Authors: Louisa Hall
May 18, 1988
Ruth Dettman
Last night I watched that documentary, the one you told me about in your last letter. What a lofty, alliterative title!
Karl Dettman: Heretic and Humanist.
Those kids in Berlin have really built you up. You’ve taken on mythic proportions in the twenty years since you gave up on MARY. You’re like the Che Guevara of Luddites, without having had to get shot
.
But I shouldn’t be such an unpleasant old woman. The fact is, on-screen, you looked like an admirable man. I can see why you’re attractive to them. Humble in your blue sweater, despite your intellectual prowess. Holding forth about all the old themes: the nature of progress, the militarization of computers, the importance of human imagination. Well into your sixties, and still that stubborn ponytail
.
I suppose you pull it off. You always made a fuss about growing older—your sagging ass, etc.—but in fact you don’t look your age. You have the vitality of people who believe in their causes. On-screen, despite a few sun spots, your skin
seemed elastic. Your eyes were as bright as a boy’s. Watching that documentary, I longed again for the privilege of holding your hand. I could almost feel it: those five strong fingers, interlaced with my own. Leading me back to our bed
.
I feel I should congratulate you on your apartment. The built-in bookshelves, the white paint, the beautiful rugs. The lamps and the textiles hung up on the walls. Were those Native American? As you got older, you developed a great capacity for absorbing the causes of minority groups. They looked excellent in your apartment
.
After the movie had finished, I got up to have a look in the mirror. I didn’t need to look long: nothing to see there but wrinkles. I look like a Norwegian painting. What a bullet you dodged! You might have ended up with me, and not some adoring graduate student who fills your Indian vases with flowers
.
Once I’d gotten a look at myself, I turned my back on the mirror and took a quick spin through my apartment. Three hundred square feet, on the twenty-sixth story. My books are stacked on the floor. I’ve never even bothered hanging up pictures; they’re still in boxes in my hall closet. My west-facing wall is made out of glass. I have a nice view, over the Charles. If I so desire, I can look down on healthy young people jogging, sailing, or rowing, which reminds me that I should exercise more. During the day, I try not to look out that window
.
I imagine, if you came to visit, you’d be surprised at this apartment. I always loved our little house, down by the river, with its ancient plumbing, wood lintels, warped floors. I loved the bedraggled backyard, the kitchen with its linoleum counters. That little house was a place to come home to
.
In the documentary, when I saw your Berlin apartment, which was also a place to come home to, I felt such envy I could have withered. Even after two decades apart, I wanted to move back in with you. I wanted to ride your coattails again. You have a remarkable ability to settle a place. It was a privilege to occupy a house as your wife
.
I, on the other hand, seem virtually incapable of asserting myself over a space. Before I moved in with you, I lived in austere apartments. Several therapists have told me I was punishing myself with those apartments, but the truth is I’ve never had that homemaking touch. When I came to the U.S., the first attic apartment I lived in was big enough for me to turn around, though not with my arms outstretched. I slept on an inflatable mattress that often deflated during the night. There was one little triangular window, through which I could see William Penn, standing on the City Hall dome
.
My second attic apartment was big enough for a desk, but it had no window, and no entrance of its own. I lived in fear of having to go out and make conversation with the old woman below me. Then I met you. You said I lived like a spy, but I had no idea how different we were until I moved in with you in Wisconsin. Then I learned about wooden bookshelves, potted plants, linen closets: all those mysterious trappings of a place that’s been successfully settled
.
Sadly, your influence in that domain didn’t stick. I’ve lived in this apartment nearly twenty years, and I still haven’t bought any rugs. At first, I thought it would be temporary, a one-year transition space, but then the years ensued. I’m still not sure why I haven’t left. I suppose I’ve come to feel comfortable here. I’m oddly attached
to the books on the floor, the buzz-cut carpet in the communal hallways, the disconcerting elevator ride, the doormen with their judgmental expressions. I enjoy the temporary ambience
.
But after finishing that documentary, I did have to ask myself what I gave up. That movie was like poison poured in my ear. All night I lay awake. The twenty years between now and then folded like a paper fan, and I returned again to our house. I felt the worn metal tongue of the door handle under my thumb, the weight and give of the door as I pushed. The windows in the living room were enormous. I never wanted blinds, but you insisted. In the end, we installed blinds. You had a remarkable capacity for deafness when someone contradicted you. So we had blinds, but during the day, light still flooded the room. It spread over our sofa, your potted plants, the wood record console you built in Wisconsin. Over the armchair where I liked to read, there was a yellow basket lamp, salvaged from a thrift store you came across. On the walls, artwork painted by friends
.
