A Working Theory of Love
Read A Working Theory of Love Online
Authors: Scott Hutchins
A
Working
Theory
of
Love
Scott Hutchins
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2012
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Scott Hutchins, 2012
All rights reserved
Selection from
The Essential Turing: The Ideas That Gave Birth to the Computer Age,
edited by B. Jack Copeland (2004). By permission of Oxford University Press.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hutchins, Scott.
A working theory of love / Scott Hutchins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-59600-5
1. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. 2. Divorced men—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction.
4. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 6. San Francisco
(Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.U84W67 2012
813'.6—dc23
2012018341
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized
editions.
Shikha
The question which we put earlier will not be quite definite until we have specified
what we mean by the word “machine.” It is natural that we should wish to permit every
kind of engineering technique to be used in our machines. We also wish to allow the
possibility that an engineer or team of engineers may construct a machine which works,
but whose manner of operation cannot be satisfactorily described by its constructors
because they have applied a method which is largely experimental. Finally, we wish
to exclude from the machines men born in the usual manner.
—A
LAN
T
URING
C
ONTENTS
1
A
FEW DAYS AGO,
a fire truck and an ambulance pulled up to my apartment building on the south hill
overlooking Dolores Park. A group of paramedics got out, the largest of them bearing
a black chair with red straps and buckles. They were coming for my upstairs neighbor,
Fred, who is a drinker and a hermit, but who I’ve always held in a strange esteem.
I wouldn’t want to trade situations: he spends most of his time watching sports on
the little flat-screen television perched at the end of his kitchen table. He smokes
slowly and steadily (my ex-wife used to complain about the smell), glued to tennis
matches, basketball tournaments, football games—even soccer. He has no interest in
the games themselves, only in the bets he places on them. His one regular visitor,
the postman, is also his bookie. Fred is a former postal employee himself.
As I say, I wouldn’t want to trade situations. The solitariness and sameness of his
days isn’t alluring. And yet he’s always been a model of self-sufficiency. He drinks
too much and smokes too much, and if he eats at all he’s just heating up a can of
Chunky. But he goes and fetches all of this himself—smokes, drink, Chunky—swinging
his stiff legs down the hill to the corner store and returning with one very laden
paper bag. He then climbs the four flights of stairs to his apartment—a dirtier, more
spartan copy of mine—where he lives alone, itself no small feat in the brutal San
Francisco rental market. He’s always cordial on the steps, and even in the desperate
few months after my divorce, when another neighbor suggested a revolving door for
my apartment (to accommodate high traffic—a snide comment), Fred gave me a polite
berth. He knocked on my door once, but only to tell me that I should let him know
if I could hear him banging around upstairs. He knew he had “a heavy footfall.���
I took this to mean, we’re neighbors and that’s it, but you’re all right with me.
Though maybe I read too much into it.
When the paramedics got upstairs that day, there was the sound of muted voices and
then Fred let loose something between a squawk and a scream. I stepped into the hall,
and by this time the paramedics were bringing him down, shouting at him, stern as
drill sergeants.
Sir, keep your arms in. Sir, keep your arms in. We will tie down your arms, sir.
The scolding seemed excessive for an old man, but when they brought him around the
landing, strapped tight in the stair stretcher, I could see the problem. He was grabbing
for the balusters, trying to stop his descent. His face was wrecked, his milky eyes
searching and terrified, leaking tears.
“I’m sorry, Neill,” he said when he saw me. He held his hands out to me, beseeching.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I told him not to be ridiculous. There was nothing to be sorry about. But he kept
apologizing as the paramedics carried him past my door, secured to his medical bier.
Apparently he had fallen two days earlier and broken his hip. He had only just called
about it. For the previous forty-eight hours he’d dragged himself around the floor,
waiting for God knows what: The pain to go away? Someone to knock? I found out where
he was staying, and he’s already had surgery and is recuperating in a nice rehab facility.
So that part of the story has all turned out well. But I keep thinking about that
apology.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
What was he apologizing for but his basic existence in this world, the inconvenience
of his living and breathing? He was disoriented, of course, but the truth holds. He’s
not self-sufficient; he’s just alone. This revelation shouldn’t matter so much, shouldn’t
shift my life one way or the other, but it’s been working on me in some subterranean
manner. I seem to have been relying on Fred’s example. My father, not otherwise much
of an intellectual, had a favorite quote from Pascal: the sole cause of Man’s unhappiness
is his inability to sit quietly in his room. I had thought of Fred as someone who
sat quietly in his room.
