The Affinities (24 page)

“Okay,” I said again.

“What?”

“It's fine. Whatever you want to do about your will, I'm okay with it.”

“You just don't give a shit, huh?”

“I didn't say that.”

“But it's what you meant.”

“No.” I took a step closer. Close enough to smell the illness on him. His body was starting to burn fatty acids as his illness advanced. The chemical products of the process included acetone, exhaled through the lungs. His breath smelled like nail polish remover. “What I meant was that you don't need to worry about me, and you aren't obliged to take care of me, and I don't expect anything from you.”

“You haven't expected anything from me since you left this town.”

Which was about absolutely true but not worth acknowledging. “I think I'll head on downstairs now. Will you be joining us for dinner?”

“I'll sit with you,” he said. “I don't promise to eat.”

*   *   *

As I approached the kitchen I heard Geddy talking with Mama Laura, a flow of happy conversation I was reluctant to interrupt. So I turned the opposite way and opened the door to the basement, where Geddy had said his friend Rebecca was sorting through boxes.

She looked up as I came down the steps. She was sitting on a pea-green folding chair, one of the set Mama Laura had retired from the backyard a decade ago, and she had her hands in a cardboard carton on which GEDDY'S THINGS was scrawled in enthusiastic black letters—Geddy's own printing, years old. The basement was as gloomy as it had ever been, raw drywall and exposed cinderblock, an elderly washer/dryer vented to the exterior world through a dusty aluminum port. Rebecca Drabinsky looked tiny, perched among the boxes in what we called “the storage corner.” She stood up when she saw me. I said, “I'm Adam.”

“Hi, yes!” Small body, small face, a pair of oval glasses that magnified her eyes, dark wirebrush hair that reminded me of a fox terrier one of my tranchemates owned. Off-brand sneakers, jeans, a black t-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt. She would have looked at home in the cafeteria of any American university, sitting at a table with a book or tablet propped in front of her. “I didn't hear you at the door.”

“I was just upstairs saying hello to my father. Geddy was going to introduce us, but he's busy in the kitchen. You're going through his old stuff?”

She nodded, a decisive bob of her head. “Geddy asked me to. To set aside anything I think is important and maybe organize it a little bit. He wants to take the best stuff back home. He'll go through it himself, of course. I just think he wanted me to see what he left here. Like, pieces of his life before he knew me.”

I saw what she had selected and set aside on a yellow blanket thrown over the dusty concrete floor. Paperback books, including some I had given Geddy. Staff paper and practice sheets from when he was first learning to play the saxophone, plus some unused Vandoren reeds in their original boxes. A stack of Grammy Fisk's old LPs. What Rebecca was going through at the moment was a box of childhood drawings. I remembered Geddy's drawings: mainly fire trucks, tall buildings, and airplanes, meticulous as blueprints.

But she had a particular drawing in her hand, and she held it out to me. “You must have done this one.”

I took it from her. It was a pencil sketch of Geddy when he was about ten years old, executed on yellowing printer paper. It was mine, but I barely remembered it. I must have drawn it out at the quarry, by the suggestion of trees and water in the background. Amateur as hell, but it caught a little of Geddy's wide-eyed gaze and big toothy grin.

“You must have said something funny, to get that smile out of him.”

“It's a good smile. I used to tell him jokes, just to see him laugh.”

“I know what you mean. When he's happy, it's just so—
wholehearted
.”

I liked her for using the word. “How did you guys meet?”

“Well, that's kind of a story. I tell people I first saw Geddy when he was busking in the MBTA. Which is true, in a way. I must have passed him dozens of times on my way through Davis Station. But that's not really how I
met
him. You're a Tau, right?”

It wasn't exactly a polite question in the current social climate. But of course Geddy would have told her about me. “Yeah,” I said warily. “Why?”

“No offense. I like Taus. I think they're the best Affinity. You know Geddy took the test, back when InterAlia was running it? He was really disappointed when he didn't qualify. Deep down, I think he wanted to be a Tau like you.”

