Goodbye for Now (2 page)

When he left the East Coast for Seattle, Sam tried internet dating and
couldn’t believe he’d been alive for thirty-two and a half years and never thought to before. Sam believed in computers and programming, in codable information, in algorithms and numbers and logic. His father was also a software engineer as well as a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, so Sam was raised to believe: computers were his religion. Everyone else pitched online dating as the only option after not meeting anyone in the vast ocean of college. But Sam liked online dating because it took away the mystery. Maybe you met someone and liked her and she liked you and you hit it off and you started dating and that went pretty well and you got closer and closer, shared more and more, starting building lives around each other, fell deeply in love, and still she slept with your roommate when you went home for the weekend. Computers would never allow for such outlying variance.

Online dating had yet to work for Sam. But it did pay well. And that came in a close second as it turned out. One too-pretty-to-go-to-work morning in June, Sam’s whole team got a sheepish text from their boss. “Fair warning,” Jamie wrote. “BB’s agenda for OOF today: Quantify the Human Heart.” Jamie referred to the company’s enormously important CEO, his boss’s boss, as BB. Sam loved him for this. BB had recently decreed that each team would begin every morning with a stand-up meeting, the idea being that the company wasn’t wasting its brilliant programmers’ time with a real meeting but only a brief encounter in the hallway. Generally, this meant it was the length of an actual meeting but without the comfort of chairs and a Danish. Jamie therefore called it OOF, theoretically for On Our Feet, though actually for how those feet felt at the end of the meeting. Sam loved Jamie for this too. Also because he wasn’t a superstickler for punctuality, which gave Sam time to run back inside his apartment and change into more comfortable shoes.

“So here’s the story,” Jamie began when Sam got there. “BB thinks we need a better bottom line. Some online matchmaking sites promise ‘most fun dates.’ Some boast ‘highest percentage of marriages.’ BB wants to up the ante. Too many dates end in failure. Too many marriages end in divorce. What’s better than dating and better than marriage?”

“Friends with benefits?” guessed Nigel from Australia.

“Soul mates,” said Jamie. “BB wants an algorithm that will find your soul mate. Therefore I turn to you. Love is a tricky thing. All that human
variable. The soul is not logical. The heart wants what the heart wants. Hard to nail down. Hard to quantify and program. But we are computer programmers, and this is our job. So we must. Tell me how.”

“Increase the odds of getting laid,” said Nigel. “Looser dates lead to more and earlier hooking up. The farther you go on a first date, the more information you have about sexual compatibility.”

“Won’t work,” objected Rajiv from New Delhi. “Dating sucks.” On this, the software engineers, save Nigel, were in agreement.

“It’s not fun,” said Gaurav from Mumbai.

“It’s very awkward,” said Arnab from Assam.

“And it’s all lies,” said Jayaraj from Chennai. Five Indian states Sam had become an expert on since beginning work as a software engineer: Delhi, Assam, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal. “You are so much worse on a date than you are in real life,” Jayaraj continued. “You can’t string two sentences together without sounding like some kind of idiot. You stammer and bring up awkward topics and embarrass yourself a lot. You’re not really like that in real life.”

“Or you present yourself as better than you really are,” Sam added, “which is also a lie. You get all dressed up and do your hair and put on makeup when really you’re going to walk around the house in yoga clothes and a scrunchie all day.”

“Makeup?” Jamie raised an eyebrow at him.

“Scrunchie?” wondered Jayaraj.

“We need a third party,” offered Arnab, “like the Hindu astrologers who know everyone in the village for generations and thus make marriages at birth that last until death.”

“Many cultures have matchmakers. Japanese nakodos. Jewish shadchens.” Gaurav had been an anthropology major at UC Santa Cruz. “There are aeons of precedent. They realize a truth.”

“Which is?” asked Jamie.

“Who people think they are and what people think they want is not really who they are or what they want,” said Gaurav sagely. “Wise and sometimes magical elders set you up based on who you really are and who would be good for you instead.”

“I have no magical elders,” said Jamie.

“No, you have something better,” said Sam. “Computer programmers.
We could dig a little deeper into the data users provide. See what it says about them rather than what they say about themselves.”

Everyone’s feet were getting tired, so digging deeper seemed worth a shot. “Accusing our customers of lying,” Jamie said. “I’m sure BB will love it.”

Sam stopped for coffee on the way back to his desk. (Five places within seven hundred feet of Sam’s desk to get a world-class double tall latte: the espresso stand on the second floor, the espresso stand on the fourteenth floor, the cafeteria, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue entrance, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Fourth Avenue entrance. Sam loved Seattle.) Then he sat down and considered where, if not on online dating forms, people revealed the truth about themselves. He messaged Jamie: “Can I have access to clients’ financial records?”

Jamie wrote back right away. “Accusing our customers of lying
and
invading their privacy. BB’s going to love that too.”

First surefire proof Sam had that users were lying about themselves: everyone everywhere was always having a fit over internet privacy concerns, but promise to find them love or at least sex, and they signed access to their financial records, credit card statements, e-mail accounts, and everything else over to Sam just because he asked nicely. There he saw them not as they represented themselves but as they really were. He saw that they said their five favorite foods were organic blueberries, wheatgrass smoothies, red quinoa, tempeh Reubens, and beluga caviar, but they spent an average of $47.40 a month last year at the 7-Eleven. He saw that the five things they listed on their nightstand were all foreign film DVDs, but they saw
Shrek Forever After
in 3-D twice in theaters and spent the week of the foreign film festival hanging out with their old college roommates at a dude ranch in Wyoming. He noted that they said they liked to write poetry and short stories and even included a quote from
Ulysses
in their profile, but Sam analyzed their e-mails and knew they were in the bottom twelve percent of adjective users and had no idea how to use a semicolon. Everyone lied. It wasn’t malicious or even on purpose usually. They weren’t so much misrepresenting themselves as just plain wrong. How they saw themselves and how they really were turned out to be pretty far apart.

