Eagle Eye (12 page)

To his right, Mrs. Camel, mother of six, was now talking seriously with Leskel, who had moved around to her. They look so grown, most of them, no matter what’s inside. Opposite him, Janacek’s earring glinted, joining him to childhood. Perhaps one day, Bronstein himself would find himself wanting one.

Janacek was staring at him. “Yes, she spoke of you. Many times. Ah, yes.”

“How is Jasmin these days? I should call her up.”

Sorry—I’m always rude when I have to wear a tie.

“How long have you been away, Bronstein?”

“Nine months. Wrote her from Paris.” After Monica? No, before. “But she never wrote back.”

“Poor boy.” Janacek grasped him by the jacket. “Sit down.”

His father was chiming at his glass again. The table straightened and took up the chime, old dinosaurs chocking their bow ties sideways at the guest of honor—a dowager iguana, a donkey with the usual whimsical specs.

Cows were harder to come by. In a pinch might two priests do? One black, one white.

“Can’t now. What’s up?”

Janacek sat down. Slowly.

It came to him then. What it must be. Of course. Underneath the din, he said it aloud. “She’s pregnant. That it? And it’s mine.”

F
OR FIVE SECONDS, HILARITY
had me. Report that as my reaction to fatherhood. Not everybody can find that out beforehand. At his own bar mitzvah. And as a candidate for the Catholic Church.

In retrospect it seems a long time. Farce would have been so lovely. Of God.

J
ANACEK BENT FORWARD ACROSS
the table, pulling me toward him. Five seconds more were awarded me. In which I called Jasmin up. His earring brushed me then. I recoiled. His eye had passed me on the way, an old red searchlight.

“She fell in Bryant Park, an anti-war day crowd. The autopsy showed a very light skull.”

The glasses went on chiming true.

“To our son on his twenty-first,” my father said. Maeve had come back. He raised his glass to me. The first time I’d seen him so, he’d been in his first custom-made tux, toasting himself in a mirror as the best dressed goddam penguin he ever saw—and I’d bawled with an eight-year-old’s rage because it was so true-not-true. “To my son. Not a prodigal. But returned.”

Buddy is a graceful man.

Grace, past or present, breaks me up.

Program me in now, Betts.

Betts?

There was a disappointed murmur at the conclusion of my speech, a one-liner I remembered from what a boy says on that day. Murmur more approving as the word went round that I had achieved tears. Buddy saluted me. Maeve put out a hand like a ghost feeling. I sat down.

“Maybe you’ll come talk to me now?” Dr. Jannie said. The children called him that; sometimes she did. She talked about him more after I’d seen him; that was natural. Still, there are these people you never expect to have to deal with personally. Even if you know their sadness perfectly, maybe even seeing their story, seeing around it, just a little different from the person telling you it. Even so—he had been only a character in my friend’s life.

But just now, I had had my first real death. And I noticed something about it that people never tell you. Not even the poets, who are supposed to have the high sign on it. From now on, Jasmin was going to be only a character in living peoples lives. She was only going to be something that had happened to
us.
Oh, we could tell each other stories. About what had happened between her and us. We could explore it forever. But nothing could ever change for her. On her own. She had no more chance.

“M-maybe I will.” I didn’t know whether I could bear to help the process along.

But that was for later. I knew what had happened to me, too.

I looked down the table. Oh yes oh yes, I was pretty young for what had happened to me; for a long while yet, it mightn’t show. But I had joined the animals. A voice was telling me so. A character in my life. “
Kangaroo,
” it said to me.
Kangeroo-oo.

Maeve was looking down the long, buzzing table, at Jannie and me. No, at him. At least lift a glass to me, Maeve, throw me a kiss, even a department-store kiss. After all, it’s my twenty-first. Her glass stood primly unused; I hadn’t watched. At the time of the toast, I was elsewhere in time. Only a few minutes ago. But I remembered a time for Maeve and me when she couldn’t take her eyes off me. From about my eighth to eleventh year, it was the worst. Or when I got conscious of it. I’d raise my eyes from my oatmeal or math book; or even while I was talking; I’d bump into hers. “Stop
looking
at me.” She’d shake her head, shake her glance away, and only smile. Ten minutes later, I’d catch her back at it. “I love the shape of your head, that’s all,” she said once. “I just like to look at it.” And reached out and smoothed my hair. When I got too tall for her to do that without stretching, she stopped. About the time of Paulina, my first girl, of course. But I couldn’t buy that, much. Or that when it came due to toast me, Maeve felt vibes from Jasmin.

It was the other way round. Jasmin was making me feel Maeve’s. Of all the girls since Paulina, all those who hung in my mind like upside-down pretty torsos not bloody at all, white as candy, tan as sand, all swaying in the wind like a gentle town on wasyday that I whizz by on my motorbike—Jasmin is now the one who’s right-side up, a speaking girl. She has a good head on her shoulders now. Thinskulled as it is, it can talk to me. She’s permanent.

She’s telling me what I always knew, even at eight. That Maeve, next to Buddy, with him, was always one person, Maeve alone another. What I see now though, is something new.