“It's not a question of failing, Rebecca. It's not that kind of test. I mean, it's too bad Geddy doesn't have an Affinity, but—”

“No, I know all about that; that's not my point. He envied what you found in Tau. He wanted what you had, and he never stopped looking for his own version of it. He bought a test kit when they came out, one of the old clunky ones with the scalp sensors. Just to make sure. He recorded his own teleodynamic profile. And that's how we met.”

“I don't understand.”

“New Socionome.”

“Ah.”

“An algorithm hooked us up.” She watched my face. “You don't approve?”

“No, I just—I don't know a whole lot about it.”

Which wasn't entirely true. I understood the general concept. Hackers and activist math geeks were trying to find new, non-Affinity ways of linking people together. Maybe that was useful for people like Geddy, who couldn't be sorted into a proper Affinity. But it had no relevance for me and I had pretty much ignored the phenomenon.

“Anyway, that's how we met. Geddy submitted his teleo profile to New Socionome. I was already registered. His name popped up on my linklist and we got in touch. He invited me to one of his weekend gigs. So that's how we
really
met—I was at a table in South End bar and Geddy was up on stage with a singer and a drummer and bass player and a rhythm guitarist. Under the lights he looked…” She laughed, a high happy sound. “Earnest and goofy and, I guess you know how he gets, kind of
outside of himself.
He came over after the set and we started to talk.”

“So what do people talk about, when they've been introduced by an algorithm?”

“Making a better world,” she said.

*   *   *

Upstairs, the afternoon was wearing on. Sunlight from the dining room window tracked over the big table as I helped Mama Laura set it. My father remained upstairs, and we were all conscious of the fact that he was mortally ill, but that didn't stop the talk or the laughter—it was therapeutic, not insensitive, and Mama Laura said at one point it might be doing him good, the sound of us all together down here, like the old days.

Around five o'clock the phone rang. Mama Laura had never replaced the slate-black landline phone my parents had owned when I was a teenager; picking up the handset, she looked like a character from a historical drama. It was easy to guess by her grin who was on the other end. “Aaron,” she announced when the call ended. “He and Jenny just landed.” At the Onenia County regional airport west of Schuyler, that would have been, probably on a chartered flight from DC. “They'll be here in forty-five minutes or so.”

Geddy and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances, by which I guessed Geddy had shared some of the family's less savory secrets with her. I excused myself, went into the bathroom, and took out my own phone. I called Trevor Holst at the Holiday Inn. “They're coming,” I said.

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Five hours before the lights went out.

 

CHAPTER 15

Much later, I looked at some of the posts Rebecca Drabinsky had left on her own website and others. Some of what she had written struck me as prescient, and this is one of the passages I bookmarked:

We are falling.

Everything made of matter is falling. We call it entropy. Matter decays. Stars eventually stop shining; planets grow cold, or are scorched to embers which themselves grow cold. Matter falls, and sooner or later it hits bottom.

Life is part of that process. Life is entropic. We dissipate the energy of the sun. Life is a falling-in-progress.

What makes living things unique is that they are teleodynamic. By dissipating the sunlight stored in food we sustain ourselves at a level above our natural rest state, which is death. Our falling is an act of self-creation. We FALL FORWARD, as individuals and as a species.

For most of the history of our species, the goals we fell toward were simple. Food to eat, food for our families, food for our tribe. Shelter for ourselves, our families, our tribes. The imperatives of love and reproduction.

But in the contemporary world, for a significant proportion of the world's human beings, those basic needs have been met, if only partially and inadequately and unjustly. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to fall forward?

The Affinities were an attempt to harness and enhance the human genius for collaboration. And they succeeded … for those who qualified for membership. But the Affinities are a tribal model. Twenty-two pocket utopias, each with an entrance fee. Twenty-two Edens, and every Eden with a wall around it and with a crowd of hostile, envious outsiders peering in.

