Roger's Version (32 page)

Dale on his plastic keyboard, its electrically supplied patter as delicate as the scrabble of rats, moves back into the viewing space, away from the plane of the screen, up again into the
Tree
, where dots and small ovals indicate the height to which small boys, if projected into the mathematical woods, might
safely climb. Each element of the array has its equation, which the machine can be made to disgorge in hexadecimal form, and which the dot-matrix printer on the other side of the cubicle—where Amy Eubank sits when Dale is absent and where she leaves her lipstick-stained Styrofoam coffee cups like love letters in another system of notation—will obediently print, in what is called a “dump.” Dale takes readings at
z =
24.0,
z =
12.4,
z =
3.0, and
z =
1.1, and the machine—another rat-noise, a terrible terrified high-pitched chattering—spews out, with a syncopated, somehow irritable bumping rhythm of rapid platen rotation, line after line of figures: these Dale scans for an abnormal, a supernatural pattern of recurrence. He especially checks the long accordion-folded sheets for 24 or any striking incidence of 2 or 4, which he has half decided are the sacred numbers in which God will speak to him—higher powers of the machine’s brute 0 and 1, astraddle the traditional weary trinity, and one short of the ominous 5 we find grafted onto our hands and feet.

He encircles in red felt-tip 24s as they occur in the hundreds of polynomials and coördinates the computer has supplied. He cannot decide if the dancing activity of the red marks—the sense of a subliminal message activating mysterious connective currents—in the periphery of his vision flows from a transrandom statistical anomaly or from his own fatigue. He starts sweating, from the probable futility of it all. Since receiving his grant he has slept poorly. Some deep trespass yearns to reveal itself to him in the dark. In the affair with Esther, her demands have become more rapacious, and her manner, simultaneously, less courteous. A fretful, disappointed impatience has been extruded by her into the heated mix of their mutual passion, and several times he has registered this uncongenial element with impotence. Sexually, she seems
bent on performing stunts, rolling up new records, and his body has protested its mechanical role as her partner in these feats. Its refusal has surprised him as well, for beneath his intellectual and spiritual aspirations Dale has since adolescence harbored a sly genital pride: he thinks his erect penis rather beautiful, its marble pallor and royal-blue veins and dusky-rose bulbous glans, and the way its tapering shape curves slightly backward as if to nestle that suffused, single-eyed head in his navel. He feels, erect, split into two creatures, of whom the much smaller has much the greater share of vitality, even of spirituality. Esther’s power over him is nowhere felt more strongly than in her spontaneous and frequent discovery, within his witness, of a phallic beauty that up to now he has always admired alone, with a sense of shame, mostly by touch, beneath the covers, on the edge of dreaming. Esther has brought his furtive beauty boldly into the waking world and made him stand before the mirror of herself.

What is
she
, the question always arises in these heterosexual matters, getting out of it? She wants him, Dale’s feeling is, to rescue her from the dour, tweedy villain who hangs like a dark cloud with his oppressive eyebrows and melting eyes over every luminous and acrobatic encounter, a sullen husbandly nimbo-cumulus that at any moment may release a chilling outpour. Though he deeply needs to rescue somebody from something—witness his extravagant plan to redeem mankind from the intellectual possibility that God is not there, or his feebler-minded dancing of attendance upon poor stoned Verna—Dale wonders, vis-à-vis Esther, if this particular package of redemption is not too cumbersome, with too many sharp corners, for him to handle. He cannot help observing that she, however dwindled her love for her cuckolded husband, is securely attached to the social role and domestic furniture that come with her wifery. She has tended to avoid
Dale’s own minimal, Kim-flavored apartment, with its faint underscents of jogging sneakers and soy sauce, after a few experiments there, and again insists on entertaining him in the upper reaches of her house on Malvin Lane, where the leafy signs and birdy sounds of early spring now infiltrate through the third-floor windows, left open a crack as if to simulate winter’s invigorating drafts; at their lightstruck attic height the lovers, as they wade into each other with a hearty smack of secretions, are serenaded by the hesitant warble of lovely Miriam Kriegman, in bikini top, practicing her flute on our neighbors’ sun deck. The prim neighborhood, its fences and greening yards, murmurs and coughs beneath them like an awed circus audience while they do their acrobatics. Dale has sensed, at times, that his mistress’s passionate contortions have something in them of exhibitionistic defiance, of “showing” an invisible third party, of effecting a balance involving factors that preceded his arrival on her scene. He figures, in short, as part of an ongoing transaction. He resents this; but could pallid Amy Eubank (say) lift him so far up the spiralling interlaced tracks of sex, the dizzying double helix at the center of things carnal? Would her mouth and eyes be anything like as avid, her ass so paradoxically tight yet pliant and penetrable?