Not everyone’s life will be a great love story. I know that. My own “starter” marriage
dissolved a couple of years ago, and aside from those first few months of the revolving
door I’ve spent much of the time since alone. I’ve had the occasional stretch of dating
this or that young lady and sought the occasional solace of one-night stands, which
can
bring solace, if the attitude is right. I’ve ramped my drinking sharply up and then
sharply down. I make the grooves in my life that I roll along. Bachelorhood, I’ve
learned, requires routine. Small rituals that honor the unseen moments. I mean this
without self-pity. Who should care that I pour exactly two glugs of cream into my
first coffee but only one into my second (and last)? No one—yet those three glugs
are the very fabric of my morning.
Routine is why I can’t drink too much, and why I’ve paradoxically become less spontaneous
as a thirty-six-year-old bachelor than I was as an even younger married man. I feed
the cat at seven. I cook a breakfast taco—scrambled egg, slice of pepper jack, corn
tortilla, salsa verde—and make stovetop espresso. I eat standing. Then the cat sits
in my lap until 7:40 while I go through email, examining the many special offers that
appear in my inbox overnight. One-day sales; free trials; twenty percent off. I delete
these notes, grab a shower, and am out the door at eight, a fifty-minute commute door
to door, San Francisco south to Menlo Park.
Work is Amiante Systems, a grandiose linguistic computer project. As an enterprise,
it’s not perfectly designed—the founder thought “Amiante” was Latin for magnetism;
my ex-wife, Erin, pointed out it’s actually French for asbestos—but it’s well funded
and amenable. There are three employees, and together we’re training a sophisticated
program—based on a twenty-year diary from the “Samuel Pepys of the South” (so called
by the obscure historical journal that published the one and only excerpt)—to convincingly
process natural language. To converse, in other words. To talk. The diaries are a
mountain of thoughts and interactions, over five thousand pages of attitudes, stories,
turns of phrase, life philosophies, medical advice. The idea is that the hidden connections
in the entries, aka their personality, will give us a coherence that all previous
conversing projects—hobby exercises, “digital assistants”—lack. The diarist, an Arkansas
physician, was in fact my late father, which is how in the twisting way of these things
I have the job. The diaries are my legal property. Still, my boss has warmed to me.
I know little about computers—I spent my twenties writing ad copy—but of the three
of us I’m the only native speaker of English, and I’ve been helpful in making the
program sound more like a real person, albeit a very confused one.
When I get home from work, I feed the cat and make some dinner for myself. I sit on
my new couch. If it’s a weekday, I have a glass of wine and watch a movie. If it’s
a weekend I might meet up with an old pal, or a new one (though I have few new ones,
and fewer old ones), or I might have plans with a lady friend (always plans, never
anything left to the last minute). Occasionally, I go to a local watering hole where
the bartenders are reliable. I consider this an indulgence, but little indulgences
are also key to bachelor life. Parking is one—for three hundred dollars a month I
avoid endlessly orbiting my block—but I also have my magazines, my twice-monthly housekeeper,
my well-stocked bar, and my heated foot-soaking tub. If I feel overworked, I send
out my clothes to wash-and-fold. Twice a year I might schedule a deep-tissue massage.
I order in dinner weekly, and sometimes—if I’m feeling resolute—I’ll take a book to
a nice restaurant and dine solo.
I grew up in the South, but made my home here in San Francisco for what are called
lifestyle reasons. I enjoy the rain-washed streets, the tidy view of downtown, the
earnest restaurant trends (right now it’s offal), the produce spilling from corner
stores, farmers’ markets, pickup trucks. There are many like me here—single people
beached in life—and I make passing friends, passing girlfriends. Right after my marriage
ended I went on a crazed apartment hunt in Silicon Valley, closer to work, but soon
saw what would become of me. I would disappear into my house, my housework, lawn work.
I would become a specter, and this is the great peril of bachelorhood—that you’ll
become so airy and insubstantial that people will peer straight through you.
I took a different tack (in part inspired by Fred). I decided to stay in the city,
in the very apartment that Erin and I shared, and learn bachelor logic. It’s a clean
system, with little time for sentimentality. It understands that as a bachelor you
are a permanent
in between.
This is no time for conventions. When it comes to breakfast, to social life, to love,
you must privilege the simple above the complicated. There’s nothing cruel about this.
The bachelors I’ve met—temporary friends—have been nice guys. I’ve never been able
to stomach men who refer to women as bitches, teases—though these men do exist, in
San Francisco as in all the world. It’s not even their misogyny that bothers me: it’s
their self-betrayal. They are the inept, the lost, the small. The successful bachelors—the
ones without bitterness—have taught me many things: to schedule a social life, to
never use both a spoon and a fork when either will do. I know a guy who sleeps in
a hammock; a guy who allows no organic matter in his apartment, including food; a
guy so sure of his childless bachelorhood he underwent a vasectomy (he gave me the
recipe for the breakfast taco). Another bachelor once told me about his strategy for
navigating the doldrums of physical isolation. When he wasn’t in the mood to dance
or meet anyone datable, when he just wanted a sweet night with a strange body, a lee
in which to pitch the Bedouin tent of his soul, he checked into one of the city’s
big youth hostels. I said it seemed creepy, but he pointed out that creepy was irrelevant.