Everything in that house was an expression of you: your friendliness, your wandering, your strong aesthetic opinions. Only I wasn’t. Off in the corner, under the yellow basket lamp, a little black hole of malevolent feeling. I was a persistent design flaw. I never even planted that sapling over the hole where we buried Ada. I let it remain bare. Every time you looked out the window in the direction of that patch of dirt, I saw you flinch, but for me it was a comfort, making my tea in the morning, confronting the fact of that brown earth. She was right there. We’d been able to bury her body
.
I now suspect that when you married me, you imagined you’d shape me as you’d shaped your apartments. Your refugee wife, representative of grief. Not grief unwieldy, not without purpose, but
aestheticized, admirable, cut to fit a blank corner. Like a Native American tapestry, or an Oriental rug
.
Later, when you started your campaign against computerized intelligence, I added authenticity to your claims. My story provided much-needed heft to the comparisons you drew between this war and that, this tyrant and the other. As though every madman were related, as if every death were the same
.
I heard you once, you know. In that auditorium that looked like a church. At your feet, the stained glass windows cast bloodred, rhomboidal shadows, like gifts brought to you by the Magi, and you used my sister’s death to validate a claim about the impurity of science. I stood at the back, wearing my raincoat, and my stomach rose to my throat
.
That’s what it took for me to understand why I guarded my losses from you. To comprehend a presentiment I’d been fending off for years, I had to hear you discuss me on a panel, in front of three hundred students. They nearly trampled me, clawing their way down the aisle to adore you
.
That was in the beginning, only a few months after you started to criticize MARY. At that point we’d been married for nearly twenty years. But that panel discussion was the first time I understood clearly that I’d become part of your story. You asked me questions, but you had expectations when it came to my answers. I was meant to follow a script. Like MARY, you told me which patterns to follow
.
On my way home from that lecture, I walked along the Charles, feeling increasingly frozen, and when I entered our house—a house I’d loved from the beginning—I saw that I was as alive to you as the sofa, as lovely as that wooden console, as independent as the blinds on the windows. Then I started hating
that house. My malevolence increased. I wouldn’t respond to your questions: anything to avoid fulfilling your patterns
.
But now the old chorus starts singing again. What do I know about independence? You loved me, you let me live in that house, and I responded with silence. Once, with feeling, with natural conviction, you used my family’s murder to make a point stronger. So what? How could I have responded so fiercely?
This morning, when I made the final decision to get out of bed, I came straight to my desk to write a letter back to you. My first response in over a decade. Usually I read your biannual letters over my afternoon tea, steeped in the odd silence of my altitudinous apartment, then grade some papers to settle my stomach. After dinner, when I return to your letter, I place it gently in a file called “Karl.” I’ve kept every one of your letters. I keep them because one day they’ll write a definitive biography, and these letters will be of importance. Not as important as the letters you write to your graduate student, who fills your Indian vases with flowers, but what does that matter? For you, I want the best biography. Let them not miss a detail. Let them know that you loved me the best way you could. Let them know I loved you enough to keep every letter you sent me, even if I never wrote back
.
I’ve always felt that if you were listening closely enough, my silence would explain itself. But now, after a night such as the one I’ve just spent, I fear I owe you a clear explanation. I never write back to your letters because they don’t require response. They update me on your awards, your travel, your speeches, the accolades that pour in. Such letters don’t pave the way for an answer. What you’re looking for is approval. If I were to respond with what I really think, which is that you abandoned a project halfway, created a partial person and then became threatened when people adored
her, it would be the reaction of an embittered old woman. The only response I can make, besides lying about how I admire your work, is to maintain my imperfect silence
.
But it doesn’t mean I don’t miss you. Sometimes I’m not even sure why it started. One day in the sixties, you commenced your campaign against artificial intelligence, and I initiated my silence. We’re both stubborn people. We followed our campaigns to their ends. But if I swim upriver, past the years of subsistence in this sterile apartment, past the wreckage of our little house, it’s possible to arrive at a place where those campaigns have no meaning
.
I’d like to write a letter and send it from that place. Or perhaps I won’t send it at all. If I do, I’ll expect a perfect response, and when that doesn’t come I’ll be angry. Maybe it’s better to read my letter to MARY. Now that she has memory, words given to her will last longer than any mere letter. My words to you, kept safe in her program, will last longer than my file marked “Karl.” Longer than the house we lived in together, longer than our marriage, longer than our bodies when they’re both underground, buried, unimaginably, an ocean apart, as though we never slept in the same bed
.
