageously overpriced, but the guilty pleasure is half the fun. Ordered the chipotle chicken panini with double-baked sweet potato fries. Side of mesclun greens with fresh black olives and roasted garlic in a rasberry vinaigrette.
Outside, a snowstorm was gathering. A defuse, bluish tint was cast over everything in view as the flakes swooped downwards, a painterly contrast to the warm, halogen-lit interior.
Having grown up mostly in the south seas, I still think of snow as a novelty. When it falls, everything becomes storybookish to me, nefariously enchanted. Through the tall windows in the restaurant, the streets looked the way I imagined the abode of goblins and witches looking like when I was a girl.
I ended up staying at the Herring for way too long because they were playing T2 on their huge new mounted flat screen and I couldn't not watch. It was nearly 3 when I finally got the check and raced back to campus for the opening gala. (Is it pronounced "gay-la" or "gah-la?" I'm never sure, and I'm too embarrassed to ask, so I end up just avoiding the word altogether, like I do with "detritus.")
For the next few days we all have to deal with this international conference hosted by the Fornier Institute. There are dozens of lectures from fancy-pants nano-technology professors and it's this huge event. Normally, these things are low-key, informal affairs with a few specialists, some students, and maybe a science journalist or two. But because of the somewhat pathological hype over nanotech this past year ― everyone's fascination with its potential contribution to medicine, artificial intelligence, and "weapons of the future" ― the whole institute is ablaze with noise and flyers and ambling tourists. The press alone is enough to make the press. Hundreds of flashing bulbs, black tuxedoes, caterers. Morsels of grilled shrimp? Sesame chicken in a horseradish-ginger sauce? Of course you can have another kir royal. Would the lady care for a steamed dumpling?
I didn't recognize anyone ― it felt like the first day of camp. When I finally found Devi, we clung to each other like nervous school children. She pointed out a lot of the big wigs, Dick Feinstein, Allen Musham; one of the biggest shareholders at Pfeizer, worth half-a-billion; Ernest Bodicker (whom I swear brought a call girl!), Haruki Lu from MIT. All men. Everyone working in nano, men. Except Susan Luka, the brutish, blocky, Asperger's-afflicted androgyne.
Secrets
Scanning probe microscopy!
Microfluidics and nanofluidics!
Quantum dots!
Silica nanocapsules!
Lipoparticles!
Applications of Carbon nanotubes!
Surgical Nanoneedles!
Nanostructures based on bacterial cell surface layers!
Nanomaterials for biolabeling!
Nanomotors made of nucleic acids!
Bacteriophage nanoshells!
Reversible binding of gold nanospheres to DNA strands!
Nanobarcodes with striping metallic patterns!
Quartz nanobalance biosensor!
Gold nanoparticles as drug carriers!
Disguising quantum dots as proteins!
(And my favorite:) Trojan nanoparticles!
Yesterday was nothing. Today, they pulled back the bleachers in the basketball arena so the trades could erect these elaborate kiosks. It was like a middle school science fair, only funded by the defense department. Colored lights, music. Buzzing, clicking, rotating robots. Times Square! Ginza! Oh, how much the corporations love us scientists. You feel the lure, the studied seduction. Beautiful sales reps ― they could seriously be models ― smiling brightly at you from every direction, beckoning. They want to show you what they do! How effective the product! How ingenious the design! Watch the videos! Take a catalogue!
The line between PR and prostitution is drawn with invisible ink.
But I lapped it up. Stood in line to watch the demos. Loaded up on bags full of free junk ― refrigerator magnets, pens and pendants, mini-maglites, golf balls, T-shirts, travel alarm clocks, paperweights ― all sporting plump company logos. I was numbed into capitulation like a helpless gambler. A desperate Wall Street trader.
Then there were the products themselves! Microscopic robots that eat the dust off your floor. A TV actually programmed to read brain waves ― you can turn it off and on just by thinking about it. Retinal implants that restore sight to the blind. I found myself mesmerized by these gadgets. I played with the toys, I shook hands with the PR girls, inhaled their Chanel no.5. I flirted with the professors, I shop-talked with the inventors. It was as exhilarating as it was nauseating. They slather attention on you, beg you to indulge them with a moment's patience, and yet you know all the while that this is a con game and you are being played ― you are not a person to them, but a tool. Saturated with stimulation, I broke into a heavy sweat.
