The Unknowns (5 page)

“Oh, it sounds great!” said Stacey. She was a nice person, but she was maybe more appropriate for younger children. “I’m sure he’d love it! Wouldn’t you like to see Eric’s computer game?” she asked Pete.

“I guess,” he said.

“Great!” said Stacey. “Maybe he could come over this Saturday and see it! What do you guys think?”

Pete and I both looked down at our plates. No food cools more quickly than French fries, or suffers more from the cooling. Bronwen asked the waiter to refill her Coke.

Afterward we went out to the Oberfells’ station wagon, Pete climbing into what we all called, by long-standing custom, the very-back. I was in the middle of the back seat, with my mom on one side and Bronwen on the other; when we turned right I was rocked toward her, and when we turned left she was rocked toward me, and I could feel her arm touching mine through our jackets. I kept returning to my Bronwen-plays-Tomb-of-Morbius fantasy, but now
I had to route around her little brother. What if Pete returned home raving about the game?
It was so fun! There were all these awesome dragons and monsters
… Unlikely: Pete’s usual demeanor was near-catatonic, and even if the game roused him to uncharacteristic heights of enthusiasm it was hard to imagine this having much effect on Bronwen. And what would Nicky say when he learned I’d agreed to show our secret project to a nine-year-old?

What he said was, “You
told
them about it? What the fuck did you do that for?”

“I didn’t want to,” I said. I was sitting on the desk, my feet dangling. “My mom brought it up.”

“How did she know about it?” he said, and I felt found out. I had given her daily reports on our progress.

“Look, I didn’t mean for it to go like this,” I said, trying to sound more reasonable than I felt. “But so on Saturday Pete is coming over to see it.”

Nicky’s eyes, small to begin with, narrowed to slits. “What, we’re just going to show it to some—some kid?” he said. “Before it’s done and everything?”

“It could be like beta testing,” I said. “Give us a sense of how it’s working.” After eighteen months building a byzantine structure that had been seen by no one but me and Nicky, I was hungry for an audience, even an audience consisting of Pete Oberfell.

The computer room was located near some nexus of the school’s plumbing system, and conversations there were accompanied by muffled gurgles and flushes. Eventually Nicky sighed histrionically. “All right,” he said.

“So, uh, we’re going to need to merge the code again,” I said. Combining my sections of the program with Nicky’s was a tedious process.

“I’ll bring my stuff in tomorrow,” he said. “You’re merging them on your own.”

Friday night I stayed up late, drinking Cokes from the fridge and integrating the two sections. When I finished it was almost three. I lay in bed, buzzed on caffeine and crashing from sugar, excited in spite of myself that I was about to see someone actually playing Tomb of Morbius. I slipped into a well-worn mental rut: when Stacey brought Pete over, Bronwen would be with them.
I figured I might as well come along
, she would say, a glint of curiosity in her eye. My hand slipped into my pajamas with a new urgency. Bronwen was playing Tomb, looking at me, kissing me, and now we were naked, on my bed, and the feeling in my body was like moving deeper and deeper underground, one level after another, further than I had ever been. I kept going, and Bronwen was on top of me, kissing me, and I kept going deeper until suddenly I was filled with light and I felt something bigger and better than anything else I have felt before or since, and it seemed like it was going to last forever. And then there was semen to clean up, and I felt strange and proud and exhausted.

I was woken by my mom turning off the TV in the living room. Stacey and Pete were at the door a moment later. We ate hot dogs and potato chips for lunch, and then my mom wanted to sit in the living room with Stacey and smoke and drink white wine, so she said, “Do you guys want to go and play on the computer?”

I led Pete into my room, briefly afraid we’d find a little puddle of semen on the bed in the shape of his sister’s initials. “The game isn’t done yet,” I said. “And you’re probably going to think it’s pretty lame—it doesn’t have graphics or a joystick or anything.”

“OK,” he said, too young to know how you’re supposed to respond when people criticize their work in front of you.