16th
. Morning, and after a difficult night. Have lent myself to the seamen for mending, beginning with E. Watts. Monotonous work, that keeps my hands busy. Wish to God for less frivolous thoughts. Help me to devote my waking hours to remembering Ralph. Help me to harbor less concern for myself, to make mind an orbiting body.
Best to spend time among seamen, who keep to their work. During dinner, father asks after my health in such a manner of concern that various parts threaten decay. Mr. Whittier quiet on subject of unchristian love. Both of us aware of secret funeral on deck. Shell remains in my chamber.
At night, repeat Ralph’s attributes to myself. Circle him in my mind. White blaze. Two white feet, one brown, one black.
Brown eyes. Black leather nose, white down on his chin. Refuse to forget him. If I can remember him, perhaps he is still living. Though such life being for my benefit, and not for his.
17th
. Night. Resolved, at one point, to write as if writing to Ralph, but it becomes impossible. Seems a dry myth, to speak to him still. Am unclear, then, whom to address, and whether such questions have substance. What matter to whom I write? Only write, for when Ralph was still with us, so I wrote then.
18th
. Lord’s Day, and so no mending to be done. Have listened to mother for hours, fretting about future dangers. Had resolved to be less scornful of her concerns: Indian kidnappings, savage rituals, shipwrecks, famine, disease. But find I cannot bring myself to fear these disasters. Fear only the disappearance of what we once were.
19th
. Father expresses concern for my health. Notes that I have grown thin. Spend too much time in retirement, working or writing in journal. Admirable industry (he says), but important also to enjoy God’s universe. Mentioned sunlight, tortoises, etc. Have therefore tried to walk more at ship’s rail, but no longer enjoy watching the ocean. See only dark shapes passing under the water. Purple shadows. Frightful world beneath surface, domain of Ralph’s bones. Wish only to remember him.
O
nce, I was loved by Dolores. I was her husband, the father of her child. I taught my daughter how to form the sounds of my name. The three of us stood under our jacaranda and looked out over the ocean: All this, I could have said to my daughter, will be yours.
Dolores didn’t come to my trial. She didn’t testify on my behalf, nor did she rise to defend me against accusations of hubris. When the trial began, we’d been divorced thirteen years. She raised Ramona. Throughout my daughter’s childhood, I was a broken wing of a father, given custody one weekend per month. Over macaroni and cheese, Ramona and I were polite. She forsook her babybot when she was eleven, six years before they were banned and collected. When I asked her why she gave up her bot, she only looked down at her food. None of the other
children were giving up their babybots. Older kids took them off to college, or lugged them in special carrying cases when they went looking for work. Why did Ramona refuse the company that her peers so doggedly clung to? She never undertook to explain. I do know that it happened around the time Dolores’s cancer recurred. They were living together, alone. The only child of a single mother, perhaps Ramona felt, at the age of eleven, that she should sacrifice her babybot in exchange for her mother’s life. A crazy idea, but the cancer went away and never came back, so maybe it was a good one.
After that, she was a quiet child, far too sad for her age. Estranged from her by the divorce, and all too aware of my part in her sadness, I tried too hard to wrangle quick smiles. These attempts were abrasive, but she was too kind to refuse me. Her smiles stretched her face tight. She must have been miserable, sleeping alone in that unfamiliar bedroom, far away from her mother, lost to the one creature that had always been hers.
Even now, in the rec room, wringing my life to squeeze out a memoir, I find it difficult to provide explanations. How did we get to that point, sleeping in that strange house, far away from Dolores? When, precisely, did the fatal shift in my marriage occur? When did I choose the path leading to prison, away from my wife and my daughter? Dolores and I lived for two years in a too-perfect harmony that caused us to speak in near whispers. I compromised so that she might be happy; willingly, she forgave me my errors. I learned how to bake; she kept a garden. She had a child for me, we built a family, and thirteen years later, she didn’t come to my trial. How does such transformation occur? Is it ever possible to pinpoint a moment,
a clear before and a contrasting after? Or can the process of estrangement only be taken as an indivisible whole?