The lectures were no less intense. Everywhere ― panels, workshops, projections. Fights broke out over the ethics of nanotherapy, the ease with which mini-machines could be exploited for destructive ends, should technology of this speed and scale be restricted to medicine, the promises, the perils, blah blah. Some talks were theoretical, most were applied.
Not that I understood much. (Science is so hyper-specialized now. Every branch has been partitioned off into sub-categories and sub-sub-categories. There are now so many divisions even within a single branch that no one speaks the same language anymore.)
The closest I came was talking at length to a plump little man with an egregious comb-over and an M.C. Escher tie. (Am I pathologically drawn to the token misfit?) Turned out he's a lawyer for some nanotech consulting firm. I asked him how he ended up representing scientists and he went on a spiel about technology being the Great Unifier, the Telos of Earthly Pursuits, even, the New Faith. I stopped him right there. "What do you mean, 'faith?'" Well, he believed that not only did science promise to cure the world of its every conceivable woe, but that it was simply a matter of time before manufactured quanta would become one with nature and "fuse with the lifeforce."
You had me, then you lost me, guy.
No one seems to know what to wear. The institute set up a free shuttle to take us from place to place, and on these chintzy busses the awkwardness becomes painfully acute because the attention is being shifted from collective spectacle to personal space. Miranda seems to be doing okay, the trollop. Look at her with that criminally tight cardigan, bosoms aching to be unleashed. Fucking harem of slobbering brainiacs trailing her from room to room. Female jealousy: nothing like it.
The Confessions of St. Bloom: Book II
I did a bad bad thing.
But first things first.
All day I kept the mystery tea leaves in my pocket. They carried a secret glow, a density, an awareness. With all the technology mania in my head, I kept imagining the bag was a homing device, or maybe some kind of radio to Carter Benchley. Whatever it was, it seemed to possess a sinister power.
At one point I peeked in on something called "Nanorobotic Gene Therapy," a lecture by Dr. Michael Liao. It was later in the day and most of the convention attendees had burned out, gone back to their hotels for a pre-dinner nap, so the audience was more or less scattered. Liao was hunched and oval-shaped, a peculiar Asian-Irish mix, with sand-colored skin and prickly red hair. He spoke in a breathy mumble, pausing frequently in mid-sentence to clear his throat or sniffle.
From what I could understand, which was not very much, Liao described a new type of 3-dimensional nanomotor sculpted at the atomic level with lasers. He projected slides showing a series of computer-generated models, followed by images of the microscopic machines themselves, which I have to say were breathtaking to behold. Interlocking cylinders of copper, sloping magnesium checkerboards, forking spires of glassy aluminum teeth, luminous green discs with blue spokes. They were marvelous and horrifying.
He showed a video simulation of the model doing its thing ― entering the bloodstream through a spritz of saline, bonding to the cells and kind of impregnating them. The motor works, disturbingly, a lot like HIV ― a robotic virus that aggressively invades its host and "contaminates" each cell one by one with a new set of instructions. From there, the cells divide and (theoretically) reprogram the affected blood with properly functioning architecture.
Astonishing, mind-blowing stuff. But what electrified me with foreboding was not the implications of such a powerful tool in human hands, nor the staggering complexity of its design; rather, a somewhat obvious detail.
The substrate used to scaffold the chromium vapor? Silicon.
Reflexively, I swiveled my head hard right, then left; reflexively, I say, because the rapid gesture, like sweeping a flashlight through a dark cellar upon hearing an ominous rustle, preceeded the willful reasoning to do so. That this was all somehow connected. That a shadowy constellation was beginning to emerge between the cryptograms and reality. Paranoia? Doubtless, but a paranoia which proved warrented when I made a second pass (this time carefully, thoroughly) and glimpsed the man in the pinstripe jacket ― the metaphile. He was at the far corner of the theatre, cut by an oblique sliver of red exit light. His rodent-like eyes met my gaze a split-second too long. That was the giveaway.
