Roger's Version (33 page)

The face is gone. A screenful of gluey polychrome yarn has replaced the image that had seemed to stare out, its eyes deep sockets of undying, grieving life. Dale tries to think how to re-execute the computation—polygons clipped by polygons—but his mind is so blank that the first half of another of Spiegel’s jokes comes into it: How many WASPs does it take to change a light bulb? He asks the machine for a dump, and across the cubicle the printer chews away with its frantic pointed teeth. In his agitation Dale lifts up from the sticky warm swivel chair and goes down the hall for a Diet Coke. The machine grinds loose the desired red-on-white cylinder from within its guts and after a second’s tumble slaps it into the waiting trough. Then, as if taking thought, it with an offhand clatter spills back his two quarters and dime. Some wise guy has rigged it to refund. These clumsy machines are constantly being outsmarted by the smart alecks on the floor. And how many Jewish mothers? Maybe you had to be Jewish to understand that joke.

The face, he seems to remember, had long hair but no beard; the traditional iconography is evidently wrong. Men of
the Middle East that you see on television giving interviews all seem to have three-day accumulations of bristle. How do they manage that, every day? Like putting the lawnmower on a higher setting.

The long cream-colored hall with its pinned-up Snoopys and baby pictures is silent. In Dale’s skull echoes the sound, perhaps a half-hour old, of Spiegel packing up and leaving. The linguistic analyst stamped flat a beer can on the floor beside the trash receptacle and shouted good night. Dale has this entire brightly lit sector of the Cube’s seventh floor to himself and, back in his cubicle, falls to his knees between the swivel chair and the display terminal. He prays for an illumination that will relieve him of this tension, this guilt, the tension and guilt of being a thinking animal. There is a swimming reddish void behind his eyelids; the void vaguely pulses and has some structure, a microscopic grain with a rapid downward movement, like rain on a sheet of glass. He leans his brow against the slightly outcurved screen; it is cooler than he, yet slightly warm. Radiation. Give himself cancer of the brain. He backs his head away and stiffly stands, resolving to keep at it for another hour or so. He feels on the edge of a breakthrough. Yet he postpones sitting at the terminal.

He goes to the window. The city as seen from the window is settling slowly, like the ashes of a still-glowing fire. In the post-midnight sky a wide-awake moon, five-eighths full, glides amid flakes of cirro-cumulus, a broadening scattering, a lake of luminous wavelets. Seven stories below, the little trapezoidal park, with its bronze statuette of Lady Lovelace, shows a softening of the trees, their twigs no longer, as in winter, merely linear, but now blurred, thickened by buds, tip droplets aching to unfold into leaves and get the photosynthetic cycle rolling again. Dale’s eyes sting; his body, too long bent into the
sedentary position, longs to stretch out, to lay its length on a bed, beside Esther, her green eyes thirsty for his slime, her slender questing trembling hands. They have had, like many of the classic lovers, no decent bed, ever—a dirty mattress in an attic, a narrow student’s pallet beneath a plastic cross.

He returns to the terminal and tries again to find that trace, that divine hint. He takes the numerical printout of the crank-up that produced the ghost of the face and has the computer count the 2s and 4s for random recurrence; indeed, he does find a small statistical edge over the strict .200 that probability would indicate for two digits—.208673, the .0086+, even if consistently generated, not quite enough to base a theology on. More promising, however, is the deviation from the .01 that should represent the statistical incidence of the configuration 24 in integer pairs from 00 to 99. Instead of .0100, the computations showed an incidence of .013824, an almost inexplicable nearly four in one thousand more than chance alone would have generated, and it ends with a 24! The same statistical tests, run off on non-biological primitives—tables, chairs, airplane wings, polyhedra, Koch curves, old fractals used for texturing—yield frequencies within .001 of the predictable random norm, which indicates to Dale virtually beyond doubt that his statistical dusting of the biologically derived models had revealed, if not one of God’s fingerprints, a whorl or two. There
is
something there.