“That’s your mother, isn’t it?” Janacek says. “I’ve not met her yet. That’s why I came. But I haven’t managed to. You know she won’t talk to any of us?”

“Why should she?”

“Only that sometimes this means the person has a very bad thing inside, that dare not be said.”

A child’s vocabulary. But it ticks.

Maeve is sitting beside Buddy; they’re together. But Maeve is now Maeve alone. That’s the difference. Is that so bad it can’t be said?

I see now that she’s not looking at either of us. Not at the doctor, not at me. There are still vibrations between her and me, from a lifetime together, but she’s unaware I’m catching them. That is another difference.

What if she’s not keeping things anymore? Objects. People. Not keeping them even to change them, to throw them out for something else. Not even keeping the coats—to be kept. And if she’s not keeping Buddy, the vibes tell me, is it a matter of divorce?

You don’t divorce a child, a son. An only son and child. And my majority has nothing to do with it. If her gaze travels past me, it has nothing to do with sons-and-mothers jazz, or any of the psycho-dramas well-meaning people are told of. She’s not keeping me on—that’s clear. Clear from the moment I entered the house, if I’d looked at it. Sure it hurts. But is that the worst?

“But she did invite you here,” I said to Janacek.

“I doubt she even knows my name. Your father did. He invited us all.”

“
He
did. How do you know?

“He talks to me now and then you know.”

“I see.”

Standard for what people say when they don’t, Betts. An adult phrase. Hilarity even came over me again; maybe that’s what chance is.

Remember Tufts, our programming instructor, came to the school twice a week from down in Dutchess County, where lives the IBM God he was always going to take us on a day-trip to see; but did never? How he used to tweak the ears of those he liked best, the ones who were serious—usually you and me—just when we had our heads bent, going at it hardest, how that jarring tug would come, in an arc that made us see stars. Treats us like reform-school boys, I said to you; what if he is such a good man at his stuff? You said no, studying was like a surface-tension you could get glued in; he wanted us to kick past. He ruined a set-up for me once though. But when he came to you, you’d already put everything to bed lightning fast and were ready for him. He bent down sideways, like a great wheedling moon, and said, “Right, Betts. You can tug
my
ear.” Though you were our best, we marveled. “How you handled him!” we all said. “Sweet drunk, like my father, I know what to expect.” You said to me later. Oh, you were our best. Not why I chose you though, to help me out here.

Remember how I visited you in India? Just four months ago, in the small house that fitted you too well. With its over-large nameplate. Never knew your middle name was Maitland. Fits you fine. I had never visited such a house before. You could tell me nothing, of all I knew you knew. Somehow I had to make you talk to me of those feverish schooldays—the lab hours after which you and I crept back to work and came out dazzled, walking across the yard in a silent double-migraine, to slide just in time into our seats in mess-hall, to chomp cold broccoli, cornbeef and ice cream—while the universal chessmen marched in our heads. With Tufts’ astral voice still barking at us what we called “Tufts’ Lord’s prayer.”
Reorganize the problem
; define it.
Determine the method
; mechanize the method. Break down the chart. Remember human error. Debug. The flow-diagram is the flow of logic. Code from the diagram.
Test
… Getting the application into production never really interested him; he was a teaching man; how we respected him for that! … But about that day at dinner—standing near you in the heavy Indian sun, I reminded you of it, and of what you had done. We were a school that said grace before a meal and gave thanks again after, very Protestant, each boy taking his turn; that day it was yours. You’d always laughed at me for loving the computer terminology for its old associations; the “assertion box”—by using which, Tufts said, a processor could assert his own individuality; the “memory box”—where the installation stores. These terms were chosen like the Oedipus complex they talked about in psych class, you said. “Just a throwback to a former world.” And I said, “
I’m
a throwback.”

But that day, when you stood up to say grace, you winked at me.
Enable all traps
! you barked, and the hall roared. When you stood up again at meal’s end, they were snuffling expectantly through their winter-wet noses. Real computer language was what you loved, those agreed-upon alphabets that couldn’t be profaned—the very name
ALGOL
could wake your smile. You stood up, fiddled stagily with the remains on your plate, wrinkled your high Northumberland nose. All drunks have drama in them, you once said.
Remember human error,
you said, and walked out. When the headmaster called you in afterwards, you were lectured not on your manners to God, but on the difficulty of keeping publicly insulted cooks. “So much for the application of knowledge, Bunty,” you said.

So when you turned eighteen, Tufts got you a research job at IBM. I visited you there too, the last time I saw you, except one. You had your own installation, or the squire’s share of it. “Still call it Batface?” I said, but got no answer; you were over my head now. And maybe IBM’s. They had you working on sub-routines, for godsake. But you were twenty, not in college, and war-vulnerable. On a nearby memo pad, somebody had written: Define Macro Skeleton. “What’s
MACRO
?” I said. “I forget?” I saw you were dashed. “A form of pseudo-instruction.” But it came back to me like a long ride on the motorbike, after months of nothing between the knees but women. “Or vice versa,” you said. By after dinner, we had each covered our respective miles. On your desk there was a book called
Calculating Engines.
“Charles Babbidge, born 1792. Anticipated everything. Including IBM’s new 7090.” I asked what that was. “This.” You laid a hand on it, like a man does on the throbbing that owns him. “Batface.”