Since
z =
2.5 constitutes a plane, then by setting
z
equal to the transformed coördinates of the model carbon molecule atoms Dale creates a series of more complex intersections, an array of traces on the gray screen that shifts as the angle of the
Tree
is shifted and the viewport and its scale are modified. He watches the screen intently, waiting for some pattern—a snowflake, a face—to emerge. The black dots dart and swarm from one edge of the screen to the other like midges above a summer pond, but Dale fails to see any message, any indicative configuration, in their staccato sway.

His idea (as I, on the other side of the sciences/humanities
divide, intuit it) has the simplicity of desperation: given that the three-dimensional primitives accumulated in this computer memory sufficiently represent the array of created things, by crashing them together—using one set of phantom polyhedra to clip another with its defined edge-planes—he is giving God the opportunity to insert His version of the shape, the talisman, beneath all forms. Mathematically, since all these polyhedra and fractal patterns (as in the
Tree
) are stored as strings of binary numbers, a certain limit will be approached in the churning that constitutes, for God, an opportunity to declare Himself, even more clearly than He has declared Himself in the preposterous odds of Creation, the miraculous aptness of the physical constants, the impossibilities of evolution, and the consciousness that flits above the circuitry of our neurons. The Devil’s advocate within Dale, the intellectual conscience, might argue that God’s opportunity already lay, sufficiently abundant, in the colossal vocabulary of form and information that stretches from here to the quasars, and that even upon our cosmically negligible planet exists as a virtual infinity of declared, achieved entities. If God, that is, did not speak clearly in the rain and the grass, or through Behemoth and Leviathan, why would a computer’s plenitude of logic gates give Him voice? Because, Dale might answer, on the computer screen numbers become points and vectors of light and are available to our apprehension with the purity of syllogisms. Vector lines are potentially the bright bones of what is, as Wittgenstein put it, the case. Really, Dale’s reasoning boils down to no more or less than prayer, a way of making himself vulnerable to visions: Byzantine saints and Plains Indians sought the same end with sleeplessness, flagellation, and hooks beneath the skin. In his nocturnal project there is something of self-mortification, an ordeal in which the computer is made to share.

The display file library contains pre-generated images of airplanes and cubes, duodecahedra and starfish, three-dimensional letters used in animated television-station logos and even a small animatable man, with stovepipe legs and B-spline–form shoulders and a face composed of over a hundred tiny tinted planes and bicubic patches attached to difference equations whose variables can be manipulated to produce expressions of joy or anger, grief or concentration, and to shape the mouth, cheek muscles, and eyes in ways appropriate for pronouncing syllables of speech; the effect, when rounded by Giroud shading and illumined from a single point by the same algorithms that remove hidden surfaces, is eerily real, though the man moves relative to the way we do as mercury moves relative to water—in quicker jerks, and with a more pronounced tension when static. As midnight tiptoes past, Dale crashes these volumes together, calling up for display now the points and planes of intersection and now, subtracting volume from volume and sweeping the remainder in an arc along a cubic curve, producing marvellous moldings such as would decorate a mansion in Pandemonium or a picnic pergola on Mars’s far side. Having switched into the double-buffered color raster now, he was calling upon the host computer—housed on the floor below, where a fan cooled its brow—to load the data bus with prodigious amounts of visual information, twenty-four bits per pixel, 1024 × 1024 pixels on the screen, each refreshed every thirtieth of a second. In crackling lurid color the strange forms rotate, rotate in silent spasms that hint of the storms of computation behind each hesitant visual tug. Discontented even with the stripy and dimension-aping marvels conjured up, Dale taps into the mechanism additional strictures and permutations. Commands in a rigid little language (
setq … defun … map-car … eq … prog
) cause electricity docilely to run through the circuits, the flipflops, the adders and half-adders, the endless infallible transistor gates, each a mere twenty microns in dimension, less than the finest hair on Esther’s breast.