But beyond all this numerical quibbling Dale still hopes—he is greedy, spiritually greedy; he is climbing his Tower of Babel—for a graphic confrontation, a face whose gaze could be frozen and printed. Refreshed by yet another Coke with its increments of caffeine and carbohydrate, he tries to retrace the steps that gave him his haunting glimpse; he tries to ascend, gate by gate, through the immense binary maze that the mere touch of
a button can reshuffle and double. He alters angles, he zooms, he changes parameters. He loses track of time. The small morning hours are much like one another. Vague sounds from elsewhere in the building—elevator doors opening and closing, cables singing in the black shaft, surges of humming on the floor below—indicate the presence either of other night workers or else of automated workings, of timers and thermostats inflexibly sending their signals. It has grown colder, outside and within. The coldness that, beginning in his fingertips and on the backs of hands, has travelled up through his wrists and forearms toward the cage of his chest he takes for Heavenly inspiration; in the microscopic maze where a single fleck of fallen dust would block a passage like a boulder and the finest hair come crashing down like a cathedral beam, he is drawing closer to the dragon, to the fire-breathing secret. As a child he would feel thus timorous descending to the cellar, where his father, in that Akron house with thin walls, had set up the Christmas train, and whose obedient switchings and reversings proved to the boy a fascination and a mystery, as if a kind of corpse lay down here waiting to be activated, a spindly metal body with a narrow, heavy, alive head, the locomotive. The locomotive had a glowing single eye and, when touched to the tracks, its wheels would angrily spin. Working alone, conquering his awe and feeling of trespass, Dale became more adept at the mysteries of the Lionel than his father, and began to buy new equipment—more track, a more versatile transformer—out of his allowance. He was on his way.

Increasingly often he encounters on the screen the protest
Insufficient Free Memory
or
Are you sure?
Beneath his commands the levels of operational hierarchy, language overlying language down to the elemental binary vocabulary, slide one within another like crystal spheres as the screen supplies
Dale’s eyes with striped toroidal surfaces displaced in a jagged twinkling by others. He has loaded the simulator with a transformative function that subjects each successive crash to new parameters derived from the polynomials of the preceding phase: a kind of spiral that should tighten, he reasons, toward cosmic essence. Yet the displayed configurations do not simplify but, rather, fragment and complicate. They are blowing up.

The face again is what he hopes for, and yet dreads. Perhaps the coldness overwhelming his body is dread. Within these hollow small sliding hours his sensation enlarges that the presence cringing within the mazy electronic alleyways of the computer is inimical: It hates Dale’s seeking It, and will extract vengeance if he finds It. Suppose, in seeking God along these pathways, he takes a wrong turn and encounters a false god, one of the myriads who have tormented men, Moloch or Mithra or Siva or Osiris or transformed Lucifer or that Huitzilopochtli who demands and eats the living heart? Nevertheless, our young man presses again the keys that spell
repeat
, and the striped colors and cells of the screen shudder like grease-marbled water into which a pebble has been dropped. The new display resembles the one before, save that its patches are finer in scale and have been subjected to a torque that has generated whirlpools, concentric intensification of color layers that appear to tunnel downward like the fingers of a rubber glove. With a slight squint and an adjustment (how? who is tapping that keyboard?) of the visual-interpretative cells within his brain, these same patterns appear to be cones rising toward him. In the crumpled strata between two of these cones, something anomalous seems embedded, in several colors. Dale zooms in, setting his viewpoint closer and enlarging the window. The anomaly, in shades of green intermixed with orange, appears to be illegibly foreshortened; he
maps its image on a plane tilted first 85° on a vertical axis, and then a more cautious 72°, and thus arrives at an image he can read. It is a hand. A hand, patched of colors as if dabbled with glowing camouflage paint but its form emergent, even to palm creases: a hand relaxed on its back and its fingers curled together and not strictly distinguishable, but the knobbed form of the opposed thumb unmistakable. Its relaxation is curious. Is it relaxed because it has been slain, a hand nailed limp to the cross? Or is it more like the hand of the sleeping Samson, flung into the folds of Delilah’s lap while the enfeebling shears are plied? Is its limpness that of Adam before he was touched with life, or a limpness of exhaustion, of final despairing surrender? Dale inspects the image and can see no dark trace in the palm of a spike or stigma. The phantom configuration’s anatomy, fitted into the ambiguous three dimensions of the tortured, abstract pattern, appears complete to Dale; he believes that, with higher resolving power than the VAX 8600 can summon, knuckles and even fingernails and cuticles would emerge, just as the tendrilous graphics of a Mandelbrot set can be infinitely enhanced. Gazing at the hand transposes him to another plane and gives him peace: rapture passes through him as if its path had been cleared by the coldness he has been feeling for hours, his own selfish vitality ebbing from him as the night progressed. Frozen along his veins, scarcely daring breathe lest he jar loose a pivotal electron, he taps the commands to take a printout of the pattern. From the other side of the cubicle, near Amy Eubank’s lipstick-stained Styrofoam cups, that inhuman shrill chatter of the dot-matrix printer is launched. Imagine being consumed alive by such avid, implacable teeth! Dale is feeding God, that tender shadow on the underside of our minds, to those teeth.

