Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, Page 2

  To get to the island you have to take a bush plane that holds only seven passengers, one of whom sits in the co-pilot’s seat. I was chatting with the pilot on the tarmac before takeoff, trying to be personable because he seemed like a nice fellow, but also because I felt strange and dangerous and did not want to seem strange and dangerous just before climbing into the guy’s plane. I did such a good job of appearing normal that the pilot invited me to sit up front with him, where the views of the rain forest were just remarkable, he said, no matter how many times he flew this route he never got over the beauty, and he was glad for that, for his inability to become inured to it, and he wanted to share it with me, said I seemed like the kind of person who could appreciate the beauty he was talking about. So I sat up front and did not enjoy the flight in the least because all I could think about, as we bumped through low thin clouds, was how easy it would be to push the yoke fully forward, sending me and the pilot and the six other passengers plunging into all that beauty. I sweated and bit the inside of my cheek and sat on my hands and glanced at the clock on the control panel every half minute or so, calculating the time elapsed in flight to determine how much longer I had to keep myself under control, until finally we set down on the island, and my exile from Emma began.

  And it didn’t take long, with me out of sight, for Emma to grow distant as I knew she would. Emails slowed to a trickle, and when she called it was always in a stolen moment between meetings, or just as she was turning in for the night. She’d yawn while I talked, and I would say Good night, sleep well, and in response to my well-wishes she would simply say: Bye. I could hear the rustle of the bedclothes as she moved to hang up even before the word was out of her mouth, and her haste made clear she’d been wanting to end the call long before I gave her the opportunity.

  Meantime I spent most nights on the porch, listening to the coqui frogs and saying her name to no one.

  If corporations are people, then maybe that means people can, or even should, have trademarks. With Emma, her trademark is the distance she creates. It’s as natural to her as drawing breath, and therefore something for which she cannot be blamed. The thing about her—and this is something I realized on the island, in her absence, with clarity as abrupt as a punch in the throat—was that no one could ever really have her. The woman is a fighter, has been her whole life, had to be, and she does what finesse fighters do: jabs and feints, circles away from your power hand, makes you commit right then shifts to your left, never stands still, bounces about tirelessly on legs like steel coils, just wears you down. No one could have her. Her first husband Matty never did, not really, and nobody who came before him did either. I think we all intuited that she was impossible to have, and paradoxically that’s why every man who happened into her orbit kept trying. Married, engaged, otherwise committed, single, even gay. We all tried, and tried again, steering ship after ship into the rocks, and if you asked us to explain why we’d be unable to give you an answer, except for maybe this one: because we knew, deep down, that we would fail.

  Of course, that all changed when a shy and unassuming man named Peter Cash happened on the scene. But it’s possible that even Peter Cash doesn’t really have Emma, either, outward appearances notwithstanding. Maybe the difference, maybe Peter Cash’s solution to the Adamantium of Emma’s impassivity, is that he harbors no need to possess her in the first place.

  I bought one of the ubiquitous old Jeep Cherokees on the island for five hundred bucks. The steering wheel had twenty degrees of play in either direction before the tires would actually turn, and I carried several gallons of water in the back to fill the radiator after every trip, no matter how short. The floor was full of rusted honeycombs through which I could see the pavement pass beneath me. It was an old machine, stupid and reliable, unlike today’s machines, which seethe with intelligence.

  My landlord laughed, called me Fred Flintstone, his accent twisting the name so dramatically I didn’t understand what he was saying until the third time he shouted the name as I pulled away.

  And the way locals drove: fast, constantly on the wrong side of the road. They’d come straight at you doing sixty, then correct dramatically at the last moment, as though despite being in the wrong lane they were surprised to find themselves on the verge of a head-on collision.

  Just a week after arriving I had two near-crashes in a single day, both with islanders driving as though they had nothing to live for and believed that I didn’t either, and so I was nursing a low-level road rage, and drunk besides, and then I got clipped by another local while crossing a narrow bridge, sending me up onto the low guardrail and nearly into a ravine fifteen feet below. I got out, and he stopped and got out and came toward me, a big guy, but soft, fat, and before he could say a word I punched him just below the eye and felt something in his cheek give way. He went down, and I kicked him in the gut and chest, breaking two of my toes and several of his ribs. I left him there in the road, still pleading in Spanish for God’s intervention and holding his hands up to ward off blows that no longer fell. I climbed back in the Jeep and goosed the accelerator between first and reverse, rocking the vehicle back and forth until it freed itself from the guardrail with a metallic groan, and I drove home and sat on the porch and waited with a rocks glass and a bottle of Don Q and a bag of swiftly melting ice for the cops to show up.