Then looked at me darkly, lively fairhaired Anglo as you still were, silver under night’s study-lamp. “Don’t you fall for any of Norbert Wiener’s leftover boys, Bunty pal. Predicting the black future when computers get out of control. All the future’s already in the past, see. And ready for us.
All of it.
”

I reminded you I wasn’t at Harvard, but merely at a nearby institution, where I had taken pains to see that my most complicated course was one on Whitehead and Russell. “In words, John. That old terminology. I’ve wonked out on the other. It’s too applicable, just now. And MIT is dirty well applying it.”

I was eighteen now, and my draft number was low. We discussed ways of not going. “Ways of not applying ourselves,” you said. “You’ll go on playing it by ear, Bronstein, I know you.” You were going out to New Delhi. For a subsidiary of IBM.

“Where the needs are still very binary,” you said, with your old smile.

This I remembered. “Tuft’s law.” It was Tuft’s contention that since computers talk in binary code—based on the number 2, instead of the decimal—and since man, from feet to hands all the way to the on-off nerve systems of the brain was himself such a collection of twosomes, that the computer was therefore as human as any of his creations to date. Sometimes Tufts would use “binary” and human interchangeably; one Christmas he gave us a discourse on “binary” love.

“Where’s he now?”

I hadn’t known he was dead. Of the error of drink.

The Lord is dead, I thought, but I can smell his disciple, in the early Fishkill morn. On my way out, you made me a present of Babbidge. I have to say I never read him fully; backpacking is hard on the mind. But when I found you in New Delhi, not at the address on your card, but no trouble at all, I remembered what you’d said of him as I left. “The government gave him seventeen-thousand pounds to build his Analytical Engine. He couldn’t, because the mechanical skills of the age weren’t equal to the job. He once said he’d swap the rest of his life for three days, five-hundred years later. And look.” You jerked a finger at Batface. “Less than a hundred and fifty years, Bunt. Isn’t that sad?”

I thought of that when I saw you again. John Maitland Betts, you were right. All your future was in the past. You knew what to expect.

I seem to be collecting sadnesses. A backpack is more expansible than I thought. Don’t mention skeletons to me, Betts, for a while. But that day, looking down at you in your house-grave, I thought I could define yours. There’s a country beetle that winds its horn out there around four o’clock, maybe to remind one to listen to the heat’s silences and be warned; you didn’t seem to hear. Your head will never again be your house.

I trust you to hear me now. The mechanical means now provided being my own memory-box. With those synapses they say spurt each to each, in an input-output of two by two. Help me recognize the problem. I’ll determine the method.
Ignore all traps
or interruptions due to time, distance and graves. In the termination of Batfaces anywhere, we shall
disable
them.

Hear old Tufts’ voice, homing like a four-o’clock beetle in the after-hours of prep-school America. “But, disciples, the computer remembers any disabled traps. And when they are finally
enabled,
as we say it, they take place in a built-in sequence. Oh beautiful, gentlemen. Socko beautiful.”

Then came the swig from the vest-pocket flask, brought out with a stiff one-two-three flexion: fingers, elbow, mouth—a ritual that he honored for a priestly moment afterward, eyes closed. Then went on talking, as if it had all been done in the dark. “And disciples, the building of systems which are to operate in real environments—with people! With other machines! With nature!—that’s the real challenge in programming.”

We found it all in our manual, later. But it remained as he said, beautiful.
Enable all traps.
Let the dining hall laugh. You and I could never get over the thrill of it. Of that sluice-gate moment when all the interruptions are cancelled, and the sequence pays off, pays and pays. How we squawked of it to each other, from bicycle to bicycle, under the Babbidge-light the stars were already sending us from their past, while we rode through people, machines and nature—all waiting to be hemmed in. I thought I’d found a religion. At fifteen. You’d found Tufts.

I got over it.

Because all computers have to be lied to, Betts. At times. The data has to fit the problem. No morality involved. Old Batface will do exactly what you tell it to—right or wrong. As all the manuals assure us, it is the perfect fool.

But it can’t lie, like a man does. To itself.

Recognize the problem, Betts? And right behind you, Tufts? You two would make a good audience. Best information processors a boy ever had. The internal world of the 7090, deals in microseconds; wouldn’t any life be quickly dealt with? But you could handle it alone, Betts, even from the India of your little house.

This particular installation—on whose magnetic tapes we could record all the data a twenty-one-year-old life can muster—belongs to my father. That won’t matter. It doesn’t know.

Pick up your past, Bronstein. According to leading authorities, it has your future in it.

Process the question. Start with any one of them.

Why did Buddy lie?

Has he before?… Put that in too…. And to whom.

EOF
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