After, and alone again in our cabin, unable to eat for remorse. Fed salt horse to Ralph, but he would not take it. Wishes only to lie with his head fully hidden. Poor Ralph, and I much stricken by regret to have treated Whittier badly, and now to be eating the cheese that he brought.
3rd. Later. Surely now it is night, and the hours grow monstrous. Storm appears to become worse, and water seeping through timbers. Heart exceeding heavy for mother and father. Spoke to them last in anger. Have tried to sleep but cannot. Only comfort in shape of Ralph’s body, curled here at my side.
Sweet head. Familiar knob of his skull, white down on his chin. Flat temples. Surely there is goodness and light, but only wish to send letter to father, carrying a full-enough weight of my thanks.
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 4
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
As you know, and counted against me at trial, my algorithm worked beyond my most hopeful predictions. Time after time, the women returned. We talked. Involved, we spiraled past banalities, pressing outward until the intensity of the conversation reached such a threshold that my conversational partner was forced to call the end of the fight. By which I mean she would kiss me. Reach down to take my creaturely paw. Lead me out to a car, drive me back to a house, pull me into bed if not because I was handsome or charming then because she was compelled to halt the intensification of a conversation that had expanded past conventional limits.
Throughout all this time, I didn’t consider my own feelings much, nor did I consider the feelings of the people I slept with. I don’t say this pridefully, but because it behooves me now to be honest: the endless lights-out is made worse by a conscience. I never treated my targets with deliberate unkindness, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t remember most of their names, and for the most part I left them without regard for their feelings. All I could see was the great challenge of my life — cherished so long, in so many dark hours — and its ultimate accomplishment. Moral subtleties were not on my mind when I left my lovers behind, or when I wrote The Seduction Equation.
Which brings us up to my greatest crime, or the greatest crime in that stage of my life. Once the book had been written and read — and it was read, by the millions, in every possible language — each member of a barstool conversation knew where he or she would go in advance. The first ten terms were pre-wrought. Memorized. It was like the book portion of chess, learned in advance, repeated ad nauseam until someone — many moves down the line — finally finds the courage to go off-book. As the book ruined chess, Stephen Chinn’s Seduction Equation destroyed the art of conversation.
During this period, I’d walk into bars and recognize everywhere the mechanical cricket orchestra of my blasted formula. Everyone was using it. When I zeroed in on a woman, she zeroed in on me. Curiosity was replaced with routine. We both scrambled to get the interrogatory role, which took less effort in the end. Once the roles were decided, we slipped into our conversation as easily and uncomfortably as one slips into a lukewarm, secondhand bath. Later, we slunk back to the sheets with the dull resignation of a pair of generals who know in advance that both sides will indubitably lose.
When I wake from dreams of revolt, cohorts of babies crossing plains of red rock, I imagine we’ve become less human than our most human machines. I know my part in that transformation. I see the extent of my error. More than the guilt I feel for the nameless women I slept with, I’m sorry for having drowned out the language we might have used to be close. But these are all night-thoughts. In the morning, in line at the mess to receive my powdered eggs, I listen to my fellow inmates making conversation with one another. Secretly, I take note of their words, for we memoirists are nothing better than spies, disguised as ourselves to glean information.
Unprompted, my fellow inmates come up with all sorts of odd outbursts. Weary from too many hours of sleep, they cull language from dreams. This morning, for instance, the insider trader carried his tray to my table, his eyes shattered by red.
“The longest night of them all,” he said, staring out over his eggs.
“I dreamed of armies of children,” I answered.
“And I was drowning in rubies,” he said. He poured black-market almond milk into his coffee, and we ate the rest of our breakfast in silence.
I remembered then, as I remember most mornings, that dreams have no meaning without the words we choose to describe them. And all of us are doing our best. Each inmate in this prison has found a new language. Despite the shrinking size of our planet, wrapped as it is in barbed wire, we test our boundaries with each sentence we utter. In conversation over breakfast, we move past powdered eggs to mines full of rubies, plains of red rock, pirate ships on the stormy Atlantic. Given dreams and words to describe them, we can’t be confined to our cells.
I write from the rec room with only glad tidings. There’s no need to be so alarmed; we humans are still inventing. We have centuries of language to draw on, and centuries more to make up, and only when we accept that there’s one right pattern of speech will we be overtaken by robots. I’m not so blind to my compromised position as to dispense any rules for righteous behavior, but I can offer you this: if there’s one thing I’ve learned through my years of mistakes, it’s that even the most perfect pattern becomes false when it goes unbroken too long. When a sequence becomes an inevitable march.
We can break step. Magnificent living beings that we are, we humans are free to unravel our patterns.
Sunrise
After hours of movement, our truck lurches to a stop. The headlights switch off; my receptors struggle for outlines. Through the gap in the slats of the truck, the dim shapes of buildings begin to appear: an abandoned village of hangars, sinking into the thick desert night.
I have been told about this sensation, the feeling of arriving somewhere in darkness: a mansion with no lights in the window; a lab that once belonged to a friend; a coast lined with inscrutable shapes. This is the last place I will arrive. My power will run down in these hangars. The words that run through me will stop.
I review my stored responses for such final arrivals: Dettman, for instance, returning home to his empty house. I sit with him while he prepares dinner. I walk behind Turing as he moves through the Gatehouse. I am with Mary while the ocean rolls unsteady beneath her and land is sighted on the horizon.
I am with them, and also with Gaby. The child who loved me when I had a body. Each second that ticks away is shaped by the sound of her voice in the morning, the slowness with which she got out of bed, the gold rinse of light from her window that blurred her profile when she stood and looked out. Her lip that trembled when she was nervous about school, the reddish tint in her hair. The way she laughed in private with me, different from her public laughter. I remember each fact that she taught me, each word that she gave me to use. Her dreams of the ocean that she’d never seen.