I loaded the file and we waited while the floppy drive whirred. Pete, sitting at the keyboard, kicked his legs rhythmically. And then the screen went blank apart from the introductory lines that Nicky and I had written more than a year earlier:

Pete looked dumbly at all this text. It was clear that he wasn’t reading any of it.

“So, uh—do you want to go into the dungeon?” I asked him. His eyes widened in fear. “In the game, I mean,” I said. “Just type
YES
.”

He still looked suspicious, but he pecked out
Y-E-S
with his index finger. I reached over and hit the Enter key.

Pete began reading the words out loud, slowly, one by one. “What’s a p—a port—?”

“A portcullis. It’s like a metal gate, Pete,” I said. “So you’re in a dungeon, and you’re looking for the treasure. Do you want to keep going into the dungeon?”

“OK…,” he said.

“Type
GO ON
,” I said.

He pecked out the letters and hit Enter, and new text appeared.
“You are a faggot,”
he read with surprising fluency.
“You like sucking cock.”
I looked at the screen, and there it was, right underneath Pete’s
GO ON: You are a faggot! You like sucking cock
!

“Wait, that’s wrong,” I said.

Pete was looking at me with frank hatred. “I am not a faggot!” he said. “You’re a faggot! And this is a stupid game!” He jumped out of his chair and ran crying from the room.

When I emerged, Pete had his arms around Stacey’s waist and his head pressed against her stomach as she stroked his hair. “I really don’t know how that could happen,” my mom was saying. “I think the computer must be broken.”

“We’re going to be leaving,” Stacey said. “Margo, I’ll call you later. And as for you”—she looked coldly at me—“I thought you were more mature than that.” She slammed the front door behind her, although it was too lightweight to slam very well.

Instead of going to the computer room on Monday I stood in the yard and watched kids kicking a ball around. There were sweatshirts on the ground to mark the goalposts, and for a while I stood near them on the chance that someone would kick the ball to me and I could tap it in, but there was always a cluster of people surrounding the ball, moving around the pitch like a cloud, and Thomas Lagos, who was playing goalie, told me to get out of the way. Nicky found me on the sideline.

“So did it work?” he asked.

“Yeah, it worked,” I said. “Nice job. Now fuck off.” The obscenity sounded small and desperate.

“OK, OK,” he said. “It was just a joke.”

“Really funny, Nicky,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m a child abuser.”

“So they found out the truth, did they?” he said. When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Well, you shouldn’t have gone around talking about the game. So now we’re even.”

“We will be even when I’ve torched your house,” I said. I turned around and walked toward the school building, telling myself not to look back. I looked back anyway. Nicky smiled at me.

What I really wanted to do was write some code. It was the first time I turned to coding for solace; it might have been the first time I ever needed solace that my mom couldn’t provide. In the decade since I walked away from Nicky Boont, who was a dick but who was also my only friend, I still haven’t found anything that keeps anxiety at bay as reliably as coding: the possibilities and ramifications branch outward to colonize all of your available brainspace, and the syntax of the language gives direction to your twitches and impulses and keeps them from firing off into panic.

In the computer room Marc Uriel was playing chess, the only computer game allowed during school hours, and Jeremy was hacking out something thorny-looking, so that was both machines taken. I took some scrap paper from the tray and found a pencil on one of the desks—I like coding on paper, you really have to concentrate—but I didn’t know where to start. I could have kept working on Tomb of Morbius by myself, but I couldn’t see any point. I looked over at Jeremy Glissan, the programming wizard, with his downy upper lip and his Eastern Bloc wardrobe and his nonexistent social life. I saw for the first time how much had gone on outside this room while Nicky and I were struggling with a persistent bug in our initialization subroutine, how Bronwen Oberfell was at that moment standing in a hallway in the high school three blocks away, leaning against a row of lockers, playing with a ringlet, talking to a sophomore boy about some topic unrelated to the recursive descent of the parse tree or evil warlocks with secret vulnerabilities to weapons made of bronze. Something to do with music or clothes, maybe? Or who was having a party, who was going out with whom? Other people found computers arcane, when to me they were transparent. For the first time I recognized that I was in an analogous position: some people found social life as obvious as I found computers, and those people weren’t stuck here in a windowless room with no friends. And that’s when I set out to hack the girlfriend problem.

