by
Ellen Ullman
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And so began a period that lasted just two weeks, but that now (visible to me only as I look back, and only after allowing myself to remember Ethan Levin and everything that happened) is a time I see as a gate, a suddenly opened door that introduced me to the real pleasures of the programming life: to its compulsions like a hunger, the desire to make something work an almost physical need. I was too harried at the time to enjoy it, too pressured by the company’s desire to ship a product, nearly overcome by new management responsibilities, not to mention devastated in my personal life, lonely, drinking, smoking myself sick. Yet even through all these difficulties, it came: the feeling of being a squirrel on the hunt for a buried nut, an animal rightness to the whole exercise, as if all of evolution had taken place only to produce a creature like me, fabricated to dissect its own mind and the thoughts of others of its kind. I was going to find the cause of that bug. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would give me more pleasure. No other experience in life could offer the satisfaction that would be mine at that moment when, understanding what had gone wrong and how to make it right, I would sit back and pronounce the words a programmer always says on a soft, happy exhale: It works.
When I understood all this, I was elated, hysterical with happiness, and began to shout, “I found it! I found it!” over and over again. And I kept shouting even after Mara Margolies’s face, startled to find me so insane, rose over the top of our partition. Because the world suddenly felt right again—human, bounded, knowable. We did not live surrounded by demons. There were no taunting jesters, no vexing spirits. We lived in a world of our own making, which we could tinker with and control. I had never felt such a sense of command in the whole of my life: I know how this thing works, I thought, how it works for real and to the bottom. I know how the actual, physical world—a mouse moving across a pad—is seen by the code, how the program turns dumb pixels into windows and buttons and menus, anything we humans want them to be. The world of stories rejoined the world of machine-states. We were in tune: human and tool back on the same side. I was a thinking animal at the peak of my powers, I thought. By God, I wanted to pound my chest and bellow.
<3
When I understood all the reasons for the bug, I again thought of Ethan Levin. I wished he’d still been alive to find the answers with me. I pictured us back in the break room that smelled of burnt coffee, whooping and high-fiving and then maybe going out for drinks. I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to—had a true stake in—those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye—going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught—was life.
He had to find it. This jester, this tease, this invader that lurked like a virus in some secret body cells between outbreaks—he had this idea that if he fixed it, he could repair his life. Yes, everything would be better then. He could handle the schedule, the layoffs, the night administrator’s music that smashed its way down the hall every night at eleven, even finding Joanna in bed with another man—they’d all be manageable, common failures, he thought, setbacks anyone could understand, if only it weren’t for this bug, this flaw, this break in his understanding of how the world was made.
[...] the Blairites' biggest problem was ideological. Whatever dynamism Blairism had, it sprang from sources not available in the post-crash economy. The programme it offered was designed for the 1990s and had ossified into dogma. The Blairite instinct always to move right squeezed its adherents into a shrinking political space. There were no more public services to be sacrificed to the market that the Tories had not already offered up. There were no more brownie points to be earned by sounding tough on the deficit that the Tories had not already banked. The Blairite agenda had reached the end of the line.
“I prefer ‘screaming,’ ” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”
“Do you do it with friends?”
“Most people can’t tolerate it.”
“Family?”
“Zero tolerance. That’s a direct quote.”
“As in, someone used the phrase ‘zero tolerance’ to address the issue of your screaming?”
“As in, they used it all together in an intervention to address the issue of my screaming.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“I see less of them.”
“Because you can’t scream?”
“Because it depresses me to know they’re using phrases like ‘craves negative attention’ to explain my project.”
“Families,” Kristen said with a roll of her beautiful eyes. Then she asked, “Do you? Crave negative attention?”
The café had mostly emptied and the apple tea had gone cold. Alfred sensed that his answer was important. He was vaguely aware of having left out the need he felt to scream at times, like an urge to yawn or sneeze. He hoped this went without saying.
“Actually, it’s the opposite,” he said. “I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more.”
Kristen watched him alertly. “Authenticity,” he said, unfurling the word like an ancient, holy scroll. He almost never uttered it, lest overuse diminish its power. “Genuine human responses rather than the made-up crap we serve each other all day long. I’ve sacrificed everything for that. I think it’s worth it.”
He was encouraged by Kristen’s look of fascination. “Do you do it during sex?” she asked. “Never,” he said, then added, with heady boldness, “That’s a promise.”
cute
“She’s the opposite of incorrigible. She’s making amends.”
“I don’t want her amends. I want her to disappear.”
“What makes you say things like that, Miles?”
I remember exactly where I was standing when we had that conversation: on the deck of the lakeside Winnetka home Trudy and I had overleveraged ourselves to buy (she was pregnant with Polly, our first) and painstakingly decorated together: the site of a planned domestic idyll of children, holidays, and family reunions that we’d rapturously envisioned since meeting in law school at the University of Chicago. Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.
Fuck Sasha, I thought.
I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work —so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about. As with Damon (whom I patronized on an accelerating schedule), there was no pretense with Janna, no restraint. The thing itself. Seven kids and two spouses between us were nothing against our mutual longing, and we fucked in bathrooms, on cold sand by the lake after dark, and in Janna’s basement rec room during the small hours when neither of us could sleep. I adored her with a heedlessness poor Trudy had never glimpsed in me; I’d never seen it in myself. I told Janna I would die for her, and I think I assumed I would have to; for all the fervor of our passion, it was death-infused from the start.
At dinner he hangs back, watching the rest of us laugh around the firepit. I’d looked forward to showing off Lincoln —graduated early from Stanford and working nearby in tech —and Alison, who everyone loves, a junior at UCLA. But Miles’s awkward solitude makes me feel petty for having craved these triumphs. He hardly interacts with Beatrice, his half sister, and I wonder if it’s shyness—whether Sasha and I should be asking him more about what he’s doing. But Miles’s history makes those questions feel loaded, or patronizing, and anyway, we’re all in our fifties—do people even ask what we’re “doing” anymore? Hasn’t that already been decided?
By the time the sun nudged at the mountaintop, we were high above the desert. It felt strange to be in the open air at such a height; the intermittent hum from the balloon’s burner wasn’t like an engine noise, and I could hear birdsong from below. As I drank from my water bottle, the sun’s upper edge cleared the mountain and dropped its lighton the world below. In that instant, a skein of brilliant color snapped into view: Sasha’s sculpture. From the ground, it had seemed a hodgepodge, but from my new height, it acquired structure and logic, like random scribbles aligning into prose. Skipping lines of color raced through the desert, skittering and twisting, backtracking, thickening, then scattering almost away: a skylarking utterance of surpassing joy that rushed up from the land and encompassed me. Where the sculpture gave way, the desert looked empty.
Tears broke in my eyes, and I pulled down the bill of my cap. “Look,” I said to Drew. “Look what she did.”