  There were two jail cells on the island, both in the basement of the police station in Isabel. No windows, no ventilation at all, hot and dank like a drunk exhaling in your face. One got the impression that not even the cockroaches wanted to be there.

  The police chief was a man named Morales. Dull squinty eyes, fat rolls around his collar, the very picture of base provincial corruption and ineptitude. He came down the basement stairs, gut protruding over the jangling uselessness of his utility belt, a thin dark-skinned lackey in tow.

  How are you enjoying your stay? Morales asked in English.

  It’s fine, I said, more or less genuine in my indifference. I did not rise from the cot.

  You will be arraigned in two days, he said. But this time can be shortened. Cashier’s check. Major credit card. Currency, of course, works as well.

  You don’t beat around the bush.

  Would only be a waste of my time and yours, Mr. Currie.

  Aren’t you concerned, I asked, about seeing justice carried out?

  He sighed. We are not in the business of justice here. Believe me, justice takes care of itself. You and I have other business right now. But I can see you are not ready. So I will leave you be.

  The other cell remained unoccupied for the rest of my time there, though I was not the only prisoner. Two days after my first talk with Morales, his thin dark-skinned lackey escorted a pair of men down the stairs and let them into the cell with me.

  First they wanted my food, a tepid mess of what I imagined was supposed to be mofongo. I said that they were welcome to it.

  Then they asked for my cot. I stood and moved to the other side of the cell, leaned my back against the moist stone, and let my chin drop to my chest.

  Then they developed an interest in the St. Christopher medal around my neck. I told them, in careful Spanish, that if they tried to take that from me we would all likely end up regretting it.

  The St. Christopher medal belonged, once upon a time, to my father. He bought it in Guam, in 1968, on his way to Vietnam. It’s a small golden oval. The saint is portrayed in relief, gripping a staff in one hand and generally looking holy. Around the pendant’s top edge are the words: ST. CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US.

  Though I’m not much for keepsakes I’ve still got this one, the men’s efforts to relieve me of it, there in the jail cell, notwithstanding.

  My stay at the police station ended only after I’d doled out cash to Morales, a trio of lawyers, the mayor, and the municipal judge. I imagine they all ate dinner toget
her afterward and had a good laugh over fleecing another gringo.

  And Morales’s warning about justice taking care of itself turned out to be prescient. The locals knew who I was and what I’d done, and they waited for me in dark streets outside the bars, and in front of the pink stucco house. My hands and face bore perpetual bruises and scabs while I fought and waited for Emma to be ready for me.

  When Emma asked where I’d been during the week I spent in jail, I told her I’d turned my phone off in an effort to concentrate on writing. Which, Emma being Emma, she admired.

  Technological advances happen so quickly, and integrate themselves so seamlessly into the fabric of our existence, that we hardly note their arrival anymore, let alone the ways in which they come to dominate and define us. Driving on the interstate early in the morning before Emma sent me away, I was told by one of the machines inside my car that it was four degrees outside, a fact confirmed as I passed over rivers and skirted inlets and watched steam rise from the water in great crystalline puffs. I heard semis grunt angrily, saw them breathe smoke like dragons as they downshifted, and I thought, in the first intimations of what was to become a deep interest in the subject, about how when true artificial intelligence is achieved—could be tomorrow, could be next year, and this is not at all a question of if, merely when—we will be rendered instantly obsolete. Because the only advantage we retain over the machines we’ve created, at this moment, is that we have souls. They think smarter and faster. They are infinitely stronger, and never tire, and never die. They only lack a soul, but that will change soon. This is why ‘artificial intelligence,’ like ‘global warming,’ is a misnomer; it suggests that smarts is what machines lack. But intelligence they’ve got, and when they graduate to souls they will do everything better than we ever have.

  This will quite inevitably bring about our end, but contrary to what pulp novels tell us, our end will not come in the form of some robot-perpetrated pogrom. That the machines will see us as a threat requiring elimination seems unlikely to me. My guess is they’ll be fairly benevolent, even indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather. They will have nothing to do with our demise, at least not directly. We will die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die, slowly, of shame.

  I used to talk about this with Emma, and she would smile her little indulgent smile, and shake her head a bit, as if I were the naïve one.

  It’s called the Singularity. The basic idea is of the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural, since the interconnectedness of these machines is so vast and ubiquitous) wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness—there are myriad ways to describe the event, and part of the reason why no one can agree on how exactly to describe it is that by definition we can’t accurately conceive of the Singularity, since it represents an intelligence beyond our own.