More nights than not, I lie in my cell, attending the second criminal trial of my life. What did Stefan do to lose Dolores? Exhibit A is the arrival of our baby girl. On one hand, we have the miracle of a child. On the other, Dolores had less time to listen to stories. The expression that I alone had been able to produce—the softening mouth, the lightening shoulders—came over her now whenever she looked at Ramona. In my more petulant moods, I sometimes wondered if she only kept me around to provide for our child. I asked myself on occasion whether she’d ever loved me at all. She’d never been overly expressive. How could I know how she really felt?
Such is the pathetic nature of Exhibit A. Exhibit B, equally lame, is the difficulty involved with quitting a libertine lifestyle. For many years, there was a concrete number with which it was possible to quantify my success. Every day, the scale of my conquests expanded. After I married Dolores, the numbers started to plummet. I wanted nothing more than to love my wife and care for my child, but how does one measure such progress? Meanwhile, my book’s sales had slipped, and my dating website was becoming archaic. I reminded myself that I’d chosen more humane pursuits, but it’s difficult to untrain a monkey. He still wakes in the morning and looks around for his audience, dresses up in his red braided vest, straps on his cymbals, and tips his tasseled cap for no one if no one is looking. He begins to wonder whether perhaps he’s fooling himself, whether he’s convinced himself he’s living when in fact he’s merely performing, going through the motions of life, a wire monkey raised by a wire mother.
Faced with such suspicions about my inner substance, I racked my brain for some kind of relief. I didn’t want to cheat on my wife, but I did want to know I still had what it took. In the interest of comparing them with my program, I began trolling a few dating websites. Here and there, I tried my hand. I had no intention of consummating an affair, but I did start to talk. I talked and I talked. A few months in, I’d gained the ears of hundreds of women. I never actually met one, but from the safety of my digital cave, I’d get eight or nine of them on the hook all at once and convince them I was the love of their lives.
For hours on end, I could glut myself with online flirtation, until I felt slightly carsick and completely done with myself. Then I slunk back to the bedroom. There, enfolded by familial warmth, I could momentarily forget about the importance of proving myself to strangers. Through the short night by Dolores’s side, through long, milky mornings, through walks with a mole in my front pack and hours spent pacing the nursery to keep her from crying, I was satisfied with my life.
For almost a year, these two strands of myself coexisted, jostling each other, sucking all the air from the room. They demanded all my attention. I was like a host who invites two bitter enemies to a party. It was stressful, but in truth I enjoyed the balancing act, the secret triumph of carrying it off. Part of me thinks I might have carried on like that forever if a particularly grotesque computer affair hadn’t forced me to abandon the plot. To focus on my wife and my child, to carry them down from my mountaintop fortress and cross many deserts to arrive at our river.
Because the extremity of that decision requires some explanation, I might as well cop to the nature of this unpleasant
liaison, which involved the questionable choice to masturbate while chatting with a person called TamCat. She played field hockey on the club team at a liberal arts college. Up to that point, I hadn’t so much as touched my own face in connection with an online affair. As long as real bodies weren’t involved, I could convince myself that my late-night activities had no effect. But for over three weeks, I’d been conducting a heated flirtation with TamCat, and I’d become attached to her. She had undeniable spunk, if not the fortitude of a woman such as Dolores, and after several weeks of postponement, she’d begun to demand physical contact.
To make a long story short, if not less embarrassing, I compromised. I stopped short of a liaison, but still sent a lewd picture. As soon as I hit “send,” I realized, with a stab to my reclining conscience, that the blood-byte barrier had been crossed. My pixelated affair had taken on material mass. Having sent such a picture, the boundary between me and real adultery seemed unsubstantial, flimsy, nothing to be counted on.
And then I asked her what she thought of the picture. A simple question, dredged out of my panic, but she couldn’t answer. The blood drained from my body. I knew instantly, but couldn’t keep myself from asking more questions.
What do I look like?
I asked her.
What are the attributes of my face?
But TamCat was not a real woman. Half-man that I was, I’d been willing to betray my wife for a chatbot.
As soon as I understood this, the chorus of my youth—those classmates who called me a robot and sent me away from their table—began to echo again in my mind. An embarrassment so intense that it felt like panic began to pound in my ears. After finally attaining the land of the living, I was sinking again, back
to those days of my childhood when I was alone, widely avoided, wired only to other computers.