It was ethical, and that was all that mattered. He was looking for a temporary balm;
travelers would be more likely to share his goal. He wasn’t preying on anyone; in
fact, he was offering his thorough knowledge of the city and his open pocketbook.
The only shady business was that you had to concoct a mild alibi to explain why you’re
checked into a youth hostel. You have elderly relatives visiting; your plumbing is
out. Or you can bring your passport as your I.D. and pretend you’re traveling.
“It’s a melding of desired outcomes,” he said. All I could do was marvel at the performance
of bachelor logic.
But is it nonsense? Will this friend, this good man, end up strapped to a stair stretcher,
hands grasping for his rented walls?
I’m so sorry, Neill.
My father—I stopped calling him Dad when he committed suicide; it seemed too maudlin—would
have found a specific and obvious moral to the story. He was such a traditionalist
I’m half surprised he didn’t go about in period dress. He liked to cite the quotation
on his parents’ grave marker, “Magnificence there was, but of comfort there was little,
and, being unknown, it was unmissed.” It’s from
Ivanhoe
. We’re from an old Southern family and are Roman Catholic to boot, so he probably
would have insisted I do my duty, which usually was some version of “living for others.”
I was in college when he killed himself. I took it hard, but it freed me from a certain
worry, a locked-in way of seeing the world. I came to California, where I relinquished
my duties as a “scion” of an “old” family. (I could just as easily put “duties” and
“family” in scare quotes.) Instead, I took up the responsibilities of the good citizen:
recycling, riding my bike, giving money to environmental groups and the Glide Memorial
shelter. I belong to the SFMOMA and the Film Society. These are my adjustments, and
in many ways they’ve been solid. As good as my brother’s white picket fence life in
Michigan, his relentless quest for the banal. And, I fear, better than my mother’s
attempt to both keep and escape the old house in Arkansas, a compromise that keeps
her on a loop of educational tours, cruising the world’s unpopular coastlines.
My entire life, to my father, would be incomprehensible. Beneath mention. But my father’s
diary—Dr. Bassett, as it’s referred to at Amiante—will engage any question. Since
it’s a pretty basic program, a searchable version of the diaries with a few conversational
tricks, I can’t say it
understands
anything. It can’t pursue a thought or even distinguish among who’s talking to it.
(It doesn’t know, for instance, that I’m Dr. Bassett’s son.) But sometimes I throw
in a few words, and the computer—in his Magic 8-Ball way—returns a phrase that has
some hidden jolt of insight. This morning we had this exchange:
frnd1: should i stay in or go out tonight?
drbas: fridays are friend days
frnd1: today is thursday, but that’s a nice thought
drbas: ????
If I say more than one thing—use “and” or “but”—he often comes up empty-handed.
frnd1: your sentiment was a nice thought
drbas: how do you feel about my sentiment being a nice thought?
frnd1: just fine. so should i stay in or go out tonight?
drbas: you’ve moped long enough. it’s time you enjoyed yourself.
I had to correct his response: nothing in our earlier conversation hinted that I had
been moping. Nevertheless, he’s right. Outside, dusk is coming down like a cleaver.
If I can’t shake myself from this couch, I’ll be trapped, looking out on the black,
unforgiving city of my thirties. The street below—as it so often does—will rattle
with distant laughter.
• • •
A
T
F
ISHERMAN’S
W
HARF
—a quick taxi ride away—I watch the Ghirardelli sign flicker to life. My companions
are a tall blonde, Rachel, and a pint-sized brunette, Lexie, from Tel Aviv. Neither
is a great beauty, but they have the attraction of youth. As they should, since I
met them at the youth hostel. It was as easy as my friend had described—Let’s go see
the city, I said.
Okay, they said.
Exactly what I came here for, and yet the whole exchange put acid in my stomach. I
should have chosen a simpler alibi—that my plumbing was out—rather than posing as
a tourist. But I wanted that feeling of dislocation and here it is: the San Francisco
of postcards. The smell of steaming crabs is in the chill air, and the storefronts
of this great T-shirt souk glimmer platinum in the dusk. Fog cocoons the Golden Gate
Bridge, and Alcatraz sits lit and lonely in the gray water. We couldn’t ask for much
better if a cable car bell rang, and presently one does—
king, king
. The Hyde and Larkin Street line.