The printout is disappointing. It looks faded; the color ribbons
need to be replaced. The hand hardly shows—a dim mottled ghost flat on the paper where the glowing points beamed onto the screen from within presented the eye with a living intensity. Still, he now has evidence, of a sort. His own hands, pale and with sparse tufts of hair between the knuckles, hesitate above the keys, to repeat the transformative function once more. The next change might wring the matter dry, presenting him with an entire body, or an empty tomb. He feels cold to the pit of his being; his stomach is possessed by an unstoppable shudder. The very hum of the computer feels to him like a cry for pity, a craven pleading silence as the electron gun races back and forth refreshing the static screen, scanning back and forth in alternating attraction to the two magnetic fields generated by the deflection yoke while the control electrode relentlessly, repetitively modifies the beam of electrons freed by heat from the barium and strontium oxides coating the cathode. All this is performed with a precision and rapidity that seem miraculous until one has been taught (as was Dale, years ago, at Case Western) that these sub-atomic particles behave in this invariant way, wave and particle both, because they can’t help it, there is no other way. So a mechanism that would itself arouse worship in a New Guinean savage whose only glimpse of civilization is of the Godlike airplanes flying overhead is for Dale simply a means. He is like (as I picture him) a bat in this night, monstrously evolved so that webs enabling his soaring and flickering fluttering stretch between his hugely elongated fingers.

He types
repeat
. The screen ripples; seconds pass as the necessary crunching is performed. The stripes and concentric tunnels of the preceding display have been subdivided into geometric fish scales. The hand has been folded in, has vanished, unless its shape has been reduced and transformed into
the single green scale at the lower right of the screen, in the position of an artist’s signature. Elsewhere, orange-red dominates; the fish scales have a certain optical alignment that leads the eye in, while yet remaining surface, remaining excited points in a film of phosphors backed by a super-thin mirroring film of aluminum. The machine is still locking him out of its secrets. Greedily, impatiently, his fingertips ask the VAX 8600 to
repeat
its gigantic loop once more.

The screen goes a cool gray, saying in unanswerable black letters
Insufficient heap storage
.

Dale feels wasted. He pushes himself back from the terminal. The skin of his eyes, the interface where vision meets light, hurts. The coldness of the place and hour have gone right through to his bones. He limps stiffly to the window; the moon is gone. The shreds of cloud have come to form a continuous blanket whose pewter color takes a yellow tint from the unsleeping streetlights of the city. In all the rectangular silhouettes of university and city buildings only a few windows are lit—bright slots spelling, in binary code, a word here and there. But of course, actually, a row of dead windows, of empty slots, spells words just as well. Zero is information also.

ii

“Nunc? Is that you?”

It was night, nearly ten. I had settled in my study with some lightweight old Tillich—
The Socialist Decision
—while Esther was finishing up a bottle of sweet vermouth and a tape of
La Bohème
in the living room. The phone had rung.

“What’s wrong, Verna?” Her voice sounded strange: hollow, charged.

“Oh God,” she burst forth childishly, “everything!” Yet it was not grievance or indignation that dominated her croaky voice, but fear. “Look”—she was tearily begging, sinking into her manipulating self—“could you possibly get your ass over here?”

A soft click told me that Esther had picked up the phone in the living room. To clue her in, I said to Verna, “You want me to come over there
now?
”