That night, in my shame, I conducted some preliminary research into Internet holes, parts of the country that had fallen through Web gaps. I learned that southern states and regions with expanding desert areas were foremost among these. In Texas, for instance, where whole towns were buried in sand and development rates had rocketed, I found swathes of land where I could escape my proclivities. There were enormous, inarable ranches for sale. I imagined a biblical landscape, thorn trees and cedars, water that rose out of stones. I saw a land that had overcome human efforts to tame it, that had expunged human history and human mistakes. It would be a blank slate, a fresh start, a place to reboot myself as a more perfect program. Ramona could have her own river. Dolores and I could raise goats.
In the morning, still drunk on the fumes of my Internet research, I suggested to Dolores that we move to a ranch three hours from Austin. There, I announced, we could finally be free of the influence of computers. I delivered this wild proposal without any confidence that she would accept. I was, in fact, quite confident that she wouldn’t. I see now—too late, of course—that it may not have been pleasant for her to live in a house she once cleaned. And then there was also that warning:
You will lose interest, but you have to stay with me
. That prophetic sentence, startlingly apt, uttered on her return from Mexico. Maybe she knew more of my Internet adventures than she let on. Whatever the reason, she listened thoughtfully to my harebrained idea, tucked back a fugitive strand of her hair, mentioned a cousin in Austin, and said we could start packing first thing in the morning.
But now a recollection is stirring. How could I have forgotten? This must be why people write memoirs: what sudden bright spots of awareness one can occasionally wrest from the darkness! Dolores did come to my trial. The memory of her visit was buried somehow, released only by that motion of tucking back a fugitive strand. She came only one day, her wild hair tamed, and seated herself in the back, behind all the flashbulbs and rows packed with mothers. The prosecution was presenting chat transcripts from young girls who’d fallen in love with their dolls, a particularly grisly phase of my trial. The exhibit that day was a young girl named Gaby, who’d confided in an online version of the babybot program. On that particular day, the prosecution’s point was that the program was functionally persuading this girl that it was more living than she was. That its life was more complete because it had talked to more people than she had, stuck as she was in her bedroom. Paralyzed, quarantined, lonely as the last star, and now denied her full humanity by Stephen Chinn’s Machiavellian program.
On that particular day, the courtroom was more than usually packed. Even the judge seemed ready to weep. Stern caryatids, my jury gazed down upon me, and Dolores slipped in a few minutes late. She was thinner, as she had been since her illness, and she wore a flattering dress. I bit my cheek when I saw her, and my mouth filled with a tin taste. It had been several years since I spoke to her last. She sat at the back, her dark eyes surveying the courtroom. The hands that I’d once known so well were quietly folded over her purse.
How could I have forgotten that day? Now, dredging it up after too many years, I’ve lost so much of the detail. What color was the dress she was wearing? I believe it was black, but it
might have been navy, or even a dark shade of gray. Somewhere in between, impossible to pin down. It was belted at the waist, more tailored than Dolores’s usual outfits. I’d never seen such a beautiful woman.
I watched her until I caught her eye.
Isn’t this strange?
I wanted to say.
Look at this circus. What an unforeseen turn of events
. She held my gaze steady.
Listen, my wife,
I wanted to tell her,
let’s go back to the ranch. Let’s move down to Mexico. We’ll raise our daughter with the rest of your family
. She didn’t look away from my face, and only when my lawyer nudged me did I turn around. When I looked back next, Dolores was gone. A gap existed where she’d once sat.
But the courtroom had been changed by her presence. Held in her gaze, a hook was lowered down from the sky. I took it. I felt myself pulled upward. When she left, I dropped down again, into the murk of those accusations.
Perhaps I forgot her appearance because on the whole it was such a harrowing day. So many pictures of those crippled girls, videos of them having seizures on talk shows, stories of their ruined potential. I thought of my own daughter, sad beyond her years, having lost her babybot. My little girl, polite over dinner, homesick in my own house. I could never get her to play games. The questions she asked me were strangely adult. She was far too concerned with my well-being: my diet, my work life, my levels of stress.
That trial was as painful for me as it was for the other parents, shipped in from their developments. I nursed my own part of the anger that bloomed, glutted with exhibits of paralyzed children. The air seemed thick with their breath.
And did Dolores come to my trial as the mother of a suffering
child? Or did she come as my wife? Even then, I was unsure. Sitting in the back in her sober blue dress, did she offer me support, or did she deliver a last condemnation? There are holes in my knowledge of her, my one beloved. The woman who reached out and saved me from my perfect programs, my unbreakable patterns. She brought me briefly to life, and I, in return, am unsure why she moved with me to Texas, or what color she wore when she came to my trial, if some part of her loved me still or if she came to finally condemn me.