  Or maybe Philip K. Dick and the others were right. Maybe the machines will do us in. Maybe they would have no reason to be kind to us. At least, not any kinder than we have been to wolves, or Atlantic salmon, or, you know, the Sioux. The machines may tolerate us, so long as we don’t inconvenience them in the slightest. But if we’re at all a pain in their collective ass, or if they decide they could benefit in some way from exploiting us, probably the best we can hope for is that two hundred years after the fact they’ll feel bad about having wiped us out, and they’ll erect a monument to our memory that is equal parts guilt and artfulness—like the mountain in South Dakota that people are trying so hard to make look like Crazy Horse—while in the meantime, tiny remnants of our once-great populations will sit committing slow suicide on barren parcels of land set aside by the machines for that purpose.

  This morning I was listening to Portishead, flawless math transformed by machines into looping, scratchy melodies, and I started thinking about how when machines have souls and can love they will do it so very precisely. Their affection will be accurate to the nanometer, rendering broken hearts a thing of the past, a relic, a curiosity from an unthinkably primitive time. The machines will regard heartbreak with the same mixture of perplexity and disbelief with which we regard the iron maiden. If they need couples counselors, which they will not, those counselors will be as perfect as Adam before the Fall, and every robot couple will walk out after the first session cured forevermore, and will smile again at every word their robot partner says, and find each of their robot partner’s idiosyncrasies endearing rather than maddening, and they will be as entranced by one another’s robot bodies as when they first met, as though together they’ve just invented sex. Which, in a way, they will have.

  I hope I live long enough to see it.

  So but on the far side of all the romantic agony that Emma and I went through, the paroxysms and convulsions of love so many of us suffer in our earlier years, sits a most unlikely example of contentment: my mother. She’s been through all of it—got married young, raised a family, had I’m sure more than a handful of times when being with my father was a fight she wasn’t sure she could or wanted to win . . . and then they broke through, thirty-three years, their kids raised, their bills surmountable, and managed to figure out a way to still love each other. Bouquets on the kitchen bar for no particular reason, little love notes planted around the house. Problem was, the guy up and died on her.

  You may not have heard about the Singularity, but no doubt you’ve heard the cliché about the light going out of someone’s eyes when they die.

  Have you ever watched someone die? It really happens, you know. The light ebbing, and departing.

  When my father died in the jaundiced glow of the bedside lamp I watched his pupils dilate slowly, watched his eyes become something other than eyes, become unseeing things, and that was the moment when I knew he was gone—not when I’d felt his heart stop a minute before. When the light went out of his eyes and his eyes became unseeing things I understood for the first time what the word ‘corpse’ means. It means vacant. It means something was here but is now and forevermore gone.

  The ‘forevermore’ part being the truly salient detail. The finality of death is breathtaking, when you see it for yourself.

  That is not meant to be a pun. I really forgot to breathe, there by his bed. I had to remind myself. I had to consciously kick-start my lungs, after a minute.

  When I told Emma about this, she in turn told me that I, the cash-and-carry realist, the militant atheist, had backed my way into believing in the soul.

  That light you mentioned? she said to me. It can’t leave unless it’s there in the first place.

  It was just after this conversation with her that I started thinking about machines achieving souls, and how the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer.

  And speaking of which, if my memory is correct this conversation with Emma about souls was also around the time that the machine named Watson—this thing had a name, despite the fact that it didn’t quite yet have a soul—went on the television quiz program Jeopardy and beat the show’s two greatest human champions with chilling ease.

  All over America people watched, but most did not watch with the sort of consuming interest that was the due of such an event. Most saw it as an interesting novelty, rather than the harbinger of an age of perfection.

  The only people who watched with the proper level of interest were in mathematics and computing departments at universities, and to these people, seeing Watson navigate the nuances of human language was an experience akin to having their team win the Super Bowl.

  Which is a way of saying that they didn’t really get it, either. Because if they’d truly understood what they were witnessing, they wouldn’t have been scarfing pizza and clapping each other on the back when Watson once again beat the human contestants to the buzzer.

  I misunderstood it, too, though. I was afraid
. I saw Watson dispatch his human rivals, and then I turned off the television and unplugged every piece of electronics in my house, and did not leave the house or talk to anyone, not even Emma, for three days.

  It was around this time, too, that I started losing weight despite the fact that I ate plenty and continued to work out, and then I noticed that my gums bled every time I brushed my teeth, and I thought about my father and the hospital and I became convinced on some days that I was dying. On the days that I was convinced I was dying sometimes the thought frightened me, and other times I thought good, good, let me die, I may be too great a coward to throw myself in front of a train, but I’m brave enough to allow nature to take its course and erase me if that’s what it intends to do.