Sam was a romantic, yes, but he was also a software engineer, and
since he was better at the latter, he played to his strengths. For two weeks straight, he worked obsessively on an algorithm that figured out who you really were. It ignored the form you filled out yourself in favor of reading your spending reports and bank statements and e-mails. It read your chat histories and text messages, your posts and status updates. It read your blog and what you posted on other people’s blogs. It looked at what you bought online, what you read online, what you studiously avoided online. It ignored who you said you were and who you said you wanted in favor of who you really were and who you really wanted. Sam mixed the ancient traditions of the matchmakers plus the truths users revealed but did not admit about themselves combined with the power of modern data processors and made the algorithm that changed the dating world. He cracked the code to your heart.

His teammates were impressed. Jamie was pleased. But BB was thrilled with the algorithm, especially once he saw the proof of concept demos and how incredibly, unbelievably well it would work.

“We’ll get you down to just one date!” BB enthused. “That’s all it will take. Talk about killer apps!”

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

T
he next step for Sam, of course, was to try it himself. He wanted to know if it worked. He wanted to prove that it worked. But mostly, he wanted it to work. He wanted it to search the world and point, to reach down like the finger of God and say, “Her.” How good was this algorithm? First time out, it set Sam up with Meredith Maxwell. She worked next door. In the marketing department. Of Sam’s own company. For their first date, they met for lunch in the cafeteria at work. She was leaning against the doorframe grinning at him when he got off the elevator, grinning helplessly himself.

“Meredith Maxwell,” she said, shaking Sam’s hand. “My friends mostly call me Max.”

“Not Merde?” Sam asked, incredulous, appalled with himself, even as he was doing so. Who made a joke like that—pretentious, scatological, and
French
—as a first impression? Sam was awkward and off-putting and a little gross.

Incredibly, Meredith Maxwell laughed.
“Je crois que tu es le premier.”

It was as if a miracle had occurred. She thought it was funny. She thought Sam was funny. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was computer science.

“So where did you learn French?” Sam recovered after they were seated in an out-of-the-way corner with their cafeteria trays.

“I spent a year abroad in college in Bruges. I also learned Flemish.”

“That must come in handy,” said Sam.

“Less than you’d think. The only people I speak Flemish to are my dogs.”

“You have dogs?”

“Snowy and Milou.”

“You named your dogs after a Belgian comic book.”

“Well, a Belgian comic book and its English translation,” said Meredith Maxwell.

Sam was wildly impressed with himself. Though she’d offered nothing in her dating profile about the names of her dogs and Sam nothing of his childhood obsession with
Tintin
, somehow he’d written an algorithm that knew anyway. He was some kind of genius. Meredith Maxwell, meanwhile, was beautiful and funny and evidently smart, thirty-four years old (Sam liked older women, even if they were only seven months older), a world traveler, a polyglot, a dog lover, an enjoyer of cafeteria-style strawberry ice cream, and possessor of skin that smelled like the sea.

“This was fun,” said Meredith as they bused their trays. But she didn’t sound sure.

“Should we do it again?” said Sam.

“Maybe off campus?” Sam observed that this was not a no but was also not an of-course-don’t-be-absurd-yes. Was this thing not as good as he thought? Was it good on paper (well, in code) but not in fact? Or more appalling still: was she his perfect match, the one soul in all the world who fit with his, the boiling down of all humanity to his Platonic partner … and she liked him sort of okay? He scrambled to think up impressive first dates. Was he insane? The cafeteria at work wasn’t a good first impression. This one shouldn’t count. He needed a do-over. “Let’s go somewhere special for dinner.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

“Um … Canlis? Campagne? Rover’s?” Sam named expensive restaurants aimlessly. He’d never been to any of them. “We could take the Clipper over to Victoria? Canada’s very romantic.”

“Boats make me throw up,” she said.

“That restaurant at the top of the Space Needle?”

“Do you like baseball?” she said.

Sam stopped breathing. Was this a trick question? “I like baseball.”

“How about dinner at the ballpark? Saturday night? Hot dogs and a game? Might be more fun.”

The ball game
was
fun. So was dinner out, somewhat more casual than Sam had suggested in the first place but still what passed for fancy in Seattle. So was the play Meredith picked out for them to see and her interrogation of him afterward, which was like an English exam but with more pressure (the stakes being higher, after all). So was the Korean horror film at the three-dollar movies, and so was the day hike at Hurricane Ridge. But it still hadn’t clicked right away. Or maybe it was the opposite.

“I can’t help but notice,” Meredith observed after all-day hiking, after separate showers and towel-dried hair and red wine and candles and carryout Thai on the floor of her living room, “that you haven’t kissed me yet.”

“I haven’t?” said Sam.

“Nope.”

“What a strange oversight. Why, do you think?”

“Could be you don’t like me,” Meredith suggested.

“I don’t think that’s it,” said Sam.

“Could be you like me but think I’m hideous.”

“I don’t think that’s it either,” said Sam, scooting a little closer toward her across the floor.

“Could be that you’re a lousy computer programmer and this algorithm doesn’t work and we’re totally mismatched, a crappy couple, star-crossed, ill-fated, with no chemistry.”

“I am a brilliant computer programmer,” said Sam.

“Maybe you’re scared,” said Meredith.

“Of what?”

“Rejection.”

“Not much chance of that. Maybe
you’re
scared.”