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By Root 505 0

she was invariably allowed to pay only a nickel. Boys were generally charged five cents over—a full quarter—on the claim that the sign referred only to the price of the lemonade, and not the cost of the cup. When cars slowed to make a purchase, she’d slap me across the shoulders and insist I kneel down in front of the table, thus obscuring the sign and allowing her to bilk the strangers for fifty cents or even a dollar. When I said I thought this was unfair, she took my face in her hands and yelled at me, saying, “You are only here because my mother says you have to be.” Around this same time I had been taking apart a calculator my father had given me, checking out the circuits, looking through a magnifying glass at the chip, imagining all those microscopic chambers inside, how every calculation was broken down into its binary constituents. I was watching Verena one afternoon, watching the expression on her face as three older girls approached from up the road. I could see her trying to decide what to charge, and it struck me that if one knew enough about her brain, if one could get down into the synapse, down into the interstitial fluid, to the binary code, well, then she’d be predictable, even reproducible, and all the apparent capriciousness, all the malleability would succumb to an algorithm, a chip on a motherboard. That’s more or less how it got started.

—Interesting . . .

—I’ve been pretty heavily into artificial intelligence ever since: neural nets, cognitive modeling.

—Ask him if he’s ever had a girlfriend.

—Al! I apologize, my roommate’s—

—That’s all right, I can answer if you like. The fact is I haven’t had a girlfriend.

—Does this bother you?

—It occasionally bothers me intensely and I feel like an outcast, and then for long stretches I don’t even notice. I must say, though, coming here is comforting.

—Why’s that?

—It makes me feel like a stable person, in control of my life.

—Coming here does?

—Yeah, I mean look at you guys. You’re living in these rooms so full of books you can barely move, your roommate’s lying on his stomach on the floor, he’s been there for an hour—

—He’s got gastrointestinal problems—

—And you’re sitting there with a bag of ice on your back and a Dictaphone asking these questions . . . and this is all somehow part of you selling me a futon? This isn’t normal, you know. There’s nothing normal about it.

6. Interview with Charles Markham

—Okay, Dad, it’s on . . . Are you going to say something?

—Day’s almost over.

—I can turn on a light if you want.

—It’s all right . . . What are we supposed to talk about?

—I told you, I’m doing this research, about how the interest in philosophy begins, what it leads to . . .

—You don’t want to interview me.

—I do.

—Danny, it’s all over now. Why do you want to drag it up? They fired me, that’s all.

—It’s not about the job. This isn’t about academics, I just mean how it got started for you, what it meant to you . . .

—Funny. What it meant to me? I was reading this book the other day. There’s this fragment I remember. Went something like, People whose best hope for a connection to other human beings lay in elaborating for themselves an elegiac mode of relatedness, as if everyone’s life were already over. Seemed accurate to me.

—How do you mean?

—This idea of living your life as an elegy, inoculating yourself against the present. So much easier if you can see people as though they were just characters from a book. You can still spend time with them. But you have nothing to do with their fate. It’s all been decided. The present doesn’t really matter, it’s just the time you happen to be reading about them. Which makes everything easier. Other people’s pain, for instance.

—Did this have something to do with what got you started reading?

—The philosophers—they were part of that, keeping things at a remove.

—How?

—They were my friends. Reliable. There to keep me company. You spent time with them, they talked to you. They didn’t have crises. They were always ready with a little numbered comment. So ideal that way. No dying bodies to drag