Because it's not enough just to favor collaboration. Collaboration is a means, not an end. Tribes devise goals that benefit the tribe, and tribes come into conflict. Endless Affinity warfare—or the capture of political power by any single Affinity—is not an outcome we should endorse or permit.

New Socionome works differently. The social nuclei we create are open and polyvalent. We make social molecules that hook up complexly and create the possibility of new emergent behavior. Our algorithms of connection favor non-zero-sum transactions, as the Affinities do, but they also facilitate long-term panhuman goals: prosperity, peace, fairness, sustainability. The arc of human history is long but our algorithms bend toward justice. We aren't just falling. We're FALLING FORWARD.

I was struck by what she had written because it explained much of what happened that weekend in Schuyler. And my role in it, and hers.

*   *   *

Aaron and Jenny arrived an hour before dinner, carried from the regional airport in one of the ancient black Lincoln MKTs the local taxi company passed off as limousines. Aaron rang the bell, he and Jenny were duly hugged and handshaken, and Mama Laura sent Geddy out to fetch their luggage: two identical hardshell travel cases of a high-end German brand.

My elder brother had learned to carry himself with the kind of assumed authority people call “statesmanlike.” Shoulders square, chin up. His hair was styled and streaked with gray at the temples. The gray didn't look natural, and I pictured him in front of a bathroom mirror, painting it on. Maybe a good move for an inexperienced junior congressman. His handshake was a quick, decisive squeeze. This, too, felt rehearsed. “Hey, little brother,” he said.

“Hey back at you, Aaron.”

Jenny gave me a hug. She lingered a moment before we broke apart, but I tried not to read anything into it. The obvious question was on my mind: was she still willing to do what she had offered to do?

But there seemed to be no uncertainty or indecision about her. The old tentative, soft-spoken Jenny—the it's-okay-with-me-if-it's-okay-with-you Jenny, the Jenny I had known and halfheartedly courted as a teenager—was gone. In her place was someone not just older but vastly more cynical. Her eyes were wary, her smile more mechanical than genuine.

Mama Laura called us to dinner as soon as Aaron and Jenny had dropped their bags and washed up: “You got here just in time!”

We took our places. The head of the table was empty until my father came shambling downstairs. He wore dress pants and a crisply starched white shirt, tragically loose on him now. We waited in silence until he had eased his body into the chair. He nodded at Jenny and gave Aaron what was probably intended as a cheery wink. “All right then,” he said. “Let's eat.”

“Not before the blessing,” Mama Laura said. She asked Aaron to say some words, and he bowed his head and reminded the Lord that we were all thankful for what we were about to receive.

Four hours before the lights went out.

*   *   *

I harbored a faint hope that my father's illness had mellowed him, but there wasn't much evidence of that. True, there were no lengthy tirades, and for most of the meal it seemed as if he had abandoned his lifelong habit of correcting the opinions of others. He put a serving of Mama Laura's glazed ham and a mound of Mama Laura's candied sweet potatoes on his plate but did little more than poke at them with his fork. He looked at each of us in turn, rotating his gaze around the table, pausing at each face as if he needed to commit it to memory. Our talk was amiable but subdued and he listened to it with an unreadable expression.

Then, as the serving dishes made a second round, Rebecca asked him whether there was any news from India.

She knew he had been upstairs watching television news, and I guessed she meant to include him in the conversation. Full credit for good intentions, but I held my breath like everyone else at the table.

My father focused his eyes on her and pursed his lips in an expression of distaste. After a long moment in which the only sound was the screech of Geddy chasing peas across his plate with a fork, he said, “There are drones.”

“Drones?”

“Yeah, drones, you know, pilotless aircraft?”

“I know what a drone is, but—”

“Probably Chinese. From their ships in the Arabian Sea.”

“Surveillance drones?” The Indian government had been complaining about Chinese surveillance drones for weeks now; they had shot down a couple and put the wreckage on display.

“No. They're blowing things up. Big news.”

That caught the attention of Aaron, who had recently been appointed to a House subcommittee on military affairs. He said, “Blowing
what
up?”