The images on the slightly outcurved screen aggregate and extend; he rotates them, in obedience to a persistent panicky sensation that something lies behind the generated garish objects, some spider or coin hiding in the illusionistic space where even shadows and reflections can be conjured with the right commands. The computations cannot swing the altered viewpoint into place fast enough, and Dale seeks to trick his unseen opponent by calling for a tilted mirror to be placed behind the occulting images—a relatively simple procedure in computer graphics wherein, each pixel being considered as a tiny peephole, the line of sight passing through all non-occulted
x
and
y
values is specified
bounce
at a certain value of
z
(a sliding value, since the mirror is tilted). This
bounce
command, attached to a specific angle of “reflection” (12° in this case), collects from the graphics memory store, pixel by pixel, the information defining the back surface of the occulting object, converted at the average rate of 160 nanoseconds per pixel. The back side looks much like the front; Dale still cannot find that lost gold coin, that spider spinning its web, that hostile secret the computer is harboring.

The merged images, as the heaped-on transformations dispassionately work upon them, look increasingly like skeins of glutinous polychrome yarn. They look organic, as if a certain process of magnification and refinement is bringing up into view a core fibrosity in things. There is, Dale supposes, on the analogy of the real world, a crystalline level beneath these fibers; but the powers of computer graphics, unlike those of the electron microscope, are not yet powerful enough to reach it.
Dale reasons, however, that the computer world, being man-made, will hold its analogous deep structure at a coarser level than the world God has knitted out of quarks. He has devised a composer program that applies torque to his chaotic accumulations, squeezes them as a giant machine might press layers of shale for a drop, a glistening drop, of underlying principle. This drop will show itself, he believes, as an oil leak fans outward from a leaking engine, spreading its peacock sheen between the rusted and sodden accumulations of debris. This statistical iridescence is what he is looking for, an aligning like that of the rods within the ancient trilobite eye. From time to time he stops to take a readout of the equations being visually expressed or to make a hard-copy design on the laser printer. He has been running these experiments and accumulating this ingenious chaotic evidence for some weeks now, all through Lent. But tonight he feels a climax approaching, a crisis and an atonement, atonement in its root sense of
at one;
after some hours he feels his fingers on the keys tingling as if electricity were flowing into
him:
his nerves and the majestical electronic architecture of the CPU and its memory are kludged together.

At some point in the evening he must have eaten his unappetizing pastrami sandwich, for the crumpled and grease-spotted bag lies on the terminal table, next to the drained milk carton and gray control mouse. At some point he must have arisen and gone to the bathroom down the hall past the vending machines and on his way back spoken to Ike Spiegel, for he finds in his head dirty traces of his doing this, leftover punch lines of jokes. “Two: one to call the electrician and one to mix the martinis.” “
Nu
, don’t vorry, I
like
sitting here in the dark.” “So boys will talk to them.” Spiegel laughed. The hairy spaces of skin between his shirt buttons framed by double elliptic arcs jiggled. Even sitting down, Ike had a stand-up comedian’s
rapid mirthless patter. Take it or leave it, here comes another. The lead-up to the third punch line comes back to Dale. “Why do girls have vaginas?” Like a punched button, he laughed; but it seemed less a joke than a mere sad truth.

His fingers flicker with their rat-scrabble on the feather-light plastic keyboard, crashing together yet two more agglomerations of vertices and parametric cubic curves. Out of the instant ionic shuffle a face seems to stare, a mournful face. A ghost of a face, a matter of milliseconds. How little, after all, it takes to make a face. A few dots on a piece of white paper will cause an infant to smile and reach out in recognition. Amy Eubank’s studies show that we can distinguish a friend from a stranger at seven hundred yards.