A thrum of dread, disequilibrium. I jerked my head forward, stared straight ahead at Liao while I collected my thoughts. The large auditorium suddenly felt very claustrophobic. I quietly gathered my bag, my notes, and crept down the aisle to the exit.
The air outside was bitter, the sky bleached and hollow. I got in the car and drove. Jesus lord, I was fevered, jittery with adrenaline. I needed a drink.
A residue of ickiness remained with me on the drive to the Harbor Inn. I recalled riding the Tokyo subway when I was thirteen and seeing an old man leering at me from behind a large newspaper page. The paper was shaking and his forehead was clenched and sweaty. It didn't occur to me until after I exited the car that he was masturbating. I couldn't seem to grasp that I was the object of his excitement, that the sight of me, a barely-pubescent white girl in a school uniform, was so arousing that he found it necessary to touch himself in public, risking tremendous humiliation and embarrassment.
I've since witnessed far greater perversions, but none have had such a disquieting effect on me. I didn't know why (and I still don't), but I felt somehow incriminated in his lubricity. Almost responsible for this man's deviant urges. It wasn't a pornographic comic or an underage prostitute that was summoning his fervid gawking, it was me. Just by being there. Did I accidentally cross some boundary? Did I give off a secret sign understood only by adults that made his revolting behavior permissable? It was as though I'd willingly joined him in a virtual space where he was free to defile me any way he pleased ― I'd invited him there without knowing it.
Here again was the freakish sense of exposure, of being watched.
The small pub was crowded, the floor wet with snowy slosh. A film of smoke hung over the bar, underlit by a fringed seam of green and yellow neon. Alternating smells of sawdust and dried beer rolled through the bar like shifting temperature patches in a pool.
Why do they call it happy hour? Everyone looked miserable. Maybe I was too late; happiness ended a half hour ago.
Unexpectedly, I felt less safe than I had. When the man seated behind me accidentally prodded my hip with his umbrella, my first thought was that it was a gun.
I sipped slowly from my martini, taking glances at the gilt-framed mirror behind the bar, the tacky, silver-tile columns entwined with Christmas lights, the network of black pipes and ducts crosshatching the ceiling. I noted the narrow spectrum of sideburns on the clientelle. The tin ceiling reflected the high frequency tones back down, the clinks of glasses, the clack of heels, loud chatter punctuated by grating cackles. The space was alive. But alive in an unsettling way, like the way a virus is alive. Still, it was refreshing to be away from the conference. The people here were locals. They were Americans.
One particular American caught my eye. From across the bar, he looked like he could be a drifter, his pale face slightly sunken and splotched with a fine, brownish-red Velcro. Only upon double take did I realize that this particular blue collar stiff was in fact Theo Pickett, my student, decked out in faux frumpy garb. When he saw me, he feigned a spit-take.
"Fancy that!" He smiled. Remember that wonderful description of Jay Gatsby's smile? Firm, sincere; a waning crescent, both mischievous and empowering. The acknowledgment of a secret joke.
I patted the seat next to mine; he joined me, obediently.
"You missed class today," I said.
"I grazed class. Nicked it."
Again, his smell: like the starchy steam of boiled pasta, but laced with something mutedly saccharine.
"So, you always dress this fancy on Saturday nights?" I said, gesturing towards his rumpled orange sweater and damp-cuffed blue jeans.
"I'm feeling festive."
He did seem festive, spirited. His collar protruded from the V-neck like wings of a paper airplane, and only then did I realize the vast gulf between myself and that elusive but discernible quality known as hip.
"But you, here," he said. "This is an unexpected sight."
Got nuffin! cried a barfly to the televised linebacker. You got nuffin!
"Scientists have lives, too," I said. "Not me, but I've heard that it's possible."
I strummed the bristles of the comb in my pocket.
"What do you actually, like, do, though? When you're not teaching us kids?"
He swiveled on his bar stool. His knees touched mine. Grazed, nicked.