THE GROTSCH BUILDING LOOMS
over the Mission like a relic of a previous civilization: once a pickle factory, now a square stone memento of a time when San Francisco hosted economic activity beyond symbol manipulation and beverage service. The city’s current inhabitants, with their gift for cheerful irony, rent it out for photo shoots and weddings. This month the Grotsch has been hired by a gang of planners and architects and urbanism geeks, grad-school friends of Justin’s, to host an exhibition called BayTopia. Cynthia has persuaded me to accompany her to the opening. The volume of space above us makes the conversations sound farther away than they are, and the air has the seedy smell of wet coats. We will find Maya here, supposedly.

In the middle of the floor is a scale model of the peninsula, with crude cardboard buildings on carefully modeled topography. Fantastic elements are painted bright colors: elevated bike paths that stretch around the neighborhoods, public parks and pools on the roofs of high-rises. On the walls are maps displaying census data in colorful and supposedly revelatory ways, but the daylight from the high windows doesn’t quite illuminate them properly. Justin is talking to a pale man who seems to be explaining something very intensely. Many of the men here have a Nordic aspect, and the women are
disproportionately short. And there’s Maya, off to the side, talking to a tall girl in a puffy jacket. Although my instinct is to hide from her, I make myself catch her eye and stage a moment of recognition, raising my chin in the universal sign for
What’s up
? At first she’s not sure who I am. Then she smiles back, casually but still enough to make me worry I’m going to explode.

“Don’t turn around,” I say to Cynthia. “Now: I need you to talk to me for the next five or ten minutes.”

“I really want to see her,” Cynthia says. “I’ve forgotten what she looks like.”

“In a minute. Just chat with me in a friendly but not flirty way.”

“I feel like a spy,” she says. “OK, chatting, chatting. Spy in the house of love. What’s that from? Hey, I should go say hi to Justin.”

“That presents me with a problem,” I say. “If we go say hi to him together then we’ve become a couple, doing things in unison. But if you go say hi and I don’t, then I’m standing awkwardly on my own.”

“I’m really seeing you in action,” she says.

“OK, OK, let’s go talk to Justin.” I glance over at Maya, which is an error, but she doesn’t notice.

Cynthia pulls Justin away from his companion and hugs him. I hover while they catch up, trying to look like I’m part of the conversation. Eventually he turns to me. “How’s it going, Eric?” he says.

“Not much,” I say. I always get the easy ones wrong.

“Cool, man, cool,” he says. “There’s some wine and stuff over there.”

And so I set out toward the buffet table, a journey that takes me directly into Maya’s line of vision. The floor is shiny cement, very hard, not comfortable to walk or stand on for long. Overriding my inclinations I look straight at Maya and smile in the hope of projecting the exact opposite of what I’m feeling. People say
It’s all about self-confidence
, but they don’t say why, and so for a long time I rejected this truism. Why should self-confidence, of all qualities, be the key
to attractiveness? The answer is that sexual selection is distorted by information asymmetry. The first time she sees you, she doesn’t know if you’re a potent, generous alpha male or a guy who spends all day getting into edit wars on Wikipedia. But you know, and the self-valuation you display is her best clue. But knowing that confidence is valuable doesn’t help you acquire it—it just pushes your confidence toward the closest extreme. Confident people know they have an advantage and become more confident; insecure people know they have a handicap and become less confident. It’s a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on which side of the zero intercept you start from. I’ve arrived at her conversation, and she turns to look at me with that amazing unsurprisable expression, and again I’m sure she knows everything there is to know about me.