The Candy House(5)
“In my reading of the Aristotle,” Tessa said, “—mind you, I’m a dance professor, there are probably a million scholarly pages on this—but Miranda Kline is not a tragic figure. For her to be Tragic-tragic, the people who appropriated her theory would have had to be related to her. That would increase the betrayal and the dramatic irony.”
“Also, didn’t she sell the theory? Or the algorithms?” Kacia asked.
“I think there’s a mystery around that,” Portia said. “Someone sold it, but not Kline.”
“It was her intellectual property,” Fern said. “How could anyone else have sold it?”
As one of the purchasers of Kline’s algorithms, Bix squirmed in a state of squeamish duplicity. He was relieved when Ted said, “Here’s a different question: Miranda Kline’s algorithms have helped social media companies to predict trust and influence, and they’ve made a fortune off them. Is that necessarily bad?”
Everyone turned to him in surprise. “I’m not saying it isn’t bad,” Ted said. “But let’s not take that for granted, let’s examine it. If you look at baseball, every action is measurable: the speed and type of pitches, who gets on base and how. The game is a dynamic interaction among human beings, but it can also be described quantitatively, using numbers and symbols, to someone who knows how to read them.”
“Are you such a person?” Cyril asked incredulously.
“He is such a person,” Portia said with a laugh, slipping an arm around her husband.
“My three sons played Little League,” Ted said. “Call it Stockholm syndrome.”
“Three?” Bix said. “I thought there were two. In your pictures.”
“Scourge of the middle son,” Ted said. “Everyone forgets poor Ames. Anyway, my point is that quantification, per se, doesn’t ruin baseball. In fact, it deepens our understanding of it. So why are we so averse to letting ourselves be quantified?”
Bix knew, from his cursory research online, that Ted Hollander’s academic success had come in 1998, the same year Bix incorporated Mandala. Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers—whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.
“Ted and I disagree about this,” Portia said. “I think that if the point of quantifying human beings is to profit from their actions, it’s dehumanizing—Orwellian, even.”
“But science is quantification,” Kacia said. “That’s how we solve mysteries and make discoveries. And with each new step, there is always the worry that we might be ‘crossing the line.’ It used to be called blasphemy, but now it’s something more vague that boils down to knowing too much. For example, in my lab we’ve begun to externalize animal consciousness—”
“I’m sorry,” Bix interrupted, thinking he’d misheard. “You’re doing what?”
“We can upload an animal’s perceptions,” Kacia said. “Using brain sensors. For example, I can capture a portion of a cat’s consciousness and then view it with a headset exactly as if I am the cat. Ultimately, this will help us to learn how different animals perceive and what they remember—basically, how they think.”
Bix tingled with sudden alertness.
“The technology is still very crude,” Kacia said. “But already, there is controversy: Are we crossing a line by breaching the mind of another sentient creature? Are we opening a Pandora’s box?”
“We’re back to the problem of free will,” Eamon said. “If God is omnipotent, does that make us puppets? And if we are puppets, are we better off knowing that or not?”
“To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.”
“By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?” Eamon asked with a sly glance at Rebecca. He’d been flirting with her all night.
“Ah!” Tessa said, seizing Cyril’s hand. “This is getting interesting.”
3
Bix left Ted and Portia’s apartment ablaze with hope. He’d felt a shift in himself at points during the discussion, an arousal of thought that seemed familiar from long ago. He rode the elevator down with Eamon, Cyril, and Tessa while the others lagged behind, looking at some plaster reliefs Ted had bought on a trip to Naples decades before. Outside the building, Bix idled in a circle of small talk, unsure how to break away without seeming rude. He was reluctant to let it be known he was heading downtown; would a Columbia graduate student live downtown?
It turned out that Eamon was walking west and Cyril and Tessa were taking the train to Inwood, having been priced out of the neighborhood around Columbia and unable, as assistant professors, to get faculty housing. Bix reflected guiltily on his five-story townhouse. The professors had mentioned that they were childless, and one side of Cyril’s wire-rimmed glasses was held together with a paper clip. But there was a crackle of conductivity between these two; apparently, ideas were enough.
Buoyed by a sense that he could go anywhere as Walter Wade, Bix strode in the direction of Central Park. But the half-bare trees silhouetted against a sallow sky put him off before he reached the entrance. He wished it were snowing; he loved snowy nights in New York. He longed to lie down beside Lizzie and whichever kids had been washed, by nightmares or nursing, into their oceanic bed. It was after eleven. He doubled back to Broadway and got on the 1 train, then noticed an express at Ninety-sixth and switched, hoping to overtake a faster local. From his Walter backpack, he unearthed another disguise element: the copy of Ulysses he’d read in graduate school with the explicit aim of acquiring literary depth. What the tome had delivered concretely was Lizzie, in whom (through a calculus Miranda Kline surely could have explained) the combination of James Joyce and waist-length dreads provoked irresistible sexual desire. The calculus on Bix’s end had involved a pair of tan patent-leather boots that went higher than Lizzie’s knees. He’d kept Ulysses as a romantic artifact, although its worn look derived more from the passage of years than rereading. He opened it randomly.