"Basically, I simulate oscillatory patterns with computational systems. It's like playing a video game. I designed an interface that treats nerve cells as glorified transistors, which generates virtual potentials based on incoming stimuli and transmits information through various chemically coded channels. It's pretty and fun, allows me to chart the interactivity between great fleets of synapses, from any angle, down to a thousandth of a second."
"Um. Okay." He swigged from his tumbler.
Fragments of speech flit about. Crisscrossing dialects, accents, intonations. Blurted imperatives, slurred interrogatives. Squawking squabbles from the football game.
"A little reductive though, don't you think? This whole mechanical approach?"
I lifted an eyebrow to let him know that I was already not impressed with whatever argument he was going to make.
"I mean, if you keep reducing higher orders to smaller orders, don't you necessarily eliminate the thing you're trying to understand?"
Perhaps the word is alert; Theo was focused in a way I could never be with my incessant digressions and ever-darting foci of interest.
"Third mistake." I blinked slowly, summoning my ready-made rebuttal. "Granted, reductionism is a very confused notion, but it's important to remember that not all reductionistic accounts of nature are eliminative. Some are productive. Describing solid states in terms of vibratory lattices doesn't eliminate solidity, it just explains why some things are solid and others aren't. Similarly, by looking at what happens when you poke and prod neurons, and sets of neurons, we can learn things about the higher orders of the brain like thoughts and feelings."
I allowed my eyes to trace the grainy path along his youthful, flapless jawline.
"You are wise beyond your years," he said.
"And you are wet behind your ears."
"I am not familiar with that expression."
"It means you're out past your bedtime, kiddo."
I put my martini down on the counter. It was held in a rhine goblet rather than a martini glass, which made the drink seem less gaudy somehow. Theo put down his drink and our knuckles touched. Neither of us pulled away.
A beat.
"You go out first," I said.
His eyes lit up. Male desire is thick batter.
We arrived back at my room before 10. Theo lingered way too long, commenting on the novelty of living in a hotel, browsing my book collection, a bit intimidated, I suppose. When we finally kissed, his mouth was dry and his breath tinged with rum.
"You hair smells like tropical fruit," he said. "Is coconut a fruit?"
I ran my fingers through his graphite-black hair as he went down there, a serviceable activity, but one that seems consistently better in theory than in practice. His lips were rough and muscular against my engorged little acorn.
I guided his hands to my nipples and made his fingers pinch. There must be copper wires in there, because the feeling dependably shoots southward like a blade of lightning.
His dick tasted like salt and chlorine. The tip, or head, or whatever it's called, was as tender as a peeled egg. I have been told I am not very good at this. I choke easy so I can't go down very far; my teeth get in the way. Miranda says, You have to listen to the cock talk. I still don't know what the hell that means. But Theo was so excited to be getting laid, I don't think he was too picky about the technique.
Sometimes you can feel in a boy's embrace the memory of a previous lover. You can feel it in some perfected gesture once used to pleasure another or clenched into the rolls of his forehead. You can sense him searching for her in your eyes.
What do you think about when you fuck? I think about blood. Our hearts are pumping it wild, making us pant. The stuff is gushing through our veins, flushing our faces. It makes the cock stiff and the pussy slick. Fucking is the bloodiest thing two people can do without shedding any.
He gasped when he came.
I didn't come (I either do in five minutes or never), but there are peripheral joys to be had. Sex has a way of delineating things, smoothing the creases of the space around you. There's a reason why the Bible refers to the act as it does. This kind of intimacy is indeed knowledge, a deep, proprioceptive knowledge ― an entire congregation of nuclei electrified in celebration, reminding us what bodies are for.
He didn't stay, thank God. After the requisite cuddling, he muttered something about a previous engagement the next morning, yanked on his boxer-briefs, and that was that.
But the smells lingered. Those cut-fruit, alkaline smells that are like nothing else ― a muddy forest floor, maybe. Burnt seaweed. Or something you can imagine smelling, like a hunted animal's fear. Something both alive and not.
The warm, briny scents lulled me into a thick and dreamless sleep. The sugar in the alcohol caught up with me at some point deep in the night, tugging me to attention. Popped an Ambien but it didn't work. The ceiling fan stared gloomily back down at me, motionless.
Sex is sad.